Appetite

The book of John portrays a story in which Jesus took five small loaves of bread and two small fish, and he miraculously multiplied the food to feed an mass of five thousand people by a lake.

A while later, Jesus and His disciples found these same people following them to the other side of the lake. Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” Jesus realized at that moment, that these people weren’t following him because they truly wanted to follow as disciples, they were following Him because they wanted more food. They wanted to fill their appetites. They were following Him for all the wrong reasons.

Do we do this? Do we follow Jesus because of what we can get out of the deal? Do we follow Him because we think He can provide safety? Do we follow Him in hopes of getting our wants and desires met? Do we follow Him so he will fill our appetite (whatever that appetite may be)? Maybe some of us want Him to give us our fill.

We know our appetites will come and go. One moment our stomachs will be full, the next moment they’re empty. We strive to fill our stomachs, yet we can’t seem to fill them enough. This repetitive behavior continues as we constantly look for our fill. Whether its consumerism, food, entertainment, addiction, or anything else; these will never make us truly content.

Jesus goes on to say, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. On him God the Father has placed His seal of approval.” Jesus invites us to halt this ongoing repetitive behavior, this behavior that only addresses our present wants and desires, these appetites that are only momentarily fulfilling. Jesus offers us the way, the truth, and the life. He offers us something so much more.

We are given an offer: we can choose to resist the appetites that are only temporary, and we can pursue a way of life which God intended for us to live. Jesus invites us to follow and partner with Him in a life of truly loving others. He invites us to learn His way of life, and live His way of life. Jesus is waiting to show us a way of life that is truly life. Will we follow? Will we continue to follow?

Will you follow Him?

Random Honest Thoughts

Sometimes I wonder if I should be a youth pastor. I mean, you're right, the kids don't need another negative cultural influence. Kids need to know the power of Christ, and that He is everything. I've spend so much time praying about this because in brute honesty, kids need to be taught that the sacrifice of following Christ calls us to be "set apart (which is the definition of Holy)". Young people do need to be taught the things that are beneficial and the things that aren't beneficial. Sometimes I wonder if anything I do helps young people love God in a deep and intimate way. I'd rather get a huge group of kids together and go and love on people who need help, poor people, sick people, people that are ignored by society. Those are the sorts of thing Jesus would do with a youth group. I wonder what challenging things Jesus would tell me as a pastor.

In Jesus' time, the people with a high religious position were concerned with outward holiness. This was referred to as the politics of holiness. When Jesus challenged them, he did not tell them to appear even more holy, he challenged them because their holiness displaced them from the people the Father truly cared about. In studying through the gospels, Jesus taught not the politics of holiness, but He taught the politics of compassion. He told the religious people they were dead without even knowing it because they made certain that their appearance clean, spotless, and pure. Yet Jesus said they were dead and that they taught people to become twice the sons of hell that they were. Jesus was concerned not with outward holiness as he was with the transforming power of God on the inside of a person. This is a huge struggle for me. Its a struggle because I know kids need to learn the difference between good and evil...but then you have to think....thats the same temptation that got Adam and Even in trouble in the first place. Reading the message of Christ, he was more passionate about people being transformed and following Him. He wanted people to see the world as He saw it, to care for the people He cared about, and to love as He loved. Its evident that He didn't care as much about our outward appearances of holiness as He did about our hearts desire for God.

Its sometimes disappointing being a pastor. I have parents telling me that I should teach their kids to get better grades, what movies not to watch, what words not to say, how they should date, what music not to listen to, how to act, what things not to do, and over and over this pressure overwhelms me. Its overbearing because I know God did not place me as a pastor to teach these things. God has called me to be a pastor to lead people to Christ. As the Father calls people unto himself, they will be transformed. This internal redirection will be the Spirit leading them to a renewing of the mind. I don't want to be just another youth group that gives kids a list of dos and don'ts. I want to be a youth group that challenges kids to seek the face of God. I want to be a place where kids are inspired to enter love affair with their Creator.

Church is not a moral compass. Our goal is not to teach kids to live by the fruit of the Spirit. Sometimes that would be easier. Wouldn't it be nice to have a handbook to give to every kid telling them all the things to avoid? But our mission is not to place a yoke on the kids and take away all their fun. Our goal is to lead people to Christ in hope that they will be transformed by His power. As they are transformed and grow in their maturity, they will bear fruit (the fruit of the Spirit). Christ is everything to us. Without Him, we are but animals driven by our sinful nature. But with Him, He gives us the power to resist every form and appeal of the sinful nature through the power of His Spirit.

