Ragamuffin Gospel

Why I Love Old Abraham

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“By faith Abraham heard God’s call to travel to a place he would one day receive as an inheritance; and he obeyed, not knowing where God’s call would take him. By faith he journeyed to the land of the promise as a foreigner; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, his fellow heirs to the promise because Abraham looked ahead to a city with foundations, a city laid out and built by God.

By faith Abraham’s wife Sarah became fertile long after menopause because she believed God would be faithful to His promise. So from this man, who was almost at death’s door, God brought forth descendants, as many as the stars in the sky and as impossible to count as the sands of the shore” (Hebrews 11:8-12).

“That’s what Scripture means when it says, ‘Abraham entrusted himself to God, and God credited him with righteousness.’ And living a faithful life earned Abraham the title of ‘God’s friend'” (James 2:23, The Voice).

I like Abraham. I can relate to Abraham.

Sure, he was the father of many nations. Sure, he’s the one through whose line came the Messiah, the Hope of the World.

But he also had clay feet at times.

Remember the time when he lied about his wife, saying she was his sister? Twice?

Remember when he tried to help God out by agreeing to go to bed with Sarah’s servant Hagar to produce the heir God promised?

Remember when Abraham had a hard time believing that God could keep His word in giving him a child?

Yeah, I can relate to all of that. Abraham’s my kind of guy.

The Bible is full of people like that. Not saints in the sense of people who walked through life with halos hanging over their heads who never messed up or got a hair out of place or got their knickers in a bunch. More like saints who stumbled and fell often, but kept getting back up, kept trusting in the next step, kept trusting that God knew where he was leading them through all the deserts and foreign countries.

Sometimes faith is simply showing up and taking the next step, trusting that God knows where He’s leading you. As Corrie Ten Boom said, faith is trusting the conductor of the train when it goes into a pitch black tunnel instead of jumping off the back of the caboose.

I suppose we’re all thankful that even faith the size of a mustard seed can move  mountains and uproot trees. It can change stubborn old hearts like yours and mine.

Best of all, faith leads you to the place where God is, where you were always meant to be, the place where your heart can rest.

 

More Borrowed Wisdom From One Mr. Lewis

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

I have the crud, so I invited a guest blogger to share his thoughts. Well, I copied and pasted from something C. S. Lewis wrote. It blew my fuzzy, hay-fevered mind. I hope it blows your mind as well.

“An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God.

But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him.

But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God—that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him.

You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal.

So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kinds of life—what I called Zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

You’re welcome.

Praying starts and ends with God. Sure, I bring my needs and wants to God, but sometimes there are no words. Sometimes, I need to know that God inside of me is praying to the God above me through the God in Christ who is beside me.

That’s prayer.

 

Coming Home

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“Isn’t it right to join in the celebration and be happy? This is your brother we’re talking about. He was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found again!” (Luke 15:32).

Editor’s Note: I still have The Crud, compete with intermittent coughing spells, so forgive me for any typographical errors I made while I was in the middle of hacking up one of my lungs. Hopefully, I’ll be better soon.

Every one of us has been a prodigal at some point. Every one of us.

Not all of us have run away to a far country to waste our lives and money on scandalous living.

Some of us have stayed at home and been just as far away from the Father.

As my pastor Mike Glenn reminded me today, lostness isn’t a matter of geography as much as it is of relationship.

All of us wander off in our affections and in our priorities. All of us.

All of us at some point will have that awakening when we come to ourselves and realize just how far away we’ve gotten.

It’s not Jesus who was lost. I was. You were. We were. Jesus found us. That’s the story of the Gospel. That’s my hope.

Some of you are praying for prodigals in your life who still haven’t come home yet. Some of you are the prodigals still out in the far country, ashamed and embarrassed to admit defeat and start the journey homeward.

Remember that God is the Father who never turns away any prodigals who come back in true repentance and faith. This is the God who doesn’t wait for us to get to Him. He runs after us while we’re still a long way down the road.

Every one of us at some point will be a prodigal again. It’s in our nature to wander and it’s in God’s nature to bring us back.

That will never not be good news to me.

The end.

 

 

No Bad Days

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“As long as your heart’s beatin’
There’s no bad days
You got something to believe in
There’s no bad days
As long as you’re dreamin’, reachin’, seekin’
Make no mistake
As long as you’re breathin’
There’s no bad days” (Django Walker/James Slater/Patrick Davis/Jeff Cook).

My old boss used to say, “Any day without a toe tag is a good day.”

My take on that is that any day you wake up is a day that you still have a purpose and a reason to be here.

Any day you open your eyes to the new morning is better for you than many who won’t get the chance to experience the new set of 24 hours.

Every single day you’re alive is a blessing.

To be sure, I do believe that to be absent from the body is to be present with Jesus.

I also believe that life isn’t something where you pass the time until you die. It’s something you get to live only once.

One of my favorite lines from the movie Gladiator goes something like this: what we do here and now echoes in eternity.”

