I was listening to Erwin Raphael McManus’ sermon from Mosaic, his church in California today.  He was talking about how people say the religion id a crutch for the weak.  He said that we as Christians frequently get offended when we hear this.  He went on to say that the reason for this was that we know that it is true.  This is something that I have been pondering all day.  I think that he is on to something.  Our relationship with God would not be a crutch so that we can better hobble along our way through life, but rather it would be a ride in the arms of Jesus as He carries us.  It is when we try to run our lives just relying on God when we feel that we are inadequate that leads to us busting head first.  We need to let Jesus lead in every aspect and let Him carry us and mold us into the perfect image of Jesus.  We need more than a crutch so that we can hobble our way through we need a Savior to daily carry us through each day!

Last weekend I had the opportunity to hear Dr. John C. Maxwell speak at a church in town.  He said something that has really stuck with me that I wanted to pass on.  He was sharing at a church that has just opened a brand new campus and will be starting with six Sunday morning services in a few weeks.  He was sharing to encourage and challenge them in this exciting time in their ministry and journey as a church.  He told this story of a group of tourists who went to climb a mountain in Switzerland.  This was not a difficult mountain that could only be tackled by professionals, but it still remained a challenge to the inexperienced climbers.  The group starts out going up the mountain hoping to catch a breath of the summit’s fresh air.  The climb up the mountain would take a day to get up and a day to return back so there is half-way house that is strategically placed half way through the climb.  The half-way house is designed to be a place of rest and refreshment to strengthen the climber on the journey.  The problem that Maxwell pointed out is that so often we get to the half-way house of our lives and get so comfortable with where we are that we stop the journey for the summit altogether.  We are far to often willing to sit in the warmth and security of the house than to step out onto the mountain and finish the journey that we were made for.  Continuing the story, the people who threw in the towel and left the journey for comfort missed the taste of the fresh air, the outstanding view, and living the adventure.  They forfeited an adventure story that could be told for generations to come in order to have a short taste of comfort.  My hope and prayer is that we would not become Christians, who are comfortable in our churches, Bible studies, and worship services, but that we would seek to dive in head first into the adventure of chasing after His desires and going to the summit where we make an impact for God and encounter Him in the process.

The Relational Word by Josh McDowell is a book that raises some questions on our evangelism tactics and our own presentations of God that we share with others.  One of the main points raised in the book is that we must present the gospel as an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.  So often, the Bible gets presented as either a rule book of moral philosophy or a guidebook for life.  These are both things that the Bible can be taken as, but when this is done, we miss the point of the Bible as a whole.  It is the story of a loving God in pursuit of an intimate and eternal relationship with a people who constantly run from the very thing that they were designed to enter into.  Josh through this book attempts to bring this perspective on the gospel to light and forms a gospel presentation that focuses on relational intimacy with God.  He continues to go back to the truth of their being a longing built into every human being that can only be filled with intimate relationships.  The most important intimate relationship is with God, but Josh goes on to argue for the need of human intimate relationships in the forms of close friends and family.  This book also presents the idea of living a relational apologetic.  This means that we seek to live of lives relationally with others in a way that shows the acceptance, love, and grace of Jesus Christ.  This is something that is lived through a life directed and fueled by the Holy Spirit to have the heart of God for the hurting people in our world.  This book also contains an appendix with several chapters from Josh’s The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict which are helpful in establishing the reliability of the Bible.  This is a good read that raises good, well-defended points that remind each one of us that the heart of God is not a heart for apologetics, theology, and doctrine but a heart for those hurting and seeking a true, intimate, and eternal Friend.

There is this song by Spur 58 that has been one of our main messages on the Awestruck Worship Nights this summer.  It talks about God taking down the things that we hold onto so that we can more fully embrace Him as the only thing that we need.  One of the lines says to “bring my castles to the ground.  I am shattered by the fall, but you are the King of me.”  This line has come alive in my world over the last few days.  This past week I found out that my dad will be getting laid off from his job that he has been with for many years.  This has been a hard time for me and us as a family.  What happens in your world when something that has been there for so long is not there anymore?  I have been struggling with stress and worry about all of this.  I know that God is there, and He not only knows the situation but is perfectly in control of everything.  That seems like at times that it is so easy to say and know in your head, but it is hard to embrace with your heart and life.  I am asking for prayer specifically about this situation, and seeking to try to live out this quote from an encouragement email that I received from an old friend: “Fear not.  All is well. Trust.”

This is a post that was originally written and posted in January 2007. 

This last weekend, I had the awesome opportunity to serve as a leader on the youth Winter Retreat trip at my church.  God really blew me away and taught me so much over the three days that I was on the trip.  We were blessed to have Matt Setliffe share with us.  We studied the bood of Acts and looked at what characteristics defined the early church and becoming missional and intentional in sharing the message of Jesus with others.  The highlight of the retreat for me seems really unusual at first.  One of my buddies who is an intern in student ministries was telling me that we were going to be washing each other’s feet.  This immediately struck me as not only odd but very awkward.  I began to think of all the foot fungi that I had learned about in my human physiology classes.  This ended up being something that was wonderful and very hard to describe.  I was thinking about when Christ took the job only a slave would do, washing another person’s feet, and turns around and does this for his disciples.  This showing of nothingness and humility that was shown in such a moving way came alive to me this weekend.  The time began by one of my mentors and good friends coming over and washing my feet.  As time went on I got the opportunity to show this depth of service to others including students that God has blessed me to be a part of their lives and even people who I had problems getting along with.  God took this time and act of humility to bring me to tears and yet encourage me so greatly at the same time.  It is amazing when we as Christians are willing to go out of our comfort zones in order to serve and encourage others.  This is an experience that I will not soon forget.  This time really made the depth of love and service that we should show to others truly come to life in a very vivid way.  Praise God for showing me what it is like to serve and to be served and to love and to be loved by others.   

