Category Archives: Personal

Culture, Personal, Ramblings

Restoration of AWE

Christmas has changed since I was a child.  The four of us kids slept in the same room and Christmas was always a special time.  If you looked carefully through the vent you would see into the living room to view the Christmas tree.  All decked out with both homemade ornaments a whole lot of tinsel.  Mom and Dad would never put our presents under the tree until the night before.  The anticipation for the big day was palpable. The change in this experience of Christmas is a change in expectation.  Kids submit there “have to have” list and expect the parents to come through.  The guess work is all gone. There is no awe.

It could well be that Christmas now starts almost a month earlier during the Thanksgiving celebration.  With Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it seems so contrived and commercialized.  It feels like the day after Halloween the Christmas commercials begin. I try to hold Christmas at bay in my mind until after Thanksgiving.

In a world drowning in trinkets and knickknacks, reruns and plastic, people are hungry for the real thing.

The celebration has become an event.  Big difference. One is filled with awe and expectation, and the other is just one more milestone to mark off the calendar.

At the heart of the celebration is not a tree and presents.  It is not Santa and red-nosed reindeer.  What it is and what will instill in my life the rightful place of awe, is to understand it is about a single gift.  A gift given freely by a man almost 2000 years ago.  It is a gift that met a need of my life for redemption. It was a gift that was both revelation and reconciliation.  And He did it for me.

I don’t believe there’s a formula that helps overwhelmed, sometimes jaded, struggling-for-a-new-Noel-angle members to reclaim our lost wonder. I just know that when I don’t have it, I can’t fake it. And in a world drowning in trinkets and knickknacks, reruns and plastic, people are hungry for the real thing. So I’ll keep fighting for wonder, and if you battle with me, we’ll have something great to bring to Christmas.

Bible, Church, Personal, Theology

The truth is not enough.

1 Comment

Sometimes I just don’t get some of the assumptions I hear from my brothers and sisters in the church.  It could well stem from personal experiences or even pre-conceived understandings of my own.  Whatever my problem may well be, I hear some of the strangest voiced conclusions and they set my own sensibilities on edge.

A few years back I was teaching a class on the book of John.  We were trying as a group to understand Jesus. What brought up the edgy feeling was the response to the question, “Why do you study the Bible?”  That question had many answers.  Some of the answers were conditioned “Sunday School” answers, while others were a little more honest, and others from those who were truly seeking more in their spiritual lives.  It was the last answer that didn’t seem quite right.  “I study the bible to be a better Christian.”  What it sounded like to me was this apt student was equating the accumulation of facts and theological understanding with growth. 

I pressed him to clarify and he quoted from John 8:32, “The truth will make you free.” He was saying when there is enough truth in your life you will, by that accumulation, become a better Christian.

I didn’t argue or tell him he was wrong, I simply smiled and jotted down a note to get a better understanding of his perceived pathway to growth.

At issue is endemic to many in the church. The idea of filling your heart with so much knowledge, so much scripture, that you become a super Christian, is often proclaimed.  What a terrible thought.  What an indictment against the very God in which we serve.  Before you get your own hackles up, let me explain.

First, the Gospel of John does say, “the truth will set you free.” But like most misconceptions of the will of God, it was taken out of a larger portion of scripture.  Jesus was speaking to Jews who had been influenced by the Pharisees and had come to an understanding of Jesus.  They had the head knowledge.  They had accumulated so much Jewish theology and insight of the prophets, they saw these as pointers to Jesus being the Messiah. Consequently, they had accepted the words of Jesus as truth.

Second, the Gospel of John in the same eighth chapter and which this “make you free” statement was stated also includes a preface. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.  Then you will know the truth, and that truth will set you free.” The key is not accumulation but a holding.

Holding is not just gathering the wheat in the fields and taking it as an accomplishment.  Holding is knowing the purpose of the wheat and making bread. To be a disciple is to conform to the teachings of God, to stay on a prescribed path set by God, and it is to be more than a sponge.

