Debt? A few thoughts.

With the current debate on the debt issue in Washington, I am brimming with thoughts and need to get the out before I explode.  

I fail to see the positives of either alternative here. More multi-billion dollar stimulus packages that simply prop up a failing system for another few years, hopefully long enough for our current elected officials to ride out their careers and never have to accept any of the blame?  More half-assed budget cuts that reduce projected (not actual) spending by 1%?  Sounds like a plan for success to me. 

I probably don't agree with everything that all of the Tea Parties say, as I don't have the time nor the inclination to follow congress that closely, but the ones I have heard speak make a ton of sense to me (specifically the Paul's, and my own district's Amash, don't know much about any of the others). 

To be completely honest, I don't trust anybody in Washington to do the right thing. Our elected officials are either too jaded, too out of touch with reality, or too sold out to do what is right for the people, rather than their party or their plan.  

I think it is a systemic problem that reaches beyond Congress, but that Congress certainly contributes to.  I actually blame our media more than Congress, to be completely honest.  We glamorize a life of luxury, but demonize the few that have worked their asses off to actually afford it, only to subsidize those who live like they’ve “made it” when they can’t afford it.   People who have money typically have it for a reason.  80% of the millionaires in the US are 1st generation rich, which means they’ve earned their money, they’ve pinched their pennies and saved.  They’ve worked their asses off, created something for our economy to stand and thrive on, lived within their means for years and now have financial success, but yet we want to tax them through the nose to support those who don’t want to work their asses off, who don’t want to create something out of nothing (aside from their handout), who don’t live within their means, but still want to lead the glamorous life style that they've neither earned nor deserve. 

Call me simple or stupid, but that seems ass backward to me.  We should be learning from their success, not punishing them for it.  I don't understand how raising spending without raising revenue is a sustainable system.  If I have a $50,000 dollar a year income, I can't add $20,000 a year in debt without going broke.  I have to live with my $50,000 a year, and if I want more, I work my ass off, get a raise, but still live like I make $35,000 and put the extra in the bank.  Then, after a few years, I might just have enough money to have the honor of being taxed through the nose as well.  

Nor do I understand how government that is constantly growing out of control based on money we don’t have is a good thing. There is a word for this in medicine; cancer, and last I checked, that is a bad thing.

Yes, maybe it is easier now, and for the next 10 or 20 years (if we make it that far!), to just ride the wave, but at some point, we either run out of money or create too much new money out of thin air that the wave we’re riding so merrily along crashes down on our ever brittling sandcastle. 

Maybe if we stop living beyond our means and start living more humbly, we can fix the problem.  Hell, if we stop acting like asshats on the world stage, maybe the rest of the world wouldn’t hate us so much and we could even cut our defense budget, which would put a large dent in our deficit. 

Will cutting spending and balancing our budget slow the economy? God I hope so. A system that relies on massive amounts of debt to keep up its crumbling facade is not a system I want any part of, and if we continue to try to fix the problem by piling on the load, it will just crash down all the harder.  Better to let it down now than later.  

There is only one death that can set the world right...

Jesus was no stranger to war or terror.  He didn’t have half a globe to separate him from  those who sought to ravage and kill for political and religious gain.  No, they lived in his back yard.  

Our “plight” is nothing compared to the context in which Jesus spoke his words and lived his life.  We live under the distant murmur of terror, the families in Jesus’ land when it intimately.  We have pundits who rile us up and get us to fear a distant threat in the Middle East.  The Jews lived their lives under the thumb of oppressive overlords.

The worst nightmares painted by the talking heads on our televisions screens wouldn’t do justice to the reality of the world that Jesus lived in.  We have rising oil prices, they had death and destruction.  We had one day in September, they had countless days every year.  We have 3,000 loved ones gone, they surely had multiple times more.  

We think we have it bad, but they had worse than we fear.  In Jesus’ own words as he predicts the destruction of the temple and the slaughter at Jerusalem:

"6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of birth pains.

   9 “Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death...let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. 17 Let no one on the housetop go down to take anything out of the house. 18 Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. 19 How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers!"

This reminds me of a certain argument that I hear all too often. “Not my wife, not my kids, I don’t care what you say, I’d kill pick up a gun and kill 100 Arabs before letting them touch my family.”

According to Josephus, there were 1.1 Million causalities at the destruction of the Temple, and nearly 100,000 were capture and enslaved.  A few more than 3,000, if you ask me.  

Jesus saw this death and destruction at the temple coming, but he didn't pick up a sword to defend those pregnant women and nursing mothers.  Seems like Jesus would have wanted to prevent this.

But how?  By killing off millions of Romans instead of millions of Jews?  Death is a cycle, a wheel of destruction.  As Martin Luther King Jr once aptly said, “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”  

Just as we can’t earn God’s favor by our own effort, we can’t set the world right by our own devices.  Death is of man and the enemy, how do we expect death to make us safe once again?  The “safety” man has created through the murder of Osama Bin Laden will crumble and fall.  It is built on a false foundation.

Just as we can’t enter the kingdom by propping ourselves up on our own righteousness, we can’t fix our world by continuing the cycle of this world.  

There is only one death that can set the world right.  He did it.

Despite this, the bible doesn’t promise us safety in this world.  Easy to say when our struggles are only financial, but what about when your enemy is in your back yard, breathing down your neck, or even with a knife to your throat?

“Who shall separate us from the love (and death) of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,

    "For your sake we are being killed all the day long;

   we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered."

 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, (not terrorists nor jehad) nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So how do we respond in the face of terror and death?  

As Chris Martin says, “I don’t want to battle from beginning to end, I don’t want to cycle, recycle revenge, I don’t want to follow death and all of his friends.”  

Luckily, we don’t have to.

The death of the tree in the garden in Eden

It is often said that Jesus was a great moral teacher.

When Jesus hung on the cross and with his dying breathe sputtered, "it is finished," he was proclaiming the fulfillment not only of the mosaic law, not even a more generalized set of moral law, but to all the concerns of morality in general.  For a follower of Jesus to still be concerned with morality is to miss the point of his death almost completely.  A Christian concerned with morals is like a computer programmer who is frustrated because he can't get his latest program running on his 1920's typewriter.

At its core, morality is the questioning of what is right and wrong.  Morality concerns itself at its most basic level with the knowledge of good and evil.

The knowledge of good and evil.  (side not: I'm not entirely concerned with the literal 7-day historicity of the account of the story of creation, and Adam and Eve.  I do believe, though, that at the very least, the story is allegorically true, but I wouldn't be terribly disappointed if it were literally 7 days, or even if something along the lines of this happened).  As the story goes, we received this knowledge when we turned our backs on God in the garden and ate the forbidden fruit, and ever since, we have been trying to reinstate ourselves into God's good graces through the very knowledge that got us kicked out in the first place.

