This is the next in a series of articles from Psalm 119…

Haggling for a better price if you pay cash, or even if you don’t, is one of the more enjoyable aspects of purchasing. In Australia a token gesture to haggling is given by a couple of well known retailers. “Everything is negotiable” or “pay cash and we’ll slash the price” are enticing catch phrases that have helped reap considerable profit for the retailers. Though you might get a lower price, you can be certain that neither retailer is jeopardizing their margins by giving you a hard deal. The same applies in poorer economies. Fox News Travel Advice tells us that it is a “sin” if you “haggle until a chosen trader turns to tears”. However, you can sleep well knowing that this is merely a technique to stop you further eroding their margin. Living in Kenya, we learnt that there are usually multiple price brackets for different customer types:

• The tourist price: if you pay the ticket, you are probably giving the vendor anywhere from 500-1000% profit.
• The tourist discount: around half the ticket, although if persistent you might get it a little lower, watch for the tears that’s an indication that you’ve hit the mark.
• The local price: much lower than what a tourist will pay, still provides the vendor with a profitable gain on their merchandise.

  NB: I don’t begrudge them their ingenuity! It’s not like I couldn’t afford the “full” tourist version – it’s fun to haggle anyway

After being Africa for more than 6 months, speaking the language and being known to the retailers, I know I never paid less than a low tourist discount for anything I bought. The only way I could get a lower price was to stay completely out sight and send in a friend to make the purchase for me, but even then, it was customary to pay a commission to my purchaser

We had a similar experience in the Chinese community where we live at the moment. When getting prices for removalists, we were hit pretty hard with what the typical commercial carriers were going to charge. Two of the Deacon’s at our new Church, suggested that they contact some movers listed in the local Chinese newspapers. They were charging less than a quarter of the cheaper commercial movers – BUT not for Aussies, only for fellow Chinese residents! (Their words, not mine!) So, we stayed out of sight while a deal with a mover was negotiated via SMS. The movers were quite shocked to see me at the house when they arrived, however soon softened and relaxed when they found out I was the new pastor at a Chinese Church, and agreed to give me the Chinese rates.

When you are not a resident of God’s community of grace, and sometimes even though you are, you probably have found yourself trying to bargain and haggle with God in prayer.

“If you do this for me God, I will _____ (go to Church, give more money, say something nice to the Pastor after his really long sermon etc)”.

Alternately, we try to sacrifice ourselves up front and then expect God to act in obligation to our exorbitant generosity. We pray something like,

“Now God I fast twice a week and give 10% of everything I earn … therefore you need to do this for me”.

As though God is in any way indebted to us by our proud, arrogant, infantile, wicked, miniscule attempts to affront his holiness and majesty. Then, when God doesn’t come through with the “goods”, we react as though to punish Him – we abandon our faith, we stop attending Church, stop praying, stop reading our Bible, start attacking and criticising Christians or we plummet into a deep and sometimes unrecoverable spiritual depression. As Christopher Ash points out in ‘Bible Delight’ (p176-8) we don’t focus on the promises God has declared in scripture, instead, we claim to rest in things that God has never said or promised – but rely on sanitised or pious reflections of our own desires. We persuade ourselves that God has promised a job (or a better paid one) or a marriage or a child (or a better behaved one). When it doesn’t happen, we think God has let us down and failed to keep his side of our bargain. Our prayer must be shaped by scripture. We pray, (because we get to, not because we have to, or because it will in-debit God to us), with a longing to experience his grace and, as a result of that grace, be transformed into his likeness with a new desire to please and honour him for his own sake.

I call out to you; save me and I will keep your statutes. Psalm 119:146 (NIV)

(Continuing a series on Psalm 119)

