spirituality

Dumb Mistakes

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

I remember vividly when I was a kid waiting for my sister. She took ballet and I would wait outside the building until her practice was over. One time, I had the genius idea and thought, “When she comes out, I’m racing her to the car.”

Lo and behold, she came out and I took off running. I didn’t stop until I sat down in the car. Then I looked up. I thought, “Hey, you’re not my sister. Hey, wait a minute, this isn’t our car.” It was probably one of the most awkward situations I’ve ever been in.

Maybe your mistake wan’t as funny. Maybe it was devastating or tragic. Maybe it ruined a friendship or even a marriage. Maybe you feel like you’re still paying for that mistake made so many years ago.

You’re not alone. Moses messed up royally. He got angry with God’s people and spoke as if he and not God were responsible for giving the Israelites water and helping them out of jams time and time again.

Then there’s David, who committed adultery with Bathsheeba, lied to and tried to deceive her husband, then finally had him killed. I think that qualifies as an epic fail.

The good news is that your story doesn’t have to end with failure. God offers forgiveness and a fresh start if you own up to what you did and are willing to change and go in a different direction.

I love what David wrote in Psalm 51 after he confessed to his own sin and repented of it:

“Generous in love—God, give grace! Huge in mercy—wipe out my bad record.

Scrub away my guilt,

soak out my sins in your laundry.

I know how bad I’ve been;

my sins are staring me down.

You’re the One I’ve violated, and you’ve seen

it all, seen the full extent of my evil.

You have all the facts before you;

whatever you decide about me is fair.

I’ve been out of step with you for a long time,

in the wrong since before I was born.

What you’re after is truth from the inside out.

Enter me, then; conceive a new, true life.

Soak me in your laundry and I’ll come out clean,

scrub me and I’ll have a snow-white life.

Tune me in to foot-tapping songs,

set these once-broken bones to dancing.

Don’t look too close for blemishes,

give me a clean bill of health.

God, make a fresh start in me,

shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.

Don’t throw me out with the trash,

or fail to breathe holiness in me.

Bring me back from gray exile,

put a fresh wind in my sails!

Give me a job teaching rebels your ways

so the lost can find their way home.

Commute my death sentence, God, my salvation God,

and I’ll sing anthems to your life-giving ways.

Unbutton my lips, dear God;

I’ll let loose with your praise.”

All I can add to that is

Amen.

What’s It Worth to You?

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I had some hard questions that smacked me upside the head today. Questions like these:

What in my life am I so passionate about that I would sacrifice everything else for?

Is what I believe just mental assent or does it a actually change the way I live?

Am I a follower when it’s convenient or will I still follow even when it costs me something?

Do those I work with know that I’m a follower of Jesus and could they see the way I act and speak and be able to tell a difference?

Am I following Jesus as a means to my own goals and dreams or for the sake of knowing and becoming more like Him?

Can I be okay with living in limbo with unanswered questions and unfulfilled desires and silences from God?

When Monday and the week start all over again, will I be willing to pick up my cross and carry it and follow Jesus no matter what?

Those are some questions that are haunting me right now. In my own strength I could only say no, but with God’s help and strength and Jesus in me, I am finally and firmly able to offer up an absolute yes.

In my own power I will choose ease and comfort and me every time, but in the power of the risen Christ, I can choose sacrifice and picking up my cross and, ultimately, to be a vessel through which Jesus can tangibly love the world.

May the same be said of each of you.

Christian Reciprocity Revisited, Or What I Learned from Kairos Roots Tonight

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I feel like Mr. Rogers. “The word for today is reciprocity. Can you say reciprocity, boys and girls? Very good.”

Basically, the word means give and take. It’s all about giving and receiving.

There will be times when God blesses you. You will pick up your Bible and truths and insight will practically jump off the pages. You will have an unexpected bonus from work or a pay raise or some other financial blessing. You will be in a good position to give.

Then there will be other times when you read the Bible and it might as well be in Greek for what you get out of it. You have an overdraft or two at the bank and your bank account has a rather unpleasant negative sign in front of the number. Then you are in a good place to learn how to receive.

Even life experiences can be shared in the same way. You go through tragedy and heartbreak at times and find others who are willing to share your load and get you through. Later,  you are able to walk with someone else who is going through the same valley.

