O Valiant Warrior

Okay so you know the story in Judges chapters 6-8 about Gideon? Well lately we have been going through these passages in Quiet Time. It is so easy to approach a passage that you know (or think you know) so well with a careless attitude. As if you cannot possibly learn anything new from it, because you have heard about it since you were born basically. Well I didn't want that to be me. So as I approached these passages of Scripture, I asked God to teach me from them, not just by the reading of them, but through my own personal life. God showed up in a big way! Why am I surprised? He always does!

Snow camp began this past weekend and I was assigned to clean the floors. That's all my job was; me and about 9 other guys - cleaning floors the entire weekend. Obviously I did not have the right attitude about it. I realized this and prayed that God would help me because I knew my heart was not in the right place concerning this. I really love to interact with campers and minister to them one-on-one. Cleaning floors needless to say does not present many opportunities to do this; especially since they are only here for like 2 days.

So as I went through Quiet Time I saw God call Gideon a "valiant warrior" (Judges 6:11). If you never noticed before; Gideon was a coward. He was so afraid of the Midianites that he was trying to thresh the wheat in the wine press, which by the way would be extremely close to impossible to do. He asked for two signs from God and made many excuses, but God persisted. I thought about that. As insignificant as Gideon thought he was, God knew that with Him, Gideon could go from coward to victor. Then, God takes Gideon and 300 men to defeat 120,000 Midianites. Wow! And we so often say "yeah, yeah, heard it before. Give me something new." Really?! Imagine your country at war and your president says "God only wants 300 men to go overseas to fight. We are sending our 300 to take on their 120,000. God will give us the victory!" Im pretty sure he would not last too long as president. He might just end up in a straight jacket.

So I thought about my life. Cleaning floors is a very small and insignificant task. Or so I thought! God WILL use that to do great things for His glory! I am confident of that. Best of all; whether or not I ever see the results of my labour, I GET to work for God! Amazing! I am not worthy. I asked God for forgiveness and cleaning floors took on a whole new light for me. Now I can't wait for next weekend to get dirty serving my King!

Joy to the World

Okay so even though the title of this blog is a Christmas song, this blog is not about Christmas. It is however, about joy; true joy. This has been something that God heavily convicted me of just today. I was spending time with my family and i realised that I was really not joyful at all. Then I realised the sad truth. That is the way I am around them often. It's not that I don't love them and want to be around them. It's just that I don't ever relax with them and just have fun being with them and spending time with them. I realised that they could see it. I realised that they wonder why I am this happy go lucky person only when they are not around. Why I hardly ever smile when I'm with them. I really don't have a simple answer for it. I do know this much; I need the joy of the Lord.
Habakkuk 3:17-19 says this: "Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, 18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. 19 God, the Lord is my strength; He makes my feet like the deer's; He makes me tread on my high places..."
I read that passage and it is a slap in the face. I never have a reason not to have joy and rejoice in the Lord. No matter what I am going through, no matter how I am feeling at the time; God is good. I realised that people need to see this joy overflowing in my life. All the time too, not just sometimes. So this is just a simple, small, but challenging truth that I ask you to keep me accountable to.

