"You're not a bad boy."

So I watched Blood Diamond earlier for the first time and it wrecked me in a lot of ways, I hope all of them are good or will be eventually. It was a hard movie to stomach. However, this scene was really beautiful and prophetic. Dia, is the boy, and he was captured and forced to be a child soldier and kill innocent people. Solomon, his father, has spent the entire movie trying to find him and rescue him, and after having just succeeded in doing so at great risk to his own life, this scene happens. It's pretty beautiful, and I'm blown away by the thought that this is how Jesus and our Father receive us.

More Than You Think You Want.

I listened to a sermon by a guy named Paul Tripp the other day entitled "The Danger of  Living With Eternity Amnesia". It was basically about the thought that we can easily feel tempted to detach ourselves from God's history and story of the redemption of all things by separating an event in our lives from the whole of God's plan for us. I think I have actually written about this thought before...maybe...I was probably plaigarizing Paul or someone else though. Either way...what happens when we do this is we forfeit both the faith that comes with a recognition and remembrance of all that God has done for us in the past and we lose our hope for what God will surely do in the future both near and distant, and how he is, has been, and will continue to be ever redeeming every fallen and broken situation in our lives and those around us.

I recently have been trying and praying that I would be more conscience of not living with this amnesia of eternity and the hope held out to me in the Gospel, the hope of glory, both future and right here and now. God is ever wooing and drawing me to himself, and will continue to do so in ways that may prove devastatingly beautiful for my plans and certainly for my flesh. God is pretty relentless and ruthless when it comes to redeeming things and he will not settle for an unfinished job. The thought that God is constantly at work in and around me in ways that I can scarcely imagine is one that truly fills me with hope and wonder. God is always up to something even if I am completely unaware of it, and that fills me with hope. The thought that he has better things in store for me than what I think I want is a beautiful one too.

For awhile now I have been thinking about dreaming, and the idea that there is something very beautiful and Christ exalting about dreaming and taking risks to pursue and believe God for those dreams, knowing and believing that God has given them to you and placed those desires in you to honor himself, and then rather than trying to provide for that dream yourself you believe him for it. A while back I was praying about this thought and I was confessing to the Lord that I felt like all of my dreams were things that I could not pursue or devote myself to because they were not centered around Christ, but rather they were centered around myself. The Lord spoke to me in that moment and asked me, "What dreams of your own are you willing to lay down so that I might give you the dreams that I have for you?" That was a question that he did not want me to answer quickly or rashly, but one that He wanted me to stop and think about and dwell on...to feel the full weight of...to be like Paul and suffer....suffer the loss of all things but then to count them rubbish for the sake of gaining Christ and knowing him and being found in him. Something beautiful about God is that he refuses to give us less than his best. Jesus gives himself, and nothing more, and nothing less. In every situation the desire of God is to give us himself. He is not one for holding out on his children, and he is not one who will give his children a stone when they ask for bread, but he also is not one who will give his child a snake when they ask for it. God will not give to us things that will separate or distance us from him, and often the things that I have desired are things that would have distanced me in my heart from God, and would have lead me into sin and idolatry. Praise God that He didn't give me those things. Thankfully, Jesus wants more for me than what I think or feel like I want. He knows my heart, and he knows my soul's most honest desire is for him and to walk intimately and closely with him and that is a desire that he will ALWAYS fulfill. He will not withhold himself from me, but he will withhold anything and everything from me that will lead me away from him.

The Lord said to me one time that another reason that he will not give me the things that I long for is because he has bigger and greater desires and intentions for those things than I have for them, namely that I would easily settle for less than his best, but he wants my every desire to find its fulfillment in him. Meaning that he wants my desires to draw me to him to where I love and praise and worship the One who gave rather than what has been given, other wise I would simply waste it on myself and the gift would terminate with me and with the thing itself and it would not transcend the physical to point to the spiritual and to point to that which is unseen. It would be only temporary rather than eternal, because the temporary and the physical only finds fulfillment in Christ and Christ alone, and when it doesn't it is blown away like chaff in the wind, or like the things that the Israelites pursued in Haggai that God blew away. Haggai is pretty awesome...and short...I'd encourage anyone reading this to read Haggai.

Fighting for Joy.

So it has definitely been a while now since I have last posted which is due in part to many reasons. Probably the most honest of which would be that I have just not been spending as much time with the Lord, and it turns out that when you're not spending time with the Lord you don't have as much to say or discuss that is really worthwhile. This has been my predicament. Even now I'm still not spending enough time with the Lord but through these last few weeks or so of being in that predicament I have been mulling over a lesson that God has been teaching me...namely...that we must fight for joy and delight in Him, and in Him alone.

I have been reading Desiring God by John Piper (very slowly) and this is one of the main ideas that he is expressing and getting at. The book is about Christian Hedonism which is a term that he seems to have coined, which he formulated from  people like John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards...something about Johns and being awesome. Anyhow, the premise of it is that we as humans are lovers and we are filled with desire, as we were made to be, and we long to pour out our love and praise and worship onto something...the problem comes in that as C.S. Lewis has so famously expressed...."we are far too easily satisfied". It is not that we have too much desire but rather not enough, for we are quick to exchange the glory of the One True God for idols and to worship the created rather than the creator who is to be forever praised. Christian Hedonism plays off of this fact that we are filled with desire and that we long for that desire to be satisfied and that we long to be happy and fulfilled....the issue comes in how we are satisfied. We must...can be satisfied only in the Lord, anything else is compromise and settling for far less than what we are made for. The beauty of it is that God is not at odds with our desire for satisfaction and love and joy and happiness, in fact He is all about it...actually He commands it. He just simply commands that we rejoice in Him, that we love Him, that we enjoy Him, that we praise Him, and that we long for Him, anything else is sin and slight at His worth and beauty and honor.

The good news here is that God is a never ending always flowing fountain of delights, love, peace, joy, hope, and satisfaction. "In your presence oh, God, there is fullness of joy, and at your right hand oh, God, there are treasures evermore." He longs to satisfy us, and to be enjoyed by us. We were made for Him. Made to glorify Him, to worship Him, and He is not after our begrudging submission to that purpose and that calling. He wants us to see Him as true bread, true drink, and true life and to come to Him and to find rest for our souls, and to find joy and satisfaction for our hearts. We were made for God and every desire that we have ever had for anything has been a shadow of a desire for Christ that was meant to draw us to Him and to cause us to return to him and to find satisfaction in Him. Only He can satisfy us, only He was intended to, only He brings joy, only He brings fulfillment, and as John Piper says so often "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." God is honored and glorified in our desire for Him and in our coming to Him for satisfaction for every desire we have, and He will fulfill those desires, if we come.

So....all of that was said to preface this lesson I have been learning of "fighting for Joy" in God alone. My heart, and I have reason to believe your own as well, is so prone to find satisfaction for my desires in things that are not God. I mean, I will in a heart beat with out so much as a second thought or glance dive head long into idolatry...usually self-idolatry, which I would argue is all idolatry because typically the only reason we would idolize someone or something else is for what it can give us...what it can do for ME....because I can easily be all about me. And so out of a love for self I end up going to things other than God to find satisfaction for the desires that I'm not finding fulfillment in God for because I refuse to go to Him. The ironic thing is that self-love is really a lot more like self-hatred, at least when this is what it looks like. Because in my self-idolatry I allow myself to replace God and in doing so I leave myself discontent, frustrated, bound in sin, and dissatisfied because I am looking to myself or other things to fulfill the desires in me that God placed there to be filled by Him alone.

