I think we as Americans have an entitlement-mentality. We think we’re owed so many things, like an 80-year lifespan, a spouse, a house in the suburbs with the white picket fence and the 2.3 kids (don’t you always feel bad for that .3 kid? He’s not even a complete person!) We think we’re deserving of a satisfying career with a nice retirement package. We think we will work hard so that one day we can sit back and live the easy life and spend our grandkids’ inheritance money.

What we really deserve is hell.

As harsh as that sounds, it is the honest truth. We’re all born sinners and we know deep down we’re fundamentally messed up. We didn’t have to learn to be selfish or to lie or to steal; we just instictively knew. My natural bent is not to be nice or giving or honest. I am by nature selfish and stingy and a liar. You are too, if you are honest with yourself.

That’s where grace and mercy come in. Mercy from God means I don’t get the hell I deserve. Grace means I get to live and that I get to know God and have Jesus take the punishment I deserve. It means I get eternal life, not just down the road in heaven someday, but right now as a life that’s abundant. It means that while most of the world is on autopilot and asleep, I am waking up to the beauty of God’s creation all around me and the amazing things God is doing in and around me.

If we admit we are messed up and that everything we have and are is a gift that we don’t deserve, that means we show grace to each other. No matter how badly I mess up or hurt you, you forgive me because you have done much worse to God and been forgiven far more times. Regardless of how you treat me, I still strive to show you the love of Christ, because He pursued me with His love when I only showed hate to Him and ran away from Him.

My love for God shows itself in my love for His people. I can’t say I love God and not love His people. I can’t call myself a believer and then bail on His followers the first time they fail. In fact, I look most like Jesus when I forgive and show grace and give multiple second chances, because that’s what He does best. When I am called to imitate Christ, I am callled to do these things. When the life of Christ fills me up, I am able to do these things.

Jesus, fill me with grace so I can be gracious to others. Give me Your heart that forgave those who murdered You as they were in the very act, so I can forgive anybody of anything. Let me be mindful of all the many second chances You’ve given me, so I can give those who fail as many chances as You gave me.

Amen and amen.

Something else I’m terrible at is silence. I don’t do well with silence or being still or learning to quiet my thoughts and let God speak through those times. I am quite practised at awkward silences in conversation, so you’d think I’d be better at normal silence, but I’m not. I always have a song playing in my head or I am rehearsing a conversation I might have with someone in the near future. Or I am thinking down about 50 different tracks at the same time.

But I’m learning silence is good. Solitude is a healthy thing and a way to hear from God like you won’t any other way. Silence says to God, You matter enough to me that I will make time to spend time with You and hear from You, not just throw up my laundry list of requests and desires. Silence is where I quiet my soul and rest my heart in God. Silence is where I can find physical and spiritual rest and see things from a right perspective again.

I think of it this way. When I took my advertising class in college, one thing I learned was the importance of white space in an ad. You don’t want to cram an ad full of images and text, because it would overwhelm the reader. White space helps to bring more attention to the ad and makes it easier to take in. In the same way, a book completely filled with print with no white space would be daunting and hard to read. The margins on the top and bottom and sides help the reader better take in the text.

In the same way, creating margins in our lives through silence helps us see what’s in our lives better. Having “white space” through solitude helps us to better focus on the important things in life and to not be driven along by the tyranny of the urgent (a phrase borrowed from a great book, by the way!)

Learn to be silent. Learn to be still and take every thought captive and create an environment into which God can speak into your life. I am learning this takes time and practice and patience with myself, because every 15 seconds my mind wanders off on a tangeant. The key is to not give up, but to refocus and keep making the effort for silence.

As with any other spiritual discipline, there are the benefits of spiritual growth and building character and knowing God’s heart more. But above all, we do these things because God is SO COMPLETELY worth it. It’s a way of saying, “This much I am grateful for You. This much I desire not what You can give me or do for me,  but You Yourself. Give me as much of You as I can handle and then a little bit more!”

Amen and amen!

It’s 10:57 pm and I am bone tired. I didn’t think it was possible to be this tired and still be awake, yet here I am. Unless this is some kind of very strange dream.

I think it’s all connected. God is true and God’s Word is true and you pretty much have to have both, because if the Word is from God, then it has to be as reliable as He is. I’m convinced you can trust both with your life. Because both will lead you to Jesus if you know how to read them.

