While my wife, Julie, is in Sydney with out family and I am in LA with my cat and my church family I find my heart wondering to Sydney.
We will be returning there in April 2010. I do not like traveling. It has just lost its appeal. I really enjoy living in Burbank and I love the church I am working with. But after considering all of what God is saying to me in my circumstances I can hear even more clearly now His voice and in it His desire for Julie and I to return to Sydney.
The next three months will be extremely difficult. Organizing the move. Raising funds for the new work that we will be partnering with in Sydney. Saying good bye to people I love dearly. It is a challenging transition.
I pray the Lord gives me wisdom and strength to navigate this difficult path. I know He will.
While my heart is full of anticipation for the Glendale Church and their renewal my heart is also full of anticipation for the new work in Sydney. My heart's desire is that God will help me fulfill the dream I have of leading an effective ministry in my home country. I can't help but think that He has been preparing me for this very thing in the last 33 years. God's kingdom is the greatest ever and it needs to get the glory deserving of it's king. God has many people in the city of Sydney. I pray He uses me (and that I let Him) to reach those precious ones with Jesus.
Looking forward to seeing what God will do.
http://georgelittlejourney.blogspot.com/
Why the names?
At my connect group last night we looked at the many instances in the New Testament that people's names are mentioned. They aren't the main characters in the letters. They aren't teachers, preachers, missionaries, pastors or protagonists. Just names. Most are only mentioned once, with very little (if any) background on their life. Romans 16. Philippians 4.
The question I asked was, "Why did God bother to have these names as a part of His Word to the world of the love He has for that world. Someone suggested jokingly that it was to give us a list of names we could give our children and claim them to be "Christian" until we noticed that very few of them are used even by the most devoted parents.
Why did God take up precious space in scripture for names when these people didn't appear to be significant? Maybe that's the answer. In our worldliness we may be looking at these lists with the values of our world and not the values of God. We started to think about whether the fact that God did include these names was to tell us that those individuals, along with everyone else God has created, are significant to Him.
We get caught up with idea that we are just one among millions. Faceless people in a crowd with no great story or significance. God whispers to us that He knows our name. He even knows the number of hairs on our head. God uses my name. Wow. God speaks to His angels and one day (maybe many days) He uses my name. Scientists would speak of DNA as the source of our uniqueness. God simply looks at us and calls our name. Wow. No double helix. He uses my name as a shepherd calls to the sheep he knows individually. I hear His voice and it sounds familiar. I know that voice. Tell me, why is He using my name?
Have you every Googled your name? Okay, you don't have to confess it but I know you did. Did absolutely no reference to you show up. There were lots of people with your name but they weren't you. Was that a little disappointing?
Well, know this. If you were able to search the conversations of God, you would find many references to you. Not someone with the same name as you, but you. God knows your name. He's keeping a follicle count. He uses your name. He speaks about you.
God gets personal with us when He uses our name. He wants to get personal with us. We often speak of us having a personal relationship with God and we focus on our side of the relationship. We speak of our need (and rightly so) to reach out to God personally. Not religiously, institutionally or mechanically. But, personally. But we also need to focus on the fact that God almighty, the Lord God, the creator of all, wants to relate to us on a personal level. He doesn't just want you to join a church or do good. He wants you to relate to Him personally as your Father.
Father is not just God's title to be used only at the beginning of prayers. It is who He really is and it is how He wants you and I to relate to Him. Father. Abba, Father.
How do we know that? Because our Father sent us Son to live among us, not as a tourist, but as one of us. To live as a servant. And to die for us. Words don't seem to convey the significance of that. Is there anyone for whom you would send a child of yours to a foreign land in the full knowledge that they would die for that person. And no glorious death but a shameful, disgraceful death. Is there anyone? My answer is no. There are some people in my life I would die for but there is no one I would ask my sons to die for. Yet, that is what exactly God did. He has that much interest in you. He has that much love. Crazy love.
And all this from a list of names. Yes. Isn't God amazing? He reveals so much to us about Himself in such an unsuspecting way. How much more is there in His word that I have been missing? I expect a lot. Now, this is going to be interesting.
http://georgelittlejourney.blogspot.com/
The question I asked was, "Why did God bother to have these names as a part of His Word to the world of the love He has for that world. Someone suggested jokingly that it was to give us a list of names we could give our children and claim them to be "Christian" until we noticed that very few of them are used even by the most devoted parents.
Why did God take up precious space in scripture for names when these people didn't appear to be significant? Maybe that's the answer. In our worldliness we may be looking at these lists with the values of our world and not the values of God. We started to think about whether the fact that God did include these names was to tell us that those individuals, along with everyone else God has created, are significant to Him.
We get caught up with idea that we are just one among millions. Faceless people in a crowd with no great story or significance. God whispers to us that He knows our name. He even knows the number of hairs on our head. God uses my name. Wow. God speaks to His angels and one day (maybe many days) He uses my name. Scientists would speak of DNA as the source of our uniqueness. God simply looks at us and calls our name. Wow. No double helix. He uses my name as a shepherd calls to the sheep he knows individually. I hear His voice and it sounds familiar. I know that voice. Tell me, why is He using my name?
Have you every Googled your name? Okay, you don't have to confess it but I know you did. Did absolutely no reference to you show up. There were lots of people with your name but they weren't you. Was that a little disappointing?
Well, know this. If you were able to search the conversations of God, you would find many references to you. Not someone with the same name as you, but you. God knows your name. He's keeping a follicle count. He uses your name. He speaks about you.