So when i say that we must fight for joy I am not referring to an arbitrary we must fight to be happy sort of idea, but rather I am saying that we must fight our flesh and crucify it walking the long, hard, narrow path that Jesus set for us, carrying our cross and enduring it for the sake of the joy set before us, just as Jesus did, and that joy set before us is Him, and in Him the fulfillment of everything we have ever longed for and at the end of that path we find that in His presence is fullness of joy. One of the beautiful things about the Gospel is what I have heard people refer to as the "now-ism" of the Gospel. Theologians describe that we live in the "Already, but not yet." period, meaning that we are already sons of God, but not fully, we know Jesus but not face to face, we have been freed from sin and are no longer obligated to it but we still feel it effects and its temptation, we have been made new, and we are being made new, and one day we will be new. Yet, the now-ism of the Gospel is that we still live in the already clause of the Gospel, and though we have the promise of fullness of joy in his presence if we endure to the end holding onto the confidence that we had when we first began, we also have the promise now that He will satisfy us if we come to Him....now. This is why Jesus stood in the middle of crowded streets and proclaimed "Whoever comes to me....will....find rest....streams of living water will flow from within Him....will find life....etc" so right here, right now, we have the promise that God will and wants to delight us and satisfy us and not just our physical desires but the desires of our heart and soul.

In Psalm 34, it says, "Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.", the word "give" there can actually be translated as "exchange" which gives it a very different twist that God will exchange your desires with you. We often look at this verse and cite as an example that if you just force yourself to delight in God then He will concede and hand you the thing that you are really longing after, and so God becomes merely a means to another end, but God is the end, there is not other. He is the first and the last, the beginning and the end. If God were to do this it would not bring Him glory, it would not put on display the worth of His character and His name, and God has said that He will not share His glory with another or allow His name to be defamed. However, if the word is exchange then it becomes that if we delight ourselves in the Lord then we will find that the very thing we desire is the object of our delight and so God will exchange with us, happily, our desires for other things that would be temptations and sources of idolatry by giving us a new heart to love and desire Him, and in so doing He alone is made much of, and then the other things that we once desired are freed up to be given to us as tokens of His love and as gifts that we can receive with thankfulness, rejoicing in the one who gave rather than the thing given.

We by sheer force of will cannot work up this delight in the Lord or just concentrate hard enough to cook up some joy in the Lord, and so we find ourselves as always dependent upon God who changes our heart, and so I have found that if I am lacking this desire for God, the last thing I should do is try harder, forcing myself to rest or long or delight or rejoice, but rather I should ask God who gives us the Holy Spirit and He is faithful to answer and to give me the kingdom and His Spirit which is His great delight to do. Love, faith, hope and joy are all gifts and God will give them to those who ask.

"A New Law."

So there have been many things that I have been mulling over and wrestling through, and there was a realization. I came to last night while praying that has left me wondering and I wanted to get some thoughts out.

I have noticed that with understanding of doctrine and knowledge there seems to come a loss of wonder and life. I have been wrestling through various doctrines and teachings and scriptures and principles for a while not and I have gotten to the place where a desire to understand has become a hindrance of faith. There are many things that have lead to this conclusion and a few scriptures.

I have noticed that we are not called to lean on our own understanding but rather to acknowledge God in all of our ways and to trust Him to make our paths straight. Knowledge puffs up but love builds up. Knowledge never was nor should be the goal, love is the goal. Knowledge passes away, but love remains with faith and hope. I feel much like the Pharisees who Jesus accused of tithing a tenth of their spices but neglecting the more weightier matters of the law. I feel like I have been missing the point, and in my search for understanding and explanation to the things that have been mysteries for so long (as they ought) I have lost the love and the wonder that I once had.

Jesus also said to the Pharisees that they diligently search the scriptures because they think that in them they have life, not realizing that the scriptures testify about Christ, yet he tells them that they refuse to come to him and receive that life. This is where I think I have been, being content to read about Jesus but fearful of getting close enough to actually be changed spectating from a distance but not drawing near to find life and rest. Faith without works is dead and so to simply make a mental assent to the truth of who Jesus is without coming to him for life results in death, it requires an action, a coming to obtain that life that is offered. Faith is meant to inspire action and works, which is why Jesus so often cries aloud in the streets making extraordinary claims that he is God and that he is the bread of life and that if you eat him you'll live forever and that if you come to him rivers of living water will bubble up with in you. There is always some sort of coming to him that he calls us to, some sort of action must develop from faith or it is dead, and if we don't come to him to find life then we won't find it anywhere else.

The Pharisees were not the only ones who missed the point, in fact, those closest to him may have missed it more often than the religious elite. This shows me that I can be close to Jesus and still be missing the point very drastically, heck Jesus called Peter Satan at one point. So certainly by all means we are supposed to grow in our maturity and our knowledge of scripture and to properly handle the word of truth, but above and beyond that we are called to be like little children and to be dependent on Daddy for everything. God never intended or planned for there to be a point in my life when I could have everything figured out. An explanation was never the point, faith is the point, trusting is the point, relationship is the point. Even if I were to gain understanding it wouldn't really matter much anyway because I'm not supposed to rely on it or lean on it, I am supposed to lean on Him.

1 Corinthians 8:1-3, "We know that "all of us possess knowledge." This "knowledge" puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God."

I'm kinda tired of constantly analyzing and trying to figure things out when all God has called me to is simple obedience and submission. It makes me think of a line from the song "A New Law" by Derek Webb...

Don't teach me how to live like a free man, just give me a new law. I don't want to know if the answers aren't easy. So just bring it down from the mountain to me. I want a new law. Just give me that new law....What's the use in trading a law you can't keep for one you can that cannot get you anything?

"My thoughts are not your thoughts..."

So a wise friend of mine recently said to me (very unawares of the impact it would have on me), "The way that the world thinks of love and the way in which God thinks of love is very differently. We think that if you love someone then you should do everything you can to make things easiest for them or to just make things better, or to fix whatever problems they have. But this is not God's idea of love. God wants what is best for us which is often not just making things better and certainly not making things easier." (Paraphrased)

That has left me thinking for a couple days now about a lot of different things, and how that is really the kind of love that I want from God. I want Him to just make everything better...to just fix it, but his ways are not mine and my thoughts are not His. He does things drastically differently than I do, and it's not as though these moments of difficulty that we find ourselves in are a hindrance to the eventual goal of where He is taking us or as though it is keeping from what He really wants for us, but rather it is that these moments of hardship and pain are often the moment that He sometimes most wants us in because His goal is not to make us happy or keep us comfortable, on the contrary He will sometimes be militant towards our comfort and happiness because they are often things that separate us from Him and he will not stand for that. His goal is to transform us. To set us free. To bring us close to him. To make us like Him.