The knowledge of good and evil.  Do this and not that.  This action is permissible, that one desirable, and this last one unforgivable.  Our new knowledge inherently begets a hierarchy of rules to be followed; for some, in order to fix our status with God, and for others, to simply regain some semblance of the order we once knew in Eden.

But neither work.  The first presents itself as religion, the other as secular law.  If we follow these rules, stand in the right place, wear clean enough closes, sing the right songs in the correct key in a certain order, if we refrain eat this or drinking that, from looking here or touching there, and most of all if we get into enough of other people's business and make sure they are following all of our rules as well, then maybe, just maybe we can fulfill all the rules that we have put in place and will stand clean before God.  We do it through the Mosaic law, the

Or maybe, if we don't want anything to do with God, we can still rebuild the order we knew in Eden.  We can prevent people from speeding, from stealing, from raping, from murdering or laundering or slandering by putting enough laws into place.

But how can this knowledge of good and evil that we were never meant to have lead us back to a state of innocence before the God who never meant us to have it?  How can our rules and regulations that come solely out of this knowledge be the answer?

By making rules and regulations, we are not addressing the core problem.  We can run around for millennia more trying to force the problem out of ourselves through as many laws as we can think of, but it won't solve the problem: the knowledge of the law itself.

So how do we break this curse that we inherited through Eden?  The bad news is that we can't.  The Good News is that God did.

God the Father, the one who never meant for us to live in this futile state, who never wanted us to deal with these problems of good and evil, who wanted nothing more than for us to live in his bosom, came to us himself to set the world right again.  We couldn't do it ourselves, so He did it for us.

But all too often we fall short of realizing the full ramifications of what our Papa did for us through the cross.  Most of us get the concept of salvation, an eternity spent in the presence of God.  Some of us even get that this salvation is for the here and now, that we are no longer slaves to sin and shame.

What I want to finally get is that what was done for us on the cross reaches all the way back to the garden.  It erases that first fallen bite, and breaks us free from the curse of the knowledge of good and evil and reinstates us as the children of our Father.

We are no longer to be concerned with right or wrong, with good or evil.  We aren't to stick our noses into other people's business, and not even into our own.  We are freed from the hierarchies of this world, as all the hierarchies we have ever known have been built on the concept of right or wrong, good or bad, better and best, with the most desirable at the top, and least at the bottom.

When we associate our identities with anything sort of the loving grace of the Father who now dwells within us, we are falling prey to the curse.  I am a white male of reasonable intellect.  If I take pride in my skin color, I am setting myself against others of different races, saying I'm better, more good, less evil, etc etc. The is the knowledge at work.  If I take solace in my brain power, I am making myself better than the less intelligent in my own opinion. This again is the knowledge at work.

When our knowledge of right or wrong, of good, better, best is removed, so is any necessity or desire to associate with anything other than the only One who can give us our true identity.  We can not receive our true identity as children of the Father without loosing the knowledge that stands against it.

But thank God, He did all the work.  He removed the knowledge and repositioned us into his bosom for eternity.  Through what Jesus did on the cross, we are freed, not by knowledge, but by faith, by belief, by trust in Him.

The cross was the final judgement, once and for all (Hebrews 10).  There is no more room for any sort of judgement, whether eternal or temporal.  We are not to be concerned with good or bad, right or wrong, but only with what the Father is doing, and more importantly, what he already did.  As Graham Cooke says, there are no longer good days or bad days, only grace days.

In the Father, our need and capacity to judge anything at all has been amputated completely.  Our concern is no longer right nor wrong, but only what the Father says.  We are to live as a branch on his vine, a leaf floating on his river, a hose for His overflowing love, and as a small child, giggling in our Papa's lap.  It is only when we take our eyes off our eternal Papa that our desire for that forbidden knowledge arrises and we become more concerned with our own opinions, our own judgments, and our own standings among others than with what our Papa is saying and doing, and more importantly, what He said and did through the cross.

Let us forsake our sophistication and sophistry and once again live as children of the Father.

My thought on Rob Bell and the dangers of dogma

As you probably know, Rob Bell has been sturing up quite a controversy in regards to his book "Love Wins". I want to start by saying that I haven't read the book, but I have read most of his other books, so I am familiar with his style, and I have heard several interviews with Rob about his latest.

If you don't know anything of this controversy, a great place to start is this video:


I love Rob Bell. Not necessarily for his specific theology, but rather for his approach to theology. Rob is a prober, and questioner, and a thinker. As Greg Boyd puts it, "First, Rob is first and foremost a poet/artist/dramatist who has a fantastic gift for communicating in ways that inspire creativity and provoke thought. Rob is far more comfortable (and far better at) questioning established beliefs and creatively hinting at possible answers than he is at constructing a logically rigorous case defending a definitive conclusion. I enthusiastically recommend Love Wins because of the way it empowers readers to question old perspectives and consider new ones."

I have a sneaking suspicion that our christian beliefs all too often turn into law. We want to grab truths and hold onto them, make them our own, memorize them then spout them off when called upon. At the core of it, our truths become our identity.

What we know, how we know it, and who we tell about it, especially in the segments of the church in which evangelism is is emphasized, becomes the currency of our identity. Our christian doctrine comes to define us. Protestant, Catholic, Lutheran, Charismatic, Evangelical. Even when we stand united and wear the name Christian as a badge of honor, it is typically against something. Atheist, Jew, Muslim.

When our identity is attacked, we revolt. If somebody calls you fat, or ugly, or says your breathe smells like arse, you typically don't react favorably, and these are only passing things of appearance. How much more do we react when the truths that we've built our lives upon on attacked. Our truths must be defended, lest we falter. Our truths must be staked out and guard, lest the things that establish us as "in" and them as "out" fail, lest the things that make us special and unique whither away. It is a scary thing seeing a wave come crashing down on your sand castle home, so we build up our walls and defend, and fight, but ultimately will lose to the tide.

So when Rob Bell attacked the very foundation of our identity, that we are special, we've received the invitation, we're "in", and by correlation that they aren't special or chosen or "in", we begin to fret a bit. If they are actually in too, what does that make us? Less in? Less special? Is our truth less true that we had hoped? We panic. Some write nasty twitter posts and blog about how Rob is misled. Our grasp on our truth begins to fade as our truths are questioned, and we don't like that.

Our identity is wrapped up in the truths we hold onto, and I hope, in that, you see a problem.

The Truth is not a fact or belief. The Truth is a person. And only in that person can we find the Truth.

The very instance we try to take the truth out of that person, to hold it in our own hands, to view it through our own lens, to apply it in a way that we see fit, then the truth is no longer True. It becomes a dogma. It becomes the fickle sand on which we build our faltering homes.

