Good Friday - The Cross Centered Life

If all you have found [in Christianity] is advantage,
whether it is fun or profit or security,
then you haven't
started following Him yet.
His way is the way of the Cross.

The world can be very hard on those it hates.
If it is not hard on you, perhaps it sees nothing in you to hate.
But then
it doesn't see Jesus in you,
for it hates Jesus with an
undying hatred.

While your way is still all fun, all easy, all
jolly, it is only your way: 
when you turn from it to follow
His way, it will cost. 
It may cost you everything you have.

That is what it cost Him.

... Robert MacColl Adams (1913-1985), "Of Rice and Men"

Hmmm... if they only knew Jesus

Gmail - Stephen King, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Angelina Jolie: What unbelievers...

We all know that life is ephemeral, but on that particular day and in the months that followed, I got a painful but extremely valuable look at life’s simple backstage truths. We come in naked and broke. We may be dressed when we go out, but we’re just as broke. Warren Buffet? Going to go out broke. Bill Gates? Going out broke. Tom Hanks? Going out broke. Steve King? Broke. Not a crying dime.

All the money you earn, all the stocks you buy, all the mutual funds you trade—all of that is mostly smoke and mirrors. It’s still going to be a quarter-past getting late whether you tell the time on a Timex or a Rolex. No matter how large your bank account, no matter how many credit cards you have, sooner or later things will begin to go wrong with the only three things you have that you can really call your own: your body, your spirit and your mind.

So I want you to consider making your life one long gift to others. And why not? All you have is on loan, anyway. All that lasts is what you pass on. ...

The Bible,really

"You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilization to pieces, turn the world upside down, and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of good literature."

-Gandhi

Exactly

We need churches with strong social ties that extend well beyond the boundaries of their buildings and families into neighborhoods and the city. In short, we need more Missional Communities not Programmed Sunday Events. HT - Church Planting Novice

Until..

"Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. "
— Frederick Buechner

A Strange Way To Change the World

It's so hard to wrap your head around it. Of all the ways that God could have acted - a baby? Jonathan Dobson quotes Bono in a post on his blog Creation Project today.

“The idea that God, if there is a force of Logic and Love in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough.

That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw…a child…

I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable.

There it was.

I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this.”

U2 frontman Bono
Excerpt taken from Bono: in conversation (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 124-5.

As I continue to prepare for Sunday's "You Say You Want A Revolution" message for this Sunday, for me it is the "backstory" of Christmas that fascinates me. Why then? Why there? Why them?

It was so... common.

And yet it changed everything.

Maybe this is the Church's Problem

"What you do speaks so loudly, that I cannot hear what you say." Emerson

just saying...


HT - Bill Kinnon

Good words

Was just reading Group magazine and read this from Ned Erickson

"Get to know Jesus well because the more you know Him, the more you will love Him.

And the more you love Him, the more you'll want to follow Him.

And the more you follow Him the more you become like Him.


And the more you become like Him, the more you become yourself."

Another great thought from the same magazine, a quote from George MacDonald.

"One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is, that those who have seen something of the glory of Christ, set themselves to theorize concerning Him rather than to obey Him. In teaching men, they have not taught then Christ, but taught them about Christ."

MacDonald's prime directive for followers of Jesus? "Do the next good thing you know to do."

Well?

The question before each of us is not “Can someone lead a good life without Christianity?” The question is, “Can I?” C.S. Lewis

Craig Groeshel - On "It"

The leader must care more about what God thinks than what people think.(emphasis mine) That sounds basic—and it is, but it is not always easy to do. For me, I have to be obedient to all that I feel God is showing me—even in the very small things. When my other people’s opinions become too important to me, I find myself delaying obedience to God or even disobeying. - Craig Groeshel in an interview about his new book "It"

Sounds like a good and needed book for pastors to read and think through. It is so easy to go with the flow - so easy to do something that you know a certain person or persons will like.

"Going along to get along" never grew people or through them a church.

Think back. How hard was it for Elijah to stand in front of Ahab and tell him the heavens were going to slam shut - there'd be no rain or even dew until Israel repented.

What about Stephen, or Peter calling out the people for their sins.

God's man is only a man. But he has to find the strength in his relationship to God to resist the siren's call to acquiesce to less than God's best.

When All Seems Wrong

Many years ago, G.K. Chesterson was asked to write an essay on what was wrong with the world. Here is his succinct but deadly accurate reply.

Dear Sirs,

I am.

Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton

The picture above illustrates all of what is right with the world. Over 2000 years have passed since Jesus' ministry on this earth ended in what almost everyone who witnessed its end saw as a brutal, awful bloody failure.

And yet, through what man intended for evil, God brought not just a temporary or band-aid fix. No, God brought forth reconciliation between a race stained forever with sin and His holy and righteous nature.

Isn't the cross beautiful?

He Doesn't Do Those Kind of Meetings

“…God doesn’t do consulting. Never has, never will.

He does God.

When we treat Him as a consultant, He simply stops showing up at the meetings.

We may think He’s there. But He’s not. And it gets worse.

God not only stops showing up to the meetings, He also pulls back some of the light He’s already given us.” Larry Osborne

Sometimes I Just Need To Remember This

Took a hit last night, one of those blindside deals that leaves you wondering. Went to bed, couldn't sleep for a while, so I prayed. And I prayed. Fell asleep, woke up. Prayed. Went on all night. Got up this morning and felt a little better about it, but things like that linger.

So God sent me Steve Brown's blog to crush what was left. He was reflecting on the parable of the sower and saw for the first time that he was focusing on the wrong part of the story.

So Jesus looked at them and said, "Let me tell you a story." He told
them about an unsuccessful sower. As I count the seeds in the parable, only 25% of the seeds grew to harvest and the rest died.

