Revolutionize [Your Heart]

There's been recent circumstances lately that have got me thinking...

My friend did something foolish- not sinful, mind you.  Simply a poor decision -and I rebuked him for it.  He's somebody who wants to be a leader in the church and he shunned my rebuke.  He insists that since what he did wasn't a sin, it's ok for him to do it.  But there's something he doesn't quite get.

If we're to be leaders- even if we're to be simple Christians -we're held to a standard by man as well as by God's commandments!  We're the very body of Christ, man cannot see Christ, except through us!  So even when we do something that's not sinful, maybe it's just foolish (and not foolish in a good way, mind you, like the foolishness of the Gospel to man), we're still going to be judged by the world as the body of Christ if we claim to be Christians.  So we should live our lives as Daniel did, when the other rulers looked for a fault and couldn't find one, not even something foolish!

What are you doing to live up to the standard that Christ set?  We all slip us, yes, but let's turn to Christ as our rock, not our human foolishness!

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I've realized something recently concerning me and my blog.

When I'm not in the word, I can't write good blog posts!  Just more proof that the Bible is an amazing book!  It provides inspiration to me extremely well, as well as information on God so we can grow closer to Him!

It's amazing how much I can get out of one chapter, even if I've read that chapter 100 times before, the Word of God truly is living and active!

If you're not reading your Bible consistently, let me just encourage you to start!  You'll never regret it, I promise.

No, not that kinda Marxism!  I was talking to my good friend Chris Marx the other day and he painted a sweet picture about a picture for me.

Look at how Adam is positioned!  Leaning back, hand all limp, couldn't care less about reaching for God!  And look at how God is reaching for us!  Like a lightning bolt from heaven, hand reached out as far as it could go!

What causes us to not reach for God as hard as we can?  It's the only thing worth reaching for, worth fighting for, worth dying for.  It's something so much bigger than anything that we can see or feel here on earth, but when will we realize that?

When will we start reaching for God as much as He reaches for us?

Where are you going?  What is your destination?  Are you headed towards a bright college future, a life as a stay at home father/mother, thug life?  Are you more destined to be a great grandparent, or maybe you feel like you're destined for now, and you want to make an impact on the world sooner rather than later, just jump right in.  For those of you who are followers of "The Way", let me just encourage you in this.

Our destination isn't anywhere in this world, our destination is heaven!  Does that mean that we should just lay around until that happens?  Certainly not!  Our destination also includes advancing the kingdom of God here on earth, "doing the Lord's work" as it is commonly referred to.

Even though it's super easy to get caught up in our lives here, let's not forget that our destination is more beautiful than anything we can ever imagine!  Don't lose sight of that!

Well, I don't know where I'm gonna go with this post, but there's a lot on my mind so I figured I'd get something good up on here.

First off, what am I doing, or any of us doing to pursue God?  What do I do at all that could be taken as fully running after Him and His love?  Take for example the other day.  I was supposed to email our church secretary and ask her to put something in the bulletin, no biggie, right?  I shot her an email, just one email, and now there's change.  There's a difference made.  People's lives could possibly be changed through me sending one email.  I didn't do anything!  I wrote an email, and sent it!  And yet God can even use that to change hearts and affect lives eternally!  Just imagine what He could do if we truly died to ourselves and took REAL, LEGITIMATE action for His kingdom!  Enough talking the talk!  Let's walk the walk!

I find more and more that my heart is closing, drying up, becoming bitter.  It's becoming more and more apparent to me every day, every waking moment.  What can I do to flood myself with life?  What can anybody do to flood themselves with something they don't have?  Why don't we realize that this is why Jesus came?  To give us LIFE!  And not just life, but life to the FULLEST!  I can't do it on my own, you can't do it on your own, only Jesus can do it for us.  So why don't we love Him for that?  And if you say you love Him, then what are you doing to "feed His sheep"?  He's proven his pursuit, He died on a cross for us....

What are you doing to prove your pursuit?

Where has the heart of the servant gone?  What about the servant leader?

I know I feel like I can be a leader, but to be honest that idea doesn't involve serving, even though I feel like it should.  It just seems like everywhere I go there's:

A) More and more people surprised that we're serving.

B) Less and less people taking a servant leadership position.

I'd like you to examine yourself now; what are you doing to become more than just another person who serves?  What are you doing to advance the kingdom of God through being a servant leader?  When are we going to start showing the love of Christ in our everyday lives?