But that was never His intent. We were never supposed to eat from that tree, issues of right and wrong, and of truth or lie, were never meant to be our questions to answer. They were never even our questions to ponder. Our only concern was to be a child to the Father, to be a branch on his vine, to be fully dependent on Him who is the Truth.

But then the tree, the apple, and the fall. We inherited the system of knowledge or right and wrong, the system of identity in "truth" and not in him is the Truth. We received all the faults listed above. So when a man like Rob Bell taps into the idea that the Truth is also Love, and ponders what this Lover did on the cross and what the actually means for the world, and begins to look into this Lover's heart for answers rather than to our dogma, we come at him, pitchfork in hand.

Does Rob Bell have all the answers? No, but you see, that's not the point. It never was, and never will be again. The point is not the answers that we can extract and pin to the wall, but the journey into the heart of Love and Truth.

Helping People...

I got a Facebook message from my buddy Chris K. a few days ago. He wanted to know what to look for in a fountain pen.

I know Chris from several screenwriting courses that we had together at UofM, in which I took notes with my Cross Aurora deep red fountain pen, so apparently he though I am the go to guy on fountain pens. He was probably expecting a few sentences, a link to amazon, and a "good luck" sign off. I wrote back with 7 paragraphs, and it was tough to limit myself to even that. Not because I am overly knowledgeable about fountains (I actually know fairly little), but because I truly wanted to help him. There have been several other similar occasions. A few months back, my best man Grant's little sister Hailey wrote me asking about camera gear. I replied with a series of similarly lengthed messages.

I don't write this toot my own horn, who knows if the advice was even any good, and it surely was too wordy. I am writing this because I throughly enjoyed giving out this advice and hopefully helping these people, which is more than I can say for much of anything I've done for quite some time.

We might be on to something here...

The next obvious thought I have is, "how do I make a living out of helping people?", which instantly spurs up a complex on my part. "If you are making money off helping people, can you truly be genuine? Are you really help them, or just helping your bank account?"

I don't know how to answer that last part, but I do know I like helping people, and that is a start.

Faith in What?

I believe in a God of the possible. I believe that God’s power is infinite and his ability to act is limited only by the human imagination and our ability to believe in his goodness. I believe that the bible is a love letter, an invitation is a dance on such a scale that we can’t even begin to imagine.

Sometimes I try to wrap my head around it all, but it simply wants to explode. I haven’t read Romans 8 in quite a while, but it has been on my mind a lot lately. Two main parts have been really sticking out to me. The first is toward the end of the chapter, where Paul says, “…If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?”

When I read this, it blows my mind! When I let this verse define my reality rather than letting my circumstances define this verse, but I can’t help but see this an invitation into the gracious gift of all things. Danger comes when I start to limit this verse by my current circumstances. “I don’t feel like I have all things. This and that are going wrong, therefore this verse can’t really be applying to me.” The problem with this type of reading is that of course your circumstances suck, you’re believing the lies of this world more than the promises of a loving God! We must, as sons and daughters, lay hold of this verse as truth and let it define the way we look at the world!

God loved the world so much that he gave the world his son as a peace offering, to reconcile us back to him forever through his son’s own blood! If God is willing to do that, to give his own son, then how could he hold anything else back? He already gave us it all! We can’t earn any more of his favor because he didn’t deserve his favor in the first place! We have it all, Jesus paid it all, Jesus gave it all! He won’t renege now, He can’t! It’s too late! He already gave his life, why would He withhold the blessing that comes from that?

It was all his idea! He died to fix every problem in this world, because every problem in this world is a result of the fall, of sin, which he took care of with his death. We don’t have to convince him to take care of us, he already has. “If God is on our side, who can be against us?” Paul doesn’t ask this, as if he wonders if God is for or against us. The context of this chapter tells us that God is NOTHING BUT FOR US, and HAS NOTHING AGAINST US. What then can stand in our way?

The other part of Romans 8 that has been on my mind is “19For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”

We see here quite clearly that creation is ready and willing to be set free from bondage. We also just saw that God is ready and willing to do pretty much anything to get this done. In fact, the great news is, HE ALREADY HAS! Note that I could have said, “In fact, the GOSPEL is, HE ALREADY HAS!”

So what is the limiting factor in this equation? Is it God’s willingness? Nope. Is creation against the idea and resisting? Um, no… Is the Devil just too darn powerful to hold us back? Seems to me that Jesus stepped on little snaky’s head (see…um…the whole bible!).

So who is left? Who are we missing? Could it be us? Could it be that we have not yet been revealed as “Sons of God?” That is one possible interpretation, though I argue a very poor one. It can be seen in countless scriptures that God has ALREADY adopted us (and not in our modern western scene, I may have another blog post about this) as sons of glory. The deed is done, it is finished, Jesus paid it all, we have nothing else to earn or buy or receive because Jesus paid the full price, remember?
So what is the limiting factor? Our faith. “Our Faith!?! But we’re protestants! It’s all about our FAITH!!!” yells some indignant reader. Let me ask you, indignant reader, what is your faith in? Is your faith in the fact that you have faith, or in the blood of Jesus? What saves you? Your faith, or Jesus’s blood?

I often find myself thinking more about my faith level than about the very thing I am meant to have faith in. I’m not required to have faith in the fact that I have enough faith, I have required to have faith in the fact that Jesus’ blood covers me and makes me holy. It is Jesus who makes me a Son of God, not my faith or my works or the miracles that may or may not be granted to me.

I think that if we were more concerned with what Jesus ALREADY DID for us and what Paul meant when he said God has given us ALL THINGS, than we are with striving for and earning the things that God has already given us, that this world would be a completely different place.

In Eph 3:20, Paul says that God is capable of abundantly more than we can ever think or imagine. Is he capable of saying, “it is finished” and having it be so? Is he capable of giving us all things just because he is that good? Are we capable of believing him?

All this to say, I don’t want to write a superhero movie, I want to live it. Hollywood can imagine a lot crazy things, but they have no effective power outside GCI and wires. I’m ready to see the Sons of God, the Son of Glory truly revealed. The only thing that is holding us back is our ability to believe. Believe in what?

[cue awesome Rage Against the Machine song as Neo flies away]


What Jesus already did. Now it's your turn!

Significance, Part 2

The thing that really draws me to movies and television is the friendships you create with the characters. It sounds a little weird, but it is true, at least for me. You watch these people on a screen, fall in love with them, root for them, cry for them, miss them when you’re not with them, go through withdrawal during the off season, but for what? It is easy and it is cheap. It is a one-way relationship. I get connected to them, but they don’t know me. They don’t require anything of me, expect that I sit there and become hypnotized, and all I get from them is a false sense of community. I don’t actually have to be vulnerable with them, to show them my heart, to open myself up to them. True love is vulnerability, all TV gives us is a counterfeit. At best, it gives us a temporary escape from our mundane life; at worst it serves as a self-contained substitute for actual relationships with real people.

