Depth This Sunday!
This Sunday after Crossroads.
NEW TOPICS. SAME PURSUIT OF CHRIST.
Having laid a basic foundation for a personal pursuit of God this fall, we’re continuing this spring with Depth, Citylife’s student discipleship initiative. If you’ve ever wondered how to make real sense of scripture, how to enable it to direct, even enliven you, if you’ve wondered how the promises of a faithful God can be received and enacted with hope and confidence, then join us as we attempt to answer these and other questions. Our aim is simple: to present the historic truths of Christianity in a manner that is palatable, relevant, and transformative so that individuals and campuses are changed for the glory of God.
Does the gospel really change things? Real things, things that matter to me? We’ll explore this question by examining topics including status, performance, pressures, stress, anxiety, worry, influence, leadership, and relationships.
When: Depth will be hosted on Sundays in the hour just after Crossroads.
Dates: January 31, February 21, March 7, 21, 28, April 18.
To Sign Up, Click Here.
Single Serving Saucy Surprises
Although we tend to use The Crossroads blog for primarily “business” related content – events, news, articles, or photos — from time to time we feel the need to update you on various miscellany and trivia that either is 1) completely unnecessary to know, 2) related to our Crossroads family, or 3) relatively entertaining. Based on this rubric, I came to the conclusion that this piece of news fits all three. So what happened? See for yourself!
Amazing! Jonathan is technologically savvy! He’s checking his email on his phone. Congrats Jonathan! Welcome to the age of smart-phones. Okay, Jonathan using a smartphone isn’t a big deal. But wait a second, what’s that on his leg? Is that what I think it is? OMG.
Nobody call 911! That’s just ketchup! Jonathan is fine. His jeans, well, not so good.
So on the streets of Downtown Crossing, a fellow (whom will remain unnamed) stepped on a ketchup sauce packet and it exploded simultaneously while JK was ambling back to the office. When he came back to the office, I happened to have a camera as he was cleaning up the mess. Even after cleaning, JK was carrying eau de Heinz for a good bit of the afternoon. But even ketchup can’t keep Jonathan down!
Being the gracious gentleman that he is, he let me take a picture of him post-condiment-trauma. Aside from some laundry duties, I think he’ll be okay. But I wouldn’t wave any bottles of ketchup around him, it may draw up unpleasant memories.
If you haven’t thought about it, consider signing up for the Univ. Ministry Winter Getaway!
Winter Getaway!
Winter Getaway
Join us for our 2nd annual trip to Franklin, NH for a one night, two day adventure at the Webster Lake Inn. Webster Lake Inn is famous the world over as the first place Christopher Columbus stayed when he came to America in 1492. This place is old!
It’s been renovated since old ‘Topher stayed there, and on February 5-6th, it’s all ours! You can click here to check out accommodations and pictures of Webster Lake.
The weekend is literally a “getaway” – a chance to get out of town, off campus, and to enjoy an evening with others from Citylife’s University Ministry. We have plans to eat a lot, laugh a lot, and hopefully leave the weekend with a few extra friends. Spots are limited to 30 attendees, so please get signed up right away! Use this as a chance to introduce friends to Citylife. Anyone and everyone is welcome. You can get signed up here.
When: Friday, February 5th though Saturday February 6th. We’ll be departing from the Radisson at 6:30 PM on Friday, returning to the same at around 5:30 the next day.
Where: Webster Lake Inn, Franklin, NH
Cost: $30 (includes transportation, lodging, and all meals except Friday night). Cash or check. Please make all checks out to “Citylife Church.” Moneys should be brought the day of the trip.
Rewind :: The Art of Giving
In the spirit of this season, here is an old post on the topic of giving. Enjoy and merry Christmas!
A Yale theologian reflects on cultivating generosity in a graceless culture. By Miroslav Volf
The first thing I saw was a tear—a huge, unforgettable tear in the big brown eye of a ten-year-old girl. Then I saw tears in her mother’s eyes. And in all these tears, just enough joy was mixed with pain to underscore that pain’s severity: their joy at seeing him, their three-month-old brother and son, and their intense pain that it was the first time they’d seen him since he was just two days old, when they’d kissed him goodbye. I sensed in those tears the ache that he, flesh of their flesh, was being brought to them for a brief visit by two strangers who were now his parents, and the affliction of knowing that the joy of loving him as a mother and sister would never be theirs.
