Happy Holy-days!

When I first found out that the church I currently attend, namely Shofar Century City, was closed during the Christmas period, I was both shocked and confused.  Why would a church not have a service for one of its most important celebratory events?

Although I am still disappointed by this, I now understand why from a recent sermon I heard - the church places such an importance on going away on holiday, that the majority of the congregation would not be present to attend!

I learnt that the word holiday comes from holy-day - a time set apart, doing things out of the normal, something special and sacred.

For most of us, we reward ourselves with rest after a hard days work. Our definition of rest is hugely flawed in thinking that vegetating on the couch, mindlessly watching TV or doing nothing, will bring us the rest we are after.

However, biblical rest is the complete opposite! We are commanded to honour the Sabbath by spending time with God.  This is God's spiritual nourishment that fuels us into feeling recharged and energised to do another weeks work.  Did you get that? Rest is suppose to come before hard work, and not the other way round!

God warns us to take rest seriously - so much so, that in 2 Chronicles 36:20-21 God punished them for not observing the Sabbath.  So if a weekly rest is so important, how much more is an annual one, where we can reflect on the past year and prepare ourselves for a new one!

We all have our favourite idea of the perfect holiday - whether it be camping, lying on the beach or going on a safari - there is a common denominator that is found in God's creation.  When we connect with God through nature, we will find rest for our weary souls and be refreshed. 

Although I do not enjoy camping myself, some might say from the Feast of the Tabernacles, where God commanded his people to build a shelter (tent) and spend 7 days in it, that God certainly does!

Rest is not a destination, but a starting point. We are able to work hard when we have spent time resting in God's presence, and thus recharging our batteries when we spiritually connect to the source of our power.

Rest is both a principle to obey and a blessing to enjoy!

So this festive season, I challenge you to set aside as many days as you are able to, to stop working and REST - (Restore - Energise - Strengthen - Transform)

And as you do so, may you be ready to start working hard again, to achieve all your goals set for 2020!

A Healing Snake on a Pole at Calvary

Based on Bible verses:

Numbers 21:8-9 The Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.

John 3: 14-15 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” 
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Have you ever wondered about the meaning of the Medical logo with a snake on a pole? Google may attribute this to a Greek god or legend, but if you read the above verses, it is obvious that these images were clearly inspired by scripture. 

God’s use of serpent symbolism for healing was appropriate for the Israelites, as they associated serpents with life and healing, due to their regenerative healing powers through their ability to shed their skin. 

When the Israelites kept moaning and complaining about their mundane life in the Wilderness, God sent poisonous snakes to bite them. But when Moses prayed for them to be healed, God gave the instruction in Numbers 21:8 (see above). God was teaching them something about faith. It is illogical to think that looking at a bronze image of the cause could heal anyone, but that is exactly what God did. The saving power came not from the bronze serpent itself, but from God, who saved the people when they trusted Him by looking at the bronze serpent. The revelation here is that God doesn’t always prevent or remove the things that may cause our death or when we are ‘bitten’ by sin, but He does promise that we will be cured from death, and healed from the poison of sin. 

In the John 3:14 reference, we see that the bronze serpent was a foreshadowing of Jesus. The serpent, a symbol of sin, was lifted up from the earth and put on a pole, just like Jesus was lifted up with his crucifixion at Calvary. Jesus became sin in order to take away the sin from everyone who would look to Him in faith, just like the Israelites had to look to the up-raised symbol in the wilderness. 

Jesus, in the place of the snake, is the source of our healing, the source of rescue from the poison of sin, and from the wrath of God. Jesus in the place of the snake is portrayed as evil and a curse. The snake on the pole is a picture of God’s curse on the people. So it was with Jesus. In becoming like the snake, He was the embodiment of our sin, and the embodiment of our curse, and in becoming sin and curse for us, He took ours away. 

When we look to Jesus, we are promised a new life or a rebirth, which symbolises how a snake shed’s its skin in order to get a new one. The grace of the new birth is in our seeing Jesus Christ lifted up. 

