Is God Good?

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Joe Chambers

In a church I belonged to years ago the person who opened the service always opened with these words:

God is good ALL THE TIME; All the time GOD IS GOOD.

Do you know deep down, rock-solid, for dead sure, that the God you worship, the God you follow, the God you serve, is a good God?

Winter TreeTheologians throughout the centuries have talked about the intrinsic goodness of God, which means in everyday language that all the good that God does in this world and all the good he does in your life or in my life flows out of this basic character and nature.

In the ancient Jewish song book we find several clips of verses that helps us know that God is intrinsically good….

Oh, how great is Your goodness, which You have laid up for those who fear You…”  Psalms 31:19

When I thought about that, I imagined a barn that’s filled with hay bales from the floor all the way to the rafters. When the rancher goes by it every day, he knows he’s not running out of hay soon.

Did you hear about the two boys playing and the older brother said to the younger, “Close your eyes and open your mouth and tell me what this tastes like.”  The little brother did so and guessed, “Is it peanut butter?” The older brother said, “No.”  “Is it mayonnaise?”  No.  “Is it peaches?”  No.  Then the older brother said, “I’ll give you a hint…it isn’t anything you eat.”

Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good…  Psalm 34:8

I was having a conversation with a new friend recently and they said,

“I’ve done a lot of dumb things.”

“Today?” I asked.

“Too many days. Sorry I don’t mean to sound vague and weird.”

“Excuse me for preaching, but what one has done is not nearly as important as what one is doing. God’s name is I Am—not I Was, or I Will Be.”

“I’ve never heard that said before, ever. ‘What one has done is not nearly as important as what one is doing.’ I often fail miserably in my trying. God has a lot of work to do. Glad he’s so good and that He is holding my hand,” they said.

…I will wait on Your name, for it is good.  Psalm 52:9

Every time your name comes to my mind, David says, I just smile. I think of your name and I think good.

Lynette and I have four grandchildren. All I have to do is call the youngest one’s name and my wife will smile.  You know you are resting in the truth of the goodness of an intrinsically good God when at the very mention of the name of Jesus brings a smile to your face.

For the Lord is good and his love endures forever… Psalm 100:5

God’s goodness doesn’t have a short shelf life.

And then at one point, David just throws up his hands and he cries out…

What can I render to the Lord for all of his goodness to me?  Psalm 116:12

Have you ever been in that situation where God has provided? He’s answered a prayer. He’s restored you. He’s forgiven you. Where God’s goodness is so overwhelming and you say, “That’s it. How can God be so good? How can I respond to a God who’s been that good to me?”

Twenty-year-old Lygon Stevens, an experienced mountaineer, had reached the summits of Mt. McKinley, Mt. Rainier, four Andean peaks in Ecuador, and 39 of Colorado’s highest mountains. “I climb because I love the mountains,” she said, “and I meet God there.” In January 2008, Lygon died in an avalanche while climbing Little Bear Peak in southern Colorado with her brother Nicklis, who survived.

When her parents discovered her journals, they were deeply moved by the intimacy of her walk with Christ. “Always a shining light for Him,” her mother said, “Lygon experienced a depth and honesty in her relationship with the Lord, which even seasoned veterans of faith long to have.”

In Lygon’s final journal entry, written from her tent 3 days before the avalanche, she said: “God is good, and He has a plan for our lives that is greater and more blessed than the lives we pick out for ourselves, and I am so thankful about that. Thank You, Lord, for bringing me this far and to this place. I leave the rest—my future—in those same hands and say thank You.”

When do you know the fullness of the goodness of God? On the other side, when you see it unabated and untainted by the evil that exists in this world. The New Heaven is the ultimate expression of our intrinsically good God. And that’s what is awaiting those of us who have trusted Christ.

The more we know the goodness of God, the longer we walk with a good God, the more we trust a good God, the more we open up our lives to his good work in our lives, then we will be good and it will be more natural for us to do good. The goodness of a good God has a way of penetrating to our souls and bringing out the better angels of our nature.

And as you walk increasingly with a good God, you’ll grow a big heart and you’ll find yourself being good and doing good naturally, reflexively—like breathing.

When that happens, you bring a heart of goodness into every environment and arena in your life.

So I say to you just now…

God is good.

What say you?

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How Big is Your God?

Posted on April 4, 2016 by Joe Chambers
"...I am continually with you; you hold my right hand." Ps. 73:23

“…I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.” Ps. 73:23

Parents often ask their young children a very important question.  Grandparents ask it too.  “How big are you?  Soooo big!”

I’m deeply convinced that the way we live is a consequence of the size of our God and the problem that most of us have is our God is too small. We are not convinced that we are absolutely safe in the hands of a fully competent, all knowing, ever present, utterly loving God who is so big.

If I wake up in the morning and I go through the day with a shrunken God, there are consequences. I will live in a constant state of fear and anxiety because everything depends on me and my mood will be governed by whatever circumstances hit me that day.

When I have a need, if I live with a shrunken God, I will find it unnatural to pray because I’m not really sure, to be honest, that God makes a difference and that prayer matters.

If I live with a shrunken God, when I need to give somebody a strong word of confrontation or challenge, I will pull my punches because if I don’t live in the security of a big God’s acceptance, then I become a slave to whatever other people think of me.

If I face temptation to speak deceitful words to avoid trouble, I’ll do it. Or if I can get credit for something at work that doesn’t really belong to me, if I don’t trust there’s a God who sees in secret and then rewards one day, I’ll do it.

