It's one full week since the previous entry. Distractions and undiscipline have abounded since then during the Christmas build-up and I am feeling very weak. In 2 Corinthians 2:15-16 Paul describes the weightiness of Gospel service, of being the aroma of Christ, which is the smell of life to those who are being saved, but the smell of death to those who are perishing. He asks rhetorically, "Who is sufficient for these things?"
The incredible nature of the spiritual warfares and realities going on around us are simply beyond us. We are weak, we are finite, we are sinners. Very easily I got caught up in other things and have realized my own insufficiency to write a blog called "the reality of Christ" by my own diminished sense of said reality.
But this is how God calls us to walk, sufficient not in ourselves but in Him.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Entry #1 - Why this blog?
There's a mission statement/description at the top of the page. But I would like to share what triggered this.
First of all, certain burdens lay on my heart. They come from all different directions but ultimately (I believe) from God. Some of them relate to arising thought patterns (and heart postures) that I see in all different parts of the country (And I have lived in 4 states in the last 6 years). Some of them come from a desire to know how to respond properly. Some of it is an awareness of my own wicked heart, wicked tendencies, and desire to put those tendencies to death. But all of these burdens have one overarching desire: The desire to live engaged in the reality of Christ.
We read about Isaiah seeing a vision of God, and of seraphim, and his horror at this because of the unclean lips of both him and the people he dwells among. We read of Peter's extreme discomfort when first realizing who Jesus was (and Peter's statement, "I am a sinful man"). We read of the fierce boldness and the extreme self-forgetting love of the earliest church in Acts. We are told that they were simultaneously saturated in both the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.
Finally, I do some research and read about Jonathan Edwards weeping for an entire service while George Whitefield visited his church in Northampton, Massachusetts and reminded the congregation there about the revival they had experienced a few years prior.
In all these accounts, I see men and women living in the reality of Christ. It's a reality that I want and seek to live in. It is the glorious reality that the Church is called to live in. This is what drives me and this is what burdens me. In my opinion, the general trends that are popular right now have nothing to do with the reality of Christ. They are based on increasing the number of converts, but with an unbiblical definition of what a convert is, due to a lack of interest in real theology. We have no interest in the fear of the Lord because we've dismissed it as an old-fashioned, barbaric notion. And with that the comfort of the Holy Spirit seems to mean very little.
I want to love. I want to be bold. I want to fear. I want to be comforted. I want to weep. Not in a program, a method, or an emotional cleansing, but with my soul immersed and aware in the reality of Christ.
First of all, certain burdens lay on my heart. They come from all different directions but ultimately (I believe) from God. Some of them relate to arising thought patterns (and heart postures) that I see in all different parts of the country (And I have lived in 4 states in the last 6 years). Some of them come from a desire to know how to respond properly. Some of it is an awareness of my own wicked heart, wicked tendencies, and desire to put those tendencies to death. But all of these burdens have one overarching desire: The desire to live engaged in the reality of Christ.
We read about Isaiah seeing a vision of God, and of seraphim, and his horror at this because of the unclean lips of both him and the people he dwells among. We read of Peter's extreme discomfort when first realizing who Jesus was (and Peter's statement, "I am a sinful man"). We read of the fierce boldness and the extreme self-forgetting love of the earliest church in Acts. We are told that they were simultaneously saturated in both the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.
Finally, I do some research and read about Jonathan Edwards weeping for an entire service while George Whitefield visited his church in Northampton, Massachusetts and reminded the congregation there about the revival they had experienced a few years prior.
In all these accounts, I see men and women living in the reality of Christ. It's a reality that I want and seek to live in. It is the glorious reality that the Church is called to live in. This is what drives me and this is what burdens me. In my opinion, the general trends that are popular right now have nothing to do with the reality of Christ. They are based on increasing the number of converts, but with an unbiblical definition of what a convert is, due to a lack of interest in real theology. We have no interest in the fear of the Lord because we've dismissed it as an old-fashioned, barbaric notion. And with that the comfort of the Holy Spirit seems to mean very little.
I want to love. I want to be bold. I want to fear. I want to be comforted. I want to weep. Not in a program, a method, or an emotional cleansing, but with my soul immersed and aware in the reality of Christ.
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