Find Me Here More Often

Hey,

His Voice has started a blog and I will be updating more often over there than here. Please come and check it out. It will be posts from everyone who is employed by His Voice.

Click Here.

Love Truth

Stunning.

Check out this video. It is amazing. My friend, Sam Byers, shared this.

Thought on Encouragement

Here is a great quote on encouragement from Tullian Tchividjian. Let me know your thoughts.

"There's a counterfeit type of encouragement and a genuine type of encouragement. The counterfeit type is what the Bible calls flattery. It's selfish smooth talk. The person who offers it does so for selfish reasons (If I tell this person something nice, he'll do for me what I want him to do). But true encouragement is different. Understood biblically, real encouragement is the verbal affirmation of someone's strength, giftedness, or accomplishment, along with the realization that God the Creator is the ultimate source behind whatever's being affirmed.

This type of encouragement is something all human beings not only crave but in fact need. God intended us to feed on it. The reason we require it is that we're images of God, designed to reflect Him. So when others aren't acknowledging God's reflection in who we are and what we do - when we're not being encouraged - it leads to a hardened heart, a saddened disposition, and a debilitated lifestyle; we lose our sense of what it means to be human. Some of the most tragically hardened and fruitless people I know are those who have rarely, if ever, been encouraged.

The secret of true encouragement is learning to see God's reflection in others, not just in Christians but in everyone. Encouragement is noticing God's reflection in other people's strengths and gifts, then verbally affirming what we see. Since all human beings are made in God's image, we all - believers and unbelievers alike - reflect God in unique ways. Learning to see this uniqueness and to point it out can have a significant impact as we strive to make a difference in our world for the sake of God's kingdom.

Some thoughts of Titus on Heaven and Hell

I just got back from my grandma's funeral in St. Louis. I brought Titus and took time to explain things such as a casket, where do people go when they die, what would happen when they close the casket to put it in the ground, etc. It was quite an interesting conversation. That night we went to the house of some good friends and as Titus was playing in the sandbox the following dialogue to place:

Titus: Daddy. Look. I made a casket for the shovel (he had buried the shovel in sand).

Me: Oh yea? That is interesting.

Titus: Yea. Did you know that when we play in the sand in Heaven it will be so much fun?!?!

Me: Yea buddy. It will be.

Titus: Yea, it would not be as much fun to play in the sand in Hell.

Me: It wouldn't be fun at all because fun is not even a possibility in Hell.

Titus: Yea, unless I brought a brick down there and killed Satan with it!!

Me: That's quite an interesting thought. Guess what?

Titus: What?

Me: I LOVE YOU!

Immediately after this he just went back to playing around in the sandbox like a typical 4 year old. His insight amazes me a ton. It is always interesting to see how he put thoughts together that are quite profound, but then also has the maturity to HAVE FUN ALSO.

Love Truth

Grief: Simple, yet messy

Grief seems to be a strange area in life. My grandma just died last night and it has brought to the surface many things about my dad (He died 5 years ago this coming May 23). I wanted to take time and share a couple of things I have learned along the way, along with some failures in the process.

First of all, grief is messy, yet it is very simple. Grief is not complicated. I have found that many times the paralyzing part of grief comes when people start believing that grief is just to complicated, along with being very messy.

Next, it is eerily scary to see how easy we can suppress our emotions and others think this is mature in some way. I remember hearing so many people tell me they thought I was dealing with my dad’s death in a very mature way. One thing I have found is that many people equate external stoicism with maturity in life. I am not saying you have to cry your eyes out every day, but the problem comes when you equate “not crying” with properly working through grief. I was scared of my emotions and in some degree am still working through this fear in my life. The fear of “feeling to deeply” caused me to suppress my emotions (whether crying, laughing, etc.) in such a way that I ended up trying to be the god of my own emotions. I quit trusting God with this part of my life. This is called practical atheism. I worked out how I could be "presentable" to people without asking God to teach me who He was and thus show me how to properly unpack grief. If you find yourself in this camp I pray you would experientially know that He is not only bigger that any emotion you have, but that He will be faithful to help you unpack your emotions.

Finally, I have learned that proper grief ultimately comes down to knowing Him. This is why grief is simple. Instead of trying to suppress my emotions or even plan how I am going to feel about a certain memory that I have, I ask God to teach me how to know Him more and have faith that He will reveal to me the information behind the emotions. After all, I may cry one day and that emotion is from missing my dad or grandma, yet tears the following day may be because I am happy from another memory. I am not trying to trivialize grief down to laughing, crying, or neither. Just like in all of life our emotions are numerous and so are the ways we express them. When I came to the understanding that God really does want us to know Him through all of our emotions I quit trying to control them and entrusted myself to Him.

