In which I learn from pee

I have been a father for twelve days, twenty one hours, and three minutes as I type this. I haven’t really come to grips with the term “dad” yet. Partly because in his twelve days my son hasn’t learned to speak, and partly because I can be a little dense. Some things take time to settle.

The place I work has pretty liberal paternity leave, so I’ve spent the last few weeks hanging out with my son and my wife trying to figure out what normal looks like now that one of us can’t be left alone for any length of time.* In those short few days, I’ve learned a few things. That said, here’s the first thing my son taught me.

Lesson 1: Sometimes we make things harder on ourselves then they need to be.

My son does not like diaper changes. They make him cry. The running theory is that it’s because of the cold wipes or the cold air in the room on his nethers. Sometimes, while changing him, he’ll cry so hard that he starts peeing everywhere. Which means he has to be wiped down with cold wipes again, and his nethers have to spend more time outside the comfort of a fresh diaper.

I do that too. Not pee everywhere. I gave that up a while ago. Rather, I make things harder than they need to be. I’ll be in a meeting with an angry person, and I’ll get angry. That makes everything worse. Because two yelling people does not diffuse a situation faster than one yelling person. Or I’ll feel tired from sitting on the couch too long, and I’ll sit on the couch more. I know that exercise will make me feel better, but I don’t do it. Because, you know, exercise sounds tiring. Or I’ll be feeling spiritually detached, and I’ll stop reading my Bible because it didn’t seem to be helping. Which makes me more spiritually detached.

In short, I have a history of metaphorically peeing in my face. The pee, of course, is a metaphor for self-defeating actions. And I guess the diaper is the desired outcome. Which is odd, because I don’t really want to wear diapers. The analogy breaks down pretty quickly if you try to pick it apart like that.

Anyway, that’s my lesson for the day.

-Tom

*My son can’t. My wife is fine.

A new post, in which I quote Tozer

"Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of created personalities to the creating personality, God."
-A.W. Tozer

I have, in recent past, been struggling with a lack of something in my life. I have a beautiful wife, a loving family, good friends, a great church, a comfortable (if poorly insulated) old house, a friendly dog, a good job, and a kid on the way. If past me (say, just-graduated-from-college me) were to put together a list of things that he wanted out of life, I think I'd hit all of the major points.*

And yet there's something missing. Something that, in it's absence, makes all that I have in this moment seem... dimmer. That's an awkward way to say what I want to say, but it's the best I can come up with. All those good things in life are there. They're all real. But they're all a little less real to me than they should be.

I have come to the conclusion that the thing that's missing is my desire for God.** And the tragic part is, knowing what is missing is not the same has finding the missing thing. Anyone who's lost their car keys knows that.

I am guilty of a sin. I am guilty of taking my relationship with God for granted. I searched hard for Him, found a measure of Him, and then stopped. I said, "This is good enough." It was good, but good enough can be a dangerous thing. The relationship with God I had began to grow cold. Because I forgot a truth. A love that is not actively seeking, a love that is not, in some part, consuming, is a love that is dying.

Christ said that our walk with God is like a marriage with Him. And the same pitfalls that face marriages are the found in faith. Dating is a process of chasing and being chased. But often people get married and stop chasing each other. They stop trying to win the hearts of each other. And, lacking the chase, the marriage cools.

I don't want to make this more dramatic than it is. I don't want you to read this and think I'm having a crisis of faith. What I'm trying to say is that I recognize that I'm heading for a crisis of faith if I don't do something. And this, this typing, is me trying to start doing something.

-Tom

*Just-graduated-from-college me would have added successful novelist to that list. You can't win them all.

**Without passion for God, all the good things in life are less then they should be.

An update

I broke my collar bone playing touch football. I tripped on the grass and landed wrong. I wonder if that means I'm like Mr. Glass from Unbrakeable. Beautiful says no, but I have my doubts.

That is all.

Grace in the Kingdom

[The following is a sermon I gave to the youth group yesterday.]

The Beginning: Where We Talk About the End

How many of you go to service with the main congregation? It’s important that you do that because it becomes too easy to think about this group as church and to forget that we’re part of a larger family.

But that’s not the point. If you’ve gone to service with the main congregation in the last few weeks you’ve probably seen a video with a clock counting up that ends with a picture of a pair of hands held under an amazingly clean stream of water. But the video’s not the point either. What the video is about is the point. And that point is that the Colonel* will be talking about living right for a while. And since we’re one family, that means that you’ll be hearing about living right here as well.

I’m about to ask you a question that will seem completely unrelated to what I’ve just been talking about. Normally in a situation like this, there’d be about a paragraph of me talking that would allow your mind to transition smoothly from the last topic to the coming topic. There are two problems with that. First, when I was writing this down I didn’t feel like writing the transition. Second, I want you to jar a bit. I’d like very much for you to think about how the question is related to the topic of living right.

Ready?

What is the Kingdom of God?

A kingdom is an area under the domain of a ruler. So you can say that the kingdom of God is where God reigns. But what does that mean?

The Bible tells us that God reigns in heaven, but is that all of the kingdom?

No! What makes us think that this loving, jealous, caring, mighty, merciful God of ours would wait until the end of time to establish his kingdom? God started establishing his kingdom on earth when he sent Jesus here to live and die among us.

