My ADD Apology

As it turns out, I’m ADD.  Without the H.  No hyperactivity here.  Just plain ole, clinically diagnosed ADD.  In fact, I took an objective test, and when the doc went over the results, he showed me where I was (which was at the top) and said as he pointed below my score, “And here’s the rest of the clinical population.”

So, yeah, I’m as ADD as the dogs on “Up.”  In fact, now that I know this, when I catch myself doing ADD stuff, I shout – sometimes in my head, sometimes out loud – “SQUIRREL!”

The most unfortunate side of this is how it has affected my relationships with others.  I have (most times) unknowingly and unintentionally caused others to feel like I’m ignoring them, or I spaced out during a conversation, or got distracted by something else while they were talking, or seemed to be more interested in my own things, or in many other ways come across as self-centered, uncaring, and/or arrogant.  Maybe I said something stupid at an inappropriate time, usually trying to be funny when they were trying to be serious.  Maybe you needed to to sit down and talk about something real and all I wanted to do was joke.

Like I said, most of the time it was unintentional.  The other times, which I think and hope were few, I was just being a jerk.

So, if I’ve made you feel that way, whether it was unintentionally or not, I apologize.

“where I’m at spiritually”

Have you ever said this? I have. And I have friends who have. And that got me thinking about it.

Most of the time this phrase means something like, “Am I doing a bunch of good stuff or not-so-good stuff?” Or, if we really get to the heart of the question, “Is the way I’m living my life right now pleasing to God or not so pleasing to God?”

So, in a typical conversation, it may go like this:

“So, how are you doing spiritually?” “Man, I’m not where I need to be spiritually right now…I’m not having quiet times (or I’m not sharing the Gospel) (or I’m not memorizing Scripture) (or I’m cussing to much/drinking too much/enjoying sinful forms of entertainment/etc).”

Notice that all the examples are focused on things that I’m either doing or not doing as the basis for “where I’m at spiritually,” which usually means “where I’m at in my standing before the Lord.” So, if I’m having quiet times every day or I’m sharing the Gospel regularly or I’m memorizing Scripture then God is pleased with me, but if I’m using foul language or drinking too much or enjoying sinful forms of entertainment then God is not pleased with me.

Now, are those things a Christian should and should not be doing? Yes.

Are they the basis for our standing before the Lord? Absolutely not!

The statement “where I’m at spiritually” exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of the Gospel.

It is an understanding of the Gospel that goes something like this, “Once I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, then I’m supposed to do a bunch of good stuff, learn Christian lingo, join some Bible studies, and be a goodie-goodie.” Or maybe not so sarcastically, “Once I accept Jesus Christ, I’m saved (which is right!) and now I have to clean up my own act and start living right (which is only marginally right at best).”

And so God goes from being angry at me (before accepting Christ) to being either pleased with me or not-as-mad-at-me-as-he-was-before-I-became-a-believer-but-still-upset-with-me (after accepting Christ). And the basis for His being pleased with me or upset with me is my effort.

The assumption is that we can do some things that are pleasing to God by ourselves. And we just can’t. As the Bible says, even our most righteous acts are as filthy rags before the Lord. So if you have this “where I’m at spiritually based solely on what my actions are like” mentality, you need to know that even when your actions are at their BEST, you stand in judgment before the Lord.

This phrase, “where I’m at spiritually,” is probably the modern day equivalent of the ancient Jewish question, “Are you keeping all the Law?” And if you are, then you are right before God.

As believers in Christ, we ought to have a more complete understanding of the Gospel. We get the first part right. Once Jesus saves us, we’re saved. But what about the way we view our actions after we are saved?

Galatians 2:16 says, “a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.”

Put simply, your salvation and your justification (your right standing before God) are based solely on the work of Christ. If you have faith in Christ unto salvation, then your basis for right standing before God is His righteousness not your own!

So where are you spiritually? If you’re anywhere else but at the foot of the Cross, pleading the blood of Christ, resting in His death and resurrection as your substitutionary atonement and righteousness, walking by faith in the Son of God through the power of the Holy Spirit within you, then you are not where you need to be.

If you’re saying “I’m not where I need to be spiritually,” you’re probably right, because you’re probably looking to your own righteousness (or lack thereof) rather than the righteousness of Christ which is yours by faith.

Perfect, But Not

Hebrews 10:14, “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.”

He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

One of our greatest needs this side of Heaven is to know that we are accepted in God’s sight. And one of the unfortunate side effects of sin is that it destroys any assurance that we are. How could God accept me and love me when I did this? How could God save me when I did this?

We’ve all been there – guilt assaulting our souls, doubts tormenting our minds.

And through the cacophony of voices comes the sweet and tender words of our Savior, “You are forgiven.”

