I’ve been thinking a lot about Daniel (as in that guy from the book named after him). The first half of that book is really exciting and suspenseful and the second half is just weird (but totally inspired and without error and useful for teaching, etc.).

What is the main takeaway from looking at the life of Daniel? I think in one word it would be faithfulness.

Daniel was faithful to God when it would have been a whole lot easier not to. I’m sure a lot of his fellow Jews who were brought to Babylon ended up compromising with the culture and blending in. Maybe at first they were trying to be relevant to their society, but they ended up bowing down to idols just like the Babylonians.

Daniel’s faithfulness did more to impress the Babylonians than trying to fit in ever could. Daniel faced Jerusalem and prayed three times a day, regardless of whether it brought him acclaim or a trip to the lion’s den. He endured the unjust treatment of a pagan culture and let God be his judge.

By the point Daniel got to the lion’s den, he was probably in his 80’s (which is not to be confused with being from the 80’s, but that is a whole other blog waiting to be written). He had won the respect of three different kings and lived a life that commanded respect. That’s what real faithfulness and obedience will do. Yet, sometimes you have to go against the higher authorities when they conflict with your beliefs and values. He did. Not only that, he was willing to suffer the resulting punishment for his civil disobedience.

He emerged from the lion’s den unscathed because, in his own words, he was blameless before God and innocent before the king. That’s not to say he was sinless or perfect, but in this one case, he was truly without blame. It’s also interesting to point out that he didn’t see God come through until after he had been thrown to the lions.

What’s important to remember is that Daniel didn’t get to that point overnight. He cultivated a habit of obedience over a lifetime of praying three times a day and being immersed in Scriptures. He was faithful in a multitude of small ways over a long period of time before God saw that he was fit to handle something bigger.

So what? If you and I commit to knowing and loving the heart of God through prayer, Scripture and obedience, God will honor that. God seeks after hearts that are fully turned to Him. It starts with being surrendered and available for God to use in any way He sees fit.

God, I desparately want that. I want to be faithful to you in a thousand different small ways and follow You wherever You lead. Take me and use me to further Your own kingdom and glory, no matter what it costs me.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

I’m still thinking about what Bill Wellons said Sunday at Fellowship Bible Church. He said that discipleship is not about having to spend time with God, but getting to spend time with God. Growing and maturing in the faith shouldn’t be things we have to do, but things we get to do.

If you’re in a religion with checklists and rules, then it’s all about what you have to do. When you’re in a relationship with the risen Christ, it becomes all about all about passion and “getting to” instead of “having to”. If I find myself feeling like I have to pray or read my Bible, that means it’s time for a gut check. Ususally, such introspection leads to the revelation that I’ve lost my first love and made it into following laws instead.

The world needs to see us not following another religion with rules and regulations and somber faces, but they need to see us as people who have fallen in love with Jesus and would give anything to follow Him wherever He leads. They don’t need to see good morals or fine ethics or a list of what not to do, but they need to see us in love with God and us being loved by God.

We as humans have an amazing capacity for self-justification. We can find reasons (more like excuses) for why what’s wrong for others is right for us to do (or say or think). If we have to spend so much time and energy justifying what we do, maybe we should simply not do it. Or maybe we could get so caught up in the privilege of following Jesus that these things we feel we need to justify won’t even matter.

As trite as it sound, love is the answer. That is, Christ’s love expressed on the Cross and poured out into our hearts, is the only solution to every problem in the world. And we get to be a part of spreading that love. We get to be His hands and feet. We get to be vessels through which God’s transforming power can radically change the world around us. It’s not a duty, but a delight. Or as John Piper might say, delight is our duty.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

As a fellow ragamuffin on the road whose trying to figure out this whole life thing, I give you permission to be imperfect. To be broken and scarred.

You can be yourself and not be ashamed. You don’t always have to be at your absolute best all the time. You don’t have to put up a wall everytime you go through seasons of discouragement and disillusionment. You can take the mask off. You can be you.

