by James | Feb 21, 2014 | Inspiration, Reflection
“Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” – Genesis 12:1 When I have looked at the heroes of the Bible, I have always read their stories in awe of the trust they had in God and what God was doing. It has always been easy to read stories like Abraham’s or Moses’ or Joseph’s forgetting that these people were human just like I am, and at the time they didn’t know the end of their story, just like I don’t know the end of mine. The past couple of years have brought me through a myriad of experiences, good and bad. I’ve been put into situations where I’ve had to trust God with everything, and more times than not, I’ve chosen to doubt. Instead of battling the temptation to doubt God’s plan for my life with peace, patience and self-control, I’ve often found myself dealing with my doubt with anxiety, restlessness, and to an extent, idolatry. In my shortsighted and self-dependent faith I had failed to grasp that God constantly uses a theme of displacement and a journey into the unknown . While in a culture where one’s identity and worth was heavily tied down to family and land, Abraham was asked at an older age to travel to a foreign land all for the sake of a promise he would just barely see the fruits of in his life. Even when Jesus calls His disciples, He doesn’t tell them exactly what they are in for, He doesn’t give them an...
by Sam | Jan 31, 2014 | Reflection
“For if you are trying to make yourselves right with God by keeping the law, you have been cut off from Christ! You have fallen away from God’s grace.” – Galatians 5:4 So many times we associate the phrase “falling from grace” to a moral failure. Someone is caught in sin, makes a mistake, etc., and the next thing you know, “So-and-so falls from grace” is all over the news. It has become a headline we see way too often. It’s always tragic to see that happen. Yet the Bible does not consider someone failing morally to be the same thing as falling from grace (nor any sin for that matter). We only fall from grace when we try to earn God’s love, His favor, and His salvation. It’s never the “sinner” that falls from grace as much as it’s the self-righteous and proud. When our Christianity becomes about us, that’s when we start to fall. We fall from grace because we rely on our merits and efforts more than we do on the grace of God. Our Christianity isn’t based on our performance, but simply on the person of Christ. We can never make ourselves right with God. Galatians 2 says that if we can be made righteous by keeping the law, then Christ died for nothing. Yet it’s so easy to make it about discipline, duty, and what I am doing and not doing in the name of Jesus. Even when it comes to our identity, it’s much easier to find it in being a leader or a minister or even a Christian. But the truth is,...
by Josh | Jan 21, 2014 | Inspiration, Reflection
“The spiritual life cannot be made suburban. It is always frontier, and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed” -HOWARD MACEY “Safe? Who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” -C.S. LEWIS The past few months, I’ve been reading and processing John Eldredge’s book called Wild at Heart. A great book that has impacted the season of life that I am currently in. Though the primary audience for this book is Christian males, I believe it speaks to everyone (male or female) and how our faith is being lived out. I’ve been personally reflecting on my own faith and what it means to live as a Christian. There’s many different ways to answer and describe that question of course. But from what I’ve experienced and seen, a few general words to describe it would be: safe, comfortable, and settled. I think a lot of us resonate with those descriptions of our Christian lives but give two different reactions. One reaction is that we simply agree with the description because it’s true and are satisfied with the way things are. The second reaction is that we realize that it describes us so well yet we’re unsatisfied reading that description. We’re left wondering why our faith and life isn’t described as bold and fearless like the stories we read in the Bible. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we all feel like that there is something missing and yearn for something deeper in our Christian lives. I think this desire of wanting something more and deeper reveals that we have...
