The One Who Does Impossible

A teenage girl lays on her bed praying...begging God to help her parents stop the fighting and yelling. Her days are filled with worry that they will divorce and her family will be torn apart. She prays- unsure her words are getting past the ceiling of her bedroom. Her prayers come from a real and deep place of desperation, but she’s never met the One who does impossible, so she has no idea what to expect. Who knows what will happen?

A successful man who is well respected within his church and known as a man of great faith prays for someone who is very sick. His prayer is confident and loud as he boldly states...”I CLAIM healing over you!” and then walks away without giving any more thought to his prayer. Will his extreme confidence move God to heal? Who knows what will happen?

A busy, single mother of 2 young children sits exhausted on her couch after finally getting the kids to bed and the house picked up. No energy to even see what’s new on Netflix. She sits in her exhausted state and begins to think about the bills that are piling up. Some surprise medical costs have her very worried about keeping up with the rent, so she begins to pray. She needs a financial miracle! As she prays, her voice trembles a bit with emotion. She’s scared about her future, but also knows that God has never before left her high and dry. She prays from a place of tension where there are the real questions of “what if?”, but also with confidence, because the One who does impossible has always been good. Who knows what will happen?

In Matthew 11, John the Baptist is in real trouble and he sends his followers to Jesus with this question: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”. Jesus’s answer is powerful, fascinating and very important for all of us today who are in need of a miracle!

Would you join me with Sunday as we look honestly into the tension of both expecting our miracle and wondering what happens if it doesn’t come?  The One who does impossible is so good and our miracle might be right around the corner! I look forward to seeking, learning and growing with you on Sunday.

Grace and Peace.

Pastor Rex

Miracles, Waiting and Kadosh

A woman waits in a doctor’s office to hear what her test results are. The wait is difficult...

A little boy anxiously waits in his bed for Christmas morning to arrive. The wait seems endless...

A groom patiently stands at the alter waiting to see his beautiful bride walk down the aisle. The wait is sacred...

Waiting - even for the good, happy and beautiful things of life is difficult. Why? Because we simply don’t wait well!

Many of us who might be reading this are in need of some kind of miracle. Healing...a new job...restored marriage...an acceptance letter to that dream university. Miracles place our faith in the reality where we’ve accepted that we’ve done all we can do and now it’s God’s time to powerfully, lovingly and mysteriously make a way for what now seems impossible.

While we wait and endure in the tension of our doubt and hope, we can wait for our miracle in one of two ways: passively, or expectantly.

We passively wait when we simply ask God to do something big for us and then go about life as normal. Work...homework...TV...Facebook...Etc...  It’s not that passively waiting is wrong. But isn't there more?  Shouldn’t we show God and ourselves a little more urgency? After all, we’re talking about miracles here, right?

In the Old Testament book of Leviticus, God tells the people of Israel to be “holy”. The prophet Isaiah once saw a choir of angels singing to each other, “holy, holy, holy”.

The word holy here in its original language (Hebrew) is Kadosh. Kadosh means “distinction”, or “set apart”. Kadosh has nothing to do with being better than (holier than thou), rather it has everything to do with putting ourselves in a place where we have a deep awareness of our self and need for God.

When we need and wait for our miracle, God asks us to be holy. To realize that we can’t fix this...we’re not in control of this. So we set our hearts apart from the busy, mundane distractions and we seek Kadosh.  Holiness.

I hope you’ll join me this Sunday morning as we explore this further and get honest about the struggle of waiting for our miracle; God’s desire for us to be holy and how we can have hearts that expectantly wait for our miracle.

Grace and Peace.

Rex

New Year, New Miracles

There is something very exciting about a new year!  2017 almost seems like “Science Fiction” to me.  We had a staff meeting today and as so many staff were down with the influenza we asked them to call into the meeting so they were not sharing their sickness with those of us who were fortunate to avoid this illness.  So, there we were, sitting in the conference room with a table full of cell phones.  It was surreal.  The people on the cell phones could not understand one another so Pastor Josh had to be the interpreter. It was a really fun meeting and we could all, even the cell phone staff, sense the excitement because of God’s plans for Washington Cathedral this year.

To grow in your Christian life, you need a solid, rational, Biblical definition of what a miracle is and how they work in your life. So, Pastor Rex and I are excited to teach on a provocative and rewarding subject – “New Year, New Miracles.”  I am starting it off with a sermon entitled “Wrestling for a Miracle”. My message is taken from the story of Jacob and how he wrestles with God for a whole night and is changed forever.  Even his name is changed from Jacob to Israel.  His experience that night was emblematic of his whole life of seemingly fighting with God.  That is, of course, the human condition whether we recognize it or not. 

This story of Jacob wrestling with God caused my Grandpa White to become a Christian and to follow God’s call into the ministry just after World War I – so, as you can imagine, it has a special place in my heart.  Even so, as I have been studying it for the last couple of weeks, I must say I have gotten even more out of what God is saying here.  I can promise you it will be funny…because I think the passage was intended to be funny. (I also have a great joke or two to share.)  But most of all, I promise you that it will be thought-provoking and heart warming as you hear the powerful Word of God in this passage for your life in 2017. It is already changing mine.

Join us this weekend and learn to understand how to wrestle with God and come away blessed.

 Your friend for the rest of my life,

 Pastor Tim White