Donut, Coffee, Bible, and a Napkin to Scribble On.
If in your answer to this question Jesus is the King of kings, then
church will reflect that. If Jesus has all authority of heaven and
earth and is always present, then church will be different. But if
Jesus is docile, passive, and indifferent, your church will be as well.
-Neil Cole, Organic Church
Last night as I lay in bed waiting for the boys to fall asleep, I had the most amazing thought. I was praying for them, and thinking about life, and I thought,
“God, if there is nothing after this, if death is death and there is no more, the best way of life is STILL with You, serving, loving, forgiving, living. I don’t want it any other way.”
Life is happening!
The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.
- G.K. Chesterton
Leaders are there to help us discover our own purpose in life, even to embody that purpose and act as a prototype.
Changethis.com manifesto on purpose
The Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments are the Doctor’s prescribed health regimen, not the Employer’s job description.
– John Piper, Desiring God
Just reading Romans 6 and thinking about the slaves and obeying thing. If a slave of Mr. Jones spent his whole day thinking about Mr. Smith, the scene would look like this. “don’t obey Mr. Smith, don’t obey Mr. Smith, don’t obey Mr. Smith, what’s that, Mr. Jones? Yessir, I’ll be right there sir. don’t obey Mr. Smith, don’t obey Mr. Smith, don’t obey Mr. Smith, Yessir, Mr. Jones, what can I do for you? don’t obey Mr. Smith, don’t obey Mr. Smith, don’t obey Mr. Smith,
How silly! I think I can say that for many years all I thought about was how to sin, and different ways to get away with it. Not just like how to get this or that experience, but if whatever isn’t motivated and led by the spirt, then man, what a slave I was! So now that I’m not a slave to sin, what am I a slave to? I must say that Jesus is a much more merciful master than sin. That’s a funny thing to say. I guess in that I never feel helpless to obey Jesus, but I remember often being helpless to resist sin.
I guess it goes back to the ‘doing what is natural’ thing. Slowly it is becoming automatic for me to follow Christ in some areas.
In some it’s a pure act of will.
“Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.”
(Rom 5:3-5 NIV)
Of course you know what I’m looking up
• Perseverance: cheerful endurance
• Character: test, trustiness, experience
• Hope: to anticipate with pleasure
wow. I told my wife yesterday that I need a revolution. I have been grumbling and mad way too much. It’s so silly.
The other day I was driving and somebody jumped out in front of me or something, and I called them an idiot. Then I felt guilty so I thought “I should be praying for people, not cursing them!” so I prayed “Lord, have mercy on that guy.”
I felt like God gave me an instant reply, “I will. Through you. You have mercy on them, and I’ll have mercy on them through you.”
I need God to live through me. The day before that I felt convicted that I say the word “idiot” more than I say the word “alleluia”
This morning I was starting up my furnace, lighting my kerosene heater, and cranking up my heat pump, and I thought, wow. I have all this stuff to keep me warm, and all around me my neighbors are cold and on the brink of dying. How much is that a picture of reality! Even though I don’t feel alive, even though I don’t feel like I’m living the victorious Christian life that all the well-groomed preachers say I should be having, God’s life is in me in this cold weather.
So here I am, so wanting my neighbors to have the fellowship and comfort of Jesus AND the comfort of being warm. I’m limited in how much I can talk to them, and limited in how I can provide warmth, but more and more it seems like something needs to happen inside ME to do all of that.
The country is experiencing major blackouts, and power loss, and I think I have been too. Lot’s of cursing people and anger, lots of depression and pity parties, I need to run some new lines, connect back to the power plant.
It is so crazy to think about Paul writing Romans and NOT KNOWING how it’s going to turn out. He is dictating, and he could go back and revise stuff, but just like a sermon that is preached rather than read, the guy preaching it doesn’t know exactly where all it’s going to go before he gets to the end. He might have some milestones to pass, but the details of the trip aren’t necessarily all clear.
Isn’t it just like God to include the way the prophet feels in his message?! Like all the prophets, and even the Gospels, God didn’t just dictate and the writer got out of the way and wrote the stuff God said. You can see that real men were writing these things, and at the same time you can see that God’s hand was on them as they wrote it. I read somewhere that the Bible is not written in a way that shows the great effort of men to compose the most beautiful work of literature. Other holy books are written in such a way that they sound very lofty and poetic, but they say nothing. The Bible is written in simple, street-language, and says everything. (that’s from wherever I read that quote.)
The Bible is as real as the people that turned it into words.
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