Suburban Church Corvallis: Recent Episodes
Suburban Christian Church
Ecclesiastes is a challenging book to read and understand, but near the end of the book the author gives us the key when he evaluates the thoughts of the Teacher that make up the bulk of the book. He reminds us to live with wisdom while also encouraging us to trust God as we make our way through an earthly life that is often unpredictable and uncontrollable. That lesson gets applied to Ecclesiastes’ view of our work and labor as well. It reminds us that we are called to engage responsibly and productively with our work, while also trusting God for the results and not asking our job to provide things it was never intended to provide (like the basis of our identity and worth).
Our relationships help determine the direction and quality of our lives, but influence in relationships can go both ways. In the story of Priscilla and Aquila, a married couple from the first century, we can learn valuable lessons about how we can have a positive impact in the lives of those who matter most to us. First, we can make an impact in their lives by giving them our time, energy, and attention. But to do this well we have to make intentional choices to engage well and not just go with decisions that seem easy. Second, to make an impact in their lives at times we will need to have the courage to confront and correct them. When we do that we do well to remember we should do it privately and we always need to check our motives, making sure that we truly have their best interest at heart.
It’s common today to see people take Bible verses out of context, twisting them and misapplying them to support all sorts of ideas that aren’t true. If we as a church want to base everything we do on the Bible, then it is critical that we know how to study and apply the Bible to our lives correctly. We can best do that when we pay attention to the context of a verse, let the Bible help us interpret the Bible, and only then apply it to our lives. By doing that with John 14.13-14 we realize that Jesus isn’t offering us a blanket promise to do anything we ask as long as we tag “in Jesus’ name” on the end of the prayer. No, the context of the passage and other Biblical passages that talk about prayer remind us that—when it comes to prayer—in ways we might not fully understand many things matter and factor into God’s response to our prayers. Our relationships with others matter. Our motives matter. Our faith matters, and—most importantly—God’s will matters. When we keep these things in mind we can pray as God invites us to—asking boldly for what we need but always trusting the results to His wisdom, goodness, and timing.
It’s common today to see people take Bible verses out of context, twisting them and misapplying them to support all sorts of ideas that aren’t true. If we as a church want to base everything we do on the Bible, then it is critical that we know how to study and apply the Bible to our lives correctly. We can best do that when we pay attention to the context of a verse, let the Bible help us interpret the Bible, and only then apply it to our lives. By doing that with John 14.13-14 we realize that Jesus isn’t offering us a blanket promise to do anything we ask as long as we tag “in Jesus’ name” on the end of the prayer. No, the context of the passage and other Biblical passages that talk about prayer remind us that—when it comes to prayer—in ways we might not fully understand many things matter and factor into God’s response to our prayers. Our relationships with others matter. Our motives matter. Our faith matters, and—most importantly—God’s will matters. When we keep these things in mind we can pray as God invites us to—asking boldly for what we need but always trusting the results to His wisdom, goodness, and timing.
While the Beatitudes talk about the character of Jesus’ disciples, in the verses that follow Jesus uses images of salt and light to describe the impact His followers can have on the world. Salt reminds us that we are called to live differently, to be distinct from the world in order to have a potent and preserving impact on it. Light reminds us that we are called to go into the world and share the good news of life that can be found in Jesus. In using these images Jesus was both critiquing the nation of Israel for failing to live out their unique mission while also inviting us to consider how we can best impact our world when we remember the new identity we have in Jesus and the full mission that God is inviting us, in His power, to live out in the world.
One of the hardest pills to swallow in the Beatitudes is when Jesus says that we are blessed when we are persecuted. When we follow Jesus we shouldn’t be surprised if we face persecution or resistance, because the Beatitudes are an invitation to live against the grain of our culture—and that always generates push back. While Christians in American rarely face physical violence, we are often insulted for our faith and we have to listen as people speak falsely about our beliefs. We face persecution both because of our commitment to God’s full definition or righteousness and our acceptance of the exclusive claims Jesus made about Himself. While persecution isn’t fun, it can help us follow Jesus by doing a deep work of spiritual formation in us and by creating a space for God’s power to work in our weakness. If we choose to see persecution as something that God can use for our good we can thrive in the midst of those trials.
When Jesus said “Blessed are the pure in heart” he was tapping into two important things—his culture’s focus on ritual religious purity and the idea that one’s heart is the center of your very being. In calling for purity of heart he was calling his followers to go beyond the letter of the law, choosing instead to allow God’s spirit to transform them internally so they became the kind of people who lived out the law from the inside out. When His followers do that, God promises that they will see God. While that will fully and finally be true when Christ returns, in real ways we can see God today as the Holy Spirit helps us understand and follow the Jesus we meet in the Gospels. That Holy Spirit can help us live with integrity before God and respond to his call for “purity of heart” today.
In the Beatitudes Jesus says “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” Mercy is a major theme in the Bible, and it can be used in a number of ways. But all of those uses have an idea in common: mercy involves choosing to give people something they don’t deserve. As followers of Jesus we are called to show mercy to others because God has shown mercy to us when we didn’t deserve it. Part of how we respond to the love God has shown us is by loving others we aren’t supposed to love. When God’s people truly show mercy to others they become a signpost that points to Jesus, and their actions can help break the cycles of escalating revenge that have marked our world since the fall.