Sometimes I sit back and think I should listen to every parent. It seems to me, that parents expect me to do the parenting for them. Many in the church would like to see a bunch of good little Christian kids with their shirts tucked in and their hair groomed clean. But isn't this sort of idea the very thing Jesus challenged the Pharisees on? This is why I struggle. The pressure of cultural anti-Christian expectations within the church can sometimes be unbearable. The scriptures say that the world will not understand...and sometimes I think the world influences the church more than we ever realize.

My hope as a youth pastor is that young people will have an internal transformation at some point. I know I'm planting seeds, and some of the seeds I'll never be able to see grow. I think a study on this was done by Willow Creek at one time. When the study was released, it said that the average Christian has to hear the message of Christ some seventeen times before they actually come to know Christ personally. I hope as I work in our Church, that I will plant one or two seeds, and that the Father will use those seeds to grow disciples of Christ.

It can be very discouraging as a youth pastor to give and give and give and rarely see results. This discouragement can be a tool the enemy uses to wear us out. Yet I know that God is working in this area. I know He deeply loves His people, and that He is crying out for them. I know that if I let discouragement take me hostage, then the enemy wins.

I could vent to you about the burden of ministry over and over, but because this message has become quite long, I'll stop for now. Dana, I just want you to know my heart for these kids. I want you to know that we are all babies in Christ, but we grow together.

I appreciate your concerns more than you realize! Iron sharpens iron and that is what you do for me. Whether you realize it or not, the Lord has given me extreme joy in our friendship. I'm beyond excited to do life with you and i hope you know that!

Everything is for God's glory! He is the most beautiful, amazing, indescribable God. I want Him to be reflected in everything I do. May we all follow Jesus together! :)

American Christians are in an interesting position. Here, in what many like to think of as the epicenter of western culture, we are American Christians who "believe" in Jesus. This position is one of paradox.

I know Christians who are Republicans. I also know Christians who are Democrats. Usually, some sort of religion has something to do with a person's political stance.

I know Christians who are pro-choice. I also know Christians who are pro-life.

For the war. Against the war.

I know Christians who say that if we have enough faith, God will grant us the blessing of healthiness, success, and victory. Some of these same Christians say God will bring wealth to those who love Him. This is referred to as the "health and wealth gospel."

I also know Christians who say that God has already blessed us and because of this, we have a duty as followers of Christ, to bless others. Some call this a social justice gospel.

These are examples of how our individual truths are unique depending on who we are and what we believe. Western culture has an effect on our faith.

The position we as Christians are in, is one of asking ourselves the question: “Is the Jesus we believe in, accurate to the person He really was?”

I know people who have a rough time with this.

Do we fit Jesus into the mold of our culture?

Maybe instead of God making man in His own image, man has turned and made God in his own image.

Doesn't this seem consistent with our culture?

We can choose our own truths, as long as it doesn’t infringe on others. So we pick our gas stations, we pick our grocery stores, we pick what brand of clothes to buy, and we pick our Jesus.

We each like our own brand of Jesus.

But is the interpretation of Jesus we subscribe to accurate? Is Jesus being fit into our mold or are we fitting into Jesus’ mold?

American Christians are in an interesting position. What culture will influence them next?

Drive-Thru

I love Taco Bell, especially in my college days. Any restaurant serving drive-thru tacos at 2am to hungry college students gets an A in my book. Recently Kelly and I went in a drive thru at Taco Bell.

Imagine a picture of three loaded tacos full of the works, with cilantro and lime to top it all off. Adding to the picture was a name which made my mouth water even more: “Cantina Tacos!”

I couldn’t resist. I ordered the Cantinas in hopes that they would be perfect goodness.

I opened up the foil around my tacos as fast as I could in hopes of biting into a delicious treat.

There laying inside the foil was the smallest, most unsatisfying tacos I have ever gotten from Taco Bell. These three tacos could hardly cover my taste not to mention my hungry, grumbling stomach.

Has our idea of church become like this?

We drive in, expect to be given something great and to be fed, only to drive away wondering why our appetites weren’t filled like we expected. We often wish church would feed us, when really it was never meant to function as a fast food restaurant. We expect programs to offer us something, and when the programs don’t meet our expectations, we wonder what’s wrong with the church.