Dr. Gregory House isn’t a real person, he doesn’t actually have feelings, he doesn’t really have emotional hurts that need fixing. Hugh Laurie might, but I’m not watching Hugh, I’m watching Hugh pretend to be House. It makes me wonder what good it is to create these broken characters who need fixing when the world is full of real characters who need real fixing. Wouldn’t my time be better spent with the wounded and broken of the world, doing the world of Jesus?

This is not to say that there isn’t any place for House, or whatever other show we watch, but at the end of the day, it is all just entertainment. Real transformation comes through real relationships, not through pixels on a screen. Can Jesus use masterful writing to convey a message of hope and grace to a person who would otherwise not have heard it? I’m sure he can. But I wonder at the idea of so many people getting excited about the idea that I might be able to disciple people through writing for TV or a movie, rather than actually discipling people through real, tangible relationships. I’ve been watching masterful writing on TV for quite a while now, but yet, I feel a lack, a void that can only be filled by actual relationships

Significance, Part 1

I once heard Bill Johnson say that every human being longs live a life of significance. He also said that often, people confuse this with a longing to be famous, or rich, or seen. You don’t need to be on MTV or in People magazine to lead a life of significance.

I wonder sometimes whether I forget this. Recently, I have spent a lot of time bouncing between mulling over and avoiding any consideration of what I am going to do with my life. I am 22 years old, married to a wonderful wife, and am on my way to live on the west side of Michigan because said wonderful wife got offered a wonderful job with a wonderful salary and benefits. What more could a guy want?

And yet, I have this strange feeling that there is something missing. I can’t shake the idea that I have abandoned every dream I’ve ever had. I’ve felt the call to significance my whole life, and I am being to realize that I have no idea what to do with it.

So now I’m sitting here, pondering the question of significance. What makes a life significant? What makes my heart burn with passion? I love Jesus. I love pondering upon him, I love talking about him, I love challenging people’s preconceived notions about him. I love getting my head out of the box and into his reality. I want to challenge and inspire people. I want to spend the rest of my life enjoying him and teaching others to do the same.

But yet, I’m afraid if I give up on screenwriting, I’ll dwindle into insignificance. Do I love screenwriting? Not especially. I do love seeing what is possible, what can be and must be and will be, and I’m afraid I mix that visionary type thought process up with a need to write movies. I get this anxious feeling when I think about what people say about Hollywood and Christians. “You can affect so many people for Christ with the movies you make!” Things like this make me feel like I have to be a screenwriter or I’m letting Jesus down. I don’t think there is anything I could do that would let him down, but when I hear that statement, I forget this. I think it is a play on significance. “Just think of all the people you could effect!”, really just means, “Think of how significant you’d be!” In this sense, pursuing screenwriting would be a great idea; I’d have the problem of significance all figured out.

Sometimes I feel like I’m running away from significance by not wanting to pursue screenwriting, but maybe I’m actually running towards something else. I used to be in a rock’n’roll band, with dreams of making it big and playing in front of 1,000’s of people: true significances. But yet, playing music was never really all that fulfilling. I enjoy strumming my guitar, but it doesn’t fill that void I feel, so why would doing it in front of people change that lack? Sure, it was nice to have people notice you, but “it ain’t Jesus”.

What I really want to do is challenge and inspire people. I have an active imagination; Jesus speaks to me through pictures, almost like little movies scenes in my head. I often wonder if I have simply confused the way Jesus speaks to me with a desire to create movies out of these pictures. I feel Jesus speaking to me, and I want to share it, so I have to make a movie out of it. I wonder if he is calling me to a different way of doing discipleship.

going home to heaven...isn't biblical?

going to heaven when we die is an expressly greek imagination, informed by the thought that material world is evil and we need to be liberated from the material world into the realm of the ideal. This is based on the idea that a perfect god can have no interaction with imperfect humans, if a god does, then he is not perfect. problem is, when god created earth, he saw that it was good. it is very difficult to reconcile greek philosophy and the hebrew bible because they start from two very different assumptions.

greek thought --> creation is bad, we need to be liberated from this world so that we can commune with a perfect god that otherwise can't interact with humans because he is removed from the bad creation

jewish thought --> creation is good, god interacts with humans through creation, he is present with us in his creation

jesus' thought --> creation is good enough to die for

if we take our christianity to be rooted in judaism, we should think that heaven/the kingdom of god is meant to come to earth (as espoused in the bible, hebrew and christian), that paradise as jesus spoke of is merely a waiting place for those who die until the kingdom is fully realized on earth. the idea that we are "going home to heaven" is rooted in the greek thoughts of trying to escape this world in order to interact with a perfectly removed god. this is not and can not be reconciled with a god that came to earth to die for the creation that he said was good.

the intermixing of greek philosophy and biblical thought is a symptom of the spread of the gospel into the greek world. the spread i am thankful for, but not the intermixing. it is time to get our worldviews straightened out.

if we are to prioritize a biblical worldview over a worldview influenced greatly by greek philosophy (much of which stands in stark contrast to biblical thinking), then we must not consider heaven our home and earth just a pitstop, but exactly the opposite.

more on this later when I don't have a pile of homework.

Palestine got Left Behind

First off, I would like to state that I am not anti-semetic, nor am I Palestinian. I am a simply a critical minded man trying to honor Jesus.

I am currently taking a course about the Jewish-Arab conflict in the middle east. It has covered from about 1890 through today. Most of the course has been focused on the events that have taken place in the middle east, and it has been only moderately interesting.

Today, we focused on American support for Israel. About halfway through the lecture, I found myself feeling sick to my stomach. Among many other reasons (ie. oil), perhaps the most dominating influence in American support for Zionism is ignorance.

Excuse me, let me rephrase that. Perhaps the most dominating influence in American support for Zionism is the association of the new Jewish state with American religious tradition. Many Americans Protestants see the US as God's chosen country. You can find references to the US being the New Jerusalem pretty easily in American history. In 1803, President Adams publicly showed support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Based in Old Testament ideals, we see America as our own promised land, and Americans as the new chosen people. As an extension of this, many Americans believe it is right for one chosen people to help out another chosen people. Many Americans took pride in Jews ability to reclaim the frontier, like they had done with the West. I would like to note that until very recently, I would fit right into this category.

Based mainly on my ignorance of this situation, I thought all these ideas sounded pretty great. All of that seems relatively harmless on the surface. Perhaps the most important, most "exciting", and least likely thing to be labeled as bad is the fact that Zionism is seen as fulfilling biblical prophecy. The OT speaks of Jews returning to Jerusalem and the end being ushered, the Kingdom established, and by our own Christian Tradition, Jesus returning.

