Someone once said that home is the place where they have to take you in. Not a very flattering image but one that rings true for those of us who have raised teenagers. But here we are at homecoming, for some of us it is truly that: a return to and a celebration in the place where we feel the most comfortable, where we have served God and others. To some of us, it doesn’t feel like home at all. It feels like a strange and foreign place where the natives speak a form of the language we know but we aren’t sure of our place, where we fit in, where we belong or what is going to happen next.
The word home in this context also brings up images of heaven, that place where we will go when we die, that place of rest and peace where the suffering and the conflict of this world will be ended and there will be no more crying, no more tears, no more night. We think of Jesus’ words in John 14 where he tells the disciples and us that He has gone to prepare a place for us in that land where his Father has prepared many mansions. The songs we sing here, like the one we just sang, “Sweet Beulah Land”, abound with such imagery. We can spend a lot of time imagining what heaven will be like and that is a valuable exercise but it brings up a pressing question. What are we to be about here in the light of the reality of God and the reality of salvation? If we only concentrate on going to heaven when we die, it is easy to ignore or mis-use the gifts we have been given here. So what are we to be about and where is God in this?
For that, I think we can go back to the Exodus text. Let’s place it in he context of where it is in the book of Exodus and where it is in the overarching meta-narrative of Scripture. These words are some of Moses’ last words to the God with whom he has journeyed from the beginning of the narrative until now. Moses has lead the people out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, across the wilderness and now they are facing entering the Promised Land. One more time, Moses and God talk together on the top of a mountain. If you can see and hear the echoes of the conversation Moses and God had originally, back in the light of the burning bush you are on the right track. That was the first of these conversations and this is one of the last. At that first conversation, Moses asked God “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” and God replied: “I will be with you.” And in that conversation, back and forth, Moses said what about this and this and this? And God replied “I will be with you and I am who I am.” Honestly, to us that doesn’t seem like a very good answer does it? We want to know what God is going to do and He replies to us, as He did to Moses: This is what I am like. This is who I am.
In our text today, in chapter 33, verse 19 Moses says to God: “Show me your glory.” And God responds: “I will make my goodness pass before you.” Hear the difference. Moses is asking God to do a mighty act, some glorious something that will keep these rag-tag Isreailtes in line, something that will keep them from another ‘golden-calf’-type incident. Moses wants God to do the work. Amaze them, scare them to death so that they will fall in line.
Some scholars say that Moses is asking to really see God’s face, to really be sure who God is. Moses wants God’s assurance that God will not just go with him but do what needs to be done. Yet, God assures Moses of God’s goodness, his nature and that God will work his power through Moses.
This has to be because if God just takes over and makes everything perfect for us, then we necessarily become robots and can’t love him freely. So because God loves us, He can’t take over and be fully present but His nature of love means that He works through us to accomplish His will in the world.
Moses says “I want to see you.” GLORY
God says “I want you to know me.” GOODNESS
Because of the golden calf incident, because of the people’s sin in the wilderness, their relationship with God has necessarily changed. God can’t come and dwell among them in the fullness of Himself, anymore than Adam and Eve could walk with God in the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden because of their sin. But the Bible is the story of God at work in the world, constantly reaching out to us in relationship and in love. And again and again we as flawed humans sin and distance ourselves from the one who created us and loved us the most.
But brothers and sisters, hear the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ:
In the coming of Jesus to earth to live and love as a human, the sins of Eden and Sinai are superceded, we can see God face to face, Moses’ request is fulfilled and we see both God’s glory and his goodness. The God whose face is unveiled at last in self-giving love (NTW).
Does the fact that Jesus has come into the world mean that we throw out the Old Testament? No, we see and hear in Moses’ the foreshadowing of our own questions, our own needs. If God is so great, the world asks, if He os so great and so powerful, why doesn’t he just set the world to rights? Why doesn’t he get this over with? That is Moses’ request: Show us your glory. The theologian Henri Nouwen wrote about it this way: “What makes the temptation for power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God rthan to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life. The long painful history of the church is the history of people ever and again tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led. Those who resisted this temptation to the end and thereby give us hope are true saints.” – In the Name of Jesus.
