Jesus

Forgiveness

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

Tonight, Mike Glenn talked about forgiveness at Kairos. He said forgiveness is releasing the other person from the expectation that they can fix the wrong and the hurt they caused you. He said forgiveness is when you are no longer defined by the pain and the hurt and the grudge, but by the love of Jesus.

He added that Jesus said to him once, “You can hold on to the hate for the person who hurt you or you can hold on to My love, but you cannot hold on to both.” When Jesus whispered, “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing,” He was praying for those who hurt you. He was also praying for you.”

We are called to forgive. Jesus said the Father would forgive you as you forgave others. When you don’t give forgiveness, you can’t receive it and you stunt the work of the Spirit in your life. Every single one of us needs to forgive and be forgiven.

But what if the person you most need to forgive is yourself? What if the person you need to learn to live with is you? What if you’re scared to death that if someone else ever knew you like you knew yourself and knew all the dirty, petty, angry thoughts you keep hidden, they would walk out on you for good?

I have been way too hard on myself in the past and projected on to other people my own self-rejection. I thought that no one could ever really know me and still like me. But the love of Jesus broke through and changed me and changed how I saw myself. It transformed how I saw others, no longer through my own insecurities, but through the grace of God.

The key is to believe what God says about you. It’s to believe that God loves you and chose you and calls you BELOVED. The key is to receive God’s forgiveness. If God chose to forgive you of something you never in a million years could have paid for, then it’s time to forgive yourself.

You have a choice. You can choose pain and holding grudges or you can choose forgiveness and freedom and love. I think Anne Lamott said refusing to forgive is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. You only hurt yourself. Forgiveness is freedom to love and be loved and mostly, to be wrapped up by the love of Jesus.

I choose forgiveness every time. Lord, grant me and all those reading this forgiving hearts and fill us up with your love so there’s no more room to carry the hurts anymore.

Amen.

Taken, Blessed, Broken, Given

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

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.

When the Lights Go Out

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 6 Comments

lucynarnia

I was en route from Memphis recently, listening to a book on CD, as all well-seasoned travellers do. It was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, book 5 of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. It was read by Derek Jacobi, by the way, in case you were dying to know.

In the book, the Dawn Treader sails into an island of darkness. It’s a place where fear rules and all nightmares come to life. Lucy is at the top of the ship, watching as the crew tries vainly to escape. In her desperation, she says, “Aslan, if you ever loved us, help us now.” The answer to her prayer is an albatross who, as he flies by her, whispers, “Courage, dear heart,” in Aslan’s voice. He then leads them out into the sunlight.

I bet you’ve been in some dark places in your life. You’ve felt trapped in the valley of the shadow of death, where no light or hope can get through. You’ve been searching for a way out, but all you find is more darkness, more despair, more hopelessness.

You feel your circumstances will never get better. You fear that nothing will ever change. You come to believe that your worst-case scenario is due to come true any day now. Your faith is at a low ebb and your fears are cresting and crashing waves that swamp you.

There’s a voice, if you are still enough to hear it, that whispers the same words what it whispered to Lucy. “Courage, dear heart.” It says, “Hold on. Trust in Me in the darkness even when you can’t find Me there. I am with you, with My everlasting arms underneath you. I will never ever let go.”

Don’t believe that you feel or what you think, but what you know. Believe the same God who has proved Himself over and over and Whose word is true. Know that He is with you and for you in your darkness. Darkness may prevail right now, but joy is coming with the morning.

For All the Phonies in the World

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

Let me ask you something. Just between you and me (and the world wide web). Do you ever feel like a phony?

Do you ever hear yourself giving Sunday School answers to real life questions? Do you ever feel that you’re praying what you think God wants to hear instead of what’s really in your heart? Do you ever lie awake at night wondering what would happen if the people around you knew what you were really thinking? What you were really like?

There’s good news that sounds like bad news at first. God knows. God knows it all. He knows all the faux-prayers and the religious jargon you talk sometimes. He knows what you do and what you think when no one’s watching. That seems like bad news until you get to the clincher. He loves you anyway.

He loves you at your phoniest. He loves you at your meanest. He loves you at your darkest moments in the middle of the night. He looks at you and doesn’t see phony. He looks at you and sees Jesus and what Jesus did in your place. He sees the perfect life Jesus lived instead of your own very imperfect existence.

Best of all, God sees you for who you will be instead of who you are. He sees what He designed you to be. He promised to not stop working on you until you’re 100% real and complete.

In the meantime, it’s okay to be real and honest and admit you have made a mess of your life. It’s okay to confess you don’t have all the answers, or even all the questions. It’s really not about how much you know or how well you act but how much you are loved.

I raise my glass and toast to all the phonies who are stepping forward to take off the mask and be honest about themselves. I drink to all the pretenders who just got real. I salute all of you who are letting down the walls on what God is doing in your life so others can see grace at work and how love can transform a person. That’s where the freedom is. That’s where I want to be. I hope you do, too.

Back to the Basics

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

Some days, I wake up and I do good to remember my own name, much less any one else’s. For me in the early morning, I have to remember whem I’m getting dressed that pants go on first, then shoes. I know most of you take that for granted, but for me at 5:30 am, it’s not a given.