Good deal, right?! Jesus coming back, the Kingdom on Earth, Hallelujah! Right?

Sort of...

A little history on Zionism. Zionism is the product of 19th century nationalist movements in Europe. Nationalism defines a nation around a certain people. Germans are people of German decent. The French are people of French decent, etc. Inherent within a Nationalist movement is a need for an "other". I am French, not blank. Many of these nationalist movements were based around the supremacy of white, protestant males. Increasingly, Jews were defined as the obligatory other (but not only Jews, but also Gypsies, peasants, etc).

As you might guess, there is something inherently evil about a nationalist movement. Defining a group of people as other, as unneeded, unwanted, or disposable is not only not "kingdom", it is the basis for genocide. Thus, the holocaust (though the leap here is rather simplified).

Increasing anti-Semitism forced Jews to seek their own national homeland. The obvious choice was Palestine. The problem? Palestinians. Through a series of what started as land purchases, then wars, the vast majority of the people Palestinian people became refugees, forced out of their homeland by war, and forced to live in extreme poverty, some still to this day.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that this entire situation is complicate and convoluted. It took an entire semester to learn all the adequate information (even then, most of it was glossed over), so to boil it all down to one blog post would be a little silly. It is not my intent to pick sides. In fact, I would like to do the exact opposite. It is easy to see (with an objective eye) that both sides have committed their fair share of atrocities, and both are certainly in the wrong on certain point. I would like to transcend sides and look at it through the eyes of Jesus.

One last historical tidbit before moving onto my point. Zionism was founded on secular, not religious, ideals. In fact, many orthodox Jews saw (and still see) Zionism as inherently heretical. The messiah was meant to lead the Jewish people back to Israel, not a secular movement.

So it was this secular Jewish movement that Protestants picked up as the fulfillment of the end times prophecies. Unfortunately, most of these Protestants take on a dispensationalist, Left Behind type view of the end times. More important than anything is to them is the fulfillment of these OT prophecies and the return of Jesus, apparently at any cost.

But does this view of the situation in Israel line up with the way Jesus views the situation? Does Jesus put his own return and the status of the Israelites higher than the Palestinian people?

I would like to propose that if there is a modern equivalent of the story of the Good Samaritan, it would probably have to be Israel and Palestine.

Did Jesus side with Israel in the story of the Good Samaritan? Does Jesus side with Palestine today?

I'd like to propose that Jesus is on all sides, especially those who are poor, widowed, orphaned, destitute (which both sides surely have plenty of). Jesus is not a nationalist, but a Kingdomist. He is all about the Kingdom, all the time. And in the Kingdom, your enemy is your neighbor and you bless those who persecute you.

So how can a movement like Zionism be the movement that brings the Kingdom of Heaven to earth? I would argue that it can't, and isn't. I would argue that it is ignorance or oversight of what the Kingdom stands for that allows for sure end times views. I would argue that Jesus doesn't pick sides, but he picks people, from both sides.

It is time that we embrace an end times world view in which Palestine isn't Left Behind, especially since Jesus doesn't leave them behind.

The Importance of Being Glorious

Have you ever thought about the fact that we are Jesus' reward for enduring the cross? We being the church, we being his people, we being you and me.

Have you ever let this truth hit you deep down, let it soak in, and really let all of its implications grab hold of you? I have caught a glimpse of what this means in the last few days, and I wanted to write on it, both to firm it up in me, and to share.

As a side note, I recently bought a bible with 26 translation of the New Testament. It basically lists major variants from the KJV, but it is an amazing resource and has really opened up a lot of different verses for me.

One of this verses is John 17:24. In this passage, Jesus is essentially praying for you and me, for "all who will have faith in [him] through [the disciples] message." It is during the Last Supper sense, just before he goes off to be murdered.

The verse in the King James reads: "Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world."

When I read that verse, nothing really stands out to me. It seems like the same thing I have been hearing all my life. But when I read it in the Moffit translation, it really hit me differently.

"Father, I ask that these, your gift to me, may be beside me where I am..."

We are Jesus' gift for enduring the cross. Jesus went to the cross and died with a reward in sight, and that reward is us. We are his gift.

When I think about what the church looks like today, I can't help but be heart broken over the fact that we're a pretty crappy gift for our King. Jesus made us holy through the sacrifice of his body (Heb 10:10), but all we do is cry out "make us holy". He gave us his glory, that we would be one (John 17:22), but all we do is bicker and fight and make new denominations because we can't be one. He did it all for free, as a gift to us, not by our own works (Eph 2:8-9), but all we do is try to work and earn it.

His blood makes us holy, nothing more, nothing less. The Son of God's blood was poured out to make us holy, once and for all (Heb 10:14), there is no other way to become holy than through Jesus' blood. There will never again be an offering for sin because Jesus' blood covers us for all eternity, once and for all, till the end of the age. One translation put it like this, "there is no longer any need of an offering for sin." Why? Because Jesus was the final offering.

I've been trying to think of an analogy for this so that we might better understand. Imagine for a minute that you are in pretty bad debt. Maybe you have a ton of student loans, or you went a little crazy with your credit card, and you owe $50,000. It is going to take you quite a while to pay it all back $100/month. Now imagine that some foreign king hears of your debt and tells you he wants to help you out a little bit. He deposits 50,000 rubies (not dollars) into your bank account. You think, “great! Now my debt is paid off!” Problem is, you’re not taking into account the exchange rate. So now you are living debt free, but still dirt poor because you think that you don’t have any money left over. You think that you have to earn your fortune. What you didn’t realize is that 1 ruby is equal to about 10 billion dollars. You are basically a multi-trillionaire living as if you were dirty poor because you don’t understand the inheritance that this foreign king gave you.

This is essentially the situation that most Christians today find themselves in. We believe that Jesus paid our initial debt, but don’t realize that he has an inexhaustible amount of grace for us, that every time we screw up, it doesn’t put us into debt, but draws upon our infinite bank account of grace.

And its not even about sin or no sin, it is about having all of the king’s resources at our fingertips because he has made us holy. Not only do we not go into debt, but we have billions of dollars we can spend on good things. We have an unending reserve of resources.

But how happy do you think the king who paid your debt and gave you access to his bank account would be if he found out that you are still living as a slave?

Now consider the fact that you are supposed to be this king’s bride. The king is planning this amazing banquet feast for you to come join him in, and you are the guest of honor. He has invited all of his friends and all of his servants have been preparing this banquet for years. He has literally poured his blood, sweat, and tears into this banquet.

