Whoosh! Storying through Acts Week 11: Extravagance

God has not given us a spirit of fear,

but of power and love and self-control.

-2 Timothy 1:7

I've been thinking a lot about fear lately.

You might know that back in May, Dennis and I sold our house, the house we've lived in for 25 years, the house where most of our family's life happened.  And it happened much faster than we expected.  This set in motion the whole circus of dismantling that home, finding a new one, moving in and making it over.  We spent our entire summer doing this.  Every. Bit. We got up early and went to bed late and spent every ounce of emotional and physical energy holding on for dear life as we rounded a huge change curve.  I expected to be tired.  I expected to be overwhelmed at times, giddy at times, completely over my head at times.  Grateful.  Surprised.  Challenged.

Here's what I did not expect: fear.

Change, even good change, brings risk.  And that is scary.  Especially if our goal, our destination in life, is to be settled.  To have arrived.  To be comfortable.

I was thinking a lot about this as I prepared the story for this week's Wednesday Bible study. Last week, when we met, we talked about how much fear is involved in telling someone about Jesus and asking them to believe and follow him.  We are asking them to "repent".  That's an old word we've heard preachers say too many times.  When Jesus says it, when his apostles say it, they mean, "Change the way you think everything works.  Go in a whole new direction."

This is asking a lot of somebody, and so it is often met with hostility and fear.  That's certainly what happens in this week's story.  It's the story of Paul & Silas singing in a jail cell, of the Philippian jailer who asks, "What should I do to be saved?"  If you grew up in church, you've heard that part of the story, but you might not have heard the part about how Paul & Silas got thrown in jail in the first place.

Paul & Silas are going about the city telling people about Jesus, and they encounter a slave girl who is possessed by an evil spirit.  Her owners make a lot of money off this girl as a fortune-teller.  When  Paul exorcises the evil spirit, these guys realize they've lost their money-maker.  So they haul Paul & Silas before the city officials and incite a mob.

"These men are disturbing our city!  They're trying to overthrow our way of life!"

The good news of Jesus does overthrow our way of life.  Jesus demands that we rethink everything.  If you want someone to be comfortable, you will not share the gospel with them.  Because you know they cannot stay where they are and go with God.  You know this from experience.

It is scary to share the gospel.

It is scary to hear and believe the gospel.

It is scary to go where God takes you next in life.

But...

God's Spirit beckons.  There are things to do and places to go.  

This resurrection life you received from God is a not a timid, grave-tending life.  

It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike, "What's next, Papa?" 

- Romans 8:14-15 The Message

Click here listen to the story and download the Bible study.

Who will you tell this story to?

Whoosh! Storying through Acts Week 10: Discerning

Pick at random any of the saints.... I venture to suggest that the one vital quality which they had in common was spiritual receptivity . Something in them was open to heaven, something which urged them Godward. Without attempting anything like a profound analysis I shall say simply that they had spiritual awareness and that they went on to cultivate it until it became the biggest thing in their lives. They differed from the average person in that when they felt the inward longing they did something about it . They acquired the lifelong habit of spiritual response.

- A. W, Tozer, The Pursuit of God

Bless our Christian hearts.  We who really want sincerely to make a difference for God and do what he wants with our days, we can really bumble along and make a mess of it.  Many of us who have known God for most of our lives are still foggy about the question: "What is God's will?"  

Well, actually it's pretty impossible to spend much time in the Bible and not know God's will is.  The tricky part to figure out is how God wants me to do it.  What is God's way to get done what he wants?  

Here's the formula most of us follow:  I decide to do something for God, and I ask him to respond.

No wonder we have trouble following God's will, because that is not a formula for following.  

This is:  God shows me what he is doing, and I respond.

Ohhhh.  I respond.  Hmmm.

