I REALLY hope that they don’t take the whole cow (the book) and turn it into a Beef Stock cube…

Here’s a sample of what’s to come:

Looking up from a hole...

Life’s a funny thing, and something that it seems to me quite regularly is challenge me… not just a ponder… not just a “oh I wish…” but a “whoa!” moment.

It happened to me today.

Someone I know has a website (now I’m keeping it vague on purpose to protect them) – but one of her followers had asked her why she settles for ”fake love” and told her that she “shouldn’t settle for that” to which she replied “it’s kind of too late for that now; my reputation will get only the wrong kind of people ‘fighting for me’.” – now this made me really sad… and it got me thinking “Is this all love has become?” a place for us to use each other for a quick fix of what we call “love” only to find that we are stuck with a ‘bad reputation’ that we are hating because we want to be better than that… but to scared to leave that behind because we have built up protection to help cope with that… I mean leaving that would mean potentially loosing friends.

And that is a really tough question and it’s something that more and more people are dealing with… they hate who they have become, but they’ve been living it so long they have started to believe it… they’ve started to live in this world for so long that it feels like it’s impossible to get out.

And to be honest none of it was a big surprise to me… HOWEVER… this is what challenged me…

IMAGINE if she wasn’t the only one in the group thinking this?

IMAGINE if others were thinking the same thing?

You see what would happen is that people would stop pushing each other down into a world that they are trying to get out of… and they would have created a group of people that work as a support group… people who understand… people who have been there with you.

In the Bible it says this:

“The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.” John 10:10

You see if you are in a hole that seems impossible to get out of… then you might need help outside yourself. Anything that is keeping you down, isn’t where you are meant to be, you were actually created for much more than that… even if your friends aren’t willing to change, you can.

God wants to give you LIFE… and a satisfying life.

The founders of AA knew this and it’s reflected in their 12 step program in steps 2 and 3:

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

When I read that I think of God our creator… he wants you to be the person he designed you to be even more than you want to change… you see he wants to see you excel in ALL areas.
He wants to see you on the adventure that he has planned for you.

You can try and change… but ONLY God can give you a LIFE CHANGING turnaround.

It never says it will be easy… in fact it say “there will be trouble” – however I would much rather be in God order “trouble” than be stuck in a life outside of what was planned for me.

Doubt

I recently revisited the book ‘Blue Like Jazz’ by Donald Miller. Blue Like Jazz was an important book for me in my Christian journey because it was the first book that I had read by a Christian who expressed doubt in their faith. I had read hundred of books by Christian authors who seemed to have it all together… and I became disillusioned. Why? because it didn’t explain what I was feeling… I certainly didn’t feel like I was secure in my faith all the time… I sometimes doubted if God even existed… did this make me a bad Christian.

What I discovered was ‘no I’m not a bad Christian’…

You see even the disciples doubted… Peter nearly drowned with Jesus right in front of him while he was walking on water… “I can’t believe I’m walking on water…”

C.S. Lewis said it like this:

“If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is  answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply.”

We are always gonna have doubts… it’s not wrong. However like Blue Like Jazz I hope that you keep the Bible in the middle of those doubts… because The Bible hasn’t changed for 1000′s of years… and the God who inspired the words in that book hasn’t changed EVER.

Explore… and it may just mean you discover your faith even deeper… or even Walk on Water?

So what is the cure?

I have to sleep with a mask over my nose, with constant air being pushed through a machine that gives continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). This  CPAP machine generates the required air pressure to keep my airways open during sleep. This means when I wake up in the morning I wake up refreshed because my body has had enough oxygen for my body to feel refreshed.

It actually got me thinking about my spiritual life.

Because we are ‘only human’ it seems we can’t rest completely in Christ and what he wants for our life because ‘the world’ wakes us up from our sleep. We walk around wondering why we are feeling so tired with our life… the problem is that we haven’t had a chance to rest or we think we’ve rested however what we need is a breath.

Just as my CPAP machine gives me a constant air pressure that gives me enough oxygen to fully rest… we also need the  same in our prayer life. When we rest on the words that Jesus gave and mediate on those words it’s like we give oxygen to our spiritual life… and that creeps into our normal life.

How deep is your rest?

How is your oxygen levels?

What is the positive air pressure levels in your life… is it just good words… or is it something deeper?

Prayer

Our Church (Hornby Presbyterian Community Church or HPCC) has just finished 21 days of prayer, however I was talking to my friend Mel who made the comment “there isn’t that many younger people at the prayer meetings” – and she’s right, there is certainly more ‘older’ folk… so why is that?

Could it be the fact that we’re to comfortable? – are we just so comfortable just so blessed that we don’t feel the need to pray?

