From This Valley

As of late I have had the Civil Wars blowin' up my Spotify - which is just a fancy, college-age way of saying, I have been listening to the Civil Wars frequently.  Off of their new, self-titled album, there is one song in particular that has caught my attention: From This Valley.

It is upbeat, and has some beautiful lyricism.  The chorus goes like this:

Oh won't you take me from this valley,

to that mountain high above.

I will pray, pray, pray till I see your smiling face.

I will pray, pray, pray to the one I love.

It's a prayer.  One that I've prayed before with different words.  Probably one that you, or someone you know has prayed before.  God, lift me out of this valley, these hard times that I am facing, these struggles.  Bring me to your high ground.  Lift me up.  I want to be in your presence.

The second verse continues like this:

Oh the outcast dreams of acceptance, just to find pure love's embrace.

Like the orphan longs for its mother, may you hold me in your grace.

Have you ever felt so lost in your trials and struggles that you can't find a place that feels like home?  Have you ever felt so lost that you feel orphaned - you have no one to claim you?  I think sometimes our pain and our suffering does that to us.  Pushes us away.  Makes us believe we don't belong.  There is another prayer I have whispered: God bring me back home to you, make me your child again.  

If you are in the valley, and you don't want to be there, God can lift you.  He wants to hear you call out to Him.  He hears your prayers in the valley.  He wants you to be joyful in hope, patient in affliction and faithful in prayer." (Romans 12:12).  So lift it up to Him whether spoken, or sung, or just uttered by your heart.  Call out to your God.

~SP 

A Heritage of Faith

Stand with Abraham for a moment.  He is outside looking up at the sky.  He probably went out there to take a break from his day, to find a quiet place where he could talk to God.  Abraham has been wanting a son for some time now.  Do you know that feeling, to want something so desperately?  It is all you think about?  It sits like a lead weight in your stomach.

Abraham is old and so is his wife, Sarah, so he is reasoning that his chances of fathering a child are little to none.  But on this night that Abraham is standing outside, in the stillness of the universe, God reaches down to Abraham.  Maybe God wasn't physically with Abraham, but I have this image when I close my eyes of a comforting arm around Abraham's shoulders and the other arm stretched out to the sky.  God makes a grand gesture to the night sky and tells Abraham, look at those stars, I will bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Did you know, that on that night, so long ago, you and I were each one of those stars that God pointed out in the sky?

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What God plans to do through Abraham is fulfill a beautiful, faithful promise.  In Abraham's day, people were so concerned with inheritance.  What did they stand to gain from those who came before them.  God's plan was to start through Abraham a heritage of faith.  What he would hand down to his children, and his children's children was the love for and faith in a beautiful and bountiful God.

God adopted Abraham, made him His own.  God blessed Abraham.  He promised to do that for generations to come.

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So what does this heritage mean for us today?  We are those stars that God pointed to.  We are the one's that He is faithful to, and continues to pour out blessings on.  Our inheritance binds our hearts to God and to the hearts of His people.  Our brothers and sisters.

What does this heritage of faith do?  For one week out of the summer it brings together a youth group from the smallest of towns in the middle of Illinois with a youth group from the biggest and busiest of cities.  It brings together youth who have grown up in different states and different nations.  Their social cultures are different.  Their style, their language and slang vary.  But they love each other.  For this week all the things that the world tells them should be barriers between them are torn down.  They realize that they are children of the same God.  They are part of the same inheritance that was handed down through Abraham.  It is this heritage of faith that binds their hearts.

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Psalm 147:4 He determined the number of stars.  He gives all of them their names.

God gave you your name that night, so long ago as He spoke to Abraham.  He had you planned long before you were born.  

Psalm 8:3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place.

You are the work of God's fingers.  He crafted you, and made a promise to you.  To bless you.  When He set you in place, He set you a place in His inheritance for you.  He wrote you into His story.

You are blessed by the God that knew you long before your first breath.

~SP

       

God's Truth: The Blessing of Sharing His Words

The last few years of my life have been a huge time of transformation in my relationship with Christ.  He has truly worked in my heart through my Church in Bloomington, through relationships here, through my summers in Green Lake and relationships there.  He has blessed me with the love and support of my parents and brother.  He has been showing me a lot about what a life lived for Him really is.  He has put strength and courage in my heart.

I have always loved to write.  I loved to write stories, and about my life experiences.  I think I had a thousand journals when I was younger - not because I filled them all - but I'd write a few things, then decided I needed a new journal to write in.  Sometimes a spiral notebook would suffice, and sometimes I needed a fancier medium for my writing.  Then Microsoft Word was introduced into my life. But the stories stayed in those journals and word documents.  In this past year God has urged me to share my stories.  It doesn't matter the number of pageviews, but it is out there.  And now my story is His story.  He is the "Author and Perfector."