God redeemed a symbol of evil (the serpent) and turned it into a symbol of salvation. Just as the Israelites had looked in faith on the serpent on a pole to be saved from death, we also look in faith to the crucified Saviour in order receive healing and eternal life.

Preparing for Life's Storms

Just like in the natural, when we are given a warning of an approaching storm, there are certain measures we need to take in order to be secure, whether it is boarding up your windows or securing your outside furniture, or just to remain inside.  Unfortunately, with the climate change crisis and the effects of El Nino, storms often strike when we are least expecting them, or with little warning. That's why it is always important to be fully prepared for a storm, BEFORE they happen, when everything is still calm and we have the time to plan for it.

This is even more important when it comes to our spiritual lives. Life will not always be plain sailing and we must be prepared for head winds and rough seas ahead.  In order for us to maintain an unwavering faith and not have a 'faith wobble' at every crisis, we need to keep ourselves anchored in the hope of Jesus and keep practicing our coping tools. Your faith and hope go together - without the one, the other will always tend to 'leak' out.  To use the analogy of flight, faith is the runway from which your hope takes flight.  You need a solid foundation of faith in order for your hope to remain steady when you are hit by a storm.  To achieve this, your faith needs to be based on WHO God is, and not what He can DO, otherwise when bad things happen that you don't understand, you will not survive the storm well.

The only way to learn who God is, is to spend time with Him.  We need to be reading His word, the Bible, daily and speaking to Him through prayer.  When we are undistracted and open to hearing the Holy Spirit, we give God the opportunity to give us a personal revelation of Himself.  We also need to take time to write down our answered prayers, so we can remember them when we are faced with a lack of trust, faith or have doubts and need a breakthrough.  

In other words, we need to already have a game plan in place and have all the necessary survival tools at the ready, BEFORE the storms come, so that we can be prepared for them and get through them unscathed. Knowing our weaknesses and trigger points will help us to be better prepared and not fear the storms of life.

(Based on 'Unwavering Faith' Sermon by Robert de Jongh - Shofar Church, Century City, Cape Town)

The Sacrifice of Feeling Foolish

When you make yourself available to God and start asking Him to use you, you can be guaranteed that He will call you to do and say things that may make you feel foolish.  The problem is, if you are anything like me, we begin to doubt that those stirrings in our heart or ideas in our thoughts might not be from God, so we talk ourselves out of it.

It takes courage to trust that we have heard from God correctly, and there is the fear and risk of feeling or sounding foolish when we step out in faith.  Whether it is doing an act of kindness like paying for someone's groceries or sharing a word of encouragement to someone God has laid on our heart or even to be as bold as sharing the Gospel with a complete stranger, it is our obedience that God is testing.  Will we sacrifice our ego to maybe feel or look a little foolish?  

The challenge for us is to trust that we have indeed heard and interpreted God's message correctly and to take a leap of faith and as Nike says, just DO IT!  When we delay our obedience, the devil will be sure to use that pause to plant doubts in our minds, which will drain our courage to be used by God. 

I am ashamed to admit that there have been many times where I've chickened out, but the more I think about it, the more I realise that even if it was not entirely from God, if it's good and right, then what harm can it do?  Surely our obedience should be more important to us than feeling foolish.  So next time I feel inspired to be used as God's instrument, I intend to lay down my shyness and my fear of feeling foolish, as a sacrifice for obedience.  I hope you will agree to join me in this quest... 

A Sombre Easter

Unlike previous Easter celebrations which were happy and joyful occasions, this year proved to be a more sombre affair. As I shared the reasons why with my sister, I was surprised when she exclaimed how blessed I had been to be touched by God in such a meaningful way.

On Good Friday, as I ate my pickled fish and reflected on the symbolism of the fish, vinegar and spices, I was reminded of the intense pain and suffering that Jesus had endured when he died on the cross. Like the sacrificial lamb that he was, he endured and submitted his life as an offering to us all, knowing that it was for a greater purpose. As Christians, we should share, not only in the celebration of the Easter message, but also in the suffering. As a parent, I can only imagine how God must have felt to see his son suffering as he was battered and bruised and nailed to that cross. If you've ever watched the movie 'The Passion of the Christ', you cannot help but grimace in anguish at how much Jesus had suffered and endured.