I give you permission to make mistakes, to admit that you’ve veered off the straight and narrow path and lost your way. You don’t have to have every single thing figured and planned and mapped out. You can own up to being weak and feeling like a nobody and feeling alone and insignificant. You don’t always have to be strong and have everything in your life together.

I give you permission to not be religious and super-spiritual. You can be free to say that sometimes during prayer, the words won’t come and all you can do is lie in a fetal position in the arms of Jesus and let Him sing over you.

I can give you permission, not because I’ve finally had my great and monumental breakthrough and am now super-duper saint with a halo. I am one who has been there many times. Sometimes I’ve been able to be transparent and confide in others. Sometimes I’ve put on my best Sunday smile and worn the one-size-fits-all mask.

It’s okay to be a doofus and a nerd and to not fit in. It’s okay to be an outsider, because Jesus and his disciples were really and truly outsiders in terms of the culture and religion of their day.

It’s okay because God delights in you just as you are. He loves you too much to leave you in your filth and shame, but He still loves you even when you’re wallowing in it. God loves you right now where you are.

Let God’s love fill you and change you. Be who God made you to be. Never be ashamed of what God is doing in your life. Let every moment of your waking life be filled with the thought, “My Abba is very fond of me!”

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

“Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care or nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world– all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God” (N.T. Wright).

At the end of my life, what will be my legacy? What will I have produced that lasts? Will it be my 401K? Probably not at this rate. Will it be books I have written or lectures I have given? Not yet (at least not in the non-dream world). Will it be risks taken, adventures had, boundaries crossed? Maybe and maybe not. What will it be?

I’d like to think it will be a legacy of love. Not a legacy of how much Greg so loved the world, but how God so loved the world and made Greg a vessel to pour that love into until it spilled over in joy and great gladness to the world around him.

It will be cups of cold water given out of compassion. It will be acts of kindness done to the least of these who never were able to repay me in my lifetime. It will be those moments when I was not caught up in my own drama and gave selflessly of myself.

Basically, it will be every time I died. Whether it was to my rights or to my plans or to my goals or to my posessions, every death I die will hopefully mean life for someone else. And ultimately real eternal life for me. Not that I’m earning it, but that I am able to experience it more fully as I die to my old, mortal way of living to die.

I think the best way to describe my first moments of heaven will be the ones spoken by Jewel the Unicorn in The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis:  “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that is sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!”

I think the feeling I will have will be the one expressed by Aslan, the Christ-figure (think Lion of Judah): “The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

Then I will know beyond any shadow of a doubt that no good thing is ever lost, whether it be places, people or possessions we truly and deeply loved. And yes, I think even pets. But the best part will be the presence of a tangible Love. The best part of Heaven is that Jesus will be there.

So, I want everything I do to be an act of love, kindness, and compassion that will leave for me a treasure in Heaven which will neither rust nor fade. That means that I must die, so that Christ can live through me. So right here and now, God, I surrender all of me to You to do with as You see fit. Make my life a legacy of love.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

“The mind, by admitting the truth of Christ in the light and power, is vastly enlarged, and has scope and compass given it, is greatly elevated and raised above things of sense, and never acts with so true a liberty as when it acts under a divine command (2 Cor. 3:17). The enemies of Christianity pretend to be free-thinking, whereas really those are the freest reasonings that are guided by faith, and those are men of free thought, whose thoughts are captivated and brought into obedience to Christ” (Matthew Henry).

Jesus said, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31-32).

Liberty is not freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want. Liberty is freedom to live out your destiny to its fullest potential. Liberty is to be who God made you to be and to finally and truly find your truest self.

What many people call liberty are really addictions or acting out of hurt or anger or trying to fill a void. That doesn’t sound free to me. Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong manual, but I read that knowing the truth will make you free. Not knowing about truth, or being familiar with truth, but knowing the Truth. And as Jesus said in another verse in John, the Truth is not a concept or an idea, but a person whose name is Jesus. He is the Truth.

So knowing Him is to be set free. Again, it’s not knowing about Jesus or even really loving the idea of Jesus. It’s knowing and loving Jesus and reading His love letters to us, collected together in the Bible.

I heard something worth passing along today. Sin always enslaves us, but the Truth always sets us free. My way leads to bondage and darkness, but the Way that is Jesus always leads to liberty and light.

