We could state our point another way: Jesus’ prayers were not formulas for getting things from God, but examples of true personalness and intimacy. We learn by watching him pray that prayer is, in essence, a discovery in what is most personal about us. True prayer comes from the deepest part of our souls and not merely off the top of our heads.

I want to assert that we need prayer to keep personal categories central in our lives. When we pray we are not our job or our status, we are not our bank account or our reputation. When we pray, we are just ourselves, unvarnished and unadorned. Perhaps this personal aspect of prayer makes it more necessary than ever. I say this because it seems that our cultural drift towards the impersonal — especially in our embrace of efficiency and technique and performance — is becoming ever more dominant.

Quentin Schultze in his book, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, explores the present technological culture and asks what technique is doing to our souls. He asks: do we really think that there is a method for everything? For instance, we tend to think about human connectedness as technique (networking we call it). I heard recently that Blackberry owners lower their functional IQ’s because of their constant distraction – they are seldom present to the task or the person before them, always being somewhere else. We tend to think about leadership and management as technique. People see through this I think – if you are a leader, you soon realize that you cannot lead without caring for people. Recently, we have begun to think about personal transformation as the application of spiritual technique. Self-help guru Tony Robbins talks about the technology of personal transformation.

I would simply like to assert that in all of this technicized living, we need prayer more than ever. And prayer is so unlike the technologies. It is highly inefficient, quite wasteful of time, and to all appearances, impractical. We need an image for this: think of prayer as like the woman pouring expensive perfume on the feet of Jesus (see Matt 26), an act that was criticized by the pragmatists in Jesus’ group, but praised by Jesus himself. Prayer is “poured-out-soul”, beautiful perhaps, but costly and not very pragmatic. In economic terms, prayer does not make much sense of time and effort. But if you want to shift the focus onto the personal, prayer is priceless.

You perhaps know of Bill Gates famous quote: “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning”. On one level, of course, Bill is right. Theologian Marva Dawn called worship “a royal waste of time” but she did not mean that we should not spend time in prayer and worship. She meant that this spending of time was precisely how we recaptured our personhood before God. Otherwise we become mere cogs in the cultural machinery. But to waste time with God, to be with the king, well that was “a royal waste of time”, and how liberating! On one level prayer appears to be wasteful; but on another level, on the personal level, prayer re-establishes the truest values.

Last Sunday we finished our series on the Sermon on the Mount with what I thought to be a very important and incisive message by our pastor Chris. If you missed it, get the podcast. And now we begin our move towards Easter with a series we are calling Generous.

See you Sunday at 9:29 or 11:1.

Bob

Questions for further reflection:

1. Be honest now: how have you been tempted to turn your relationship with God into a technique?
2. What is your experience of prayer? What is it about your life that makes it hard for you to pray?
3. Can you name a moment in your life when you felt connected to God in a personal and intimate way? What was the lasting effect of that experience?
4. How are you preparing yourself for Easter? How can you make the connection with Jesus more personal?

Our Easter series, Generous, starts on March 14 and will run until Easter Sunday.

March 14 – Take – Chris
March 21 – Bless – Jeremy
March 28 – Bless – Chris

Stations of the Cross will be open in the West Hall from 9am-9pm on March 30/31 and from 9am-5pm on April 1

April 2 @ 10:10am – Good Friday Service – Break – Bob

April 4, 2010 @ 9:29am & 11:11am * – Easter Sunday Celebrations – Give – Chris

*please note there is no 7pm service on Easter Sunday

To begin with, his words resonate with our intuitive and deep-seated awareness that we need to move on from where we are. As human beings, we somehow know we are not yet complete, not yet home, not yet where we need to be. Most our current cultural conversation is about this need to go forward in some way. Our politics are filled with the language of a better day, a better world, a better life. But why is Jesus telling us that the way forward is through the tight squeeze? What does he mean by this?

Maybe more importantly for us, are we willing to trust Jesus when his way seems so strange at times? How are you personally doing with his call to follow him through the squeeze? Really, how are you doing?

