He Will Rise up in the End

In need of some hope today? Listen to the new song from Ben Shive entitled "Rise Up". The song is chock full of hope, and it keeps reminding me that my future is certain with Christ. Here are a few snippets of lyrics from the song...

Every stone that makes you stumble,
and cuts you when you fall,
Every serpent here that strikes your heel
to curse you when you fall,
the King of Love one day will crush them all

He will rise up in the end,
He will rise up in the end,
I know you need a Savior,
and He is patient in His anger,
but He will rise up in the end.

go listen to it, go

mark.

You have heard that it was Said

Tonight found me browsing through parts of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, and I came across these few verses which really leapt out to me:

You have heard that it was said, "Love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)

It wasn't so much the first part that shook me awake as the line: If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?...I started realizing how directly this hits home. With these few simple verses, I am indicted for living out the part-time gospel. The part-time gospel of loving and encouraging those who are easy to encourage, but shying away from the hard-to-relate-to people. It's exactly what I'm guilty of. These verses plucked the right string in my heart, and really sent encouragement to a new place inside of me, helping me realize that we can't sell the gospel short. It's too rich and too deep to be dealt with in such a manner.

Loving your enemies is hard. Praying for people you severely dislike is hard. But with the strength of the Lord, it is possible. Thank goodness I don't have to rely on my shallow resources of strength, but that I can draw from the deep well of strength available in Christ.

Puzzle Pieces

It started routinely enough. After getting my feet muddy, I gingerly made my way to the shower to get cleaned up. It took a little while to get all the little mud splotches, but sure enough after some careful scrubbing i was as clean as I was before I met the mud. But something clicked right then and there, something that had been marinating in my head and in my heart, unbeknownst to me.

In that moment all the fragments came together, and the light-bulb went off in my head. It was kind of like the feeling I got as a kid when I would finally get a math problem after 30 minutes of attempts.

Everything became clear in that moment. I suddenly put the puzzle pieces together, and the picture was amazing. It was a picture of transformation. All that God had been leading me to was an understanding of transformation.

Life is full of tiny little flags that bear witness to the transformation that God is all about. And I stumbled across one when i was cleaning the mud off my feet. I went from dirty to clean, a kind of transformation on a small scale. Even the act of growing up is that of transformation. We are these frail, tiny beings who become bigger with years. Summer gives way to Fall. Fall gives way to Winter. Winter holds firm until Spring shoots out of the ground. It's all an act of transformation.

Transformation is all around me. It's encoded in the DNA of life. We are made to know God. It takes a transformation for that to occur though. And my, how beautiful it is to see the transformation of a soul yielding itself to Christ.

All of it came crashing down on me at once: God is in the business of transformation.

the old shall become new. put on the new self of Christ. therefore i consider myself crucified with Christ, but yet I live.

It ALL points to transformation, to God willfully and powerfully transforming us into something beautiful. This is something I want to pursue with my life. Not changing people's minds but engaging in the business of the soul, in the business of transformation, which is the specialty of God himself.

The Olympics

Back in the day, I ran on my high school's track team. I competed in a bunch of different events, from the short sprints to several field events. I loved the mental aspect of running, how it was just you out there, running against the clock. Our coach reminded us over and over that until the district meet, we were merely running against the clock, not against our other competitors. See, we were a small school, and we ran in the big meets. So if we worried too much on our place, it would be hard to find the motivation to stay competitive. Instead, our coach kept telling us that we were competing against our personal bests. As a result, many times I'd be ecstatic after running a new personal best, even though I was 4th or 5th overall.

My time on the track team taught me a lot about competing, and a lot about life. Track's mainly an individual sport, but there's the team aspect too, and if you don't train and run well, you end up hurting the team. Track taught me in concrete terms what discipline is, what commitment is all about, and how to take joy in the simple things.

And now we're only a month or so away from the Olympic games. I can hardly wait to watch all the different competitions. There's always something special about watching the olympics, and it doesn't even matter what you're watching. I would never choose to watch gymnastics, diving, or swimming races on a regular day, but because its the Olympics, these events transform into something more exciting, more dramatic. Maybe it's because there's so much riding on each performance. Maybe it's the knowledge that every competitor has trained their whole life for those few simple moments. Whatever it is, it's incredible to watch.

