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In the introduction to For All God’s Worth, N.T. Wright describes the incarnation (Jesus) this way:

How can you cope with the end of a world and the beginning of another one? How can you put an earthquake into a test-tube, or the sea into a bottle? How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that fire has become flesh, that life itself came to life and walked in our midst? Christianity either means that, or it means nothing. It is either the most devastating disclosure of the deepest reality in the world, or it’s a sham, a nonsense, a bit of deceitful play-acting.

I think this is wonderful imagery! My former pastor, Karl Barden, put a practical spin on it:

If Christianity is anything, it is everything!

If you didn’t catch that, I’ll rephrase it: If Christianity is anything, anything at all, then it must be everything! Service to Jesus should absolutely dominate your life. I think both of these are another angle of the well-known challenge from C.S. Lewis:

I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I am ready to accept Jesus as the great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a boiled egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

So what do we do about this?! Lewis reveals his answer along with the question:

…fall at His feet and call Him (Jesus) Lord and God.

Bishop Wright goes on to prescribe:

…sheer unadulterated worship of the living and true God, and by following this God wherever he leads, whether or not it is the way our traditions would suggest. Worship is not an optional extra for the Christian, a self-indulgent religious activity. It is the basic Christian stance, and indeed…the truly human stance. “Worship” derives from “worth-ship”: it means giving God all he’s worth.

And Barden went on to put in 30 hard years of pastoring a congregation whose mission statement began with:

Lift up the Lord Jesus Christ in worship.

I think all of this is a wonderful place to start! The obvious next question to ask is “What is worship?” or “Can you tell or show me what it looks like?” From there we jump from our high position into a sea of confusion. I really want to come up with a working definition of “worship” over the next month. I think I’ll make it a series on this blog. I’ve had it explained to me many times, and each time, something quite different from the previous definition was being described. I want to work through all of this and come up with something more solid. Maybe it will be a long definition with 20 variations. Maybe it will be really short.

The purpose? Intellectual exercise? No. I want to worship Jesus! I want to do it right. I don’t want to miss something important. I want to teach my children how, and I’m not exactly sure what it looks like.

I’ve been reading The Nautical Chart, a mystery novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte (translated from the Spanish). It’s difficult to like the main character because he is such a loser. Nonetheless, I really identified with this sentiment:

Coy let himself sail with the ship for a moment, lost in a daydream of a long chase at the first light of dawn, of fleeing sails on the horizon. When there was no such thing as radar or satellites or sonar, ships were little dice cups dancing at the mouth of hell, and the sea was a mortal peril, but also an unassailable refuge from all things-lives lived or yet to be lived, deaths looming or already accomplished, but all of it left behind on land. “We come too late to a world too old,” he had read in some book. Of course we come too late. We come to ships and ports and seas that are too old, when dying dolphins peel away from the bows of ships, and when Conrad has written The shadow-Line twenty times, Long John Silver is a brand of whiskey, and Moby Dick has become the good whale in an animated film.

There’s a reason Gene Roddenbery says space is the final frontier. We’ve run out of them here. There is no hidden city left to discover in the Congo. There are no pirate ships hiding in the mists. GPS and satellite imagery have laid the smack-down on adventure. I think we must turn to other mysteries and frontiers: To mapping the human genome, to sub-atomic particles and cold fusion, to artificial intelligence, and of course, to interstellar travel. There will ALWAYS be a space program somewhere. Even if it never accomplishes anything substantial. The sons of Adam have a calling to understand and dominate their world.

(OK, apparently there isn’t a whiskey named after THAT particular pirate. So we’ll grab a different one instead!)

From Reaching for the Invisible God:

Here, Yancy quotes Paul Tournier. Who, from what I can gather was a Swiss physician turned Christian psychotherapist. He lived mostly during the first half of the last century.

The most wonderful thing in this world is not the good that we accomplish, but the fact that good can come out of the evil that we do. I have been struck, for example, by the numbers of people who have been brought back to God under the influence of a person to whom they have had some imperfect attachment… Our vocation is, I believe, to build good out of evil. For if we try to build good out of good, we are in danger of running out of raw material.

I see this now goes to reinforce one of the major points he established earlier in the book:

The world is good.
The world is fallen.
The world can be redeemed.

Yancy calls this the story of the universe. I can’t help but think I’ve seen this same idea in other places, but worded differently.

From Reaching for the Invisible God:

…what finally brought me to God: not the Bible or Christian literature or anyone’s sermons. I turned to God primarily because of my discovery of goodness and grace in the world: through nature, through classical music, through romantic love. Enjoying the gifts, I began to seek the giver; full of gratitude, I needed Someone to thank…God had been there all the while, waiting to be noticed. Though I still had no proof, only clues, the clues led me to exercise faith. (p. 118)

I really loved this comment because I feel that it sheds insight into how the holy spirit actually works in our hearts and minds. I’ve always wondered at how God does it. How does he take our fallen selfish thoughts and turn them into humility? How exactly does he change us from being jerk to being deeply aware of Jesus’ sacrifice and to generating love for the people around us? The usual example we know of is when tragedy hits someones life. They almost die or they lose their family in some horrible accident and it really slaps them around. But that kind of thing only happens to some people. It didn’t happen to me or even most of the people I know. So how did we all come to faith? Being raised by Christian parents? You can have that and still turn out bad. Everyone knows our efforts come to nil without the work of the spirit.

I like this because it’s another way that he works in our hearts to draw us to himself. I couldn’t put my finger on it before, but Yancy’s description is one I can relate to a lot.

Mark Byron offers some keen insight into spiritual warfare:

The classic verse in the area comes from James 4:7 – “Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you.”
Note that it doesn’t say “Whup the Devil’s ass, and he will flee from you.”

It’s a short post. Keep reading…

From Reaching for the Invisible God:

I learn about faith by looking back at Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for God proceeded in a most puzzling manner with all three. After God had promised to bring about a people as numerous as the stars in the sky, what followed more resembled a case study in family infertility. Abraham and Sarah entered their nineties before they saw their first child; that son married a barren woman; the grandson Jacob had to wait fourteen years for the wife of his dreams, only to discover her barren as well. This tortuous path toward populating a great nation shows that God operates on a different timetable than impatient human beings expect. Each of those Old Testament characters lived and died in faith, vowing to the end that God had indeed kept his promises. (p. 75)

I think it’s fascinating that the patriarch’s faith is presented as being so loosely tied to tangible results in their lifetime. I wonder if they were like us now: Wanting God to take care of their problems in a relatively short amount of time. (A couple of weeks sounds good.) Then, lying on their bed in their old age, they rally themselves to proclaim their faith, even thought they are about to die without seeing any of the promises come true. OR did they live their day-to-day life with this kind of conviction, not actually expecting God to deliver for a few hundred years or so. When you read about famous characters in an epic, it’s easy to imagine the latter, more mythical faith. However, remembering that Jacob was a guy just like me, I suspect it may have looked more like the former.

I would also like to relate this to eschatology for a moment. The pre-trib, pre-millennial rapture is a future that seems to me to appeal to the impatient Christian. We just hang on for a few more years and then God comes down and whacks everything into shape in a very short amount of time. Only 7 years or so. The post-millennial view sees the power of God working in the hearts of men and growing the church to cover the whole earth over several thousand MORE years from now. This is the slow, patient salvation of our world. When I open the bible, I see God working slowly.