fellowship

Advent Thoughts

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I love Advent. Even though I grew up in a Baptist tradition that didn’t include Advent, I am so glad I have found the joy and anticipation that Advent brings. Christmas isn’t a day on a calendar or even a season; it’s an event that changed absolutely everything.

I love the fact that God Almighty became a fetus inside the womb of Mary. I love that He was born to Mr. and Mrs. Nobody in a barn trough and grew up in Nowhere and chose other nobodies and nowheres to be His disciples and first missionaries. I, too, once was a nobody and an outsider who didn’t fit in. In some ways, I still am.

I love the fact that Jesus walked in my shoes and felt all my feelings and saw the same kinds of troubles and pain that I see. I love the fact that He walked my road perfectly and offered up to God for me the kind of obedience I could never even dream of, much less carry out.

I love the fact that God still has a heart for the orphan and the widow, the homeless and the outcast, the broken and the ignored, and all those who don’t fit in anywhere. I love the fact that God has His affections set on me and an loved me with an unquenchable love that I can’t lose or destroy or run off.

I love the fact that while people are human and will eventually fail me and I will fail them, my Jesus never will. While everyone I know, including me, is fickle and changeable as the wind, Jesus is the same in all my yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows, and forevers.

I love the idea that we are celebrating this Christmas season the impossible becoming possible, the unthinkable becoming reality, and all lost causes finding hope again. I love to think that God did this to show that yes, Love would go that far.

I love most of all that today after I forgot again the reason for this Season, You reminded me. You always do. I’m always running away and You’re always waiting for me with open arms. I’m always breaking promises and being weak and denying You, but You are always ready and more than willing to forgive and to finish this great work You’ve started in me.

These and so many other reasons are why I love Advent.

Unclean

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For the better part of two days, something that Mike Glenn said at Kairos has been running around in my brain.

He related the story of how God showed Peter a vision in which a whole assortment of food came down from heaven and God said, “Eat.” Peter said, “But that’s unclean and against my religion (I’m paraphrasing a bit here).

God said, “What I have made, don’t you dare call unclean.”

Did you catch that? Let me put it this way. “God said, “I made you, and what I have made, don’t you ever call unclean or ugly or second-rate or worthless or no good. Don’t you dare put down the one I made, because when you do, you’re insulting Me.”

God made you. That gives you great worth. After you fell into sin and brokenness, He redeemed you. That makes you priceless.

Hear this. You are not what you own. You are not what you do. You are not what you drive or where you live or what you wear.

You are not the names people call you or the names you call yourself. You are not your past or your failures or your shortcomings.

You are not your usefulness or your abilities or your net worth or your talent level. None of these things.

You are who God says you are. You are His child, Ransomed, Redeemed, Living Temple, Saint, Saved One, and, my favorite, Beloved.

I love what Henri Nouwen says. Prayer is listening to the One who says good things about you. The One who calls you Beloved and invites you to His lap time and time again.

The Creator God who made all that is knows your name. He knows every deep, dark secret you keep and every promise broken and every lie told and every intention unfulfilled.

And He loves you anyway.

Because of what He did sending Jesus to the cross for you in your place, you are holy, righteous, blameless, innocent, perfect, and His forever.

You are unclean no more. You are the BELOVED!

Going Deeper

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I’m not one to call myself a prophet or to claim I receive prophetic words from God. I think He speaks to me, like He did today, but I’m not the one to judge whether what He said to me was prophecy. The word was “Go deeper.”

That’s what I believe the Spirit of God is telling the people of God: “Go deeper.”

You can stay in the shallow end of your faith and stay comfortable and have one foot in the kingdom of God and one foot in the flashy, multimedia world. You can stay where the water is only ankle-deep and where what you say doesn’t have to match up with how you live.

But You will always live defeated. You will always be a victim and never a victor. Your worship will always be dead, your prayers cold, your Bible just words on a page. You will always be ruled by fear and doubt. You will always give in to temptation and never see deep healing in the deepest , darkest places of your heart.

