Day 78?
04 Jan 2011 Leave a Comment
Putting off TV is pretty easy when you have 40 pages to write and you were born with writer’s block. I didn’t realize it when I hit the one-month mark. Then came holidays, travels…you know, things to do, people to see. Pretty easy resolution.
In order news, happy new year. May it be lived for our great and worthy God and His good pleasure and glory.
All to leave and follow You
25 Oct 2010 Leave a Comment
It seems from every direction I’m called and wooed toward something less than missions-mindedness, and undoubtedly away from my Savior.
The irrational desire for that which is all in all vanity and worldliness rises in potency and seeks to reign. Its fate is eagerly awaited. It is to be crushed by the supremacy of Christ.
But the experience is painful and humbling. That may be my understatement of the year.
Give me grace, Lord, and with joy and pleasure, I will fight this.
Jesus, I my cross have taken,
All to leave and follow Thee.
Destitute, despised, forsaken,
Thou from hence my all shall be.
Perish every fond ambition,
All I’ve sought or hoped or known.
Yet how rich is my condition!
God and heaven are still my own.
Let the world despise and leave me,
They have left my Savior, too.
Human hearts and looks deceive me;
Thou art not, like them, untrue.
O while Thou dost smile upon me,
God of wisdom, love, and might,
Foes may hate and friends disown me,
Show Thy face and all is bright.
Go, then, earthly fame and treasure,
Come disaster, scorn and pain
In Thy service, pain is pleasure,
With Thy favor, loss is gain
I have called Thee Abba Father,
I have stayed my heart on Thee
Storms may howl, and clouds may gather;
All must work for good to me.
Day One
19 Oct 2010 Leave a Comment
Today marks the start of my one month resolution to forgo TV, movies… those precious episodes of Law & Order that NetFlix has made available on instant…
Sigh.
Why would I do such a thing, you ask? The reason is because I think TV is evil.
Okay, not really.
The reason is pretty simple. I didn’t ruminate over this decision for hours. It went something like this:
Thought #1: TV has so wastefully absorbed so much of my time.
Thought #2: No more TV.
Instead of watching Law & Order today, I read Edward’s Resolutions. Here I am championing my No-TV resolution, and pow! (That’s the sound of a jaw dropping to the ground, in case you couldn’t tell). Puts my resolution into perspective, if you know what I mean.
Finals
25 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
Forgot I had a blog for a while. Then I remembered. Then I was confused about how to navigate around WordPress. Now I’m organizing things, which includes going through old drafts, either deleting or posting. This one is from 2008.
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With finals week just around the corner, I’ve been spending plenty of time at the library, and I haven’t been able to get over how packed it’s been and how frantic some students look (particularly at certain hours in the night). Within these past few days, I’ve been reluctantly getting my work done, stressing and complaining about the amount that needs to get done, deceiving myself with the claim that my workload justifies my reaction. I’m treating schoolwork as if it’s some kind of burden, when it’s no burden at all, it’s too great a blessing.
During a break tonight, I was sitting on a bench outside, next to a fountain, sipping my tea, enthralled by the beauty of my campus, at such a fine institution, where my only job is to become educated. Oh, what a burden it is to be in my shoes! I think of children in this world, the circumstances they endure, what they’d give for an opportunity to receive higher education, or for a meal… and then I think back on the packed library, the distressed faces, my own grumbling, I mean, what can we do, it’s just such a difficult week…
I often enter class or handle schoolwork with a negative attitude, sometimes claiming that I’m not learning anything lasting or valuable anyway. Or, there are times when I’ll act as if I have some sort of claim to certain circumstances, and if things don’t go my way, I have a right to dissatisfaction, when it’s all grace. It’s so sad when we look at our lives and desire more or display discontent with what we do have, when we have more than we deserve as it is, regardless of how it is. And even sadder when handling gifts such as studying and school, we find cause for grumbling.
Psychological Theories . . . Accepted By Faith?
25 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
“Before you see a client, you have theories: theories about what is normal and abnormal, theories about motivation, theories about how we know, theories of right and wrong, and yes, theories about God. These assumptions . . . came from your culture, family, religious background, influential professors, graduate program, and many other factors. You have been indoctrinated in a set of presuppositions that are empirically unverifiable. You accept them by faith.”