Why do I study the Bible?  Two things.  I study to understand God and His path for me. And subsequently, to finding that path, I utilize my new understanding to follow that path.  My life is one of revelation and reconciliation. Without the second part, the first part is without much help to my growth.  My growth is dependent upon my understanding of God’s place for me AND my willingness to do something about it.   

Personal

My path, my hope!

Tell me Lord, in your merciful grace,
What would you desire for me in this place,
In my life lived out both near and far?
Or Should I look up and yearn for a star?
Or should we be content with things that are?

What is your will? What is your plan?
Living a life and doing what I can?
Or perhaps to find a greater call,
Giving myself up, and relinquishing all
And adverting my eyes and hazarding a fall.

Tell me Lord, shall I grunt and grown beneath a load,
Or give it all up that I may skip along the golden road?
Do I simply keep on keeping on with a load to hard to bear?
With my head held low in total defeat and woefull despair?
Is this my destined plight, is it a dull prospect or fair?

Would you have me, just as I am , my Lord?
Sinking beneath the load I bear and can ill afford,
What is your will, shall I drag on or or make footsteps fleet?
My choice is before me, living the path set by your feet,
Or living a life full of pain and defeat.

I hear and echo your voice, I smile with a pure inner warm,
A voice that healed the lepers and calmed my inner storm.
“Your yoke is easy, your burden is light.”
Your path for me is simple and a gracious delight.
Steady on to the higher prize to a place of perfect light.

Personal, Ramblings

God in the trunk.

Sometimes God seems distant.  You know what I mean, sometimes the Preachers sermon doesn’t quite hit the right spots for you.  It is when you go about your day and you know full well that God is everywhere, but you feel as thought instead of being in the passenger seat but more like back in the trunk. I don’t think that the God I serve and love and adore and most highly esteem is hiding but He seems a little far off.  It is as if He may well be taking a rest from all the junk He has to put up with from me.  I stick my nose into something when I shouldn’t, or I make a supposedly humorous remark that puts someone on edge.  It is probably a self-imposed distance, but it is hard to not notice the gap sometimes.

The good thing is that in a 50 years or less, God will not know me better than He does right now. He knows my weaknesses and my foibles yet He still loves me.  The second thing is that in 50 years or less I will know God much more than I do now.

Culture, Personal, Politics, Ramblings

Fertile soil of life

Chesterfield wrote that “without a good moral soil, art and reason will never flourish.” As I look around me, whether in politics, art, music, reason, discourse, conversation and culture, it is all about self. The culture today is one of no central moral soil.  We have no real moral compass that allows art and reason to find a home.  Without an environment of living for more than self, there will be no great art, no great discourse, no great progress, no great furtherance of life.

I just don’t see this infertile soil of morality today nurturing the best things, the progressive things, the living things that makes life worth the living.  Trying to live in a culture where what ever is good enough, is nothing more than a life of just getting on.  It is a life of pure pragmatism.  It is a life without hope. It is a life of what ever works.  There is little trying to make things better.  It is a pragmatism which settles for the moment and never for the possibility of future.  It is a place where majority ideas and thought patterns become the new norm. Further, this new norm changes from day to day.

Our culture just follows along, just staying a step ahead of the slowest.  Never excelling, never having a thought of our own. The mantra says, “What ever works for you must be good enough for me.”

I read some parts of social media.  The idea for a place to share your thoughts and ideas is a great concept.  But it has become a place of redundant re-post after re-post.  No new ideas, no sharing of who we really are.  All shares are of things or ideas of others that agree with you; fully expecting by taking the effort to post something at all is making the assumption that someone might be persuaded to think like you.  There is no critical thinking, no trying to learn of the person behind the pretty head shot picture.  There is no effort to learn more or to understand.  It is all being more impressive and thought provoking by posting someone the common drivel of some one else. There is no discourse for understanding. “If you don’t agree with them, that must be your problem. 

