EPIPHANY • 7

How can we, as God’s People live in the World Today and be Salt and Light?

SET PRAYER

Divine Gardener,
you give growth to our seeds
and to the towering forest trees;
you raise to abundant life that which seems dead.
Teach us to choose blessing
and life rather than death,
so that we may walk blamelessly,
seeking you through reconciliation with all of your children. Amen.

SONGS FOR PRAYER

reading for: Tuesday Night, 7 February

Matthew 5:21-37

Jesus Calls God’s People to Return to Faithfulness to Him

  • READ

    Read the table below and compare God’s commands in the Old Testament with Jesus’ intensification of God’s commands in the New Testament. What do you notice?

To understand why Jesus was intensifying the Law (God’ commands) and what he was doing here, we need to first understand what happened on Mount Sinai after God led his people out of slavery in Egypt, about 1500 years before Jesus. In the book of Exodus, through Moses, God delivers his people out of slavery in Egypt. God starts to lead them on a journey back to the ‘Promised Land’ where God first called their ancestor, Abraham to inherit. They pass through the Red Sea and walk through the wilderness where they come of Mount Sinai in Exodus 19. Here Moses and the people stand at the foot of Mount Sinai, God and the Israelites make a ‘marriage’ covenant together. God vows to be their God and they vow to be his faithful people. (see Exod. 19:3-8). So right there, they make a two-way commitment to be faithful to each other.

Much later on, when Israel becomes unfaithful to God, God sends the prophets to call them to repentance (back to faithfulness to their marriage covenant). These prophets rebuke and remind God’s people to repent and be faithful again. The prophets write these warnings using the language of ‘marriage’:

 For your Maker is your husband—    the Lord Almighty is his name—the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer;   he is called the God of all the earth. (Isaiah 54:5NIV)

14 “Return, faithless people,” declares the Lord, “for I am your husband. I will choose you—one from a town and two from a clan—and bring you to Zion. (Jeremiah 3:14NIV)

In the gospel of Matthew, we read of Jesus intensifying God’s commands in the Old Testament because the Jews of his day were living as an ‘unfaithful wife’ to God by either totally ignoring the commands He had given at Sinai, or by merely ‘obeying the rules’ on the surface, without actually or catching God’s heart and intentions behind the ‘rules’.

So here, in the New Testament, when Jesus intensifies God’s commands given in the Old Testament he is actually revealing the heart and intention of the Father behind the commands. And because Jesus is the only one who interpreted the commands of God correctly and lived it completely, he ‘fulfills the Law’. And therefore when he called the Jews back then, and all of us today to follow Him, He was and is calling His people back to covenantal faithfulness to God. That is why, for all Christians, faithfulness to Jesus, IS faithfulness to God and all that He commands.

And if we’re thinking that Jesus calls us to an impossible task, there is Good News! Jesus shows how it was humanly possible to do this. He did it 2000 years ago through his human life and death on the cross. Then God raised him from the dead as the one whose life has been set as an example for us to follow. There’s even better news! After He ascended to the Father, He has poured out the same Spirit on all of us! (Acts 2) This same Holy Spirit who led him throughout His life and empowered Him to live in complete obedience to the Father, is the same Holy Spirit who makes us God’s sons and daughters and who empowers us to follow Jesus and overcome sin and death just as He did. So now, you and I, as part of the Church, the Bride of Christ, we have the means and the power to remain Covenantally (or ‘maritally’) faithful to God and love Him with all our heart, mind, soul and strength!

  • REFLECT

    Reflect on Romans 8:1-17 (or whole chapter if you can) and journal what the Holy Spirit is inviting/challenging you to surrender, change your mind about, or act on, this season.

reading for: Wednesday Night, 8 FEBRUARY

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

God’s People are Free to Choose or Reject His Offer of Life

  • READ

    What would a loving groom want for his bride? To give her the very best that he can give - the security of a home to call her own, a family to raise and intimacy of relationship with him, her attentive and loving husband. Similarly, what can a loving God give to his people? A secure land to call their own, descendants to inherit the land and the glory, honour and admiration of all the surrounding nations and his loving attentive provision and protection. In other words, every conceivable means for an abundant life. And this all comes through obedience to the Lord.

