Fractured Saints » crabb

Being a speed bump to the Gospel

crabb — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:01:52 +0000

So I have had the great pleasure / heavy responsibility of teaching my first adult Sunday School class this spring, and it has been eye-opening to say the least. First, as an aside, I have so much more respect and honor for pastors that prepare sermons every week. It is a fairly stressful ordeal of realizing that you are putting words around the truth of Scripture and the Gospel. I mean honestly pastors should get 5 to 10 mulligans a year where they say, “Look other than the Scripture of this sermon, the rest is likely to suck and I am sorry. I am claiming one of my mulligans” .

So this leads me to think about my class. I am teaching on Heaven which is a subject that I am wildly passionate about. I wish everyone was more excited about heaven, and that is one of the big goals of the class for me. However, only God can provide eyes, ears, and hungry hearts to hear His truth. This has lead me to pray like this, “God please, please let me interpret and teach your word faithfully. Please, please, please give your people ears to hear and eyes to see your truth from Scripture. More than all of this, God, please forgive your sinful servant. Please, dear Lord, may I not be a impediment or speed bump on the path to your Gospel truth. God, please help a straight Truth come from this crooked man.”

I have been more fervent in this prayer than any in a while (teaching Sunday School is scary), and yet as I look at my prayer, it applies equally as much to how I act as a husband, father, friend, and general witness for the Gospel. So due to that, I am trying to pray it for all areas of my life. May He grant this prayer request for His glory, and His glory alone.

Mercy in the Workplace

crabb — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:57:40 +0000

One of the things that I often struggle with is how to incorporate my faith into my work. At work, I am very execution minded. It probably has a lot to do with wanting to avoid negative attention most of my life (didn’t like turning in homework late or being the last person sitting down at lunch), but for the most part I like my projects to be delivered on time and really complete. The unfortunate side effect (or sin effect) is that I end up having very little patience with people who cause my projects to be put at risk. I try hard to give people lots of heads up, but when it is coming down to the wire, I tend to apply pressure on people until I get what I need. In an effort to be vulnerable, I am not going to dress up the last couple sentences to make it sound better.
So my question that I am praying about is where is mercy and understanding in this? With many of the people that I depend on, should I let them be late and under-deliver on their responsibilities? I realize that I am putting it in very black and white terms (another behavior that I suspect is sin-based), but I am not sure what mercy looks like in this situation. Is it so radical / Christ-like that I am not considering it? Is it a matter of putting mercy ahead of successful projects? Would love to hear anyone’s thoughts.

Shocking lack of personal insight

crabb — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:43:31 +0000

Over the past week, I have spent several conversations with close friends holding a mirror up to my personality / how I treat people. It has been hard to see how little insight I have into myself and my behavior. This is tough for me as how I handle myself in some areas (work for example) is receiving a fair amount of positive feedback. However, in friendships and other close relationships, I am finding that I look more clueless than anything. I find this really frustrating as it not only extends to close friends, my wife and my kids, but certainly to my relationship with Christ as well. I praise God that I have a Savior and close relationships who will continue to put up with me, but I wonder if there is a way to help this process along. With my relationship with Christ, more time in the Word and prayer is something to pursue with my relationship with God, while putting more “thought into interactions with other people” is the tact for personal relationship deepening.

More than anything, I think it is the kind of thing that I avoid because I am not naturally good at it. As a friend of mine said this afternoon, “What an opportunity to see the Holy Spirit work.” That is my prayer this evening.

Our actions reflect on us

crabb — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:40:29 +0000

So one of the things that I probably follow too closely is politics these days. Regardless of which side you fall on, now is clearly an interesting time for the US, but that isn’t the point that I want to talk through.

This week, a representative from NY basically got caught in a whole mess of online infidelity (cheating on his wife) and then lying lots about it. While this isn’t something that really surprises me given the tremendous damage of our over-sexualized culture of easy access and low standards, I was really surprised by one part of his admission. He apologized to his wife, voters and his staff, but said that he wouldn’t resign as nothing he did impaired his ability to serve as a public servant.

