religion

Old School CCM

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Maybe this makes me super old, but old music just sounds better. It sounds like real people playing real instruments and singing with real voices.

I grew up on 80s and 90s music, but if you want to get me started and never shut up, start talking to me about 80s and 90s Contemporary Christian Music. Mention artists like Kim Hill, Steven Curtis Chapman, Susan Ashton, PFR, dc talk, Julie Miller, Rich Mullins and so many of those others.

I’m pretty sure I’d win a trivia contest based off of old-school CCM. Or at least I’d know some of the answers.

One of my favorite artists from back when was Julie Miller. She had a unique sound and voice and could write songs like nobody else. Probably my favorite of hers is a song called “Nobody But You.” It’s so honest and transparent and true. Here are the lyrics:

“I have seen the night of a million tears
I have seen an angel’s smile
I have come of age and remained, these years
With the longings of a child

Nobody but you can find my heart
Nobody but you sees in the dark
Nobody but you can call my name and scatter all my pain

I have had the fears of an orphaned heart
I have had a homeless soul
I have been embraced in the arms of grace
You have brought my spirit home

Nobody but you can find my heart
Nobody but you sees in the dark
Nobody but you can call my name and scatter all my pain

Nobody but you can find my heart
Nobody but you sees in the dark
Nobody but you can call my name and scatter all my pain

Nobody but you, nobody but you
Nobody but you, nobody but you
Nobody but you, nobody but you
Nobody but you” (Julie Miller).

Never Getting Beyond My Need

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I was channel surfing earlier, and ran across a program called Better Together, where some speakers and authors were discussing modern idolatry and how we are all prone to it.

Basically, most of us think of idols as tiny statues made of gold or silver or wood. Most of us picture idolaters as people bowing toward some stone image that can’t possibly reciprocate.

The reality is that idolatry is taking something good, i.e. marriage, family, children, careers, success, and putting it in the place of God. It’s letting something other than God take the throne of our hearts.

The painful truth is that we are all idolaters. We have something else other than God that we put in front of God or place beside God. We never get past needing to repent our idols because our flesh craves something tangible to worship. Our flesh isn’t satisfied with God.

We will never get past our need of God because the more we grow, the more we see how far we are from the mark of God’s standard. The more we see our own faults in the light of God’s perfection and holiness. The more we understand that our good intentions rarely lead to good works.

But God is faithful even when we are not. God is faithful to His promises when we don’t keep ours to Him. God is faithful to pursue us when we so often pursue so many lesser objects instead of God. God is faithful to finish what He started in us and make us like Jesus.

The Peace of Christ

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“‘I give you MY peace’ John 14:27. Jesus, thank you for a peace that doesn’t just prepare us to die well, but also to live free. The peace of no condemnation and your full delight. The peace of knowing you’re working in all things for our good” (Scotty Smith).

I’m thankful that the peace of Christ isn’t based on my ideas of what peace should look and feel like.

My idea of peace is no conflict, no discomforts, no pain, no trials. If I had my way, I’d go from ease to ease, from comfort to comfort, and never grow up. Jesus’ way isn’t about making me suffer simply for the sake of suffering, but in my trials and tribulations I can 1) become more like Jesus, and 2) identify with Jesus in His own sufferings (which were way worse than mine will ever be).

Peace isn’t the absence of storms, but being sheltered in the midst of those storms. As the old song says, sometimes Jesus calms the storm, but often He comforts His child in the storm.

Peace is ultimately an inner solitude that nothing from the outside can shake, a confidence of faith that no outside crisis can kill, and a trust that says, “Even if He kills me, I will still keep trusting” (adapted from Job 13:15).

Grant us peace tonight that passes all our human understanding and guards our hearts and leads us to adoration of You, O Lord.

There’s Always a Choice

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“I call Heaven and Earth to witness against you today: I place before you Life and Death, Blessing and Curse. Choose life so that you and your children will live. And love God, your God, listening obediently to him, firmly embracing him. Oh yes, he is life itself, a long life settled on the soil that God, your God, promised to give your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Deut. 30:19-20).

The children of Israel had a choice. They could choose to serve and obey God, or they could follow after the gods of the peoples in the land they were called to occupy.

Both choices had consequences. Choosing to follow Yahweh led to life and blessing, while running after idols led to curses and death. There was no third option with no consequences.