Meaning, purpose, commonality, adventuring spirit, an ever pushing ahead is simply not tolerated. And heaven forbid if I disagree with your post.  “Don’t do that, it offends me.” If you are going to post an idea of someone else you need to be able to defend that position, not to sit in the corner yelling, “I don’t love you anymore mommy.”

All that remains for our unthinking pragmatism is a comfortable existence of being OK.  No excellence, no reason, no meaning, no purpose, no excitement, no zest, no reaching out, no life but the status quo.  In the end, in doing only what works for you in the moment, will result in the discovery that it simply does not work for you.  Your life becomes a habitual malaise. Contrary thought is condemned.  Finding the reason for action becomes just too much work.  Purpose becomes, “just getting along.”  Life is nothing more than “safe spaces” and political correctness. It is a place where everyone gets a trophy.  It is an environment where equal rights become a demand for equal results.  There is no place for excellence.

It is only in finding more than self, more than the status quo, more than just getting along, more than pragmatism, more than being politically correct, more than being the perfect mediocre.  It is only within the eternal does the temporal find its relevance.  There is nothing without that eternal compass, that fertile soil seeded with the eternal which gives life more meaning.  IT is not things, or posts or the number of likes.

It is an eternal environment, not a temporal temporary that brings life.  It is only in the eternal that you ever really live.  Why?  Because it pushes us onward, one step at a time, toward the better way.

Culture, Personal, Politics

God on a shelf

1 Comment

I am not a “gloom, despair, excessive misery” type of person.  Most of the time I strive to seek out the light at the end of the tunnel. But I am discouraged by our nation.  It seems that God seems without substance.  God has become almost unimportant.  God has become an afterthought.  God has become so inconsequential that He has become a supplement, something that you take at night to help you sleep. To me, God in America has become a necessary item to place on a shelf to be called upon when things get so bad that He is pulled of the shelf and shaken up like a holy talisman. If we take a poll, which we seem to think is the only way to figure out what we really believe, God may well still believe in God’s existence. But as one philosopher said, “we may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgments no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertiser’s sweet fog of flattery and lies.”

I don’t know where the line is, but it is there.  When does our apathy, poll driven, and politically correct country cross the line to where God has had enough?  In my studies this week on the Minor Prophets, I read, “A jealous and avenging God is the Lord; The Lord is avenging and wrathful. The Lord take vengeance on His adversaries, and He reserves wrath for his enemies.  The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, and the Lord will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.” Nahum 1:2,3.

Life, Motivation, Personal, Sermon Illustration

No choices left?

1 Comment

I completed a Bible study a couple of months ago with ten men about decision making. It was about the choices we make and what criteria we as Christians should use.  But while looking through my obligatory Facebook friends, I was struck by a forlorn and heart-breaking post.  He lives in the back of his car, lives from moment to moment and he seems to be saying, “I have no choices left.”  The outpouring of this helplessness is being spewed out for the world to hear and it is all negative.

In John 15 there is an account of an invalid.  Someone in worse circumstances than my acquaintance.  He could not walk.  He couldn’t gain meaningful employment.  His only choice was to depend on a few that knew him to bring him to a place of prayer, the pool of Bethesda.  No options, no hope, no dignity, no expectations other than getting into the swirling waters first.  But even that was almost impossible because he had no one to help him in. As Max Lucado said, “God’s efforts are strongest when our efforts are useless.”

Jesus told the man, “stand up, pick up your mat and walk.” In a moment a flash of a second the man was able to do just that.

We have to take Jesus at His word.  When God tells us to get up and get out, God enables this motion, this progress to something better.  I believe there is a stubborn unwillingness to cast off our maladies and just do.  When Jesus forgives your sin let the guilt go with it.  When Jesus says you are a child of God, act like it.  When Jesus says something it is our obligation to believe Him.