One of my favorite Christian thinkers, John Stackhouse, recounts overhearing an honest and unguarded conversation along this line:

I sat in a pew on a Sunday afternoon recently, awaiting the start of my son’s piano recital. Their teacher had rented a church for the occasion, and the families of her pupils – some of whom had apparently not been in a church for some time, if ever – were staring at the images all around them. As a father and daughter behind me began to remark on the pictures they saw, I was struck again by this basic principle of Christianity’s strangeness.

“Isn’t Christianity weird?” the teenage said to her father in a stage whisper. “ I mean, all these pictures of a dead guy on a cross. All this blood and suffering and stuff.”

“Yeah,” her father replied with a nervous chuckle. “It’s gross, isn’t it. I don’t get it.” (John Stackhouse, Humble Apologetics, pp. 163-164)

On one level, the gospel can be hard to understand. It makes no sense to say that humanity’s deepest hope and highest good is found in and through the pathway Jesus walked — the path that led through suffering, and death on a Roman cross. But it does makes sense if this is the only passage through to the widest and most open country there is. And that is what Easter is.

See you this Sunday at 9:29 and 11:11.

Bob Osborne

Some thoughts for further reflection:

1. When, or why, have you ever been confronted with the strangeness of Christianity? Have you ever been struck with the seeming absurdity of the way of Jesus?
2. How would you describe the squeeze Jesus invites us into? What has it been like for you?
3. When have you found that being squeezed was in fact the only way into a better life?
4. What are you looking for? How will you know when you get there?

Calgary Christian Mixed Slo-pitch is a league that provides a platform for Christians to use slo-pitch as a means to build community and friendships between fellow believers and as a form of outreach to friends and co-workers.  For more information about the league, please visit their website by clicking here.

We are looking for between 12 to 14 committed people to start up a Westside team (7 – 9 men and 3 – 5 women).  If you are interested in being a part of the team, please contact Laura Sickle at  403-701-2042 or e-mail lsickle@shaw.ca.  Deadline to sign up for the team is March 21, 2010.

For the Wednesday evenings of March 17th and 24th we present a two-part series we are calling The Baptized Life — a Lenten meditation on what it means to follow Jesus through the image of our baptism.  As always we begin our sessions in silent prayer at 7 pm, followed by public readings at 7:15 and then on into our teaching and interaction. We conclude always promptly at 8:30.

During holy week (March 30 to April 1), we will again present the Stations of the Cross. A Good Friday service will be held on April 2 followed by Easter on April 4.

So what did Jesus have in mind when he told us not to judge others? Is this Jesus’ endorsement of a kind of relational passivity? I don’t think so. In fact, I think he is pushing us in the opposite direction, reminding us that life is best lived when we consider the well-being of others. Could any of us be entirely passive with our children, spouses, family or friends? One can easily see that to be in vital relationship necessarily means that passivity is impossible. To love someone means that we very much caught up in their well-being.

What does Jesus mean then? Simply this: a relationally engaged life must have, as its first principle, an embrace of our common humanity. We are not essentially different from each other. We are all made of the same stuff, prone to the same fears, faults and failures. And therefore, it is hypocritical to hold others in contempt. To be contemptuous of another is to condemn one’s own humanity. Far better, far truer, to reach out a hand while you recognize the need of grace for yourself. Listen to Saint Paul’s commentary on this idea:

It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. (Galatians 5:13-14)

See you this Sunday at 9:29 or 11:11.

Bob Osborne

Some questions for further reflection:

1. What is your understanding of the value of tolerance in our culture? What do you think about the idea that love is better than tolerance, and that love is engaged?
2. When have you ever experienced something like “loving correction”? In what way was it loving? In what way was it correction?
3. After reading this, who comes to your mind as someone you could reach out to? Who could you get engaged with in a loving and helpful way?

Perhaps it was the gift of time that allowed John to see as clearly as anyone what the essence of this life in Christ is all about. Perhaps that is one of the benefits of living longer, but only if one is drawn into the beauty and wonder of faith and doesn’t get old and bitter. John was anything but old and bitter. His writings suggest that he was full of wonder in the vision of Christ.

John’s writings were remarkably clear and focused. In fact, some scholars see John growing simpler as he grew older. If you take time to read his first letter, what has come to be called “First John”, you will read some of the most direct teaching on what lies at the heart of the Christian life, a kind of three-fold strand of basic Christian living.