But I don’t want you taking my word for it, so we’ll see what Jesus had to say on the matter.

The Kingdom: As Defined by Christ

Jesus was talking to a group of people and they brought him a demon possessed man who was also blind and mute. Jesus, being Jesus, booted the demon out of the man. He also gave him his sight and the powers of speech just for good measures. The Pharisees who saw this said to themselves that he was removing demons by the power of Beezlebul. For the purposes of this sermon, you can think of Beezlebul as just another name for Satan.

This is what Jesus said in response:

Matthew 12:25-28
25 Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, "Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. 26 If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? 27 And if I drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges. 28 But if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

Look at the way Jesus phrased that last sentence. “The kingdom of God has come upon you.” He asked a rhetorical question and used it to point out that he was not only the son of God, but that he was building a kingdom right in front of them.

It’s really easy to miss the full impact of what’s being said here, so allow me to translate for you.

The Pharisees said, “Jesus, you’re an agent of Satan. You’ve been doing the devil’s business, using his dark power, and we’re on to you. We see the mess you’ve been making of things, and we’re going to put an end to it. You’ll rue the day you crossed the Pharisees.”

But enough about them. Let’s talk about what Jesus said. “You and I both know that I’m not doing any of the things that I’m doing by the power of Satan. You can’t do good in Satan’s name. That’s a contradiction in terms. The work I’m doing is by the power of the Spirit of God. I’m building God’s kingdom on earth. Right here. Right in front of you. And there’s no power on earth that can stop me.”

Bam. Dominance established.

The ground was cleared for the first bricks of the kingdom by the prophets in the Old Testament. That job was finished by John the Baptist as he wandered the desert telling those who would listen to repent and make straight a path for the king. Then Jesus came on the scene and become the cornerstone of the kingdom, the part that all the rest is being built on. That last part is important.

The kingdom has not been built.

The kingdom will not be built in the future.

The kingdom is being built.

Brick by brick, soul by soul, the kingdom of God is being made ready for his return.

In another verse that we’ll see just as soon as we get to the next slide, we’ll see Jesus say the same thing.

Luke 13:18-21
18Then Jesus asked, "What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? 19It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air perched in its branches."
20Again he asked, "What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? 21It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount[a] of flour until it worked all through the dough."
In both cases, the kingdom was compared to something that was spreading. The tree grew and the yeast spread through the dough. The kingdom of God is like that. It grows, and it changes what it touches.

Being reasonably intelligent people, I’m pretty sure that if I asked you who the citizens of the kingdom of God are, you would tell me that they’re Christians. So I’m not going to ask. Instead, I’m going to tell you what kind of kingdom we’re a part of. And if you’re not a Christian, then you get to hear what kind of kingdom you could be a part of.

There are two things that separate the kingdom of God from any other kingdom of the world. Those two things are truth and grace.

Thing the first: Truth

The truth we’re talking about here is this: that all have fallen short of the glory of God and that it is through Jesus Christ that we find forgiveness of sins. It is only through his death and resurrection that we can approach the throne of God. It is only through his death and resurrection that we can call ourselves part of the kingdom of God.

This truth is what Jesus told us to go out into the world to preach. This is the gospel of salvation that can bring light to a dark world and warmth to frozen hearts. But it can also be used like an iron rod to beat people into submission. It can be, and has been, used to crush those who do not agree. There have been times in its history where the church of Christ has offered salvation in one hand and death in the other. Convert or die. Convert or be exiled. Convert or I will smite you until your self-worth looks like a quivering pile of jelly on the ground.

I could go on about this some more, but I really want to talk about the second thing. So I’m going to on the very next slide.

Thing the second: Grace

Brothers and sisters, the grace of God is at the core of our faith. It was by his grace that God sent Jesus to live and die among us as a sacrificial lamb for our sins. It was by God’s grace that Peter was forgiven for denying Christ three times on that dark night so long ago. It was by God’s grace that Saul was forgiven for holding the coats of those men as they stoned Saint Steven to death. It was on God’s grace that the kingdom of God was founded. And it is by God’s grace that we have assurance of our own salvation.

Truth destroys without Grace.
Grace is useless without Truth.

These two aspects of our faith are inseparable. Without grace the truth of our own sinfulness would only serve to crush us with guilt. Without truth there would be no need of grace because forgiveness is not required where there is no sin.

In the two thousand plus years of the kingdom of God, we’ve done a pretty good part with the truth end of things. We’re good at remembering sin, finding it in ourselves, finding it in others, and telling people that they need to be forgiven. What we’ve been less good at is the grace side of things.

I’m reading a book that has a story in it where a man is talking to a prostitute about her drug addiction. The man asked her if she ever considered getting help from a church. This is what she said:

“Church? Why would I go there? I already feel terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.”

That, my friends, is truth without grace.

If you asked your friends who aren’t Christians what they think of when they think of Christians, do you think any of them would say we are a people who love deeply? Take a minute to think about that. If your non-Christian friends had to sum up Christianity in one world, what would it be?

