You wicked servant!

I’ll admit:  it is hard to hear and hard to say.  Jesus only uses the descriptor 5 times in the Gospels (2 of them are from the same story!).  So it is not a term He throws around loosely.

Jesus uses wicked to describe people who miss a critical characteristic of God. In Matthew 18, the servant missed that being forgiven, frees (and obligates) him to forgive! In the parable of the talents (Luke 19, Matt 25), the wicked are the ones who hide their talent–  who don’t use it for the building of the Kingdom, who don’t take risks.  In Matt 24, the wicked is the one who blows off Jesus’ promise to return and His instruction to be ready. And John 3 describes what we all know to be true–  if we have done bad things, we want to hide in the dark. We don’t want anyone to see them.

How should we respond to these stories about the wicked?

First we should do the opposite–  we should forgive, we should take God-sized risks, we should be ready, and we should bring things into the light.

Second, we should embrace the truth that from time to time we have all held on to unforgiveness and revenge, we have all kept our talent to ourselves, we have all done whatever we want and tried to hide it. We need to embrace that we are all a bit worse than we would ever care to admit, even a bit wicked.

Third, we have got to see that Jesus came for the wicked and the lazy and the vengeful and the fearful and the self-made-moral-arbiter and for you and for me WHILE WE WERE WICKED!!

God showed His love for us in that while we were STILL sinners (wicked), Christ died for us.

We can’t say it too much: God sees you where you are.  God can restore you to Himself.  God loves you more than you could ever hope…

because while we were wicked, before we got it all together, God made it right–  on the cross, out of the tomb, for His great glory.

allow me a little, yee haw!

In some ways, this makes sense, especially since the category of “spiritual gifts” is one that many people may not have heard much about before.  On the other hand, though, I find this difficulty in identifying gifts curious.  Anyone who’s ever been through a job interview has probably had to identify his or her strengths.  And in most meaningful relationships — whether with a friend or a family member or a spouse — we have some sense of what we bring to the relationship that’s unique or valuable.  I think most of us, outside of the church context, have at least some notion of what our strengths are, what we’re good at, what brings us joy, what causes us to think, “I was made to do this!”

Yet for some reason, when we bring those ideas into the context of church, or our relationship with God, we tend to balk.  All of a sudden, talking about our strengths and talents starts to sound an awful lot like bragging.  And surely bragging isn’t a very Christian thing to do? So we shy away from naming and claiming our gifts.  Often we even doubt that the Holy Spirit has given us any gift at all.  ‘Who am I to think I would have a gift?’ we think.  ‘I’m nobody special… I’m just me.’

I get it.  I really do.  I’ve spent a lot of time in that thought pattern (ask me about seminary sometime), and I still find myself there from time to time.   But it’s such a shame when any of us gets caught up in that kind of thinking — thinking that leads us to deny the very good spiritual gifts that God has in fact given to each one of us. Because it’s a loss not just for us, but for the church community of which we’re a part.

Recently I’ve been reading (and recommending to anyone who will stop to listen) Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s book, Boundaries: When to Say Yes and How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life.  Combining a strong biblical perspective with solid psychology, Cloud and Townsend help us see what we do and don’t have responsibility for and control over in our lives. At one point, they talk about how a young child’s beginning to identify things as me, my, and mine doesn’t necessarily reflect selfishness, but can signal the healthy development of a sense of what we do have responsibility for and stewardship over.  While they’re not talking about spiritual gifts, I think a lot of what they have to say is applicable.  Here’s an excerpt:

As Adam and Eve were given dominion over the earth to subdue and rule it, we are also given stewardship over our time, energy, talents, values, feelings, behavior, money…. Without a ‘mine,’ we have no sense of responsibility to develop, nurture, and protect these resources. Without a ‘mine,’ we have no self to give to God and his kingdom. Children desperately need to know that mine, my, and me aren’t swear words. With correct biblical parenting, they’ll learn sacrifice and develop a giving, loving heart, but not until they have a personality that has been loved enough to give love away: ‘We love because he first loved us’ (1 John 4:19).

Like being able to determine what is “mine,” we need to be able to name and claim our spiritual gifts before we can offer them for the good of the community and the building of God’s kingdom.  And recognizing and celebrating our gifts isn’t bragging or pride. It’s an expression of gratitude to the Giver of the gifts. When we know how much we are loved, and how God is delighted to give the gifts of his Spirit to us, then we can in turn offer those gifts to others, an outflow to others of the love and the delight and giftedness that we know we have from God.

So, let’s keep asking each other: What are your spiritual gifts?  And let’s celebrate and encourage each other as we learn to name and claim the good things God has given us, for his glory and for our good.

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.  1Corinthians 12:7

What’s your spiritual gift?

