08.22.08
Posted in God Centered, relationship at 12:22 am by Administrator
I recently ran into a guy that I met at Taft Street Coffee in Houston. Now he and I really don’t have much in common, especially on a socio-economic level. This fellow one day had just walked up to me and began telling me his story about how he had found God. As he told me the story about how he had been addicted to meth and how he had wandered into the coffee shop looking for a glass of water. He told me that he had found so much more. It showed me that we need to be aware of the people that we meet and those that cross our paths.
Now 4 months later, I have realized how much I have in common with this lower classed, former meth junkie. At the time we met, he showed me his former track marks and I commented that I had my scars too but they resided on the inside. Every time we see each other, it seems we were made to help each other out. It is eerie how similar our struggles are despite how different we are. God had provided both of us a person who truly cared about the problems that we had and who would listen and give aid. It is sad that in my former Christian life I would have just walked away from someone like this who has been such a blessing in my life.
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08.21.08
Posted in creation at 10:09 pm by Administrator
First, I am not a big fan of the literal creationist crowd. Many of these people seem a bit obtuse for my tastes.
But many people fail to realize how much faith it takes to believe in a theory such as evolution as propagated by Darwin and other evolutionist. We are to believe that through chance mutation and random occurences that life grew from primordial goo to complex organisms. All of you mathematicians figure out the odds of that one. It is greater than the odds than when you calculate the probability of all the factors that make the Earth habitable and conducive for life.
Now people cannot deny evolution on a micro scale. It has been proven that species do adapt to their environments such as Darwin’s finch example with changes that help them adapt to an environment. There is a lot of documented scientific research there. However, it is dificult to prove that one species has morphed into another on a grand scale.
Creation as a whole cries out that their is something that has imposed order upon it. Life proceeds along orderly paths (albeit messy) and follows cycles and patterns that are seen in nature all around us. Modern science has tried to give us chaos theory, by pioneers such as Edward Lorenz, but even random events seem to follow circular patterns (aka “the butterfly effect”). Inevitably if there was once all chaos, what acted upon the chaos to impose order? Creation cries out the need for a creator. Many call this theory “intelligent design”.
Modern day scientists and humanists and scientific atheists all tell us that God and science are mutually exclusive with one another, yet I find that look and understanding creation of all that is around us screams out the role of a Creator. I have faith in that.
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08.16.08
Posted in God Centered, Poetry, Spiritual Warfare at 4:25 pm by Administrator
Someone close to me was going through a hard time. The person kept saying to me that “I am nothing”. This crushed me, because I knew this was not true. This was a person who was sad and depressed. Yet it got me thinking about things. I wrote this poem about it.
THE NOTHING
The Nothing wanders the paths of life,
consuming the substance of all that we love.
Into its gaping maw, all sources of feeling go
Consuming the energy driving one and all
The nothing it lies
The nothing it deceives
The nothing just binds and torments
destroying that which is free.
Doubting one’s life, doubting one’s soul
The nothing grabs on and on doubts does grow
The nothing does linger, the nothing does lie
The nothing confuses with thoughts that die
The nothing leads us down, isolated back roads
Far from the paths of those walking by
The nothing tells people, hold on to their pain
for embarrassment it will bring
The nothing says no one will understand what we feel
The nothing discourages
The nothing says hide
The nothing whispers to us that
The nothing is inside.
Soon we believe it, the words we hold as true
The nothing resides within us
and there’s nothing we can do
Soon hope in us is fading
Soon light is cast out
Soon nothing does become us
and leads us to the dark night.
by Brett the Lofter — 5/5/08
The nothing is the essence of spiritual warfare. It is the loss of hope. We change that by embracing a relationship with God. This is one of the tactics of the father of lies. If you feel this way, seek out the Lord. Look in the Psalms for there are many there who have fought this battle too.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 4:05 pm by Administrator
Left of Self Center was a group of words that I felt God press into my heart. I didn’t grow up in church in particular save for the once or twice a year pilgrimage to celebrate Easter or Christmas. I did go to twelve years of parochial to escape the local public schools however but that was a strange experience for a person who had been baptized as a Protestant but lived in a Catholic world. God intrigued me but in some ways I was a stranger in a strange land who was able to participate fully.
