I just finished reading Michael Yaconelli’s Dangerous Wonder.  It was an excellent book about rediscovering what it means to embrace risk and the unknown in our relationship with Jesus Christ.  It is a book about stepping out in faith to discover that Jesus Christ is big enough for all of our doubts and hold-ups and wants to embrace us and pull us into His arms.  Michael communicates clearly through stories and accounts of people truly encountering God that make the reader want to seek after more risk and depth in his or her relationship with Christ.  He points out that our busyness and schedules so often keep us from hearing God’s voice and spending time with Him.  He also points out how we can easily become so set on our religious rules, regulations, and theology that we make God a concept and rule maker.  Yaconelli goes on to explain that Jesus broke all the rules and social norms and lived a life of unpredictability that left His followers shocked.  This is the kind of Christianity that Michael says that we should seek to live out.  A lifestyle of radical trust living our lives on a roller coaster of faith chasing God’s desires.  This is an excellent book that will really help to refocus and renew your thoughts on your relationship with Jesus and daily pursuit of Him.

For my times of connection with God over the last few weeks, I have been reading through Genesis.  There is this really weird story that you come to at the end of Genesis 9.  God has just destroyed the earth due to the sin in it.  He has found Noah to be the only righteous person so He has spared Noah and his family as an act of His grace while wiping out the rest of the world by an act of His wrath.  Noah gets off of the ark, gets blessings and promises, and then the most random thing happens.  Noah decides to get drunk and then lounge outside naked.  This seems very odd for this to be put in scripture, but I think that there are two key reasons for this very odd passage.  The first thing is that God wants to present not just the sucesses of His people but also the failures.  Noah, the one that God finds righteous, fails.  God does not present people in the Bible as these ethereal and holier-than-thou people.  He presents them as real people who have real struggles, but the thing that defines them and sets them apart is this pursuit of God and His desires.  The second thing is this cursing of Canaan that we see at the very end of the passage.  So Cannan, one of Noah’s sons, spots his father lounging outside of his tent drunk and naked.  So what does this son do? The ideal thing for him to do would be to try to cover up his father’s sin and failure that is on display for the whole world to see, but instead Canaan goes and gets his brothers so they can check out this crazy scene.  After this whole deal is over, Canaan receives a curse from Noah and is placed as a slave to his brothers. To me this whole cursing thing was very odd until it hit me that Canaan was making a mockery of Noah’s sin.  He was taking the sin of this man of God lightly and sharing it with others like it was some kind of joke.  Then it hit me how often I make light of the sin in my life and the culture around me.  How often and easily are we willing to sit back and take a laugh at sin presented on TV or in the movies or in the lives of others around us? When we do, we are acting just like Canaan.  We should be like the two other brothers, which received a blessing, and seek to cover the sin up from public view and then confront the person caught in that sin.

I was listening to a preaching podcast the other day, and there was this question that the speaker raised that has been on my mind and heart ever since I heard it.  He was talking about the person that God will use.  He said that God uses people that He can trust with His glory.  So the question is “Am I a person that God could trust with His glory?” This question hinges on several things.  First off, the issue of giving God the glory for everything that He does in and through you.  It is a temptation for anyone in ministry to take the credit for God’s work.  This comes under the aspect of humility where my self-worth is based.  Is my self-worth based in my relationship with Jesus and the fact that I am loved by Him or do I have to perform to prove my worth by making myself look good by what God has done through me?  If my self-worth is based in my relationship with Jesus, I will not be interested in stealing glory from God.  Secondly, I think that part of this is will we use the opportunities that He has given us to do every part of it with excellence as an offering of worship to Him.  I think that it is really easy to half-way do ministry to get by and not doing the best you can and seeking to persue excellence.  This is the problem with many things that are considered Christian.  It is done in a manner that does not include the investment of time, energy, and prayer that an offering of worship to God should.  Thirdly, I think that someone must be a vessel that can most clearly reflect God’s glory.  This gets back to personal purity and holiness.  Everyone who has attempted to do this knows that this is something that only the Holy Spirit can do.  We cannot perform “good” without the Holy Spirit working in us.  Even the “good” deeds that we do will be wrongly motivated when we attempt to perform on our own.  My prayer is that God would make me into a person that He can trust with His glory.

A good friend and mentor of mine made a statement several months ago that is just now beginning to sink in. He was talking about the concept of preaching to himself every day. This seemed at first a very odd to me. I always tend to think of the gospel as the message of God’s grace to people who have never heard that messahe before. It is really neat to me that the Holy Spirit will just bring random conversations like the one that this statement came out of to your mind. After thinking about it for several months, I think that I am finally beginning to see the relevancy of this statement in my walk with Christ. Preaching the gospel daily to myself acomplishes two key things. The first thing that it accomplishes is putting me and my role in proper perspective. When I look at the grace of God given to me on the cross, I am reminded of my sin. I see my past and current sins which are the driving force behind the hammer of the soldier that put nails into the palms of my Savior. This is a very humbling thought. When I somehow get in this Americanized mindset of performance and think that I can somehow do something to serve God, the gospel reminds me again of my ultimate failure. Once gaining perspective on my self image, I can then move onto the second thing which is driving me to worship. When I am daily reminding myself of the great price paid for me on the cross, the only reasonable response that I can give is a lifestyle surrendered in worship. I guess that my friend had it right after all. This daily habit of preaching the gospel not only to an unsaved world but to myself accomplishes great things in my walk with Christ. So the question remains, who are we preaching to?

I have been reading a lot and struggling with grace. It seems like such an elementary spiritual concept that we are saved “by grace through faith,” but grace being something that I cannot earn or do yet am supposed to live daily in light of is something that I am having a hard time getting my head, heart, and life around.  When I look at myself and the depths of my own sinful heart, I am overwhelmed that God would have any desire to call me His child not only that but to use me to spread His gospel.  I think that living the Christian life is living in constant amazement of who God is and what He has done.  This amazement led John Newton, former slave-driver turned pastor, to write one of the most well- known hymns.  There is a verse of Amazing Grace that is rarely sung that I think gets to the heart of living a life wrapped around grace:

The Lord has promised good to me,
His Word my hope secures.
He will my schield and portion be
as long as life endures.

This verse clearly paints a picture of us holding on to Christ as our place of safety and finding everything in Him.  He has given each one of us so much through His death on the cross for our sins.   Living a life wrapped around grace I think is allowing Jesus Christ to be all in all in your life. Allowing Him to not just be the eternal sin remover, but allowing Him to be your schield and portion.  As your schield, Jesus is the one that you run to when life gets rough or when you are feeling overcome with temptation.  If Jesus becomes our portion, He will become the sole desire of our hearts and lives.  I think this is the heart of living in grace.  May we all live lives of a radical surrender to the One who holds the universe in His hands and who is also wanting us to rest our lives fully in His hands.