Imitate Him, not Imitations

This Sunday Aug 31, 2008, I preached Ephesians 5:1-14, http://bethelcc.net/sermon_archive.php?targetPage=73 on being imitators of God, rather than being imposter imitations of the world's shame or just some external religious sham. We had a good discussion Sunday night at the Ellis' home on how to really be light to such a hard and dark world with headlines in our own neighborhood that make us shudder.

Whether my neighbor the landlord who was burned to death last week, or the kid across the street who was arrested the very next day for dragging, stripping, and beating another kid who came from a few blocks down to our block, whether the young mother of four who aborted another child and is trying to raise her children while the two fathers of her children are incarcerated, or the two men who stood across the street for an hour last weekend till past midnight having a rap battle using the most loud, perverted, and violent language you wouldn't want to imagine, while the kids who come to our kid's ministry literally rolled in the middle of the street with laughter...

It could almost seem hopeless. But the call of Isaiah echoed in Paul in Ephesians 5 is
"Awake O sleeper, and arise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you."
This is not just a gentle reminder that breakfast is on the table and we should roll out of bed. This is the voice of God that thunders, shakes the forests, and wakes the dead. This is the prophetic voice calling to the four winds and the Spirit of God rushing upon dead bones in dry valley to assemble a living army and produce a flowing river teeming with life.

This is a command that provides what it requires, giving sleepers the call to come out from the covers of darkness, giving corpses the command to walk out of their coffins, giving all of us who live in darkness, the hope of the light of Christ, the light of life.

And we are not just living in the light of Christ, but the light of Christ is in us, we are children of light, begotten of His light, and Paul even says in this text that we ARE LIGHT in the Lord. Kind of hard to escape holiness and evangelism when Paul puts it like this. How can we go on sinning? He doesn't just say, "The light shines on you to expose your sin" (though he does), but "You ARE light" (what place does darkness even have in you, what business could it possibly have at the doorstep of your mind?). How can we keep our lives and mouths from proclaiming His marvelous light when we ARE light in Him?

We MUST imitate God, for we ARE His children. We must shine His light in our dark world, for we ARE His light.

A minor bloggage in a major artery

I've been thinking about starting a blog, mainly for my friends, friends, and my church family to be informed and to interact together on life and ministry in the city. The city that is broken but being re-glued by grace. The city that is dirty, but being cleansed by the washing with water of the Word. Most of all, I hope that this blog will encourage those of us who are working for the transformation of this city into the New City, by remembering that we in a real sense ARE the City, we are the Bride, the New Jerusalem, the Holy City. We work to remove the broken bottles and filthy litter from these streets and lives of this grown-over garden knowing that we are not only working in hope and laboring in love for Eden to return in more glory than the original story, but that we are also the Lord's garden, the planting of His hand, for His splendor.

So I'll consider this a minor conversation within a small circle amid the swirling mass of information cluttering the airwaves of the bloggosphere. A minor bloggage in a major artery.