I don’t blog because I’m brilliant or because I necessarily have some bright new ideas that no one else has been able to come up with I blog because it forces me to collect my thoughts and think specifically about something. It’s Lso an opportunity to help me determine how to write out my thoughts in a slightly more cohesive and comprehendable manner. So I may post bad ideas, incorrect thoughts, and frequently boring material, but I’m not doing it to gain an audience but rather to improve myself.

As another year comes to an end,  I’m excited about the things I’ve accomplished and I’m looking forward to what is to come. I’ve made some great friends and deepened other existing relationships. I’ve had an amazingly fun year with my wife, enjoying life in the city of Chicago. We took our first vacation to North Carolina, Virginia, Washington DC and back to Chicago again on a week long road trip.

Jessica successfully started the preschool at Chicago International Academy, and I was able to launch a new website for them (www.ciacademy.org).

I’ve got big dreams for this next year and I am looking forward to what God will do in and through me. I’m looking forward to the adventure!

Merry Christmas Everyone & A Happy New Year!!!

We talk a lot about the “conversion process” as Christians, but it seems Christ spends just as much time talking about following Him and how that would look.

Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.  For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.  For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost?  Luke 9:23-25.

In no way do I want to ignore the concept of coming to Christ, but I’ve heard many conversations on “assurance of salvation” (especially through youth groups), hypothesizing about potential situations of potentially lost souls. A friend of mine started the process of shaking up my thinking on these concerns when he said his response to people asking about these things was always, “Are you following Jesus?”.

“Follow Me” is a phrase Christ repeated over and over again during his time on earth. What does it mean to follow Him? It means to do what He did, live how He lived, and be who He was, right? That’s how a rabbi and his disciples worked as I understand it. Not sitting around drawing lines in the sand about who is in an who is out. In fact, within the inner twelve disciples was His eventual betrayer, Judas. Christ, who knew all of their hearts, intentions, and futures, didn’t reject or seperate out Judas or try to label him as a non-disciple. (don’t misunderstand me as trying to reject labels of any type.)

The questions get thrown around all of the time about salvation and sin. What if someone did X unmentionable sin, could they still be saved? Really, what does asking and answering that question help? Wouldn’t Christ’s response to such a situation be to call it sin, and challenge the person to turn from it and follow Him. I’m thinking of the woman at the well, Zacheus, and several others, who were obviously in sin, and Christ isn’t afraid to confront it.

A friend who claims to be a Christian, and is doing X, doesn’t need his salvation questioned, but a true friend who will call him to follow and pursue Christ, and through that to see how his life contains things aren’t right (sin). Christ makes it clear that salvation is a necessary part of following him, and if that’s the step that my friend felt he needed to do in order to follow Christ then great. If he felt that he had already accepted Christ, then great, repent from your sin and follow him.

Please don’t get offended by what is quite possibly my mind’s oversimplification of a complex topic, I’m simply trying to help myself and others follow Him.

I’ve always had what I felt was a conservative view of how God spoke to his children (believers). I felt like I was justified in this position because of how God had spoken in his written word, and how he had chosen prophets and individuals in the Bible to communicate his words. I’ve had this working understanding that for the most part God spoke solely through his word, which the Holy Spirit revealed to us, meaning gave clarity and insight to.

But I’ve recently started reading Hearing God by Dallas Willard, and some of the questions he’s asked have gotten me thinking again about this (which is always a good thing). One quote that challenged me to start thinking was the following quote from his book. Speaking of the experiences of Moses, Adam and Eve, and even Enoch, he writes:

Aside from their obviously unique historical role, however, they are not meant to be exceptional at all. Rather they are examples of the normal human life God intended for us: God’s indwelling his people through personal prescence and fellowship. [p.18]

A thought provoking quote:

The Spirit who inhabits us is not mute, restricting himself to an occasional nudge, a hot flash, a brilliant image or a case of goosebumps.

Holy enough to hear from God?

I’ve been mulling over these two thoughts since reading them over the last few weeks. Along the same lines as the previous quote from Willard:

“We must think of ourselves as capable of having the same kinds of experiences as did Elijah or Paul” [p.37]

He goes on to say that we frequently feel incapable of this because we feel God is too great to deal with the likeness of us, and that he only speaks in this way to the likes of Elijah or Paul. But he goes on to say that we don’t preserve God’s greatness by believing this, because as Willard writes:

“his greatness is precisely what allows him to ‘plan his day’ around me or anyone and everyone else as he chooses.” [p.37]

That Important

Another thought which I’ve been mulling over while reading this book is that we are that important to God that he would speak to us. How do we know this?

• God gave His Son for us, to die for us even though we didn’t deserve it (while we were still in our most terrible awful state of sinfulness)
• God has chosen to dwell in us as believers through the Holy Spirit

God obviously loves us and values us enough to do these two things, which are incredibly amazing, undeserved and unwarranted.

Hearing God doesn’t make us important

The other side of this though is that we are not made important because we hear from God, because he reaches out to us when we are humble before him and in our brokenness. Consider Psalm 25:9

He leads the humble in doing right,

teaching them his way.

