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There’s an amazing account in Acts 19 where the Apostle Paul spends two years teaching about the Kingdom of God in an Ephesus lecture hall.  Eventually every Jew and Greek in what was then Asia heard the Word of God and of the resurrection of Jesus. God even did miracles - healing the sick, freeing the demonically possessed. It wasn’t all low-hanging fruit though! Even sorcerers and those who practiced evil confessed their sins publically and relinquished their way of life to take up a new life of Christ.

As people burned up their scrolls and old ways of life in a bonfire, it became clear the place was changing. What used to matter to these people no longer mattered and what they once trusted in was no longer valuable to them apart from Christ.

God changed the landscape of Ephesus to such a degree, people stopped buying idols! Most people were probably pleased as sick people became well and those under oppression set free - but not everyone.

Acts 19:23-27 | About that time there arose a great disturbance about the Way. A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought in no little business for the craftsmen. He called them together, along with the workmen in related trades, and said: “Men, you know we receive a good income from this business. And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Asia. He says that man-made gods are no gods at all. There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited, and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty.”

If Jesus wins, then someone else is going to lose. Many refuse to follow Christ because doing so would cost them their livelihood.  Others refuse because the things in which they’ve spent their whole life investing will fail if He triumphs.

Forgive me for this, but I can’t deny the parallel this has with our election (and politics in general).  Look again at the story above, but instead of silver shrines to Artemis imagine glossy signs for politicians.

Could it be, our politics and politicians are idols we worship in place of God? As Jesus changes the world and reengineers our hearts - our politics are worthless. Our trust finds itself in Christ rather than any candidate. Yet, some of us cringe when we hear this. For the last year or longer, we’ve fought disagreement viciously, rallied for our guy (or gal) passionately, and placed our trust in one potential executive blindly.  In an election focused on change we hone in on the nominal and neglect the revolutionary. A friend of mine was recently berated at her workplace because she appeared ambivalent toward a candidate someone else found to be a messiah.

“What’s wrong with {candidate}?! Why don’t you like {said candidate}?! Huh!”

We who follow Jesus and know Him in truth as the Messiah simply cannot fall in love with a politician - no matter how compelling their platform.  We believe in much more than politics.  By faith, we hope for more than reform - we need renovation - or better yet, a whole new city.

Hebrews 11:9-10 | By faith [Abraham] made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

Final question when I think about quitting…

Does my life need all this aggravation?

Once again… Yes!  It is a common misconception that the life of a Christian is an easy and stress-free vacation from reality.  Considering how being a Christian involves following Jesus - this should be obvious.  Jesus lived anything but a stress-free and easy life - yet, His joy and fulfillment were made complete in His life’s trials.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. Those who doubt should not think they will receive anything from the Lord; they are double-minded and unstable in all they do.  James 1:2-8

Here’s the truth about me: I am double-minded.  Of any sin in my life, this one is probably the most recurrent.  I tend to over-think most things and when it comes to making decisions I often neglect to pray or heed the voice of God like I should.  When am I most double-minded and confused?  During a tough trial (like selling a house).  I even become frustrated and doubtful to the point where calling it quits and giving up sounds like a smart move.  Much of the time when I ask God for wisdom, I fail to believe His wisdom and doubt my way to even more aggravation.

Trials and difficulties are not meant to knock us off track with God and the person we are called to be in Christ.  Instead, we should be holding onto Jesus and His wisdom even tighter in these times.  You could say this is the whole point, really.  Here’s why: God’s desire is to work into us something more than shallow, uneventful bliss.  If His goal was really to simply make us happy - food, illicit drugs, and monetary gifts would suffice.  No.  God’s desire is to work our hearts and minds to find joy in circumstances where many other people are destroyed.  Trials and troubles plus real faith plus wisdom from God equals pure joy… and a mature and complete human being.  Your maturity and ability to face life’s ups and downs with a heart of love for God will positively effect the people and world around you.

