Author: dhammerslag

At sometime or another, nearly every parent’s refrigerator starts to resemble an art gallery.  We take the wonderful, if not fully recognizable, artistic renderings our children produce and put them on display on the ‘fridge door.  But I think my Father in heaven doesn’t have much of my artwork on his ‘fridge.  Why not?  Because long ago I stopped producing any artwork for him to display.

I am blessed to have a delightful two-year-old granddaughter, Anna.  She recently got her hands on a harmonica and delights in “playing” her harmonica and dancing — in her mind dancing is integral to playing the harmonica!  Seeing her play and dance made me think.

I have several harmonicas.  They sit in a box, unused. I used to play them. I tried to teach myself — to become at least proficient, but in the end I convinced myself that I’d never be very good and stopped trying.  I put my harmonicas away.  I’ve done the same thing with other musical instruments and with painting and even with my writing.  In each case, I convince myself that I am “not that good” or not “good enough.”

But a two-year-old knows something I have forgotten:  the point of playing the harmonica is to enjoy being creative; it is not to impress others with our skill.  Anna plays and dances with abandon, deep in the joy of creative expression.

Our God is a creative God. Since we are made in his image, we too are to be creative.  It is part of our design. When we stifle our creative urges we keep a part of ourselves, the creative part made to create, play, sing and dance, from God.  We keep ourselves from being all we are intended to be.

If you feel like painting, paint.  If you feel like writing poetry, write poems.  If you’d like to dance, dance. It doesn’t matter if anyone else ever sees or hears your creative expression.  And if you feel like playing the harmonica and dancing, follow Anna’s lead and do it with gusto and joy!

Don’t be surprised if God starts to commune with you through your creative impulses. We are told be childlike in our relationship with the Lord — to come to Jesus as little children. Part of being childlike means to stop censoring our creativity; stop being self-conscious and self-critical.  Take joy in creative expression simply because you are enjoying this God-given part of your nature.  Create some masterpieces for your Father to enjoy on his refrigerator.

On Father’s Day the Arizona Republic ran a front page story by Karina Bland headlined A boy’s new life. It is a warm and wonderful story about a man, Nick Dugas, who reached out to help an abused, runaway 12-year-old boy nicknamed “Bug”. Nick eventually adopted Bug. It is a story of selfless and unconditional love.

I have never met Nick and no nothing about him that you won’t know after you read the Republic article. No doubt he is as flawed as any of us, but the story of Nick and Bug can be a powerful reminder of how our Father reaches out to us, saves us, and makes us his own.

Nick discovered Bug lying down in the shade of a building in Phoenix one morning. He offered the boy a meal but was rebuffed. Nonetheless, noticing that the boy had a cell phone, he wrote down his number and said that if the boy decided he wanted help, just give him a call. Nick was barely back to his car before his phone rang.

Nick gave Bug food and clothing and a safe place to sleep. At first Bug didn’t stay; he would come and go from Nick’s house. As trust grew, Bug eventually decided to stay. Nick provided Bug a room of his own and made sure he attended school. Eventually, after learning that Bug’s father had no interest in him, Nick took the necessary steps to become Bug’s foster parent and eventually his adoptive father. At his adoption Nick wisely told Bug that his anger and his hurts would take time to heal but that he was now loved unconditionally and was safe.

This wonderful story is a good reminder of how God, our Father, cares for us. He finds us, often hurt and alone, and offers a way out when we have absolutely nothing to give him in return. He doesn’t suggest that if we clean ourselves up and get our lives back on track, only then will he accept us. He offers to take us in the way we are, clean us up, feed us, keep us safe, and love us. We are free accept the offer or, as Bug did at first, decide it is not for us. Nonetheless, in God’s Word and in the presence of believers around us, we “have his number.” If we call out to him he is always their for us, as Nick was when Bug called him.

We are often distrustful of God’s goodness and fidelity, thinking surely there must be a catch! Even when we do accept help we often withdraw, preferring to live life on our own terms (seeming to forget that we were not doing it very well). But each time we return our Father is there, waiting for us, watching for us, welcoming us back into his home. He patiently waits for us learn that he really does love us and wants nothing more than the love of a son or daughter in return. As we grow closer to our Father’s heart we can learn to trust; We can let him begin the healing of our hearts and souls.

