2020 3 29 Call & Cost: The Suffering Servant – I Call & Character – W. Pratt

This is, as our pastor stated, a delayed start to an Easter series he was excited about but thought he needed to address the crisis of our times first (See March 22 – Keeping Faith in the Storm). As he said, we plan, but reality takes over. 

This series will examine how Jesus knew what his calling was and what kept him on the costly path to faithful fulfilment of his mission. He was fully human and so, like us, was a unique individual whose development, to be a mature and successful person who would accomplish his calling, needed him to have a healthy self-understanding of (1) who he was, his identity, and (2) what he was called to do.

During his walk on earth, Jesus at least three times predicted his death (Mark 8:31-3, 9:30-2, 10:32-4). This tells us he had come to understand that the cross, death, was part of his calling. But how did he come to know this, what motivated him, what did he hope to achieve, why was this a necessary part of his calling/mission?

Pastor Winston here shared how he had felt called from a career in business to become a pastor. We need to follow our calling if we do not want to miss out on what life, what God has in store for us.

How then did Jesus learn of his calling?

1.     His parents, who had been told who he was to be, the Messiah, no doubt told him this when they gauged he was old enough to begin to understand.

2.     We see this in that already, at age 12, when he was found debating with religious leaders in the temple in Jerusalem, Jesus told his parents he needed to be “about the father’s business.” He identified God as his father. Perhaps he wanted to learn from these leaders what they understood from scripture of who the Messiah was to be and what was his mission.

Quite possibly one of the passages they considered was one of the Servant Songs of Isaiah, e.g., 42:1-9:

42:1 “Here is my servant whom I support,

my chosen one in whom I take pleasure.

I have placed my spirit on him;

he will make just decrees for the nations.

42:2 He will not cry out or shout;

he will not publicize himself in the streets. 

42:3 A crushed reed he will not break,

a dim wick he will not extinguish;

he will faithfully make just decrees.

42:4 He will not grow dim or be crushed

before establishing justice on the earth;

the coastlands will wait in anticipation for his decrees.”

42:5 This is what the true God, the Lord, says – 

the one who created the sky and stretched it out,

the one who fashioned the earth and everything that lives on it, 

the one who gives breath to the people on it,

and life to those who live on it:

42:6 “I, the Lord, officially commission you;

I take hold of your hand.

I protect you and make you a covenant mediator for people,

and a light to the nations,

42:7 to open blind eyes,

to release prisoners from dungeons,

those who live in darkness from prisons.

42:8 I am the Lord! That is my name!

I will not share my glory with anyone else,

or the praise due me with idols.

42:9 Look, my earlier predictive oracles have come to pass;

now I announce new events.

Before they begin to occur,

I reveal them to you.”

Here, Jesus would have gotten insight into something of his call:

            i. The nature of his ministry – v. 1 – he was to be a servant to his people

ii. The character of a servant – true to God, faithful to his ways (v. 3), delighting in doing his father’s will, which would bring real success (v. 4) 

iii. He would be a leader with a gentle touch (v.2-3). This can make us question, what kind of servant or

leader are we?

iv. The goal of his ministry (v.3-4) – he was to bring righteousness, justice & hope, re-establishing God’s 

order into all of society - setting it on the right way, God’s path.

v. the purpose of his ministry (v. 6) -  to renew the covenant and bring light, including to the Gentiles.

In other words, he was to begin to bring The Kingdom of God back to this earth (v. 4).

            vi. What he was to accomplish:

                  Live a life that would be:   a. The basis of a new relationship between God and his people (v. 6)

                                                            b. Hope for the restoration and renewal the world seeks. He would make the

world right and good as originally intended. He would open up God’s blessings to all.

