Reflect. Love.

The past few weeks, some reading I’ve been doing, and a few recent conversations have prompted me to ask myself, who am I without the gospel?  What is it that makes up who I am as a man?  If it’s not the gospel of Jesus, then I have nothing.  A friend of mine knows someone very well that has just recently decided that he doesn’t believe in God anymore at all.  He’s an atheist now.  When I sat down to read last night, I couldn’t get him off of my mind.  My heart just breaks for him.  I know he’s got emptiness and that he’s just trying to explain that emptiness or maybe make it better by trying to find all of the answers, but it’s so clear that it’s not working.  My first thought was, “who is he now?”  What is he defined by now?  What makes us different?  What makes us respond different to various situations?

I’ve recently become obsessed with Friday Night Lights.  I started season 1 last week and finished it and now am in the middle of season 2.  It’s an addiction and I’m not proud of it  So, anyway, I was watching an episode where a coach finds out that his wife has 3 months to live and he doesn’t know what to do.  He tells another coach and the other coach doesn’t know what to say or do, so he just says “I’m sorry” and leaves the room.  It got me to thinking about those who don’t know Jesus.  I have looked at that situation with my dad before and the only hope that he had, the only hope that my family had, the only hope that I had was Jesus.  I just wondered, “what if I didn’t have Jesus?”  and I think I would feel so hopeless.

So I began to realize that what makes me different from the atheist is hope.  What makes me different is the gospel.  I think it has caused me to look at my own life as well and ask, “would your life be completely different if you all of a sudden just stopped believing in God?”  I just felt empty.  I couldn’t ever stop following Jesus because the gospel defines who I am in my heart.  What has to change is that the life I live on the outside has to reflect what is inside of my heart.  If the gospel defines who I am on the inside, then I need to be a proclaimer of the greatest story in history on the outside.  This doesn’t just need to be with my words, but with my thoughts, my actions, and my whole life.

What defines you?  Take an honest assessment of yourself.  Step back, look in the mirror and ask yourself some hard questions.  If you are a Christ follower, church attender, or whatever walk of life you’re in, what defines you?  If you’re a Christ follower, is it the gospel?  Because if it’s not, then you’ve got some soul-searching to do.

I’ve been on a pretty crazy ride spiritually since my last post.  My ideas and strategies for NorthBrook have changed in my head and I’m pumped about what God is going to do.  Before I tell you about a few things, check this post out by Perry Noble:

http://www.perrynoble.com/2009/08/06/ten-things-i-hope/

I love getting some encouragement through things like that and thought I would share it with you.  I echo those thoughts in that post.

I talked to a mentor/friend of mine today that I really enjoy talking with because I just feel the spirit of God ALL over him when I get off the phone with him.  The man just radiates Jesus.  He’s so encouraging in my own personal walk and he doesn’t think I’m crazy when I tell him how God’s been speaking to me!!!  The one thing that we talked so much about is having boldness for the gospel.  It’s so easy to get caught up in strategy and methodology of the church to try and grow.  We so easily forget that Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell will not overcome it!”.

As I talked with our student pastor, Dylan, the other day, we discussed how we don’t want to fall into the trap of trying to become the “cool” church.  We don’t want to sacrifice the gospel on the alter of relevance.  We would rather do it the other way around.  I would MUCH rather sacrifice relevance on the alter of the gospel because the gospel IS relevant!  I’m afraid that so many of our churches today act as if the gospel isn’t relevant anymore!  We’re so worried about offending people, and guess what…the gospel IS offensive because we’re all sinners!

So, as a pastor, I am committing to being BOLD for the gospel of Jesus.  Less strategy, less methodology, more Jesus.  We be a church that shares our faith and shares our stories of how we’ve encountered Jesus in our lives.  We’re trusting God to show us the way and to draw all those to Himself if we just continue to preach His gospel and follow Him as closely as we can.