I came to true faith and relationship with God when I took the leadership of a small group that was meant to build up Christian families. What I saw was people being cast out and judged even though these were the people who needed to hear what was being said the most. I saw the hypocritical side of Christianity, the one I lived in my own life, face to face. It was not a pleasing sight to me. I stood up to these people saying that Jesus came for the sinner, not for the religious and that these people were being modern day Pharisees. Yet I was a Pharisee of the highest order myself in practice. Disillusioned I left the church.
Soon after, my life fell apart. I found myself in the proverbial pit, crushed by the pressure of the depths like Jonah experienced in Jonah 2. God found me there and he saved me. I began to realize that it wasn’t about the ritual, it was about the relationship. I wish I could say I got it right from there but God has had to continuously work on me, taking away the masks with which I hit myself with and breaking off the rough edges. I have had to learn many lessons that I now realize that many people struggle with: authority, rebelliousness, submission, self-centered versus God-centered life, the nature of relationship, humility, love, and many more.
Though I have always considered myself a Christian, I have only been a true Christian for 4 years. This blog is my attempt to share the lessons I have learned as I come to embrace my relationship with my God through Christ. I do not hold to any particular denomination stance as I believe that most of them have their strengths and weaknesses. I joke that I am a mutt Christian. Despite this you may see evidences of my past experiences in the Roman Catholic, Baptist, Pentacostal, Methodist, Prebyterian, Lutheran, and Non-Denominational style churches. I do embrace a missional stance especially in terms of building relationships with my fellow believer and I do agree with many of the ideas found in the Emergent Church movement as long as it doesn’t devolve into a Christianity Light mentality.
I am married and have 3 children and live in the Houston metropolitan area. Enjoy
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08.15.08
Posted in God Centered at 10:35 pm by Administrator
I recently began reading Gordon MacDonald’s “Ordering Your Private World”. I was stunned when I read chapter 3. Concerns over being driven and having drivenness running your life resonated so strong in me, that it scared me badly. I have talked about the problem with individuals being “driven”, yet this issue compound exponentially when taken to an institution, whether spiritual or secular. It brought to mind the parable in Mt. 7:21-23 where Jesus hears the laments of those who said “Didn’t we prophesy in your name?” His response was chilling in return. “Go away, for I knew you not.” So people doing the right things for the wrong or (self-centered) reasons, are not glorifying God’s kingdom. So when Gordon MacDonald talked of drivenness that: “Maybe the clue is in the fact that you see them wanting to place conditions on their discipleship by stipulating when they would engage with Jesus and what they might want out of the relationship.” (p 26) He then relates it to the spiritual arena by saying that:
“…there is such as thing as a spiritually driven person who is never satisfied with who he is or what he accomplishes in religious work…
Here in North America we now live in what I call the era of the visionary church. Almost every pastor is judged on the basis of whether he/she has a vision. And this usually means a vision of how the church can grow, grow, grow. The pastoral care of the people – which for hundreds of years has been the aim of the church – is less important in comparison to the gathering of more people. Because more people means more programs, more buildings, more employed staff. Doubtless this is not all bad if it results in bringing unchurched people into the kingdom of God. But one wants to watch a lot of this “vision” and ask how much of it is satisfying the need of a driven leader who has to see thing expand at all costs.” (p 35)
Many of the churches I personally have gone to over the years, have suffered from this sort of spiritual narcissism. These churches are ruled by committees wielding five year plans, driven to conduct stewardship and capitol improvement campaigns and justify fiscal budgets and salaries. There was always an emphasis place on the need for growth in the numbers of people and of programs to cater to them. Recently, the Willow Creek Association put out a survey called Reveal. The conclusions which they came up with were shocking to them. There were big chunks of their churches that were disillusioned or discouraged with large numbers of this ground actually thinking of leaving the church. They looked at themselves and were baffled by the results. They had good stage presentations, great teachers, excellent programming, top notch facilities, and were attracting ever increasing numbers of people into their venues. What did these people want? Why were they discouraged and dissatisfied with their church? The long and the short of it was that these people were lacking in relationships. When you delved into the research, the designated “more spiritual mature” people were asking for things like encouraging Christian friendships, mentoring programs, and encounters that built community. I wonder if the leaders of Willow Creek scratched their heads and asked why the programming had not worked. But to Bill Hybels’ credit, he stood up at their Leadership Summit and admitted to everyone that they had gotten something wrong.