Somebody gets mad at me or disapproves of me and I get all twisted up in knots because I won’t have the security of knowing that if a giant God loves me, cares for me as a Father, then what difference does it make how people think I am doing?

When human beings shrink God, they offer prayer without faith, worship without awe, serve without joy, suffer without hope, and the result is a life of stagnation and fear, a loss of vision, an inability to persevere and see it through.

And it’s against this backdrop the writers of Scripture never tire of telling us, “You do not live with a little tribal God.”

Whatever you need, God is bigger. Whatever your weakness, God is stronger.

Yours, O Lord, is the greatness,

The power and the glory,

The victory and the majesty;

For all that is in heaven and in earth is Yours;

Yours is the kingdom, O Lord,

And You are exalted as head over all.  1 Chronicles 29:11 (NKJV)

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Easter Sermon

Posted on March 28, 2016 by Joe Chambers

After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” Matthew 28:1-10 (NRVS)

Various kinds of genres of artwork and even the artist themselves more often than not have certain tell-tale clues or earmarks that tip us off to specific details about the piece of art. Like the time period or the identity and character of their creator and other details.

Two bars of a piece of jazz music and I can tell you if that is Miles Davis or Chet Baker playing the horn. You can tell by reading a paragraph if you are reading William Faulkner, with his run-on sentences and sparse punctuation, or Earnest Hemingway with his short, staccato sentences and descriptive prose.

If you are watching a movie and a beautiful blond woman who is with some friends in a cabin in the woods hears a suspicious noise coming from the barn and says, “I’m going to go see what that noise is. I’ll be right back.” You know she is not going to be right back. She is never coming back. You are watching a formulaic American horror movie.

At this moment in the story of the Scriptures, something similar is occurring. Matthew, who is no less of an artist, wants to clue us in on the fact that this happened on the first day of the week. On the same day on which creation began back in Genesis one, there are earthquakes, angels dressed in lightning, and beaming with good news. Matthew is tipping his hand to the fact that this moment of resurrection is THE ultimate moment in God’s story to heal, reclaim, and restore a broken people and a broken creation.

Matthew doesn’t want us to miss that on this day,

Morning has broken, like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the word.

Matthew doesn’t want us to miss that this moment is THE moment—that the morning of the very first Easter in the morning that would change us and everything forever.

If you read popular culture’s commentary about this holy day you will quickly learn that they don’t hold to the same view about the significance of this day as Matthew did.

We gather today and celebrate this holiest of holy days because something happened 2,000 years ago that was more significant than brunch specials at the local restaurants, mattress sales, or Easter Egg hunts. Easter is not about vague niceties or moral platitudes.

The announcement of Easter is the good news that something has happened, out in the open in history that has changed everything forever. Easter changes everything.

So, I want to invite you for a few moments, to take up the angelic invitation with me and come into this tomb and see what we find there and to go out changed by resurrection. To come in and to go out.

Come In

Let’s go into the tomb with Mary and Mary. They are making their way in the predawn dark to Jesus’ tomb, hoping that the dark will give them the opportunity to morn with a little peace and privacy. But when they get there they are startled by an angel dressed in lightning and trumpeting good news. An angel rolls back the stone as these terrified women stand among the corpse-like bodies of Roman soldiers who have been frightened into a death-like stupor and hear one of the angels say:

Empty Tomb“There is nothing to fear here. I know you’re looking for Jesus…He is not here. This is a tomb and tombs are for dead people. He was raised, just as he said. Come and look at the place where he was laid.”

So, they enter the tomb and are surprised by the resurrection.

When Christians talk about Jesus coming back to life we are not talking about the memory of Christ living on in the minds of his followers. We don’t mean His teachings are living on to the present. When we say He is risen, we mean that the joints that had begun to become stiff from rigor mortis, the eyes that glazed over, the cells that had begun to disintegrate, somehow began to pulse and thrive again. We mean that Jesus went through death like we might pass through a gauzy curtain and came out on the other side into victory.

One of the earliest creeds of the Christian church put it crudely by saying, “His corpse stood up.”

When we talk about the resurrection we mean that in a show of power not seen since the dawn of the cosmos, the Living God burst Jesus from the tomb. Undoing our death, curing our sin-sickness, and beginning God’s work of healing a ravaged creation forever.

That’s what the angel means when he tells these two terrified friends of Jesus, “He’s not here. He is risen.”

I know that the thinking person must wonder about this claim. I mean come on, really. I’ve seen lots of dead things and I know a dead body begins to decay very quickly. I know this is a hard idea to accept. If not you, many of your family and friends really struggle with the idea that a man three days dead “stood up.”

You may like the festivities that surround Easter, the flowers, the nicely dressed church folks, and the brunch specials, but you just can’t buy the whole resurrection business.

If that is you, I would encourage you to veer away from the chronological snobbery that would listen to this story and think “now that we live in the 21st century we know that we can’t believe in this kind of thing. These two Marys didn’t have an opportunity to take human anatomy courses and advance biology seminars.”

But you know what? They were familiar with death. They’d seen it before. In fact, they may have had much more first-hand experience with death than any of us. Infant mortality was higher than it is now. There are professional people to come and deal with the dead in our day. Back in those days if someone died in your family or in your neighborhood—you touched it, cared for it, and prepared it for burial. Just like these women. They knew about death.

These women knew what we know, that the death rate hovers right around 100%.

And yet these two women, who would be the last two women on earth to expect it, were just as surprised as the entire world has been for over two thousand years—with the news of the resurrection.

