The Day My Wallet Stood Still

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Jesus Follower

Lately, I have felt as if I’m in a bit of a spiritual desert. Things at work have been very hard, a lot of projects I’ve been working on have been plagued with unexpected difficulties, I’ve picked up some new responsibilities for church I feel like I’m called to do (yet don’t feel I have time for), and there are challenges at home with kids’ schedules and my spouse’s job that we’re trying to plan and work through.  If that weren’t enough, there are a couple of areas that I feel God may be leading us into that I frankly feel unprepared for or that I simply don’t have time to press into.

I know that in general, the root of the problem is an over-busy schedule, but it’s all a bit of a confusing mess at the moment.  I believe that the things I’m working through are God-honoring, but what I really don’t know is if I’m directing my energies in the right ways.  Like, it is known to me that I have a gift for administration, yet I am getting absolutely no life out of using that gift in my present circumstances.  I also have a gift for teaching that does bring me life, yet having opportunities to use that gift are perhaps more scarce than I’d prefer.

Such times are part of life, and I think it’s healthy to reflect on what’s going on and what God would have you do.  I feel in some ways that He’s working on changing a season in my life, but what that might actually look like, I don’t know.  I am trying to listen for His voice to help guide my path straighter, but I am finding that I have a lot more questions and frustrations than I have answers.

I have faith that it will all work out in time, but the reality is, though I haven’t prayed this way, many of my thoughts lately have been in the vein of “God, help me…” and “God, where are you?” than anything else.

Since God knows my heart better than even I do, I believe He chose to give me an answer to those thoughts the other day in a way I didn’t see coming at all.  On a recent car trip to a place about 30 minutes away from our house, I inadvertently placed my wallet on the rear bumper of our truck. Not realizing I had left it there, I got into the truck and headed for home.

Well, you can probably guess what happened.  When I got home, I realized that I didn’t have my wallet with me.  A wave of horror washed over me as I remembered that I had left it on the bumper of the truck.  Literally, that thing could be anywhere between the place I’d left and home.

Disgusted with my mistake, I prepared to call the place we’d left so see if it’d fallen off the truck when I’d pulled away.  That was the best case scenario, to be honest — we’d driven over numerous surface streets, bumps in the road, and sped down the freeway at 70 MPH.  If it wasn’t at the place I’d left, it was more than likely scattered somewhere along the route home, lost forever, with scads of my personal information scattered about.  I suddenly felt very exposed and vulnerable.

I don’t know why, but when I got out of the truck, I headed for the rear instead of trying to go around the front of it.  And unbelievably, my wallet was still there, right where I’d left it.

Now, there are some Christians who say that God’s not in the business of doing miracles any more, but even the most ardent skeptic would be hard pressed to explain this one.

Moreover, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s totally God’s character to be doing unexpected things like this on our lives, right when we need them most.

Words cannot adequately express my feelings when I realized that my wallet had a very high probability of being gone for good.  Thoughts in the vein of “Here’s another hassle I don’t have time to deal with” and “I’m such an idiot” filled my head.  But, in an instant, with one little miracle, God protected me from not only those thoughts, but gave me some reassurance in my life I desperately hungry for.  He IS willing to help me.  He DOES have my back.  He’s right where He’s ALWAYS BEEN.

And, He did this without me ever consciously realizing that these are truths I should have been praying into all along.  In an instant, He turned frustration and desolation into heartfelt gratitude and awe of Him, not just in the case of the wallet, but in the broader picture of my life as well.

Truly, my Heavenly Father knows my heart best 🙂

Posted in God's Character, Miracles | Leave a comment

Does Loving God Matter?

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Jesus Follower

I imagine that one of the things that most baffles atheists about people who follow Jesus is the commitment we are called to have to follow what he called the greatest commandment:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37 NIV)

Why on earth would this, of all the commandments, be the “greatest”?  Can you not live a pretty darned “moral” life without loving God?  I’ve seen the arguments that one most certainly can, and if I’m being honest, there are many people I know personally who profess atheism yet seem to have more compassion for the poor and outrage over social injustice than many Christians.  They also have good marriages and try and raise their kids to be honorable and hard working.  If such things are possible “without God”, is loving Him even necessary?

In order to unpack my response to this question, I want to start with an analogy.  When a person is in love with another person, something happens inside of their heart.  Their decision making processes change.  Instead of sitting on the couch and watching a movie, they are compelled to share a trip to the grocery store instead so they and the person they are in love with can spend some time together.  Instead of surfing Facebook, they do the dishes.

