Anatomy and Theology

Am I Enough?

I’ve been too lax (or perhaps let myself get too busy to catch up) on my entries about Passion. Will resume soon, more for my own benefit and processing than yours (whoever “yours” is…). But, I felt the need to post about a question the Lord has brought before me twice in the past month, once at Passion and once tonight:

“Am I enough?” 

Is His Word enough without the commentary or added wisdom of preachers and writers? Is His presence enough to sit with Him for a minute, 10 minutes, an hour? Is His wisdom and truth enough to be the guiding points of my life? Is His love and attention enough for me in the midst of singleness which grows ever more apparent as I find myself surrounded by more and more couples? Am I able to be content satisfied in Him alone? What does that even mean? 

Oh Lord, I know I should not have to prayer this prayer but remind me that You are always enough. Not because You have ever stopped being enough but because I so easily stop remembering. Grant me perspective. And grant me faith. Help me to seek You above all things, even ministry because without You, ministry lacks meaning. Help me to see Your fullness and help me to see and know that I am filled in You.

“…and you have been filled in Him” (Colossians 2:10). 

We don’t overcome sin by telling it to go away. We are delivered from sin when we are captivated by Something greater. 

Means to an End

I am realizing I view people as a means rather than an end. A means to what I do not know: perhaps ministry, perhaps self-righteousness? By all this I mean I find myself loving people (often not as well as I would like) for another reason, and even if this reason is good (like sharing the gospel with them), I am missing enjoying the people and the moments with them and suddenly, life has flown by and I have forgotten to enjoy it. Sam Wells’ ethics class actually started this realization, and I don’t think it’s come to full fruition yet, but yesterday on the drive down to Duke, it occurred to me WHY people should be an end in themselves. God views people as an end. They were the purpose of salvation through Christ: “For God so loved THE WORLD…” (John 3:16). God came for people. God loves people. I sometimes think of loving others as a way to get to God, which is works-righteousness, or I view God as a means to love people, which is just using God. God is not a means. God is the beginning and the end. Ok, Jesus was THE means for salvation, true enough, but it blew my mind when God showed me on the drive yesterday that God is the source, I am the means He uses to love others, and people are the end. He loves people through me. As J.D. says, the church is God’s Plan A to reach people. God needs no Plan B. But moving the equation around to have God as the beginning (and obviously the ultimate end), changed everything. It brought to life C.S. Lewis’ analogy of the sunbeam- I find myself trying to figure out everything about the ray of light (me) and what it’s illuminating (people) that I forget to look at the sun (God). People are loved when God loves them through others or I suppose through anyway He chooses, but as the source of all Love, it is He who instigates the love and we are the mere recipients and perhaps vessels of that love. We are the means to His perfect end. That changes things in the best way possible 

But God

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…”

(Ephesians 2:4-6 ESV)

We deserve death and yet we have life. The CRU speaker (no idea what his name was) said that sin is measured by the person offended, and the more important the person, the harsher the punishment. So, rebelling against Obama is a lot different than rebelling against the leader of a student organization, for example. Sin, an action which humans cannot avoid, is rebellion against the one Holy and Perfect God, Creator of the universe. The punishment is death (Romans 3:23). BUT GOD made a way out. Out of his mercy and love, he MADE US ALIVE with Christ by grace, seating us with Him in heaven in Christ. That’s a lot of doctrine. But that’s also a lot of love. Here, it is important to define two terms without which the gospel would not exist: 

mercy- not getting what you deserve

grace- getting what you do not deserve

Mercy is when you are suddenly on the highway and unbeknownst to you, you have to merge into heavy traffic and the person behind you lets you in. Wow, that was nice, you think. You could have waited for a while trying to get in, which would have been understandable since you accidently made a mistake, but yet this person showed mercy! Grace is when you know your lane is ending but you really don’t feel like waiting in the traffic in the other 4 lanes on the highway so you bypass all the other cars, get to the end of the merge area knowingly cutting other people off and cheating the system a little bit and then somebody, seeing that you have done all this, lets you in. That is grace, undeserved favor. And we get a powerful combination of both of those in Christ when we accept His gift. 

