The big idea of Honor Season
Honor Season is the time of year to discover the heroic side of Jesus and how we as honorable finishers fulfill the purpose he had when he laid down his life. Honor Season is about his total commitment to his agonizing assignment in Gods' campaign.
Here is the big idea, the Honor Rhythm we focus on during Honor Season:
God is on a campaign to turn his campaign team members into honorable people, and the center of his campaign strategy is Jesus carrying his cross. He inspires us to carry our cross, to honorably endure the world's shame for the sake of his campaign.
The Bible is one long coherent story. The sad pattern repeated through most of this story is that we humans keep disgracing ourselves. Adam and Eve did it, Moses did it, David did it, Israel did it as a nation, even Jesus's followers did it when he was arrested.
Jesus broke that pattern. He was an honorable finisher, faithful to the death. He showed us how it is done by locking onto his God-given mission and refusing to let human shame and violence influence him.
By itself, his heroic example does not guarantee we will have what it takes to copy him. But he gives us more. He promises to be with us continuously as we go about our risky, painful mission (Matthew 28.20). He moves into our lives by putting his Spirit into us, connecting us to him constantly. His presence is the source of our courage.
Here is the other half of the big idea of Honor Season:
God's campaign strategy for our era is to impress the world with the fact that even us cowardly people on his campaign team are taking heroic actions. How can we? The Spirit of Jesus has made the campaign more important to us than our own welfare.
It is easy to think that Jesus had the courage and faith to carry his cross heroically because he was the Son of God, but we don't have that courage because we are not God. We lift Jesus up as a hero but we don't expect ourselves to be like him. We call people to admire his courage whether we have any courage ourselves or not.
But if we think this way, we are out of SYNC with God's strategy for our time. He has already shown the world how much loyalty and courage Jesus had. Now he wants to show the world that Jesus can inject his heroic courage into ordinary people, even cowards, so we can follow his heroic example when we have to "carry our cross" for God's campaign.
Carrying our cross has nothing to do with general pains in life like a traffic accident, arthritis, an unruly child, or financial struggles. Our "cross" is the pain we experience because of opposition we run into as we carry out our assignments in God's campaign.
Of course, we never run into that kind of pain at all if we don't do any campaign work or even realize we have any campaign assignments. How strong is our sense of being on a God-given campaign to connect, heal, and bless the world?
Many people who go to church every week have no sense of that at all. Perhaps they donate to support professionals who do campaign work, but they do not get personally involved, certainly not in any risky way. They support the campaign only to the extent they can fit it into their comfort zones. They never carry a cross. They never attempt anything heroic.
Of course, we aren't trying to be heroes or to call attention to ourselves. Jesus is the one shining the spotlight on our surprisingly heroic actions in order to show what he can do with people as weak as we are. He is putting his strength into us so we can finish honorably, enduring any and all opposition loyally. That is his strategy, and it plays out in the life of everyone who ever says to him, "SYNC me!"
Bottom line of the big idea of Honor Season:
We see ourselves in Christ as honorable finishers, showing the world that no shame or violence will break our loyalty to the campaign that Christ died for. He was raised to keep leading the campaign team, and we live in SYNC with the personal instructions that he still gives us one day at a time.
Our campaign message is that Jesus the Messiah deserves more honor than anyone else who ever lived. He is the key to connecting, healing, and blessing the world. He is seated on the throne of the universe! (Hebrews 12.2)
But on his way to the throne, he out-suffered us all. He took more physical, legal, and personal abuse than we will ever know. And through it all, he never wavered in his commitment to his excruciating assignment as the campaign Spearhead. That is heroic, and God honored it.
Jesus defended his honor by not defending it, that is, he showed true honorability not by using violence against those who shamed him but by disregarding their shame, not reacting to it at all. He was so focused on God the Father's opinion of him that human opinions did not matter.
When you SYNC, when you See Yourself iN Christ as an "honorable" finisher, it means honorable in God's eyes. People around us may not honor us when we live in Christ, but we don't have to defend our honor by force or even take their opinion into consideration. It does not get to us. We accept human opposition as our cross, carry it quietly, and let them think we are losers. Jesus did, and he is with us by his Spirit, giving us whatever it takes to get through whatever we have to get through.
And that is why we stay focused on Jesus, "the champion who initiates and perfects our faith." (Hebrews 12.1) Our faith or trust comes from him and leads us to him. This is the trust that "overcomes the world." (1 John 5.4) When we look at Jesus carrying the cross, we know he looks like he has lost, but we also know that things are not what they seem. The hopeless loser is on his God-appointed way to his destiny as the ultimate winner.
Our role as honorable finishers, staying loyal under fire
Our role as honorable finishers, staying loyal under fire
Here is the big picture, the flow of the story that leads up to Jesus carrying his cross:
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Everyone expected that the Messiah would come with God's glory and power, demanding the respect the world owed him
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Jesus built a massive popular following by healing many people and by sending seventy followers out across the country with his proclamation that God's reign on earth was about to begin
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He was hailed by crowds as the nation's deliverer when he entered Jerusalem for the annual national "Freedom Festival" (Passover, celebrating the deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt)
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He entered the national Temple in Jerusalem and started giving orders like he was in charge, clearing out the people who were profiteering on their monopoly of sacrificial animals and foreign exchange
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To the delight of the crowds, he humiliated the religious establishment when they got into some verbal duels with him; violence was the the only option they had left to stop him
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He saw his suffering and death coming, prayed for escape, but ended by saying to his Father, "Not my will, but yours be done."
