Things I learned at Home Group

I've decided to add a feature to my blog. I go to my home group almost every Monday and we talk about Jesus...well, we're supposed to, at least. Needless to say, regardless of how off topic we might get, I always come away with something. So I've decided to take the time to share weekly what I learn. However, I won't be going tonight, so I'll just share a couple of lessons from the past.

-Men in their twenties can be entertained, literally, for hours by what happens to small, solid objects when they're thrown into a fan while it's moving at full speed.

-It turns out that Deborah's Song from Judges 5 is supposed to be sung to the tune of Lord I Lift Your Name On High.

Give it a shot. It really kicks in around verse 24:

1 On that day Deborah and Barak son of Abinoam sang this song:

2 "When the princes in Israel take the lead,
when the people willingly offer themselves—
praise the LORD!

3 "Hear this, you kings! Listen, you rulers!
I will sing to the LORD, I will sing;
I will make music to the LORD, the God of Israel.

4 "O LORD, when you went out from Seir,
when you marched from the land of Edom,
the earth shook, the heavens poured,
the clouds poured down water.

5 The mountains quaked before the LORD, the One of Sinai,
before the LORD, the God of Israel.

6 "In the days of Shamgar son of Anath,
in the days of Jael, the roads were abandoned;
travelers took to winding paths.

7 Village life in Israel ceased,
ceased until I, Deborah, arose,
arose a mother in Israel.

8 When they chose new gods,
war came to the city gates,
and not a shield or spear was seen
among forty thousand in Israel.

9 My heart is with Israel's princes,
with the willing volunteers among the people.
Praise the LORD!

10 "You who ride on white donkeys,
sitting on your saddle blankets,
and you who walk along the road,
consider 11 the voice of the singers at the watering places.
They recite the righteous acts of the LORD,
the righteous acts of his warriors in Israel.
"Then the people of the LORD
went down to the city gates.

12 'Wake up, wake up, Deborah!
Wake up, wake up, break out in song!
Arise, O Barak!
Take captive your captives, O son of Abinoam.'

13 "Then the men who were left
came down to the nobles;
the people of the LORD
came to me with the mighty.

14 Some came from Ephraim, whose roots were in Amalek;
Benjamin was with the people who followed you.
From Makir captains came down,
from Zebulun those who bear a commander's staff.

15 The princes of Issachar were with Deborah;
yes, Issachar was with Barak,
rushing after him into the valley.
In the districts of Reuben
there was much searching of heart.

16 Why did you stay among the campfires
to hear the whistling for the flocks?
In the districts of Reuben
there was much searching of heart.

17 Gilead stayed beyond the Jordan.
And Dan, why did he linger by the ships?
Asher remained on the coast
and stayed in his coves.

18 The people of Zebulun risked their very lives;
so did Naphtali on the heights of the field.

19 "Kings came, they fought;
the kings of Canaan fought
at Taanach by the waters of Megiddo,
but they carried off no silver, no plunder.

20 From the heavens the stars fought,
from their courses they fought against Sisera.

21 The river Kishon swept them away,
the age-old river, the river Kishon.
March on, my soul; be strong!

22 Then thundered the horses' hoofs—
galloping, galloping go his mighty steeds.

23 'Curse Meroz,' said the angel of the LORD.
'Curse its people bitterly,
because they did not come to help the LORD,
to help the LORD against the mighty.'

24 "Most blessed of women be Jael,
the wife of Heber the Kenite,
most blessed of tent-dwelling women.

25 He asked for water, and she gave him milk;
in a bowl fit for nobles she brought him curdled milk.

26 Her hand reached for the tent peg,
her right hand for the workman's hammer.
She struck Sisera, she crushed his head,
she shattered and pierced his temple.

27 At her feet he sank,
he fell; there he lay.
At her feet he sank, he fell;
where he sank, there he fell-dead.

28 "Through the window peered Sisera's mother;
behind the lattice she cried out,
'Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why is the clatter of his chariots delayed?'

29 The wisest of her ladies answer her;
indeed, she keeps saying to herself,

30 'Are they not finding and dividing the spoils:
a girl or two for each man,
colorful garments as plunder for Sisera,
colorful garments embroidered,
highly embroidered garments for my neck—
all this as plunder?'

