CN | The Rest of God: Stopping to Hear God & Become Whole

City Notes (CN): Books in 30 minutes or less

CN are more than a book review. They are meant to provide you with direct quotes from some books I've read in the last year, so you can get a taste of the overall theme of the book and then begin to chew on what your life might look like if you applied what you read. Here are links to the previous CN books: AND; Life Together; A Meal with Jesus; The Art of Neighboring; Speaking of Jesus; A Praying Life; Leading Missional Communities; Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times; Encounters with Jesus; The Rest of God Part 1 and Part 2

Chapter 10 Reflection | Restore: Stopping to Become Whole

"Do you want to get well? Restoration shocks the system. It alters not just our health – it alters our world. All that we establish to placate or indulge or accommodate our sickness disintegrates with those stark words, 'Take up your mat, and go.' Do you want to get well?" – pg. 152 

  

"I want to return to my work slow to speak, quick to listen, slow to become angry. I want to hide more things in my heart and ponder them there. I want to return with a sharper instinct to pray, to watch and wait, and with less impulsiveness to act straightaway. I want a stronger conviction that, though God welcomes my honest efforts, he manages quite fine without my Peter-like outbursts of ill-conceived enthusiasm and then sudden loss of nerve, my opinion swapping and bully tactics, my reckless volunteerism to fix things for God and then desperate evacuation when things go wrong. Part of Jesus's regimen for me, I've discovered, is holding my tongue. ... as I quiet down, my heart does as well. Quietness allows room for God to speak or to be silent. Both are gifts. Quietness stops crowding the Holy Spirit, elbowing aside God's gentle presence. The end of striving makes room for dwelling." – pgs. 153-154

"I long to get back to a place I was at a few years ago, where every day I heard God. I was more vigilant then, I think, more expectant and hungry. I was the hunter hunted. I was the man in the woods who depended on the keenness of his senses in order to eat and not be eaten. My pursuit of God had an end-of-the-world kind of desperation. Like Rachel crying to Jacob, 'Give me children or I die,' I cried to God, 'Give me your Spirit or I die.' I was spiritually lean, wily, stealthy, alert, and yet also vulnerable, wide open. A child and warrior both. Somewhere I got dull. The child got old, the warrior timid. Again, I think I know how this happened – a combination of growing responsibility and increased privilege – but so what? Somewhere, I started to play things safe. I started to fall back on tried, tired methods of doing things and stopped asking God each day whether I should fight or not fight, go up or go down. I got formulaic in my thinking. I got hidebound in my routines. In the spring, when kings go out to war, I started to stay home, wander bored and restless on the palace roof, looking for something to make me feel young again. Do I want to get well? Yes. I think. Sort of. Maybe. I'm not sure." – pg. 154

"The problem here is that nakedness and hunger are painful. They are like unclosed wound. And God is relentless, always pressing that wound. He is always calling us higher up the mountain, deeper down in the valley, farther out on the water. And some days, I just want life to be easier. My wife said to me awhile back, 'Sometimes I want a holiday from the burden of being made holy. A little time off from God.' Or as my daughter Sarah asked when she was four, 'Is it true God sees us all the time? Even in our hearts? Even what we're thinking? 'Yes.' 'Oh,' she said and looked stricken. And yet my response is the same as Peter's when Jesus asked his disciples if they, like so many others, wanted to leave him: 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life' (John 6:68). I have nowhere else to go. Yes, I want to get well." – pg. 155

"Jesus's favorite day to heal and restore was the Sabbath. He deemed that day most appropriate. 'Should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?' Jesus asks his critics, who think this kind of healing is better done midweek, along with the laundry and hay bailing and stone quarrying (Luke 13:16). Eighteen long years. Jesus says that, uses that adjective: long. He knew. A year in captivity is longer – darker, bleaker – than a year in freedom. A year in sickness is painstakingly slow, each day an ordeal. So Jesus isn't working, he's liberating. That's his language, too. 'Woman,' he announces, 'you are set free from your infirmity' (Luke 13:12, emphasis mine). The religious rulers accuse Jesus of working here, but this woman is the one who's been working. She's had to slave without ceasing beneath her affliction. She's the one curse like Sisyphus to this unending toil, only instead of pushing a boulder, she's hauling one. It's on her back. What Jesus does has nothing to do with work as it's commonly conceived. He sets her free. He liberates her. Liberation is dangerous. It's costly. It's high drama and high stakes. It calls for enormous risk, superhuman effort, steely nerves. There's an enemy in the way, a vicious enemy, heavily armed, not to be trifled with. Of all the words we might use to describe what Jesus does here, work isn't one of them. Setting free isn't work. But being set free can be. You have to want to get well." – pgs. 155-156 

