Grace

To be completely honest with you, I've been dealing with some pretty big inadequacy issues lately. There are a few things in my life right now that I don't feel like I'm good enough to handle. All of this is leading me to think that I just don't have a full handle on grace and what it actually means to me.

The thing is, I get it. If you were to ask me what grace is, I could give you a pretty good explanation of it. But I just don't feel like I have a firm grasp of it if you catch the difference.

I was reading Romans 6 the other day and some verses really popped out at me and it was like God was actually showing me how incredibly logical His grace actually is.

Paul explains later in this letter that the wages of sin are death. So if the payment I owe to sin is my own death, and I died with Christ upon His calling of me to Himself, then sin's payment has been met. It is a debt that is no longer owed. It's not that God wiped it away like I never owed anything. I completely owed it. The only difference is that He paid it for me. That's what grace is!

Yet for some reason, I'm having such a hard time feeling like I could actually be worth God's time. And when you actually look at grace, one of the things that God shows through having His Son die for me is that I'm not good enough. I can't earn anything other than hell.

But, looking at the gift God has given me, I'm reminded that there are two kinds of generosity that I've been able to partake in. There's the kind of generosity that you might show to an older lady when you hold the door for her or when you buy a homeless person a meal. When I do these kinds of things, it's because it's just a nice thing to do for someone.

But I remember a little while back, I had a friend who was having some issues in his life. He had and still has so much potential. I really believe in this guy and think that amazing things are coming and are going to come out of his life. But he had a major hindrance come his way that was impeding his ability to minister to others. I saw that need, was prompted by the Holy Spirit and met it. Not because it was the right thing to do, but because I believed in him. This wasn't something I would probably do for some random homeless person. I was willing to make a sacrifice and really invest in him.

I think that every person God calls to Him, He calls because He believes that they can be used to enlarge His Kingdom in some way. There is no mediocrity in the Kingdom. Everyone was made for greatness. Perhaps not greatness by this world's standards, but greatness nonetheless. So I think that God's gift falls under the later category. God called me because He has a use for me. And no, I'm not good enough on my own. I am inadequate. But God makes up for those inadequacies.

One more cool thing happened today. I randomly read through 2 Corinthians 12. Verses 9-10 popped out to me and I guess you can see why. I don't need strengths. I have grace. I just need to learn to let God take over and not to worry about my weaknesses. I need to learn how to believe that when I'm weak, that's when I'm really strong.

Where's the leak?

I have a feeling I might have more readers if I posted more regularly, so I'm really going to work on that. If I go a while, please leave comments yelling at me for not posting. Anyway, on to the show!

I've been growing an insanely large amount lately. It's like God just opened up a whole new level of His existence to me and whenever I open His Word, it speaks to me like it never has before. But, while God is showing me this new level, I'm becoming overwhelmed.

I feel the call to mentor a few of my kids this summer and this is just one of those things that really makes me feel like I've jumped in over my head. I really don't feel ready to do this stuff, and because of this, I've been trying to grow rapidly with God; like I'm playing catch up. I've found that this is, by far, the most frustrating part of being a Christ follower. Normally, God doesn't work like that. Changes take place over time, not all at once.

I fully believe Phillipians 1:6. Nothing in me would bring me to this new level, so I know it was God. And if God brought me here, then He has every intention of bringing me to the top of it and maybe even to another level that I can't even comprehend yet. But one thing in particular He's been showing me lately is how to better reach Him. And that is by removing things in my life that separate me from Him. In other words, sin.

When I was 17 I got my very first flat tire. I had no idea what to do in this situation. I didn't have a flat tire, so I just assumed we'd have to buy a new tire. This sucked because we didn't have the money to go out buying tires all willy nilly. But my dad came to my rescue. I moved my truck over to the air pump at the gas station across the street and my dad brought some stuff to plug the hole with. The one really cool thing I remember is that once the hole was filled, he poured water over the tire. If he saw any bubbles then that meant air would get out and there was a weak spot in the tire.

Lately, I've been praying for God to do that to me. Show me where in my life I'm bubbling up so I can see where my weak spots are and get them fixed. I say "get them fixed" because there's nothing in me that could fix this stuff apart from God. And, as I said before, there's nothing in me to want to get rid of my sin. So if I'm wanting to get rid of it, then it's God working in me. And if He started this work, He's going to finish it!

BEST....THING....EVER!!!!

I can't imagine anything else topping this today as my favorite thing.

Please go here and enjoy this beautiful thing!

I think the fact that they're holding hands makes me mourn for them the most.

Been a while...

I've been without internet access for the past two weeks, so I apologize for my absence. Although, I do slightly like feel like I'm apologizing to the air, but I will persevere and blog anyway. I'll put up an official entry soon, but for now, I have to share this with everyone. I'm not sure anyone other than Theresa will enjoy this as much as I did, but let's hope others will as well.

I almost got in trouble at work because I laughed too hard at the Kevin Max stuff.

Stupid Christians

In my head right now I have a huge rant going on about this:


I'll give you a second to take in the ignorance.

...

Done? I didn't think so, I'll give you some more time.

...

After reading the full story here, I was decidedly even more angry. The "pastor" actually says, "It's just something to try to stir people's minds. It was never intended to hurt feelings or offend anybody." How does a "pastor" like this get people to follow him? Does he really think God is so small that the idea of a non-christian in the White House terrifies Him? Does this idiot think that God doesn't work through non-christian leaders? It's not as if we've had such wonderful examples of Christian presidents anyway.