Edward T. Welch, “A Discussion Among Clergy: Pastoral Counseling Talks With Secular Psychology,” The Journal of Biblical Counseling 13, no. 2 (1995): 24.
The Binding of Isaac
25 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
Genesis 22:1-3 After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.” 2 He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” 3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him.
During my first quarter of taking biblical Hebrew as an undergrad, about seven weeks in or so, the professor had the class dive into BHS, reading from it for the last portion of each class. We began with Genesis 22. Upon reaching the end of the quarter, we knew that questions from the chapter would be on the final exam. The night before the exam, I was reading the passage for maybe the 40th time in the past 3 weeks, probably the 10th time that day alone, and reached the words “Abraham rose early in the morning” in verse 3. A knife to my heart.
Ouch
08 Feb 2010 Leave a Comment
Complaints have been rising in my heart this week, so this was a much needed rebuke to read today:
“If you read, ‘I want to get rid of the pain of this situation,’ you know that the agenda is probably wholly wrong. God may have brought a person into a painful situation in order to challenge, grow, and bless him. To be rid of it (at least for the present, or in the way he wishes) would be to dump God’s blessing overboard. What the Lord may want in a situation is to teach endurance (how to hang in there when the going gets tough), greater dependence on Him, or how to help others whom he could not if he were ‘rid of’ the painful circumstance.” – Jay Adams (Critical Stages of Biblical Counseling, p.40)
Not In Them
14 Nov 2009 Leave a Comment
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was a longing… For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
-C.S. Lewis
Advice to Missionaries
11 Sep 2009 Leave a Comment
From Adoniram Judson:
Beware of the reaction which will take place soon after reaching your field of labor. There you will perhaps find native Christians, of whose merits or demerits you can not judge correctly without some familiar acquaintance with their language. Some appearances will combine to disappoint and disgust you. You will meet with disappointments and discouragements, of which it is impossible to form a correct idea from written accounts, and which will lead you, at first, almost to regret that you have embarked in the cause. You will see men and women whom you have been accustomed to view through a telescope some thousands of miles long. Such an instrument is apt to magnify. Beware, therefore, of the reaction you will experience from a combination of all these causes, lest you become disheartened at commencing your work, or take up a prejudice against some persons and places, which will embitter all your future lives. . . . Beware of the greater reaction which will take place after you have acquired the language, and become fatigued and worn out with preaching the gospel to a disobedient and gainsaying people. You will sometimes long for a quiet retreat, where you can find a respite from the tug of toiling at native work — the incessant, intolerable friction of the missionary grindstone. And Satan will sympathize with you in this matter; and he will present some chapel of ease, in which to officiate in your native tongue, some government situation, some professorship or editorship, some literary or scientific pursuit, some supernumerary translation, or, at least, some system of schools; anything, in a word, that will help you, without much surrender of character, to slip out of real missionary work. Such a temptation will form the crisis of your disease. If your spiritual constitution can sustain it, you recover; if not, you die.
HT: Desiring God
Read Judson’s entire letter here. So glad to come across this.
One Life To Live
06 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment
Have you ever felt like you were not living the way you were created to live, and if each year for the next 50 years looked like this one, you would look in the mirror, gray and wrinkled, and feel like you’ve completely wasted so much of your life? Yet it’s okay to take it easy because you’re young and you have forever to live a life of significance. Someone once said, “Who you are today is who you are becoming.” And should it be that you don’t have another 50 years to live but a mere 5 minutes, what are you doing today to make your life count? Jonathan Edwards, when he was a teenager, wrote, “Resolved, never to do anything, which I should be afraid to do, if it were the last hour of my life.” How often do you think about death? Let’s not think about that, let’s enjoy the moment.
“Resolved, to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death.” – Jonathan Edwards
Life is not one party after another. Don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying live miserable and depressed. I’m not saying don’t go to parties. I’m not saying don’t enjoy what God has blessed you with. What I’m saying is that you should not have to be reminded day after day that people are perishing, and you should not have to be persuaded not to be apathetic about that. In all your business and activities and youth, don’t forget that life is about more than a preoccupation with clothes and sales and tans.