Lee Strobel was a legal and crime editor for the Chicago Tribune for a long time and an avowed atheist. He wrote about his own spiritual journey as he wrestled with whether or not he could really believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. He wrote the story of his own journey in The Wall Street Journal a few years ago,

It was the worst news I could get as an atheist: my agnostic wife had decided to become a Christian. Two words shot through my mind. The first was an expletive; the second was “divorce.”…For nearly two years, I explored the minutia of the historical data on whether Easter was myth or reality. I didn’t merely accept the New Testament at face value; I was determined only to consider facts that were well-supported historically. As my investigation unfolded, my atheism began to buckle…One by one, my objections evaporated. I read books by skeptics, but their counter-arguments crumbled under the weight of the historical data…In the end, after I had thoroughly investigated the matter, I reached an unexpected conclusion: it would actually take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a follower of Jesus.

— Lee Strobel, from “How Easter Killed My Faith In Atheism,” in The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 16, 2011

How on earth could he say that? Here’s why: From a historical perspective the resurrection of Jesus is by far and away the best explanation for the events of the first Easter morning and the explosion of the Christian movement after it.

Even people who are not followers of Jesus easily poke holes in all of the other explanations that people venture for what could have happened that first Easter morning. Like maybe Jesus didn’t really die, or maybe all of Jesus’ disciples had some sort of spiritual experience that they talked about so much it became embedded in their collective narrative and felt as real as a fact, or maybe it was a hoax concocted by Jesus followers to validate their movement.

Historians of various stripes and kinds have noted that Jesus was killed by killing experts. And psychologists have done enough research to be able to say that hundreds and hundreds of people don’t have the same hallucinatory experience at the same place and at the same time and talk about it in exactly the same ways. And we know historically that many of Jesus’ first followers died for their witness to His resurrection. Lots of people have died for things that are a lie throughout human history, but nobody dies for things they KNOW are a lie.

Even if you choose to disbelieve the story of Jesus’ resurrection you have to find another way to explain the explosion of the Christian movement across the world. A movement that has grown faster and farther than any other faith movement.

I love how one thinker puts it,

Never in so short a time has any other religious faith, or for that matter, any other set of ideas religious, political, or otherwise, without the aid of physical force achieved so commanding a position in such a short time in such an important society. The more one examines the factors that seem to account for the extraordinary victory of Christianity, the more one is driven to search for a cause underlying them all, it is clear that at the very beginning of Christianity there must have occurred a vast release of energy virtually unparalleled in history without which the future course of the religion is utterly inexplicable. ~ Wayne Meeks (Professor Emeritus in Religious Studies, Yale University)

Like a corpse standing up, something like a resurrection.

So, the invitation is still being offered to come into the tomb of Jesus with your anxiety, your cynicism, your questions, and your doubts and be surprised by resurrection.

These two women are invited in to see the empty tomb, but then they are propelled back out. I want us to do the same.

Go Out

Now, I think these two women running bewildered in the pre-dawn dark of the first Easter actually guides us in figuring out what Easter does to human life. How it transforms us. They do two things that I want us to attend to for a moment:

  1. They Take Hold of Jesus

 So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.9 Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him.   vs.8-9

These two women, brim-full of fright and delight, as they sprint from the midnight of the cave to an unexpected morning, somehow and someway—Jesus is there and they hear a familiar voice—“Greetings!” Or “Rejoice!” And as they turn and see Jesus, they come undone.  They fall at His feet and cling to Him and worship Him.

This is what the good news of God coming among us in Jesus and of Him living for us and dying for us and being raised from the dead for us does to us. Mourning has broken!

This is the good news that when we hear it and it finds its way down into our hearts—down where the knobs are—we take hold of it for dear life.

Easter is the story of God sneaking up on us in our darkness, addictions, confusion, and death—and greeting us. Embracing us. Healing us. And that is good enough news to hold onto for dear life.

I invite you to take your cue from these two women and take hold of Jesus. Perhaps that will happen for the first time for you this morning. Or perhaps some of you have come to church for the first time in, I don’t know, a year—but something is stirring in your soul and you need to grab onto Jesus again and cling to Him for dear life.

The good news of Jesus is worth centering your entire life around. So, take hold of Jesus and hang on for dear life.

  1. They Tell the Story of Jesus

The resurrection transforms them from mourners into preachers.

Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”  vs. 10

Galilee was Jesus’ home base. It is where He carried out most of His ministry. Where He called disciples and defeated evil; healed sick people and announced the staggering news of God’s grace for broken people.

It was where He told haunting stories about all the wrong people being acceptable to God. Galilee was where Jesus preached over and over again that the Kingdom of God was at hand—that Up there was finally coming Down Here.

Mourning has broken!

The point of Jesus telling them to go back to Galilee is that Easter isn’t the end of the story, it is only the beginning. See, Jesus’ being raised from the dead is not that someday God will beam us up Star Trek-style from this terribly broken world before He melts it down or blows it up.

Easter is the good news that God loves this material world. And that He loves this world He created so dearly that He has come into it as a material man with real skin, bones, hair, and sinew—to heal it and make it new.

Easter is God’s future bursting into our unsuspecting present. 

The promise of Easter is that what God did in the physical body of Jesus on the first Easter morning, He will one day do for you and me —Mount Princeton, the Arkansas River, Denver, and the Pacific Ocean.

One day you and I and the cosmos will get a resurrection. 

And followers of Jesus are people who live, work, and serve with that hope here and now. We know that the way in which we extend grace to people when we give compassion, all of the time we spend serving and healing people who are sick and visiting those incarcerated in prison and pursuing justice and celebrating beauty in this world—all of this matters and lasts because of Easter. God intends to make this world new.