Chapter 10 Action | Restore Sabbath Liturgy: Wanting to Get Well

"We've yet to find a cure for cancer or Crohn's disease or the common cold. But we have discovered the cure for our souls. It may not come easy, but it is free for the asking and available everywhere. But it begins with an honest answer to that question, Do I want to get well? I have a friend who not long ago phoned a former pastor to apologize to him. My friend had been taking stock and was gripped by a conviction that years before he had failed this pastor. He had not supported him as Scripture commands. He had refused to speak words of life and instead had stood aloof, silent in judgment. He saw how his failure had cost both of them. He also believed that any future effectiveness in his own ministry, and maybe in this pastor's, was tied to his willingness to humble himself and seek forgiveness and make amends. He wanted to get well. My friend did as God told him. He called the pastor and, without excuse, apologized. He simply walked in unquestioning obedience to his conviction. Out of that is blossoming for him a long season of fruitfulness and influence." – pg. 159

Chapter 11 Reflection | Feast: Stopping to Taste the Kingdom

"It used to bother me that the church had taken the Eucharist – the love feast – and reduced it such meager portions. What had originally been a visible, bountiful demonstration of the banquet of grace had become, over the centuries, a token of scarcity: a mere crumb of bread, a single mouthful of wine or juice. But I wonder if, rather than scarcity, the meal now symbolizes simplicity. In a gluttonous age, where nothing is enough, the sparseness of the Communion meal becomes a reminder that grace is sufficient, that our daily bread is all we need." – pg. 163

"Be careful when you eat well (see Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 6-12, 14). Be careful when God lavishes wealth on you so that feasting is your daily experience. Be careful lest you come to expect it. Be careful when those days of testing and refining and humbling and disciplining that hunger brings are long forgotten. Be careful when the days of having to look to God for daily bread and water from the rock are a murky memory, faintly embarrassing. I don't know how else the memory of hunger can be kept alive except by sometimes being hungry. Fasting is good for this. But restraint in our eating – the practice of frugality – is good as well. Then, when we interrupt our frugality with feasting – on Sabbath days, wedding days, birthdays, national holidays, and the like – we are like workers in from the harvest. We are soldiers home from war. We are hunters returning." – pg. 165

" ... there's another food the Bible speaks about. It is not physical food. It is God's will – doing what he asks, finishing the work he sent us to do. That's the way Jesus put it. ... Jesus reveals many things to the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4. He tells her that God is looking for worshipers. He lets on that he knows she has lived – indeed, is living – a sinful life. But the most startling revelation is this: he tells her he's the Messiah. She's the first person to whom he reveals this. He hasn't even told his disciples yet. Jesus chooses these circumstances, this place, this person – his own weariness and thirstiness and hunger, the dusty outskirts of a Samaritan village, a woman who's lived from one broken relationship to the next – to make the announcement. His disciples return, appalled to find Jesus talking to her, though none of them dare speak that out loud. The woman runs off, amazed that he knows all about her – 'everything (she) ever did' is how she puts it (John 4:39) – and more amazed that he loves her anyhow, that he does not withdraw or qualify in some way his promise to her of living water. If anything, his knowing her, knowing everything she ever did, makes him more vulnerable and extravagant with her. More willing to risk and bless and reveal. Many Samaritans, stirred by the woman's testimony, come out to see this man for themselves. ... (Later) Jesus tells his disciples straight up: 'My food ...  is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work' (John 4:34). Jesus began tired, hungry, and thirsty. He asked the Samaritan woman for water, but she gave him none. He was spent from the journey, but the woman's needs interrupted his own. His disciples brought him food, but he never took a bite. None of Jesus's physical needs were met, yet he was refreshed, alert. His thirst was quenched, his weariness lifted, his hunger satisfied. His food was to do God's work. ... Jesus speaks of a work that moves in the opposite direction: the more we do it, the fuller we get, and the fuller we get, the more we want to do it. This work is food, a thing that nourishes, satisfies, strengthens. We savor it, sit back content from it. The Samaritan woman said to Jesus when he offered her living water, 'Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water' (John 4:15). I say to Jesus, 'Sir, give me this work so that I won't get tired and have to keep toiling at things that exhaust me.' The work is to do what God wants." – pgs. 168-169  

