"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.