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The establishment plotted to arrest him after dark, try him at night (which was against their own law!), and get him executed by 9 the next morning, before the crowds could organize to try to stop it.
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When we realize that he, the King of the universe and the Spearhead of God's campaign, carried that cross under those conditions, any cross we have to carry looks a lot smaller. He has won our respect and our loyalty to the death.
The King has sent us to continue his mission of mercy, which was the focus of the previous season of the SYNC annual cycle. During Honor Season we put our bodies where our mouths are. We accept shame, pain, whatever, and show the world how far we are willing to go for the sake of that mercy mission. It is all that matters to us.
As honorable finishers, we love to repeat the Honor Declaration. It SYNCs us with the intentions Jesus had when he as our example carried his cross. The Declaration connects us with him, the Spearhead and Director of God's campaign. We honor him by carrying our crosses, accepting any disgrace we suffer for the campaign.
The Big Idea vs the Big Lie
If we get the Big Idea of Honor Season, it protects us from the Big Lie, which is,
"The more you serve God, the better life gets for you. He blesses you and protects you more, and he punishes you less."
This lie has some truth to it. God does punish evil and reward good. However, if that is God's basic strategy for improving the world, we are stuck with three nasty tendencies:
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We tend to get stressed by the thought that everything depends on how much we serve God, which means we always having to try a little harder.
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We become ungrateful to God for blessings since they are wages not gifts; if we don't get the wages we think we earned, we accuse him of cheating us.
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We become less compassionate toward people who are suffering, since we assume they must have done something to deserve it.
If trying to serve God makes people stressed, ungrateful, and hard-hearted, who needs that? It sounds dangerous to get too focused on trying to serve him. Let's be moderate, think about God once in a while and thank him we get some extra special blessing. That approach to life is perfectly sensible if the Big Lie is the truth.
But what if the Big Lie is a big lie? What if there is a massive disconnect between serving God and having an easy, blessed life? And what if the disconnect is there because God deliberately put it there, not because he isn't paying attention to the welfare of people who serve him?
Why would God allow any "massive disconnect," much less create one?
Because God's basic strategy for healing and blessing the world is more sophisticated than "quid pro quo" ("this for that"). He is developing a global campaign team, a network of people who are willing to accept suffering in order to achieve their mission, and their mission is to connect the world to the King who accepted the most suffering of all, Jesus the Messiah.
Campaign team members have to demonstrate that they are not serving God in order to get more of his blessings right away. They are out to finish honorably, to complete their risky mission at any price. They are doing what Jesus did, walking the path he walked, "carrying their crosses," trusting God to honor their loyalty in the end even if they endure human shame or lose their lives in the meantime.
Holidays and the Big idea
In 2022, Honor Season is October 6 - November 19 that is, from the day after the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) to the day before Christ the King Sunday, which looks forward to the Christ's return in glory. Honor Season includes both the week of the "Roughing it Festival," a.k.a. the "Feast of Tabernacles" ("Sukkot" in Hebrew) October 6-12, and Halloween-All Saints Day (originally "All Martyrs Day"), October 31 - November 1.
The "Roughing it" Festival (Sukkot, or Feast of Booths/Huts) October 10-16, 2022
The Jewish festival of Sukkot involves a week of roughing it, living in makeshift booths, huts, or shelters as reminders of the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. The roofs have to be made from branches cut from trees, and the sky has to be visible through the roof somewhere.
The point of a flimsy shelter is clear. “We should not have survived that journey under those awful conditions, but by the grace of God we did! And we are still here! Praise God!” The God of Israel wants to be remembered and honored as the God who takes his people places and who gets them there even if the journey seems impossible.
In spite of the hardship, there is nothing glum about the "Roughing it" Festival. In fact, to this day Jews celebrate it as a feast of unbelievable joy. Their focus is not on how uncomfortable life is in a makeshift shelter. It is on how reliable God is to help us survive and how much he blesses us once the journey is over.
A prayer of welcome for the "Roughing it" Festival
Lord Jesus, you are the Messiah worth dying for. We will welcome you here every day until you welcome us there in the land you have promised.
An affirmation for the "Roughing it" Festival
The cross of Jesus the Messiah can get us through any difficulty it gets us into.
Halloween and All Saints Day, a.k.a. All Martyrs Day, October 31-November 1, 2021
Halloween, the evening before All Saints Day, is one of the two ancient Christian festivals that has become twisted and corrupted beyond all recognition. The other is Mardi Gras, the day before Lent begins.
To restore Halloween to its rightful place in our annual calendar of worship, a short history lesson is needed--the story behind "All Saints Day."
In the earliest centuries the church celebrated a memorial day on each anniversary of the martyrdom of a prominent church leader such as Stephen (Acts 7, celebrated on December 26th). As martyrdom increased, the calendar got too full. Not wanting all these newer, lesser martyrs to be totally forgotten, the Church added a new holy day for all of them together. In English we know this as All Saints Day but the label, “All Martyrs Day,” would give us a clearer picture of the original meaning. It is the spiritual equivalent of holidays that remember soldiers who have died fighting for their countries.
The eve before such a day would naturally be a holy time (Hallow-eve), a somber time of remembrance and reflection on the courage and sacrifice of so many. Instead it has become demon, ghost, and zombie night. Even if the scary costumes are replaced by Disney princess outfits and superhero costumes, the memory of the martyrs is still totally forgotten.
Halloween and All Saints Day are great times to refocus on people who carried their crosses, people who were loyal to their mission and gave their lives for it. Hebrews 11.35-40 reminds us of many ancient heroes of the faith. Web sites like Voice of the Martyrs and IDOP (International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church) remind us of modern ones.