If you talk to some older people you will discover that prayer was the thing that got them through lots of hard times… but that’s just the thing isn’t it? They have something to pray for.

Is it because we don’t know HOW to pray? Maybe we’re just so out of practice that we have forgotten what words to say and so when we do pray our prayers are vague and shallow…

I wonder if part of the reason we are not very good at praying is because we’re not really good at reading the Bible. Pastor Mark Batterson once said “You don’t read the Bible… You pray the Bible”.

You see the really BIG miracles in the Bible were from people standing on the PROMISES of God. When Joshua asked God to make the sun stand still so he could finish his battle… it was because he believed that the promise of God. God had said he would always be with his chosen nation. I’m not sure Joshua knew exactly what he was asking for… however I believe he knew the immensity of the prayer.

I wonder if our prayers are so boring because we’re not willing to let God be God. We’re scared to pray a BIG prayer just in case God doesn’t do something.

But do you know what? I believe the main reason prayers go unanswered… is because they are not asked.

All through the Bible we are told… “Pray first…” but it seems that we have put prayer as our last resort… and for some it’s not even an after thought.

If you want miracles… you need to stand on the promises of God and trust that God will fulfill those promises.

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Inspired by the verse John 10:10 “The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.” this fun video takes the verse and puts it to song… from the Devils point of view.

In the words of Satan.

This happened to me yesterday and I’ve been mulling it over in my mind for a while.

The article started of well… it started off about acceptance and trying to solve bullying and how it’s leading more and more people to look at taking their own lives as a way out. The article spoke about people who were likely to be bullied and highlighted gays, fat people and Muslim… it also spoke about how the kids learn from the adults in their lives.

I was saying in my mind… YES, YES YES…

As Christians we should love everyone, we should embrace other peoples culture, we should be against boundaries that divide our communities… YES, YES, YES…

But then… was ruined… in these couple of sentences.

“…we don’t believe that homosexuality is a sin. Your parents are Christians who believe that the Bible is inspired by God, just like people are. And since the Bible is a living thing, it is in its very nature to evolve toward becoming more loving. We are to interact with it, to interpret it with our minds and hearts and souls.”

Wait… hold on?

It’s in the Bibles very nature to evolve toward becoming more loving?

So let me get this right… the Bible changes, depending on how the culture changes?

My wife Emma commented on it by saying “That’s like saying… it’s OK not to obey your parents, just because cultures changed or it’s OK that you are an compulsive liar, because you’re nice…”

I think we’ve got it all round the wrong way…

The Word is unchanging…

“In the beginning the Word already existed.  The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1

I can’t imagine God creating everything making laws… for him to go “heck what was I thinking… lets just change that to suit you”

You see lets not fool ourselves…

The Gospel doesn’t change because our culture changes.

We change because the Gospel is constant.

We’re not smart enough to change The Bible… we’re far to selfish for that…

I’m thankful that the Bible is constant… it’s stable… it NEVER changes.

(If you want to read the article I read click HERE)

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It starts with PRAYER

I’ve recently been convicted (on a few occasions now) on these words from Jesus.

“You will see even greater things than these.” John 1:50

Now the problem I have is not that I don’t believe the words, but I don’t SEE it happening, and I guess it makes me ask… Why is that?

I personally think it’s because we are an arrogant generation…

We think of God not as our King or as our Saviour… but as a Magician… and like the magicians we see we want to know how he did the tricks… We know it’s not REAL magic so how did he do it???

We think we know how he made the Earth we think we know how the miracles in the Bible happened, we think we can explain things away… however we are then stuck with a problem… our god that we see is only just a little bit bigger than we are… When the truth is our God is  bigger and stronger and more powerful than we could ever care or could imagine.

The truth is we are most likely the most educated church in the history of the church and we have lost the AWE of God… We’ve lost the WOW of God… and we’ve lost the faith it takes to look silly in believing that. We are educated way beyond our means.

Pastor Mark Batterson recently made an observation:

“I wonder if our faith is so subnormal that the normal of the Bible seems abnormal.  We need a new normal.  Prayer meetings should be normal.  Miracles that are the byproduct of prayer should be normal.  Radical conversions should be the normal.  But there is a price to be paid.  The price is prayer.”

Do we need to get out of our trying to crack the code of The Bible… to stop trying to understand why God would do certain things… and maybe just let God be God and rediscover the awe and wonder of God.

Didn’t Jesus say that we are to be like Children?

Lets put our trust wholly in God and let him start the miracle within us…

Lets start to let the miracle overflow from us…

Lets start fighting by getting back down on our knees and be audacious enough to ask God to start showing us the ‘Greater’ that Jesus was talking about.