                                    c. An act of liberation – opening the eyes of the blind, not only physically, 

but from the darkness of this world to the light of God’s ways (v. 6-7). He would free us from our

prisons of patterns and habits that chain us down, lock us up, releasing us from the darkness and 

gloom of our broken world.

vii. What the power behind his call would be: God’s Spirit would be on him (v. 1, 6)

viii. What a privileged position this servant would have – he would be first to know what God was about and what his role in it was (v. 1, 6, 8-9). The Father would take him into his confidence. The servant’s obedience and faithfulness would grant him a special place in the Father’s trust, in his heart. His faithfulness to God tells us we can put our faith in him.

All of this helped shape Jesus’ self-understanding and identity as the Messiah, so he was able to live up to and fulfil all of it, to prove himself.

Likewise, if we believe in Jesus, we can let him show us our call, our destiny and empower us to fulfil it as he did, also as the same kind of servant.

Like Jesus, we can also look to determine our identity by studying God’s word. 

As believers in Jesus, he ultimately defines who we are; our identity can only be fully found in him.

2020 4 30

2020 4 26 Knowing the Signs of the Times - Wake Up Call: Making Sense of a Covid-19 World - Notes on a sermon

This sermon on April 26, 2020 by our pastor, Winston Pratt (Peace Mennonite Church, Richmond, British Columbia, Canada) is very timely and deserving of a wider audience. You can listen to it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mPUiJDxcro and my notes on it are here

from Luke 12:54-57; Pastor Winston Pratt 

12:54 Jesus also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, ‘A rainstorm is coming,’ and it does. 12:55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat,’ and there is. 12:56You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky, but how can you not know how to interpret the present time?

We can see from this passage that Jesus expects us to “know how to interpret” the times. We are not bystanders watching form a distance but need to be wise interpreters of how and where God is at work and what God might be trying to tell us. 

Reaching the wrong conclusions can be disastrous.

Today, dealing with a pandemic and Canada’s worst contemporary mass shooting people are asking: 

Where is God? 

What does this mean?

What is happening?

How should Christians respond?

We need to be able to think biblically to know how to:

1.     respond to our world

2.     be faithful to God

3.     live in hope

4.     be a beacon of hope, a witness to our world

We don’t need to defend God. God can defend himself. The Bible does not explain or justify many of God’s acts. They are recorded to help us see who God really is and what he has done, is doing and will do.

Israel in exile in Babylon in the 6^th century BCE was asking the same questions as are being asked today. In the midst of God telling them their being there was his doing but that he will deliver, restore them (Isaiah 54-5) God’s response was “Isaiah 55:8 “Indeed, my plans are not like your plans, and my deeds are not like your deeds.”

In the midst of crises such as ours we need to accept the following truths:

1.     God’s ways are not our ways. We can’t fully understand this transcendent Being, let alone be like him in our knowing and ability to control things and determine outcomes. But God has left us a witness – the scriptures – to tell us what we need to know. He also revealed himself most fully in Jesus and this is recorded in those scriptures.

2.     God is always active and involved in his world. He is not “Watching from a Distance” as Bette Midler sings and as the 17^th and 18^th century Deists thought. This can even include the direction of pagan kings without their knowing it, such as Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar and Persia’s Cyrus. Mostly though, he is behind the scenes. We tend to understand things in hindsight, although the nearer we keep to God, the more likely we are to understand sooner than if not close to God.

3.     There is a bigger picture of God acting than what we might see in front of us, and we need to keep that in mind and seek to discern what that is.

Jesus also pointed out, as recorded in Luke 13, how we judge wrongly: “13:1 Now there were some present on that occasion who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. 13:2 He answered them, “Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered these things? 13:3No, I tell you! But unless you repent, you will all perish as well! 13:4 Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower in Siloam fell on them, do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who live in Jerusalem? 13:5 No, I tell you! But unless you repent you will all perish as well!”

The points we can make from this are:

1.     We make wrong judgments: “They deserve it.” No, the message is for us to repent to be sure we are prepared for come what may, so that we do not also perish. 