Today, we have a choice. Following God leads to life, and following sin, self, and Satan leads to death. Jesus said that He was the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one could come to the Father and eternal life but through Him.

The good news is that while you’re living, there’s always time to change the road you’re on. No matter what you’ve done in the past, what terrible choices you might have made, what wreck you might have made of your life, you can always come to God, and He will never cast out anyone coming to Him in faith.

Choose today. Choose Jesus.

Obedience and Trust

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Here are some words from George MacDonald on the importance of obedience and trust:

“Trust and obedience is the greatest thing that is required of any of us. The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting until you lay the book aside, to consume you, that need, which is no real need, is a demon sucking at the spring of your life. Do you object, saying, ‘But no, you do not understand. The thing I am worrying about is a reasonable anxiety, an unavoidable care.’ ?

‘Does it involve something you have to do at this very moment?’, I ask.

‘Well, no.’

‘Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something that is required of you at this moment. The greatest thing that can ever be required of any man or woman.’

‘And what is that?’

‘To trust in the living God.’

‘What if God does not want me to have what I need at this moment?’

‘If He does not want you to have something you value, it is to give you instead something He values.’

‘And if I do not want what He has to give me?’

‘If you are not willing that God should have His way with you, then in the name of God, BE MISERABLE, until your misery drives you to the arms of the Father.’

‘Oh, but this is only about some financial concern. I do trust him with spiritual matters.’

‘Everything is an affair of the Spirit. If God has a way of dealing with you in your life, it is the only way. Everything little thing in which you would have your own way has a mission for your redemption. He will treat you as a willful child until you take your Father’s way for your own.'”

There is no area of your life that does not concern God or is outside of His purview. Every part of your story is sacred because God is using that small part to showcase His glory in a way that only you can see. What everyone else can see is your faithfulness to trust God when it doesn’t make sense or goes against what you think is best.

When you choose God’s way over your way, then people see where your allegiance really lies. They see that you are God’s and that He is yours. While it is important to speak your faith, how you live it out is just as vital to a good testimony of the goodness of God.

A Lenten Prayer

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“O Lord, this holy season of Lent is passing quickly,
I entered into it with fear, but also with great expectations.
I hoped for a great breakthrough, a powerful conversion, a real change of heart;
I wanted Easter to be a day so full of light that not even a trace 
of darkness would be left in my soul.
But I know that you do not come to your people with thunder and lightning.
Even St. Paul and St. Francis journeyed through much darkness
before they could see your light.
Let me be thankful for your gentle way.
I know you are at work.
I know you will not leave me alone, 
I know you are quickening me for Easter – 
but in a way fitting to my own history and my own temperament.
I pray that these last three weeks, in which you invite me to enter 
more fully into the mystery of your passion,
will bring me a greater desire to follow you on the way you create for me
and to accept the cross that you give to me.
Let me die to the desire to choose my own way and select my own cross.
You do not want to make me a hero but a servant who loves you.
Be with me tomorrow and in the days to come,
and let me experience your gentle presence.
Amen” (Henri Nouwen).

Lord, may the last three weeks of Lent not be wasted. Help me to use my time away from social media to create margins of unhurried space within my day for me to hear Your voice speaking to me. Give me a quiet heart and a calm mind to receive Your words. Above all, grant me the ability and willingness to obey what I hear. Amen.

Boxen

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I started a new book recently. I’ve actually owned this book for a while, but for some reason or another have never gotten around to it. It was perpetually on my to-read-next list.

This is a collection of what C. S. Lewis, who preferred to be called Jack, wrote with his brother Warnie when they were kids growing up in Belfast in Northern Ireland. It wasn’t something they ever meant to be published but it was stories they wrote for each other to take their minds off of the outside world and losing their mother at an early age.

It feels a bit like the Beatrix Potter books (which they read as kids) where the animals wear clothes and talk and behave in human ways. If you’ve read the Narnia books, you can see where the seeds that led to those books came from.

These stories have typical childish spelling and grammar, but also they seem a bit advanced for children who were both under the age of 10. You can tell both these boys were intelligent and well-educated. I feel like these characters could have easily existed in the world that Kenneth Grahame created for The Wind in the Willows (which is a story that he also never originally meant to be published but wrote for his young son).

