A Voice of Sorrow

Flourishing:

If you put your ear to the Bible, you can often hear the sadness.  Psalm 81:13 is one example.  Can you hear the pleading, the sorrow in the Lord's voice as He declares, "Oh that My people would listen to Me."  Those are not the words of one who just wants to get his own way.  That lament comes from a heart that wants what is best for His wayward people. A couple of verses before we read these sad words, "My people did not listen to My voice. . . . So I gave them over to the stubbornness of their heart"  (Ps 81:11–12).  "Gave them over," you find those words three times in Romans 1:18-32.  We mistakenly think that Romans 1 is referring to some particularly evil group of people--a place where wickedness is so bad that property values plummet.  Or, we figure it is about some particularly wicked time, perhaps even a prediction of the final falling away before the Lord returns to bring things to a final conclusion.  I don't think so.  I think what Paul is describing is the condition of people, apart from God's grace ever since the first sin in the Garden of Eden.  Like our first ancestors we continue to believe the lie and grasp for that which we think will make us better, but which, instead, gives incalculable misery. You have to focus your listening.  Somehow you have to cut through the din of racket that fills our world wall-to-wall, but if you do, you'll hear a loving, sad voice, "Oh that My people would listen to Me."  It is the voice of a loving Father to his wayward children.  He wants them to flourish.  He knows they will wither and die if they persist in going their own way.  To force us would be contrary to the nature of love, so He pleads. LISTEN! It's STTA. Click here, to find out about has been done so that each of us can have eternal life--a life begins here in this messy world, where God desires that we make a flourish.

Some Thoughts on the Death of Fred Phelps:

Something To Think About, Sad! 3/22

Almost everything that was said about the late Fred Phelps was wrong.  I suppose that is appropriate.  His life was wrong. Fred Phelps was often called "Pastor Fred Phelps," or "Fred Phelps, Pastor. . . ."  He was not a pastor.  The word "pastor" really means shepherd; the model Pastor is our Lord, Psalm 23, and John 10.  Perhaps there was a level at which Phelps had that caring-for-the-flock mode, but it never showed in his pubic persona, and, since that image was one he clearly cultivated, he should not be known by a title that doesn't fit. Some called the leader of Westboro Baptist Church, so called, a Fundamentalist.  Again wrong.  Hatred is not a fundamental point of any faith that is remotely Biblical.  I was nurtured in Christian Fundamentalism, and while some have veered off into the realms of hatred--though I know of no one to the extreme of Phelps--hatred is not one of the Fundamentals.   Phelps was often called a Christian, as though his venom characterized faith in Christ.  I am unable to see someone's heart, and I claim no special knowledge, but it is hard to make the claim that  Phelps was a Christian, in the sense in which the Bible uses the term.  He certainly failed to model the poverty of spirit, meekness, brokenness over sin, and self-focused--as opposed to others-oriented judgment that Jesus said marked His disciples.  Jesus said that it was love for fellow Christians that would mark us as His disciples.  Phelps drove many people away from the Lord and His truth.  His only converts were to a convoluted system of hatred, not Christianity. We need to know, though, beyond any doubt that the preacher of hatred's death is cause for mourning.  He is a creation of God, made in His image.  The great potential of that heritage was distorted and wasted.  He is one for whom Christ died.  As I already said, I intend no judgmentalism, but I saw no signs that God's grace had touched his cold, hard heart.  It is sad.  I won't protest his funeral.  I mourn his wasted life.  I hope the news will report that nothing happened.  I pray that folk will lovingly, kindly, respectfully share the Good News, that one need not see their life wasted. Over nineteen hundred years ago, there was another man who breathed out "threats and murder."  He called himself the "chief of sinners."  God saved him, and changed him.  Saul the persecutor became Paul the missionary, the ambassador for the One Who gladly was known as the 'friend of sinners."   Fred Phelps died this past Thursday.  I mourn that I saw no evidence that he opened the door to God's life-changing grace.  Don't wave a sign, not at the cemetary, not online.  Bow your head and pray. It's STTA. Explore the Good News here.