Going deeper means that maybe you have to sacrifice the hip and trendy crowd for the homeless and the broken crowd. You may stop hanging out with the oh-so-cool artsy crowd and go to the outcasts and the hurting and the shamed.

Going deeper means trading in a feel-good sentimental kind of love for a selfless sacrificial kind of love. It means that you give without any expectations of ever getting back. It means you are willing to lay down your life in a million tiny deaths each day.

Going deeper means that you say YES to Jesus, no matter what. You go where He says go, you give what He says give, you love who He say to love, and you do what He calls you to do.

I will be the first to admit that I have been a casual fan of Christ far more than I have been a follower. But that’s what going deeper means– to stop being a sideline fan who roots for the Home Team and be a follower who gets your hands and feet dirty and messy, but find out that those are the very hands and feet of Jesus touching, reaching, and healing a broken world through you.

This isn’t my normal positive, encouraging blog. This is my blog that says that if you want to know more of this love that is deeper than your sin, wider than your understanding, and higher than your imagination, you have to surrender.

As always, I’m just a nobody trying to tell everybody about Somebody who can save anybody. I’m just one beggar telling other beggars where to find the Bread of Life. I’m a ragamuffin who has joy because my Abba Father calls me His beloved.

What Community Means: Part 2

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In yet another sellout, I am putting out a sequel to my last blog. But before you accuse me of going Hollywood, let me offer a few words of explanation. I left out some stuff in my last blog. Deep, right?

Being a part of the community of faith means these things as well:

You are only a stranger once; after that, you’re family. You are a fellow pilgrim travelling along the same narrow road.

No matter where you go, you will always carry your brothers and sisters with you in your heart, in your mind, and in your soul. Each brother or sister is only a prayer away.

You are always held and carried by strong arms of prayer and by the God who hears them. That’s in good times and bad, through sunny weather and storms. Regardless.

Sometimes, you will be strong for someone else who can’t be and speak to God on their behalf; sometimes, you will be weak and need someone else to stand in the gap for you.

Your family isn’t just those who are related by blood to you and share a common ancestry, but all of those who seek after God with hearts made alive and minds transformed and lives changed by the resurrection power of Christ.

Last of all, community means that above all, we seek to be in unity and to have the mind of Christ in all matters. That we do everything in our power to make our relationships work and to seek reconciliation and restoration when they don’t. It means to put others’ needs before our own and to seek to serve rather than be served.

That’s what community means.

What Community Means

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When you and I said an eternal YES to Jesus, we became a part of the universal community of faith. That means:

You and I are stuck with each other. There’s no way biblically you can justify turning your back on me and no way I can ever give up on you.

You will never walk a single day through a single storm alone. You will never walk through the deepest darkest valley by yourself.

Your joys will be my joys, your sorrows will be mine, and your burdens lightened because I will share your load.

You can be yourself, warts and all, and I can do the same, and neither one of us will ever have to fear judgment or condemnation.

We will speak the truth in love to each other and gently guide the errant ones back on to the path and keep each other honest, transparent, and steadfast with our eyes on the prize.

Since this community of faith is made up of broken and imperfect people, we will often hurt and neglect each other, but the hallmark of this community is forgiveness and second chances.

We have one God, one Savior Jesus Christ, one faith, one baptism, one goal, and one love to share with a fragmented and scarred world.

Every single person matters, and every single person is essential to the community bringing forth the visible image of God into our world.

You can only be you and I can only be me. We each have a unique place in the mosaic of faith that no one else can fill, and a part to play in God’s unfolding drama that no one else can play.

The Church is all of us. The Church is not you and the Church is not me. Alone, we are vulnerable and susceptible to enemy attack, but standing together under the banner of Christ, nothing can overcome us or separate us from God’s love.

Community means all these things and much more. Community means that you and I are unique and special. That we are not alone. That we are wanted and deeply loved by the Father who called us all into this koinonia, this fellowship of saints.

That’s what community means.

