Fractured Saints - never beyond mending - a christian blog for the broken ones

Hebrews 3:12 – 14

(12) See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. (13) But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. (14)We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.

This past Sunday, we had a sermon on the verse above and were challenged to take up the task of “encouraging” one another daily.  While this is very much what I think that we need, I am often at a loss in what encouragement even means.  In relationships that are established and healthy, encouragement seems to fit and really serve an end, but if there is no real relationship undergirding the encouragement, it seems almost trite to me.  With the verse in mind above, I am asking God that I am not being hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.

How has encouragement worked for any of you?  I want to encourage my brothers and sisters in Christ, but I want to do so authentically rather than just a “hey I think you are swell” kind of fashion.  Is the person you are encouraging a big factor in how you pursue them?  Should you pursue friendship first before really trying to provide generic affirmations?

God has a high calling for His church and it is clear that the enemy would like nothing more than for us to remain disconnected and hardened.  I am praying through it and appreciative of any hints from your experiences?

So I have always enjoyed the TV show LOST which has serious themes of good vs evil, redemption, guilt and the consequences of our choices, but this season has helped me to understand God a little better.  Let’s see how fast this community can tear this up.

Last week, Slice of Infinity ran a great article on Plan B (http://www.rzim.org/usa/usfv/tabid/436/articleid/10511/cbmoduleid/1133/default.aspx ) which presented a great way of looking at God’s plan for our lives.  I remember as a teenager in the youth group community / college community and frequently the question of “What is God’s plan in my life?” came up.  The article addresses this question in the following unique way.

A wise friend of mine once wondered if following God was not something like following the directions on a GPS system. At the beginning of the journey, the plan for arriving at the desired destination is set before you. But when you accidentally turn left or are forced to take an unforeseen detour, the computer doesn’t scold you. It doesn’t force you to start over or announce that you can no longer make it to your final destination because you have ruined the route. In fact, it doesn’t even make you feel guilty. The end still in mind, it simply adjusts the plan from that point onward, as if the “wrong” turn was a part of the journey all along. The destination has not changed. Plan A may have switched to Plan B, but the outcome will be the same.

With this in mind, LOST got me thinking about alternate realities.  My Old Testament professor in college always said that reality, especially in terms of sinners coming to faith in Christ, is “100% man’s free will + 100% God’s sovereignty”.  While this understanding lines up with Scripture, it is hard to wrap your head around.  Using the GPS analogy and LOST’s alternate realities from this season, this is how I am thinking about the conflict now.

So my changed understanding is this.  God is not constrained by time and therefore can see / is sovereign over all possible alternate realities of our lives.  This could be seen in the book of Jonah where God says He was going to destroy Nineveh, yet does not when the people repent.  Being that God is unchangeable, this posed an issue for me.  Now, the way I think about it is that God saw 2 alternate realities, was completely in control of both, and responded as He had planned in that reality.

The post is long, but what is people’s thoughts on this?  Helpful or not?  May God be glorified as we search for Him and His nature.

Conan O’Brian’s run on the Tonight Show ended last week, and in his last monologue / signing off speech, he asked all of his fans not to be cynical about the situation.  He said, “All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere”  This got a fair amount of attention, and was lauded by many evangelical leaders as good commentary for our culture.

In my mind, hope is the opposite of cynicism. While I certainly agree that cynicism isn’t the way to live life, I find that without Jesus there is little reason to find lasting hope in life.  However, given that I love Jesus, albeit poorly, I have great reason for hope and therefore I should have little room for cynicism, and yet I find my life full of it.  My views of politics (don’t get me started), work, altruism (ouch), people and sadly the church is marked by cynicism more often than it is by hope.

My current direction on my faith is asking the hard questions both of myself and God.  Why do I have so little hope?  How can I get out of it?  Is it as simple as just believing God’s promises and seeking His perspective?  Balancing the simple and yet complex nature of our faith is challenging and yet I hope that God can forgive my cynicism and help me move onto hope.

Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.

My dad gave me a sermon series for Christmas which was Randy Alcorn speaking on heaven while at Billy Graham’s The Cove Training Center.  While I have read Alcorn’s nearly exhaustive book on heaven (review), this sermon series had some great new thoughts for me on heaven.

I often get all pumped up on heaven and talk to fellow saints about how great it is going to be to have restored relationships with nature / animals or how great it is going to work and accomplish such great things in heaven.  Many of them will say, “Yes, yes, but how does it apply to your current life?”  Generally, I am torn between agreeing with them and other times, I point to the fact that a vision of the heaven greatly energizes Christ’s work in my life.  But after the sermon series, I have an additional point to think about.

Clearly throughout scripture, there are multiple references to rewards in heaven according to the life we live here on earth.  This is most commonly thought of in terms of the martyrs and appropriately so as they will hold a great place in heaven.  Alcorn, however in his sermon series, points to our daily walk with Christ being a foreshadowing of the quality of our fellowship with God in heaven.  I hadn’t ever really thought of it in this way, but it makes sense to me in a way that I hadn’t thought of before.  Not only do I need to be living life in a Christ-like manner to gain crowns to throw at His feet, but I need to see my daily walk of prayer and time in the word as laying the groundwork for the rest of my eternal existence.