2.     Bad things happen to good and bad people. Jesus’ healing of a blind man (John 9:1-3) was not because of a need to correct any sin on his or his parents part but to show God’s power. Too often we need our own spiritual blindness corrected.

3.     Tragedies should remind us that our day of reckoning could come quickly too.

4.     Suffering can have a purpose in God’s plan. The ultimate example is Jesus on the cross. The powers of evil thought by killing him they had won, but it was really their defeat. All of this knowledge should give us hope we can share. We should not turn elsewhere for answers and support.

5.     These things can be signs of the end times, “birth pangs”, beginnings, Jesus called them (Mark 13:8); signs of something new God is doing. However, he did not expect us to try and predict when the time of the end will be, as he told his disciples during his ministry and again before ascending to heaven (Mark 13:32, Acts 1:7). That is wrong.

Questions for us:

1.     Has God given up on the world and left it to follow a course to its own ruin? No, God created the world good and God will now allow us to totally change that. Look what he did in Noah’s time and at the Tower of Babel when humans were doing other than what God wanted.

2.     Are the bad being punished? Are we being punished for being bad? No, God can use these things to show his power and glory.

3.     Is this a sign of the end? Not necessarily. In any case, what did Jesus tell us? Watch and pray, but go about your work (Mark 13).

4.     What is God telling us?

a.     Life is short and unpredictable; are we ready to face that?

b.     Something new is underway in the world. Can we see what it is?

5.     How are we reading the signs of the times? Are we mistakenly going our own way and making our own judgments? Jesus wants us to see him for who he is.

This could still be a wake-up call for us all!

2020 3 22 Keeping Faith in the Storm - notes on a sermon

The sermon on March 22, 2020 by our pastor, Winston Pratt (Peace Mennonite Church, Richmond, British Columbia, Canada), I thought deserved a wider audience. You can listen to it here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed5LuKMNmCc and following are my notes from it:  

When it comes to storm s that can rock us and shake our faith, Covid-19 is one facing us all, globally. It tells us our lives are not as secure and comfortable as we thought; we are not as self-reliant as we thought we could be.

We can learn from Daniel 3 how we can respond. When three Jewish counselors of th eking refused to worship his gods and bow down to a golden statue he had built, as commanded, they wer brought before the king.

They said to the king: “O [king], we have no need to present a defense to you in this matter (3:16).

1.      If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us… O king, let him deliver us (3:17)

2.     But if not… O king… we will not worship your gods and we will not worship the golden statue you have set up.”

If God honours a response like #1, we bear witness to God’s goodness and power in our lives. 

If not, we still have victory as, if we are secure in our faith, in death we receive the ultimate delivery and experience final victory as we end up in heaven. 

This should help us maintain good faith-based thinking under pressure. It can help us:

1.     Grow in the quality of our faith 

2.     Strengthen our character and develop greater resilience

3.     Provide occasion for God to reveal his extraordinary power in us

Romans 5:1-5 also has a message like this for us. Suffering is said to yield endurance, endurance character and character hope “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy spirit that has been given to us (Rom. 5:3-5).” 

James 1:2-4 gives us the same assurance. In fact, it says “whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that testing of your faith produces endurance, and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be nature and complete, lacking nothing.” 

Mark 4:35-41 (and its parallels in Matt. 8:23-27 & Luke 8:22-25) give us another example of this situation. Jesus and the disciples are caught in a storm on the sea of Galilee and the disciples’ faith, such as it might have been, gave way to fear. Jesus is awakened – he was sleeping! – and calms the storm. Then, “He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

Firstly, Jesus ability to calm the storm raised a new fear in the disciples: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” With fear, we are unable to think straight and see what might be really going on. Rather, we focus on the perceived threat.”