The joy and the pain of those tears led me to a repentance of sorts. My image of mothers who put their children for adoption, though not as bad as that of the fathers involved, was not exactly positive either. I could not shake the feeling that there was something deficient in such an act. The taint of abandonment marred it, an abandonment that could be understandable and certainly was tragic, but abandonment nonetheless. To give one’s child to another, it had seemed to me, was to fail in the most proper duty of a parent: to love no matter what.
As I was reflecting on those tears, I came across a passage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. “Witness the pleasure that mothers take in loving their children. Some mothers put their infants out to nurse, and though knowing and loving them do not ask to be loved by them in return, if it be impossible to have this as well, but are content if they see them prospering; they retain their own love for them even though the children, not knowing them, cannot render them any part of what is due to a mother.” The text comes from Aristotle’s discussion of friendship. He used the example of mothers to make plausible that “in its essence friendship seems to consist more in giving than receiving affection.” For Aristotle, a “birth mother” would manifest the kind of love characteristic of a true friend, a love exercised for that friend’s sake, not for benefits gained from the relationship.
“It is hard to know that you have a child in the world, far away from you,” wrote Nathanael’s birth mother in her first letter to us. It is hard because love passionately desires the presence of the beloved. Yet it was that same love that took deliberate and carefully planned steps that would lead to his absence. In a letter she wrote for him to read when he grows up, she told him that her decision to put him up for adoption was made for his own good. “I did it for you,” she wrote repeatedly, adding, “Some day you will understand.”
She loved him for his own sake, and therefore she would rather have suffered his absence if he flourished than have enjoyed his presence if he languished; her sorrow over his avoidable languishing would overshadow her delight in his presence. For a lover, it is more blessed to give than to receive, even when giving pierces the lover’s heart. My image of birth mothers has changed: “She who does not care quite enough” has become “she who selflessly gives.” When we parted, a smile had replaced the tears on the face of our son’s birth mother. Now it was my turn to cry. Back at home, with him in one arm and an open album she made for him in the other, I shed tears over the beauty and the tragedy of her love.
About three months earlier, the most extraordinary thing had happened on an ordinary day in an ordinary maternity ward between three ordinary human beings. After chatting with us for half an hour or so—to assure herself once again that we were the right parents for her child—Nathanael’s birth mother called the nurse and asked her to bring in her two-day-old baby. There he was, wonderful to the point of tears, rolled in to us in a crib. She took him and held him for a while in her arms, in a last maternal embrace. Then she handed him over to my wife, Judy. In one simple act, painfully sad for her and wonderfully joyful for us, she gave him to us, and she gave us to him.
She gave us that most incredible gift at about 11 o’clock one beautiful March morning. Just one hour earlier, a man in a dark uniform wearing dark sunglasses had given us something entirely different. He had appeared at the window on the driver’s side of my car. As I rolled it down, my ears were still ringing with the ominous, evenly paced sound of his boots hitting the pavement. “Driver’s license and insurance card!” I still did not know what I had done to be stopped by the police. Even when I had first seen the flashing red and blue lights behind me, I had been puzzled. Then, as he paced back to his car, it dawned on me. We had stopped at a doughnut place at an intersection to get a quick bite in place of the breakfast we had missed. After finding out that a child would be given to us, we had had only 24 hours to get our nest ready, and we had stayed up until four o’clock in the morning trying to name our boy. From the parking lot in front of the doughnut place, I had not seen that the street to our right was one-way. After a bite and a sip of coffee—tired, excited, and a bit bewildered about what was to happen—I drove out onto that one-way street the wrong way and positioned myself to turn right toward the hospital. Right in front of me, on the other side of the intersection, was a police car. Soon the siren was on, and I was pulled over.
Not knowing that in the U.S. you aren’t supposed to get out of the car to talk to a police officer, I opened my door, took one step, and said, “Mr. Officer, we’ve just had this wonderful news…” I was interrupted in mid sentence. “Get back into your car!” he barked at me. I tried one more time: “May I explain…” Again, I was interrupted by that same bark, more irritated this time: “Get back into your car, I said!” Clad in a uniform, with his eyes—those windows of the soul—hidden behind dark shades, he was all power, all law, all business. His humanity? Locked up somewhere deep inside, underneath the shiny police belt buckle. His generosity? Hidden behind the badge of office. Within the space of one hour, I got a nasty ticket from a gruff cop, and a tender child from a loving birth mother.
