Faith – Page 2 – No Small Talk

If I’m this angered…

God has been giving me a lot of insight into his love of all people. But not the kind of love that the world says, you know what I mean, the one that says we shouldn’t disagree with things like pre-marital co-habitation, pre-marital sex, homosexuality… of course those the some of the “big ones”.. but along the same line, and as God has shown me recently, his heart grieves the same for those that avoid conflict with people, the people pleasers, manipulators, deceivers, etc.

You see, I have a growing anger inside of me, one that I believe is righteous. Everwhere I look I see broken people, inside and outside the Church. I see people who have been pushed over, “in the name of love”, I see people who “in the name of love” argue to the end on politics, I see my friends making choices to please people that just gets lorded over by another person. This anger in me about these things is so hard to walk out though. I want to tell people the truth, but many of them just are not ready for the truth, they see it as shame, hate, or just religion.

If God’s people were to truly focus on Jesus, if they were to struggle listening for him, rather than their world desires, I believe we would see a lot more happening. We must focus our dicipleship efforts on brining people into a healthy understanding of faith, humility, and submission in Jesus.

Love the hell out

True love of others and of God is loving the hell out of people. Not shaming people, but giving them grace to be human, to be selfish, to be well, full of sin. We simply can not expect people who haven’t given their life and heart to Jesus to understand our values, principles, and morals. We can’t logically argue with a person who doesn’t understand living by faith. We can try, but many times (not all) it’s in vain. Someone who is avidly pro-choice abortion, or pro same-sex marriages, isn’t going to understand the reason having faith nulls those issues.

Faith gives us a much bigger understanding beyond ourselves, it gives us the courage to carry a child even when circumstances are terrible. It gives us the courage to see that our sexuality is more than physical. Faith gives us the understanding that God will take it into his hands when we give it to him. My faith in Him has relieved me of my homosexual desires. Having faith gives us the courage to tithe first and give our offerings even when when our bank account is empty or negative and we still have hundreds of dollars of bills.

So, we must first love people, live in faith, and remind ourselves that Hell is real. When we love people, in and out of the Church, we bring them out of Hell and into the Kingdom of God. That is why Jesus is the savior. He desires for us to be in relationship with him, not stuck in Hell, 100% alone, but with the knowledge that Jesus simply wanted our hearts so he could bless us in our free will to choose him. Those that do end up in Hell, they won’t be partying, they won’t be hanging out with like minded people, they’ll be utterly alone, unable to be in relationship for eternity, yet knowing, and I believe seeing the rest in relationship and living in the glory of God.

So, love the hell out of people. Bless them. Speak the truth. Live in faith. Live the truth of God’s love.

Obligation to love

This Thursday I’m speaking at our young adults group, I’m calling it “An obligation to love”.

We really don’t have a choice to love. Our God doesn’t have the choice, He gave us free will so that we would love genuinely. As a disciple in the teachings, divinity, and person of Jesus, I do not have a choice to do anything but love people. For who they are… human. Everyone sins, we all make mistakes, our flesh is weak. And still I must love, I must accept people’s faults. None of this is a free license to be walked on, beat up, and spat on. No, that would mean I wasn’t loving myself.

To love God, is to give him praise, allow him to speak into my life, and obey Him in his commandments (to love Him and people). To love people is to treat with respect, listen, have sympathy for, speak encouragement, and most of all speak a life of truth. If I notice another brother with red flags in his life (IE, spending habits, the way he talks with girls, etc) than to truly love him I must confront him out of the relationship that I have. Confront someone is not shaming them, it’s not condemning them, it’s speaking truth where it counts (as Jesus did w/ the woman at the well). If a friend is always seeking to be with people, and is feeling lonely when not with friends, than I may probe into the priority prayer in their life.

For our culture, these ideas usually prompt the response of “it’s none of your business” or “that’s personal”. Yes, I know, and because I love you I want to see you grow in that area. The key to all of this is relationship though, and speaking gracefully, the more grace, and the more relationship we have, the more our love for Him and others can be shown.

We must stop being afraid to love in truth. This is what I believe worshipping in truth and spirit is.

What is love?

“All you need is love”, “Love is just a game”

Well, lately God has been showing me a new side to Love. Now I bet most of you think this is about Emma… well in a way it is, but not really.