It’s pretty easy to pastor a church when I have a small vision.  As long as I show up and have a pretty decent sermon on Sundays and show up to the big events and shake hands with everybody, it all runs pretty smooth.  This is one of those days though that God has had to remind me to NOT be that guy.  It’s so tempting to allow things to get in the way  of what I know God has called me to do, like my work schedule, sleep, laziness and all of the other things on my mind lately.

Every now and again though, God decides to kick it in gear for me.  He tells me that he doesn’t desire for me to do small things because He’s not a small God!!!  Why is my view of God so miniscule at times?  God is the only Great and the only Good that we know, yet, my way always stands in the way of His way.  It’s the most frustrating part of my life right now.  I feel like I’m grabbing hold of the wheel acting like I know how to drive the vehicle of my life, my church, etc., while Jesus, who really knows how to drive, where to go, and how to get there, just desperately wants me to give him control of it all because He knows what’s best for all of the things in my life!

So I’m asking God for some big things.  Some things may not be big for some of you, but they are HUGE for me right now in my life.  If you come across this blog, please pray through these for me, if you don’t mind.

- That God would provide a way for me to become full-time at NorthBrook.  Working full-time and pastoring a church is getting increasingly difficult.  There are so many things that I want to be able to do as a pastor that are not possible being bi-vocational.  I’m praying that God would grow our church numerically, by introducing people to Christ, but also, He would help people take the next step spiritually where they would become more faithful in giving to support NorthBrook.

- That we would hire a worship leader.  This is a BIG prayer request that I’m begging God for.  A talented and creative worship leader is a HUGE part of the vision for NorthBrook Church.  Worship is such a vital part of a church and God will introduce us to the person who can help us to connect with Christ on Sundays.  You may think, “That’s not really a BIG prayer”.  Well, right now, it’s VERY big to me because I’m not just looking for someone who can lead worship.  I’m looking for God’s person for NorthBrook.  It’s a vital step in becoming who we will be as a church.

- That God would give us SO many opportunities to impact our community by loving and serving them.

- God would continue to grow and develop my new son into a healthy baby boy as our due date draws near.  Even more than that, that God would use Emery’s life for His glory and that Emery would be a part of making God famous throughout the world.  That Emery would have Kingdom impact and become an agent of change in our world for Jesus Christ.

- That God would send us people that need to meet Him.  Whether this is on Sundays or not, I pray that God would provide opportunities for us to introduce Jesus to others and that one by one we could impact our community and our city for Christ.

- God would just continue to make me into the leader that He desires for me to be.  That I would forget about my direction for NorthBrook and that I would desire His direction for us as a church.  That He would make me into more of a servant than anything else.

- That God would provide for NorthBrook a “sun stop in the sky” moment.  In other words, that He would do HUGE things inside our church and our people and our community.  That He would introduce people to Him and help us be a part of helping people take the next step in their spiritual lives.

I am praying for BIG things right now.  I’m praying for a movement of God so big that it can’t be explained, other than God is behind all of it.  I pray that the people of NorthBrook will catch this passion to pray for our church, our leadership, our community, our city and ourselves!

I heard a song tonight that is currently a prayer of mine every time I think about it- “Take my life and let it be all for you and for your glory, take my life and let it be yours!”

Pray BIG prayers.  God is a HUGE God!  He wants to do exceedingly, abundantly more than we could ever ask or imagine! (Eph. 3:20)

Reflect Jesus.  Love the World.

I’ve been reading through the Old Testament recently in The Message and as I finished Ruth, I was reading the introduction of 1 and 2 Samuel.  Eugene Peterson has done the translation for The Message and has written every introduction.  During this particular introduction, it completely speaks to how God is trying to teach me right now in this part of my walk with Him.  Instead of trying to sum it all up in a way that wouldn’t give it justice, I’m just going to give it to you straight from The Message.  Here it is:

Four lives dominate the two-volume narrative, First and Second Samuel: Hannah, Samuel, Saul, and David.  Chronologically, the stories are clustered around the year 1000 B.C., the millennial midpoint between the call of abraham, the father of Israel, nearly a thousand years earlier (about 1800 B.C.) and the birth of Jesus, the Christ, a thousand years later.