You are forgiven. He knows what you did. He knows you’re probably going to do it again. And He loves you anyway.

And here’s the greatest truth of all: You’re not only forgiven, and God not only loves you, but He sees you as perfect, even in the midst of your sin.

Not because you are perfect, for you still sin, but because Christ was, for He never did.

And now you get Christ’s perfection, while the Holy Spirit works in you to get you there.

There Is A Fountain

Every so often, a song will capture my heart and attention.  Does this ever happen for you?  When it happens to me, I have to listen to the song over and over.  Today, I had the line “and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains” stuck in my head.  So I googled it for the name, which is “There is a Fountain” by William Cowper, and found the following video on YouTube of Selah performing it.  The lyrics are listed after the video.

1. There is a fountain filled with blood,
   Drawn from Immanuel’s veins,
   And sinners plunged beneath that flood
   Lose all their guilty stains.
2. The dying thief rejoiced to see
   That fountain in His day;
   And there have I, though vile as he,
   Washed all my sins away.
3. Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood
   Shall never lose its pow’r,
   Till all the ransomed church of God
   Are safe, to sin no more.
4. E’er since by faith I saw the stream
   Thy flowing wounds supply,
   Redeeming love has been my theme,
   And shall be till I die.
5. When this poor, lisping, stamm’ring tongue
   Lies silent in the grave,
   Then in a nobler, sweeter song,
   I’ll sing Thy pow’r to save.

What's it to you?

I was going to say that the Lord has been good to us recently. But as I typed that sentence, God said, “That’s it? Recently?” And then he flooded my mind with all the hard times we’ve been through that taught us that He is always good, even in the worst of times. And so, I’m going to rephrase it.

The Lord has been particularly good to us recently. Our van doesn’t work and our car is a 5-speed, which stinks. (I realize that owning two cars makes us super-rich according to global standards, which is why I said the Lord has been particularly good to us recently.)

Anyway, we’ve been thinking and praying about what to do about it. And it’s funny how God does these things. We were looking around. We don’t want a car payment or anything like that. But even used cars are so expensive nowadays. And I got some good advice from a woman I work with who basically said, “Just pray about it! You never know how God will provide!”

So, Leah has a half-sister named Doris. And they haven’t really had a relationship in years because of some past issues with their step mother. It’s complicated. But they have recently reconnected. And they found out they quite like each other.

They are talking about a week and a half ago, and Leah is telling her about our car situation. And Doris says, “You know we own a used car lot, right? And we have this Ford Explorer that sounds exactly like what you’re looking for.” So we go down and look at it and we loved it. And they sold it to us for about $4000 less than its worth.

The reason I tell you all that is because I don’t know how to tell stories without back stories. Here’s what I’m getting at: We’re at this car lot this past Thursday getting this SUV and Leonard, Doris’ husband, has hired this guy who is a bi-polar ex-convict to work on his lot cleaning cars and other odd jobs. He’s basically giving him a second chance kind of thing. Well, this guy is washing our car, which we are trading in, and when he’s done he walks over to me and hands me this bracelet with this cross pendant on it, and he mumbles, “You left this on the rearview mirror, some kinda religious thing…thought it was important.”

I wanted to scream. SOME KIND OF RELIGIOUS THING??? IT’S THE CROSS!! IT’S THE ONLY EXECUTION DEVICE TO EVER BRING LIFE!!!

But I didn’t. Because he’s a bi-polar ex-convict. And I’m a wuss.

But all of this has just gotten me thinking. The cross he handed me was a pretty cross. It was given to Leah as a gift. But let’s just think about that for a minute. A pretty cross?

The cross was anything but pretty. If you would have been there, if you had seen Him hanging on the cross, with blood running down his face from the crown of thorns, with the railroad spikes through his wrists and feet, with the blood from his skinless back running down the back of his legs and dripping to the ground beneath him, you would have, at best, hidden your face from the sight, you would probably have vomited, and maybe even passed out. It was disgusting. And then there were the screams of agony as Jesus put all of his weight on those nails so that he could lift himself up, dragging his beaten back up that wooden, un-sanded piece of wood, just so that he could take a breath.

It’s offensive. The cross is offensive and gruesome and terrible. But pretty crosses make it a little more palatable. Because, really, who’s going to wear an electric chair around their neck, except some raving lunatic?

Look, I don’t have a problem with cross jewelry. I think Christians should wear a cross necklace or a ring with a cross on it if they want to. If they are ready to explain what it means if asked. You wear a cross, you better be ready to tell somebody about it. They compliment it, saying, “That’s a pretty cross!” “Well, thank you, but let me tell you about what it represents.”

But that’s what you’ve got to figure out. What’s the cross to you?

