The Simple Truth

A Lot Can Hide Behind a Smile

Check out this poem my son, Drew, wrote for school. I was blown away when I read of it. Proud dad moment...

“A Lot Can Hide Behind a Smile”

What everyone sees is only just part

We cannot see what hides in your heart

Broken dreams and long-past success,

Unorganized thoughts and memories in a mess.

Love of people you’ll never meet,

Hating people you’ll never beat

Images of warmth and joy,

Pictures of Death’s great ploy.

Feelings of blissful togetherness,

People you love who could care for you less.

Hurt and pain, unending sorrow,

Things you dread to happen tomorrow.

Birthdays to come and birthdays that passed,

Gifts you know will never last.

The list goes on and on for miles;

A lot can hide behind a smile.

 

Makin' a List

He's makin' a list. He's checkin' it twice. Gonna find out who's naughty and nice. Santa Claus is coming' to town.  He knows if you are sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake. 

Based upon this song here's how Santa operates. If you're on the nice list you get toys. If you on the naughty list you get coal.  In other words your gifts are based upon your works. You only get what you merit. You have to earn your presents.  

I'm so glad God doesn't operate like Santa. God has a naughty list too, and all of us are on it (Romans 3:23). Despite our sinful condition God has offered us the gift of eternal thru Jesus Christ (Romans 6:23). We don't merit it. We can't earn it. We certainly don't deserve it. But God offers it to us anyway (Ephesians 2:8-9).  Through faith in Jesus Christ we are put on God's good/nice list called the book of life (Philippians 4:3).  We make the list not because we are good, but because Jesus is good.  We should be good for goodness sake - our life should be filled with good works (Ephesians 2:10) not to gain eternal life but because we already have it.

So, during this Christmas season as we're threatening to take away your kids gifts (which we never do by the way) when they misbehave, don't forget that God offers you the greatest gift ever given in-spite of your naughtiness.

Sorry vs. Repentant

Being a parent to two children has taught me so much about myself and my relationship with God. The most recent lesson came about a week ago.  The lesson came in the midst of a fairly typical episode in our home when one of my children "misbehaved" and received a consequence.  A few minutes later the child, who shall remain nameless, came to me and said they were sorry. I accepted their apology and then they preceded to ask if their privilege could be restored to which I replied, "No". They were dumbfounded - "what do you mean, I said I was sorry!" Of course, then we had a conversation about how apology doesn't necessarily eliminate consequence.  That wasn't well received to say the least.

What became very apparent throughout this experience was that my child's expression of sorrow was driven by a desire to have their pain stop.  They weren't truly repentant for their actions.  There was no remorse over the sin that had been committed, there was simply sadness because what they wanted had been taken away.

I'm afraid we are sometimes guilty of approaching God in the same way.  We come to Him saying we are "sorry" for a particular sin motivated by nothing more than a desire for our pain to stop. There is no doubt we can come to God confessing our sin and He will forgive us (I John 1:9), however, our confession must carry with it an attitude of repentance (Proverbs 28:13). Our sorrow, our confession, our forsaking of sin must be driven by a brokenness and an acknowledgement that we have sinned against God and damaged our relationship with Him. Coming to God in this way may or may not relieve whatever consequences we are experiencing but one thing is sure - we will be forgiven and fellowship will be restored.

Thankful For...

As followers of Jesus we are to live in a continually state of thankfulness.  First Thessalonians 5:18 tells us that it is the will of God for us to give thanks in all things.  Notice it says to give thanks "in" all things, not "for" all things.  There may be things that occur in your life for which you are not thankful but we can still maintain an attitude of gratitude while we are endure difficult circumstances.  That said, as we set aside today to focus our attention on being thankful, here are a few things for which I am extremely thankful...

• My Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ
• My beautiful wife
• My two children
• The word of God
• The opportunity to be involved in the work of the ministry
• The faithful people of PBC
• Good health
• Good friends
• Circumstances of life that drive us closer to our Lord.
• God's unfailing provision

I encourage you to spend some time today expressing your thanks to God for His numerous blessings.  Then turn that day into a lifestyle of thankfulness.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Great Advice from Tim Hawkins

To all my married male friends out there - here's some great advice from comedian Tim Hawkins...

Handling Adversarial Relationships

From time to time we all have adversarial relationships in our life.  We might even call some people "enemies". It could be a co-worker who you just don't get along with; a boss who takes all the credit and cast all the blame; the grouchy neighbor who keeps letting their dog poop in your yard; someone at church who just gets on your nerves; or it might even be someone who lives under your roof (spouse, parent, or child). For whatever reason we sometimes get sideways in our relationships with certain people and no matter what we do it never seems to improve.  In fact, maybe its so bad your not sure it can ever be repaired, and so you've decided just to avoid the individual in question and have a "non-relationship". That strategy might work in certain instances for the short term, but is that really what God desires for us to do? Based upon what Jesus says in Matthew 5, I think there are some things we can do to possibly improve these relationships and bring God glory in the process.  Check out this passage...