Unlike Nick and Bug, we don’t have to navigate a bureaucracy before we are adopted. When we have faith in Jesus we are adopted as his brothers and sisters. We have access to the lives we were always intended to have: lives where we experience the love of God and enter into the mutual love that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have always enjoyed. Our hurts may not heal overnight, but we can know that we are safe in the unconditional love God.

Pride is Satan’s signature sin. Pride caused Satan’s fall and pride caused our fall. As the great Reformer theologian John Calvin observed, “Hence flowed ambition and pride, so that the woman first, and then her husband, desired to exalt themselves against God.”

Pride takes many forms. There’s vanity, the love of self.  There’s a sense of entitlement, impatience, arrogance, hubris, desiring relevance or appreciation, incessant dissatisfaction, complaining, demanding.  Pride is a stern master.

But God has given us an escape from pride. Listen to learn how you can be freed from pride and free to become your best self.

That is how my Pastor, Graeme Sellers of Wonderful Mercy Church,  summarized the message I preached on March 11th.  I couldn’t ask for a better summary.

You can listen to that message, “The Root of Our Problem,”  here.

Recently I was reminded of how the Lord can take the straw of our very imperfect efforts and spin it into kingdom gold. A child we had sponsored years ago reached out and contacted me through social media. My family has been sponsoring children through Compassion for many years. Compassion is a great organization and does fantastic work, addressing spiritual, emotional, and relational needs of children, in addition to their material needs.

Although we have always been faithful with our financial support of the children we sponsor, we have not always been faithful in prayer and supporting the children relationally by corresponding with.  When you sponsor a child through Compassion you are the one and only sponsor that child has.  Since Compassion works through local churches the children had other Christian adults sewing into their lives but the children especially value hearing from their sponsors.

Ten years ago we began sponsoring a college student in Thailand through the Leadership Development Program.¹ Our LDP student in Thailand was just beginning her time at the university and we were able to support her for three years, until she graduated. As with the school-age children we sponsored, we weren’t the best sponsors, but God took our imperfect works of straw and spun them into Kingdom gold.  He combined our efforts with whoever her through her previous sponsors, her local church, the Compassion workers in Thailand, and His own power to produce a very good end indeed.

Our former LDP student recently contacted me via social media: she is now working in Christian ministry in Thailand and as I write this she has travelled with Compassion from Thailand to Australia where she is visiting churches to share her testimony about how God has worked in her life.   I am very proud of the small part we were able to play.

Her story reminds me of how God takes our most ineffective actions, whether we are seeking to do kingdom work or just to know him better and hear his voice, and spins our straw into gold.  We don’t have to wait until we are good enough or have it all sorted out.  We just have to start.  He is there to meet us WAY more than half way, if we just take even the first halting steps.

^{1. The Leadership Development Program, which allowed us to sponsor a child in college no longer exists, but Compassion does have Youth Development Fund.↩}

Featured photo: Narsil/shutterstock.com

My last post was about how we cannot rely solely on our personal experience of God. Theology has an important part to play as well. Our experience, as sweet, as intimate, as powerful and as impactful as it may be, gives us only a narrow view, a tiny piece of the picture of who God is. The experience and thoughtful analysis of the countless faithful who have gone before us can help us understand the fuller picture.

The sermon I heard in church this Sunday shifted my perspective. Not to say that our experiences of God are not important; not to say that theology is not important to help us understand the bigger picture. But, really, neither of those can be our starting point. At Wonderful Mercy Church this morning, Pastor Graeme Sellers was preaching on 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. In that passage, St. Paul declares that “…Christ crucified, [is] a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles…” (v. 23, English Standard Version). And yet, as Pastor Sellers taught, the cross is the definitive revelation of God: “Our picture of God is to be derived 100% from Jesus on the Cross because Jesus reflects what God is like with 100% accuracy.”