It wasn’t always like that, you know. There was a time when the church saw people through the grace-filled eyes of Christ. In fact, there was a time that people were so excited about the good news being preached that they were forcing their way into the kingdom of God. They were beating down the doors, people. They were beating down the doors to get just a taste of God’s grace.

Luke 16:16 talks about it. The verse is from the Today’s New International Version.

Luke 16:16
16 "The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John. Since that time, the good news of the kingdom of God is being preached, and people are forcing their way into it.

The New Living translation talks about people being “eager” to enter the kingdom. That loses some of the impact for me. This isn’t just being eager. People are eager to get at fresh baked cookies. Kids are eager to get out of school early on a sunny day. But people were forcing their way into the kingdom of God.

Now keep that in mind and think about that conversation Jesus had with the Pharisees earlier. He told them the kingdom of God was upon them, and he knew exactly what the kingdom of God looked like. When I translated Jesus’ words earlier, I left off the last bit. As he was telling them that he was, in so many words, the man, he was also offering them the biggest helping of grace they could possibly imagine. He was telling them that should they ever decide that he wasn’t the spawn of Satan bent on charring the earth with his brimstone, then he would be more than willing to forgive them of their self-righteous pride and allow them something worthwhile to be proud of.

Who can tell me what John 3:16 says?

John 3:16
16 “For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

That’s grace. Right there. Humanity was being beat to a pulp by the law. Not because the law was attacking us, mind you. But because the law is a brick wall that we kept trying to run through. I want to be clear on this point. God didn’t have to send Jesus to die for us. We had a deal with him, and we broke it. By rights, he could have just ended us. He could have wiped us off the face of the earth as a creation too stubborn, too obstinate to learn how to love. But he looked down at us with blood on our faces, and he saw that we didn’t know how to love. So he came to teach us.

Who knows what 1 John 3:16 says?

1 John 3:16
16 We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters.

We didn’t know how to love, so he came down to earth to show us.

There was this debate on Nightline a while back about whether or not Satan exists. During this debate, one of the people said that he didn’t need Satan or God to make him feel guilty.

I’ll say that again in case you missed it: he didn’t need Satan or God to make him feel guilty.

You see, in that man’s eyes, the church is a place for people to come and feel guilty about their failure to measure up to the impossible standards of the church. The Christianity he sees is a Christianity of regulations without grace.

The pastor he was debating responded by saying that he didn’t feel guilty because his sins were forgiven by Christ Jesus.

Grace.

The Statue of Liberty has a plaque with a poem on it that you may be familiar with. This is part of that poem.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me

I’m not making a parallel between the US and the kingdom of God. Our citizenship in the kingdom of God must be put before our citizenship in the US. I read that poem to you because that’s what Christian grace should sound like. Jesus spent his time with the outcasts of society: the prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, and degenerate sinners of his time. He touched the untouchables.

The Kingdom: as it Was

Let me describe for you the kingdom of God that people were forcing their way into. It was a kingdom made of people from every imaginable background. Poor and rich, old and young, well educated and poorly educated, Jew and gentile, slave and master, rulers and peasants. It was a kingdom that did not place money, title, or heritage above the value of a soul washed clean by the blood of Christ.

The kingdom of God in those early years was populated by people much like you and me. It was a bunch of sinners, people who tried to live right but failed as often as they succeeded. But what made these people special, what made that kingdom a place so strongly desired, is the grace that flowed from those people. These were people who loved each other more than they loved themselves. They gave without thought, loved without measure, and forgave without reservation.

The Kingdom: as it Is

Sometime between then and now, we’ve lost something. We’ve lost that love, that encompassing grace that made the kingdom such a desirable place. I’m not saying that all of Christianity has become graceless, but I am saying that the majority of Christianity either needs to remember the grace that’s been given to us or we need to get better at showing it.

I tell my wife that I love her all the time. I don’t tell her that because I think she’s forgotten. I tell her because there’s so much love there I can’t help but express it. And if I stopped telling her, I wouldn’t stop loving her, but we’d be missing something.

Love, without expression, is less than it should be. The same goes for grace. The kingdom of God needs to resonate with grace. It needs to be spoken. It needs to be made alive through words and actions. In the first few generations of Christians, it did. Back then the kingdom of God was a powerful, vibrant expression of God’s love for humanity.

Show of hands, who’d like to be a part of a kingdom of God like that?

I’m about to tell you something very exciting. I need you to prepare for it. Ready yourself, because I’m about to rock the foundations of your world.

Ready?

The Kingdom of God: as it Can Be

We can live in that kingdom. We don’t have to wait until we get to heaven. We don’t have to wait until next year or next month or next week or tomorrow. We can start today. Right now. Right here.

My friends, I’m excited. We stand at the door of something very beautiful. We stand at the door of a world filled with Christ’s love and grace. We are God’s kingdom here on earth, and I want us to live like it. A year from now, when you ask your friends what they think of Christians, I want them to think of unbelievable grace and love. Now I’m not a blind optimist. I know that even if the church were perfect in the eyes of God, the world would still reject us. People blind themselves to what they don’t want to see. But when people are looking, when people’s eyes are open, I want them to see something that will change the way they look at the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are the kingdom of God on earth. Imagine what would happen if we lived like it? Imagine if we forgave as Christ forgives? Imagine if we thought of others before we thought of ourselves. Imagine if we woke up thinking of what we could do for others instead of what we can get for ourselves.