31 "So may all your enemies perish, O LORD!
But may they who love you be like the sun
when it rises in its strength."
Then the land had peace forty years.

Movin' stagnantly on up!

I'm sitting down at work right now. I'm not working too hard obviously, so I'm using this time to write a little since I haven't got the chance to in a while. If you're reading this, then you're a pretty dedicated reader. I imagine that you've been checking my blog every day for the past month with high hopes of new content and then going away crying every time. And for that, mom, I'm sorry.

I start a new job on Monday, so that's pretty exciting. I'll also be making enough money to get my own place soon and feel like a real boy. So it's good times all around lately.

While I'm in this transition stage of my life, I figure I should impart some sage wisdom that I've gained in my few months working at a part time job.

Gentle reader who might still be in college, let me give you a little warning that no one thought to give me while I was still in school. When you graduate, almost everyone you meet will judge you by how much money you make.

I can't even count the number of times that people have talked to me at the coffee shop then asked if I was in school and then always gave me that, "aww, you poor thing" look whenever I told them I just graduated. They saw me as a failure at life just because I hadn't found a decent job six months after graduation. Me? I don't care what they think. Or, at least I don't want to care, but it's hard not to at least pay attention to them. It's something that I wish I could have prepared myself for.

I'm not defined by how much money I make or how highly respected my job is. I might not have made much money at the coffee shop, but I had a great time working there and I'm going to miss getting to see all of the people I met there all of the time.

Monetary value doesn't decided your worth as a person, so please remember that. I'm only 22 (nearly 23) years old. I have tons of time to move up in the world. I don't have to be that guy that lands the 6 figure job right out the door. I wouldn't know what to do with that much money anyway. It'd be nice if I were able to make that much money some day, but if I don't, it doesn't make me less of a person.

My main point is, if you're stressing out because you're about to graduate and have no idea what you're going to do with your life. Chill out! God's purpose for your life might not have anything to do with your actual job. That being said, whatever you do, be it tech support, coffee shop, clerk or manager, do it well and always pursue excellence.

The Talking Heads

Last weekend I was downtown and there were a bunch of sandwich board sign wearing people claiming to be Christians. They were wearing signs that said things along the lines of "Turn or Burn," and "The wages of homosexuality is death and AIDS," which not only bothered me because it singled out one sin specifically as worse than others but also because it was grammatically incorrect.

I passed by them before going down to the park and they were just standing around looking all judgmentalish but when I came back by it looked like a riot was about to break out. On one side were all of the "christians," and on the other side were the people that they were pissing off. It was just a huge yellfest. Nothing was getting accomplished because no one was willing to give way enough to hear anybody out. The cops ended up breaking the whole thing up. So these people went home feeling like they'd done a good job of representing Jesus because they were "persecuted" in His name.

The thing that gets me about people like this is that there is no way to talk to them. Their goal is simply to yell their position with absolutely no chance of listening to someone else's. I find that I have to stop myself from being like this often. I don't want to be a guy who has an opinion and my goal is to share that opinion with others, not caring about their reaction or what they could add to or take away from it. I don't want to just be a walking mouth. I want to be the type of guy that isn't afraid to voice his opinion but not be so cocky that I think that I can't learn anything from what others has to say.

Steven Furtick said in a blog post last week, "You're a big boy. You can eat the fish and leave the bones." You don't have to agree with everything that someone says for a conversation to be profitable. Not every conversation has to be an argument where your goal is to convince the other person to have the exact same opinion as yours.

I want to be a guy who isn't afraid to hear what others have to say and to understand the stance that others have, especially non-christians. Because, why on earth should they listen to what I have to say if they know that I could care less why they believe what they believe?

It's my Lord in a box!

My small group has been reading through Matthew this summer and we got to chapter 23 this week. Chapter 23 is the chapter where Jesus is really laying into the religious leaders for not living up to their calling. They're all very surface level and religious. Sometimes I forget about context when I read the Bible. It's easy to read a chapter like this and imagine Jesus sitting with his apostles telling them these things about the religious leaders, but the religious people were right there in the crowd that Jesus was talking to. He wasn't afraid of a little confrontation. But apparently the religious leaders were, since they killed Jesus because He challenged them to live up to what God called them to be.