Don't just dream change, be change.

I'm listening to Thrice at the moment, and there's a line that always just hits me hard.

"Stand and feel your worth, oh my soul"

It raises this question in me : What worth does my soul really have?  There's billions of souls out there, they're a dime a dozen, what makes mine, or yours, so full of worth?  And what different does that make?

Those are questions that I haven't fully reconciled with yet, but here's what I've got so far.  The worth of our souls is directly related to the unexplainable love that God pours on us.  Without that love, what's the worth?  We're each made differently, so the originality adds some worth points.  But in the end, it's what we do with that love that makes our souls truly worthy.  We can accept the love of God, then do nothing with it.  But let's not do that, let's live worthwhile lives and make a difference in life!  Get involved with a charity, help somebody across the street, buy somebody lunch.  But don't do it out of yourself, do it out of your love for God.  As the Bible says "The love of Christ compels us".

I've recently hooked up with a website called socialvibe, and I recommend that you check them out.  There's a link below.

So what are you doing to feel your worth?

I wasn't feeling too hot this morning, so I took off work and decided to walk and talk to God instead.  I sat down and wrote this without thinking much about it.

Needs:

Love

Joy

Peace

Patience

Kindness

Goodness

Faithfulness

Self Control

Because why should I have fruit of something I'm not sowing?

And I sat there and prayed, thought a bit.  But how true this statement it!  These are the FRUITS of the spirit, aka the result of us being disciplined in the word and in prayer and dwelling in the spirit.  When we're not in those things, we can't exhibit these behaviors, or at least it becomes unnatural to.  

This past month has been tough for me in my spiritual discipline and even I can see it in my life and attitude, I become selfish and unfocused.  And now that I've been disciplined for a while I'm able to see what a contrast it truly is, and the changing power of the blood of Christ is more apparent than ever!  I'd like to ask you all to examine your own lives: are you spiritually disciplined to the point that the fruit of the spirit becomes your first nature, to the point where it's the easier choice for you most of the time?  If you're not, I'd like to say that you're missing out, and I'd encourage you to start today in reviving America by revolutionizing your heart to this noble calling that is being a Christian, or "little Christ".

I was hanging out with my good friends the Glovers the other day, and we were looking through the plethora of videos on Youtube.  If you have a little bit of time I'd encourage you to check out this video.

Basically this "crazy baptist woman" rants about how God sent Katrina and the 911 attacks because of homosexuals and the sins of America.  While I don't necessarily think she's correct, I think her bigger mistake was going on TV constantly and ranting.  When I first saw this, I called her an Ian, aka "A Christian without the Christ".  For all I know, she might be right, I wasn't knowledgeable of God's will at the time of those things and I'm still not.  But all I know is that Jesus wouldn't of gotten onto a TV show where there's no hope of changing anybody's heart and telling them they're going to hell because they're sinners.  It just seems to me that there's so many better ways to show love than to be so condescending.  We're sinners saved by grace too, guys!

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I find it so amazing and heart breaking that God loves us the way He does.  Recently I made an oath to Him, concerning spending time with Him.  Well this past week I haven't really read my Bible much, and things have been going wrong lately so I decided to go outside and read.  I opened to Psalms and the wind flipped the pages a bit and turned me to Psalm 132:

I just read this, and I thought it very sad.  Two things about it I would like to comment on though.

Tonight at Transit I was showing Joel some Underoath and As Cities Burn.  For the uninformed, those are two "screamo" bands that I listen to often.  Ira, one of the elder people who attend Transit, was questioning my reasoning behind liking this kind of music.  I could tell that he didn't like the music, but nonetheless I thought it was awesome that instead of simply passing it off as lame music he wanted to know more about it, understand why I like it.

I think so often that when people hear "screamo" music or any music involving screaming, they associate it with anger, drugs, violence, etc.  When I listen to screamo, I think of the opposite.  I see a love from Christ that's so powerful and that's lifted a soul from such horrible sin that the only way to express it is by screaming.  Sometimes it sounds...ugly I suppose.  But there's something about the ugliness that portrays to me a contrast between what we offer to God and how He sees it.  We give Him these seemingly "good works" and all He sees are dirty rags!  And yet how He appreciates those rags!  In the same way, screamo shows me how God sees us: as a soul screaming to Him, straight from the heart, with no melody or beauty to it.  And I've learned to appreciate that.

I know that screamo music obviously isn't for everybody, but before you go bashing it try to understand it, appreciate it even if you don't enjoy it.