I think that it helps if you think of the Bible as Letters from Home. Kinda like those letters you got from mom when you were in college. Only infinitely better, of course. It’s all about showing you how God never gave up on making a way for you to come Home. How He made a way where there was no way previously. How He became that Way in Jesus.

Think of the Bible as God’s love letter to you. How your rebellion grieved His heart, but instead of bailing on you, God chose to win you back through loving tenderness in a thousand ways, culminating in Jesus’ death on the cross. That showed true love in its highest, purest form.

All that for something I don’t read nearly enough. All that for a God I all too often pay token lip service to. He deserves so much more. If you and I can find a few more stolen moments to spend with Him, I believe that will make an impact on how we live and how we treat others. It will change how we see God and how we see ourselves through Christ.

I won’t even touch fasting, because I am still working on that one myself. But make it a priority to do whatever it takes to know God and know His heart, so you can be changed by that. But more than that, because He’s so infinitely worth it!

Amen and amen!

At Kairos tonight, Mike Glenn talked about God as Heavenly Father and how we are led by the Spirit to call Him Abba. I think I really started to grasp what that means tonight. The implications and ramifications are HUGE!

To have God as your Father means that He chose you to be His child. You weren’t automatically born into God’s family, but He went and picked you out at paid the highest price possible to make sure you would be His. It means that however the world tells you that you don’t belong and you are not wanted, God choosing you means that you do belong and you are most definitely wanted.

Having God as Abba means that you don’t ever have to let anybody call you a nobody ever again. You are a child of the King of the universe. Your Father made the heavens and the earth. He spoke and it happened. Just like that. Your Father sent Jesus to be the sacrifice for the very people who rebelled against Him in the first place. He turned the worst tragedy in human history, the cruxifiction, and made it the biggest triumph ever.

Having God as Abba means that you don’t have to be ruled by fear or be a slave to addictions and strongholds anymore. It means you don’t have to let someone’s harsh words or actions define you anymore. You don’t have to be what anyone else thinks you should be. What God says goes, and what He says about you defines you. Those whom He has set free are free. Period. There is no more slavery or condemnation or bondage for those who belong to God through Christ Jesus!

My prayer is that you would be consumed by this thought: My Abba Father chose me because He wanted me. He didn’t pick me because I was the last one left and He didn’t have a choice. He picked me because He wanted me, because He set His affections on me and loved me with a love that never has or never will give up on me. He said once and for all, This one’s mine!

Amen and amen!

Today at Fellowship Bible Church, we had Christmas in February. Well, not exactly. We’re going through the Gospel of Luke and today’s passage happened to be the familiar Christmas passage of Luke 2:1-20. One thing that caught me was how Mary when she was traveling must have been expecting a nice, warm room in the inn where she could safely deliver her Child. And what happened when the reality turned out to be far different than her expectations.

As someone pointed out, Mary must have been thinking, “Lord, surely not this stable! Surely, this is not what You had in mind. Surely, the innkeeper will come out at the last minute and say how he’s sorry but they do have a vacancy after all and how it was just a big misunderstanding.” But nothing like that happened.

Sometimes our life turns out way different than what we exptected. We end up in the stable of a cancer diagnosis or a seemingly eternal single status or a family rift. We think, “Surely this is not what You had in mind for me. Surely You will come through and make this right.” But still we remain in the stable. We walk through our pain and grief and not around it or over it. There is no shortcut, but only a narrow and hard road to follow.

Jesus knows what it’s like to be left out in the cold. For there to be no room for Him. He knows all about being in a stable.

The beautiful part of the story is that out of the stable came Immanuel. And Immanuel does not mean God watching us from a distance (as Bette Midler sang once). It means God with us, God near us, God for us, and God on our side. It means God became one of us and walked through all our sorrow, pain, grief, and trouble. It means that He still walks with us through all our anxieties and doubts and fears. It means He carried all those things on Him at Calvary. It means that many times, He carries us when we can no longer walk or even crawl.

Let that be your song today: that Immanuel is here and He’s never going to leave you. It’s a guaranteed promise that He will bring you safely through and you will shout at the end that it was all worth it because you discovered Jesus was all He said He was and so much more.

Amen and amen.

Sometimes, I think I’m getting close to having it all figured out and being where I want to be in life. Then I wake up and think, “Wow, that was a good dream.” The reality is that I feel like there’s so much that I’m supposed to know that everyone else knows that I don’t. Like some sort of secret handshake or password. Or one of those pages with the dots on them where you’re supposed to see Jesus and I never do. I just see dots.