 Matthew 5:43-44 "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;"

Our natural tendency in adversarial relationships is to return the behavior to them in kind. You treat me bad and I'll give it right back to you. You hate me, then I'll hate you even more! Jesus puts the kibosh on this strategy. He tells us to go the opposite direction - he wants us to love our enemies.  If fact, he gives us three things to do in order to display this love...

 1) Pray for them. Turning these relationships around starts right here.  Pray for them (and not just that God would kill them!).  Earnestly ask God to work in their life and make himself known to them. Remember, hurting people, hurt people.  If they are mistreating you most likely it flows from a place of hurt in their life.  Ask God to give you a sensitivity to their hurt; to soften your heart toward them, and the ability to love them like He does.  It's really hard to love someone who is mistreating you and so we need God's power to rest upon us and give us a supernatural ability to love.

 2) Bless them. This has to do with the words we use.  Don't get pulled into a verbal jousting match. That never solves anything. Verbal warfare is driven by pride and quickly escalates to heights we never thought imaginable. Chose to bless them with your words rather than curse them. Speak to them in a positive way. Find good things to say to them and about them. Refuse to engage in gossip about them with others. James tells us that taming the tongue is hard, but with God's help we can choose to bless rather than curse.

 3) Do good. It's not enough to just refrain from lobbing verbal grenades at people or to avoid them in order to pretend like everything is ok. God tells us He wants us to actively seek an opportunity to do good for them. Show them the love of Jesus in a practical way.  This is the proactive part of love. Don't just pray for them. Don't just choose to speak differently to and about them. Go above and beyond and perform some act of love in their life. You never know it may be the only love anyone has ever shown to them.

In Romans 12:17-21 Paul address the topic of adversarial relationships. He echoes the advice of Jesus and tells us when we love our enemies we heap coals of fire upon their head. That sounds pretty good! Unfortunately, he's not talking about literal coals, but rather the coals of conviction.  When we attempt to overcome evil with good, the party in question will feel bad for how they've treated us. A word of caution here - our goal is not to make them feel bad. Our goal is to do good and to show the love of Jesus. Also, people tend to react one of two ways toward coals of conviction - they resist/reject it and the result is even more outrageous behavior; or they melt under it and become softer toward us and hopefully toward God.  Either way, their reaction is not our business. We are striving to love them and do good to them regardless of the outcome and benefit to us. We simply desire to stand blameless before God saying that we did everything within our power to live peaceable with all people.

If you find yourself in an adversarial relationship I encourage you to try Jesus' three-fold strategy. I think you'll be amazed by the impact it will have on your situation. If nothing else you'll be able to stand before God with a clear conscience.

Lessons from Irene

Last Saturday/Sunday New Jersey endured a major Hurricane - IRENE! It was quite an experience
filled with many observations and lessons (some practical, some spiritual).  Here are a few...

• People truly freak out when they hear bad weather is coming. Stores where stripped bare of food, water, and batteries.  Obviously, it's great to be prepared but generally people need to SETTLE DOWN. I guess its the fearfulness in mankind's heart that causes this panic.
• I enjoy modern conveniences (A/C, running hot water, lights, showers, etc.) but I wonder if I've become a bit spoiled when it comes to the creature comforts the Western world offers.
• I am in dire need of a sump pump. We had water in our basement (2nd time in the 2+ years we've lived here). Once things settle down from the storm I'll have someone out to give me a quote.
• Crisis draws people closer together. I've had a number of people comment to me about how they were able to connect with previously unknown neighbors as a result of this storm.  We tend to do all we can to avoid suffering or any type of inconvenience but in these trials we find a fellowship that had alluded us heretofore.  This is what the Bible calls the "fellowship of suffering".
• Many hands really do make light work.  Kerrie and I were up at 4:30am sucking up water with the dry-vac and carting buckets of water upstairs to pour down the kitchen sink.  It was exhausting. Once our kids woke up (I woke them up) and started to help, the whole process was a lot less daunting.
• We often pass by little blessings in life.  Here's one I just rec'd...Thousands of people in our area lost power during and after the storm. In our neighborhood (over 400 homes) one side of the neighborhood is still without power while the other half didn't have so much as a blip of the lights. My backyard neighbors (literally 50 feet from my house) are without power while we are not. I count myself very fortunate and am extremely thankful that we did not lose power.  No power = no wet/dry vac = flooded basement.  I don't know why my power stayed on and others didn't. I'm certainly not more worthy of power than they are but for whatever reason, God has given me this blessing...
• Because God has blessed me with electricity I see it as my responsibility to minister to those without. We've baked cookies for our powerless neighbors, offered the use of electricity, hot showers, and outlets for the charging of cell phones.  We are blessed so that we can be a blessing.
• Here is my number 1 take away from Irene - Early last week my family and I happened to be on the Outerbanks of NC on vacation. We watched the track of the storm with great intensity. On Thursday the area where we were vacationing issued a mandatory evacuation and so we packed up all our "stuff" and headed back to NJ at 3am on Friday morning.  Needless to say this was a real pain in the neck as our family vacation was cut short.  However, had we not been made to leave NC and return home we would not have been here to pump off the water as it rose in our basement.  We would have returned home to a flooded basement and many ruined possessions.  God used a truly minor inconvenience to move us to the point where he could help us avoid a much larger problem. Bottom line - our perspective on life is so limited. Trust that your heavenly Father has your best interest at heart.

