Christ has no body on earth but yours,
No hands but yours,
No feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which
Christ's compassion for the world is to look out;
Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good;
And yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.
- Saint Teresa of Avila
Monday, January 17, 2011
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Is God Silent?
My Large Group talk at Joliet Junior College 1/13/2011
This semester we will be tackling many questions that face a lot of us! During welcome week, we have been asking people to give us some of their questions so that we can be better equipped to share with people at our meetings. It is our hope that this semester we will be working through these questions but ultimately we will be spending time with the Father so that we can have an answer for those that are searching for answers.
To kick us off I would like to address three questions that a lot of people ask:
Is God silent? Hidden? Unfair?
I think if we are all honest with ourselves we have all asked one of these three questions some time in our life. Over this past year and a half, it is one that I have wrestled with several times.
Before this year and half, I think that I have been waiting for some kind of ball to drop on me some time in my life. I had never really faced any kind of tragedy. No deaths in my immediate family, no sickness, no loss of jobs, no rock your world kind of stuff.
Well, it all kind of changed with the diagnoses of my daughter Leah’s Cystic Fibrosis last summer. My wife’s parents losing their house to a flood, brother in law’s out of work, my mother’s accident…I could go on, but that is not my point. To say that my world had changed is an understatement.
As most of you know I had the opportunity to take a six month sabbatical since July. It could not have come at a more perfect time in my life. It was a both a stretching and renewing time for me. I had the opportunity to meet with several ministry leaders to help me walk through my life and help direct me into this next phase of ministry.
One of the books that I read over my sabbatical that a lot of this talk is reflective of is a book by Philip Yancey, it is called “Disappointment with God”. One of the stories in the book talks about a young author that asks Yancey to edit his book that is coving the topic of “Job”. Yancey agrees only to find this young author come to him to talk about his final manuscript. But now this young man has come to the conclusion that he no longer believes that God is real and in fact he has taken all of his Bibles, Christian Books and even his manuscripts for this book on “Job” had lit them all on fire in his backyard grill. All of his ideas about God going up in smoke, and all he could feel was relief.
You see this young author came to the conclusion that God was non-existent because he was silent in all of his prayers, God seemed to hide himself from all of his problems, and came to the conclusion that God couldn’t possibly exist due to the injustice and unfairness that had happened in his life.
If you don’t wrestle with some form of those questions, I am sure that you have someone in your life that does.
I think more than anything I was not wrestling with the idea of if God did exist, it was more of trusting God that he had good intentions with all of theses situations.
• I know that if I was God how I would act in these situations.
• I would influence the people who were going to hire my brothers in laws.
• I would tell the mayor of Lombard that he should purchase that flooded house on 44 W. Berkshire,
• I would change the genetic composition of that adorable girl named Leah Nordquist,
• I would restore the broken brain cells and bring back Mary Jo Nordquist to full physical and mental health.
That is what I would do if I was God.
So during my sabbatical what I did was pray, and then pray, and then pray some more. A friend of mine was even praying with and for me and she was describing this huge banquet table that was before me of all kinds of delicious food, and Jesus was telling me to take and eat.
She also was describing part of Psalm 23 where in verse 4 it says,
“Even thought I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
I had no doubt that Jesus was present with me, but I wanted to take the rod of discipline and the staff of leadership and take control. I didn’t trust that Jesus was going to lead the way I wanted Him to. It was a very difficult time for me.
What really helped me more than anything else was when I took some time to do a peer visit with a staff, Elsie Mokoban, that had been working with community college students for over 20 years.
I took a flight to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and meet a woman that taught me what praying without ceasing looks like.
She prayed all the time, not in an obnoxious way,
but in a way that I could see that she was dependent upon God.
After our visit of the campus she worked at, she brought me to a home that was purchased by a prayer ministry in her town. I took probably two hours of time in silence and listening to God, and had a image that I believe that God gave me. I could feel his hand on the back of my neck, as if I was a small kitten and someone was griping me. It was Jesus. I was facing not toward Him but in a way I was going my own direction. Jesus then said to me.
Phil, I don’t want you to just turn around and take my hand, I want you to chase after me. …So that is what I am trying to do I want to chase after Him.
You see I think that it is good for us to have these questions. God is not afraid of these questions, He uses them to teach us more about His character and to grow in intimacy with Him. I believe that only when we can be in a place of dependence upon God and reality check that He is God and we are his creation, can we be in the right place with God. God wants to use these questions to help us submit to him.
We can see in scripture story after story of people who had questions for God.
Even David in scripture, who is called a man after God’s own heart had struggled with seeing God move. We see him pleading with God in Psalm 42
As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
(down to verse 9)
I say to God my Rock, “Why have you forgotten me?” Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?” My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
God was not afraid of these comments, he welcomes them. He knows us better that we even know ourselves. Through the process of asking questions and wrestling with God, He shapes us and we learn both about ourselves and the role that we need to play out in God’s plan.