I feel like Tom Hanks’ character in the movie Big, just a 10-year old in a 30-something year old body. I’m pretty sure that soon everyone else will figure that out and send me back to fourth grade or something. Which might be a good thing, because I could use a refresher on grammar and punctuation and all that.

I’m beginning to figure out it really isn’t what you know, it’s who you know. Or Who you know. Jesus knows everything. He knows everything I will ever face and will get me through the best, the worst and the rest of it. He also knows me fully and completely and has chosen not to bail on me, but to set His affections on me and love me with a love that’s crazy and wild and passionate.

I know that I am the Beloved and nothing I ever do or don’t do will ever change that. I know that I have infinite worth because Jesus told me so when He spent His precious blood to buy me for the Kingdom.

I know you are Beloved and of infinite worth to Jesus. I know that you are never alone in anything you face. If you’ve trusted Jesus for your salvation, He’s on your side. He’s in you and with you and for you. You don’t have to know everything. You just have to know the One who knows everything. Then you’ll be fine.

So be proud of the face that you are weak, because then He is strongest. Be glad that you are broken, because that’s where true wholeness comes from. Rejoice, because God is working on the canvas of Your life to create something amazing. If He created the universe in 6 days, imagine the work of art He’s been creating in you all this time. It will be a masterpiece that will take your breath away and cause the world to stop and stare and be in awe of a God Who could make something as beautiful as the finished you.

Amen and amen!

My life in the hands of God is like a beat-up instrument in the hands of a gifted musician who knows how to play it and bring forth the most beautiful melodies from it. I may not look new. I may look like I’ve seen better days, but the sound God makes with my life is lovely. The angels stop and take notice of what God is playing with the strings of my life. I can’t believe what’s coming out of me and how something so extrordinary could come out of somebody that’s not all that special or unusual. I’m just me.

God can take your life that’s offered freely to Him and do miraculous things with it. He can take your mess and bring forth a stunnng masterpiece. He can take your broken heart and make it sing a song that catches the world by surprise. One that makes the people around you stop and listen. One that tells of a love story between God and His people and how God never gives up until He wins our hearts.

You are in good hands if you are in God’s hands.

There is no one God can’t use. There is no dark place God can’t shine His light in. There is no broken life God can’t turn into a testimony of His power and grace. There is no hopeless situation He can’t turn into a story that everyone wants to read. He did that already. It’s called the Bible.

I know that if God can play through me, He can play through anybody. He is fine-tuning me and every day I am more and more surprised at the melodies coming out of my life. I am just one person who is learning to surrender and trust that God knows what He’s doing. Nothing extraordinary. But God takes my brokenness and multiplies it to feed a multitude.

Just give God your life and let Him choose the song. You will be amazed at what comes forth. So will everyone around you. I truly believe that one person who is surrendered and available and willing can be the one person to start radical change in the world.

Amen and amen.

Jesus, You are faithful always. You are true always. You are good always. And You are for me and with me always.

I can’t imagine what I would have done today without You there to calm me down. Sitting in my car, looking down at a gas guage reading E for empty, having to pee like Seabiscuit, seeing the low battery on my cell phone, and wondering if my tires would be able to handle all the ice, I found You to be faithful.

Like the song says, You calm my raging sea. When I am in full-on anxiety and overanalytical mode, You step into my maelstrom and speak to the wind and waves, bidding them be still. You speak to my racing heart and bid it to beat normally. You speak to my fears and bid them depart. You speak to my anxious thoughts and they turn to thoughts of You.

Thank You that when nothing goes my way, that when my plans blow up in my face, when my hopes get obliterated beyond recognition, You are still there, holding me like a child and comforting me. You remind me that what I was really looking for all the time in all those things was You. You remind me that You are my best plan, my true hope and– above all– THE WAY.

I feel my weakness keenly tonight. My tendancy is still to default to panic mode and to try to make my own plans work for the 100th time, even after the other 99 times have been fiascos of epic proportion

But You said Your power is made perfect in my weakness. You said that is when You show up best. So I am thankful for my weaknesses, because they remind me that I need You for every breath, every heartbeat, every step and every moment.

Here at Your altar, I come and lay down, ready to die. Do whatever You want with me for Your kindom purposes and Your glory. I am all Yours. Have Your complete way in me, even if that means my hopes for marriage die and my dreams of success fail. What I want, what I really want, is You.

Amen and amen!