Wednesday, April 23, 2008

The Need to Major in the Minors

Jared Wilson at The Gospel Driven Church posted Tuesday on Worship as Turning to God's Agenda. The article itself is very good, and I especially liked the quote on worship from David Ruis. Click on the link above to read the whole post.

What I liked the most about Jared Wilson's post, however, was his use of the Book of Habakkuk. The Prophet Habakkuk Rocks! Wilson says:
God has an agenda and it is not only not ours, it frequently and constantly interferes with and opposes ours. We are used to thinking in terms of God helping us in our life, that our life is "our story" and we invite God to participate in it, and that is so bass ackwards. It is God's story, God's world, God's life, and we get to participate in it. This is never more vivid in Habakkuk than in the way God answers Habakkuk's complaints. He does so completely outside of Habakkuk's assumptions and preferences and expectations.
The so-called Minor Prophets (minor in length but not in importance) are probably the most ignored and little known portion of the Bible for evangelical Americans. The Hebrew Bible calls these books the "Book of the Twelve," which might be a better term than "Minor Prophets," not implying a less than major importance. There is so much important and very relevant stuff in those books! They can teach us so much about the sovereignty of God, the Lord's mercies,the nature of justice, and hope in the midst of pain and suffering. There is a great revelation of the suffering and risen Christ in these books.

We need more preaching and teaching from, and more study and listening to, the Book of the Twelve! It would do most churches good to have a season of majoring in the Minors.

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