Some would say that these examples of unselfish behavior are borne out of a desire to get something in return.  In other words, the only reason you did the dishes was so that you wouldn’t get into a fight about watching the kids later.  Or, perhaps, they’re making up for spending too much time out the night before.

Such arguments, I believe, miss the point of love in the first place.  The very nature of love is that it cannot be earned.  Love is not simply the “trading of favors” between two people.  How do I know this?  Because genuine love is totally possible between two or more people without the possibility of “acts of kindness” being exchanged.  Think of parents who hug and kiss their screaming newborn baby for the first time — what good can the infant do for his or her parents at that point?  Yet, even though the little one cannot take out the trash or sweep the floors, it is impossible to deny that parents still feel love towards their new arrival.

I look at love as a gift freely given to someone else that contains within it an implicit promise to “do life together”.  That is, to share in all of the ups and downs of life regardless of what happens.  When your heart is turned towards another person in this way, your lives become intertwined.  Their problems become your problems.  Their joy becomes your joy.  Their goals become your goals.

When Jesus came down to the Earth, he presented an incredibly radical picture for how people should live their lives.  He audaciously suggested that we bless those who persecute us, pray for our enemies, and forgive others 70×7 times (which is his way of saying don’t ever stop forgiving) for the same offense.  He welcomed sinners into his inner circle and served the needy.

The Book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is the exact reflection of God (chapter 1, verse 3), and this is where I believe part one of the answer to the question posed in the title of this post lies.  If it is true that love implies an intertwining of persons to the point where goals and sorrows become shared between all parties, then the love of God becomes critical to healing a fallen and broken world.  Things that upset God upset us.  Things that God wants us to do become things we want to do as well.  Our lives begin to emulate the example Jesus laid out for all of us.

Can you do these things without loving God?  Maybe, but my question is, “What’s your motivation to do so?”  That is, are you really “trading favors” or is this out of some deeper longing for meaning?  Without God, the latter possibility is impossible; it raises too many questions like, “Where did this longing come from?” and “What really defines ‘good behavior’?”  Both of these questions posit something greater than ourselves in order to answer them.

But, I think there’s something else here that frames the second part of what I believe is the answer to this question.  I find it incredibly fascinating that God calls us to love Him first (literally with everything in our being) before anything else.  On the surface, this sounds preposterous – how can you really love someone you can’t even see or hear or touch with your senses?  Is God out of his mind?

Perhaps not surprisingly, I don’t think so.  I believe that loving God first helps us realize how much we ourselves have been forgiven and how desperately He wants us to live the lives He originally created us for.  I also believe that when we are secure in the Father’s love, we become able to love others the way He loves us.  He sets the example of what unconditional love for others looks like, and we can go forward with confidence that no matter what happens, we will never be without someone who loves us in our lives.

But, there is another reason for why God tells us to start with loving him that may perhaps be the most profound — that if we can find a way to love someone we can’t see or hear or touch, loving those we can becomes a lot easier.  By starting with arguably the hardest thing to do, He effectively has made loving literally everyone else possible.

It’s a brilliant plan, one that helps frame why I believe that loving God absolutely matters!

Posted in God's Character, Love, Tough Questions | Leave a comment

Watchful

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Jesus Follower

This week, I have definitely been out of my comfort zone. My spouse is currently away for 10 days in Brazil on a mission trip, so I am learning by fire what it means to be a single parent of a teenage girl and an 11 year old boy. Also, I’d be lying if I said that safety issues down in Brazil weren’t on my mind – after all, the reason the mission trip is even necessary at all is because of some pretty serious issues with how things like government and law enforcement run down there.

Moreover, my awesome mom planned a trip for us that took us into a different state to visit with relatives and check out some local attractions. I don’t travel very well, though, can be extremely introverted, and I am somewhat directionally challenged (so is she) – not an ideal mix for heading to a strange place!

I guess the bottom line is that I’ve had some fairly anxious moments over the past few days.  But, thankfully, that’s where God’s power shows up best, and He did so through a brief and unexpected encounter at an aquarium we were visiting during our trip.

When we showed up at the aquarium, it was EXTREMELY crowded – very similar to the crowd at a concert when it’s over.  But, we managed to meander our way through each exhibit and ended up in an unusual room where the jellyfish were.  The room had been darkened, and there were long cylindrical tanks holding the jellyfish with some lighting that accented the beauty of the creatures.  It’s the type of room that you want to stay in and look at for a while, and that’s what we did.

While we were looking around, though, I noticed that my son had sort of wandered off from our group and was looking around by himself, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he could easily have found himself lost and in a serious situation quickly due to the large crowd and lack of light in the room.