Hello, interwebz!  I got back from my "Labor Day Getaway Glover Edition" and I had a blast there!  For those poor, uninformed souls, I went away this weekend to go with the Glover family to Indiana for their family reunion.  Anyways I had a great time and had some good thoughts.  Most of them involved human instincts and how that relates to our relationship with God.

I thought about how it's EXTREMELY easy to just live my life putting God on the backburner.  He's always there and I don't think I'll ever forget Him, but sometimes I treat Him like the friend that I bring to a party and then ditch Him the entire time.  Needless to say that the ride back from the party is sometimes awkward.  I sometimes wonder how God can have all the love for me that He has for me, what with all the times I fall away and come desperately scraping back, covered in mud and expecting Him to give me a bath.  And yet every time that happens He scrubs behind the ears.

Another thought worth noting is that it's our human instinct to look to a higher power, and yet it seems against our instinct to submit to God.  Any thoughts on this would be appreciated, otherwise it remains a mystery to me.  Pray that I fight my blackened heart and just submit fully to God.

I was reading the devotional book that I got for my birthday - "my utmost for His highest" by Oswald Chambers - and it brought up an interesting point.  It basically said that we expect prayer to change things, but it doesn't.  Prayer changes US, and WE change things.  I've noticed a lot lately that people relate faith and prayer to just sitting there and waiting for the hand of God to come down from heaven and change the world.

But from what I've read in the Bible, WE are the hand of God, the hand and the feet and the arms and the body of Christ!  If we truly want the hand of God to come and change things then let's move because we are that hand!  Faith without works is dead, so what kind of faith takes the easy way out and does nothing?  While being patient IS important, don't let that patience turn into sloth, like it so easily does.

Another point that Chambers brought up was that we ourselves don't need prayer to live, but he said that the holy spirit inside us is nourished when we pray.  That brought a thought to my head: Oh how our spirit is starving!  I've been starting to make a habit of praying constantly to myself throughout the day, and I can feel the holy spirit soar inside me, I'm connecting on a certain level with my creator and my innermost being obviously loves that!  So be sure to give the holy spirit 3 square meals a day of prayer, and you can take that as a challenge if you want, find somebody to be accountable to and prayer 3 times a day, the spirit of God needs to be moving in us and it's hard to move when you're starved and malnourished.

There's a line in a song, by As Cities Burn, and it goes like so:

Love, what is love without trust?  At my word, would you bring your Isaac?

It's interesting thinking about that story.  God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a burnt offering.  But why did God want that?  Not because the blood of a child was pleasing to him, but to show Abraham that there could be nothing holding him back from Him.  And what did Abraham do?  He had to painstakingly bring his son to a mountain, bind him with ropes to an altar, and nearly drive a knife through him!  Who of us today can say we have that faith?

Some might say that it wasn't fair that God would order a murder, after all "do not murder" is one of the ten commandments, right?  But here's something that's been striking to me: God IS justice!  I forget who I was talking to, but they said God could (and will) destroy the earth and the angels would still be screaming before His throne "You are just in your actions, Lord!"  And it's something that, by our human nature, doesn't make any sense.  Pray that we come to grips with the fact that our God isn't simple just in His deeds, but that He IS justice.

I was talking with my mom just now, talking about life and things and how God is good and he provides, my prospective new phone, school, etc.  Then she said "I'm just passing through this planet" and all of a sudden I became very sick in my stomach.  I thought to myself "I've felt this feeling before"...  And sure enough, it's the feeling I get when God impresses eternity upon my heart.  Oh how I long for comprehension of the mystery of eternity!

I get so very much caught up in my life here, the clothes I wear, the friends I have, the things I want to say, and I enjoy doing it.  But what am I, or any of us for that matter, doing to further the kingdom of God?  There are millions of people walking on the broad path to eternal damnation and what are we doing about it?  We're so caught up in our lives, and what does that give us?  It only gives us ourselves, such a very meager return!  Why don't we make it our life mission to go and make disciples, like Jesus commanded us?  We say that He is God, we confess with our mouths and believe in our hearts, we have the salvation of our souls!  So why do we cut corners and try to ignore His commission to us?  It's not an option:  we NEED to go!  I for one desire to make that my life mission, and for once in my life I can say I'm looking full steam towards heaven, and I can't wait to embrace the Lamb and to eat the fruit of the tree of life!

