Tag Archive - love

I Refuse

October 18, 2010 in Faith, Service with 2 Comments

I read a Rick Warren quote a couple weeks ago that I haven’t been able to escape ever since.

The last thing many believers need to go to is another Bible study. They already know far more than they’re putting into practice.

Dang.

Reading that really challenged me. Its often easy for me to think that learning more about what Jesus said gets me off the hook for having to actually walk out and do what Jesus said do and be who Jesus said to be.  Personally, I grew up in a church environment that knew all about “church” and all kinds of doctrine and could quote you half the Bible, but never really did anything with it but try hard to be “holy” and come back to church.

I’m currently reading John Ortberg‘s book The Me I Want To Be and he made a statement in it that really challenged me.

Often, people in the Gospels who got in the most trouble with Jesus were the ones thought they were working hardest on their spiritual life. They were trying so hard to be good that they could not stop thinking about how hard they were trying, and that got in the way of their loving other people.

That Jesus just spent time with the oppressed, dejected and broken isn’t what set Him apart. It was that He LOVED them. To be honest, anyone can serve a meal to a homeless person. You don’t have to believe in Jesus to serve the oppressed. But as followers of Christ, what should make us different than everyone else doing what we’re doing is who we are and how that filters how and why we do what we do.

Last night at Stretch, we talked about how as much as we love how the group has grown and we’ve been able to mobilize a lot of people to service and action, ultimately we’re doing a disservice if we only get people to serve a meal to a homeless person but don’t challenge them to LOVE that homeless person, look them in the eye, remember their name and dignify their humanity the way Jesus would have.

We’re about to dig into David Platt’s book “Radical” together and challenge each other to go deeper into community and service, and allow ourselves to be uncomfortable to a degree that we begin to understand what it means to live like Jesus tells us to.

Josh Wilson has a great new song called “I Refuse”. In this video, he talks about how he was praying for the people affected by the Nashville flood earlier this year, and praying for people to step up and come help. But then he wondered if it was possible for him to be hiding behind his prayer and using it as a defense and a cop-out to actually doing something himself.  I was really moved by that and thought it was a perfect compliment to how all this fits together. We showed the video at Stretch last night and begin to challenge people with the awareness of the great needs that exist all around them and ask the hard question…

Will you refuse to do nothing?

 

Stretch

August 16, 2010 in Community, Faith, Service with 11 Comments

In the fall of 2009, after reading Richard Stearns’ “The Hole In Our Gospel”, my friends Wes Howard and Ben Turner felt compelled to gather a group of 20/30-somethings together around the idea of being intentionally missional and living out the Gospel by actively serving the needs of others. That group started with 3 people last fall and currently stands at just over 140 who are regular/semi-regular attenders. I’ve skipped a lot of details for the sake of brevity, but suffice it to say something very unique has been happening in what we have affectionately called our “not so small” community group at Cross Point Church here in Nashville.  Essentially, people keep coming and keep getting connected.

The mission statement the group adopted earlier this year is:

“We are imperfect people, living inside our design, building enduring relationships with each other,actively serving the needs of others, and committing to grow deeper in love and faith with Christ.”

Within those 140+ people, there are 8 small groups that are made up of folks in their early-20′s to mid-30′s looking for an opportunity to connect and serve and to experience community in a whole new way. It is nothing short of amazing. This particular model is quite the anomaly as far as “small groups” go and was NOT by design, but very much just “happened” somewhere along the last several months.

For the past 7-8 months, our group has been officially called the “young professionals”, a somewhat nebulous name that wasn’t very clear as to exactly who we are as a group.  Several weeks ago, Wes, Ben and I began talking about the idea of giving the group an actual name that would help to define its actual identity and point to who we were. We landed on the name “Stretch”.  Here’s why…

A few of the definitions of the word ‘stretch’ are:

make great demands on the capacity or resources of
cause to make maximum use of talents or abilities
straighten or extend one’s body or a part of one’s body to it’s full length

The cool thing is, those things are happening within our group in a variety of ways, and it’s incredible to see.

