On Sunday I arrived in Jeffreys Bay, very much ready for a holiday after probably the longest and busiest term I've ever had at Rhodes University. I am still hoping for a vacation filled with seeking God's face and hearing his voice, getting my mind and heart in order for the next semester and the plans I must make for next year.
When evening comes, I sat down and watch the news to find that Morgan Tsvangirai had withdrawn from Zimbabwe's runoff elections this week. My immediate reaction was, "I need to pray." I'm so saddened that a faint glimmer of hope for Zimbabwe has died. Nevertheless, I can only think that the MDC made the right decision: if Tsvangirai had won the run-off, Zanu-PF may well have unleashed civil war, as Mugabe has threatened many times over the past few weeks. Even after the withdrawal, the situation is still perilous. How long can this last?
So after the news and after I finished supper, I knelt down and flipped through my Bible for one of those nice psalms that rages at the injustice of it all and calls down thunder and lightning from heaven on evil people who just carry on prospering. I settled on Psalm 10, which expressed more or less what I was feeling at the time. The wonderful thing about psalms like these, though, is that they rarely end in anger. Through writing the psalm, the author works through his emotions to the point where he is able to give them all to God, and trust him to deal with the wicked. (Incidentally, this is also Exhibit A in my argument that emo rock can add a lot to our understanding of worship!) Psalm 10 ends this way:
"Lord, you know the hopes of the helpless.
Surely you will listen to their cries and comfort them.
You will bring justice to the orphans and the oppressed,
So people can no longer terrify them." (Psalm 10:17–18, NLT)
I love it! God will not let the helpless remain helpless. Justice will come, if not in this life then in the life to come. And the Lord is still in control.
All of this explains why I was so amused when Mugabe pronounced last week that only God could remove him from office. Funnily enough, a prayer point in my church's bulletin from Sunday 15 June (a few days before Mugabe said this) said "Pray for the land of ZIMBABWE...only God can restore this land and its people." When I was shopping with a Zimbabwean friend on Sunday before I left to Grahamstown, she took one look at the newspapers and said "I'm so glad [Mugabe's] said that. It challenges God to take him out."
I, for one, hope God rises to the provocation, but I know that his plans are not ours and his sense of timing is far better than our limited thinking. He doesn't need to pander to Robert Mugabe's threats, but I know he loves the people of Zim. So let's pray for them right now. Pray that the Lord will be glorified in that country, despite all human plans.
Please pray also for us: a group of seven of us from Grahamstown Baptist Church's 222 Men's Ministry are travelling up to Zimbabwe to join in Chisipite Baptist Church's men's camp at Mana Pools on the Zambezi. It promises to be an amazing time of teaching and relaxation, but pray that we'll be safe travelling through Zimbabwe on our way there and back, and that we can be a blessing and encouragement to those who are suffering there. When we come back, I'll let you know how it went.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Monday, June 09, 2008
A question of unity
Yesterday I was trawling the web and found some interesting articles reporting back on the National Initiative for Reformation of South Africa (NIRSA) consultation that I attended in April. For my whole take on the consultation, visit my post on the Christians @ Rhodes blog: http://christiansatrhodes.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/are-you-ready-to-start-reforming-south-africa/.
Dion Forster, a Methodist theologian from Somerset West, had some great insights on NIRSA in his blog, which you can dig out of the April archive at http://www.spirituality.org.za/www.spirituality.org.za/2008_04_01_archive.html.
Then Ebenezer Ntlali, an Anglican archdeacon from King William's Town, had some good things to say about the consultation, but was also worried that organisations like the SA Council of Churches weren't represented properly and there wasn't enough time for discussion. His report-back is here: http://www.diocesegrahamstown.co.za/articles/nirsarep.html.
But by far the most "interesting" of the accounts to me was this one by Dr Peter Hammond of Africa Christian Action: http://www.christianaction.org.za/articles/nirsa%20Reportback.htm.
Peter Hammond gives what basically looks like a typed-out version of his notes on the consultation, with a bit of his own personal opinion thrown in. He describes thoughts that the conference was completely sidetracked for an afternoon and a morning, including two of the talks I found most insightful. But what puzzled me the most about his critique of the consultation is that he was coming from such a different ideological position to mine that from time to time I had trouble believing that he was speaking about the same talks I heard. As a linguist, I was fascinated at how two people could have interpreted the same talks so incredibly differently.
What this all goes to show is that Christian unity is a hard thing. The Bible tells us plenty of times that revival and reformation won't happen unless his people are unified. And what God has said to us as a nation through many different movements since 1994 confirms this. But can we get there? We don't only have theological differences to worry about; when we speak about reforming the nation, very often political differences become involved and it gets terribly tangled... if we're all relying on our own strength.
It takes brave people of vision, conciliatory people, wise people to negotiate all these differences and decide what we must agree on, and what we can "agree to disagree" on. Or that's what I thought when I read some of these accounts yesterday. But wait, I have a feeling that there's someone better suited to the job. Someone who's in all of us and knows exactly how we all tick. His name is the Holy Spirit. Only in him can we really be unified.