Can you see it? Can you see the kingdom of God among you? Look at the people around you. Did you see the love of Christ in those eyes? Do you want to?

The End: Where We talk about the Beginning

I started by saying the Colonel will be talking about living right for awhile. I’m excited about that because I don’t think that most of us know how to do it. We mean well, but we get lost on the way. We forget the things we’ve been taught. We get lost, stumble off the path in the dark.

As you listen to the Colonel talk about living right, I want you to be thinking about grace. I want you to think about how Christ forgave you so that you can have eternal life. I want you to remember that there is no need for guilt and shame once you’ve been forgiven. That doesn’t mean you can go around sinning willfully and then asking for forgiveness later. That shows a blatant misunderstanding of the whole concept of grace. But if you mess up, when you mess up, know that you can always find forgiveness in Christ.

We are citizens of the kingdom of God. Let’s remind those around us how powerful our love is.


*My senior pastor is a colonel in the Air Force reserves, but even if he wasn't, the title "Colonel" would fit him. He has a... presence about him.

Prayer: It's Better With Practice

[The following is a sermon I gave to my church's youth some weeks ago.]

I’m going to tell you a few things about prayer. I’m going to tell you that it’s important (that’s why we call it foundational). I’m going to tell you that it’s a learned skill. In other words, you get better at it the more you do it. With that in mind, I’ll tell you a bit about how to pray. And I’m going to tell you that while it might not feel like it, it’s one of the most powerful things you can do.

But before I tell you all that, I want to talk to you about rock climbing.

A story (told by me):

There’s this really big rock in Squamish that they call the Stawamus Chief. I’ve been told that it’s actually a 2000 foot tall granite monolith, but that’s just a more impressive way to say “really big rock.” The reason I bring up the Chief is because this story starts with me on it.

I was climbing with two other people. I can’t remember the name of the guy who was leading, so I’ll call him Leroy. A girl named Sarah was the other climber. I was belaying Leroy, and Sarah was sitting next to me waiting her turn. People can get philosophical when they’re 400 feet off the ground, and as Sarah looked down at the town below, she said something that struck me. She said,

“I like big walls. They make me feel so… small.”

I didn’t feel any smaller than normal, so I looked down to see if that would help. The rock sloped away beneath me, the water in Howe Sound glistened in the sun, and I felt pretty much the way I always feel. So I looked up, thinking that the remaining 1600 feet of granite would bring about the small feeling that Sarah was talking about. It didn’t.

Looking up or down, I felt like me. It took me a while to figure out why I didn’t feel tiny. After all, I was just a spec on that rock. A 5’7” man doesn’t leave much of a shadow on a 2000’ tall rock. But before I tell you why I didn’t feel what Sarah felt, I want you to do something for me.

I need everyone to close your eyes.

Okay, now imagine that you’re looking at yourself hundreds of feet off the ground on the Chief. Try to picture the scale more than the height. One person sitting on a giant rock. Now let your mental picture zoom out a bit. Imagine you can see all of Washington and British Columbia, and try to picture yourself still on that rock. Keep pulling back. Watch as the entire North American continent comes into view. Let your mental picture pull farther back until you can see earth like a spinning marble circling the sun. Don’t forget that you’re still sitting on that rock next to the water. Let the solar system shrink in front of you until you’re looking at the galaxy like a glowing top spinning in a dark room.

You can open your eyes now.

Did that make you feel small?

Now I want to put this in perspective. Remember that God, the King of all Kings and Lord of all Lords, made all of that. He holds the entire galaxy in the palm of his hand. He is awesome in the true sense of that word. That is, he inspires awe if you get even a glimpse of him in your mind. Knowing that, I want you to think about this: God loves you. He knows your name. He knows the number of hairs you have on your head. Try to hold that thought in your head at the same time you imagine the vastness of God. Now ask yourself how small you feel. Pretty cool, huh?

The reason Sarah felt small is that she didn’t understand that God loves her. She knew of him, but didn’t have that connection between him and her. Ultimately, she felt alone in the universe, and that made it a big, scary place.

The reason I didn’t feel small is that I wasn’t alone on that rock. God was with me. Now, I didn’t feel big either. I just felt like me. It was a good feeling, sitting on a rock way up high with God right there with me.

The reason I knew he was there is that I know him and trust him. One of the most important ways I got to know him is through prayer. Which brings us back to where we started.

Prayer: Talking to the Almighty

Christianity is, in part, a relationship with God. Praying is communicating with God. You can’t have a relationship with someone without communicating with them. You can’t communicate with God unless you pray. That said, you can’t have a relationship with God unless you pray.

I’ll repeat that because it’s important: You can’t have a relationship with God unless you pray.

You can read your Bible. You can go to church. You can listen to people pray. You can give all you have to the poor. But if you don’t pray, all that other stuff is just pretending to be a Christian. In the end, it’s not worth anything.

Some of you are probably thinking that this is all pretty obvious and that I should hurry up and get to something interesting. But before I move on, I want to ask you a question. The last time that something bad happened, who did you go to first? Did you go to your friends for consolation? Did you go to your parents? Did you pray? What about when something really cool happened? Did you text anyone? Did you run screaming down the street? Did you pray?