And hear God’s response to Moses, to us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit: I will show you my goodness, I want you to know me. The Christian life isn’t about signs and wonders, it’s about the difficult and messy work of relationship. It’s about pain and suffering, it’s about grace and forgiveness received, offered and received again, over and over and over. It’s about sinking into the quiet intimate times of communication where words themselves are unnecessary and living through the painstaking work of being heard and understood, of hearing and understanding. And all those things are true both in our horizontal relationships, the ones we have with other people as well as being true in the relationship with have with God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
Where are you this morning? Are you tired and worn out and fed up? Good, you are in exactly the right place to receive the refreshing grace of the living God. Are you living your life expectantly waiting for what God has for you next? Here among this family, you are at home for we wait also, to see where God is already at work and to join him there. L.L. Nash who was the pastor of this church from 1872-1874 tells this story of his call to this church:
We are not Christians to simply see the phenomenon of God’s glory but to receive and to give, to do the work of loving God and loving others in this world. Brothers and sisters in the light of the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, it is time to get to work.
Monday, October 27, 2008
How to hear the Word
I have copied for you here a short but incredibly powerful hermeneutic statement from NT Wright. Read slowly, savor and enjoy! Kelli
The Fourfold Amor Dei and the Word of God
intervention by the Rt Revd N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham (Church of England)
Synod of Bishops, 14 October 2008
Your Holiness; your Eminences and Excellences; brothers and sisters in Christ:
It is an honour and privilege to be here, and to bring you greetings from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
We face the same challenges as you: not only secularism and relativism, but also postmodernity. Challenges, though, bring fresh insights and opportunities. Uncritical rejection of cultural pressures is as unwise as uncritical embracing. Uncertainy here breeds anxiety, and I have detected some anxiety in this Synod: anxiety that the Bible might tell us things we didn’t expect or want to hear, and also anxiety lest the Bible’s powerful message should be stifled.
To get the balance right, I propose a fourfold reading of scripture. We are to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength.
1. The heart: Lectio Divina, private meditation and prayer, and above all the readings in the eucharist.
2. The mind: historical study of the text and its original contextual meaning.
3. The soul: the ongoing life of the church, its tradition and teaching office.
4. The strength: the mission of the church, the work of God’s kingdom.
Some insist on the heart to the exclusion of mind, soul and strength. Then you have a dangerous and vulnerable anti-intellectualism. But with modern critical study you often have the opposite: thousands of pages of research from which we only hear the faintest echo of the word of God: parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Then we bishops naturally react, insisting on ‘devotional’ reading only, or strict magisterial control. We then run the risk that we never hear God saying anything which has not already been controlled and neutralised. We need all four ‘loves’, in proper balance, as our hermeneutical principle.
In particular, we need fresh mission-oriented engagement with our own culture. Paragraph 57 of the Instrumentum Laboris implies that Paul’s cultural engagement on the Areopagus merely purifies and elevates what is there in the culture. This, to be sure, is part of it. Paul begins with the Altar to the Unknown God, and speaks of the true God. But Paul also confronts head-on the idolatry of ancient paganism, its temples and sacrifices. In our own culture, some elements need purifying and elevating, but we must also confront idolatry (today, in particular, Mammon!). This cultural discernment applies not least to the tools and methods of historical/critical scholarship themselves. As a religion of incarnation, we are bound to do historical research. But this is sometimes confused with scepticism, and we must distinguish.
So, yes, we read the Canon as a whole; but the climax of the Canon is Jesus Christ, especially his cross and resurrection. These events are not only salvific. They provide a hermeneutical principle, related to the Jewish tradition of ‘critique from within’. The narrative of scripture enshrines the path of death and resurrection as the principle for its own understanding.
H. E. Cardinal Dias gave a splendid lecture at the Lambeth Conference, in which he spoke of three moments in the life of Mary: Fiat, Magnificat and Stabat. To these, I add the other relevant verb, which Luke repeats: Conservabat. Let us apply these to our reading of scripture. First, God calls us through scripture in sovereign love and grace, and the response of the obedient mind is Fiat: let it be to me according to your word. Then we celebrate, with our strength, the relevance of the word to new personal and especially political situations: Magnificat. Then we ponder in the heart what we have seen and heard: Conservabat. But scripture tells us that Mary, too, had to learn hard things: she wanted to control her son, but could not. Her soul is pierced with the sword, as she stands (Stabat) at the foot of the cross. We too must wait patiently, letting the written Word tell us things that may be unexpected or even unwelcome, but which are yet salvific. We read humbly, trusting God and waiting to see his purposes unfold.