Your small acts of love, your random acts of kindness, you’re showing up and not giving up on a daily basis causes a ripple effect that will be felt long beyond your earthly years.

So make it count.

Oh yeah, and remember to keep things in perspective. In my own life, I’ve found that most things aren’t worth getting upset over. You waste too much time and energy fretting about what you can’t control and what ends up being transitory.

You can’t control most of what happens to you. You can only control you and how you choose to respond to it, Better yet, you can choose to surrender to the God who not only controls it all, but works it all together for good– your good and His good.

That was for free.

 

Music I Like

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

I’ve gotten to the point where I really don’t care how old the music or what format it is. If it speaks to me and tells me my story, I like it.

I used to look down my nose at country music. I thought it was too hick for me. Then I tried to listen to it and didn’t like it.

Later on, I found some Dwight Yoakum. It turns out that I really did like country music after all, just not the sugar-flavored pop with a twang that passes for country music these days. Yes, I just showed my age.

I have just about every kind of genre from just about every decade that music has been made. I like it all.

Lately, I find myself gravitating toward the road less traveled, musically speaking. I don’t tend to go for top 40 as much. I like more alt-country and Americana-style music.  But not to the point of being hipster. I’m not there yet.

There’s still nothing better to me than the right song at the right moment. It’s almost like the song becomes a part of the soundtrack of your life and the moment becomes etched in your memory.

I like the Grateful Dead, mostly because every time I listen to one of their songs, I think about Uncle Bob and how much he loved the Grateful Dead. It makes me happy. Hopefully he’s up in heaven smiling at my new musical broad-mindedness.

I also tend to avoid music awards shows like the bubonic plague. All they do is reward mediocrity and popularity over actual talent. Generally speaking. And that was my soapbox speech for the evening.

The beauty of music, as well as art, is that there really is no such thing as bad art. Art and music are subjective, and chances are that what turns me off completely may speak to you where you are and you may love it. More power to you.

As Uncle Mikey aka Mike Glenn says, that’s why Baskin Robbins has 39 flavors of ice cream. Not everyone likes Rocky Road. Not every one likes what I like in music. Some actually like Justin Bieber. God bless and keep listening. Just make sure you have your headphones on when you’re around me, please.

 

 

Neighborliness

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“Neighborliness is not a quality in other people; it is simply their claim on ourselves. Every moment and every situation challenges us to action and to obedience. We have literally no time to sit down and ask ourselves whether so-and-so is our neighbor or not” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship).

Who is my neighbor? That’s the question that the expert in Jewish law asked Jesus. In other words, who am I required to love?

Jesus turned the question around from “Who is my neighbor?” to “How am I being a good neighbor to those around me?”

So, a neighbor is anyone who is in need and who is within my power to help. I can’t help every single one in need, but I can meet the needs of those who are in front of me, and those by Jesus’ definition are my neighbors.

Ultimately, the Good Samaritan is a picture of Jesus Himself. I’m the one who foolishly took the dangerous road alone and ended up beaten up and robbed. I’m the one lying half-dead on the road whom the Neighbor spotted and had pity on.

That changes the parable quite a bit, doesn’t it? It means just as the Good Samaritan wasn’t the kind of hero the Jewish audience was expecting, Jesus wasn’t (and isn’t) the kind of Messiah we were expecting.

We prize physical strength and virility. We prize magazine-cover good looks. We love take-charge, grab-the-bull-by-the-horns people.

I wonder sometimes if we’d know Jesus as Messiah if He showed up today as He did almost two millennia ago. People were expecting someone to rally the people against Rome, but instead got a man who insisted that we turn the other cheek and go the extra mile.

Sure, Jesus overturned those tables in the Temple, but He also said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

I’m thankful most of all that in Jesus, I got not the kind of Savior I might have wanted, but the kind I so desperately needed. He loved ( and still loves) me just like I am but refuses to let me stay that way.

PS Credit for all of this goes to Mike Glenn, courtesy of tonight’s Kairos message. Check it out some Tuesday evening if you’re ever in the Brentwood/Greater Nashville area.

 

Here’s the Deal

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

So I found out today that the cost to repair the transmission on my Jeep is $2700. I almost needed the smelling salts as I typed that sentence. I’ll be sans car for up to four weeks. Pass those smelling salts, please.

That’s a lot of money. All for some itty bitty parts that decided on their own without consulting me or anyone else to stop working. All for some unseen mechanical gears that I didn’t even know existed until they decided to break down. Rude.

A lot of life is like that. Things break, people die, situations change. What seemed like a sure thing vanishes like the morning mist and what you thought would last forever ends abruptly without any warning.

It’s easy to let those things make you cynical, believing that only the very worst scenarios will play out and that nothing good can ever happen and that people are only out to get you.

Or it drives you deeper into all the Mystery that is the Abba Father.

As big as my car bill is, God is bigger.

As big as the void that is left by the passing of a loved one is, God is bigger.

As big as the hurt caused by the rejection of a friend or a family member, God is bigger.

As big as the accumulation of scars and wounds from a broken relationship are, God is bigger.