He may have been oblivious to this, but I sure wasn’t!  I put my eyes on him and watched to make sure I knew where he was so that if he looked around and found himself lost, that I would immediately be able to rush in and let him know that he wasn’t lost at all – I was watching him the whole time…that I was making sure he was safe. He just didn’t know it.

And that’s where God met me – His sweet, still, small voice spoke to me in that moment, “That – what you are doing for your son – is what I’m doing for you right now.”

I am glad the room was a bit dark because I teared up a little as the truth of this really hit me. Jesus promises us in Matthew 28:20 that he will always be with us, and His promises are always good – even if we don’t realize all of the time.  This is something I know intellectually, but God knew in that moment that I needed to hear it directly from Him.

The effect was instant – when God meets you like that, a huge weight comes off and you suddenly are free to just be in the moment to enjoy what’s happening around you. That’s the peace of God, and it is a wonderful gift!

Today, I am very thankful for the great time we had in the midst of some amount of uncertainty, and I am certain God is watching very closely what’s going on in Brazil as well. I am thankful for a God who love His children like I love mine. And, I am thankful that God loves me so much that He let me know this when I really needed to hear it!  He is good, so good, all the time!

Posted in God's Character, Lessons from my kids | Leave a comment

Bird Brain

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Jesus Follower

It was Saturday morning a few weeks ago when I passed by the walk out area of our basement and noticed something didn’t look right. The glass on the doors was pretty gross looking and the stairs leading out into the yard were covered in bird poop.

We had a pretty rough winter where we live, and the home is new to us, so in my inexperience, I remember thinking that runoff from all of the snow and ice melting was the likely cause of the problem with the glass on the doors and resolved to make a point of washing them once the weather warmed up. As for the bird poop, well, the most likely explanation for that seemed to be that the birds were nesting some place in the area behind the house, and a cure would be as simple as finding the nest and removing it.

The problem was, there was no nest to be found. I looked under the eaves of the roof, in the corners of the home, and did a search in the trees in the area and didn’t find a thing. Frustrated, I concluded that there was something else going on that I couldn’t see and didn’t have time to deal with, and just let it go while I tried to come up with another hypothesis as to what might be going on.

About this same time, a day came up where I needed to work out of my home for a day. During the morning hours, I was hearing a knocking sound outside the house every so often. Several times, I got up to check and see if someone was at the door or if there was an animal poking around, and didn’t find anything, which I felt was odd. Needing to get some work done, though, I quickly forgot about it…

However, sometime in the afternoon on my day at home, I needed to go into the basement to grab something, and it all started to make sense. As I passed by the walkout area again, a bird slammed full speed into the glass door. When the bird hit the door, it slobbered up the glass and was so stunned from the hit that it pooped! As the bird was trying to recover, there was a knocking sound as it tried to right itself on the wood floor and rubbed against the doors it had just flown into.  I finally had answers to what was going on!

As I went upstairs, I began to think about how wrong my assumptions were and how interesting it was that all three seemingly unrelated events were all very closely correlated with one another. However, I had a sense that was not the lesson God had for me out of this bizarre story – it is something that I believe is far more profound.

Lately, I have been struggling with a lot of things – work things, home things, etc. It has been a nearly constant battle for me for quite a long time – it feels like every time I turn around, something is going wrong that needs my immediate attention. After months and months of this, it starts to grind you down. It starts to make you wonder if the things you believe about God are really true. It starts to make you feel like all you’re doing is banging your head against a glass door.

It is only now that I can see that my problems are very much like that bird’s. Like the bird, I could see clearly enough where I felt I needed to go, and I had a belief about what the best way to get there was. But, there was something I couldn’t see that was in the way blocking the path. Moreover, what was in my way was causing me a lot of pain personally and spiritually.

I felt like God was using that bird to show me something about the power of “belief” – that is can be very harmful, particularly if one can’t see the whole picture clearly. We can even end up believing the wrong things while being rightly intentioned. Belief can make you keep slamming into a glass door because you’re “sure” of what you see.

God knows the damage belief can cause and calls us to a higher ideal – faith.

The problem for many Christians is that we equate “faith” with “belief” – that all we need to do is believe in the right things and that doing so makes all the difference in the world. But, that can be dangerous – we live in a world at war with forces on it that actively work to ensure that we don’t see the whole picture clearly. Honestly, knowing what I know about the world and the experiences I have make me question as to whether I can actually really “believe” anything with much certainty!

Faith, however, is so much more than belief. It is a condition of your heart, a willingness to embrace the vision of something that doesn’t exist and then working to ensure that vision comes to pass. It doesn’t require you to believe – it requires you to buy in, to trust, to pursue something day by day, regardless of the bumps that happen along the road to getting there.