One of the later Psalms, David explains the right posture that we should take on when dealing with difficult times or times when it might seem that God would be silent.
Psalm 139
O Lord, you have searched me
And you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
You perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
You are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord….
For you created my inmost being;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
God knows both our Joys and our pain. We are His creation, he knows us better than we know ourselves. What a joy it is to know that we have a God that knows us so personally and knows what is best for us.
Yet, we still want some sort of physical sign. We want God go show up and reveal himself, so that we can know that he is not silent or hidden from us.
You see in the book of Exodus, that Moses was leading the Israelites out of Egypt and people had a physical demonstration of His Power. He split the Red Sea, He had water pour out of a rock, He gave them Manna. You learn that they knew which direction you should go because there was a huge pillar of smoke in the daytime and a pillar of fire in the evening. I think that we all wish we could see those manifestations of God’s Power today. Only, if God could show us some sort of sign, some sort of writing on the wall. But, often we feel that our prayers are unheard or perhaps even ignored. But, you see friends, we are no different than those Israelites, we would be just like them in seeing the power of God in a physical way and then complain to him or rebel against him like they did. They got tired of walking in the desert, they grew to abhor the manna, they just expected the water, and they even said at one point it would be better for them all to just go back to Egypt then to be following God’s leading.
God knows that we need something different than His miraculous presence in a physical form. That is why he has given us the church and the Holy Spirit. I know that some of you are thinking, not my church, or all I see is a bunch of hypocrites. But, you see friends, it is through the church and the Holy Spirit that we can be one with each other and hear a word from God. If we are left to our own self, we will stray like a lost sheep. We need to be part of the family of God to hear from him, we need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. He gave us the church to be His voice, His hands, His feet.
Our chapter is like an arm of the church. We are here on campus to be a voice of the living God to those that are looking for hope. As students, staff, and faculty we have the opportunity to invite the JJC community into the body of Christ. We get to share about the love that God has for us and this campus. If God was so silent, he would not have chosen to offer his only Son Jesus Christ as a sacrifice on our behalf. If we put our trust in Jesus we are part of the family of God.
If this is all new to you and you have been struggling to understand what it means to have a relationship with God. I want to invite you to take a step of faith and ask God to forgive you of your sins and ask God to help you to follow His leadership, recognizing that it was through Jesus death, and him taking on your sin on the cross that we can have freedom from sin and a newness in life. That the Holy Spirit would fill you.
Both to comfort you but to give you power to share about Jesus and to go into this world
and share about a God that is Not Silent!
This semester we will be tackling many questions that face a lot of us! During welcome week, we have been asking people to give us some of their questions so that we can be better equipped to share with people at our meetings. It is our hope that this semester we will be working through these questions but ultimately we will be spending time with the Father so that we can have an answer for those that are searching for answers.
To kick us off I would like to address three questions that a lot of people ask:
Is God silent? Hidden? Unfair?
I think if we are all honest with ourselves we have all asked one of these three questions some time in our life. Over this past year and a half, it is one that I have wrestled with several times.
Before this year and half, I think that I have been waiting for some kind of ball to drop on me some time in my life. I had never really faced any kind of tragedy. No deaths in my immediate family, no sickness, no loss of jobs, no rock your world kind of stuff.
Well, it all kind of changed with the diagnoses of my daughter Leah’s Cystic Fibrosis last summer. My wife’s parents losing their house to a flood, brother in law’s out of work, my mother’s accident…I could go on, but that is not my point. To say that my world had changed is an understatement.
As most of you know I had the opportunity to take a six month sabbatical since July. It could not have come at a more perfect time in my life. It was a both a stretching and renewing time for me. I had the opportunity to meet with several ministry leaders to help me walk through my life and help direct me into this next phase of ministry.
One of the books that I read over my sabbatical that a lot of this talk is reflective of is a book by Philip Yancey, it is called “Disappointment with God”. One of the stories in the book talks about a young author that asks Yancey to edit his book that is coving the topic of “Job”. Yancey agrees only to find this young author come to him to talk about his final manuscript. But now this young man has come to the conclusion that he no longer believes that God is real and in fact he has taken all of his Bibles, Christian Books and even his manuscripts for this book on “Job” had lit them all on fire in his backyard grill. All of his ideas about God going up in smoke, and all he could feel was relief.
You see this young author came to the conclusion that God was non-existent because he was silent in all of his prayers, God seemed to hide himself from all of his problems, and came to the conclusion that God couldn’t possibly exist due to the injustice and unfairness that had happened in his life.
If you don’t wrestle with some form of those questions, I am sure that you have someone in your life that does.
I think more than anything I was not wrestling with the idea of if God did exist, it was more of trusting God that he had good intentions with all of theses situations.
• I know that if I was God how I would act in these situations.
• I would influence the people who were going to hire my brothers in laws.
