New Jersey

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR Joshua 1:1–6 (NIV) After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ aide: “Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them—to the Israelites. I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses. Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates—all the Hittite country—to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. No one will be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you. Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them.” CONSIDER To live a courageous life, we must make it our daily work to give and receive encouragement. Because we mostly find ourselves in our relatively small context, with our super-limited life—somewhere between a bunker and the front lines of all we are dealing with—one of the big strategies of encouragement is to keep in touch with the big-picture view of things. In order to run and not grow weary and to walk and not faint, we must be regularly lifted up out of the woods of our reality onto the eagle’s wings of the Holy Spirit. Genesis 1 and 2 offer us a picture of the whole creation—the heavens and the earth—as the temple of God with the image-bearers of God created and called to walk with God, be fruitful and multiply, and lead the whole creation toward flourishing abundance. Genesis 3–11 unfold the story of the tragic rebellion and demise of what became a self-serving, God-denying people. Genesis 12 through the rest of the Old Testament is the story of an incredibly small, very focused restart. It is easy to get the picture from reading the Bible, the story of God, that we are talking about something massive and grand. I don’t want to burst your bubble, but the majority of the Bible is actually a pretty small story. The plot centers around the promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey, a veritable garden of Eden place. We see its scope in today’s text: “I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses. Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates—all the Hittite country—to the Mediterranean Sea in the west.” It always felt so large and grand to me. In truth, this promised land, the focus of most of the Bible and the centerpiece of much of the story, is in actuality roughly the size of the tiny state of New Jersey. So what’s my point here? Am I somehow trying to diminish the story? No, I am attempting to magnify the God. Our God, the God of heaven and earth, the only true and living God, almost always begins very, very, very, very small. Indeed, the God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and the hills, chooses to make a promise to one man and engage a relatively small group of people to journey into and inhabit a territory the size of New Jersey. And all told it takes around two thousand years. And it, ultimately, apparently, comes to a disappointing failure with the people expelled from the land and sent into exile because of their persistent hardness of heart and stiff-necked ways. And it turns out all of this is merely the backstory. For onto this platform of the ruins and rubble of an apparently failed experiment, this God will come himself into his creation, into this little promised land, incarnated in the human flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah. This, my friends, is again a very, very, very, very small, incredibly unconventional, unbelievably absurd approach to save the whole world. And look at it now, two thousand years hence, a massive scope and yet still small, seed by seed, one heart at a time. Friends of the awakening, this is very, very, very, very small, and it is massive—sowing and growing over the entire creation now, billions and billions serving and being served. Take courage. It can actually start with you, your heart, your home, your church, your town—with us. As we say in the Sower’s Creed, “Today, I will remember that the tiniest seeds become the tallest trees.”  PRAY Father, how can it be? New Jersey! You are so big, and yet you have worked so small. And you have worked so small, and it has become so big. Small, Lord, teach us the small ways, the ways of Jesus. Show us the seed in our hands today, and give us the audacity to sow small and in doing so to sow big. Come, Holy Spirit, and interpret this mystery and this miracle to our deepest hearts and minds. Thank you for sowing this encouragement into us. In Jesus’s name, amen. JOURNAL Are you grasping the mysterious and miraculous nature of the small-big ways of God? How does it encourage you? How will it help you become a better encourager? SING Today, we will sing "We've a Story to Tell to the Nations" (hymn 458) from our Seedbed hymnal, Our Great Redeemer's Praise.