You could live a life of significance. That doesn’t mean being popular, or famous, or rich, or a CEO, or just like your favorite celebrity, or that your friendships will mimic the cast of your favorite TV show. You want your life to count? Your friendships will look nothing like the friendships from your TV show. No one will want to be like your friends. The world will not want to be just like you because you do things no one else wants to do. You serve when everyone else wants to be served. You give when everyone else wants to receive. You do the dishes when no one else wants to. You clean the apartment when no one else seems to. You serve the church with all your heart, and don’t complain about how imperfect it is. You love people not because they love you in return, but even when they don’t. You pray for people when they are unkind to you. You respect authority. You honor your parents. You bless your enemies. You are not cliquey or partial with your friendships, and you ask for forgiveness when you are. You don’t play around in sin, and you definitely don’t love it when you do. You find, as we all do, that your failings are many in all of this. You endeavor still to do these things, from assurance, not insecurity; and you don’t say “being a Christian is tough” or “ministry is hard” at the end of the day, but realize you are an unworthy servant and weep at your own sinful yet forgiven heart, and pray that it would be more inclined to serve sacrificially and impartially like your precious Lord deserves. You realize any good wrought in you is all grace.
Your life will not make it as the next TV show with the cast whose lives everyone wants to emulate. You do these things even if for the next 50 years not a single person recognizes you for them, because you really do believe that the Lord sees and that the Lord is pleased, and you don’t aim to please man but God. You sing “Oh to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be” at church and live each day like you actually mean it. You want to love your neighbor as yourself, and so when you see that your neighbor is suffering or has a lack of resources or oh so much more significantly, has eyes that do not see and ears that do not hear, you don’t ignore your neighbor or wait for your neighbor to ask for your affection and time, all with the statement “God wants me to enjoy my life.” …You are afraid to wrongly interpret and apply Scripture.
Look back on your life so far. What do you have of eternal significance to show? On that judgment day you will be stripped of all your excuses. I don’t want you to stand there and wish you could do it all over again. I don’t want to stand there and wish I could do it all over again. You may be a full-time employee, you may be a full-time student, you may be a full-time mom, you may be a combination of those, your life may be full of events and activities. You could still do everything above. I intentionally did not include anything about missions when I say to you, make your life count. Though not to suggest that you should not be involved in missions. John Piper once said, there are those who go, those who send, and those who are disobedient. I didn’t include missions in here to demonstrate that you could live a life that is not wasted even if you’re living in a place like LA amidst all the noise and distractions and triviality. Everything all around you may seem to suggest that it is normal to live an apathetic, lukewarm life. There’s nothing normal about it. Don’t look around you to see what’s normal. Look to the Word of God. Look to what God has commanded of you and that is what’s normal. Turn off the TV, pass up on one of the events or parties, close the door, open your Bible, dwell in it, seek the Lord. You will see that it is not normal to live an apathetic life. And on that judgment day, you will not regret the time you spent praying to the Lord, seeking to know Him, studying His Word. You will not regret giving, serving, loving, yielding everything for the cause of Christ.
Do you really want to be used by the Lord? Know this, the world needs the Word of God. I want the Lord to use me too, but I realized something. I’m not making myself useful. I know so little of the Word of God and I don’t pursue holiness with the vigor that I should. I spend too much time watching TV. I realized this when I was having a conversation and knew that if I had spent more time studying the Bible, I would be more useful in that moment. The hours I’ve wasted. Let’s encourage each other in the Lord daily. I know I need it. O how I need to exhort my own soul in these very things as I’m writing at this moment. Are you equipped in the Word of God? Are you holy? Are you yielded? Flee from your idols. Mortify your sin. Seek the Lord. He will help you and preserve you and encourage your heart with the Gospel when you fail. Who hasn’t failed? Keep going in the strength that He provides after you fail. And know that your life will be infinitely better than what you see on the TV shows. You will enjoy a life that is truly life; and more precious to your heart, dear Christian, than anything else, you will honor King Jesus.
