Every morning that breaks,
There are mercies anew.
Every breath that I take
Is your faithfulness proved.
And at the end of each day,
When my labors are through,
I will sing of Your mercies anew.

When I’ve fallen and strayed
There were mercies anew.
For you sought me in love
And my heart you pursued.
In the face of my sin
Lord, You never withdrew,
So I sing of Your mercies anew.

And Your mercies, they will never end
For ten thousand years they’ll remain.
And when this world’s beauty has passed away
Your mercies will be unchanged.

And when the storms swirl and rage
There are mercies anew.
In affliction and pain
You will carry me through.
And at the end of my days,
When Your throne fills my view,
I will sing of Your mercies anew.
I will sing of Your mercies anew.

His Mysterious Ways: Confounding Pharisees, Rescuing Sinners

How would you react if God asked you to marry a prostitute? Such a question at first seems heretical, but is it because it doesn’t fit our view of how God works? Would you deny the possibility that God would ever ask you to do such a thing because it does not fit into your “Ten Steps on How to be a Perfect Christian”? I believe one of the weaknesses of modern Christians is a failure to listen to the will of God if it doesn’t fit our mold. Consider the mystery of Hosea’s call to marry a prostitute, Abraham’s obedience in sacrificing Isaac, and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross: we observe the divine will of God that confounds man’s religious ideas on how life should go. People are forever saying, “God works outside the box.” But do we really believe that or are we following a different framework?

Before you burn me as a heretic, please consider what I’m really saying and what I’m not saying. I am not advising anyone to go out and marry a prostitute. The story of Hosea, however, holds an important message that challenges Christians to not limit the way that God works. Many obedient servants of Christ have chosen to submit to the will of God, even in the face of scorn by modern day Pharisees. That is what Christ did in his time. I suspect that Hosea wrestled with God’s request. Maybe he thought, “There go my plans for a godly, happy life.” But attempt to wrap your mind around this: Hosea’s union with a prostitute, in the holy and sacred institution of marriage, was God’s divine design for a full life for Hosea.

In order to appreciate the potency of Hosea’s story, it is necessary to consider the practical theology of Christians today. It is common for Christians to view an ideal life as one with no mistakes. Christ does call us to be holy as He is holy. Too often, however, we forget that we ourselves are so far from the holiness He calls us to. Our hypocrisy frequently resembles the white-washed tombs of the Pharisees. Indeed, in Matthew 21:31, Jesus rebukes the chief priests, declaring that even “the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” We Christians judge the woman of ill-repute and the reprobate because they do not look like prime candidates for Christianity. But consider Luke 6:32-36:

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that….But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.

It is easy to love those like us, but what of those who defy God’s standards of holiness? It would be foolish to dismiss sin and turn a blind eye, but there is a call for forgiveness and repentance. We need to realize that we serve a God who changes lives and that we are some of those changed lives. If we observe the lost, drowning in their meaningless life of sin and think, “I’m glad I am not them,” we limit the power of the Gospel. We quench the Spirit of God that radically changes lives.

The people who most desperately need the message of salvation are the ones who do not fit the “Christian” profile. Take my childhood friend Hoku, for example. Only fourteen, already she bore the scars of a woman who had experienced a life of heartache beyond her years. Sexually abused by multiple step-fathers, boyfriends, and uncles, she had been forced to protect her younger siblings as she watched her mother repeatedly beaten by the men in their life. When I met her, she told me she felt unworthy of friends, love, anything good. Many Christians could - and did - judge this scantily-clad Asian girl for her indecent garb in church, failing to see the gaping wounds beneath. She was a girl in need of the redeeming love of God, not the disdaining eyes of hypocrites. That is what was so revolutionary about Christ’s ministry. He didn’t pick the Pharisees as prime targets for his message. He chose the prostitutes and sinners as the ripe candidates. He asked Hosea to pursue Gomer, in the same way that He chases Hoku today. Christ came to heal the sick, not the well (Matthew 9:12).

