Fearless

Last night on the news we saw a story about a young man who had just become a Christian. He was so excited about it that he started telling all of his friends. Apparently he told one of them about it one too many times; the guy was found shot to death at an apartment complex.

So my 8-year-old son was there listening to the story and I wanted to see what he thought; you have to make sure your kids aren't scared by something like that. So I asked Mikey, "What do you think of that? Is that scary, that a guy got killed for telling someone about Jesus?"

Mikey didn't hesitate, and he didn't blink an eye. With total honesty, in answer to the question "Are you scared about that?" he told me, "No, not if it's the Word of God!"

Lord, please teach me to be as fearless as Mikey!

Do Angels Sing?

A few days ago I was at choir rehearsal, practicing for the Christmas production coming up in a few weeks, and someone told me that there is nowhere in the Bible that it says that angels sing, despite Christmas carols misrepresenting this passage (which, you will notice, says the angels were praising God and saying, not singing). I immediately thought of a passage I recently read in Revelation which I knew had an awful lot of praising in it, but as it turns out, in my ESV it only mentions singing one time, although they do a lot of "saying" in that passage.

So who is singing? Well, it's "the 24 elders" who sit around God's throne, and four "living creatures." Apparently there are folks who believe the 24 elders are angels, but I don't really buy that... if they were angels, how could there be "elders"? I've never heard anything that would lead me to believe that any angels are older than any others. On the other hand, what about those creatures? The description of them in Revelation resembles descriptions in Isaiah (who specifies that he is describing seraphim, a kind of angel) and Ezekiel (who also calls them "living creatures"), but neither of those prophets exactly describes the creatures as John describes them in Revelation, so I'm not sure we can consider them seraphim, or even angels at all. It could be argued that they actually are just some very unusual creatures that live in Heaven!

So that's no good, so I asked the almighty Google for answers. Here are some scriptures that people use as proof that angels sing:

Job 38:4-7 - assuming the "sons of God" are angels, which I think is iffy given this.

Jeremiah 51:48 - assuming that angels are either in the heavens or on Earth, which seems like a fairly good bet to me.

Isaiah 49:13 also mentions "the heavens" singing.

I would consider all of these good college tries at it, but I can't see any of them as being conclusive. So are angels melodious, or tone-deaf? The Bible doesn't seem to care enough to clear it up for us. I guess we'll just have to wait and see! And while we're waiting, there are plenty of places where it encourages us to sing our praises to God!

Blogerella

I just got my confirmation email for Blogerella!

What the heck is a "Blogerella", you ask? Well, it's a new directory of blogs. When I saw that there were no other blogs yet in the "Religion - Christianity" category, I knew I had to get in on that action! What's the point? The point of Blogerella is to help people find blogs that they'll enjoy reading. How does Blogerella know what people enjoy reading? Votes!

If you could take about 30 seconds to create an account on Blogerella and vote smiley faces for any posts on this blog that you see there that you've enjoyed, I'd really appreciate it. You should be able to go directly from links at the bottom of the posts themselves straight to the voting page for that post. You don't vote for the blog as a whole; you vote for individual posts. And if we get enough votes, we go up in the standings and even more people get to see the blog!

So, get clicking! (If you came here from a different post, vote for that post... it's not really necessary to vote for this one!)

Attractive Worship

Now Muriel plays piano
Every Friday at the Hollywood
And they brought me down to see her
And they asked me if I would
Do a little number
And I sang with all my might
And she said "Tell me, are you a Christian, child?"
And I said "Ma'am, I am tonight!"

-Marc Cohn, from "Walking in Memphis"

I wonder if our worship services are sufficient to draw the lost to Christ. At my church we have a very contemporary style of worship, very upbeat, with a lot of pop and rock influences. People are welcome to raise hands, jump, dance if they want, whatever. Your church's music may be more traditional and majestic. Either way, we should be expressing something of our relationship with God in worship... either exuberance and excitement to be in God's family, or wonder at His majesty and beauty, or humbleness at his power, or thankfulness at His provision, or something along those lines. We don't worship to be seen, of course, but if someone does see us worshiping God, they should see a living testimony of our relationship with Him. It should be enough that people should want to be a part of that relationship themselves. By the time worship is over, The Lost should already be convinced that they want to be part of The Found.

Coming Out Of The Closet

Today God was trying to get me to come out of the closet. I failed miserably.

As I was waiting for the bus, someone came up to me and asked me if I could give him a dollar. He gave me the whole "I'll pay you back the next time I see you, I get paid tomorrow, do you always ride this bus?" thing. Maybe it's true, or maybe not, but I believe the Word says to give when people ask of you, so I gave him a dollar without hesitation. I even asked him if he had the extra quarter it would take to ride the bus (he said yes, he had it). The Holy Spirit told me to speak to the guy about Jesus. I did not.

I got on the bus and it was fairly full, so I sat down in the front seats next to a guy. This particular bus runs past the V.A. clinic, and quite often veterans ride it to get to the clinic, sometimes to catch the free shuttle from there to the V.A. hospital in Oklahoma City for more involved treatment (I mentioned one guy I met who does that in this post). The guy I was sitting next to asked the bus driver if he would let him off right across the street from the hospital (the bus stop is maybe 20 yards or so away, so that would save him some steps, especially on a rainy day). I felt impressed that I could find out what was wrong with him and pray for him. But I did not do so. When it started raining harder just before we let him off, I also considered giving him my umbrella so he would be a little dryer crossing the street. I did not, and it's not even an expensive umbrella.

Shortly after we let the guy off at the clinic, the bus driver commented, to nobody in particular, that the rain was really picking up. I had the thought that he would probably be appreciative if I stopped on the way off the bus and prayed for his safety on the job today. But I did not do that.