However....my goal IS to be comfortable and happy, and so often I find my plans and my goals at odds with the Lord's which leads to me quarreling with Him or railing against him and shaking my fist at the Heaven's or if my heart isn't quite that bitter simply sitting down in despondency and lies and feeling as though He has rejected me and that He doesn't care or that He doesn't love me. The only problem with this sort of thinking is the Bible.

But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers. Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.

So in response to my question of why? Why this way? why me? Why now? Why? God responds, "Because that is the path my Beloved Son walked giving you and example that you ought to do likewise." If it was fitting for THE Son of God to be made perfect through suffering and to learn obedience by what was suffered then how much more should I A son of God walk that same path. After all, He was perfect, but I am being made perfect. In John, God, tells us that He loves us the same way that He loves Jesus and so it only makes since that I would be made perfect by my suffering, and so suffering to Jesus was not evidence of His Father disappointment in Him or His neglect, but rather it was an evidence of His mercy, and His love, and His grace, and His approval.

Have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

    "My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
   nor be weary when reproved by him.
For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
   and chastises every son whom he receives."

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

I read through 1 Peter last night after listening to a few sermons taken out of it, and there were 2 phrases that stood out to me from the rest: "if necessary...", and "if it is God's will...". These things Peter said in relation to suffering... which tells me that there are times that our sufferings and our trials are by all means God's will for us and that they are not moments or circumstances that we need to be rescued from but rather that we need to endure as God treats us as sons just as He treated Jesus as His Son. this does not mean that God enjoys or delights in our sufferings but rather that He greatly rejoices in the perseverance and hope and joy and genuineness of faith that it produces in us, just as He encourages us to also rejoice in because they are means to an end of our redemption and our salvation. God's plan for the redemption of all things is one that includes each moment of hurt, or rejection, frustration, pain, fear, hopelessness, doubt, loneliness, poverty, desperation, or a car breaking, down, or a dear friend passing away, and so those moments cannot be removed from the circumstances that lead up to them just as they cannot be separated from the moments of God's redemption that will certainly follow them. They were all meant to be viewed in light of the whole of eternity because God formed his plan long before he made us out of dust and you can't plan the end and not plan the means of getting there and so these moments do not stand in opposition to God's plan but rather they are God's plan or at least a part of it. If we remove these moments from the rest of God's plans and intentions for us we will lose our perspective of eternity and of His love for us, and it seems to me there are two responses to suffering. Either we shake our fist at the Heavens and harbor bitterness in our hearts, or we echo Job and David saying, "Though He slay me....yet will I praise Him....may these bones that you have broken rejoice.", knowing that He wounds those He loves.

So take heart for your Father is treating you as a son or a daughter, and He disciplines the one He loves and rebukes the one He delights in.

"I will not leave you as orphans."

So I have been feeling very inspired by Spencer and Melody's blog where they talked about how they hid in a park or field in Italy just hoping they wouldn't be caught because they couldn't afford a hotel. Spencer wrote this:....

"We were disturbed through the night at the thought of getting caught. We had become like orphans not knowing what we were doing and forgetting our purpose and identity. God is a King and His children don’t behave that way. He had not come through in the way we thought He would only because our thoughts were only those of ones who believe their father doesn’t care and are set out to survive."

Jesus has been revealing to me now for a while how much i have given in to this orphan mentality that seeks to provide for itself because it doesn't believe that God or anyone else will or even cares. I've been living at a distance from anyone and everyone...even myself; scared to be hurt again; scared to be disappointed; scared to be unloved; scared to be proved right again; scared to discover that I could be right; scared that maybe they don't care....that maybe You don't care. I have been listening to the voices of liars and excusing it as caution, as guarding my heart, as holy living, but really it has been fear.

Yet, He has not left me as an orphan. He said He would come for me. That He would not abandon me. That He cares. He loves. For I have never seen a righteous man go hungry or his children left begging in the streets. God is our Father and he owns everything, and we are his heirs, co-heirs with Christ. We are told to consider the lillies of the field and the spwrrows of the air and see how they neither toil nor spin and God provides for them richly and abundantly, and He says "How much more will I provide for you....my child? I will not give you a stone for bread, or a snake for a fish. I know what you need what's more....I know what you long for. You mean much more to me than the sparrows and the flowers. Even young lions suffer hunger and want, but when they look to me I fill them, I satisfy them just as I satisfy the desire of every living thing that looks to me. I own the cattle on a thousand hills.The silver and the gold are mine, and I will give to you as you need if you look to me. Ask it of me and I will give you the nations as your inheritance and the distant shores as your heritage. I will rebuke kings on your behalf, commanding them not to harm you or lay a hand on you. Look to me and you will not be put to shame. Seek me and you will not be disappointed. Cast your cares on me. I care for you. Come to me if you are weary and I will give you rest. My yoke is not harsh, and my burden is not heavy. I am gentle and humble in heart. A bruised reed I will not break, and a smoldering wick I will not snuff out. How much more will I not turn you away, my child? Come to me. Let me satisfy your longing heart and fill your hungry soul with good things. I love you. I have given you my Son, how much more will I not graciously give you all things if you ask? Test me me in this and see that I don't bless you so abundantly that people see it and stand in awe at who I am because of my provision for you. I will never stop doing good to you. Believe me. Trust me. Let me love you. Let me provide for you. Let me serve you."

Our Father knows what we need. There is a reason that David never saw the children of the righteous begging in the streets and that because they looked to their father for food just as their father looked to their Heavenly Father for food. We aren't called to provide for ourselves, or just try to survive. We are called to ask. We are called to look to Him for everything. He knows our hearts and He knows what we need and what we long for. He wants us to ask Him; to look to Him. Not to settle, but to trust him, and to believe Him.

Jesus, was for us the example of the One who trusted his Father at all times, and loved Him with His whole heart. He showed us how to live with the Father, and how to walk with Him. There was never a time that Jesus didn't look to His Father or believe His Father's heart for Him. Jesus was so well provided for by His Father that Jesus was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard by the religious people of his day. This must demonstrate something for us. I know that I more often live my life in such a way where I don't trust God and I am scared to spend money on food or things I need because I'm afraid it'll run out. I call this being frugal, or better yet...a good steward of what God has given me. I believe God calls it fear, and unbelief. The point is not having much or having little. The point is asking. The point is looking to Him. Peter pulled a coin from the mouth of a fish that he caught in order to pay his taxes. The key is that Peter went to Jesus and obeyed what He told him to do.

A recurrent theme I see in the passages where Jesus talks about prayer is that we are given an example of someone who is not generous or kind and not a very good giver (a tired and annoyed friend woken from sleep in the middle of the night, an unrighteous judge, and an evil father) and the Jesus says if THEY would give to those who ask "How much more will your Father in Heaven..." Jesus is showing us that we are not calling on an annoyed friend or evil father and judge but rather we are calling on a Beloved friend and brother, on a righteous judge who is for us and not against us, on a perfect Father, and loving Husband....so how much more will he provide for us when we are his Beloved children, bride, and friends?

He has not left us as orphans or widows.

You Have Me.

