Great meditation from Eugene Peterson…mc

The Tree

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. Isaiah 1:1

Jesse’s roots, composted with carcasses

Of dove and lamb, parchments of ox and goat,

Centuries of dried up prayers and bloody

Sacrifice, now bear me gospel fruit.

David’s branch, fed on kosher soil

Blossoms a messianic flower, and then

Ripens into a kingdom crop, conserving

The fragrance and warmth of spring for winter use.

Holy Spirit, shake our family tree,

Release your ripened fruit to our outstretched arms.

I’d like to see my children sink their teeth

Into promised land pomegranates

And Canaan grapes, bushel gifts of God,

While I skip a grace rope to a Christ tune.

“So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”

2 Cor.5:16-17

“But now we have been released from the law, for we died to it and are no longer captive to its power. Now we can serve God, not in the old way of obeying the letter of the law, but in the new way of living in the Spirit.”

Rom. 7:6

Through the centuries the church has been making the same mistake over and over again as it has defined Christianity by what you know instead of Who you know, or better yet, Who knows you. We’ve confused information (learning about God) with transformation (being known and recreated by Him in His image, not our own).

When we define Christianity by what we know…it becomes a doing based religion, a treadmill of shoulds and a list of tasks derived from the information we have acquired. That is not the freedom found in being a new creation, or the new way of the Spirit, it is life under the old Law of performance.

There is a big difference between these two dynamics however. As I was thinking about these two realities, the following considerations and contrasts came to mind:

information is finite – transformation is infinite

information improves – transformation creates

information is temporary – transformation is permanent

information is the known – transformation is the unknown

information is safe – transformation is risky

information is predictable – transformation is unpredictable

information requires study – transformation requires trust

information promotes self-sufficiency transformation demands dependence

information breeds familiarity – transformation embraces the unfamiliar

information is inanimate – transformation is alive

information is a noun – transformation is a verb

information takes hold – transformation lets go

information is knowledge – transformation is truth

There is so much more for us to encounter and experience in God, but we must be willing to allow the information to translate into a liiving reality in the graceful grip of God. The journey in and down to the soul-ular level is a journey that will change your life.

It’s time to experience being a new creation, and life lived in the new way of the Spirit…if it is a new way, then why do we keep doing the same old things? Perhaps it’s time to move from information to transformation.

Dei Gratia,

Monty

But Samuel replied: “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams. For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you as king.”

Thoughts: Saul, the first king of Israel, did not know much about silence or listening to God. Like David, he was gifted, anointed, and a successful military/political leader. Yet we never see him seeking to be with God like David. In this passage, Samuel the prophet reprimands Saul for doing many religious acts (i.e. offering burnt offerings and sacrifices) but not quieting himself enough to listen, or “to heed” God (vs. 22).

“We all must take the time to be silent and to contemplate, especially those who live in big cities like London and New York, where everything moves so fast…I always begin my prayer in silence, for it is in the silence of the heart that God speaks. God is the friend of silence – we need to listen to God because it’s not what we say but what He says to us and through us that matters. Prayer feeds the soul – as blood is to the body, prayer is to the soul – and it brings you closer to God. It also gives you a clean and pure heart. A clean heart can see God, can speak to God, and can see the love of God in others.”  ~ Mother Teresa

Question: How could you make more room in your life for silence in order to listen to God?

Prayer: De-clutter my heart, O God, until I am quiet enough to hear you speak out of the silence. Help me in these few moments to stop, to listen, to wait, to be still. to allow your presence to envelop me. In Jesus’ name, Amen

*From the Daily Office, Scazzaro

I have just returned from leading a 3 day Sacred Space retreat. My mind all abuzz with the epiphanies the retreatants were having, the God-moves that took place in the quiet corners of people’s soul, and the rhythm of the Divine Hours being practiced by the monks at the Abbey that we experienced as we quietly slipped in and out of their practice… receiving something they had no idea they were giving.