On another note, I've discovered that people actually read my blog!  Thanks for reading guys, it's really encouraging to me and I hope it's helpful to you guys.

Yesterday was the last day of camp, whee!!!  I'm looking forward to starting this school year and applying myself for Christ's sake.

As I was driving home from camp, listening to my accursed "punk rock" I had something like an epiphany.  The big message behind "punk rock" is to "break free of society and rules and to be yourself in your own way".  And I guess I agree with that somewhat.  We shouldn't let our society define who we are, because what does our society tell us?  We don't need Jesus, hate, dissension, smoking weed is cool, porn is cool, etc.  We shouldn't be tied to those assumptions by conforming!  I read Romans 12 today and Romans 12:2 reads "Do not be conformed any longer to the patterns of this world, but be TRANSFORMED by the renewing of your mind".  So that part of the message of punk rock is accurate I believe.

However, the other part really desperately needs Jesus to dominate it.  If we're breaking free of society to be ourselves, we're not changing anything because we're converting to something that's equal to society, and that's our sinful nature.  When we convert to ourselves, we still hate, have dissension, thinking pot and porn are cool, etc.  Nothing changes!  In order to truly be "punk" and break free of our society we need to raise ourselves up from the ashes, not push ourselves into ourselves.  It's well known that this world HATES the Bible and the redeeming blood of Jesus, so I choose to take that burden, that higher calling, in order to fill my "rebellious" feelings I have as a teenager.  After all, it's the ultimate rebellion against society.

So what will you do?  Will you conform to the patterns of this world, and be common?  Or will you break free of that and be called to holiness?  The choice is entirely yours.

I went to Transit tonight- man, Chris Marx ALWAYS has a great message! I wish I could magically capture his words and share them with you guys... oh wait, I can!  His podcast can be found HERE. It's free to subscribe!

He said a lot of great things but one of the things he said that just smacked me in the face was this: he said "maybe someday we can look back and say 'I learned how to love my enemies'".  That just hit me really hard for some reason, my stomach still has a sick feeling from it.

I think it hit me hard because it's a phrase that's said so often "love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you" and yet the way he said it made me feel like I absolutely hated all my enemies.  I had to re-evaluate my view on those people who I find annoying, the people that find me annoying, all the people that could possibly be viewed as "enemies", and I am still evaluating that now.  Pray that I find the humility to give up that bitterness, because right now my heart wants to hold on to that, after all I love to talk about people behind their backs, poke fun, that kind of stuff.  It's going to be super hard to change that attitude, but I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength, amen?

So this morning I woke up, and as I was getting ready to go to work (camp agape rules!) I realized that I had told myself I would look for my CD case, because it had been missing for awhile now and I was no longer in the mood for the CD currently in the car.

I quickly checked everywhere I could in the house, and, determining that it was not in there, went to the car hoping it was in the back seat or something.  I looked everywhere in the car, under the seats, in the trunk, nowhere to be found.  I tired of this game quickly, and opened the driver's door to get into the car.  Then I thought I should probably check under the driver's seat.  And guess what I found?

Yup, the CD case.

As I was rocking out to my new tunes and feeling pretty good about my accomplishment, I had an analogy that might make sense and might not.  I related my search for the CD case like many people's search for Christ.  We look in all the wrong places for happiness: drugs, sex, parties, etc. and even in the realm of the church: we sometimes tend to look for happiness in the church through fellowship, sunday service, youth group.  And those things do bring us joy, but when we look to them as our main source of happiness it's not right.  The only source of true, lasting happiness is to constantly be striving to know God and His son, Jesus Christ, whom He sent.  There is absolutely NOTHING in this world that can bring us the reward that the sacrificial blood of Jesus Christ can.  And He's right under our "driver's seat", waiting in the easiest place to be found, wanting so desperately to know us.

It makes me weep to see so many people searching in the wrong places, looking for their happiness, their "independence", their "individuality", when all we really need is the Word of God and what results from salvation?  Eternal joy with the spotless Lamb!  Which raises this question?  What are we, as the largely lazy American church, doing to show these people the Joy of Salvation?  Something from a skit once impacted me, this guy is trying to tell his pagan friend that Jesus will change his life and the guy snaps back "What it boils down to is that me and you, we're exactly the same.  There's nothing you do that's different from what I do, you just carry around that Bible as a trophy!"  And oh, how many people do that today!

Let's use our Bible's as "The sword of the Spirit" instead of a trophy.