Jesus revolutionized the religious circles of his day, confounding the standards of the outwardly holy.  If Jesus came back today, how would we respond? Would we be one of the Pharisees that failed to see Him as the Son of God?  I am afraid that many of us, caught up in our religious hypocrisy, would.  Songwriter Nichole Nordeman wrote “Wide-eyed” with this in mind:

Not so long ago, a man from Galilee
Fed thousands with His bread and His theology
And the truth He spoke
Quickly became the joke
Of educated, self-inflated Pharisees like me

And they were wide eyed in disbelief and disillusion
They were tongue tied, drawn by their conclusions
Would I have turned and walked away
And laughed at what He had to say
And casually dismissed Him as a fraud
Unaware that I was staring at the image of my God

The climactic bridge of Nordeman’s song presents a challenge to the Pharisaical and limited view we often have of God. Let us not miss the power of the Gospel because we are limited by our pride and education.  God has come to use the simple things of this world to confound the wise (1 Corinthians 1:27).

I believe this message is relevant for Christian college students in particular because of the sheltered nature of such campuses and their emphasis on education and knowledge.  It is an easy step for us to fall into the Pharisees’ trap. Nordeman was challenged to wrestle with hypocrisy:

Having lived in Hollywood for about a year, I was forced to come face to face
with many diverse people everyday. I was surprised and embarrassed by how sheltered my life had been until then... Surrounding myself mostly with people who were like-minded, and consequently, safe to know. I really had to come to terms with my quickness to judge, to laugh, to dismiss anyone who threatened my sense of normalcy. And it made me wonder - How would I have reacted to Jesus if I'd met Him in Los Angeles?

How would you respond to Jesus if He had come to earth in our time? A pious businessman or elaborately robed priest would probably ignore a carpenter with wood shavings in his beard and grainy, dirt-streaked, calloused hands, if He said He was the Son of the Most High. While it is difficult to provide a modern parallel, the idea of Christ in our time is a jarring one. One would expect the Messiah to come in the form of a religious teacher, not a carpenter. But God is committed to stretching our imaginations and presuppositions of how He works.

A misapplied emphasis on attaining happiness as the end goal of life has also created confusion in our understanding of the callings of Hosea and the sacrifice of Isaac. They seem imperfect and unfulfilling callings.  But here there should be a perspective shift. Our end goal should not be the fulfillment of our life’s dreams. Happiness is not in attainment of some political notoriety or astounding the world with our intelligent arguments. The telos of life is to live in obedience to God’s call. Many Christians dream of settling down, making money, and eventually retiring in style. Author and Pastor John Piper challenges such dreams as a wasted life:

I will tell you what a tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider this story from the February 1998 Reader’s Digest: a couple “took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30-foot trawler, play softball and collect shells…” Picture them before Christ at the great Day of Judgment: “Look, Lord. See my shells.” This is a tragedy. (Don’t Waste Your Life, John Piper)

Too many people live life without a passion for God and without a wholehearted purpose of obeying His voice. These people waste their lives. God may not ask you to marry a prostitute, but He may ask you to lay down dreams. He might ask you to give up what you think you need most. He is committed to tearing down anything that seeks to provide security outside of Himself. Francine Rivers, author of Redeeming Love (a retelling of Hosea in a style appealing to modern audiences) wasted the first four decades of her life at the wrong altar:

I believe we will serve someone in this life. For the first 38 years of my life, it was myself… I used to believe the purpose in life is to find happiness. I don’t believe that anymore. I believe we are all given gifts from the Father, and that our purpose is to offer them to Him. He knows how He wants us to use them (Epilogue, Redeeming Love).

Let us respond to Christ’s call to lay down our wills as Paul did, “Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:7-8).

Life is far more satisfying when we walk in obedience to His call and leave a legacy of faith, rather than a trail of wealth, titles, or even sea shells. May we not get caught up in living for pleasure, but rather in laying down our lives for His name’s sake, even if that means we never do anything fantastic in the world’s eyes. We must live and die boasting in the cross of Christ, making the glory of God our singular passion. God moves in mysterious ways. He often asks us to do things that we don’t understand. It is because He has to destroy everything in our lives that would seek to set themselves up as idols. We need to lay our desires for achieving momentary happiness before the Grand Designer, and ask Him to guide our steps in whatever way He chooses. We can’t understand His ways - Hosea’s calling is still a mystery to me - but it is not for the clay to question the Potter. We are called simply to listen and obey.

