Mars Hill bids farewell to Rob Bell

Members of Mars Hill bid an emotional goodbye to their renowned pastor and teacher, Rob Bell, on Sunday. Bell has become known for his brilliant teaching through the NOOMA series, and recently courted controversy in evangelical circles for his book ‘Love Wins,’ which speaks about heaven and hell.

Bell announced last year that he would be leaving Mars Hill Bible Church to involve himself more fully in his speaking and writing. Bell started the church 12 years ago and it has since grown to tens of thousands of members. Bell is planning on writing three new books, while he is also co-creating a new ABC television drama with Carlton Cuse, the producer of “Lost”. Bell has also already launched in new speaking tour entitled “Fit to Smash Ice.”

At his farewell ceremony, Mars Hill co-pastor Shane Hipps presented Bell and his wife, Kristen, with a book carrying stories and good wishes from church members.

“Grief is like a sprinter and joy is like an endurance runner,” The Grand Rapids Press quoted Hipps as saying. “I hope this community joins with me in the journey of grief fading and joy searching.”

Hipps added jokingly, “I’m hoping 10 years from now you will say, ‘Rob Bell? That sounds familiar.’” Mars Hill, he insisted, “is not Rob Bell. It’s a whole lot bigger than Rob and Kristen. It’s as big as God himself.”

Singer and songwriter David Crowder also appeared in the service to lead worship.

Bell last preached at Mars Hill on December 18, where he said:

“This church, this place, this community, was once simply a hunch. A dream. A vision. A picture in the mind of a new kind of church for the new world we find ourselves in. I will never be able to fully, adequately explain what it has been like to have imagined you, conceived of you – this church – and then have you exist.

“When people ask, ‘what about Mars Hill?’ or ‘what’s Mars Hill going to do?’ It’s as if Mars Hill is a disembodied reality with a life of its own,” Bell added. But, “here’s the twist: the church is not an inanimate, impersonal product. There is no ‘Mars Hill’ in theory. There is no abstract, disembodied entity Mars Hill apart from the people in this room who ARE Mars Hill.

“I feel like I’m just getting started,” Bell concluded. “Like I’m a rookie, a freshman. I believe that that God has made this day. That it’s good. And you can have joy in it, even if you’re limping.”

Scientists create monster 'super-soldier' ants

In a move that proves scientists have learnt nothing from watching B-grade horror movies, a group of genetic specialists from Canada have created freakish monster ants with giant heads and jaws.

The ants were created by dabbing normal ant larvae with a special hormone, after which the larvae develop into 'super-soldiers' rather than normal soldier or worker ants.

The scientists believe the monster ants could be a genetic throwback to an ancestor that lived millions of years ago and claim that the experiments show that ordinary ants of the species Pheidole morrisi contain all the genetic 'tools' needed to turn them into 'super-soldiers,' since all they need is a hormonal push for the development to occur.

Dr Rajendhran Rajakumar, from McGill University, Canada, and colleagues wrote: 'We uncovered an ancestral development potential to produce a novel 'super-soldier' subcaste that has been retained throughout a hyperdiverse ant genus that evolved 35 to 60 million years ago.'

These 'super-soldier' ants do occur in the wild, but only rarely. In the deserts of America and Mexico, they exist to protect their colony from raids by using their enormous heads to block the nest entrance and attack any enemy ants who venture too close.

(Image source: Alex Wild/alexanderwild.com).

Our Father is Younger Than We

Joy is at the very heart of WHO God is! Joy is a fruit of God’s Spirit and it is part and parcel of God’s nature. And because joy is at the heart of who God is, then it should be at the heart of who we are as well.

In his wonderful little book called ‘Orthodoxy,’ G.K. Chesterton writes about how the joy that one sees in a little child is just a fraction of the joy that exists in the heart of God:

“Because children have a bounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again.’ And the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead, for grown up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again!’ to the sun, and every evening, ‘Do it again!’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike. It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old and our Father is younger than we.’

Isn’t that an incredible thought? We have sinned and grown old, jaded, tired, worried and irritated, rushed and blind; we have sinned and grown old and our Father is younger than we!