Part of me hopes this guys thirty person church dies so that they can't hurt anybody else or ruin the already bad reputation Christianity already has with non-christians. But Jesus died for every person in that church that voted to keep the sign up. They are made in His image and are to be loved. But I do hope God smacks them around and shows them their wrongs. I'm going to be praying for this church, as much as my first instinct is not to. Hopefully God will turn them around.

Where I'm coming from...

Lately I've been doing a lot of working out my salvation and I've been thinking a little bit about how I first met Jesus.  I grew up in a great Christian family and in church, so I don't have any crazy drunken, crack dealing stories to tell.  But that doesn't make my salvation experience uninteresting.  Anytime God reaches down from Heaven to save a soul, its a huge deal.  So, on that note, I thought it might be kind of cool to share with whoever reads this how I met Jesus.  this could be a long one, so hang in there and I'll try to make it readable.

I said the sinner's prayer for the first time when I was five years old.  I knew absolutely nothing about Jesus and His grace, I'd just heard the man on stage talking about hell and heaven and I knew I didn't want to go to hell.  So I was told if I prayed this prayer, I'd get Jesus and not go to hell.  Why wouldn't I say this prayer?  I'd burned my hand on the stove before and I knew how much that hurt and couldn't imagine that happening all over!  Basically, Jesus was my oven mitt (this feels like it has t-shirt potential).

So when I was twelve and Jesus really did get a hold of me and I felt his irresistible grace tearing at my heart, I really didn't know what was going on.  I was "saved" already.  I'd even been baptized.  I just didn't know Jesus.  But I didn't want people to think I'd been lying  to them for years about being a Christian.  So I didn't know what to do.

Thankfully, irresistible grace is just that:  irresistible.  So I had very little choice but to grab my preacher after the service and tell Him I needed Jesus.  I remember Him putting his arm around me and moving me down the isle.  I very fondly recall, as we slid by people to a back Sunday school room, him saying in his most country preacher voice, "We've got to get this boy saved!"

He also grabbing my mom and sitting her and a twenty something guy in my church, who was my absolute hero, named Eric down with me in those way too small plastic yellow chairs in the children's Sunday school room.  My mom cried the entire time.  I repeated after the preacher and I just knew that it was right this time.  I had Jesus and I was never going to be the same again.

I was pumped up about Jesus and ready to tell the world, so I went home put on my favorite Christian bracelet and went to school the next day expecting tons of people to ask me what all the different colored beads meant.  That didn't happen, sadly, but I persevered nonetheless.  That is until my pastor started asking me about being baptized.

I had been baptized already and doing so again would make it very clearly known that I'd been lying about knowing Jesus.  I felt as if the whole church would have looked at me with the same disdain as that shop clerk looked at Kevin with when he stole that toothbrush.

So I did what I now absolutely hate to hear people say.  I told my preacher that "I really think that that was more of a rededication of my life."  It makes me sad that I'd already been trained to think that I could take my life back from Jesus after giving it to Him in the first place.

A lot of things happened between that time and now, but they equal way too many funny stories to even hint at in this already too long post.  But I do believe in baptism after conversion, and so does God.  So He finally grabbed me by the shirt and told me this is something I needed to do.  Of course, by this time I was 21 and becoming a member at NewSpring Church.  Better nine years late than never.  

It was an absolutely amazing experience finally following through on what God wanted me to do.  I was Baptized with around 400 other people but never felt like I was lost in the crowd, that was just more people for me to make my faith public in front of.  But, I am happy I was at the front of the line.  I can't imagine that water was too clean by around person 340.  

So many people came out to support me that night, even some of my former youth came which was amazing.  And I still remember Jake Beaty commenting to me about how loud my cheering section was, thanks to the energetic Ignite volunteers on the sidelines.

This is basically a snap shot of how I came to Christ.  There's so much more to tell and that's encouraging.  But one thing God's been hitting me with lately is how important it is to remember what He's done for me and where I've come from.  And just seeing how immature I was compared to how...well, I'm realizing I'm still pretty immature, but I'm getting better!  I promise!

Smacked around on a Saturday Morning

It's never been my intention to have an all serious blog, but it seems that lately I've had a lot of serious stuff to talk about on here whenever I actually take the time to write some stuff.  So I promise that the three of you reading this (two if Brandon has actually started to have things to do at work) that I will throw in some fun stuff eventually.  But for now, here's some amazing stuff that God's been teaching me.

I've been reading through John recently.  I really want to get serious about being like Jesus so I figure there's no better way to do that than to learn what He is actually like.  And John is such an awesome Gospel.  Primarily because He's just off doing his own thing.  The majority of the stuff in there isn't even in the other three Gospels.

Anyway, I was reading chapter four this morning and God does what He does best with me, which is being very blunt about how dumb some of the things I do are and how most of the things that I tend to judge others on are things that I do as well.

So I get to 4:22 this morning and the first thing that pops into my head is, "This is just like those stupid Revelation enthusiasts who have charts outlining which plague hits where in which part of what used to be America before the EU decided to wipe us off the map."  Then God lovingly slapped me on the back of my head and showed me that way too often I'm only interested in praying about my own future and which direction to go in.

So the question is there now; do I follow God because I want to have a loving relationship with my creator, or because I know that He can give me a future with some purpose like I want?

I've got to get over my own selfishness.  I'm glad God loves me enough to smack me around on occasion.