God’s vision for the world is “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10b), and he calls each one of us to buy into that vision by faith through relationship, through coming to know Him. My problem was that I was putting belief in front of faith, which led to screwed up expectations and ultimately disappointment and pain. What I needed to embrace was God’s vision and let go of my own.

By doing so I am filled with much more hope than I had before. I am confident that every prayer I offer in faith moves things in the direction of bringing heaven to earth – even if I can’t see it. It’s no longer about the bumps in the road or whether we truly ever “arrive” – it’s about the direction I’m heading in my relationship with God. And, that direction will never be directly into a glass door I can’t see!

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The Case for Faith

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Jesus Follower

I recently read an article about a Pastor who became an “atheist” (I put “atheist” in quotes because I’m not entirely sure that’s what he is right now) after deciding to spend a year without God and blog his experience.

The reason this article interested me was because I have spent a considerable amount of energy on the question as to whether there is a God and came to a completely different conclusion.  So, I wanted to see what this individual had to say about what his year without God led him to believe.

Ultimately, he said that the reason for his atheism was because “the intellectual and emotional energy it takes to figure out how God fits into everything is far greater than dealing with reality as it presents itself to us.”

Being honest, it’s really hard to disagree with this point – this is actually one of the reasons I started this blog…to process through tough questions in a rational way that can perhaps shed some light into why the world we see is set up the way it is. Because, let’s just get this out of the way right now, God could make it a whole lot easier to believe in Him if He wanted to.

The problem, however, is that God created us to have free will – the ability to chose to accept Him or reject Him.  In order to have a system like that work, He has to strike a careful balance between being obvious and invisible.  Yes, He could have just put Himself up in the sky so everyone knows He’s there, but would people really have a choice to believe at that point?  I mean, you could just point to the sky and go, “He’s right there.”

It’s like how if you’re a parent, your kids behave differently when they know you’re watching. We all know the true test of their character is what they do when you’re not watching. The system God set up works the same way.

I think this is an easy enough concept to grasp for many people, but there’s a deeper question in here.  That is, “Why doesn’t everything all of a sudden become hunky dory once you make a decision that God is real?”

This, I think, is where a lot of “believers” really get stuck. Because to believe doesn’t guarantee that your life is going to be pain free all of a sudden (far from it – see John 16:33 to see what Jesus Himself has to say about this!). In truth, many Christians experience extremely difficult circumstances – some are so severe that they begin to doubt the existence of an all caring and loving God. They can’t rationalize the world they see with a God who is love. And, I don’t blame them at all – bad theology, a church that isn’t always willing to do what Jesus said to do, spiritual forces, intellectualism, pop culture, etc. are always working to tear our belief in God to pieces.

The reality is that once this type of doubt starts to creep in, it is not all that hard for a belief in God to evaporate very quickly, just as it did for the person in the article I linked to.  This is the “the intellectual and emotional energy it takes to figure out how God fits into everything” that he mentioned. When your daughter gets raped, your dad dies of cancer, or you’re ruined financially, it’s easy to wonder where the heck God is because he’s supposed to be there ALL THE TIME and IF HE REALLY LOVES YOU HE WOULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING. If your situations wasn’t “fixed”, God must not really exist or love you. To try and “prove” otherwise is a very difficult exercise for most people – why would someone who loves you as much as God claims to let you feel pain like that?

I think what this points to, though, is the reality that “belief” is completely insufficient in order to have a relationship with God – we’re called to something higher…FAITH.

You see, faith isn’t an intellectual exercise nor is faith “rational”. Yet, it is essential if one really wants to understand who God is and the [good] plans He has for your life. Why, though?  I think many of us (myself included!) believe that once we start to believe that it would be a WHOLE lot easier to “keep our faith” if God just took care of every need and hurt, all while shielding us from the evils of this world. So, why doesn’t He just do it that way?

The answer is: He tried that first, and it didn’t work.

In the story of Adam and Eve, God had a system setup that we would describe as ideal.  “Belief” in God was easy – He freely walked with mankind in the Garden of Eden.  “Faith” was easy too – every need was taken care of!  Things were so good they didn’t even need clothes to wear!

But, we all know the story – it wasn’t enough…Eve and then Adam both allowed themselves to believe that God was holding out on them and therefore ate the fruit of the Tree of knowledge of good and evil. They didn’t have enough faith in God’s character to believe in His word and His best for them.

I know we’d all like to believe that we’d all be different were we in that situation, but the reality is that we wouldn’t be, and God knows it.

So, the system God works with now is way more difficult and risky, but what it does is produce a faith that is far more durable – it goes beyond belief and provision and into a place where you continue to have to build your faith day after day.