Some times you have to remind yourself of the basics. Sometimes when life gets hard or confusing or just plain weird. Most of these are not original with me, but I’ve picked them up over the years.

1) God is for you. God’s not up there, wherever “there” is, waiting to smite you or cast a lightning bolt at you or give you acne. He’s not. He’s on your side.

2) Don’t sweat the small stuff, and most of life is small stuff. Most of what you get so hung up on and stressed out over is small stuff. You probably won’t even remember most of those things that got you so worried today.

3) God never said He wouldn’t give you more than you yourself can handle, but He also said He Himself would take care of you. Quit trying to figure everything out and handle it all yourself. Be the child Jesus talks about and let God be your Father and get you through your trials and tests and other stuff.

4) Life is short. Choose family and friends and relationships over work and getting things done, because no one on his death bed ever laments about not having spent enough time at the office.

5) The only opinion of you that matters is what God thinks of you. The people you spend so much time wondering what they think of you are just as paranoid over what you think of them. Only God knows you completely. He made you. And He likes you.

6) You can’t do whatever you want or be whoever you want. I will never dunk a basketball on a regulation goal, no matter how much I really want to. You and I can’t be whatever we want to be, but we can be who God made us and meant for us to be.

That’s all I have. Other than maybe pants go first, then shoes. But like the song says, there are two things I know: 1) that God is good and 2) that He loves me.

No matter what else will happen to you, those two things will always be true. Always.

Behold, I Am Making All Things New

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

image

There’s a part on The Passion of the Christ that is not in the Bible in the strictest sense, but I think it fits. The part where Jesus falls while carrying the cross and His mother runs up to Him to help Him and comfort Him and He tells her in essence, “I have to do this because I am making all things new.” That is such a great line and it struck me powerfully tonight.

To the one who has struggled with addictions for years, He is making all things new.

To the one who keeps getting visited by the same old fears, He is making all things new.

To the one whose life feels wasted and who feels unneccesary to anybody or anything, He is making all things new.

To the one who said goodbye to a loved one and buried a piece of their heart with them, He is making all things new.

To the one who carries a broken heart that hurts more than it did when it was broken the first time, He is making all things new.

To the one who has almost lost hope that anything will ever get better, He is making all things new.

To the orphan and widow, the homeless and outcast, the unwanted and unloved, He is making all things new.

He is making everything right again. He is making all the lies come untrue.

He can make you new. Not just better or stronger, but a completely new creation. One where you get to be what you always wished you could be and dreamed about, but never thought could actually happen. All you have to do is look up to Jesus and say, “Help me. I need You.”

Celebrated this Easter the Day that made it possible for you to start over. Know that it’s never ever too late for a do-over. He never gets tired of making broken things whole, dirty things clean, and old things new. Including you.

Amen and amen.

My Obligatory Charlie Sheen Blog

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

image

Honestly, this is not another blog about how crazy Charlie Sheen is these days or how he needs help or any of that. If I were in his shoes, I might be acting twice as crazy. Plus, I’d probably be walking funny ’cause His feet are probably at least 2 sizes bigger than mine.

Actually, this is about a dream I had that starred Charlie Sheen. In my dream, I was about to cut the front yard when ol’ Charlie pulled up and asked if he could do it, because he’d never used a lawnmower before. His dream words, not mine. And that was it. I don’t know if it’s weird that I dreamed this or that I still remember the dream. And yes, I totally pulled a bait-and-switch blog on you.

Dreams always seem normal when you’re dreaming them. You never notice anything bizarre when you’re in the dream. You could be flying naked and be thinking in the dream, “Hey, I always fly on Tuesdays. And where did my clothes go? I’m pretty sure I was dressed when I left the house this morning.” Only when you wake up do you realize that what you dreamed about wasn’t normal. And I mean both the flying and the being naked part.

I think we do that in life, especially as believers. We tend live the same way, thinking that the way we think and act is normal, but only when God’s Spriit moves in and wakes us up, do we realize how abnormal we’ve been. So many live under the belief that it’s normal to feel defeated and discouraged and numb to your faith. It’s normal to not feel anything in worship. It’s normal to think that God must be upset with you and that your fellow believers don’t really want you around.

Only when God opens your eyes do you see that victory is the norm. You see that God sees Jesus when He sees you and He is very pleased with you. And those fellow believers you thought were ready to throw you under the bus? They may need to hear your struggle so they can encourage you or at the least empathize with what you’re going through. And once you start making worship about declaring the great worth of God because He deserves it, whether you feel it or not, the feelings eventually come back. I promise. But at that point, it doesn’t matter whether you’re super-hyped or barely able to sing the words. It’s still worship because it’s centered on a God who is able.

So yeah. I pretty much fooled you into thinking you were going to read a scathing blog about another Hollywood star gone wrong. All I have for Charlie Sheen is prayer and support. But for the grace of God, that could have been me or you. Or much worse. You and I need God’s grace just as much as any of the Charlie Sheens of the world. We needed just as much of the blood of Christ. And God is able to save all the Charlie Sheens. . . and us. . . to the uttermost!