Dunelmiensis dixi.
The Fourfold Amor Dei and the Word of God
intervention by the Rt Revd N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham (Church of England)
Synod of Bishops, 14 October 2008
Your Holiness; your Eminences and Excellences; brothers and sisters in Christ:
It is an honour and privilege to be here, and to bring you greetings from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
We face the same challenges as you: not only secularism and relativism, but also postmodernity. Challenges, though, bring fresh insights and opportunities. Uncritical rejection of cultural pressures is as unwise as uncritical embracing. Uncertainy here breeds anxiety, and I have detected some anxiety in this Synod: anxiety that the Bible might tell us things we didn’t expect or want to hear, and also anxiety lest the Bible’s powerful message should be stifled.
To get the balance right, I propose a fourfold reading of scripture. We are to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength.
1. The heart: Lectio Divina, private meditation and prayer, and above all the readings in the eucharist.
2. The mind: historical study of the text and its original contextual meaning.
3. The soul: the ongoing life of the church, its tradition and teaching office.
4. The strength: the mission of the church, the work of God’s kingdom.
Some insist on the heart to the exclusion of mind, soul and strength. Then you have a dangerous and vulnerable anti-intellectualism. But with modern critical study you often have the opposite: thousands of pages of research from which we only hear the faintest echo of the word of God: parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Then we bishops naturally react, insisting on ‘devotional’ reading only, or strict magisterial control. We then run the risk that we never hear God saying anything which has not already been controlled and neutralised. We need all four ‘loves’, in proper balance, as our hermeneutical principle.
In particular, we need fresh mission-oriented engagement with our own culture. Paragraph 57 of the Instrumentum Laboris implies that Paul’s cultural engagement on the Areopagus merely purifies and elevates what is there in the culture. This, to be sure, is part of it. Paul begins with the Altar to the Unknown God, and speaks of the true God. But Paul also confronts head-on the idolatry of ancient paganism, its temples and sacrifices. In our own culture, some elements need purifying and elevating, but we must also confront idolatry (today, in particular, Mammon!). This cultural discernment applies not least to the tools and methods of historical/critical scholarship themselves. As a religion of incarnation, we are bound to do historical research. But this is sometimes confused with scepticism, and we must distinguish.
So, yes, we read the Canon as a whole; but the climax of the Canon is Jesus Christ, especially his cross and resurrection. These events are not only salvific. They provide a hermeneutical principle, related to the Jewish tradition of ‘critique from within’. The narrative of scripture enshrines the path of death and resurrection as the principle for its own understanding.
H. E. Cardinal Dias gave a splendid lecture at the Lambeth Conference, in which he spoke of three moments in the life of Mary: Fiat, Magnificat and Stabat. To these, I add the other relevant verb, which Luke repeats: Conservabat. Let us apply these to our reading of scripture. First, God calls us through scripture in sovereign love and grace, and the response of the obedient mind is Fiat: let it be to me according to your word. Then we celebrate, with our strength, the relevance of the word to new personal and especially political situations: Magnificat. Then we ponder in the heart what we have seen and heard: Conservabat. But scripture tells us that Mary, too, had to learn hard things: she wanted to control her son, but could not. Her soul is pierced with the sword, as she stands (Stabat) at the foot of the cross. We too must wait patiently, letting the written Word tell us things that may be unexpected or even unwelcome, but which are yet salvific. We read humbly, trusting God and waiting to see his purposes unfold.
Dunelmiensis dixi.