"Most days, the work I do – preaching, teaching, writing, exhorting – is what God wants. I believe, with deepest conviction, that this is the work God sent me to do and to finish, and I'm a glutton for it. It feeds my craving. It fills my inmost places. I may go into it weary, hungry, thirsty, but I come out replenished. I cannot number the times I have stood up to speak so empty I'm sure I'll fall over, only to finish ready to slay a thousand Philistines with no more than an ass's jawbone. I begin in weakness and end in strength. I discover all over again that this is exactly what God loves: to make his power perfect in our weakness, to show up in splendor when we show up in faithfulness, obedient but inadequate, trusting but inept, with nothing in our hands but our need for him. 'You feed them,' he tells us, when we have hardly enough even to feed ourselves. We give what we have anyway and find afterward that everyone had his fill. There are even basketfuls remaining." – pg. 169 

     

Chapter 11 Action | Feast Sabbath Liturgy: Staying Hungry

"My food is to do the will of the one who sent me. One thing Jesus did in the Eucharist was to connect, in a vivid and simple way, eating with obedience and worship. He joined earth with heaven, bread with manna, flesh with Spirit. He linked physical hunger with spiritual hunger. He reminded us that every bite is also a prayer. Do you eat this way? I have two suggestions for this Sabbath Liturgy. The first is that you receive your very next meal – breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever – as a gift from both heaven and earth. Partake of it with thankfulness and simplicity, eating just enough to fill you, then stopping. Nourish your spirit and your body together. Try to do this whenever you eat and drink. The other suggestion is that your next Sabbath meal be a feast: a time of enjoying the sheer bounty of God and his creation. Maybe if you don't do this already, invite others to join you. Overdo it a bit. Delight in the utter extravagance of God, who does exceeding, abundantly more than all we ask or imagine. In John 21, the risen Christ, repeating an earlier lesson with his disciples, instructs fishermen in their trade. They have fished all night and caught nothing. 'Try casting your net on the other side of the boat,' Jesus calls to them from the lakeshore. They do, and the nets fill. Peter recognizes that it's Jesus on the beach, and he jumps in and swims to shore. Soon they all arrive, lugging the nets, hauling the fish. Then this: they 'saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread' (v. 9). Jesus always has food we know nothing about. But he's willing to share." – pgs. 174-175

Chapter 12 Reflection | Listen: Stopping to Hear God

" ... I always return to the same thought: If people stop to listen to you, to whom are you stopping to listen? All our authority is derived. Either God gives us words, or we are only giving opinions. Either God vouches for us, or our credentials are forged. If anyone ever stops to listen to you or me, this had better be solidly in place: Our speaking comes out of our listening. What we say comes out of what we hear. We have to be people who listen, day and night, to God. Our utterances ought to be as Jesus's were: an echoing of the Father, an imitation of him. They ought to be a holy ventriloquism, a sacred pantomime. Peter puts it this way: 'If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God' (1 Peter 4:11). That verse should be paired with Jesus's statement: 'He who has ears, let him hear.'" – pg. 178

" ... there has not been enough silence in my life. Silence is the condition of true listening. But I have too little of it. Silence came visiting and found me already occupied. The element of silence is for me scanty and thin. ... Henri Nouwen noted that the root of the word absurd is the Latin word for 'deaf,' surdus. Absurdness is deafness, where the voice that speaks truth in love, that wounds to heal, that gives clear guidance amidst many false enticements – that voice is lost in the cacophony. We cannot hear it. We are deaf to it. For lack of silence, our lives are absurd. 'I confess my sins,' poet and farmer Wendell Berry says, 'that I have not been happy enough, considering my good luck; have listened to too much noise; have been inattentive to wonders; have lusted after praise.' I confess my sins; I have done these things also." – pgs. 178-179