• I would tell the mayor of Lombard that he should purchase that flooded house on 44 W. Berkshire,
• I would change the genetic composition of that adorable girl named Leah Nordquist,
• I would restore the broken brain cells and bring back Mary Jo Nordquist to full physical and mental health.
That is what I would do if I was God.
So during my sabbatical what I did was pray, and then pray, and then pray some more. A friend of mine was even praying with and for me and she was describing this huge banquet table that was before me of all kinds of delicious food, and Jesus was telling me to take and eat.
She also was describing part of Psalm 23 where in verse 4 it says,
“Even thought I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
I had no doubt that Jesus was present with me, but I wanted to take the rod of discipline and the staff of leadership and take control. I didn’t trust that Jesus was going to lead the way I wanted Him to. It was a very difficult time for me.
What really helped me more than anything else was when I took some time to do a peer visit with a staff, Elsie Mokoban, that had been working with community college students for over 20 years.
I took a flight to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and meet a woman that taught me what praying without ceasing looks like.
She prayed all the time, not in an obnoxious way,
but in a way that I could see that she was dependent upon God.
After our visit of the campus she worked at, she brought me to a home that was purchased by a prayer ministry in her town. I took probably two hours of time in silence and listening to God, and had a image that I believe that God gave me. I could feel his hand on the back of my neck, as if I was a small kitten and someone was griping me. It was Jesus. I was facing not toward Him but in a way I was going my own direction. Jesus then said to me.
Phil, I don’t want you to just turn around and take my hand, I want you to chase after me. …So that is what I am trying to do I want to chase after Him.
You see I think that it is good for us to have these questions. God is not afraid of these questions, He uses them to teach us more about His character and to grow in intimacy with Him. I believe that only when we can be in a place of dependence upon God and reality check that He is God and we are his creation, can we be in the right place with God. God wants to use these questions to help us submit to him.
We can see in scripture story after story of people who had questions for God.
Even David in scripture, who is called a man after God’s own heart had struggled with seeing God move. We see him pleading with God in Psalm 42
As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
(down to verse 9)
I say to God my Rock, “Why have you forgotten me?” Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?” My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
God was not afraid of these comments, he welcomes them. He knows us better that we even know ourselves. Through the process of asking questions and wrestling with God, He shapes us and we learn both about ourselves and the role that we need to play out in God’s plan.
One of the later Psalms, David explains the right posture that we should take on when dealing with difficult times or times when it might seem that God would be silent.
Psalm 139
O Lord, you have searched me
And you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
You perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
You are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord….
For you created my inmost being;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
God knows both our Joys and our pain. We are His creation, he knows us better than we know ourselves. What a joy it is to know that we have a God that knows us so personally and knows what is best for us.
Yet, we still want some sort of physical sign. We want God go show up and reveal himself, so that we can know that he is not silent or hidden from us.
You see in the book of Exodus, that Moses was leading the Israelites out of Egypt and people had a physical demonstration of His Power. He split the Red Sea, He had water pour out of a rock, He gave them Manna. You learn that they knew which direction you should go because there was a huge pillar of smoke in the daytime and a pillar of fire in the evening. I think that we all wish we could see those manifestations of God’s Power today. Only, if God could show us some sort of sign, some sort of writing on the wall. But, often we feel that our prayers are unheard or perhaps even ignored. But, you see friends, we are no different than those Israelites, we would be just like them in seeing the power of God in a physical way and then complain to him or rebel against him like they did. They got tired of walking in the desert, they grew to abhor the manna, they just expected the water, and they even said at one point it would be better for them all to just go back to Egypt then to be following God’s leading.
God knows that we need something different than His miraculous presence in a physical form. That is why he has given us the church and the Holy Spirit. I know that some of you are thinking, not my church, or all I see is a bunch of hypocrites. But, you see friends, it is through the church and the Holy Spirit that we can be one with each other and hear a word from God. If we are left to our own self, we will stray like a lost sheep. We need to be part of the family of God to hear from him, we need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. He gave us the church to be His voice, His hands, His feet.
Our chapter is like an arm of the church. We are here on campus to be a voice of the living God to those that are looking for hope. As students, staff, and faculty we have the opportunity to invite the JJC community into the body of Christ. We get to share about the love that God has for us and this campus. If God was so silent, he would not have chosen to offer his only Son Jesus Christ as a sacrifice on our behalf. If we put our trust in Jesus we are part of the family of God.
If this is all new to you and you have been struggling to understand what it means to have a relationship with God. I want to invite you to take a step of faith and ask God to forgive you of your sins and ask God to help you to follow His leadership, recognizing that it was through Jesus death, and him taking on your sin on the cross that we can have freedom from sin and a newness in life. That the Holy Spirit would fill you.
Both to comfort you but to give you power to share about Jesus and to go into this world
and share about a God that is Not Silent!
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