Therefore, grief has ultimately taught me to be challenged with the question, “Who is God?” Do I trust who He says He is? Do I trust that He knows me better than I know myself? Do I trust that He will work all things out for my good? (Rom. 8:28) If I trust Him with who He says He is according to the Bible, it only follows that He will be faithful to comfort me and teach me who He is in the face of grief and will also give me unspeakable joy.

I pray that you will feel and know His comfort today if you are grieving in any way. I pray you will trust His faithfulness. I pray you will know that He really does want to show you how much He love you in the face of your grief. I pray that if you have never lost someone close to you that He would teach you how to walk alongside those who are grieving. I pray that in the face of good memories or bad that you would know He is your ultimate joy in life.

Grief is simple. Know Him. Grief is messy because it hurts terribly, yet He promises to comfort us in all of our afflictions so that we are able to comfort others in their time of need. (2 Cor. 1:3-5)


Thoughts?

Insight from D.A. Carson on The Gospel

One must distinguish between, on the one hand, the gospel as what God has done and what is the message to be announced and, on the other, what is demanded by God or effected by the gospel in assorted human responses. If the gospel is the (good) news about what God has done in Christ Jesus, there is ample place for including under “the gospel” the ways in which the kingdom has dawned and is coming, for tying this kingdom to Jesus’ death and resurrection, for demonstrating that the purpose of what God has done is to reconcile sinners to himself and finally to bring under one head a renovated and transformed new heaven and new earth, for talking about God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, consequent upon Christ’s resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Majesty on high, and above all for focusing attention on what Paul (and others—though the language I’m using here reflects Paul) sees as the matter “of first importance”: Christ crucified. All of this is what God has done; it is what we proclaim; it is the news, the great news, the good news.

By contrast, the first two greatest commands—to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves—do not constitute the gospel, or any part of it. We may well argue that when the gospel is faithfully declared and rightly received, it will result in human beings more closely aligned to these two commands. But they are not the gospel. Similarly, the gospel is not receiving Christ or believing in him, or being converted, or joining a church; it is not the practice of discipleship. Once again, the gospel faithfully declared and rightly received will result in people receiving Christ, believing in Christ, being converted, and joining a local church; but such steps are not the gospel. The Bible can exhort those who trust the living God to be concerned with issues of social justice (Isa 2; Amos); it can tell new covenant believers to do good to all human beings, especially to those of the household of faith (Gal 6); it exhorts us to remember the poor and to ask, not “Who is my neighbor?” but “Whom am I serving as neighbor?” We may even argue that some such list of moral commitments is a necessary consequence of the gospel. But it is not the gospel. We may preach through the list, reminding people that the Bible is concerned to tell us not only what to believe but how to live. But we may not preach through that list and claim it encapsulates the gospel. The gospel is what God has done, supremely in Christ, and especially focused on his cross and resurrection.

Failure to distinguish between the gospel and all the effects of the gospel tends, on the long haul, to replace the good news as to what God has done with a moralism that is finally without the power and the glory of Christ crucified, resurrected, ascended, and reigning.

Thoughts?

Love Truth

Titus talking about Heaven and Hell

Amber asked me to go back and talk with Titus in his room before bed because he was asking questions about Heaven and Hell. It went like this...

Titus: Daddy, why do people go to Hell?

Me: Because people choose to go to Hell. God doesn't desire for them to go to Hell, but they decided that other things would bring more joy and happiness than relationship with Him. Therefore they are separated from Him for eternity.

Titus: Yea. People who go to Hell do this to Satan (This is where Titus made the sign of saluting Satan!) Also, why did God make people?

Me: God was totally happy without making us, but He chose to make us so we could know total joy, mainly a relationship with Him.

Titus: Yea


It is always amazing to hear what is going on in the mind of Titus. He constantly teaches me and keeps me on my toes.

Love Truth

Some thoughts by a former Atheist on the Logical Fallacy of the Universe Being created by Chance

Anthony Flew was a well known Atheist. In 2004 he became a theist because of what he says were overwhelming evidences from a scientific and logical viewpoint of the need for an Intelligent Designer.

He wrote a book called There is a God about his journey from Atheism to Theism. He was in his 80's when he converted to Theism. He is not a Christian, yet his case for Theism is very strong. I have posted a passage below from his book.