Firmly planted

So lately I have noticed that too many Christians have begun to drift away from the study of God's Word. For some reason that I cannot understand, we no longer esteem knowing doctrine as important. This idea of just "living right" has infiltrated the churches and Christians as individuals. A class that I took on postmodernism opened my eyes to this and I can see that it is a real problem. Before you get me wrong, I do believe we must live lives that are pleaseing to God, and I do agree with the statement "people don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care". My problem is, how do you live right if you don't know what that looks like? How do you please God if you don't know what pleases Him. The only way to find those things out is through the study of His Word. "Oh I will just let my pastor tell me what God's Word says about how to live and I will apply it to my life." Really?! We have completely and totally allowed Satan to decieve us when we think like that. Yes the world will not want to listen to our message if we do not live out what we preach, but think about this for a second; you have lived a life pleaseing to God and someone notices, so they come to you with all these questions and you can't answer the because you have been to busy living and your Bible has collected more dust on your shelf than your encyclopedia. Do you think people are going to want to listen to you if you don't know what you are talking about? You have to know what you believe and also live it out, you cannot have one without the other. Doctrine is important and every single word in the Word of God is worth looking into. What we like to do is find the passages that make us feel good. Seriously, what about the rest of the Bible? Don't you think that God gave us the whole Bible because He wants us to study and know the whole Bible? One quote that really bothered me the other day was from Donald Miller: "I won't defend Christianity because it means different things to different people". That was a summary of what he said in his book Blue like Jazz. It sounds good on the outside and I agreed with him at first. But think about it, if we never defend Christianity, then Satan has won. Yes we need to focus on defending Jesus, but whether we accept it or not we are Christians, and we have to defend what that truly means. Miller said he was a Christian and yet would not defend what the term meant? Really? Then he went on to say that he would rather talk about Jesus and how He "likes" us? That blew me away! Jesus does not like us. He loves us! With an incomparable love. I like ice-cream. Do you really want to compare that with how Jesus loves us? I don't. Here is something else that Donald Miller once said - "The problem with the Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against." I read that and think, DUH! We must have ethics and rules governed by God's Word. No, we shouldn't judge each other by them but we must have a moral standard governed by God's Word. Miller also said this "Trevor is one of my favorite people. He is my Ninendo buddy. We yell profanities at each other while playing NFL Blitz." Shocking right? Well this is what happens when you throw truth out of the window. We have to place knowing God and His Word above everything, because out of that, comes a lifestyle. Let us base our lives on biblical principals. Do not base your biblical principals off of your life, culture, feelings, etc. I am not in any way trying to lessen the importance of how you live. We must live according to His Word if we are to please Him and reach the world. But knowing how to do that comes first with studying God's Word and tryng to find what pleases Him.

Exciting Disapointments

Well, God has tested me greatly so far this year at Word of Life. I began the year early on at R.A. training. I wanted the position of a student leader on campus. So I was accepted to the training and I came. I felt confident after my interviews and handbook exam that I was going to get the job. I didn't get it. However, I didn't let that get me down because I know I can still be a leader and God has even better things planned for me. So I moved on from that experience and tried to focus on the ministry that God had planned for me. Last year I was on the drama team and it was aweome, so I wanted a new ministry this year. As many of you know, I really have a passion and heart for praise and worship. So, I decided to try-out for praise team as my ministry. I also tried out for drama just incase I didn't get praise team. I made drama call-backs that did not go so well. I honestly was kind of relieved at that because I thought well maybe God doesn't want me on drama after all and He is gonna allow me to make the praise team. Well I made drama team before I even got a chance to try out for praise team. God took that away as well. Again, not a big deal for me because I love drama and hope to carry it into future ministries God gives me. So then I interviewed for the student lounge job here on campus as my service assignment. I really wanted this job because of it's atmosphere and experience I would gain in the area of customer service. God didn't give me that despite what I thought was a good interview. Instead, I recieved the job of sweeping ad mopping the dinning room and classroom floors. Once again, I tried to have an attitude of contentment because that is an easy job that isn't time consuming. As I swallowed my pride and moved on from those experiences, I applied to go on a Local Church Ministries Trip for the required missions trip this year. This is the kind of ministry I feel God calling me into, so I felt it was a great opportunity for me. I communicated my passion for reaching youth and my love for youth ministry to those in charge of assigning people to this particular trip. Today, I found out that I didn't get that either and am instead going to Hungary for my missions trip this year. I cannot lie, all of this piling up on me was disapointing and yeah it hurt a little bit. But I found out that the only thing it really hurt was my pride. Of which I am thankful because it is just what I needed. Here is my thinking: I had my plans for what I wanted to do this year. They were prayerfully considered (although not as much as I probably should have) and I thought they all were what God wanted for me. Needless to say when I looked at how I thought this year would fall into place, I was very excited. Now, as I look at the way GOD has articulated this year in ways that I didn't plan, I am overjoyed. I am overjoyed because I now know that God's will for me this year is being accomplished and no longer do I have to be unsure. And here is another thought, if what I wanted to happen this year seems exciting, think about how much more exciting God's plan will turn out to be. So that is why I called this blog exciting disapointments, because although in reality it is in fact a little disapointing, it is exciting because it is God's will and what could be better! So I covet your prayers as this year goes on and God continues to teach me. I truly believe that a part of all this whole situation is a lesson God is teaching me. That lesson is humility. Wanna know something better? That's only the beginning. God is going to shape and mould me this year into what He wants. I am willing to make sacrifices, and live open-handed to His will. My goal is God's will. I am going to start it this year by being open-handed. That is every single little tiny aspect of my life, being placed in God's hands. From relationships, to study, to time, to ministry, to family, to goals, to my future, to my very life. Yeah it is scary because His hands are consuming hands. Hands that will knock off the rough edges and that causes pain, but in the end, if I allow Him, He will shape me into a beautiful masterpiece for His glory, and not because of me, but because of Him! Now that's EXCITING!!!

