Today at TFCA, Andrew and I led the Middle/High School students through a prayer experience we crafted around the Exodus, which we've studied for the past several week together. We based each of the stations on one of the events we discussed:
- We began with a "burning bush" experience, where we lit was was, in effect, a candle representing God's ever-presence and call to us to recognize Him in our midst. Students removed their shoes and prayed, echoing back to YHWH's conversation with Moses on holy ground.
- One station was a naming station. Moses' name means "to draw out", and the Exodus story shows us how Moses fulfilled the plan of God in obedience and drew the Israelites out of Egypt and into the land of promise. At this station, we asked students to write their names on large sheets of paper, where other students could then come and write attributes of those students they see as part of how God may use them in the future for his kingdom.
- We had two chain-metaphor stations: one for confession and one for deliverance. The confession chain was a long chain of paper strips (pictured above) where students could confess things that were keeping them in Egypt, so to speak, and out of the experience of God's promise. The deliverance chain was the inverse of that--it was a chain of praise for the ways God has delivered them out of bondage and into His full provision and victory.
- We has a psalm/song station based on Moses and Miriam's songs in Exodus 15. These songs boast in the Lord's might and power, His favor toward His people and His faithfulness to keep His word. We asked students to write their own poem/psalm/song/prayer about the things the Lord has done for them and their families/churches. They then kept their writings in their bible, marking this passage with their own echo of this chapter.
- We had a station of intercession, where we asked students to stand in for those who are suffering and need the Lord, asking for His mercy and deliverance for others. They wrote these names and situations on white boards and prayed for the requests of others as well as the situations they wrote down.
- And finally, we had a "manna station. The manna station consisted of note cards and empty bread loaf bags. Students wrote down verses on the cards that were nourishing to their own walk of faith. They then placed these cards in the bread bags. At the end of the prayer experience, the students drew "manna" out of the bread bags to take with them as encouragement and nourishment for their journey.
We've set up a number of prayer experiences like this before (with varying stations). Todays was shortened a bit, but ended up being a pretty amazing experience from what we saw and heard. At the end of the time, we brought the two chains of deliverance and confession and linked them together with a piece of paper bearing the name of Jesus. We talked about how, much like the Exodus story, our life of faith is the story of the tension between deliverance and the need for it. We live in the already/not yet experience of salvation, and Jesus is not only our Savior and our Hope, but also our process (or our Sanctification). He is the Victor where we've tasted victory, and the only chance of victory where we need it most.
In a lot of ways, this is very Advent-y; this season in which we celebrate that the Messiah has come and yet we grieve and long for the day when He returns and makes all things new. I think its crucial to tap into this kind of tension in our faith because it drives us to both the covenant we're in and the hope we have because of it. Jesus' arrival in the flesh was the culmination of a long history of God's faithfulness being shown in history as He related to Israel. It was the covenant of God that God acted out of towards the Israelites in the Exodus story, to the point where before the writer mentions that God was remembering His covenant with Abraham, Issac and Jacob, he had already set Moses apart to "draw out" the people for His purposes. By the time we reach the New Teatament, we see this pattern of God's faithfulness to His promises as well established in spite of the reckless and often shameless disobedience of His people. He is faithful, and those who stand on His promises have never seen anything but that.
The baby in the manger is the most tangible expression of God's faithfulness to His people in all of history. It's His committment to His word, as He once again steps into history to intervene for His people, and this time in a new way: as one of them. He becomes a frail, helpless child--picture the one who spoke the universe into existance now having to cry for food and drink, a mother and father cleaning up the messes of the one who would clean up theirs, and all the worlds who would believe. The Incarnation gives us our cornerstone to build our faith on. And yet, there is still an equal call for hope in what has not yet come: the promise demands it.
One of my favorite portions of the Exodus story is when the Israelites are next to the Red Sea, fearing their imminant death as the best soldiers of Pharoah charge towards them. Moses makes this awesome speech, one that belongs in an epic like Braveheart or Gladiator:
Moses answered the people, "Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the LORD will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still." (Exodus 14:13-14)
What confidence, eh? There's a part of me that wonders if the griping and complaining ones felt like idiots after Moses rolled that little speech out. And yet, its not that part of the story that excites me the most; its the verse after it:
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on..." (v. 15)
The first time I read that passage, I didn't get it. "Hmmm...why cry out to God again...oh, yeah. They massive dudes with chariots coming to kill us. Lord, if you're going to deliver us, you better step in and do something---that's why I'm crying out to you."
But Moses didn't get it. God had already steped in: He gave his word.
When God called the children of Isreal out of Egypt, in the call, in the promise, everything they needed to move forward was provided. The motion of moving forward reflect what the writer of Hebrews marks as faith, or the assurance of things hoped for. God wasn't asking them to wait on Him, but rather to believe and hold to His promise and to move forward on it as their (only) hope. Maybe it was at the river side they first felt the tension of already having deliverance and not yet having it.
As we connected the two chains today, I began to think about how the incarnation and subsequent passion of Jesus is the only way this already/not yet tension becomes bearable. As Don Peters and David Clark pointed out in their intro to our (Hope's) Advent celebration, there are actually three comings we celebrate during Advent: the birth, the second coming, and Jesus' arrival in our own lives. Jesus arrived, but through the cross and resurrection, He still shows up. In the tension of already rescued and needed redenption, Jesus comes into our history, our circumstances and arrives, tying the faithfulness of God in our past to our moment, and linking our moment into the hope we have in Him now.
And it is through His arrival now, through the person of the Holy Spirit, that we are continually re-created and renewed. He enables holiness through giving us His very own, and through that we find and hold to the promise all the more; the promise ahead of us that is waiting to be unearthed and displayed.
So as we talk Advent, maybe we should talk more about this tension, and really start to embrace it. May it enable us to meet with Jesus now, as His life reaches back and forward in promise for us, establishing every step between Egypt and the promised land, the new Eden, forever.
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