Celebrating

P 3436 There is a time to jump up and down.   

/ DVH

“Praise the Lord, all you nations; extol Him, all you people. For great is His love toward us and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever. Praise the Lord.” NIV Version Psalm 117, V1&2. This is the shortest Psalm in the bible, it has just two verses. Sometimes brevity can be incredibly important. This Psalmist knew what to focus ON! It’s anonymous. Plus it is an exhortation for all of us to praise the Lord, no matter what nation we belong to or what is going on around us. By the way …

…to extol means: “to praise someone or something with a lot of energy and high emotion. It is a formal verb used when normal praise is not strong enough, often translated as glorifying, celebrating or speaking very well of a person or idea.”  Praise is not a just starting place for worship, it has an entity all of its own, just like thanksgiving does. 

Praise isn’t only about singing. The Lord can be celebrated with words, like this Psalmist does. It’s what I call … pulling focus. We stop wandering about talking to each other and focus on Him. We choose to praise Him because He is worthy of praise, our focus, our energy. Praising God doesn’t mean we sit about like stunned mullets half-heartedly mumbling the words and hoping no-one will notice our lack of participation. Nor is the sermon the only point at that moment either! When we focus on Him with praise, it opens our ears and eyes to His possibilities in our impossible situations.

A lack of praise is like going to a birthday party, where the guests, the cake, the balloons, the bunting, the trimmings… the celebratory things – are the point! We go to a birthday party to wish the person who is having a birthday a happy day. In the same way, praise takes our eyes off us, and our circumstances, and puts the Lord where He always belongs … foremost in our minds. It is a way of tuning into Him, and tuning UP to each other. One voice, one heart, one song — all for Him.

We don’t sing, dance, clap etc. to amuse Him, we do these things because every single part of us needs to stop our normal busy everyday lives and completely focus and recognise “we are His people, the sheep of His pasture.” Doing something physical helps us focus. It is not about how rhythmic we are, or how polished our choir is … church is all about HIM. Then, because He is so incredibly generous, our spirits come alive gazing at life Himself! 

Coming to church is not about singing songs and learning, it is about corporately giving the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit honour. All of us come together to bow down before the One Who has given our lives salvation, purpose, direction and meaning. That’s why we get in our cars, etc. and drive across town and deliberately come to a time and a place that has been set aside for Him. We come to be with Him — together.

We are mistaken if we think praise and worship is for us. Church is not FOR us! We do what we do because He deserves it. When we don’t participate in praise, or worship, we’ve missed the reason we came to church. These things are not flattery, or meant to be lip-service, instead we are calling out to the Lord …with a deep desire to give HIM something that will please His heart. Our unity will blossom in these circumstances. Because we don’t want anything back, instead we choose to leave our own agendas at the door. What He has done for us makes us a grateful people.

We can’t praise and worship without the Holy Spirit guiding us … this means we come to church having prepared our hearts to go and be with the Lord, and His body. For just a short while, we stop focussing on our busy lives, and enter His Rest. When we sing, we are singing to Him. Just like the people at my mythical birthday party sing – “Happy birthday to you.” A birthday party is not for the other people, it is for the birthday person. Praise and worship are for our King and Saviour, Jesus, and our Heavenly Father. Let’s prioritise that!

It is good to ask the Holy Spirit as our conductor and choir master, to come and help us, because human beings can be caught up in themselves and their own lives, becoming selfish and self centred. His holiness will prompt us from the inside and remind us that God Himself is the reason for our lives. There may be times we come to bring a sacrifice of praise and worship, because our life has chucked a wobbly and it took all we had to come to get there. There is no right way to approach these things- we do them the way the Holy Spirit tells us to do them. 

In church, Father God has His own purposes, and His will supersedes what we think we want or need. Part of that is letting the people who are leading us, lead. If someone happens to need ministry, God will arrange it. So we choose to trust the Holy Spirit, the One Jesus gave us to help us, because He knows what is in our Father’s Heart at any given moment. We go to participate. 

We don’t have to see Him to be able to give Him glory –  we have His book! More on that tomorrow. “Rejoice in the Lord, always, and again I say … rejoice…”  Like I said, jump up and down! Almighty God loves us, now, and always. Bye. 👋

P 3189 Love looks like something.