How does your eternal existence, not just your eternal destination, affect your daily life on this earth?

So for most of my life, I haven’t been the smartest person in the room nor was I the star athlete.  I think that this is a dynamic that most people experience to some degree.  The troubling thing for my personal walk with Christ is that my response is largely sinful.

Over the years, God has been gracious to allow me to move past certain sin areas in my life.  While that has been a huge blessing for me, it left me wondering what God wanted to work on next.  Through accountability and sharing life with fellow Christians especially recently, God has really put a bullseye on the next area of my life to work on.  As friends and family have helped me see, this trait has played a huge role in my life.

You see I like to be right.  That is an understatement.  I LOVE to be right.  I don’t care nearly as much about prestige or money or power.  Those things can all be set aside, but question a position that I hold and the love and care I should have for fellow believers and especially non-believers goes out the window.  So in the end, this is a terribly ugly face of pride.  So many times, I have clung to the fact that I was right, and sadly, even if I may have been factually right then I have not loved in my delivery.

So now the cat is out of the bag.  At work, in the church, and with friends, I am asking God to break me of my addiction to the idol of “being right”.  Anyone else experience this?

Yesterday, I got to hear a great sermon on Exodus 20:7 which centers on the third commandment which is “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.”  PJ spoke through how very important God’s name is, and how very little we are in awe of it / respect it / give it the weight it is worth.  I mean Christ’s admission of his divinity before the pharasees who were judging him actually caused people to fall back.  God’s words brought creation into being.  Yet I look at my life and I take words far too lightly.

The ins and out of my regular day have at least a couple times when I look back in pain at words that came out of my mouth, and yet, our culture is blissfully happy to say that words don’t matter.  “I love you”, “Till death do us part”, people taking God’s name in vain and other such phrases have been seemingly stipped of their weight by our times, and yet Exodus 20:7 reminds us that God will hold us accountable for our words.  Our speech, promises, exclamations have eternal consequences.

Thoughts everyone?  How have we cheapened our relationships with God, work, family by not placing the appropriate weight to our words?  What can we do to re-assert God’s view of words in our life?

“I’m still tuning myself to the Great Key…”

Still by Great Lake Swimmers

So one of the chief objections that you often here about heaven is that it will be boring.  The Far Side comic captured this feeling well with a drawing of a guy with wings sitting on a cloud listlessly with a thought bubble which said, “I wish I had brought a magazine.”

At church this past weekend, I was deeply convicted on a passage of text that I knew very well.  The exodus story is a often told, much repeated part of the Bible, and as such it is really familiar to many church-goers.  Yet, after being in church for over 30 years, I am being convicted, pleased and overall astounded by the truth found in the great Gospel story of the Bible.

This got me thinking about heaven, and I think that people’s complaint on boredom in heaven is not at all thought out.  We will never cease to learn about God’s attributes.  If we sing a song of praise for ten thousand years, I am confident that God can reveal more of Himself in year 10,001.  We will always be able to tune ourselves a bit more to the Great Key.  This is a great comfort and joy which we should all revel in more.

This weekend was a good mix of fun, work and some great preaching (Check out the Crosspoint sermon from 8/16 if interested).  The sermon was on Exodus, shortly after the Israelites had crossed the Red Sea and were beginning to grumble about not having food nor water in the desert.  It was a convicting sermon which just shows me how much better I have it in today’s life with food a couple steps away and over 50 magical things called faucets which will provide water immediately.  And yet, I find that I grumble a lot to God when things are going so hot.  I find that the word is so appropriate with my overall attitude when life isn’t going my way.  If we take a closer look at the grumbling, we can uncover a whole host of nasty dark attitudes which God finds abhorrent.  Worship of the idol of ease, discontented-ness of where we are in life and general extreme lack of gratefulness not only for our salvation, but also just for our current lifestyle just to name a few.

All of this isn’t to provide a dark thought to start the week off, but rather to call those like me to shake off some of the grumbling.  Know that God will provide for those that He loves even if through a season of suffering.

“If you stick with the Gospel, you will always feel homeless.  The ‘religious’ and ‘liberal’ people will both hate you.”

Man this was a good point.  Not only to do a check on my expectations of this life, but to allow the homeless feeling to point us to our real Home which is in Heaven with Christ.

So the last couple weeks have been somewhat rough at work and it seems that the adversity of life always seems to teach me a thing or two about God.  When I work lots of hours in a given week, reality seems to take on a odd, otherworldly sense where nothing makes sense.  Family relationships get strained from lack of time spent, sleep gets rare and your body starts acting funny with situations like waking up in the middle of the night with adreliline pumping.

The thing that I learned this past rough season of work is that God is to be worshipped for His constancy.  He doesn’t change like the humans nor does his love for his people falter.  This isn’t to say that stuff is going to go great for us.  Actually Israel was slaves in Egypt for 400 years (twice as long as the USA has been around) and then got to walk around the desert for 40 years after they were freed.  That sounds incredibly difficult to someone living in our easy culture.  But God was constant.  The evidence of this is all around in so much that we take for granted.  The sun comes up every morning.  Seasons come and go.  These are things that we just expect, but this expectation rests on God’s constancy and good grace in giving us even the sun every morning.

God be praised in good times and bad times.  He is constant.