Refusing to Listen to Truth

I've been studying the prophet Isaiah recently and I've been struck by some thing in Isaiah 30. The words in this chapter relate quite well to our lives as Christians today.

Isaiah 30 is titled "Woe to the Obstinate Nation" in my Bible. And it's a chapter detailing some hard lessons Israel would learn for their turning away from God.

As I've read and studied this chapter, I've realized there are some important lessons we can learn through it.

 Isaiah 30:10-11 says,

"They say to the seers,
          'See no more visions!'
and to the prophets,
          'Give us no more visions of what is right!
Tell us pleasant things
          prophesy illusions.
Leave this way,
          get off this path,
and stop confronting us
          with the Holy One of Israel'."

                                   
How often do we say these things?

How often do we refuse to really hear the truth because it's not what we want to hear?

I think we do this more often that we would admit. If not with our words, than with our actions. If it's hard or unpleasant, we want nothing to do with it. We push it away - often at great personal cost, because it's what we really do need to hear.

It is the truth that comes from God that is the only thing that can set us free. Sometimes the truth will be hard to hear or it won't be what we wish it was. But, even then, maybe especially then, we need to listen to the truth being spoken and work through it to see how it needs to change us.

We don't want to get to the point Israel had in this chapter of Isaiah. They were trying to silence those who spoke the truth because they didn't like the message. We don't want to become so opposed to the truth that we try to silence those who are speaking the truth.

Is there some truth God has been trying to tell you that you don't want to hear?

Are you willing to listen - even if it's hard?

When you hear a hard truth, take the time to ask God about it. Ask Him to help you understand it. Talk to another mature believer about it. Don't assume just because it's hard, it must be from God.

But, let's not be people who run from the truth when it is hard.

Lessons from my Grandpa

It's been a reflective couple of weeks for me. More than usual - which, if you know me, you might wonder if it was possible for me to be any more reflective.

It seems that when some things happen in life it causes us to reflect on things a bit more. We stop. We remember. We look for the good things to hold onto. We look for lessons we can learn for the future.

It's been a couple of weeks since my Grandpa passed away. Last week in a chapel service at work, I began reflecting on things I had learned from my Grandpa over the years. The speaker started talking about some of the lessons we had learned from his Grandpa and it started me thinking about that.

I didn't always know my Grandpa well. Until a little over 5 years ago, the kilometers between us meant we didn't see each other often. Once he moved here, I saw him more frequently and got to know him better.

As I've reflected on it, I've realized that there are a few things where my Grandpa had a part to play in teaching me that thing. He's not the only one who helped me learn it, but he definitely played a part in teaching me these things.



You Never Retire from Serving God

I heard my Grandpa say it and I watched him live it to the degree he was able each day. My Grandpa said there was one thing in life that you never retired from and that was serving God. Certainly, how you serve God changes over the years, but you still serve God in the capacity He gives for each season of your life.



You Never Stop Learning to Love God's Word More and More

When I was at Bible college, I spent a few days out of one of my reading breaks at their house - since a few hours away was a little closer than the 14 hours to go home. I always knew my Grandpa loved the Bible as God's Word to us, but in those few days I spent with him that was very clear to me.

We had some of the best conversations we ever had over those days I stayed with him and Grandma. We talked about the classes I was taking and things I was studying. And I received some of his wisdom learned over years of studying and loving the Bible through those conversations. I left after those days with a greater desire to keep learning and loving God's Word each day of my life.



You Should Mean it When You Say You're Praying for Someone

At the end of every phone conversation and with every hug good-bye when they came to visit, my Grandpa would say he was praying for me. I don't remember ever doubting those words. I just knew that when he said it, he meant it.

However distant our relationship may have been at times, I knew those words were true and I could count on it. It's made me conscious of what it means when I tell someone else I'm praying for them. I want to be someone who follows through when they say those words, because I know the difference it can make to know someone if praying for you.



When I reflect on things, those are the lessons that come to mind as things my Grandpa helped to teach me during his life on earth. Lessons I want to have shape the way I live the rest of the days God gives me on this earth.

God Shining Through Us

I was watching M*A*S*H a few days ago, when I struck by something the priest in the show said. Father Mulcahy is the priest and I've been struck a few times by his words. The show is defeinitely not a Christian show, but there is truth in the words this priest has to say.

The words that struck me recently are these ones:
"God didn't put us here for a pat on the back. He created us so He could be here Himself. So that He could exist in the lives of those He created, in His image."
Father Mulcahy was speaking to our desire for recognition in what we do, our desire for a pat on the back. A desire that can become something that consumes us and causes us to miss out on why we're really here.

Jesus taught about serving and loving others when H was walking this earth as a man. He backed up His teaching with His actions. There was no task too low for Him to perform in serving other. The most notable example being when He took on the job of the lowest of servants and washed His disciples' feet (John 13:1-17).

The love Jesus had for all people is evident in all His interactions with them. Even if He didn't agree with their lifestyle or their choices, He still loved them as a person.

It's when we love the people we come into contact with and serve others that we are "being Jesus" to them. That is when we are allowing God to exist in us in the created world in a way that others can see.

