A Thought About Holiness

I'm cleaning up my message for tomorrow morning's worship gathering and have been considering holiness for a few moments. Here is a thought that will not make it into this message and might be worth sharing.

Personal holiness is not about (nor is it measured by) profound theological understanding, ecstatic expressions of worship, or extremes in sacrifice. It is simply thinking the way God thinks and wanting what God wants.

Our actions take care of themselves when these fundamental concerns are rightly in place.

Thoughts About Failure

Failure is an event, not a person.
I love this thought. It clearly reminds me that although I will surely experience failure, I am not one. Maybe you too!

God does not look at us through the lens of our greatest failure, but through the lens of our greatest potential.

I think God likes it when we fail some. We learn so much that way. Faith grows that way. I think there is a way to fail forward. To fail for trying instead of failing for lack of effort. In the parable of the talents its the guy who feared failure that received the master's reproof.

So, go on. Try it. Try it real big and just call it an experiment so that if you fail, everyone around you will just be looking for what you learn instead of what you produce. And if the experiment is a success, God gets all the credit!

Repentance Question

In my thinking about repentance and in my daily consideration of the things that need changing in myself, I keep coming back to the same question.

WHY IS TRUE REPENTANCE SO DIFFICULT TO REALIZE?

Tell me what you think.

More on Repentance

As I read through and meditated on today's quiet time in our guide for this week, I reflected even more on the idea of God's will.

How easy it is for us as Christians to wait for God to reveal His will! How easy to put off our obedience because we are waiting for God to reveal his will. How easy to wait to serve others, press into worship, pursue our mission, develop our character, sacrifice our pursuits until God tells us or shows us more of His plan for us. What a convenient excuse.

I did it. I do it.

I was 12 when God first showed me that He planned to use me in ministry. Then the picture was of a Youth Pastor. Through my high school years, I involved myself in my youth group, eventually taking on leadership roles and responsibilities. I did this to pursue God's plan for me. Along the way, I discovered that I was good at business - administration, visioning, planning, and implementing. So, I developed a goal of owning my own business some day. Soon I was pursuing that and doing my youth group stuff on the side. Then, through a set of painful experiences, God reminded me of His calling on my life. I began to prepare for Bible college and seminary by going to Jr. College and working to save. When it was time to transfer to the university, I didn't have enough money saved and had to take a year off of school to work and save money. After a year, I didn't have enough money and had to work more. I did less in my youth ministry and even gave up on Sunday worship. And soon my old desires to start my own business resurfaced. And I began to pray that God would show me His will. Here's what God showed me. (He led me to some scriptures, spoke to my spirit, and used fellow believers to advise me.) I didn't need to know more about God's future for me. He had already revealed all I needed to know about that. I needed to follow God's will for today and by obeying Him today, He would get me to the tomorrow He had planned for me.

Well, I made a fast and sweeping course change and got myself in to the university the very next semester. God took care of the money and everything else too!

I have such a painful desire to rule my own life: to make my own decisions and set my own priorities. I remember a season in my life and ministry when I could identify weekly, if not daily, instances of sensing God's direction. And in those seasons I always got closer to God's ultimate plan and in fact lived God's ultimate plan.

I need God. I need His Spirit to guide me every day in every way.

I have shamefully tried to take over God's position of leadership in my life and given myself permission to do so for a thousand reasons, not the least of which is because I am waiting for God to show me His will for my future. I need His will for this minute. I need to obey what I already know about for this minute. I need to repent of doing my life and my ministry my way and just get back to what I already know from God, and seek His direction for every act of obedience to that divine will.

Good Theology Please

OK, I read a post on an old friend's blog that bothered me. It bothered me because it was so mean spirited. It bothered me because it never came around to offer hope to anyone. It never came around to offer anyone something practical to use to grow closer to God or more like Him. But most of all, it bothered me because this friend used bad theology.

So, for everyone's benefit, here are just a couple of basic rules of theological thinking.

1. Always use the Bible to interpret the Bible as your first and primary source.

a. Look for other passages that talk about the same subject and see how

those passages seem to interpret what you have read in another location.

b. Read the whole book from which your study passage is drawn. Jesus would

often tell us what he wanted us to do in response to a parable several verses

later.

2. Always use Jesus to understand the rest of the New Testament. We have often misunderstood Jesus because we have already studied Paul. When we should

start with Jesus and interpret Paul's writing by what we have already learned

directly from Jesus. It is an incredible gift to have Paul's #1 source available to

us in order to better understand Paul. To work in the other direction can be

disastrous.

I did send a private message to my old friend, sharing my opinion.