Gerry Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!), the monkeys produced fifty typed pages - but not a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (a or I). A is a word only if there is space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters (the twenty-six letters and other symbols), the the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27,000.

Shroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy: "What's the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?" he asked. He continued:

"All the sonnets are the same length. They're by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening line for, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What's the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in "Shall I compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" What you end up with is 26 multiplied by itself 488 times - or 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690th.

[Now] the number of particles in the universe - not grains of sand, I'm talking about protons, electrons, and neutrons - is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the 80th is 1 with 80 zeros ofter it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you'd be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th.

If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips - forget the monkeys - each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the world thinks the monkeys can do it every time.


Thoughts?

Thoughts from Bernard of Clairvaux on "Glorying in the gifts God has given"

Here is a passage from a great author. The title of Bernard of Clairvaux's book is "On Loving God". He lived from 1090-1153.


There is no glory in having a gift without knowing it. But to know only that you have it, without knowing that it is not of yourself that you have it, means self-glorying, but no true glory in God. And so the apostle says to men in such cases, ‘What hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now, if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it? (I Cor. 4.7). He asks, Why dost thou glory? but goes on, as if thou hadst not received it, showing that the guilt is not in glorying over a possession, but in glorying as though it had not been received. And rightly such glorying is called vain-glory, since it has not the solid foundation of truth. The apostle shows how to discern the true glory from the false, when he says, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord, that is, in the Truth, since our Lord is Truth (I Cor. 1.31; John 14.6). We must know, then, what we are, and that it is not of ourselves that we are what we are. Unless we know this thoroughly, either we shall not glory at all, or our glorying will be vain.

Thoughts?

Some More Titus Brilliance

This past Saturday I was going to our backyard in order to ask Titus if he wanted to come with me to the store. Titus was sitting on one of those bouncy exercise balls in the middle of the yard and this is the conversation that ensued:

Me: Hey buddy! What are you singing?

Titus: Um, The Happy Song!

Me: Why were you singing that song?

Titus: So God and Jesus can hear me.

Me: Why do you want them to hear you?

Titus: Oh, I just want them to still know I am here. Let's go to the store now.


He blew me away with his comments. I was talking to my step mom today and she made the statement that it would be good for all of us to sit in the middle of the yard on a exercise ball and sing to Jesus. So, if you are by the house any time soon and you see me in the middle of our backyard singing, just know that I have been learning from my son :)

Great Thougths from a Muslim Friend

I was meeting a friend yesterday morning for coffee. His name is Hasan and he is an Imam (a Muslim Pastor) in Arlington. As we were talking he said a couple of things that I thought were greatly interesting and also challenging to the Christian community.

He gave typical Islamic reasons for being against Christianity, such as the thought that the Trinity is a form of Polytheism etc. These are always very good and challenging discussions. The two things he said, which I thought were interesting, were the following:

1. He said, "Your pastors are so proud of preaching that is so focused on man. I have never seen someone who has walked out of a church challenged by God, just more focused on themselves and what they need to do."

What a powerful statement! Although I corrected him on the over generalization, it seems he has a decent point. He went on to say, "Don't your pastors understand they are talking about God!" I believe his challenge is incredible because if we truly trust that God knows us better than we even know ourselves would it not be best to seek Him and then let Him tell us what is best for us? Instead, many times we fall short by focusing PREDOMINANTLY on us. I am not saying preaching and teaching will not include practical outworkings, but it is possible to focus in such a way that we look good in carrying out "good works", while we miss Him.

2. Hasan also said something that is a fairly typical argument for Muslims, but is always interesting to talk through. He said, "Islam is an entire way of life. Christianity is only spiritual. In fact, separating Christianity into the spiritual seems to be a pride they like."

Again, I corrected him in saying that Christianity is not an entire lifestyle. I believe it is, but listening to these objections from someone who does not trust in Jesus for eternal life is always quite sobering. I believe Hasan is right when it comes down to many Christians trying to segment belief from lifestyle. This is not the way of Jesus.


I say all of these things hopefully in a way that is challenging to you, if you are a Christian. I also say these things so you have a chance to see things through the eyes of a Muslim. I am always challenged and encouraged in Jesus when I am able to have a conversation with a Muslim.

Love Truth

LRA

Sorry for the delay in writing :) If you are interested in seeing a good video on the Lord's Resistance Army, I am putting a link below. I use the term "good" because of the journalism, not because of the atrocious acts. Please take time to watch this video. Take time to pray for all the people involved.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYURvl8WXFU

Let me know what you think.