So, I'll leave the last word to another online NIRSA commentator, Johan Boot from Housechurch SA. You can read his report-back on NIRSA at http://housechurch.co.za/2008/05/nirsa-consultat.html.
He says, "My strong conviction during and after the Consultation, was that the only way that this Declaration, would become lived out reality is, if we, as the followers of Jesus, were to put aside our power brokering that so often threatens to divide us from our fellow followers and which prevents us from being a powerful influence in the society of which we are a part. The way forward involves us putting aside our personal agendas to be the biggest and the best and submitting first to God and then to one another, so that the Kingdom of God becomes a reality."
Amen, brother! May we seek God's Kingdom first, and the Holy Spirit will deal with the rest (Matthew 6:33).
Dion Forster, a Methodist theologian from Somerset West, had some great insights on NIRSA in his blog, which you can dig out of the April archive at http://www.spirituality.org.za/www.spirituality.org.za/2008_04_01_archive.html.
Then Ebenezer Ntlali, an Anglican archdeacon from King William's Town, had some good things to say about the consultation, but was also worried that organisations like the SA Council of Churches weren't represented properly and there wasn't enough time for discussion. His report-back is here: http://www.diocesegrahamstown.co.za/articles/nirsarep.html.
But by far the most "interesting" of the accounts to me was this one by Dr Peter Hammond of Africa Christian Action: http://www.christianaction.org.za/articles/nirsa%20Reportback.htm.
Peter Hammond gives what basically looks like a typed-out version of his notes on the consultation, with a bit of his own personal opinion thrown in. He describes thoughts that the conference was completely sidetracked for an afternoon and a morning, including two of the talks I found most insightful. But what puzzled me the most about his critique of the consultation is that he was coming from such a different ideological position to mine that from time to time I had trouble believing that he was speaking about the same talks I heard. As a linguist, I was fascinated at how two people could have interpreted the same talks so incredibly differently.
What this all goes to show is that Christian unity is a hard thing. The Bible tells us plenty of times that revival and reformation won't happen unless his people are unified. And what God has said to us as a nation through many different movements since 1994 confirms this. But can we get there? We don't only have theological differences to worry about; when we speak about reforming the nation, very often political differences become involved and it gets terribly tangled... if we're all relying on our own strength.
It takes brave people of vision, conciliatory people, wise people to negotiate all these differences and decide what we must agree on, and what we can "agree to disagree" on. Or that's what I thought when I read some of these accounts yesterday. But wait, I have a feeling that there's someone better suited to the job. Someone who's in all of us and knows exactly how we all tick. His name is the Holy Spirit. Only in him can we really be unified.
So, I'll leave the last word to another online NIRSA commentator, Johan Boot from Housechurch SA. You can read his report-back on NIRSA at http://housechurch.co.za/2008/05/nirsa-consultat.html.
He says, "My strong conviction during and after the Consultation, was that the only way that this Declaration, would become lived out reality is, if we, as the followers of Jesus, were to put aside our power brokering that so often threatens to divide us from our fellow followers and which prevents us from being a powerful influence in the society of which we are a part. The way forward involves us putting aside our personal agendas to be the biggest and the best and submitting first to God and then to one another, so that the Kingdom of God becomes a reality."
Amen, brother! May we seek God's Kingdom first, and the Holy Spirit will deal with the rest (Matthew 6:33).
Monday, June 02, 2008
Let's look up!
This past week I've been reading through a bit of Numbers, which tells the story of how the Israelites wandered through the wilderness, continually growing and stumbling in their relationship with God. Every now and then they have big failures of faith, and God reacts by saying "You're not ready to enter the Promised Land. I guess I'll have to hold you back longer."
But what really got to me was that these failures of faith didn't often happen in the places where you'd expect them. When the Israelites were preparing to fight a battle against a nation that stood in their way (like the inhabitants of Arad in Numbers 21:1-3 or Sihon and Og in 21:21-35), you'd expect them to be shaking in their boots, but instead they pumped up their faith and they had no problems gaining the victory with God's strength.
Instead, it was in the dreary, routine, desert wandering times that their faith failed. Sometimes this even happened straight after the high of a battle won, when you'd expect them to be ready to believe God for anything. For instance, they started complaining in Numbers 21:4, just after having flattened Arad in Numbers 21:3! Why is that?
I believe the answer is that they stopped looking up to God for strength. When we go through unspectacular, low-level hardship as the Israelites did in the wilderness, it's easy to think we should be able to make it through on our own without God. But then, when we stop depending on God's help, we look around and see our bleak circumstances and complain, instead of looking up and seeing things from God's perspective.
Even Moses was guilty of this. In Numbers 20 :1-13, the Israelites complain that they have no water. Moses asks God what to do and God shows him a rock which he should command to pour out his water. Now I've heard that in the Sinai desert, there are certain rocks which hold in large aquifers filled with water, and if you just hit the rock hard enough, it'll give and the water will come rushing through. So Moses, instead of commanding the rock to pour out water, and trusting God for the rest, decides he can do this in his own strength and hits the rock. It was a terrible failure of faith. Because of that, God didn't let him enter the Promised Land.
