Thermal underwear.. a headlight to use for running.. an Orange Crush and a Kit Kat bar..
Somewhere between thoughts, hernia surgery for my mom.. a camping trip.. swimming and a marathon.
When God steps in. I’m in line at Target, and I hear ‘Let’s pray I have the rest of that in my purse.’ The lady I chose to get in line behind was a little short with her purchase, and was scrambling for change. I listened from close by as she got flustered. I was looking for those Hot Hands things…
Then I turned to look at her, and realized she wasn’t going to have the money to finish her transaction. And she looked at me. And asked me if I could help.
She asked me if I could help!
That’s pretty darn rare. And I bet quite a few people reading this wouldn’t see that as a good thing. But I did. I got to show grace!
Heck yeah I helped her. And between her and me and the cashier, we got to glorify God with our credit cards and tongues right there in Target.
So here’s why I love this. 99.9% of people are too proud to ask the guy next to them for $4.40. We can handle it on our own, thank you very much.
And if we’re too proud to ask for something that small that challenges our self-sufficiency and pride, how much less are we to ask for Christ to forgive us for our sins and take hold of His grace!
But here’s the thing. We’re all short a lot of money. In fact, we can never make enough money or have enough power or anything else to get to that cash register with God and have enough to pay. We’re all going to turn to look behind us, after we have pulled all the change out of our wallets, and there will be Christ. And the question is this… will we turn away in our pride, figuring we’ll live or die in our self-sufficiency.. or will we ask Christ, who already paid the debt for us, to pay it for us now?
Ask him, and he will pay. He did it with His blood. He took the wrath you deserved.
Matthew 7:7-9 (New International Version)
New International Version (NIV)
Ask, Seek, Knock
7 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
It just felt so awesome to be able to give grace to someone. In this country we just don’t need it. You can hide from need. You can go days and days and not find anyone who really ‘needs’ much of anything. I’m good about asking people if they need help with things. Most of the time they’re good about saying ‘nah I got it..’ It’s just how life works here in the big city in the USA.
But that doesn’t mean it’s right. And our ability to take care of ourselves so well on a daily basis blinds us to the fact that we are all dying and all sinning and all falling short of what we’re supposed to be. We need God’s grace. We need God’s presence. Now as much or more than ever!
John 1:12 (New International Version)
New International Version (NIV)
12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—
At various places around Africa are thousands and thousands and thousands of orphaned children. The AIDS epidemic there is a crisis. If anyone needs a bailout, it’s the AIDS children of Africa.
Imagine growing up without a mother or father, or enough food to eat, or decent healthcare, fending for yourself in a country torn by civil war and refugees.
It’s really bad, and it’s extremely sad. But compared to the way things should be… we actually share in that life.
Follow me… in the beginning, in the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve literally walked with God in the garden. Noah.. Moses.. Abraham.. all were able to communicate with God. It’s a really sweet picture of communion with the Creator.
But with sin came death, and came separation from God. On our own we were left to sin, to doing everything our own way. War, disease, murder, ethnic cleansing, refugee camps, hate, strife, all sins that began with this separation from our Father.
Much like the orphans in Africa, we are looking for our father. In today’s day and age we have fully decided we just don’t need that, that we can dig out from underneath our problems with our own intellect. But we don’t realize we’re trapped in a hole that we can’t get out of on our own. Naked. Hungry. Sick. And nobody to feed us.
Yet to all who believed in Him, to all who received Him as God the son… he adopted, he gave the right to again become children of God.
And to all who receive Him and believe in His name now, children. Heirs to heaven. Sons and daughters. Children!
Exodus 6:7
I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.
Leviticus 26:12
I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.
Whatever you may think, however you might act, however much freedom we have to do what we want, at the end of the day, we are all possessions of God. We belong to him.
We can ignore him. He lets us. We can pretend it’s not true. We have that freedom. We can live our entire life in denial. I know I did for a long time.