I find this trend all over the place, even in my life (sadly). We want to have the freedom to act as we wish, but when caught, claim that it is not really indicative of who we are. In the example of the congressman and in my heart, this just doesn’t stand up. Our actions matter. If we have been forgiven by Christ’s blood, we are clean in God’s sight and saved, but this doesn’t give us license to sin. I have been really praying that God would help me see that there are real consequences all over the place if I live my life like a fool. These consequences spread to my life, my family, my church, my work place and even future generations. Two of the books that I am reading are really challenging me in positive ways (Generous Justice and Don’t Waste Your Life), but this example is causing me to look at my sin anew as well. May God help me change for His glory.

To be salt and light

crabb — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:21:25 +0000

One of the things that I have always struggled with is parties. I generally hate going to them unless I know everyone fairly well. It simply isn’t an environment where I have ever had much success with connecting with people / keeping up conversation that myself and the other person enjoys. The trouble is that, generally speaking, this is the venue to get to know my neighborhood which is comprised of mostly unbelievers.

In the last several months, our family has been noticeably not on the invite list for various neighborhood parties. I have been frustrated by this as it continues to further limit my interaction with neighbors and have wondered if I did something wrong to not be on the invite list. We have had several people over to our house for dinner, but generally speaking, we’ve gone to functions after the kids are in bed, thus limiting our children’s exposure to unredemptive behavior.

A couple days ago, a friend changed my perspective on this. He pointed out that we could be seen as freeloaders only showing up when there is a party and not being very good guests anyways (I am bad at parties). This really rocked me as it completely changed my perspective from worrying about my relational needs to seeing how my family has been a piss poor example of hospitality and Christ’s love.

So the question that my wife and I are starting to struggle with is how can we be salt in light in our neighborhood in practical ways? Is it inviting everyone to a party at our house, come one come all? Is it being more intentional in reaching out to individual families that we haven’t gotten to know? With kids, personalities and other challenges in the mix, we are starting to simply pray that God would open our eyes further to opportunities and that He would act through us, despite our challenges.

Any helpful tips from any of you on this?

My sad posture towards God

crabb — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:52:46 +0000

So in the last couple weeks I have been thinking through how I conduct my daily spiritual walk. In this thinking, I have started to think of how I act much like a sullen teenager. Though the imagery is probably something that almost any adult can conjure up, let me explain what I mean.

The sullen teenager is the one who lives in his parents house, understands that he is loved / supported by his parents and yet responds by listening to music on his iPod constantly and sighs when he is forced to unplug for family interaction. Though many would excuse this behavior as a “phase”, there seems to be little excuse to me for this attitude of disengagement and ungratefulness.

Aaaaaand, we bring this back to me. Far too often I find myself engaged in the normal busyness of my life whether with work, family or entertainment to the extent that interacting with my heavenly father causes me to act like that sullen teenager. For me this was a revelation, as for the parent of the sullen teenager, I imagine that they don’t want the teenager to unplug so that they can yell at him, but rather so that they can connect with him in a deeply relational way. This causes me to want to throw off as much as possible this attitude of sullenness and realize I have a heavenly father who wants to connect and interact with me. This is my reason for the current season of my life to interact more with the God who loves me, rather than a sense of checking off the quiet time box.

Sin of busyness?

crabb — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:41:59 +0000

In many ways, this post could be considered a confession of sorts. I am sitting here, trying to come up with a good post topic and have not been able to come up with much in the last half hour. Part of this is that my life is generally consumed with some many other things going on (crazy job, 3 kids, wife), and I don’t feel like there is much “down time” to reflect on life / the gospel / how God would have me live.

A friend and I are reading through Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life over the past couple weeks and Piper is continuing to make the point that Jesus and the cross needs to be our consuming, sole passion in life. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that we should all become pastors and full time church staff, I am struggling with how to incorporate the passion into the busyness in my stage of life.