Actually the entire Psalm 25 is an amazing testimony to how David cries out to God in spite of the fact that he is a broken, sinful man, and cries out for mercy, grace, forgiveness, and victory. You can find the entire passage on bible.logos.com

I’m glad for reading and books that challenge my thinking about my faith and how I relate to God. I hope that it get’s you thinking as well, regardless of whether you agree with it or not, as I’ve been try to do.

I recently watched Seven Pounds, and it was a dramatic sorrowful story of reckless penance from a man who had lost his wife and killed several others in a car crash.It seemed like a sorrowful, selfish, and eventually suicidal death in a vain attempt to get rid of a debt he could never repay. But, it was also a reminder to me that althought we might tryt ot fix our wrongs and do penance, it will never be enough. This is why we need our Saviour and He has paid our debt for us, a debt we could not ever repay.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

And this passage begins with this:

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

This peace was the very thing he was looking for in his final days and was unable to find. Seven Pounds is a sorrowful examination of a lost person attempting penance on their own, that misses the redemptive hope that is only found in Christ.

During my final semester at Moody (www.moody.edu), as I completed my degree in Evangelism and Discipleship, I had to write a final paper to culminate my learning. I used this as an opportunity to examine some of how our culture is changing and how we are sharing the gospel/evangelizing/sharing the good news/telling our personal faith journey’s (or what ever your variation of saying this is).

I’m going to start out by admitting a few biases. I don’t think change is bad. I’m a fan of understanding your audience and communicating through a means that won’t poison the message or the hearer from even starting to listening to it. I accept that the Bible is an awesome big book of truth, and that it has many different parts because there are many different situations in life that need to be addressed. So from that I gather that 1 verse is never the end all be all of sharing the message of Christ. And finally until I can come up with more, I know I will offend some of you because I might talk about evangelism and not discipleship, or I might refer to sharing the gospel more than sharing God’s love, or I might talk more about talking with people than doing. Such is life in my mind. We are pendulums swinging back and forth from one extreme to another. We never are perfectly balanced in life, so I won’t attempt to claim I am. Please if you disagree, great, comment, create your own blog, challenge my thoughts, help me keep my crazy thoughts and ideas in check.

So here I’ll end my ramblings, and move on to the topic of this post. Just another thought from a child of God who is inwardly turned upside down by Him, but still alright.

evangelistic methods after modernity

I’ve found today’s society to be marked by three general characteristics:

post-modernism…truth is absolute…or is it?
post-consumerism…I have to get the newest…but maybe I don’t?
post-interruption…look at this flashy ,cool, new…please put me on your “do not call” list.

And as I consider the emerging society that we live in, I feel that street preaching-based forms of evangelism, tract and bible distribution, confrontational and five-law based evangelism’s are defunct and useless.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention with my extreme claims, I’d like to over the next few posts explain why I believe our culture has changed, what it is becoming, why our current methods are loosing effectiveness, and begin to explore what’s to come for the future of evangelism.

Tonight as I took out my contact lenses out I realized how easily I forget I’m wearing them. They’re great for exactly that reason, because I can forget they are there.

When I thought about this tonight it made me wonder what other “lenses” I have in my life affecting my cision and the way I see the world around me. More importantly how often am I ignorant or oblivous to there existance, blindly (no pun intended) ignoring they’re effect on my life. I clean my contact lenses daily and inspect it fir it’s quality. Do I ever do that with the “lenses” in my life though?

Too much to do and so little time to do it. It’s the story of most peoples lives. Just today I had a list of things I wanted to accomplish before the day was over and I only completed a few of them. My lofty ideals and goals got post in the reality of my life. It wasn’t for a lack of good intentions.

I don’t feel alone in this place of being unable to keep up with the pace I’d like to keep (or others would like me to keep). Is the problem then internal (ie. A lack of motivation) or external (ie. Societal demands are too high)?

I’m not sure if it is clearly one or the other. Just thinking.

Tonight as my wife and I were trying to fall asleep, we heard voices out in the dark alley behind our apartment. My response to this was threefold. First, I didn’t really notice it. But I gradually started noticing it more. Then I thought about turning on a fan to avoid hearing their voices and to block them out. But after my already cold wife said no more fans, I had my third and final thought, and that was could call the police. (Now I didn’t consider this third option too serously, but…)

But this concept of dealing with unwanted noise is similar to how our attempts to evangelize can be. We are good intentioned Christians talking about Christ as best as we can in a dark world. And often we get the same response from the people who hear us as I responded to the unwanted hangout going on in my back alley tonight. They might not notice us at first, then they may try to block us out, and finally they migr try to stop us using whatever means they can. Can I share my faith in a way that is not unwanted noise in the alley, but instead the invited friend who’s been asked to visit, or who is being visited?

Singularity, it is…

The quality or condition of being singular or

Something uncommon or unusual (1)

I find it is interesting that I so infrequently consider the singularity of Christ. A more theological way of saying it might be to say the uniqueness of Christ. Sometimes I get to caught up in how buddy-buddy I can be with Christ and I lose sight of His singularity. I cannot do justice to his singularity, but many others who are wiser have written on the topics.

Here are a few links to articles and books on that topic:

• Article: Norman Geisler on the uniqueness of Christ
• Book: Christ the One and Only: A Global Affirmation of the Uniqueness of Jesus Christ (on amazon.com, on BarnesandNoble.com)

(1) American Heritage Dictionary (dictionary.com)