I understand why you might have disdain for God.
I assure you, He has no disdain for you.
Talk in His direction. Experiment. He’s closer than you think.
Show me a perso…
Show me a person who doesn’t suck in their stomach when they look themselves in the mirror and I’ll show you someone capable of changing the world.
Masterpiece
It is purely through grace that God reveals Himself to us
But on occasion we forget that
And we begin to think of ourselves higher than we ought
while making Him lower
We judge and assess God based on how He responds to our demands and prayers
This is not right
God does not owe us anything
He acts and reacts based upon a wisdom that we can not even begin to grasp
For He is Holy, Perfect
We must understand that He is good, and we must trust that He is orchestrating a masterpiece with all of what we know, dream, and imagine
He invites us to be friends… but we must never underestimate the expense that He has paid for us to take a seat with Him
It is our place to be humble and receptive of all that He is
This is the highest place in this life.
Interviewing an Alien
Here is an interview with Francis Chan, a recovering Mega-church pastor who began to reject his own fame to follow the Spirit of God. The interviewers seem to be simply confused by him and attempt to pick his brain… attempt to poke fun at him.
It’s clear that he has no idea what he’s getting himself into. Love this. It’s the tension that comes with following Jesus. We. are. aliens.
Exchanged.
It grieves me to report that from my estimation, from the US in the city with the most churches…
we have almost completely quit estimating our Christianity by spiritual means, discerning the presence of the Holy Spirit and the fruit therein, and we’ve exchanged it for our perceived “church” attendance.
Heart-broken.
For this is a result of a people who have chosen to separate themselves from the person of God and the sacrificial life that He has gifted to us.
We would rather have our ears tickled and be popular.
Rescue us from this deranged brokenness, Lord Jesus.
Murmuration vs. Heaven
I’m confident that even the best of us can’t imagine the beauty of G-d’s dwelling place.
This video reminds me of that.
In the video you can hear the girl cuss… I bet we might do way more than that if we experienced the full beauty and majesty of G-d and His Heaven.
Dallad Willard on His Spiritual Practices
A short video interview with the late Dallas Willard, one of the most profound Christian thinkers of our time.
I love to hear about disciple’s personal lives with Christ. I think that there are so many telling things about our faith by sharing our personal spiritual practices. And this is no different.
I can’t say I agree with everything Dallas says here, but I am pleasantly challenged by it. To attempt to “mimic” any person’s spiritual life would be an error and would be incongruent with the personal relationship that God has called each of us to live.
From Compartment to Fulfillment (Updated*)
One of the more difficult facets about coming out of an organized and human sustained church environment is transitioning into a life more dependent 
on relationship with God and with the organic group of people that God has strategically placed us in.
When I received the revelation that God was calling me out of the traditional prescribed organization and into a spiritual family, I was a little shocked and heart broken. I had placed all my focus on living a certain way and working towards goals that, with a simple revelation from the Lord, changed instantly. I felt gypped. I came to the hard realization that I had wasted years of my life. The group that I had given blood, sweat, and tears for fundamentally disowned me and seemingly forgot about me. I found out that when relationships are built on common vision and doctrines instead of God’s relational bond they cannot and will not last (pain and hardship often accompany these). As much as I would want to make these relationships work, they would not. They were not being held together by God’s grace.
I’ve learned through this heartache that God is most concerned with the task of building a Kingdom, not making us “happy” socially. When I stepped far enough away I realized that there was a strong “in or out” mentality, one that was cultish in nature and one that worked against the heart of the Great Commission, the kind of Love that God had been attempting to develop in my heart. Despite my best of efforts during my time in traditional American Christianity, everything seemed to work in opposition to the gentle guidance of the Spirit. It is as if something was wrong… and it was.
Continue reading “From Compartment to Fulfillment (Updated*)”
Living in the Romance
“Praise Jesus, I’ve been saved, sanctified, and filled with the Holy Ghost!”
Ever said this, or heard someone say something similar. There’s not a lot wrong with it, the intentions of it are pretty good. But, there’s a problem I want to point out… it’s all in the past tense.
See we have a tendency to live our life in God in the past tense and not in the present tense and in future tense. We base our eternal future destination by what we did in the past. For example, if you’re a Christian and you’re reading this you likely have a date that you were converted to the faith and “got saved”. Maybe you joined a church and got baptized. Those are all good things. But that is not where the story ends, nor what Christianity is all about.
Present and Presence
It seems that us church folks love to focus on the past and on the future of God’s history, while neglecting the present. We study the history of God, what He has done and how He has done it… i.e. creation, covenant, laws, relationships with men and women, ext…
And we study the future reign of God and how He will return. Who will be receiving His wrath and why they will according to the history that we know of God.
We stretch out our arms grabbing with our left hand the past of God, and use our right hand to stretch out to the future of God and pull them together to create a kind of life that is chalked full of God stories and God vision.
Yet, the part of the story of God is that He is not just a God of the past and the future, but He is also a God of the present. In fact I believe that God does not adhere to the same time and space laws we do. He is somehow always present, He is somehow still able to see and interact with times past and is already waiting in times future.
And He calls us out of our history books and future prophecies to dwell with Him here and now, specifically through the laying down of our lives and reception of His eternal, everlasting, abundant life that is held in His all-powerful tight grip.
On the other hand there is a life of living IN the Spirit of God that overflows from the present to make our timelines all “mush”. A life that sees death coming and laughs “for to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
There is a life that makes since of the stories… and makes way for stories to be written, even today, of God miraculously changing the world through mere humans.
This is what a life of God is all about, His present and His presence.
Collision of Kingdoms 