Inspiring Grace

As long as I’ve been a Christian I’ve struggled with the concept of grace. Do I really need it? Are the normal everyday slip-ups of pride and selfishness and the occasional white lie so bad that I truly need a life-altering, sacrificial Savior? Growing up in a Christian home grounded me in a Jesus-based right and wrong. I didn’t want to lie or be selfish or fail to have discipline – but sometimes I did – and then I promised I’d be better. I’d do better.

Behavior modification is a slippery slope.  Faith suffers when we zone out in church and miss quiet time, so we’re told to pay attention and make time in the day. So often our problems confessed are answered with a list of actions to follow the next day. But what happens when the desire to do these behaviors is missing? Shouldn’t there be a transforming power that comes with being saved that makes church and quiet time and the presence of Jesus something we can’t live without? For me, this constant influx of instructions has dumbed an awe-inspiring concept of grace down to a guilt-inducing moral code. A code of do’s and don’ts and expectations that sometimes weighs me down so heavily I can’t even think to miss the hope that should be found somewhere in this whole Jesus-following thing.

The weight and burden of my actions became so great that I put my faith on hold. I didn’t love Jesus or seek his face. How could I when my actions had so repeatedly failed? I couldn’t do better – I’d tried. “The things I do not want to do – these I keep on doing”, to use Paul’s words. Christianity without an understanding of grace is a stagnant place of constantly failing to meet expectations, and that’s the point I reached: a depressed faith where I knew what I should do but had no desire to act. After all, what was the point? Failure was inevitable.

And then someone challenged me to consider the difference between seeking Jesus and grace and simply modifying behavior. I was taking the Holy Spirit’s convictions, thanking him for his trouble, and then shutting the door in his face for me to deal with it on my own. A night spent crying on a friend’s couch revealed the flaw – I sought answers from her about the frustration and confusion and weight I felt, and she simply turned me to Jesus. And I resented her for it. “Obviously I need to Jesus, but come on” was my attitude. But her nudging lingered and pressed on my mind until it burned its way to clarity. In living my Christian life. I’d left Jesus behind. I followed the good Christian moral code like any good girl who grew up in the church, but I had no passion for Christ. When I read Paul speaking of his awe for Jesus so mighty he couldn’t contain himself, I felt envy – not agreement or contentment.

So I’m learning. Slowly God’s opening my eyes to all His Words that have been pointing me to this realization – all the lessons from so many places about abiding in the presence of the Lord, about praying continually, and seeking His face. I don’t expect perfection. I know I won’t read my Bible every day next week or pray about everything I should or be as kind to everyone as I need to be. I know sometimes I’ll seek counsel and be told to work on my quiet times and prayer life. But I pray that I will take that instruction and turn away from the culture of Jesus I’ve settled for for so long and pursue the person of Jesus. I pray that I will know my times of sadness or stress mean I’ve fallen away from his presence and need to be still and accept his grace. I pray that I don’t just experience a great time in the Word or a long session of prayer, but that I experience Him. And instead of feeling guilt and weight when I fail, I’ll seek hope in the knowledge that all He asks is to seek His face. To love Jesus.

My pastor said today, speaking about not knowing how to discipline his kids, “I don’t need God to change my behavior, I need to understand who God is better. If I think of how he is patient with me, I know how I should be patient with my kids.”

God doesn’t call us to “do’s” or “don’ts” or a life of checking things off a checklist. He doesn’t want to modify our behavior but transform our hearts. And while that by no means trivializes the importance of prayer or quiet time, it does change our approach. I want to know the person of my Lord, so I seek his face in prayer and His voice in the Bible. I share what He’s teaching me with others and listen to their stories in turn so we can fall more in love with the Creator together. What a beautiful life of hope He has prepared for us – if only I will take off the burden of these self-imposed expectations and surrender to His inspiring grace.

 

Knowing

Senses hungrily grab information

What eyes see, what ears hear

Can you really know?

Analyze the memories

Pick, pick apart

Meaning in everything

But nothing in clarity

Trust it’s true

Faith?

