Category: Theology Thursdays

The _____ of the Lord is my strength

I’ve been too serious in worship lately, and I’m sick of it.

I’m not a serious guy, and too much seriousness fatigues me. I want to recapture a sense of joy and exuberance in worship and genuinely celebrate God’s goodness.

I keep remembering the worship services I attended in Ghana and Liberia (nations in West Africa). Offerings were danced forward to the altar to the lively beat of the drums. Songs were sung with full-body dance moves and ear-to-ear grins. Wearing your “Sunday Best” meant donning your brightest, boldest colors. Worship was a par-TAY, a celebration! If you said, “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice!” they’d DO it, and they’d MEAN it!

Problem is, I’m in a deeply German Protestant setting (hey, I’m descended from a family named Weirauch – I’m rather German myself!) Stoicism and the Protestant Work Ethic are deeply ingrained in our culture.  You get what you earn, and you’d better earn what you get.  Talking about God is serious business.

But Nehemiah 8 tells us that “the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

It doesn’t say the work of the Lord is your strength.”  It doesn’t say that the doctrinal purity of the Lord is your strength.  It doesn’t say that the scholarship or intellectual rigor of the Lord is your strength.

It says JOY.

Isn’t Jesus worth rejoicing about?  I think so.

Unclench.  Relax.  Rejoice.  Laugh a little.  Smile a lot.  This is supposed to be fun, Deuel.

 

Theology Thursdays: Brief Questions about Free Will and Predestination

I wonder what Methodists in the pews think about the following:

  1. God’s foreknowledge:  Does God know the future, and if so, to what specificity?  Does God know every detail or just the big picture?  Or does God know all possible futures based upon the activities of the past and the present?
  2. Wesley himself was no Calvinist – he was Arminian.  He was firmly on the “free will” side of the free will vs. predestination debate.  I wonder how many United Methodists in the pews know that, and how many agree with him?
  3. I wonder how many Methodists subscribe to what I’ll call (for the sake of brevity) “Rapture Theology.”  And do we realize that one would have to subscribe to a pretty strict theology of predestination in order to believe it?
  4. What is the relationship between predestination, foreknowledge, and foreordination?

Discuss.