Wisdom Books: Part One

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SUNDAY 27 AUGUST 2017

I love movies - I’ve always loved the power of the story - that you see and understand the world differently through the journey - all stories basically go like this:

Act 1 - character & their current circumstance & a PLOT POINT - something happens to throw the character onto a new trajectory - somewhere they would never of gone under normal circumstances…out of their comfort zone you move into:

Act 2 - Conflict/Danger - where the hero faces loss and danger both internal and external and woven through it seems the hero is about to fail, suffering, pain, sacrifice…DARKNESS

Act 3 - Climax - unexpected twist or making of the character - where they overcomes obstacles - evil is defeated, the hero becomes a better stronger person & all tension is resolved… the world is set right.

Sometimes even as we read the book that describes this journey and informs it we don’t see how parts of it apply to us…And there have been many people who have gone before us in this story and there is wisdom we can learn by zooming out…

Here is a stunning video that talks about the big story we are in and where our part is…

So we are part of this story, and there are many who have gone before us and captured the complexities of living - that have wrestled with right and wrong, with choices and how to make them - there are three books found in the Old Testament that capture the questions that are in common for all humans:

What kind of world are we living in?
What does it look like to live well?
How can we wisely negotiate the realities of our fragile existence…

What kind of world are we living in and what does it look like to live well in this world?  What does the Bible say about living the good life?

One of the struggles we have in unpacking the Old Testament is that we don’t always understand the genre and make up of the books - we jump in or hold tightly to one bit without seeing the whole.  When we ask the question 'how do we live well?', the Old Testament answers that in three books and each one carries a different perspective -

As highlighted here, Wisdom is understood from all three books/perspectives - Our issue is that often we only hold one view and then we try and justify/make life fit our view.  But Biblical wisdom is multi-faceted and holding all three in tension is our challenge - let’s start with part one today...

Be Strong and Courageous

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SUNDAY 20 AUGUST 2017

The Old Testament is full of people - real people; whose lives are messy, their families dysfunctional and their obedience not always full or immediate, yet God used them.  Our study of their lives is to bring perspective, hope and instruction to ours - to recognise that at times we are tempted to sanitise or selectively interact with their stories and in that way make them heroes.  The reality is that their stories are powerful because they are human like us and face the same temptations and frailty that we do - yet God used them.

Meditation (hagah and siyach) means to roll a word, thought or phrase around in the mind, continually contemplating, pondering and dwelling upon it, viewing it from every angle, weighing it and considering it carefully.  Not just once, but over and over again - until you begin to talk to yourself about it, allowing it to infiltrate, permeate and saturate your thinking.

Scripture meditation, is the digestive system of the soul - it is the process by which we apply, absorb and internalise truth as a working principle into our daily lives.

Just as natural food is taken into our bodies and the digestive system absorbs it, that’s the same with the process of meditating on the Word of God – it’s the process by which spiritual food is absorbed into our spirits and transformed into spiritual faith and energy, making Biblical principles working realities in our daily lives.

The underlying secret to Joshua’s success was his continual process of meditating on the Word of God and the Word of God being the filter that determines action. His ability to be strong and courageous and to step into all that God called him to be, was constantly meditating on the Word of God - allowing it to shape his every thought, attitude and behaviour.  From strategy for setting up economies, households, businesses, families, for temptation, for battle - everything shaped by the Word of God.

Throughout the bible and history we see this it in the change makers, the Word of God was the shaper of their hearts, minds and behaviours.  So what does this look like for you? What is your practice of ingesting, and meditating looking like?  What’s your tangible step to increase this in your daily life?

Even in the mess, God is at work in this

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SUNDAY 13 AUGUST 2017

The Old Testament is full of people - real people; whose lives are messy, their families dysfunctional and their obedience not always full or immediate, yet God used them.  Our study of their lives is to bring perspective, hope and instruction to ours - to recognise that at times we are tempted to sanitise or selectively interact with their stories and in that way make them heroes.  The reality is that their stories are powerful because they are human like us and face the same temptations and frailty that we do - yet God used them.

There are lots of Sunday School versions of Ruth, but today we ignore all of those and look at the significance of ending the book with geology of Perez.

At first glance the book of Ruth is about a jaded mother-in-law convincing her daughter-in-law to leave her own mother and father and hook up with Boaz. But if you fly a little higher, you see that the book of Ruth is also about Gods commitment to Abraham and his family.

The Moabites and the Isralites are reunited in Boaz and Ruth. God is commited to the restoration of all things, but sometimes that is played out through a period of pain, suffering and injustice. 

A life without pain, suffering and injustice is not really what we find in the bible.  It's our culture that says that life should be fair, it is advertising that tells us that life should be easy, its social media that tells us that we should always be happy, its NCEA that says everyone should pass. Its our school system that tells us that a successful life is a good education, a good job and a nice house.

Jesus’s death on the cross is not just the gift of forgiveness for your sins, or an invitation into eternal life. Its also an invitation into the pattern of being a living sacrifice, to accept and understand that we are experiencing this period of life so God can use it and us in the future.

Jesus dying on the cross is not just something that he did for us… it is him demonstrating for us how he wants us to live. If we want to be like Jesus, we need to trust that God will ALWAYS bring something good out of pain and suffering.

The Midwives

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SUNDAY 06 AUGUST 2017

The Old Testament is full of people - real people; whose lives are messy, their families dysfunctional and their obedience not always full or immediate, yet God used them.  Our study of their lives is to bring perspective, hope and instruction to ours - to recognise that at times we are tempted to sanitise or selectively interact with their stories and in that way make them heroes.  The reality is that their stories are powerful because they are human like us and face the same temptations and frailty that we do - yet God used them.

Last week we spent time with Joseph – seeing in the story of his life that God had a dream – through pits, prisons and palaces God was faithful to work in and through Joseph to see the dream realised. We now move out of Genesis and into a significant shift…from the people God made promises too – Abraham, Isaac & Jacob – that they would be a great nation and through them the whole earth would be blessed.

And right at this critical pivot we find two unlikely people who God uses to deliver a nation... I don’t know about you – but I wonder if you jumped to Moses & Aaron? They are usually the next heroes in our usual Sunday school stories. But in this text there are two people who step in first to bridge the gap. We find inbetween the people who the promise of God was made too and the people who would see the promise first realised –  two women.

Two women who feared – held in awe/respect God and therefore obeyed God rather than humans.  And in doing so delivered a nation!This is there story...