Secondly, the disciples failed the test. Jesus, Immanuel, ‘God with us’, was right in the boat with them. But they did not see him as such yet. This should remind us that, whatever crisis we find ourselves in as believers, Jesus is with us in his Spirit! He has told us: “…remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age (Matt. 28:20).”As Daniel’s three friends asserted, as such, we can be delivered, but if not, humanly speaking, on another level, we will be taken care of.

Pastor Winston also shared the story of Louise Loewen, whom we recently remembered with her passing. She had gone through some significant trials: running for her life from the enemy at age 17, coming to a new country to start a new life at 20, a couple of bouts of cancer and surgeries over a long span. However, she never lost her faith.

We can also pass the tests, personally, with God at our side. We can continue in hope because:

1.     Christ is with us in the storms and trials of life

2.     Tough times are not wasted. God in his grace and mercy can use them to grow our faith and character

1.     There is always hope. God will give us what he knows we need; he will take us through and make us stronger 

We can be a calming presence among our family, friends and community because of our faith if we believe all this. We can have the faith and strength of Daniel’s friends.

May God give us peace and use us as a witness to God’s goodness and providence and so bring him glory.

The Most Important Decision of My Life

Oh, what’s this, some of you might say. Is this new? No, and it’s not the decision to leave the prairies for British Columbia in 2005. It’s not even getting married in 1977. Nor is it choosing to go into medicine as a career in 1965. It’s a decision I made when I was a youngster of seven years of age, maybe six. 

I refer to my decision to become a Christian. Actually, it was not entirely different than the decision many children make to follow the faith of their parents, their ancestors. When you grow up in a certain faith, to begin with, that I all you know. You accept it as the norm. 

You see, I come from a line of Christians that can be traced back to the Reformation in the 1600s in Europe. My ancestors were likely Dutch and had become part of the Anabaptist movement. They were called that because they chose to be re-baptized on confession of their own faith. They had come to the conclusion, through their study of the scriptures, the Bible, which was becoming available because of the printing press, that the infant baptism practiced by The Church at the time was not biblically based. This had been the practice of the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. The first Reformers, the Lutheran and then Reformed Church, continued the practice, as did bodies like the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church after that.

So, my parents, at least to me at the time and in my growing up years, were wonderful models of what I have come to understand it means to be a Christian. Our home was filled with love, generosity and hospitality. Our parents helped many a neighbour. 

My parents were in fact what we called missionaries. They had felt called to live among Manitoba’s indigenous people and be a witness there to the message they had come to believe in their own lives. Father was our pastor. He and mother were our Sunday school teachers and music leaders. Sometimes there were extra activities for children and in the summer, Daily Vacation Bible School. Father, for the Protestants, and the local Roman Catholic priest for the Catholics, even taught Religion classes in the local school, which was allowed then (this was the early 1950s).

So, I had heard the story of the Bible from infancy on. I knew the good news, the gospel message. Simply put, it was that all we humans have gone astray from the way our Creator God had intended. He had sent his Son, the long-promised Anointed One (Messiah in Hebrew or Christ in Greek) to become one of us humans, the miracle of God become man – the big word is Incarnate – to show us what God was really like and what God was about. Ultimately, the world did not want to see it, hear it and - we likely know the story – Jesus, his human name, was killed; crucified in fact. However, three days later he shocked everyone by rising from the dead to live a further forty days on earth before disappearing out of his followers’ sight, saying he was returning to heaven.

In those forty days, Jesus clarified what his death and resurrection were all about. We, mere humans, could never make our way back to our original state, much as we might like to. Our current state ends in death though – permanent separation from our Creator. Jesus showed and taught that God did not want that. He loved us, his creation, too much for that to be left uncorrected. God wanted to restore that relationship, but how? The only way was for Christ, as God, to take our place, take on our fallen state and die in our stead. Jesus and the Apostles after him explained that this miracle was possible through God’s love, mercy and grace. All we had to do was believe this message, accept that what Jesus did to remove our separation from God.

