Sunday, January 23

God moment....





“God, Your faithful love is so valuable that people take refuge in the shadow of Your wings. They are filled from the abundance of Your house; You let them drink from Your refreshing stream, for with You is life's fountain. In Your light we will see light. Spread Your faithful love over those who know You, and Your righteousness over the upright in heart.” (Psalms 36:7-10 HCSB)

It is not that often, gathered with the immediate members of the vast family of God, that my mind wanders and my thoughts drift away from the course of the message being given or the lesson being taught. Because I so love to listen to the virtues of the Word and the imagery that He’s given to someone about a particular passage or thought that is being expounded upon. I used to be, in the earliest of my new life, particular about the whole ‘functionality’ of the pastorship and those who are put (or put themselves) into positions of leadership for a congregation simply because it was MY ears they were reaching and it was MY family in which they were ‘in charge.’ I’m probably not alone in that, and it is a sad state of affairs that the body is so fractured because of the human side of the equation…..we still tend to elevate those in pastoral, directorship and even elderships into extremely isolated pockets were only the godly can walk (or so we assume) and the righteous lounge without fear of eviction (or so we believe).

It is not that often even absent of the fellow believers that I know (even if they don’t know me) that I wander when approaching the manner of being in the Word. There have been only a few times, and a few choice places, where the ‘fortunate’ occurrence takes place….without my noticing, at least in the beginning…

I call them ‘God-moments’ because the clarity and profound peace that I feel during them can only mean He is very near……..molecules of air close…..

Worship was heightened for me today, I just couldn’t seem to stop smiling even as my heart was carried away by the essence of the songs…the words both meaningless and profoundly impacting, even though I’ve heard them before. The worship band, led by Marshall Mobley, performed both as they normally do (exceptional) and with an apparent brush of the divine whispering amongst the chords and strums, beats and depressions made on the musical instruments and interspersed among the amplified voices of the singers. It wasn’t that Nellie Fowles was helping or even that she gave a powerful reading from the Word, stepping boldly into a powerful song with a heart dripping with the passion brought on by the Holy Spirit…something I’ve seen her do, miles away behind some dark red doors in a environment called New York City.

Maybe it was her voice so burdened with a heart for God that tripped the ‘God moment’ for me, or at least started the turning of my world into the mystical, peaceful and charged place where God sits in the Holy of Holies. If so, I owe her a debt of thanks.

Maybe it was the heartfelt prayer before service, where I asked to be emptied of the blessings given before that moment so that all could be filled with an overwhelming, overfilling amount of the Spirit so that we were driven into the streets burning with the flame of the redeemed.

Maybe it was my son, as they read off the announcements today and the Bowery Street Mission trip was once again mentioned, who tugged on my arm and whispered as I leaned close, “You’re going there, Dad!”

Most likely, it was simply a matter of God’s success in getting and securing my attention beyond the realm of the physical and the mental. A firm grip on the hand of His son, a moment where the world was put on hold as we sat together and He displayed the wonders of the plans that He set aside for me even before the world I know began. A simple invitation to “Come, worship Me.”

I know it wasn’t Shannon Nielsen, the lead pastor for the church I go to called Mosaic A2, and his need today to expound upon the minutia of the story of Jacob, Leah and Rachel that is the central focus for the topic today from Tim Keller’s book, Counterfeit Gods….. how marrying your cousin and marrying more than one wife was not the ‘truth’ of the Bible but rather humanity’s customs at the time that bothered me to the point of drifting, though I was bothered by the necessity that seemed to overwhelm the meat of the topic today, “Love is not all you need”, by a defense of what was being read. A momentary thought of annoyance drifted in my mind and was gone, as was my centering on the voice coming from the stage.

I spotted Shannon Carey sitting down in the seats on the main level (I have taken to sitting in the back upper level, off to the side) and I was filled with a happiness for her, a certain and expressed ‘knowing’ that whatever God was facing with her, whatever dealings He whispered in her ears as she swam the mighty oceans of His Word or whatever prompting He was gently prodding her with was a great and mighty thing that is leading her closer and closer to the ‘sweet spot’ He’s reserved for her even before her world was begun. I would’ve loved to be a part of that, just to watch it unfold in the life of such a special daughter of God, but that seems to be a momentary, selfish wish that isn’t going to happen. Maybe it was meant to be but was altered by the wounds of this world, but I think it wasn’t meant to unfold other than the way it did. Still, I know our paths will cross again someday as God draws us both into the paths He would have us walk as we journey towards home. And in the end of it all, that is what matters. Today, that was a moment glimpsed that God gave me to settle a part of this life.

