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The Holy Spirt Working

In my reading this week I came across an excerpt out of No Little People (a collection of sermons by Francis Schaeffer). Here is what Schaeffer wrote:

"Both the Scriptures and the history of the church teach that if the Holy Spirit is working, the whole man will be involved and there will be much cost to the Christian. The more the Holy Spirit works, the more Christians will be used in battle, and the more they are used, the more there will be personal cost and tiredness. It is quite the opposite of what we might first think. People often cry out for the work of the Holy Spirit and forget that when the Holy Spirit works, there is always tremendous cost to the people of God, weariness and tears and battles."

This seems to ring true in my life and in the lives of those I know who are actively praying to live and move and have our being in Him, to be directed by the Holy Spirit. When this is your bent in life it will come at a personal cost.

You will be tired....do you have the discipline to make time to rest and rejuvenate?

Spiritual warfare will come at an intense pace....do you have the eyes to see it and the companions to battle it?

Weariness and tears and battles will ensue daily....do you have the perseverance and support of community to endure?

Schaeffer is right, this seems very counter intuitive for our simulated fabrications of how the Holy Spirit moves. We often see the Holy Spirit like the ice-cream man who only brings good things for us to experience and eat and ride the sugar high.

And most people will limit the moving of the holy spirit to an event, an hour of produced emotional manipulation that the programmers have conjured up, so we can willingly offer ourselves to the experience. And if we feel the tinge of emotional up-rise internally, like a good story will naturally cause, we say wow, the holy spirit was really moving this hour, I could feel him.

But maybe, just maybe the scriptures are right and we are wrong about how the Holy Spirit moves. Schaeffer's insight to the scriptures and the history of the church are sobering. When the Holy Spirit works, there is always tremendous cost to the people of God....weariness....and tears....and battles. So let's not mistake the emotional high of a weekend experience that was crafted to give us the high we seek, with the true working of the Holy Spirit.

If you are crying out for the Holy Spirit to move in your life and in the lives of those around you and it seems that things are not going smooth, you are getting weary and life is difficult, don't be surprised. When you pray for the Holy Spirit to move, life is not lived beyond the fray but rather it is lived right in the middle. Offer your praise to God and get real with your faith community and go to battle, because whenever the Holy Spirit moves the enemy will be there.

A more accurate definition of success

Fellow blogger, Bob Hyatt, Pastor at Evergreen Church in Portland Oregon, has posted his thoughts of the success they are seeing in their faith community through declining numbers and lower giving. Of all the pastors I have talked to, and read, about "how" they define success, I think Bob has the most accurate perspective that I have read or heard so far on what really makes a local church successful!

Read Article HERE

Bob blogs HERE

I pray in the words of St. Augustine...

"Lord Jesus, don't let me lie when I say that I love you....and protect me, for today I could betray you."

What agreements have you made?

Have you ever stopped to think about what (or who) shaped your belief in who you are or who you want to be?

For some, you were raised in an environment where parents, teachers, coaches, grandparents, friends, peers, boyfriends/girlfriends, pastors, cub scout leaders, and even the lunchroom lady constantly protected your heart from the attacks of the enemy's voice so you could only hear the sweet sound of your heavenly father speaking his truth into your heart unconditionally, "I love you", "I created you", "You are good", "You are lovely", "You have what it takes", "You are mine", "You are fearfully and wonderfully made", "You are worth it"!

For the rest of us we didn't have such privilege. We grew up where the enemy used all the above mentioned people and created personal situations to attack our hearts with false agreements about who we are and who we will become, all cultivated from his bag of lies.

I'm not suggesting that everything we grew up believing about ourselves is a lie. Far from it. We are who we are because our individual experiences along our journey have shaped us into who we are. God will use all people and all experiences in our life for good - if we allow him to own it. What I am suggesting is that there are those subtle agreements that we have made with ourselves (and the enemy), while on the surface seem like good, well intentioned moments, are actually quite damaging to who we are and who we want to become.

2009 Malibu Men's Retreat

Critical Swine Flue Prevention Tip

TIP: Do NOT do this!

Our Need of Recovery by Brian McLaren

For many people, economic recovery means getting back to where we were a few months or years ago. That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life. I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery, drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life—a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life—unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.

Similarly, I’d like to suggest whenever we hear the word “recovery,” we as a nation see it not as a call to get back our old addictive high, but rather as a call to face our corporate and personal addictions, including the following:

1. Our addiction to carbon. Fossil fuels are an addictive substance. They give us speed, quick energy, serving as a kind of cultural amphetamine. Meanwhile, they toxify our environment and throw the ecosystem in which we live into dangerous imbalance.

2. Our addiction to weapons. Weapons give us a feeling of well-being and security, removing our feelings of fear and anxiety, much like a barbiturate. But like a drug, they make us lazy and slow in the much more important work of relationship-building, justice, and peace-making—lazy in seeking the common good. And they plunge us into an addictive cycle, because if everyone in the world is getting more and more weapons, we aren’t safer … especially when increasing numbers of those weapons are nuclear, biological, and chemical.