I do believe that we are most like Jesus when we are giving freely, expecting nothing in return, to those least likely to reciprocate the favor.

I also believe that it is a good lesson to learn to receive gratiously and humbly. To not receive is to rob someone else of the blessing of giving out of pride or false self-sufficiency.

The bottom line is that all we have is from God. We didn’t earn one red cent apart from His grace and provision. In the end, we’re not owners. We’re stewards, taking care of what really belongs to God.

Lord, give us Your eyes to see the need and Your generous heart to reach out with what You gave us to help meet that need. May we not give just our resources and our time but our very lives away for the cause of Christ every single day for the rest of our lives. Amen.

A Good Word

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I thought that since it was Monday and I wasn’t feeling particularly creative, I’d have a guest blogger for the day. You might have heard of him. He’s King David, best known for writing a few songs we call Psalms. Here goes:

“O my soul, bless God. From head to toe, I’ll bless his holy name!

O my soul, bless God,

don’t forget a single blessing!

He forgives your sins—every one.

He heals your diseases—every one.

He redeems you from hell—saves your life!

He crowns you with love and mercy—a paradise crown.

He wraps you in goodness—beauty eternal.

He renews your youth—you’re always young in his presence.

God makes everything come out right;

he puts victims back on their feet.

He showed Moses how he went about his work,

opened up his plans to all Israel.

God is sheer mercy and grace;

not easily angered, he’s rich in love.

He doesn’t endlessly nag and scold,

nor hold grudges forever.

He doesn’t treat us as our sins deserve,

nor pay us back in full for our wrongs.

As high as heaven is over the earth,

so strong is his love to those who fear him.

And as far as sunrise is from sunset,

he has separated us from our sins.

As parents feel for their children,

God feels for those who fear him.

He knows us inside and out,

keeps in mind that we’re made of mud.

Men and women don’t live very long;

like wildflowers they spring up and blossom,

But a storm snuffs them out just as quickly,

leaving nothing to show they were here.

God’s love, though, is ever and always,

eternally present to all who fear him,

Making everything right for them and their children

as they follow his Covenant ways

and remember to do whatever he said.

God has set his throne in heaven;

he rules over us all. He’s the King!

So bless God, you angels,

ready and able to fly at his bidding,

quick to hear and do what he says.

Bless God, all you armies of angels,

alert to respond to whatever he wills.

Bless God, all creatures, wherever you are—

everything and everyone made by God.

And you, O my soul, bless God!”

All kidding aside, I hope this speaks to you as it did to me when I first read it. By the way, if you don’t recognize it, it’s Psalm 103 in The Message translation.

Invited

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(This was largely inspired by a sermon I heard today at Fellowship Bible Church. I highly recommend checking out the podcast on their website, fellowshipnashville.org.)

“You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat” (Matthew 5:6).

Imagine the most lavish, ornate dinner party ever thrown. Call it a banquet or a gala if that helps.

Or if that’s not your cup of tea, imagine the biggest, wildest rave ever thrown with a top-notch dj and a lineup of great bands.

Imagine the guest list. You would think it would be full of celebrities and moguls and people who are listed in places like People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People or Time magazine’s 50 Most Powerful People or Forbe’s 50 Most Wealthiest People in the World.

It’s not. If you look at the list closely enough, you see the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame, the outcast, and the orphan. You see people that ordinarily wouldn’t even be let in the door.

Look closer. You see your name and my name there. We’ve been invited.

That’s the idea behind Jesus’ parable. The original guest list accepted but then backed out at the very last minute. So the King authorized the servants to go find the least of these and bring them in. Then he told them to go into the highways and byways and find people and compel them to come.

That’s our job as believers. Invite people to the best feast with the best food they’ll ever eat. We’re to compel them to come. Not in the sense of holding them at gun point, but to do all that is in our power to get them to come.

Jesus Himself told us what was on the menu. He said things like “I am the Bread of Life” and “Whoever drinks of me will never be thirsty again.” He’s not only the one inviting us, He’s the feast. He is the party.

We say, “You can come as you are. You don’t have to get cleaned up first. You don’t have to bring anything other than just your appetite”

That’s the Kingdom of God– a party like you’ve never seen offered to people like you and me who can’t seem to ever get their acts together and always seem to make stupid choices and dumb mistakes.