Some of the most personally painful experiences we had whilst serving in Kenya involved the theft of our personal belongings. After our arrival we were feeling isolated. Riamarabu, the village where we were living, is about 10 km from the closest post office in the township of Ogembo. The nearest public transport to the village involved, in the dry season, walking 3 km (we didn’t have our own vehicle). In the wet, we had to walk 10 km out to catch transport into Kisii Town which was a another 20 km away. This made getting mail quite an involved task. (We had PO Boxes in both Ogembo and in Kisii). A local recommended we hire one of the boys to run into Ogembo each day and check the mail. All it cost was the price of a soda (about 30c Australian). It took him less than 2 hours return trip cross country – rather than the 6 it would take us fat westerners However, we thought it odd, after being there almost 6 weeks, we had not received anything from home. Then one afternoon a local pastor discovered the mail-runner had been stealing the mail believing it would contain money or valuables. Each time he collected our mail, he would open it, check the contents then destroy it. The next week, we received a letter from Rachel’s Mum, which she had numbered #6! The first 5 were lost forever. We felt violated and betrayed about this abuse of trust. We wanted justice! The chief was called to administer a penalty. He whipped him with a stick and forbade him from entering our compound. Did we get justice though? It didn’t feel like it. There was no way to fairly compensate our loss of personal letters from family and loved ones. Our desire for restitution went unrequited.

In another incident, while returning from a difficult and dangerous trip to Tanzania, we stayed overnight with a family just north of the Kenya/Tanzania border. Transport complications and a cholera outbreak had made us quite tired. The wife offered to wash all our clothes before we continued the 2 day trip home. We bathed, changed into our only clean clothes and handed over everything else. The clothes were washed and hung to dry, by the time we left the next morning. But by morning, everything was gone: All my trousers, shirts, my wife’s dresses, our underwear and socks. Two hours later a village Elder dragged a boy into the compound shouting at him. The boy had taken the clothes during the night and sold them. Despite the Elder’s protesting and berating and others attempts to track down the clothes, all was lost. No restitution, no recovery, and, as far as our experience was concerned, no justice.

More recently, back in Australia, I overstayed my time in a car parking spot and was fined. Now, rather than craving justice, I was keen for mercy. I wasn’t being malicious or violent, so why should I be penalised? We demand justice when wronged, but cry for mercy when we receive a due penalty. A sense of justice, fairness and right-ness comes from the law of God written on our conscience. The law, due to our impotence and inability, drives us to seek a functional saviour that will excuse our conscience, relieve our guilt and grant us a reprieve. We achieve incomplete justice and experience insufficient and inconsistent measures of mercy. Affliction gives an imperfect glimpse of the absence and inadequacy of our justice and right-ness. In Jesus we find mercy in the only saviour that meets us in our desperation and freely dispenses forgiveness and justice through his death on our behalf. In Jesus, God was both just, in punishing sin, and merciful, to those who have faith in Jesus. God made Jesus who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. In Jesus we have justice AND mercy. We delight in God’s law and his commands, because they display His character (righteous, true, trustworthy and everlasting) and drive us to find perfect justice and a full measure of mercy in Jesus alone.

Trouble and distress have come upon me, but your commands are my delight. Psalm 119:143 NIV

HT Gordon Cheng at Sola Panel.

HT: mhcseattle

HT Dan Phillips

Back to Psalm 119.

Since moving into a part of Sydney I had never lived in previously I have gotten considerable use out of a GPS Navigator in our car. Prior to purchasing the GPS device, I was out one evening visiting a new family that had started attending our Church and got lost. What should have been a 15-20 minute trip turned into a very stressful 70-80 minutes. Getting home was no less an adventure, and took about 50 minutes. The following pay period we invested in a GPS device and travel has been considerably easier.

As I have become more familiar with the area, I rely on the GPS less often. This doesn’t lessen it’s value, as I still use it to map out the location of variance in speed limits, safety camera locations and School Zones. When traveling home from the office of an evening I have a choice of about 4 or 5 routes that I take depending on the time and traffic conditions. However, the GPS is insistent on taking the same single route each time regardless. I usually ignore it, and after a few commands to “turn a-round” it recalculates the route from my new position. Occasionally, when I go somewhere new, and I know how to get to the area but not the specific address I will leave the GPS off until the very last minute in the hope that I haven’t gone too far in the wrong direction. After all, men don’t like asking or taking directions, even from machines

The tendency to not follow directions is something that is prevalent in most of us when it comes to spiritual guidance. Like the owner of a new GPS, a new believer is often keen to read as much of the Bible as often as possible. They find, within the scriptures, a light and a guide that leads them in the way everlasting. They relish the time spent reading, praying, listening to sermons, participating in Bible Studies, small groups and conventions because in each of these they are increasingly exposed to Christ in his Word. They literally hunger for it, exactly as a new baby craves milk. Yet after a while, it is not altogether uncommon, for this enthusiasm to wane. Instead of being a daily source of spiritual nourishment, the Bible is relegated to the “Open in case of emergency” box. Soon afterwards, it is simply not consulted at all, even in times of crisis.