Amen and amen.

Something Beautiful

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 2 Comments

First of all, I love Needtobreathe and I totally stole this blog title from one of their songs (which I love, by the way). Just so you know. Not that it has anything to do with the rest of the blog.

One of the most beautiful things I’ve seen lately is a group of believer who are fully coming alive to who they are in Christ, who are learning that they have all the authority and power of Christ in them, and they can do what everyone else says is impossible, because for God who lives in them, all things are possible. They have a God who lives in them who relishes making impossilbilities into possibilities. It’s His speciality.

I love seeing my brothers and sisters in Christ waking up to their sonship and daughtership (if that’s a word) in Christ, watching as the chains of past failures and hurts fall away, as strongholds and addictions are broken, and as the love of Christ cleanses and heals and restores and makes them whole. I love seeing fear turn into joy, mourning into dancing, ashes into beauty, despair into confidence, and defeat into victory.

The absolute most beautiful thing to me right now is believers who share life together, who break bread together, who bear each others burdens and laugh and cry together. That kind of love is what turned the 1st century world upside down, and is what will turn this 21st century world on its head if we ever can come together in Christ as one.

Now is the time to come together in unity and love with crazy radical love. Now is the time to be all in for Christ and to embrace His vision of who you are and accept what He has already said about you. Revival comes to hearts that are not just a little hungry and thirsty and needy, but to starving, parched, desparate people who will wrestle with God and not let go until true revival fire falls.

Let those things be our desire and our prayer. Don’t wish for something beautiful to make the world fall in love with Jesus; let your transformation be that something beautiful that will draw them to the God who can change anyone and to Whom no one is ever past hope or a lost cause.

Amen and amen! Come, Holy Spirit. We need you now!

Just Love

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 3 Comments

just-love

A friend of mine told me about how God had recently impressed upon her heart lately the words, “JUST LOVE!” I think that’s God’s word to me, too.

What is the power that conquered death in all its forms and made the fear of death something that the believer no longer has over him or her? Just love.

What is the force that will still be around when all the dictators and kings and presidents have gone to their graves and kingdoms and empires have fallen? Just love.

What will be the power that outlasts hate, overcomes fear, overwhelms ignorance, and will be the last one standing? Just love.

What can’t be stopped by any army or weapon or group that has ever been and ever will be? What has survived centuries of attempts to snuff it out only to grow stronger with time? Just love.

What is God’s ultimate force He has used to end the dominion of sin and overthrow darkness and usher in a new Kingdom with new values where anyone is welcome, nobody is perfect and nothing is impossible? Just love.

What are we as believers called to do to see this Kingdom of God come and see multitudes coming to faith in the Messiah and King, Jesus? Just love.

What will overcome every obstacle and barrier and what will draw people to the God we serve and make them want to know Him? Just love.

What can mend your broken heart, refresh your weary spirit, renew your mind, and heal your sin-scarred body? Just love.

Just love and only love is what will win. God is love and His love for us is so powerful that nothing, not death or the grave or anything else, can keep Him from getting to us and taking us back. Nothing can separate us from Him. Nothing will cause His love for us to stop. Nothing will diminish His love for us in the slightest.

God’s love in us and through us WILL change the world. That one thing I believe with all that is in me!

Amen and amen!

I Love the Way God Works

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

IMG_0992

I am goofy. I admit that. I don’t think normally and I don’t act normally when I’m nervous (or even when I’m not nervous, for that matter). I am wearing a t-shirt right now that has a clown on it and says, “Normal people scare me.”

While I say all that in jest (mostly), I have to confess that I love the way God works in my life. I love the way He meets me where I am, loves me just as I am, and takes what I have in my hands, no matter how small and paltry and uses it in ways that astound me. I am always amazed at what God can do in and through me when I am surrendered and available. When I am prayed up, confessed up, spiritually armored up. Even when I’m not sometimes.

I love God’s grace because I need it. I love God’s forgiveness because I would be screwed without it. I love His spirit within me, because I know deep down that I couldn’t love anything at all without Him in me. And the more I know of God, the more I love Him. The more I learn about Him, the more I sense my need for Him. All I can do is open up my hands and receive. Even my so-called giving and ministry is simply what spills out of my open hands when I am receiving.

My goal in writing this blog is for you to love God and the way He works as much or more than I do. I want you to know how He sees you and that He is not mad or disappointed in you, but how He cheers for you and is for you and is always with you. How He can take the smallest beginning of surrender and transform your life into something amazing and miraculous. A life that will reflect the glory of God and that will make it impossible for anyone to remain neutral about the God in you. Hopefully, they will be drawn to a God who can make a broken mess into a beautiful masterpiece. Even if not, they won’t be able to see your life changed and remain the same themselves.

I love that God chooses people like me to work in and with. I love that God never gives up on those He chooses. I love that God’s in love with me (and He’s also crazy about you, too). I love that God can take this blog and send it places I would never have dreamed possible and have people read it that I never would have imagined would. I love that God can take anyone at any place at any time and do anything He wants with them.

God amazes me and blows my mind every single day. And I love that about Him!

Amen and amen!