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Rejecting the King????

I am super excited that our church is going to be talking about the “Kingdom of God”.

Those who have read the Bible and the things that Jesus talked about would know that the Kingdom of God was a big issue. In fact that was what Jesus talked about THE MOST.

The problem we face with it is… it all seems a bit cryptic, I mean I’m sure you could understand the plot of the first Mission Impossible Movie faster than this… and what has happened it has left us all divided standing in our own camps trying to argue if it’s now or later, here and now or then and there.

Now I have read a few books by people on the subject and they can be so varied… some say things like…

“The Kingdom of God is a spiritual thing… and we can fully realise it now, we can work miracles and we can do wonders” 

The problem with this is that… we all know that we are far from perfect and it would seem to me that Jesus was talking about things far more tangible… and not so completely spiritual and ‘fluffy’

I’ve hear someone else talk about it being about just the Church…

That’s great but that seems to make the Kingdom of God seem really really small. This theory to me makes it seem like Jesus took the whole Bible and reduced it to a bumper sticker… or took his prize Bull and turned him into a Beef Stock Cube. I don’t think Jesus would have wanted us to take the Kingdom of God idea and reduce it to such a small man sized idea.

And then I heard someone talk about the Kingdom of God being in the Future… nothing now… it’s all later. The Kingdom of God will only be realised in heaven.

However this doesn’t explain the miracles (that Jesus predicted)… it doesn’t explain why we have the Holy Spirit… there is a lot of loose ends, in this theory.

But here is the thing… I can understand why we want to box an idea like this up… I get that.

The Kingdom of God is a HUGE idea… and it’s not an easy one to get our little dust brains around. We are challenged by it… we are frightened by it…

The hardest thing for me the more I think about it is this…

We talk a lot about a God of love… about a savior… and it’s right, and good to do so… but here’s were it gets me… KINGdom…

Jesus is not an elected member of parliament… he wasn’t voted in… he’s the KING.

That gives you NO wiggle room… and then if this is the case…

I once heard this phrase about 5 years ago and it’s stayed with me since.

What are the consequences of accepting the savior… but rejecting the KING???

Hmmm I may need some more Kingdom thinking…

Image via Wikipedia

One of the elders at my church a fantastic guy called Colin Price spoke about the importance about reading the Bible… he did  a great job. During his sermon he told the famous story about Billy Graham and Charles Templeton.

The story goes like this… Billy and Charles worked together doing evangelical crusades together in the mid 1940′s, thousands of people came and gave their lives over to God… and committed Christ as their personal saviour in their lives. Charles was offered the opportunity to go to Princeton Theological seminary and study. During the time there Charles tried to convince Billy to come along… at the time Billy decided it wasn’t the best decision for him so he didn’t go. As time went on Billy kept in touch with Charles, and it seems that Charles was becoming more and more liberal in his teaching… to the point where Charles said to Billy that Billys message was “too simple”, as Charles studied more and more liberal views.

In the end Billy Graham became noted in history as preaching the Gospel message (in person) than anyone else… ever. He spoke in the ear of Presidents… world Leaders… he was awarded many awards inculding an honourary knighthood in the UK.

While Charles Templeton struggled with doubt and ended up calling himself an agnostic.

So why did this story stand out for me?

Because I like history… I like to study the patterns that happen in history for those who don’t take note of historic moments. For instance if Adolf Hitler had taken a look into history at Napoleon Bonaparte he wouldn’t have tried to invade Russia in  Winter… and his   war story could have been so different.

But if we look at the pattern with Billy and Charles you can see it happening again… but maybe in a bigger scale.

The simple Gospel message verse intellectual liberalism.

We have some church leaders and evangelists who are becoming more and more liberal… and they are trying to make the Gospel message into something that they can intellectualize it… box it… make it easy for them to understand… to explain… to make palatable.

However the Gospel message is not these things… it is simple… it is unappologetic… it’s not P.C.

And I find myself drawn more and more to church leaders, speakers and evangelists who lay the Gospel message on a plate and say simply “here is what the Bible actually says let God speak this into your heart… into your very soul”… and I find people who are trying to twist the Gospel to say something else more and more unpalatable.

I don’t think it’s right to ask “does the Bible really say….?” – that’s the equvelent of the Devil saying to Adam and Eve… “did God REALLY say….?” – in John 1:1 it says “In the Beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the word WAS God”

The word WAS God… so when we are starting to twist the Bible or to cast doubt into the Bible teaching… then it simply isn’t the Gospel message… it’s not the truth that the Bible gives.

The truth is so simple… it hurts… it heals… it opens us… it saves us.

IT SAVES US.