We see this rather wonderfully throughout the story of Creation. Day 1 - God creates and then pronounces, ‘It is good!’ Day 2 – God creates and then pronounces, ‘It is good!’ Day 3 – God creates and then pronounces, ‘It is good!’ And so it has gone every day from that day until this one. It is good!

That is how it is with God … but not with us: For we have sinned and grown old and our Father is younger than we are.

Joy is more than happiness because joy celebrates ALL of life. God did this in Jesus by sharing in both our laughter and our tears. Jesus laughed out loud with lepers being healed and he wept alongside grieving families.

Remember what Jesus once said to his disciples as he prepared them for the day he would leave them. ‘I have given you all my teachings so that MY joy might be in you, and that your joy might be complete, it might be filled up to the brim!’

God is a God of incredible joy and so the source for all life’s joy is God himself. Don’t spend your life pursuing happiness, don’t even pursue joy, instead pursue the God who is the source of all these things and more!

We come to God because none of us has it within ourselves, except momentarily, to be joyous. Joy is not us concentrating so hard on being positive that beads of sweat pop out on our foreheads! As Eugene Peterson reminds us, joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence! We don’t have to be joyful in order to follow Jesus; it’s what gradually happens within us when we do follow Jesus.

Joy is God’s dancing ’it-is-good and lets-do-it-again’ nature being lived out in us.

PRAY AS YOU GO
Lord you are the source of all life and all joy. Joy is something that you form within us as we faithfully follow you and obey your commandments. We pray that your joy would indeed be within us so that our joy might be filled to overflowing. In Jesus name. Amen.

FOCUS READING
John 15:9-11 (NIV)
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

The Difference Between Joy and Happiness

There is a big difference between joy and happiness. Unfortunately, there seem to be several misconceptions that abound in modern thought about what joy really is.

Firstly, the concept of joy needs to be rescued from Christians themselves, because there is the unfortunate misperception that to be joyful one has to look and act like Ned Flanders in the TV show ‘The Simpsons’! Joy is not a sickly-sweet, unreal, lets-all-pretend-we-are H-A-P-P-Y!

In fact nothing could be more real and down to earth than joy.

If I had to define joy it would be as follows: Joy is a courageous and persistent CELEBRATION OF LIFE, even when times are tough (in fact, especially when times are tough). Joy is that which helps us to embrace all of life, both the laughter and the tears, without the need for escapism into daydreams or by pretending to be what we are not.

We must understand that happiness is not the same as joy, although happiness can form a part of joy. Joy is much bigger than happiness! Because circumstances allow for happiness (it comes from the same root word as ‘happening’), a change in circumstances can therefore make our happiness dissolve into thin air. Happiness is emotion, whereas joy is a choice, it is a discipline that doesn’t come and go with circumstances but defies them and lives to the full despite any difficulties.

Joy can coexist with doubt, ambiguity and pain. Joy doesn’t seek to escape from tough circumstances but rather to overcome them without losing who we are in the process. Joy is an inner contentedness, trust, peace and knowledge that takes us through tough circumstances knowing that God has never let us down and that God NEVER will!

So the pursuit of happiness is actually a misguided one. God created our souls for joy – that’s what is promised as a fruit of God’s Spirit. When we pursue happiness instead of joy we blur the lines of what it is we really need. We begin to misunderstand and misdirect our soul’s yearnings in a number of different ways.

Eugene Peterson pointed out one of these common misunderstandings when he said: ‘We try to get joy through entertainment. We pay someone to make jokes, tell stories, perform dramatic actions, sing songs. We buy the vitality of another’s imagination to divert and enliven our own poor lives. The enormous entertainment industry in [the world today] is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture. Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal. But that kind of joy never penetrates our lives, never changes our basic constitution. The effects are extremely temporary – a few minutes, a few hours, a few days at most. When we run out of money, the joy trickles away. We cannot make ourselves joyful. Joy cannot be commanded, purchased or arranged.’

The question you may well be asking yourself now is, ‘Why is joy important to me then? Why do I have to know about it?’ Well, joy is vital to faithfully following Christ because it is that quality that triumphs over adversity without losing who God made us to be in the process. In an age when sadness abounds, joy is the triumph of God’s Spirit being worked in and through the human spirit.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Holy and loving God, help us to understand what joy truly is. Help us to not confuse it with happiness and help us to never be false and pretend to be what we are not. Fill us with your spirit and your joy so that we might learn to celebrate all of life and live it to the full in your name. Amen.