C.S. Lewis on "Temperance"

Today’s reading from “The Business Of Heaven: Daily Readings from C.S. Lewis” by Walter Hooper was really good, so I thought I’d share.

“Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usualy means teetotalism. But in the days when the second Cardinal virtue was christened ‘Temperance’, it meant nothing of the sort. Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures, and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion. Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he wants to give the money to the poor, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying. One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons — marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of the word Temperance to the question of drink. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man who makes his golf or his motor bicycle the centre of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as ‘intemperate’ as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals.”

Trading a Lamborghini for a Geo Metro

(sermon excerpt, Philippians 3:17-21)

Verse 20-21, “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.”

So we don’t pursue self-actualization here, we don’t pursue wealth and material accumulation here, because our citizenship is in Heaven.

Look, where you’re from makes a difference in who you are, what you like, and what you want. When we lived in Indiana, they didn’t want LSU to win the national championship last year. They didn’t want the Saints to be successful. Why? They wanted their teams to be successful. They wanted the Indianapolis Colts to win the Super Bowl. They didn’t want boiled crawfish in the spring. They didn’t want a big pot of gumbo when it was cold outside. They wanted other things.

In the same way, if your citizenship is on earth, then you will desire earthly things, earthly pleasures. But if your citizenship is in Heaven, you shouldn’t desire those same things. No, you are looking to Christ. Your mind is set on things above. You can’t wait to rid yourself of this sin-ridden, decaying, soul-shell so that you can put on your glorified body, the body like the one Jesus has now, which will live forever in sinlessness and painlessness and function as a well-oiled, God-glorifying machine, because your heart will finally be free to just worship Him and the idea of worshipping him unceasingly won’t sound boring, and you will rejoice in the fact that when you’ve been there 10,000 years, you’ll have no less than when you first begun!

That’s what we’re looking forward to!

That’s why we are imitating Paul and not those others who are walking as enemies of the cross. It’s like trading in your Lamborghini for a Geo Metro.

We can’t even imagine the unending, immeasurable pleasures of Heaven. And because they are unknown to us, we are so easily tempted to give them up for the known, yet far less superior pleasures of this life.

May we have minds set on Christ this morning, and this week, and this month, and this year, so that we don’t wind up walking as enemies of the cross.

Must read for Christian Men

Thanks to a good friend, Will Turner, I was pointed to Mark Driscoll’s short e-book “Porn-again Christian.” It’s a short book, but the message is clear and needed.

Of course, I want all my man-family guys to read it as a refresher of what we spent our year together building up in each other.

But not just those guys! If you are a Christian dude, you should read this book. You can read it online for free and its pretty short, so you don’t have any excuses, except you like your porn and don’t want to get convicted about it.

Look, even if you don’t typically like Driscoll or The Resurgence (you know who you are), you still need to read this.

If you are a woman, you probably don’t need to read this book, unless you are reading it with your husband AND he has invited you to read it with him AND he is willing to talk about these things openly and honestly AND if something comes out that you weren’t expecting, you can work with him for his purity, not beat him down or disrespect him like he’s some kind of animal. He’s not. He’s a dude, and all of us dudes face this temptation. It’s your job as his wife to help him fight it off. If he’s steeped in it or has been steeped in it, he’s got enough guilt on his own AND IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!

There ya have it. Men, read it.

Here’s the link: http://relit.org/porn_again_christian/toc.php

Black Panther Sighting

I know this isn’t typical material for this blog, but I have to tell my story.

I went to Super One in Pineville, LA yesterday (December 13th). I pulled into the parking lot around noon and I was talking with a friend, so I stayed in the car. The parking spot I was in was facing a large, tree-lined field next to the store.

As I was sitting there, I saw a large, jet black cat step out of the trees. It was probably 100 yards away, and seemed to be a little larger than a golden retriever…but this was no dog. It had pointy ears and a long tail.

It just stood there, looking around for a while. Then it walked around the edge of the field. After about 10 or 15 minutes, it disappeared into the woods.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera with me, and I was talking on the phone at the time. So, I have no proof. Oh well. Fortunately, it wasn’t Bigfoot, or something else less believable!

The video below, especially around 29 seconds, shows what I saw. As Ripley would say, “Believe it or not!”

His Birth Means Our Salvation

The terrible, yet glorious, implication of John 3:16-17 is that the cross was not an accident.

The cross was not an accident.

Jesus wasn’t crying out to God in Gethsemane because things had gone terribly wrong.

They had gone terribly right.

So, this Christmas, instead of focusing on the “Merry Giving,” as the sign in our local mall says, how about we focus on Jesus Christ.

God in the flesh.

Savior of the World.

Who for the joy set before him endured the cross.

So that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

Making Him the greatest gift you or I shall ever receive.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son…”

Let’s celebrate Him this Christmas.