Forgive but please don’t forget

So I do not usualy watch the Grammys and this year was no different, but when I return home from work and jumped on Facebook and Twitter, I only seemed to be able to read about it. The next morning I went online to see if I could find the performances and I was completely surprised. Usually, all of the performances on the Grammys are not good, in my opinion, but this year seemed to be the exception. Though the performance of Nicki Minaj moved Hip-hop back [somewhere between] 15 to 20 years the other performances were amazing. Bruno Mars, Alicia Keys and Bonnie Raitt, Jennifer Hudson and more. Seriously, if you have not seen any of the footage you should check them out here.

Anyways, I noticed something that disturbed me and I wondered how many people were as disturbed at The Grammys choice to showcase so much of Chris Brown. If you remember Brown was arrested and subsequently convicted for assaulting his then-girlfriend Rihanna on the eve of the 2009 Grammys,but his acceptance speech after winning best R&B album included no act of contrition whatsoever .

It seemed odd to me that Chris Brown performed twice and won an award in front of the woman that he assaulted. I also realize the the Grammys are by no means the moral compass of my life but it did make some truths clear.

Chris Brown is a great entertainer, his performances were great.
Based off of his abilities and album Chris Brown deserved to dance, sing, and get an award.
For Rihanna, this whole night could not have been easy at all, I could only imagine.

Reality is that Grammys and music industry are built for fame and seems to be much quicker to forgive Chris Brown than most communities built for Christ are.

This is where it becomes hard for me and the place where I would love for you to weigh in. I have not been hurt [physically] like Rihanna before nor have I had to watch the perpetrator be rewarded with the most illustrious award in the industry that I work. I can not imagine what it must feel like to be in that place, but I also know that the Bible is clear that I am to forgive as I was forgiven. This is where you will see me differ with convential wisdom that says:

“Forgive and Forget”

I don’t have the ability to forget nor is it my job to forget the Chris Brown’s of my life, but it is my job, as a Christ follower to forgive. I do not know that the Christian community, as a whole, does a great job in this regard despite the fact that our salvation begins with the forgiveness of more heinous crimes than that of Chris Brown.

I would love to know some of your thoughts…

Truths learned from the life and death of JoPa

It’s been over 2 weeks since the passing of Joe Paterno and I wanted to offer some thoughts about his affect on my life and thoughts about his greater affect for our community.

Upon hearing of the death of Joe Paterno I was saddened to say the least. I began to listen and read different peoples opinions of the man, the myth, and the legend. Everything was customary and nice until I read this:

For 50 years, he was a god of college football. He may be the best college football coach of all time…. [h]e was so great that I think the ultimate story about him will eventually outshine the awful ugliness of a child molestation scandal that happened right under his nose, on his watch, by his coordinator, on his turf. You know why I’m OK with this?

We are all Joe Paterno.

Hundreds of thousands of children are molested right under our noses, on our watch, in our country, in other countries AND only a few people are out there fighting for them.

While I do not disagree with what this blog and it was not unique in its assertions, my mind began to race because of its opinions (especially by Christians) misses the point completely.

In Acts 19:21 – 41 we encounter a situation that is not all that different from the one we are seeing in Happy Valley. It’s not exactly the same but very similar. Paul and his disciples find themselves in the middle of a riot. The Spirit led Paul and his disciples to to the Ephesus to preach the Gospel and eventually plant a church. The Spirit moved and people were saved, because of this the idol makers in town began to lose money. The idol makers, angry about lost wages, spread the word and eventually raise up a crowd to protest and eventually it turned into a riot.

I am not saying that JoPa preached the Gospel, or that there was lost wages because of his firing. The similarities lie in what happens when we [humans] lose an idol. Read this definition and see if it applies:

idol |ˈīdl| noun an image or representation of a god used as an object of worship.• a person or thing that is greatly admired, loved, or revered.

The night that JoPa was fired and the riots began, the only thing i could think was, “this is what happens when we lose our idols, when we lose our object of worship.” Harold Best says explains this best in his book Continuous Worship:

We begin with one fundamental fact about worship: at this very moment, and for as long as this world endures, everybody inhabiting it is bowing down and serving something or someone—an artifact, a person, an institution, an idea, a spirit, or God through Christ.

The point here is that worship describes something that is bigger than singing a song, or any specifically “religious” action. When you take your first bite of an amazing meal, when you witness the phenomenal catch in a baseball game, when you hold your newborn child for the first time, you naturally and freely proclaim your wonder and joy to everyone without shouting/tweeting (new school) distance. These are not bad responses in and of themselves in the right context, but they help to illustrate that we can not help but worship, all the time. Worship involves our entire life. The problem is the opposite of worship is idolatry. Every human being, at every moment of their life, today and into eternity, is continuously doing either the former or the latter. On this point a scholar i read said (and I’m paraphrasing),

“People are not to be defined by skin color, gender, by geographical location, or even, shockingly, by their good behavior. Nor are they defined by the particular type of religious feelings they may have. They are defined in terms of the god they worship.