    Having been freed from the hardships of Egyptian slavery and having journey through the wilderness where they also entered into a covenant with God on Sinai and given God’s laws for an abundant living, God’s people are now about to enter the land they are about to inherit.  Moses is preparing to die and the people are preparing to enter the promised land.

    Moses tells them in this passage that they have two choices—either choose life and prosperity or death and adversity—and the choice rests with them. If they choose correctly, then Israel will live long in the land – just as the land would be fertile and prosperous, as a people, they would be fertile, blessed with many offspring and descendants. If not, then Israel will be destroyed – the land would be occupied by their enemies and they would be forced into exile (to live outside the land as slaves). They are at a big decision point.

    To choose life is to choose “obedient” to God and God’s ways. Once again, the Ten Commandments comes to mind. These are not merely impossible laws set down to achieve perfection or individual holiness (see Exod. 20:1–17). These laws are meant to preserve the ‘marriage’ covenant between them and God (Exod. 20:1–7) and with one another (Exod. 20:12–17). And with ‘keeping the Sabbath holy’ the very centre-piece of all the laws. This day was meant to be a day of recalibration and reordering existence.  The Israelites would come together to celebration, rest, recollect, and delight in God’s creation, take stock of their relationship with God and with one another, and ultimately to enjoy rest in God and with God.

    And at the centre and intention of all the commandments is for God’s people to love Him with all their hearts, soul, and might (Deuteronomy 6:1–9) —to circumcise the foreskins of their hearts to God (Deut. 10:16).

    The people are called to live the commandments as a way of life, not out of fear of defaulting and punishment from God, but out of the freedom to love God back for his rescuing them rescue from slavery, his commitment to them and the blessings He is leading them into. But the blessings don’t end there. They will in turn become salt and light, “a blessing” (Gen. 12:2–3) to other peoples around. And so God’s commandments and given not as restriction to ‘killjoy’ but in fact as ways that lead to the fullness of life for everyone.

    In the last part of our reading (v.19 – 20), Moses gives the people a specific instruction with regard to the choice they face. He exhorts them to “choose life”. The cards have been laid out before them. God’s will has been revealed. The ball is in the people’s court on how to exercise their free will. Unfortunately, as later Bible stories show, many times the Israelites chose their own way and suffered the consequences of their own decisions. God, however, remains faithful to the people in many ways, despite their wrong choices.

  • REFLECT

    Do you make it a point to observe the Lord’s Day and set it aside as a special day of your week? In other words, do you participate in Sunday Services regularly? Last Sunday, many CNLers came together to rest, worship, hear the word, celebrate Holy Communion and dedicate our children to the Lord. Setting aside our Sundays to gather together and to honour the Lord, is life-giving and brings order to our chaotic and driving pace of life.

    Make a special commitment in your Life Group to set-apart Sundays from the rest of the week. Make it a life-giving rule for yourself.

reading for: Thursday Night, 9 february

1 Corinthians 3:1-9

God’s People Need to Get Ready for Him and Overcome Fleshly Division

  • READ

    Paul is working to address the Bride of Christ, the church, which is young and growing but not quite ready for Christ, it’s groom. There are divisions in the Corinthian community that have formed around claims of superior wisdom attributed to various religious teachers and Paul’s response to this situation has been to deny that human wisdom has any ability to attain reliable knowledge of God (chap. 1). Paul argues instead that it is the Holy Spirit that equips human beings to know God truly (chap. 2), rather than human persuasiveness or cleverness in argument.

     

    Prior to this passage, the Apostle Paul makes it clear that godly wisdom is not something a human being can come to on his own. Rather, there is an authentic wisdom that consists of insight into the eternal plan of God for human beings that has reached its climax in Jesus. Grasping such wisdom depends on the Holy Spirit, who helps human beings to recognize truthfully what God has done.