It is when we remember this gospel, the undeniable grace and mercy shown to us to even be able to enter God’s presence, given to us through the redemptive death and resurrection of the Perfect One that becomes our own in Him. Worship comes from remembering this good news. And this good news cannot be good without knowing the bad news: that we were, indeed, dead in our sins and need to be brought to life or else we die eternally in them. But the gospel is indeed good news and not just news or it would not be called the gospel (which means good news in Greek.) Everything would have been bad news for us, but God…

“Majesty into the Mess”

And, here begins the Passion blogs based on what God taught me during Passion 2012, one of if not the most spiritually edifying experiences I’ve had in my life. God did not disappoint as usual.  If you’re curious about what it is, check out http://268generation.com/passion2012/#!/home/. If you’re curious about the $3 million raised to end world slavery, check out http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/05/college-kids-vow-to-end-slavery/?hpt=hp_c2, but more on that later. 

A huge theme of the talks and worship there in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome was the idea of death-to-life transformation. This post stems from Louie Giglio’s first talk Monday night. I tend to think that people need the gospel for various reasons: to be better people, to know God and all the goodness that brings, to have eternal life, to understand the purpose and meaning of life one earth, to understand their God-given worth. Sure, those may be true to an extent. But, what many of the speakers, songs and scripture passages we read made this new fact abundantly clear. We don’t need the gospel because without Christ, we’re bad- we need the gospel because without Christ, we’re DEAD. There is no life apart from Him. That’s pretty powerful if you let it sink in. Being dead is a lot different than being bad. It’s something humans often try to avoid, but ironically, humans are already dead. We were born spiritually dead, apart from Christ, separated by sin, and we remain dead until we embrace fully the work done by Jesus on our behalf to raise us from the dead WITH Him to everlasting life. 

We cannot bring ourselves back from the dead. We cannot make death beautiful. We do not inherently like death. But it is when we are dead that Christ lives. It is when we are dead that He can make beauty from ashes (Isaiah 61:3). It is when we are dead that we understand we can do nothing without Christ. I will come back to this passage later, but Ephesians 2 rocks. This book overall, and really v. 1-10 of this chapter in itself, details the gospel: who we were (why we need Christ), who God is and what He did to save us, and who we are now through Jesus.

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” - 2:1-3

We “were by nature children of wrath” just as the rest of humanity is. I still live like this sometimes, according to the passions of my flesh, doing what my mind and body want rather than what Christ commands. But that is not who I now am. That is who I was. My community group leader brought this passage into focus Tuesday morning, but Louie interestingly talked about the Luke 7 where Jesus raises a widow’s son (v.11-17). Like this dead boy, we were on our way to our graves, BUT GOD (Eph. 2:4) intersected us at the perfect time to touch our corpses (without becoming unclean!)  to bring us to life to give His Father the glory. Louie said that the enemy’s plan is to get you to that grave, and at the end asked people to stand who felt like they were on the way to death, being carried in their own funeral procession by some sin or lie or passion of the flesh that was keeping them from being a live to Christ. At the largest gathering of young Christians in the nation, over 1/3 of the people stood up. I was floored. Jesus Christ, he said, was intersecting our lives here at Passion whether they liked it or not. And only He has the power to bring us to life. 

Sharing the gospel just took on a whole new meaning: it’s life or death. And thanks be to God that He inserted His “majesty into our mess.”