There were others in the group, this band of members that I fellowship with silently among the borders of their community, where I felt a heightened sense of “blam, there He is” or “Hoooray, He walks there”….. some that I have known and been known by and others who, though part of the same family and community, have never crossed that invisible line between seen and being known. But each seemed to glow with a certain light or a different posture that whispered “God’s there” to me.

For me, I was ensnared by the picture I carry in my bible from the Bowery trip last year, one of many that are stuck in the zippered outer compartment of my bible pack……..one of the Red Bowery Doors and nothing else.

I want to go back to behind those doors, I realized today, with a very intense and powerful desire. Tim Keller tells us to think about what we daydream and what whispers in the darkness of our sleep, for there are what the gods of our lives reside and drawn their enslavement of our hearts from. Even good things, born of a desire that shadows out God and replaces our relationship with Him for the objects hidden behind our mind’s eye. It is not my desire to go to the Bowery Street Mission because it’s a week away from the kids, family responsibility and a chance to travel; nor because I want to be preaching again at the famous Bowery Chapel where Presidents and other notable figures have stood and given God’s Word to the community there. In the intensity of the God-moment today, it was simply one reason and one reason alone.

To be joyfully broken by my God.

To be used as an instrument after being crafted again at His hand, to embolden and incite a community and to be a piece of the work that is being overseen by the Holy Spirit and those God has emplaced in that city to be His eyes, ears, hands and feet to a people who would turn from His salvation for the lack of experience.

The money needed to go will come, the ‘babysitter’ for the kids will be identified and the experience of the Bowery will once again grow me further and farther than I have been in a week for in the midst of the desire to be an instrument for the caring of His people, both the lost and the found, there is the welcomed opportunity to be shaped and molded by walking alongside Him in the work He is doing.

As the service wound down and the moment that I was given to walk hand in hand, step to step with my God faded into the backdrop of this reality, all I could do is whisper;

“Wow, what a great and mighty God is He……”

Monday, January 17

The night He burned those idols down

"He knows what He is doing with me, and when He has tested me, I will come forth as pure gold" Francis I. Anderson "Job: An introduction and Commentary" Job 23:10

(as quoted from Timothy Keller’s book Counterfeit gods: The empty promises of money, sex, and power and the only hope that matters.)

It has been a long and difficult 2010, not because of the events that have happened along the way. No, the things that have made 2010 difficult haven’t been consequences, though they definitely were felt; haven’t been the deep disconnection that has come from the breakup with Shannon, though I must admit to being deeply wounded from that departure; hasn’t been the difficulties with the job search, one year and two months (and counting) or the opinions that surface as the time moves on and opportunities fail and chances are missed; hasn’t been the health aspect of my physical body (back in braces for the hands, taking high blood pressure medicine, high heart rate medicine, high cholesterol medicine) and increase in weight gain. It seems everything that has transpired has brought me to the place where I needed to be so that God’s sculpting could commence with purpose.

Keller speaks of the sin beneath the sin, the foundational cement upon which idols are set, unconsciously worshiped and pinned for, to the absence and rejection of God. It is that sin, the one I recognized in my life for the past year, especially the first six months of the relationship I was blessed to experience with Shannon, that drove the consequences and results into the mire of my despair and why God has brought me back to this place I thought I’d never see again. It is a place where I know I’ll have to come time and time again as I journey into the purpose He has set for me, however He decides to work it out and how it is envisioned by the Holy Spirit…..for even as I get closer to home, the danger of erecting similar idols will increase for I know where He would have me go is not for the faint hearted.

The cold bitter wind blows hard in this place, so hard I am surprised I can breathe. It is impossible to light the fire here; there is no fuel for it anyway. I can only shiver in the numbing cold and pour my broken, bitter and angry heart out to a God that I turn away from even as I call His name…. the idol of my sin blocking my sight of even His distant light.

As Paul says in Romans, God has ‘give[n me] over to the desires of [my] heart….” (Romans 1:24). It wasn’t a corrupt thing but it was a thing that was meant for something good and beautiful that became corrupted in my greed for it. My thoughts, my hopes and my dreams entangled by its thorns, my day dreams full of its ‘successfulness’ and my dreams at night enraptured by its enticements. It became, well before even Shannon entered into the picture, an idol I would build daily and wail before as the darkness loomed. It started well before Kristy, though the tale is woven with the same results and the others that I sought to be in a ‘intimate’ relationship with both before and after my salvation accepted. This idol has lived and breathed in the moments of my life with the sickly-sweet odor of its succulent petals and bled me upon the harsh prick of its thorns.

Keller breaks it down into three distinct ‘idols’, but I believe I wrapped them all up into the one called love.

The love of approval, comfort and control that would give me the desire of my heart; someone who would never reject me, chastise me or hurt me.

