Ragamuffin Gospel

Deliverance from Fear

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“I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears”(Psalm‬ ‭34‬:‭4‬, ESV‬‬).

I heard a good word from a good friend today about this Psalm. Apparently when David penned this Psalm, He was still on the run from King Saul who sought to take his life. His life was still very much in danger. God’s promise to make him king was still in the future.

God didn’t deliver him from his circumstances but from the fear of his circumstances. In other words, God didn’t immediately pick him up from his current predicament and place him on the throne. David learned a deeper kind of trust and a deeper kind of worship in the midst of having to daily depend on God for deliverance.

The takeaway is that you or I don’t have to wait until every prayer is answered and every dilemma solved before we can worship. We can praise God in the mist of difficult circumstances that sometimes defy our understanding. We can remain under those circumstances and yet not be afraid because God is with us even then and even there.

I know that whatever comes my way isn’t bigger than the God I serve. I know that nothing in all the world can ever separate me from God’s love. I know that I am eternally secure in the arms of my Savior. Even if my circumstances don’t change, my perspective does because I see Jesus walking toward me in the middle of my storm with the power to make the waves and the wind cease or to simply comfort His child in the midst of those winds and waves.

And that’s enough.

The Lord Has Need

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“When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, saying, “Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ you shall say this: ‘The Lord has need of it.’’ So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them” (Luke 19:29-32, ESV).

I heard something tonight that blew my mind a little. It definitely got me thinking the story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem in a different way.

Have you considered the story from the point of the colt? Have you thought that God appointed that a man should go and buy a donkey to take care of it and raise it and feed it? That donkey then proceeded to give birth to a colt, which the man also raises and feeds, all for the moment when Jesus sends His disciples to fetch the colt, saying “The Lord has need of it.”

Have you thought that maybe God placed you and me where we are in the time and place we’re in so that one day, you can be in the place to hear the words “The Lord has need of you”?

We don’t really think about all the time that passed before Jesus needed the colt. All that time that seemed wasted or useless was a time of preparation for one single event that led to the event that changed the entire world.

You may be in a season of preparation that proceeds the moment when God will say to you, “I have need of you.”

I get that in one sense God doesn’t really need you or me or anyone else. But I also know that God places you in the exact moment and location where He will be able to best mold you into the person He can use. Maybe it’s for a lifetime calling or maybe it’s a moment in time. But God will use you. All He asks of you and me is that we are available.

My Favorite Bookstore

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I confess that I currently listen to more books than I read. Since I spend a lot of time in my car, it makes sense to listen to books through Audible. That said, I still love an honest to goodness bookstore that only sells books.

I do love me some Barnes & Noble, but I also admit they’re like the big bad bookstore in You’ve Got Mail. They not only sell books but movies, music, and lots of other stuff. They have a very retail chain feel to them.

My favorite bookstore right now is probably Landmark Booksellers. It’s close enough so I can go there regularly. They have a unique indie vibe that I really like. They also sell new and used books, which is definitely right up my alley.

On a bit of a tangent, there’s something about holding and reading a physical book, especially if it’s older. Those old books have an aroma and a texture that makes you want to soak in every word.

Parnassus is also a legit bookstore, but it’s a bit out of my way to go there, plus the parking in Green Hills is practically nonexistent. But that’s a good one for those who live more in the Nashville area.

I hope there will always be books and people who read books and places that sell books. I can’t imagine a world with only audio books and Kindles. That would be super sad.

Today, I picked up an old used C. S. Lewis book at Landmark. It wasn’t a planned purchase, but I saw this old book with the dust jacket still intact, and it called my name. What else could I have done?

A God We Can’t Exaggerate

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“Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves. His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can’t contain Him. Isn’t it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?” (Francis Chan)

There’s a beautiful old book by J. B. Phillips called Your God Is Too Small. I think that’s the case for anyone who has ever lived who tried to conceive the idea of God. We always fall short. We always make God way too small.

The problem with a lot of deconstruction is that we make ourselves the standard by which God and truth are measured. We are definitely too finite and small to be any kind of measuring stick to which God must conform (thanks to Frances Chan for that one as well). It’s putting ourselves above God, essentially saying that God would never [fill in the blank] because I would never [fill in the blank].