There’s lots of wonderful arguments and examples that people like to use, but I like to keep it simple. Look at us. Look at the beauty and intricacy of nature and of animals and humans, and of love and nurturing and all the great things about us. Random? Come on… wake up!
We are possessions, and more than that, valuable possessions! Possessions who are worth dying for in God’s eyes. Many of us wouldn’t die for each other.. but God saw fit to die for us all, his treasured possessions. He prepares a place for us in His glorious house. I pray that Christians will understand how awesome this is, and those who don’t believe would stop and look around and see the beauty and understand that there is an intelligent creator, and not just some force in the sky, but a powerful, holy God who takes ownership of us, and claims us as His own!
It sounds great, right? We don’t need a god to tell us how to be good, right??
The American Humanist Organization misses the point.
First, we don’t believe in God because we want to be good. We believe in God because there is a God. The truth of what has been made makes this clear to us all.
Second, we know that we cannot be good. Good without God is completely subjective in every way. The crazy thing about it is that, no matter who you are, you can rationalize yourself as good, because of a basic love for yourself. Hitler and Stalin likely thought themselves to be good.
Nobody’s ever in the wrong in a nasty breakup right?
It’s worship of self… of course I guess that’s the definition of a humanist. But somewhere there’s a serious conflict between the worship of self and the article’s contention that morality is based on a “set of values embraced by individuals and society based on empathy, fairness, and experience.”
God doesn’t ask us to be good for goodness’ sake. He knows it’s impossible for us.
Instead he sent someone, Jesus Christ, to be good, and by that I mean the true, objective good, declared by God, and by being completely good and suffering the undeserved wrath of God on the cross, transferred that goodness to those who have faith in Him.
I pray that God would use these advertisements to show the foolishness of trying to live life apart from our Creator, and to stir up a passion for the gospel!
I’m tired. My feet are tired, my brain is tired, my heart is tired. My spirit has been tired.
And I’m kind of tired about talking about myself, as evidenced by the fact that my posts have slowed to a trickle.
But I have a great conviction to be a voice of the gospel of Jesus Christ that isn’t cliche, that isn’t exactly what people have heard and have tuned out in this country, not to sacrifice any of the truth of the message of who He is, what He did and why…
The site looks a little different (I love the theme) and may get even more different in the next days and weeks. And the content may get a little different too. I’m just not 100% sure yet.
But through it all I hope to walk in the will of the Lord, and to continue to show others what that means through my words. So maybe a couple of you have stuck around this far to see what comes next.
There are many disagreements. There are people who aren’t on board. If you look at it by ballot I am one. But there was something really special about this. Pretty amazing actually.
People care again. People of all colors in all economic situations. There are folks outside the White House celebrating. The atmosphere of apathy has lifted, and an atmosphere of hope has arrived.
I didn’t vote for that, but it’s exciting.
For those like me who didn’t vote for the winning candidate, I would give the following advice.
1. Get on board.
2. Disagree where you disagree, agree where you agree, but do it all for the United States.
3. Help someone. For me as a Christian, that means help the hungry. Help the orphan and the widow. Speak boldly of the hope of Christ. Bring Him into the lives of those around you that don’t know Him. Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as myself.
God’s Church will always be more capable of fixing what truly ails this world (sin) than any President or other ruler will ever be able to. This is because as The Church… His power works through us.
So to those who ‘lost’ tonight.. Don’t see this as a loss. Consider this an opportunity for Christ to be glorified through us, as we answer President Obama’s call to service.. for our country, but first and foremost for Jesus Christ our ultimate leader and ruler.
This is quite an interesting time! And it makes me a little emotional to see young people care about something. There’s a young black kid in a poor neighborhood tonight that just realized for the first time that he is capable of doing something with his life. And that’s not an exaggeration.
Let’s all take this time to pray for President Obama, and our country, and that God will be glorified in this nation in a way that’s way cooler than what we could even dream up in our own mind! His ways are higher than our ways, and I’m happy about that.