He does this by allowing us to go through trials so we are forced to continue to question what we believe. And, He promises that He sees our pain, that He is there to help us through it, that those who hurt us will have to answer for this some day, and that some day things will be a whole lot different. But, accepting all of this when sometimes God seems to not be there or is invisible requires something beyond the rational – it requires faith.

However, when faith makes it through the difficult storms of life, it becomes more permanent, to the point that no matter what happens, complete and total belief in who God is never in question.  And, that’s the type of people God wants in His Kingdom – an army of authentic people who know who He is…so the unfortunate events in the Garden of Eden never happen again once Jesus comes again to reclaim His creation. And, that’s a pretty cool picture if you ask me!

I’ll close this post with a brief note about reading the Bible, because I believe doing so is essential if you want to hold onto your faith through tough times. The reality is that the Bible is full of people (Abraham, Isaac, Job, Jacob, Judah, Joseph, David, to name a few) with flaws just like you and me who went through even greater problems than the ones we face every day and God saw them through their circumstances every time.  And think about this – they didn’t have a Bible available to them that they could use to build their faith!  The reality is that most of them were flying blind and being asked to trust God in a far greater capacity than we ever will. 

That truth is what encourages ME to keep pressing into tough questions and seeking to build my faith in the midst of difficulty. May God build your faith until it’s bulletproof!

Posted in Faith, God's Character, Tough Questions | Leave a comment

How Satan Was Defeated at the Cross

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Jesus Follower

And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he [Jesus] made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
-Colossians 2:13-15 (NIV)

If you look around it’s hard to believe that Satan is truly a defeated foe.  Children are being sold into slavery, people are being shot in schools, and the news is full of all sorts of corruption and malice in our society.

Yet, the Bible tells us that the powers and authorities of this world (Satan and his followers) were not only disarmed, but they were made a mockery of on the cross.  How can this be?  If we’re honest with ourselves, is this a “truth” that is easy to reconcile with the world we see?

To me, the answer is an emphatic no.  First of all, how can dying on a cross disarm anything? Getting flogged and dying in the most painful way available at the time (the word excruciating comes from the same root word as crucifixion in Greek) doesn’t look like making a mockery of powers of authorities either.  Clearly, dying on the cross was an “upside down” act of grace, but I believe something else took place that day that explains the words of Paul in Colossians.  But, to explain them, we need to go back to the beginning and look carefully at the question of why God allowed Satan to keep on existing after he rebelled against God.

Honestly, this question is a hard one – in fact, I believe it’s a reason why many atheists become atheists in the first place.  They don’t understand how a so-called “loving” God could let the horrible things that happen in the world actually happen.  Therefore, since evil is allowed to run rampant in the world, God must not exist. Or, if He does, He surely doesn’t care about the world and people He created.

There are several problems with this, not the least of which is that it takes the blame off of the entity committing the act of evil in the first place. It’s like blaming two loving parents when their child commits a crime. No reasonable system of justice would punish the parents for the act of their child – more than likely, the parents are as horrified as anyone else at what happened.  The child is the one responsible for their own actions.

We call this “free will” – the notion that we are able to choose our own path and make our own choices about who we love, hate, serve, etc. And, I would argue that “free will” is necessary in order to have love. Love is an act that by its very nature must be freely chosen – you can’t force love on someone and still have it still fit the definition of love. In fact, we have other words to describe what happens when “love” is forced on someone, and none of them are positive (lust, brainwashing, etc.).

However, in order to have something like love exist, you have to allow for the possibility that an entity may not choose to love.  Love cannot be forced – it must be chosen.  In order for it to be chosen, you have to have more than one way to choose.  One of those choices is always going to be evil in the case of love.

So, what does this have to do with the question of why God didn’t destroy Satan when he rebelled? I believe a conversation took place at the beginning that went something like this:

Satan (to the other angels): God says that we are free to choose whether we follow him or not, but I doubt that’s actually true. The moment one of us steps out of line, I guarantee you He will just turn us to dust. After all, it’s what I would do if I had His power.  He doesn’t care about so-called “love”…he just wants to control us.

God: I heard that. If you really understood love, Satan, you would not say the things you are saying about Me.

Satan: There you go again, always eavesdropping and telling me that I don’t understand – it’s not my fault I wasn’t created to be omniscient.

God: You are only saying what you are saying because you don’t trust Me or believe the things I have told you about who I am. 

Satan: Yes, yes, you’ve told me this already, but I don’t buy it for a second. Moreover, I’ve decided that not only do I not believe it, but I’m going to prove that you are not who you say you are.  If I’m truly “free” to choose to love you, then you really can’t stop me from choosing to NOT love you.  So, here’s your first test, God – I DON’T choose to love you and trust in your goodness.  Just try and stop me!