I’ve included a link to Amazon if you’re interested (although I think you could probably find it cheaper in a secondhand bookstore or through other book websites):

Do Thou for Me

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“Do Thou for me, O God the Lord,
Do Thou for me.
I need not toil to find the word
That carefully
Unfolds my prayer and offers it,
My God, to Thee.

It is enough that Thou wilt do,
And wilt not tire,
Wilt lead by cloud, all the night through
By light of fire,
Till Thou has perfected in me
Thy heart’s desire.

For my beloved I will not fear,
Love knows to do
For him, for her, from year to year,
As hitherto.
Whom my heart cherishes are dear
To Thy heart too.

O blessèd be the love that bears
The burden now,
The love that frames our very prayers,
Well knowing how
To coin our gold.  O God the Lord,
Do Thou, Do Thou” (Amy Carmichael).

There are times when we simply don’t know how to pray for a circumstance or a loved one. Try as we may, the words will not come.

I think even then God hears the groans and sighs of our petitions and knows what they mean. He hears the deepest desires of our hearts and knows best how to grant them.

Even when we have words, they aren’t always the best ones. Sometimes, we ask without such a limited point of view. Sometimes we ask selfishly. Sometimes we have too small a view of God and ask too little.

In Jan Karon’s Mitford series, Father Tim Kavanaugh always has his go-to prayer, or “the prayer that never fails,” as he calls it. The prayer goes “Thy will be done.”

You can never go wrong with leaving the matter in God’s hands.

That’s What He Said

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“How are we to think about Jesus’s presence today? No doubt volumes could be written on that question, and have been. But the simple fact is that Jesus Christ is present in this world, the only world we have, and in many ways. His teachings, even mangled and broken, have an incredible power to disrupt human systems, including the ones that claim to own him. He is the misfit and thus is available to all who would seek him. His crucifixion and resurrection announce the end of human systems and stand in judgment over them. He is the man on the cross calling us to join him there. He makes himself available to individuals who hear of him and seek him. In many forms both inside and outside the church, with its traditions, symbolisms, and literature, he is simply here among us. He is in his people, but he does not allow himself to be boxed in by them. He calls to us by just being here in our midst. There is nothing like him. The people in the churches also have the option of finding him and following him into his kingdom, though that may rarely be what they are doing.

For many today who think of themselves as educated, historical studies and ‘higher criticism’—perhaps something they call a ‘scientific’ outlook—have made the person and teachings of Jesus problematic. From where they start, he seems a questionable resource for actually living their lives. He may become for them a scholarly football to kick around or to ignore. But he does not go away. In spite of all, he himself is still available in this world, and beyond all historical issues and confusions there stands a strong if somewhat hazy impression of what he stood for. To come to know him and to clarify who he really is, people have only to stand for what he stood for, as best they can, and to do so by inviting him to take their life into his life and walk with them. If they do just this with humility and openness—which everyone knows to be his manner of life—they will know him more and more as they take his life to be their life. In this way they do not have to ‘know’ at the start. It is enough to venture in the kingdom of God and its King. ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’ (Acts 2:21)” (Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge).

Wow. I do believe that says it all.

 

Down from the Mountain

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“You see, all have sinned, and all their futile attempts to reach God in His glory fail. Yet they are now saved and set right by His free gift of grace through the redemption available only in Jesus the Anointed” (Romans 3:23-24, VOICE).

So many see Christianity as another option, just one road among the many that lead up the mountain to God. They say that all paths get to the destination but in different ways.

How about this? There may be several roads that lead up that mountain, but none of us will get to God that way. None of us are strong enough or brave enough or stedfast enough to make it all the way up.

How about this? God didn’t wait patiently for someone to find a way up to Him. He came down from the mountain to us to help us get to Him. He didn’t merely show the way or even offer to walk before us up the path. He became the way.

Jesus is our way up the mountain. Not by chanting and meditation. Not by praying five times a day. Not by sin management and moralism. Not by keeping a set of rule. Not by any amount of sacrifices or religious rites.

How then?

By simply believing that Jesus is Who He says He is and He did what He set out to do. It’s by trusting that Jesus took on our imperfections and sins and failures and death, instead giving us perfection and righteousness and new life.

If it had been up to me and my own efforts, I’d still be at the foot of the mountain looking up in despair. But thanks to God, I’m on my way up and guaranteed to reach the top. And my victory song will be that Jesus led me all the way there.