We each come to everything that we face in life with strengths, gifts, and some amount of knowledge.  In most circumstances, we use the skills, gifts, and knowledge that we have in order to do our best and to succeed in what we are trying to accomplish.  Serving Christ, however, does not operate on these principles.  Like many things presented in the Bible, serving God is done in a way that is truly upside down compared to what we are used to seeing in the world around us.  2 Corintians 3:4-5 NKJV reads this way “And such trust through Christ toward God.  Not that we are sufficient of ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God”  This verse flies in the face of each one of us being capable to serve God and do ministry.  So we face this battle daily of whether we are going to try to run things in our own strength and wisdom or whether we are going to allow the Holy Spirit to provide the knowledge by working through us.  Martin Luther makes some comments on this struggle in a sermon that he gave on this text.  In that sermon he says with regards to his role as a minister of the gospel:

“Of ourselves - in our own wisdom and strength - we cannot effect, discover nor teach any counsel or help for man, whether for ourselves or others.  Any good work we perform among you, any doctrine we write upon your heart - that is God’s own work.  He puts it into our heart and mouth what we should say and impresses it upon your heart through the work of the Holy Spirit.  Therefore, we cannot ascribe to ourselves any honor therein, cannot seek our own glory as the self-instructed proud spirits do; we must give to God alone the honor…”

Luther goes on to say that “Man’s achievements, Man’s reasoning and power are of no avail save in so far as they come from God.”  I want to be a person who lives and serves others in a way that it is not my suffieciency and knowledge that is coming through, but it is the work of the Holy Spirit that is done in such a way that only He can get the glory.  I want to not be driven by my “wisdom” and “strength”  I would much rather tap into the source of all true wisdom and strength.

The Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McLaren is my second book that I have read by this seemingly controversial author.  For those of you who are not familiar with controversies in modern Christianity, Brian McLaren is viewed as one of the main voices in the Emergent Church Movement.  In this book, McLaren presents a new view of Jesus that is intended to redefine our theology of how we view Jesus Christ.  His argument is based around this idea of God’s kingdom coming to earth which he bases strongly out of both the Beatitudes (Matthew 5) and the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11: 2-4).  He presents this new theological idea of us as Christians seeking to live out the upside down gospel of loving the unlovely and touching the untouchable.  This is one thing that I think McLaren is right about.  We should be the hands and feet of Jesus on the earth seeking to extend grace and love to others.  The problem that I see with this book comes in when McLaren begins to question traditional interpretations of scripture.  The major thing that stood out to me as something that was very questionable if not totally unbiblical was his interpretation of the entire book of Revelation.  He presents this book as a form of Jewish fiction meaning he views the entire last book of the Bible, which is traditionally held as John’s visions and pictures taken from his encounter with God and glimpse of heaven, and takes it as an allegory of how the world may end up if we as Christians do not step it up and seek to bring the kingdom of God on the earth.  This seems to presuppose the idea that the world can evolve into a better state.  When I look at the world around me and some of Newton’s Laws of the physical world (law of degeneration), I do not see how this improvement is possible.  If we as people are able to fix the world that we live in and restore an Edenic paradise where do we need God.  Where is the picture of a totally messed up world that has no other hope than a Savior who will take the mess and fix it?  Where is the place for God to receive the ultimate glory from a resurrected creation that is transformed to its true design?  I am still struggling with some of McLaren’s theology, but one take away from this book that is very applicable is that we need to seek to bring the grace and love of God to a world who does not know what they are missing.

I have been reading a lot recently about the Kingdom theology that is embraced and highly promoted by Brian McLaren and our other brothers and sisters in Christ that see themselves as emergent.  I have been struggling with this theology about a view of Jesus based strongly out of His Sermon on the Mount where He sets up this mindset of an upside down world.  Jesus comes on the scene in Matthew 5 with what most people today would call the Beatitudes.  He stands up in front of a crowd to make His first statements to these people who are trying to figure out who He is and what He is about and totally rips apart the cultural status quo of the listeners.  Jesus looks at the nobodies and says that they are the ones who are truly blessed.  This must totally shock the listeners as it shocks us today as modern readers of the text.  This is a God who is all about the nobodies.  I think that He is about the nobodies so much because the somebodies do not feel like they need Him.  He comes on this planet and makes the nobodies somebodies in Him.  He reaches out to those who no one else even acknowledges or sees any value in.  This is the upside-down God of scripture.  He is not a God of the pious and successful people who have it all together, but He desires to be the God of the helpless and hopeless and shine His glory in the darkness of their situation.  Following in light of this view, Brian McLaren goes on to present an ideology in order to answer the question that if this is what Jesus is about, how can we live this out in a practical way to the least of these in our world.  This is the heartbeat of a life lived not for my own desires, but it is a life lived in order to give a touch of love and a touch of grace to every person who we come into contact with.  It is a lifestyle of showing the priority of Jesus in loving those who have never felt love, listening to those who have never had a friend, and living a life where we not only receive grace from Jesus but we go on to give grace to others.