One day God planted a stake in the ground

God spoke
        Darkness came
                        God was there

God spoke
        Light came
                        God was there

God spoke
        Creation overflowed
                        God was there

One day God planted a stake in the ground

"Everything I have is yours
    - share it with me or use it for yourselves"

They ate
         A different light came
         They were hidden from each other
                          But God was there

"Everything I have is mine"
    - but still a voice within whispers of a different way

One day God planted a stake in the ground

"This is my body given for you"
    - a gate or a stumbling block

Take, eat
          Their eyes were opened
                           And God was there

"Lord, it's hard to give my body to serve you"
    - but the Spirit comes and brings strength within

Still....

Sometimes when we speak
           Darkness comes
                           God be there

Sometimes when we speak
            Light comes
                            God is there

Lord help us speak
            "Your kingdom come"
                             God is here

Learning to pray

In a couple of weeks time I will have been a Christian for 13 years. I guess I was pretty arrogant, and just expected that I would become a great Christian quickly and having done that would go onto the next thing! Growing in humility in the time since then has been one of the best and one of the hardest parts of the journey that God has me on. The last few months I have been thinking a lot more about prayer, and how we participate in God's kingdom through praying: "YOUR kingdom come, YOUR will be done", this is not something that you can say with integrity from a heart of pride. Ideally my motivation will always be seeing God's kingdom rule and reign becoming a reality around me, but the process of creating in me clean hands and a pure heart (Ps 24:4) is not complete yet! So one thing I have been learning that helps with right motivation is that Jesus wants to be engaged with us as we pray. This has been an odd revelation since it isn't like I have only just started to pray! But pausing and waiting to see what He wants to say to me or to those I am praying with has introduced a new dimension to prayer for me.

 

In my homegroup over the last couple of weeks we have been looking at the teaching of Jesus on prayer, and we did a great exercise that I would recommend to anyone. Taking the Lord's prayer in Matthew 6:9-13 as a framework, we read out each line and then each of us privately wrote our own version. It made me realise what a powerfully concise set of words it is, and helped me see this very familiar prayer in a new light. This is what I wrote:

 

Daddy of all of us, you are holy and you are in heaven watching over us...

We want things to be like they are heaven all around us

which means everyone loving you as our king and doing things the way you know is best.

Give us all we need to live well today.

As we release people from the things we think they owe us,

please take the burden of things we don't need to carry away from us.

Help us to turn away from all that distracts us from you and your plans for the world.

Your kingdom rules when we love, show mercy, act justly and walk humbly,

it is only your Holy Spirit that gives us the power to do this

and it is for your glory when people see you in us.

Thank you that you are present in every moment of time.

Amen



Place and space

Psalm 84 opens with the words 'How lovely is your dwelling place O Lord', the NET Bible translates this as 'How lovely is the place where you live, O Lord who reigns over all!'. Of course the Psalmist is referring to being in the Temple in Jerusalem with God, this was the special place where heaven and earth met in the Holy of Holies.

Since you could only go into the Holy of Holies once a year and then only if you were High Priest, there were not many people who were dwelling with God.  The Psalmist was desperate to even just be in the courts of the Temple and satisfied that God was near. The arrival of Jesus into the world changed the place where God dwelled.  Jesus is God, and so wherever He was there was a meeting of heaven and earth and an opening of the divine.  We often call this the Kingdom of God, and where Jesus was, there the Kingdom started to become a reality on earth. 

This is what makes being a Christian so amazing because when Jesus was killed by us, that was not the end, He broke through death into new life and assures us that by having faith that He is God we can both still be sure of His presence with us always (Matt 28:20) and  that He has opened a connection between heaven and earth (Heb 8-10), a way for us to be in the presence of God.  This is not just a hope for the future, it is a hope for now, that as Christians we can expect the Kingdom of God to be manifest where we are because God is with us there. 

So anyway, all this got me thinking about place and space....

At the moment in the UK, the two areas where people increasingly have a Christian engagement are in cathedrals (attendance up 30% in the last 10 years according to Church of England stats) and in churches with a Pentecostal emphasis (see Christian research stats), i.e. those churches that emphasise direct personal experience of God and the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers.  I think this should be of no surprise to us.  We live in a culture that is looking for meaning in life, and essentially because God created everything this means that searching for meaning is searching for God. Searching for where He dwells. 

I think this is where place becomes important. When Christians gather, there is God (Matt 18:20). When this happens repeatedly over many years in places that act as memorials to encounter with the living God, in places that proclaim His glory through their beauty, then I think it helps us get caught up in the big story of God that stretches through the past, present and future, anchoring us and giving us hope. I think this is what cathedrals are starting to increasingly be symbols of, that God is present in places, He is not remote from us.

I think this is also why space is important.  Churches (or us in our individual Christian lives) that make space for an encounter with God, will experience an encounter with God. Churches with a Pentecostal emphasis seek to do this and teach this. The book of Ephesians talks about us being a dwelling place for God as individuals (Eph 3:17) and as a corporate body, a community built together by God (Eph 2:22). And because we are known fully by God, making space for an encounter with Him brings meaning, understanding and transformation to our lives.

Back to Psalm 84 then, and the reason for the name of this blog. I want to be where God dwells, my heart and soul yearn for Him. I want to see the places where He is dwelling and at work, and I want to make space for Him to dwell in my life and the lives of people around me.