Ordering My Private World

Finally finished reading this book, about fifteen years too late.  It is proof positive that I do have some variation of Attention Deficit Disorder.  But after three airplane rides, I finally got through pastor and author Gordon MacDonald's National Bestseller.  It is in the category of self-help but with a theological impetus.
He starts out making a distinction between being Driven versus being Called.  The former is in the patterns of meeting demands of the ego and society, while the latter meeting a far more quiet invitation to partake in life with a sense of personal decrease, and a God-increase. 
The rest of the book addresses me, the disorganized person, who has poorly managed time, usually being dragged by dominant people and while often relying on talent, dismisses the discipline of personal development. 
There are useful insights and strategies to maximize one's effectives in whatever one is doing:  Like knowing your own rhythm and not fighting against it but to learn to work with it.  Having a fixed criteria on how to budget your time and to do it far in advance (one of my greatest weaknesses I must say).  To keep up the intellectual agility by actively engaging in Christian thinking.  To learn to appreciate God's creation.  (To read messages that God has coded into nature).  To train the mind to research information for the sake of serving people of the public world.  Many of the points sound familiar, it is a good title for Christian formation.  MacDonald encourages readers to become good listeners, to grow by becoming accustomed to read, to keep up with disciplined study.  The last few chapters touch on the centrality of God in the process of getting ordered.  To take time alone and to go to God, to learn to listen to God.  Keeping a journal for example (an account of things that were accomplished throughout the day, prayer topics, insights from Bible reading and other materials, and details about their children and their milestones).  Worship and rest, how they are related.  This is how he finishes out the book.  First edition copyrighted 1984, it is a classic.  Already 33 years in print!  Wow.  I might put it up there with M. Scott Peck's "The Road Less Traveled."  To the תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ - Let there be Light.    

If you can't bring the people into the church...

Bring the church to the people.

One of our EM church members was the conductor for the first segment for this Fall "Reformation Chorale" put on by ASU students of their music department.  It was an offering that celebrates Martin Luther's 500th year of nailing down of the 95 theses that began the cutting away from unbiblical traditions that misled the people of God (namely the selling of indulgences).  500 years of returning to the heart of the matter, the Holy Scriptures; but it also turns out that Luther was a prolific hymnodist.  I was not aware of this until last night!

The feature piece was Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott which is likely to be a familiar tune (from movies) to even non-church-goers.  After about 80 minutes of all the classical music, the remaining segment was of gospel choir.  I don't know how many people were there to tap into, or to participate in what is "singing unto the Lord," but between four songs a young man from the choir came up and explained the importance of an African American Methodist Episcopalian church had become influential during (I am guessing) around the 50' or 60's.  At the very end they sang a spirited "He's My Everything." a musical score recorded by the late Julia Mae Price-Williams.

Towards the tail end of the show, as they were clapping, turning left and right, and really entering into a kind of tangible joy readily found in the African American gospel choirs, the conductor turned around, faced the audience and he had this look like, "Well, come on now~  Why aren't you standing?" prompting the audience to join in.  Right away the entire audience got up and started clapping to "Jesus, He's My Everything, Jesus, He's My Everything..." and I really got into it!

I wonder if the Spirit touched any of the unchurched people of the audience through the elaborate theatrics.  Was the cultural venue (Tempe Center for the Arts) a distraction or conduction?  His church should go into the world.  That is after all, how it all started.  The event ended on a high note because I for one, felt the spark of what I would call a spontaneous moment of worship.  It was an epiphenomenal moment.  It was no longer just music, it was exalted with a standing ovation, that Jesus always deserves!  For a mighty fortress is our God.

Did we in our own strength confide,
Our striving would be losing;
Were not the right Man on our side,
The Man of God’s own choosing:
Dost ask who that may be?
Christ Jesus, it is He;
Lord Sabaoth His Name,
From age to age the same,
And He must win the battle. 

Recovering the Image of God

I am in between two (three) realms of ministry context.  Being that I am born in Seoul, Korea, I have a scattered Korean identity to bind up and foster into my being, which I have departed from in my teens, in order to merge into what I thought to be, the American mainstream.  But even before that took place, sandwiched right in-between, I acquired what I call my third culture, the Latin American culture.  (Lived in Ecuador for three years in my childhood, the sweetest three years of my life!)