Once again I don't really have a whole that I really want to say right now, but I still just feel this stirring in my heart to get somethings out. God has shown me the last few weeks or so how bitter and angry my heart is in so many ways, and it still feels this way. While I could easily sit and point my finger to people and circumstances in a way of deflecting the blame for my anger and disappointment, ultimately when it comes down to it I am the only one responsible, because we are not merely a by-product of the events that happen to us. It's funny I can remember getting that very same word for a friend of mine recently. God never ceases to provide me with ironic humor in the ways that His word is a double-edged sword and so whenever I speak it if it doesn't cut me and the one being spoken to in that moment I need only wait a week or less and it will cut me and penetrate my heart.

Yet, at the same time I can remember when a few days ago the Lord spoke to me and told me that it is not my fault that what has happened to me has happened and so I don't have to wear the shame and hatred of allowing my heart to get to this place. Even though I have sinned it is never God's heart to simply point the finger and expose my heart and my sin just for the sake of exposing it. He's after my healing. My joy. My love. My wholeness. My freedom. He is not after "better" external behavior or my begrudging submission to the things He reveals to me. He longs to change me and transform me, to make me new. Which is why he will often lead us places we had not intended to go to produce in our hearts a devotion and love for Him that we could not have gained had we not walked through the wilderness that he leads us into to worship him.

I have heard discipline defined as a parent's vision for their child's future. I believe that is very true. The point of discipline is not punishment or correction, the goal of discipline is love and growth. That we would no longer be like little children cast here and there by every wind and wave that comes our way. That we would grow in righteousness.

I often forget how different God is from myself, and so I become surprised when he does things differently than I would. This leads me to being much like the disciples at times. Confused. Selfish. Quarrelsome. Frightened. Yet...captured with a radical love and desire for this Man, sometimes not knowing why. This is where I find myself now. I find myself very confused about what God is doing and where He is leading, and what He is doing with my heart. I feel scared to keep giving it to him because often it feels as though he mistreats it. However, I believe it only feels this way because I am so unaware of the condition my heart is in and I dress my "wound as though it were not grievous" as Jeremiah describes. So when I hand it over to the Lord it should be no surprise to me that it needs immediate attention and surgery that will feel quite unpleasant. I'm not so sure that God really believes in using anesthetics so much either. It seems to me that numbness is the worst condition to our growth and being near to God and so it is necessary that we feel the pain fully and this leads to our heart being in a condition to fully receive his comfort as well.

Despite how much things hurt and despite how messed up my heart feels I am also captured with this desire for the Lord that were I to deny I would be denying myself, and so I here his voice beckoning me to return to Him and I can't help but come, despite my doubts and fears that he really cares. Like the disciples said, "Where else would we go?"

Yesterday while driving home I listened to the song "I've Seen I AM" by Jonathan David Helser, and I felt as though the Father were singing it over me. The lyrics that stood out to me most were, "I've seen I AM and now I know that I am loved." and "When I saw you Jesus...When I saw your eyes and felt your smile...maybe it was just a dream but I believe it was more than reality. When you walked right through my walls...all I could do was worship....all I could do was weep when I saw my King. I fall down like a dead man, but I am more alive than I've ever been. Oh God I fall at your feet like a dead man...but I know....I know...I'm loved...I am loved."

I know that if we just go back to Him...when we see Him we'll know that we are loved. It takes seeing Him as he really is to know that. He doesn't just want to tell us...He wants to demonstrate it.

Beauty.

I have quite simply put had a morning of beauty.

I got on a computer at school to do work for class and I decided to look at Spencer and Melody's blog because I hadn't read it in a while and really had very little knowledge of how things have been going. As I began to check out their blog it I put on the new Gungor CD, and was overwhelmed by the beauty I saw in the pictures they posted and that coupled with the beautiful music that Gungor makes was a bit too much for me. As I began to now read I was so overwhelmed with how I was able to watch this story of what they had been through unfold not knowing what was going to happen next. Yet, the thing that was stirred up in me was this deep knowledge and recognition of the fact that they belong to the lord, that they are his and He was surely going to put himself on display in their lives and that these hard times were merely going to be the backdrop and the stage that he would use to truly display his glory. I was filled with such hope for them knowing His goodness and being fully persuaded that He does good.

As I read further I watched this story unfold that did not leave my hopes and expectations wanting or disappointed. I was tearing up the whole time I was reading and had my hand over my mouth trying to contain myself and all of the joy and passion and hope that I was feeling. It blessed me so much getting to see how God has come through for them and how he has displayed himself as a good loving daddy who adores in a delights in his children.

I can hardly begin to express the hope that I now feel as a result of this with just the knowledge and reminder of his goodness and the intimate and gentle leading of his hand as it presses against our backs leading us deeper and deeper into him and past the fringes of his power and glory, as we get right into the midst of it all and are allowed to behold his glory.

I have been missing this kind of intimate walking with the Lord because I have been fixing my eyes, thoughts, and affections on all of the wrong places...namely, myself. So this has really stirred up in me this great longing and desire to break away from where my heart has been which has been grounded in principle and teaching and theology which are all wonderful but in light of the one whom those things are about and refer to they are poor empty and vain substitutes I for one am tired of drinking from the wells of religion and fear and an orphan mentality. I long to allow myself to be caught up in his love again and be captivated by him and enamored with him rather than myself and rather than settling for just learning about him. I want to see him. I want to experience him. Right here, right now. I'm so stirred up with a reminder of how beautiful the Lord is and how wonderful his love and his leading. Oh, how much time I wasted in things that do not satisfy and indeed cannot satisfy!

We are caught up in this wonderful epic that is so much bigger than ourselves, but so why then do I choose to take side roles or be a part of the audience and spectate when Jesus is extending his hand to me and you offering us to come alongside him and be a part of his story as he takes center stage. We ought to rejoice that he is made much of in the trials and terrors of my life and that he is so loving to allow this to draw me nearer to him and to make himself known. It truly is in these times that God puts himself on display disclosing a little more of himself to us and unfolding the story a little further. He is the point, and when we lose sight of that we begin thinking that we should be the one with the leading role or we begin feeling left out or even entitled that we deserve more. but if He is truly what we are after and these are the means by which to gain him then ought we not to rejoice with Paul and count all things as loss compared to knowing him. Or to walk as Jesus did and become the lowest to show us a glory in the highest, who endured the cross scorning its shame for the sake of the joy set before him.

I have much to learn, and it will not be done by reading books. It will be done by coming and sitting before the Lord with unveiled face in the temple of meeting and being transformed with ever increasing glory into his likeness from glory to glory. I don't want to to just try my best to act like him, behave like him, and conform my life to the word...I want to become like him, i want to know him. Paul says this comes with sharing in his sufferings, and his death, and his resurrection. It is all about loving communion. Like Misty Edwards said at this past OneThing, the only reason that Jesus asks us to leave behind everything we have ever known and to take up our cross and follow his path of pain, tears, and suffering and to receive a cal to die is because that is the path that he walk. "This is the voice of the Bridegroom saying to His bride...come leave your father-s house, come away with me and come and be with me where I am." This is the path we must walk to get to him. It's gonna be worth it.

So come Lord, and put yourself on display in my life and allow me to fellowship with you all the more as I share in your sufferings which you promised would come and as you lead me to walk with you across stormy seas, taking me through places I had not intended to go and bringing me to places I could never have dreamed of.

You are worth it all. You are.