"Samuel 'grew up in the presence of the LORD,' grew 'in stature and in favor with the LORD,' and 'ministered before the LORD' (1 Samuel 2:21, 26; 3:1). We read all that and then stumble over this: 'Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD: The word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him' (3:7, emphasis mine). Thus, with Scripture's classic understatement, we encounter an ancient problem that plagues us still, that is as old as the garden and as contemporary as this morning's news: we can be very busy for God and still not know him. Absurd. But God means to remedy that, for Samuel and for us. And so one night, God speaks to Samuel. He speaks into the silence in a way that pierces it. In a way that subverts the absurdity. It is a clear voice, unmistakable, inescapable, personal, imperative. It is a voice that demands a response. ... Eli tells Samuel the next time he hers the voice to respond, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening' (1 Samuel 3:9). Samuel lies down. God calls a fourth time. Samuel responds as Eli said. And God speaks, and speaks, and speaks. Thus begins Samuel's intimacy with the Lord. All his finely wrought religious training is transposed into face-to-face encounter. All his theological studies are finally rendered as worship and prayer. And so: 'The LORD was with Samuel as he grew up, and (the Lord) let none of his words fall to the ground ... And Samuel's word came to all Israel' (1 Samuel 3:19; 4:1, emphasis mine). The logic of this is straightforward: God protects, preserves, and empower Samuel's words because Samuel hears, receives, and obeys God's word. ... Our concern, our responsibility, is simply to hear and heed God. It is always and everywhere to say: 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." – pgs. 181-183

"I want it. I want God's voice to be to me as it was to John (in Revelation 1:10, 12: 'I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet. ... I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me', emphasis mine), a thing so real and solid and inescapable I can virtually see it. I want to live by faith, not by sight. And faith comes by hearing. I want to have ears so tuned to the Voice that when God speaks there is no ignoring it. Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. ... There are two contextual details we know about the apostle John that day he turned to see the Voice. One, he was in exile on Patmos. He was, in other words, under an enforced silence and aloneness, a season of inactivity. Two, it was Sunday, the Lord's Day. It was his Sabbath. ... Sabbath is a time to listen. Rabbi Abraham Heschel claims that Sabbath is a token of eternity, an outpost of heaven. It is time uniquely poised for God's presence. If ever we might expect to see a voice, this day ranks highest. A predominant Jewish legend is that God imparted the Torah, the Old Testament law, on the Sabbath: for on this day, the conviction went, Israel listened best, was attentive to the Voice, and so was least likely to miss the day of God's visitation." – pgs. 185-186

"Today, if you hear his voice. The generation under Mosses was punished for disobedience and unbelief. But at root, those sins are a failure to hear and heed the Voice of the One who speaks. It is not accident that the lengthy passage in Hebrews 4 about Sabbath rest and hearing God's voice is immediately followed by this: 'For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account' (Hebrews 4:12-13). And that in turn is followed by this: 'Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need' (Hebrews 4:14-16). God is always speaking. 'There is no speech or language / where (his) voice is not heard' (Psalm 19:3). But we're not always listening. We don't make the effort and so fail to go boldly into his throne room to receive what we need: a word that can piece, and cut, and heal. Here's the paradox: If we don't listen, we never enter his rest. Yet if we don't enter his rest, we never listen." – pgs. 187-188

 

Chapter 12 Action | Listen Sabbath Liturgy: Listening

"'The heavens declare the glory of God,' Psalm 19 says, 'Day after day they pour forth speech' (vv. 1-2). But who's listening? Prayer, before it's talking, out to be listening. Before it's petition, it should be audition. Before it calls for eloquence, it requires attention. God speaks. We listen. Prayer's best posture is ears cupped, head tilted toward that Voice. And what does the Voice speak? More often than not, a question. God's curiosity is his most underexplored attribute. He's downright inquisitive, brimful with questions – some childlike blunt, asked in seeming naivete, others lawyerlike shrewd, asked with stealthy cunning. Many he asks at odd or awkward moments, moments of heightened danger or giddy elation or riveting shame, moments when my impulse – especially were I God – would be to command or announce. But God asks. He's a God of wonder in more ways than one." – pgs. 189-190
 

