Moving With God

Baby steps of faith, hope and love

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Accents

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Written by: Alyssa
Category: Thoughts

One of the youth led Bible study at Chazown this week, and it was great! We read about Peter denying Jesus in Matthew 26, and something new stood out to me - in verse 73 a bystander comes up to Peter and says, "Certainly you are one of [the men with Jesus], for your accent betrays you."

Peter was a Galilean, and the way he spoke made it obvious, even when he was trying to blend in with the crowd outside the courtyard. I don't think Christians should try to keep their faith a secret, but there are many times it may not be possible or appropriate to preach and evangelize. For those times, I hope I will live with an ever-strengthening accent: a humble attitude, gracious spirit, and integrity of character - all testifying to the work God has done in me, so that no matter what my words happen to be, bystanders will recognize that I belong to Jesus.

Punishment

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Written by: Alyssa
Category: Thoughts

Matt and I were chatting with an atheist friend of ours who grew up in the church and is now done with God. It was a really good conversation even though he didn't decide to convert at the end. One of the things he said got me thinking though - that IF there were a God (which he denies), he is either not all-knowing or a jerk. Our friend didn't say jerk, but it was a four-letter word that ends in k.

God's a jerk, he says, because he gave humans free will knowing we'd mess it up, and then he punished us for messing up.

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Testimony

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Written by: Alyssa
Category: Thoughts
I gave my testimony at our church picnic this year, which was great! I was happy to share the great things God has done for me and in me, and it helped me to connect with some new people so I am making more friends at church :) I said more than I wrote down, but here's what I had written:

Hello, I want to say first of all how happy I am to be sharing my testimony with all of you. I hope that you will be encouraged in your faith to hear how faithful God has been to me in my life.
     My father is a pastor, and I grew up going to church and learning about God. I believed in Jesus when I was very young, and I was baptized when I was 7 years old. It was always important to me to be a good Christian. I tried to be kind to everyone at school, even if they were unpopular, I memorized Bible verses in Sunday school, and I volunteered at my church’s programs.
     When I was 14 I found a lump in my neck. There was a cyst growing on my thyroid that grew bigger and bigger, so by the time I had surgery it was bigger than my fist. There was cancer in the lump, so I had radiation treatment, and after the radiation treatment I had another even bigger surgery to make sure that there was no cancer left in my neck.
     This was a very difficult time for my family because my parents were very worried about me. My church was praying for me, and even strangers from other churches who knew my story prayed for me and my family. It was frightening for me too because I felt very young to be so sick, but whenever I was scared or sad I would pray and ask God to help me be brave and to make me better. God helped me and everyone in my family to trust him, and finally my cancer was cured.
     Gradually as time passed I started to drift away from God. I knew that he had helped me a lot when I was sick, but I was tired of all the rules to being a good Christian getting in the way of things I wanted to do. I started going to parties with friends and drinking alcohol on the weekend, but I always went to church on Sunday too. This went on for about a year – I still tried to be a good person, and I worked hard in school, but I rarely thought about God and it didn’t seem to matter very much.
     Finally one day I was sitting in church hung over and realized that I had become a huge hypocrite. There wasn’t anything in particular happening during the service that convicted me, but there was a stillness in my mind and a very clear understanding that it was time to choose whether I was going to obey God or choose my own path, and I knew that the decisions I was making were not leading to the kind of life I wanted to have.
     I prayed and asked God to help me begin a new relationship with him, not just keeping rules so people would see what a good Christian I was, and not just going to church so that I wouldn’t feel guilty, but getting to know God and becoming more like his child. I started going to a mid-week Bible study to get a more solid grounding in my faith, and I started living with more integrity and honesty. It wasn’t easy, and I made a lot of mistakes. I had bad habits, and most of my friends didn’t understand why I would want anything different. I was afraid that I would give up and walk away from God again, but one day when I was reading my Bible I realized that God has made an amazing promise:
     Jude v 24 says that God is able to keep you from stumbling and to bring you into his glorious presence faultless and full of joy. When I read that, I memorized the promise so I could remember it in any circumstance, that no matter how much I fail, no matter how weak or vulnerable I am to sin, I can remember that God is able to hold on to me.
     What I have learned in my relationship with God is that he loves me more than I can understand, and he cares about my life. He matches all of the effort that we put into our relationship with him, and he helps us to understand and do what is right and to become people who are pleasing to him, who want the same things as he wants for the world.
     This past week I was reading in 1 Peter and was struck by chapter 2 verse 10 – “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
     It’s not that God wasn’t merciful before I gave my life to him – he totally was! Merciful by the family he gave me, merciful that things didn’t get more out of hand than they did when I was drinking, merciful to be ready to forgive me before I asked and merciful to convict me, to speak gently to me when I was hungover in church. Jesus died for us while we were still his enemies – Romans 5:8, so what does Peter mean about receiving mercy? I think that before we are saved, it is there for the taking but we don’t accept it. Now that we have accepted it, how fully it is ours! We cannot allow ourselves to question God’s mercy toward us – no amount of backsliding or frailty or lostness can keep us from God’s mercy or disqualify us from forgiveness. It is God’s will to keep us from stumbling and we can claim that promise! God is faithful not only to forgive us but to gently, mercifully shape us and change us – not that we ever get past the point of needing forgiveness, but he makes us able to rejoice in our salvation free of guilt or shame or fear!