He has even sent you his personal aid to help you in preparing for this day. The aid is supposed to teach you all the etiquette for the banquet, how to act like the royalty that you are. The only problem is, you still have it in your head that you are a servant. You don’t realize that you have access to the king’s full resources, and you don’t listen to the king’s aid when he tells you all the great things about you. It is like you plug up your ears and refuse to see the reality right in front of you. The king has chosen you, made you worthy, and invited you to dine with him, but you are too busy telling yourself that you are unworthy, rather than accepting the fact that your worthiness has nothing to do with you and everything to do with what the king says about you.

Imagine if you showed up to the king’s banquet, the most beautiful, expensive, fabulous banquet thrown in the history of the world, imagine that you should up to this banquet in your servant’s garb. Imagine that you were in ratty old cloths, sweaty from a long day of labor (that the king’s aid should have been doing for you), dirt on your face, runny nose, the whole nine yards.

Wouldn’t this be basically the ultimate slap in the face for the king? He has made it his life’s work to create this banquet and prepare you for it, he sent you his best friend and personal aid to groom you, he even had to sacrifice himself, to suffer and die and be raised from the dead in order to throw this banquet with you are the guest of honor. All this preparation, all this work on his part to get you here, all to be taken as a free gift. You didn’t have to earn a single ounce of the honor and worth he has given you; he did it all.

But the whole time, instead accepting the free gift, you tried to earn your honor and worth by working for it. Instead of being the royalty that he made you, you tried to work to make yourself into royalty, saying you weren’t worthy to accept it as a gift, you had to earn it.

I don’t want to imagine the look on the king’s face when he was expecting a glorious bride and you show up in rags. “Didn’t you get my personal aid, my best friend that I sent to you? Didn’t I tell you that I made you worthy? Wasn’t I flogged and murdered to make you whole and complete? Aren’t I enough for you?!?” I can’t imagine the pain in the king’s voice. “Don’t you get what I have done for you???”

I can’t fathom what it would be like to dedicate your entire life and all the resources of heaven for this one purpose, only for your bride not to get it, for your bride think that it is all about her and not what you have done for her. What Jesus made us into has nothing to do with what we can or have earned, but it has everything to do with what he deserves.

When the high king of heaven pours his blood out to make for himself a holy and beautiful bride, and when he says, “It is finished,” meaning, “I’ve done it, I’ve made my bride holy, now all she has to do is come to me,” I’m pretty sure that he meant it.

He made us holy when he died on the cross. He deserves a bride that stops trying to make herself holy through her own works and accepts the fact the He made us holy through His works.

The only suitable response to such a gift is to accept and live as the bride he made us into. Jesus is throwing a huge party in heaven, he is demanding that we attend, and as the guest of honor’s gift and only request, we’d better make it worth his while and accept.

It has nothing to do with what we do or earn, but everything to do with what he did and says about us. If you have accepted the invitation to be his bride, his gift, then he has made you holy and worthy. There is nothing left for you to do but live in that reality.

A Better Explanation of What This Blog Is All About

iBethel.TV // Bethel Church // Living Unbalanced : Aug 30 '09

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Who He Has Made Us...

Probably my biggest pet peeves is theologically incorrect worship music. Usually the songs that really irk me are the ones about the "rapture"/ones about escaping to heaven, for obvious reasons (its "your kingdom come", not "let us fly, fly away").

Much of our theology isn't formed from reading the bible or listening to sermons, but from the music we sing during "worship". But what happens when our "worship" isn't glorifying to Jesus?

Recently, I have been more and more distraught by the songs containing lyrics like "make us holy", "wash us clean", or "i'm just a sinner, won't you fix me", etc. (These are generic lyrics, as I can't think of any specific songs to speak to right now).

Why have these songs been bothering me you ask? Because the finished works of the cross have already made us holy, clean, and righteous. Jesus poured out his blood to free us from our slavery to sin and shame, we carry it no more because Jesus took it from us. So why do we continue to sing, asking him to do something he has already done? He did it on the cross and paid the ultimate price.

He can't do again what he already did. I'm not entirely sure what result we are looking for when we sing lyrics like these as worship. By singing "make me holy", it is almost like we are asking him to bear the cross again.

"Oh Jesus, you're so good! La la la! But now that I think about it, the first time you died and rose again wasn't enough to make us holy! La la la! Won't you go to the cross again so that I can be holy once more? La la la!"

I understand that while we are made holy in Jesus, we can still sin. But sin isn't the standard, righteousness is. How are we going to live up to the standard of righteousness if we continue to believe the lie that Jesus' blood isn't enough to make us holy for eternity? I honestly think that the distinction is in something as little as a mind set. We were baptized into his crucifiction, and raised again with his holy spirit. We are a new being, the old is gone, the new has come. We are not slaves to sin, but to righteousness. We no longer have the chains of death shackled to our leg, but we are free, holy, righteous, and the only place that this isn't true for most of us is in our minds. In Eph 2, Paul says that before coming to Jesus, we lived as sons of disobedience, and we "lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind". Well our flesh was crucified with Jesus, and we were given the mind of Christ. Maybe its about time to renew our thinking about our holyness and our standing with the Father.

Jesus is soooo good. He poured out his blood to make us holy. We sit in heavenly places with him. We are his body and his holy temple. The holy spirit dwells in us.

He stands at the door and knocks, and if we just but open the door, he will come in a dine with us, and he will let us sit on His throne with him. He's so freaking good that he doesn't even put us at the kiddie table in heaven, but asks us to sit on his throne with him! I can't even process the implications of what this means.

One thing I do know is that having him elevate us so high should do nothing but humble us and cause us to worship him even more. Us being holy has nothing to do with our actions and everything to do with how much he loves us. The only possible responce would be for me to offer up a sacrifice of worship to him. And not a weak, "make me holy" kind of worship, but a worship that says:

"Jesus, you're so good, you're so beyond compare, you're so holy that you made me holy, you're so good that you made me (who once was a broken wretch) righteous, you made me a king in the heavens, and that makes you the king of kings. You made me a king, and you're the king of kings!"

This is the kind of worship that will not only bring the utmost glory to our savior king, but will also glorify his body and cause a generation to rise up and be who He paid for us to be. Because when the church is glorified, Jesus is glorified, because we are his body. Jesus can't be glorified unless we are glorified. Jesus can't be king on high unless we are king on high with him.

Jesus can't be who is deserves to be unless we accept who he has made us...

Why is this man blind...?

I am currently reading Greg Boyd's God at War. In it, Boyd addresses the blind man "who sinned, him or his father" passage in John 9.

Jesus response is typically translated "he was born blind -so that- God's works might be revealed in him." Boyd argues that the word we translate "so that" shouldn't be translated as passive, but as an imperative (as more of a command). Boyd translates it, "he was born blind. But let the works of God be manifest!"