God gets personal with us when He uses our name. He wants to get personal with us. We often speak of us having a personal relationship with God and we focus on our side of the relationship. We speak of our need (and rightly so) to reach out to God personally. Not religiously, institutionally or mechanically. But, personally. But we also need to focus on the fact that God almighty, the Lord God, the creator of all, wants to relate to us on a personal level. He doesn't just want you to join a church or do good. He wants you to relate to Him personally as your Father.
Father is not just God's title to be used only at the beginning of prayers. It is who He really is and it is how He wants you and I to relate to Him. Father. Abba, Father.
How do we know that? Because our Father sent us Son to live among us, not as a tourist, but as one of us. To live as a servant. And to die for us. Words don't seem to convey the significance of that. Is there anyone for whom you would send a child of yours to a foreign land in the full knowledge that they would die for that person. And no glorious death but a shameful, disgraceful death. Is there anyone? My answer is no. There are some people in my life I would die for but there is no one I would ask my sons to die for. Yet, that is what exactly God did. He has that much interest in you. He has that much love. Crazy love.
And all this from a list of names. Yes. Isn't God amazing? He reveals so much to us about Himself in such an unsuspecting way. How much more is there in His word that I have been missing? I expect a lot. Now, this is going to be interesting.
http://georgelittlejourney.blogspot.com/
Incomprehensible, Crazy
When we love ….
We picked the cutest, healthiest puppy
We pick the good looking person
We pick the talented one
We pick the perfect
We pick the comfortable least painful path. We often pass by.
We avoid the tainted, the imperfect, and the ordinary
We pass on the unhealthy and the flawed
When God loves ….
He invites “… the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,” (Luke 14:13) to His party
He hangs out with the embezzlers, prostitutes, and blowhards (Matthew 9:11, 16:21-23, 21:31) and tells us to do the same (1 Corinthians 5:9-10)
He deliberately allows Himself to be hurt (Romans 5:8-9)
He fills His church with “the sexually immoral … idolaters … adulterers … male prostitutes … homosexual offenders” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10)
Crazy love. Yes, crazy love. Love that surpasses knowledge. Love that you and I need to have and do.
Amazing love. Sing it church. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dooif2-yAoI
http://georgelittlejourney.blogspot.com/
What Language Do You Speak In?
I don’t know why, but as I was speaking to him, it occurred to me that we were not speaking the same language. So as not to appear to obvious, I waited until another time to ask him the question that I wanted to ask immediately.
“Karl, what language do you think in?”, I said to him as offhandedly as I could. Without missing a beat he said, “Austrian.” Karl had lived in Australia for 20 years but had been born in Austria (two very different countries who are geographically or unobservant of precise spelling). He wasn’t that old but, when he thought about something, his mind would be processing his thoughts in Austrian, not English, the language he had been speaking every day of his life for the last 20 years.
It made me think of Jesus oft repeated challenge, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” (Mark 4:9, 23, 14:35, Matthew 11:15). Isn’t Jesus saying that for effective communication to occur the hearer must be listening in the same language of the speaker? We know that the Lord is not speaking of human languages as they were both speaking and hearing in the same language. He is speaking of understanding the message you hear.
This is the same truth that applies when we try to communicate in English to someone of a different generation. The King James Bible is an extreme example of this. It is written in English, but it is often very difficult to understand. For example, in 1611 when it was published the word, “let”, meant to stop. Now it means to allow. Its present meaning is almost an exact opposite of its original meaning. Do you think that might change the message of a few verses? Oh yes. So what is the solution? I think the easiest one is to use a translation that uses 20th or 21st century English. Most of us do that.
This really highlights a very important principle in our efforts to communicate the good news of Jesus to a lost and dying world. We must try as hard as we can to speak in the language of the people. Now, don’t get me wrong. No one has the right to change the content of the message, not even an angel (Galatians 1:8-9). That’s not what I am saying. I am saying that we must use our best efforts to speak the unchangeable gospel in the changeable languages of the day.
Paul specifically mentions this in 1 Corinthians 9:22 “To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.” Becoming all things to all men involves speaking to them in their language, their style, and their images.
You see, different people and generations listen in different ways. I think we generalize too much about the generations, but I do think that there are fundamental differences in the communication that occurs today as compared to the 1950’s. I won’t go into all the differences but they are huge. OK, I will go into one difference. Today most people, especially those born since the early 1960s get a lot of their information visually (TV, movies, video, internet, etc). So, because of that I use references to movies and occasionally movie clips to connect with the audience. However if you are one who doesn’t communicate this way much, then you will get little from a lesson like this. However when I preach with extensive quotations of scripture and with lists of points you might hear the message clearly. The problem is that there are many who don’t hear the message clearly when I use that style.
This is important. When we are trying to communicate we must not only pay attention to the language and style we are speaking in, we must pay attention to the language and style that the people are listening in. You see, I can’t change the language they listen in, but I can change the language I speak in.
The gospel has been given to us and we have welcomed it into our hearts, minds and lives. God has blessed us with the task of taking this gracious gospel into all the world. We are not called to do this haphazardly or without care. We care enough to make sure that the hearers have the best chance we can give them to connect with the message. What does that mean?
It may mean …….
1. Feeding some physical food before getting the opportunity to feed them the Word. Didn’t Jesus do that? See Matthew 15:29-39
2. Holding someone’s hand through a crisis and in that love get the opportunity to truly be heard.
3. Submitting to someone long before we get the opportunity to speak the word. Isn’t that what Peter asked wives to do? See 1 Peter 3:1-2
4. Learning a new language so they hear the gospel in their native tongue.
5. Speaking to their felt needs before speaking to their eternal needs.
6. Listening to my child’s terrible music so as to find a point of connection with him.
Why go to all this trouble? Because many will not hear the story of Jesus without it. What are you willing to become to get the message of Jesus to the people in your life and your community?
http://georgelittlejourney.blogspot.com/
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