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| This blog has moved (a long time ago) to The Cyberdeck Dialogue.
Obviously
this site hasn't been updated in LOOOOOOONG time. That's because I've
been over at blogspot. I was unaware that anyone ever visited this site
until I followed a link to a xanga blog and saw myself listed in the
blogroll. So evidently someone has been looking for something.
Anyway,
just in case anyone else happens upon this page, I'm providing a link
to my active site complete with well over 600 posts for anyone who has
nothing better to do. Visit me at:
The Cyberdeck Dialogue
where you will find plenty of rants, rambles, nonsense, important
questions and unfortunately, not a lot of answers. Might make you think
though, or mad, or sad, or happy, who knows?
So please stop by the Cyberdeck and join the conversation. | | |
| The Kid on the Back
I took my son on a bike ride. We were cranking and banking through some fun turns around the lake when it occurred to me how much he has to trust me to sit back there hanging on to my waist. I began to remember moments from my own childhood – scary times with Dad, driving up a snow covered logging road to go hunting, or even just sitting by a fire in the dark woods on a camping trip, my child’s imagination going wild in the wilderness. I remember what I thought at those times. I always felt that Dad wouldn’t put me in a situation where he wasn’t in control. I felt that probably he needed me to be safe even more than I did. I thought – and this is going to sound weird – that if I went, Dad went with me; and I found my identity in him, so I had no reason to be protected if he wasn’t. I think the summary of all that is that trust didn’t entirely mean that I felt safe from harm. It meant that I knew Dad was with me and in control. Whatever happened when I was with him was ok.
Well then of course I want to have this reliance as a grown-up on my heavenly Dad. Who in fact, is in control in ways that I can’t comprehend. I know that He doesn’t promise physical protection, but spiritual protection. I know that whatever I go through, He has gone through and is doing it now, with me. When He takes me into a dangerous situation, He does just that - TAKES me. He doesn’t SEND me on my own.
Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him, because His protection reaches beyond what I know here. My name is carved in His hands, written in His heart.
His hands are on the brake and throttle, I’m just riding on the back, cranking and banking and hanging on.
© 2003 rod lewis | | |
| Worship is a specific thing that we do intentionally at a specific time.Worship is a lifestyle.Unless we embrace both these realities, I believe we fail to walk with God the way He intends. What so many of us do though, is choose one as an excuse for the other. We forgive our own neglect of a time alone with God by telling ourselves that it’s how we live our lives that counts. I want to submit that we can’t possibly know how to live our lives unless we spend intentional, focused, time alone speaking with and listening to God. “Lifestyle worship” doesn’t exempt us from intentional “closet time” where we confess, adore, seek, and listen; where our prayers aren’t crafted for the benefit of others, when we don’t face the largest part of the congregation or wax poetic in our public supplication. On the other hand, spending intentional, closet time with God doesn’t give us license to go about and live Godless lives the rest of the time. More often, this is probably the problem.
Many of us have embraced the terminology that calls church music “worship” to the point that we’ve not only separated that “worship time” from every aspect of Monday to Saturday life but even from the other elements in the Sunday service.When pressed, we are ready to consider everything from tithing to taking out the trash, worship. At the same time, we call singing worship, separate from communion, offering, sermon. We've quite broadly defined the term "worship" in inverse proportion to how narrowly we've defined the method by which it is carried out. Worship is something that we do, that we give.Worship is not something that we should expect to experience.Worship is something that God experiences. We, in turn, can experience God.If we have obediently poured ourselves out to Him, and have recognized Who He is and how filthy we are, we will have left ourselves open to hear His voice.Our expectation of an emotional experience from music to facilitate worship, can blind us to the actual “God experience” He had planned for us. Perhaps the “God Experience” is simply feeling His pleasure. But we must not approach God for the experience.We must approach Him for His sake, in reverence, contrition, awe, thanksgiving; we will be further awed by His gift back to us. Then when we open our mouths to sing, it will be in response to Him in our lives.We won’t sing in hopes that it will put us in the mood to worship, but as a result of having been worshiping.
© 2003 rod lewis | | |
| I’m beginning to think that the single most important criteria for relevance is struggle. The best teacher is a learner. And maybe even one who stays but a few steps ahead of his students. For it is only in learning that a teacher can know why the material is relevant to the learner.
Most of us struggle. Problem is, we’ve always avoided talking about or teaching from our struggles. We’ve dared not to address questions for which we’ve not yet found the answers. Instead, we chose safe topics with which we’ve never struggled or have long since conquered, so that we have no idea of the problem or have forgotten the severity.
The emerging culture will no longer put up with self-help books written by self-help book writers, or generic how-to sermons written by generic how-to sermon writers. The emerging culture will not listen to someone who plugs himself in as an illustration of someone else’s second hand insight. This culture says show me what you’ve learned from your own struggles and I might gain some insight into mine. You want to know how to seem irrelevant to me? Cause me to feel that you have no insight into my struggles, strengths, weaknesses; that you’ve just chosen what direction you will lead me with no knowledge of where I’ve been or where I was headed before you came along. I’ll feel that what you have to say is equally inapplicable to all of us and we’ll probably all look elsewhere to have our questions heard.
© 2003 rod lewis | | |
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