God: As I said before, you are always free to choose. I won’t force you to love Me if you truly don’t want to.  

Satan: You’re not who you say you are anyway, and are therefore a liar.  I’m going to make a mess of your creation, and some day, you’re going to get mad because I didn’t choose to follow you and destroy me right in front of everyone because I didn’t do things your way.  They will see you for who you really are – not interested at all in “love”, just control.

God: I knew when I created beings with free will that this was a possibility. Everyone has a right to choose for themselves; that’s the system I created.  There will come a day where I call all those who love Me to Myself, but first, all must be given time to choose.

Satan: You’re going to regret this, God. Every kind of suffering imaginable is on the table – you just wait to see what I will do. Who’s with me?

Obviously, this dialog is fictional, but I think it’s a pretty fair representation of what probably occurred.  The first act of rebellion was a disbelief in the character of God, a belief that God really wasn’t interested in love, just control.  That God would turn to dust immediately any “deserters” because they didn’t agree with Him.

Scripture tells us that Satan was not the only entity who believed this about God. When he rebelled, he took a number of other fallen angels with him.  So, once the rebellion occurred, there were two major forces in opposition to one another.  One good, interested in love and in growing love.  The other force believed that God is truly only interested in control, and will literally do anything to prove that everything God says about Himself is all a big lie.

So, for thousands of years, the spiritual battle raged on.  Satan kept his promise to make a mess of creation, and God kept his promise that not only would He continue to let people choose, but He would continue to call people to Himself through the power of love. I don’t believe either side really had the “upper hand” in the battle (though the Earth was clearly under the authority of Satan (John 12:31), though, until Jesus showed up with a plan to be the final sacrifice for the sins of the world as an act of amazing self-sacrificial love.

A plan that radical would never have occurred to Satan, who doesn’t understand the idea of love – it would be absolutely absurd to him. Think about it – the idea that a Being as powerful as God lowering himself to become “just a man”, just so he could die on the cross for all mankind would have been beyond his comprehension. You can almost hear the words – he can be tempted now? He doesn’t have all of the power He had while He was in Heaven?  You mean, Jesus can feel pain and I can KILL GOD? There’s no way he is going to go through with letting me get away with this! What an IDIOT!!  I’ve got him right where I want him!

So, Satan proceeded to do his worst…

…to tempt Jesus to follow him instead

…to try and trap Jesus into contradicting the Word of God

…to put him up on a Roman cross, where he would put him in unimaginable pain, practically forcing him to call the heavenly hosts down and put an end to his suffering

But…it didn’t work, and it didn’t work in front of everyone, whether they were a supernatural entity or a human being…

What everyone saw instead of Satan being proven right was an innocent man forced to die because of a lie.  They saw a man that willingly gave himself up so that all of the damage Satan had done to the world could be undone, and that He did it through an act of unconditional love.  They saw God suffer through all the temptation, accusations, and suffering even though He could have ended it at any time and destroy those who were doing this to Him.

That’s how God disarmed the powers and authorities – He proved once and for all that Satan was a liar, and that the path of Satan leads to the condemnation of the innocent.  That God loved those He created so fiercely that He was willing to endure the worst form of torture the world has ever seen to prove it.  Nothing disarms a lie like glorious truth.

And, the way that God revealed His truth was done in such a way that left no doubt as to where He stood.  You can almost see the angels in heaven looking down with every crack of the whip going “OK, that one looked like it really stung. He’ll call us all down now and put an end to this.” One could also imagine Satan’s forces saying “OK, that one looked like it really stung. He’s going to call His angels down any minute and put an end to this because He is not dumb enough to keep putting up with this.”  Jesus make a mockery of this thinking by doing everything “the hard way”, through love, even though He technically didn’t have to as God.

However, the scope of the sacrifice and suffering reveals just how wrong Satan was.  Not only was he wrong, his argument couldn’t have been more wrong.  And, the fact that he did this to himself out of his own arrogance, believing he would be vindicated in the end just shows how laughably ironic his actions were in the first place. Said another way, he fell into the trap he dug for someone else.

And THAT is how God defeated Satan on the cross.

Posted in God's Character, Spiritual Warfare, Tough Questions | Leave a comment

The Strength of the Light

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Jesus Follower

Where I live, this winter has been brutally cold.  We’ve had record snowfalls, record low temperatures, and about 5 months of winter weather.  Put simply, it’s been a hard, tough slog through a winter that doesn’t seem like it will ever end.