I pray that you all see in me the ability to love recklessly. This is an awesome quote. Hope you find it that way as well..
Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as “Careful! This might lead you to suffering.”
To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities.…
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. (From The Four Loves, as found in The Inspirational Writings of C.S. Lewis, 278-279.)
God created the world. He is infinitely good and infinitely holy. Everything belongs to Him. He made it all.
God created man. God created man to be with Him, to be in His presence, to enjoy Him. The first people indeed walked with God and spoke with Him directly, as a father. God loved His creation.
But all was not well. The serpent, the adversary, the devil, spoke to man, and convinced man to seek happiness in something other than God. This was called sin. When Adam and Eve sinned, creation was broken. Fellowship between God and man was broken. And the stain left by sin was transferred to us all by that sin, so that not one of us is without it.
This presents a problem. In addition to His goodness and holiness, God is perfectly just. We hold a judge in high esteem who punishes the guilty to the measure they deserve. And so it is with God for sin. And you are the guilty. And I am the guilty. And that’s not very good for us, because the wages of sin is death, and the sentence is eternity separated from God and His love, and eternity spent in torment and anguish.
But God is also love. God is the most radical kind of love, in fact it’s impossible to see this type of love in our own life without seeing it in God. And in His love he didn’t leave us to die without hope.
The solution had to remove our punishment, but do so in a way that upholds God’s justice. And one who is guilty of sin could not bear anyone else’s sin, so that removes us from the picture.
So here is how it went down. God sent His son, in the flesh Jesus Christ. He was with the father before the beginning of time. And God sent Him here to live as a man, to suffer the same temptations as us, to understand everything that we go through because He is fully man, and yet to do so without sin, because He is also fully God.
God then sent Jesus to die on the cross. But it wasn’t just about death. Transactions happened on the cross. Jesus took on the punishment from God for sin.. yours and mine. And in return He gave us his righteousness, the righteousness He earned by living a sinless life.
Then, to show God’s power and destroy eternal death, God raised Christ from the dead, and he went back to be with the father in heaven.
This righteousness becomes ours when we have faith in our heart that Christ is indeed our savior. And when we believe and trust in the Lord with our heart, the Lord brings the Holy Spirit to dwell within us. And much like Adam and Eve in the very beginning, we are able to walk with the Lord, and have a relationship with Him through Christ, and the order that was lost with sin is made new and fresh through the justification of sinners, of me and of you, by God through Jesus Christ.
There’s nothing to do to get it. There’s nothing to trade to get it. There’s nothing to sell to get it. And there’s nothing you have to be to get it. It’s free. It’s free. If you truly want salvation from the Lord, and you ask Him and trust Him, then He will give it to you..
This begins a beautiful process of transformation, of learning about God through His word, and growing more and more away from the sinful ways of this world and more toward the love that Christ showed when He healed, fed, taught, loved and died that we might have this gift.
And then like Christ, we will be raised up in our last day just as He was, to worship the Lord in heaven. There will be no more tears in that day, and no more sadness, and no more death. Only worship
In a way this is where it ends. And in another completely different way this is where it begins.
And yet, it is everything. It’s everything you need to live. It’s everything you need for contentment. It’s the answer to ‘why?’ that science cannot give and possessions cannot give and your father or mother or wife or husband can’t give and nothing else out there can give except for God.
It’s the gospel, and it changes everything… and it is everything. And I don’t guess I’ve ever just clearly written it on this blog and I felt time that it was due.
Turns out I was extremely wrong. Hats off to the Rays for circling the wagons and taking game 7, or to finish my analogy, get it together in the last round, fight back, and get a unanimous decision. It kinda felt nice to be wrong watching them celebrate. Should have been the Indians last year!
Ok back to your regularly scheduled Monday morning..
"Oh, that my words were recorded,
that they were written on a scroll,
that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead,
or engraved in rock forever!" -Job 19
