28 Days of Encountering Jesus

Yesterday I challenged the people of the grove to spend the month of February reading a chapter a day out of the book of Luke. My intentions are twofold: 1) Helping you create the habit/discipline of reading scripture daily & 2) Helping you encounter Jesus in the narrative of His life and ministry.

I believe if you take the challenge seriously and delve into the discipline of reading the gospel of Luke, you will have new spiritual insights and a deeper relationship with Christ by the end of February. In a culture where we want fast fixes and quick answers it’s important for us to slow down and be intentional in our relationship with Christ.

SO this month, take time to read one chapter of Luke a day, 6 days a week and as you read ask yourself “What is God teaching me through this scripture?” and “How can I apply it to my life?” And when the month is over, you will see a difference in your life.

Mary

It’s been a long time since my last blog entry. For those who follow me I hope it was a nice break.

This December we’ve been talking about the Advent Conspiracy movement at The Grove. Each week, we’ve looked at a different person or set of people found in the Jesus Birth Narrative of Matthew and Luke. Each person reveals what a life devoted and surrendered to God looks like.

Mary’s story has always fascinated me. The more I think about her and what she must of endured for the sake of God’s mission and purpose, the more I’m humbled at my weak attempts at following the Father. I’d like to think that I would have the internal fortitude to say yes to something as world shattering as did the young (probably 12-14 year old) peasant girl Mary. But when I’m honest with myself, I know it would take supernatural strength for me to say “I’m your servant, do what you want with my life…”

Perhaps that’s the lesson for us this Christmas Season. In order for us to be all that God intends for us to be, we need His supernatural strength to say yes. And perhaps the way for us to gain that strength is by strengthening our relationship with Him. Mary was able to say yes out of humility, submission, and trust. The way for us to gain humility, submission and trust is by growing closer to the One who is worthy of our submission and trust. This Christmas, draw near to God and see what He will do with your life.

Simple Discipleship

Discipleship is an oft misunderstood word. Maybe more accurately, it is most often misunderstood in our practice. We have tended (as many authors/prophets have pointed out) to replace discipleship with the dissemination of information. If we know more scripture, take another Bible Study that approaches faith from a new, refreshing angle, then we will be better disciples. In this wrong thinking knowledge=discipleship. And in the worst of cases, attendance=discipleship. The thinking goes, Jesus had disciples whom he taught and whom lived with him for 3 years, therefore, we need to learn and to attend/be present.

The problem with those thoughts is that they fall short of what actually took place between Jesus and his disciples. The other problem is that they are a 21st century, North American reading and interpretation of a 1st century Palestinian way of life. In order to be a disciple, a young Jewish boy would enter into an in depth journey of learning and memorizing scripture and varying interpretations of those scriptures. They would have to leave their family and friends behind to go and live with their rabbi. But the most important aspect of discipleship was that each disciple was expected to become like their rabbi. They would slowly loose their own identities in order to become more like their teachers. In other words, discipleship was all about a transformation of lifestyle, worldview, theology and praxis.

Alan Hirsch writes, in his must read book ReJesus, “one must first be committed to being marked by Jesus, to submit oneself to being shaped and changed to reflect more and more the lifestyle and teaching of Jesus” (p. 35). It’s not enough to have knowledge of scripture. It’s not enough to be active in a faith community. It’s not enough to have a daily devotion. It’s not enough to slap a fish sticker on your car, your backpack, your laptop or anywhere else. Discipleship is simply becoming like Jesus! Discipleship is abandoning ourselves in order to become like our rabbi in our thinking, in our lifestyle, in our worldview, and in the way we live & serve. We have been marked by the indelible love of Christ and that mark now must color every part of our being. When it does, we begin to be like Christ. Then, and only then, we are disciples.

Simple Jesus II

ok but there’s a catch, we’re called to simply follow Jesus~to let him be the one controlling our lives. But, as many of you know, to simply follow Jesus is not so easy. Let’s not get confused though, simple never equals easy.
To acquire and perform the simple, most basic fundamentals of any sport it takes patience, endurance, practice, discipline and even failure. But if you’re committed you can become great. I think it is similar in our relationship with Christ, in our simply following him.

It’s simple, not easy. It requires right habits, patience, endurance, practice, discipline and even failure sometimes. If it were easy it wouldn’t be worth the journey.

Simple Jesus

I have a tendency to make things way to complicated. I’ve carried that tendency into my faith. With two degrees from Seminary, it’s easy to get bogged down in the intricate nuances of the person and works of Jesus. But when we strip all the layers away, when we get past the cultural additives in which we bubble wrap Jesus, we see a simple picture and a simple truth.

Jesus died in our place, for our sin. Jesus wants to be Lord of our life: all our desires, our will, our material goods, our finances, our love, our sexuality, our consumption, our prayers, our decision making, our work, our play, our social life, our family…

It’s simple. Jesus is Lord. Let Him be Lord of you!

Hit Reset

“Living in a consumer society is not the same as adopting a consumer worldview.We must learn to exist in it but not forfeit our soul”~Jethani

Wow-that is so very hard for me to do! It seems that at every turn I’m being bombarded by messages that my life mission should be to get more, to consume more, to produce more, to make my family safe and comfortable, to give my kids the best so that they have better opportunities in life. On the surface those things seem good and natural. The problem is that they represent a consumer world view!

Our challenge as Christians is to get past the powerful, mind-shaping marketing machine that has become the largest influence in shaping the contemporary, North American worldview. How sick is it that we fall for the endless promulgation?! How wicked is it that even in the church it has become about having more… bigger… better… stuff? We consume a huge portion of resources given to the cause of Christ even while we are becoming a much smaller fraction of the Kingdom Movement on Earth.