I have just gotten around to uploading some videos from this summer of the message I was blessed to be able to share at Quest.  I want to share it here on my blog.

Early in life I was always hesitant to share my testimony (the word made me cringe) because I thought it would be boring.  My testimony is the one that starts, "Well, I grew up in a Christian home..."  But a testimony is dynamic.  The story is changing.  My testimony isn't about me, it's about the One who created me, so it is worth sharing.  If you have similar hesitations, know that your story has value because God is a part of it.  I hope and pray that God will use my words for His glory and His truth.

~SP

Great is Thy Faithfulness

I have said earlier that I am a fan of hymns.  I wanted to start off my hymn reflections with one of my favorites: Great is Thy Faithfulness.

I keep an old hymnal from my church right next to my bed, underneath my Bible and journal.  As I was flipping through it the other day, I stopped for a moment on Great is Thy Faithfulness.

Great is Thy faithfulness!  Great is Thy faithfulness!  Morning by morning new mercies I see; All I have needed Thy hand hath provided.  Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.  

God's faithfulness.  I often think about my relationship with God in terms of my faith.  I am called to be faithful to Him and have faith in Him.  In times of frustration or confusion, have you ever wondered why God asks you to have faith in Him?  My mother made this statement to me earlier this year: "I want to be found faithful, because God is faithful."  These were such simple words, but they illuminated a truth that I had not thought much about before.

God is faithful to His people.

Lately, I have been able to resonate with Abraham and his story.  An old man with a barren wife.  It may not seem like we could have anything in common.  God asks Abraham to leave his home and go to a new land with his family.  "Now the Lord said to Abram, 'Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.'" Genesis 12:1  God's call to Abraham is a get up and go kind of call.

In May, I will get up and leave Bloomington.  I don't know where I will be going yet.  That will be determined by April.  It is very exciting, and also scary.  I might be called to somewhere where I will have to completely rebuild a life and a community.  Somewhere completely new.  But God is calling me to get up, and leave the places where I am comfortable. 

Back to Abraham's story: around the time that he is called to leave his home, Abraham is waiting desperately for a son.  He just wants a single offspring.  This is what God tells him: "Look up to the sky and count the stars -- if indeed you can count them...so shall your offspring be." Genesis 15:5.  God makes an incredible promise to be faithful to Abraham.  Despite Abraham's age.  Despite his wife Sarah's age.  God will be faithful to Abraham and bless him in abundance.

God does bless Abraham with a son, Isaac.  And Isaac is just the beginning of God's faithful promise to Abraham.  God has a plan to prosper Abraham in His own time, and we see this plan unfold throughout God's story in the Bible.

God may be asking me to take a plunge into the unknown.  But He is faithful.  Just like with Abraham, His plan for me is for prosperity (Jeremiah 29:11).

Abraham's life and my life are separated by thousands of years.  Yet I am written into the same story that Abraham is a part of - God's story.  God promised to hand down a heritage of faith through Abraham.  You and I are each one of the stars in the sky that God pointed out when He told Abraham of His faithful plan.           

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I think the operative word in this hymn is not great or faithfulness, but rather is.  Great is Thy faithfulness.  It is a present and enduring thing.  God wasn't faithful for a time.  He was not faithful in a few things.  He is always, and continues to be, faithful. 

The hymn also reinforces this thought:

Thou [God] changest not, Thy compassions they fail not, as Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be.

God's faithfulness never changes.  It will endure forever.  When you are struggling with faith, or being faithful, remember that your God is still faithful to you.       

~SP

Rug Doctor Grace

This summer at camp each of our Thursdays focused on David and Bathsheba.  Prior to this day, the stories about David's life had been about his growth, his triumph over struggles, and the way he devoted his life to God.  Then David, like all of us, makes a harmful decision.  The moments that unfold are not so glorious as when he slayed Goliath.  It is hard to recognize the beloved Psalmist.

David sins.  Commits a transgression against the God he loves.  He decides to sleep with another man's wife and a scroll of misfortune continues to unravel from there.  Bathsheba becomes pregnant.  David makes a few failed attempts to make it look like Uriah, Bathsheba's husband, is the father.  When that doesn't work, David sends Uriah to the front lines of battle where he loses his life.

David's sin snowballs.  He becomes buried in it.

And then there is grace.  Never ceasing.  Grace that covers all transgression.  Jesus death redeems David's sin.  Jesus death redeems our sins.  It is a promise.

