Honoring Christ In Human Rights-Day 2
Everyone has the Same Story In John 13, in the wake of Jesus washing the disciples feet, predicting his coming betrayal, and foretelling of Peter’s coming unfaithfulness and three denials, the disciples were feeling pretty insecure, to say the least. In John 14:1, Jesus comforts his disciples and encourages them to “not let their hearts be troubled.” What is most interesting about Jesus’ encouragement in this passage of John’s Gospel...
Honoring Christ In Human Rights-Day 1
Our Homelessness The Scripture tells us that we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The word glory in Greek is a diverse word. Kabod means a weighty presence in which to dwell. God’s presence is our home. The Garden of Eden was the first home, or kabod where God dwelled with man. Sadly, when we chose to sin, we all became homeless in the...
Honoring Christ In Toil And Suffering- Day 3
Over at MakeJesusCulture.com Aaron Keyes spoke about sorrow and how you work through that in a team in order to walk through hard issues together as you create: how living life among and with one another actually girds up a household of creatives that they may live out a fuller, Christlike resilience in the teeth of suffering. In the background, while he spoke hung the great wave of Kanagawa. The wave creates a great piece of chaos...
Honoring Christ In Toil And Suffering- Day 2
Over at MakeJesusCulture.com we had Latiphah Alattis talk about songwriting, but in the midst of it she grew very honest about her father’s funeral. Her father died young, all things considered, and she was a younger woman when it happened. As a Christian songwriter, the despair really sang pretty deep into her melancholy spirit and festered there. Meanwhile, the parishioners and fellow citizens all passed her by ignorant of the...
Honoring Christ In Toil And Suffering- Day 1
At MakeJesusCulture.com we had several speakers talk on toil and suffering in their work. One of them was Harrison Hollingsworth, the New York City ballet conductor and bassoonist who leads worshippers at Redeemer Presbyterian Downtown. His main talk revolved around how meaningless our toil is without relationships – particularly relationship with the father of heavenly lights. And this of course applies to all made things, whether...
Honoring Christ In Our Singing-Day 6
TARGET IN SINGING We’ve considered our singing through the use of these words; total, text and tone, and now we must add one more perspective to the list—our target. Target with 1 – 2 – 3 Mike Cosper in his book Rhythms of Grace offers some helpful insight to our conversation here in what he calls “1-2-3 Worship.” He says that our singing should have three audiences or targets: God, each other, and...
Honoring Christ In Our Singing-Day 5
TONE IN SINGING Recently, I found myself philosophizing with friends over the state of singing in the church[jm1] . We talked about how the church has grown too “happy;” wherein we pop songs like worship pills and it seems to stink of inauthentic denial. Jesus, in his perfect, fully God, fully man state, here on earth, experienced the full tones of human emotion. He wept, he laughed and he got angry and tired[jm2], etc. He...
Honoring Christ In Our Singing-Day 4
TEXT IN SINGING | Pt. 2 Continuing from Day 3, one more thing emerges for our consideration in our songs. If we think back to the words of Colossians 3:16, our singing is actually supposed to “teach and admonish one another in all wisdom, through singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” Dave Yauk in The Tempo of Discipleship: The Rudiments and Rhythms to Shaping Followers of Christ helps us devise some quick learning...