Currently Listening The Last Samurai By Hans Zimmer see related

 

Freedom Under Siege 

By Angelise A. Anderson

Exposing the growing need for modern-day heros

Every break I come home and watch one of those epic movies that I can't watched without my dad’s strong hands and presence.  This year it was, Gladiator.  What a sobering movie it is.  I would have significantly mangled my dear sister or patient roommate’s lovely hands in the viewing of this violent and heart-wrenching film.  I could barely keep my eyes on the screen.  It was so intense and I was so appalled by the horror of it all.  And then I began to think of the corruption and evilness that could have created a sport like gladiator fighting, slavery, and the corruption of Rome; the sounds of a stadium filled with the mobs bloodthirsty cheering and booing, while innocent men, women and children were slaughtered by wild animals and trained gladiators.  Public exhibition that delighted in making sport of human lives, as if they were mere pieces of flesh with absolutely no worth?  Unthinkable?  I wish.

Were the mobs so uneducated?  They were definitely unaware of the horrors that surrounded the stories of those who fought on the Coliseum floor.  But as long as they were safe in their seats, they could enjoy the activities with an air of unaffectedness. Or could it be that there was fear in the hearts of many who watched, realizing that they could be next; that there lives were merely a breath and their bodies merely dust.  Oh but wait, these were the gluttonous and corrupt Romans who gorged themselves with food before they vomited it out behind the Coliseum walls, only to stuff themselves again.  But are they so different from society today?

What really scared me about these reflections was realizing where America is today.  Don't get me wrong, I don't want you to think I'm one of those extreme right-winged Conservatives.  No indeed, I’m rather for a non-Conservative approach to the hypocrisy in society today.  But I'm becoming increasingly aware of the uneducated, and often uncaring state of our society.  I bought my mom a book this Christmas, "Because they Hate," by Brigitte Gabriel.  Gabriel is a Arab Maronite Christian Lebanese who had a upper-class, carefree, party-filled life in Lebanon until the Muslims came in and destroyed everything she knew.  She lived for seven years as an underground Christian Lebanese teaching herself English through the television.

In 1982, as the civil war escalated, Gabriel's mother was injured in a skirmish and Gabriel was forced to transport her wounded mother to a nearby Jewish hospital.  What she experienced there changed her views forever.  The ideas about the hatefulness of the Jews that she had been brainwashed to believe all her life, did not match with the actions of those around her.  She naively paid her Lebanese "friend" an exorbatant amount of money for a 15 minute car ride to the border, and then was surprised when the Jewish taxicab driver that took her several hours to the hospital charged nothing.  She grew up where the Arabs were treated first by class in a hospital, and any Jews brought in would be killed immedietely.  She was surprised to find that the Jewish hospital took no notice of ethnic orignis, but treated the more critical cases first.  Her Arab mother, for example, was one of the first to be taken in to be cared for.  The impressionable teenager was surprised to see hundreds of her countrymen, the supposed "enemy" being treated in the Isreali hospital.   The Lebanese soldiers who were fighting against the Jews, were cared for beside their enemies.  She couldn't even comprehend the un-biased attitude and began to resent the lying and hate that she had been raised in.

"I realized I was fed a fabricated lie by my government," Gabriel told the Jewish News.  "As a child, all I heard was, 'Jews are evil. They are barbaric."  She thought they were the cause of all her people's pain and misery.  Crying after seeing wounded Israeli soldiers returning to the hospital, she vividly remembers a Jewish nurse, wrapping her arms around her and telling her that it was not her fault.  In a place, where one would feel like the intruder and guilty for the wounding and killing of the very people who were caring for her mother, she was overwhelmed instead by their love and care. 

