How Is Your Daily Connection to God?

"Tell me what your daily connection to God looks like?"

That question felt like someone flicked on a giant spotlight as the crowd went silent in anticipation of the answer.  The perfect question to hold me accountable to the kind of life God has called me to live.

And like other accountability questions, there are days when an answer comes easily and days when beads of sweat begin to form and the answer is a struggle.

I was inspired as I heard a middle and high school student in our church answer this question by talking about reading the Bible, listening to music, "spoken word" poetry and prayer.  It was an encouraging reminder to me that God doesn't see this division of "sacred" and "secular" like we do.  Because God became flesh and dwelt among us, the light of God has shown in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

God is not compartmentalized into a worship service on Sundays, a weeklong mission trip or Vacation Bible School.  God is present in the everyday ordinary days as well.  Meeting God during those special times are meant to remind us that God is also walking with us into those places where we may be ignoring God.

The God we know in Jesus Christ seems to have this weird joy in showing up where he's not welcome and disturbing things in a redemptive kind of way.  More times than not, Jesus comes looking for us than we come looking for him.  And when we do go looking for Jesus, he rearranges our expectations and shows us how different his ways are from our ways.

So, your daily connection to God requires your intentional decision to meet with Him in prayer, Bible reading, worship music, poetry, serving, etc.  AND your daily connection to God is entirely up to God who has proven to be relentless in showing up even where He is not invited.  It's not either/or. It's both/and.

If you are looking for looking for some material to read this summer, here are some options that God may use to mess with you.

• Common Prayer for Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne and others. (You can get this in hardback, kindle or search iphone apps "Common Prayer" published by Zondervan
• Life Journal Bible Reading Plan.  Contact Rob Githens. He is placing an order. They are about $6.50.
•  The Art of Neighboring by Jay Pathak. It's about living the great commandment to love God and love your neighbor.
• You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving the Church and Rethinking Faith by David Kinnaman.

The Father's Day Gift that Keeps on Giving

When there is something important that I don't want to forget I usually put a reminder in a place that I'm going to see it - a note on the fridge, bathroom mirror, scheduled reminder on smart phone, etc.

So, now I get why God chose circumcision as a sign of his covenant with Israel. God needed to put this important reminder of His covenant in a place where men (in particular) would see it - literally put their hands on it, multiple times a day, so as to not forget it!

What could be more important to remember than God's faithfulness? What better place for God to put a permanent reminder of God's faithfulness than on a dude's genitals? Brilliant God.

The fact that I'm just now figuring this out after following Jesus nearly forty years, getting a Master of Divinity, pastoring a church for 17 years and being circumcised my whole life, is telling. God knows I need a lot of help remembering to walk by faith.

When I told my wife about this revelation she wondered why God didn't give her this particular reminder too. I said because God knew how interested husbands would be in showing it to their wives - regularly.

This all dawned on me as I pondered what I might share for a Father's Day message and I was reading these words of Stephen, the church's first martyr, in Acts 7.

"Then God made a covenant with [Abraham] and signed it in his flesh by circumcision. When Abraham had his son Isaac, within eight days he reproduced the sign of circumcision in him. Isaac became father of Jacob, and Jacob father of twelve 'fathers,' each faithfully passing on the covenant sign." (Acts 7:8 MSG)

The original Father's Day gift that keeps on giving!? Circumcision. God's covenant signed in the flesh!

Think about it guys. You might lose your job. You might experience failure in business, marriage, school, etc. You might lose everything. Heck, God might tell you to sell everything, give it to the poor and go follow Jesus into a place you've never been. It might be a place where you don't get to bring your smart phone to schedule reminders, and the bathroom mirror you look into might be a different one everyday. And if all that were true, you'd still wake up wearing your birthday suit and see a visual reminder of God's faithfulness to you first thing in the morning.

I don't have any tattoos because I am just not that cool (plus my mother may disown me). However, I have been told that there is a story behind every tattoo. There's something deeper than simply the mark on the skin. Of course the same is true of the Biblical reason for circumcision. Beyond the mark in the flesh is the story of God's claim upon us individually and as a people.

Perhaps God knew men, being statistically more ADD than women, needed the physical reminder of God's faithfulness to keep his promise, to lead us, to provide for us, to restore us when we wander, and to even raise us from the dead. But of course this promise isn't just for men. It's not even just for Israel. It is for all people.

And there is a flip side to this wonderful promise God gave us in the flesh. It's all too true that men in our culture are obsessed with our outward appearance and accumulation of stuff. Obviously we think the marks we have and the size we are matters for our worth. Who are you without your car, your job title, your degree, your clothes or your tattoos?

The Jews and early Christians started missing the point of circumcision when they gained a measure of wealth and power. They began to use it as a badge that pushed others away and and a means to elevate themselves rather than remember how God made them something out of nothing. This is how prone we are to turn good things into bad things.

So the Apostle Paul had to remind the church in Rome that it wasn't their outward appearance or marks in their skin that made them special in God's eyes. It is the condition of their heart that made them children of God.

You might have a lot of marks of success and things are going really well for you now. But what are you doing when no one is looking? How are you using the possessions you have in a way to point to God rather than yourself? Do you find yourself thinking more about protecting what you have or sharing it with others? Are you practicing generosity through tithing and regular giving? Are you setting limits at work so you spend time with those who are most important?

Funny how different our perspective is when we have nothing but our birthday suit and a mark to remind us that God will always be faithful. The reality is that no matter how much stuff you have or accumulate, you will leave this world the same way you came in - with nothing but God's mark, God's claim upon you. It's a gift from our Heavenly Father that keeps on giving.

Happy Father's Day. Remember you are God's.

Why Worship

Worship attendance is important on a number of different levels.  On a personal level, a school principal would agree that students do better academically if they don't miss a lot of school.  Coaches would say players do better on game day if they don't miss a lot of practices.  On an institutional level, that same principal and coach could use school and practice attendance as a measure of their institution's health. Not surprisingly, pastors and church leaders think about the same kind of things.

Worship attendance will impact your spiritual health personally and it also affects the church insitutionally.  You know that you arent going to have a deeply moving experience of God or spiritual epiphany every time you go to worship.  There will be those days you leave worship and think, "I didn't get anything out of that."

This reminds me of something that I've heard Bishop Willimon say that goes something like this: "God has a lot of big things to deal with like natual disaster and starvation.  Maybe you didn't get anything out of worship today because it wasn't for you today. God was busy working on someone else. And who knows, maybe God was hoping to get your help speaking to that someone else on God's behalf."

This opens my eyes to see that worship attendance affects both my personal spiritual health and the institution's health.  In other words, there are bigger reasons for attending worship than whether or not I get something out of it personally.  

There are times when God will encourage me to keep the faith, step out in the face of fear, or lay down my bitterness once again, just by being among those God gathered for worship.  It's hard to describe.  The "community gathered" is itself a proclamation of the gospel of Jesus resurrection.  There have been times when I've heard, "Jesus is Alive!" through the presence of others: young, old, rich, poor, male female, black, white, spanish, english, strong faith, weak faith, no faith, republican, democrat, not even American.... better than I've heard it through the sermon.

So the next time you think, "I didn't really get anything out of that" when you go to worship - consider that God may be using you as His message to someone else.  And didn't a wise man once say that we will only find life when we give ours away?

Don't take a vacation from worship this summer! Even if you are on vacation, look for a place to worship. You and God's church will be healthier for it!