Are we Christian consumers?

Does our mentality of church fit that of a drive-thru restaurant?

In the book of Acts, a scene is described in which the Spirit of God moved upon a group of people. These people were concerned with two main things, the love of God and love of each other. The two went hand in hand. They weren’t interested in what they could receive from the community, they were interested in what they could contribute to the community as God contributed His Spirit to them.

Many people who attend church possess this consumeristic mentality.

This bothers some of us. Some of us feel a pull to bring back church in its original context. Some of us are sick of being church critics; we're ready to be solutions.

"Imperfection" IS perfection

I've been trying to see through new windows lately and this is one of the things I've been working on for the past few months. I'll soon write about this when I get my thoughts organized.

Saturated by Ruach Elohim (Spirit of God)

Recently, I finished a book about the Holy Spirit that, quite honestly, messed me up. In this book, it talked about how we as Christians tend to ignore and suppress the Holy Spirit’s active leading in our lives.

Our relationship with God can often become quite one sided. We ask Him to bless us with this thing or that issue. We pray that He would bless our situations, our families, and our nation. We place Jesus fish on our cars to let people know we are Christians. We remain conscious not to swear because, well thats just not a Christian thing to do. Our focus, priorities, and goals continue to be “of this world,” the only difference is we sprinkle a little Jesus on top which makes us feel like a good Christian. My question through all these nice little Christian scenarios is: Are we keeping in step with the Spirit of God? Maybe some of us are in step with the Spirit, maybe some of us front the Spirit’s leading. However our relationship with God works, if we are ignorant of the Spirit of God and His leading, then any relationship with God we have is quite one sided.

The scriptures tell us the effects of remaining in step with the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5). Other phrases such as: “abundant life,” “eternal life,” and “life that is truly life,” tell us of the life God meant for us to live by embracing His Spirit.

The book I read messed me up because it challenged me to seek God in more deep and intimate ways. Instead of being a “outside of the cup” kind of Christian, I want to embrace the fullness of the Spirit in the deepest corner of my soul. I want God to saturate me with His Spirit, transforming me to look more and more like Jesus everyday. This is how God created us. He created us to be temples of the Holy Spirit. If the temple doesn’t embrace what is was made for, then it’s just a shell; useless.

May we all embrace the Spirit of God’s leading. May we all join together in one purpose, one song, opening ourselves to let God work in and through us for his purpose, His Kingdom.

Ideology of Perfection

Jesus once said, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

A day or two ago I was eating an apple. By the second or third bite, I noticed something: this apple was perfect. It was perfectly round, had no bug bites, was picked at the right time, and had a wonderful flavor. That same day I was driving my car into town and I passed a yard with landscaping that probably cost more than my car. While in town, I washed and waxed my car to get rid of the dirt and give it a glistening shine. Whether this is a cultural thing or not; we as a people seem to be obsessed with perfection. Our fruit, our houses, our cars, and our lives often portray this value.

We tend to point out, identify, and correct flaws; some of the flaws we’re most aware of are the flaws in ourselves. We rarely tell people these flaws, and if we do they usually are the closest friends in our lives. Some of us even pretend that these blemishes don’t exist. Many of us like to see ourselves as the apple: flawless. Some of us even pay money to correct our defects. Surgeries, cosmetics, tanning beds, clothing, and plenty of other coping mechanisms are used to divert attention away from our flaws and on to another object.

You have to start to wonder something: If we really learned from Jesus, would we see things differently? Maybe Jesus is telling us that perfection comes not through focusing on ourselves, but focusing on others and following Him. Maybe we need to stop trying to perfect all the flaws in our lives, but embrace them. Maybe by embracing these flaws and looking outward beyond ourselves; we will see a worldview where things become more about “us” than they do about “I.”

Jesus is talking about an awareness more concerned with the needs of others, an awareness larger than the “me.”

The Spirit of God will give us the ability to see beyond the apple to the tree.

So you have to wonder:

What if Jesus really meant what he said?

Creative Life

What kind of creativity did it take to make this flower?

As i try my hand at close-up photography, I see fresh details I’ve never seen before. Like, the God who created us has this unlimited, infinite imagination. Sometimes, by looking at the small, we get an inside view of Big. Creative!

Its interesting.

