Presby-Musings

Today we're going to be continuing a short Daily Devo series on the Holy Spirit of God.   Some years ago, I remember having a conversation with a young woman who told me that she had come to point in her life where she knew she believed in God, and that this belief had ultimately led her to experience Jesus. She said that "there is just too much good in the world for this not to be true...." The first time I heard a sermon on grace was when I was twenty four years old in a Presbyterian church in Ocoee, Florida.  I can't remember exactly what the pastor preached, but I couldn't stop crying.  I'd been an agnostic for some time.  I was bitter.  I had spent years trying to fulfill the longings of my heart by appeasing one god or another.  And I thought that the God I had learned about in Sunday school was angry and required negotiations.  There wasn't anything imminent about that God, and by imminent, I mean up close, personal, and real.   ...

For today's Daily Devo, we're going to continue thinking about the Spirit of God, and how the Spirit of God works in and through us.   I believe that the Spirit of God within us creates a longing to connect not just with other people, but with God, who knows us better than we know ourselves.  We long to know and to be known.  We long to truly feel.  To not give in to the despair that comes from the resignation that this is all there is, and there is no Creator or Designer, no plan or purpose.  Because when we resign ourselves to this--even slightly--we end up trying to fulfill our longings with other things, other feelings or even what some might call other "gods."  But when those longings are met for real. We know it.  When we realize (sometimes surprisingly) that there really is a God, and that God is actually connected to us.  It draws out emotions, feelings we didn't know we had.  And when we respond to these emotions we ofte...

The Chicago Cubs won the World Series this week.   The fact that I was able to write that sentence is fairly unbelievable.  The last championship the Chicago Cubs won was in 1908.  They came close a couple of times over that 108 year stretch, but never won it all until this week.  I lived in Chicago long enough to become a Cubs fan.  I've sat in the stands at Wrigley Field on beautiful summer days with a Chicago hot dog in one hand and an Old Style beer in the other.  I have also suffered with Cubs fans every year since as the Cubs always seemed to find a way to let it all fall apart at the end of a season.  Perhaps there is no greater living Chicago Cubs fan than the actor Bill Murray.  Murray was invited into the Cubs locker room to celebrate with the team after they won Game 7 of the World Series.  "Dreams do come true," he told reporters with tears in his eyes.   He acknowledged that the Cubs had always been the "Lovable Los...

I've been sitting in the lobby of the dentist office where my kids go to get their teeth cleaned and such.  It's easily the most magical dentist office lobby I've ever seen.  Seriously, it looks like a Disney attraction.  It has a jungle theme and there are resin figures of giraffe, meerkat, a large elephant eating popcorn and a ring-tailed lemur on the ceiling.  There is a huge TV playing a kid's movie, iPads for kids to play video games.  There's even a TV in the corner with "adult" programs.  And there's free wifi.   I watched my littlest kid getting some pretty awful work done on his teeth one day.  I was standing on the other side of the door looking through a window.  He had on cool tinted googles and was playing video games while looking at a screen on the ceiling.  While getting his teeth messed with.   The dentist I went to as a kid once numbed one side of my mouth to pull a tooth and then started pulling the t...

From time to time I will have someone come up to me after a worship service and say, "I just look forward to church all week because when I come here, I get my batteries recharged."   Or they will use language like, "I love coming to church and getting my spiritual tank filled."  And sometimes people will say something like, "Coming to church just gets me through the rest of my week."   While I completely understand what they mean (I've also have had some of the same kinds of feelings when I've attended church and came away feeling energized), I've started to question the perspective that fosters that kind of dynamic.   Lately, when I hear someone say something like "I get re-fueled on Sunday," the question that comes to my mind is simply this, "What is happening when the weight of our day-to-day lives makes us feel like we are merely enduring things until we get to Sunday?"   Is this what God wants for us?  To j...

I've been reading a great book by Morgan Guyton this week entitled, How Jesus Saves The World From Us: 12 Antidotes to Toxic Christianity.   I bought the book because I had the mistaken notion that it was going to be an indictment of what those other  kinds of Christians (the ones who are always angry, yelling and boycotting stuff) were doing to make it difficult for the rest of us.   The problem is, it wasn't that kind of book.  The author effectively brushed aside my clean categories, and leveled some serious truth at all Christians--me included.  In one of the chapters, he focuses on the following verse from the prophet Hosea: "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." - Hosea 6:6 In this verse, God is speaking through the prophet and saying, "I could care less about the performance of your worship.  What I care most about is your worship in action."   The difference between mercy and sa...