Yes Fatherhood has shown me a new side of love, and quite possibly this is where these ideas are stemming from. But as I was talking with Marcus at our devo this morning…

You see, lately as I drive around from client to client, the Lord has been showing me people’s faces, and giving me a glimpse of how he loves them. It’s like I feel in my heart the overwhelming grief, and/or pride he has for particular people. When I think of people I know who have made choices contrary to God’s values I get even more emotional and can’t do anything but pray for clarity in the person’s life.

And now there’s even more, you see, I believe true love, is a love that holds people to God’s values. A love that doesn’t just let our friends, our brothers/sisters slip away into “their own choices”, if the choice is made with loving confrontation and loving correction, and still does not honor God’s values, well then, the choice is theirs…

But way to often than not I see the opposite. I see people too afraid of rejection, too afraid of confrontation, to talk in love and grace to people about red-flags… those red-flags turn into spiritually killing decisions. If we are going to be known for the love we have for each other, we have got to allow God to work through each other, obey your convictions and your heart when God speak to it. Only blessing and honor and glory can be given to Jesus even if a person makes a decision to walk another path, at least they know the loving truth… and believe me it can be done, and God’s name is always given glory, I’ve been there, scared to death, but I’ve done it. I’ve had people still decide, but I’ve seen people make the right choice as well. The choice is yours.

To the 20 or so who read this daily…

According to my feed stats about 20 people are subscribed to this place I call my blog. So for those 20 people I have a question (and hopefully more will answer)…

We are currently in the process of creating our missionary budget, or living and ministry bugets for when we take the plunge and move to Krak

Living off faith

Sometimes I am in awe of the provision that God entrusts to our lives. I know that we could certainly do better in the area of how we manage our finances, I’m sure we could always invest a bit here, or save a bit there. In fact this month alone I identified $102 of “misc” spending. Nonetheless, I stand amazed at the fact that God has given us so much, that he’s figured the numbers ahead of time and knows that we’ll be taken care of. He’s given us the wisdom to make the right choices and the faith to know that the money isn’t ours.

It wasn’t long after I began my walk with God that I learned the idea of tithing… it wasn’t anything really spoken or asked of me, just something that over the first year I decided that if I was going to put my faith in God and “step by step” follow him, than I needed to put my money where my heart was. There have been a few months where I have neglected this conviction but for the most part I’ve been faithful to give my gross 10% to my home church right up front, than I do the bills.

About 10 months ago the Lord put on our hearts to give some offerings, above and beyond our tithe to some missionaries… well now that has grown to $90 a month. The past 4 months have been the most we’ve ever struggled financially, I have had to some very creative budgeting, prayer, and have more faith. We owed more than $500 in taxes, we have a $1000 hospital bill (due to our insurance changing 1 month before Emma’s birth, previously we had no co-pay for hospital/maternity stay, than it all changed just before hand, giving us no time to save for it), and back in January/February my hours were cut by 25%, and we’re still rebounding from that.

Yet, each pay period bills and needs are met, and God does little adjustments or shows us little ways of making things work. However, we know that this is not the end, we know that as we move forward in our plans to minister in Poland we’ll be on the edge more often, so we are thankful for this season, and we are learning more and more what it means to live off of faith, to ask for help, and prayerfully state our needs. It’s humbling and also encouraging in a very Jesus kind of way.

Well…

This has been one of the more interesting trips I’ve made, and quite an introduction for Jordan to missions and Poland. All of our flights went well, no trouble there, except for checking in in Portland (stupid “easy checkin” wasn’t so easy because it couldn’t process my passport for our international segments) and we had to wait over 20 min to get help. After the check in was complete everything was fine, we made it to Krakow with out any trouble, all our bags, everything was good.

We stayed in Krakow until about 9pm local time and ran a few errands with Denise, ate at KFC and gave Jordan a quick low-down on ministry, poland, and the week ahead.

Our first full day (Monday) was full of moving everything from the apartment the church here has been renting to Denise’s house (about 30 min away). This made for a long day, of multiple trips in her car, she stayed at her place cleaning while we drove back and fourth with all the stuff. On the last trip of the night we loaded up a desk and a table on top of the car and attached it to the rack.