Taken, Blessed, Broken, Given

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lifeofthebeloved

“During the meal, Jesus took and blessed the bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples: Take, eat. This is my body” (Matthew 26:26).

I’m in the middle of another Henri Nouwen book and I am loving it. He more than any other writer (except for maybe Brennan Manning) always seems to speak to where I am right here and now.

He says, “To identify the movements of the Spirit in our lives, I have found it helpful to use four words: ‘taken,’ ‘blessed,’ broken,’ and ‘given.'”

I had never thought about it that way before. I never looked at Jesus breaking the bread at Passover and made an analogy to my own life.

We are taken (or chosen) by God who loved us from the start. We are blessed by Him with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms. We are broken by our own sin and the broken and marred world we live in with so much poverty, injustice, and inhumanity. We are given to be God’s hands and feet to bring healing and justice and compassion into the world.

I read somewhere that my life is loaves and fishes. Remember the ones that Jesus used to feed the 5,000? In and of myself, I can’t do much. But if I am blessed and broken and poured out, God can bless so many more through me.

News flash: God takes and uses broken lives, scarred hearts, screwed-up pasts, and promises left unfulfilled. He can use anybody. In fact, He more often than not prefers the outcasts and nobodies and failures to be the ones to turn the world upside down (see the 12 disciples for examples).

Lord, may I be taken by You, Who chose me before I was born and gave me the name Beloved, and blessed with as much of You as I can stand. Break my heart for the things that break Yours and then give me out to those in need.

PS The book I’m reading is Life of the Beloved. Expect more blogs to come out of this. I’m not even halfway through. And, to throw in yet another shameless plug, go buy or download or pilfer or ingest this book as soon as humanly possible. It’s that good.

Bedtime thoughts

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Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-40).

That’s it. Love God and love others.

But for you to love God, you have to know the reality that God already loves you. For you to love others as yourself, you have to love yourself. Ultimately, you can’t do it. Well, I will only speak for myself here and say that I can’t love God or anybody else, even me, on my own strength. I need Jesus in me, pouring out His agape love, or else I am empty and cold and love-less.

Sometimes, God calls you to love yourself as you love your neighbor. Sometimes, it’s easier to love someone else than to love that person you hang around with every minute of every day. That person who looks back at you in the mirror with accusing eyes that speak of all the impure thoughts, mixed motives, and selfish ambition.

That’s when you and I have to believe what God says about who we are over what we see and think and feel. As a friend of mine told me once, “What you think and feel will lie to you.” But God never will.

God is true. God is love. And God loves you.

And you have all the power of Christ that overcame the grave in you. You have His perfect righteousness that covers your own wretched self-righteous rags of filth.

So be free to love. Love God, love others and love you.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

My bucket list

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First of all, I’d like to know who came up with the expression “kick the bucket” and who first associated it with dying. I’m not losing any sleep over it, but it would be nice to know just in case I’m ever on Jeopardy or a caller on a morning radio show with a chance to win a fabulous prize. I’m just sayin’.

But for real, I do have a bucket list of sorts. It’s not written down, but I have one item on my bucket list. Only one. My one bucket list wish is to hear Jesus say to me at the end of my road, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” That’s all. To please Jesus is not only on my bucket list, it is my bucket list. That being said, I pretty much suck at it. Most of the time, I try to please just about anyone and everyone else before I even attempt to please Jesus.

Still, that’s what I want. More than anything else. Sure, I’d like to see Scotland or meet Bono. And for the record, I would try skydiving, but I have a burning desire to NOT DIE! Plus, I’m not really keen on heights, which is pretty much a prerequisite for jumping out of a plane at 1 gazillion feet in the air.

I want to make Jesus proud of  me. I want to be His hands and feet and serve Him every chance I get, whether He be the person at the cash register at Publix or the homeless man on the corner looking for spare change. I want my whole life to be one big THANK YOU note to Him.

I think I’ll get there. In fact, I know I will, because Jesus told me that He would never leave me or forsake me. He said He would finish the good work He started in me. When He sees a heart that yearns to please Him, He honors that.

