This week we welcome our new teacher, Clara Bastidas, with her first teaching for Simple Churches.
Clara grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and worked as a human rights lawyer at the UN before she and her husband went into full-time ministry. They came to Canada seven years ago to serve with International Student Ministries Canada, and Clara also runs La Vida Clara, a Spanish-language teaching platform about the sufficiency of Jesus.
In Exodus 32, Israel gets tired of waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai. These are people who had walked through the sea, eaten bread from heaven and heard God's own voice, and they ask Aaron to make them a god. Clara looks at how they tried to add a golden calf to their worship of the Lord. She asks what our own golden calves look like today: careers, bank accounts and carefully built plans for security. She connects the story to Psalm 106 and to Jesus' parable of the wedding feast in Matthew 22, where the invited guests "made light of it" and went off to their farms and businesses. She ends where the story points, with Jesus, who pleads our case the way Moses pleaded for Israel and brings us back into the worship we were made for.