Scary as crap.

to make good

To lead. A burden far greater than I ever anticipated when I dreamed of growing up. So far I’ve turned it into a stressful event every time I’m put in charge. I retreat so deep into self that all I have mind for is my own stress, failures, and emotions. I don’t serve.

I want to lead and think of others. I want to go so fully into other that the ultimate goal of leadership – to have others leading and contributing and participating – is a win for me. I want a smile on the participants’ faces to equal success in my heart. I’m tired of leading in and for myself. I want to serve so wholly and truly that it’s like I’m not even there – for me and others.

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

God. Lord. Father. I know you want to be a servant. A slave. You said the old Gentile rulers lorded their authority over their followers and ruled from a place of control, not love. But I want to lead as you led. To remove self and be other. To be the slave of all. And I can’t do it without your Spirit giving me words to say and taking me out of my own stupid head.

As Tuesday draws closer, my first day as a small group leader, fear grows stronger and stronger in my heart for how I will lead these girls, many of whom asked to be in my group. Do they know? Can they see the uncertainty in my eyes? I fear unpreparedness. I fear busyness. Doubt. Bossiness. Hypocrisy. Insincerity. In the mirror of my own leadership, these faults stand glaring me down as I try to prepare prayerfully for the days, weeks, and months ahead. I’m not ready for this.

Yet it is not I who must be ready. I am not the one who gave his life as the ransom for many – but He who did wants to equip me to follow in His footsteps. One of the speakers during the BCM leadership retreat spoke of the parable of the talents – each talent being worth something like a million dollars, I don’t remember how much exactly. To one servant was given five talents, another three, and the last one, according to their history of performance in the past. The first two went out and invested their talents, doubling the original amount entrusted to them by their master. The last did not follow his fellow servants’ ways but instead went out into the fields, dug a hole in the ground, and left his talent buried until his master returned. The first two servants were praised by their master for their investments and returns: “Well done, good an faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come, share in your master’s happiness.” Mark 25:23. The last servant, however, admitted his fear of action and of his master, saying “I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.”

I am the man of the one talent. Where much – millions – has been entrusted to me, I am an ostrich burying its head in the sand with fear. God gives abundantly and I hand it right back: Here. This is what belongs to you. It’s yours, God!

But that’s not what God wants. The opportunities that come our way are investments. To live in fear, burying the leadership skill or musical talent or prayer life or whatever it is in long term storage until God comes back is to hear the Lord say: “You wicked, lazy servant… You should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest…Throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Mark 25:26-30. No matter what fear whispers in the dark, we must make a return on what God has entrusted to us. He doesn’t want to turn us out into the weeping and gnashing; he gives us gifts so that we will do something with them.

I fear leading a small group because I’m afraid of my own leadership. I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past and trample the talents of those I lead into the mud as I pursue praise and power for myself. Studying Jesus’s words about the authoritative Gentiles of old shows me that that’s not God’s desire, either – but it’s equally wrong for me to retreat altogether into the shell of fear and self-doubt.

He has entrusted to me this one talent, this one million: my small group. And I must act to make good on His investment so I can hear those beautiful words – “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Redeemed

You know God’s trying to hit something home when “coincidences” somehow miraculously come together and you keep encountering the same truth in random places. I’ve been studying 1 Samuel and James in the past few days, and the truth in those pages practically screamed at me. The story of Hannah in the first few chapters of Samuel defies customs and culture – a poor woman from the hills understands faith to a far greater degree than the priest in charge of teaching other s about faith. Her passion for the Lord inspires me, and the way she follows through on her relationship with actions convicts me, especially since I read the story of Hannah at the same time I read about faith and deeds in James.

“As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.” James 2: 26

I love the way Hannah’s faith leads directly to her actions. She cried out to God with faith and then God used her to uplift and guide an entire nation through her son, Samuel. A personal relationship with God shouldn’t have been on Hannah’s radar, but God used her in her barrenness, her anger against her husband’s other wife, and in her motherhood for his own redemption. Just the way she was, a poor woman in the hills – God didn’t make her have a life epiphany or talk to the priest. He took her faith as it was.

