Spiritual Disciplines

I recently read the book, The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard.  In it he talks about how we have walked away from the disciplines in the reaction against being justified by them.  "No, I will not do anything to prove that I am a Christian, Jesus alone proves that."  While it is t-r-u-e that Jesus Christ provides our only justification, that does not negate our literal following of him.
I am a runner who has run five marathons.  For each one I have spent hours in training my body to run for 26.2 miles.  For each marathon I was very prepared although not quite prepared enough.  If I were to have lined up at the starting line without any training at all, I would have looked good for abut a half mile, or about 1/50th of the marathon.  But after that it would have been hard for me to go on at all, even walking.  Who could I blame but myself for not training?  Maybe if someone had told me that I did not have to train.
The same can be said for spiritual training.  If I encounter a spiritual battle and have not trained and end up beaten, who am I to blame?  Do I say to God, "Why have you given me more than I can bear?"  "Why have you made me fall?"
Many athletes are cocky and say, "I earned my glory and my fame and my victory" forgetting who it is who gave them their crafted bodies.
In the same way if we win a spiritual battle and cry out, "I am such a disciplined spiritual warrior.  I earned the victory, we miss the whole of the point of the training."

Let us train in order to recognize more and more who it is who is the Victor, the Winner.

How do we train?  We will bring this up in future posts.

Generational Baggage

Do you have generational baggage?  Maybe it is a generational sin like murder or some sexual sin or gossiping, or maybe it is something that was done to you, or maybe it is some secret that you do not know.

Do you see yourself in the light of that baggage?
Does God see that baggage and say, "Yes I love her, but I can't use her with all that baggage on. . . "

Saul felt the same way when he said to Samuel, "Am I not a Benjaminite, the least of the tribes of Israel, and is not my clan the humblest of the clans of Benjamin?  Why are you talking to me in this way?" in Samuel 9.

Benjamin was almost done away with in a civil war (Judges 19-21), so they were literally the least tribe in terms of numbers and the only tribe to be genocided against.

But what about his clan?  What would be the humblest clan of Benjamin?  The reason for the civil war was because some worthless men from Gibeah of Benjamin surrounded a house in a similar way that the men of Sodom did in Genesis except that the men of Gibeah actually committed an act - they did things to a woman so that she died.  It seems that the most humble clan of Benjamin would be the clan connected to the town of Gibeah.  In 1 Samuel 10:26 we learn that Saul is from Gibeah.  It may have been some of his family members that were doing the evil deed of Judges 19, one of the worst things done in the entire Bible, and that is saying a lot.

So God chooses Saul.  Why would God choose Saul?

He also chose another Saul of Benjamin, but he was also the son of Pharisees, and Pharisees were the enemies of Jesus and they planned his murder.  So when God decides to pick someone to take the message of Jesus Christ to the other nations in the world, he picks Saul, whose family did the worst thing in the Bible.

Why does God choose the worst possible choices?

"God chooses what is foolish in the world to shame the wise,
God chooses what is weak in the world to shame the strong,
God chooses what is low and despised in the world,
even the things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,
so that no human being might boast in the presence of God." (1 Cor. 1)

God chooses you not because of your goodness but because of His goodness.

Answers, or Questions, in Genesis

There is a group out called Answers In Genesis that seeks to help Christians develop a Biblical worldview by helping people to find answers in Genesis through showing how the Bible is true in all that it says regarding science and that God created the world and universe in 6 literal days.  I love the spirit behind getting people to look into the Bible to find answers, but I want to propose something a little different.  Instead of providing answers for our children and even for ourselves, could we not instead provide questions so that they themselves could seek to answer them.  Actually let me take it one step further.  I believe that I do not have the answers to God, and yet I have many questions, and so maybe we come up with questions without worrying if we can answer them or not. 

Analogy time:  If you decided to walk the Appalachian Trail and did so with a know it all, and this person always knew the right gear to use and always knew which trees should be in bloom and which animals like coke zero and which ones didn’t, and of course they always always knew where you were, would it not take the joy in discovery away, and indeed the joy of wonder.  Things that fascinate me do so often because of how much I do not know about them.  So I want to look out on the AT and not hear someone tell me the scientific reason why the leaves on the trees change color, but I want to hear someone say, “Wow!”