Here’s what Stretch means to us as a group:

It speaks to our age group being very much in the “stretch” between life phases.
It points to the opportunity for your life be stretched and changed through service and community like never before.
It speaks to the growth that happens in the space between moving FROM one thing, TO another.
It says our group is not just the cool Sunday night hang, but something that will deepen your life and put new demands on your capacity for community, faith and service.
It speaks to creating capacity for your life in the “space between”

So last night marked a milestone and the beginning of a new chapter for our “not so small” community group as we officially renamed the group “Stretch”, cast the vision for what it meant, unveiled our new logo and showed this video we put together to communicate the concept even more.

It is such an honor to do life and serve next to Wes and Ben in co-leading this incredible group of people. God has done amazing things through us and every single bit of it has been in spite of us and not because of any of us, but because He has a greater purpose and agenda than any of us could accomplish on our own.  The folks in the group are incredible and are so hungry to build deep community and be the hands and feet of Christ.

In his message yesterday, Pete Wilson talked about how the Gospel challenges us to be not just recipients of grace, but agents of grace, and that the Gospel does not call for reflection, but rather action.  I was so excited to hear him say those things yesterday because they are so essential to the core of our DNA as “Stretch”, and should also be to the core DNA of the heart of everyone who calls themselves a follower of Christ.

I will be talking more about Stretch in the coming weeks and months, but I wanted to take a moment to share this with you all here on my blog. I hope the “Stretch” concept resonates with you and challenges you to consider ways in your own life that you could stretch and create capacity for God to work in new and greater ways in your life. You’ll never be the same.

How does the Stretch concept apply to your life right now?

 

He Is Jealous For Me – Guest Post At LindseyNobles.com

June 23, 2010 in Faith, Guest Posts, My Story with 3 Comments

My friend Lindsey Nobles is in the middle of a series on her blog called “How He Loves”, inspired by John Mark McMillan‘s epic worship song of the same name.  She asked several folks to write around the central topic of how we are each beautifully, uniquely and often messily (if that’s even a word) loved and pursued by God.

Lindsey invited me to contribute and I’m honored to have the opportunity to add my voice to those of Tam Hodge, Sarah Markley, Justin Davis, Bianca Juarez, Trisha Davis and Alece Ronzino in discussing our various takes on the passionate, incomprehensible and irrepressible love God has for us.

For my guest post on Lindsey’s blog, titled “He Is Jealous For Me”, I decided to drill down a little deeper into my personal story than I have before publicly.  I first had the opportunity to really share my story on Justin & Tricia’s blog a few months ago, and have since taken it a few steps further like here, here and here.

It is my belief that our stories are not just for ourselves, but also for those whose lives crash and bleed into ours in beautifully unexpected ways.  I hope that something I share from my own story will encourage, challenge and remind you of the God who relentlessly pursues your heart.

Thank you, Lindsey, for inviting me to be part of the great thing God is doing with your blog through this series.

“He sees the way your heart flutters when it catches the gaze of the latest would-be suitor who speaks eloquently of security and promises hope; and He sees you lying broken on the floor in a pool of disillusionment, as once again, disappointed, dejected and detached, you struggle to pry your heart away from another broken promise and unfulfilled dream that you foolishly tried to replace Him with.  He sees it all… and yet He waits… and loves in spite of your whorish heart’s attempts to attach hope to something it can see.” (excerpt from He Is Jealous For Me)

READ MY GUEST POST: He Is Jealous For Me

 

The Kindness Of The Lord

April 5, 2010 in Faith with 10 Comments

Just wanted to share a simple thought that has been on my heart today.

This is the kindness of the Lord: with one hand he shields our eyes from tomorrow, while with the other he holds our hand.

