Stop reading your Bible !!!

For the second time in as many weeks I have heard someone say that it is not Jesus that they have a problem with…..it's Christians.
Ouch!! Nothing hurts like a kick to the groin.
What are we doing wrong?
In his book Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne details a case where an old rundown church building that was no longer occupied by a church, had turned into a favorite place for some homeless people to escape the elements. The city was going to kick them all out and it was getting some media attention. It also got the attention of some local Christians, who one night dropped off a box of microwave popcorn. Like the homeless people have a microwave. We are so out of touch with the world it's sick.
We spend so much time trying to present ourselves as Holy. We pretend like our life is a bowl of cherries. We don't have a care in the world because we know Jesus. We dress up for Sunday service in suits and ties so that any lost person who comes in the door in search of the "Truth", instantly feels out of place, and we achieve our goal of not allowing any outsiders into our clique. We don't go into bars because we are afraid of what people might think of us if they were to drive by and see us going in. Notice that by doing so we will never have to get into a conversation with anyone else at the bar and have to give them the reason that we have hope! We pray loudly and use large churchy words to demonstrate to others around us that we are extremely close to God.
We go into Caribou coffee and buy our latte and sit in the comfy chair and pull out our mega sized Bible so that everyone within a 2 mile radius will know what we are reading, and we plant our nose in it so deeply that we can't notice the lady 2 tables away, crying.

So now we have a choice to make. We either continue to read our Bible,
or
We stop reading our Bible and start acting on what we have been reading……and care for His children. Perhaps then we give people one less reason to hate Christians.

Milk muck e pock pock

My sons were walking around the house the other day, shouting back and forth "Milk muck e pock pock", and then laughing hysterically. I was just silently watching them and taking it all in, wondering what I was missing. Eventually I asked them, "What are you guys saying"?
Gavin looked at me like I was a moron and said it again.
"Milk muck e pock pock".
"So what exactly does that mean", I asked.
"I don't know", he said
"Well where did you get [Milk muck e pock pock] from"?
"My Burger King toy"
"Let me see it"
Turns out it was a talking Dr. Spock toy. When you push the button on Spock's back, he says "Live long and prosper". It was a bad recording and the acoustics of a plastic Spock head are not the greatest as you can imagine, and with all of the noise of 3 kids in our home it is no wonder that he could not make out what Spock was actually saying. Do you ever wonder why you can't hear what God is trying to tell you. Elijah learned first hand (I Kings 19) that God whispers. How do we expect to hear Him when we are going 70 with the windows down and the radio volume knob turned all the way to the right? As a reminder, I now keep a little piece of paper in my car that reads: "Milk muck e pock pock". Get somewhere quiet today and seek God's voice. You might end up hearing something other than a jumbled message that you can't decipher.

Embracing Imperfection

I was thinking this morning about the great commission. It is so interesting to me that Jesus would entrust humans to spread the Gospel. Didn't He read the scriptures?? Doesn't He know that we humans have a pretty bad track record that includes screwing up just about everything we are entrusted with?
None of the Disciples were perfect. They were human. They screwed up all the time and in several cases were on the receiving end of Jesus' rebuke. Why didn't Jesus just create a band of 12 perfect people to "go" and share the gospel? It's an extremely important message don't you think? You don't put a mall cop in charge of guarding the Hope Diamond do you?
Sometimes I feel timid about sharing the gospel with people because of my imperfections. I am afraid that someone will ask a question that I don't know the answer to, or that I might say something that repels them instead of pulling them in. Why did Jesus choose to have a group of imperfect zealots, tax collectors, and fisherman as disciples? I believe it is so that we could say, "If they can do it, so can I". These men had struggles with pride, lying, and stealing. We are people who struggle with alcoholism, drug addiction, pornography. We have modern day problems and issues that we are trying to kick in pursuit of Jesus and here is the best part….. Just like Christ had faith in the disciples, He thinks we can do it too. Jesus didn't create 12 perfect people to share the Gospel with the world because the broken world would not be able to relate. Jesus uses the broken to spread the Good News because we can provide people with a story. We can say I had a problem with the bottle but look what Jesus has done with me. We can say to the world, my marriage was on the brink of destruction, but look what Jesus did for me….taste Him and see that He is good!!
God uses imperfect, broken, wrecked, sinful people…..who the heck wants to be perfect and unused?