Everybody gets one. When they use it, God is revealed.  They are showing off the power of God living inside them.  We use our gifts not for our aggrandizement, but for the common good.  God gives us gifts to build His Kingdom.  He reveals Himself through us so that folks will be drawn to Him–  His goodness, His power, His love.

Ignorance is not an excuse. If you don’t know your gift, you need to deliberately spend some time in discernment.  The best way to figure out your gift is to get with some people who know you well (your Restoration small group is a great place to start) and ask them.  What do you notice about me?  When do I ‘come alive’?  What do I seem passionate about?  When do you notice Christ in me or at work through me? These answers are great catalysts for prayer.  Pray by yourself.  Pray with others.  Ask your Father in heaven:  how have you gifted me?  How do you manifest yourself through me?

Once you know, you can direct more of your energy towards opportunities to use that gift–  for the common good and the building of God’s Kingdom.

I’m not sure of my gift.  Can you help me get the conversation started?

Sure.

Read over the various ‘gift lists’ in the New Testament. Remember they aren’t intended to be exhaustive, just illustrative of the myriad ways God can manifest Himself.

1. 1 Corinthians 12  (especially verses 8-11, 27-31)
2. Romans 12 (specifically verses 3-8)

For some of you, taking a ‘spiritual gifts inventory’ might help prime the pump. These tests are useful to get you thinking, to give you categories to think about, and to give you data to bring to prayer and conversations with friends. They are only a tool and they are best used in conjunction with community discernment.  Here are a few that are on-line:

MinTools.com (Focusing primarily on Romans 12 gifts)

a little bit longer one from the ELCA

I hope the message and the tests inspire lots of prayer and great conversations.  That’s where the gift becomes clear.

Reviewing a new biography of E. M. Forster

Time to throw out virginity and tactical nukes

Girls, hooking up, Taylor Swift, Glee, and true love

porn, devastation, it’s as bad as you think

And while you’re at it, friend me so you can see the conversation taking place on my facebook page.

Just trying to keep it real.  See you on Sunday.

Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course.  God isn’t stingy with his grace; he’s more lavishly generous than we will ever understand (check out Psalm 103, especially verses 11-14). And God doesn’t keep a running tally of how many times we’ve committed the same sin, his disappointment increasing with the frequency of our failings; when we seek his forgiveness, he wipes the slate clean (see 1 Corinthians 13:6 — “Love keeps no record of wrongs”).  Yet it can be so, so hard to really believe that — to live in the day-to-day conviction that there really is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

I think part of the reason is that we still keep those checklists in our head, even if we know that God will forgive us when we mess up.  And not just that: I think that those checklists are often ours more than they are God’s.  They’re what we think God wants from us, what we imagine he demands of us.  But the problem is that our idea of what God’s checklist looks like can be incredibly skewed.   And so we find ourselves condemning ourselves for not living up to a standard that may not be God’s standard to begin with.

Don’t get me wrong: Scripture is plenty clear in lots of ways about how we’re supposed to live, and it’s also clear that God cares how we live.  But somewhere between “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” and “What do I do about this coworker who is driving me absolutely insane?” things can get kind of messed up.  We know we’re supposed to love, but we don’t necessarily know what it looks like to love.  And whether it’s because of our own sin or our brokenness or the woundedness we carry from others, we can end up with a pretty warped understanding of how we ought to love people.   We confuse humility with self-negation.  We mistake servanthood for doormat-hood.  And we end up condemning ourselves for not living up to a standard that doesn’t reflect God’s desires for us in the first place.  (We also end up condemning others for not living up to our ideas of God’s checklist… but that’s another blog post.)

The point is this: we don’t just need Jesus to wipe clean God’s checklist for us; we need the power of the Holy Spirit to give us new eyes to see what God’s checklist really says in the first place.  Or, for those of us who tend toward the perfectionistic, maybe it’s better to think of it not as a checklist, but as a goals statement.  Not as some list of criteria that God hopes we’ll one day live up to, but as a description of the kind of life and heart that God wants to help us grow into. Not a checklist for our lives, but a guidebook — from a God who is as lavish with his grace when we falls short as he is with his praise when we flourish.

According to whose checklist are you evaluating yourself?  What would happen if you asked the Holy Spirit to give you new eyes — God’s own eyes — by which to see it?

]]> http://restorationarlington.org/2010/05/gods-checklist/feed/ 1 http://restorationarlington.org/2010/05/experiencing-life/ http://restorationarlington.org/2010/05/experiencing-life/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 18:33:26 +0000 davidmartinhanke http://restorationarlington.org/?p=2722

On April 25, we thought about being Spiritually dead… this week we took off after life. Experiencing life! How does the Holy Spirit bring those who are dead to life, wake ‘em up?