I don’t expect police officers to give out candy for traffic violations. But even in the old communist Yugoslavia where I grew up, usually you could talk to traffic police like human beings. Maybe my experience on the streets of Southern California was an exception. But it fits into a larger pattern of what we may call the gracelessness that is slowly spreading like a disease throughout many of our cultures. Some may suggest that we are no worse off today than we were 50 years or even two centuries ago. My sense is that we are. But my main point is not to note a decline, but to name a problem. We live in a culture in which, yes, extraordinary generosity does happen. But at the same time, that culture is largely stripped of grace.
It’s not a gracelessness that’s necessarily apparent at first glance, but it nonetheless underlies so many of our interactions. If I were to say that today everything is sold and nothing is given, that would be an exaggeration. But like any good caricature, it distorts reality in order to draw attention to what is characteristic. Mainly, we’re set up to sell and buy, not give and receive. We tend to give nothing free of charge and receive nothing free of charge. “The person who volunteers time, who helps a stranger, who agrees to work for a modest wage out of commitment to the public good, who desists from littering even when no one is looking … begins to feel like a sucker,” wrote Robert Kuttner in “Everything for Sale.” To give is to lose.
It’s not just that we are calculating rather than generous. In buying and selling, we are often not even fair. “You don’t get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate,” the saying goes. With only our own interest in mind, we try to squeeze the last drop out of those with whom we are dealing. Far too often, power—not fairness and certainly not generosity—is the name of the game. We assert ourselves and our own interests through raw physical strength, political connections, or loads of cash, through sexual prowess, sarcastic comments, lies and half-truths, through anything that can serve as a weapon in this low-grade war called life. We fight, and we often take spoils or go away defeated. Whether in business, politics, family, or education, the big fish eat the little ones. Laws and regulations do limit excessive abuse. But laws and regulations only mark the space in which the war is waged. They don’t eliminate the war.
Sex is as good a site as any to observe the slide away from generosity, through self-gratification, profit maximizing, and selling and bartering to nasty warring. Watch any currently popular TV series—“Sex in the City” or “Desperate Housewives” for example—and it would never occur to you that sex might be a gift two people in a lifelong covenant give each other, a sacrament of their lasting love. Instead, partners randomly “hook up,” each hungry to sexually satisfy some inchoate craving that has no definite object and can never find rest. They crave chocolate, they grab a chocolate bar; they crave sex, they just grab the most willing partner. Worse still, wars are waged with sex. Sex can bring status and define who belongs and who doesn’t. It can serve to inflict a sweet revenge or to reward cooperation, or it can be a tool to manipulate and dominate. By having sex, we can easily do almost anything other than truly give and receive—give and receive pleasure and give and receive each other as treasured lovers.
Loss of generosity doesn’t just leave us sexually unfulfilled and in search of pleasures that are ever more intense but never truly satisfying. Left unchecked, the slide away from generosity ultimately robs us of significant cultural achievements on which our flourishing, as individuals and communities, depends. Let’s consider just a few of the losses a lack of generosity can put into motion. Without generosity, our economic system would falter and the exchange of goods and services could easily become unsustainable exploitation of the poor by the rich. Without generosity, our democratic political system would decay, and powerful interest groups would likely exclude much of the electorate from participation and rule them to their detriment. Without generosity, our educational system couldn’t be sustained; nothing can secure the services of good teachers who are, by definition, neither sellers nor takers but givers who cannot be bought even if they do get paid. The list could go on.
A “rose” from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” reminds us of a more personal kind of loss that comes from a lack of generosity, an intimate loss that, at the same time, is a loss of a whole world of meaning. From the star where he tended three volcanoes and a single rose, the little prince found his way to Earth, where thousands of roses can be found in people’s gardens. “People where you live,” the little prince said to his pilot friend, “grow five thousand roses in one garden … yet they don’t find what they’re looking for… And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose”… And he added, “But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”
Yet to find that for which you are searching in a single rose is more than just a matter of looking with the heart. For the heart to see rightly, the hand needs to give generously. That’s the deeper wisdom the little prince goes on to reveal.
His mysterious affair with the rose began when he responded to the rose’s simple request, “Would you be so kind as to tend to me?” The gift of care made it his rose, the only one in the whole world. “It’s the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important,” the wise fox told him. Take that gift away, and the one special rose blends into 100,000 other roses, beautiful and interesting for a while, but, in the long run, ordinary and even boring.