This requires that we develop and practice discernment.  

discern

verb

perceive, make out, pick out, detect, recognize, notice,observe, see, spot; identify, determine, distinguish;

Spiritual discernment is the ability to notice what God is doing around you, recognize it as the activity of God and determine what response he is calling for from you.  What's your part in what he's doing?
Paul urged the early church to grow in this ability.  He considered it essential for them.
I ask God to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is he is calling you to do. - Ephesians 1:17-18
In this week's Wednesday Bible story, we see Paul and his companions learning how to do this.  

Click here to listen to the story and download the Bible study.
Who will you tell this story to?
In this

Whoosh! Storying through Acts Week 9: Marked

Every morning, I lay the pieces of my life

on your altar

and watch for fire to descend.

-Psalm 5:3 The Message

Psalm 5:3 is what you might call my "life verse," except it is really more than that.  It is my operating system.

My commentary tells me this was the Hebrew Morning Prayer.  When I first stumbled across it in Eugene's Peterson beautiful translation The Message, I stopped dead in my tracks.  Something in my heart said, "Let's sit right here for awhile."  "Awhile" turned out to be ever since, and that was years ago. This verse has taught me so much.

In the beginning, it captured my imagination, as I pictured the story it tells.  It uses the language of the offering or sacrifice.  Perhaps you have brought a dove or a little goat, which you have led through the camp to the opening of the Tabernacle, where the great bronze altar radiated with the smoke and smells of others' sacrifices.  You handed your offering to the priest, who carefully slaughtered it according to Levitical law and laid the pieces up on the altar.  The flames leapt and the fire hissed as the fat burned away.  The smoke filled your lungs, mingling with the smells of blood and roasting flesh and the incense of the altar, particular to the Tabernacle. When you walked away, you were marked by that smell. It is the smell of death, the aroma of life with God.

This is what Paul had in mind when he wrote, "Offer yourselves as living sacrifices." (Romans 12:1) Or as Eugene Peterson translates it, "Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking around life—and place it before God as an offering."

When you do this, when this is your operating system, this is what you do:  You carefully lay out the pieces of your life.  All the questions, the tasks, the people, the problems, the hopes and dreams, the details of the day, the way you think life works. And you stand back and watch.  What will God do?  Some things he will burn away, because it doesn't belong in your life, or because it doesn't belong there anymore.  Some things will die.

What are you letting die?

Some things God will light up with His Spirit.  This conversation, that appointment, this project, that passion.  This is where God is working and asking you to join him.  There is where he is going.

Where is God going in your life?  What is he lighting up?  And are you going with him?

I was thinking about this as I learned this week's story for Wednesday Bible study.  Peter and Cornelius and all the believers find themselves caught up in something God is doing, something he has never done before.  And they must lay the pieces of it on the altar and stand back.  Some old things are doing to burn away.  Some new things are going to light up with God's action.

How do they know where God is going and if it is okay to let go and follow?

"And then I remembered Jesus said, "John will baptize you with water, 

but I will baptize you with God's own Spirit."

- Peter, in Acts 11:16

They watch for the fire.  They watch for the Spirit.

It's that simple, and it's that challenging.  It is that adventurous.  It is that intentional.

That's why Jesus said that the way to life with God is narrow and requires our full attention.

Are you watching for fire?  That is the believer's operation system. It is what marks us as people who have life with God.

Click here to listen to this week's story and download the Bible study.

Who will you tell this story to?

Whoosh! Storying through Acts Week 8: Included

Were it not for grace,

I can tell you where I'd be:

wandering down some pointless road to no where 

with my salvation up to me.

And I know how that would go,

the battles I would face—

forever running, but losing the race

were it not for grace.

- "Were It Not For Grace"

David Hamilton & Phil McHugh

In this week's Wednesday Bible story, we meet a man named Cornelius.  Luke tells us that Cornelius was a captain of the Roman guard.  He was not a Jew, but he was a good man who tried to please God, who kept regular hours of prayer and gave generously to the poor—two things that he had noticed that observant Jews did in order to worship their God.  In Luke's day, Cornelius was called a "God-fearer."  Not included by birth in God's chosen people, but someone who did everything they could to please this God and be accepted by him.

