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Wednesday, December 01, 2004
I call them Pure Life Moments.
Those moments when you can't think you're any more alive than you are at precisely that point in time. They happen when you least expect them and in the strangest places. They happen in the most normal places.
I've had them in hospital delivery rooms.
I've had them just looking at my wife.
I've had them in sports venues.
I've had them in movie theatres.
I've had them riding around in a car with the right music cranked up.
I've had them on beaches.
I've had them on mountain tops.
I've had them in the chair in my living room.
I've had them in New York City.
I've had them in rural Georgia.
I've had them in church.
You get the idea. And, now that I think about it, those moments were always involving other people.
Yesterday, we established the idea that the presence of God in abundance is vital in our sense of community from verse 2 of Psalm 133, and today, I'd like to take a closer look at verse 3. You can read the NASB version from yesterday's entry, but here's verse 3 from The Message:
"It's like the dew on Mount Herman flowing down the slopes of Zion. Yes, that's where God commands the blessing, ordains eternal life."
Remember, this is a continuing thought on exactly what it's like when brothers and sisters who do life together abundantly is considered "wonderful" and "beautiful." It's like the dew at the top of Mount Herman in Israel. That water eventually flows into Jerusalem and the surrounding area, giving the people of God...
...life.
And life with abundance. It flows from the mountaintop down to us, or in this case, Israel. And it gives us, as a group, abundant life.
In his book "The Celtic Way of Evangelism," George Hunter contrasts the "Roman" way of evangelism with the "Celtic" way. In a nutshell, the "Roman" way says that someone has to believe and then they're invited to come in to the community; the "celtic" way is to invite someone into the community, allow them to see it at work, and then they would want to become part of it.
Hunter describes the way some Irish evangelists accomplished this. They would put together a team of believers and they would all move, as a tribe, near a village. They would then "out-live" those in the village through simply living the abundant life--the dew of Mount Hermon flowing down to us--and then eventually those in the village would be drawn to the love of Christ because they'd seen it at work in the lives of the team.
I know that's an oversimplification of a very detailed process, but the idea is there in that book, and the idea is there in Psalm 133: That if we, as a community of believers, were truly "out-living" the world, they'd beat a path to us in order to get what we have. We wouldn't have to program anything.
They lived out Pure Life Moments as a group of followers of God.
So, the question before us is this: What can we be doing today that helps others see us and our tribe and living abundantly, like the dew flowing into the slopes of Zion?
Brent 4:01 AM
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