"(God) possesses all things in all fullness. God, strictly speaking, has nothing to ask. But he asks anyhow. And this, I think, is why: nothing hooks us and pries us open quite like a question. You can talk all day at me, yet it obliges me nothing. I can listen or not, respond or not. But ask me one question, and I must answer or rupture our fellowship. God's inquisitiveness, his seeming curiosity, is a measure of his intimate nature. He desires relationship. He wants to talk with us, not just at us, or we at him. So a key attitude of prayer is listening, and what we listen for most are God's questions. 'Where are you?' 'Where is your brother?' 'Where are the other nine?' 'Why do you call me good?' 'Why do you call me 'Lord' and not do the things I say?' Who do you say I am?' ... He who has ears, let him hear. For this Sabbath Liturgy, find any one of the questions God or Jesus asks: 'Where is your brother?' 'Why do you call me good?' 'Where are the other nine?' 'Who do you say I am?' – there are many. Choose one. Ponder it until you hear God asking you the question personally. And then ponder it until you can give an answer." – pgs. 190-191

Chapter 13 Reflection | Remember: Stopping to Pick Up the Pieces

"To remember is, literally, to put broken pieces back together, to re-member. It is to create an original wholeness out of what has become scattered fragments. At times it traps us, I know, memory holds us hostage, demands we pay some impossible ransom. But just as often it frees us, reminds us of something we know in our bones but forget in our heads, only to remember it again in the nick of time, before we seal an identity not truly ours. ... There is a terrible cost to our busyness. It erodes memory. Or worse than that: it turns good memory into mere nostalgia – memory falsified and petrified – and turns bad memory into bloodhounds that chase us to rend us, that keep us every running, dodging, backtracking. Busyness destroys the time we need to remember well. In the confusion, we forget who we are. The broken pieces remain strewn. The Swahili word for 'white man' – mazunga – literally means 'one who spins around.' That's how East Africans see Westerners: turning ourselves dizzy, a great whirl of motion with direction. We're flurries of going nowhere. Sabbath time invites us to stop turning around and around." – pg. 196

"All these – remembering, reflecting, anticipating – are Sabbath practices. They are also Eucharistic practices, the ways we approach the bread and the cup of Communion. Jesus told us to eat and drink in remembrance of him, and to do it in anticipation of that day we will eat and drink with him in heaven. He told us, in other words, to look back and to look ahead. The apostle Paul adds one thing to this: when we eat and drink this meal, we ought to examine ourselves and our relationships with others. We ought to look around and look within. We ought to reflect. Both Sabbath and Eucharist join all three: remember, reflect, anticipate. This linkage between Sabbath and Communion is not accidental. Eucharist, after all, is the Christian embodiment of the Jewish Passover, and Passover is the High Holy Day of Judaism, the lord of Sabbaths. Just as we approach the Communion table with reverence and awe – we sanctify it and don't treat this as just another meal, another chunk of bread or mouthful of wine awe – so we ought to approach Sabbath with a sense of its sacredness – that this is not just ordinary time, chronos time. This, rather, is kairos time, time as sanctuary, time as holy ground. This is God-given space to remember, reflect, and anticipate." – pg. 196

"Sometimes I think an alternate title for the Bible could be The Book of Remembering and Forgetting. A constant scriptural refrain is to remember. Our faith is rooted in memory, so much so that one of the key works of the Holy Spirit is the ministry of reminding (see John 14:26). ... (And) Equal to this is the capacity to forget. 'Forgetting what is behind,' Paul writes, 'and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus' (Philippians 3:13-14). Only by forgetting, Paul says, can he 'press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me' (Philippians 3:12). Taking hold of God's call on our lives depends on this quality of forgetfulness. God's future entails a relinquishing of some of our own pasts. God himself wills a holy amnesia in regard to confessed sins: he 'will remember their sins no more' (Jeremiah 31:34). Certain memories clamor for preeminence but must be denied it. They are bully memories, despotic and spoiled. These are memories – we all know this – that seek to use up all the energy that might otherwise be invested in remembering well, or reflecting truthfully, or anticipating joyfully. This kind of memory is gluttonous, never satisfied with its share. It wants, not just the day it had, but every day, today and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, until the end of all days. As a pastor, I've spoken to hundreds of people held hostage by these kinds of memories. Old wounds they keep reopening. Old glories they keep reliving. Old grudges they keep nursing. Old taunts they keep rehearsing. Old fears they keep reviving. Their minds curve back to and curl around these with virtually no provocation. These memories are a prison they've lived in so long they don't know how to live outside it. They're stuck. True remembering gets us unstuck. Do you remember well? 'Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you stood your ground in a great contest in the face of suffering ...  Do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere' (Hebrews 10:32, 35-36). Do you remember those earlier days? Do you remember the moment you knew you were loved with a love that could not be taken or broken or lost? Do you remember the day the Voice broke into you like a storm, terrifying and healing all at once? Hold that memory until it's alive, until it assumes its true size and weight and shape. Persevere. Until it reminds you who you really are." – pgs. 197-199