In this week's story, as Cornelius is devotedly at his prayers, an angel appears to him.

"Your prayers and your giving have brought you to God's attention.  

Send to Joppa for a man named Peter.  He can tell you how to have life with God." 

 - Acts 10:4-5, 11:14

Though this story is primarily about Peter's vision—how God gave him permission to go to the house of Cornelius and share the good news of Jesus—there is a chilling truth embedded in it.

You and I are surrounded by God-fearers.  People who know a little about God—maybe correct information, maybe misinformation.  People who want to be considered "good."  People who try very hard by good behavior, good deeds, good values, to be good enough for the God they understand.  People who line up in our pews every Sunday and sing all the songs.  Who sign up to volunteer and lead and serve. Who establish charities and work for social justice.  Who read devotional books every morning.  People who chalk up good deeds, but have no personal relationship with the God they fear.  They are missing a crucial piece of truth: that a relationship with God comes by grace, offered at the hand of his Son. Not by works—but by the loving act of God. That there is so much more than doing for God;  there is being with God and being loved by God.

Would God point to you and say, "She can tell you how to have life with me?"

Let us who know the gospel of grace set the God-fearers free from the gospel of "try harder."

Click here to listen to this week's story and download the Bible study.

Who will you tell this story to?

Whoosh! Storying through Acts Week 7: Changed

In every person's story who encounters Jesus, there is a Before and an After.

I have a missionary friend whose story includes a very dramatic Before & After.  She said that before she took Jesus seriously and let him make a huge change in her heart, she was a very different person.  So different that when a friend from her "Before" life heard she was a missionary, the friend said, "No way. We must not be talking about the same person."

She is not the same person she used to be, and she will be the first to tell you that.  In fact, she has turned her life upside down in order to go and tell people that.

I was thinking about that because in Wednesday Bible study, we've been learning the story of Paul's encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus.  Paul, like my missionary friend, has a dramatic Before and After story.  We are all pretty familiar with the After part of Paul's story—what a great messenger of God he became.  We still read his letters to the believers to understand how to live an "After" story.  But until this week, I never really thought about what it was like for Paul right after he encountered Jesus.

What was it like for Paul to wait, blinded, fasting and praying for three days?  What was it like to wait in the dark, the vision of Jesus still burning in his mind, trying to make sense of what he had seen and heard?  What was it like to feel the touch of Ananias' hands on his shoulders, to hear a stranger call him brother? 

What was it like for the believers to have this former enemy, this Pharisee of Pharisees, this man who  moved among governors and chief priests, sit down to dinner with them?  What was it like to see him go under the water, baptizing him into their community?  What was it like for Paul to depend on them, his new family?  What was it like to step out onto the synagogue steps and hear him say, "Jesus is Lord?" How long before they understood and accepted that this was not the same person?

Luke tells us that the believers in Damascus were skeptical of Paul's "conversion."  And the believers in Jerusalem were downright afraid of him when he tried to meet with them.

But a believer named Barnabas took Paul under his wing.  

He introduced him to the disciples.  He told them how Jesus had appeared to Paul and called him to be his special messenger.  He told them how bold Paul had been in Damascus, telling everyone about Jesus.   

- Acts 9:26-27

Today in Wednesday Bible study, we acted this story out.  It was powerful to see the women playing the circles of believers in each town shrink away from the woman playing Paul.  To see their fear, to see Paul's alone-ness.  And so poignant when Betty, who played Barnabas, put her arm around Jaina, playing Paul, and vouched for Paul.  As she shared what had happened to Paul and validated the change in him, the group playing the Jerusalem believers began to soften.  And everyone watching in the room began to visibly relax.

