When Christ bore our sin, He didn’t just go straight to Hell. We often think that He did. Why? Because we treat sin as being bad only for the consequence that we were cast out of paradise.
But that is not the case. Before Jesus descended to Hell, He was beaten, mocked and spit on; He then died a slow, painful death. Notice: this was all on earth.
Our sins, therefore, have a terrible price to to be paid on earth as well: another reason to hate the sin that we have. Hate it as God hates it.
For a while now, I’ve been thinking about living on $30k a year (excluding tithing or saving) by living wisely in order to leave the rest of my salary for more worthy pursuits: supporting the church (especially missionaries), artists and writers, et al. It would reduce my love for things of this world and keep me from getting distracted from things of eternal importance; I think it would also be an example to others to do the same and be raised in godliness.
Doing all the smart things to the life I live is a smart one, not a short-changed one. To come up with even more ways to live more efficiently – and hopefully more effectively – I’ve been reading excellent sites like getrichslowly.org or thesmartdollar.com.
What I didn’t know before was that the motivation for this had biblical precedent as well. In Bible study Mike pointed out a verse:
Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. (Eph. 4:28)
Note here that the point of the former thief working isn’t that it makes him self-sufficient but that it enables him to give back to the body of believers. This flies completely in the face of all conventional wisdom, but it supports my recent conviction of using my money in a way that I can store my treasures in heaven where they will truly matter.
If you know me, you know I do. They’re a lesser computer that facilitates a layer of lies to the customer about how a computer really works; they also encourage no thinking. But that’s not the point. While talking to Sam Lee, I think I finally realized why, beyond being an inferior computer, it elicits so much anger in me:
Irrational consumerism. People buy what they don’t need, at prices that they should know they don’t need to pay, for a product that doesn’t really actually perform with hardware that’s up to date.
I mean, look at the first-gen iPhone (there are plenty of examples, but this is an easy one). 3G had been around since 2001 and was becoming less of a novelty in 2005, and they weren’t able to put it in the iPhone. But because of his holiness Steve Jobs, people bought them anyway. Then, when the second-gen iPhone came out and had something that should have been in the first, people upgraded the Mac way: throw away a product that costs too much and does too little to buy, at full price, an almost identical inferior one. Yay for frivolous gimmicky features.
Oh, and I seem to dislike people with a messiah complex as well.
Maybe it’s because I’m a twenty-something-year-old (almost), but I’ve noticed that I never hear the word “men” to describe males my age. Nor “boys.” Only “guys.”
Perhaps this has to do with the mentality of the never-grow-up generation?
A thought came to me when we were studying the clearing of the temple by Jesus and His declaration that He would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days:
The Temple in Jerusalem was made with human hands, made with human righteousness and honored in human ways. Christ destroyed that temple and built a second one in our hearts with things unseen and eternal, sanctified with the eternal blood shed on the cross.
Even non-Christians are aware of it on some level.
Happy reading.
Living water.
I chuckle to myself standing over the kitchen sick with another cup of water, struck by the words of a song by Avalon:
You’re everything to me
More than a story, More than words on a page
Of History
You’re the air the I breathe
The water I thirst for
And the ground beneath our feet
You’re everything
To me
I’m bemused about how often I have to drink water in order to be fully hydrated. (about two mouthfuls every 15 minutes). I’ve lately found that drinking it all at once is nowhere near as helpful as doing it in frequent small gulps. How much more is God’s presence needed like water, like air even.
I have written before about God being our daily bread, about how we need fresh bread grace and providence from Him. But how when Jesus says that He is the living water, that we need to drink from Him, the living water?
Wow, the glory of God is truly in all things. What a powerful illustration to remind us how much, often we need Him.
There is no such thing as a “stronger Christian.” I don’t mean that there aren’t more mature Christians: I mean that there is nothing inherent in a person that makes him a “strong” or a “weak” Christian.
A mature Christian is one who saturates himself with scripture, meditates on it, and grasps hold of God and knows Him intimately. It is only by drawing on a deeper portion of God and His strength that we are able to be a “strong” Christian by expressing Him and His glory. Mark Driscoll gives a good example when talking about being a godly man (but women can learn from this illustration as well):
You need to memorize these words, “A man … is the image and glory of God.” The next time you are out hunting or camping and sitting around a fire, take a long stick and put one end of it in the fire. When that end gets hot and glowing red from glorying in the fire until its heat and light are transferred to it, take it out and look at it. Remind yourself that when the Bible says you are the glory of God, it means that you are like that stick and supposed to draw near to the pure and powerful God who is your Father and radiate his heat and light to the world.
Even Paul considered any of his human accomplishments to be rubbish and loss when he considered Christ. How much more should we?
Porn is bad. But we often don’t realize how bad.
In a continuation from a previous post about how caustic porn is, I address another effect of porn: listless disatisfaction with anything else but the porn-masturbation combination. (Credit: Husbands and Dads blog)
Excerpt: “Are You a Porn Addict?“
Of the two pleasure centers in the brain, one is high impact, thrilling pleasure stimulated by pornography, erotic fantasies, or new sexual encounters. The other is a steady, less intense pleasure realized by walking on a beach, making love with a long term partner, helping a child with homework, experiencing deep feelings (painful or pleasant) and sharing them in a significant relationship.
…
People who stimulate the high impact pleasure center too often rarely get enough satisfaction. Porn can generate this type of pleasure with little effort. Once a man is hooked, he will have an extremely difficult time transitioning to healthy, more stable pleasure.
…
he is addicted to high intensity pleasure and does not know how to experience pleasure from everyday, ordinary life situations; such as, spending quality time with his family or having intimate talks and sharing with his wife.
Wow. That’s pretty intense. It robs us of every other pleasure.
Women, you’re not exempt either. The last paragraph finishes on a note of mutuality
Frequently, neither partner knows how to enjoy these simple pleasures, therefore, it is not just the man who needs therapy. The marriage needs an overhaul where both have to address emotional issues.
In an age when helping others is already seen as a big accomplishment, we often stop at the act and don’t stop to examine ourselves.
Tim Keller speaks in an interview about the dynamics of a church as it grows larger and about how we can actually be selfish in helping people.
Redeemer has grown fairly rapidly over recent years: what are some of the adjustments you have personally made to ensure ongoing growth?
TK: There’s a piece I wrote on this subject that is readily available on the internet — it’s called ‘Church Size Dynamics’. In a nutshell, however, as a church grows larger, the lead pastor has to be more present to groups of people and less available to individuals. When hundreds of people are waiting to hear your sermon, or dozens of leaders are waiting to be trained and mentored, is it good stewardship to take away three hours that could be helping hundreds and thousands of people grow to counsel one person in crisis? My pastoral heart — and (to be honest) my need to please people — make me want to be available to any individual who wants me. But at various times my own leaders had to confront me about the selfishness of such availability. They would say, ‘You are being a terrible steward! You recruited us to shepherd people, but we are doing it poorly because you are too busy wanting the emotional pay-off of doing it yourself, rather than teaching and training us.’(emphases mine)
While most us have the opposite problem, having people to help and not doing it, we still need to examine our motivations for heling people: people-pleasing and a sense of pleasure we get from being useful. We should instead take pleasure that we are serving God’s people — and if they are not Christians, they are still created in God’s image.
