Month: October 2023

Morning Musing: Exodus 14:15-16

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“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to break camp. As for you, lift up your staff, stretch out your hand over the sea, and divide it so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Prayer is important stuff. Vitally important. One of the things I find myself telling my congregation more and more frequently lately is that prayer is one of the three essential things you need to be pursuing regularly and intentionally if you want to grow in your faith (the others are engagement with the Scriptures and a local body of Christ). I have several times heard messages about prayer that rightly remind folks that prayer is not a substitute for doing something. In many cases, it is the something we most need to be doing if we want to see positive changes come to a hard situation. Prayer is essentially for getting God involved in a situation to make things happen. What we see here, though, brings a much needed balance to all of this. Let’s check out God’s response to Moses and the Israelites’ panicked cries to Him when they spotted the Egyptian army bearing down on them.

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Do Your Job

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As we wrap up our series, Nuts and Bolts, today, we are zooming back out from the little nuts and bolts of making the church work to reflect one more time on the big thing that it is we are doing together. What is the church’s mission. Sometimes we confuse that with our mission as individual followers of Jesus. That’s an understandable error, but one that can set us off the track of what we should be doing as a group. Let’s talk about that today through the lens of Jesus’ great commissioning of the disciples at the end of Matthew’s Gospel.

Do Your Job

Do you remember getting a syllabus when you were in school? In college and seminary, that document was like the Bible in all my various classes. A really well-written syllabus told you not only what to expect to learn throughout the semester, but also what the assignments were going to be. A really industrious student could technically go ahead and get all the work done for the semester in the first few weeks with that help. But there’s even more. A really, really good syllabus told you not only what the various assignments were going to be, but also what the big projects were for the semester along with the grading rubrics by which they were going to be evaluated. In other words, they laid out all the parameters for success for you right at the beginning. You had the ability to know at any given point during the year just what you were supposed to be doing along with how to do it in such a way as to meet with the teacher’s expectations for success. You knew out of the gate that if you did this much work, you’d get this many points, but if you did this much more work, you’d get this many more points. A good syllabus like this serves as a kind of set of mission parameters for the course. If you pay attention to it, you’ll always know where you stand when it comes to the line between success and failure. 

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Digging in Deeper: John 8:10-11

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“When Jesus stood up, he said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, Lord,’ she answered. ‘Neither do I condemn you,’ said Jesus. ‘Go, and from now on do not sin anymore.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The apostle John probably did not write those words. You would be hard-pressed to find a translation that doesn’t include them in at least a footnote in his Gospel, but they were probably written sometime after he died by someone else. Still, this particular story from Jesus’ life probably really did happen. The conclusion of the story here is powerful, and in one moment captures both sides of a tension that our church culture struggles to balance. Some folks fall pretty firmly on one side and Jesus’ refusal to condemn to death this sinful woman; some on the other, when Jesus commanded her not to sin anymore. In the last couple of weeks, our culture has been treated to a bit of a high level debate mostly between two of the highest profile Christian leaders in the country, Albert Mohler and Andy Stanley. I’ve had a chance to read or listen to their reactions and responses to a conference Andy’s church recently hosted that aimed to give support to Christian parents of kids who have come out as somewhere along the LGBTQ spectrum. To say it created a bit of a stir in the Christian world would be a bit of an understatement. As someone who has a fair bit of respect for both men, here are a few of my thoughts.

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Digging in Deeper: Exodus 14:13-14

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“But Moses said to the people, ‘Don’t be afraid. Stand firm and see the Lord’s salvation that he will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians you see today, you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you must be quiet.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

There are all kinds of stories about fighting against the forces of darkness and evil. Spiritual warfare is a common theme, especially in the horror genre. And in pretty much all of our stories about fighting spiritual forces that are opposed to God, the battle always goes about the same way. We do all the work. Yes, God may give us a little bit of help in the form of a powerful weapon or talisman or something like that, but the victory is always ours. We achieve it. We save ourselves. This makes for a fun story, but in terms of an approximation of reality, it really doesn’t come close. What we see here is a much better picture of how our biggest battles are really won. Let’s talk about what’s happening here as Moses tries to reassure the people in the face of what appears to them to be their impending doom.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 14:10-12

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“As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up and there were the Egyptians coming after them! The Israelites were terrified and cried out to the Lord for help. They said to Moses, ‘Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Isn’t this what we told you in Egypt: Leave us alone so that we may serve the Egyptians? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

If you have taken the journey of parenthood, do you remember when your kids went through their whiny phase? If you don’t nip this in the bud as a parent, what starts as a fairly natural phase can become a personality trait that sticks with them to the eventual frustration of everyone around them, but that’s a conversation for another time. What is it that prompts a kid to whine? The same thing that tempts us to it: not getting our way. When the Israelites saw the Egyptian army heading toward them, they felt like they hadn’t gotten their way…and they were terrified. Their response should have been a major red flag for Moses, but that’s only really visible thanks to hindsight. Israel had a great chance here to demonstrate great faith in the God who was in the process of rescuing them. Let’s talk about what they did instead and why it is a warning for us.

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