We have to stop the craziness! And perhaps the most freeing, powerful way to reset our worldview from consumerism to Kingdom is by giving! Giving time, giving attention, giving talents, giving money! What if this Christmas season we decided to give more to the least than to our family? What if we decided to give our kids quality time rather than gifts that will break and/or be forgotten in a mater of days? What if our giving defined us more than our consumption?

Hit reset. Give. Change your worldview.

the river

This past week @ the grove, we looked at the passage in the 47th chapter of Ezekiel where the prophet, in a vision, sees a river flowing from the temple, to the Jordan and then into the dead sea. The river brings healing and new life. It change everything in it’s path. And the change is good!

Many have read into this passage some end-time, literal event that will change the geography of Israel. While I am not saying that it could happen in some eschatological fashion, I think the meaning and the purpose of the passage is to point us to the redemptive work of God. And His work of redemption is not some future hope but a reality that is at work even now!

God, through the work of Jesus Christ and the ongoing work of His Spirit, is healing and bringing back to life the dead in us. He is re-forming us into what He intends for humanity. God is creating and re-creating a people who are dedicated to love, to life, to service, to right living, to world altering, life giving change! The image of the river reminds us that God cleanses and empowers. He takes away the old ways of destructive living and empowers us to live new lives-to live like Jesus did.

Dance in, jump in, swim in the river! The river of God’s love and power, His redemption and re-forming.

leader/disciple

I started reading Neal Cole’s book, Organic Leadership. One of the quotes he uses in the book is from Ralph Nader: “the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”

I liked the quote so much that I tweeted it. The quote automatically went to my Facebook status. I was surprised to see that two people on fb had a negative response to the quote. The gist of the their problem with the Nader’s thoughts was that leaders have to have followers. The assumption that most of us have is that for someone to be a leader there has to be some sort of hierarchy, there have to be followers who submit to “the leader.”

But when we seek to understand leadership from a Biblical worldview, we see a different model; a flatter model where the aim is not more followers to do the bidding of the leader, but instead more leaders do dream and innovate and work together. Leadership is like discipleship. True disciples seek to disciple others who will in turn disciple others. Likewise, valuable leaders are those who seek to empower others to become leaders who develop other leaders!

Perhaps it would be best if we in the Christian movement began to see discipleship and leadership as the same thing! Spiritual leaders are disciples who make disciples who make disciples. Spiritual leaders reproduce other spiritual leaders. Ultimately then, our focus in the church, as so many others have said better than I, should be to make disciples. As Alan Hirsch says, “I suppose if we fail at this, we have failed completely.”

Be a leader. Make a disciple.

football as religion

As I have been preparing for the sermon series Old School: The Prophets of the Old Testament, I continuously run into the issue of idolatry. It’s hard for me to understand the attraction to hedging my safety and my spiritual life by worshiping multiple gods, some of which were made by human hands. I would never place hand carved wooden idols on my mantle piece and literally bow down to worship them daily. I would never take an infant and offer it as a burnt sacrifice on an alter. But the more I’ve studied and meditated on the stories of the prophets and the Israeli people, the more I realize that I too have idols.

Here are some of the ones I struggle with:

1. Safety – for myself and my family. I don’t want to be put into a dangerous situation and I certainly don’t want my family in a dangerous situation. I choose safe things all the time. And the more I have been aware of my idol “safety” the more I realize it dominates a great portion of my life.
2. Comfort – this one is closely related to the first. I want to live as comfortable as possible. I want a comfortable house, a comfortable mattress, a comfortable pair of jeans, and I want my job, family & church life to be comfortable and not challenging.
3. Materialism – I love stuff. The more stuff I have the “safer” and more “comfortable” I feel. I love buying new stuff. There is an addictive feeling of exhilaration when I get something new. But the more I get the more I want. The more I have, the more I want.
4. Selfishness – Too often, I make decisions on what I think is best for me. I think that the world and that my time should be shaped by those things that benefit me or that give me pleasure. I want to spend my time, money and my effort on myself. When I do I close the door for God using me, my time and my money for His glory and/or to serve someone in need.
5. Football – This time of year millions of people gather every Saturday and Sunday to worship football (and I’m one of them). They give it much of their time, their money and their effort. Americans will spend more money on all things connected to American Football than we will on helping the least of these in our own country and around the world. We will quickly spend a couple of hundred of dollars on Tickets to a game, but we will not give any money to build a well in Africa or to support MexicoAid as they provide for poor children in drug war torn parts of Central America.

This list is just a start to the many idols I bow down to on a regular basis. And that’s sad. I have to work hard every day to overcome the consumerist selfish behavior that have shaped my life. I have to be intentional to divert my attention away from selfishness and put my attention and efforts on serving others.

So, yeah, I have idols that are just as silly, ridiculous and dangerous as the idols of the Israelites. And I am trying everyday to quit my own version of idolatry. I’m trying to be a single minded, radical disciple. I don’t want football to be the main religion I observe over the next few months.

blogging again

i’ve taken about a month off from blogging for a couple of reasons. first, my schedule got crazy. second, this blog became a chore and i was writing just to get it done.

now my schedule has settled into a rhythm and i’m actually excited again about writing. and as i thought about the blog it began to occur to me that i often treat my relationship with God like i do this blog. when life get’s busy and prayer seems more like a chore than a joyful, life-changing experience of God, i just drop it.

the challenge for myself and for all of us who are seeking to follow Christ is to not let busyness or our lack of desire prevent us from the discipline of spending time with Christ.