In Focus

I have never been a part of a church that modeled a spirit of gentleness. I have had pastors who could be gentle, and I've experienced gentleness in other churches. Never before, have I experienced a consistent theme of gentleness in every communication from the church or church leaders as I have since I became a part of the leadership team here at In Focus church.

It is refreshing and encouraging to never feel mandated, pushed, driven, inspected, evaluated, or pressured aside from the pressure that I put on myself. I haven't known how to react to it so far. For a while I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, not believing that it people could be so genuinely nice. I made demands on myself above what was asked of me thinking that, perhaps, people weren't being straight with me and were holding me to undisclosed standards.

I'm now resolved to try to enjoy it, if I can.

Trusting God for less

I was trusting my Father for too much. It was careless of me. Because I trusted for too much, I regarded His record of faithfulness a bit tarnished. I am beginning to realize my error, and it isn't the first time I have made it. I was trusting His love to do what He never promised His love had given. In trusting his love for less, I feel I can trust His love more.


How Deep the Father's Love for us
by Stuart Townsend

How deep the Father's love for us,
how vast beyond all measure

That he should give his only son,
to make a wretch his treasure

How great the pain of searing loss,
the Father turned his face away

As wounds which mar the chosen one,
bring many sons to glory


Behold the man upon a cross,
my sin upon his shoulders

Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
call out among the scoffers

It was my sin that held him there
until it was accomplished

His dying breath has brought me life;
I know that it is finished


I will not boast in anything:
no gifts, no power, no wisdom

But I will boast in Jesus Christ:
his death and resurrection

Why should I gain from his reward?
I cannot give an answer

But this I know with all my heart:
his wounds have paid my ransom

Hope Fearlessly Excerpt IV

This message was a long one, but this is the final installment of this series of posts. It is more of a patchwork than the previous posts, but I think the content is still good. I basically left myself room to wing it so my notes are sketchy.

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There are at least 3 interrelated enemies to hope that you will have to face time and again. They are the fear of rejection, the fear of failure, and accusations against God, yourself, and others.

fear of rejection- What if no one supports me? What if I'm misunderstood?

There are two things about the fear of rejection. On the one hand, it is true that you will be rejected in life. I know because Jesus was rejected. Not everyone received his message with joy. Some were offended because of Him. There was a group of religious leaders called the Pharisees who tried to embarrass Him. They tried to silence Him. So, if God in flesh was rejected, what hope have we but the same. John 15:20 tells us the world hated him before it hated you. You will be rejected.


On the other hand, rejection isn't that bad. It is a normal part of life. If you've ever tried to sell candy for a school fundraiser, you know that not everyone wants to support you. Rejection becomes a problem because of insecurity. If who you are is defined by what you think other people think about you, then you will go out of your way to have people like you. Not everyone will like you or will endorse the dreams or desires God has put in your heart. Fear of rejection may also come from a wrong sense of obligation. The only person whose apporval you need is God's.

When God told Peter, a Jew, to go to the house of Cornelius, a gentile, a lot of people had a problem with that. peter had a problem with that. He did it in obedience to God despite the likely prospect of the disapproval of others. This raises an interesting point, you don't even need your own approval. Some things may not agree with your temperament or personality but are required for the success of the desire that God has given you.

fear of failure- What if I mess up? What if I lose? What if it doesn't work? I failed last time I tried; what makes this any different?

Can be a result of pride which honors appearance over obedience
The kindness of God gives us freedom to fail. He is not an impatient abusive taskmaster who will grind you into powder when you mess up. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. When you were God's enemy not even trying to do right, God was for you. How much more now?

accusation- is God really going to honor this promise? Did He really say that?
Are the promises of God true? Did you really hear God? Does anyone really understand? Do they even care?

That's when you have to believe the best. You'll suffer more from blocking something good than from letting in something bad.I'm not talking about when you know it's wrong and do it anyway. but, when you aren't sure. feel free to try. Trust God to guide you. If you take a wrong turn listen to the Holy spirit telling you to stop and turn around.


Since I love God, I will hope in him. Though it takes time, though accusations have come, I will trust God to satisfiy the desires of my heart. I will HOPE FEARLESSLY.

Hope Fearlessly Excerpt III

Below is a continuation from the previous posts of a message I preached this summer at a local church. I hope you are able to get some benefit from it. Since I endeavor to be a better communicator, critiques are welcome.

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I say hope fearlessly because hope is not always easy. Hope is beset by fears all around. So often, our hopes remain nothing but dreams and later bittersweet remembrances of dreams. These dreams may concern a relationship, a calling, your church, the Church, the world, some great and godly thing that you yearn for, or some humble and simple desire to be satisfied. A certain perseverance in hope is required for a dream to become more than a dream.

Without perseverance, the life cycle of many dreams goes something like this:

At the beginning, we may dream easily. We may boldly develop a desire for that dream. We spend time imagining it. We may talk about it. We may even go so far as to write it down. We can see it, touch it, feel it as if it were already come.

However, after thoughts of what we call practicality and sensibility, after considerations of what we like to call reason and realism, and after taking assessments of our resources and the expenses involved as well as measuring our own insufficiencies, we stop imagining. We no longer talk about those hopes of ours. To read the written expression of our dreams is embarrassing and painful.

