If you worship at Hillside Church or watch
our services on YouTube or Facebook, you are reading this in August, 2026, and
you know we’re in the middle of a series of sermons from 1 Peter. This will run
through the rest of August. After that, we will turn our attention to some prophetic
moments in the Old Testament. We’ll hear from Deborah, King Saul (who was
briefly filled with God’s prophetic spirit), Gad, Obadiah, Micaiah, Huldah, and
Oded. If these are unfamiliar names, that’s the point. We know about Elijah,
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and other “big names” among the prophets. In the
Bible, God say things we need to hear. Often the message is embedded in
familiar stories, but just as often, God speaks his word through people Bible
we might not know as well.
Walter Brueggemann notes a
recurring theme in prophetic literature: the prophet’s word both “plucks up and
tears down,” and “plants and builds up” (Like Fire in the Bones, p.9).
When God speaks through the prophets we must listen and align our lives with
the message. Sometimes this leads us to radically changes our lives. Michael
Fishbane says “God’s living voice [is] experienced as a caesural implosion on
human consciousness” (Sacred Attunement, p.163). In poetry, a caesura is
a built-in pause. The reader of the poem pauses at the caesura and takes a
breath as she digests the words. Taking a pause to hear and understand God’s
voice is necessary for all who take their faith seriously.
I am calling the church to open the
Bible, sit in quiet awe before the words we read and hear in it, and pause; we must
read with enough honesty vulnerability that we feel ourselves plucked up and
torn down as God implodes our consciousness. Then, just as we, in
our sin, feel unmade in the presence of the holy God, that same God plants
us and builds us up, or as Paul puts it, makes us new (2 Corinthians 5:17).
If we breeze through Bible reading too quickly, failing to slow down and pay
attentions, we might miss the ways God wants to go to work on us and in us.
So, for the next 4 weeks, take a
caesura. Pause with me, as we sit before 1 Peter. Then over the course of the two
months after that, walk with me through the stories of lesser known but
extraordinarily important prophets. Along the way, we’ll pause as needed.
Reading closely and attentively and vulnerably, we find that the word of the
Lord is not always easy to take, but even so, when we read in faith, we meet
God and this revives the soul (Psalm 19:7).
From now through the end of October, who will join me in pausing and
receiving revival from the living God?
