Thankfulness is the anecdote for bitterness and self-preoccupation (thanks to Michael Easley for that one!) You can’t be thankful when you are always comparing yourself to someone else and envying what that person has that you don’t. Thankfulness means that I am not entitled, but that everything I have, including the air I breath, is a gift. Every person I have in my life is a gift and I should treasure every moment I have with them.

I struggle a lot with envy and bitterness. Those few moments when I am able to genuinely be thankful are sweet. When I am genuinely able to rejoice for that person who has something I wish I had, I am free. Those moments are getting more frequent lately, thanks to Jesus in me.

I think thankfulness isn’t something you wake up one morning having it mastered. You learn gratitude by reminding yourself to thank God for those little things– the blessings and the hardships, the surprises and the annoyances, when things go as planned and when things go awry.

Thankfulness means I surrender my idea of how my world should be and take my world as it is, the way God ordained it. Thankfulness means I acknowledge that God’s plans and purposes are way better than my own. Thankfulness means I have no rights but to deserve hell and that if God never did one thing more for me after saving and redeeming my life, He would be worthy of an eternity of my thanks.

The hardest part for me is to get that into my heart right now. I have to believe it even when I don’t feel it, because feelings can deceive. But God is always Truth. I am learning to rejoice in little everyday victories over small sins. I am learning to be patient with myself and give myself grace to be human and to fail. To realize that when I am tired, my thoughts and feelings get skewed and I shoudn’t trust them.

I plan on OD’ing on turkey Thursday and going into a tryptophan-induced coma. And trusting God with my life.

I’ve been a believer for a while, but I feel like I am going back to basics and unlearning some things I learned wrong the first time. Not that I’m placing blame on anyone or any church. I think we as American Christians have been taught wrong in some areas and have let our culture dictate our theology, rather than the other way around.

So what does maturity in the faith look like? Is it something that automatically comes with age? Is it all about being Super-Spiritual Bible Answer KnowledgeMan? Is it about being able to reach a place of spiritual superiority where you can finally look down on everyone else from your lofty devotional heights?

After reading The Calvary Road, I have some thoughts.

Maturity means humility. It means looking for fault with myself first and then in the other person. It means that even if the other person was wrong, my own reaction of anger, impatience, pride, etc. was also wrong. I have to own up to my own failings and not worry so much about the failings of others. But I also have to be willing to speak all the truth in love, even gently admonishing a brother or sister who has gone astray. But not until I have pulled that huge plank of wood out of my eye to see the speck in theirs.

Maturity means brokenness. It means acknowledging that after all I’ve done for God, that I am still an unworthy servant. That my best works are stained with sinful motives and that my best intentions are chocked full of selfish ambition. Yet even in my unworthiness, Jesus calls me friend and can take my dross and turn it into gold. If I come to Him, confessing my filthy rags and holding out my empty hands, He will fill me up with so much of Himself that it will spill out all over anyone who is around me.

Maturity means seeking revival in my own heart constantly. I can never come to a place where I am satisfied with where I am. I must acknowledge that I am in desparate need of Jesus from the first moment I wake up to my last thought before sleep takes me. Revival means being continually cleansed from sin and filled with Jesus, a cup that runneth over.

Maturity means I don’t have a 50-year plan of saintliness and godliness, but I say, “Lord, I want to be faithful and obedient to You for the next 24 hours.” Somedays, it means, “Help me to just believe for this moment.”

I have not arrived, but I am on my way. I have not reached perfection, but I am a masterpiece in the making. I didn’t travel a thousand miles today, but I did take one step. Actually, more like 9 steps back and 10 steps forward. But God willing, I will take one more step of faith tomorrow. Maybe one day I’ll take that leap.

This is for you if you have wandered away from the faith or know of someone who has. This is a hymn by Robert Lowry, who penned such other hymns as “Nothing But the Blood” and “Shall We Gather at the River”. This expresses the Father God’s heart for all his children who have gone astray.

“Where is my wand’ring boy tonight—
The boy of my tend’rest care,
The boy that was once my joy and light,
The child of my love and prayer?

Oh, where is my boy tonight?
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
My heart o’erflows, for I love him, he knows;
Oh, where is my boy tonight?

Once he was pure as morning dew,
As he knelt at his mother’s knee;
No face was so bright, no heart more true,
And none was so sweet as he.

Oh, where is my boy tonight?
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
My heart o’erflows, for I love him, he knows;
Oh, where is my boy tonight?

Oh, could I see you now, my boy,
As fair as in olden time,
When prattle and smile made home a joy,
And life was a merry chime!

Oh, where is my boy tonight?
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
My heart o’erflows, for I love him, he knows;
Oh, where is my boy tonight?