The sad part is that the most religious people and the most holier-than-thou types won’t be there. Jesus said matter of factly to the Pharisees that they wouldn’t even get a taste of the banquest because they rejected the offer a second time.

The best part is that for people like you and me, the offer still stands.

Will you come? Will you invite someone else?

Kairos Revisited

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Tonight’s guest speaker, Pete Wilson from Crosspoint Church, spoke about idolatry in relation to the American culture.

We don’t have actual wooden and golden and stone idols that we physically bow down to, but we have idols, nonetheless. Our idols are internal, and are anything that we expect to give what only God can give.

Two of the biggest areas of idolatry are accomplishment and approval.

Accomplishment says that if you can get that raise or that promotion, you will find meaning. If you work more hours and earn more accolades through your job, you will have value.

Jesus says, “I give you meaning and value merely because you are Mine.”

Approval says that you spend your life trying to make other people like you and notice you. Approval dictates how you dress, look, speak, and live your life.

Jesus says, “I approve of you because you are My beloved and I have eternally set my affection on you.”

If you seek fulfillment in these idols, it’s like being on an endless treadmill where you’re always reaching and striving because nothing you do is ever quite good enough. It’s exhausting.

Jesus says, “Come to me, all who are weary and overburdened and who work to the point of exhaustion, and I will give you rest.”

I really liked his definition of authenticity. It’s the practice of letting go of who you think you should be and who everyone else thinks you should be in order to become who you really are.

Authenticity is rare, so rare that those who dare to be their true selves will stand out like colors in a greyscale world.

As a recovering approval-addict, I appreciated tonight’s message. If I were honest, I’d have to repent on almost a daily basis of idols I have let slip into my life and given my time and attention to rather than God.

I think I for one want to step off the treadmill and find rest in my Abba as my only true source of contentment and fulfillment. Will you?

 

The Kingdom of God Is Like . . .

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The Kingdom of God is throwing a birthday party for a prostitute who has never had one in her life and giving her a birthday cake with candles and the gift of unconditional love.

The Kingdom of God is leaving the safety and comfort of the suburbs and going to the unsafe part of town to share a meal with homeless people.

The Kingdom of God is forgiving the person who took a part of you that you can never get back, whose wounds still have scars, and whose words still cut.

The Kingdom of God is hate turning into love, enemies turning into friends, the lost becoming found, the dead coming alive, and the hopeless rising up with new hope.

The Kingdom of God is a feast where the guests are the blind, the lame, the poor, the outcast, the forgotten, and the nobodies and where the least of these have the best seats in the house.

The Kingdom of God is wherever the people of God choose to be malajusted (to borrow a phrase from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)  to a world that prizes sex over love, greed over compassion, votes over justice, war and weapons over peace, religion over Christ, and where life is regarded as cheap.

The Kingdom of God is more than taking back our country; it’s about taking back the world and turning it right-side up again and filling it with justice that runs like a river and mercy that flows like a neverending stream.

The Kingdom of God is those who aren’t satisfied with climbing corporate ladders or making more money, but instead want to make a difference by embracing a lifestyle of downward mobility where they choose to lead through serving and counting others as better than themselves.

The Kingdom of God is an unstoppable force, because it’s main power is stronger than all the bombs and armies and weapons and strategies that have ever come against it– and that power is love.

The Kingdom of God is the faith of a little child who believes unquestioningly and trusts Abba unswervingly.

The Kingdom of God is you and me.

The Kingdom of God is now.

That Watershed Moment

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I will give you a scenario and then you can find out if you’re anything like me or if I really do need more pills. Here goes.

Tonight, I was debating internally whether or not I wanted to make the long trek downtown to work with the homeless at Set Free Nashville. Part of me wanted to go, but part of me wanted to not be bothered and stay home and veg.

The lazy part almost won. I had almost talked myself into not going, but then I went.

Guess what? The pastor was preaching to me. It was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. If I hadn’t gone, I would have missed out on a big blessing.

Maybe you’re in a place where you’re debating on whether or not to give up a Saturday to go serve meals to the homeless. Maybe you’re deciding whether or not to go to a Bible study even though you’re feeling wiped from a long day of work.

You will find every excuse not to go. You will have no trouble rationalizing staying and thinking of all the other chores you could be doing and/or all that rest you could be getting.