God not only above us, He is so far beyond us that our minds could never have fathomed God at all apart from God revealing Himself to us. That blows my mind. It also humbles me whenever I get to the place where I think I have God figured out.

We can’t possibly exaggerate God. How cool is that? The biggest, grandest, wildest picture we can dream up or draw or sing about or write about falls short of who God is by far. All we can do is sit at the brink and adore the depth, to borrow from Matthew Henry.

God is never too small. Only our conception of Him is. But God made Himself incarnate and came near and became a tiny infant. That’s my favorite part.

Weeping Prayers

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This is not me currently, but I know a few people who are navigating the process of grieving a loved one. It’s never an easy process and even though I’ve been around a while, I still can’t say that grief is a natural process because death really isn’t natural. It’s a product of the fall brought about by sin and not in God’s original design.

I do believe that God hears weeping as a prayer as much as He will hear your words and desires of your heart. The Bible says that God collects our tears in a bottle. I know that someone in deep grief may not have anything more than tears to offer to God, and that is enough.

As a reminder, there is no time limit on grief, because grief is the price of love this side of heaven. It will never be right that the person isn’t here. It will never be right that you will never hear that familiar voice or see that face again until heaven.

I love the fact that Jesus, knowing He was about to call His friend Lazarus out of the grave, still wept over his death. He wept over the grief of his friends who had no inkling of the coming miracle. He wept to show that we can believe in heaven and the resurrection and still be sad at the same time.

So I’m saying that there’s no shame in grief. Sometimes tears can be the only prayers we have.

Getting Back to the Gospel

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“Everything about which we are tempted to complain may be the very instrument whereby the Potter intends to shape His clay into the image of His Son–a headache, an insult, a long line at the check-out, someone’s rudeness or failure to say thank you, misunderstanding, disappointment, interruption. As Amy Carmichael said, ‘See in it a chance to die,’ meaning a chance to leave self behind…” (Elisabeth Elliot).

We’ve lost that aspect of faith. In our myopic, selfie-driven, self-focused faith, we miss the part where Jesus told us to take up our cross daily and follow. We’ve forgotten that He said that unless a single seed falls into the ground and dies, it can’t break open and blossom.

I’ve forgotten what it means to die to self daily. All these interruptions and inconveniences, even the hard stuff that shakes the very core of who we are, are merely chances to die and leave self behind. We have the opportunity to become more like Jesus the less we whine and the more we worship, the less we agonize and the more we adore.

So many of us follow after false teaching because we’re not grounded in the goodness of God. As one writer puts it, we lower our theology to match our pain because we’re not steeped in that goodness. The only way for our rough edges to be smoothed away and for the impurities in us to be burned away is to let the Master have His way in us and with us.

That means those thousand tiny deaths to self that happen every day in a thousand different ways. That means that all the negativity in your life, from flat tires to rude co-workers to tragedy in your family is God working in you to be more like Jesus. And God works even those things for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purposes.

This is me reminding me again that nothing is wasted in God’s economy. Everything serves a purpose — even pain — and every trial is a chance to die and be transformed into the image of God’s Son.

Homesick for God?

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“How many people have you made homesick for God?” (Oswald Chambers, Disciples Indeed)

That’s the key to evangelism, I think. It’s not constantly reminding people how sinful they are or ridiculing their worldview. I think in that approach we forget that we too were once sinful and had wrong beliefs about the universe.

What was it that won you over? What was it that made you want to know and love God? Was it really someone telling you what an awful person you were? Was it someone constantly berating your beliefs?

I think the key is to make people long for God to the point where they’re homesick for God. I think people seeing you loving God and living out of the overflow of God’s love for you will want to know God. People who see you loving others well the way God loved you well will crave that kind of love, even if they don’t have a name for it.

The way the early Church drew people was in how those believers loved each other. They loved lost people as well, but mainly it was in their love for each other that made people want to hear their gospel message.

If all you have is a well-defined set of doctrines and beliefs, no one cares. If all you have is a passion for making people as moral as you are, then no one wants to hear about it. But when you live transformed and let the life of Christ in you permeate everything you do, then people can’t help but see and be drawn to what they don’t have.

The key is to make people homesick for a home they’ve never known but want to go to more than anything or anywhere else. Make them homesick for God.