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Sometimes I feel like I live with God's grace as a rented Rug Doctor from our local Sears.  It's like bringing out the big guns.  I let a lot of stuff accumulate.  I spilled grape juice on the rug.  A few days later I added an orange juice stain.  Dirt from my boots.  But it's all ok, because I can bring in the Rug Doctor.  It will eliminate every stain.

But God's love for us calls us to something better then just the Rug Doctor grace in times of need.  Paul articulates it beautifully: 

"What then are we to say?  Should we continue to sin in order that grace may abound? By no means!  How can we who died to sin go on living in it?"  Romans 6:1-2.

God's grace will cover us, but His love calls us to live a life glorifying and pleasing to Him.  He calls us to fight uphill battles and resist temptation.  He calls us to die and rise again with Him.  He knows in the flesh we will fall short, but He calls us to begin living and walking in the Spirit.

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There's another thing about sin: it creates distance.  Because we have God's grace, could we go on living in sin?

God knows.  He sees the stumbling blocks and the pitfalls.  I also know this to be true: in Psalm 40, David talks about God "reaching into the miry pit."  I would have to imagine that the miry pit is someplace that is very deep, and very far off.  God will reach for you.  But He wants something better for us than to live life in the miry pit.

God doesn't want the distance between your heart and His.  He desires closeness with you.  Sin prevents that closeness.  It buries your heart; hardens it.  If you call out to God in the valley He will reach down for you.  He never tires.  Never grows weary.  Yet, He wants you to know that if you choose it, He will walk with you on solid, stable ground, and lead you up to the mount of His love.  You do not have to live life chronically in the valley.

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We are called to say no to a life of sin, because it is no life at all.  It is death.  God wants life for us.  He wants us to live for the home we were made for.  A final thought on Paul's words: If we do fall short, and sin, God's grace will abound; if we strive to live a life free of sin, God's grace will still abound.  God's grace is not dependent on us, but rather we are dependent on it.    

~SP

      

Bringing Life to a Relationship

James 2:14-26. Often, I have heard verse 17 extracted from this passage: So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

I have been mulling over James' idea for a while.  If I were to give you my gold star, Sunday school response, I would say: simple, James is encouraging us to live out our faith.  Talk the talk, and walk the walk.

I know this to be true: that God loves me, sent His son to atone for my sins, and wants to call me His child because of who He is.  It has nothing to do with getting good grades, attending Sunday School every week, or of any of the times I went Trick-or-Treating for UNICEF.

However, James is giving some stellar relationship advice.  I wonder if he knew?

I try to be good about telling my family and friends that I love them.  I think there are people in my life that also simply know that I love them, even if I can't tell them every day.  I know that my parents love me, even if we go a few days without communicating.  And we could go on like that, in all of our relationships, just telling each other we love each other.  Just loving each other.

But there you have it: I didn't get through that last paragraph without using love as a verb in every context.  It is an action.  A few weeks ago at my church, Pastor Stacee talked about Agape, Godly love, the kind of love that gives.  Giving is active.  God's love is active.

Love is active.  Faith is active.  Belief is active.  When Jesus asks us to believe that He is the way the truth and the life, He is asking us not just to profess it from our mouths but from our hearts.  Belief does not sit silently or passively, belief gets up and goes.

So what brings life to our earthly relationships?  Is it the thread of text message conversations?  The collection of snapchats?  I don't think so.  It is the times when they show up at your recitals or sporting events.  It is the times where they help you run an errand.  It is the times when they lend an ear to listen.  You could just simply say that you are friends - but by giving, by being actively invested in the relationship, the relationship comes alive!      

When I read the faith without works passage, that is what speaks to me:  Jesus loves me because of who He is and what He has done.  There is nothing I can do to earn that.  At the same time, Jesus' love for me puts me on my feet.  It fills my heart and it makes me want to move.  I want to be the active hands and feet of Jesus because it brings my relationship with Him to life.  It helps me grow toward Him.

James is not encouraging us to incorporate works into our faith because he thinks that God has a tally sheet.  I think he is giving this advice out of love for his readers because he knows something to be true: God can bless us and others through our works of faith.  There is no instrument that God finds unusable.

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Sometimes it is so overwhelming to know that God wants good things for us.  It can be hard to let that thought sink in because live in a world that is not mindful of us.  God encourages us to get up and go - through Paul He speaks to us: "Live a life worthy of the calling you have received" Ephesians 4:1.  This is all out of His love for us.  All Agape.  All from a love that gives, never fails, never ends.  

~SP