Learning To Live For Something Better

In a world that teaches pride in the guise of self-esteem, it's a difficult teaching to say that we aren't the most special person alive. But none of us are. Even more importantly, nobody is special enough or good enough to be right with God through their own strength, looks, money, or intelligence.

But what you are is loved. With all your faults. With all your problems. In the midst of your brokenness, you are loved.

In Japan, they have a practice called kintsugi:

"It's the art of fixing broken pottery with lacquer resin dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy it speaks to breakage and repair becoming part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise."

"It is the embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Japanese culture values marks of wear by the use of an object over time. This can be seen both as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has broken, and as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage."

Your brokenness makes you uniquely you. Despite the flaws being things that we may wish that never happened, they are what makes us who we are. God is a lot like the Japanese mindset that values an object that is broken and fixed. He loves us despite us being broken. And He fixes us. 

Here's the thing with God's unconditional love. Being loved by God doesn't just apply to me. I'm not super special being the only one that is loved by God. Everyone is loved by God.

This is the heart of the gospel message. God loves you despite you being broken. He knew you would be broken and He still paid the price for you to be right with God. Yet He did the same for your neighbor. And He wants you to love your neighbor despite them being broken just like He loves you despite your brokenness. He knew we would all be unfaithful, yet He still came down to earth to show us how to live. This wasn't because of our greatness; this was because of His great love. This is the message we need to share with the world through both our words and action, all in love.

I find myself playing out of tune with God at times. I get distracted. Lose focus. Start worrying about things of this world rather than things of God, yet I am called, as are all of us, to be primarily spreaders of the love of God to others. That is our primary occupation whether we receive a paycheck through any other full-time occupation. No matter what our paying occupation may be, our primary occupation, if we claim to be Christians, is to spread God's love and bring about His will here on earth as it is in heaven.

The problem with the church today and the world around us is that many just claim to follow Jesus, yet they don't make following Jesus their life. This is ridiculous because we can't fool God. He knows whether we have given him our lives or not. He sees our heart.

After David had his affair with Bathsheba, he wrote a song. This is the David who God loved because David was a man chasing after God's heart. Yet David wasn't perfect. He made some serious mistakes. And having an affair with Bathsheba and having her husband killed was one of the worst. Yet this is what he said to God after facing the seriousness of his mistake.

You would not be pleased with sacrifices, or I would bring them.
If I brought you a burnt offering, you would not accept it.
The sacrifice you want is a broken spirit.
A broken and repentant heart, O God, you will not despise.

Psalm 51:16-17 (NLT)

David knew what God wanted. God wanted his heart. All of him. His passion. His focus. His goals.

He wants the same from us. Yet we get distracted.

I get focused on this or that. I stop trying to love others, and I become self-absorbed. Maybe you find yourself doing that at times too. When we fail, we need to be like David. He turned right around and gave God his heart.

We start to forget that we are all broken vessels who have been put back together by God for use by Him. We begin, once again, to think that it is all about us. We deserve what we have. We deserve to be selfish with our blessings.

But it's never about us.

We can't forget that.

It's never about us.

Everything gets messed up when we start to think things are about us.

Our society teaches us to look out for ourselves first -- that our needs and wants are the most important things to be met. And we all know that in following Jesus and getting right with God, our lives will have to be surrendered from loving ourselves to loving God and loving others. Our life will no longer be about us. It will be about Jesus.

The most baffling thing is that at the end of the day, loving God and loving others is actually the most loving thing we can do for ourselves. In giving ourselves up, we will find true purpose. In emptying ourselves for others and allowing God to refill us, we will find true contentment. In denying ourselves and living for God's higher vision, we will find true meaning. If you don't believe me, try it this week. Take twenty dollars and spend it on someone that you would never spend it on. They may think you're weird, but they will appreciate the gift. And you will also appreciate the giving. And in that, you may just find God.

A Christmas Story - You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

A Christmas Story was released in 1983 to moderate success. From those humble beginnings, it has become a perennial Christmas movie, a movie so popular that even CC Banks Productions is presenting the play adaptation this Christmas season in Antwerp.

One of the most famous lines in the show is Ralphie being told by his teacher, by his mother, and even by Santa, that he will shoot his eye out if he gets the official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot range model air rifle.

And as we see, the warnings were right. Ralphie heads out to play with his newly received Red Ryder BB gun and on his first shot has the BB rebound off of a tin sign and break his glasses.

I don’t know if you were ever warned not to do something, but desired it so much or were just rebellious enough that you did it anyway. I remember when I was four my parents would let me play outside in the yard. We lived in the country on a farm with many barns. The rule was that I was not to go into the hayloft. One day, while climbing into the hayloft, my hands slipped off of the handle and I fell, whacking my head onto a horse feeder. A concussion and stitches later I realized the err of my young ways.

