Tag: Lord

vocational stewardship

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 18 – Entering the Dance

Vocational stewardship

[Bible references: Ephesians 6:5-9; Colossians 3:1-17]

In-between those basic strategies, the question we all need to discover is, within the context we find ourselves in, what are the practical ways for us to use the gifts and talents God has equipped us with. For some of us, we can find ways to use our gifts and talents directly within the church. But all work, whether done in the church or outside can be done as unto the Lord. For others, Amy Sherman has identified four different strategies outside the church itself for us to consider.[1]

  • Promote the kingdom in and through your daily work
  • Volunteer your skills to an agency outside your employer.
  • Launch your own social enterprise
  • Participate in your church’s targeted initiative.

Whatever strategy we use, the goal is to bring hope to the world around us by bringing in Kingdom values of justice, righteousness, and peace.[2]

We do have to consider the reality that many of us have jobs that consign workers to demeaning labor: either doing tasks that treat workers as if they were biological robots on an assembly line doing repetitive tasks, or just doing unskilled tasks that require no creativity and that fail to regard the humanity of those workers.[3] Then sometimes, we simply find ourselves in a job which could easily be more meaningful if we were appreciated. What should we do then? Dorothy Sayers’ position is that we should have the same attitude as given to us in Genesis 2, we should serve the work. We can hope that the work was designed to serve the community, so that in serving the work we serve the community.

“The only true way of serving the community is to be truly in sympathy with the community, to be oneself part of the community and then to serve the work without giving the community another thought. Then the work will endure, because it will be true to itself. It is the work that serves the community; the business of the worker is to serve the work.”[4]

[1] Sherman, Amy. Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good. Intervarsity Press, 2011 eBook Chapters 9-13

[2] Sherman, Amy. Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good. Intervarsity Press, 2011 eBook Chapter 1

[3] Smith, James K.A. “The Beauty of Work, the Injustice of Toil” Comment comment.org/the-beauty-of-work-the-injustice-of-toil/

[4] Sayers, Dorothy. “Why Work” in Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine Villanova University www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/mission/faith/Why%20Work%20by%20Dorothy%20Sayers.pdf

Reflect

How might you use your vocational stewardship?

Observe

Read Ephesians 6:5-9. How do we serve “as unto the Lord” at whatever our vocation is?

Relation to Yahweh

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 17 – Finding our place

Relation to Yahweh

[Bible references: Exodus 6:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:12]

Most English translations of the Bible obscure a very significant relationship. In Exodus 6, the Creator revealed himself to Moses as Yahweh for the first time in history. Our translations mask the personal nature of the name when they translate that name with the title, LORD. However, if when reading the Old Testament replacing the word LORD with the name, Yahweh, we will discover, particularly in the Psalms, a very personal relationship between us and Yahweh.

Not only is God not some impersonal force but He is a person with whom we can have a relationship. In fact, He created us to have a special relationship with Him. As such, the meaning of our lives cannot be found solely within ourselves as if we were isolated creatures or self-contained universes. We are image-bearers of Yahweh, the person who is a community, we are designed to be people in community. And since we are created as an outpouring of the love that was shared between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we should outpour that very same love in our relationship with Yahweh and with each other.

We were created to be co-creators with Yahweh. Not that we have the same kind of powers, but we can use the materials and abilities He has supplied for us to create families, cities, nations, art, tools, and many other types of things. It was intended that our creations would glorify Him.

We know that we are not able to love Yahweh in the same way He loves us. Firstly, He is the Creator, and we are the creatures. Secondly, ever since our Rebellion, we were born in a corrupt state with a tendency to rebel against our Creator. Therefore, to discover the meaning of our lives, we need to search out the essence of the love of Yahweh toward us. In Chapter 15, we explored the various spiritual disciplines which could be helpful in guiding us in the search of who Yahweh is and how he loves us.