The gift of care didn’t just transform the rose, however. When the little prince looked up to the stars above the Earth, they shone in a new way because on one of them he had left behind the rose he loved. It cast a spell over the whole heavenly firmament, like a buried treasure casts a spell on all the islands where you think it may lie hidden. That one rose changed his whole world. And what did his unfaltering loyalty to a flower do to him? It gave him a new radiance, a halo, invisible but palpable. “The image of the rose [is] shining within him like a flame within a lamp, even when he’s asleep,” said the pilot. He was a boy in love, vibrating with desire and yet strangely at rest. He had found what he was looking for.
On that cool March morning, after the rude cop let us go, we received a “rose”—and then another, four years later, on a hot July midday. Each of those roses, Nathanael and Aaron, said to us, “Would you be so kind as to tend to me?”—well, not in those words but in the piercing and relentless cries of a baby hungry for food, for touch, for tender and soothing words, for the presence that delights, for time and space to grow, in a word, of a baby hungry for love. So we tended them, and out of millions of little boys, they became our boys, unique and more precious to us than all others put together.
Like our sons, all of us were a gift when we were born—a peculiar yet most beautiful of gifts, a gift that at first only receives, a gift that gives back only the joy parents might feel in giving and the delight they might experience in the child’s flourishing. Often enough, tiredness chokes up joy, and worry extinguishes delight. But still, most parents do their best to give, and they do so knowing well that their gifts will never be returned in full, but perhaps will be paid forward, that children will give to their own children or to others they encounter on their life’s journey.
We know it is good to receive, and we have been blessed by receiving not only as children but as adults as well. But Jesus taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35), and part of growing up is learning the art of giving, as well as that of receiving. If we fail to learn this art, we will live unfulfilled lives, and in the end, chains of bondage will replace the bonds that keep our communities together. If we just keep taking or even trading, we will squander ourselves. If we give, we will regain ourselves as fulfilled individuals and flourishing communities.
Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. His book Exclusion and Embrace won the 2002 Grawemeyer Award in religion.
Excerpted from Free of Charge by Miroslav Volf. Copyright 2006 by Miroslav Volf.
Don’t Eat the Bread of Anxious Toil, by John Piper
Psalm 127
Wherever there are people whose hearts are not fretful or anxious or in a resentful frenzy, but instead have a tranquility of heart and a kind of peaceful abandon in which they take thought for other’s concerns instead of being all wound up in their own—wherever there are people like that, the world sits up and takes notice. And rightly so because in all likelihood something out of this world is at work there, something that people everywhere are hungry for—even if they are not sure what it is. The world is full of anxious people: students anxious about whether people will laugh at their new shoes, about getting good grades, about giving a book report in front of the class; adults anxious about impressing the boss, losing a client, finishing a report on time, getting out of a foolish investment, a strange pain in the chest. From time to time there settles over everyone that dark, grey, heavy blanket of depressing anxiety that in the moment makes everything look dark and seems impossible to throw off. The experience is so common, that those who live in peace and freedom and joy shine like stars in the darkness. Those who have found the way to obey Jesus’ command, “Be anxious for nothing” . . . these are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. They bring savor and sunshine to places where the creeping grey fog of anxiety has made everything tasteless and dark.
Don’t Be Anxious
In the past year, one text above all has blown away more of that fog for me than any other, and I’ve used it repeatedly. I can remember time after time going out of my office door on the way to teach my classes on 1 Peter and Romans 9-11 with a stack of books and notes under my arm and saying: “Father, unless you teach the class, all my preparation is in vain.” And I would comfort my heart with the good news that ultimately it was God who would bring fruit from my efforts or not.
The text is Psalm 127:1-2. “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved in his sleep.” I think the main point of these three verses is: “Don’t eat the bread of anxious toil.” It means just the same thing Jesus meant when he said, “Don’t be anxious about what you shall eat.” When we grow up we must all work for our bread. And we can either work nervously, worrying about what men will think of us—and so eat the bread of anxious toil. Or we can work with serenity in our hearts, as serving Christ and not men—and so eat the bread of peace. God’s will for his children, indeed the sign of whether we are children or not, is that we not eat the bread of anxious toil.