If God really is the most important person in your life, why don’t you go to him first? I’ll let you think about that for a bit.

Prayer: A Brief How to Guide.

Prayer is not instinctual. Humans are not born knowing how to pray. I know this because Jesus had to teach his disciples how to pray. You see, while the disciples weren’t perfect, we can hardly call them spiritually deficient. And if they needed instruction, it’s safe to say that we need some to. Which is good because everyone I know who’s tried this praying thing has needed help at one point or another. What Jesus said to his disciples can be found in Matthew 6:6-8.

Matthew 6:6-8
6But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

People have given very long sermons on these verses, and I don’t have the kind of time I’d need to tell you all I want to tell you about them. Instead, I want you to pay attention to two things.

Thing 1: Prayer is between you and God. Like I said earlier, listening to people pray doesn’t bring you much closer to God. True closeness begins when you start talking to him.

Thing 2: Forget about trying to make what you say pretty. Prayer is not performance art. God isn’t going to be impressed by your mastery of the English language. He also won’t be upset if you have trouble saying what you want to say. It’s okay to stutter and falter and walk over your own words when you’re praying. God knows what you need already. He just wants you to ask for it.

About a year after I graduated from college, I decided that I didn’t know how to pray well enough. So I talked to my dad about it. My dad is a retired preacher for the United Methodist Church. He’s done a lot of praying in his day. He still does a lot of praying. I expected my dad to sit me down and tell me deep mystic secrets. Instead, my dad gave me a work book on how to pray.

As I read through the book, I kept thinking that this would all be easier if my dad had simply told me the deep mystic secrets. But the book didn’t seem to have anything in the way of secrets. The information in it wasn’t really anything spectacular. But it kept asking me to pray, and I kept praying. I think partly I wanted to do all the steps so that when I wasn’t any better at praying by the end of it I could call the book stupid and get on with life. But a funny thing happened. By the end of the book, I figured out that it really wasn’t the author’s intent to bring to light ancient secrets. What the author wanted me to do was pray to get better at praying. My dad didn’t warn me that the author was a sneaky man. I think that’s because my dad is also a sneaky man.

You see, the best way to get good at praying is to pray. It can be awkward at times. Sometimes the words simply don’t come, but God understands. He doesn’t want perfection. He wants you.

I’m going to say this again because it’s important: the best way to get good at praying is to pray.

Set aside a time every day to spend some time alone with God. I don’t know how busy you are, but I know that you make time for this. If God is a priority in your life, then communicating with him is a priority in your life.

Prayer: Making the World a Better Place

If you pray long enough, and pay attention to what you’re praying for, you’ll notice something amazing. God answers prayer. It usually won’t be in the way you expect. God is smarter than you, and he rarely works within our narrow expectations. But he does work. Pay attention, and you’ll see beautiful things happen in response to your prayers.

James 5:13-16
13Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. 14Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. 16Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.

The first night of winter camp I talked to some of you about spiritual warfare. I talked about how real spiritual warfare isn’t glorious. We don’t get to walk around in shiny suits of armor and kill big red dragons. Real spiritual warfare is fought on our knees.

So not only is prayer our communication with God, but it’s also God’s gift to us. We hear on the news that the world is falling apart, and we want to help fix it. But it’s so big and so complicated and we’re just… you know… people. But God has given us a tool. God told us that if we want this place to get better, we need to ask him to change it. We need to pray.

A Recap: Because People Forget Things

1. Prayer is important. Without it, you can’t get close to God.
2. Prayer is a learned skill. It takes work, but it’s worth it.
3. Prayer is powerful. With God, you can change the world.

Homework: Because Some Things Take Practice

Practice praying this week. Make time to make it happen. Sometimes you’ll feel like it, sometimes you won’t. But it’s always worth it.

In which I learn something

My understanding of love is far too narrow. My dad told me that. Except, he didn’t actually say those words. He’s classier than that. He listened to me complain, and then he showed me a better way. I’ll tell you what he said in a minute. First I need to tell you a short story.

When my grandma on my mother’s side died, her children drifted apart. Some families are held together by a single person. The family breaks apart when the person dies. My mom’s mom was one of those people. Time passed and my mom’s family became more of a memory than a reality.

Then, last year, my uncle found my mom again. He shattered decades of silence with a phone call. And just like that my family got bigger. My uncle (I’ll call him Colossus* on this site) brought with him a fianceé and her four year old daughter. I met him for the first time that I can remember at my wedding. I met him again over Christmas. Then, about a month ago, I got a call asking me to be his best man at his wedding. My brothers and I were asked to be groomsmen, and our significant others were asked to be bridesmaids.

As Beautiful and I drove to Idaho before the wedding, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being taken advantage of. I had a rented suit in the back seat, and I was driving over three hundred miles to participate in a wedding that would have no guests other than immediate family. But, most importantly, I didn’t really know the bride and groom.

When we got to Idaho, my dad was sitting in his office ruminating on the state of the universe while smoking a pipe and drawing. There are times when the world becomes very clear in that office. Hoping for one of those times, I sat down and shared my concerns with him. It was then that my dad looked at me and told me my definition of love was too narrow. He said the following with love in his voice, for them and for his son:

“They’re two lonely, hurting people looking for a family. And that’s why we’re doing this.”