The Psalms.

I'm not really sure what I have to say right now that is worth taking the time to express let alone share with another human being, not to mention that I don't even know what I feel like saying or what i have on my heart. Yet, the fact still stands that I have an odd urge to write something. so after that disclaimer I think I'm just gonna go for it.

Well I have been reading through the Psalms for a while not which was kinda on my heart today already and then Andrew got a word for me a while back that I should read through the Psalms and that God had much to show me there, which he certainly has. I think I'll hop on into Proverbs and Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes now.

It's hard to say for sure what exactly god has been showing me because i feel there are many things, but the main thing that has and continues to stand out to me is the wealth of doctrine and theology that are quite plain in the Psalms. I'm amazed by the things that David and the other Psalmists spoke out and claimed so boldly over their faith that I and many others are not so quick to speak out let alone rejoice in. A few phrases that come to mind are "Our God is in the Heavens he does whatever he pleases." or God speaking through David, "I own the cattle on a thousand hills....if I were hungry, would I ask you?"

I also noticed the Psalmists confession of their utter dependence upon God, and yet how they did not allow their knowledge of that dependence hinder them from fighting for holiness and obedience, and furthermore did not allow it to be an excuse for sin or lethargy, as I find is easy to do on some days. In particular Psalm 119 really demonstrated this to me as I see many places where the Psalmist would say things like "I will run in the way of your commandments when you enlarge my heart ("set my heart free" in other translations)" or "Teach me You way and I will walk in it.", and many others.

However, I also noticed in the Psalms that often the writers would understand that although the things often commanded of them were impossible for them to do alone, they did not allow that to be an excuse from trying, or more importantly from asking God to produce it in them. Often even, I'd read David or another writer say things like "I WILL rejoice, for my delight is in your law." They would often preach to themselves and determine that they would act according to the word of God and that they would follow what was good rather straying into evil simply because they lacked that ability to walk in total holiness and freedom.

John Piper called this idea that I'm trying to express and articulate as "Willing God's willingness." or in another sermon "Acting the miracle." Saying "I don't wait for the miracle, I act the miracle." Meaning that as Paul wrote that "it is God who works in us both to will and to work for his good pleasure" or that he "worked harder than them all, never the less, it was not I working but the grace of God that was with me." So I see in these scriptures that we are called to wait upon God and to rely on him, yet the waiting of faith seems to be active and not passive because we recognize that as we work God is working in us and with us. So as I battle sin I don't simply sit on my butt and ask God to change my heart, but rather as I beg him to change my heart I also go militant against my sin and crucify my flesh and demolish every argument that sets itself against the knowledge of God.

My favorite prayer that has come out of this is David's prayer in Psalm 27:5 where he says to God, "Say to my Heart, 'Seek My Face.' and my heart says of You, 'Your Face Lord I will seek.' " I pray and ask the Lord to declare and command to my heart to seek His face, and then I respond that I will seek his face and determine to do so. Because faith without action is dead, and so the asking and waiting or believing of faith responds recognizing that God is willing and that he is more zealous for our holiness than we are and so we ought to realize that he will act and move and that he is supplying and will continue to supply grace and the aid of the Spirit as we seek to kill sin and uproot it. the fact that I even care and want to kill sin is evidence that He is with me and that won't change. So I can actively ask for grace, and I can actively live and act from grace because he has supplied and has promised that it will always been mine and available to me. I feel like I'm going around in circles, but hopefully this will make sense to whomever reads this.

....I have to pee...very badly.



....The End.

"When Death Dies."

So I have been really digging on a lot of Gungor lately and I just stumbled across this video and I just had to share it because it is incredible. Homeboy on the cello has got some mad skills.

Jesus and John.

Going on towards maturity...

"For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Therefore, let us leave the elementary doctrines of Christ and go on to maturity..."

Hebrews 5:12-6:1a

So I was listening to sermons earlier today and yesterday that pertained for the most part to stepping into biblical adulthood or maturity. The most recent sermon basically talked about how adolescence in and of itself is a lie of our culture and a delusion. That in scripture there is nothing to support the idea of an in between stage in our development into adulthood. That adolescence is essentially this stage that our culture has developed within the last 60 years or so that is a stage where children begin to experience the pleasures or benefits of adulthood without the responsibility of it, a sort of "testing the waters" stage. Yet, in the Bible we more see that you are either a child or you are a man, but how does one know when they have reached adulthood and passed from being a "little child" to being a "young man" (1 John 2:12-14)?

Society has altogether done away with any sort of rite of passage into manhood, and so within our society we have, what many have dubbed "an epidemic of extended adolescence" or as Mark Driscoll calls it "boys who can shave". I believe that this aspect of our culture has bled into even our faith, which is something through out the New Testament that Paul often warns churches not to be taken in with "fine-sounding/ plausible arguments" (Colossians 2:4) not, "Let no one delude you with crazy and outlandish arguments" but rather plausible ones, and adolescence seems to be a plausible argument to me.

One of the things that the letter to the Colossians was addressing was syncretism, which is, according to wikipedia, "the combining of different beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought". It seems to me that this is where we find ourselves as a Church. Much like the Colossians we have allowed unbiblical teaching and schools of thought from our society to influence our religion, but James says that "pure and undefiled religion is one that remains "unstained by the world"...the very thing that we allow to happen in many ways. I believe that we have allowed this idea of adolescence to come into our development into spiritual maturity as well. Really I can only speak for myself and say that I know that I have allowed this to happen in a variety of ways.

There are many things that we accept into our religion that do not hold true to the sound doctrine God has given us or the Gospel that has been entrusted to us, and I wonder how we as a Church have allowed these things to hold us back from moving on from the elementary teachings about Christ towards maturity. What have we allowed us to keep us from growing in godliness, or living our lives according to the word. I'm finding myself to feel much like Francis Chan, seeing what God commands in scripture and seeing my life in the light that His Word provides and finding that my life does not match up and that I don't look as good as I think I do. I have found that I am a lot like the crowd that Jesus was addressing when He said, "Why do say to me 'Lord, Lord' but do not do what I say?" (Luke 6:46), and I don't think that responding with, "Sorry, I was taught a different interpretation of Your word." or "Sorry, what You asked of me was just to much to carry out.", is really going to get very far because ultimately I am the one who is accountable for my view of God and my interpretation and application of scripture. I will not be able to defer the blame to being a victim of society or bad teaching, and so something in me has to change even if what is being asked of me seems like too much to bear. God has given us all that we need for "life and godliness" even if we feel foolish, and desperately wicked, and that we don't have what it takes most of the time.

Jesus wants the Rose.

"The Fellowship of the Unashamed."

So I have just gotten done listening to what my mind wants to call a radical sermon, but my Spirit tells me it isn't radical it is just biblical.

It was a sermon by a man named Tullian Tchividjian, which that name deserves a sermon in and of itself, but the sermon was entitled "Jesus Plus Nothing Equals Everything". The basic gist of what he was preaching was that it is the Power of the Gospel and it alone that changes and transforms us and continues to do so throughout our lives. We are not the result of discipline and determination, rather we are the result of the Spirit of God transforming us through the life, the death, and resurrection of Christ, reconciling us to the Father and fulfilling all requirements of the law that we might be free to live not for ourselves but for Him, who for our sake gave His life, being motivated by Christ's love for us which we are incapable of being separated from and all of this done not by looking at and evaluating what we need to do better and how we need to grow but rather by looking back at what Jesus Himself has already done and accomplished and earned for us.