God does not lay down specific rules for how early we rise for work and how late we knock off at night. But he does lay down this principle for his beloved: Don’t rise early and go late to rest out of anxiety, out of fear and fretfulness. If the joy of fruitful labor lures you to work 12 hours a day, so be it. But take heed lest you are really deceiving yourself, and in fact are being driven by anxiety, or by her twin sister, selfish-ambition. Christians will work hard, but they will work more for the joy of all the good their work can bring to others than they will out of fear at what men will think if they fail. So,
Be diligent as God may lead
And eat the bread you earn,
But fret not over what you need
And let not worry burn.
Four Ways to Labor in Vain
That is the main point, I think: God’s beloved ought not to undertake his labors fretfully. Then besides the main point I see two reasons given why it is pointless and unnecessary and indeed wrong for God’s beloved to eat the bread of anxious toil. The first reason is given in verse 1: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.” What would it mean to build in vain and to watch a city in vain? How might the efforts of a man to build himself a house be shown to be futile and empty and vain? I can think of four ways:
1) If God Isn’t with You
First, if God isn’t with him in the building he simply may not be able to finish it. You remember of course the builders of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11. They built, but God was not in it, and so they labored in vain—he did not allow them to finish it. That is the first way our labor could be shown up as vain when God is not in it.
2) If the Building Collapses in a Year
The second way is that the building may in God’s providence be completed and yet later collapse because of a poor foundation. “The foolish man built his house upon the sand, and the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell and great was the fall of it.” God might sustain us and allow us to go right on building utterly oblivious to his secret support; and then when our buttons are bursting and our nose is in the air, the sand crumbles and we fall flat on our backs, and hopefully learn before it is too late that unless we rely on the Lord in our building, we labor in vain.
3) If You Die Before Entering
But there is a third way that my labor may be in vain. The project is completed with no interruptions, the achievement is sound and long lasting. But on the very day for entering, I drop dead of a heart attack. Solomon was painfully aware of what he wrote inEcclesiastes 2:20f.:
So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes a man who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by a man who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.
Life and death are in the hand of the Lord and none of us can lengthen our lives one cubit beyond our appointed time.
But someone may argue, the psalm says that our labor is in vain only if the Lord isn’t in our labor, but people die even when the Lord is in their labor. Can it be that they too have labored in vain, even though they relied on God for help in their building? My answer is, No indeed, for death is not the end for God’s beloved. When they die, to be sure, they do not take their house or business or family with them, but all their labor done in reliance on the Lord does go with them and testifies to their faith before God. As Revelation 14:13 says, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth. Blessed indeed, says the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.” And as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:58, “Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
Yet for those who labor in this life without relying on the Lord a third way that this is shown to be vain is that when the achievement is complete and ready for their use, they may die and get no pleasure from it.
4) If It Becomes a House of Tragedy
The fourth way that our labor may be in vain if God is not in it is this: the mansion may be completed smoothly; it may be fine and long lasting and we in God’s providence may be granted to enter and live in it only to find it has become a house of tragedy—a broken marriage, rebellious children, amid an abundance of meaningless knick-knacks on marble shelves. Emptiness, futility, vanity because God did not build the house.
It seems to me that the point of verse 1 is that no matter how hard you work to achieve anything, its achievement and the fulfilling enjoyment of it depend decisively on God. If we do not trust in God with all our heart but instead rely on our own insight, then we might, if he wills, produce a monument, but in the end it will only be a monument to futility.
I said that verse 1 was the first of two reasons why God’s beloved should not be anxious in his labor. How does it, then, help us overcome anxiety? It worked like this for me. As I walked out of my office on the way to class, I reasoned that if my highest efforts are only in vain without God’s special help, then the success or failure of this class lies ultimately on him, not me. And with that a weight was lifted off my back that I was never created to carry, namely, the final responsibility for the success or failure of any venture. Sometimes the truth of that would well up in me so much I felt as light as a butterfly. I can’t carry the weight of whether this class likes me today, Lord. I can’t carry the weight of whether they may ask me questions beyond my ability, Lord. I can’t carry the weight of opening their hearts to believe the doctrine of your sovereignty, Lord. These weights are too heavy! They are yours! And I have found that God is not only willing but eager to take the burden of final responsibility for whether the house gets built and the city is saved. And for me that is a great reason not to be anxious in my labor.
