A Few Thoughts

God has been going crazy at 24/7!  Talk about JOYFUL worship!  Two reasons why I think it’s happening:

1. Our services have been more about Jesus than our church.  When you have a church that spends all its time talking about how YOU are going to do things, what YOU need to change, how YOU felt about the music last week, what direction YOU think the church needs to be going, what YOUR doctrine statement is, how YOU are managing the church’s money, what YOUR vision for the church is, the things YOU think are important to have in a meeting…the souls God has placed under your leadership to steward are never led to the One from which all meaning and significance flows.  The moment even one single aspect of your ministry stops being about God, the entire ministry becomes irrelevant and pointless, and its purpose is reduced to simply making you feel good about yourself for “doing what God called you to do.”  God never calls people to do anything that makes them the hero.  Churches must be all about how GOD wants to do things, what GOD is pleased with, where GOD leads you, and what brings GOD the most praise and glory.
2. We’ve prayed for a spirit of celebration instead of a spirit of success.  The reason we go to church services is not primarily so that God will do something, but because of what God has done already.  The Sabbath was the day God rested from working the other six days.  We should not ever rely on the one hour per week we have at church for God to do miraculous things.  We should be listening for God’s voice and acting on what He reveals to us on the other six days, and use Sunday to rest and celebrate.  So many Christian’s lives revolve around what they will get out of a church service, when really, they should be bringing something to put into the church service as a harvest of the work God has done through their faithfulness.  We sing songs to God because He is faithful and praiseworthy…but unless we truly believe that, our voices are empty, and unless we are seeking God in the other 167 hours of the week, we will have a much harder time truly believing.  Soren Kiergegaard said, “It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey”…obedience nurtures belief.  None of this means that God doesn’t do miraculous things and speak to people and change lives at a church service, in fact it’s often quite the opposite—but we ought to come to church services with joy and thankfulness more often than despair and demands.  God often only gives us more when we are good stewards of what we have already.

When we put God and His glory above ourselves and our own efforts, and when we are satisfied in Him instead of demanding of Him, INCREDIBLE THINGS HAPPEN.

ONE Lesson #4: Raising the Bar

With God behind us, we can do anything (Php 4:13).  But when our knowledge goes too far beyond our practice, our belief becomes a burden because we’re not giving God space to fulfill the promises of scripture in our lives.  It’s easy to acknowledge what God says to us and still live lives that never go beyond what we can do.  As Christians, we’ve got to keep each other accountable, and not just with struggles or responsibilities, but with our faith at its core as well.  If we want to step into God’s dreams for our lives, we have to challenge each other to live in ways that require both God’s sustenance and each other’s support (both are necessary…Lk 10:27).

While explaining how individual’s personal walks with God play a part in their unity as a team, the youth staff at NewSpring Church said that they hold people to a standard they can’t live up to without Jesus and each other.  Leaders especially need to have unity between each other that is so solid that every person’s quiet time is vital to the operation of the ministry.  Holding each other accountable in this way not only makes sure that what you’re doing is always based in, surrounded by, and covered with scripture…it also ensures that your personal time with God becomes not only for yourself, but for your teammates too!

I’m an Opportunist

First off, check out my friend Tim DeGroot’s new blog here. He has taught me so much and I am blessed to be able to serve with him in ministry, and I have no doubt that you will benefit from what he has to say.

Second:
I have prayed so much in my life for God to give me opportunities to serve Him, and to share the gospel, and to make a difference, etc.  I pray for God to give me opportunities a lot.  And while we do need God to provide us with opportunities (because otherwise none would come to us), we also need to remember that we cannot do anything with those opportunities unless God moves.

So I think that more often than asking God to give US opportunities, we need to do everything we can to give HIM opportunities.  Because if God doesn’t move, nothing significant will ever happen.  Ever.  And we need to continually give God room to move if we want what we’re doing to be significant.  Miracles do not happen if risk is not involved.  And while waiting for God’s direction is INCREDIBLY important, if we know what God’s heart is about something, we can’t wait for God to move before we do.  Sometimes we have to prove our faithfulness by giving the Spirit room to work, instead of making Him push you out of the way.

Note: We ALWAYS know what God’s heart is about the lost.  He wants us to be fishers of men, to go and make disciples of all nations, and to unapologetically preach the good news to all who listen.  We never have an excuse to avoid doing this!

We need to give God opportunities to move so that something eternal can happen, instead of asking Him to give us opportunities to do something that without Him is worthless anyway!

“You Chose Wisely…”

“In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will…”
Ephesians 1:11

“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”
Colossians 3:12

“For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you…”
1 Thessalonians 1:4

“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”
1 Peter 2:9

God does not simply ALLOW people into His kingdom.  There is no one who is part of the body of Christ who wasn’t expected, or who God had to make room for.  Each one of us is CHOSEN, and each one of us has a PURPOSE in the Kingdom.  God had (and always will have!) a REASON for choosing you.  And even if it feels like there is no visible or tangible evidence of God’s purpose or reason in choosing you, remember…sometimes the INvisible and the INtangible things are the most POWERFUL, and serve in the ways closest to the spiritual workings of the Holy Spirit.