This morning, as my spirit honed in on this particular prayer to breathe into my soul, it seemed to speak about all that God was doing in and through the men and women who were at Sacred Space…read and pray this slowly and ask the Spirit to illuminate the parts that your heart needs…

____________________
Empty Me…

Gracious and Holy One,
Creator of all things
and of emptiness,
I come to you
full of much that clutters and distracts,
stifles and burdens me,
and makes me a burden to others.

Empty me now
of gnawing dissatisfactions,
of anxious imaginings,
of fretful preoccupations,
of nagging prejudices,
of old scores to settle,
and of the arrogance of being right.

Empty me
of the ways I unthinkingly think of myself as powerless,
as a victim,
as determined by sex, age, race,
as being less than I am,
or as other than yours.

Empty me
of the disguises and lies
in which I hide myself from other people
and from my responsibility
for my neighbors and for the world.

Hollow out in me a space
in which I will find myself,
find peace and a whole heart,
a forgiving spirit and holiness,
the springs of laughter,
and the will to reach boldly
for abundant life for myself
and the whole human family.

Ted Loder
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Rumination…

This prayer is full of ruminatorial opportunities! (but I’ll focus on just one)

The line that first drew me in was, “Empty me now of…the arrogance of being right.”

I wondered, ‘

“what would happen in our lives if we took 30 days and decided that we would choose to be kind instead of fighting to prove that we are right?”

How would we handle the tension in our souls that worships the god of rightness more than the God of love.

Could I possibly see and believe that I can choose to be kind over being right without having to give up on what I believe…yes I think I could, but that would require a mind like Christ’s.

He was able to be 100% right in every situation when the people around Him were so lost and wrong, yet love and kindness flowed from His soul.

I often ask myself, “even if I prove myself to be absolutely right in this moment, does it really have an eternal significance?”

Most often it does not, and my need to be right can easily take second place to my call to be kind and demostrate love without really giving up anything that matters, and gain much that does through kindness.

Our need to always be right lurks in the shadows of most all conflict…

Our need to always be right reveals the insecurities that fill our identity…

Our need to always be right becomes a god that we fashion and dress in religiosity and truth justifications…

Our need to always be right keeps us from enjoying the people in our lives…

30 days…can you do it…will you allow yourself to enter into and feel and become aware of the tension that you are experiencing with a need to be right…

When you sense the Holy Spirit placing some Divine Duck Tape over your mouth again and again, let me encourage you to laugh and smile at yourself as you see how often you need to apply the filter. It’s okay, it is all a part of the process and journey of becoming, and on the way, your kindness just might unleash the soul of smeone who desperately needs it.

Dei Gratia,

Monty

As I was meditating on some thoughts penned by A.B Simpson this morning, I was again struck with the truth that we never really tread new spiritual ground, there is always someone who has been there and experienced God’s truth before us. So often I think I am onto some incredible revelation and am then humbled by a blog, or even the words of a God-follower from centuries ago that have already said what I was trying to say.

A.B Simpson seems to always be quite a few steps ahead of me in my God-journey. Recently I was in Thailand speaking with Alliance missionaries. During a men’s luncheon, my talk was on “Three Types of Men”…the power-drained, the power-full, and the power-filled.

The heart of the talk was to move men out of a powerless existence as well as a powerful existence. It seems we are either one or the other. We either abdicate our spirituality or we take control of our faith in a legalistic religious fashion. Neither one draw us nor place us in the presence of God. Both are spiritual toxins that need healing, restoration and repentance.

The movement God is calling us towards is being power-filled. To be powerful is to have the right answers, know the right stuff, and behave externally the right way. This leads to ego, ritual and religion. To be power-filled is the surrendered life, where we make room in our soul for God to dwell and the life of Christ to expand over the self life.

So, it really was no surprise when I read Simpson today and basked in his words that were penned long before mine indicating the same spiritual truth. Listen in as he calls us to enter the life of the power-filled and not the power-drained or the power-full.