So choose liberty and life and light and freedom. Choose whom you will serve today. As for me, I choose Jesus.

One of these days, I will learn not to trust my emotions, especially when I’m tired. It’s easy to let what I’m feeling filter what I’m seeing until I get a very skewed version of events in my head. Generally, I tend to be more judgmental and harsh when I am sleep-deprived. Surely, I’m not the only one who does this.

It’s also very easy for me to be me-centered. As in everyone should cater to me and meet my needs and make me feel affirmed and valued. Plus, giving me chocolate never hurts. I want to be noticed and liked and approved and thought of as cool. My desire to fit in often overwhelms my calling to be set apart. I want to blend in when I should stand out.

So I need to confess that my idol is me. Among other things. Me and my desire to be thought of as super-cool. Why should I desire popularity when my Lord was despised and His early followers were persecuted (and rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer for His name)? Why do I want to make my name great, but not live to make the name of Jesus look great? I am nobody’s savior. I can’t even save myself. But Jesus, whose name is above every name– including mine– can save anyone anywhere at any time.

Usually, a good night’s sleep puts things back into perspective for me. That and chocolate. I need to be reminded again and again that it’s not about me and my happiness, but about God coming into a broken world and redeeming it, while allowing me to be in on it.

God loves me when I am wide awake and tuned in to His heart and when I am tired and out of sync with His voice. He’s ever so patient (or, to use the old King James word I like so much, He’s longsuffering toward me). That He can use me in spite of me amazes me. And when it doesn’t, it should.

God is good, all the time.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of a quick topic for a blog. Kind of a microwave-ready burst of inspiration. Honestly, I got nothin’. The thoughts in my head aren’t going much deeper than “Fire bad. Tree pretty.” I feel like a fog has moved in off the west coast into my brain and settled there.

Ok, I do have this. You don’t have to feel good all the time to be doing good. It’s okay to have moments of discouragement and despair. It’s okay to not be at your best every single minute of every single day. You can be flawed and ordinary sometimes.

In fact, feeling good (or feeling bad) can be misleading. Feelings lie. Even what you think can be misinformed or wrong. What do you trust? Or better yet, Who do you trust?

My hope is in the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth (and me). He knows who I am and what I am thinking. He knows every single blunder, mistake and sin I’ve committed. Ever. And he still loves me.

If there’s a takewaway from this (other than the fact that I seriously need sleep and medication), it’s that God loves you. Not only that, He likes you. He is very, very fond of you.

May that be the last thought before you drift off to sleep and the first remembrance when you awake. May you be filled up completely with the knowledge of God’s love for you. No, wait. May you be filled up completely with God’s love so that it shoots out your eyes and ears and comes out of your mouth as praise and thanksgiving. May you be so filled up that it spills out to those around you in the form of cups of cold water and words of hope and peace.

That’s all I got tonight. Maybe that’s all I need.

The buzzword for the Church these days is for us to be relevant. We have to fit in and assimilate to have inroads with our community. The problem is that believers have done such a good job at being relevant that those outside the church can no longer tell us apart from them. Or worse, they hear us talking one way and living a diametrically different lifestyle.

The lesson I take away from Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is that the better way is faithfulness. Or to use a very non-PC word, obedience. All they did was to be obedient to God by refusing to bow down to the golden image of the king. They were willing to die rather than compromise; too many times we are just dying to compromise. They went through the fire– literally– for their beliefs. The result was that their obedience touched the heart of a king, as well as touching the heart of God. That obedience gave their witness credibility.

We as believers don’t have to be heroes, just faithful. And to me, a hero isn’t someone who goes out and tries to do heroic things. A hero is someone who is faithful in the little things and the details. When the world is bowing down to the lastest idol and you don’t, you stand out. You don’t have to condemn them for bowing down; your standing firm will draw attention. I always like Dwight Moody’s comment that lighthouses don’t have to fire cannons to draw attention to themselves; they just shine.

And the way I see it, we’re not supposed to fit in. We’re supposed to stand out and be set apart. And to shine. The world around us won’t take us seriously as long as we’re just like them. But when they see a difference, it makes a difference.