On Sunday, again, instead of a happy, uplifting, joyful message, Pastor Jaco Janse van Rensburg from the Shofar Church in Century City chose to focus us on the betrayal of Christ by Judas and Peter and the importance of repentance. As he shared how Peter had denied knowing Jesus, I was reminded of how often I too had denied Jesus - by not sharing that I was a Christian with others or by saying, thinking or doing things that I knew he would disapprove of. As I wept with repentance of how sinful I was, I realised how it is only with a contrite heart, being made fully aware at the wretchedness of our sin, that you can fully appreciate the magnitude of Jesus's death and what it cost him and what it means to me as a sinner.

As a sinner, we can either choose to be like Judas who ended his life in despair or we can repent and be like Peter, who became one of the greatest witnesses for Christ. We may not go to the extremes of ending our lives, but by choosing not to repent, our sin can eat at us and end up killing our faith, our hope and even our future.

Two things stood out for me on Sunday's sermon. One was from Luke 22:61 when after Peter had denied knowing Jesus for the third time, Jesus locked eyes with him. Peter remembered what Jesus had said the night before and was filled with shame and wept bitterly. But I also reflected on the love and forgiveness Peter must have seen in Jesus's eyes - no condemnation or anger, just pure love and understanding, which remorsefully turned Peter's shame and guilt into true repentance.

The other highlight was the significance of Peter denying Jesus 3 times, and then in John 21:15-17 when Jesus, after his resurrection, asks Peter if he loves him 3 times. It is almost as if there is a spiritual transaction that takes place when we sin in the natural, that needs to be cancelled out again in the spiritual. Or perhaps the number 3, being the symbol of completion, was Jesus's way of saying 'It is finished'. Just like the message of Easter should be for us - Jesus died for our sins, paying the full debt of our transgressions. His work was done.

Only once we can fully appreciate and comprehend what Jesus's death means for us as a sinner, can we then rejoice and celebrate how Christ conquered death by rising again to give us the amazing gift of eternal life.

The Cycle of Comfort

Reading 2 Corinthians, I've come to realise that the purpose of our suffering, is to become a part of God's cycle of comforting. When we go through the storms of life, or are shaken by the tragic loss of a loved one, we get to experience God's amazing comfort, as well as the comfort of family and friends. 

God promises us that He will be with us during these difficult times, which tells me we will and should expect to go through them. Grabbing hold of God's tangible comfort, allows us to stand firm, without having to fall apart, for it's in His comfort that we find the peace to trust Him, even though we do not understand why. It is in His arms that we find His strength to carry all the pain and hurt, until we are strong enough to lay it down.  The cure for our despair is trusting that God will, not solve the problem or take away our pain, but help us to get through it. 

If you are in desperate need of God's comfort right now, but cannot feel His presence, then trust that He is there, whether you can 'feel' Him or not. Spend time alone in His presence, encouraging yourself with the healing balm of the Psalms and completely open up your heart to Him honestly in prayer.  God hears all the groanings of our heart when we don't know what to pray. Build up your spirit with worship and praise and let your free-flowing tears heal you with their cleansing. I also find that spending time in nature helps me to feel God's presence. Be bold enough to ask God for a sign that He is there, and be amazed as He shows you His goodness. 

Another comfort revelation I've come to learn, is that when a sorrow is shared it is instinctively halved. Sharing our pain with others and accepting their gifts of prayer as we battle with lifes trials, testings and tribulations, is a blessing we should be thankful for, and not take for granted. And the amazing thing is, that when we comfort others, putting aside our problems and our pain, we ourselves are helped and comforted in return. In fact, it is the purpose of our very pain that we are able to comfort others who go through the same thing, that allows us to truly empathise and become an effective comforter.  

