Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology and written a fantastic article about about the phenomena of Bait and Switch Christianity.

When she reached spiritual matters we had the following exchange:

"I need to spend more time working on my relationship with God."

I responded, "Why would you want to do that?"

Startled she says, "What do you mean?"

"Well, why would you want to spend any time at all on working on your relationship with God?"

"Isn't that what I'm supposed to do?"

"Let me answer by asking you a question. Can you think of anyone, right now, to whom you need to apologize? Anyone you've wronged?"

She thinks and answers, "Yes."

"Well, why don't you give them a call today and ask for their forgiveness. That might be a better use of your time than working on your relationship with God."

Obviously, I was being a bit provocative with the student. And I did go on to clarify. But I was trying to push back on a strain of Christianity I see in both my students and the larger Christian culture. Specifically, when the student said "I need to work on my relationship with God" I knew exactly what she meant. It meant praying more, getting up early to study the bible, to start going back to church. Things along those lines. The goal of these activities is to get "closer" to God. To "waste time with Jesus." Of course, please hear me on this point, nothing is wrong with those activities. Personal acts of piety and devotion are vital to a vibrant spiritual life and continued spiritual formation. But all too often "working on my relationship with God" has almost nothing to do with trying to become a more decent human being.

It's a provocative thought and worth exploring. Jesus had the following exchange with someone seeking to live for God.

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment." (Matt 22:36-38)

But he didn't stop there:

"And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." (Matt 22:39-40)

Our godliness can be increased when we take both of these together. When we work on our relationships with others, we are working on our relationship with God as well. When we go to those who have wronged us and forgive them, we are practicing godliness. When we help the poor and needy we are being Jesus to them.

The point is to be Holy people.

All love is an exercise in faith.

A few conversations recently reminded me of this truth. One with an atheist believer, another with a Christian believer.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. - 1 John 4:7-9

My atheist believing friend wanted proof of God so I asked him if he loved his children. Of course he said yes (atheists are not monsters after all) so I shared with him the passage above.

Love is a strange action. I say action, not thought or feeling because to love requires you to act. You can't say that you love your children then give them a rock when they ask for something to eat. Your love is borne out in your actions. Each day I wake up and choose to love my wife more this day then the one before.

Love is an action that binds people together but love is an exercise in faith.

To love much is to risk much. When I give my heart to another in love I am risking hurt, rejection, ridicule and so much more.

When God loves us He exercises faith in it being returned to Him. And when we love God, we exercise our faith that He will hold fast to us and never let us go.

Shake off your dust;
       rise up, sit enthroned, O Jerusalem.
       Free yourself from the chains on your neck,
       O captive Daughter of Zion. Isaiah 52:2

The photo below is from my desk at work. On a good day I can see 100 Km's to the Blue Mountains, today I can see the building across the street. This Scripture came to mind.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
       so great is his love for those who fear him;

as far as the east is from the west,
       so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

As a father has compassion on his children,
       so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;

for he knows how we are formed,
       he remembers that we are dust.

As for man, his days are like grass,
       he flourishes like a flower of the field;

the wind blows over it and it is gone,
       and its place remembers it no more.

But from everlasting to everlasting
       the LORD's love is with those who fear him,
       and his righteousness with their children's children-

with those who keep his covenant
       and remember to obey his precepts. Psalm 103:11-18

The photo below is from my kitchen window at 6am this morning. Sorry, iPhone quality.

This Scripture comes to mind.

He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
he seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor.
    "For the foundations of the earth are the LORD's; upon them he has set the world." - 1 Samuel 2:8
   
He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap - Psalm 113:7

Like most of Sydney, today I woke to a foreign scene. The wind was howling violently and the sky had turned blood red.

That is not hyperbole.

My thoughts turned to Scripture:

Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath ; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?"

Ecclesiastes 3:19-21

In the last post I discussed the first prayer that in my experience God always answers: Grow me. When we ask for God to grow us he is faithful and will place something in our path that we much choose to use for our growth.

The second prayer that God always answers is "Break me".

This is a dangerous and tough prayer to get past this lips. In my experience it comes with repentance or the need for repentance. When I have prayed break me it was because I had been building up a shell around myself which had hardened and was making me inflexible to the demands of the Spirit.

The biblical writers call this a hard heart. When the prophet Ezekiel was speaking to the nation of Israel about their sin he echoed God's heart to His people with these words:

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. (Ezekiel 36:25-27 )

Cynicism about people, the trauma of life, disappointment, failed expectations, a rocky marriage, rebellious children, lust, dependence; these and much more cause our hearts to slowly turn hard as stone if we do not deal with the issues properly.

The prayer of break me is in line with the heart of God but it hurts when he brings the hammer down on it. Ezekiel promises the new heart and spirit but my experience is that it isn't a delicate surgery but God smashing through the hardness.

Often that which has made us hard has chained us down into negative patterns of life. It might be a failed relationship that causes us to keep all others at arms length or lust that keeps us chained to the computer screen. I believe God can simple wipe away these negative patterns and free us but this is the road less traveled. Rather, when He breaks away the stone He causes us to confront our sin, decisions and the patterns that occurred afterwards in order to grow us.

Afterwards we need to stay broken to be attentive to the Spirit of God afterall

 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
  a broken and contrite heart,
  O God, you will not despise. (Ps 51:17)

God answers this prayer because he wants to see us broken. Not broken as in disrepair but broken of hardness, because when we are broken we are truly fixed.

When I first came to faith the pastor of the church told me a (true) story about prayer.

He took a young girl (in age and faith) to a Christian bookstore to help her find something to challenge and grow her faith. The girl came across a book called something like "When God doesn't answer prayer", which shocked her because she did not know that God might say no to prayer, it was contrary to her experience of prayer.