As followers of Jesus, we are invited to live in such a way that announces that great hope here and now. Easter is good news for this present world.

That’s why this church serves 100 rafting guides a free meal in the summertime. That is why this summer we have a mission group coming to join us and do community service projects here in BV. That is why we take clothes down to Victor Lira in Alamosa to hand out to the poor and homeless of the San Luis Valley. That’s why we cut and split firewood for the community. That’s why we are joining up with another church to bless our community with clean-up projects here in our town.

Because we believe that God loves THIS world and intends to restore it and make it new. We intend to be a part of that in some small way.

Even unbelievers ought to hope that Christianity is true and that those who call Jesus Lord live out His teachings because in so doing this world will be a better place to live—here and now. And, honestly, to the degree that so-called Christians are not getting their hands dirty in the day-by-day restoring of this planet and the people who live here, they are NOT living out the faith demonstrated at Easter.

This life is not a rut that ends in a grave. We are working on fulfilling the Lord’s Prayer, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is being done in Heaven.

That is a big story. Morning has broken!

Our sense that beauty, justice, and relationships matter is not an accident. The faith that we cling to at Easter is that God intends that these things will be transfigured, healed, and restored through the resurrection. So, even unbelievers ought to hope that Easter is true and that those who follow Jesus would finally live out their faith. The world would be a better place if we did.

Easter changes everything.

A few years ago an attorney began to come to our church named Adam. He and I began to meet every Saturday morning at a local Starbucks to talk about life and faith. He was single at the time and a public defender in Mount Vernon, Washington. As a public defender, he had seen humanity at its worse. And because of his analytical and critical mind, he was very skeptical about life outside of this tangible world.  But, curiosity and an inner wonder drew him to explore faith.

As we walked through the scriptures and began to read books and discuss them together his keen intellect would ask the most provocative questions. I answered the best I could. And over time he grew softer and softer towards the faith.

One Saturday morning Adam, with fists clenched and voice rising in volume said, “Okay, I believe that Jesus is exactly who He says He is. He is the Son of God. But pastor, I have a problem!”

What is that, Adam?

“If He really did rise from the dead—it changes everything. I can’t continue to live the way I’m living.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Now what am I going to do?”

“Cling to Him for dear life, Adam,” I said.

So, brothers and sisters hear the good news that changes everything: Morning has broken, like the first morning. Christ is no longer in the tomb but has risen.

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The Wounds

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Joe Chambers

For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. 1 Cor. 5:21

“…You were bought at a price.” I Cor. 6:20

One day a little girl was combing her mother’s hair leaned over and said,” Momma, you know I love you, don’t you?”

The mother said, “Yes, I know.”

“Momma, I love to comb your hair with these little strands of gray but so full and so beautiful. I love to comb your hair. Mother, I just love your voice. Your voice is so sweet. I love to hear you sing. As far back as I can remember your lullabies would gently put me to sleep. I love your voice.

“Momma, I just love lookin’ at your eyes as they sparkle and the dance with delight. I just love lookin’ into your eyes. They mean so much to me.

“But, Momma, why…tell me why…why did you let your hands get so scarred and so rough. Why didn’t you get you some lotion or some cream? Why didn’t you take better care of your hands?

There was a long moment of silence.

The mother reached around and caught her little daughter’s hands and pulled her around, picked her up and set her on her lap and said, “Mary, I’ve got something to tell you; maybe I should have told you this before now.”

“What is it, Momma?” Mary asked.

“Mary, there was mother who had prayed to God to give her a baby girl. And the Lord answered her prayers and gave her this baby girl. And she got so much joy in doing for this baby girl. She loved the sewing and the knitting and making clothes for this baby girl.

“One day while this mother was ironing remembered that she needed something from the drug store and she looked there and the little baby girl in the crib sleeping. The mother thought I’ll ease off to the drug store and get these articles and get back before her nap is over.

“And, Mary, this mother went to the drug store and on her way back, fire trucks passed her but she didn’t think nothing of it until she got to the corner. When she got to the corner and looked, the fire trucks were parked in front of her apartment; and the ladders were up to the third-floor window where she lived.

“All of a sudden, Mary, she remembered that when she was ironing and had decided to go to the drug store she had left the iron on the board. And it was her apartment that was on fire and that her little girl was in there!

“She began to run and the firemen would pull at her to try to stop her and the policeman reached for her to try to stop her and she pulled out of her coat and ran up the stairs and opened the door to her apartment and Mary as she moved across the floor she looked and flames of fire were reaching out to embrace her little girl so she raced over to the crib grabbed her little girl and pulled her to her bosom just as the flames of fire were reaching for the little girl they burned the mother’s hands.

“Mary, I want you to know that little girl was you.”

Tears began to roll down Mary’s cheeks. She began to weep and wash those hands with her tears. She began to kiss them and said, “Oh, Momma. Oh, Momma. Oh, Momma how I love your hands! Because your hands saved me!”

I’m reminded about what the prophet Isaiah said hundreds of years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem,

easter scene with crown of thorns, hammer and nails with blood on sand

“. . .He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5

I don’t know about you, but I love Him. I worship Jesus because he took my punishment and because He purchased my salvation with his broken body and shed blood.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. ~ Jesus

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The Lord Reigns In Zion

Posted on March 20, 2016 by Joe Chambers

‘Behold, your King is coming to you,
Lowly, and sitting on a donkey,
A colt, the foal of a donkey.’”   Matthew 21:5

On July 22, 2013, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William and his wife Kate, had a baby boy–George–and it seemed like everywhere you went people were talking about it.