Dei Gratia,

Monty

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A spiritual man is not so much a man possessing a strong spiritual character as a man filled with the Holy Spirit. So the apostle Paul said: Ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.

The glory of the new creation, then, is not only that it recreates the human spirit, but that it fits it for the abode of God Himself, and makes it dependent upon the Son, as the child upon the mother. The highest spirituality, therefore, is the most utter helplessness, the most total dependence and the most complete possession of the Holy Spirit. The beautiful act of Christ in breathing upon His disciples and imparting to them from His own lips the very Spirit that was already in Him expressed in the most vivid manner the crowning glory of the new creation. And when the Holy Spirit thus possesses us, He fills every part of our being.

~A.B Simpson

I am always on the search for great poems, verse, meditations or benedictions to use in group settings, teaching environments or personal reflection times with God. This week a ran across a benediction that really caught my heart. While I was not able to track it’s genesis, I think it strikes at the heart of what I long for in my own spiritual journey.

Reflect and enjoy,

Monty

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May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships. so that you may live deep withing your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitations of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

Amen

Relax…breathe deeply, invite the illumination of the Holy Spirit and meditate on what Larry said: (MC Wright)

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The Bible is clear. God exists. He exists in heaven. He exists on earth. He exists everywhere. Most important, He exists in us. That’s where He is most personally and satisfyingly discoverable.

The life of the Trinity flows in our being (Colossians 2:9-10). Christ is in us (Colossians 1:27). The Spirit has entered us and taken up permanent residence (1 Corinthians 3:16). The Father and Son have made Their home in everyone who loves Jesus, and They promise to let us know They’re there (John 14:23).

Our search for God is therefore an inward search. Silence and solitude are essential to discovering His presence. We must block out the noise of life and become aware of our interior world if we’re to find God. Beneath every heartache, beneath every moral failure, beneath every shattered dream, a divine Presence is waiting to be discovered.

Why then do so few find Him? Because He is hidden.

Like a city after an earthquake, God’s presence is hidden beneath the rubble of the Fall. Look inside. An honest look will first reveal the rubble of our efforts to make life work without God, of our terror that keeps us from naked vulnerability to anyone, of our construction project that has created a false self that we hope will stay together through life.

This is the rubble of dust and stone that hides the Presence. We live in sheer dread of giving up control and abandoning ourselves to God. Only when we discover a desire for Him that is stronger that our desire for relief from pain will we pay the price necessary to find Him.

If we’re to encounter the divine Presence, we must enter the interior sanctuary of our heart and, like Jesus in the temple, become indignant over what we find. There is no way to God but through the rubble. We must go through, not around, whatever keeps us from Him. The process is what spiritual people call brokenness and repentance.

That does not mean, of course, that we should dwell every minute on what is difficult in our lives. We would get nothing done and be good to no one if we did. More often, we should lighten up, enjoy what’s enjoyable, and seize everyday opportunities to trust God and do good.

But we must let our souls live in a private monastery, in an attitude of contemplation that helps us see that all of life is sacred, where we remain alert to the Spirit’s revelation of ourselves ad God. When life gets tough and God does nothing, the Spirit is telling us that this world is not our home. He is whispering to us about another world and revealing Someone who is faithfully leading us there along the best path. And He is exposing the rubble that must be cleared away.

If we fail to be quiet enough to hear all that the Spirit is saying, we will be in danger of discovering our desire for God and never discovering His desire for us. When that happens, the Christian comes as close as he ever will to Hell. (pgs. 100-101)

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Larry is right…the journey to find God, to experience His kingdom reality, to taste His life is found along the inward journey. Solitude, silence, prayer, and meditation are paths that help us begin the great descent towards our heart where Christ dwells by faith.

The broken realities of life thrust us toward a journey to find and begin desiring God…however, the jewel of the journey is found when we begin to believe that God actually desires to know us…

When we believe this…we don’t fret so much when we don’t sense or see His presence…it is a knowing from deep within. It is beyond apologetics, beyond charismatic experiences, beyond divine epiphanies…it is faith alive in us that carries us deeper and deeper down and into God Himself.