This brings us back to the first quote of this post.

For 50 years, he was a god of college football.

I know that I will be derided for this but it must be said this is the truest summation of the whole situation I have heard yet. Whether you consciously or sub-consciously worship him or anyother figure in your life (including yourself) as god then maybe we should all reevaluate our priorities and realize that the Bible is still true when God told Moses in Exodus 20:

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

These are the first 2 of the 10 Commandments. I know that some of you will read this and hear me saying that I hate JoPa or Penn State or (fill in the blank), but this could not be further from the truth. What I did realize is in this moment an idol was exposed and I began to wonder exactly how many more idols there were in my life [specifically] and in others lives that we just do not identify. So I wanted to provide some practical steps from Pastor Mark Drisoll (Seattle) to help you avoid idolatry, in the hope that they might be helpful:

Be careful of making a good thing, such as marriage, sex, children, health, success, or financial stability, an ultimate thing, or what Jesus called our “treasure.”

Avoid participating in any religious community where the clear truth claims of Scripture are ignored while contemplative and mystical practices are favored simply for their spiritual experience.

Be careful of any church or ministry wherein acts of mercy and environmental stewardship are devoid of a theology of the cross and wind up being little more than the worship of created people and things.

And be careful not to worship a good thing as a god thing for that is a bad thing.

Well that is it, I would love to know your thoughts below…

Man UP!!!

There’s an ongoing war within [our] culture. It’s the war for manhood. The older I become the harder it becomes to see a proper example of Biblical manhood. Much like the culture the chairs and pews are overwhelmingly filled with ‘boys who can shave’. Let me give you an example actually taken from the people I interact with daily.

What is the difference between a 16 year old that lives at home with his parents, plays Xbox 360 all day, doesn’t have a job, dates around without any form of commitment, and has little or no responsibility outside of which fast food joint he wants to take his date for dinner and a 25 year old that bunks with dudes, pays $100 in rent a month, works part-time, and doesn’t shower very often?

You’re exactly right; the answer: age.

I know what you’re thinking. The aforementioned descriptions might be a little extreme and probably not ‘completely’ accurate in most cases, but the picture painted here should be pretty clear.

Adolescence is often seen as the stages between puberty and legal adulthood. In our culture, this would be about 18 years old. When a young man turns 18 he can buy tobacco, vote, and purchase rated R movie tickets. Pretty sweet huh? Yep. Well, it seems that way.

In today’s culture, boys can become men without any ‘rite of passage,’ so to speak. All it takes is… well… age. I am seeing ‘men’ who are in their 20′s and 30’s reflect the lifestyle of 18 and 19 year olds. And we call it manhood. This is pathetic!

Confusion over what manhood is has plagued our cities, families and lives. The concept of a biblical man has been lost in our generation. Unfortunately, many churches struggle to provide for its members, much less those beyond their walls, with a tangible definition of a real man.

Mark Discoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church, gives some pretty good insight into this.

Historically, a guy would go through two life phases: boy, then man. The transition from boy to man was comprised of five sociological variables that happened almost simultaneously or in very close succession:

1. Leave your parents’ home (Gen. 2:24);
2. Finish your education or vocational training;
3. Start a career-track job, not a dead-end-Joe job;
4. Meet a woman, love her, honor her, court her, and marry her;
5. Have children with her.

But here’s what’s happened. Rather than moving from boy to man by this succession of sociological transitions, we’ve created something called adolescence. It’s a third life stage in the middle between boy and man. We don’t know what to call them so we just call them guys. These are boys who can shave.

Today, adolescence starts somewhere in the teen years and continues indefinitely. There is no foreseeable end. The problem with adolescence is guys don’t know when they’re ever going to grow up and be men, and no pressure is exerted on them to do so.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_K9sjB2pKM&feature=plcp&context=C3e679e9UDOEgsToPDskL7-M9Y0PM8UU5z0xQHxjc7]

Lyrics below…

[Lecrae]
Momma want some more Obama in me the hood want PAC hip hop wanna see the
Common in me. And since this a senseless contradiction I end up a misfit tryina fit In. This ends when I stand up and see the hands of the standard: holy is
The lamb huh(holy is the lamb) Now we holding you to man up cause we were made
In his image start looking at what you came from.[KB]
Right after Adam every atom in our anatomy had to make adamant after what
Adonai is against. Let me take you back to the tree in Eden, if you read it you’ll see that eve was deceived but Adam is the one who let it in.(Man up) Standing Leading no, we ain’t leading we (Bump that) Basically little boys with
Muscles and a mustache! The femininity, we need a remedy, the God-Man, a
100 percent (strength) masculinity