Why is it that even in the United States with our proud independence from the royal rule, we continue to be fascinated by royalty? Derek Rishmaway has written a fascinating blog post on “How the Royal Baby Fever points us to a Royal longing.” Allow me to quote from that article because I think what he says is pretty insightful,

We love the idea of a true king who will come, take things firmly in hand, reign with righteousness, and bring the shalom of a kingdom at peace. This is why everything in us clapped for joy when we read Aragorn finally crowned king in The Lord of the Rings.  It’s also why some of us found ourselves uncomfortably agreeing with Loki in The Avengers film as he lectured the masses on their innate desire to be ruled: “You were made to be ruled …In the end, you will always kneel.” There was something true about it, and yet that truth felt like a dangerous lie coming from Loki’s mouth. Indeed, it’s telling that the film didn’t directly reject the notion, but had the brave old German man say, “Not to men like you.”

The implication of course, is that for the right man, we would gladly kneel.

Perhaps nowhere is the age-old longing for a righteous king more clearly expressed than in the Jewish hope and expectation of a coming Messiah. God promised King David that he would raise up a descendant from his line whose kingdom would endure forever.

In churches that use lectionaries, where they give you an Old Testament reading, a psalm, a New Testament epistle, a Gospel reading every week of the year, it is surprising how often (and they’re right when they do this) on the triumphal entry day, Palm Sunday, they give you readings that have to do with the second coming of Christ.

Entry of the Christ in Jerusalem, by Jean-Léon Gérôme

The entry of the Christ in Jerusalem, by
Jean-Léon Gérôme

Because when the people say, “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord,” the blessedness that they’re asking from the Messiah is the same thing as shalom. The word “blessedness” and “shalom” are the same basic words. Shalom means complete thriving and flourishing.

This story is pointing to the coming Kingdom.

“For you shall go out with joy,
And be led out with peace;
The mountains and the hills
Shall break forth into singing before you,
And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.  Isaiah 55:12

You say, “Oh, that’s metaphorical.” Maybe, but what it’s trying to say is when the true king comes back and puts everything right, everything in nature will work again. There will be complete harmony, complete peace.

But not only are the trees going to clap their hands, the animals are going to submit to the Lord of creation—like this donkey foal.  Surprisingly, in the midst of this excited crowd, an unbroken, young animal remains totally calm under the hands of the Messiah who controls nature and stills the storm. Therefore, this event points to the peace of the consummated kingdom. What is he saying? Jesus didn’t have to break the animal. He’s Lord of nature; he’s the Lord of all and under his hand, nothing but harmony and peace comes about. The animal knows and loves its true master for who he is.

How would you treat the literal thirty-three-year-old person of Jesus BEFORE He died on the cross and was resurrected? Would you take care of him, if you could? Would you give Him respite, if you could?  Would you feed Him, if you could? Would you clothe Him, if you could?  How you would treat the Jesus of Nazareth before He was crucified and risen is exactly how we are to treat our neighbor, our prisoners, community, our school systems, our city, our mountains, and rivers.

When you’ve done it unto the least of these, you’ve done it unto me, right? That same Lord is coming again to take us to another place and whatever happened to his physical body through the resurrection is going to happen to this cosmos when He returns.

For those of us who trust Him by faith in this life that will be our destiny as John Ortberg has said when Up There Comes Down Here.

One fair morning I’ll wake up in a celestial city.  And maybe I’ll go walking down the street for a stroll.  I’ll walk upon a woman who has a wagon-load of roses.  I’ll reach to get one and discover there are no thorns on those roses.  I’ll say, “Ma’am, where did you get these roses?

“I grow them out there in the desert.”

“What?” I ask.

“Haven’t you heard?  The Lord reigns in Zion.  And the desert shall rejoice and blossom as a rose.” (Isaiah.35:1)

A little farther I walk down the street I’ll step into a pet shop.  There, I hear a man say, “I want to buy that cobra for my little boy.”

“What?” I ask.

“Didn’t you know?  The Lord reigns in Zion.  And the lion shall eat straw like a lamb and the sucking child shall lay upon the nest of the snake.” (Isaiah 11:8)

Little further I say to a man, “Where is your police department?

He’ll say, “We haven’t got any!”

“Well, where are your soldiers and military academies?”

“Haven’t you heard?  The Lord reigns in Zion!  And they have beat the swords into plow shares and their spears into pruning hooks and the nations have learned war no more!” (Isaiah 2:4)

“Well, what about the home for crippled children?”

“We don’t have any.   And the lame shall leap in that day.”  (Isaiah 35:6) The Lord reigns in Zion!

“What about your home for the deaf and dumb?”

“Don’t have any of those either!”  “The tongues of the dumb shall sing in that day.  And the ear of the deaf shall be unstopped in that day. (Isaiah 35:6) The Lord reigns in Zion!”

“I want to go to your hospitals and visit some of your cancer patients.”

“We don’t have any.”

“You don’t?”

“No.  Not since the Lord began to reign in Zion!  The inhabitants in this land never say, ‘I am sick.‘”  (Isaiah 33:24)

“Well, what about your funeral homes and cemeteries?”

“Not any of those in this land.  For the Lord reigns in Zion!”

“Well, where do you folks go to church?”

“We don’t have a church. Haven’t you heard? Up there has finally come down here and we all go up to the New Jerusalem and worship the great King!”

And I look up, and there I see the Lord high and lifted up. And the great choir begins to sing:

    “All hail the power of Jesus name!

     Let angels prostrate fall;.

     Bring forth the royal diadem,

     And crown Him Lord of all!”

