South Africa 2011-2012

I got to hear another awesome sermon at Gates of Praise today; it went something like this. Many of us, after we “get saved” (or however you want to describe what happens when we choose to follow God; for many, myself included, it doesn’t happen this way) enter a period of contemplation and even complacency where we are basically reveling in our blissful new state and waiting for God to work exciting things through us. This state, however, shouldn’t be, and isn’t, the end of our journey. While our Christian walk must happen from a place of rest, if our contemplation doesn’t lead us to action, we need to reexamine our rest! All true prophecy involves action (James 2:17: ”Faith without works is dead.”). In order to acquire this power to rouse ourselves to action, we must only claim the inheritance that’s already ours in Christ, but that the devil keeps trying to convince us doesn’t belong to us; in doing so we must remember that the devil only has as much power as we give him. Throughout this sermon I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes: “It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” (C.S. Lewis). It’s often very hard for us to act according to our full powers in God because we’re afraid of how painful the resulting changes in our lives might be, or because we simply don’t understand or believe that we have so much power at our disposal. This balance between rest and action, and (regarding the latter) not underestimating what we can do in Christ, is, of course, a lifelong struggle. I continue to be impressed with this church’s messages of action outside the comfortable boundaries of the church walls; clearly it’s important to go to church if we are committed to walking with God, but what we do in church on Sunday mornings is never going to be more than the starting point for that commitment.

On a lighter note, I had a fun experience in Swedish culture yesterday when we went to the house of a Swedish couple (former volunteers and friends of POR) to celebrate St. Lucia, generally celebrated on December 13th (see link below for the history of this holiday). All the volunteers (including Adam, the one guy) wore white dresses, and the women wore tinsel on our heads and around our waists, though I wore holly because I got to be St. Lucia! We walked into the room with lit candles singing St. Lucia songs in Swedish (I had a cheat sheet) and then repeated the performance for a German couple across the street. I can only imagine what any South African who saw us must have been thinking; five young white people dressed in white robes and tinsel and carrying candles is certainly an unusual sight!

http://www.newsweden.org/luciahistory.htm