Chapter 13 Action | Remember Sabbath Liturgy: Remembering

"If the Israelites ever forgot the Exodus, they forgot who they were. If Christians ever forget Jesus's death and resurrection, we come unhinged from the story that defines us, the story that frames and explains all other stories. Here is a Sabbath Liturgy borrowed from an ancient Christian practice. It is called the prayer of examen. One way to practice this is to review your days at the end of each and to ask two simple questions: Where did I feel most alive, most hopeful, most in the presence of God? And where did I feel most dead, most despairing, farthest from God? What fulfilled me, and what left me forsaken? Where did I taste consolation, and where desolation? This is a good practice all on its own; it trains us in the quirks and rhythms of our hearts and teaches us to track the wind of the Spirit. But it also makes us better stewards of memory. It enshrines those moments, many elusive and capricious, that are probably far more significant in God's eyes than those moments that rivet or command attention. A wild man in camel hair, a young couple in a stable – these are infinitely more significant than all the grandeur and fanfare of Caesar. But they're harder to see. We won't grasp their importance unless we take time to notice. Try this. At the day's end ... Quiet yourself. Reflect on the day. When were you most alive? What were you doing then, thinking, saying, seeing? When were you most empty? What was going on at that moment? When did it seem God was close, and when did it seem he was far away? Practice that each day." – pgs. 200-201

Chapter 14 Reflection | Reflect and Anticipate: Stopping to Glimpse Forever

"This is a fight like all the others (in Genesis 32 with Jacob and God). This is a fight like none other. This is fight he cannot afford to lose, and a fight he cannot afford to win. This is a fight that can cripple him and mend him. It can end his exile and make good his homecoming, even if ever after he limps. But first a question: 'The man asked him, 'What is your name?'' (Genesis 32:27). Who are you? Jacob can't run, can't hide, can't fight any longer. 'Jacob,' he answered' (v. 27). And then a miracle happens, a miracle greater than the reconciliation about to take place between Jacob and Esau, a miracle that perhaps had to happen before that reconciliation was even possible. Jacob finds out who he really is. 'Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you struggled with God and with men and have overcome' (v. 28). Jacob then has a request, the same one the man had of him: 'Please tell me your name,' But the man refuses: 'Why do you ask my name?' is all he says (v. 29). Yet Jacob knows who this is. Somehow – a tone, a gesture, a touch, something – the man discloses his identity. 'I saw God face to face,' Jacob declares afterward (v. 30). On that night before meeting Esau, Jacob met himself, really for the first time. And he met God, really for the first time. I don't think I'm making too much of this story. I have sat more hours than I can tally with people who have avoided themselves so long – often by indulging themselves, by playing Jacob, by coveting what others have and amassing wealth at others' expense – that they have no idea who they are. And almost without exception, these people are going so headlong at life that they have no time, or so they're convinced, and usually no inclination to be alone, to listen, to wait. To reflect. To ask, Who am I? Who are you? I think they're afraid, many of them. They fear the man who stalks them to wrestle with them, to wound them, to bless them, to ask them their names, to name them anew. They fear meeting the men who are really themselves. They fear meeting the man who is really God. And, I suppose, more than this, deeper than this, they fear not meeting either." – pgs. 205-206