Jesus is not the king I want, but he is the king I need—and the King is coming!

Soon, I hope.

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People Get Ready

Posted on March 13, 2016 by Joe Chambers

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming…Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. ~ Jesus

We’re so sorry Uncle Albert
But we haven’t done a bloody thing all day ~ Paul McCartney

As far back as you care to go, you can find preachers with a penchant for interpreting Bible prophecy by holding the daily news in one hand and the Bible in the other. Back in the 1950s, many last-days pundits claimed the apocalyptic city known as “Magog” in Revelation was the Soviet Union, but in the 1980s the USSR collapsed. Then, new revelations began to come as to the identity of “true” Magog (many now say Magog is Islam).

What confuses me is how the last-days experts talk with such confidence and authority. These guys read the New York Times and the Jerusalem Post the way a psychic reads tea leaves. And with a rising fever in the air, you get the feeling you need to stay close and stay tuned to hear the latest from their prophetic perspective.

But then, when what they say doesn’t happen or the interpretation they have been espousing demands adjustment, they do so as unapologetically and frequently as the local meteorologist. But are Bible prophecies supposed to be approached like weather forecasts, or should we just be a little more tentative about our interpretations to begin with?

Someday

The point of much apocalyptic and poetic imagery is that the very elements of the cosmos one day will announce Jesus’ full and triumphant return. It will be majestic, beautiful, and awesome. There will be a day when God will finish what He started at the cross and the empty tomb—when he will heal and restore everything forever.

Jesus imagines this day as both rescue and judgement. God is going to gather a worldwide human family of forgiven failures just because he is staggeringly gracious. They will join together to be with Him forever. And when God tears the thin veil between our dimension of reality and His, and overcomes darkness, evil, and injustice for all—there will be a judgement. The nations will mourn, according to Jesus.

God is so passionately committed to the world that he refuses to shrug off its darkness and wrong like a doting grandfather.

One of my favorite authors, Cormac McCarthy, captures this in his bestselling book No Country for Old Men, when he has the chief protagonist, a sheriff named Ed Tom Bell, who is trying to solve a drug trafficking crime spree of epic proportions along the Mexican border near El Paso say,

I think if you were Satan and you were settin’ around tryin’ to think up somethin’ that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics. I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there ain’t nothin’ short of the second comin’ of Christ that can slow this train.

That echoes exactly what the Christian story says. It will all come to a sudden and decisive halt: All of our violence, addictions, injustices, power-grabbing, bullying and death. Because a God that refuses to judge the world is a God who refuses to love the world.

Jesus is telling us that God will save his redeemed family from judgement but will not save them without judgement.

Today

Jesus’ teaching gives us deep energy to live each day of our lives with bated breath and in complete anticipation of God’s activity moment-by-moment in our lives. It wakes us up for today.

This is not primarily an evangelistic passage. It is for those of us who are His followers. We are to wake up!

Imagine the most important person in your life, after a long absence, calls you and says, “I’m coming over, but I’m not going to tell you when.” What would you do? Would you clean the house? After that would you keep it ready?

That is Jesus’ point when he says, “Stay awake! I’m coming again, but you don’t know when.” Don’t wait until tomorrow to deal with the life God has given you to live today. There’s no time for that—no matter how much time there is.

Maybe we should look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves the question, “How do I to need to be ready? How do I need to wake up today? Write the letter that needs to be written, make the phone call that you need to make, forgive the person you who hurt you, stop postponing the day when you will start taking God seriously.

How do you need to wake up to Jesus today? Because in reality it is the only day you have. Annie Dillard, in her beautiful book The Writing Life, says, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”

What can you do today for the durable welfare of the world that God loves and has promised that one day he will reclaim, restore and make right? How can you invest your time, energy, talents, experience, resources—in serving the needs of your town and community—today?

One summer when I was a boy, my dad had about 3 yards of top soil delivered to our home and dumped in large piles in front and back of our house. All summer my brother and I’s job was, while he and my mom were at work, to take our shovels and spread the top soil out over the yard area so he could plant some grass. Of course, since he and mom were gone we did precious little work—until right before their scheduled arrival then we would work like Turks. When he assessed our work we always got in trouble because it was clear we had only been working for 30 minutes or so. That’s when the appropriate judgment of our father came down.

Until one day we started digging tunnels through the large mounds of dirt. Tunnels large enough for our cat or a puppy to walk through. We dug tunnel after tunnel. We had a blast. We dug all day long. And when our parents came home they caught us actually working and we had, quite unintentionally, accomplished their mission of scattering the dirt all over the yard. It’s funny, when we found joy in the work, we worked hard and was found working by our parents when they returned.

How can you wake up to Jesus’ grace, life, and hope with the today that He has given you?

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver gets at this in her poem The Summer Day where she reflects on the uncertainty and brevity of life. She closes her poem with this profound question:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver

tree-plantingJesus would say, “Look at the someday, the great and future hope, that you can bet your life on because of the empty tomb, and then keep awake with your one wild and precious life.

“If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree.” ~ Martin Luther

 

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When Your Pastor Lets You Down

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Joe Chambers

I stand 6’4” and weigh over two hundred pounds but felt physically insignificant standing next to David.  He weighed north of four hundred pounds and was one of my first baptisms in my first church—almost three decades ago.  When we both stood in the baptismal, we displaced a goodly amount of water. The choir seemed a little nervous as two behemoths stepped into the water behind them, for the only thing between them and a biblical flood was an 8-inch tall pane of glass.