As adults, we often become too prideful to take the advice of others and avoid things that are harmful for us. We might hear grown-up versions of “You’ll shoot your eye out” or “You can’t go in the hayloft,” but we are talented at ignoring the warnings. For starters, we rephrase them. Things like sexual immorality become casual sex or porn. Pride, the word I used at the beginning of this paragraph, becomes self-esteem and a feeling that we are expected to feel about our homeland if we want to be patriotic. Usury becomes the normal means of the haves helping the have-nots. We imagine appropriate scenarios where murder, which was forbidden, is allowed. And with greed, we don’t even try to morph it. Society has adopted the Gordon Gekko’s moniker from the movie Wall Street that “Greed is good.” We have a difficult time staying away from the sins that God has told us to stay away from. In the many years since the time of Jesus, even before the time of Jesus, humanity has mastered justifying our sinful lifestyles as necessary means to our selfish - although we wouldn’t dare use that word - ends. We have become experts at disguising and justifying our sinful lifestyles, and we, our families, and our society pays the consequence for that mistake. There. I just did it. I used the word mistake rather than sin.

“Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’” (Mark 1:14-15 ESV).

Repent. That just means to turn away from the life you are currently living. You can’t stay on the same course if you are going to repent. The word in the Greek here is metanoeo. It’s the combination of two words. The preposition “meta,” which means “after” or “with,” and the verb “noeo,” which means to “perceive” or “think.” The idea is that our actions will change once we shift our thinking.

On a simple level, it would be learning new information and changing your actions because of it. Many of us travel to Fort Wayne. We have our routes that we take. An unrepentant person would be one who learns of a different way that would save them ten minutes but continues to do it the way they have always done it. A repentant person would be one who changes their course based upon the new information. That might be a light-hearted explanation of repentance, but I hope you get the idea.

During the Christmas season, we are faced with new information. God came to the earth in the form of a little baby. He came for a few major reasons. One was to be the sacrifice for our sins. Another was to transform God’s kingdom. The other was to show us how to live our lives. It is in this latter that he wants to tell us, “You’ll shoot your eye out if you continue to live the life that you are currently living.” God knows what is best for us. He came down to earth to live with all of our vulnerabilities to show us what is best for us. When we believe that He knows and has shown what is best for us, that is the information that should cause us to change. That is the gospel that should bring about repentance. What needs to change in your life as a result of the truth that God knows what is best for us?

If you are looking for a church home this holiday season, I invite you to come join us at Riverside Christian Church. Throughout this month, we will be exploring the themes of A Christmas Story. Sunday, December 14, will be “Oh, I hate the smell of Tapioca.”

Would You Like to Hear More? - A Relational Approach to Evangelism

When it comes to evangelism, Christians struggle with two major issues, both stemming from pride.  We have  a tendency to think we are always right, especially in spiritual matters, and we are not willing to humbly discuss what we believe.   Instead, we jam our beliefs down people's throats.  We're too in the face of others about our faith all of the time.  I understand that we deeply care about people getting right with the Lord, but the way we behave in going about convincing people that the Lord loves them and has a plan for their lives is completely the wrong approach.  Our actions often do more harm for God's cause than good.

Last week, I was at the park with a friend and our kids.  A woman was there, and we struck up a conversation.  I don't introduce myself as a pastor.  As a matter of fact, I try to keep that a secret.  When people find out that I am a pastor, they usually begin to act differently around me.  My friend shared that I was a pastor.  She replied, "You aren't going to be preachy now, are you?"  I jokingly retorted, "I save that for Sunday."

It saddens me that the reputation of Jesus' people, especially pastors in His Church, is that we are preachy.  We have done something wrong in living out the message of love, non-judgment, and grace that Jesus taught when someone's response when they heard that I am a pastor is that they want to make sure I am not going to preach at them.

It is a struggle to balance our witness for Jesus while respecting people's personal space, their convictions, and their lives.

I recently heard the story of a man who was an aspiring musician in the early 90s Seattle grunge scene.  You know the scene that gave us Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and others.  Well, this guy would always go to parties, drinking, doing drugs, and the like.  But there was always this other guy there, and he would just be drinking a Coke.  Eventually, the aspiring musician decided to ask the guy why he came to all of the parties if all he did was drink Coke.

He walked over to the guy and asked, "Darrell, why are you here?  You don't drink like the rest of us.  You don't sleep around.  You are not partying like the rest of us.  What are you doing here?"

Then he replied, "Do you really want to know?" 

"I wouldn't have asked if I didn't want to know," was the response of the aspiring musician.

"Well, you see, I am a Christ follower.  I follow Jesus.  And I believe that if Jesus was around today, he would want to be here, with you guys, hanging out.  Would you like to hear more?"

The aspiring artist said that he would like to hear more about this Jesus who Darrell was talking about.  From that time on, the aspiring artist wrestled with following Jesus, and eventually surrendered his life to Him.  A little non-intrusive evangelism can go a long way.

Peter wrote:

"In your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:5).

Would you like to hear more?