Author: merittmusings

I've been in ministry in the Christian Churches/ Churches of Christ for 20+ years. Finished my doctorate in Biblical Studies in 2015. Serve today as a Hospital Chaplain.

How Would You Answer?

www.bible.com/72/pro.15.1.hcsb

in light of my blog yesterday, it seems Youversion is concerned about the words I speak and my reaction to stress. Interesting. It makes me wonder if they have an actual theme going here or if they are listening through the microphone and giving verses of the day that may be appropriate to my needs. Or, maybe I am just being paranoid.

It’s like when you go to church and the pastor seems to be speaking directly to you. This happened to me Thursday, where the pastor seemed to look directly at me and asked “What’s holding you back?” And then he starting talking about getting exercise and losing weight. Hmmm.

I am not a thin man. I really have never been considered skinny. There are times when I have been lighter, but not thin. Serves me right for attending s church where the pastor is thinner than me. As such I hear this periodically. On the other hand, I’ve never had a situation where being fat has been an issue. It’s not prevented me from doing anything I’ve wanted to do.

All the same, it came down to me as a conviction. As usual.

Truth is I love good food. I like buffets. It has always been a comfort for me. I don’t enjoy being hungry, and I live in a culture where going hungry is a cardinal sin. I also like cheap food, which is usually bad food. (Applying moral qualities to food is one of my pet peeves.) unhealthy food. But when I hear that phrase, I think, “poison is unhealthy food.” Poison kills immediately. Transfats take their time. Sugar kills slowly through its addictive power. We are the most well-nourished people on earth. Also the most depressed, and the most addicted.

I know my food. I usually don’t think about it. Also Thursday, I ate bugs for the first time. That was different. I didn’t think about eating them. I was onstage at church and it was all in good fun. But it didn’t bother me. That’s troubling. It should have at least been a warning. But I chomped away at these things, and I didn’t think about what I was putting into my mouth. Sometimes you have to do that. I ate them because it was all part of the show.

I know none of this has anything to do with the verse above. Because that verse is all about how to respond to prevent violence, which should be how we respond to others in love. It made me think about how sometimes Bible verses strike the heart unintentionally. See you tomorrow.

God bless you today.

Be a Do-Gooder

www.bible.com/72/1th.5.15.hcsb

Ugh. I really don’t like that word. A “Do-Gooder” just seems bland and cliched. In he same vein, a “goody two-shoes” comes to mind, which I found out last week was an actual person, and now used as a paragon of virtue, an example for others to emulate and point to. Be again, it smacks of cliche and unreality. Real people have bad days, difficult times where they slip. A real human being has real human problems, which seem so unlike the stellar phrases above.

And yet here is this text stating back at us. Do good. Always seek to do good, and do not repay evil for evil. If I may, I understand this to be an instruction to us, do good rather then evil, especially when evil is expected. I am human. Because I am human, I more often am prone to react in anger when threatened or wronged. This comes with a choice. I can choose to react violently and “fly off the handle” or I can choose not to, and do something else. I used to not have that choice. Because before I started to follow Christ and received His Spirit into my life, I didn’t have that check on my temper. But now, however brief a time I experience it, it is there, and my renewed conscience comes back into play, so that I am now conflicted. I want to react in evil, hurting the one who hurt me. I know better. And that has made all the difference. This verse reinforces that which I know to be true, but I still need to hear it. I hope it has helped you today too.

God bless!

What is Justice?

www.bible.com/72/amo.5.24.hcsb

Amos seems to be all in when it comes to justice. He wrote these words over 2 and a half millennia ago. The voice behind the words comes from God, who is expressing frustration with the Israelites lack of sincerity in their worship, as their hearts are following false gods and idols. Their worship of God is perfunctory, a duty to be performed rather than a privilege. They would rather be somewhere else while in the Temple of God. Sound familiar?

So the call for justice isn’t about making sure everyone gets a $15/ hr minimum wage, or everyone paying their fair share in taxes. It isn’t about blacks getting equal treatment by cops or that black lives matter. All the recent ink spilled over “justice” has little to do with what God is saying here.

He begins this thought a few verses before in verse 18, asking them why they want the “Day of the Lord” so badly. As far as we can surmise here, they want God’s Day of Justice to occur to mete our punishment on their national enemies, not unlike what we look for today. They were hoping for the Day of the Lord to dish out Justice to all who have burdened them and hurt them so that they would prevail. However, God’s perspective is different. The Day of Justice will not be one of “light” but one of “darkness” for them. They too are in the wrong, and God’s justice will level them as well. His counsel is to work on their own house, being God’s righteousness into their homes and families, into their worship so that they will not be in danger of God’s justice.