Go for my wand’ring boy to-night;
Go, search for him where you will;
But bring him to me with all his blight,
And tell him I love him still!

Oh, where is my boy tonight?
Oh, where is my boy tonight?
My heart o’erflows, for I love him, he knows;
Oh, where is my boy tonight?”

I have a theory that goes something like this. When you’re in your twenties, pretty much the first thing you look for in the opposite sex is looks. Is he hot? Is she fine? I hear the talk about how a girl wants some rugged, handsome man to come sweep her off her feet and how a guy really wants the supermodel to go out with him.

When a girl says she wants to be persued, what she really means is that she wants a very specific person or type of person to do the persuing. All others need not apply. Guys for the most part only pursue the ones they consider very appealing and attractive.

I don’t think this applies to every single twentysomething out there, but I’d safely bet it applies to 95+% of the singles ages 20-29 out there.

When you get closer to my age, your thinking changes. Hopefully. You start to see beauty as not so much what the person looks like, but how he or she lives. Not so much cosmetics, but godly character make a woman beautiful and a man handsome. How they treat others and show compassion to the least of these makes them attractive. They aren’t nearly as concerned about being fashinable as about being faithful  and obedient.

Ultimately, the most beautiful part about any person is Jesus and the more He shines through that person, the more beautiful that person becomes. Apart from Jesus, all of us are dressed in filthy rags and stained with sin and are ugly messes. But Jesus loving us makes us beautiful again. The more you surrender yourself to Christ and lay down your life for Him, the more He shows in and through you. And there is nothing more attractive than that, in my opinion.

Jesus, make us more like You daily. Take our broken lives and make them whole, take the ashes of our messed-up world and make them into a beauty that will dazzle the world around us.

Amen.

For some odd reason, I was thinking about that part from Kill Bill Vol. 2 where Bill is describing super heroes. All the rest put on a costume, he says, to be the superhero and fight evil. That is their diguise. Superman, on the other hand, wears a costume, the suit and tie bit, to blend in. His regular clothes are the blue S outfit. In other words, for him being a hero is not something he becomes by putting on a costume, but something he does every day as a part of who he is.

That’s a hero. Not someone who tries to do great things, but someone who does what he does and performs ordinary feats in extraordinary circumstances. A hero is someone who has built a lifestyle of habits of doing good things and helping other people. They never consciously set out to be a hero, but to do their job. When that extraordinary circumstance occurs, they only do what they know to do, what they have done day in and day out.

In the spiritual sense, the heroes of the faith were (and are) not people who set out to be spiritual giants. They set out to be obedient and faithful. They cultivated a lifetime of making habits of obedience in small things and faithfulness with the talents God gave them. Then God brought the fiery furnace or the lions den and they responded by doing what they had always done– be faithful and obey God.

We are not called to be heroic, but faithful. We are not called to rescue the world (I think that job’s taken). We are called to be witnesses to what we’ve seen and heard and obey what God has called us to.

Jesus is the ultimate hero. His mission, astounding in its unwavering devotion and purpose, was to please His Father and to do and say the things God called him to do and say. He was perfectly faithful and obedient. He calls us to do the same. Love God, love others, trust and obey, no matter what. God may put you in a circumstance where you end up a hero, or he may call you to obscurity. Your and my response should be the same either way– trust and obey.

“There He goes – a hero. A savior to the world.
Here He stands with scars in His hands.
With love He gave His life so we could be free.
The Savior of the world.” (Abandon)

“[Jesus] told his next story to some who were complacently pleased with themselves over their moral performance and looked down their noses at the common people: ‘Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax man. The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: ‘Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.’ ‘Meanwhile the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, ‘God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.’ Jesus commented, ‘This tax man, not the other, went home made right with God. If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face, but if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.'” (Luke 18:9-14, The Message).

Which one of these am I? Pharisee or Publican? By the way, Publican is just another way of saying tax collector, but it alliterates and it makes me sound smarter. But I digress.

When I listen to a sermon, do I automatically bring up someone else to mind who should be there to hear the convicting message, or do I apply it to my own heart? I think I’m the Pharisee on this one.

When I look at a homeless man who looks like my idea of homeless– filthy, bedraggled and drunk– do I think to myself “Thank God that’s not me or anyone I know!” or “That is someone Jesus died for and that very well could have been me but for the grace of God”? Again, I confess to being a Pharisee.

Do I look back on my week and see all the obvious sins I avoided and religious duties I performed, or do I see within a nature still bent toward sin and as capable of any vile thing as the worst criminal? Pharisee yet again.

The worst thing I can say is, “Thank God I’m not like that Pharisee,” because it just proves that I am exactly like him. At least he’s honest about his hypocrisy. I try to pretend to be a tax collector while strutting around like the biggest Pharisee of them all.

Lord, have mercy on me, a Pharisee.

It’s good to stretch before exercising. So says Captain Obvious.

It’s also good to stretch yourself in other areas. Like for me tonight.

I went over to Brentwood Baptist Church and helped out with Room at the Inn, a program they have that gives food and shelter to homeless people. I didn’t do much, quite honestly. I talked to a few of the men who were there and passed the salt shaker. I felt a bit out of place and awkward and not sure what to do with myself (which is pretty normal for me most of the time, actually).

But I think I stretched myself a little bit. Maybe not even a noticeable amount, but a little. I’ve heard that once you are stretched, you never go back to your original shape. You’re never quite as rigid as you used to be, but a bit more flexible.

Sunday night, I went to an evangelism training class. One point I walked away with was “The one who is listening is the one who’s in control.” Of course, none of us are really in control; God is. But we earn the right to speak into people’s lives by listening to them. Again, I got stretched just a tiny bit.

Go stretch yourself. Do something you’re afraid of. Take risks. The biggest way I’ve found to be stretched is to pray, “Not my will, but Yours,” and actually mean it. God is the best at stretching us into people that look just like His son, Jesus. I think the Bible calls it “being renewed by the transforming of your mind.”

God, stretch me until my arms can reach around the hurting and my heart can wrap around their pain. Stretch my eyes until they can see the people You love who are in need and stretch my ears until I can hear their cries. Stretch me until I become more like you.

Amen.

In his book, The Calvary Road, Roy Hession makes an interesting point about what it means to walk in the light as opposed to walking in darkness.  “When anything reproves us, shows us up as we really are– that is light. ‘Whatsoever doth make manifest is light.’ But whenever we do anything or say anything (or don’t say anything) to hide what we are or what we’ve done– that is darkness.”

Simply put, light reveals and darkness conceals.

If I am walking in the light, I am open and upfront about everything in my life, my struggles and my victories, even my addictions and strongholds. I am honest with myself and with others and especially with God. I am completely transparent. I seek out fellowship with others because I know I can’t walk the faith alone and that every believer needs other believers to speak into their lives, both encouragement and reproof (in love).

If I walk in darkness, I hide what I’m feeling and thinking. I put on my mask that says I have everything under control. I keep my faults and struggles hidden from everyone, especially myself. I am not going to be around people who might try to see beyond my well-practiced and rehearsed speeches and mannerisms. I make excuses for my behavior and focus on wrongs done to me.

I have walked both ways. I’m learning how to walk in the light as He is in the light. I’m learning slowly how to share my life with others and let them share their life with me. I still put on masks and lie sometimes, but I think not as much as I used to.

The beauty of Jesus and what He does is that if I surrender and say, “Not my will but Yours,” He takes those words and changes my heart to want those things, then He changes me. He is my light and His light in me is what anyone sees when they see good in me.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

If I put on a Sunday mask or

I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately and wondering where you are in this great big world. I’m fairly certain that I haven’t met you yet, but I can’t wait until I do. You already inspire me to want to be a better man and more importantly, a man who follows hard after Christ.

I don’t know if you’re like me and you’ve come so close to mind-numbing despair so many times and almost given up and quit about a thousand times. But there’s something, no matter how tiny, that won’t let us give up or give in. Maybe the same God that drew us each to Himself is drawing us ever so slowly together.

I am going to start praying for you tonight. I will pray not that God will make your way easier, but that He will walk through the hard roads with you and you will know sweet intimacy with Him. I pray not for prosperity for you, but that you will come to know with your whole being that God is your dwelling place, your shelter and your inheritance.

I may not have a lifetime to love you in when we meet, but I will love you a lifetime’s worth in the time we are given. It won’t be a perfect me and a perfect you in a perfect setting forever, but Christ in me loving Christ in you in the midst of the awesome advancing of God’s kingdom on earth.

So know that I think about you a lot and those thoughts make me glad. You will be so much more than I deserve and I will (I hope and pray) never stop being thankful to God for you.

Don’t run after me (or any other guy), but run after Jesus. I will try to not run after you, but also run after Jesus and maybe when we are both running toward the same Savior, we will run into each other.

You are clothed with strength and dignity; you can laugh at the days to come. “Charm can mislead and beauty soon fades. The woman to be admired and praised is the woman who lives in the Fear-of-God.” That’s what I pray you are becoming. And I pray that I am becoming a warrior and a mighty man of God who will be worthy of you.

Until we meet, God make His face shine on you and give you His blessed peace.