Nothing in Particular

It has been a while since I have updated this. Much has happened since Thanksgiving. To begin with, I have finished all of my classes for this semester. I hope that I have passed all of my classes. The only class I am worried about is me Spanish 3 class, which is the only class I really need to pass. I feel very confident that I passed the rest of my classes. At the moment I am in Florida with my cousins on vacation. I have been reading books while here.

The first book is Desiring God by John Piper. To begin with, this book has challenged me beyond all reason in how I think about my relationship with Christ. The entire book is full of amazing thoughts on Christian living and how Christians Hedonists are the ones that will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Hedonism is a living for pleasure. Christian Hedonism in living for pleasure in Christ. One of the statements in the books that has stood out the most is a reply to why John Piper would not say that those that believe will inherit the kingdom of God.

His reply was “My answer has two parts. First. we are surrounded by unconverted people on the street who think they do believe in Jesus. Drunks on the street say they believe. Unmarried people sleeping together say they believe. Elderly people who haven’t sought worship or fellowship for forty years say they believe. All kinds of lukewarm, world-loving people church attenders say they believe. The world abounds with millions of unconverted people who say they believe in Jesus… This leads to the second part of my answer. There are other straightforward biblical commands besides ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.’ The reason for introducing the idea of Christian Hedonism is to force these commands to our attention.”

How often do I, as a Christian, delight myself in the Lord. How often do I seek after the Lord. How often do I love the Lord with all my heart soul and mind. The answer is a resounding “not as often as I should.” Instead, I seek after my own hearts desire, seek after my own prideful desires, love myself with my all and reject what God has to give. When we do this Piper explains it like us “playing with mud and making mud cakes when the are offered a cruise.” God has offered us so much more when we follow him and yet we choose to reject His gifts and His love and His forgiveness and His grace and His everything. Instead, we play with our mud cakes and continue to play in our own sin.

I don’t know if this post will encourage you, as readers, or if it will challenge others.  I certainly hope it does both.  As I stated in the first paragraph this books is certainly challenging me beyond anything that has challenged me previously.  I am humbled by how often I treat my creator like trash, when I deserve worse then even Hell could offer.  Oh how graceful God is to allow His son to die for me so that I can have a relationship with Him.

Don’t Waste Your Life

If you all know me, you know I’m one of those white guys that loves rap, but I don’t like just any kind of rap; I love Christian rap.  Lecrae, Trip Lee, and Flame are my favorites just becuase they are so godly and so theological in all of their music.  In Lecrae’s newest CD “Rebel” he has a song called “Don’t Waste Your Life” and everytime I listen to the second verse I am just floored by how ridiculous I am when it comes to serving the greatest thing that has happened to me.  The second verse goes like:

Suffer
Yeah do it for Christ if you trying to figure what to do with your life
if you making money hope you doing it right
because the money is Gods you better steward it right
stay focused if you aint got no ride
your life aint wrapped up in what you drive
the clothes you wear the job you work
the color your skin naw we Christian first
people living life for a job
make a lil money start living for a car
get em a house a wife kids and a dog
when they retire they living high on the hog
but guess what they didn’t ever really live at all
to live is Christ yeah that’s Paul I recall
to die is gain so for Christ we give it all
he’s the treasure you’ll find in the mall
Your money your singleness marriage talent and time
they were loaned to you to show the world that Christ is Divine
that’s why it’s Christ in my rhymes
That’s why it’s Christ all the time
my whole world is built around him He’s the life in my lines
I refused to waste my life
he’s too true ta chase that ice
heres my gifts and time cause I’m constantly trying to be used to praise the Christ
If he’s truly raised to life
then this news should change your life
and by his grace you can put your faith in place that rules your days and nights. 

The part that really gets me is: “Your money your singleness, marriage, talent and time they were loaned to you to show the world that Christ is Divine”.  How often do we take a step back, see what God has given us and thank Him?  We, especially as Americans, take so much for granted.  We have clean water that we can get from a sink.  IN most countries to get clean water you have to get bottled water or walk for miles to get it and yet we complain when we have to get up to get a drink.  We have hot water to use for 15, 20, 30, or even longer showers.  Most people don’t get hot showers and if they do not for that long.  And yet we complain if someone flushes the toilet or turns on the sink water when we are in the middle of our shower and we get a little uncomfortable.  One more example is, especially for me, I am single, and I would love to date a really godly girl, and since I don’t have one I complain.  I think that since I “do so much for God and His kingdom” I, for some reason, deserve to have this.  Wow!  How selfish am I to even think that!!!

Don’t Waste Your Life

This is my first post and I am going to be starting off this blog with one of my favorite books.  This book, as you can tell by the title of the post, is “Don’t Waste Your Life” by John Piper.  In this chapter Piper is explaining why we, as human beings, were created.  So, without further adue… Here is the quote.

THE CRYSTAL-CLEAR REASON FOR LIVING

What does it mean to glorify God? It may get a dangerous twist if we are not careful. Glorify is like the word beautify. But beautify usually means “make something more beautiful than it is,” improve its beauty. That is emphatically not what we mean by glorify in relation to God. God cannot be made more glorious or more beautiful than he is. He cannot be improved, “nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything” (Acts 17:25). Glorify does not mean add more glory to God.

It is more like the word magnify. But here too we can go wrong. Magnify has two distinct meanings. In relation to God, one is worship and one is wickedness. You can magnify like a telescope or like a microscope. When you magnify like a microscope, you make something tiny look bigger than it is. A dust mite can look like a monster. Pretending to magnify God like that is wickedness. But when you magnify like a telescope, you make something unimaginably great look like what it really is. With the Hubble Space Telescope, pinprick galaxies in the sky are revealed for the billion-star giants that they are. Magnifying God like that is worship.

We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life. God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. In the night sky of this world God appears to most people, if at all, like a pinprick of light in a heaven of darkness. But he created us and called us to make him look like what he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God. We are meant to image forth in the world what he is really like.

DOES BEING LOVED MEAN BEING MADE MUCH OF?

For many people, this is not obviously an act of love. They do not feel loved when they are told that God created them for his glory. They feel used. This is understandable given the way love has been almost completely distorted in our world. For most people, to be loved is to be made much of. Almost everything in our Western culture serves this distortion of love. We are taught in a thousand ways that love means increasing someone’s self-esteem. Love is helping someone feel good about themselves. Love is giving someone a mirror and helping him like what he sees.

This is not what the Bible means by the love of God. Love is doing what is best for someone. But making self the object of our highest affections is not best for us. It is, in fact, a lethal distraction. We were made to see and savor God—and savoring him, to be supremely satisfied, and thus spread in all the world the worth of his presence. Not to show people the all-satisfying God is not to love them. To make them feel good about themselves when they were made to feel good about seeing God is like taking someone to the Alps and locking them in a room full of mirrors.

The Bible is crystal-clear: God created us for his glory. Thus says the Lord, “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory” (Isaiah 43:6-7). Life is wasted when we do not live for the glory of God. And I mean all of life. It is all for his glory. That is why the Bible gets down into the details of eating and drinking. “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). We waste our lives when we do not weave God into our eating and drinking and every other part by enjoying and displaying him.

You can find this book and many more by John Piper here.  Just a few questions to think about.  Are we doing everything we can to bring glory and honor to God, to the point that we gorify Him with everything we eat and drink? Or, as Piper puts it, are we going to the Grand Canyon and looking in a mirror?