This is too good not to share.

God, thank You for being You. Thank You that You are in charge and I am not. Thank you for having every single molecule in the universe under Your control and every single moment under your Lordship. You are better than any words that I could possibly come up with to praise You.

Forgive me for hating on judgmental people when I can be very legalistic and pharasee-like (pharasaical? pharaseeistic? You know what I mean). Forgive me for condemning the spirit of greed in this generation while being envious of their possessions at the same time. Forgive me for reading books and always thinking that this person or that person really should read this part, when all along You meant it for me.

I am weak, but You are strong. So many times, I will listen to every other voice before I listen to Yours. I will go through stretches of my life where I barely give You a thought at all. Anything and everything in my life takes priority over You. But you love me still.

I have an amazing capacity to justify my own behavior and to elevate myself over others. Yet you gently remind me that I am still a work in progress and that while You love me, I stand at the cross on level ground with all Your children.

Bless You that tomorrow is a new day full of new mercies that never fail. Bless You that You have declared me sinless and righteous and one day You will make me just that. I am nothing, have nothing, and can give nothing but what You’ve given me.

Take my life as an offering and use it wherever, whenever, and however You want. All I have is Yours. All I am is Yours.

Thank You. Thank You! THANK YOU!

Amen.

I like grace. I mean I really, really like grace. I like the idea of it. I especially like being the recipient of it from other people and from God. I love it when I am able to see past my own pettiness and show grace to others as well, though it’s not as often as I would like.

My favorite definition of grace is this: “God’s riches at Christ’s expense.” It has been definited as “God’s unmerited favor.” I have also heard that grace is getting what you don’t deserve, while mercy is not getting what you do deserve.

Brennan Manning writes, “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.” He also states, “To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.”

I think he is better than just about anybody outside the Bible at really grasping and defining and explaining grace. I know that there are consequences to my sin, but to think that grace covers the penalty and the punishment from God is sometimes overwhelming. Why should I be given grace? I can’t think of one good reason.

I do think we are given grace to show it to others. We can say, “This is what God is really like. He’s not out to get you. If He really wanted, He could strike every single human on the planet dead with a single thought. He woudn’t even have to say a word. He would be totally justified, because we are all sinners with desparately wicked hearts who fall short on a daily basis. But He doesn’t, and that’s grace.”

Honestly, most Christians suck at showing grace. We can give you a law and point to a verse that backs it up (whether that verse is used in its historical and cultural context is beside the point). If you don’t measure up, we are good at labelling you and condemning you and turning our backs on you. Not many people are really good at demonstrating the grace of God.

Lord, make me an instrument of your grace. You have shown grace to me too many times to count, starting at the moment of my birth to the point where You made me alive in salvation to even just this moment. Help me to love the unlovely and to be patient with those everyone else has given up on and to reach out to the lonely and the outcast in their plight. Help me to see Jesus in the face of the orphan and the widow, the poor and the leper. Help them to see Jesus in me as I reach out in compassion with a cup of cold water and my testimony of Your faithfulness.

Left to myself, I am cold and callous and unloving. Only You can love them through me. So thank you for your grace by which I stand and take the next breath.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

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.