If we want to know God, good theology is important; personal experience can be sweet; but they cannot be our starting place. We cannot start with those and work our way up to the cross, the stumbling block and folly. We must start with the cross, the God’s love for us perfectly reflected in Jesus on the cross. From there we can work our way to the rest, but we must start at the cross.

This post steals steals shamelessly from Pastor Sellers’ message, “Power, Knowledge, and the Cross of Christ.” I encourage you to take 30 minutes and give it a listen. It will be well worth your time.

The theme song from “Cheers” famously proclaimed, “You wanna where everybody knows your name.”  That rings true for a lot of people, it certainly does for me.  We really do want to be somewhere where we are known — we want to be accepted.

Do people know you?  I mean really know you, not just know about you.  The difference is huge.  If you knew about me, you might know where I work, how many kids I have,  where I went on vacation and so on.  But if you really knew me you would know my hopes and dreams, my aspirations and deep regrets. You would know what brings me joy and what breaks my heart, what I am proud of what shames me.

Do you have people in your life who really know you?  Social media such as Facebook has made it easy to feel that lots of people know us when, in reality, they only know about us.  If you are very lucky you have a few people in your life who really know you, who you can be yourself with.

Our desire to be known, or  connected to others at a deep level is one of our deepest needs.  In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, belonging falls just above our physical needs and our need for safety.  Psychiatrist Curt Thompson has it this way:

“While connection may not be our top need for immediate physical survival, our Creator has formed us in such a way that there is nothing more crucial to our long-term welfare. In fact, virtually every action we humans take is part of the deeper attempt to connect with other humans. Even when it terrifies us. Even when we suspect at some inscrutable, preverbal place in our minds that we will be betrayed. Even when we have spent years perfecting our deftness at avoiding connection or carefully protecting ourselves from all but the most controlled forms of it. We find ourselves drawn to it, despite our occasional repulsion by it—especially in relation to particular people.”

[Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships; Curt Thompson M.D., p 109]

When we allow ourselves to be known by others it can launch an important chain.  When we allow ourselves to be knowing by others we begin to know ourselves; we must necessarily start peeling back the masks and false selves we have been building up most of our lives.  Knowing ourselves is key to being known by God.  To have an authentic relationship with the Lord we must be able to bring our true selves to him; it does no good if we come to the Lord with who we wish we were or think He expects us to be.  We have to bring our true selves.

Both Augustine and John Calvin taught that we cannot know God if we do not know ourselves and we can’t really know ourselves without knowing God. When we know God, not just know about God, we can experience His loving compassion toward us.  That experience allows us to reflect that love others.  That is, we can obey the one commandment Jesus gave his followers:  that we love one another (John 13:34, 15:12).  We cannot obey that commandment if don’t really know God’s love.  Yet it all begins with letting ourselves be known.

If you want to know more, both Dr. Curt Thompson and David Benner are excellent resources on the importance and value of being know.

This blog entry is derived from a sermon I preached at Wonderful Mercy Church.  You can listen to the full message here.

Feature Image: By InSapphoWeTrust from Los Angeles, California, USA (Cheers, Quincy Market branch) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

If we ever needed to know how to overcome Hate, this is the time. Hate, as vile and reprehensible as it is, cannot be out-argued, out-protested, or shouted down.  Only Love can overcome Hate.

Only Love can overcome Hate — but how?  Love cannot prevail by hating Hate.  To overcome Hate, Love must be, like God’s Love: pure.  So I am praying that when Love meets Hate it will be Love that is patient and kind; Love that does not boast or envy; Love that is not arrogant or rude.  I pray that in the face of Hate, Love will not insist on having its own way; will not be irritable or resentful; that Love will not rejoice in wrongdoing but will rejoice in the truth.  I am praying that Hate will be met by Love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.

God’s approach to Love does not fit our human calculus of how to overcome Hate, yet I am convinced that any other love will feed, not overcome, Hate.  Faced with the vileness of the hatred we see today it may feel impossible to love with Godly Love. It may well be impossible if we move solely out of our own strength and reason, but it is not impossible for God.  He can transform our hearts and help us to love with His Love.

So I am praying that today’s Hate will be met by Love, God’s  holy version of Love.

How are you praying?

Featured image By RecycledStarDust [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons