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Premeditated Ignorance

July 2, 2011 in church, Daily Life, God and us, Parenting with 0 Comments

When our oldest child was a toddler, my wife and I were baby bodyguards – never more than a leap away from rescue if she were approaching something potentially harmful.  My wife still has that instinct (she’s a mom).  I, however, have become a bit slower in my response time. Our 3rd child is now a toddler and if he is approaching something potentially harmful or messy, I first observe, assess, play out the possible outcomes in my mind, and THEN determine it’s worth getting up for.

Every now and then I pretended not to hear my kids speaking out of line or see them acting out of line.  This way I figure I cannot be held accountable for correcting them.  For example, if I leave the room at just the right time, I can plead ignorance when asked “Did you know the baby was in the cupboard?!”

You could call it pre-meditated ignorance. You can’t be held accountable for what you didn’t know, right?  And as long as you are NOT in the right place at the right time, you may experience this bliss of ignorance (for a brief time).

I have been faced with a challenging reality in my life.  In my church experience, I have not been held accountable.  How many sermons have I sat through, books have I read, prayers have I prayed, without being held accountable for the action steps I was compelled (or commanded!) to take?  When I go to church on Sunday morning and sit through a sermon and jot down some notes (assuming my notes are action steps, not interesting info points), who asks me later how I am doing on those things I wrote down? What consequence do I face if I fail to address problems in my life that God brings to my attention?

How many small group sessions or Bible studies have I sat through without anyone asking me “What are you going to do about it?” And then making me feel like I BETTER do something about it.

I find myself premeditating my ignorance.  If I never tell anyone what I think I should do, I don’t have to be accountable to take that step.  If I pretend I don’t hear God (or willingly plug my ears to Him) I don’t have to be held accountable to a command I never heard.   I think that’s probably a dangerous way to live.

I may premeditate my ignorance in order to dodge accountability.  But in the end, I will have to give an account for every deed and every word that came from us.  At times I think I am clever when I dodge accountability.  But I will one day find out it was not dodged, merely delayed. Accountability is inevitable.  I would be wise to take advantage of it now while it still has an opportunity to influence positive change in my life.


Are We Going To Die?

December 15, 2010 in church, Daily Life, Missional Living with 1 Comment

Gravity moving the Glacier

August 3, 2010 in books, church, Daily Life, Kingdom, Missional Living with 0 Comments

From my journal dated May 29, 2009

I have 3 insights from today.  God perhaps has given them to me.

1) People need Jesus. We are Jesus.

2) The pursuit of the American dream leads away from Jesus.

3) My family is me.  We are one.  We are a body.

Our lives can usually be characterized by unperceivable change. Like the hour hand on the clock, you don’t see it move when you look at it but only when you look back at it.  Sometimes, though, the change is so rapid, you do notice it.  When I wrote those 3 things I was at the beginning of a perceivable change in my life.  It’s what ultimately got me writing on this blog and has set me on a path I hope my family and I never depart from.  In a phrase, I would say this shift awakened me to the Kingdom of God.  It was about me (and consequently, my family) realizing our primary identity as a citizens in a Kingdom where Jesus is in charge.  It was also the realization that I have no individual identity apart from my family.  My wife and I are one.  Our kids are one with us.  There is no more me, only we.  So at risk of non-comformity, I’ve made these things known to you – in the hopes that my journey for truth will inspire others to follow hard after Jesus.

If you’re not looking for it, you probably haven’t seen it.  Well, I’ve been looking for it and I’ve noticed there are others awakening to the reality of God’s Kingdom.  I’ve had friends sharing their thoughts and recent life stories that mirrors my own.  I’m seeing books emerge that cause us to test what we call our Christian faith against the Bible.  I’m seeing churches making changes in how they do things (including our own) in order to guard against conforming to the patterns of the world.  It’s kind of like what we say about natural disasters: Are there more of them or are we just more aware of them because we have more access to media?

At any rate, I’ve been into some of these books.  I made it through Irresistable Revolution, Crazy Love, among some other lesser known titles, and now my wife and I are part way through the book, Radical: Taking your faith back from the American Dream by David Platt.  Radical is essentially a book about my above #2.  I’m reading it and hearing echoes of my own thoughts and convictions. God’s Spirit is moving among the believers within our culture.  I really hope we are at the beginning of another great awakening.  (David Platt has quickly impressed me by his boldness and life of action.  Check out what he’s leading his faith community to with the Radical Experiement)  I will predictably say, the book is really good.  There is one phrase that has begun (began?) to haunt me:  ”…Not how much can I spare, but how much will it take.”  What if we measured our giving not by how much we’ll have left, but if the need was met?

When I thought about those 3 things above, I had in mind that I wrote them only a few months ago.  When I looked them up I couldn’t believe I wrote that more than a year ago.  You don’t know how far you’ve gone until you stop and look back and see how far back your starting point is.  At the same time, I feel my family has merely inched forward a few small bits.   But it’s phrases like the one in the previous paragraph that work like the gravity moving a glacier.

Thank you, readers, for being my audience.  Journaling this adventure for others has been a critical part of the journey!

FSBO

July 13, 2010 in church, Daily Life, God and us, Pastoring, Worship with 3 Comments

I was listening to a sermon the other day and either my own mind came up with this or it was God’s Spirit revealing truth – or at least a different point of view to look from.  Now, this is all kind of off the top of my head.  I haven’t searched scriptures to verify the theological accuracy of these ideas :) But let’s take a quick look at the concept of “surrender.”

The act of surrender is a daily practice for those who call Jesus “Lord”.  When we wake up in the morning, our natural inclination is to take life into our own hands and let God watch.  Thankfully, God knows us well and Jesus told us we would need to deny ourselves daily.  After listening to the aforementioned sermon, I’m starting to wonder about surrender, what it really means, and what motivates surrender in my life.

Often times, especially while partaking in the Lord’s Supper (communion, during worship services) I meditate on what Jesus did for me.  I think of Jesus giving everything he had for me (and us).   It would seem natural to think “Jesus gave it all for me, therefore, I owe it to Him to give my life to Him.”  Is this way of thinking right?  Am I thinking that I am indebted to Jesus and therefore I have to pay Him back for what He did for me?  Do I OWE him my life because he gave His life for me?  If that were true,  doesn’t that make Jesus’ sacrifice more of a barter than a gift?  Jesus gave to me without any requirement of repayment.  It’s not a trade-off.

So now what I’m thinking is, in stead of “surrender” being a matter of giving and receiving, perhaps it’s a matter of ownership.  God owns all he has created – including me.  Perhaps surrender is about us re-acknowledging that God owns us and WE don’t own ourselves.  Yes, in a sense, it’s the same as “giving your life to Jesus”.  But I don’t know if I’ve really ever owned myself.

We often lead an existence with only a vague sense of God’s presence.   It’s so easy for us to lose sight of God’s ownership of the world (and everything in it) because there are much louder and more consistent messages in our lives that drill the ideas of personal possession and ownership into our consciousness.

In those moments when I remember that Jesus bought my life with His death, I need to re-align my way of thinking and humbly surrender ownership rights.

What do you think, reader?  Perhaps it’s all semantics.  Don’t know.  Whichever way you look at it, though, for a disciple of Jesus, surrender is a big deal.  And it’s really difficult.  And COMPLETE surrender might just be a rare quality.  Complete surrender – is it even possible?  Sounds like a good blog post.  We’ll see!

Preposition Proposition

July 11, 2010 in church, God and us, Worship with 0 Comments

It’s Sunday morning again and many of us will be heading off to some sort of worship gathering.  Currently, God has me carrying responsibilities as our local congregation’s worship leader (among many other things).  As a worship leader I am often thinking on and wondering about the corporate worship environment and experience.

A while back I was reading a few different passages in the Bible and a phrase came to me.  ”Look for God”.  This phrase, or invitation, has become part of my Sunday morning vocabulary and I’ve used it many times to help us all understand one of the facets of worship.  I explore it a bit here.  Lately, however, I’ve been thinking of a new preposition.

I thought about it a lot and it seems like my worship times with God (I mean those times of singing and just standing before God in adoration and awe) are often more like a phone conversation or writing a letter.  How much do we realize God’s presence among us when we’re worshipping?  I mean a real conscience, relational sense – not just the cognitive sense.  How much do we just send off our thoughts and words into the air with the trust or hope that it reaches the invisible God somewhere somehow?  Or that we send it off like an email and know that some distant God will receive it.  Or we express our hearts to God not really expecting a reply.

Let me suggest a new phrase.  ”Look AT God”.  This morning we will try an experiemnt.  Before we begin our time of singing, I will ask the congregation to try this experiment.  To close their eyes and in the best way they can figure out, to look AT God.  Then once we’re all looking at Him, to tell Him we are there to meet with Him, and to tell Him it’d be awesome if He would reveal Himself to us.

I realize this will have different results for different people.  For anyone who doesn’t really know God, this will be meaningless. I suspect there may be people more religiously oriented who’ve never began to imagine God is really there.  There may be some who know God but become painfully aware of certain sin barriers that separate them from seeing God.  Either way, I hope this helps shape our understanding of our relationship with God – that it is a real relationship.

Have you ever tried to close your eyes and look at God before talking to Him?

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