Now growth is a wonderful thing in Christianity as more people come to Christ, however many of these churches that are focused on growth in their memberships are doing so at the expense of the spiritual growth of their members. It would be like parents having children and then turning them out on the street when they are 3 or 4 years old. In my own personal case, my spiritual growth came more from a sense of interconnectedness between different groups of people in a variety of situations. Many of these churches see the solutions being addressed by the installation of small groups. As I have heard many of the small group gurus say, “We need to be making the church smaller while the church grows bigger.” I wonder about that. Just being in a group of 6 – 10 people may not provide for the level of interconnection that people need to grow spiritually. Christianity is best a shared experience, yet most of the time it seems that church is focused on the give and take versus the joint experience.
During the beginning of the process of writing this book, I remember being baffled by the response of a pastor friend of mine who presided over what would be consider a smaller church with an attendance of around 150 people. But what he had to say mirrors the quotes from MacDonald above. At the time, we were talking about evangelism, and he looked me straight in the eye and said that evangelism wasn’t his job. His job was to equip the saints and look after them. It was his job to teach his congregation how to share their faith and evangelize. At first, I was quite baffled by his response, but then I realized that he was right. A pastor’s job is to equip the saints. A pastor instructs and takes care of his people through building a relationship with them. Yes, a large church can do large things, but so can one man. I think of several of the mega churches that I have been at. Churches where people had no relationship whatsoever with the senior pastor as he was unavailable to the everyday member unless you had six weeks to wait. His time was spent crafting the “vision” and “building the five year plan” versus building up the saints.
So what is more important?
Notes from Gordon MacDonald’s “Ordering your Private World”
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Posted in relationship at 9:59 pm by Administrator
I was talking with an old friend yesterday and I noticed on his profile that he said he was an atheist. I asked him about the story behind that. It sounded like he had a spiritual crisis in graduate school and he mentioned how he really disliked people who used Christianity as a tool.
That really got me thinking about other people I had talked to and my own personal experience. My own experience was that I was completely turned off by a group of Christians that were castigating people without trying to build up their brothers or sisters in Christ. What was happenning in the groups these people were in on the premise of building better Christians was that those that were perceived as “sinful” were cast out and the others congratulated each other for purging the “sinful” nature in their group. It didn’t matter that many of these people had their own “secret sins” found in their lives. They were quick to throw stones. Did they love on these people, no… Did they show these people how they were being “sinful” through interactions with them and coming along side them? No.
So what is the result of this kind of action? People like my friend and others leave the church, never to return. Many want to know God but are turned away from doing so by self righteous christian types. I always thought to myself that people who were divorced or addicted to internet porns were usually the first people to throw stones at the homosexuals. For me both sides are not holding up to God’s word.
So I ask myself. Should we not seek out the lost and the hurting and embrace them with love? Should we not live our lives in honoring God and others in relationship? Shouldn’t we live our lives so that we shine the light of Jesus wherever we are? Should we take the light of Jesus to those who are far from it?
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Posted in God Centered at 6:22 am by Administrator
I recently ran into a guy that I met at Taft Street Coffee in Houston. Now he and I really don’t have much in common, especially on a socio-economic level. This fellow one day had just walked up to me and began telling me his story about how he had found God. As he told me the story about how he had been addicted to meth and how he had wandered into the coffee shop looking for a glass of water. He told me that he had found so much more. It showed me that we need to be aware of the people that we meet and those that cross our paths.
Now 4 months later, I have realized how much I have in common with this lower classed, former meth junkie. At the time we met, he showed me his former track marks and I commented that I had my scars too but they resided on the inside. Every time we see each other, it seems we were made to help each other out. God had provided both of us a person who truly cared about the problems that we had and who would listen and give aid. It is sad that in my former Christian life I would have just walked away from someone like this who has been such a blessing in my life.
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