Jesus Jumped

I realize I can be rather critical, espeically of churches, and it’s a problem. There’s a difference, I’m realizing, between being discerning yet constructive and downright judgmental and negative. Pretty sure I’m supposed to be focusing on the good things, not always the bad (Phil. 4:8). I don’t think that this is who I am in Christ, but especially when I visit other churches, as I did tonight for Christmas Eve, I find myself nitpicking in my head about why I have problems with their stained glass windows and the way they said this prayer or used that verse. I think those things are indeed important to notice, but they are not paramount, and in the midst of my negativity, I forgot to enjoy certain hymns I love or just bask in the wonder of Christmas. I haven’t quite figured out how to balance all this, or how God might see the whole thing, but I wish, tonight, at least until I caught myself, I had thought about what was true, right, admirable, pure and lovely (v. 8). I wish I did this more with my family and friends, and I believe that prayer can make that change. I will hopefully write more about what I am realizing about how I view people later (this serves a way to keep me accountable lol).

But, once I finally got my mind into the right place for a Christmas Eve service, I actually enjoyed the sermon, though I did not love everything about it (and that’s OK!) The pastor mentioned the story of a policeman, with a rope tied around his waist, who went out onto a bridge where a man was about to jump. Startled that the police arrived, the man jumped suddenly, but so did the policeman. He grabbed the guy-midair!- and wrapped his arms and legs around him so that when the rope jolted them, they would stay together. The rope stopped before they hit the water and they were pulled to safety. I’d never heard a story quite like that, and she tied it rather nicely to the grace of Christ, manifest at Christmas. Before I blogged about it, I wanted to find an article about it to post and could find no such factual basis for her story, which happened last week. But, then, I realized, while I would prefer a preacher not to lie (though I do not believe she intended to), it doesn’t really matter whether there’s an article on it, or whether the story is actually true. The fact of the matter is we’re all free falling toward an imminent end, deeply in need of someone to catch up. We jumped, we made that choice to step away from help. But instead of Help stepping away from us, He jumped after us, unwilling to let us go. Why? Not because we have done anything to deserve it, but because He loved us enough to jump for us, catch us and ultimately die for us, which is where the analogy fails slightly.

We don’t just have a savior who jumped for us and caught us by some miracle. He actually jumped, caught us, tied His rope around us so that we were safe and He fell into the water and died, which was what we deserved. But then, He rose…ah, but that’s for Easter. The beauty of Christmas is that we can remember that this little baby came into the world to jump for us and with us. If you get a chance, listen to Shane & Shane’s “Born to Die” song off their Christmas album- it’s not your feel-good Christmas carol per se, but it’s real and it’s true. (I’d post it but I’m using my mom’s computer because mine died and her internet doesn’t show the address of the Youtube link.) I hope that tomorrow amidst all the festivities, I take time to realign my thoughts with His and remember the baby that came for us to give the Father all the glory.

Stamps

Today, I went to the post office with my mom because we needed stamps. We asked for a booklet and the postman asked us, “Holiday or regular?” “Oh, Christmas, why not?” my mom said. She’s not one for “Happy Holidays.” It’s “Merry Christmas” or nothing. “Religious or ornaments?” He asked. My mom glanced at me because I think she thought I’d be mad or something if she didn’t choose the “religious” ones. I am, apparently, the pious one of our family. “Religious,” she answered. And, we were handed a packet of stamps with a Raphael painting of Mary and the baby Jesus in His little halo. Who knew Christmas had so many options? I could theologize on this, but I won’t. I could talk about how Christmas can either be secular or “religious” as I suppose they call it. But, to be frank, Christmas isn’t secular, or it’d be calling Secularmas. Don’t get me wrong. I am all about Christmas and the tree and I believe in the wonder of Santa and all that jazz, I really do. But, I can’t help but feel better about the state of the world when the fruit stand we stopped in on the way to the post office had a basket full of free books about “Christianity without Religion.” At first, I was skeptical- just another attempt for people to take Christ out of Christmas. But, my judgment was heaped on me when I read the back and found that it was indeed a book about the gospel and not religion. At a time when I can oddly feel discouraged because it feels like people just don’t “get it,” it was lovely to be reminded that Christianity isn’t even about Christmas or religious practices at all. It’s about Christ, and for that matter, so is Christmas.

Ok, stepping off the soapbox now. Sorry. Reading John Piper gets me all fired up :)