Summary

This is our third Sunday of our ‘Season of Intentional Giving’ – a season to focus us on how we are choosing intentionally/deliberately to respond to God’s grace in our lives.

We began on September 8 by looking at our response to the giving nature of God by being givers… Even as God loves by giving us Jesus Christ – whom we understand as the pouring out of all of GodSelf into all of creation – so we get to reflect and return that love by the giving of ourselves in what Bonhoeffer described as ‘costly discipleship! As we follow in the way of Jesus Christ, the more we give of ourselves, and the more we look like God!

Last week (September 15) we looked at parables describing the searching nature of God, whom Jesus compared to the shepherd searching after his lost sheep, the woman searching for her lost coin, and the searching father longing for his son to come home. There is a searching something about our God that LONGS to see us coming home. As we live in ways that look like God’s searching, poured-out-for-others love, so that is us demonstrating our homecoming!

This week (September 22) it’s about us continuing in that flow of intentionality, looking at the ‘to-be-praised-at-all-times’ nature of God. We do so as we explore whom exactly it is that we are allowing to define our lives, set our life-agendas – just whom exactly it is that we are intentionally serving!   Remember that Bob Dylan classic: You have to serve somebody…? Whom or what do you intentionally allow to be the controlling agenda-setter of your life?

I was horrified to read a blog by Church Leader and Teacher Carey Nieuwhof[i] who recently highlighted this question, asking whether we have any idea of what’s currently influencing how we think & live? He writes about algorithms,  claiming that much of our lives are being run by them. They drive the suggestions we see on the online sites we may visit, from Amazon to Netflix to Spotify or Prime. ‘Because you watched X, you’ll probably like Y.” Or those annoying online advertisements that keep popping up? Carey Nieuwhof warns that these modern computer algorithms threaten our ability to think freely! We may be looking something up on, say, Google, and we may THINK we are getting objective results – BUT WE’RE NOT! The app itself decides what we should see and what we shouldn’t. They give us the ILLUSION of being in charge of our lives when, actually, THEY are!

He describes at least 3 potential challenges associated with our living like that:

We loop into ever deeper confirmation bias.[ii]

We become more tribal and extreme. [iii]

We lose the ability to think freely[iv].

He writes: If you allow someone else to get to know or to define you more than what you know or deliberately choose to define for yourself – game over! Instead, we have to get to know and to embrace and to be defined by the story we deliberately allow to be within us![v]

I believe that THIS may be the very main point of Psalm 113 – probably written around 536 BC, long before computer algorithms, but when people were still being subjected to all sorts of outside forces and influences!

They were returning from exile FULL of externally imposed Babylonian influences, and desperately needing to own again something of just what was most essential to their lives!

Like so many of us! Even if we’re not into computers and the internet, perhaps it’s the TV programs we watch, or other people’s opinions that we listen to probably too much – that we allow to drive and influence us: Our wanting to be popular/people-pleasers perhaps, at work, in the sport’s/social club…

Psalm 113 calls us back to living life-agendas that are not formed or manipulated by anything other than an awareness of God who we believe is at the center of everything!

It calls for an intentional re-orientation/ re-alignment of our priorities. Our lives are NOT to be restricted to the life-sucking serving of just our own prejudices and biases… They are to be blown wide open by the inclus