I know I try to do things in my own strength that I should be doing with God, all the time. Or there are times when God asks me to pray for someone and I don't, because I don't have the faith that God will do what he's told me to ask him to do. How dumb is that! But when I look at God, everything is put into perspective. Some of my greatest "Aha!" moments come not when I'm sitting around, trying to puzzle an issue out, but when I'm talking with God about it. It's as the song says:
"Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in his wonderful face,
And the things of the earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace."
But that also needs to be complemented with another verse my Mom came up with:
"Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in his wonderful face,
And the things of the earth will grow crystal clear
In the light of his glory and grace."
When we look up to God, all of our circumstances grow both strangely dim and crystal clear at the same time. Strangely dim, because our circumstances matter less than God's power to change them. Crystal clear, because we can see exactly how they fit into his master plan.
In fact, this principle is at the heart of the Christian worldview: first, we look up to God, and then see the "things of the earth" from his perspective, through the eyes of faith. I hope that in future blog posts God will enable me to show how looking up changes the way we see specific things happening in his world.
I've been particularly encouraged by signs that the Church in South Africa is learning to look up. For instance, when some Christian leaders saw bleak circumstances in this land, corruption and weak leadership in government, poverty, violence, idolatry, they decided to look up and so the vision for the National Initiative for Reformation of South Africa (NIRSA) was born.
And it spills over into my daily life too: I can easily become discouraged by the amount of work I have to do for exams and research projects: work I can battle through in my own strength, but do so much better with God's. I need to learn to look up from my academic work and see God's perspective on it more and more often. He will give me the motivation to carry on.
So let's look up! Let's look to God today and see what he wants us to see, so we can live as he wants us to live.
But what really got to me was that these failures of faith didn't often happen in the places where you'd expect them. When the Israelites were preparing to fight a battle against a nation that stood in their way (like the inhabitants of Arad in Numbers 21:1-3 or Sihon and Og in 21:21-35), you'd expect them to be shaking in their boots, but instead they pumped up their faith and they had no problems gaining the victory with God's strength.
Instead, it was in the dreary, routine, desert wandering times that their faith failed. Sometimes this even happened straight after the high of a battle won, when you'd expect them to be ready to believe God for anything. For instance, they started complaining in Numbers 21:4, just after having flattened Arad in Numbers 21:3! Why is that?
I believe the answer is that they stopped looking up to God for strength. When we go through unspectacular, low-level hardship as the Israelites did in the wilderness, it's easy to think we should be able to make it through on our own without God. But then, when we stop depending on God's help, we look around and see our bleak circumstances and complain, instead of looking up and seeing things from God's perspective.
Even Moses was guilty of this. In Numbers 20 :1-13, the Israelites complain that they have no water. Moses asks God what to do and God shows him a rock which he should command to pour out his water. Now I've heard that in the Sinai desert, there are certain rocks which hold in large aquifers filled with water, and if you just hit the rock hard enough, it'll give and the water will come rushing through. So Moses, instead of commanding the rock to pour out water, and trusting God for the rest, decides he can do this in his own strength and hits the rock. It was a terrible failure of faith. Because of that, God didn't let him enter the Promised Land.
I know I try to do things in my own strength that I should be doing with God, all the time. Or there are times when God asks me to pray for someone and I don't, because I don't have the faith that God will do what he's told me to ask him to do. How dumb is that! But when I look at God, everything is put into perspective. Some of my greatest "Aha!" moments come not when I'm sitting around, trying to puzzle an issue out, but when I'm talking with God about it. It's as the song says:
"Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in his wonderful face,
And the things of the earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace."
But that also needs to be complemented with another verse my Mom came up with:
"Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in his wonderful face,
And the things of the earth will grow crystal clear
In the light of his glory and grace."
When we look up to God, all of our circumstances grow both strangely dim and crystal clear at the same time. Strangely dim, because our circumstances matter less than God's power to change them. Crystal clear, because we can see exactly how they fit into his master plan.
In fact, this principle is at the heart of the Christian worldview: first, we look up to God, and then see the "things of the earth" from his perspective, through the eyes of faith. I hope that in future blog posts God will enable me to show how looking up changes the way we see specific things happening in his world.
I've been particularly encouraged by signs that the Church in South Africa is learning to look up. For instance, when some Christian leaders saw bleak circumstances in this land, corruption and weak leadership in government, poverty, violence, idolatry, they decided to look up and so the vision for the National Initiative for Reformation of South Africa (NIRSA) was born.
And it spills over into my daily life too: I can easily become discouraged by the amount of work I have to do for exams and research projects: work I can battle through in my own strength, but do so much better with God's. I need to learn to look up from my academic work and see God's perspective on it more and more often. He will give me the motivation to carry on.
So let's look up! Let's look to God today and see what he wants us to see, so we can live as he wants us to live.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)