20081026Deu34
The Death of Moses
Today’s text is about the death of Moses. It is basically his obituary. Nobody likes to talk about death. But it is the final reality of life. We think about those who have passed away and we feel the deep ache that we will never again see them in this life and sometimes, even the assurance of seeing them again in heaven seems like a hollow promise. When we first read this text, we as humans focus not so much on what Moses did and the legacy that was his life. We focus on what he didn’t get to do. He didn’t get to enter the Promised Land, the destination toward which he led the Israelites for over 40 years. There is a lot of mystery that surrounds the death of Moses. Why didn’t he get to enter the Promised Land? Where is he buried? Why isn’t there some great shrine there to this one man who walked with God, and in shaping the band of Jewish refugees into a nation and the people of God, literally changed the world, changed culture and civilization even into our own time? This text raises a lot of questions. It raises more questions than it answers.
There are two underlying themes to the life and death of Moses that is described in this passage. Call and change. Those are the two things that categorized Moses’ life and the two things he had to facilitate in the lives of the people who followed God under his leadership. And across the centuries, those two things haven’t changed in the Kingdom of God. There is a saying that made the rounds a few years ago and it still holds true today: God loves you enough to meet you where you are (CALL) but He loves you to much to leave you that way (CHANGE).
God, through Jesus and through the Holy Spirit, meets us where we are emotionally, spiritually, physically. He meets us in prayer, in the Bible, in each other and in the situations and circumstances of our daily lives. He met Moses on a mountaintop in a mysterious burning bush. He met the apostle Paul on the Damascus Road. He met John Wesley in the middle of a stormy Atlantic Ocean and in the words of a teacher in a Bible class meeting. He met me in the words and actions of my faithful grandparents and in the soaring Christchurch Cathedral on Oxford, England. He meets each of us to assure us of his love and his saving grace. We have heard dramatic conversion stories, dramatic call stories, like the one from L.L. Nash, an early pastor of this church that I shared with you last week. But it is not just preachers and clergy that are called to God’s service. We are ALL called into God’s service. Yes, Moses is a towering, colossal figure in the three major religions of the world, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The Apostle Paul stands over us as a true Christian, one who was converted to belief in Christ and then proceeded to convert the world around him. The pastors who have stood in this pulpit, all the way down to me, have been called to be servants of God in this place.
But just as importantly, perhaps more importantly, YOU have been called to serve God in this place. God’s call on your life is that holy nudge, sometimes the holy shove you feel when you think about the place you’d like to serve. It’s the way your mind spins in a thousand creative directions when someone brings up an area that needs attention, a place where the church could be a stronger witness or a stronger agent for good in the world. Your call is the place where you are uniquely gifted by God to serve Him and only you can accomplish that task.
But God does not require what he doesn’t empower. And that’s where change comes in. Serving God, fulfilling your call, will take all you have but it will give you more than you can ever ask or imagine. In the beginning, we take baby steps. We change in small ways in response to the call of God in our lives. And then, as we grow in Christ and in working with the Holy Spirit, the changes get bigger and bigger, until one day we look around and our lives, ourselves are totally different than we ever expected them to be but better in good and life-giving ways.
Change is hard. When things are good, we want them to stay that way forever. How many of us as parents think of that moment when you held your new baby in your arms for the first time. We want that moment to go on and on. Where we can hold our children safe against us and nothing can hurt them and nothing can hurt us. But, as Bill Cosby says, babies are false advertising. They draw you in with smelling good and looking cute and begin cuddly. But then they become two and then 12 and then 17. Babies grow up to be teenagers and vital, energetic 30 year olds become senior citizens. There’s nothing we can do to atop that. No amount of Botox in the world can stop the hands of time. The best analogy I know is that we each go through seasons in our lives. A tiny acorn grows into a massive oak tree that will someday die and fall and the process will repeat itself. But we are humans, not oak trees. It matters what we do in the here and now. An acorn can only grow into one thing: an oak tree. But we as humans are gifted by God in a multitude of ways across all the seasons of our lives.
Moses is one of the pivotal figures in the biblical text because we see so much of his life. From abandoned baby to hotheaded young man, from a stuttering, stumbling half-hearted leader to righteously furious prophet,, who destroys the first set of stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. We see him grow from beleaguered shepherd of sheep to beleaguered shepherd of God’s people to the one who looked out across the mountaintop and the river to the Promised Land and then went on with God to that eternal Promised Land.
