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.

We speak againt the devil not by our own power and authority, but under the blood of Jesus and by His own resurrection power and the authority that God gave Him over everything in the universe. I personally never say, “I rebuke you,” but “The Lord rebuke you.” And remember that our fight is not against people but against the demonic forces behind the scenes.

That said, I have some reminders for the devil.

1) When he reminds me of my weakness, I remind him that Christ’s power is made perfect through my weakness.

2) When he reminds me of my failures, I remind him that God works all things (especially failures) together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.

3) When he reminds me of the filthy rags that I pass for my own righteousness, I remind him that I have Christ’s robes of righteousness and that God sees not my pitiful excuse for righteousness, but Christ’s perfect and complete obedience in fulilling the law for me.

4) When he reminds me of things left undone or unsaid, I remind him that in Christ every morning is a chance to start over. It’s not how you began will matter, but how you finished.

5) When he reminds me of the fact that he is stronger than I am (in my own strength), I remind him that as a child of the King, I have all power and authority from God over him and the world and my own flesh. Christ is in me, the hope of glory!

6) Finally, when he reminds me of my past, I can (under the blood of Jesus) remind him of HIS FUTURE!

The most important reminder is for myself. I am not fighting a battle in which the outcome is undecided and hangs in the balance. I fight a battle that’s already won. Christ has overwhelmingly conquered. As Chip Ingram says, I fight not for victory, but from victory!

As always, I believe. Or I want to believe most days. Help me to believe every day and then live it out.

I thought about calling this taxicab confessions, because this is risque stuff. Ok, not really. They’re just confessions. But this time it’s not people confessing sins to the Church. This is what it would sound like if the Church (or a spokesperson for the Church) could confess to the people she has been trying to reach. Here goes:

We confess to you that we have missed the mark. We have obscured grace and the gospel and made a big deal about following a lot of rules and regulations. Most of the time, We’re more concerned with rules than with justice, with giving more than compassion. We’re really good at making much of ourselves and our programs and strategies, but not so good at making much of Jesus and the Cross.

We confess that we’ve been obsessed with “taking back our country” and not about trying to advance the Kingdom of God. We’re all about the American Dream, but less so about God’s vision for the world. We need less of tea parties and more of the “cup of cold water” parties, as in “if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward” (Matthew 10:42).

We acknowledge that God created us in His image, but we confess that we have returned the favor by creating a god in our own image who just happens to hate who we hate and endorses our polilitical platforms and sends liberals to hell just because they are liberals. Our god judges only those whose sins are sins we don’t happen to struggle with. Our god would condemn homosexuality and promiscuity, but never gluttony or sloth. And especially not pride.

We confess that we have been silent when we should have spoken out about injustice and poverty. We confess our hearts do not break nearly enough over the thousands of children who die daily of hunger and malnutrition or of babies born with AIDS or of the thousands of children, men and women trapped in sex-trafficking.

We confess we have put up too many barriers between you and the Gospel. We preach God and conservitism, God and democracy, God and ecology, etc., but rarely just God (in the since that He and He alone is sufficient). We have talked like we were holier than thou, but we have lived just like you. You cry to us that the issue is not that we’re too different than you, but that we’re not different enough.

Here’s the gospel that we have so many times gotten complicated and confused. No matter how badly you’ve messed up or how far you’ve fallen, no matter what addiction you have that you just can’t break, no matter how dirty you feel in all your sin and secret shame, Jesus can still save you. He can change you. He can make you the person you always wanted to be in your best moments.

We’re trying. We just get it wrong a lot. We’re not perfect people, just forgiven people. We’re sorry we’ve made it seem like we’re perfect saints while we wear our masks that hide our scars. We’re sorry we haven’t been more authentic and genuine with you. We’re sorry we haven’t just loved you instead of judging and condemning you.

God’s working on us. And He always finishes what He starts. That’s a promise.

I admit it. I love Christmas.

Every year, I pull out my astounding collection of old Christmas movies on DVD and find the cheezy decorations and tune in to the station that plays Christmas music ad nauseum (until you want to toss your Christmas cookies). And every year I feel cheated that the celebration of the birth of Christ and all the good things that came with it gets only one day a year.

Not this year. Well, ok. Maybe this year, but definitely not the next. Not if I can help it.

I want to celebrate the whole Advent season. According to Wikipedia, advent is “a time of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus at Christmas.” It starts the fourth Sunday before December 25, which I think puts it right after the Thursday of Thanksgiving.

No, I’m not Catholic or Episcpalian. Actually, I’m not sure what I am or what to call myself, other than a follower of Christ. I am a follower of the child born in a manger who grew into a man who lived a sinless life and perfectly fulfilled the law in my place. God came near and became one of us. To me, that deserves more than one day.