[Trip Lee]
Where the men at, seems like they all lost, none of them are on the scene,
Seems like they died off. They extinct but my dream is to rise up, we
Chasing the prize of the King the divine boss, but we fell away, now we
UnGodly we lose and we really got the blues like Navi, I wanna celebrate the dudes that’s beside me fellas lets elevate we through with the lobby

[Tedashii]
Go ahead I say boy Get your shine on. and if a sucker try to block you get your 9 home and
What I heard you gotta do to be a man now, stand up for yourself so I took
It in my hands now. And that’s the problem man we busy trying to solve it
All the while we walking dead man somebody bring the coffin, boy drop
Peach fuzz now you think that your a man cause you feeling yourself you
Need to man up!

[Sho Baraka]
Sex and models, and tipping bottles back a pile of excuses right next to
Your bottle caps. A rolodex filled with names that you aim to
Please next to the stack of money, building up a heart of greed. Ice on his
Neck give the jokers a cold shoulder, you drunk off pride plus you loving
The hangover. You gotta whole lotta stuff that won’t amount to gain life
Will never make sense cause you never made change

[PRo]
You got it Twisted sick like a fever, little man live to stack doe
Keebler. Man up! Get up out of the treehouse leave the cookies alone it’s
Time to eat meat now. Trying to show you a new way to live now, no charge
You can call it a freestyle. without Christ you know how your man is, was
A boy in a mans body like Tom Hanks in BIG.

[Andy Mineo]
Being a man got nothing to do with age. You can be a boy till the day you
Lay in your grave. None of us behave in the image of who were made, cause
We’ve fallen away it’s better known as depraved. Running from
Responsibility really we crave the easy way out of places that call us to
Pull our weight. Man there going through everyday decisions are made,
Responding to the call God’s giving em from the…

[All]
Man Up!
[Andy]
Let the process begin, separate the boys from the men
[All]
Man Up!
[Andy]
Doesn’t matter how you started, partner, it’s about how you end
[All]
Man Up!
[Andy]
Jesus is the model follow us we gon’ follow him
[All]
Man Up!
[Andy]
We-we the last of a dying breed it’s time that we

[All]
MAN UP!

You are a Christian…right?

A friend from work texted this to me and I laughed immediately. He said that it reminded him of some of the conversations that we have had about Christ and His church. I would love know your reaction to this….

Bible Reading Plan for 2012

At the beginning of every year it seems that almost every person I come across resolves to do something different in the upcoming year. The actual statistics are that 40 to 45% of American adults make one or more resolutions each year. Among the top new years resolutions each year are ones about weight loss, exercise, and stopping to smoke. Also popular are resolutions dealing with better money management / debt reduction.

While many people who make new years resolutions do break them, research shows that making resolutions is useful. People who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who do not explicitly make resolutions. So I wanted to suggest one to you taken from a blog post I read a few years back, enjoy!

The beginning of a New Year is an an excellent time to try something new. As you make your list of resolutions and goals I want to recommend adding a simple four step process that could transform your life by, quite literally, changing your mind.

After reading the entire post the vast majority of readers will snicker at such a hyperbolic claim and never implement the method I outline. A smaller number will consider the advice intriguing, my assertion only a slight exaggeration, but will also never implement the method. A tiny minority, however, will recognize the genius behind the process and apply it to their own life. This group will later say that my claim was an understatement.

This post is written for those people.

A few years ago I stumbled across a variation of the four steps in a blog post by my Evangel co-blogger Fred Sanders and implemented his recommendation that day. I later had the pleasure of meeting Sanders in person and telling him how his post had transformed my life. My hope is that at least one other person will follow this advice and experience the same transformative effect.

Before I reveal the four steps I want to reiterate that while the advice couldtransform your life, it likely will not. As with most life-altering advice, it is simple, easy to implement, and even easier to ignore. Statistically speaking, the odds are great that you’ll ignore this advice. But a handful of you will try it so for the one or two people who will find this useful, the four steps that will transform your worldview are:

1. Choose a book of the Bible.

Choose shorter books and work up to longer ones. Since you’ll be reading an entire book of the Bible and not just a chapter or two, you’ll want to work your way up to more extensive readings. When beginning this program you may want to start with a short book that has only a few chapters that can be read several times in one sitting. This will give you a sense of accomplishment and help develop the reading habit. For example, a short book like John or Jude can be read four or five times in one sitting allowing you to finish the entire twenty readings in less than a week. [NT books, shortest to longest: 3 John, 2 John, Phlm, Jude, Titus, 2Thess, Rev, 2 Peter, 2 Tim, 1Thess, Col, 1 Tim, Phil, 1 Peter, James, 1 John, Gal, Eph, 2 Cor, Heb, 1 Cor, Rom, Mark, John, Matt, Acts, Luke; OT books, shortest to longest: See this chart.]