God Gives to His Beloved in His Sleep
The second reason is given in verse 2: Don’t eat the bread of anxious toil because “God gives to his beloved in his sleep.” Some translations say, “He gives his beloved sleep.” Either is a possible translation from the Hebrew. One implies that God helps a person rest at night, the other implies that while a person is resting God is busily at work in the world to bless him. Which fits the context better?
The first half of verse 2 says that it is vain to rise early and go late to rest, but how would the simple statement that God gives sleep discourage a person from rising early and going to bed late? He is not interested in his sleep; he’s worried and wants to be about his work. But if Solomon meant, as I think he did, “God gives to his beloved in his sleep,” then there is a tremendously strong incentive to stop being anxious and cutting our sleep short. The incentive is this: God can perform more good for those who trust him while they sleep than they can perform with anxious labor for themselves while awake. Can you think of a better reason not to rise early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil?
Have you ever wondered why God made us in such a way that we have to sleep away a third of our lives? God could have designed a human being that was always fresh and rested and needed no sleep. Why did he decree that sleep be part of human experience? I’ll give you my opinion. He wanted to give a universal reminder to the human race that we are but children and ought to own up to it. We are so frail that we have to become helpless and unconscious and blind and weak every day in order to live at all. Sleep is a terribly humbling experience. We are never more weak, never more childlike than when we sleep in faith. And has not God said, “My power is made perfect in weakness”! And, “Unless you turn and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of God.”
If God’s power is made perfect in our weakness, then surely we may believe this psalm that when we hand over our anxieties to God and lay our heads down in peace, God works with all his might through the night on our behalf.
The great test of faith is to believe that when we can see only a bleak outcome to some situation and no good coming of it, yet the sovereign God can and will bring out of nowhere, as it were, a turn of events or attitudes that brings great blessing. And he can do it while we sleep! Beware lest you try to interpret his work too hastily; it may not be what you expect and he may not be finished. William Cowper wrote a great hymn that has helped me a lot at this point.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense
But trust him for his grace,
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.
His purposes will ripen fast
Unfolding every hour.
The bud may have a bitter taste
But sweet will be the flower.
Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan his works in vain.
God is his own interpreter
And he will make it plain.
I close with a personal experience. I remember a time a few years ago when I went through some weeks of not being able to get to sleep. Even my reasonings about why it was futile to be anxious kept me awake. The solution finally came in the form of a scene that I brought before my eyes each night.
I was on a boat in a rough sea and the crew was working with frenzy to keep the bow into the wind and secure all the cargo. As I climbed down into the small hold of the ship there was Jesus asleep on the cot. There was no tension in his face and his head rocked back and forth with the waves. I walked over and shook his shoulder, “Jesus, I can’t sleep; please help me.” He got up slowly, moved to the end of the cot, and sat down. He motioned me to lie down and put my head in his lap. Then with his hand on my shoulder he said, “I’ll take care of you tonight, and don’t worry. I’ll be sure you are ready for class tomorrow.”
I can’t tell you how many nights I went to sleep in that position. But there were a lot. And I still go there when sleep won’t come. For he gives to his beloved in sleep.
So don’t eat the bread of anxious toil, because no matter how hard you work to achieve anything, God has lifted off your back the final responsibility for its success, and God can accomplish more good for those who trust him while they sleep than they can accomplish with anxious labor while awake.
Supplemental texts:
1 Cor 3:7; 15:10; Phil 2:13; 1 Pet 5:7; 4:19
Who is the “beloved”? Cf. Ps 146:8 (Ps 32:8, 11); Jn 16:27
1 Kings 3:3-15—Solomon’s reception of promise in his sleep
Is 43:13—I work and who can hinder it
Ps 60:11; 108:12—vain is the help of man
Jer 46:11—in vain you used mediums
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Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org
Turkey Bowl + Thanksgiving Dinner = Reason to Come Out!
5th Annual Thanksgiving Turkey Bowl
Join us in a classic Citylife tradition as we embark upon our 5th Annual Thanksgiving Turkey Bowl! What’s a turkey bowl you might ask? Well, it has little to do with turkeys inside of bowls even or bowls shaped like turkeys. The real origin of the phrase “turkey bowl” came about in 1907 when a group of Amish farmers decided they were tired of milking cows by hand early in the morning and late at night, day after day. Their solution was the turkey bowl, of which we are all indebted, and so we celebrate their innovation and quick thinking by hosting our own “Turkey Bowl” from year-to-year! (If you believe that story you might be the Turkey!)