I faced the congregation and David faced towards my left.  I told him that he would have to bend his knees and help me get himself back up after he was fully immersed.  He nodded and licked his dry lips like he was nervous. As it turns out, there was good reason for both of us to be nervous.

I wore fishing waders underneath my snow white Baptismal robe.  David was dressed in a blue shirt and “overhauls”—4XL.  He folded his hands together at the surface of the water, ready to clasp his nose as I tipped him back for a full dunking.  I put my right hand in the middle of his back, between his shoulder blades and raised my left hand, palm facing out toward the congregation, and began to recite the familiar incantation: “David, upon your profession of faith and in obedience to the commands of our Lord and Savior, I now baptize my brother in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

Baptism1-600x340His hands went to his face and clinched his nose as water ran down his elbows.  He bent his knees and began to lean back.  I spread my feet and prepared for his weight in my strong right hand, but it wasn’t strong enough even with the help of the buoyancy of water.  When he passed some sort of geometric tipping point, he went down into the water like a sack of stones.  There was nothing I could do but get out of his way.

As he went under, fear set in and David’s hands left his face.  He began flailing for something to grab to save himself from going to the bottom.  Not once or twice, but at least three times he groped and grabbed at me, the curtains—anything—while his bare feet tried to get purchase on the slick concrete floor.

Heads in the choir turned with furrowed brows of concern upon hearing the thrashing just feet away.  One later said to me that he couldn’t tell if I was trying to help or kill him.  Their eyes got large as offering plates when David’s ham hock of a hand landed on and tightly gripped the only thing standing between them and Noah’s flood.  He had grabbed the glass with his right hand and my robe with his left and was trying to right himself, spitting and spewing water out of flared nostrils like a surfacing beluga whale.

I went low and dead-lifted with all my might so as to take pressure off the glass and thus save the lives of men and women in the choir that tithed regularly.  Somehow, some way with the strength of Samson, I lifted David and saved the flood. As he stood and wiped the water from his eyes, tsunami waves slapped from one end of the tank to the other, the choir released a collective sigh and someone muttered, I think it was Otis Whittington, “That was as close to dying in church service as I have ever come.”

David climbed out with effort.  He was winded.  I was too. After we dried off he confided in me that the reason he wanted to be baptized in our church was because he thought I was the only preacher in the county who was large enough and strong enough to handle him. Then he said something that I have never forgotten. Layered with meaning he said, “Pastor, everything was going great until you let me down.”

It happens.

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A Sin Too Far

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Joe Chambers

Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him… Matthew 12:32

As a pastor I certainly have discovered over the years quite a number of people who have been afraid they have committed the unpardonable sin. People would ask, “Is there such a Unforgivable Sinthing as an act or a deed or something so profound, something so deep, something so deeply wrong and sinful and wicked, that it really can’t even be forgiven by divine love?

Here is the short answer—Yes and No.

Read the rest of this article for the longer answer.

 

Externally

Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him.

That’s what the Bible says everywhere. There’s nothing we actually do that would be somehow off limits and now God can’t do anything to save us.

“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow…” Isaiah 1:18

The prophet doesn’t say, “If your sins be as scarlet, all but one of them can be whiter than snow.” Think about this:

  • King David kills a man, and probably others, in order to cover up his affair with Bathsheba, yet he’s forgiven. He’s brought back in; he’s accepted.
  • Peter denied that he ever knew Jesus and punctuated that with a curse.
  • Paul was a persecutor of Church people and a murderer of deacons, yet he’s forgiven and becomes an apostle.

Externally, over and over the Bible says, there is no one particular thing you could possibly do to put you outside of God’s mercy.

Internally

But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him.

However, if you resist the work of the Holy Spirit to lead you to repentance, no sin is forgivable. It is the job of the Holy Spirit to convict us of all our sins.

And when (Holy Spirit) has come, He will convict the world of sin… John 16:8

But once we become aware of that heaviness of heart we find comfort in the promise of Saint John…

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins… (1 John 1:9)

What this is saying is absolutely anything can be healed through this incredible medicine of humble, clean confession and repentance. But it also means without humility, confession, and repentance, nothing can be healed, even the little sins.

The Holy Spirit’s job is to get me to say, without hopelessness, anger, and blame shifting, “I was wrong.” If I resist that, even the tiniest sin can absolutely destroy my life. There’s a remedy for everything if you repent. There’s a remedy for nothing if you don’t.

Let’s just say you don’t have any big sins. But, you tend to be critical.  But you will not admit how far away from God you are. For you, having a critical attitude is not as big of a deal as adultery, murder, or voting Democratic. But this critical spirit can ruin your life. I know lots of people who are lonelier than they need to be. People don’t want to be close to them. The critical spirit keeps them isolated. It’s like trying to cuddle with a porcupine.

A Christian parent who carps and criticizes all the time, they never see it, and they never change, their kids could grow up hating the faith, not because the parent is a hypocrite, not because they are having an affair, but just because they grow up hating that critical attitude about everything.

Kids know intuitively that a critical, censorious spirit is a fundamental violation of Christian love and it is anti-community and it repulses them. Growing up in that death-by-a-thousand-cuts “Christian” environment they turn their back on faith and say, “Look at this lack of Christian character.” They can see it, but you can’t. And because you can’t see it due to your resisting the interior work of the Holy Spirit, you will not confess it as what it is—cosmic treason. And without the confession there is not repentance and forgiveness.

And that what you call “little character flaw” will send you away from the bosom of God.

What Jesus is really saying here is with repentance anything can be healed; without repentance nothing can be healed.