So it is with God.  I believe that God is not a question to find the answer to, or an arithmetic problem to solve, but a mystery to be explored – without having the trip planned out.  There is so much about God that is so unlike we humans.  The Bible, being God-breathed as it is, often resists our pinning it down and getting all our questions answered, rather it calls us to ask more questions without knowing all the answers, without solving every exegetical problem or theological dispute.  But as we follow Jesus Christ we know that He is the only Answer we need, and that there is much of Him we do not yet know, and so we press on to take hold of Him, yearning for that day when we will be completely held by Him. 

Jesus, the toddler survivor

Christmas is different this year in America because of the children who will not be able to open their gifts.  Gifts are such fun to give and receive, but everything changes when a horrid tragedy like what happened in Connecticut happened.  One of the most horrible parts of this story is that this is not the first time something like this happened.  Many Christmases ago in Bethlehem a little boy received gifts that his whole family wondered at (Matthew 2:9-12) and those who gave the gifts were overjoyed.  And yet everything changed when an evil man named Herod was hunting the little boy to kill him (Matthew 2:13).  Jesus survived this hunt and fled to Egypt (Matthew 2:14-15), but there were many of his playmates and age mates who did not survive the evil man’s rage (Matthew 2:16-18).  Jesus grew up with the horrible start of surviving a man killing his friends when he was less than two years old.  He grew up in a similar way that the children who survived the shooting in Connecticut will.  Jesus was the toddler survivor.  Jesus started his life in the midst of grief, and he came to be known as the “man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53).  Both Jesus and the kids in Connecticut had and will have questions that few can answer:  “Why did this happen?”  “Where was God?”  “Why did God let this happen?” and many other such questions.   But God sent his son not only for more questions to be asked, but to provide an answer, and that answer was not an answer with words, but and answer with a person, the person of Jesus Christ, who was God and who was man, and who died and rose from the dead and so defeated death and offers an invitation to us.  He asks us not to bring our gifts only to his feet, as the wise men did, but also to bring our grief, our hatred, our death, because Jesus can take our grief and turn it into joy, and he can take our hatred and turn it into love, and he can take our death and turn it into life, because he himself is joy, and love, and life.  Jesus Christ invites us to himself.

the myth of a Christian nation

America is not a Christian nation. . . .

not because the President supports abortion
not because the almost President is a Mormon which is a cult
not because of Roe v. Wade
not because the founders fathers were Freemasons which is a cult
not because Andrew Jackson killed as many Native Americans as he could
not because this country was built on enslaving the continent of Africa
not because this country was built on raping and pillaging Native Americans
not because they allow gay marriage
not because the ten commandments are not in city hall
not because there is no prayer in school
not because we have lots of guns, big ones, to kill everyone else
not because of MTV
not because of marijuana
not because of meth, bath salts, crack, and pills
not because of broken families and prisons

but because Jesus did not come to institute a "nationalistic" government
but because Jesus did not come to be king, president, or governor
but because Jesus did not come so that Harry Truman could blow up Hiroshima and Nagasaki
but because Jesus did not come for religious freedom in the sense of democracy
but because Jesus did not come for people to have a free market economy
but because Jesus did not come to be elevated on a throne
but because Jesus came to be crucified and to die
but because Jesus did not call his followers to overthrow Rome
but because Jesus called his followers to be something more than Rome,
and more than Spain, and more than England, and more than the United States,
and yes, even more than Israel
but because Jesus called his followers to follow him by taking up our own crosses and dying
but because there is no such thing as a "Christian" nation, because the very idea of
"nation" is that we are concerned about it, concerned about something besides joyfully following Jesus Christ into the face of death so that His face we see.

you may want to keep your idea of your Christian nation
I want to keep HIS idea of the Christian Church
let's follow His to our deaths

My Mission Statement

to receive the all-consuming embrace of the FATHER
to lead others to His open arms through the SON
to encourage a family hug through the HOLY SPIRIT

The seven habits of people who admit they are uneffective

I am reading S. Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and I am feeling that his view in the book is that the answer is in us, like Mariah Carey's song, Hero.  I myself feel that the sooner I realize that I am uneffective the better.  Although many parts of the book I love, here are my:
Seven Habits of People who Admit they are Uneffective
1.  Let The Almighty God be ProActive
2.  End with the Beginning in mind.
3.  Put last things first.
4.  Think God wins.
5.  Seek first to understand God.
6.  Syn-God.
7.  I haven't read that far yet.