Oil

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Written by: Alyssa
Category: Thoughts

Our preacher this Sunday spoke on Psalm 23, focusing on verses 5 and 6. In the sermon he also commented on the parable of the ten virgins - five wise and five foolish. The only difference between the wise virgins and foolish virgins was whether or not they had enough oil, and the preacher used OIL as an acrostic to describe what it represents in terms of believers being prepared as we wait for our bridegroom (Jesus!) to return. This is one of the few acrostics I have heard/seen used in a sermon that actually enhanced my memory and understanding of the preacher's point, so I thought I'd share:

O - obedience
I - intimacy (not waiting for death and eternal life in heaven to participate in the intimate, personal, real relationship we can have with God through Jesus)
L - love (I prefer longing here, because it is less vulnerable to cliche. We must truly long for Jesus to come back because we love him)

It was also a pretty sweet sermon because it was a communion Sunday, and he reminded us that communion is not only a remembrance of the Last Supper, but an anticipation of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

All in all, God was very generous with himself to me this Sunday =)

Language

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Written by: Alyssa
Category: Thoughts
I was reminded this Sunday of how meaningful it is to worship in one's own language. It is easy to forget in Canada, but it was something I learned the hard way in Brazil, where it was often very lonely and unfulfilled to stumble through worship songs in Portuguese, focusing more on phonics than God. I could sing or pray or cry to God in English any time, but communal worship is an integral part of Christian practice, and I missed it. One week Joyce (the missionary who hosted me) took me to an English-speaking church in Brasilia, and I loved it so much. I soaked in the announcements, sang from the heart, took notes during the sermon, and read the bulletin as if it was the 67th book of the Bible (youth group to play board games at the Walkers on Thursday? Amazing!).

Church is always in my language now, and my heart has been lazy to appreciate it. I have been struggling on and off to really worship God at church this summer, but I loved this past Sunday because we had someone sing special music in Tamil. The English translation of the song was printed in the bulletin, so everybody could read the words, and the words were beautiful, but they weren't what struck me. My heart was touched when part way through the song and again at the end, I heard the Tamil people in the pew behind me humming and singing along under their breath with the singer. It reminded me of my longing for English worship, and I was humbled to remember that these people participate every week in our English service without complaining that the language of their hearts is not represented.

(We) English speakers find a lot to complain about in our church services - too long, not enough time spent on a certain aspect, wrong type of music, hating that we repeat a chorus 9 times, wishing people were "more spiritual," wishing people would mind their business about our spirituality - what a miracle that in heaven we will still have our differences but without any division - "a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all trives and peoples and tongues, standing before the throng and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches [in] their hands; and they cry out with a loud voice, saying, "Salvation to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb." (Rev. 7:9-10)

Oneness with God

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Written by: Alyssa
Category: Thoughts

A lot of Christians like to talk about following Jesus, which I've been thinking about a lot since I got an email from a wonderful sister in Christ about intimacy with God. She wrote:

I am covered in the blood - the inseparable life of Christ. I don't need to be a follower now his life is complete in me. Nothing can separate us from his life not in action, thought or deed. His life is living and breathing and very exciting to live in that relationship place.

I find so much strength and comfort knowing that nothing can separate me from him or his life.

I've been thinking about this the last few days - and I agree there are times when our mentality as Christians should be as Christ-followers, but I like the way Jesus takes out a step by sending the Holy Spirit to live in us and guide us straight from the heart, not only from our minds solving the answer to WWJD. It is so good in those times when I can get out of my own way to trust God and allow him to use me, and those are the times when I really realize how useless we are apart from him.

I want it more!!

The Gerasenes

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Written by: Alyssa
Category: Thoughts

The sermon I heard on Sunday was about the demon-possessed man Jesus set free in Luke 8:26-39. This was the weirdest thing that struck me:

When Jesus arrived, "He was met by a man from the city who was possessed with demons; and who had not put on any clothing for a long time, and was not living in a house, but in the tombs... [The demon that possessed him] had seized him many times; and he was bound with chains and shackles and kept under guard, and yet he would break his bonds and be driven by the demon into the desert...many demons had entered him."

Nuts, right? This guy is scary, and his situation is scary. He is not someone I would want as a neighbour, even if he did keep to the tombs. This is not a man I would want to have to explain to my children.

How did the Gerasenes feel? "The people went out to see what had happened; and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting down at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they became frightened. "

I don't know what is scary about this. I'm trying to think if maybe there is anything in my life that (insanely) I am more scared of Jesus making right than just living with it.

Thoughts?

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