The more we learn how to love in places that are not like our own, the more we are able to transcend our categories of who is or isn’t worthy of love, and the more we learn to inhabit our true identities as being “in Christ”. Steadily we find, as we go to the “ends of the earth”, that there is no real boundary to compassion that this cross-shaped love cannot overcome. It is Jesus’ care and consideration for this journey of love that he first sends us to our personal Judea, and when the time is right to our personal Samaria, so that we can expand the circumference of our love to meet all people, everywhere.
Part of the healing work God does in our lives is to carefully parse through the elements of our origins, teaching us to let go of what no longer serves us or the Kingdom, while magnifying those qualities that best reflect the character of God and become our best contributions to the advancement of the Kingdom. The plot of our lives goes deeper than the surface appearance of things; it speaks to a general spirit or attitude that might pervade our stories before we really encounter the God Who turns curses into blessings. The more closely we can name this spirit, the more preciously we can name the specific character of the spirit of God that enters in and brings us to new life. Once you were one way, but because of God’s work in your life, you are becoming something more.
Story is the realm of the Father, Who is intimately with us on the journey and turns curses into blessings. This is true for human history, and it is true for your personal history. Learning how to read your story as the Father has worked in it will help you understand how the Father desires to work through it for the sake of the world.
Calling can be seen as the way in which each of us specifically fulfill that common purpose through the uniqueness of our stories, our personalities, and our gifts. The beauty of understanding our individual calling as part of the larger purpose of the church is that we don’t feel the pressure to take the whole mission upon ourselves. We learn to trust that, as we steward well what God has placed on our hearts, others will do the same for their part in the larger picture. In this way, God weaves together a grand narrative that celebrates diversity, as we all contribute out of our gifts and limitations. There is tremendous relief in not holding the burden of the whole great commission, and with it a renewed call to responsibility to really understand what we’re each called to do.
Psalms are essentially the worship book for the Hebrew people. They were read publicly, often as call-and-response during services; hence the way lines are broken and indented on the page…
“Jesus told them a parable, about how they should always pray and not give up...” (Luke 18:1)
We wrapped up LISTENING TO THE HEARTBEAT OF GOD by weaving some of the major themes into our prayer for approaching the Lord’s Table. This liturgy is a combination of texts from the Book of Common Prayer, call-and-response reading of scripture, and custom-written words that connect to our series… Read More