When Jesus says, “stand up,” don’t just sit there thinking of all the reasons not to but in faith, get up and go.

Just saying.

Life, Personal, Ramblings

Relationship Ideas!

I have a file in my desk that captures all the things which I need to incorporate into my writings.  It is called “IDEAS”.  It is often surveyed for current relevance and note-worthiness.  Today I pulled one out that seemed to be apropos for today.  I seem to remember this list as a culmination of the teachings of Jesus from the Gospel of Mark.  A listing of relationship concepts that need to be nurtured and kept close to my heart.  It is in no specific order than being typed here.

  • We need an attitude of determination to have relationships.
  • We need to be willing to learn from others and be willing to change.
  • We need to recognize the authority of Jesus Christ.
  • We need to know Jesus personally.
  • We need to be dependent upon God.
  • We need to keep near the warmth of Christian fellowship
  • We need renewal and restoration includes confession to God.
  • We need to accept the responsibility of servanthood.
  • We need to love enough to lay down our lives.
  • God is faithful to us.  We must be faithful to Him.
  • God’s purpose in our personal world is to lead us to greater things.
  • We must let the Word of God stand in judgement of our lives.
  • Good News!  God loves me and loves you.
Culture, Life, Motivation, Personal

Take them down!

1 Comment

Delight only comes with abiding and our desires change as we abide.

I want what I want when I want it.  I want Joy.  That deep inner delight that comes with the assurance of all things working out and working out my way.  I do not want trucks that break down.  I do not want my back to hurt all the time.  I do not want to take pills to survive.  I want that inner relish for life that fills the soul.  John 17:13 says flatly that Jesus came into this world to give me full measure of His joy within me.

If it is mine, if it is promised, if it is my possession, if it is full measure, if it is to be a deep welling joy, where is it?  Driving the streets with my little granddaughter, she is oft to say, “take it down” in response to seeing Christmas decorations still hanging from the eves of homes.  “Christmas is over.”  It is as if the time for joy and peace on earth is now complete and we can get about our dreary lives.

How can I life I Thess 5:16 when it says, “Rejoice evermore,” when all the Christmas lights are gone?  I would suppose it is the difference between happiness and joy.  Happiness is a fleeting thing, if you pursue it blinks at you and it is gone.  I guess I have said this before happiness is not joy.  Happiness is on the outside blinking red and green.  Joy is internal warmth of dwelling in the God of Christmas and the rest of the year.

Ministry, Motivation, Personal, Psycolog

Priorities

Some things are much more important than others.  Choosing between two things or options before you there is an inherent prioritization. Your mind immediately wants to put them into a logical order.

Figuring out what most important is part of life.  Sometimes we even have to say no to one thing in order to say yes to something more important in our lives.  At issue is we want both.  “I want my cake and eat it too.”  To live according to the tenants and teachings of Jesus we must set priorities. 

My first priority is that relationships are more important than things. People are always more important than thing I may accumulate.  Don’t get me wrong here, I have several things in my life, but when given a choice between a relationship and this accumulation of plastic brightly colored stuff, people win.  You see people are ultimately forever.  Wives are more important than what chair I sit in at night.

Second, Intellect over emotion.  I once heard to never make a decision when I am upset, sad, jealous or in love.  Emotions rule the immediate. In my life I must slow down and let emotion subside.  The intellect allows the spirit to speak.  The intellect allows the soul to make a logical decision.

Third, Joy over happiness.  Happiness is short term.  Joy comes in abiding.  Our desires will change the longer we abide in Him.  Joy is beyond a smile.  If you seek happiness it will disappear. Happiness is a good thing but when it is rooted in joy it is the best.  I believe we can’t always have happiness, but we can always have the joy that comes with God.

Fourth and last.  In setting my priorities I must choose the future over the past.  The past is over.  I can’t change that, but I can be forgiven.  The past does not necessarily dictate our future.  Our habits of yesterday can be broken.  The future has its foundation in today’s decisions.