We were created for more than earth…when we settle for earth’s best, we miss true beauty.

Dei Gratia,  Monty

It is not an everlasting dying and an eternal struggle to live. But it is all expressed in a tense that denotes definiteness, fixedness and finality. We actually died at a certain point and as actually began to live the resurrection life. Let us reckon ourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ (Romans 6:11).

And death is only the pathway and portal
To the life that shall die nevermore;
And the cross leadeth up to the crown everlasting,
The Jordan to Canaan’s bright shore.

Scripture:  Whosoever will save his life shall lose it—Luke 9:24

~Thomas Merton, Spiritual Direction and Meditation, p.16

I Want To Stop Running: by Kenneth Phifer

Eternal God, you are a song amid silence,

A voice out of quietness,

A light out of darkness,

A presence in the emptiness,

A coming out of the void.

You are all of these things and more.

You are mystery that encompasses meaning,

Meaning that penetrates mystery.

You are God,

I am man.

I strut and brag.

I put down my fellows

And bluster out assertions of my achievements.

And then something happens:

I wonder who I am,

And if I matter.

Night falls,

I am alone in the dark and afraid.

Someone dies,

I feel so powerless.

A child is born,

I am touched by the miracle of new life.

At such moments I pause…

To listen for a song amid silence,

A voice out of stillness,

To look for a light out of darkness.

I want to feel a Presence in the emptiness.

I find myself reaching for a hand.

Oftentimes, the feeling passes quickly,

And I am on the run again:

Success to achieve,

Money to make.

O Lord, you have to catch me on the run

Most of the time.

I am too busy to stop,

Too important to pause for contemplation.

I hold up too big a section of the sky

to sit down and meditate.

But even on the run,

An occasional flicker of doubt assails me,

And I suspect I may not be as important

To the world

As I think I am.

Jesus said each of us is important to you.

It is as if every hair of our heads were numbered.

How can that be?

But in the hope that it is so,

I would stop running,

Stop shouting,

And be myself.

Let me be still now.

Let me be calm.

Let me rest upon the faith that you are God,

And I need not be afraid.

Amen

(* from Kenneth Phifer’s book “A Book of Uncommon Prayer”)

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Monty’s Rumination…

There truly is not much for me to say about this prayer.  The deep, heartfelt words paint a very real tapestry that many will instantly connect with.

When I first meditated on this prayer, I was at a monastery with some other pastors, and one line captured my attention more than any other:

“I hold up too big a section of the sky to sit down and meditate.”

Even now, those words roll over me and leave me feeling somewhat uneasy. I’m uneasy because that is very often how I feel. My biblical theology tells me that it is God who holds up the sky, but if that is so, why does so much of it seem to depend on me?

My  practical theology tells me that it is impossible for me to hold up a big section of the sky, and that if I think I am, I need to let it go, but if that is true, why does it seem so many people and things really do depend on me?

We are forever in the catch-22 of monergism and synergism, how much is mine and how much is God’s. When we think that too much depends on us, we posses weary souls, tired feet, and frazzled emotions. When we think that too much depends on us, we create God in our own image. When we create God in our own image, there is no one left who is stronger than ourselves to lift us from the tangled web of living. When we think too much depends on us, our self-importance creates an ego that fills the universe, so of course there is no time to relate with a God who is smaller than we are.

Yet, in our over inflated bigness, Jesus still loves us, still calls us, still waits…

As he graciously reminds me of His power, passion, and presence, I relax, realizing He not only holds up all of the sky, but He made it too. Then I breathe the final words of the prayer:

“I would stop running, stop shouting, and be myself. Let me be still now. Let me be calm. Let me rest upon the faith that you are God, and I need not be afraid.”

God has your corner of the sky,

Dei Gratia…Monty