For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;It has been a difficult week for a myriad of good reasons, but I am grateful for God's work to strain out sin and produce good work in me. Today I listened to a couple of sermon podcasts from my church that tore me up as they first, pointed to points of weakness and failure in me, and at the same time showed me how incredible God's grace is and how much He has done to heal me and continues to do. The first was Matt Chandler's sermon on knowing God, and the second was Eric Mason on brokenness, given several months before I began attending the Village. The first one made me take stock of my life to date and realize that, as far as it seems to me that I've come, there is still such a long way to go and so much in me that still rebels, still loves sin and hates the light. But in the second, the Spirit moved to follow up with hope in showing me that God uses moments like that to make us useable, moldable, and ready to become fully His.
you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
--Psalm 51:16-17
Psalm 51 has been huge for me, a proto-gospel of the Old Testament and a display that God was no different in the Old than in the New--He still called His people to submit their hearts fully and covered the sins of those who confessed and repented. I am doing that formally in recovery through the step studies, and I do it daily in my prayers and the men around me. But I still know my deepest foolishness and pray to be set free from being drawn into earthly lusts. Not just lust in the sexual sense, although that is a big part of it, but desires for things like money, security, success, and such that I feel like I need and yet have nothing to do with knowing God and with the truest success which is life in Christ.
Saturday is a couple of meetings leading into the next men's Bible study, and I am simultaneously excited and sobered. This study is seeking to move simply from a passive "show up and we'll talk about the Bible" mode into active discipling and missionary work, using the book of Acts, and Saturday we start to learn about what we as leaders will be doing. I actively pray for wisdom in this and a great deal of humility, and I hope that you, reader, will do the same for me. My roommate showed the pictures from his recent trip to Asia at homegroup as he pursues a vision of church-planting there, and the needs of the people there not simply in a felt-need sense but the need for Christ and truth was palpable. It weighs heavy on me that to date, my work has largely been focused on me.
Yet God's call to move beyond is not stifling but life-giving and I love Him for it; he never lets me sit on my heels but always woos me, calls me forward, telling me that ahead is better and bigger and more of life than where I am. That is why today's message of my lack and God's providence producing that sense of being broken in me was so crucial and yet so welcome: in being broken, I am where I ought to be as long as I am on this earth, and Christ is still so beautiful.