But, I can hear you thinking from all the way up here, I am NOT Moses. I am just me. But God’s need of Moses was no more and no less than his need of you.
The Gospel text for this Sunday is Matthew 22:34-46. In that reading, the Pharisees and Sadducees are testing Jesus, their last conversation with him before they put their fatal plan in motion. ‘What is the greatest commandment?’ they ask him. And that was a rhetorical question. All good Jews knew the answer already for it was the Shema, the Jewish prayer they each recited at least twice a day: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment and the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
But then Jesus turns the tables on them and asks them a question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” “The son of David” they answer, like the educated Jews they are. And then Jesus asks them a question that seems totally confusing to us. Something about David’s son also being David’s Lord but the bottom line is that Jesus was really asking them: “Who am I?” Am I the Messiah and are you willing to live like it? Or am I just another misguided Jew with political aspirations? The Pharisees could handle Jesus being David’s son. There were many Jewish men who claimed to be of the line of King David. What they couldn’t handle was Jesus’ divinity, the fact that he was also King David’s Lord. And we hear that even in the world today. People are willing to accept that Jesus was a good man, a good teacher but they refuse to accept that he was the Son of God. Why? Because then they’d have to change. Jesus is either Lord of All or he’s not Lord at all.
Jesus called the Pharisees and Sadducees to follow him, to believe in him but instead of surrendering their pride and their comfort, they fended him off with philosophical arguments and detailed reasons why not.
And Jesus stands before you and I today, here in this place and calls us. He calls us to follow him, to change, to live into being transformed by the Holy Spirit to be more like him, our Lord. Will you follow, will you step out, step up, stand up to be counted? Or will you find philosophical arguments and detailed reasons why you just can’t. There are decisions to be made every day in our lives but no decision is more important than choosing who you will follow and how.
Call and change: The two things that characterize the Christian life. Both come from God and lead us to God. No matter how long ago you first gave your heart and life to God, He is still calling, calling you deeper, calling you to change, calling you home.
The Death of Moses
Today’s text is about the death of Moses. It is basically his obituary. Nobody likes to talk about death. But it is the final reality of life. We think about those who have passed away and we feel the deep ache that we will never again see them in this life and sometimes, even the assurance of seeing them again in heaven seems like a hollow promise. When we first read this text, we as humans focus not so much on what Moses did and the legacy that was his life. We focus on what he didn’t get to do. He didn’t get to enter the Promised Land, the destination toward which he led the Israelites for over 40 years. There is a lot of mystery that surrounds the death of Moses. Why didn’t he get to enter the Promised Land? Where is he buried? Why isn’t there some great shrine there to this one man who walked with God, and in shaping the band of Jewish refugees into a nation and the people of God, literally changed the world, changed culture and civilization even into our own time? This text raises a lot of questions. It raises more questions than it answers.
There are two underlying themes to the life and death of Moses that is described in this passage. Call and change. Those are the two things that categorized Moses’ life and the two things he had to facilitate in the lives of the people who followed God under his leadership. And across the centuries, those two things haven’t changed in the Kingdom of God. There is a saying that made the rounds a few years ago and it still holds true today: God loves you enough to meet you where you are (CALL) but He loves you to much to leave you that way (CHANGE).
God, through Jesus and through the Holy Spirit, meets us where we are emotionally, spiritually, physically. He meets us in prayer, in the Bible, in each other and in the situations and circumstances of our daily lives. He met Moses on a mountaintop in a mysterious burning bush. He met the apostle Paul on the Damascus Road. He met John Wesley in the middle of a stormy Atlantic Ocean and in the words of a teacher in a Bible class meeting. He met me in the words and actions of my faithful grandparents and in the soaring Christchurch Cathedral on Oxford, England. He meets each of us to assure us of his love and his saving grace. We have heard dramatic conversion stories, dramatic call stories, like the one from L.L. Nash, an early pastor of this church that I shared with you last week. But it is not just preachers and clergy that are called to God’s service. We are ALL called into God’s service. Yes, Moses is a towering, colossal figure in the three major religions of the world, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The Apostle Paul stands over us as a true Christian, one who was converted to belief in Christ and then proceeded to convert the world around him. The pastors who have stood in this pulpit, all the way down to me, have been called to be servants of God in this place.
