Pastors Log Supplemental
I’m a huge Star Trek fan (and also a Star Wars fan, don’t worry!) and I always liked how Captain Jean Luc would always in the beginning of an episode have a Captain’s log to record what was happening at that moment on the Enterprise. Then later in that same episode you would here him say “ Captain’s Log Supplemental” This was a an addition to the larger log note he had first entered. Well, on this blog I have been mostly posting messages I normally give at Canton South Church of the Nazarene. These to me are my “Captain’s Log”.  In the course of writing these messages though I find that I have a ton of material that never makes the final cut of the message. For some reason people will watch a two hour Avenger movie but a two hour message on Jesus, well that’s asking too much. So, I thought, what can I do with all of this extra stuff I’ve dug up that does’t seem to have a home? Hence the idea of Pastor’s Log Supplemental, a little bit of extra stuff that I have come across doing the research on the message that I’m not sure what to do with. Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about. I have been studying the first five books of the Bible because I am intrigued by first, what it means for us to be the priesthood of all believers, and second, the connection between this priesthood and this idea of bearing the Name of God which by the way is much bigger deal than most of us know. So, as I am studying my way through Deuteronomy, I keep coming across this idea of clinging, clinging to God. This I found out is what was behind Jeremiah taking his underwear down to the riverbank and burying it for a while, to show that after it was rotted it would no longer cling to him just like the people of Israel no longer were clinging to God. Gives new meaning to Captain Underpants doesn’t it! So, just what does it mean to cling to God? First, I found that it is like what your skin does with your bones. This is is how tight we are supposed to be with God. I’m 58 and my skin is a little saggy but I still get the metaphor; we are to have a unity that is organic, and living. I began to be intrigued so I dug deeper.  I found that the Hebrew word for cleave is devekim. This is word is, I found a difficult word to translate. I found help from an author, Chaim Bentorah. In a blog post from April 9th, 2019 on his website chaombentorh.com, he writes this, that devekim is “the word for glue.  It is also a synonym in modern Hebrew for dedication toward a particular goal. Yet in religious Judaism it is attaching yourself to God in all areas of your life. In the state of devekut one hears the voice of God, receives direction from God. One lives in the presence of God and heart of God.  It is unifying all aspects of your life, body soul and mind with that of the heart of God.” Now what my mind thought is this: We often ask the question “Do you have Jesus in your heart?” But when we understand what cleaving to God means then the better question is this “ Are you in God’s heart?” Are all aspects of your life, your heart, your resources, the entirety of who you are is all of this united with the heart of God? Are you living every day in the presence of God? These seem to be so much greater questions than to ask if Jesus is in our heart, don’t they? If this is what it means to cleave to God then God has set the bar pretty high for all of us. May we live each day in the heart of God!