God doesn’t make you come to him for redemption. You don’t have to get all your ducks in a row and have life figured out for him to redeem you, to come right down to where you are and save you.

Rahab was still a prostitute when she saved the three Israelite spies. Ruth was still a Moabite, a pagan  race detestable in the eyes of the Lord, when she chose to stay with Naomi.

God chose these women right where they were, in the middle of their circumstances, and he used them. Their lives were forever changed – having tasted and seen the life of faith they couldn’t turn back, but as complete strangers to the way of the Most High they still performed great deeds of faith. God didn’t ask Ruth to reject her identity as a Moabite before using her to help Naomi. God didn’t make Rahab clean up her act and go to the temple for a while before she could save his men’s lives. He used them just as they were. All he asked was a little bit of faith to bring great deeds to life.

What a beautiful testament to the love and grace of our Lord! If you’re one of the Hannah’s of this world, then I I don’t have to be David Platt for God to use me or for my faith to come deeds. No, wherever I am in my walk, as I struggle to wrap my mind around this everyday, every moment relationship with Christ – God redeems me. He uses me. I might not be the best speaker or have the most consistent prayer life, but God still redeems me. And every word, every gesture, is an opportunity to make my faith come alive in deeds for his eternal glory.

Gospel Time

Loneliness. Failure. Disappointment. Emptiness inside. Hunger to be known. Humanity runs on trying to sate these desires, trying to fill a gap in life with anything we can get our hands on.

That gap is sin, and it will forever hold satisfaction out of our reach. Why? Because God is the only thing that can fill the emptiness in our hearts, and He cannot just disregard the evil of sin – a price must be paid. But the beautiful part about the gospel is that “God demonstrates his love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8).

There’s nothing we can do about the sin situation on our own. We are weak and powerless, too wrapped up in ourselves to lift a finger without carrying sin along. But God loves us with a love greater than anything we can hope to understand – a love so great that he sent his son Jesus to die a horrible death on the cross and bridge that gap of sin. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but gain everlasting life.” (John 3:16). So long as we remain wallowing in our sin, the price is death and an eternity of punishment. But with the gift of God’s grace and mercy and Jesus’s sacrifice, we are forever redeemed and embraced as children of God. This salvation has nothing to do with our actions; again, we are powerless on our own. Salvation is merely an acceptance of what God is handing to us freely: a life forever with him, free from the loneliness and failure and emptiness weighing us down.

The even greater news of the gospel is that Jesus’s sacrifice didn’t end with his death on the cross. He rose again after three days! He paid the price, redeemed our souls, and returned to reign with the Father in heaven. Romans 6:8-11 sums up the power of Jesus’s resurrection perfectly: “If we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Faith in Jesus Christ is not a sad, dead faith, but a living joy that will change your life forever!

Christian Ministries Matter

Something clicked for me when I came to UGA and joined our BCM. For the first time, I feel a part of a Christian community. I experienced discipleship, leadership, service – all the things that never fell into place before have suddenly come together in the building on Lumpkin Street. I spend a large (probably too large) bulk of my time either at the B or thinking of everything I need to do the next time I’m at the B – and I absolutely love it. But not everyone feels the same way about collegiate ministry, or Christian ministries in general. In the past several weeks, I’ve heard several different perspectives surface in conversations:

“This ministry frustrates me. All we do is talk to our same group of Christian friends! That’s not real discipleship!”

“We keep going in circles with this ministry. All of the problems are discussed, but none of them are solved.”

“I feel like this ministry is isolated and exclusive, and I’m tired of not reaching the campus.”

These arguments each carry valid points and have reasonable proof, but I think we’re getting hooked up on the details and missing the bigger picture of what ministries like the BCM accomplish.