It's not about what we do or getting recognition for what we do. It's about presenting Jesus to the world through the way we live and the way we love and serve others.

What Will Your Verse Be?

O Me! O Life!
(Walt Whitman)

O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish then I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life?
                                                                     Answer
That you are here - that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.



I will be the first to admit, I don't usually read poetry from the time this poem was written - much less use it in a blog post. It reminds me too much of English class and how much I disliked it and struggled with it.

A few days ago, I was watching the movie "Dead Poet's Society" with a friend, when a part of this poem caught my attention. At the start of the poem, the despair of the poet is evident. He is looking for the good amid all the bad he sees around him. The last two lines of the poem offer the answer to his despairing question:

          That you are here - that life exists and identity
          That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

It can be easy to despair of anything good when we look at the world we live in. The violence, disease, war, poverty, hatred that seems to overwhelm us. Even the circumstances of our own life can cause us to despair. To ask the question: Where is the good?

But, that's not where we are to get stuck. There is something beyond that for us. Our very existence means that we can be a part of the good in the world. We have an opportunity to pay a part in what happens.

The English teacher in the movie "Dead Poet's Society" asks his class a question after the last line of the poem is read. He asks, "What will your verse be?" What part in the drama unfolding around us will we play?

         The powerful play goes, and you may contribute a verse.

This life goes on and we are here. We have a chance to contribute to the good in the world. To contribute to what God us up to .

What will your verse be?

The High Calling of all Believers

What is your calling? What has God called you to do?

In Christian circles we like to talk about calling. We hold it up as something important. We make it into something that we can use to put people on a pedestal.

In the process, we leave many Christian feeling less than because they don't feel like they have a calling from God on their lives. They fell unworthy as believers because they think God didn't see them as good enough and gifted enough to be called to something specific.

We also set people up for failure with the way we talk about calling. When someone says they feel like they're called to something, we often put a list of expectations from them, of what that calling should look like. We put them in a box of our own making of what that calling should look like. And it's usually not God's ideas.

What if calling is something so much simpler than all we make it out to be? What if we could be certain what the calling of every believer was?

"Our call is not to 'fix' everyone else, please everyone else, or live up to everyone else's expectations of us. Our call is simply to wholeheartedly love Christ; then He will direct our steps." (Sheila Walsh, All That Really Matters)

When we look at the call of God on our lives this way, it changes things. We don't have to wonder if we're called to it. We don't have to feel stuck in a box. It frees us to really live the life God intends for us to live.

The call of all believers is to love God first. It's as simple and as difficult as that.

When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was in Matthew 22, He answered with these words: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." (vs. 37) Jesus teaches us that the most important thing for us to do is love God. He goes on to say that the second is loving your neighbour as yourself.

When we choose to love God first and love Him with everything we are and everything we have, He shows us what comes next. He will show us how to love our neighbour and who that neighbour is.

We can be sure that we are loving God first, He will show us what to do next. That part looks different for all of us and may look like what other people expect of us. We may not always know clearly what it is, but we can be confident of what our first call is as believers - to love God.

All Parts Working Together

Community

Serving together

Unity

Words we talk about often in the church. But sometimes it can seem like just talk. We don't seem to see them in action.

Paul talks about the church being a body - all of us working together, doing our part. Each person has role that is important to the whole. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul speaks of the need for each of us to take our part - the part God has given us - and do it with our whole hearts, not comparing it to others. This is just one of the examples in Scripture that speaks of our need to work together.

This has been on my mind a lot this weekend, because I've been privileged to see it in action. Privileged to see each part of the body of Christ working together in unity and serving God. And it has been something beautiful to see. This has moved from just talk to being action.

It's something that we see glimpses of throughout the year. We get it right sometimes - hopefully, more often than we don't. We're on this journey called life and we learn over time how to do it better.

This weekend of the year, I get to see it in my church in an amazing way. Living Nativity weekend is a weekend where I get to be a part of my church coming together to serve in a great way. Each person doing their part - no matter how small and insignificant or upfront and seemingly important. All the roles are important and each is required to make it happen. An example of the body of Christ working together as Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians 12.

And my prayer is that it is something that carries on beyond this one weekend. That it becomes a part of who we are as a local body of believers. That each year we learn to serve together this way all the time even better. That we can be an example of what God intended His people to be.

And each of us has a part to play in that. It's not something any one of us can do on our own. Each of us needs to choose to be a part of it and fill the role God has for us in that.

Five Minute Friday: Finish

It's a phrase I've heard often. A statement made. A wish declared.

Finish well.

We talk about finishing well. On a project. With a job. In a ministry we've been serving in.

We use it to describe someone who lived life well right to the end.

Finish well.

We use the phrase often, but do we really mean the same thing every time? Does each person who uses it mean the same thing every time?

What does it mean to finish well?

I'm brought back to the words of the Apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 4:7, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." Paul wrote the letter near the end of his life, and these were the words he had to say. Paul knew that he has finished well.

When Paul spoke of finishing well, he was talking about faithfully serving God to the end. Paul knew that he had followed God and served God the best he knew how to do.