Genesis tells us God created man in His likeness. It goes on to say He created man in his own image.

Genesis 2:7 says, “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

Look around.

Cars. Road Systems. Science. Architecture. Technology. Medicine. Farming. Literature. Art. Music. Language.

Incredible creativity and imagination!

You can’t tell me people aren’t creative. God gave “man” the ability to be imaginative and creative.

But lately I’ve been struggling. I find an alarming decline in imagination and creativity when it comes to being a follower of Jesus. We don’t smoke, drink, or do drugs; we come to church every Sunday. Are these few virtues what it means to follow Jesus?

Where did our imagination and creativity go?

Is this what Jesus had in mind when he said, “Follow me?”

Jesus’ teachings are full of unlimited creativity we sometimes miss because of our familiarity. Look at His parables and see the imagination.

I’m convinced that the same Breath, the same Spirit that the LORD breathes into us will give us an outflow of creativity as we love God and people.

Romans 8:6 reads, “The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit (breath of God) is life and peace.

Life and peace.

An eternal, infinite, creative LIFE!

How creative are you?

Ephesians 2:4

One of the glaring -- yet too often overlooked -- failings of contemporary America is that we have become a nation obsessed with justice and retribution. We claim to be The Land of the Free, yet we have lost sight of what it means to be imprisoned; denied liberty and access to one's family, subjected to isolation and violence and unspeakable boredom. We have come to believe, in the most pernicious way, that people should get what they deserve. What a sea change it might be in our public discourse and our civic life if we focused instead upon mercy and forgiveness. A merciful and forgiving culture might find itself with less anger, less social disruption, and even less crime. ~Jacob Appel


From "The Merchant of Venice," when Portia asks Shylock to show mercy. He asks, On what compulsion, must I? She responds:

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear the kings.
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show like God's
When mercy seasons justice.

Somebody's Reality

We find art everywhere.

Sometimes we notice the beauty of a painting...

Sometimes we don't even realize what we're seeing.

Recently I found myself sitting in a waiting room completely perplexed and conscious by a pair of paintings.

The details.

The scenery.

The temperature created by the colors.

One had a cold feeling as it tried to capture the emotions of an overcast day.

The other was warm as the sun vanished behind the clouds of a summer day.

Strange,

...I was looking at paint dried on cloth.

Sitting there in that waiting room something dawned on me and I began to wonder....

If I were sitting with the artist of these paintings, would they want me to be interested solely in the paint and the cloth???

I'm convinced artists are far more concerned with expressing their perspective of reality than they are about the objects of paint and cloth.

I'm convinced they see art as a portal revealing another way of seeing the world.

People have been doing this sort of thing for thousands of years.

Warm colors

Cold colors

Its not simply seeing the colors, its feelings the colors.

Art reflects reality through the eyes of the artist.

I'm convinced that artists prefer us to look beyond the art into something deeper.

Something bigger.

They don't want us to stop at the art.

They want us to look at the world from another angle.

To appreciate reality from another dimension.

Paintings, sculptures, photography, landscape, literature, music, ...

Look beyond

Look bigger

See the beauty behind the art.

See reality from another angle.

Maybe it will dawn on you like its dawning on me...

...we can be so numb sometimes.

Art is somebody's reality.

Rare People

Many of us often project an image that exaggerates our good qualities.

Many of us want people to think we're better then we really are.

Some would say this sort of trait is quite normal.

We front.

We act.

We pretend to take on characteristics of someone we aren't.

The thing is, the people closest to us notice this kind of activity.

They see how silly we can act.

They might even call us out for being "fake."

The people closest in our lives help keep us grounded.

But...

Rarely.

We come across someone who really IS the way they project.

See, usually the more we get to know people, the more flaws we see.

The more we get to know people, we see how they front and act.

We even come to love people for their flaws.

But what about those people who are opposite of this.

The people who we respect, look up to, and admire more and more as we get to know them.

The people who care more about integrity and character than they care about their "image."

These people are rare!

When we find these people, we should keep them close.

They make great friends

...the sort of friends that we want to have for the rest of our lives.

These people inspire us

...they lift us up

...they show us what it means to be real

...pure

...legit

...these people are solid.

We don't come across these people everyday.

When we do, we tend to notice.

This sort of thing stands out.

...my Dad....

He is one of these people!!!!

Thank You Dad!

I love you!