I Can't Stop, Blog Blog Blog

Going into this week’s Access Out block party outreach, I knew what I should have been doing to prepare.  Outreach is always hard for me, but I knew that by depending on God and immersing myself in the goodness of His gospel, God could change my heart from being full of fear to full of hope, and maybe even make it fun to meet new people.  On Sunday, I planned to preach the gospel to myself each day of the week, and throw myself on God’s mercy, and ask Him to be my strength on Friday.

I knew what I should have been doing this week, but I did none of it.  Many many moments I looked at Game of Thrones and the bible both sitting on my desk, and I chose Game of Thrones every single time.  I watched video game shows broadcasted live instead of praying because they were live but God… just didn’t seem so pressing.  Even when I got sick and had a fever, a physical message saying Hey, you aren’t in charge of anything, Josh, not even your own body, I turned to entertainment because I had to “take it easy on my day off”.So I came into Access Out thinking I was going to get smited, or at least going to get disciplined in the form of being painfully reminded of how bad I am at making small talk and being friendly.

Long story short, in my mind there were a million ways it could have sucked (I was even insecure about my music choosing abilities, for crying out loud).  But it didn’t, and God was very very merciful to me.

I have always thought that it would take a miracle for me to really really care about a stranger I had just met.  But tonight, God made it happen.  He was talking about how he valued community, and respected Jesus greatly for what He did.. but he fell away, and now is lost.  And I think I almost teared up as I heard him share, because I just thought, how good it is to live with God, and how dark it must be to live without Him!  And there it was again, the same feeling I’ve only had one other time in my life, the feeling of this person NEEDS the gospel!

It would seem irrational for God to keep offering Himself to us again and again even when we continuously push Him away.  But then again, what father doesn’t keep trying to feed his child, even when the child closes its mouth or spits the food back out?  I was God’s idiot, bratty, sickly child this week, but He remains faithful.  He will see His children fed and justified and glorified, even those children who don’t know it yet.  Praise God.

whatshouldwecallchurch:

Tonight Pastor Pete was talking about how he wanted our church to be a generous and sacrificial church that was willing to give freely of ourselves to show God’s love to others.  And usually when I hear stuff like this, I think I subconsciously automatically say, “I can’t be like that- I’ll never be as open or loving or caring as this person and that person because that’s just not who I am.”  And sure, maybe I can improve from like 10% to 15% loving over the course of my up to 60ish years that I have left to live, but I’ll never be someone who can love someone as myself (50-50?), let alone 100%!

But as I realized that I was thinking this, I felt God saying, Just ask.  Just ask!

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.  James 1:5

And suddenly I just felt so happy, as I asked God to help me to love and care about people.  I think I just stood there smiling instead of singing as I imagined the hundreds and hundreds of people in our church loving one another and caring for one another and giving for one another.  And God’s gonna make it happen!  He is!  If our fathers, who were evil, knew how to give good gifts, how much more will our perfectly good Father give us good and perfect gifts!

I know that God doesn’t just give us every single thing that we ask for, and that only what’s promised in His word is guaranteed.  But when it comes down to it, really?  Everything that we really need is already in there, in a box with a bow on it, promised to us.  Praise God.

It’s interesting to reexamine the beliefs we once (perhaps even alarmingly recently) held.  I think there was a long time that I thought of the gospel as God “cheating”- we couldn’t be saved by our works, so God “cheats” by sending his son as a man who is also God so he won’t sin, and then when Jesus dies and Satan thinks he’s won then God “cheats” again and raises Jesus from the dead.  And so now, by a technicality, everyone who believes in God gets into heaven.  Whew.

Of course this view is so so wrong in many ways, and one of the ways is that it made me imagine God’s attitude as He brings us into salvation as something like this: yeah ok go ahead.  I’ve made this loophole so now I can forgive you and you get to live, awesome.