But that's not the point of this post. In verse 5 it says, "They made their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long." After I read that I went into uber study mode to find out what phylacteries are. Essentially, the Pharisees took Exodus 13:9 literally and decided to make leather boxes containing scripture and wear them around their foreheads or arms. They wore these things at prayer times originally as a reminder of what God had done for them, but it eventually became social statements about how "holy" they were. They were pretty much the WWJD bracelets of their day. They started out for honest enough purposes but eventually they became a social statement.

The verse in Exodus could easily be interpreted that God wants us to have His Word in all of our thoughts and actions, but I think I know why they were more willing to have elaborate head decorations. It's easy to put a box on your head or to wear a bracelet or t-shirt telling people about Jesus. In the same way, it's easy to go downtown and to wear a sandwich board sign and yell at people that they're going to hell. What's challenging is having a real change in your heart. It's hard to reach out to people that you're uncomfortable around and have an actual relationship with them to show them Christ's love. I know that deep down, if there were just a t-shirt I could wear to fulfill the Great Commission, I'd jump at that. I'd rather take the easy way out, but thankfully, I have the Holy Spirit to convict me and to challenge me to not just put on my Christian clothes and live like Hell.

God has been impressing upon me lately the difference that He can make through the life of one person. This is why I feel that this is so important, because if God can do so much with one person, He can do even more through multiple people. The church is growing so much recently, and it's progressing with a minority of people who claim to know Christ. There are so few people who are taking ownership of their faith, and regardless of this, God is doing great things. If people would just take off their Christian t-shirts and start to have a Christ-like heart, the church could be doing exactly what God has called for it to do.

Sacrifice

A few weeks ago I did a post called, Apathy. I talked about how lately I feel numb to all of the amazing things God is doing around me and in my own life. While I'm still dealing with this, I think that I've started to understand why. I've heard about the sacrifice that Christ made me all of my life and have depended on it for my salvation for nearly 10 years now, but I don't think that I've truly begun to understand what Christ really did.

I've always heard that Christ paid my debt for me, but I don't really have a grasp on the size of that debt. If someone is house sitting for you and when you get back they tell you, "A bill came in the mail and I covered it for you," then you will be thankful that they did that. But your thankfulness will be different depending on what bill was covered. If they paid your cable bill for $60 then you'll say thanks and be happy that they did that, but, in reality, you could have afforded it, and even if you couldn't, you really don't need cable anyway. However, if that same person paid your mortgage bill that you weren't sure you'd be able to make and keeps you from losing your house and not having a place for your children to sleep safely, you'd probably fall on your face in front of the person in humility and thankfulness.

Christ made a very real sacrifice that there's no way that I could have paid and it was 100% necessary. It wasn't a convenient debt for Him to pay but He paid it anyway. I pray that Christ will make the size and necessity of the debt He paid real to me. I don't think that I comprehend what He's done yet, but I think I might be on the verge of getting a glimpse into it.

It would be funnier if it weren't so sad...

I feel like churches just don't get it sometimes. I had to share a few of these signs that I found. I hope you enjoy them just as much as I did and that you cry about them a little less than I did.










I got these at http://crummychurchsigns.blogspot.com. Be sure to check it out.

The inner workings of a burrito...

Recently some very important information has fallen into my services and I wish to share it with those who choose to read and take advantage of it. Apparently there are incorrect ways to eat a burrito which could lead to disaster regarding one's masculinity. So, in order to save my readership from a world of grief, I feel it is my obligation to enlighten.

First of all, regardless of it's size, the burrito is to be held with both hands at all times.

Secondly, one is never to bite from the top down. The correct biting prioties are as follows:
-Right corner.
-Left corner.
-Center.
-Repeat.

And finally, it is common knowledge that sour cream is an important ingredient in a burrito. There is nothing wrong with this sour cream and it can, in fact, prove quite delicious. However, It is of the utmost importance that when (not if) said sour cream emmerges from the top of one's burrito to simply continue to eat in ignorace of it, never bringing it to light in the conversation one is having over the aforementioned burrito.

I hope that my past folly will in some way impact others in a way that could save from quite a bit of misunderstanding.