Live your life with confidence that there is something God has chosen YOU, over everyone else in the world, to do, and that you are an important and vital part of the body of Christ, because…

God does not choose poorly!

It’s the Simple Things

Just as we can do “no great things, only small things with great love,” so is it also with evil. The temptation to murder is not what causes a man to murder, it is the temptation to annoyance, to a quick comment of disdain, to a thought of anger, that brings a man to kill. We do not enter into tyranny because of the tyrant, but because of the disrespectful child.

As the evil one has been defeated, he can no longer wage war upon us—but like a scattered force living in a jungle, small ambushes and guerilla tactics are continuously at hand for those of us walking through a world in which we know Heaven is above, but are only able to catch glimpses of it through the thick canopy. It is not great evil that we are afflicted with, but small evil: that which finds its way into the cracks of our character, growing hardly noticeable thread-like roots beneath a slab of concrete, and over years and years causing the sidewalk to split and crumble and be overrun with vegetation. Now it is hardly noticeable as a sidewalk. It appears to the passer-by that by some strange occurrence, chunks of cement have been left among a bed of weeds; it seems that it is the cement that is out of place.

Jesus speaks of a seed that is sown among different types of soil. There is perhaps another sower, another type of seed, that tries to take root in the soil yielding harvest. Trees do not come from above and mash themselves into the ground, they grow from small beginnings beneath the soil and become something huge and immovable. So it is with temptation: it is not the great and terrible things we see causing mass ruin that we should concern ourselves with, it is the small things. “Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick,” as C.S. Lewis explains in The Screwtape Letters.

Though some may say that we do not need to concern ourselves with the small things in our life, if only the big things seem aligned—how much it is the opposite! For we see small and big with the world’s eyes: our actions, possessions, and experiences. But the eyes of heaven see only one’s heart, one’s motive, one’s true thoughts and desires. How can a thirty-story building stand if the first floor’s beams are weak? In the same way, we must be on the watch for the beginnings of temptation, the smallest deterrence from the Way, if we want to avoid great calamity. As Shane Claiborne says, “the tempter’s best lie is 99% true,” and it is this that we must be most on guard for.

Inside Out

Perhaps Christians should be less concerned with living out their faith, and instead be more intent on living in their faith.  To live in faith—from within my faith—so that as I go I make disciples; not by worrying myself with how much I do, or how many things I am doing “right” versus how many things I am doing “wrong,” or how many results I see, but rather by being intimately connected to and in love with an impossible God.

Our commands from Jesus are to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Too often I attempt to love God by loving my neighbor, while Jesus explicitly states them as two separate things.  I can never try to find God first in people.  I can never be satisfied with God only when I am attempting to love my neighbor.  I cannot let myself mistake the feeling of loving someone else or seeing just one facet of God’s work for God’s true fullness and being.  I must first be satisfied with God alone, in silence and solitude, before I attempt to love my neighbor, for if I try to love my neighbor first not only will I fail but I will become addicted to God’s work rather than God Himself.

When I am fully satisfied with my Father—with only His being, and my being near His—then I will inevitably love my neighbor as well.  A love for God creates a love for others.  And when I love others, I will fall more in love with Jesus.  It is a never-ending cycle that feeds itself.  But I won’t ever be able to love my neighbor more by attempting to create love for them myself.  I can never cultivate love by action.  Unless I love with the Holy Spirit’s love that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 13, I will certainly fail.  I will never learn to love others more unless I first find the Holy Spirit within myself, and am satisfied with God’s presence alone.  I must live in my faith if I want to see my faith grow out.

When Means Become Ends

Christians should always be pursuing social justice, but never for the sake of social justice.  Social justice is one of many different stepping stones towards seeing the Good News come alive, but without following the other stepping stones[1] all to the end of our Father’s glory—without the Holy Spirit as our motivation, our purpose, our passion, our guide, and our sustenance—all of our efforts for social justice are in vain.  Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:3 that “if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.”  If we are running the race, then we are running the race to win—to the finish line, not to anything that we pass by on the way.  Social justice will be passed through on the way to the finish line but it is never the finish line itself.

We can do extreme things, but we can never become extremists.  We should never tie our hands with an excess of words[2].  And we should never become sold out to an ideal or a movement instead of the Great I AM.  We should never seek to do extreme things, we can only seek the way of Jesus and leave it up to the world to determine whether or not what we do is radical or extreme.  As Shane Claiborne says, “The only reason God’s cultural refugees seem so peculiar is because of how far the world has moved from God’s dream for it.”  It doesn’t appear that Jesus sought to be extreme or radical, He simply lived out the will of His Father in heaven, and it was seen as radical by the world.  We are not rebels, we are simply alien residents.

Our purpose is not to fight against the world but to bless the world.  Much of what we do might clash with the world’s ways, but this is never our sole intent.  The Gospel is good news to all people, and anything that is not good news is not the Gospel.  This is not to say that it will all be easy…but it certainly will all be freeing and hopeful.