Fill your own home and life with the righteousness of God so that when the Day comes, He will not come to judge you too. Good advice. Before you pray for God’s wrath to be visited on your enemies, make sure you aren’t in the way.

Looks like Amos still has something to say to us too. God bless you today!

Rest in Jesus

www.bible.com/72/mat.11.28.hcsb

At the time Jesus spoke these words, He was talking to a group of people who were literally carrying heavy burdens and were physically tired. I think we have to understand what He was saying to those people before we start turning it into metaphor. What kind of rest was Jesus offering to those who carried their belongings, their livelihood on their backs? They carried water from the well to their home. They carried grain from the field to their grindstone to mill into flour. They carried goods from the market and to the market. They carried their lives on their back. What kind of rest was Jesus offering them? Was he offering a rest for the weariness, or from the work itself, or both? If they did not work, they did not eat, or pay their taxes, or pay their creditors.

Yet when they came to Jesus, as in this instance in the text, they were not working. They were listening to Him. While they sat and listened to him, they weren’t busy doing all the other things of living. So in this sense, He was giving them rest. He was inviting them to stop from their labor and listen to Him for a while.

We place a high priority on work. We are to be commended for our diligence. But Jesus says sometimes we pause our busy schedules and pay attention to Him. He is as important as a paycheck. I would argue more important.

What we want to do is say that Jesus offers relief from stress and overwork in this passage. That simply giving our life to Jesus will allow us to keep doing all the things but with only half the stress as before. That’s not what He is saying. His audience worked everyday (but the Sabbath) just to survive, and He is calling them to rest. We work everyday to be comfortable. If it was about merely survival, we could probably make do with less, but we like our conveniences, like electricity and internet. Do you have time to stop and listen?

When you look at the context of Matthew 11:28, you will find on the next verse that Jesus offers rest for their souls. Doesn’t that mean this is a metaphor? Not necessarily. It seems to me in the larger sense that Jesus is offering rest because we no longer work for ourselves, or for the Man, but for Him. “My yoke is easy and my burden is light”. When we place ourselves under a His yoke, we find it slot easier. Less stressful? Yes. Less burdensome? Yes.

As you work today, consider who you are working for. Don’t forget to stop and listen along the way to the words of the Master. He offers true rest, a respite from the tyranny of labor and its curse. You will never be able to do it all anyway, for there is always more to be done. Like Mary, take time to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen.

God bless you today!

Starting with Love

www.bible.com/72/jhn.3.16.hcsb

Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Maybe I am just a hack when it comes to preaching. And I probably am. After preaching for over 20 years, I’ve been out of the pulpit since 2016. My preaching gears are getting rusty. In part, that’s why I write this blog, just to have an outlet for those energies. I don’t have an axe to grind. It’s just that that street preacher really bugged me. It bugged me because he represented for most what Christianity is about, fire and judgment and the wrath of God. While true, it is a narrow interpretation of God’s nature. God is much more than this.

If he had delivered that message in a church, he would probably received a more sympathetic hearing, but as a trial sermon, I think it would have been a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” situation. I can’t fault the guy for trying, because it was more than I was doing sitting there minding my own business. But could I have done better, with that mildly hostile crowd? The guy was preaching the word of God, and reading directly from the text. But he might have started with this John 3:16 instead of Romans 1:19ff.

He could have started with John 3:1. He could have started in the gospels. He could have started in the Psalms. He could have started with love and then balanced with God’s wrath for sin, and that expended upon Christ at the cross. As Paul in 1 Cor 3, he could have come preaching “Christ and Him crucified.” He could have went a number of different places. But what do I know? I’m just a guy writing a blog.

It seems to me that guys that begin and end preaching against the sins of the world have come out of some pretty dark places themselves. This is preaching out of personal pain and shame. If someone has not felt the love of Christ, it’s very hard to preach about it. And I think that’s where these guys come from. They are spoon-fed the wrath of God and fear of God’s judgment if they live less than perfectly. And that’s where they start in their preaching. It is a sad reality that many are exposed to Christianity in its most negative light. It’s not fair to God to describe Him so one-sidedly.

God bless you today.

Mere Foolishness

www.bible.com/72/1co.1.18.hcsb

I had the opportunity over the weekend to witness a rare sight, a street preacher in Williamsburg, VA, standing in the middle of the street with a couple of signs declaring God’s position on several key social issues. My kids kept asking me if I approved of the guy’s message, because they wanted to know if this was ok by me. I sat with a sense of personal conflict, not knowing how I should feel. On the one hand, this guy was reading Scripture (albeit the parts about God’s displeasure with sin and the judgment for the wicked) and on the other hand I was repulsed by his chosen means to deliver said truth, with an attitude that said “I am not one of you sinners. I am holy and you are not.”