I don’t exactly know how the whole Advent thing works. I have a Common Prayer Book, which I will use this year, but other than that I am pretty much clueless. I’m also clueless about dating and directions, but that is a whole other blog that I will write some other time.

So help me out. If you celebrate the whole Advent season, I would love to know what you do. By the way, there’s only 70 more shopping days left until Christmas, so you better get crackin’ and ‘wrappin’!

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

The Bible talks about exposing deeds of darkness. For the longest time, I thought it meant to find evildoers and go up to them, wagging a finger and telling them what they did wrong. As in, “You dirty rotten evildoer you! How dare you (fill in the appropriate sin that I’m not guity of)! Don’t you know that is just plain wrong?”

I like to think I’ve grown up since then and come to see things differently. Exposing the darkness is not so much calling darkness dark, but showing it for what it really is by your deeds of light. That is, they should see a difference in you and me.

If all we do is tell them how wrong they are and never show the right way, what good is that? If we claim to follow a better Way and our actions don’t bear out our words, what kind of faith is that?

This is not try harder and do better. This is about being vulnerable and transparent and letting the light of Christ shine through you. It’s about putting His light in a place where it will shine brightest (on a city on a hill rather than under the shrubbery). It’s about being available and willing at every moment of every day for God to do in you whatever He wishes.

The really amazing part is that even if your light is tiny, it is still enough to overcome the darkness. Even if your witness seems pitiful and weak, your willing and surrendered heart still touches the heart of God and He blesses what you do. He takes your little and turns it into a whole lot.

So let your light shine. Dwight Moody said something to the effect that lights don’t go around firing cannons and shouting into bullhorns to announce themselves; they just shine. If we are surrendered to God, we don’t have to use gimmicks and tricks to draw people’s attention to us. Our light shining will be enough.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.

First of all, my apologies to Clives Staples Lewis for borrowing his idea, but I think ol’ demon Screwtape has a few more things to write to his nephew Wormwood. For the record, the premise behind The Screwtape Letters is a senior-level demon writing advice to a junior-level demon about how to best lead astray his human charge. His job is basially the opposite of a guardian angel.

My Dear Wormwood,

I must say that, even though I despise and abhor genuine emotion and devotion in Greg’s life, I believe we can use emotion to our advantage. We must make him think that emotions are the only true litmus test to how he is doing in his religion. You must continually impress in his mind that the most important aspect of any service or activity is whether it leads to an emotional high. Simply put, if he doesn’t have the feeling of elation after Kairos or services at Fellowship Bible Church, you must convince him that he is spiritually slipping and in danger of falling out of favor with God. Barring that, you must lead him to think that God has become distant and removed.

We never want him to reflect that God may be testing him to show him that true faith is not based on feelings, but rather on revealed truths as found in that infernal Bible he carries around all the time (we must think of a way to put an end to that!). You must try every way to convince him that true spirituality means a continual feeling of ecstacy, and any absense of that feeling should be seen as either a defect in his faith or, better still, a defect in his God.

We want him caught up in the popular teaching that God wants all his children happy and that any suffering of any kind is either because he is bad or that God is bad. Never allow him to see suffering in any other light. Furthermore, he needs to feel that all the sermons and talks and lectures and such must be tailored to meet his needs and make him feel better about himself. Convince him to leave any establishment that doesn’t meet those needs and keep hopping from place to place until he finds someone who will tickle his ear with cotton candy theology. We don’t want any of that repentance garbage making him feel bad and causing him to lose all his bad habits we’ve worked so hard for.

Wormwood, take every occasion to plant seeds of doubt and mistrust in his mind against his friends and family. Get him to think that he can’t really trust anyone and that he is really on his own in life. Our goal is to make him a cynical spectator instead of an engaged worshipper (those types really do so much to upset our plans).

Never allow him for one moment to have time to sit and reflect in Silence. Silence is our enemy. You must continually be sending stimuli from every possible source, like television or radio or even thoughts of things left undone. We want him to be like so many of those who profess to be followers of our Enemy, but live like one of our own by ceaselessly seeking the next bigger thrill and the next bigger event, always thinking that those will quiet the nagging doubts in his mind (a job well done, I might add. Especially that doubt about his self-worth. That was a nice touch!

One last word of advice. Every time he hears any sermon or other words from God, immediately bring to his mind a person who really should be hearing this. Never allow him to begin to apply the messages to his own heart. That way he will be well on his way to becoming a judmental pharisee (and how we love those types! They do so much to advance our cause!)

Your affectionate (but still really evil) uncle,

Screwtape