Choose an appropriate version. A modern language paraphrase is not an appropriate version for synthetic reading. Likewise, the familiar rhythms and cadences of the KJV can, upon repeated readings, get in the way of comprehension. I personally recommend the ESV, though the NIV can be a suitable alternative.

2. Read it in its entirety.

3. Repeat step #2 twenty times.

4. Repeat this process for all books of the Bible.

Click here to read the rest of the article…

How are you planning to get into the Bible more in 2012? What do you think?

Advent Week 5: Anticipation

For many of us, Christmas Day was one of the most important days of the year, which is obvious given the amount of preparation that often goes into it. Schedules, plans and budgets are adjusted months in advance. Family members travel in from far away. As a matter of fact we added 2 new members to our family from Uganda this Christmas, but I digress. Decorations are perfectly placed, menus are planned, gifts are purchased, wrapped and hidden and then re-hidden. There is intentionality, joy and anticipation all because this day is significant, valuable and also because we believe it is a reality.

Christmas isn’t a pretend day; it’s real. We wouldn’t go through all the trouble of trimming trees and fighting crowds if we didn’t believe Christmas was, in fact, an actual day. We trust it to come on the same date every year, and out of love and expectation, we make every necessary preparation so that when December 25 becomes our reality, we’ll be ready.

We spend months preparing to celebrate and remember Christ’s first coming. How much more should we seek to be ready for the day of His second coming? That day, too, is a reality, an absolute certainty. Unlike Christmas Day, which we know to expect every 25th of December, only the Father knows the day and hour His Son will return, but He is coming. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Beloved One, will return to the earth. It has been promised.

In the fullness of time, He will split the sky and descend to destroy all wickedness, receive the worship that is rightfully His, and usher in a new age – one free of sin, suffering, disappointment and fear. On that day, the children of God will walk in full-hearted belief and unrestrained delight as we see our Beloved face to face. We will be free from the sin and the brokenness of this world. And that will be wonderful, but the real treasure is Jesus. His return marks the beginning of unbroken, unending fellowship with Him. It is a day we should believe in, think about, look to and prepare for with joy, anticipation, hope and holy fear.

The day of Jesus’ return is certain and coming, but (so far) it is not today. At this time, we find ourselves much like the Israelites long ago – a people in waiting – which begs the question: how then shall we wait, and what does it mean to be ready for that day? How should we, as the people of God, live as we look toward and long for the coming of Jesus?

We should live as if we believe Jesus is, in fact, returning. In the same way that we have made thoughtful, intentional preparations for Christmas because we knew and believed it was an actual day that was actually coming, we are to live lives of thoughtful, intentional preparation for the actual day that Jesus will actually return. (Matthew 24:42-44)
We should be faithful and wise stewards of everything that has been entrusted to us by God, understanding that all of it—whether possession, ability, talent or gifting – actually belongs to Him and exists for His glory. (Matthew 24:45-51; 25:14-30)
We should have hearts that have been tended and prepared for His coming by being full of faith, love, worship and overwhelming delight in Jesus. We will fight and flee from sin and do all that is needed to be found faithful to our first love. (Matthew 25:1-13)
We should love and care for those who are poor, weak, cast out and in need. True disciples of Jesus cannot and will not ignore the plight of the least of these. We will serve, love, give, go and pray for those in need of food, drink, clothing, friendship and comfort. (Matthew 25:31-46)
We should love the nations and proclaim the gospel both far and near. As the church family, we are the vessel appointed by God to herald the gospel in all the world through both word and action. (Matthew 24:14)

The Bibles exhortations are just as much for us today as they were for the believers long ago. We, too, are living in the days of God’s patient mercy. Christ will not return until the gospel of the kingdom is preached in all the world and the full number of those appointed for salvation has been brought into the family of believers. We need to be reminded, as those who are dearly loved by God, that really believing in and looking toward Jesus’ return changes the way we live. It reorients our hope and perspective. It creates a sense of urgency, sobriety and giddy anticipation – just like a child who cannot wait for Christmas morning. Let us, as the people of God, be found ready in the waiting.

As this Christmas season comes to a close, take some time to reflect upon how the reality of Jesus’ return affects the way you live. May your heart be full and your eyes bright as you hope in all things in Christ and look to His coming. Take heart, beloved. It won’t be long.

This is anticipation…

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