two sunday services for you this weekend.
my dear friend Kurt is in the house leading the music.
we would love to see you.
is the grass greener?
the grass always looks greener on the other side, but maybe it's under a septic tank?
(i was reading this as part of our daily Bible reading plan for the spring. if you are looking to go deeper in your faith, join our facebook group LINK)
proverbs 5 is a plea from wisdom to youth to avoid adultery. the verses go through reasons + consequences for this behavior leading to my favorite one ..
proverbs 5.15
drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well.
specifically in the context of your own marriage, but certainly applying to your family or job situations as well .. the point is, the best defense is a good offense. pay attention to + treasure the relationship you have to avoid temptation to look elsewhere. the grass is greener where you water it. the grass is greener where it's taken care of.
simple advice we would all do well to take .. so often we think that the difference in happiness between us + others is that they know something or have something we don’t have. most often our perception of others happiness is false anyway, but the happiest among are not those with more or better: they are those who treasure what they have.
if you are blessed with a wife or a child or a job or a church or a hometown or a neighborhood coffee shop or a baseball team that won the World Series and then stopped trying (thanks Cubs) or a friend from high school …
drink from that cistern. bless that thing. treasure what you have and watch it slowly become ever more like what you would want.
I remember one day hustling to carry my groceries in before I had turn around to pick up the boys from school. There was so little time and in my foolishly Wonder Woman motivation that day, I grabbed as much as I could carry including bags and gallons of milk. With sweat on my brow and groceries in hand I slammed a gallon of milk on my counter only for it to hit at the exact angle that split open the plastic jug making it flow out entirely. Sticky milk was everywhere and alas I was definitely going to be late to pick up.
Often, we put confidence in our flesh. What we can carry, the material we can learn and stretch our minds with, the letters that follow our name, or even in the way we try to follow after God with such obedience that we are trusting more in our own righteousness than our own. No wonder we’re so exhausted and weighed down trying to carry and trust in what we can accomplish or achieve.
Let me share this passage from Philippians 3:4-8 with you… “though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh-also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the 8th day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
Paul is addressing the Philippian church and encouraging them to get this right! He was like, ‘don’t trust in what you can point to that has to do with you, the only thing that is worth trusting in is the resurrection power of Jesus Christ!’ Let’s not miss the message of Easter beyond Good Friday and resurrection Sunday. We can’t fall back into trusting in the things that we can do but Him alone.
For those cultural times circumcision was a big deal. But just because that’s not a cultural necessity in our time let’s not replace it with works that ‘cost us’ but that are more about pointing at than authentic belief. Another trap that we can fall into is trusting in our credentials or heritage rather than digging in and growing our own personal relationship with Jesus. The truth is that no one else’s relationship with God can save us. Paul’s like, if someone could have earned God’s affection with credentials it would have been me. But, possibly the worst trap we could succumb to is following the law to the T and become legalistic and holding a measuring tape toward others.
True trust relies on one thing alone: Jesus’ resurrection power! At the end of the day Paul had to count all these things as literal dung. You know what dung means? Poop. In some ways trusting in things that point to effort and energies of the flesh is easier because we can point to it. But Christ’s death on the cross cost too much for us to trust in anything less. He knew our deep need and that because of sin we’d never measure up. He bridged that enormous gap; just like Paul, our foundation has to be in what God has done for us rather than what we could ever accomplish. And when we flail and spill milk everywhere we reveal our desperate need for him to reign over our failed attempts of trusting in things other than His work on the cross.
Cup of Leadership
we tend to use words + phrases until they stop having a clear meaning. eventually words like ‘woke’ or ‘evangelical’ or ‘bully’ or ‘pro-life’ become so layered with varieties of connotations that we need new words to convey the original meaning. this isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, it’s just a linguistic cycle. as an example…
history of the word, “gay”
1862 - used in the Christmas carol ‘Deck the Halls’ ‘don we now our gay apparel’ to mean light + happy
1951- Oxford dictionary adds to definition that it is ‘slang for homosexual’
1990’s - the word is increasingly used in adolescent culture as a pejorative euphemism for ‘dumb’ or ‘weak’
i think something problematic + similar has happened with the word neighbor, specifically as it is used in the Bible. many folks have reverse engineered Jesus command to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ into something meaning love your digital neighbor or love the person at your church from two suburbs over, but what if the literal definition approximates what Jesus actually meant. what if paying attention to the closest people to us geographically is what Jesus wanted?
given our ability to gather in groups that are likeminded most of the day each day, it is paramount that the variety provided from those in our proximity is something we take hold of.
neighbor means neighbor.
Saturday Morning Book Review
the vitals: the critical organs of christianity
by junior ziegler
my friend wrote a book on the basics of Christianity. it’s short + punchy + funny + modern + faithful + orthodox + perfect for the 2020’s. if you are new in your faith or are trying to encourage a person who is, i strongly encourage you to read this book. i particularly liked the careful but clever ways junior connected our historical faith with modern ideas.
most of the books i read aren’t from people i know, but junior is a local pastor + a good friend to me. that made me a little nervous to read his book, because i didn’t want to not like it. it’s legit, go check it out.
have a great weekend…
luke + kristen