At church, we recently completed a series exploring the character of God.  A couple of the weeks in the series were spent answering tough questions like “If God is so good, then why is there so much in the world that doesn’t look like Jesus” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?”  We even looked at the story of Job, where it looks like Job is a pawn in some cosmic game of chess.  Where was God in the midst of all the suffering?

I won’t lie and say that I got all of the answers I was looking for out of the series that was taught at church.  Being honest, answering all of the tough questions people have about the problem of evil in a post-cross world wasn’t really the point of the series anyway.  In the end, one of the main points of the series was that we learned a lot about who God is because of what Jesus did in his time on earth, and that it isn’t the greatest idea to base our assumptions about who God is on stories that were early in the process of God’s redeeming work on behalf of His people.  God had to slowly show His people a better way, and there is a pattern that you see where God was gradually “raising the bar” as more and more time passed.

I get all that, but something that always bothered me is that we live in a world where we have to deal with truly evil things happening all around us. It’s not always easy to see God working in our circumstances, and there are genuinely things out there that hurt us.  Where is God in the midst of this present evil?

Interestingly, God provided me with what I believe is at least a partial answer to this question when I walked out of church on a Sunday morning. When I walked out, the sun was shining so bright that I thought the temperature had to finally be above 30 degrees for the first time in what seemed like forever.  After the winter we’d had so far, it felt wonderful!  It was so warm (I thought)!

However, when I looked at the temperature gauge in the car, it read 12 degrees.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I would have sworn up and down that it was at least 20 degrees warmer than that!

That’s when it hit me – the strength of the light made all of the difference.  It made me feel warm when it clearly was not.  Perhaps dealing with the problem of evil in the world has some parallels to what I felt that day.

Many times in the Gospels, Jesus calls himself “the light” – perhaps if the “light” within us is bright enough, the troubles of this world don’t seem quite so bad.  In other words, when evil should be consuming us, the “light” keeps us from feeling like it is.

I am realizing that I am far perfect in living in the light – in fact, many days my life feels like kind of a mess.  What I need to realize is this is a sign that I’m not letting enough “light” in, and that if I will just let Jesus do what he promises us He will do, things will definitely feel a lot different in a positive way.  Sure, things are still going to happen that are completely out of line with God’s plan for His creation, but carrying a powerful “light” is the best possible way to stand up to it all.

Posted in Evil, Faith, God's Character | Leave a comment

Unexpected Evangelist

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Jesus Follower

One of the things I have always struggled with on my walk of faith is sharing it with others.  It’s not necessarily a fear of looking silly or just being honest – it’s more that I sometimes fear being “that Christian” who ends up turning someone off because out of ignorance or stupidity.

Further, my attempts at evangelism with people I am closer too (and theoretically in a position to grant grace if I screw something up) have not been all that successful.  There is data out there that suggests that as many as 9 out of 10 people would go to church if invited by a friend.  If that’s the case, I either don’t have many friends as I thought or I am so terrible at evangelism that the mere thought of attending church with my family and me is truly horrifying (I am joking – sort of).

Paul tells us in Ephesians 4:11-13 that evangelism is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  While I certainly feel like I have gifts in some areas, this clearly isn’t one of them.  That’s OK, though – no one can be good at everything.

I do, however, sometimes feel bad that people who I know and care about are suffering needlessly perhaps because I am a terrible evangelist.  Maybe if I were more charismatic or interesting, people might see what a huge blessing church life can be.  Sometimes, I feel like I can do nothing but watch helplessly as someone’s life unravels.

Generally, I don’t think or dwell on this too much, but lately these feelings have been more persistent.  It’s not a guilt thing, but I do have some close friends\relatives with amazing hearts who are struggling in many ways.  To hear some truth poured into their souls could do some incredible good, particularly with the series of messages we’re going through at the church.  But, I can’t seem to find the right words to get people to move…frustrating!

In the midst of that frustration, though, I was helped to see a different perspective on evangelism that I hadn’t considered before through an email I received from my pastor this morning.  To provide some context, one of the ways that I serve the church is to produce a podcast of the weekly sermon.  It doesn’t take very long and is something I consider a small service, but the email I received helped me realize that there’s perhaps a bigger impact to being a “computer geek for Jesus” than I had thought:

“Awesome news! I saw this on my Facebook wall on Sunday. Wanted to celebrate with you as YOU are the reason these folks were able to listen to the sermon online.”

The post that was shared on Facebook was a post by a book publisher who shared a link to last week’s sermon where one of their books was a recommended “digging deeper” resource.  The gist of their post was that they highly recommended listening to the talk (which they called great).  Reading some of the comments on the post made me smile as well.