These four lives become seminal for us at the moment we realize that our ego-bound experience is too small a context in which to understand and experience what it means to believe in God and follow his ways.  For these are large lives- large because they live in the largeness of God.  Not one of them can be accounted for in terms of cultural conditions or psychological dynamics; God is the country in which they live.

Most of us need to be reminded that these stories are not exemplary in the sense that we stand back and admire them, like statues in a gallery, knowing all the while that we will never be able to live either that gloriously or tragically ourselves.  Rather they are immersions into the actual business of living itself: this is what it means to be human.  Reading and praying our way through these pages, we get it; gradually but most emphatically we recognize that what it means to be a woman, a man, mostly has to do with God.  These four stories do not show us how we should live but how in fact we do live, authenticating the reality of our daily experience as the stuff that God uses to work out his purposes of salvation in us and in the world.

The stories do not do this by talking about God, for there is surprisingly little explicit God talk here- whole pages sometimes without the name of God appearing.  But as the narrative develops we realize that God is the commanding and accompanying presence that provides both plot and texture to every sentence.  This cluster of interlocking stories trains us in perceptions of ourselves, our sheer and irreducible humanity, that cannot be reduced to personal feelings or ideas or circumstances.  If we want a lie other than mere biology, we must deal with God.  There is no alternate way.

One of many welcome consequences in learning to “read” our lives in the lives of Hannah, Samuel, Saul, and David is a sense of affirmation and freedom:  we don’t have to fit into prefabricated moral or mental or religious boxes before we are admitted into the company of God- we are taken seriously just as we are and given a place in his story, for it is, after all, his story; none of us is the leading character in the story of our life.

For the biblical way is not so much to present us with a moral code and tell us “Live up to this”; nor is it to set out a system of doctrine and say, “Think like this and you will live well.”  The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us, “Live into this.  This is what it looks like to be human; this is what is involved in entering and maturing as human beings.”  We do violence to the biblical revelation when we “use” it for what we can get out of it or what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives.  That results in a kind of “boutique spirituality”- God as decoration, God as enhancement.  The Samuel narrative will not allow that.  In the reading, as we submit our lives to what we read, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but to see our stories in God’s.  God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

I couldn’t think of any better way to say it.  God is the context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

Reflect Jesus.  Love the world.

“And take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth for my hope is in your rules.”- Psalm 119:43

When I think about what gives me hope, rules certainly aren’t the first idea that pops into my head.  I wonder sometimes if I were to lose the word of God, what would my life be like?  If it were taken from me, would I miss it?  Would I be like the Psalmist who can’t live without it?  I believe that I would.  I think of all of the times that I’ve needed to hear from God and I’ve opened up His Word to find truth and it gives me hope for my situation, my future, or whatever I’m going through.  So, it’s really true!  God’s Word does give hope more than anything else!

In America, we are desperate for hope right now.  We’re desperate for a future and we’re desperate to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  I’m praying that this is a time that people turn to God with their families because their is no other hope, but hope in Him.  Even the word “hope” just lifts my spirits when I hear it.  To me, hope is about a new future.  It’s about taking away the old and bringing in something that’s great and something that I don’t deserve but I get it regardless.  To me, hope is about grace.  It’s about getting something that we don’t deserve for free.  We can put ourselves in some bad situations and then can’t find a way out, but somehow, God offers us hope in the midst of our pain.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve lived in a bad economy.  Just read scripture!  Heck, at one time, God wiped the face of the earth clean with a flood and saved 1 family.  ONE family, and a male and female of each animal on the planet.  What kind of economy was THAT?  It will get better.  The sun will rise again as it did for Noah and his family.  It may look bleak now, but God’s Word offers hope.  We have a future in Him.

Reflect Jesus.  Love the World.