An amazing message for ordinary pastors. God doesn't think any more or less of you based on if we measure up to our perceptions of success.
Showing posts with label Eswine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eswine. Show all posts
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Evening Hospitality
If you can't tell by the amount of quotes I'm posting from Zack Eswine's, Sensing Jesus, I love this book and recommend it to everyone. The last couple posts have been about the cycles of everyday life; the seasons of a day, including the morning, noon day, evening, and the night watch. Zack does an amazing job at describing the mundane ways in which these daily cycles are really ways in which we, as finite human beings, are to relate and experience God. Regarding the evening, Zack writes:
"'The day is over now.' The teacher and teaching come to a close. It is time for good and a bit of rest in the company of others who are also at rest and could likewise use a bite to eat. The limits of our food do not prevent but only remind us that our true portion is Jesus and that he will prove sufficient to rest us and nourish us amid the company of the evening. We needn't take our work with us. Workless in the evening matters. In order to learn how to rest in life, we need the spiritual grace to set down our work and to rest when an ordinary evening arrives. An inability to do this where we are in our ordinary place on a given and routine evening will render it nearly impossible to cultivate a life of stability 'out there' amid the chatter and frenzy.
By 'hospitality,' I have in mind extending the kindness and protection of a peaceable presence to our neighbors. It is kind because it takes our neighbors bodily and soul needs into account and provides them a room-giving acceptance and practical sustenance. Hospitality is also protective because remaining hospitable toward another means that we do not transgress, misuse, or consume them. We allow them to take up company in our presence in such a way that they know that we will not use them to satisfy our lust, mandate that they act as if they are not tired or in need of nourishment, or require them to take the heat for the afternoon moods that we are carrying with us and misplacing on them.
Grace and wisdom, are of course, necessary evening friends. But hospitality seems to take a front seat in the evening. Blessing, rest, good food, friendship, acceptance, honesty, freedom from misuse, reclining at rest at the table prepared for us-the welcomed reward from a long day of solid work. The prayers of thanksgiving rise from our lips, and we raise our hands in gratitude to God for his faithfulness through the day. The morning teaches us to sing. The afternoon teaches us to preserve. The evening teaches us to enjoy the blessing of ordinary goodnesses and to give thanks to God for the sacred boredom of mundane blessings that we can count."
Something to consider this evening.
Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry As a Human Being (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2013), 78-79.
"'The day is over now.' The teacher and teaching come to a close. It is time for good and a bit of rest in the company of others who are also at rest and could likewise use a bite to eat. The limits of our food do not prevent but only remind us that our true portion is Jesus and that he will prove sufficient to rest us and nourish us amid the company of the evening. We needn't take our work with us. Workless in the evening matters. In order to learn how to rest in life, we need the spiritual grace to set down our work and to rest when an ordinary evening arrives. An inability to do this where we are in our ordinary place on a given and routine evening will render it nearly impossible to cultivate a life of stability 'out there' amid the chatter and frenzy.
By 'hospitality,' I have in mind extending the kindness and protection of a peaceable presence to our neighbors. It is kind because it takes our neighbors bodily and soul needs into account and provides them a room-giving acceptance and practical sustenance. Hospitality is also protective because remaining hospitable toward another means that we do not transgress, misuse, or consume them. We allow them to take up company in our presence in such a way that they know that we will not use them to satisfy our lust, mandate that they act as if they are not tired or in need of nourishment, or require them to take the heat for the afternoon moods that we are carrying with us and misplacing on them.
Grace and wisdom, are of course, necessary evening friends. But hospitality seems to take a front seat in the evening. Blessing, rest, good food, friendship, acceptance, honesty, freedom from misuse, reclining at rest at the table prepared for us-the welcomed reward from a long day of solid work. The prayers of thanksgiving rise from our lips, and we raise our hands in gratitude to God for his faithfulness through the day. The morning teaches us to sing. The afternoon teaches us to preserve. The evening teaches us to enjoy the blessing of ordinary goodnesses and to give thanks to God for the sacred boredom of mundane blessings that we can count."
Something to consider this evening.
Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry As a Human Being (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2013), 78-79.
Monday, January 14, 2013
In the Morning...
"But I will sing of your strength;
I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning."
Psalm 59:16
Zack Eswine:
"In the morning, songs of praise and thanksgiving can rise because God's strength has gotten us through the night. The night didn't win. We awake and see once again that God's love hasn't quit on us, and we ask that he will go with us and guide us into what awaits us. The morning stirs us to pray, therefore, and to watch how God will answer these prayers through the day.
The new dawn also calls out to us that the help of God has come. Morning is meant as a poem or sermon to console the downcast. Their soul cry is given new invitation to ask again to have hope that the dawn of God will soon come to answer. The morning enables us to think again of God's goodness and to ask him why he waits to reveal that goodness to us (Psalm 88:13-14). The ending of night also rouses us to a renewed conviction to use the day as a means of opposing what is wretched in the world and protecting what is good and beautiful and right.
Because God gives this meaning to the morning, he poetically pictures the sun as a bridegroom love-struck and happily longing to see his bride. The sun is no melancholy like me, tired of shining again unnoticed, traveling the same old path everyday and bored with it all. No! The sun is like that running in the story 'Chariots of Fire', who, when he ran, lifted his head as one who joyfully feels the pleasure of God (Psalm 19:5)....
One of mistaken uses of the morning, therefore, is to look at the circumstances and appointments awaiting us on our calendar without attending them with an awareness of their service or surrender to God and what God may wish to reveal to us with them or in spite of them."
Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry As a Human Being (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2013), 74.
Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry As a Human Being (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2013), 74.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
The Purpose of Sleep
"Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent." (Psalm 4:4)
"In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety." (Psalm 4:8)
From Zack Eswine's 'Sensing Jesus':
"One purpose for our bed in the night is to ponder in our hearts what troubles us and to speak such things to God. We entrust to him now what we pray the morning will relieve with fresh hope. Sleep results. Sleep is a Sabbath-like act. We rest from it all and leave it all for God's keeping while we lie motionless in the world for a while. If we hope to enact such trust out there on the horizon of another place, the practice this very night affords to us is our best hope."
Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry As a Human Being (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2013), 80.
"In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety." (Psalm 4:8)
From Zack Eswine's 'Sensing Jesus':
"One purpose for our bed in the night is to ponder in our hearts what troubles us and to speak such things to God. We entrust to him now what we pray the morning will relieve with fresh hope. Sleep results. Sleep is a Sabbath-like act. We rest from it all and leave it all for God's keeping while we lie motionless in the world for a while. If we hope to enact such trust out there on the horizon of another place, the practice this very night affords to us is our best hope."
Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry As a Human Being (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2013), 80.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Recovering Eden
Zack Eswine:
"But I commend to you that God has been about nothing but seeking to restore and recover what was lost in Eden."
In other words, grace restores nature. What was corrupt and lost in the fall, is now being regained in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
I Am Not the Christ
"He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, 'I am not the Christ.'"
John the Baptist
Zack Eswine commenting on these verses in his book, Sensing Jesus:
"It seems to me that while it is true that we can dangerously make too little of God by drawing improper attention to ourselves, it is equally true that we cannot fully magnify God without confessing that we are not him...Each of us is not God and is only human (I am not the Christ). The absence of such a confession is making us a ragged bunch."
Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry As a Human Being (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2013), 20.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry as a Human Being
Check out this interview with Zach Eswine, author of Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry as a Human Being. A few months back, I had the privilege to hear Zach speak at Covenant Theological Seminary. Zach is one of those rare people who you hear or meet, and they just ooze with gospel grace.
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