Strangely, I feel a sense of missed opportunities this morning, but I do not feel like a failure and I do not feel any sense of "condemnation" over it. I'm naturally a very reserved person, not the type at all to strike up conversations with strangers outside of maybe a little joke about something going on around us or something like that, but not anything heavy. But I've been reading about Jesus and how He went around meddling in people's lives, healing their illnesses, casting out their demons, teaching them about His Kingdom, and I know I need to be like that. But it's a learning process for me. This morning I definitely learned what not to do. Besides, the day's not over! I may yet get some chances to share some part of God's good news with someone. I'm not planning on keeping my Christianity in the closet forever! I've cracked the door open, and I've inadvertently shed some light into the darkness outside. Soon another opportunity will come and I will fling open the door and the light of Jesus will shine on everything around me! Holy Spirit, don't give up on me... teach me how to live my life as Jesus would live it!

Jesus' Debating Technique - Part 2 of 2

Yesterday I started talking about Jesus' debating techniques in Luke 20. This is the other half of that... if you missed it yesterday, you might want to read that first!

Second question: Those same scribes and Pharisees sent flunkies to first butter Jesus up, and then to ask Him, "Is it lawful for us to give tribute to Caesar, or not?" They must have figured that either Jesus would answer that Caesar should get tribute, thus angering the crowd, or that he shouldn't get tribute, thus opening the door for them to have him arrested. Instead, Jesus knew they were trying to trap him and answered in a way that not only demonstrated that the people should follow the law, but also taught them that whatever has an "image" of someone belongs to that someone. Although Jesus did not explicitly mention this verse, it is the logical basis for His answer; whatever has God's image belongs to God. What has God's image? You fill in the blank! The answer was so perfect that it literally shut up the people who were trying to trick him.

Third question: Some people brought a complicated story based on a rule from Deuteronomy to Jesus, trying to trick Him into being on their side on the subject of life after death. It's not really clear to be if they were trying to do away with Jesus, but they were clearly trying to trick Him. The final question they asked, "In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife" was apparently meant to allow only the answer "None of them will be her wife, because after people die they are dead and gone and it doesn't matter any more." The unexpected answer, that marriage is not an issue in the afterlife, was so clear and such a good explanation that even the people who had been trying to trick Jesus commended Him on His answer and "...no longer dared to ask him any question." Once again, Jesus shuts the mouths of His opponents.

Did Jesus stop there? No, He did not. He continued by asking His own Theological question, on that from the perspective of a Christian is simple to answer, but from the perspective of one of those religious leaders must have seemed like an insoluble riddle. Anyone who still had any idea of trying to outfox Jesus by that point must have been too scared to speak another word to Him!

The whole exchange ends with Jesus cautioning His disciples to be careful around people who are always looking for approval and financial gain at the expense of others, and making a comparison with someone who was somewhere close to the bottom of the social food chain, a widow with almost no money to live on. He basically said that she was closer to God's will than rich people, obviously referring to the scribes, Pharisees, and Saducees He had been verbally sparring with.

In the course of one chapter, maybe 15-20 minutes' worth of dialogue containing three questions and answers, not only had Jesus silenced his critics and made them afraid to say another word, but He had managed to teach several critical kingdom principles to His disciples. He never stopped teaching them, even in the middle of a heated theological debate, and kept turning things around to exactly what He wanted to talk about! Is that some great debating technique, or what?

Jesus' Debating Technique - Part 1 of 2

There have been a lot of debates lately in the U.S.... "official" Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates, unofficial water-cooler debates over the merits of the candidates, debates in Congress over the economy. This morning I read about my favorite debate of all... one between Jesus and the Scribes/Pharisees which is recorded mostly in Luke chapter 20 (it kind of laps over into chapter 19 and 21 a little bit, but the main part of it is in chapter 20). A while back I read the chapter and was seriously impressed with Jesus' unique debating style and how he flummoxed his opponents, and today when I read it again in my new ESV Study Bible I remembered why I like it so much. It's got to be one of my favorite chapters in the Gospels!

The debate actually starts in the last few verses of chapter 19 when Jesus "cleanses" the temple. This of course made the religious leaders pretty upset: they "...were seeking to destroy him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words." So I suppose they decided to try to discredit him on credentials, or destroy the people's faith in Jesus' teaching abilities by outfoxing him with questions. Bad idea! You can't out-question the Son of God!

First question: "Tell us by what authority you do these things, or who it is that gave you this authority." I guess they religious leaders figured they had official credentials and Jesus didn't. Instead of answering their question, Jesus answered, I've always assumed, by deftly changing the subject. "Now tell me, was the baptism of John from heaven or from man?" The religious leaders were too afraid to answer what they really believed (that John was a wacko out in the desert somewhere) because they knew the people thought John was a prophet (for the record, yes he was!) and they were afraid of a riot. So they refused to answer, and so Jesus refused to answer their question as well.

Was Jesus really changing the subject? He was not! Jesus' authority came from the same place John's came from, and if the religious leaders weren't willign to recognize John's authority, they weren't going to recognize Jesus' either. So he refused to answer, but he got them to refuse first! Smart, huh?

Then Jesus immediately launched into a story. Is the story unrelated? No, it is not! The story is a parable about some tenants who are given the task of keeping a vineyard for the owner. Every time the owner sent a servant to pick up some of the fruit, the tenants beat the servant up and kicked him out, until finally the owner sent his son, whom the servants killed, thinking they would be able to keep the vineyard for themselves. The story is really about God giving authority to the temple rulers, who misused it and abused the true prophets of God, and who would shortly have God's son executed. At the end of the parable, the tenants are "destroyed" and the vineyard taken away from them. The story completely relates to the question of authority, although the people it was leveled against probably didn't get it.

Come back tomorrow for part 2!