Today was a good day. My wife had the day off. We took a drive. We hung out at a mall. We ate out. It was good. But more importantly is the fact that I am blessed beyond measure everyday. I am not sure I really realize that in it’s entirety the rest of the time. On a good day I can see it clearly. On an average day, a little. On a bad day, the fog just sits there blinding me from all that is good.
The point is this. God is good. When I feel horrible or something bad happens I tend to immediately forget that. It’s almost as if the situation was like this:
You have a best friend. You two are close. Really close. You tell each other everything. Just because I stub my toe one afternoon on my way to get the mail doesn’t mean I call him/her up and start hashing out how it’s all their fault or how they never should have let it happen. That would be completely insane.
Now if that friend called you up and blamed you for something that you had absolutely nothing to do with on a regular basis then the next day wanted to borrow some money for the latest want they have been drooling over, how long would you remain friends? Probably not very long. Fortunately God has more patience than we do.
I think my prayer is that I learn to love God not just when I feel like all is good, but be able to go to Him when I feel like it’s not and just be completely honest that my pride wants to blame Him when it’s really the reality of living in a fallen world that is getting me down. It should make me want to be nearer to the one who is my Savior rather than blame Him for the condition He never wanted for us to begin with and has died to save us from.
My wife and I have started working through reading the Bible together in a year. It comes down to four chapters each night (we each read two) right now. I am not sure if it doubles up chapters later or not. The interesting part so far has been the other things that seem to happen around our house while we sit down to do it the last two nights. In two nights we’ve had our dogs spontaneously start fighting, Aidan wake up crying and quite terrified for no reason, dogs randomly start barking, and neighbors begin being rather loud.
All of which were quite distracting from reading the Bible together.
Spiritual warfare?
I feel like there is a Jesus image that we lift up for each generation. It’s rather strange to think that this timeless Gospel must be re-branded every few years to “relate” to our culture. Our culture is going downhill rather fast. Shouldn’t we be lifting up the timeless truth of the Gospel rather than the latest rendition?
I’ve been giving a lot of though to the idea of how we typically do outreach. I think I have often misunderstood that marketing and outreach were the same thing. A talk the other day with one of the pastors at the church I’ve been involved in lately has really opened up my eyes to how marketing can also become a trap that we fall into. We are supposed to “market” God with our lives, not just some catchy slogan on a billboard somewhere. The catchy slogans are good for building awareness that someone indeed wants to reach out (outreach) to them and may serve as a connecting point, but we will never touch a life through a fancy billboard. It’s what happens when people do respond to our marketing efforts that changes lives. But here’s the catch, marketing isn’t required if lives are indeed changed. Marketing will only be to let outside people know of the exciting things already going on.
I am guilty of this. A friend or someone has opened up in some vulnerable way and just laid bare their soul before you and not knowing what to say or do, I’ve closed up the breakage with a greeting-card-sticky-pathetic-sloganized “I’ll pray for you”. Almost as if a vital artery (are there non vital arteries?) has been cut and we just slapped a band-aid on it and sent them home. I was talking online via xbox the other day with a friend of mine and he opened up about a situation that has been on his heart and mind a lot lately. I almost said “I’ll keep you in prayer, man” but I thought better of it (or more likely, I was too tired to be overly spiritual anyway) and I just told him flat out “um, I don’t really know what to say… If you are asking my opinion, then I don’t have an answer for you on this one.” For a second, everything went really quiet as if I had crossed some invisible line. Then he went on to tell me that he really only needed someone to listen and be available in that way.
I started a series awhile back called “full disclosure” and one of my little business card slogans was “I am praying for you”. But, I think I even perpetrate a misconception about prayer at times. Prayer isn’t something that we do because it’s easy to close our eyes and act like life doesn’t get messy at times. Life gets quite messy, dirty, and rather unpleasant at times. God knows that. Jesus even died on the cross a messy, horrible, even nasty death so He knows it better than we can imagine. He even prayed a messy prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood and asking His Father if there were any other way. But we often use prayer as an excuse to get out of real life situations that are quite hard to deal with. The bad part about it all is the fact that most times when we flippantly tell someone that you are praying for them, that we completely forget to do so. Or worse yet, it’s just the “Christian” (say it with sarcasm) way of telling someone to bugger off!
