More Than Bread

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Years ago, when speaker of the house Sam Rayburn heard he had terminal cancer, he shocked everyone when he announced he was going back to his small town in Bonham, Texas. People said to him: "We've got the finest facilities here in D.C., why go back to that little town?" Rayburn's response came from his deep desire for community. He said, "Because in Bonham, Texas, they know if you're sick, and they care when you die." Perhaps some things are even more important than the finest medical facilities. If no one cares, you're truly alone. So who cares?

In this episode we'll start where most good things start, with Jesus. Because the  more we get to know Jesus...the more our hearts get saturated with the undying reality that Jesus Cares. In fact, Jesus not only cares for us, he cares that we care. 

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How do you measure greatness? Whether it's for a country, a business, a community or perhaps even more importantly for a person, for you and me. How do we measure greatness? What does glorious greatness look like? How do you recognize it?  We may have different pictures of greatness in different fields. So how do you measure greatness?  To what greatness do you aspire? That's easy for me, I want to be a great dad and a great husband.  I want to be a leader of a great movement that touches people so profoundly, that whole cities are transformed. I want to go on glorious adventures...be involved in great missions to love people all the way to Jesus.

But is there a glory, a greatness that superseeds all other categories? That's the question we're asking in this episode. The true essence of greatness is...?

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Henry Blackaby said that "A love relationship with God is more important than any other single factor in your life." Did you live your day or your week as though your relationship with God was the single most important factor in your life? Listen, the witness of the church is so intimately related to the manifest presence of God, that without it, the peoples of the world cannot and will not, believe. And that's what we have...the presence of God. Moses was a man who had experienced the power of God in ways most of us could only dream about.  But he was also a man who knew His God; they talked together face to face as a man would with a friend. And when the time came for Moses to choose between the presence of God and the power of God, it was no contest. 

So the question is...do I value His presence over His power. Am I God's friend?

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In the permanent record of his words, God has told us time and time again that He loves us. And He has used a variety of illustrations in the hopes that one of those stories would resonate with the deepest chords of your heart. But every story, every illustration, every metaphor was simply a pre-view of the real deal...the cross. Can you imagine the courage it took to love so deeply that you would walk the path of the cross? It's a courageous love; the kind of love that will go to bat for you even when it costs; the kind of love that won't walk away when it's hard and scary; the kind of love that will even be willing to die for you...

The story of God involves a cross.

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God is calling you to go all-in, because that's how he loves you...with all His heart. What God asks from you is what He gives to you, His whole heart. God is all-in. His heart burns for you! This holy, sovereign, high and exalted, God is all-in for you.  Even when you are undone by your failure, you have all of his heart. He didn't choose you because you've got it all together. He chose you because He loves you and He loves you just because. Whatever your track record is, if you are willing to fully surrender to God, then he'll use you to make a difference in your world. You become eligible to be a hero in God's story, the moment you surrender. 

He is for you, with all His heart! 

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Are you on fire for God? Make no mistake, the fire of God will look different in the
hearts of different people. For some people being on-fire for God will cause them to be God's greatest cheer-leader; for others on-fire will bring a steely-eyed courageous love that sacrifices and surrenders for someone else's good. For some the fire of God will bring a mysterious smile in the midst of hard times; for others it's tears every time their heart brushes up against His presence. It will deepen our prayer lives and cause us to truly love our neighbors, even those who are our enemies. I can't answer this question for you...because your heart has a different shape than mine, so we each need to answer the question for ourselves...

Have you ever been on fire for God?

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In this episode and the next we are going to look at a prayer in Isaiah 64. It's a corporate prayer of lament, but it's also my Easter-Prayer. You know I think it's difficult to grow in prayer, if the prayer "God we need you." isn't always at the center of our hearts and on the tip of our tongues. In fact O Hallesby in a classic book on prayer says, "Listen my friend your helplessness is your best prayer. It calls from your heart to the hrt of God with greater effect than all your uttered pleas."

But helplessness is not our preferred state of life, is it? Acknowledgment of our helplessness is not our habit. We would much rather be busy than helpless. We embrace busyness because busyness is all about what we can do, what we need to do, what everyone expcts us to do...maybe even what we do pretty well.

But what if our helplessness, the kind of helplessness that would cause us to dive into prayer like it was necessary and urgent, what if that kind of helplessness would lead to the life-burst of God? That's my Easter-Prayer!

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At Calvary (my church) every fourth Sunday is CWOW Sunday, church without walls. Rather than going to church, we go out to be the church. You know we call Sunday morning a worship service. We sing and we pray. We listen for a word from God to our hearts and we experience God's presence in many different ways. We call it a worship service. But in this episode I will suggest another term, another way to worship. Rather than just going to a worship service, what if we participated in service-worship? 

Service in the name of Jesus, serving people with the love of God is real worship. Instead of just saying, I worship you. We show that we worship Him. Generosity can be a simple, profound act of worship! 

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Mary had this opportunity that I don't have to give an extravagant gift to Jesus, face to face, to see his expression of gratitude. I have to be honest, I’m kind of  jealous of this woman who has been remembered for centuries as someone who was so crazy in love with Jesus, that you cannot talk about the good news with out talkng about her. I would love Jesus like that, if I had a chance. I tell myself, "Jesus would not go hungry or thirsty in my town."  I tell myself, "Jesus would have a place to live in my world."  I tell myself, if I had anything to say about it Jesus would be taken care of...but Jesus isn't around anymore. I tell myself.

But what if He is? What if the story Jesus is telling is just a figurative life-principle but a spiritual reality? Then I have to ask myself, "She was crazy in love with Jesus, am I?"

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When it comes to living God's dream for our lives, the journey to become  someone great, a true follower of Jesus; sometimes we focus so much on the process, all the stages that we have to master, all the different things we have to learn to  do right, that we lose sight of the motivating passion that inspires us to keep going no matter how many times we fall & fail. Our motivating passion gives us no other choic, something inside just won't let us stop. 

I think we begin to find that motivating passion when we ask the question, "Will Jesus remember me?"