My cultural multiplicity certainly does complicate things quite a bit (in terms of identity) but it also affords a kind of wings that many may not fathom (ie. the Kingdom vision of the multicultural people of God, not unlike the sitz im leben of Paul's ministry).  In short, I am certainly blessed, challenged, and dumfounded, even elated.  After a decade of searching, for myself, and finding my soul, the Korean soul that I began with, I also found my American soul wrestling in there and coming of age.  If there be any ambition, was so that I would be, not only contained to my own little ethnic group, for I find that my sensibilities are decidedly more Global.

As the years pass, I find my outward gaze grow from continent to continent, past Europe to Japan, China, India, Southeast Asia and beyond into Africa and other significant nooks like Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, etc...  My eyes are on the world, unashamedly.

And while going this way unchecked for so many years, I got married and realize, some branches have to be pruned for any real fruits to be borne.  And the virtual sightseeing has my gaze sometimes veering from what matters most, my Lord, my Jesus, who gives me the WHY I gaze out in the first place.  If I don't gaze into my Lord, my outward gazing is tantamount "to gazing out into the abyss, that gazes back into me."

And during a major season of strife and reckoning, I come across this little Korean discipleship/inner healing material, that I find very helpful.  It is a book by Rev. Yoo the previous senior pastor of All Nations Church out in Lake View Terrace, California.  And it is titled:  Recovering the Image of God.  It is a Korean title readable in one sitting.

It told me, I have hurts and wounds.  Yeah, it sounds like a Christian cliché but the candor with which Rev. Yoo speaks, it was therapeutic.  While it is tempting to assign all our misgivings to some obscure wounds that we may have acquired in the past, if we are prone to anger, apathy, flare-ups, temper tantrums, they all reside in our insecure little corners that we had denied the all-so-necessary access and attention of God.  This is to say, we seldom go to God to address the very parts that only God can handle, not us- with all our little sophisticated psychologies or philosophies.

It is a short but an amazing book.  I wish it would be available to more people.  But my people, the Korean people need to heed to this.  Just how far have we veered from the precious image of God, in which we have been made to begin with?  And what have been constantly insisting upon its replacement?  I pray for myself, for my wife and children, and for my relatives including my parents, that they see the deep seethed flowers of pain that flourish unchecked, while we move on, trying to keep up with the Joneses in this world.

The thesis of the book is, (consistent with many other inner healing books) that the enemy forces in the spiritual realm capitalize on personal wounds that we are reluctant to bring to God and His family.  Should the church be an honest and therapeutic gathering, how much might people benefit from bringing their issues to the table without worries of rumors, backstabbing or condemnation?  Not to be harsh against the church, I find that many churches are yet to be equipped to become that gathering of healing.  And the solution that Rev. Yoo offers is, worship.  Not just any kind of worship, but the inner sanctuary worship of the holiest of holies.  A protracted, resolute one on one with God who knows our wounds better, than we know them ourselves.

It is a really good read if you read Korean, but if you don't, feel free to write to me, I would be more than happy to provide a synopsis of it in English, or Spanish too (although folks at Duranno publishing probably already have translations available).

Spiritual Battlefield

One of the major problems with charismatics, which I identify with also- by virtue of the fact that I am not a cessasionist; is that they confuse personal impulse with movement of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is a person, and will not infringe upon your will to choose.  One can decline at his or her own peril, but the Spirit does nothing to place us under compulsion that is not mediated by the stable and enduring Word of God.  And by the Word of God, I am not talking about proof texts outside of the context of the whole.  I am talking about how the text communicates God's will in a way that radically controverts our own world view here in this culture and our own personal fallen states.  It is an obviously dangerous thing, when religious people begin to appropriate their personal agendas as the will of God on their personal whim, apart from:  1) The Word of God, 2) The Community of God, and 3) the Holy Spirit, who is no less than the very same Spirit of Jesus, and the Spirit of the Heavenly Father.

And on a personal note that should serve as a corrective to my previous entry:  Yes, anger does serve a purpose for the souls that are God's but, 19My beloved brothers, understand this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger, 20for man’s anger does not bring about the righteousness that God desires."

I am guilty of this, I am not accustomed to slow anger, in my most impoverished states, I am quick to burst into a fire, that resembles more a monster from hell than a saint bound for heaven.