Wading through life

Here’s Mike Bickle’s way of explaining God’s “Principle of Judgement”:

God uses the least severe means to reach the greatest number of people at the deepest level of love without violating anyone’s free will.

The context of the quote is great tribulation sermon notes (all sorts of notes on IHOP’s Web site), but I think it could be said that in any act of judgment of by God, this framework is in place.

We often wonder why He allows terrible things to happen on earth… Why are millions starving to death in Africa? Why are millions killed before they even see their parents’ faces in America? Why have there been only a handful of years in the history of mankind where there wasn’t war somewhere on the earth?

Well… besides the fact that we live in a world cursed by sin, and the wages of those sins are death, judgments ultimately drive people back to God. We don’t understand how it works because we aren’t God. But somehow, in His infinite wisdom and goodness, God facilitates the most merciful judgments that will bring the maximum number of people into the closest love encounter with Him. All while respecting the law of free will.

Tonight I plan to watch The Godfather II and eat grilled cheese and tomato soup. That’s probably not the update you’ve all been waiting for… but that will have to do for now. Look for exciting news early next week!

Oh… and I guess I could let you know I preached at church last night, along with Clark and Sherry. We each did 1/2 hour sermonettes and I felt everyone, including myself , did a great job. Thanks for the positive feedback, peeps.

Though, in listening to the recording of my message and self-critiquing, I realized I twice misspoke toward then end by calling Revelation’s church in Philadelphia the church in Ephesus. If anyone noticed that blunder, I give you permission to next time pipe-up mid-sermon and point it out to me.

I’ll post the notes and audio as soon as I get around to it

Thank you, thank you, Pete Grieg. You are quickly becoming one of my heroes.

Pete and his wife helped spearhead the planting of a church in a UK nightclub. When it came time to name the congregation, they felt some pressure. It “needed to sound cool and non-religious enough to attract non-churchgoers, but, after devoting way too much time to discussing the branding of the event, someone spoke up in exasperation: Who cares what the stupid name is? Let’s just call it what it is.”

And so they did. They called it “Church.” And lo and behold, non-churchgoers loved it.

Reflecting in The Vision and The Vow, he had this to say:

Sometimes it is when we stop trying to be relevant that we actually become relevant to a watching world. Our “irrelevance” may well be the very message the world is looking for at this time. Sometimes we will be called to defy the culture—never to deify it—by living biblically and modeling a different way of being a student, a musician, a teacher, or whatever world we have been sent to inhabit.

In his book Prophetic Untimeliness, Os Guinness rues the fact that, “never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously” than we currently do, and yet “never have Christians been more irrelevant.” He attributes this sad state of affairs to ta number of factors, not least that “a great part of the evangelical community has transferred authority from Sola Scriptura to Sola Cultura.” In other words, we are being shaped more by the culture around us than we are by the Bible.

We must beware all the talk among trendy Christians of cultural relevance. During its first three hundred years, the Church grew exponentially, and yet it was radically committed to a biblical lifestyle that often clashed with the prevailing culture: “every Christian by definition was a candidate for death. To understate: if one wanted a soft life, or to get ahead in respectable circles, one did not become a Christian” [Alan Kreider, Worship and Evangelism in Pre-Christendom].

Sprint has added a credit to your account for $xxx.xx. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Shame on you, Sprint, for trying to say I was in a contract when I switched to Verizon when I’d been month-to-month for about 2 years.

Thank you, forgotten-name customer service woman, for dealing with my irritation and resolving the situation with the above account correction.

This, from Pete Greig’s The Vow portion of The Vow & The Vision:

The disciples of Jesus were often challenged to make sacrifices for Him, but the price they were asked to pay was consistently dwarfed by their desire to follow. To put it crudely, the sacrifices they made for Christ always seemed “worth it.”

The way of discipleship—of covenant commitment and sacrificial worship—modeled by those first followers and explored in this book, is costly and hard. Anyone who says that it is easy to follow Jesus is a liar. He Himself said that the way is narrow. But nothing we forgo in the cause of Christ—wealth, popularity, kudos, not even our very lives—can come anywhere close to the return. The price we pay to follow Jesus—whatever it might be—will acquire for us the most astounding “bargain” of our lives!

“I tell you the truth,” Jesus said to them, “no one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life.”

When the Holy Spirit fills our lives, we begin to want what God wants and to see what God sees. In His grace, God interrupts our mundane little lives and calls us to follow. As we obey, our hearts are changed. The old covenant of our selfish motivation and “far-off” vision is replaced with a new covenant written on our hearts, and we now share God’s priorities, longing for the fulfillment of His will whatever it may cost. The sacrifices of obedience are outweighed by the joy of being chosen to walk, one step at a time, in relationship with God.