What is wrong with Christianity?

So I know I havent been sharing in my blog the past few days, I know I have been kind of inconsistent from the start of it. It's not that I haven't been doing my quiet time, I just have forgotten to wrtie my blog because classes have started again and I have alot of other things on my mind. But quiet time has still been awesome recently. So anyways sorry but this blog is not about quiet time either. It is just something that God sparked in my heart through a seminar on biblical principals we started today. Here are just a few things out of the many that struck me. We (yes including myself) have become very legalistic in our thinking and actions. I want you to think about why you do things and please be honest with yourself. Why do you read your bible and pray (if you even do it)? Well I know in my life many times it is done out of duty. I really wish I could say that I have a fervent desire to daily dive into God's Word. That I can't wait to read it and learn and apply from it. But sadly that is not always the case. Yes, I do have those days but I also have many days where I do it out of duty. Now, I should still do it because even when I am doing it out of duty, God still speaks and convicts, but not in the same way because , our hearts are not open. You know what I find to be the case; when we get busy, the first thing to suffer is our time with God. That is the painful reality. Here is another thought for you. Why has Christianity been made into an event rather than a lifestyle? Evangelism, discipleship, worship, all these things should not be what we do, but who we are! We invent all these programs that we set up to evangelize and we never do it any other time. Worship, well that has become something that only happens when the praise band plays. We should have individual lives of worship to God that are so passionate, so real, so fervent that when we come together as a coorporate body of believers, the roof raises and God is honoured. My friends, God is not honoured with Sunday morning worshipers, that is those who only worship Him then. We have got to get serious. We are so legalistic that we continually do ministry, do quiet time, do worship so we can try to earn points with God and get Him to like the way we live our lives, when all He says is "just pick up your Bible and I will show you what I like". Convicting thought that I will leave with you as I close. Let's live our lives based on biblical principals and lets let our Christianity be a lifestyle; a lifesong pleasing to God. Let us live out the lives that Christ has given us in Him!

Psalm 93

Here, we have a little praise prayer type psalm. It is only 5 verses that just praise God for His greatness and how He reigns and creation shouts Hid praise. How often do we just offer up little praise prayers to God throughout our day? We too often think it is enough to just simply do our quiet time and offer our praise to God then. The Bible teaches a continuous spirit of prayer should define our lives. So I just want to thank God right now just for who He is. He is everything we need and so much more, awesome in glory, majestic in all His ways. God is bigger than any problem I have and He is too amazing for words. I wish I could say that I love Him as much as i should, but truthfully, none of us do at all times. God I thank you for your amazing grace that saved a wretch like me. Grace that sustains me and continually amazes me. Thank you for your mercies that are renewed every morning. God you are awesome in all your ways, bring me to my knees in adoration of you and may every moment of my life, every action, every thought of mine be an offering of praise to you. May I live out my purpose of glorifying you in EVERYTHING. Amen.

Psalm 92

So here is sort of a paraphrase in my words of this Psalm: It is good to praise God in every sense of the word at all times. Because His works are great, and no man can understand His works. Even though it seems that the wicked men prosper, it is only for a season and you WILL have your justice. But you have blessed me in ways I cannot imagine. You have set my feet upon a rock that cannot be moved. May my life continue to bear fruit and praise Your name forever.
So thought about this Psalm and I thought about the fact that we do not get excited about the work of God. This Psalmist had no toruble in that, this whole psalm is full of excitement over God's works. So here is the deal. I am not going to fill you with words in today's blog. I want you to read the psalm again for yourself and think about you. Are you going through the motions. Has God's work become just another event? Or do you truly get excited to the point of rejoicing over what God is doing? Here is another tough question: do you only focus on the negative and how the wicked seem to be getting away with their sins, or are you excited about the growth that is occuring and the people that are comming to God? Think about it and read the Psalm again.