In light of this reality, spiritual growth does not look like me doing better me looking better, but rather it looks like us understanding in a greater and more colorful the essence of the Gospel which is that God in Christ has done everything. We live under the banner of "It Is Finished!". Christ has accomplished everything for us, freeing us up to where we have to do nothing. He was strong for me, which frees me to be weak. He succeeded for me which frees me to fail.

"So this is the question. What are you going to do now that you don’t have to do anything? That will set you free. Because what’s ironic about this is, once the gospel frees you from the enslaving pressure to do anything for Jesus, you’ll want to do everything for Jesus. There is this remarkable fear that if you preach the radicalism of God’s unconditional grace, people are going to take advantage of it and they’re going to go off the deep end. Parents are afraid of that and preachers are afraid of it. It’s not true. Think about this. The more assured I am of my wife’s unconditional love for me, whether I’m being nice or not nice, the more assured I am that she will love me just the same whether I’m in a good mood or a bad mood, whether I’m being nice or mean, that makes me want to be nice. This idea of “Yeah, grace but. . .” is not what Paul says in Romans 6. He speaks about the radical substitutionary life and death of Christ in Romans 5, and then he begins Romans 6 by saying, “I know what you’re thinking. Shall we sin more so that grace may abound?” His preaching led to someone asking that question. That’s how scandalous grace is. The preaching of the gospel should cause people to ask that question. And Paul goes on to say, “By no means.” And what you would expect him to do in that moment is to put the breaks on grace and give a little law. “Let me maintain some spiritual equilibrium here. I’ve given you grace. Now let me give you law and balance things out.” That’s not what he does. What he does is go deeper into grace. He actually probes the gospel more, not less. So this idea that grace is dangerous and needs to be kept in check is the devil’s lie. Yes, it will mess up your hair. Yes, it’s undomesticated. Yes, it will wrestle control out of your hands. Yes, it’s scary because it’s uncontrollable and it’s untamable, but it’s the only power that can melt a human heart." ~ Tullian Tchividjian

In this sermon Tullian preaches out of Colossians 1:9-14, in which we are told that we have been redeemed, qualified, forgiven and transferred from darkness into light. Those things have already been done and Paul's prayer for the saints is that they would grow not in external behavior, being able to do the right things and not do the wrong things, but rather that they would "filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord...". The action comes out of the growing in knowledge and understanding. In Philippians it says "I pray that your love would abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight..". Every time that Paul gives commands to church of how they ought to live in light of the Gospel it never precedes the Gospel. He always first tells them what God has done from them already in Christ Jesus because that is our fuel to live in a manner worthy of the Lord. "For Christ's love compels us..." to live not for ourselves but for Him who for our sakes died. It is not our love for Jesus that compels us, it is Christ's love for us that compels us. For we love because He first loved us. Our weak, tired, and selfish love was never meant to be transformative, but God's love for us is transformative and is what inspires our own love for Him.

If it is grace plus something then Christ's life and death counts for nothing, therefore it must only be Christ's life and death and resurrection....alone.

But let's be honest most of us agree to this and are even thinking that of course this is true for our justification, but what about for our sanctification. Don't you have to read your Bible and pray and meditate and fellowship with other believers and evangelize? So we have become like the "foolish Galatians" who Paul asks "Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?" So having been justified by grace through faith alone are we now trying to be sanctified by the flesh or by "grace plus..."


"Do you want to know what sanctification is? It’s a big theological word for Christian growth. The best definition of sanctification I can find is this. Sanctification is simply getting used to your justification. Sanctification is receiving Christ’s words “It is finished” into our rebellious regions of unbelief. I tell people all the time, “Preach the gospel to yourself every day.” People come up to me and go, “What do you mean?” So I point them here to Colossians 1:12b-14. I tell them that preaching the gospel to yourself every day means that you go back to these verses and come to a greater, bigger, deeper, brighter realization that you have already been qualified, delivered, transferred, redeemed and forgiven. Martin Luther said it best when he said, “To progress is to always to begin again.” Going forward requires a daily going backwards. Backwards to what? Backwards to the reality of what has already been accomplished for you. It’s going back to the already secured reality of your justification and hitting the refresh button a thousand times a day. It’s living in these verses. The apostle Paul never tells us what to do before he tells us what God, in Christ, has already done, ever. Colossians is four chapters. In the first two chapters, all he talks about is what God, in Christ, has done. It’s not until he gets to chapter three that he says, “Therefore, in light of all that God has done for you in Christ, go out and live this way.” We tend to skip over chapters one and two in our thinking. We think much more about what we need to do, and then we run out of gas. Because the engine that is powering us forward is not the gospel. It’s willpower, it’s self-righteousness or it’s something smaller than the gospel. So we conk out." ~ Tullian Tchividjian

This last little bit is another excerpt from the Sermon I listened to (which you also can listen to on thevillagechurch.net/sermons, if you'd like which I'd highly recommend), and this first part is quote I have heard before though I'm not sure who wrote it and it is called "The Fellowship of the Unashamed". this is how he concluded the sermon.

" 'I am a part of the Fellowship of the Unashamed. The die has been cast. The decision has been made. I am a disciple of Jesus. Therefore, I won’t look back, let up, slow down, back away or be still. My past is redeemed, my present is empowered and my future is secure. I’m done with low living, sight waking, small planning, smooth knees, colorless dreams, tame visions, mundane talking, cheap giving and dwarfed goals. I no longer need preeminence, prosperity, position, promotions, praise or popularity. I don’t have to win, be first, be right, recognized, regarded or rewarded. I now live by faith, lean on His presence, love with patience, live by prayer and labor with power. My goal is God’s glory, my face is set, my pace is fast, my road is narrow, my way is rough, my companions are few, my guide is reliable and my mission is clear. I cannot be bought, compromised, detoured, lured away, turned back, deluded or delayed. I will not flinch in the face of sacrifice, hesitate in the presence of adversity, negotiate at the table of the enemy, ponder at the pool of popularity or meander in the maze of mediocrity. I won’t give up, shut up, let up or slow up until I have stayed up, stored up, prayed up, paid up and spoken up for the cause of Christ. I must go till He comes, give till I drop, preach till all know and work till He stops me. Christ has qualified me to become a part of the Fellowship of the Unashamed. I am His and He is mine.' 

"Now that kind of life cannot be lived apart from the power of the gospel. It’s when you come to the heart realization that it is finished, when you come to the heart realization that Jesus plus nothing equals everything and that everything minus Jesus equals nothing, until that grips your heart, then you will continue to live in a posture of slavery. Paul said in Galatians, “Christ has come. It is for freedom that He has set us free.” Jesus said, “I have come to set the captives free.” So if you’re a Christian, you’re free. You’re free to succeed, you’re free to fail. You’re free to win, you’re free to lose. You’re free because Jesus paid it all. It’s finished, and that’s good news." ~ Tullian Tchividjian

"Let Me love you."