What: 5th Annual Turkey Bowl (flag-football game!)
When: Sat, 11/21 (1-4PM)
Who: Anyone who wants to play, both men and women are encouraged to participate!
Where: Joe Moakley Park, South Boston. (3 min walk from the JFK/Umass T-Station, Redline)
Plenty of street parking is available!
Email college@citylifeboston.org
Citylife Thanksgiving Dinner
This year our entire congregation is gathering to commemorate the Thanksgiving season. In classic pot-luck style, community groups from acrossthe church are baking and basting away! While we celebrate God’s faithfulness to us and express our Thanksgiving for his provision, you are invited to gather others for a great evening of food and fellowship. There is no cost, just come ready to meet, greet, and eat!
When: November 21, 2009
Time: 5-8 PM
Where: Raytheon Amphitheater, Room #240
THE EGAN RESEARCH CENTER
AT NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY
120 FORSYTH STREET
BOSTON, MA 02115
Q&A w/ JK: On Prayer | Part 2
Jesus taught that prayer effectually helps one to resist temptation. He instructed his disciples to pray by asking God to “lead us not into temptation” (Luke 11:4). In Augustine’s commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, he writes that “lead us not into tempta-tion” does not mean that we will never face tempta-tions but that God will help us to resist them rather than walk into them. In fact, Hebrews 2:18 and 4:16 promise us that Jesus can and will help us as we are being tempted when we look to him in prayer.Facing Sin
In addition, on two occasions in Luke 22, Jesus ex-horted the disciples to “pray that you may not enter into temptation.” Jesus also prayed before and after Luke 9:21-27 where he predicted his suffering and death as well as charged his disciples to take up their cross daily to follow him. This suggests that prayer is one means to overcome suffering as well as an ave-nue to crucify one’s fleshly desires and follow Christ. In Luke 21:34-38, Jesus taught that when facing temptations such as drunkenness, cares of this world, and trials prior to his second coming, his disciples should “stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” Again he teaches that prayer is a way for us to have strength to live for him and to resist sin.
Q&A with JK: On the Role of Prayer in His Life | Part 1
Q: In what ways has God used prayer to change your life?
A. That is a great question. For the Christian, there may be no bigger boost to your faith than answered prayers. At the same time, many people have walked away from Chris-tianity because of what appears to be “unanswered prayers”. Yet when we trust God as God, even when he seems silent, we’re confident God hears us and is concerned for our good. But to answer the question, inside the larger umbrella of kingdom-centered prayers, I’ve been con-victed to pray specifically for the smaller things in life, realizing that God genuinely cares about those things. Most Christians feel like God doesn’t have time for the details, and that we can only come to him when we have a big problem or need. But that’s not the way I cultivate a rela-tionship with my friends. Why would I assume it would be different with God? Lately I’ve been praying about loving my wife well, about being a good father, for caring about my co-workers who might be hard to love! Ha! It’s humbling to reflect on how God has been active in these areas, and has been answering these prayers according to his will, not mine. I’ve also been praying for the fruit of the Spirit in my life, and noticing the areas where they show up. In those areas where I want to get angry, what I’m finding is more self-control; in those areas where I tend to be anxious, I’m finding peace of mind. It’s not because I’m loving or peaceful, but because I pray for God to produce these things in me. I believe these are transformative kingdom-centered prayers. These are prayers that God delights to answer because they produce his character in our lives.
Q: What has God been teaching you about prayer lately that is changing your life?
A. The big thing is that my prayers are naturally so far away from His will that I need to re-learn how to pray. If we’re willing to learn, God delights in reprogramming us to pray. Usually He teaches through those who have come before us and, pri-marily, through the honesty of the Scriptures themselves. Instead of separating the two practices of Scrip-ture reading and prayer, God has been showing me that they are intricately connected. If I want to learn how to pray well, then I need to see that the words of Scripture, even when they don’t directly teach us about prayer, are the ingredients for sculpting a heart bent upon effective God-centered prayer. We’re invited to pray, not only the Psalms, but all of Scripture, because it is in the Word that we learn who God is – and it’s in prayer that we commune with this God. I have found a new focus, vocabulary, and vigor in learning to pray the Scriptures.
ESV Bible Reading
I’ve managed to figure out how to use RSS feeds! Now you can navigate on the sidebar for your easy link to the ESV Study Bible Daily Devotional. Enjoy!