So, yes.  Your life does need all this aggravation and your joy can infect someone else today if you’ll let it.

• Are you still thinking about quitting?
• Where is your joy?  Have you ever found it in God?
• Mature and complete.  Are you on your way there?
• Whose wisdom are you employing - your own or the Lord’s?

There is this really old worship chorus, “Take your burden to the Lord, and leave it there…”  Many of us carry heavy burdens throughout our lives.  These heavy weights were never meant to rest on our shoulders.  Yet, we still carry them.  Baggage.  To live without excess baggage is to live trusting the Lord.  I’ve always known this, but haven’t always understood what it meant.  Here’s what I’ve learned:

Your trust in the Lord is incomplete until that trust is put to the test.

In other words, my trust and faith in Jesus grows deep roots in my life when I actually need to work at trusting Jesus.  And there is no better thing to trust Him with than our baggage.  To be free of baggage or emotional struggles, we have to give our baggage to God.  The hard part, however, follows.  There are many reasons we may prefer to keep the bags (listen to this podcast, seriously!), but none of them make it okay.  When we leave our baggage with Jesus, we will be tempted to take them back up within moments.  The reality of our transformation in Christ is revealed in how we respond to this temptation.  Once we give our baggage to God - we must leave it there.  Jesus took the weight of our baggage with Him to the cross when He was crucified.  When we continue to carry the bags, we are refusing to leave them behind.  My wife just wrote an amazing post about her baggage and how Jesus is giving her real freedom from it.  For me, leaving it there entails a change in my mind.  I’ve written before how I used to carry a bag that said I was not welcome to the party.  In a very emphatic sense, I have given this baggage to the Lord!  Hardly does a day go by where I am not tempted to believe this same old lie and pick up the same old weight.  Romans 12:1-2 says,

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

“Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice“ - this is the give it to God part.  “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” - this is hard part!  It involved submitting my heart and my thoughts to God - deciding to think differently and to relinquish every thought not in line with the truth of God.

• What baggage do you carry?
• Have you given it to God?
• Better question: Have you given yourself to God?

Need some more encouragement, read this.

Early this morning, I headed out to the local Metropark in search of some quietness and time to connect with God.  The wind was blowing, it was still fairly dark, and the sky was predominantly gray. With rain in the forecast, I knew I would have to make the most of the time I had.  I left the house early and promptly wearing only jeans, my junkie tennis shoes, and a T-shirt.  A sweatshirt would have been good, I know.  Only thing is, grabbing my hoodie would have required me to open the closet at the bottom of the steps - the one with hinges in need of massive amounts of oil that squeaks shrieks like a really loud shrieking thing being tortured.  With the kids and Ruth asleep, I wasn’t going to risk it.  I already wake up the kids every weekday morning - adding Saturday to it would likely push Ruth over the edge! :)  So, no sweatshirt, just a T-shirt, feeling a little cold…

I walked out into the woods, saw some cardinals, followed a woodpecker, frightened a few hundred squirrels, imagined that scary black fog monster from Lost nabbing me… yet, was still increasingly cold and thinking about going back to the car.  I looked up and wished the sun would rise a little faster.  Things would have to warm up when the sun came up.  So I waited and told myself (and my goosebumps) to just relax and trust warmth was on the way.  The sun will rise and the so will the temperature.  I may have neglected to bring adequate insulation for the walk, but the earth would soon provide what I lacked by warming the very air around me.

And so I realized something here about God.  Many moments and spaces in our lives may remind us of a dark, cold, and ominous sky.  Know this: it’s only morning!  It will warm up.  Even if the sky remains gray, the very presence of the sun will warm everything.  And the sun always rises, and so does the Lord.  In times of waiting and believing without seeing - in these shivery times - the Presence of God looms close.  If we will wait and trust the Lord to rise on our life, we will be warmed.  The air around us will be our shelter.