/ DVH

At this time of the year, we are reminded that God’s love looks like a baby in a food trough, surrounded by His parents, animals, smelly unwashed shepherds, (no showers out there!) — and glorious angels lighting the sky, celebrating and singing the new baby off to sleep. That was one heck of a birth announcement! The Lord Jesus’ life was ended far too soon by jealous religious people who esteemed rules over love. If that happened to Him, then why are we surprised if unforeseen unpleasant things happen to us? Pure love will be opposed, because it challenges self-centredness. But, at the same time, it goes right around religion and hits people in the heart!

I think God’s Love looks like RISK. Following Jesus is a risky business. Unlike Forrest Gump’s naive, often quoted wisdom – “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.” I disagree with that thought – MY box of chocolates comes with a list of yummy contents — and so do the Lord’s blessings. My list of blessings are in His book! Mercy, for instance, turns up fresh and new every morning! We are going to have to stay spiritually alert to find His blessings in the middle of this life’s chaos. And we will have to risk what we think we know, to receive from the One Who knows everything. 

Love also looks like not getting what we want, or even like. I’ve met that one. And afterward I’ve given thanks because what I thought I needed, turned out to be a set-up, wickedly provided by the enemy. If anything distracts us from God’s purposes – it’s a trap! The bible calls such things a snare. Whatever it is called, sometimes not getting what we pray for is a blessing! No matter how good, right and just it seems to us. We can pray for more money ‘cos we need it, or a house, or a spouse, only to find that the picture in our mind looks nothing like the reality. Almighty God saves us from ourselves all the time. Praise Him! That’s what I call LOVE.

Love looks like not giving someone else a piece of our mind …especially when very few people care about what we think! This kind of stuff becomes clearer when other people have misunderstood us. Or, even worse, they have misinterpreted our actions. Love looks a lot more like putting a sock in it, than it looks like starting a war over who said what!  I’ve noticed that our lives today seem to be more about making ME understood – than it is about ME understanding YOU! That’s a swing and a miss… plus it flies in the face of everything Jesus said and did.

I really like this scripture: “You have worn out the LORD with your words. And yet, you ask, “How did we do that?” You did it by saying, “The LORD is pleased with evil and doesn’t care about justice.” Malachi 2:17. Even God Himself – the inexhaustible source of all real love, can get sick and tired of our irrational, petty excuses and miserable attitudes. Love can look like taking the blame, whether it is our fault or not, and then asking the Lord to make the difference – instead of pulling out our trusty broad sword and whacking other people over the head with it. The bible is the very best kind of sword, it will cut people free. But .. it doesn’t injure them on purpose for the sake of winning an argument.

Love does not look like compromise.Tell me one time Jesus compromised what He said to make someone else happy! JESUS the LIVING WORD – is the stone that other people stumble over!  “And another scripture says, “This is the stone that will make people stumble, the rock that will make them fall.” They stumbled because they did not believe in the word; such was God’s will for them.” 1 Peter 2:8. Sometimes we can end up striving so hard to make disgruntled people happy! We can’t upset this group because of this … We can’t afford to upset that other group, because we want something from them…  …but nobody says that bit out loud!  

Adapting the Lord’s’ Word to make others feel comfortable, can cause us to compromise all over the place. That is part of our enemy’s most potent strategies. We can call it love, or inclusion, or sharing, but if we compromise on the little things, without His guidance, then compromising on the big things will get so much easier. Love  always has an opinion – HIS!

Love looks like making hard choices – it is not about what we think we want, or need. How can God bless us when we are so busy grabbing stuff for ourselves? This kind of attitude shows us clearly the actual level of our faith. It means we don’t believe He cares for us enough to provide for our needs. So we finagle our way through things instead of sitting back and saying: “If You want me to have such and such Lord, You will provide it.” And then we let those desires go.

Years ago, when my kids were small, we got rid of the TV. Why? Because every single time I spoke to them, all I saw was the back of their heads! It was the Lord’s idea … so we sold it. We were the only people we knew, who had no TV! My kids found ways to amuse themselves, it was a win, win kind of thing. In our news right now we have an uproar about taking away some things that facilitate wrong attitudes in young children, exposing them to all kinds of danger and misadventure. Many parents are scared of not being popular with their kids, but popularity is not an adult’s priority, safety is!

Love looks like boundaries and it also looks like leadership. It looks like kind and firm responses that care about young lives because maturity can see what will happen down the road. Love could care less about popularity, it wants what He wants. Bye 👋