Recently, the Lord reminded me of the fact that He does not treat me or receive me in the way that I expect him too....He is much kinder and much more loving than I give Him credit for.

Almost 2 years ago now I went traveling with a certain Curt Vernon on a road trip the likes of which neither of us were very prepared for...once again god had much different plans than I did. I expected that this trip (living in a van for a year praying and loving on people we found) was going to be a lot of fun, that it was going to be a time of great growth and development, and that it was going to be easy...I was very wrong. Looking back I can now see that I should have known that if I was expecting growth and development that I should have known to expect to encounter trials of many kinds for the testing of my faith so that it might produce perseverance in me and a genuine faith that has been refined by the fire.

Long story short...throughout the whole trip God was exposing sin in our hearts and in our lives and he was using each of us to speak truth into the other's life, and in the midst of all of our conviction and desire for true repentance the enemy came in and twisted conviction into guilt, shame, and condemnation to bring disunity between Curt and I. It was a very difficult time which the Lord brought a lot of beauty out of as He promises to always do for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.

So that sets the stage for what is on my heart of God receiving us differently than we expect or feel we deserve. Somewhere in the middle of all of this God exposed a fear I had (of being rejected or cast off by God when I was in sin) by giving me a picture of what I thought that would look like. It was a picture of me "coming boldly before god's throne of grace to receive mercy in my time of need" and as I approached the throne I flung my face on God's lap and began to weep. As I did God the Father sat unmoved, cold, and apathetic. the picture really laid my heart bare and I knew that couldn't be the way that God really recieved me, but as I asked the Holy Spirit what it really looked like I just sensed that He was telling me that He would show me at the right time and for me to just wait...that I would know when it happened.

So...fast forward a couple of days, and I'm sitting in a living room with Curt, and my new friend Tommy Jaggers, and the woman he is now married to, and we are worshiping. Curt is playing the guitar, and we are each praying or singing along or something along those lines of what we call worship. Curt begins to play a song that he wrote called "How Could I..." which I will allow him to tell the story behind since it's his story and not mine, and as he begins to play this song something that still blows my mind to this day...The Lord began to give me what I have heard referred to as an open vision (almost like you are watching a movie or something play out in front of you through your mind's eye).

My eyes were closed but I saw everything in the room. I saw Curt playing guitar, I saw Tommy with head bowed praying and I saw his wife singing along with Curt, and as my eyes glanced around the room I looked down at the foot of my chair and I saw Jesus, kneeling in front of me with His face buried in my lap weeping. Suddenly, I saw that it wasn't Jesus who was the one reluctant to recieve me but that I was reluctant to receive Him. It made me very uncomfortable having Him just sitting there weeping over me, I was very taken aback and didn't know what to do. So...naturally, when I didn't know how to respond, I began to cry also.

Just then He began to look up at me with tears in His eyes, and it was then I realized He was crying because I had sinned, He wasn't crying because I had messed up, rather, He was crying because He loved me and He wanted me to come to him instead of running away in fear and shame. Then He pulled out a basin of water and just stared at me, waiting to wash my feet. He never spoke a word audibly, but His eyes said everything, I could just see His heart and feel it in His eyes. Then what began to happen between us was like the dialogue between Jesus and Peter in the Upper Room. "Never Lord, You'll never wash my feet..." , "Unless I wash Your feet, you will have no part in Me." Except I was not so quick to give in as Peter was I continued to argue and explain how unworthy I was and how wrong it was for Him to wash my feet until finally He spoke.

 "I want to serve you, but you must humble yourself and allow Me to serve you. I want to love you, but you must humble yourself and receive My love. Don't argue with me any longer on this matter. I love you, having taken all things into account and knowing everything about you I have decided that I want you all for myself, and have chosen to love you with a love that keeps no record of wrongs and with a love that never changes. Let Me love you."

I had to choose to physically lower my feet to the ground and allow Him to wash my feet, and after doing so He embraced me, and the vision ended. To this day it was probably the most profound encounter I have ever had with the God and am still at a loss when I think about it. It just doesn't seem real and it is hard to explain...I mean, I could smell Him...I could feel Him. My words do little justice to how amazing it all was, and to the God who would make Himself a slave to love a people ill-deserving of His love and His constant advances to woo them and to capture their heart. In these moments God serves us in ways that words cannot express and loves us beyond all reason and expectation.

So...I see in scripture that God not only loved people in a way that was outrageous and embarrassing, as we see with Him defying every social expectation by calling a tax-collecting "sinner" like Zaccheus down from a tree to eat at his house that night and be a "friend of sinners", but we also see Jesus receive other people's love and affection in a way that is unexpected. John, the Beloved Disciple, leans back against Jesus and rests his head on God's chest as they recline at the table of the Last Supper. Jesus gently and lovingly responds to the outrageous assertions and requests of James and John to sit at His right hand in Glory or to call fire down on a town for not being hospitable to them. Jesus reinstates Peter by asking him three times if Peter loves Him after Peter denied knowing Him three times. Jesus allows a prostitute to kiss and wash His feet with her hair and tears as He is eating with the socially elite and when they speak against her affection He says that she has "done a beautiful thing " for Him. When a woman is brought before Jesus, having been caught in adultery and deserving of being stoned according to the Law of God, God doesn't condemn her but tells her to go in peace after having silenced all of her accusers.

Throughout the Gospels Jesus constantly shocks and surprises me with his actions and His love for sinners like me. I can't fathom it or take it all in that God could love like this. It feels like the kind of thing that you read about in story books but that couldn't possibly be real, or at least that it couldn't possibly be for me...right? But.....this is the Good News.

"This is how we know what love is: that, while we were yet sinners, God sent His only Son, Jesus Christ to die on our behalf....He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him....we were dead in our trespasses...but with the great love with which He loved us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ...and I am convinced that nothing can separate us from the love of God, in Christ Jesus our Lord...."

Because it's easy.

So for a while now I have been doing a lot fo thinking over scripture, and my view of God as He has revealed Himself to us in the bible, and I often find that my view of him falls short and sometimes I find myself in danger of creating for myself and idol rather than worshipping the  One True God. I don't think that I am a lone in this struggle, for I see it very often all around me. It is a really easy thing to do, creating an idol. John Calvin of Piper ofr Edawrds or some other insightful John figure once said "That the human heart is an idol factory." and that we are "master craftsmen of idols from birth". I find this all too true in my own heart. I believe that our greatest idol would be ourselves, and that every other thing that we feel tempted to se up as an idol (sex, love, marriage, money, power, etc.) is only tempting to us in so much as it brings us pleasure. These things that can bring us pleasure are more just in roads to being able to worship ourselves and love ourselves above God. If something doesn't bring us pleasure than it often isn't very tempting because we want to be pleased. This is why often the things that become idols or lead us to sin are not evil things or practices but are good things that are raised to place of being ultimate rather than just good, and so we set it up as a greater importance to us than God and buy the lie that it can bring us pleasure and life in greater abundance than God can, and often we become our source of our greatest joy and we want to be made much of rather than making much of God.

