27 January 2009

New Audio

I just wanted to drop two new audio links here.
The first one is a recording from our Spring boot camp (2008) and it is my Spiritual Warfare session. This needs to be seen as part of a larger 4 day event, but it stands OK by itself.

The second is a sermon that looks at the way our seniors operate in the church and how much we need them.

Check them out in the right column.

21 January 2009

Perspective

I’m ruminating on a thought here and I’m not sure what to make of it yet – but it seems like something that I ought to write down for the sake of articulation and as defense against losing it. (loosing it?)

I’ve heard many people say something to this effect:
The miracle of restoring a person’s soul (AKA: salvation) is far greater than the miracle of restoring sight to the blind, seeing the lame walk or even raising someone from the dead.

I think that the statement is doctrinally true – salvation is an eternal event where a resurrection is merely temporal. I can really get behind that thought...but there is also something about it that bothers me. Because in some way that I can’t quite put my finger on, the statement feels somehow like an incomplete picture, like something really important is missing. As Morpheus says “like a sliver in your mind...you can feel it.”

Yesterday, a solution to this vague dilemma struck me and I’m honestly a little uncomfortable with the implications.

What if the reason even a relatively minor healing feels bigger than an alter call is because I’ve come to expect virtually nothing from salvation?

Like I don’t have any expectation that a person ‘dedicating their life to Christ’ will be at all noticeable. What if I’ve come to swallow a picture of salvation that is so watered down as to be virtually undetectable, so ‘private’ that any public indication of ‘dead to sin but alive to Christ’ is too much to ask, and so ‘progressive’ that thirty years of ‘wrestling’ with the same sin is accepted as appropriate sanctification?

01 January 2009

"...forgetting what is behind, I press on."

The snow has been falling all morning and I've been sitting in my mother-in-law's basement room watching the miracle of fluttering frozen flakes. I love the snow.

It's also the first day of a new year - Jan 1, 2009 - and I have this feeling in my heart like something truly new and powerful is budding up in my life. (see my last post about Soma).

Over and over (not sure if I've said it here) I've said that 2008 has been like a Dickens novel - both the best of times and the worst of times. Where the professional and financial aspects of life have been hard, the spiritual aspect of life has been redlined and off the charts. Crazy, mad stuff like I only used to read about in book...now I write about them on my blog.

But I know that I still have so far to go, so much more to press into. I recently found a blog called Violent Grace and I think even the name is just a brilliant sum of the way I feel about my hunger these days. Anyway, on that blog I found the following clip and I was dumbstruck by the plain spoken words in the proclamation to live a life for Christ without compromise and without excuse. (the video footage seems only partly connected...but maybe I don't get it...)




A whisper to a scream.