Following Jesus requires you to trust in what you don’t see yet.  When answers are scarce, questions abundant, details untended, future foggy, fears consuming - we tend to wonder if Jesus is really there.  Sometimes, He even calls us into cold places without much to keep us warm.  Our skin grows little bumps and we begin to shiver and look for shelter.  If we are willing to wait and keep walking, we will see Jesus in our life.  Like the sun rising, Christ will rise (and has risen).  It’s only morning.

On Thursday night, I enjoyed my final session of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Winebrenner.  It was a great class and, as the subject was counseling, it was a surprisingly therapeutic process.  As we learned and discussed the art and ministry of guiding individuals to find healing and wholeness in Jesus, we were ourselves drawn to Jesus in our own brokenness and need for healing.  We even had the chance to counsel our professors as they opened up their lives and challenged us to ask the deep-reaching questions of them we were asking of ourselves.

One concept we consistently arrived at in the course was the unshakable lie.  This a lie we hear at some point in our life and then spend the rest of our life believing about ourselves unless we find truth in Christ.  Everyone has a lie…

• “You are ugly.”
• “You are a failure.”
• “It is all your fault.”
• “You are stuck.”
• “God will not forgive you.”
• “You cannot change.”
• “No one really wants to hear what you think.”

The class helped me identify (more like re-identify) the lie I keep falling for… “You are not invited.”  Yeah, no matter what someone tells me or what I see in the Word of God, my default outlook is that I am never going to be invited to the table.  What does this mean?  To be invited is to be valued and to be valued is to have purpose - purpose from God.  The lie someone once told me and I’ve apparently failed to relinquish says I am of no value to anyone else and they would be better off if I didn’t show up to dinner.  It says I am worthless.  But it’s a lie.

Here is what I’ve learned: every lie must be answered with truth.  So here goes…

… streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.  Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.  [Genesis 2:6-7]

At the pinnacle of what many would call the most productive week ever, God formed human beings from the dust of the ground and gave them immeasurable worth in giving them life.  This is where my lie falls and falls hard - God gave me breath.  It is highly unlikely the Lord of Heaven and Earth and Creator of everything would waste a lung-full of His miraculous breath on something for which He did not have great purpose.  Even more unlikely, would be for God to deny us (His most amazing creation) a place at His table.  If fact, in Christ, we are not just invited to sit - we are carried to the table.

This is the truth.  I’m not going to believe a lie anymore.

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.  [Matthew 4:17]

What is the Gospel?  I know the word means good news but what is good news.  There is plenty of bad news to go around.  That’s probably why so many people are interested in the Gospel - at least, the Gospel as they see it.  When Jesus said the kingdom of heaven was near what did He mean exactly?  And if the Kingdom was near way back then - is it here now (or at least, closer)?  Lots of questions… and as I’ve found, lots of answers.  There are a myriad of explanations and images of what the Gospel consists of and how the Kingdom is expressed.  Some believe the Gospel to be a message and life toward social justice.  Others see evangelism and personal salvation as the hallmark of the Kingdom.  Then there are those who minister inner healing and physical healing.  Still others hold that the Gospel is all about racial and ethnic reconciliation.  These are just a few pieces of the Gospel - or gates to the Kingdom.  In reality, the Gospel is all of these things and more.  Yet, in large part, our understanding of it and derived ethos is very fragmented and with most attributes of the Gospel isolated from the others.

So… how do we bring it together?  How do we defrag the Gospel?  What is the whole story?

… to be continued.

I’ve been studying the book of Mark this past week.  Funny thing about this book - since it’s the shortest of the four Gospels, I’ve always seemed to overlook it and concentrate more on Matthew, Luke, and John - I don’t really know why, but I’m definitely glad that I’ve looked at Mark in this season.  In my conversations with the Lord Jesus over the past few months I’ve kicked around a lot of ideas.  Most of my ideas are huge - I’m a dreamer.  However, I’ve realized that I tend to prefer the large grandiose kind of dream because I find that there’s a kind of safety in these ideas.  This safety being the fact that most big dreams never come true.  Big ideas are risky and most that embark on a large endeavor eventually choose to retreat and settle for lesser aspirations.  That is, if the dreamer even got started!  Personally, I tend to dream huge dreams and then spend the rest of my time awaiting the launch date.  Looking back now, I can admit that most of my ideas rarely launch - just too big.  I so enjoy the safety of picking a task that anyone would understand quitting on.  It’s the equivalent of biting off more than you can chew - no one holds it against you if you spit it out.