" ... this is mostly what I do when I counsel: I help people anticipate. ... What I do best is describe, as much as human words allow, the hope to which they have been called, the glory we are to receive. I describe how Jesus has power to bring everything under his control, and how he exerts that control on our behalf, to take us at our lowest and change us into people who resemble him. ... We truly know ourselves only in light of God's future. We truly know God only in the same light. Apart from a compelling vision of things unseen, our lives shrink to things as they are or things as they were. ... The most determinate fact of reality is not things that were or things that are. It is things to come. It is things that will be: 'Now he has promised, 'Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.' The words 'once more' indicate the removing of what can be shaken – that is, created things – so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our 'God is a consuming fire' (Hebrews 12:26-29, emphasis mine) ... In Hebrews 3, the writer condemns the generation of Israel under Moses who did not believe God's promise of a land God had prepared for them and so did not enter God's rest. 'Therefore,' the writer says in chapter 4, 'since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it' (v. 1). Because of their forfeiture, the promise has been extended to you and me. 'Now we who have believed enter that rest' (v. 3). ... By faith we make every effort to enter this rest, not by striving, but by trusting. Not by works, but by believing. Later, in Hebrews 11, the writer spells out the nature of this faith: 'Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see' (v. 1). ... Sabbath isn't eternity, but it's close. It's a kind of precinct of heaven. A well-kept Sabbath is a dress rehearsal for things above. In finding the rest of God now, we prepare for the fullness of God one day. In Sabbath, we anticipate forever. Make every effort to enter that." – pgs. 210-213

Chapter 14 Action | Reflect and Anticipate Sabbath Liturgy: Practicing Heaven

"We have let consumerism tutor the church in its creed of more, better, brighter, faster. So we have fostered expectations that no church, no home group, no pulpit, no band of brothers, no brand of worship, no conference, no Bible school can ever deliver. The shortfall between what we dream and what we get is vast. All is weighed and found wanting in our sight. Only we set our sights on the wrong horizon. The truth is, we're always a bit restless. We're supposed to be. This is not a flaw in our faith, it is faith's substance. It is a divine ruse to keep us from making permanent settlement this side of eternity. Our citizenship is in heaven. Between now and then, here and there, we live as sojourners, Bedouins, exiles, tent dwellers. There is always a little sand in the sheets. There is always a sense that over there is better than right here. If ever we achieved perfect Sabbath here, unbroken rest and restfulness, then the eternal rest that Sabbath hints at would become irrelevant. God let us groan now to woo us heavenward. He gives us rest here, but not enough to fully satisfy, just enough to keep us in the race. With rest he mixes restlessness. ... Sabbath is for rest. But it is also a good opportunity to point our restlessness heavenward." – pgs. 214-215

"When we recognize that our loneliness, our hunger, our weariness, our disappointment – that these are not final verdicts but only rumors of things unseen, it changes their meaning. It empties them of their power to defeat us. It fills them with an energy to spur us toward deeper hope. Jesus, speaking of things unseen, often talked about 'how much more.' If you, though evil, know how to give good gifts, how much more does your Father in heaven? If even bad judges eventually dispense justice, how much more our God? This last Sabbath Liturgy is to help train your restless heart heavenward, and it borrows from the logic of 'how much more.' If this meal with friends and family is rich, how much more the banquet of the great King? If resting in this patch of sunlight is refreshing, how much more to rest in that place where God and the Lamb shine brighter than any sun? If lovemaking with my spouse is blissful, how much more what no eye has seen and no ear heard but which God prepares for those he loves?" – pg. 215

Epilogue | Now Stop 

"Sabbath was made for man. It was something God prepared long ago, inscribed into the very order of creation: a day when all the other days loosed their grip. They were forced to. It's a day that God intended to fuss over us, not we over it. It was designed to protect us, pay tribute to us, coddle us, in all our created frailty and God imprinted beauty and hard-won liberty, in our status as men and women whom God made in his own image and freed by his own hand and own blood. It is a father's gift to indulge his children. Before we ever keep the Sabbath holy, it keeps us holy. ... God, out of the bounty of his own nature, held this day apart and stepped fully into it, then turned and said, 'Come, all you who are weary and heavy-laden. Come, and I will give you rest. Come, join me here.' He makes the footprints, and we just follow along beside. In one of my other books, I tell the story about the time Philipp Melanchthon turned to Martin Luther and announced, 'Today, you and I shall discuss the governance of the universe.' Luther looked at Melachthon and said, 'No. Today, you and I shall go fishing and leave the governance of the universe to God.' Ah, the rest of God." – pg. 220

Next post: Interrupted: When Jesus Wrecks Your Comfortable Christianity Part 1 of 3

– Sully

Email Pastor Mike | Facebook Us | Join Us | Support Us