The disciples are asking a moral question, Jesus is responding with a command to heal the man. Jesus isn't concerned about answering questions about God's intent other for this man to be healed. "Yes, he is blind, stop asking questions and heal him." In such a situation, with such an emphatic command, there is little room left for God's will to be in question. He wants this man (and all men) healed. He is blind because the world is fallen/the devil caused it, but this passage isn't about why he is blind. It is about God's desire to heal him.

Even if we did read this passage in the traditional vain of thought, it would be a lone passage saying its God's will for this man to be blind from birth in a book neck deep in stories of God healing all whom he touches. Should we change our entire mind set to fit this one passage (that as Boyd argues is mistranslated/interpreted to start with), or should we seek to find the reading of this passage that fits with the rest of scripture?

Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8) by healing the sick, raising the dead, and advancing the kingdom of God/heaven/light against the kingdom of darkness. Everywhere else in the gospels, Jesus healing acts are seen as advancing the kingdom. Nearly everytime the "Gospel of the Kingdom" is mentioned in the gospels, healing, raising the dead, etc, follow as commentary on what preaching this gospel entails. I could walk you through the versions, but I feel like I have done this multiple times before, so scroll down.

Would it be too much of a stretch to say that this man was blind because he lived in the "kingdom of darkness" (i.e. the fallen world he lives in)?

When the Light of the World comes into the Kingdom of Darkness, the only proper question is not about God's will, or the origin of sickness, "Why is this man not healed yet?"

A Life Examined

I feel so idle right now, like I want to (or am supposed to) be doing something more, but I am afraid (or can't, or am too lazy/not motivated enough) to get there.

I have serious questions about why I am in school right now, whether being in school is wisdom, or if it is actually unbelief in God's power in my life. One of my professors once said "we are in the education business because we don't want to die". It was a bad joke about the dangers of coal mining and why we are getting educations instead of working in some dirty shaft in Pennsylvania, but I feel like there is a lot of truth to it. If I can only get one more A, if I can only get that piece of paper that says I did it, then I won't have to rely on God, to trust him to provide. I can wrap my identity up in my diploma and my alma mater then I won't need to be vulnerable with Jesus. If I can get this degree, then I will have job security and not need to trust in Yahweh. But at this point, it would be stupid not to finish. I already have debt equivalent to a very very nice car, so why not tough it out and get that piece of paper that will solve all my problems?

The weird thing is that I have had some very inspiring times in the bible recently. Joshua 1:5-6 says "⁵No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life. Just as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you or forsake you. ⁶ Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them."

Something about those verses ring so deeply inside of me, like they were placed there for me. They raise up inside of me this fiery passion for God that is inexplainable. "For you will cause this people to inherit the land". God is so good.

In Exodus 33 it says of Joshua, "1Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses turned again into the camp, his assistant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent."

While Moses met face to face with God, Joshua was apparently there too. When Moses left the weighty presence, Joshua remained. He would not depart. I believe that it was in his weighty presence that Joshua was turned into the kind of man who would "cause this people to inherit the land." There are intense connotations to the idea of inheritance that I can't go into right now (wish I had time and more knowledge on it). It wasn't through intense study of the law or through military cunning that Joshua cause the people to inherit the land, but because he was a man who "would not depart from the tent".

I want to be a man who will not depart from the tent, who will not leave YHWH's weighty presence, but how am I to do this when my life is consumed by school and my heart grows cold to him when I am immersed in the godless smut of academia? "My heart and flesh cry out for the living god", yet I am stuck in a system, "always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth." The greeks demanded wisdom and the cross was folly to them.

Worldly education is a paradox to me. It seems the more I learn, the deeper desire I have to recede into the tent. Yet, I constantly substitute learning about the tent for time within the tent. I know there is value in my education, it has taught my to think critically, and to write, and a few other useful things, but all too often, I use these things as substitutions for interaction and communion with the only one who will ever fulfill me. I write so much about encountering God, but spend so little time actually doing it. I learn so much about what a Christian should look like, but spend so little time actually looking like it. I have so much knowledge, and too little Jesus.

Is my education bad? No, but it isn't Jesus either. I have this gapping hole in my heart that Jesus needs to fill, a hole that seems to only get bigger the more I do homework and study, a hole that only gets more clogged and sodden the more I learn about the things of the world through, the more I divert time away from the wellspring of life into the desert of school.

Part of me wonders if writing is evasion or healing for me. I would like to lean toward the latter, but only if it leads me closer to Jesus, close to the tent of his presence.

The sad thing about this is that I now have to go study... :(

Jesus Is Alive...

Jesus isn't in heaven b/c he went there when he died. We have this thought in our heads that death leads to heaven, which I suppose is true in some regards.

I've recently been hit with the thought that Jesus isn't dead. He is in heaven, but he isn't dead. He rose again. He is in heaven, alive and well. He ascended in life, he still lives.

I find myself all too often praying to the image of Jesus on the cross, the dead or dying Jesus. The problem is that he isn't dead or dying. He is alive and glorious.

I feel like the distinction is between defeated and victorious. If we pray to a defeated saviour, a saviour still hanging on the cross, then our prayers will be defeated, weak, and powerless.

If we pray to victorious saviour, a saviour who in his glory trampled all over anything that could be coming against us, then our prayers will be powerful and bold and will move mountains, because that is was Jesus did with his resurrection.

Death couldn't hold him down. God made a spectacle of evil with the cross.

Col 2:15 says:
"nailing it to the cross, He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him."

The Message puts it like this:
"He stripped all the spiritual tyrants in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets."

I put it like this:
"Jesus took a huge dump on all the false powers, the demons and their minions, triumphing over them on the cross, smearing the poop on their faces with the resurrection."

Sorry for the vulgar image, but something has to wake us up to the fact that Jesus rules and Satan drools.

Jesus put them to shame, not in a wimpy, meek, boring Jesus of the movies kind of way, but in a powerful, I rule the world and I'm taking it back for my people, so get the hell out of here kind of way.

Jesus is alive. He is not beaten down and broken. He is victorious, he uses demons as shovels to clean out horse stalls, he cleans toilet bowls with them.

He has utter and complete power over any evil. There is nothing they can do to stop him.

That is, aside from convincing Jesus' body, his action in this world, that none of this is true, that Jesus is still on the cross, that evil still has power.

I just got hit with this thought.

If the church, who is Jesus' body, still envisions Jesus on the cross, then where will his church be? All we will know to do is act like people who are still nailed to the cross.

The problem is that Jesus isn't still on the cross. He is victorious, all things are under his feet, subject to him. He rules the world with power.

If the church, who is Jesus' body, envisions Jesus as being over all things, then where will his church be?

Father, help us to repent of our low view of you and in turn of ourselves. Help us to live a life of victory, a life to destroying the works of the devil. Father, help us to realize that our ministry is the same as your ministry. We are to continue the works that you did on this earth, as if you never left.