Continuing my conversations with the Lord has led me to a place of transition.  Up to now I had been holding out for a certain miracle and overlooking the possibilities of any different miracle.  Ever do that before?  Get your heart set on something so much that you fail to acknowledge any other possibilities.  God is moving me (and my family) away from many of the comforts and certainties we’ve enjoyed so much toward new places of increasing danger and possibility.  I usually tend to enjoy revel in change but, to be honest, I have my areas and my moments where I’d rather just stay right where I am - or if I have to get up and go, I’m taking a full case of supplies just in case!

This realization brings me to a scene in Mark…

"Calling the Twelve to him, he began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over evil spirits.

These were his instructions: "Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra shirt. Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave, as a testimony against them."

They went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them."

[Mark 6:7-13]

Here, Jesus sends out His twelve companions on a journey with very little by way of provision.  He gives them authority to carry out ministry in His name and instructs them to pack minimally for the journey.  Why?  Jesus wanted them to trust not in their own accumulated supply, but instead to trust in His authority.

This is so refreshing and humbling: no matter what resources, supplies, connections, or safeties we procure in this world, we can leave those things behind when the Lord calls us and trust Him to keep us safe - even in the face of danger.

I hear the call of the Lord and I am (we are) taking steps to follow His voice but I realize that for too long I have carried too much along for the trip.  I’m learning that there are seasons where we can only go where God is calling us if we are willing to leave behind just about everything - give up every shred of safety - and walk right into the danger - trusting in the Authority of the One who sends us.

In college, I had the unmatched pleasure of an economics course (two courses actually). While most economic concepts remain entirely abstract and beyond my grasp, I did take one idea away from the experience: opportunity cost. Defined as (via Wikipedia) the cost of pursuing one choice instead of another. Imagine this situation: you’re the member of an alternative pop garage band. You’ve been together since the 7th grade and you and your band-mates have played out in every dingy, half-empty dive in town. Upon graduating high school (just barely) you meet someone. Yeah, you see where this is going. Sparks fly, she (or he) is everything you’ve ever wanted, and before you know it you’re sharing a kebab and beginning to talk about the future. This future being the very problem with the situation. The plan up to this point was to work a job, practice with the band every night, and keep plugging away until you hit your big break and score a record deal. But now that pretty little thing with the blue eyes on the other side of the table (charred chicken, peppers, and tomatoes-in-hand) is asking you to consider something new - going to college - together. Of course, your Sweetie wants to double-major in French and Journalism (Fashion Journalism to be exact) and must attend a school on the east coast. Here in this new realm of possibilities is where microeconomics comes into play. Going to school with blue eyes is a great idea - for sure - but is it worth passing up on the dream. You’ve worked hard in the band for a long time and was looking forward to putting more serious effort toward that dream. Quitting the band to attend the same college as your BF (or GF) is not what you planned, but it’s kind of on the road toward another dream - getting married. Choices, choices. Two dreams, one future. The cost to pursue one is to forfeit another. Economics.

The life of a Christian is one full of opportunity costs. From the outset of this journey following Jesus, I had no idea what it would cost me - time, energy, money (mostly for prayer cloths - just kidding!), ambitions, dreams, comforts, etc. Although, in reality, everything that I’ve given up has been in lieu of a greater opportunity - meaning, experience, wisdom, fulfillment, peace, and the chance live a life of eternal purposes rather than temporary pleasures. Sure, I had plenty of dreams before, but now my dreams are bigger than I could have ever… dreamed! That’s the beauty of following Christ - He gave up everything for what He valued most - therefore, you and I can do the same.