We got a bit over half-way to Denise’s house and KABOOM…. something fell off… but it didn’t fall all the way off. After we finally reached a good place to pull over (about 1/2 a mile of dragging) we realized that the table had fallen partially off and we had dragged it, one of hte bungee chords we had used to hold it on had snapped. Not only did the table fall off, it busted the passenger side far rear window (not the door window but the one behind it) and at the same time gave a few scratches to the car. To this moment we don’t quite get how this all happened, especially the angle at which the table fell, it seems it woudl’ve taken out the passenger side-view mirror instead. Anyway it’s about $190 to repair it… ouch.

So today, I got the pleasure of going to the car dearler and figuring out how to make an appointment, find out the cost, and do all of this in Polish… yay me. Thankfully there was a guy who spoke English and understood my broken Polish when English wasn’t working. It was a little challenging but a good one.

Tonight I’m meeting with my old roommate from 2003/2004 who I lived with here in Poland, he’s now married and has a daughter as well, so I’m very excited to see them and have a good conversation. This is really what I thrive to do, serving physically is all great, but the relationships, the connections, and the truth that God brings out in all of it is amazing. So with the moving piece behind us (we have one last trip tomorrow, and we did one load today) and the retreat coming up, I’m excited to see Jesus in all of it.

Keep us in your prayers, the broken window I believe is a blessing in disguise for something, not sure what yet… but it will be good. The weather is yucky, it’s pretty much hanging around 32-35 making for a nice slushy mess.

Thanks for your prayers, support, and interest in all of this… I’ll have more pictures up soon, looks like I’ll have time tomorrow to upload some good ones.

Our jaded generation

Sometimes I struggle with the general cynical and jaded attitude of my peers. I’m really grieved by other Jesus followers who look at life as if the glass if half empty. But it goes deeper than that, many times my generation hangs onto the seams of life with just the logical, western mind-set that we have to climb the proverbial ladder of success before we even be in authority over anything. Not that we desire authority, but for most authority for some reason is how they view their confidence and relation to the rest of the world.

The truth is, we have been given all authority, to do even greater things than Jesus did. Yet we let the world system tell us we don’t, we need this paper, and that paper, and X years of experience. Bump that, bump it all, we need to realize what we are called to, seek wisdom from those that have gone there before, learn from them and experience it for ourselves!

If you know that you are called (and all followers are called) then step into it. Of course you’ll make mistakes, that’s why we have mentors (Timothy and Paul), that’s why we week wisdom, and that’s why we submit ourselves to grace-filled truth tellers (or as I said the other day, butt holes for Jesus) – people who we have given permission to point out the boogers in our lives and the blind spots so we can have more confidence and authority to speak Jesus’ gospel.

I was called to be a pastor over four years ago, this created a fear in me because I had never thought about it before and I’ve always been afraid of rejection. But now, even though I’m not “ordained” or “licensed”, I am doing pastoral kinds of things, such as mentoring, being relational with others, and allowing God’s voice to be heard and his flock cared for.

PS check out this new blog I found, fits the topic of this post quite well, none the less, I love what he has to say – it’s grace filled truth at its finest!

What freedom and forgiveness ARE NOT

For my generation, especially those that have grown up in the church, or been in it long enough to be jaded by the humanity of it (the imperfect, hypocrites that fill the church) of which they themselves fall into, the idea of

Dangerous Territory

I know I’m in dangerous territory when I’m feeling discontent. Sometimes discontent is a sign of moving forward, desiring more from life or a person. But I know that in my current scenario, it is not that… I know my direction, I know where I’m headed, I’m just being impatient.

I’m tired of the IT world, I know there are many opportunities to see people and “be a light” in many different places, but my heart is for discipleship. I know that at any point in time the Holy Spirit could guide me to bring people to Him and he could use me for evangelism and I also know that my gift, my “sweet spot” you could say, is for seeing people grow to new understandings and depths in who they are with and in Christ.

I hate offending people, and I hate the awkward pause or looks when people realize that I’m a “church goer”… but I just gotta be me. Most of all I know that Jesus offended people, I’m okay with offending people with His truth… but I refuse to offend people in the name of a “church” or “organization” that calls itself a house of Jesus followers when really all they are doing is shaming people rather than setting them free with God’s grace and truth.

So I’m discontent because computers are 1. Not very responsive to God’s truth 2. Certainly don’t understand grace and 3. Are not very open to discipleship.