When I think of finishing well, that's what I think of. Serving God. Living my life for Him completely. Following God the best I can.


Joining in with Five Minute Friday again this week. The word for this week is "finish."

Doing Good Without Knowing How it Turns Out

"You do something good. You're not always around to see how it turns out."

That's a line from an episode of one of my favourite TV shows. I was watching NCIS a couple days ago when those words were spoken. They were spoken as encouragement to someone who was feeling like they weren't doing enough good in what they did.

"You do something good. You're not always around to see how it turns out."

I think there's a lot of truth in those words. And they can apply to many aspects of life.

We can spend time doing good. Helping people in many ways. And then they're gone from our lives and we don't know the outcome of what we did.

It's frustrating. Maybe even depressing.

Especially when we're trying to help people. We want to know how what we did turned out.

But, sometimes we're just not going to see how the good we did turned out. We can't get caught up in that. We have to instead, focus on the good we did - regardless of whether we know how it turned out or not.

Ultimately, we're not responsible for how things turn out for the other person - the one we try to help. We're just responsible for what we do. For the good we are compelled to do.

Do You Take Care of Yourself?

I spent a couple of days last week in a Mental Health First Aid course. It was interesting and I learned a lot. But there was one concept that kept coming up, that really made me think.

Over and over through-out the course, there was an emphasis on self-care. The idea that we can only help others in their times of need if we're looking after ourselves. If we're always giving and not doing things to recharge, then we're eventually going to have problems giving to other people because we have nothing left to give.

As I walked away from the course, I started thinking about how this idea applies when it comes to other areas of life. It's important for all sorts of things in life.

One of the things that came to mind for me has to do with this blog. If I'm not taking the time to read things others write and to write things no one will see, then I have nothing to give when I write here. That's a little example.

Another thought that came to mind has to do with serving in ministry in the church. I love what I do with leading and helping with women's Bible studies. I love serving the women in my church in this way. But, if I'm not taking time to spend reading my Bible and growing in my relationship with God outside what I do to prepare for that, I don't have much, if anything, to give when I'm involved in those Bible studies.

And if I'm not spending time with friends who I can really talk to and share more details about what's going on in my life, then I don't have much in me to give when I notice a lady at Bible study seems to need someone to listen and care. Because I've been giving, but I haven't done anything to look after myself so I have something to give to others.

It makes me wonder why this is.

Why do we struggle so much with taking care of ourselves? Where does this idea that we need to always be giving come from?

I wonder if maybe it comes, at least partially, from a misunderstanding of what Jesus said in Matthew 22:34-40, where He is asked what the greatest commandment is. Jesus answers this way,

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself." (vs.37-29, NIV, emphasis mine)

It's that second part that we need to stop and think about it a bit, I think.

We get the loving God with everything we have part. We even understand about loving others. But, I know for a long time I missed all that Jesus said when He talked about loving our neighbours. Jesus didn't just say were to love our neighbours. He said we were to love our neighbours as we love ourselves.

It's natural to love ourselves and to think of ourselves. We end up in trouble when we do it to exclusion of everything and everyone else. But, maybe we need to take that love we have for ourselves and learn how to love others with it, without ignoring ourselves and our own needs in the process.

We've gotten good at loving others, but in the process we've trained ourselves to put our needs on the shelf and ignore them. But we can only do that for so long before we find ourselves in trouble.

We can't let our needs and thinking of ourselves take over everything. We should be loving and serving those around us. But, I don't think that means we can never do anything for ourselves.

Sometimes we get to a point where we just need to get away from everything that everyone is asking of us. And that's not wrong. I just wonder if we've reached that point, if we've waited too long to start looking after ourselves.

What if we regularly scheduled things into our weeks and time into our lives to look after ourselves. so that we can give and serve others better the rest of the time?

No Excuses for not Knowing

If you're a friend on Facebook, you would notice that I have my "causes" I support and I share things from them regularly. In the last week, that has meant many mentions of an event coming up this evening. I've always been hesitant to post too much about anything because I don't want to frustrate people.

But, when I think about it, I realize that the only way people know what's going on outside of their little world, is if other people let them know. It doesn't mean I'll share everything, but it does mean I will share what I see as worthwhile to share.

It's so easy to get stuck in our own world and never go beyond it. But the truth is, there's an entire world out there that we can't ignore. Living in ignorance in the ultra-connected world we now have isn't acceptable.

Once we know, it becomes our choice how we respond. Each of us is supposed to help with different things. We may feel like one area is where we are supposed to be involved, while another area is not the place we are to be involved. But, even if we're not involved in one area, it doesn't become an excuse for us to not know anything about it.

So, I find myself wondering, what are you involved with that you need to be sharing with the world around you? What do you believe in that needs to be shared with the world around you?

And how do you share it without pushing people away?

For me, I think it comes down to those things being a part of who you are. My friends know where I work and they know why I work there. So, when I share things about the place where I work and the "cause" we are part of, they know it's coming from who I am. I'm not just telling them they should do something. I'm doing something and then telling them about it. Because I believe in it.