Gabriel's story is long and unveiling.  She eventually moved up in journalistic ranks and now resides int he United States where she is sharing her story of the hate filled religion that is taking over the civilizations birthplace.  As I thought about the state of America today, I began to mourn the direction in which we are headed.  We are largely uneducated, more secure in our own surroundings and unafraid of that which we think can not harm us.  Islam is creeping across the world and America is busy playing a game of "political correctness." How sick it all is.  There are no perfect good guys, but we have a President, who is fighting for the survival and protection of freedom.  He is leading one of the last truly free and capable nation in the world, and thus is one of the last leaders, who is strong enough to fight well for that which matters.  And so many American's today walk around, uneducated and unconcerned with a danger, because it doesn't affect their own self-consumed, commercial lives.  They’d rather critique each other and fight in defense of those who threaten the survival of the very freedom they have to spout their ideals. 

We need to stop being so consumed with the meaningless activities of our American lives, and more involved in the blood-bathed, hate-filled, world we live in.  We need to be voices of for the condition of thousands of Christian lives in Middle Eastern countries and abroad, who exist in a world not much different than that of the slaves in Rome.  It does no good to be consumed with that which does not matter.  Even as I wondered how Rome could be so corrupt and enjoy such degrading activities, I saw a picture of where America is heading. 

On the Official Lebanese Forces website, Habib C. Malik in an article entiled, “The Forgotten Christians of Lebanon,” writes:

"Meanwhile, the reputed tolerance of Islam, particularly for the 'People of the Book,' as Jews and Christians are designated, created in reality the dhimmi  system of second-class servitude, which, under the guise of toleration, was actually a system of subtle repression and dehumanization leading to gradual liquidation.  Repeatedly, the advice offered to the Middle Eastern Christians by Westerneres - the sincere among them as well as the self-serving -- would counsel restraint, circumlocution, and a self-effacing posture vis - vis the dominant Muslim majority; in other words, a resignation to the perpetuation of dhimmi status in the name of mere survival and not rocking the boat.  The one community in the region that has persitently resistetd traveling down this demeaning road is the maronit Christian community of lebanon, along with assorted portions of Lebanon's other Christian communities - the Orthodox, Greek Catholic, and even Protestant.  This has earned them a number of by now familiar adjectives in the specialized as well as the popular literature, the most benign of which has been "obstinate."

Maximus Decimus Meridius was the hero of Gladiator because he did not fear death.  He was not afraid of what man could do to him (Luke 12: 4-5).  Sure he was tough and strong, escaped assassination, and was one of the most decorated Generals of Rome’s glorious army.  But he was more than muscle.  He knew what who He was and what He was called to stand up for.  He was a man of honor, who refused to bow to those who chose to treacherously usurp power from those who rightfully and honorably held it.  He refused to bow to societies whims or the fickleness of “public opinion,” and “political correctness,” even if it cost him his life.  Would it be difficult to find such men in society today, who would mercifully spare a competitor's life in an arena, amidst a blood-thirsty crowd ranting for more blood, who hold the strand of your life at the mercy of their fickle whims?  Maximus was loved, respected, honored, and eulogized because he stood alone for justice, mercy, and the beauty that makes humanity what we are; not merely dust, but creatures created in the image of a loving and good God.

We have our own stories to write today.  We have our own heroic battle in the arena.  The battle for freedom and justice take a new shape in the twenty-first century, and we have an opportunity to play the hero who will enter the arena in the name of what is right, not what is popular.  

I encouraged you to get a hold of Brigitte Gabriel’s book and be a voice or an arm for the cause of freedom and that which is worth fighting for.

Do a search on “Lebanese Christians” to learn more.  Read more about Brigette Gabriel also HERE.  Another article is found on JewishNews.com.

 

Currently Listening Satisfy ~ Kathryn Scott (Audio CD) "Search Me, Know Me" see related

Philippians 5:6-7

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your heats and your minds in Christ Jesus."

 

 

Currently Listening Nothing Left to Lose see related

 

So I haven't posted in forever and my mom sent me this really encouraging quote last week, so I thought some of you who pass by my blog might be encouraged by it. No matter what you're going through. Trust His better plan. Trust His bigger love. Lay your treasures at His altar and embrace His perfect plan will for you. Because, as a dear friend reminded me this morning, His love for us brought Him to a place of sacrificing His own Son. We need to be humbled as we become more aware of who we are before Him.

 

                                                                            

 

"Not so in haste my heart,

Have faith in God and wait.

Although He lingers long,

He never comes too late."

~John Calvin