Now, while I didn’t have much to do with the sermon prep, what I realized is that my little corner of “techie evangelism” reaches people I’d never imagined.  A responsibility I consider a “small service” ended up being a big deal to God, drawing people I have never met to Him.  Pretty cool.

My encouragement in all of this is that God can use small things to do big things – we just have to keep our eyes open to what He’s doing.  And maybe, the picture we have of what evangelism “should” look like is not the picture God would necessarily have for us right now at this time on our journey.  And, that’s all good, because He is good!

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Portrait of God

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Jesus Follower

It has been hard for me to blog lately.  I took on a new job with a lot more responsibilities, and we’re in the middle of a very important project.  Through this project, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to maintain positive and edifying at all times.  This project has been riddled with challenges and problems – dealing with them all has taken a lot out of me personally.

If that were not enough, there are countless other personnel and other matters that need my attention that I simply am unable to get to right now.  It’s frustrating – every time I turn around, there’s another fire to put out, which makes it even more difficult to get the project I need done.

I told a friend today that I feel like I just ran a marathon, and I’ve been asked to run another.  I am drained emotionally, physically, and spiritually – I’m tired, irritable, and dealing with constant feelings of failure.

In times like this, it’s hard not to wonder where God is in all of this.  Why do I feel like I’m constantly under attack for trying to do the right thing?  Can’t things just go right for once?  Are my prayers even being heard?

In my younger days, I would have said that God set his creation in order and then walked away from it.  The notion of a personal God who answered prayer was foreign to me.  God doesn’t care about his people.  He’s mad at us because we can’t keep ourselves out of trouble.

The fact of the matter is that if this is your portrait of God, then you need to find another photographer.

This morning, God placed a story on my heart that reminded me of who He really is.  The story is from 1 Kings, chapter 19 – the story of when Elijah ran away to die in the wilderness.  When Elijah had reached his lowest point, God sent an angel to provide.  Through God’s provision, Elijah was able to get up and continue on.

That’s God – picking us up and carrying us when we have not the strength to continue.  It’s like that poem footprints where the person in the story wonders why there’s only one set of footprints during the darkest days of his life and Jesus answers that it was then where he was carried through by the grace of God.

God also uses the people around us to bring us up.  Tonight, after another hard day, I opened an envelope with the following note in it from my son:

Dear Mom and Dad – 

I love you.  You guys are the best parents I can have.

This is just what I needed after another day of feeling like a failure.  God put something on my son’s heart that brought light back into darkness.  That’s the portrait of God I need to keep in mind.  He loves us and will carry us through…always.

Posted in God's Character | Leave a comment

How Much More Appealing…?

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Jesus Follower

This past weekend, our church was visited by Rob Morris, who is President and CEO of an organization called Love146.  Love 146 is one of the amazing organizations out there that are on the front lines fighting the monstrous evil of human trafficking.  Rob is an amazing man with an amazing gift of teaching, and gave this week’s sermon.

During his presentation, Rob showed a video that told the story of how one of the girls they are trying to bring back to life ended up in the child sex trade.  The story was horrible – she was raped at a young age and ran away from home.  What she said then was something I will never forget.  “I was hungry and they [a brothel] fed me.”

Think about that for a second…this girl was selling herself for sex and going down an extremely dark path so she could eat.

When I read those words on the screen (she said them in her own language, so we had to read the translation on the screen) something in me screamed “THAT’S THE CHURCH’S JOB” (Matthew 25:35).  We’re commanded as Christians to feed the hungry with no strings attached so people can see the love of a living God.

I then realized that we as a church body can’t be doing a very good job with this if girls feel like their only hope is to sell their bodies into exploitation. Ouch.

I have a friend right now who’s currently in a struggle with his neighbors over an issue that seems like it should be a trivial matter.  These neighbors are all Christians and my friend isn’t atheistic, but he isn’t exactly what you would call a “hard core” believer either.  Unfortunately, these neighbors have been less than helpful in dealing with this situation.  In fact, just about everything they’ve done has made him and his family feel even worse.

When I talked to my friend last time, he was incredulous – “What happened to love your neighbor?” he asked.  He then told me some of them have been trying to get him to go to church with them.  I have to ask the question (and so is he) of why he would even want to based on how he’s being treated.

As Christians, I feel that it’s our responsibility to model love, grace, compassion, and forgiveness, and to have others see those things reflected in our words and actions.  Sure, no one’s perfect, but how much more attractive would Christianity be if we all did the best we possibly could?  Maybe then, people would see the church not only as a much more attractive offer, but as the only one worth pursuing at all…

Posted in Evangelism, Human Trafficking, Kingdom of God | Leave a comment