You might have a strange resistance to going and it will almost feel like you’re walking into the wind if you step out in faith.

I think that what you’re experiencing is spiritual warfare. The devil does not want you to go and receive that blessing, so he is trying his best to get you from going. Though sometimes you and I do just fine on our own for finding reasons not to step out.

One word: go. Get up off the couch, put down whatever suddenly seems so urgent and pressing, get in the car, and go.

I promise you will receive a blessing. You will receive a very precious word from God that you would have missed if you had not gone. You will serve, but find yourself receiving so much more than you give. You will find that you saw Jesus in the eyes of the least of these that you spoke to and served.

You will have the joy of knowing that God called you and you chose to obey and got to be where He was moving in power.

Go.

 

 

An Awesome Definition for Worship

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“Worship is extravagant love and extreme submission.”

I love that definition.

Too often, worship is all about singing songs. It’s all too easy to sit back and critique the song choices and musical styles and whether or not those around me are worshiping the “right” way.

In Nashville, it’s easy to let worship become all about the level of musicianship and charasmatic personality. It’s easy to manipulate a crowd into a frenzy if you’re talented enough, but that’s not worship.

Worship is extravagant love. I can’t help but thinking about the woman who poured the expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet and then wiped those feet with her hair. That was more than inconvenient. That was extremely costly and humiliating. That’s worship.

It’s also extreme submission. It’s surrendering my own illusion of self-control and admitting that I have a desperate need for God. And it starts long before you enter the sanctuary and the church service and doesn’t end when you pass the exit doors on your way out into the parking lot.

Worship is not an event, but a lifestyle of saying, “Not my will, but Thine.”

I don’t normally do this, but I posted a link to a fantastic blog about the nature of worship that I ran across today.

http://allsonsanddaughters.com/2012/03/26/art-in-worship-join-the-conversation/

I challenge to you read it and let it soak into your very being.

If I’m truly worshipping in Romans 12:1-2 fashion and being transformed by the renewing of my mind and offering my body as a living sacrifice, then it won’t matter whether I’m singing the most current and trendy modern worship songs or the old, old hymns.

It won’t matter if there’s a rockin’ worship band, or a guy with a guitar, or an orchestra and choir, or just a piano and organ.

It will be worship. It will declare the great worth of God to the world.

After all, like the song says, it’s not about me. It’s all about You, Jesus.

My Confession Booth (Stolen from Blue Like Jazz)

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image

I love the fact that they kept the confession booth from the book entitled Blue Like Jazz for the movie of the same name. I also love the fact that it is a very non-religious Christian movie.

The idea behind the confession booth is not receiving confession, but in giving one. Sorta like this.

We confess that we’ve done a poor job of representing God and Who He is. We’ve made Him in our image and had Him hate all the same people we do, people whose sins we magnify and villify because those aren’t the sins we struggle with.

We confess that we’ve made our faith a means to a political platform and getting our man elected. We’ve made our faith a means to more effectively climbing the corporate ladder and making even more money.

We confess that while we look down our noses at unbelievers, we don’t look much different. Our vocabulary and our lifestyles are too much like theirs for them to take our message seriously.

We confess that we’ve replaced the holier-than-thous with hipper-and-trendier-than thous, and made faith an exclusive club that you have to dress the right way and know the right words and the right people to be able to join.

We confess that we’re so proud of knowing God and have forgotten that the only reason we know Him is because He first loved us and revealed Himself to us. We confess that without His revelation, we’d be completely in the dark, the blind leading the blind, banging our heads against the same stone walls.

We confess that for too long too many of us have been ashamed of this Jesus who saved us and wasn’t above being made a spectacle in front of the crowds so that we could have life better than we thought was possible.

We confess that we have tried to give bumper-sticker answers to complex questions and given people Bible band-aids for deep soul wounds.

We confess that we’re not perfect people. We’re not better than anyone else or more holy or more likeable. We confess that we are the worst of sinners who have found out what it means to be forgiven and free. We want you to know what that looks and feels like, too.

I confess that I need to re-read Blue Like Jazz sometime in the near future because the movie reminded me how much I didn’t remember from the book.

I confess that it is way past my bedtime and I will turn into a flesh-craving zombie if I don’t get to bed in five minutes, so GOOD NIGHT AND GOD BLESS!