 

Less Like Scars

March 10, 2010 in Faith with 2 Comments

Perspective is a funny thing.  I remember when I was a child, being so fascinated with those optical illusion puzzles where the static picture seemed to move and take on different shapes right before my eyes.  Or I could look at the picture for hours and see nothing a bunch of multi-colored circles, while someone else would look at it and see a lion, ready to pounce from the canvas onto the unsuspecting onlookers.

It is always intriguing to me when two or more people can discuss or see something and have very different thoughts and views on it.   It’s because of perspective.  The way I am likely to see or perceive a certain thing is largely due to my relationship to or view of that thing.  Perspective is powerful.

In his book The Knowledge Of The Holy, A.W. Tozer says:

“… the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like…  were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ‘what comes to your mind when you think about God?’ we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man.”

Essentially, he is saying that it’s not about the “what” that you do, but about “why” you do it.  It’s not about what you see but why you see it that way.  Perspective projects performance. In other words, how I see something is pretty indicative of how I will respond in my thoughts and behavior.

In his amazing book, “In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day,” author Mark Batterson tags Tozer’s thoughts with the following:

How you think about God will determine who you become.  You aren’t just a byproduct of “nature” and “nurture”.  You are a byproduct of your God-picture.  And that internal picture of God determines how you see everything else.
Most of our problems are not circumstantial.  Most of our problems are perceptual.  Our biggest problems can be traced back to an inadequate understanding of who God is.  Our problems seem really big because our God seems really small. In fact, we reduce God to the size of our biggest problem.

That is powerful stuff right there.  In fact, what both Tozer and Batterson are saying is that the perspective we hold is the true barometer of our heart, which will, in turn, be the thermometer for our life.  A healthy “God-picture” or perspective will produce life, love, justice, grace and mercy because those things are the heartbeat of the Father.   At the same time, a warped “God-picture” will essentially preclude any of those same things from taking root and flourishing, not because of what we say or do, but because of what we, in our heart, believe.

Tozer goes on to say, a “low view of God… is the cause of a hundred lesser evils.” But a person with a high view of God “is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems.”

One of my favorite songs by Sara Groves is “Less Like Scars”, which is all about the power of perspective.  Here are some of the lyrics.

less like tearing, more like building / less like captive, more like willing
less like breakdown, more like surrender / less like haunting, more like remember
less like a prison, more like my room / it’s less like a casket, more like a womb
less like dying, more like transcending / less like fear, less like an ending
and I feel You here, and You’re picking up the pieces, forever faithful
it seemed out of my hands, a bad situation, but You are able
and in Your hands the pain and hurt look less like scars
and more like character

Wow.  It takes quite a “high view of God” to be able to look at what you thought hurt you, and realize that it really came to develop character.  To me it looks like a scar, but in God’s eyes, his character is being revealed in my life.  But that is precisely what a “high view of God” produces… healthy perspective.

Sometimes it takes being on the other side of something to be able to really embrace that kind of perspective.  But after you’ve been through enough of those experiences and had your perspective challenged and changed, you should find yourself grasping a high view of God in the middle of the situation. 2 Corinthians 4:16-19 is a great perspective verse.  It truly takes a “high view of God” for Paul to be able to confidently say, in the present tense:

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

I will say that my “God-picture” has changed dramatically, even over the course of the last year and several months specifically.  It’s part of this amazing journey I’m on.  My God-picture was warped for most of my life.  But I can testify first hand that the adjustment of my view of God has indeed changed how I see absolutely everything, and it is rocking my world.

Author Andy Andrews wrote a great book called “The Noticer”, which is all about the power of perspective in your life. In the book, one of the central characters, Jones, weaves in and out of folks’ lives, always challenging them on their perspective and encouraging them to embrace a higher view.  It is an amazing book that really impacted me and I highly recommend it.

There are so many applications for this topic, and I’ll jump back on this a little later, but it’s really been stirring in me lately so I wanted to go ahead and jump into it now.

What perspective governs your life and how have you seen your “God-picture” change over the years?