God is bigger than anything you will face today or tomorrow or the next day or any day after that.

God is bigger than any problem that you will ever face.

God is bigger than your fears and your doubts and even your unbelief.

Whatever circumstances, God will prove that He is enough. Everything you could possibly desire or want or hold in your hands without God is less than holding onto nothing but God.

That’s a lesson that all of us learn eventually, whether that means losing everything in a literal sense or in coming to the end of your own schemes and plans.

God is enough. God will be enough.

That is enough.

 

A Little Taste of Narnia

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“Son of Adam,” said Aslan, “you have sown well. And you, Narnians, let it be your first care to guard this Tree, for it is your Shield. The Witch of whom I told you has fled far away into the North of the world; she will live on there, growing stronger in dark Magic. But while that tree flourishes she will never come down into Narnia. She dare not come within a hundred miles of the Tree, for its smell, which is joy and life and health to you, is death and horror and despair to her.”

. . . Aslan suddenly swung round his head . . . and fixed his large eyes on the children. “What is it, children?” he said, for he caught them in the very act of whispering and nudging one another.

“Oh—Aslan, sir,” said Digory, turning red, “I forgot to tell you. The Witch has already eaten one of those apples, one of the same kind that Tree grew from.” He hadn’t really said all he was thinking, but Polly at once said it for him. (Digory was always much more afraid than she of looking a fool.)

“So we thought, Aslan,” she said, “that there must be some mistake, and she can’t really mind the smell of those apples.”

“Why do you think that, Daughter of Eve?” asked the Lion.

“Well, she ate one.”

“Child,” he replied, “that is why all the rest are now a horror to her. That is what happens to those who pluck and eat fruits at the wrong time and in the wrong way. The fruit is good, but they loathe it ever after.”

“Oh, I see,” said Polly. “And I suppose because she took it in the wrong way it won’t work for her. I mean it won’t make her always young and all that?”

“Alas,” said Aslan, shaking his head. “It will. Things always work according to their nature. She has won her heart’s desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.”

From The Magician’s Nephew
Compiled in A Year with Aslan

I think there are a whole lot of applications you can make from this one little passage, but I’ll leave it to you to figure out what those are.

 

Takeaways From Another Immersion Conference

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

I attended an Immersion: Going Deeper conference at Brentwood Baptist Church over the last two days, featuring Union University professor Dr. George Guthrie.

It was as good as billed and more.

God’s Unfolding Story was the theme and Dr. Guthrie spoke about how grace always has a face and a space in which to work. To me, that says that grace works best not as a theoretical proposition, but as a concrete reality lived out in the midst of where we live, work, and play.

Grace says that I have a standing invitation into the throneroom of the God of the Universe that never expires and never gets rescinded. As a student at Union University back in the day, I’d never have dreamed of barging into University President Dr. Hyram Barefoot’s office and telling him fears and dreams.

But God invites me to do just that. It is His desire that I come to Him at any moment with whatever’s on my mind. He is a good, good, Father, as the current worship song says.

Sometimes, it’s good to simply sit in God’s lap and bask in His presence. Other times, only two words will do for my prayer: thank you.

There have been times when the hurt and pain go too deep for words, yet God hears the sighs and groans that go deeper than any words can ever express.

It was great seeing Dr. Guthrie again, as well as Chuck Maxwell. It was also fantastic getting to hear Michael Card perform a couple of songs on Friday night. That alone was worth the price of admission.

Sometimes, it’s good to go deeper into God and to find out that He’s way more amazing than you had ever imagined in your wildest dreams. He never disappoints those who seek Him with pure and willing hearts.

That’s a fact.

The end.

 

Patty Griffin and the Long Ride Home

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

  
“I’ve had some time to think about you
And watch the sun set like a stone
I’ve had some time to think about you
On the long ride home” (Patty Griffin).

So, here’s the deal. The Red Sled has a pooped-out transmission. Thankfully, that means rebuilding and NOT replacing (which is apparently about $1400 more). That got my anxiety up a bit.

But on my ride home, I had Patty Griffin’s A Kiss in Time to keep me company. To those who only know top-40, Patty Griffin is an astoundingly amazing artist who has the rare combination of angelic voice and keen songwriting ability. This particular album captured her in a 2003 live performance at the Ryman Auditorium (the same place where I saw her live in 2011).

There’s something about music that forces you to be present in the present. You can’t daydream about the past or fret about the future when a good song is playing. You can’t help but notice the music. At least I can’t.

Music is a reminder that you can’t change the past or control the future. All you can do is to live in the present and receive it like the gift it is. Each moment is a package waiting to be unwrapped by those not enslaved to their smart devices.

So I go to bed tonight knowing that in the end everything will be fine, because God’s already there and He’s promised me that He’d take care of the details.

Hopefully, I won’t keep myself up half the night coughing out my lungs like I did last night. That’s not my idea of fun.

Here’s hoping you find something to smile about and celebrate about God in the days and weeks to come.

My celebration will be my head hitting the pillow as soon as humanly possible.