God promises to bless and satisfy those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Scripture shows that Biblical righteousness has both a vertical component (about being in a right relationship with God) and a horizontal component (about our relationships with others and making things right in the world). God is calling the church to be a prophetic critique of an alternative community for the world, and we can only do that if we embrace the full, Biblical definition of righteousness. If we allow the church’s definition of righteousness to fracture along cultural lines the church loses its prophetic voice and power. To stay faithful to God’s full definition of righteousness we need to be committed the practice of regularly reading Scripture and also we need to be mindful of which voices we are allowing to shape us. It is only be holding on to our uniquely different calling that we can be the unapologetically different community the world needs.
Meek is a hard thing to define, as we tend to think of it as weakness. But the Biblical idea of meekness is strength under control, it is choosing to lay your own strength aside as you trust that God—in his strength—will help and vindicate you. In this Beatitude Jesus quotes directly from Psalm 37, using his listener’s knowledge of that Psalm to reinforce the idea that those who receive an inheritance from the Lord are those who trust in Him and in His strength. We can put this into practice in our lives today by trusting that God is at work even when we don’t see it, by trusting that God will provide for all we truly need, and by inviting the Holy Spirit to help us imitate Jesus, the Biblical model of meekness.
One of the hardest attitudes to understand is how it can be possible that those “who mourn” are actually blessed. It turns out the already/not yet nature of the kingdom speaks to that issue. Because the kingdom is already here, the Holy Spirit is currently available to comfort those who mourn. But because the kingdom is not yet fully here, we realize that it is only in the future that those who mourn will be fully and finally comforted. While we tend to think of mourning as something that is thrust on us when the unexpected happens, Scripture actually invites us to mourn in several ways—all of which can lead to a deeper understanding of God’s blessing in our lives. We are invited to examine our hearts and mourn our own sin. We are invited to mourn the brokenness of the world and the systems and structures that make that possible. And we are invited to consider and mourn the way that we as individuals have contributed to and participated in the broken structures and systems that mark our world. Finally, we see that God can use our mourning to help others. He can use our experience of mourning to enable us to share His comfort with others who are mourning. And he can use our experience of mourning to catalyze us and embolden us to fight against the injustice and brokenness we see in our world.
In the Beatitudes Jesus gives a surprising list of who is invited into the kingdom of God and what it looks like to live as citizens of God’s kingdom. The list begins by saying “blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Someone is poor in spirit when they recognize their state of true spiritual bankruptcy before God. Nothing we have and nothing we do can save us, so it is true that “blessed are” those who realize they can do nothing but rely on god’s mercy. It can be hard to remember that truth and live out of that truth in our world because every other voice in our culture pushes against that. For example, one part of the “American Dream” is the idea that anyone can work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that we have it within ourselves to make a better life on our own. When that thinking spills over into our spiritual life we are in a dangerous place, so we need to constantly be vigilant against that and work to stay rooted in God’s Spirit and power so that we remember our true spiritual state and continue to rely on His grace both to enter and to continue to live in the Kingdom.
For thousands of years people have been asking the question “what is the good life and how can I live it?” Most world religions try to answer that question as well. Jesus answered it in a surprising way, by talking about how the good life can only truly be found by living in the Kingdom of God. In Jesus’ day there were widely different views (held by groups like the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots) about what would help God’s kingdom come. Jesus swept all of those to the side and instead introduced a whole new vision of what life in God’s kingdom looked liked. In the Beatitudes, Jesus paints a picture of what life in God’s kingdom is like—and it is very different than the answer to “how do I find the good life?” that we often hear in culture. Jesus teaching shows that the only way to live the good life is by becoming the kind of person who lives out the Beatitudes, and the Bible reminds us that it is only through the resurrection of Jesus that we have access to the power of the Holy Spirit to truly live that way.
John 11 is a critical story in the Gospel of John because it serves as the hinge between the two parts of the book. The response of the religious leaders to Lazarus’ resurrection is to set in motion a plan that leads to the execution of Jesus. But this story, from the perspective of Lazarus’ sisters, is really about waiting. And it teaches us important lessons about who Jesus is. Jesus loves us and can speak to us individually in ways that we can understand. He is with us in our sorrow, grieving when we grieve. And he can use the timing of things in our lives to bring glory to God. Our job in the waiting is to trust Him, even if we can’t make sense of the timing of it all. And we need to remember that in times of waiting God can do a unique work in us, helping us put down deeper roots and deepen our trust and faith in him.
In the first half of his Gospel, John gives us four different stories where Jesus interacts with different Jewish holy days or festivals. In each of these instances Jesus takes the imagery associated with that day and applies it to Himself, making incredible claims about His relationship with God and what God was doing in and through Him. It reminds us of something that Jesus knew to be true—that the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus. As we read the Bible that way we can encounter Jesus there and know him more deeply. But, as we do that, we also have to be aware of ways that we can fall into the same trap the religious leaders of the day fell into—where we get so focused on certain things that we miss the larger picture. We need the Holy Spirit’s help to point out ways to us that, in our own relationship with God, we may be so invested in practices that point to Jesus that we miss the reality of Jesus working in our midst.
In pair of back to back stories in John 4 and 5 we see Jesus interact with two people—both of whom were outcasts in their society—in remarkable ways. As we compare the stories of Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan woman at the well and the paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda we see that Jesus loves people so much that he is willing to break barriers and reach out to them just as they are. But, as we also see in both stories, Jesus loves everyone too much to let them stay just as they are. He always offers them a chance to change and move towards the life He has for them.
The first chapter of John beautifully begins the disciple's gospel that Jesus is not just a good teacher or prophet, but God dwelt in bodily form.
John has written specific details about Jesus so that everyone who reads and engages in the book of John would see that Jesus is the Messiah, the Savior of the world, and the Son of God. John is likely writing both to call unbelievers to faith in Jesus and to provide confidence for those believers struggling in their faith.