Thanks Irene for all the little life lessons you've taught me over the past couple of days. I'm better for it!

You Are What You Worship

Every person who has ever walked the earth is a worshipper. God built us to worship. The problem is that often times our worship becomes horizontal rather than vertical. We begin to worship things/people rather than worshipping the one and only God.  Even the most sophisticated of society engage in idol worship. We may not bow before a golden image of our own creation but we have idols nonetheless.  Here are a few of the more common idols in western culture...

• Almighty $$$$. We bow before the god of Benjamin (as in Franklin).
• Automobiles.  Our god is sometimes parked in our driveway or garage.
• god of the Flat screen. We spend hours each day staring blankly into our god.
• Our job - we sacrific so much on the altar of our career.
• Good time - we pursue happiness and a good time and eliminate anything that hampers our ability to have fun.
• Food - we love to eat our god in huge portions.
• Children - our life revolves around our kids and their schedules.
• Sports teams - every Sunday afternoon in the Fall hundreds of thousands of people meet for church in their local stadium.
• Self - this is our A #1 god. 

The above things are not necessarily evil things but none of them deserve the #1 place in our life. None of them are worthy of worship.

What's the big deal with misguided worship? The answer is found in Psalm 115:8.  This verse tells us that we become like the gods we worship. If we worship $ we become greedy. If we worship material things we become materialistic.  If we worship self we become ego-centric, and selfish. As followers of Jesus our priority is to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.  This transformation takes place over time as we continually give ourselves to worshipping Him. If we desire to be like Him then we have to make him the center of our worship and guard our heart against other things that would steal our worship.  

He alone is worthy of our worship.

More Random Friday Thoughts

Here are some more of my not so insightful random Friday afternoon thoughts. Read at your own risk...

• The weather in NJ has been beautiful the last few days. The key - low humidity.
• Went to the eye doctor yesterday. Time for progressive lenses in my glasses. I'm officially old - I wear bi-focals, drive a mini-van, make noises when I get up and sit down. What's next? Wearing white socks with dress shoes and dark socks with running shoes, and eating dinner at 4pm.
• I don't drink enough water. (I told you these were random)
• I'm excited to watch the first preseason game for the Chiefs tonight.
• Busy weekend ahead filled with birthday parties, baby showers, church, Plainsboro bulk waste day, and much more.
• Saw pictures from my 25th High School class reunion. How come everyone else looks so much older but I still look the same? :)
• What a week for the Dow! I'm sure glad I don't have any money.
• Played hackey sack with Abby yesterday - really sore today. More proof I'm old.
• Finding more and more that naps don't help. I'm still tired when I awake and really grouchy. Answer - more coffee!
• Still really fired up about what God is doing in people's hearts to help raise funds for Snehashrya Woman's Shelter in India.  
• Working on some ideas for a new writing project - excited! Lord give me the discipline to do this.
• Saw Soul Surfer this week - really liked this flick!

Random Friday Thoughts

It's a Friday afternoon in August and I have number of random thoughts bouncing around in my head.  Read at your own risk...

• Why are we more tired when we return from vacation than before we go?
• I'm looking for a fresh supply of worship tunes. Who are you guys listening to?
• Do 13 year old boys PMS?
• I'm still totally jacked about what God is doing in the folks at PBC to raise money for Snehashrya.
• Blown away every time I pray the new PBC prayer of commitment - Where ever you want us to go, whatever you want us to do, however you want us to live; we give our lives to You to spend in making your gospel and your glory known to the ends of the earth.
• Had a blast at the GBC / DPBC high school camp this year. God did some really cool things! So awesome to reconnect with dear friends.
• Man it was hot in MO this year - surface of the sun hot.
• The financial state of the federal gov't is SCARY. I appreciate that there is no easy answer but come on fellas how about putting some sound economic practices in place before the house of cards comes tumbling down.
• Some people take themselves way too seriously!
• Every human being that has every graced this planet is a walking worship machine.
• My 25th high school reunion is this weekend. Wish I could be there to see everyone. I'm sure they'll have a wonderful time. Can't wait to see pictures of Facebook.
• I want to write more. What format would be the most useful to the most people? I don't want to add to the noise of written Christian materials.
• So glad the NFL resolved its labor issues. Excited to see what the Chiefs will do this year - continue to build upon last year or come back to reality. I say 9-7 with a really tough schedule.
• I count myself to be abundantly blessed. God is so good to me!