To get after that, I talked about the process of moving from death to life from three vantage points: the mechanical, the volitional, the experiential. For each category there was a prayer response and an image. Here they are:

1. Mechanical:  It is the Holy Spirit that brings people to life so they can respond to the claims of Christ and His call on their life.  It is like a computer coming out of sleep mode–  the screen just goes from dark to an image, but lots of things are going on in the background that get it ready for input and instruction.  That’s what it is like when spiritually dead people wake up…  prayer point:  put a list of people next to your computer monitor and every time your computer ‘wakes’ up, pray that God would wake somebody up.  ”God, please wake up____ to your goodness and love.”
2. Volitional:  The Holy Spirit wakes us up, makes us alive, so that when the opportunity comes for us to hear words and see signs that point us to our need for a Savior in Jesus, we will respond.  It’s like turning on a light switch.  prayer poing:  ’Name’ your light switches.  Every time you flip one on, pray that God connects the dots for someone who is curious and seeking.  Put the right words, the right signs at the right moment.
3. Experiential:  2 NT images of coming into a relationship with God:  The Holy Spirit washes us and the Holy Spirit adopts us into God’s family.  prayer point:  random idea–  every time you brush your teeth, pray that you would ‘experience’ being spiritually washed:  forgiven, without guilt or shame, at peace with God.

One of the primary Holy Spirit gifts for those who are following Jesus is that we would EXPERIENCE Him–  that a relationship with God would not just be cognitive, or disciplined, but an experience of life.  We’ll talk a lot more about life in the Spirit in the weeks to come.

And for those who are over-achievers…  in the past 2 weeks, I have gone back to one of my favorite and most influenced by books:  Redemption Accomplished and Applied. Probably the most succinct and careful treatment of the process/order of salvation.  You should read it at some point in this lifetime.

Restoration is taking the post-Easter, ‘getting ready for Pentecost’ season to study, explore, and engage the person of the Holy Spirit.  In order to provide a benchmark and introduction, I talked about what life WITHOUT the Spirit is like.  Here are my thoughts on what it means to be  Spiritually Dead.  (BTW, special thanks to Corrin Chambers who helped me with spanish…)

Here’s the point:

Spiritually dead people are only the product of their environment and sensibilities.  They are facing pain, trying to cope, coming up with life strategies, and using whatever behavior they can get away with.  Sometimes they are very successful.  Sometimes they are harmfully destructive.  Spiritually Dead People are completely blind [2Cor 4.4], unaware, clueless, and even hostile [John 10.31-33] towards spiritual things because the Spirit is not in them [1 Cor 2. 11,14]  This is so important because if we are spiritually alive, we often mistakenly expect people who are spiritually dead to behave, or think, or act the way we do.

As your pastor, I want us to tread cautiously when we try to legislate or control people’s coping strategies…  We treat people like they are spiritually alive, when they are spiritually dead.  I’m not saying don’t work for justice.  I’m saying there is a reason there is a raging culture war about behavior:  it’s because Christians expect people who are dead to the things of God to understand or embrace the freedom, purity, wholeness that can ONLY come from the presence of the Spirit of God.  Attacking with scorn and derision the coping strategy that lets spiritually dead people face the pain of life will be fruitless…  Or maybe just bear the fruit of self-righteousness. May I humbly suggest that you pray? Ask the Holy Spirit to come on them and make them alive.

Ignorance is overcome by information.  Information comes from the community of people and ideas whom we give access to our brains.  Your mind is being shaped by the community you let in.  In our worship yesterday, I noticed that Paul exhorts his little church to ‘no longer walk as the Gentiles do.’  Because of ignorance and hardness of heart they are futile, darkened, and alienated.

Ignorance is overcome by information.  I submit that we need to have a community of authors who regularly stretch our worldview.  How many minutes a week/month do you give to thinking deeply about who God is and your relationship to Him?  Here are 10 suggestions to deepen your thinking:

not the way its supposed to be Cornelius Plantinga
The mission of God Chris Wright
Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God Gordon Fee
The Unity of the Bible Daniel Fuller
The Gospel of the Kingdom by George Ladd
The Incomparable Christ by John Stott
Creation Regained by Albert Wolters
Liturgical Theology by Simon Chan
Renewal as a way of life by Richard Lovelace
In My Place Condemned He Stood by J.I. Packer and Mark Dever

Put one on your Christmas list.  Find a friend and read it together.  Gather a group of people to talk about it for 4 weeks.  Take a deeper step into your Christian worldview and redeemed mind.  ‘so that you may no longer walk as the Gentiles do.”

I’d love to hear about what you like.

The short answer is no.  You don’t need to be confirmed. Jesus never said a word about confirmation. Confirmation doesn’t accomplish, secure, guarantee, or otherwise bolster your salvation. As far as I know, no one’s ever depicted St. Peter standing at the pearly gates with the churches’ confirmation rosters to determine who’s in and who’s out.