So anyway, as I have noticed this propensity in myself to love myself more than others and more than God, it occurred to me that I often do this with scripture and what I choose to believe about God, or rather what my actions demonstrate to myself and others about what I believe to be true about God. It is very easy to more readily accept and believe the easy scritpures that fit in with what I want and what is a norm in my culture rather than having to turn my life and my culture on it's head to live out what I see in scripture. It is easier to recieve scriptures that talk about God making much of me rather than the verses that say that I am like a flower that is blown away like chaff on the wind and I am remembered no more, because the point of it all is God anyway, not me. So there is this huge poropensity in myself to want what I want or believe what I want or think what I want because I want to, and God has a way of  thinking much differently than we do in fact Jesus straight up says in one of the Gospels that God does not value the things that men do. We put a huge empahsis on things that are unimportant and we would quickly take what makes us feel good rather than crucifying our flesh and dying to ourselves to make much of him which is our greatest joy anyway.

I dunno I could probably go on long tangent off of all of this, but it would be fruitless I just wanted to make anew post now that my facebook is gone and try to get in the habit of getting on here occasionally to share thoughts. I have just found God taking my view of Him and my interpretation of scrioture and flipping it on it's head, and I just wonder how much of scirpture do we interpret because it is the way that we've been told to interpret it all of our lives or because it easier or more comfortable to do so, and I know that in myself it is very easy to it for both of those reasons, but I know that my God is much bigger than I often see him to be and I don't want a lifeless idol of my own creating, I want to truly know God and walk with Him. So anyway, those are my thoughts, now I gotta go to work.

"What about you?"

"What are you doing here, Son? You don't belong here. You belong with me."

In my fear, I have run from You.
In my shame, I have hidden my face from You.
In my doubt, I have forgotten You.
I have looked around at all the others rather than looking at You.
They don't believe You.
Many of them don't even believe You are real.
They think You're only in my head; that I have deceived myself.
I have listened to them, and been deceived.

"Yes, I know what they think of Me, and what they believe, and who they say I AM, but who do you say I AM? Who am I to you? That is what I AM eager to hear."

You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.
You are not just in my head.
You are not just a good thought or idea that we have come up with.
You are not an anesthesia to dull our pain so that we can make it through the day.
You are not a false hope.
You are my Hope.
You are the Lord of  Heaven and Earth.
The God who created the world and everything in it.
You do not dwell in a temple built by human hands,
And You are not even served by humans as if You need anything.
For You Yourself give all men life and breath and everything else.
Yet...all men have left you and have turned aside to their own way.

"What about you? Will you leave Me now too?"

Lord, where else could I go?!
You alone have the words of Life.
No one has ever loved me the way You do.
No one has ever pursued me or fought for me the way You do, Father.
I believe and know that You, Jesus, are the Holy One of God, full of grace and truth.

"Blessed are you, my Beloved, for it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but our Father in Heaven. You did not stumble upon this revelation and it was not taught you by men. so do not fret over what men say about Me for I have been pleased to reveal Myself to you. I love you, and I will continue to show Myself to you."

Oh, Lord, show me Your face, and let me hear Your voice.
For Your voice is sweet, and Your face is lovely.

"I don't want to lose heart."

All men lose heart, but I don't want to lose heart.
All men lose faith, but I don't want to lose faith.
All men ache with the pain and regret of their past, but it doesn't have to be that way.
All men grow weary of doing what is good, but I don't want to be like other men.
I'm not like other men.
I am Yours.

You said we would find renewal of our strength.
You said You would mend the brokenhearted.
You said You would set the captives free.
You said that even if we were faithless You would remain faithful.
You said that You Yourself would wipe away our every tear.

If You have said it, Lord, then I know it to be true.
For by Your Word You declare things that are not as though they were.
You nullify things that are as though they were not.

Surely, You can make strength from my weakness.
Faith from my faithlessness.
Joy from my sorrow.
A new heart from these broken pieces.

I don't wish to argue with You anymore, Father.
I believe that You are who You say You are, and that I am who You say I am.
If You have said it, Lord, then I know it to be true.
If You have spoken it...then it is.

"Who do you say I AM?"

My heart feels devastated, fragmented.
I see it there at my feet in shambles; cast down and shattered.
As I gaze upon the broken places of my heart I look for a glimpse of my former self, of who I once was, but it seems that he has all but disappeared.
It feels as though I should grieve this loss, or that I should mourn or possibly be distressed.
Yet, I find myself strangely numb and unfeeling, a feeling I am quite familiar with.
As this insensitivity creeps in, I look all the more frantically at the shattered mirror of my heart, hoping to find my own likeness that has now been lost.
Have I somehow forgotten my own face?
Have I forgotten who I AM?

These broken pieces will never be whole again?
Will I ever be whole again?
The fear begins to set in now, and I find myself frantically snatching up pieces and setting my hands to the task of putting them in their rightful places, but they have become so shattered by the fall that I could never hope to restore this broken image to the Glory it once held.

How can I be made whole again?

In my desperation the fear sinks deeper within me.
What have I done?
How have I fallen so far?
Have I fallen beyond saving? Beyond redemption?
Who else but myself could remind me of who I AM?
I AM alone here, or so it would seem...

How can one recall what has been lost from one's memory?
Worse yet, how can one recall what has never been made known to them?
For truly this feels much like a dream, and I can not remember how I got to where I now am.
I feel as though I have arrived at a theater halfway through a film.
All I can recall is the sound of a heart breaking loudly as it fell to the Earth, and now here I stand looking down at its broken pieces.
Can I truly be so certain that this is my heart?
Was it even I that broke it?

There are so many questions that I am unable to answer,
and a task now set before me that no man could ever accomplish.
So then how can I be saved?
Who will show me who I AM?

My eyes begin to search around frantically for help, but there is no one.
All I can see are hills all around me.
How did I get here?
If only I could remember then I could know where to go from here,
but I have found myself lost here in this valley...alone.
Yet, what good would company do?
Who could tell me who I AM better then I myself?
They would have to know who I AM better then I do.
Is there such a Man?
My own heart has deceived me more times than I can count.
How could another understand it?
This Person would have to know me intimately inside and out.
They would have to be familiar with all of my ways,
Knowing each word from my lips fully before it has been spoken,
Having every hair of my head numbered,
Having known me from my mother's womb,
They would have never left me and would still be here now...

Who is like this?
Who could love so extravagantly?
Who could care so deeply...about me?
I have nothing I could ever offer such a person; nothing to attract such loving attention to myself.
How could there be such a Lover?
And if there were how could I possibly find them?

This Lover must choose to call me His Beloved, and reveal Himself to me.
He must be one who would rush over these hills and down into my valley.
One who would take me away with Him to a home that He has prepared for me.
Surely only with such a Lover could I ever be satisfied.
My eyes have been opened to what my heart yearns for...could I now settle for less?
What else could make my heart whole again, but this Lover and He alone?
Will He come for me, bounding over hills to my rescue?
Will I discover who I am, or does it still matter in light of the greatness of my Lover?
Could I ever find a greater identity than being His Beloved?
He has become my only desire as I have reflected upon Him.

What can I do now but sit and wait for as I ponder Your Love?
Surely You will come to me...You must.
See that my hands are open and outstretched to receive Your own.
They are weary from work and long to hold Yours.
They were made to hold Yours, my Lover.