My dad is a significantly wiser man than me. We saw two very different things when presented with the same situation. I saw myself being taken advantage of, and he saw an opportunity to show Christ’s love. Where my immediate response was to withdraw, his was to step forward. He opened his arms, his home, and his heart, and he treated them like the family they are. My dad has his faults, but his heart is the size of west Texas. And I hear west Texas is a pretty big place.

So the next day, I gathered my tux clad brothers, and we went to a wedding. The service was a small, beautiful affair. In the end, I lifted my glass of sparkling cider and welcomed Colossus and his wife into our family.

Like I said earlier, my understanding of love is far too narrow. But it’s getting better. If I can keep listening to people like my dad, if I can keep learning that I don’t have all the answers, maybe one day it’ll be as full as Christ wants it to be.


*Quite simply, the man in huge.

Fans, poo, and your conscience

[Author's note: This is another sermon I gave.]

Introduction:

Hi.

My name is still Tom. Christina asked me to speak again today. So here I am.

Last week we talked about walls, both walls of brick and mortar and walls of love and hope. Now, I don’t know if any of you noticed last week, but I’m not a professional public speaker. I was a bit nervous and skipped through some bits faster than I intended. I also didn’t have time to cover some of the stuff I wanted to talk about. Which is cool, in a way, because now I get to talk about that stuff today.

I have three things I want to talk about today. The first two I talked about last week, but I want to be more specific as to how to do them. The last thing I want to talk about I hinted at, but didn’t get to say too much.

The three things are:
1. How to find the holes in your wall.
2. How to fix the holes you find.
3. How to deal with the fact that not everybody will be happy with the construction work.

Unfortunately, when I sat down to write this, I filled up a whole sermon with just the first one. So… that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Finding holes in your wall.

Finding the draft:

I moved into an apartment about four years ago. It was a little one bedroom place that seemed nice enough during the summer. It was newish, was reasonably quiet, and had covered parking. The problem with the apartment didn’t show up until winter. The apartment had a tiny wall mounted heater that was as effective at heating up the apartment as a BIC is at lighting up a dark gym. In other words, you could tell it was doing something, but whatever it was doing, it wasn’t doing it that well.

So it was with a sense of mild horror that one day, while reading a book on the couch in my living room, I felt a cold draft. The tiny wall heater was barely capable of heating the room up without a draft. It didn’t have near the BTUs it would take to overcome the chilling effect of new cold air constantly trickling into the apartment. I was not about to spend the entire winter wearing my snowboarding gear in my own apartment. So I went on a draft hunt. My high school chemistry teacher taught me that the most heat sensitive part of your body is your wrist. (Now, there are more heat sensitive parts of your body. Anybody who has walked into a cold lake knows that. Since the conversation in question revolved around seeing whether a ceramic dish was still scalding hot, he figured nobody would use those parts.)

Anyway, I went through the whole apartment holding my wrist up to all sorts of things. I ran it along window seams. I ran it under the vent for the oven. I went around the front door and the sliding door. And then I went to the fireplace. I didn’t start with the fireplace because I assumed that it had a flue and that said flue was closed. I was wrong on both counts. My apartment had a fireplace with no flue. Just a gaping hole that ran straight up to the wild outdoors. And by “wild” I mean cold and drafty. So I did what any bachelor would do. I closed the glass doors in front of the fireplace (you know, the accordion kind) and duct taped it shut. I duct taped it but good. Deana and Rachel were there. They saw it and can testify to its awesomeness. It’s a miracle I ever got married.

Some of you are probably wondering what drafty fireplaces have to do with Christ-injuring sins. The answer is simple. Absolutely nothing. Heat sensitive wrists, on the other hand, are related in a deeply meaningful way. You see, my heat sensitive wrists let me detect the draft. And since I’m supposed to be talking about finding out where we’re sinning, it would make sense for me to use my heat sensitive wrist story as an analogy for whatever it is that helps us find sins in our lives. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Ready?

Heat sensitive wrists are very similar to your conscience (or moral compass, if you prefer). The major difference here is that where heat sensitive wrists detect heat (or the lack thereof), your conscience detects sin (or the lack thereof). So just use your conscience and all will be well. After all, my heat sensitive wrists worked out okay for me.

Why all will not be well if you just use your conscience:

As many of you have probably noticed, we don’t live in a perfect world. There is a lot of stuff out there that is well and truly screwed up. Can I say “screwed up?” Do I need to say, “messed up?” Regardless, the metaphorical poo has hit the metaphorical fan and made a big metaphorical mess of everything. So, the question is, how do you separate the good from the poo when your own conscience is covered with poo… metaphorically speaking, of course.

Can someone read 1 Timothy 4:1-3?

Paul was a classy guy. When he wrote a letter to his friend Timothy, he didn’t use words like “poo.” The way Paul put it was that in the messed up latter days (those are today, by the way), people would be walking around with their consciences seared with hot irons. It’s a significantly cleaner metaphor that I would have used if the word “poo” weren’t so funny to me. But enough about poo, let’s talk about wrists again.