Amazing Grace

I am halfway through this book called "The backward life" by Jarrod Jones, and the book has not been all that great but I came to this one section where he is talking about Isaiah's encounter with God and how these angels that were present were burning from God's holiness. These are angels, WITHOUT SIN, and they are on fire because the holiness of God is too much for them to handle. Why in the world He would want a personal relationship with me is unfathomable. I just know that if the sinless angels were on fire, My sinful life would cause me to spontaneously combust within a picosecond. I always hear skeptics say, "If there is a God, why would he let bad things happen to good people?" The problem with this statement is the term "good". If anyone is "good", I would have to say it would be sinless angels, and here they are, burning from God's holiness. The painful truth is that we deserve "bad things", and any moment where we are not expiriencing something "bad" it is God's amazing grace alone that allows it.

Swear words

So I am out mowing the lawn this last weekend minding my own business, when I passed by one of our pine trees a little too closely. As I came around the tree and started heading across the yard I felt a sharp stinging sensation in the back of my leg. I must admit that my very first thought was that the neighbor kid had just shot me with a blowgun (not sure why…he's a good kid and I don't think he even owns a blowgun), but very soon after the initial sting came an onslaught of others……it was then that I realized I had run into a hornets nest. I need to preface what I am about to tell you next by saying that I don't swear. I remember my wife scaring the living daylights out of me in the middle of the night one time as I was dead asleep, and the toughest language I could come up with as I sprung from the bed was "Jimmeny Christmas". I don't even know what that means. So as I am under siege from these hornets that are frothing at the mouth, I came to the understanding that being scared may not be enough for me to swear, but apparently the right mixture of fear and acute pin pricking stingers entering my body at a rate of speed that I cannot fully explain to you, is enough. I am not proud of this but the story must be told. As I was running for my life, swinging my arms and swatting at my legs in a blind fury (and my wife would add, screaming like a little schoolgirl), it happened. I could feel the words forming in slow motion and gathered steam on the way out. It started with just a minor swear word (like the ones that they can get away with on prime time television), but it wasn't enough. It's true….the big daddy of 'em all uncontrollably flew out as if I had been practicing it for months. I had dropped the F-bomb.
As I was cornering the house, I could see my neighbors out of my peripheral vision, standing on their deck with a look on their face like they just saw a yeti. Obviously they were in utter shock and horror at what they heard come out of my skull cave. That’s when Romans 12:3 came to mind where Paul says "...do not think of yourself more highly than you ought...". From here on out those neighbors will always think of me as the guy who dropped the F-bomb (and screamed like a little school girl), and I will always think of the event and remember that I shouldn't think too highly of myself, as I am only 1 hornets nest away from another humility check.

Throwing hats

So I was playing golf over the 4th of July weekend with a good friend of mine (who will remain nameless). He happens to be an extremely good golfer. I happen not to be. His score card was a constant stream of pars and birdies. My score card looked like the judge cards from Mary Lou Retton's vault event in the 1984 Olympics (all tens). Eventually my friend had a bad hole (by his standards, not mine). He ended up throwing his hat out of frustration.
I was thinking about the event on my way home and asked myself, "why didn't I throw my hat in frustration? I suck big time". That is when it occurred to me: I don't care enough about the game to get frustrated. I like to play but I am content just to be out there hacking away. I would like to get better but I can't devote the time to it and therefore I am just content with my suckiness. But for my friend, he WANTS to be better. He is a student of the game. He takes notes about how the ball reacted on a certain swing, notes about how the ball ended up on a particular drive so that next time around he is that much smarter. He loves the game and has a DESIRE to get better and it is frustrating when you work hard for something and fall short. The same holds true for our Christian walk. If we DESIRE to walk closer with Jesus, we are going to have moments of frustration. We will be angry with ourselves when we sin because we have a DESIRE to abstain from sin. Have you been frustrated lately? If not, perhaps you are just content with 10's on your scorecard. Being frustrated because of our sin shows that you share the same distain for sin that God does. Are you content with 10's on your scorecard or are you throwing your hat?