But it wasn’t something I believed, even in the dark days of my life, that this so-called God of Jacob, this great I AM, was capable of delivering. After all, I had the life to prove that god’s incapability in such matters and so I built that idol out of the gold in my life to worship as I controlled it, demanded of it and heaped condemnation upon even as I groveled for its favor. So God released me to its deaden worship, even as I faced the depravity of my sinful nature and begged His eternal mercy and grace.

This mighty God will not demand our worship, though it is His to do so. This God will not beg our worship, even as His heart breaks to allow us our freedom to idolatrize the desires of our hearts. No, He releases His hands ever so little as we struggle against Him and His loving grip.

That idol was ignored when I was in New York and doing the Bowery Mission work with Shannon… the happiness and joy felt there was far removed from the simple quest for its appearance in the life we would return to once the week was over. It is there that one of the truths Keller speaks of, that the removal of idols can only happen with the increased closeness to God was evident and true. Once New York was gone, the idol was re-erected and love corrupted by its worship.

Six months and three weeks to the day, Shannon told me that she didn’t want to be in the relationship anymore. The idol had failed, again.

I have been forced, in the last six months as I have sat here in the bitter dark cold of this place, to face this idol and look in disgust at its visage. Streaked with the dark stain of sin, it no longer glitters or entices or even attracts me anymore…..for if its existence is the one thing that God requires to take away in His demanded sacrifice of my desire, then I have journeyed to my Mount Moriah and laid the desire of a love that bleeds approval, gives comfort and controls only the beating of its life onto the altar I’ve built there. And offered it to the cleansing fire that comes from the only hope I have. I have gone from needing this, desperately wanting it and manipulating my world for it to seeking Him in all of its beauty and glorious honor it brings its Creator.

“And Abraham named that place The LORD Will Provide, so today it is said: "It will be provided on the LORD's mountain." (Genesis 22:14 HCSB)

There are many things that were damaged and destroyed by this idol. Shannon walked away from the relationship we shared six months ago because the idolatry of its existence in my life corrupted a beautiful wonderful and potentially dynamic thing that it would’ve been if I had sacrificed it upon the Mount Moriah altar even before we began. I used it to justify turning my back on the impossible things God called me to do, I used it as an excuse or a sheepskin upon the thrashing room floor as a test of God’s purpose. With the impossibility of the future dying upon its golden table, I begged cajoled and controlled this idol…..the altar upon which this idol sat burned day and night with the desires of my heart….for God had surrendered me to it.

In the end, the idol failed to deliver as it had failed to do so in the annuals of my life’s story. It hurt more this time for one simple fact; I learned to dress this idol up as a facsimile of what I thought was God. I fooled myself with its enticements and imagery and called it God. I sat as David upon the castle top and gazed upon this idol with lust instead of stepping back into a role of a godly man seeking God’s will in it and all things that my life was bringing.

I have sought her forgiveness and worked on my own. I pray for her and the marvelous things that God has given her to taste in this world, events that have lavished her in His love and tender mercies and prayed for myself, that I would even as I failed to be in the relationship a true friend even in the twilight of notice.

Now the Bowery Trip is coming back up and I hesitate to go; because God wants me to be part of His work there and I’ll be going with the full realization of what I’ve lost in the worship of the idol of my need to be loved by someone other than God. And I realize that He brought me here, by allowing me the desires of my heart, to this place where I am single and potentially will be for the rest of my life but where I am fully reliant upon His grace, mercy and love to do what He gives me to do.

As I sat here thinking of writing this, I opened my bible study program (E-Sword) and this was the verse that it opened to:

“I call for my servant, but he does not answer, even if I beg him with my own mouth.” (Job 19:16 HCSB)

Oh, there are many idols that I have erected in my life, some hidden in the shadows of this darkness among the trees and valleys of this place. The fire’s gone cold and the wood damp with the despair of this world….and yet…..and yet


He calls me to burn those idols down and come to Him empty, a vessel to be filled once more with His love, purpose, grace and mercy.

Overfilled, so that I may pour it out in service of others that I can empathize with.

"People who have never suffered in life have less empathy for others, little knowledge of their own shortcomings and limitations, no endurance in the face of hardship, and unrealistic expectations for life" Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods

"If I go east, He is not there, and if I go west, I cannot perceive Him. When He is at work to the north, I cannot see Him; when He turns south, I cannot find Him. Yet He knows the way I have taken; when He has tested me, I will emerge as pure gold. My feet have followed in His tracks; I have kept to His way and not turned aside. I have not departed from the commands of His lips; I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my daily food. But He is unchangeable; who can oppose Him? He does what He desires. He will certainly accomplish what He has decreed for me, and He has many more things like these in mind. Therefore I am terrified in His presence; when I consider this, I am afraid of Him. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me. Yet I am not destroyed by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face.” (Job 23:8-17 HCSB)

These verses are the essence of burning those idols from our lives......