I saw this video the other day and I thought it was wonderful. You may also recognize the guy who plays in the tv show “Bones”. But what I liked about the video was the message. We have an opportunity to “validate” and encourage others. So often we miss out on the chance to do so.
found via shallowfrozenwater (awesome find by the way)
The biggest lie perpetrated today is that we are not free. I am prone to anxiety in life. It’s one of my greatest downfalls. But it stems from this idea that I have to live up to other people’s expectations rather than just be who I am. Or rather, who I am in Christ.
- Can God take care of the bills and the debts?
- Can God watch over my son Aidan each night when he goes to bed?
- Can God make sure we have enough to eat?
My answer unequivocally is “yes”, but as I told a friend last week “My heart knows it by my brain doesn’t quite get it.”
If you were to have all the resources that you needed and complete financial freedom, what would you do? It’s a question that I have been asking a lot lately. I am far from “financial freedom” and I don’t have abundant resources but it’s been getting to me lately. What would I do if I had that kind of situation handed to me?
For me, I’d probably become some kind of wilderness recluse. Buy a cabin in the middle of the woods and have most things delivered. Books and stuff I’d order from Amazon.com. I’d learn about trees and roots and what to eat and what won’t kill you in the woods. Maybe even live completely off-grid and invest in some kind of alternative energy while I grew my own food. In short, I probably wouldn’t be much help to anyone outside my own family.
Maybe it’s not just a burden that I carry of debt and having to try to supplement income every month. Maybe it’s the blessing that through my situation (however much I dislike it) that I can be used to be a blessing to others. If I weren’t in need, it might be rather difficult for me to understand those who are in need.
I know often I am blinded to the spiritual element of life. I go day to day thinking that things could be coincidence or just random events conspiring against me. I forget that we are at war. It”s not that I don’t believe that I am at war for my soul, it’s that the way this war is waged is not by physical weapons. It’s thoughts and feelings and nudges of both demonic influences and my own sinful nature that are working against God in my life.
All we get out of sin is death and destruction.
Sure, sins seem nice when they are happening. We even try to justify them a thousand different ways. But what it ultimately comes down to is that God is God. He is the one who decides if something is sin or not. In fact God even holds Himself up as the standard of Truth and righteousness.
If there is question about it, stay away.
It gets me that some argue that certain things are not sin because it’s part of their genetic makeup. I find it amazing that they have come to that conclusion because scripture tells us we have a problem called “sinful nature”. I won’t deny it.
- I am likely to speed every time I drive, so I use the cruise control to keep myself in check.
- My mother was an alcoholic, therefore I stay away from beer.
It’s really that simple. I realize that I am prone to a certain sin so I take more measures against it. Sin is still part of our nature though. Often, those sins we are most likely to commit are also the ones that we are most aware of actually being sin and are the ones we usually fight most vehemently that they are not.
The opposite of rebellion is repentance.
Once we are aware of our sin, we can accept God’s grace. Repentance means humbling yourself and turning around and going the other way when you realize you were wrong. Rebellion is going the way you know is wrong knowing it is wrong.
Sin and the Church.
Unfortunately, many people who attend church have gotten it backwards. Church is a gathering of sinners who recognize their own depravity and want to be in community with other people seeking out the way of repentance. So the church can be divided in several categories of people.
- Those who recognize their own depravity and are somewhere in the process of turning away from it and seeking God.
- Those who think they have it all figured out and so waste their time by telling those who are seeking God where they think He is.
- Those who are delusional that their particular brand of sin is somehow acceptable to God and are seeking the acceptance of the church to somehow justify themselves.
- Those who really don’t care one way or the other so they go with whatever the majority thinks.
I’m a mess, you’re a mess, we’re all a mess.
Not to sound like an AA meeting, but we are all sinners and we have to come to recognize that fact first. You don’t have to justify it to me because God’s the one who has set the standard.