Quoting Harry Blamires, Kent Hughes in his “Disciplines of a Godly Man”, mentions a “religious anorexia, a loss of appetite for growth in Christ” as attributable to Christians dogged refusal to regularly read the Bible.

“God calls us in His Word to a massive and positive discipline of the mind. This can only happen through a profound exposure to and continual immersion in God’s Word, accompanied by the illumination of the Holy Spirit -” (p. 76)

Refusing to read, Hughes adds, is “in effect “editing God” and [you] will never have a fully Christian mind”. (p. 78)

When the Psalmist is seeking guidance and stability, he looks to the scriptures; not to subjective experiences, inclinations, impulses or other dubious phenomena, but to the objective, declaration of Jesus Christ and the will of God found in the Bible. Christians often lament and become angst riddled about making decisions concerning marriage, study, career and ministry. God’s wisdom is readily available to us in the Bible, if only we would pick it up and read it and allow that to influence our thinking instead of anxiously waiting on the advent of a special impulse or blinding vision. Praying and asking God to “direct your steps” whilst making lifestyle decisions is a prayer that he will definitely answer. You won’t know to pray like that if you don’t read the Bible though. Tolle Lege!

Direct my footsteps according to your word; let no sin rule over me. Psalm 119:133 (NIV)

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Over the next 2 Sundays we are going to be looking at the question of “Who is Jesus?“. In 325 A.D. (or thereabouts) a group of Christian leaders got together to ask the same question. Rather than only define themselves by what they were against, they decided to formulate a statement that positively expressed who Jesus is. That statement became known as the Nicene Creed (so named after the city where they meet for discussion and debate). This is not a subject to dismiss lightly. Either Jesus is God in the flesh or he is just another man and unable to be a suitable saviour. However the reasons that most will deny the identity of Jesus as God the Son is not because of some intellectual argument, rather it is the implications of who he is that determine their response. If he is just a teacher, than take it or leave it. If he is God, then what he says is of critical importance and has profound impact on what we value, how and for what purpose we live.

A modern version of the creed (copied from Phil Johnson) is below. Phil also has some excellent notes explaining each portion of the creed in more detail.

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father [and the Son].
With the Father and the Son
he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. AMEN.

The Germans signing of the Armistice Treaty in the early hours of the morning on November 11, 1918 brought an end to official hostilities of World War 1 as of 11am (Paris time) that day. Since then each year on the eleventh-hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month a short time of silent remembrance is observed in honour of those who sacrificed their lives. Whilst the celebration of military servicemen and women and the multitude of auxiliary support services is generally observed on ANZAC Day in Australia, Remembrance Day is still an occasion to reflect on the loss of life, expense of war and the cost of freedoms that we daily take for granted.

In our own Church we have individuals and families that made incredible sacrifices, some with added mortal risks, to leave their ancestral homes, culture and loved ones to find a sanctuary of political, religious, moral and personal freedom in Australia. That freedom, by and large, was bought with the blood of men and women who never lived to see the magnificent opulence that we revel in, even now. The mere fact that you can read this blog, or dismiss it entirely without fear of reprisal, persecution, arrest, or torture is a bold evidence of our freedom and a product of the sacrifice of our military.

Their sacrifice, though, only acquired a temporal stay and a partial freedom. True freedom, from our inadequacy, insecurity, fear and sin was purchased once and for all by Jesus on the cross. His defeat of the final enemy, death, provides us with certainty of life with God as our Father now and in eternity. The choice to live that life and how to spend our time is ours. John Piper, a Baptist Pastor in the USA, suggests that we pursue godly pleasure with all our energy as a means to make the best use of our time. He contends, “God is most glorified in me, when I am most satisfied in him“, therefore to pursue a thankful, enjoyment of life as a gift from God is one of the greatest ways to serve and honour our heavenly Father. What will most glorify God in your life today?