You've probably heard me say that if you get 51% in a fallen world, you should file it under success. Let me tell you something else. If you're a farmer and you get only 25%, you probably should give up farming.

Now let me tell you what I learned when I started thinking about the sower.

First, I learned that if you can't deal with failure, don't play the game.

I'm reminded of the priest who, when he began his ministry at 20, prayed, "O Lord, grant that I may win the world to Christ." When he was 40, he prayed, "O Lord, grant that I may win my city to Christ." When he was 50, he prayed, "O Lord, grant that I may win my church to Christ."

When he was 60, he prayed, "Lord, don't let me lose too many!"

I tell my students that if they have biographies of "famous Christians" in their libraries and those books don't tell about the failure and the sin, they should burn the biographies. The ones that don't tell you the truth about the humanness of being human will make you go into vinyl repair.

I also learned from the parable of the sower that I don't own the farm or the seeds. I'm just a "hired hand."

And then this...

Oh, and I learned one other thing from the parable of the sower. I learned that one should never define oneself by the seeds, the soil or the harvest. If you define yourself that way, sometimes you'll feel that you're "pond scum" and at other times you'll think they ought to expand the Trinity to make room for you.

Both are inappropriate for a Christian.

The only appropriate way for a believer to define himself or herself is by the One who loved us enough to make us acceptable and to give us the seeds to sow. Wherever you are, just throw the seeds God gave you. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to do that and you don't have to be trained at a leadership seminar. All you have to do is to take the seeds God gives and, wherever you are, throw them on the soil.

And don't keep digging them up to see if they're growing. That's not your concern.

He asked me to remind you.

New Hope is not mine, and I don't have a congregation. God does. He's the owner of the field and the giver of the seeds. I can be passionate, skillful, winsome and wise and some seeds won't thrive, and I can be none of those and some will.

My job is to love God fiercely, and through that love, love the ones He's given me and help them grow. Sometimes I just need to remember the limits of my job description.

On Preaching In Faith

This quote is from one of my most treasured books "Correspondence With A Cripple From Tarsus - Romans In Dialogue With the 20th Century" by H. Beecher Hicks Jr. Of all the commentaries I have on that great book from Paul's hand and God's heart, none rise to the level this one does when I consider how that book would have been written today. It is well worn, my copy, but fresh every time I come back to it.

Hicks is in dialogue with Paul who writes:

"Beecher, you know this, but I must remind you that God reserves the right to be God. Mysterious. Awesome. There is none like Him. Not one.

Moreover, God makes hard statements. God makes stern demands. God asks hard questions. What makes you think hard questions will have answers? What makes you think that we need to know all the answers? or that if we knew the answers we would understand what they mean? Abraham discovered that God will do right. Is that enough for you?"

Yes it is. It is enough for me.

Oswald Chambers on Christian Critics

The average Christian is the most piercingly critical individual known…The effect of Criticism is the dividing up of strengths of the one being criticized…Criticism serves to make you harsh, vindictive, and cruel, and leaves you with the soothing and flattering idea that you are somehow superior to others…The first thing God does is to give us a thorough spiritual cleaning. After that, there is no possibility of pride remaining in us.

Maybe the rise of judgmentalism is one other blind spot that can be laid at pride's front door?

Living in the "different-ness"

To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that "different-ness." The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time. We have to preach it in a way that says this was the turning point in world history. NT Wright

Exactly. It's as if God turned to Satan and said:

"Death? Ha! What else you got?"

What Should the Church Look Like?

From John Wimber:

Folks, the world knows what this is supposed to look like. Years ago in New York City, I got into a taxi cab with an Iranian taxi driver, who could hardly speak English. I tried to explain to him where I wanted to go, and as he was pulling his car out of the parking place, he almost got hit by a van that on its side had a sign reading The Pentecostal Church. He got real upset and said, "That guy’s drunk." I said, "No, he’s a Pentecostal. Drunk in the spirit, maybe, but not with wine." He asked, "Do you know about church?"

I said, "Well, I know a little bit about it; what do you know?" It was a long trip from one end of Manhattan to the other, and all the way down he told me one horror story after another that he’d heard about the church. He knew about the pastor that ran off with the choir master's wife, the couple that had burned the church down and collected the insurance—every horrible thing you could imagine.

We finally get to where we were going, I paid him, and as we’re standing there on the landing I gave him an extra-large tip. He got a suspicious look in his eyes—he’d been around, you know. I said, "Answer me this one question."

Now keep in mind, I’m planning on witnessing to him. "If there was a God and he had a church, what would it be like?"

He sat there for awhile making up his mind to play or not. Finally he sighed and said, "Well, if there was a God and he had a church—they would care for the poor, heal the sick, and they wouldn’t charge you money to teach you the Book."

I turned around and it was like an explosion in my chest. "Oh, God." I just cried, I couldn’t help it. I thought, "Oh Lord, they know. The world knows what it’s supposed to be like. The only ones that don’t know are the Church."

What Is God's Plan For the Church?

What is God's plan to PROVE His love for an AIDS orphan?

What is God's plan to PROVE His love for a lonely widow?

What is God's plan to PROVE His love to a new mother who's baby is dying of malnutrition?

What is God's plan to PROVE His love to the AIDS sufferer, in his final days?

Answer: We are.

...and there is no Plan B. Ward Broehm

One Bright Light

“We are in a world of mystery, with one bright Light before us, sufficient for our proceeding forward through all difficulties. Take away this Light and we are utterly wretched—we know not where we are, how we are sustained, what will become of us and all that is dear to us, what we are to believe, and why we are in being.”

—John Henry Newman—

On Faith

Now Faith … is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. - C.S. Lewis