Even though our rebellion against Yahweh has harmed our relationship with Him, he continues to love us and has made provision for our relationship with Him to be restored. It is also because of his love, that he has had great patience to endure our constant rebelling and he is constantly working to draw us back to him. Our relationship with Yahweh does not require us to do great things or to do sufficient good things to outweigh the bad things we do. We “merely” need to be born again, to have his Spirit join with our spirit. When we are born of the Spirit, that is when we are born again, then we are not only image-bearers, but children of our heavenly Father. And one day, we will know him fully even as we are fully known by Him.

Observe

Read Exodus 6:1-6. What is the difference between knowing God as “God Almighty” (El Shaddai) vs. “Yahweh?”

Mystery of God’s name

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 2 – The God who created

Mystery of God’s name

[Bible references: Exodus 2-3]

 Many English-speaking Christians would say that, of course we know God’s name – it’s “Jesus,” or if you want to pronounce it in Hebrew it would be “Yeshua.” That would be true for the name of the Son of God. But what about God? The mystery of the name of God in the Old Testament has to do with the original Hebrew.

When God introduced himself to Moses, His name using modern Hebrew letters[1] would look like the next to the last line in the picture above. In older Hebrew it would have looked like the lines above it – the original characters are the top line . The original Hebrew language had no written down vowels, so these letters all represent consonants. In modern reading practices we mostly read silently to ourselves, but for most of history, it was more common to read out loud, so having written words with no vowel marks would not be a problem, because everyone would always be hearing the vowel sounds.

The difficulty in this case, is that in Old Testament times when Israel was in exile in Babylon, it came to be considered that the name of God was too holy to be pronounced. So, whenever someone would read that name, they would substitute the word “LORD,” which in Hebrew would be “Adonai.” In less formal settings, the Hebrew word, “Hashem,” which means “the name” would be used.

 That means that over time, the actual pronunciation of the word became forgotten. By the time English translations were produced, the translators adopted the Hebrew practice of using the word “LORD,” however, to distinguish the special name, the practice was to use a special way of spelling, “LORD.” What you will see in the English Old Testament, is the word “LORD,” using a capital “L” followed by “ORD” in smaller capitals.

As the centuries went on, Hebrew in general started to become less used and there was a concern about the pronunciation of all the Hebrew words. So back between the 7th and 10th centuries AD, a group of Jews called the Masoretes, added vowel markings to the Hebrew letters, except for the name of God.

During “Enlightenment,” many Christians started to feel less constrained by the holiness of God. So back in the 1800s, when Germany was center of the academic world, and the Christian academics made an attempt to try to pronounce the long unpronounced יהוה. In Hebrew, the letters are written right-to-left and corresponded to the English letters YHVH. The next step was to figure out the vowels, so they used the vowels for the Hebrew word for God, Eloah. And then, because the German language didn’t handle words beginning in “Y,” the “Y” became “J” with the resulting pronunciation being “Jehovah.” So that became the standard pronunciation in English for more than a century.

In recent decades there has been accelerating research in archeology of the Ancient Near East and researchers started to question the standard pronunciation. Currently, most scholars are in agreement to use ‘Y’ instead of ‘J’ as the first consonant and now understand that in Old Hebrew the third consonant should have a “W” pronunciation instead of “V.” Then they determined that they should use the vowels from the word “Hashem” which led to the pronunciation of “Yahweh” for the Hebrew name of God.

A new level of understanding can be obtained if we take another type of look at the letters in the name, יהוה or  . Particularly, if we look at the older letters of the Hebrew language, we can see that the letters are pictorial, that is they represent objects or actions.  The first letter represents either a hand or an activity of doing something. The second and fourth letters represent windows or revealing something. The third character represents a nail or fastening something. That means that the name God revealed to Moses means, according to the letters, “Hand revealed, Nail revealed.”

[1] Shurpin, Yehuda. “What is the Authentic Ancient Hebrew Alphabet?” Chabad.org www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3582435/jewish/What-Is-the-Authentic-Ancient-Hebrew-Alphabet.htm

Observe

Read Exodus 3. What difference would it make to the Israelites that their God has a name?