But here’s why you might want to be confirmed. Confirmation is a chance for you, as a mature, cognizant, decision-making person, to make a public profession of your faith in Jesus Christ and your decision to live out that faith in the context of this church community. For those of us who were baptized as infants or young children, our parents made promises on our behalf at our baptism—promises to renounce evil, to accept Christ as their savior, and to follow and obey him. Confirmation is our opportunity to take on those promises, and the responsibilities they entail, for ourselves. For those who were baptized as adults (or older children), confirmation is a time to reaffirm your faith and the commitment to the promises you made at your baptism.

And for all of us, through confirmation we are strengthened and empowered by the Holy Spirit to use our gifts for the building of God’s Kingdom. As part of confirmation, the bishop lays hands on you and prays for you. (You can read the prayers that he’ll use on page 418 in the Book of Common Prayer.) There’s nothing magic about this act. But it is one of the mysterious ways that God chooses to fill us with his grace. While confirmation isn’t mentioned explicitly in Scripture, it does have its roots there. For example, in Acts 8:14-17, the apostles Peter and John go to a group of newly baptized converts and lay hands on them, and they receive the Holy Spirit for the first time.

So, if you have never been confirmed in any denomination, but you are a baptized Christian and you feel like you might want to take this next step in your faith journey, pray about it. Ask God if he is calling you to this step of declaring your faith and to being strengthened to live out that faith as a part of Restoration Anglican Church.

What if you have been confirmed in another denomination? The answer is a little complicated. If you were confirmed in a denomination that has confirmation by bishops (in addition to Anglican, this usually means Lutheran and Catholic), then your confirmation transfers to the Anglican church; you don’t need to be confirmed again, and you will be “received” by the bishop into the Anglican church. If you were confirmed in another denomination, you do need to be confirmed by our bishop. (This was the case with me: I’d been confirmed in the Methodist church as a teenager, but then was confirmed by Bishop Bena as part of my commitment to the Anglican church.)

And if you’ve been confirmed in The Episcopal Church, or CANA, or another Anglican body, you don’t need to be confirmed or received… but the bishop will be happy to pray a prayer of “reaffirmation” for you when he is here!

Thoroughly confused? Feel free to ask questions and comment below; I’ll do my best to answer. And take a look at the service of confirmation in the BCP (pp. 412-419)—you’ll learn a lot about what confirmation is and why we do it!

]]> http://restorationarlington.org/2009/03/confirmation-is-it-for-me/feed/ 5 http://restorationarlington.org/2009/03/confirmation-101/ http://restorationarlington.org/2009/03/confirmation-101/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:02:22 +0000 erin http://restorationarlington.org/?p=1170

So there’s been a lot of talk at Restoration recently about confirmation. That’s because our bishop, David Bena, will be visiting Restoration on Palm Sunday (April 5), and he’ll be confirming people at that time. This brings up a lot of questions: What is confirmation? Is it for me? Why do I need it? Why would I want it? What am I being confirmed into? If I was confirmed somewhere else, isn’t that good enough? Why does the bishop need to do it? (What’s a bishop?)

Lots of good questions, all worth asking. I’m going to explore some of them here on the blog in the next few days. I hope this will open up thoughts and questions and conversations and prayers about what it means to be on this journey of faith together at Restoration.

So, what is confirmation? One way to answer that question is to say that confirmation is a sacrament in the Anglican church. A sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” In other words, something that we can do, say, see, feel, or touch that signals the invisible work that God does by imparting his grace to our hearts. In Anglicanism, we have two main sacraments (the “Sacraments of the Gospel”), which are baptism and the Eucharist; they’re the two that Christ expressly mandated his disciples to follow. There are also five other sacraments, including confirmation. These aren’t necessary for everyone to experience, but they are ways that God communicates his grace to us. (Check out p. 857-861 in the BCP for more on this.)

That’s kind of a general answer. A more specific answer is that confirmation is the rite through which we make a public declaration of our faith in Jesus Christ and are strengthened by the Holy Spirit to live out that faith in our lives and in the context of our church community. When the bishop confirms you, he asks you to reaffirm the covenant of your baptism; then he lays hands on you and prays that the Holy Spirit would strengthen, empower, and sustain you. In many ways it’s pretty simple. It’s also very powerful.

At its heart, then, confirmation is a gift and a grace—yet one more way that God provides for us to deepen and strengthen and grow our relationship with our Lord, our savior, our redeemer and friend.

Up next: I’d like to be confirmed, I think I’ve already been confirmed, I’m not sure I want to be confirmed… Figuring out whether confirmation is for you.

In the meantime, please comment and question below!

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