But just as importantly, perhaps more importantly, YOU have been called to serve God in this place. God’s call on your life is that holy nudge, sometimes the holy shove you feel when you think about the place you’d like to serve. It’s the way your mind spins in a thousand creative directions when someone brings up an area that needs attention, a place where the church could be a stronger witness or a stronger agent for good in the world. Your call is the place where you are uniquely gifted by God to serve Him and only you can accomplish that task.
But God does not require what he doesn’t empower. And that’s where change comes in. Serving God, fulfilling your call, will take all you have but it will give you more than you can ever ask or imagine. In the beginning, we take baby steps. We change in small ways in response to the call of God in our lives. And then, as we grow in Christ and in working with the Holy Spirit, the changes get bigger and bigger, until one day we look around and our lives, ourselves are totally different than we ever expected them to be but better in good and life-giving ways.
Change is hard. When things are good, we want them to stay that way forever. How many of us as parents think of that moment when you held your new baby in your arms for the first time. We want that moment to go on and on. Where we can hold our children safe against us and nothing can hurt them and nothing can hurt us. But, as Bill Cosby says, babies are false advertising. They draw you in with smelling good and looking cute and begin cuddly. But then they become two and then 12 and then 17. Babies grow up to be teenagers and vital, energetic 30 year olds become senior citizens. There’s nothing we can do to atop that. No amount of Botox in the world can stop the hands of time. The best analogy I know is that we each go through seasons in our lives. A tiny acorn grows into a massive oak tree that will someday die and fall and the process will repeat itself. But we are humans, not oak trees. It matters what we do in the here and now. An acorn can only grow into one thing: an oak tree. But we as humans are gifted by God in a multitude of ways across all the seasons of our lives.
Moses is one of the pivotal figures in the biblical text because we see so much of his life. From abandoned baby to hotheaded young man, from a stuttering, stumbling half-hearted leader to righteously furious prophet,, who destroys the first set of stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. We see him grow from beleaguered shepherd of sheep to beleaguered shepherd of God’s people to the one who looked out across the mountaintop and the river to the Promised Land and then went on with God to that eternal Promised Land.
But, I can hear you thinking from all the way up here, I am NOT Moses. I am just me. But God’s need of Moses was no more and no less than his need of you.
The Gospel text for this Sunday is Matthew 22:34-46. In that reading, the Pharisees and Sadducees are testing Jesus, their last conversation with him before they put their fatal plan in motion. ‘What is the greatest commandment?’ they ask him. And that was a rhetorical question. All good Jews knew the answer already for it was the Shema, the Jewish prayer they each recited at least twice a day: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment and the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
But then Jesus turns the tables on them and asks them a question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” “The son of David” they answer, like the educated Jews they are. And then Jesus asks them a question that seems totally confusing to us. Something about David’s son also being David’s Lord but the bottom line is that Jesus was really asking them: “Who am I?” Am I the Messiah and are you willing to live like it? Or am I just another misguided Jew with political aspirations? The Pharisees could handle Jesus being David’s son. There were many Jewish men who claimed to be of the line of King David. What they couldn’t handle was Jesus’ divinity, the fact that he was also King David’s Lord. And we hear that even in the world today. People are willing to accept that Jesus was a good man, a good teacher but they refuse to accept that he was the Son of God. Why? Because then they’d have to change. Jesus is either Lord of All or he’s not Lord at all.
Jesus called the Pharisees and Sadducees to follow him, to believe in him but instead of surrendering their pride and their comfort, they fended him off with philosophical arguments and detailed reasons why not.
And Jesus stands before you and I today, here in this place and calls us. He calls us to follow him, to change, to live into being transformed by the Holy Spirit to be more like him, our Lord. Will you follow, will you step out, step up, stand up to be counted? Or will you find philosophical arguments and detailed reasons why you just can’t. There are decisions to be made every day in our lives but no decision is more important than choosing who you will follow and how.
Call and change: The two things that characterize the Christian life. Both come from God and lead us to God. No matter how long ago you first gave your heart and life to God, He is still calling, calling you deeper, calling you to change, calling you home.
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