Scriptural Hymnal

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I went to a concert tonight at Christ Community Church that was a bit atypical. What made it unusual is that it was a Scriptural Hymnal Release Celebration — basically, the words of Scripture set to music.

I’m all for modern worship. I’m all for the classic hymns. But there’s something especially powerful about straight up singing the Word of God. Knowing that instead of singing words about God or words to God, you’re singing God’s words back to God is a mind-blowing concept.

I learned tonight that over the next year or so, there will be 100 songs released on 10 albums. How cool would it be if churches all across the country picked up on these hymns and incorporated them into their worship? I mean you can’t get better theology than that. You definitely can’t get more biblical than the Bible.

It reminded me more than a little of Handel’s Messiah, but with contemporary arrangements and using the NIV instead of the KJV. But I guess Messiah was contemporary for its time. It only seems antiquated because it’s around 400 years old. Not that I mind. I still love Handel’s Messiah and listen to it at least once every year.

But this was what I needed. What better way to get Scripture into your mind than having it become an ear worm through hearing the songs? What better way to pray and praise than singing God’s word back to God?

Much thanks to Randall Goodgame, A. S. Peterson, and the good folks at the Rabbit Room for this one. It was a truly spectacular night.

Chocolate Is Salad

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It sorta makes sense if you think about it.

In my own fantasy world, I’d be able to eat all the chocolate and not get fat or turn into a diabetic. But even in that fantasy world, I’d probably get as sick of chocolate as of anything else that I ate exclusively for days and days.

Chocolate is so good because it’s a treat. It’s rare. It’s not an every day thing. That’s what makes it good.

You could take that and apply it to anything spiritual.

It’s like sex within marriage versus all the time with just anybody.

It’s like being financially responsible while allowing yourself to splurge every now and then versus impulse buying all the time and disregarding your bank account.

Discipline is a dirty word in this culture, but it can be a beautiful thing if you can learn delayed joy instead of always caving in to instant gratification. Good things do come to those who wait indeed.

Now if I could only train myself to crave salads instead of chocolate all the time.

The Mother of the Mother of God

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This is a borrowed post that speaks not about Mary, the mother of Jesus but about Mary’s mother. We know absolutely nothing about her other than she obviously existed — no name, no lineage, no story, no angel visit, no nothing. But yet her faithfulness led to Mary’s faithfulness, which led to the Incarnation.

It’s a post from December 20, so we’re not quite to the time of year to be talking about the nativity just yet. At least for most people. I think this is something that works all year round. What follows is amazing:

“This time of year, we talk about Mary a lot.
But what about Mary’s mother?
Someone had to raise Mary to find favor with God.
Someone had to raise Mary to treasure purity.
Someone had to raise Mary to honor Joseph.
Someone had to raise Mary to know the voice of the Lord, even though they were living in the silent years.

Mary’s mother, we don’t know her name.
We don’t know what her life looked like.
We don’t know who she was married to, or what he was like.
All we know is, she raised the mother of Christ.
She raised a daughter, highly favored of the Lord.
She raised a daughter to fear the Lord, when the Lord was silent.
This is what we know.

Mary’s mother didn’t have an encounter with Angel, telling her to raise Mary carefully because of how the Lord was going to use her.

Mary’s mother chose to raise Mary wisely so that the Lord could use her.

Mary’s mother didn’t have an encounter with Angel, telling her to honor her husband, because Mary would need to honor Joseph when he told her to travel to Bethlehem while she was great with child, when he told her to flee Herod’s wrath (before it came to pass) in the middle of the night, Mary’s mother just honored her husband, obeyed, and submitted to him because she knew that’s what she was called to do.

Mary’s mother didn’t have an encounter with an angel, giving her a word to cling to in those dark, silent years. But she clung to the word of God that she had. She trusted his word, even during his silence.

And her home shone with divine favor, because she made choices in the dark, that affected the whole world.

Mary did you know?

She knew some, she knew what the Angel told her.

But Mary’s mother?
She had no idea.
But she chose to raise a daughter that the Lord could use.
And that choice still affects us all today.
Who you raise can affect eternity.
The example you set in marriage, can affect eternity.
Your home can make the gates of Hell tremble.
But it starts with you” (Sarah Trent).