First off, this is college. The setting is no longer the Sunday school/youth group experience so many of us grew up in. The people involved in the ministry want to be there – Mom and Dad can’t drag you into the minivan and force you to sit in the pew anymore. So even though it’s tempting to take for granted the community of Christians around you, don’t. They’re sacrificing study time, party time, and whatever else they could have come up with to be immersed in Christ alongside their fellow believers. Just because you believe the Bible and love Jesus doesn’t make it any easier to show up to a service every week!

But what a community it is when you show up! The Bible studies, the late night talks, the friendships, the experience, and so much more that I have gained from my involvement with BCM have had the greatest impact of almost anything else on my walk with Christ. How can that not be considered discipleship?  I guess we’ve been bombarded our whole lives with heart-wrenching discussions and the tear-jerking bonfire nights at summer camp until we’ve grown complacent with spiritual growth and taken it for granted. What we don’t realize when we’ve been raised in the church is that every discussion makes a difference. That training to open up and examine yourself, to share with your community how you’ve grown and how you’ve stumbled – these are skills that most people outside the church don’t experience in the same way. They don’t have a God to answer to. But Christian ministries believe in discipleship, which means making people grow in the Lord. In practical terms, that means facilitating community environments for people to be held accountable, to love your enemy, to serve with humility, to fess up and do better when you fail. For me, these things mean the difference between a stale relationship with God and an active one full of fruit.

So don’t hate if your small group doesn’t have any non-believers in it. Don’t think that nothing’s being accomplished, or your ministry isn’t going anywhere. I definitely don’t want to undermine the importance of evangelism or applaud exclusive, “Christian bubble” tendencies, but I want us to think about how often we take for granted the value of what we’ve got. People’s lives are changing. Who are we to protest the work of our ministries when Christ is using them to help people grow?

 

 

 

Savannah

How

     how do I express

     in mere words 

     all that my heart knows?

How do I describe

   the only peace that lasts

   the only joy that holds

   the love that never fades?

How do I convey 

    that God

    is more than just a high,

    and that emotions let you down?

How do I speak the truth

   when the truth is far too blunt,

   when the romantic veil is torn,

   and life seeps through the cracks?

All I want is to say what I know

     to share how I’ve grown

           show how I’ve changed.

It’s not the high,

Not the low.

It’s the still small voice in my heart.

The kinda day to write a song in a car…

It’s a blustery day,
just like Winnie the Pooh,
It’s a blustery day
for you and me, too.
But the sun is still sunny,
And the blue is so blue,
Let’s let the wind blow all
The old into new,
And I will keep searching,
My honey, for you.

But don’t fly too far away
I’ll come where you are
If you promise to stay
Where the sun is still sunny,
And the blue is so blue,
Let’s let the wind blow all
The old into new,
And I will keep running,
My darling, to you.

Yes, I will keep running, and chasing, and laughing, and kissing, and loving… You.

Bride of God

The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it’s now complete. He must become greater; I must become less.

It’s all about God. God takes priority, and then the focus is His union with the church, as a bride to her groom. As spiritual leaders or leaders within the ministry, it’s vital to remember that the goal is to bring the groom to His bride. We must become less and God must become more. It’s not about our following, our popularity, our power, our plans – the bridegroom is coming, and He is greater.

The thought of Jesus should be one of great joy, not bitterness or grudge. To see the bridegroom brings great excitement! But if we set ourselves up as great ones, if we lower our eyes from the standard and stop listening for the bridegroom, His approach won’t bring joy. We’ll draw back in dismay – unprepared and unwilling.

No. He must become greater, I must become less.

Twilight

Here’s to the twilight:

To the wisps of

Half-seen purples and blues

To the stars peeking out from curtains

Of moon-kissed velvet.

To the depth and mystery

Of a twilight lane,

To the moon casting shadows

As it peers between pines,

Spying on a lovers’ tryst below.

To the darkening sky

And the sparkling fireflies,

Nature’s faeries all aglow.

To the peace and calm

I feel as I

Sit and marvel at my God

In the magic of a twilight.

______________________

And together, the two grandfather frogs croaked away the twilight into night.