     

    Furthermore, within this divinely given wisdom there is still a progression from “milk” to “solid food.” The problem with the Corinthians is not their desire to grow in divine wisdom. The problem is that they have been seeking the wrong kind of wisdom from the wrong sources!

    Real insight into the plans and purposes of God is given only through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Therefore persons who are truly in touch with divine wisdom are recognized, not by their philosophical elegance or inspiring speeches, but by signs of the Spirit’s presence with them.

     

    What signs could we see that indicate the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Chist? Indeed, Paul has already described those who have the Spirit as those having “the mind of Christ” (2:16). So, acting, thinking, and loving like Jesus are marks that a person is Spiritually alive and able to properly follow the gospel.

     

    This is a shocking teaching for modern believers, because like the Corinthians, we place a lot of value on technical skill in our preachers, teachers and leaders. We look for knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, facility with exegetical technique, historical and theological expertise, and above all an engaging speaking style! As useful as such skills are, Paul insists that the primary qualification for knowing God and understanding the gospel rightly is to be a certain kind of Spirit-formed person, living a life that looks like Jesus and the end result must be the building up of God’s servants, the Church, (v9).

  • REFLECT

    How can we be mature instruments of God? What must we do to help feed fellow new believers and families with ‘solid food’? What workshop, class, course, conference, or seminar will you sign-up for this year to help yourself grow in maturity? Which LG members would benefit from this as well? Is it possible to sign up and grow together?

reading for: Friday Night, 10 february

PSALM 119:1-8

God’s People Wrestle with Him In the Word for the Journey

  • READ

    The whole Psalm is an extended meditation on the Law (God’s Commands).  

    The first two verses of Psalm 119 introduce the psalm with the repeated phrase “Blessed/happy are those …”. This echoes the beginning of Psalm 1, the Psalm that serves as an introduction to the entire Psalter. Here, those who are happy are the ones who have kept their way blameless by obedience to the law.

    They keep God’s decrees and seek after God “with their whole heart” (v. 2). Unlike today’s ideas of the ‘heart’ which usually refers to seat of emotion, the scriptures speak of the ‘heart’ as the locus and centre of our thought and intention. The heart was responsible not only for understanding the law but also for having the intent to obey it. To seek God with the whole heart meant to embrace Torah (Gen – Deut.) as God’s instructions to us and embody Israel’s story as our own personal (as did Jesus) and community story.

    Verse 3 reinforces the connection between upright behaviour and keeping to the ways of God, bringing the picture of walking the straight path to the front of our minds again.

    Verses 4 and 5 build upon each other. In verse 4, the psalmist states that God has commanded the law to be kept diligently (lit. “to keep the precepts exceedingly”). Wanting to obey but aware of his own limitations, the poet prays in verse 5, “O that my ways may be steadfast,” asking that his path might conform to the path of God. Here he expresses hope that he might be able to keep the commandments, a hope that serves as a prayer God would keep him on the right path.

    In verses 6–8, the psalmist who obeys God’s commandments will not be put to shame. In ancient Israel, where honour was most important, to be put to shame was to lose social standing (see Ps. 25:1–3). The psalmist says here that only through following the law with an upright heart will honour be kept intact. The connection between moral behaviour and the worship of God is strong. Only with a heart that is obedient to the law can God be worshiped in a worthy manner.

    The final verse in this first section completes the verses that begin with ‘a declaration and a request. The psalmist declares his intention to keep God’s laws. God has commanded the law to be kept (v. 4); the psalmist prays that he might be able to keep it (v. 5) and now states his intent to follow the law (v. 8). This section ends with the request for God not to abandon him.

  • REFLECT

    This year, who in your LG/circle of spiritual friendships will you pray about to join you as your spiritual companions? How often will you meet? How will you prepare to encourage them?

Season of EpiphanyCNL