Pithy Terseness

During the meeting of my community group on Tuesday, the topic of God's specific will came up and I managed to get a word in edgewise which met with some resistance. I didn't back down and transmitted an aggressive little electronic message to the group about it the next day.

It sort of sums up a bit of what I learned from the Discovering God book by Henry Blackaby, but the references were pointed out to me by David Andrews who was the "leader" of the house at which I once lived in Pullman. These references were pointed out to him by someone else, but I pulled them out of the house meeting documents that I had built so that I could include them in the electronic message about which I am typing.

I have received so much good feedback about this electronic message that I have decided to include its text below:

Subject: Getting started on God's will

God's will for your life is God's will applied to your life.

1 Thess 4:1-12
Romans 12:2
Ephesians 5:17
1 Thess 5:16-18

I am Joshua

Innoculated to the Power of God

We are created by God.

really

We are created, by, God.

And he signed us, like a masterpiece. With his image.

Today I was thinking that the ravages of experiencial, man-centered worship in the modern church are saddest when looking at what worship should be with lament, community, joy, reverance, sacrifice, and creativity.

The question of our life is not whether we are happy, but whether our life pleases God. That is what will give us the joy over any circumstance. He is all powerful, but I seldom act like it. How can we engage God on His terms? How can we avoid being anesthetized to Him.

I was also thinking about the all of the different kinds of work my team does here. I was making the next two months calendar today and it is full of some really different and cool stuff. We’ll go to tel aviv, tiberius and nazareth, we’ll do soup kitchen work, and youth work with two conferences, we’ll talk to people on the beach and at the mall and on the street, we’ll tract and do drama, we’ll clean homes and fix gardens, we’ll give out thousands of books, and we will study and learn and eat together.

Sometimes my schedule feels like the blessing of a big burden that isn’t mostly fun, but in both foresight and retrospect, and in special moments along the way, the calender carries a certain priceless freight because I know that living this way seems to match eternal value the most. As a struggling slow disciple, im learning to choose a fear of a great big awfully wonderous God. There sure is a lot of power in our creator.

-David Wheeler (contributor to this blog - posted by jefro for him)

The weight of Emptiness

What we see in the modern day is that the more that we have, the more that we see our small containers of life filling up. Whether it be this or that, things or thoughts, we find that the crannys of our very persons are slowly disappearing. There is something to having. And to not.

I’m working around the premise that what is full cannot be empty. (Naturally, this is not rocket science, but is something we blindly ignore in order to keep on doing what we have found important). And if what is empty needs to be full, what then? This seems to be a central problem of my life – I will endlessly find things to fill my time – and when push comes a shoving, the spaces left are so small that they show their worth.

I’ll break it down just a little further. Let’s say that we have a glass full of water. I mean literally to the brim. In order for more to fit we either need a bigger glass or something has to come out. Let’s say we want to add air. This can be done via CO2 by injection, which will cause some sort of displacement. Or just by taking out water. But something must be done.

We want to be more Christ-like, but our lives are so full that something must be taken out in order to add something. It has to give. Naturally, as believers, we have Christ already – but often we feel like we need an injection of something. But it falls apart in that we know we have everything necessary for life and righteousness. So we are left with the working out. We need to not only expand our understanding of Christ – but also start to exclude the things that fill up this glass in place of the space that Christ should take up.. But if we refuse to empty, then we can hardly be filled. Sometimes things are taken out by natural evaporation, others by the complete tipping over of the glass. But Christ must have this space one way or another – otherwise we have shown that what we really desire – the water of the world. For our space defines us in spite of our grandest dreams.