All too often in the gospels, Jesus is described as preaching the gospel, follow by a list of these things: heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse leapers, cast out demons, feed the poor, free the captive.

How are we to do Jesus ministry, as listed above, while believing that we can't, that we are still nailed to the cross, that evil is triumphing and we can do nothing about it?

We can't. But what we can do it realize that is a lie, that Jesus won, that we share in his victory, and that is the ministry that we are called to.

Father, let us realize this. Renew our minds with your reality...

Diamond Washing

So the other day I was talking to a friend and I realized this great analogy for how sin affects us and how it affects our relationship with God. I thought I'd share, more to remind myself than anything...

So Abby and I are engaged (surprise if you didn't know!), therefore Abby has this amazing ring on her finger. A few weeks ago, we noticed that one of the prongs that holds the diamond in place was bent, so the diamond was a little loose. We took it into a jeweler asap to get it fixed.

It took a few days, but when we got it back, it was sooo sparkly. We walked out onto the street and looked at it shine, it honestly kind of hurt my eyes to look at it. When I asked the lady what they did to get it so shiny, she was like, "Oh, we just cleaned it. You should probably do it every day with a little toothbrush and some water."

Everyday? At that point we'd been engaged for at least 3 months and hadn't cleaned it once. No wonder we noticed such a huge difference. 3 months worth of dirt and oils and lotions had built up on the ring to the point of it hardly shining at all anymore. With a little soap and water, that thing bore a hole in my retina.

I would like to propose to you that when we become Christians, we all become like diamonds in the eyes of the Father. He has an incredibly high view of all his people, certainly higher in regard than we humans hold diamonds (which is saying a lot).

I would also like to propose to you that if we sin, we don't cease to be diamonds, we just got dirty. If we sin, we don't cease to be sons or daughters of God, we just need a little washing, a little bit of repentance.

Out nature does not change. We are still diamonds. A diamond does not cease to be a diamond just because it doesn't shine, nor does a son or daughter of the most high cease to be just because they make mistakes.

But it is contrary to a diamond's nature not to shine. That is what it lives for, to reflect the beauty of the sun's light, to draw the eye of all the people and bring glory to its creator. It is contrary to our nature to sin. We are not slaves to sin, but slaves to righteousness. We died and rose again through baptism, just as Jesus did on the cross. We are new creations, the old is gone, the new has come (not is going to come someday or at the resurrection, but HAS COME, now).

It is contrary to our nature not to shine like a diamond. Isa 61 says "Arise, shine for the glory of the the LORD is upon you." We were made to shine.

But if we sin, we get dirty. We get the oils of this fallen world on us and we can't let the light flow from us. If we go 3 months without being cleaned, we are as dull as that diamond before we took it into the jeweler's.

How are we cleaned? By the blood of Christ. By letting his blood wash away our dirt, our sin and shame. By letting Jesus in on our dirty little secrets and letting him make us shine again.

1 John 1:9 says:
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

I can't think of anything more freeing in my life than humbling myself before Jesus and letting him wash me clean.

"Jesus, I'm sorry that I sinned. I know it is not my nature, I know you didn't die on a cross in order for me to keep on sinning. It is not who I am, it is against the nature that you bought for me with your blood, it is not my lot in life. Jesus, break off these lies that tell me that sinning is the norm and that I am indebted to it. I am indebted to nothing but righteousness; that is the call on my life. Wash me from this sin and these lies that tell me otherwise. I have always been a diamond, my sin never changed that. Make me shine like one again."

Let us shine like the diamond that we are and always have been by realizing that we aren't enslaved to sin, but repenting quickly and whole heartedly if we do.

I can stop writing now....

So I have been trying to figure out how to say something in every blog post thus far, but can never quite find the words to express it.

Watch this video. It's 4 minutes long:

http://www.bjm.org/content/1/the-normal-christian-life.html

(It's called power forces a decision).

Bill Johnson says in 4 minutes that which I have been trying to say for nearly 4 months....

Wisdom of the World...

So I thought I'd make a quick post about something I was reading this morning, more as a mental brainstorm for myself than anything.

In 1 Cor, it talks a lot about the wisdom of the world vs. the wisdom of God. The wisdom of the world is folly to God, and the wisdom of God is folly to the world.

I find myself all too often trying to live by the world's wisdom, but the world's rules, trying not to be the last kid picked in the proverbial game of kickball that is my life. Recently I have spent so much time trying to fit in to this world, compromising my beliefs so that I won't looked at like I'm crazy, when all along that is what I need most. That is what I'm called to. "If we're crazy, it's for God, but if we're sane, it's for you."

I want to be crazy in the eyes of the world, to be laughed at, to be the scum of the earth, because it is in dying that we live. We are meant to live in an upside down kingdom.

Honestly, I have very little problem saying that I believe in God, that's a rather normal thing. Most people do in some form or another. My problem is that I really, really, really believe in God, in his goodness and his desire to renew all of creation.

In 1 Cor, Paul says "For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles"

How is it wise to die? In the world's eyes, it's not. But it is the thing that sets us free.

A few verses later in 1 Cor, Paul says
"¹And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. ²For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. ³And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, ⁴and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, ⁵that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God."

There is so much in those verses to talk about, but I want to focus on the last part of the last verse for now.

Paul wants us to have faith in the power of God. The word power there is "dunimas". We get the word dynamite from the same root, and this word is in specific reference to miracles.

Paul wants us to have faith in the miraculous working of God. In the dynamite of Jesus.

Not in what the world tells us, because that is folly. Not in what our doctors learned in a textbook. Not in the scientific or the provable, but in the miracles of God. Not to say that doctors are bad, or that you shouldn't trust what they say, but we are called to have faith in God, not in doctors.

Doctors are trained to see what is scientifically possible in this world, believers are meant to see the impossible and make it happen.

I believe that God is good, that he is miraculous, and that we are meant to worship him for this. I believe that God wants to demonstrate his power today.

He wants us to have faith in his goodness, in his purpose, in his working in this world. He wants us to have faith in what he says, not what the world says about him or what he is capable of.

I would like to point out that Christian teaching can be just as worldly as anything else. Paul called the Jews' wisdom worldly, just like the Gentiles'.

The only wisdom I am to follow is that of God, and right smack in the middle of Paul's discourse on wisdom, he says he intended for the Corinthians to have faith not in the wisdom of man, but in the power of God.

Let us have faith in God, faith in his goodness, and faith in his miracles. Paul did...

Grace Days

So I was just playing guitar, worshipping Jesus when I remembered what Graham Cooke (a prophetic guy in SoCal) said once:

"There are no good days or bad days, just days with Grace."

I always remembered him saying that, but never really got it until just now. I'll let you contemplate it and see if you can make the connect faster that I did...

(hint: read the post before this)