So next time you meet someone who is going through something you have had to endured, you can come along side of them with a comfort only you can offer, for God has prepared you for this very task...

Pruned for Joy

If you’ve ever experienced the joy of gardening, you will appreciate the wonderful benefits of pruning off all the dead leaves and twigs after a hard season of winter.

When we ourselves experience God’s pruning in our lives, we assume that He too is cutting off all the dead things in our lives.

However, I recently heard an insightful sermon that gave me a different perspective to God’s kind of pruning and His purpose for it in our lives. 

Unlike winter pruning, God also prunes us during Spring and Summer seasons by thinning out our growth to help our fruits grow better and bigger. By fruits, I’m not only referring to our fruits of the spirit, but our Christian growth in general.

All pruning is painful, but we need to understand that God’s purpose for it, is to help change us so that we can better fulfill our purpose and destiny, thus enabling a more joy filled life.

We can see this kind of pruning throughout the Bible, through the testimonies of men like Joseph. So often we experience testing times after a spiritual victory, which is God’s way of snipping off our ego and keeping the glory on Him instead of on ourselves.

Much like plants, God’s pruning builds character by removing over-mature, weak, problematic & excessive growth, so that we can produce a bigger yield of better, longer-lasting, more durable fruit.

Our fruit is not only for our benefit, but also for the building of God’s kingdom. When we allow our growth to remain uneaten within us, it becomes overripe and inedible, and will be pruned from us.

When we submit to God’s pruning, we inevitably become better, more mature Christians with better, bigger more life-changing fruit (growth).

If you are going through a tough time right now, I challenge you to ask yourself what is God trying to prune out of your life? Is it people, like aphids that are eating away at your growth; is it securities and things that you have become too dependent on; or is there pride, ego or offenses that need to be pruned out of you?

Rest for the Week

Working for a Jewish boss, I have often admired his family’s devout observance of the Shabbat, the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, and have at times pondered the concept of what this means.

As Christians, we tend to believe that the Sabbath commandment only applies to Jewish followers, as a law to be strictly adhered to, and that it is not necessary for the rest of us. Having recently heard an insightful sermon on the Sabbath, I have had a change of heart and am intrigued what it could mean for all Christiams. 

It is the fourth commandment in the Old Testament, and even though many Christians interpret Hebrews 4 as Jesus becoming our rest, I am also seeing a purpose and a need for setting aside one day a week to recharge ourselves physically, and to reconnect with God, to refresh and strengthen us spiritually.

There are many verses in the Bible that urge us not to work on the Sabbath or do anything in pursuit of our own interests. (See Isaiah 58:13-14) Yet, instead of seeing this as a legalistic law, we need to realise that rest is not meant to be a reward or a luxury, but a necessity of life, something we tend not to allow ourselves enough of, without feeling guilty.

We’ve chosen to ignore the need to rest, choosing instead to be fearful of not getting everything done, or running out of time to finish all the tasks on our to-do list.  Yet, God promises us that a Sabbath rest is a fruitful time and that when we observe it with a willing, holy attitude, He will provide provision in place of it, like He did with the manna for the Israelite's.

We should not see it as an obligation to NOT do ANY work, but rather as an opportunity to seek God and find rest in the process.  When we change our perspective of it, the Sabbath becomes the Lord’s gift to us and is no longer a law or a burden, but an invitation to be blessed with a much needed rest.

When we spend time resting in God’s presence, the fruits and blessings we receive are peace and joy, which is a great inventory to start a new week with - Not to mention the increased productivity and creativity it will produce in our lives.

The Sabbath is not about resting perfectly, but resting in the one who is perfect!  It’s not about not doing chores or work, or things we must be doing on the day, it’s merely about being consciously in His presence. The Sabbath is not some meaningless ritual or restriction. God created it for our benefit as a gift and a blessing.

We need to see the Sabbath, our Sunday, as Christians, as our weekly date with God, and become eager and willing to sacrifice OUR time to give Him our undivided attention to help deepen our relationship with Him.

If this has struck a chord with you, I urge you to study God’s word further on this subject.