But 1 John says something different:

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Faithful, I’ve heard.  He says he’s gonna forgive us, and he does.  But just?  Isn’t the point of the gospel telling us that we escape from justice because we don’t get what we deserve?  But John says that God forgives us because He is just.

The implications are big- the first being that God’s justice is now on our side.  Having been washed with Jesus’ blood and having received His righteousness, it is now just and right for God to forgive us.  No cheating- that’s just how clean we are when we are clothed with Christ.  And it can’t be changed, even as God’s justice and faithfulness cannot be changed.  And secondly, Christ’s sacrifice was huge.  The only reason why we are so clean is because every speck of sin on us was paid for in Christ, and He suffered all of it.  No cheating there either.

Praise God that we didn’t get in by a technicality.

It’s ironic and embarrassing and so God that after coming off of a semester (or a whole school year, really) of discovering and falling in love with theology and the clarity and solidity that comes with embracing thinking as a vital part of Christianity, and resolving to, as best I can, henceforth have all my emotional responses be informed by doctrines to which I first give mental assent, that in the first week of summer I would get my emotions all invested and tangled up in something as trivial as a video game, and be out of commission and nonfunctioning for a couple of days.  I am indeed a wise fool.  Or maybe just a fool.

Anyways, here we go Spring 2013! - From one degree of glory to the next.

I’m ashamed to admit it but playing Bioshock Infinite has had a bigger impact on me than I thought it would. As of this moment I’m still feeling sad because I miss someone that doesn’t exist. Somebody help! Maybe I should stop playing video games haha.

There was a while when I really enjoyed dark/depressing stuff.  I loved reading books like Lord of the Flies and The Great Gatsby, and I prefered shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad and The Wire where characters were complex and lived in melancholy worlds to the saccharine stories in Disney movies.  I thought Tangled would have been a better movie if Eugene had died at the end.  LOL.

I think the reason why was because it just tasted more real to me.  I looked at the sadness and the ambiguity and the dilemmas and the crappy situations and I (only partially correctly) thought, mmph.  That’s real life.  Life is hard.  It sucks.  So when I started reading the Walking Dead comics, the darkness and the danger and the bleakness of it drew me in.  It was almost like the worse the situation got for Rick Grimes and his band of survivors, the more “real” it seemed to me.  Like how dearly loved characters died suddenly and unexpectedly.  Wow.  That’s real life.  Or survivors that betray the group and lead to the deaths of people that trusted them.  Dang.  Or other groups of survivors that had deteriorated to the point of placing little value in human life. Whoa- people are messed up.

I liked the comics so I started playing the games that they put out.  It’s a similar flavor, but I’m halfway through episode 2, and…. I just can’t.  I can’t play it.  Not that it’s bad- it won a lot of awards and has great writing and I’m sure it has a story that’s just as good as the comics or the tv show.  But I just… can’t.  It’s just way too far from reality.  The writers of the Walking Dead do their best to put the characters in progressively more and more hopeless situations.  They always get out (at least so far) but always at the cost of some people dying, or injuries, or being forced to commit acts that deaden their humanity.  But there’s no point to the story.  Because there is no God in the Walking Dead.  The whole point of the entire universe is God, and when you take God out of the picture, what you’re left with is a meaningless mess that, try as we might to draw out principles or takeaways or truth from, makes no sense.

And I can’t live in that world, even if it’s just pretend.  I need Him.  I need His Son, and His Spirit, and His love, and His promises, and His sovereignty, and His goodness, and His working all things for my good.  I need to know that even if a worldwide catastrophe like a zombie apocalypse happens, He’s there for me.  Because He is.  That’s reality.

Matthew 24:13:

But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

2 Timothy 2:12:

If we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us.

Revelation 2:7:

To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

Revelation 2:10:

Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.

Revelation 2:17:

 To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.

Revelation 2:26:

The one who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations…

Revelation 3:5:

The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.

Revelation 3:12:

The one who conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God. Never shall he go out of it, and I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name.

Revelation 3:21:

The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.