Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

At church this Easter, my pastor spoke about experiencing God. To this end, he had us do a prayer exercise.  We were to be silent for one minute and pray, “are you there?” Just then my wife, who was sitting next to me, put her head on my shoulder. In that instant, something said to me, “I am the bond between you and her, just as I am the bond between the Father and the Son.” I realized that I was being addressed by the Holy Spirit.  If you believe this is outlandish, there is a long tradition (4000 years long) of God speaking plainly to humans in the bible.  We believe he is a living personality and he gives us nudges and words that we evaluate to see if it is God in light of a relationship with him (and knowing his personality from the pages of scripture.)  This is an especially strong tradition in the Evangelical spirit-filled church of which I am a member. After prayer, we did the doxology and I got up and went to the restroom. There, standing at the urinal,...

Surroundings are important.  I am sitting in the Starbucks at Meijer’s just down the street from my house.  The noise of the blue carts on the concrete floor is deafening.  I miss the old quaint cafés in little towns like Saline.  Now it is all big box, cookie cutter and impersonal spaces.  I have been thinking about spaces recently and where I spend my time. To this end, I have been doing an exercise where I picture myself in a calming and beautiful place.  For me, it is on the rocks by the ocean in Bar Harbor, Maine.  We went there on our honeymoon, and this picture is from that moment when I looked out over the sea and was filled with such peace and tranquility, it calmed me from the inside out.  The sun was shining, and sea gulls were flying overhead.  The rocks were warm from the sun, and the crashing of the waves was soothing music as they ebbed and receded from the rocky shore. I have been going to that place several times a day...

What does grace mean?  In a secular sense it is simply a refinement of movement, or to honor someone by your presence. But it can also mean a disposition to an act of kindness. In a religious context, it is a much bigger can of worms to unpack. The concept of grace appears in the old testament as well as the new. In the Hebrew old testament, the commonly translated grace, or favor is  chen.   It occurs 69 times and means the unmerited favor with others or with God. (but in some instances, it means elegance, as in speech). In the new testament   Charis   can refer also to elegance in speech, charm, loving-kindness, or good will.  But it is most often used as divine favor with God.  As in " Do not be afraid, Mary ; for you have found   favor   with God." Lk 1:30.   The specifics of how it is dispensed or what vary from Catholicism to Protestantism.  However, we know some important things about it. Namely, that it is ...

Jesus's final prayer, in John 17 was a call for unity among Christians: " that they may be one as we are one —   23  I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me  and have loved them  even as you have loved me."   He knew that this would be a sign to the world that no other religion could bring. And where are we now? The  Center for the Study of Global Christianity   at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary estimated 34,000 denominations in 2000, rising to an estimated 43,000 in 2012. These numbers have exploded from 1,600 in the year 1900.  We are not headed in the right direction.  Jesus desired that unity would be the mark of his church. I used to look at the proliferation of denominations as continuously splitting branches reaching out the the end of the tree.  The tree, then with all it's multiplicity then makes up the church as a whole. I think this only works i...

I am reading "what good is God?" by Philip Yancy.  It is a collection of speeches he was invited to give and one was to an Alcoholics Anonymous group. In it he compares the church to AA. In AA, everyone knows that they are an addict and that they are utterly dependent on God to give them strength. To keep them from that first drink. To better their character and help them make amends to all the people they have hurt (and to the ones that they are hurting now).  Church is often quite the opposite. In church, we can be lured into the trap of the Pharisees, whom Jesus called "White-washed tombs." They looked so good to other people by keeping up appearances, but were filled with stinking filth on the inside. It is the trap of righteousness: when you begin to feel that you are better than others, closer to God, or that you know the truth when others do not. Jesus warned us of this path. But to often in church, we shy away from the truth that we are sinners and that we ...

My favorite story in the old testament is the story of Elijah's encounters with God when he escaped from certain death by the hand of Jezebel in 1 Kings 19.  Elijah barely escapes with his life, and runs out into the wilderness.  At the point of death, God comes to him and cares for him. 4  But [Elijah] himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a broom tree; and he asked that he might die, saying, “It is enough; now, O  Lord , take away my life; for I am no better than my fathers.”  5  And he lay down and slept under a broom tree; and behold, an angel touched him, and said to him, “Arise and eat.”  6  And he looked, and behold, there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. And he ate and drank, and lay down again.  7  And the angel of the  Lord  came again a second time, and touched him, and said, “Arise and eat, else the journey will be too great for you.”  ...

"Come now, and let us reason together, says the Lord" -Isaiah 1:18. How does God come to you?  Like a whirlwind, like a bolt of lightning?  This is not my experience or the experience of most of the people in the Bible, nor was it the experience of the first disciples (in Luke 5).  He comes like a living being with a personality, inviting you to stop and listen.   God did this over and over in the Old Testament. In the New Testament we see God doing the same thing through Jesus, God made flesh. Here is how he called his first disciples: He was teaching a crowd within earshot of the fishermen. First he invites you to listen. Then he asks you to inconvenience yourself for him. He got into Simon Peter's boat and asked that he put out from the shore so he could teach the people from there. (Luke 5:3)  Then, once you are willing and a little invested, he asks you to do something that you have probably done a million times before, but he invites you to see diff...