On our church staff, we often refer to a management model called "The Change Curve."  The Change Curve shows us what a congregation goes through as they make major changes in their identity or in the way we do things. It's not always a smooth upward arc—in fact, there is a sharp dip in the Change Curve known as "the valley of despair."  Because, as we know, following Christ involves dramatic change.  It involves risk and fear and vulnerability and an ever-fluctuating combo of cowardice and courage.  Jesus said it would be complicated.

“I assure you,”  Jesus said, “there is no one who has left house, brothers or sisters, mother or father,  children, or fields because of Me and the gospel, who will not receive 100 times  more, now at this time —houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions —and eternal life  in the age to come. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”  

- Mark 10:29-31

What's your Before & After story?  How big was the change curve for you?  Who came alongside you and helped you?  What have you lost in the change?  And what have you gained?

Click here to listen to this week's story of Paul's change curve and download the Bible study.

Who will you tell this story to?

Whoosh! Storying through Acts Week 6: Chosen

Maybe
by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems, Volume One

Sweet Jesus, talking
    his melancholy madness,
      stood up in the boat
        and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
    So everybody was saved
      that night.
        But you know how it is

when something
    different crosses
      the threshold — the uncles
        mutter together,

the women walk away,
    the young brother begins
      to sharpen his knife.
        Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
    like the wind over the water —
      sometimes, for days,
        you don't think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
    after the multitude was fed,
      one or two of them felt
        the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight
    before exhaustion,
      that wants to swallow everything,
        gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
    as they are now, forgetting
      how the wind tore at the sails
        before he rose and talked to it —

tender and luminous and demanding
    as he always was —
      a thousand times more frightening
        than the killer storm

I recently discovered this poem by one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver.  Most people, including me, like Mary Oliver for her beautiful way of capturing the natural world in words.  But I also like Mary Oliver because of the way she thinks about Jesus.  The last stanza of this poem is chilling and probably very accurate: tender, luminous, demanding, a thousand times more frightening than the killer storm.  

Yes.  We imagine that to see Jesus in person would be all sweetness and harps.  But that is hardly what it is like in the Bible stories we are learning!  This week's story is about Paul's encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus.

As they neared Damascus, 
they were suddenly struck by a blinding flash of light, 
and Paul fell to the ground.  

And a voice said, “Paul, Paul, why are you out to get me?”

“Who are you?” Paul asked.

“I am Jesus, the one you are opposing.  
Get up and go into the city.  
And you’ll find out what you need to do.”

-Acts 9:3-6

Paul is not the only one in this story who has a personal encounter with Jesus.

There was a believer in Damascus named Ananias.  

And Jesus came to him in a vision.

“Ananias.”

“Yes, Lord?”

“Get up and go to a certain house nearby.  
Ask for a man named Paul.  He’s there praying.  
And I’ve given him a vision 
that you will come lay hands on him, and he will be healed.”

-Acts 9:10-12

Every week in Wednesday Bible study, after I tell the story, we ask these questions:

• What did you like about this story?
• What bothered or troubled you in this story?
• What does this story tell you about God (or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit)?
• What does this story tell you about people?
• What does this story tell you about how life with God works?
• If this story is true, how should you respond?
• Who will you tell this story to?

One thing I like about this story:  Jesus appears personally to both men.  

One thing that bothers me in this story:  When Jesus appears, he shakes up your assumptions—how you think the world works, what you think about God and about people.  Paul says, in talking about this encounter later, that he was on his way to Damascus hunting down Jesus' followers because he thought that was the way to serve God.  He honestly thought he was doing God's business.

Ananias is rocked by the idea that Jesus would ask him to go pray for that man.  

Both men are chosen.  And both discover that God works in ways they could never imagine. 

Whenever we assume we know that if God is doing something, it will look exactly like "this," we are probably about to get our assumptions rocked.  Here is what I am learning about life with God:  Never assume.  If you are comfortable with how things are, you might not be keeping up with God.  I can't say for sure.  I can say that, as Mary Oliver hints, Jesus is probably more frightening than you or I are comfortable with.  

Click here to listen to this week's story and download the homework.

Who will you tell this story to?