FOCUS VERSE
Philippians 4:4, 6-7 (The Message)
Celebrate God all day, every day. I mean, revel in him!
Don't fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the centre of your life.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Some of you might recognise today's title from the recent major movie starring Will Smith. In the movie (based on a true life story), Smith plays Chris Gardner, a man who is bright, ambitious and driven and yet always puts the safety of his son, Christopher, first. The movie tells the story of Gardner’s struggles to make something out of his life. He encounters one setback after another, at one point even ending up sleeping on the streets with his son.

After months of poverty and hardship, facing one disappointment after another, Gardner finally becomes rich beyond his wildest dreams! … And then the movie ends. ‘So is that it?’ we are left asking ourselves. Is that what the pursuit of happiness is all about? Getting rich beyond our wildest dreams?

Now, I am not aware of how closely the movie portrays the ‘true story’, but I do need to say that the conclusions this movie draws for us sends some serious shivers down my spine. Do we really believe that endless wealth will provide us with all the happiness we desire?

Yet, in all honesty, I know that my personal daydreams have sometimes involved winning lotteries or somehow getting rich. We all do that to some extent. When times are tough we tend to daydream about past happy memories, or we daydream about a bright and prosperous future. We place our hopes in fantasies like winning the lottery or drastically changing our present circumstances in some way.

This is accentuated because times are quite tough right now. There are fears over a global recession, while many parts of the world such as Zimbabwe and the Middle East seem to be in constant turmoil. Wherever we live, we seem to be facing our own challenges of various kinds. Those of us who live in South Africa can find reading the papers a bit depressing because you are almost sure to find the latest horror crime story in the headlines.

Yes, times are quite tough for many at the moment. Which is why the title ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ probably stirs something deep within our souls. All of us, probably without exception, would like to find and know some happiness. Who wouldn’t want more laughter, fun and inner contentment to be part of their lives?

Yet Scripture would challenge this kind of response to life’s difficult times. The pursuit of happiness is understandable but ultimately hugely misguided. For if we pursue only happiness then we are really looking for all the wrong things in all the wrong places.

Scripture emphasises that what our souls need is to know joy rather than just happiness. And there is a huge difference!

We will spend the rest of this week studying that difference and discussing why exactly joy is such an integral part of the Christian walk.

In the meantime, spend some time thinking about your daydreams. When times are tough, what kind of daydreams do you escape into? What can you learn about yourself from this?

PRAY AS YOU GO

Lord, we know that the pursuit of happiness is something that drives us powerfully. Help us not to look for all the wrong things in all the wrong places in the hope they will provide us with the inner happiness and contentment we so desire. Help us to find all we need from you, and you alone. Amen.

FOCUS READING
Psalm 16. 8-11 NIV
I have set the LORD always before me. 
 Because he is at my right hand,I will not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; 
       my body also will rest secure,
  because you will not abandon me to the grave, 
       nor will you let your Holy One see decay.
 You have made known to me the path of life; 
       you will fill me with joy in your presence, 
       with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

Second Choice Worlds and God

Some of you may have been reading through this week’s devotions and thinking to yourselves, “Well this is all ok for God. He never has to deal with unwelcome changes, or a second choice world not of his choosing. God is powerful enough to sort it all out with just a wave of his hand”.

If we have ever found ourselves thinking like that, we would have of course, been forgetting about the Garden of Eden. Remember that? God’s first choice world is seen in the Garden of Eden – a place of beauty, justice, peace, love and deep communion between God and humanity. This peaceful place was, however, fractured by humanity’s poor choices, and thereafter sin entered the picture.

It is interesting to note what God did at this stage. God did not in his righteous anger destroy us with a click of his fingers. Nor did God give up on us by turning his back on us and leaving us to our own devices. No, God in passionate love, decided on an entirely different, yet far more difficult way. God chose to sacrificially enter this “second choice world” through Jesus and to impact it. God faced human temptations and shared human sufferings. God did this so that he might show us a way back into relationship with him, and so that he might restore us into Life as he originally created us to live it. It was the long way round but God saw us as worth it.