The first thing I am going to resolve to do to address this would be to cut down on entertainment after the kids are down. Maybe this won’t provide a significant additional portion of time, but it will at least allow for more reflective time spent with God.

But beyond that, are we as Christians called to lives that are less busy that our unsaved culture or should we be busy with pursuing Christ?

Why can’t God just save all the cool people?

crabb — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:19:56 +0000

So I was listening to a new-ish band the Civil Wars the other day, and was really impressed with the quality of their music. On top of that, it is fairly clear that they are believers in some capacity. As you watch them in interviews / videos, they are talented, relatively good looking and charismatic. Whenever I see people like this, I think, “Awesome, attractive Christians who will be excellent and will bring glory and further recognition to the Gospel through their work.” Wouldn’t it be great if God saved all of the cool people? It would make witnessing that much easier if people said, “Oh Christianity, that faith with tons of cool, likable famous people” rather than “Oh Christianity, that faith with televangelists and hypocrites.”

This got me thinking. Overall, I think that I want to be associated to a Gospel community that is full of cool, talented people who have it together. Often though, the church is filled with broken, mourning, meek, poor in spirit people, and I find myself in this group. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus said that these people would be blessed, and I think that he was talking about the church. Jesus didn’t always choose the cool people as his people. God could have chosen a more powerful people than the Israelites, more charasmatic apostles than Peter and Paul and believers that are better than me, and yet He often doesn’t.

The truth of this hit me deeply this week and is summed up in I Cor 1:26 -29 below. Praise God that He is all wise and has chosen His church as His own. May we humbly strive for further sanctification and to love God and others more deeply.

²⁶ Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. ²⁷ But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. ²⁸ God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, ²⁹ so that no one may boast before him.

Happiest Statement from the Last 6 Months

crabb — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:29:51 +0000

I was spending some time with a good friend last night, and we just were talking through various people we know who are at different points in their relationship with God. My general follow up statement to this was as follows -

In the past 5 years, I have fallen so much more in love with the Gospel. I am not saying that my life reflects it as much through my actions (to my shame), but I am more captivated with the truths of Jesus and his life and work.

This is a pretty stark contrast with people I know who are being challenged by the Gospel and some of the inconsistencies of their life / fellow believers. I am not trying to brag / be proud, but rather trying to simply say this. We have a GREAT SAVIOR whose message of hope and salvation doesn’t need us to be compelling. I continue to pray that God would help me to fall further in love with Christ and what He did, and with that love, I would share with others. Additionally, I pray that if I doubt anything in life, it would be something other than the Gospel.

Have a great day all not because our experiences are necessarily easy or good today, but rather that if you are a believer, Christ has already done the work for us.

Forgetful Me

crabb — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 14:55:06 +0000

James 1:23-24 – “²³ Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror ²⁴ and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.”

I have somewhat of a reputation of being forgetful with my wife and close friends. I don’t completely agree with their assertions, but it struck me the other morning how truly forgetful I am in even small things. I was getting ready for work in my usual routine a couple mornings ago and all of a sudden I couldn’t remember if I had washed my face within the last several minutes. I washed my face for the second time (I think), but God used the opportunity to call to mind the verse above as I think it applies all too often to my spiritual life.

One of the main sins that the Israelites were guilty of was not remembering all of the things that God had done for them. They grumbled in the desert about God’s providence of food and other basic needs. To this line of argument, God would chastise / punish them for not remembering the splitting of the Red Sea and their deliverance from Egypt. These events often occurred over decades, not days or weeks. This brings me to my spiritual state. Often I feel that I read scriptures and engage in prayer, and I often can’t remember well what the mirror of God’s Word revealed to me even hours later.

I pray that God would be more present in my life and mind to avoid this, but looking at these verses, I think that I should be confessing my lack of action on what I am learning. Remembering God and His Word go hand in hand with obeying what He lays out. I pray that my times with God be more frequent, but more than that, I pray that the Holy Spirit would work in me to better put my faith in action.