Jesus is teaching that if you deny Him, disobey Him, ignore Him, call His name in curses, and any number of other things—He will forgive you. But if you resist the convicting presence of the Holy Spirit—you will not be forgiven. And the reason you won’t be forgiven is because you won’t see that you have done anything needing forgiveness—therefore you won’t ask for forgiveness.

Here’s your word of assurance. If you’re afraid you’ve committed the unpardonable sin, you haven’t. Because only the Holy Spirit can produce that worry in your heart, so celebrate your anxiety today!

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Are You Who You Want To Be?

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Joe Chambers

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.  Matt 13:44

Adorable Preschooler Eating CrackersIf a small child were to walk into a room where you were sitting with some fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies and they had two fists full of saltine crackers, how long would it take that little crumb-snatcher to drop the crackers?

Does the Kingdom of God require self-denial?  Of course it does, but it’s worth it.

 “The self-denial that Jesus calls us to is always the surrender of a lesser, dying, petty, futile self for a greater eternal one.”                                                                                                   ~ Dallas Willard

Crackers or Cookies?

One day someone came to Jesus and asked him what he must do to inherit eternal life? The man was expecting a list of externals of do’s and don’ts. Here is what Jesus said,

“‘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 neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  Matt 22:37-40

In other words, when someone repents from running their life on their own terms, receives forgiveness and moves in the direction of loving God and loving people, they are in the Kingdom.

If people do not experience authentic transformation, powered by God, to become more loving, joyful, peaceful people—in time their spirituality will deteriorate into the search for some doable externals to prop up their sense of being different from other people.

Back in 1992 I got a phone call from a person checking out our church and he asked, “What version of the Bible did I preach from? Asked if I was a premillennial, asked if I voted for Bush or Clinton, asked if we sang hymns, asked if I believed in evolution and predestination. These important issues are what sociologists call identity markers or boundary markers. They are the tell-tale signs of who is in and who is out of an organization, but they are not the Gospel of the Kingdom.

Sometimes very good things can be turned into identity markers…

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices–mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law–justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.  Matt 23:23

Doesn’t say quit tithing, but rather pay attention to the kind of person you are becoming.

I wonder if in many Churches they have done what the rabbis of Jesus’ day did by reducing the Gospel down to “identity markers.” Turning good things into the ultimate thing. I wonder if that is why the world is not beating down our churches to get into the Kingdom. Why would they?

What kind of life are you living?

When our oldest son, Cole, was 7 years old and our second son, Clinton, was 4 we were eating at a hamburger joint in Denver—they were acting up, getting loud, being boys.  I snapped at them, “Sit still, be good, eat your food, stop stealing French fries—don’t spill your drink!” People were starting to stare at our table. Clint needed to go the bathroom and in a terse tone I said, “Cole take Clinton to the bathroom.”

Cole went through a stage (it only last 18 years) where he mercilessly antagonized his younger brothers. All of a sudden I heard Clinton screaming from in the bathroom at the burger joint.  I had had enough.  I went in mad and grabbed Cole swatted his little bottom and chewed him out.  Through sobs Cole said, “But daddy I told Clint to wash his hands afterwards and he accidentally turned on the hot water and burned his hands, I was putting them under cold water when you came in.”

I felt as low as whale dung.  What was going on in my life that would let frustration build up in me that would cause me to be more concerned with peace and quiet than to rush to judgment?

That bothered me for days (and is bothering me right now). It caused some real introspection on my part and I remember thinking:  Why would anyone want to be a Christ follower if they made their determination by watching me with my family in the last hour?

Is the life I am inviting other people to live the life I am living myself?

Lots of folks in the Church who are just as anxious, fearful, angry, driven, unsettled, exhausted, envious as everybody else in our culture. Why? Because we have settled for identity markers rather than the Gospel that changes lives!

There was time when a people started to do this. Tell them to be quiet and they would shout about Jesus all the louder. Throw them into prison and they would convert the jailer. Whip them and they sang hymns. Starve them and they shared what little they had with less fortunate. Persecute them and it just filled them with joy. Hate them and they would love you back. Exclude them and they would invite you in. Kill them and 100 would rise up and take their place.

How do you stop a people like this? They loved the Kingdom more than anything else in the world. It happened once—it can happen again.

But we have to drop our crackers.

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Distant Trumpet

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Joe Chambers

Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying,

“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord
   and of his Messiah and he will reign forever and ever.” Rev 11:15

Did you hear about a trumpet player and a jazz band leader? This band leader was rehearsing a jazz piece where there was a certain trumpet part required to be played at a distance. Sometimes they would use a mute to make it sound like the trumpet is a long way away. But this band leader wanted it to sound authentic so he had this trumpeter get way off stage. Almost out of the theatre and had him play from that distance when the time came.

He rehearsed his part over and over to get his cues just right because he couldn’t see the leader and he wanted it to be perfect.

The night of the performance the place was standing room only. During the beautiful set at just the perfect time the distance trumpet began to play. It was incredible. The trumpet played two bars of his part and then suddenly he stopped. The band leader waited and waited but then couldn’t wait any longer and went on with the ensemble and concluded it.

Chet Baker

Chet Baker

After the performance the angry band leader grabbed the trumpet player and demanded to know what happened. The guy said, “Well, everything was going so well. I hit my cue just right… it was great. Then all of a sudden this stage hand came to me and jerked my trumpet out of my mouth and said, ‘You dummy! Don’t you know there is a concert going on out there?”

If you have joined Jesus in His Kingdom band every note in your life has been planned by our Father and you can relax and enjoy the music.

My problem is that sometimes when I hear the notes, I think it’s noise.

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