This verse reminds of the crowd’s reaction to the preaching and the preacher. For one man, it was utter bull**** and he told him so. Another danced around the preacher, mocking him while he talked. For many, His preaching was foolishness. And it was amazing to see this happening in the wild. To see this truth in this text playing out in the public forum.

I would have rather seen this man engaging the crowd, using his context in historical Williamsburg, a place where Liberty gained a footing against the tyranny of the British Empire, or the fact he was standing in a marketplace, or simply engaging the crowd with a simple story, to draw in the interest of the crowd before they rejected him outright by his quoting of the darkest parts of Scripture. It just seemed irresponsible to me, taking the dearest, sweetest message of the gospel of Jesus, and turning it into a call for judgment upon the wicked. As Paul writes, it is the message of the cross, the message that Christ died for our sins out of His love for us that the world considers foolish. It is the preaching of God’s great love expending such great sacrifice for the sake of all of us. And then the preaching of that same Christ rising from the dead. Oh the power and glory of God revealed through the preaching of the gospel message. Foolishness? God’s extravagant expenditure seems foolish. Surely atonement is limited only to those who believe, as even some Christians believe. But God’s foolishness is our gain. This is the message that needed to be preached on the streets of Williamsburg, and everywhere.

I know in that audience Saturday there were Christians of all denominations. Non-Christians who had never known Christ, and fallen Christians, so turned-off by he church and its people that their evil came from their hurt and betrayal at the hands of those who claimed to be saved. Of the three groups, these are who I would preach to, those whose vitriol and hatred comes from their hurt. These are the ones that needed God’s grace and love and would have benefitted from a kind word, not one of judgment.

Just my two cents. God bless you today.

Humility Before Our Namesake

www.bible.com/72/2ch.7.14.hcsb

This verse needs little commentary. But let me provide some context. The voice is that of God, speaking to the people of Israel after Solomon has finished offering prayer over the Temple. This response was given to Solomon in a vision (yes, Solomon has seen God personally, something his father had only glimpsed through prophets). The qualifier for the prayers of humility suggested here is that they be made at the Temple. In other words, prayers made at this newly dedicated Temple or toward it, prayers of humility and repentance, are the prayers that this verse refers to specifically. This Temple no longer stands. It is no longer possible to satisfy the technical requirements of this prayer.

Now the promises of this prayer are two-fold. God promises to forgive sin and heal land, the land of Israel. As Christians, we no longer pray at a Temple for forgiveness of sin. We go to the One crucified and call on His name. We are cleansed through His blood. We receive forgiveness of sin by calling in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. As far as the Temple is concerned, Paul says in 1 Cor 3 that we are God’s Temple, the Church that Jesus establishes and upon whom the gates of Hell shall never prevail. We are a Temple that cannot be destroyed, because we are built on better promises. Everywhere we go, we are taking the Temple with us. But our Temple isn’t tied to a particular land, but the world to come. Technically, the promises of this verse do not and cannot apply to us, not if our redemption is through Jesus Christ.

Well, that’s a bummer, isn’t it? Because Christians have been using this verse for years as a point for prayer for our nation in the hope that we would see political and social change. We can still pray for those things, as we do so through 1 Tim 2. I don’t think God’s desire to see men change has diminished. It has only grown as the population of men has grown. Let this verse inspire us, but don’t depend on this verse to save our nation. Is it not nations that are saved, but people. Jesus didn’t die for America, but for her people. He died for you. His blood cleansed you and all who call upon Him. Call upon Him today.

God bless you.

Be Brave, But Wait

www.bible.com/72/psa.27.14.hcsb

Twice repeated is the phrase “Wait for the Lord” . Sandwiched between them is “Be strong and courageous!” We are certainly to be bold and strong in our faith, as long as the Lord goes before us. I think the Lord needed to remind us twice to wait on Him because we often don’t, and then bleat like sheep when we find ourselves in danger. He told Joshua to be strong and courageous to arm him for the promised land. Now He calls to us, “Be strong and of good courage” but also to wait for His timing.

So today, be strong, but wait for the Lord’s signal to move. God bless!

Extraordinary Power

www.bible.com/72/2co.4.7-9.hcsb

Need a miracle today? Consider that the church founded by Jesus Christ 2000 years ago still stands. Consider that despite the temptation and hardship you have experienced in your own life, you still cling to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Consider that God still loves, still protects, and still considers the Church His, especially after all the times we have abandoned Him and tried to make Christianity about us, tried to make a religion from our relationship, tried to pervert and undermine its very message of grace and love with rules and legalistic layers of ritual. Yep. That’s a miracle in my book.

Let us rejoice and be glad today that God has not abandoned us to our sins as we deserve. But He continues to watch over us, guide us, continues to lead us by His word and counsel. Blessed be the name of the the LORD.

God bless you today!