The three vitals evidences of true Christian life are inter-related, says John: the life of truth, the life of obedience, and the life of love. In other words, there is a truth in Jesus to be embraced (he is the divine Christ), a way in Jesus to live (in obedience to God’s commands), and a heart that animates it all — the love of God which is most perfectly displayed in Jesus. Some have called these three strands “the tests of life”.

But it was the message of love that was most characteristic of John’s teaching. A very old tradition tells us that one of John’s students once complained, “why don’t you talk about anything else? “Because there isn’t anything else”, John answered.

My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.

My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love! (1 John 4:7-12, The Message Bible)

Here is a message that must be constantly revisited. As we pursue truth and goodness, let us also live out the love of God. If old John was speaking at Westside King’s Church this Sunday he would say it one more time: “love one another”.

See you this Sunday at 9:29 or 11:11.

Remember that our Lent Prayer Retreat is only two weeks away: click here.

Bob Osborne

Some questions for further reflection:
1. What is the most challenging thing about love?
2. How do you think we are most confused about love in our culture? What one word would you use to describe what most people understand love to be?
3. What metaphor, image, or story best describes love to you? (see if you can do this without reference to Jesus) Is there any picture of love that moves you?
4. When, where, how have you been the recipient of a love that has transformed you?

We currently have 4 dinners looking for people to sign up to attend and more dinners will be added as hosts sign up.  For more information about these dinners and to register to attend, click here

It was a stimulating, thought-provoking time, full of insight, humor, passion and even the odd (gracious) disagreement. We had a broad sense beforehand of what we going to talk about (our current series) but we did not map out how we would go about it. So we just let the conversation happen, and happen it did. But that is what conversation is all about. It is an uncontrolled, spontaneous thing, and you don’t quite know where you are going or where you will end up. You will certainly want to listen to the podcast.

Which brings me to ask some questions (with more below). How are you with conversation? Do you enjoy conversation, especially those kinds that shed light and are helpful? How about talking with friends about life and faith? In my opinion, conversation is the reason God created Starbucks. I know of few things more helpful in my life as a Jesus-follower than talking with friends about this life we are called to. I need their perspective and they need mine. And somehow, in the process of the give and take, something is discovered by talking it out, something I could never know sitting alone with my thoughts.

I often reflect on this: in the dynamic of conversation there is a kind of true personal knowing of another person that can be found in no other way. We reveal ourselves as we talk, not just in formal concepts but in the way we make associations, in the connection of thought to thought, and what we choose to focus on. You know someone when you listen deeply to their voice. Indeed, you come to know yourself when you talk. Conversations are vehicles for dynamic personal discovery.

And we are invited into this way of being with God. We call it prayer, but in many ways you can think of it as conversation with God. And if you take full stock of how this is modeled in Scripture, you will notice that it is variated as any common human conversation — there is information, argument, self-disclosure, passion, emotion. I believe that prayer is the basic way we practice a relationship with God. One of my favorite New Testament words is paressia (Gk), which literally means “freedom of speech” but is often translated as “boldness” or “confidence”. The New Testament reminds us, over and over, that we have free speech with God, that we can say what is on our hearts and in our minds, and that we can expect him to listen to us, and honor our perspective (Eph. 3:12; Heb. 10:19). Now, our perspectives can be totally skewed, and badly informed, but they are ours, and by sharing them we are known. If we stay at this with God, somehow, through the process of being in conversation with him, we change. There is a kind of learning that comes to us mystically and surprisingly, often through the normal processes of life, but amounts to nothing less than God’s conversational response to us. What a wonder!

This Sunday is Valentines Day, and we want to pay special attention to with a special look at love. See you at 9:29 or 11:11.

Bob Osborne

Take time to ponder these questions:
1. How are you in conversations about the real meaningful aspects of life? Do they frighten you? Or enliven you?
2. Why is it that so many people now prefer virtual conversations (afternoon talk-shows) rather than to participate in the real thing?
3. When was the last time you have a conversation about matters of faith and God? If it has been a long time, why? Where could you find conversation partners for that purpose?
4. If you are married, what is the general state of your conversations? I often think of marriage as a life-long conversation — so how is your conversation going? Are you talking about meaningful things? Are you sharing life?