Make no mistake, God is powerful enough to sort out the situation with a wave of his hand, but love demands following an entirely more difficult route. You see for love to truly be real, free choice has to exist. Relationships have to be chosen, they cannot be forced. This is why God did not use power to sort us out, but gave up power for the sake of love, (see Philippians 2. 6-8). God’s extravagant love for us means that he would never give up on us, that he would enter into a world comprising the very worst of our mistakes, just so that he can bring us back to him.

This should help us to remember that God can do something wonderful even in the very worst of second choice worlds. God does not necessarily give us an easy way out of a bad situation with a click of his fingers, but he does offer us all the grace and strength we need to get through it. Although the path may be narrow, God takes us by the hand and remains with us to the very end of our journey.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Lord, we learn from the Bible that you are not necessarily into “easy-way outs” of difficult situations. For you did not abandon us when we turned from you, nor did you destroy us when we sinned. Instead you took the narrow road, the long and difficult way of love that has brought us a wonderful message of redemption and hope. Give us the strength we need to follow you always even if it takes us down some narrow roads, and help us to keep trusting in you always. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Abandoning Perfectionism

The movie, “The Truman Show”, was a clever satire which poked fun at how people often choose to live their lives. Jim Carrey played a character called Truman who unknowingly grows up as the central character on a reality show. He had no idea that all his friends and family members were nothing more than actors, and that the town in which he lived was a giant indoor set.

His was a pretend and commercially driven world where everything worked perfectly. The sun rose exactly the same way everyday, the rains always came on time, his neighbours were unfailingly polite, and his wife was perfect in every possible sense. And yet within all this perfection, Truman constantly struggled with the feeling that he was not actually living and that there was something vital missing in his life. Scarily enough, we often perceive that our lives should be exactly like Truman’s…perfect. We pray and hope for a nice life in a nice world with no problems. A world where being problem free proves that God loves us and that we are doing something right.

However this perfectionist view of the world is not the world the Bible speaks of. For in the Bible we find that saints make error judgements, Christians die, the innocent face unfair judgements, loved ones are lost, and prominent Christian leaders have strong disagreements. In other words, life is not always perfect. In fact it is often downright unfair and tough. Life can be messy, and that is the simple reality of it all.

Faith is not about never having problems, and never being stressed, tired or angry. Faith is not even about never having doubts. Faith is about holding onto God and the life God wants us to live, even though everything around us becomes messed up for a while.

So much of our prayer lives has to do with convincing God to buy into things as we would have them done, and to make our lives perfect. We forget about Jesus’ great prayer - ‘not my will but yours be done’. There is no doubt that God wants to bless our lives in an extraordinary way, but sometimes our view of what it means to be blessed differs from God’s. For example, God would rather have us be faithful than successful. Paul managed to abandon perfectionism when he saw that although he had arrived in Rome as a prisoner and not as a preacher, Christ was still being proclaimed in a wonderful way. Paul managed to see his prison guards as a potential congregation!

Perhaps it is time that we started working through the kind of process that Paul obviously went through. We should commit our lives to God’s agenda and not our own. We should look again at difficult and imperfect situations and see what God could do through them. We should pray for faithfulness before we pray for success.

PRAY AS YOU GO
Holy God, help us to abandon our often vain and selfish ideas of perfectionism. If we face difficult situations, it is not necessarily because we have sinned, but simply because they are part and parcel of life. We commit ourselves to following you no matter what. We trust that your ways are greater than our own, and that your wisdom far exceeds ours. We pray that you would grant us a spirit of deep faithfulness to you and to your plan for the world. Amen.

FOCUS READING
Philippians 1:18-21 (The Message)
And I'm going to keep that celebration going because I know how it's going to turn out. Through your faithful prayers and the generous response of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, everything he wants to do in and through me will be done. I can hardly wait to continue on my course. I don't expect to be embarrassed in the least. On the contrary, everything happening to me in this jail only serves to make Christ more accurately known, regardless of whether I live or die. They didn't shut me up; they gave me a pulpit! Alive, I'm Christ's messenger; dead, I'm his bounty. Life versus even more life! I can't lose.