Wrists are sensitive to heat because there are a bunch of nerves in the wrist that are sensitive to heat. If I were to take a scalding hot iron and burn them but good, my wrists would no longer be heat sensitive. I would have killed the nerves, thus killing my ability to find drafts in fireplaces. Or, in the case of my conscience, I would have lost the ability to tell right from wrong.

If you spend enough time in the world without the love and support of Christians around you, your consciences slowly goes numb. It doesn’t feel like someone slapping a hot iron on your wrist. If it did, we’d realize something was wrong. Instead, it happens bit by bit. You conscience gets scarred over one tiny cut at a time.

You go to school and your friends are gossiping about someone. You know that’s wrong but you don’t say anything. You rationalize or ignore it. After a while, it just seems like the way things are done. Your conscience bleeds a little bit.

You flip on the TV at night and watch another sitcom about attractive people have sex with other attractive people. None of them are married, at least, not married to the people they’re having sex with. You watch, knowing what they’re doing is wrong. But, eventually, it doesn’t seem as wrong as it used to. It just seems like how things are done. Your conscience bleeds a bit more.

Every time your dad has a bad day at work, he comes home and yells at you. You know that it’s wrong at first. But, after years of it, you start to think that having a bad day gives you the right to be cruel. It would seem strange to be nice to people when you didn’t feel like it. Like you were faking niceness or something. Your conscience bleeds a bit more.

After years and years of cutting and scarring and cutting and scarring, you start to lose feeling in the places that matter. You start to feel numb all over. Sure, you don’t act like you’re feeling numb. You act angry or sad of super happy or a seemingly random combination of them all. But deep inside, there’s this numb spot that you have a faint memory of not always being numb. If someone were to come along and tell you to search yourself for your faults and give them to Christ so that you could be made whole, you wouldn’t know where to start. You wouldn’t see faults. You wouldn’t see merit either. You wouldn’t see much of anything.

I realize I’m talking to Accelerate Youth Ministries, so some of you won’t have any idea what I’m talking about when I talk about that numbness. But I also realize I’m talking to high school students in the twenty first century. If modern society is good at anything, it’s good at crushing a healthy conscience. So I’m pretty sure that on one level or another, some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. And for the people who don’t know, it’s likely that at some point or another in your life, you will. The world is a hard place. Good people get hurt. It happens.

So, if you’re so numb you have no idea what’s wrong inside, or if you’re so perfect that you’re pretty sure that nothing is wrong inside, allow me to offer some hope. Christ can heal you. He said so himself.

Can someone read Luke 4:16-21?

This is part of what I talked about last week. Jesus didn’t just come to save your souls. He came to set you free, to give you sight, and to release you from oppression. Which, I think you’ll agree, is pretty sweet.

Waking up: Unsticking your Moral Compass

As with all things in Christianity, if you don’t know where to start, you should pray. As a Christian, you should always be in a state of prayer. Paul said that we should pray continually. Which sounds good, and I hear it is good, but it’s also hard. So let’s start with praying regularly. Pray when you get up. Pray before you eat. Pray before class. Pray after class. Pray before sleeping. Pray and pray and pray. Those of you doing the 60/60 Challenge with your running partners are doing this or trying to do this. And, if your compass is broken, your heat sensitive wrist if burnt to a crisp, and your conscience is a scarred over mess, start by praying to get those things fixed.

Can someone read Romans 8:26-28?

As a side note, you may have noticed that we read past one of those section headings. Those things always make me stop, or pause, or change gears. When you’re reading through the Bible, it’s important to know that those section headings weren’t in the original text. They were added to make the books easier to handle by breaking things up into logical sections. It’s okay to ignore them sometimes.

But back to praying. Paul says that the Spirit (which is part of God) intercedes for us. God is really, really smart. So smart, in fact, that he knows what you need to pray for even if you don’t. He knows what’s right for you even if you don’t know that you don’t know… if that makes sense. What he’s looking for from you isn’t a well worded request, what he’s looking for is intent.

Let me put that another way. You commit sins by doing and thinking. That is, you commit sin by willfully opposing yourself to God (even if you don’t realize you’re opposing anything). Your actions, thoughts, and words are things that come from you but they aren’t you. Sound comes from a drum, but the sound isn’t the drum. Light comes from a light bulb, but the light isn’t the light bulb.

I need someone to read Mathew 12:33-34

God doesn’t just want your thoughts or words or actions. God wants the source. He wants your heart. So when you pray to God, it’s okay to groan some times. It’s okay to speak without words. It’s okay to just… emote. To feel toward God. Give him all you have, even if it’s just a series of grunts, sighs, and other strange noises.

He understands. Remember, he knows what you need to ask before you ask. He just wants you to make the first step. It’s not an easy step, but it’s an important one.

Not only does God understand, he does something else. He sends his Holy Spirit to live in you and act as something of a surrogate conscience. He recognized that yours is broken, and being a loving and caring God, will provide you one to use while you heal.

You see, the sad truth is that your conscience will not heal overnight. You will not wake up tomorrow with all your internal scars magically swept away. God could do this for you, but he probably won’t. There wouldn’t be so many verses in the Bible talking about how enduring hard times well helps to make you stronger if God went around and started magically making life easy for Christians. The people who wrote the Bible knew God didn’t do that. What’s more, they knew that God uses hard situations to make you stronger.