The one part of the story that troubles me is this. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego weren’t the only Jews who were captives in Babylon. They were just the only ones noted for not compromising. It makes me think that several of the ones taken into captivity did. It must have been hard to stand up against the Babylonians when they saw people they had grown up with and played with and worked with compromising. To see the same people they went to synagogue with bowing down to idols and not bow down must have been really hard.

We’re not called to judge the sins of those around us. That’s God’s job. We’re not even called to judge those who profess faith but don’t live it. We are only called to be obedient, and it will be our obedience that will convict those around us (and possibly bring persecution and suffering). If I’m not living what I profess, the last thing I want to see is someone who is.

Obedience to God in its essence is loving God and loving others. If we do those two things well, everything else will fall into place. Oh yeah, and it’s impossible apart from the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit in you. I almost left that part out.

God, I want to be faithful and obedient right now, where I am, for the next 24 hours. Help me and forgive me when I fail, which will be often. I surrender to Your plan and place myself into Your hands to do whatever You want with me. Here I am. Send me.

Once upon a time, I thought faith was about having all the answers. I thought that maturing in my beliefs meant that I would get to a point where I was always strong and always would do the right thing and would have obtained the new super power of being temptation-proof (like whenever temptations lurked nearby, my spidey-senses would go all tingly). I thought that as a grown-up Christian, I would have my life mapped out in my head and always know what choice to make and what path to take. I think I know better now.

I’ve been a believer for a while. I’m not saying I’ve arrived or even reached maturity, but I’ve learned a lot. And one of those lessons I’ve learned is that I really don’t have all the answers– or even 1% of all the answers. Heck, I don’t even know the questions most of the time.

I’ve figured out that I can have faith without having every answer to every question. In fact, if I knew all the answers, I wouldn’t really need faith, would I? Faith is not that I know everything, but that I know and trust the One who knows.

I can have an active and growing faith without having a complete roadmap for my life. Or, that I have my spiritual GPS planned out for every single step from start to finish. Maybe just knowing the next step is enough. After all, faith means not knowing where you are being led, but knowing and trusting the One who leads and knowing that He has never and will never steer me wrong.

I’ve learned that you really can’t judge yourself in comparison with anyone else. For one, you (or I) tend to have selective vision when it comes to how you see others. I find that I project my own fears, faults and foibles onto others. But the main reason that comparison never works is that there is no cookie-cutter plan. God made me unique with a specific plan for my life that’s different than anyone else’s. And it is a good plan.

So faith for me means trusting without knowing the answers, following without knowing the way, and yielding without understanding the plan. All that sounds a whole lot like surrendering. Faith means not pretending that I know all the answers or that I know the plans I have for me or that I have it all figured out. Faith is honestly admitting that I am weak, but that He is strong, that I am lost, but He is the Way and that I am clay in the hands of a Master Potter.

So I will be the best me I can be. I will be authentic and transparent and honest to God. And you can’t get more honest than this:

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

I find myself praying a lot lately for change. Not the shiny kind that shows up under the couch cushions, although that is a nice bonus. I mean the kind where I pray for God to change my work environment, my marital status, etc.

The dangerous part of that prayer is that most of the time, God responds with something to the effect of: “You want change? Let’s start with you.”

God’s idea of change is usually not that He magically transforms my circumstances to my liking, but that He changes me. God wants not to change my circumstances, but for me to be the change in my circumstances.

Did I mention how I really don’t like that idea? I mean, change is hard, takes time, messes with my head. . . and so on and so forth, yada yada yada.

God’s will for me is not so much where I am or what I’m doing, but who I am. And Whose I am defines who I am. I am God’s child, and here in this life I am His hands and feet and voice. His will is not my comfort, but for me to be Christ to my world.

Thankfully, He is more than patient with me. He knows what He’s doing, although I always tend to forget and doubt and complain. A lot.

God, change me. Make me the person who will be the change in my workplace. Make me the kind of godly man who will draw a godly woman to me by my character and my actions. Make me like Jesus.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.