In a few weeks time I will be speaking to my new church on the topic of prayer and I so I've been reflecting on the kinds of prayer that in my experience God always answers.

The first prayer that God always seems to answer is Grow Me.

Grow me, stretch me, move me. Whatever way you choose to phrase it, whenever we ask Him to take us out of the comfortable place God obliges us quickly. My "Grow Me" prayer used to be "God, place someone in my path for me today who I can share about Jesus with". Any morning that I prayed those words I would encounter someone later in the day who I could establish a conversation with, share their burdens and then share with them hope.

In actual fact I would have most likely run into that same person during the day (although I certainly believe that God brought some of us together in extraordinary circumstances). So did my prayer achieve anything? If I was going to bump into the person in the lunch queue at work, or still sit next to them on the train anyway, did my prayer change the circumstances at all?

Quite simply the answer is yes, because prayer changes us. When I prayed for someone to share my faith with in the morning I had not only asked something of God but I had prepared myself for it to occur. My thoughts during the day were, "is that the person God?", I lived with the anticipation that James shares with us in his letter to the early church: "But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind" (James 1:6)

Grow me, is a prayer always answered, and it's a dangerous thing to ask of God. Try it today.

This morning I dusted off the new mountain bike that my wife bought me for my birthday. its a great present but because of the extremes of Australian weather of late I haven't had much opportunity to ride it. In one week it was consistently over 40 degrees (that's Celsius, 104F), it peaked at 47 C for my birthday (117 F). The next week it hasn't stopped raining.

So I resolved last night, no matter what the weather, I was riding my bike! You see I'm trying to regain my fitness so with good intentions and a liberal salting of guilt over my health I set out this morning to set a bench mark for improvement. Basically I set out to ride as far as I felt I could until I was too tired to return.

At the apex of my journey I felt like just giving up and taking the next shortcut home instead of pushing through the pain of the ride. Then all of a sudden a shortcut opened up to my left, it was a little side street that would cut right across the U bend of the cul-de-sac I was peddling down. It was literally Grace Street.

In the sermon on Sunday morning, the pastor likened the Christian faith to a knife edge that we walk between faith and works. He highlighted the perils of straying to far to either side as if both are cliff faces that we can fall over and hurt ourselves on. For my mind he was spot on.

I didn't take the turn down Grace Street this morning, but it did prompt my thoughts away from the pain in my legs and towards my relationship with God.

My observation of Christian living is that there are those who certainly cheapen God's grace by continuing in their sin. They see faith in Christ as a free ride to heaven as if they are on a tandem bike and Jesus is doing all the peddling. Grace is the shortcut to heaven and a means of living.

Others, and I include myself in this lot at times seem to think it's all about them. It's their effort that will get them to their destination, it's their peddling, their sweat and their muscles that move them into the Kingdom of God. It's almost like they are punishing themselves into the Kingdom.

James the brother of Jesus asked the question "What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?" and concludes (rightly) that "faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead".

That's a hard thought to swallow sometimes. God's grace is a means to living faithfully. It draws us in, shows us how valuable we are in God's eyes and the lengths that God will go to in order for us to call him Father. But God's grace is not an end in itself, works are a part of faithful living, they are an outpouring of our obedience and response to God's love.

Ephesians 2:10 tell us "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

What we do for God has been planned by God to bring about His glory. Let's not rest to long or struggle to hard but find our place in Him.

Following up from my last post, On the market I want to reflect for a moment on what I believe God's motivations are for moving me on from one church to the next (wherever that is).

We were reading through James chapter one in my bible study last night and a passage that really hooked into people was:

 4Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. 5If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.

Mature and complete, not lacking anything, that really resonates with me. In my mind it links to a Scriptural principal that I live my life by. It is the lesson from the parable of the talents: "Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!"

Our maturity and completeness is borne out of our faithfulness to God in the small things that he has given us. When we show faithful with that He gives us more. This is no "Prayer of Jabez" increase my borders nonsense but a call to Christ likeness.

I believe that over the past 10 years of my Christian life God has been calling me to ministry. This wasn't something I was able or prepared to do in the beginning. It started with a call and in faith I answered and that began a journey.

In just answering the call of God he began to add more to me. I found myself leading a bible study, leading the congregation in worship and other things that I will label small, not to belittle them but to put them in context.

Being faithful with those things came more responsibility, soon God opened the door to bible college so I could further learn and grow. Along with it came the role of Student Pastor at my church. The role stretched me, made me think differently and brought me to a higher place in my relationship with God.

From there God has placed more responsibility on me with a pastoral position and the position of Elder in his church.

At each turn God has taught me something, entrusted me with something and allowed my care of that something to stretch, grow and test me. After every instance of faithfully dealing with that something, he has given me more.

Leaving my current church is a real stretching time for my faith. I have been ministering in the same place for the past 8 years, the church that I was brought to faith in and with people I have known for up to a decade. But in many ways these circumstances make it difficult for me to reach a new level with my relationship with God.

It's not that I am complacent, or totally unchallenged, but God wants to finish a work in me, to make me more mature and complete and I can not do that where I am.

I want to challenge you, it doesn't matter if you are a pastor or not. Where are you in your relationship with God? Is your faith complete? What is the last thing he entrusted to you? Where you faithful or has your faith stagnated?

My observation is that when we fail at the task at hand most people just plain give up. They say "I've failed God" and cease to look for the opportunities he is bringing their way.

Is that you? You can continue to grow even after failure if you repent. When you admit your failure to God, I can almost guarantee that he will find another way for you to grow and mature in him.