So I probably have the shortest bucket list on the planet. Just hopefully not the shortest bucket.

My two cents on spiritual warfare

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A group of guys and I have been watching a DVD series on spiritual warfare by Chip Ingram called The Invisible War (and yes, that was a shameless plug). It got me thinking about the mindset of so many American believers (including me) regarding the whole topic of spiritual warfare. Plainly put, either most of us don’t believe there is an war going on with an enemy that is constantly seeking our destruction. If we believe, we sure don’t live like it much of the time. Again, me included.

The war is real. The enemy is real. In this world, we are not tourists on vacation, or passengers on some kind of luxury cruise, but soldiers engaged in battle. Our ignorance of the battle and our enemy can only do us harm. We need to wake up to realize that we are under attack. But here’s the best part.

The battle is already won. Chip Ingram said, “As believers in Christ, we don’t fight FOR victory. We fight FROM victory.” That’s the good news (which is why it’s called the gospel!). But there is still a battle.

We fight back by putting on the armor of God as described in Ephesians 6: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit. We should pray these on every morning and pray these for each other on a daily basis. We should pray with eyes wide open to the spiritual realm, asking God to give us eyes to see the battle around us like the Elijah prayed for his servant when they were surrounded by the Syrian army. We should pray for discernment and wisdom. Most of all, we should pray at all times to be Spirit-filled and Spirit-controlled, taking every thought captive and submitting them to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

We must fight together. If you are fighting the enemy on your own, apart from other believers, you may succeed for a season, but you will ultimately grow weary and faint. You will stumble and fall. You need other believers praying God’s protection over you, encouraging you and keeping you honest.

We fight ultimately with one weapon– LOVE. Not as a feeling, but as a decisive act of the will. We fight by showing that Calvary’s love is stronger than hate and that love overcomes anything. Chip Ingram said, “Love is giving to another person what they need the most when they deserve it least.” Love is doing whatever you can, even to your own detriment, for the good of the beloved. It means dying to yourself and your rights and own ideas about how the world should work.

So live with eyes wide open, hands raised, side by side with your brothers and sisters in Christ. And remember that the battle is already won and that we have overcome!

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Some not-so-original thoughts on prayer

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“To pray, I think, does not mean to think about God in contrast to thinking about other things, or to spend time with God instead of spending time with other people. Rather, it means to think and live in the presence of God. As soon as we begin to divide our thoughts about God and thoughts about people and events, we remove God from our daily life and put him into a pious little niche where we can think pious thoughts and experience pious feelings. … Although it is important and even indispensable for the spiritual life to set apart time for God and God alone, prayer can only become unceasing prayer when all our thoughts — beautiful or ugly, high or low, proud or shameful, sorrowful or joyful — can be thought in the presence of God. … Thus, converting our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer moves us from a self-centred monologue to a God-centred dialogue” (Henri Nouwen).

Prayer is not about me letting God in on information He was unaware of, or getting Him to do or change things for me. Prayer is about getting to know the heart and mind of God. It’s about seeing my problems and issues with His eyes. It’s about me being conformed into His image, which is ultimately God’s will for all of us.

Prayer is not just about me alone with God. It’s about me and other believers coming together in one accord before God, praying as one. It’s about seeing and seeking God in every waking moment.

All that to say that I am not really that good at prayer. I can pray in emergencies or crisis, but I forget to pray when I feel I am in status quo normal mode. Sometimes, I even forget about God and all He’s done for me. But I’m learning not to come at God all the time asking for things and not sticking around for His responses. I’m learning to come to God and be open to whatever He has for me. I’m learning to be still and listen. I’m learning to quiet my mind and be still. I’m learning to pray not my will, but Thine.

I am a student in the school of prayer who has a very patient Master who won’t ever flunk me or get frustrated with me or give up on me. He is pleased with my weak efforts and my directionless monologues out of a mind that is so easily distracted by anything and everything else. I have an Interpreter who will take the groans and sighs of mine that can’t find words and turn them into perfect prayers.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.