I can't wait.

Update

I'm not going to write a whole post about the new Coldplay album, or how excited I am to see them when they come to Atlanta in November. That would be just a little too effusive. No, there's a lot going on, both inside my head and in the outer world. And that's what I'd like to write about instead.

I saw the documentary Expelled last night, and like a lot of people who've seen the film, was shocked at what I saw. Basically the documentary (without giving too much away) is about Ben Stein's quest to find out if there is freedom of inquiry within the scientific community specifically related to the debate over the origin of life. It's a well done film, and I just left shaking my head at some of the comments I heard from some of our leading scientists today. And here's why:

Pride. If you get the chance to watch the film (and please do), you'll notice a grotesque amount of smugness on display from several of the top scientists being interviewed. It's dripping from every word they say, from the smirks and the stares into the camera. It's kind of disturbing to realize how much faith and trust we put into scientists today. They are legitimately smart people, very smart. In fact, they are incredibly knowledgeable people, but there's a catch. Remember the old saying "knowledge puffs up"? I think that is an apt description of what has happened to the scientific community. Go watch it if you have time.

I read The Weight of Glory this weekend, and I'm still chewing on all the material. It's not a long book, in fact its rather short, broken up into short, topical chapters. But the depth in each page is astounding. There is meat on the bones of this book.

Orientation's are almost over, and it seems like summer's going by pretty fast. Oh no.

Peeling back the bark

I made a goal, before summer began, to work through the wisdom books of the Bible: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. Other than Psalms and a little bit of Proverbs, these books are large swaths of biblical territory that I have not spent much time traveling through. I'm in the process of going through Job right now, and it's really coming alive in a way that I never noticed before.

Job is the story of brokenness It's the story of pain and suffering. It's the story of a man angry at God and taking his case directly to Him. It's the story of a man confused and utterly perplexed with God. And it's the story of Job's friends, too. The friends who are not really friends at all. It's just such an interesting story, full of such tremendous depth. For one thing, concrete answers seem to be few and far between in this book. You start to realize that pain and suffering do not fit into the "problem-solution" model of thinking.

But you know what, it's the story of a man being brought closer to God, being cut to the core, but being made whole in the end. The story is really gaining traction in my head and my heart, because of its raw nature. Here we are, fragile human beings, so scared to be put on the operating table under the knife of God, but knowing all the while that we have so much to be fixed. The painful process of being made whole is so hard for me to understand, but in the end I have far greater depth in a relationship with Christ that is built around blind faith and sheer trust.

If life were easy there would be no need for faith. If life was simply one success after another, why would you need to trust in anything? But its the fact that life is NOT easy and that life is NOT one success after another that reveals our great need before our gracious God.

music takes you places

I was listening to the radio this afternoon on my way back from an errand when I heard a song I hadn't heard before. It was a tune from Nanci Griffith, a folk artist who evidently has been around a long time and has had a successful career. This was all news to me, as I listened to one of her song's for the first time. Now the song was one of those catchy sing-a-long types, mostly in the range of folk, bordering on bluegrass. Instantly the song reminded me of a drive through the mountains, and even though I happened to be on a giant freeway with no mountains in sight, I was transported to a different place.

I love how music has that effect on us. You hear different styles and different artists and your mind takes you different places. I think it's amazing how God wired our senses like He did, allowing us access to such amazing things as imagination. We see beautiful things, and they capture our minds. We smell something aromatic, and we tie it instantly to an event in the past or a fond memory. We hear a song and our imaginations hit the gas pedal.

We didn't have to be wired this way. Being able to enjoy sights and sounds and smells isn't really all that necessary of a thing, but God thought of it anyway. They are all gifts, and fine ones at that. It's healthy for us to realize these things and be thankful for all the gifts that, while they may not have packaging and a bow, are nonetheless some of the finest thing's God has given us.