This surrogate, this Holy Spirit, speaks to you. The Spirit does not whisper in your ear, at least not audibly. The Holy Spirit speaks to the part of you that everything else flows from, your heart. It is the heart that is the root of your actions and thoughts, and it is the heart that needs to heal first.

To re-cap: the world is a poo-hit-the-fan scale mess, if you want to get closer to God you need to know what’s keeping you separated (which is sin), and if you want to know what sin is you need God’s help.

Getting to know God: from Heart to Head

Paul the Apostle says it’s good to know God with your heart, but it’s also good to know him with your head. I agree, and that’s not just because Paul’s an apostle and I’m not. I agree because he’s right. The apostles were wrong sometimes. Further proof that you and I have a shot at this Christianity thing.

The question is, how do we get to know God better? Well, we pray. But we talked about that earlier. We’re doing that, at least we’re trying to do that. We’ll just say that it’s in the works. Anyway, there’s something else we can do. It’s even something we should do.

This is complicated, so I want to make sure you’re ready for it. Ready? Okay. Here it is.

Read your Bible.

Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

The reason you want to read your Bible is simple. It’s about God, and it’s inspired by him. Since we’re trying to get to know God better, it makes sense to read a book inspired by him.

Some of you may be confused right now. First I was talking about seared consciences, and now all of a sudden I’m talking about getting to know God. I have an explanation. Your conscience is what tells you right from wrong. God, being perfect, has a perfect knowledge of right and wrong. Thus, getting to know God is getting to know what is right and wrong.

To put it differently, living in the world will blind you to the truth. Following Christ will open your eyes to the truth. There are a whole bunch of verses in the Bible that talk about how Christ coming into the world is like a giant light was turned on. Before Christ we were blind to the truth. With Christ, we can see the truth.

So, I’m going to say it again. Read your Bible. I’ve talked to people before who didn’t much care for the Bible. They wanted to know God in their heart, but they didn’t think the Bible would help them there. And the Bible by itself, and by that I mean without prayer and Christian fellowship, won’t. They had that part right. But reading the Bible is an important part of maturing as Christians. We have to start our journey with Christ down here, in the heart. But it can’t get very far unless we involve our heads as well.

By the way, because the act of maturing as Christians is a process of getting closer to God, you can replace the phrase “maturing as Christians” with “spiritually healing.” Remember that. Spiritual maturity is a process of spiritual healing.

Back to the Bible. The Bible was written by a bunch of different people over a really long time period. When you read it, you’ll notice something. Each author has a slightly different take on God. They use different analogies, and they emphasize different characteristics. Take the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All four books are about the life and times of Jesus Christ. And while each book has some of the same events, they all include something different. They all have a slightly different take on who Christ was.

Has everyone heard the story about the four blind monks and the elephant? The four monks all ran into an elephant and each tried to explain the experience to the others. The first monk said it was a giant serpent. That monk was holding the elephant’s trunk. The second monk said the elephant was like a giant column. That monk was touching the elephant’s leg. The third monk said the elephant was a giant leathery wall. That monk was touching the elephant’s side. The fourth monk said the elephant was a huge four legged creature with big ears and a snake-like nose. At which point the other three monks realized that the fourth monk was lying about being blind.

The point is, the three blind monks were experiencing the same elephant. But they couldn’t experience the whole elephant all at once. The elephant was too big for their powers of perception. God is like that. He’s too big to see all at once. He’s too big to take in within one life time.

Which is where the Bible comes into play for us. You see, all those different books in the Bible written by all those different authors gives you access to life times of experience getting to know God. All those different people look at God differently. And comparing those different viewpoints gives you a bigger picture.

There’s this photo program out there called Photosynth. For all the nerds here today, you need to check it out. It’s amazingly cool. What it does is simple. It gathers together a whole bunch of pictures of the same object, say the Sistine Chapel or the Eiffel Tower. Well, all those photos are going to be taken from different angles and directions. Some are going to be taken from the east, some from the south, some from the middle looking straight up. The program takes all those pictures and combines them into a three dimensional environment you can move around in virtually. You see, the sum total of the information in all those pictures has enough information to digitally recreate the place in question.

That’s kind of what the Bible is doing. It’s giving you a whole bunch of different vantage points that you can use to get a bigger, better, more complete picture of who God is. And, by getting to know who God is, you get to know what right is and what wrong is.

Why We Care

Remember, the reason we care about knowing the difference between right and wrong is that sin keeps us from God. At least, sin keeps us from experiencing the love that God wants us to experience. In other words, sin keeps us from being whole.

We were designed for union with God. We were made in his image. He calls us his children. But we live in a world of crud. We’re surrounded by it. Sometimes it feels like we’re filled with it. So he sent his son to die on a cross. It is that sacrifice that will wash the crud from us if we ask. And more than that, more than brushing off the dirt, if we don’t stop there, Christ will do something beautiful. He’ll make us in his image again. He’s restore what was tainted. And then all sorts of cool stuff will happen. Then we’ll start truly living.