3. Our addiction to fear. Religious leaders, media leaders, and political leaders have all discovered that you can raise quick votes, dollars, and members through the hallucinogenic stimulant of fear. By making straights afraid of gays, conservatives afraid of progressives, Christians and Jews afraid of Muslims, citizens afraid of immigrants, and vice versa, these leaders get a quick organizational high—”crack” for their unity and morale. But the more fear you pump into your system, the more fear you have, and pretty soon, you go from being stimulated to paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and missing things that are. And soon after that, you move from paranoia to paralysis, leaving you in greater danger than ever.

4. Our addiction to stuff. Jesus said that a person’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of her possessions. An economy that measures growth by the number of durable goods (resources) extracted from the environment and turned into non-durable goods that are bought, used, and then thrown away into a landfill … that economy “succeeds” by turning goods into trash, and calling it success. That’s not success. We need to imagine moving beyond an extractive, consumptive economy to a sustainable economy, and beyond a sustainable economy to a regenerative economy. I believe that in God’s world, if billions can be made destroying the planet and exploiting people addictively, trillions can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.

5. Our addiction to a single bottom line. During the president’s town hall meeting, a man from Indiana told how he started a solar-powered attic fan company, and how he chose not to ship manufacturing overseas, but instead, to provide good employment for his neighbors. That meant, he said, that he had a little less cash in his pocket … but wouldn’t you agree that being a good neighbor has a value that can’t be measured in dollars? The single bottom line of financial profit is addictive, and like an addiction, it destroys families and communities. We need to rediscover a triple bottom line—financial sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. So we need a recovery of family values, and we also need a recovery of community values, and neighborly values, and ethical business values.

6. Our addiction to easy answers. “Government is the problem.” “Just throw money at the problem.” We can’t afford our addiction to these kinds of easy ideological slogans and facile reactive fantasies in a complex, real world. Ideology is, in many ways, a drug that substitutes the quick high of unthinking reaction for the hard work of acquiring wisdom.

So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long. That’s my hope and prayer.

Brian McLaren is a speaker and author, most recently of Everything Must Change and Finding Our Way Again. This piece is taken from the God’s Politics blog at Sojourners.

HT: Catalyst

from nakedpastor.com

Somewhere In Between

Have you ever been stuck in between something, not sure how to move in any given direction, whether it's forward, backward, sideways, whatever way? 

I was reading Shane Claiborne's book, "Jesus For President" and he was writing about the parable found in Matthew 13:3-8.

3Then he told them many things in parables, saying: "A farmer went out to sow his seed. ⁴As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. ⁵Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. ⁶But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. ⁷Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. ⁸Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.

Shane was talking about the blessing of the world through the people of God is not like a violent, quick revolution that takes over power. It starts small, grows silently, faces setbacks, but nevertheless permeates the world with love. Then he made this comment which really hit close to home, "That's difficult for us in a world where we bounce between aggressive impatience and paralyzing cynicism."

Bounce Between Aggressive Impatience and Paralyzing Cynicism!

That's where I am. 

Bouncing between these two ominous opponents, stuck in a volley. My wounds keep me there. My humanity is comfortable there. My sin is alive there. And it's not just about learning to patiently love the world, but for me it seems more about being patient with those that call themselves "Christian". Either way it is the same opponents I meet, in every match, that want to knock me back and forth - in between.

I grow impatient with Christians when they choose to live life in the shallowness of their faith and yet I feel like I am paralyzed by my cynicism toward them that I forget to go deeper, further then where I am myself. 

Even more, I become a participant in my own opponents game of being impatient and cynical of myself! It is in this self destructive space that the enemy wants me to make agreements with him about who I am and who others are. I have have made these agreements in the past. 

However, I hear Jesus declaring redemption on my heart, desiring me to hear his voice of truth about me, to break the agreements I have made with my enemy, and heal me in those spaces. This is my tension that I live in each day as I struggle to push deeper into my God.

So, if I come across as aggressively impatience and/or paralyzingly cynical, know it is not who I fully am called to be, but rather it is my messy spirituality that I am acting out of. And please, trust my heart in this space. Or don't, it's up to you.

Jesus is NOT a Brand

I have tried on many occasions in the past to write about my frustrations about christian consumerism, church branding, church marketing, etc. Among many articles I have written about our Pragmatic Approach, I have thought that Maybe it's the WAY success is being defined, Scratched my head at Pastors feeling frustrated as they serve up hot messages to feed their Sunday morning consumers when we should really Feed ourselves and ultimately I grieved at the churches idolatry of the god of consumerism.

In all of these articles I hacked through my thoughts to express the danger and frustration of Christianity branding Jesus, marketing their church and targeting consumers. I say this to tell you that I just finished reading Tyler Wigg-Stevenson's article in Christianity Today, "Jesus is not a Brand" from his book "Brand Jesus: Christianity in a Consumerist Age". This is a well written article that articulates more better what I have tried to in all my articles on this blog.

Definatley worth the read!