As a young child, I was aware that there were too many times I had failed and disappointed my parents. In those days, it was still customary to get the strap if you were naughty, if you did wrong. I knew my parents did not like to administer that punishment. They told us so. Father would say it hurt him as much as us to have to do this. One evening, I broke down in tears and asked my parents what I needed to do to solve this dilemma. I neither wanted to disappoint them nor hurt them. 

As I think back on this, I think – what a wonderful way to model how God feels towards us. God does not want us to have the consequence of our actions – death – either. He loves us too much to see us disappear from relationship with him in death. After all, he made us to share his love. He also hurts when we do wrong. 

My parents pulled out a Bible and read a couple of verses to us – my younger sister was joining me in this by this time. They were I John 2:1-2: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father (God), Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the world.”

In other words, Jesus had made the ultimate sacrifice for us. Not only that, he was now pleading or case before his father in Heaven. If Jesus was doing that for us, what more could one ask. 

My sister and I accepted these words that evening. We prayed with our parents, acknowledging or unhappy state and felt and believed that God had indeed forgiven us, accepted us back, and that from then on, we were right with God. We had entered into a new relationship with God which is what God wanted all along. That was some sixty-five years ago and I have never looked back. I wish everyone could share this.

Now, if you have read this far, some of you who are skeptic might say – you were a child, what did you know. Indeed, the unspoken question there is why am I still a Christian. That is another story. I hope I get to tell it too. 

The Joy of Revelation IX - Hymns of Praise 2

2.  Revelation    4:11

4:9 “And whenever the living creatures give glory, honor, and thanks to the one who sits on the throne, who lives forever and ever, 4:10 the twenty-four elders throw themselves to the ground before the one who sits on the throne and worship the one who lives forever and ever, and they offer their crowns before his throne, saying:

4:11 “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, since you created all things,

and because of your will they existed and were created!”

This hymn is described as a follow through to the hymn of the four creatures in 4:8 (see previous post). Whenever they, that is, all of nature which they represent, which is present day and night, give glory and honour and thanks to God – the one seated on the throne, there is a response. It is sung by the twenty-four elders who surround the throne. Twenty-four is obviously twice twelve. Twelve can be seen to refer to the tribes of Israel, the People of God under the Old Covenant. This could refer more broadly to all down through the ages, including the Jews prior to Jesus’ time, who believe in God, however they understood him, and tried to live as best they could with that knowledge. It also refers, of course, to the twelve apostles who were entrusted with teaching the New Covenant. They would represent the People of God as we have come to understand through the New Covenant.  In other words, all those who believe in God are represented by these twenty-four figures, and all praise God together as the global church. 

Again, we see this refrain encapsulated in the powerful anthem “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God Almighty,” especially stanza two: “Holy, Holy, Holy! All the saints adore thee, Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea…” The writer here also appears to understand that these elders represent all believers and Christians, whom he describes simply as saints, not even referring to the elders. Younger readers will also recognize where a contemporary Christian music ensemble get their name, the Casting Crowns.

At this point we should note that the praise of God in this hymn comes from acknowledging that he is eternal, and also the Creator of all things. He is also understood as the sustainer of all things – “by your will they existed.” As we will see, there is a progression of ideas and pictures as one goes through Revelation, and the same is true of these hymns. Here, one could say, we start at the beginning, with praise for creation. As believers, we should always keep the whole picture in mind. For the first readers of this letter, in the midst of difficult times in the Roman empire, to be reminded of God’s eternal presence and power is a good perspective to begin with if one wants to bolster one’s faith to endure the tribulations of the time, and indeed of all ages. As this is written, we are in the midst of a trying period that most of us have never experienced with the threat of death from a global pandemic of an untreatable viral illness ravaging the globe. We too need the messages of these hymns. We too need the reminder that God is ever present and that he is the one who created all things good. Therefore, he will not let us entirely spoil what he has set in motion, nor be doomed by doings of our own accord. After all, we too are part of that good creation, even though we know it is no longer what it once was.