Let us live lives set apart from the ways of the world, and let those set apart ways never drive the world into further darkness but rather draw it up toward the everlasting light of Jesus Christ.

1. Sharing the Gospel, prayer, personal and intimate relationships with Jesus, fellowship, sharing of possessions, breaking bread together, etc.
2. As Thomas Merton says, “If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, we will never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.”  And as one of my friends has said, “We must do with our hands what our mouths are itching to say.”

Splinters

Distractions—things which are usually felt to be pleasurable yet take our mind off of seeing heaven—quickly become habits, in which the distractions become much more desirable but much less pleasurable.  Habits are the beginnings of idols.  We must protect ourselves from distraction then, for Satan is most successful when taking things from us rather than when giving us more.  We must seek poverty (which is more than simply the “things” we may or may not possess) so that he has nothing which he is able to take from us, and we must be on guard of the small things, for it is the small things that find their way into the deepest areas of our hearts and then do the most damage as they grow without our knowledge.  We must be careful to defend against what C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters says is the most dangerous way of temptation:

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Don’t Vote for Jesus…

While you will have already voted (or let the election pass you by) by the time you read this, I still feel that it is important that I share.

The American church is convinced that they are to vote for whatever political party or presidential candidate most supports their morals and the teachings of scripture.  But it seems to me that the separation of church and state must exist, not because I want to live in a country that is full of people who don’t know Jesus, but because the power of God is far beyond the power of government, and I would hate to see Christianity diminished to nothing more than legal issues that are enforced by mere men.  I prefer Christianity as it IS presented in scripture: a complete salvation of humanity’s depravity—not enforced on people who desire something else, but praised by people who desire nothing less.

Voting for a political party because they will make your morality into legality is simply agreeing to raise up a country of pharisees. This does not at all negate our morality (which is from Christ alone)—for we must protect our relationship with Jesus at all costs—it is simply going about it in a terribly wrong way.  The pharisees brought guilt and condemnation to those who did not follow the strict laws put in place by the twisting of scripture, and were concerned only with whether or not the laws were being followed.  This is no different from Christians being so eager to turn their moral beliefs into government-enforced legalities.  The change of president should never affect how we live out the gospel.  If we are hoping for a change in government so that we might finally be able to live how we are called to live, we will only become more disguised in our initial failure to live as Christians, because if this is the case we have not been living as Christians to begin with.

The dissatisfaction with the way moral issues are dealt with has nothing to do with the government.  Yes, making abortion or homosexual marriages illegal will decrease their occurrences.  But Jesus is far less concerned with the frequency of sin, and far more concerned with being in an intimate relationship with his people.

Discipline does not make people righteous.  Laws do not change people’s hearts.  Jesus taught this over and over again.  It is only the power of the Holy Spirit in each individual person’s life that can ever defeat the tools of Satan.  And if we are relying on the power of government to impress our heart condition on others, we are setting ourselves up for a very great fall, and we are putting very little faith in the power of God.  Instead, the church must begin to live the gospel of Jesus Christ.  If there is such a problem with abortion, love those who have had them and who are planning on having them.  If there is such a problem with homosexual marriages, love a homosexual.  If there is such a problem with war, live a life that overflows with joy from peace.  I, for one, am sick and tired of Christians talking about all the things they hate, and preaching to each other every Sunday about how wrong certain things are, and then driving in their six-figure vehicles back to their cozy houses with guest bedrooms and big-screen televisions, where they remain safe from the afflictions of the world.

The church must show the world that there is a better way to live.  Do not ever think that we can substitute legality for living the gospel in our own lives.  Do not ever let government replace the call of Christ.  We must bring Jesus to the dark places of the world if we want to get rid of those dark places.  It is on us, not the government, to make life with God irresistible.  If we live for Him, so much more will be accomplished than obedience to scripture.  Christianity is about so much more than sin management.  The power of God is so much greater than anything we can imagine…

Don’t vote for Jesus if you refuse to live for Him.

Control is something out of my control

To say that God is in control is to preach a reassuring truth.  Responding to that by doing nothing is completely contradictory to that truth.  Usually when it is said that God is in control, what is meant is that He will take care of things.  The first problem with this idea is that it subjects His control to the way we think things ought to be taken care of.  The other problem is not with the phrase itself, but how it is most commonly used—the tendency is to say that God is in control so that we won’t have to take care of things ourselves.

The question that has to be asked is, what is God in control of, and how is His control manifested?  While the technical or theological answer is that He is in control of everything, the point I am trying to get at is that He is in conrtol of us, and He uses us to do His work.  If it is true that the Holy Spirit resides within us, then it is nonsense to do nothing in response to saying that God is in control, for by doing so we are actually limiting what God has control of in ourselves, and misinterpreting inaction for faith.  But as Fireflight says, “faith is moving without knowing,” and as 1 Corinthians 5:7 says, “we walk by faith and not by sight.”  We cannot have faith while sitting still.  If God is truly in control we must realize that He is within us, and that it is us He has control over, and that we must live the life He has for us by faith, rather than watch it pass us by without.