Later in life, we may regard with a sweet fondness the memory of the dream once held admiring that now lost ability to believe that such dreams will come true.

Later in life, we may remember with bitter regret the memory of the dream for now we wonder what we could have had if only.

Why this frustration except that our fears and doubts stunt our hopes in the early stages of development. Many hopes are aborted soon after conception because our fears are so great.

The truth is that the thing that so often separates hopes fulfilled and hopes unrealized is believing. While one may not always get what one expects, one will always get what one settles for. You may not get what you want but you will get what you are willing to put up with. When you stop believing, you stop trying. When you stop believing, the dream starts dying.


So I say, HOPE FEARLESSLY.

Hope Fearlessly Excerpt II

I continue posting the text of a message I delivered this summer.

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Now, my exhortation to hope fearlessly is not meant to be suggestive, but rather, imperative. This is not merely a preferential state of mind, though it is that. This is not merely a healthy attitude to possess, though it is that. And, it is not merely a positive outlook on life though it certainly is that as well.

No, hope is what love does for love "hopes all things", and to love is commanded. Jesus declares this the greatest and most fundamental of all of the commands:

Mt 22: 35-27
35 Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,
36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
37 Jesus said unto him, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and
with all thy mind. "
38 "This is the first and great commandment. "
39 "And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. "
40 "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

According to Jesus, the first and second greatest commandments deal with love for God and love for people. Taken together these commandments are called the Law of Love. Therefore, the supreme law of the kingdom of God is love. It is the greatest law and a law in which every other law is contained. If you could keep in mind only one law that God has established, it would not be one of the laws about the appropriate manner of presenting one of the ritualistice sacrifices in the old testament law. It would not be one of the various laws against types of sexual immorality. It would not be one of the Ten Commandments. No, it would be the law of Love that you should always remember.

Remember in 1 Corinthians Paul told us what love looks like. In your life then, it is commanded that your relationships with God and with other people should be characterized by love as described in the verse from 1 Corinthians 13:7.

Regarding God:
"If you love the Lord your God you will be loyal to Him no matter what the cost. You will always believe in Him, always expect the best of Him, and always stand your ground in defending Him."

and regarding other people,

"If you love someone you will be loyal to him no matter what the cost. You will always believe in him, always expect the best of him, and always stand your ground in defending him."

An attitude that always believes in and expects the best of God and other people is an attitude of fearless hope.

Hope Fearlessly Excerpt I

I will post a series of excerpts from a message I preached a few months ago. It seemed encouraging to some so I thought it might be useful to others.

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1Cor 13:4-9

4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity
vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not
easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things,
endureth all things.
8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall
fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish away.

In the letter that Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, we read of the character of love. This is important because love is often mischaracterized. For example, Lust is often confused with Love, but

Lust consumes while Love contributes,
Lust grabs while Love gives,
Lust ensnares while love empowers.

Feelings are often confused with love, but

Feelings fade while Love never fails,
Feelings are easily offended while Love overlooks an offense,
Feelings may be self-centered while Love is not self-seeking.

So Paul characterizes love that we not be confused. The particular characteristics of love that I want to draw your attention to today are in verse seven:

"Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."

The Living Bible paraphrases this verse in these words, "If you love someone you will be loyal to him no matter what the cost. You will always believe in him, always expect the best of him, and always stand your ground in defending him."

So because it is commanded of us to love and we know that love believes all things and love hopes all things, I want to encourage you this morning to:

HOPE FEARLESSLY

A pair of defining beliefs

Pastor Brent made this statement at church today and it struck a nerve.

"Whether or not you agree with the following two statements will determine a lot about how you live as a believer.

God loves me and:

(1) there is nothing I can ever do to make him love me more.

(2) there is nothing I can ever do to make him love me less."

A couple of years ago I don't think that I believed that at all. I thought God loves one category of persons a certain amount and other categories at different amounts. By my obedience, devotion, and faith I can move into higher love categories. Failure to obey, doubt, unbelief, and lapses in devotion would result in my falling into lower love categories. Though everyone does get a guaranteed minimum love allotment.

Relational breakdown

“It is not enough to insure that people understand you, but to insure that they cannot misunderstand you.”

Halford Luccock, Professor in yale Divinity School from 1928 to 1953

I am convinced that churches split, friends fall out of favor, marriages wither, and relationships in general fail because this bit of advice is rarely consistently observed.

I'll see if I can't make this quote a rule for my communication this coming semester.

Change the world in your spare time!

Most of us check our email using what a few decades ago would have been considered supercomputers. That laptop or desktop computer is probably being under utilized as you type your newsletter. Some clever people have figured out ways to harness the unused computational power on your machine to help solve some difficult medical research problems. I have discovered 3 such projects you may want to donate some processing power to. They are described below:


1. Folding@home:

Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.
http://folding.stanford.edu



2. Genome@home

Our partner project, Folding@home, is striving to understand how existing proteins attain their specific, functional three-dimensional structures. The goal of Genome@home is to design new genes that can form working proteins in the cell. Genome@home uses a computer algorithm (SPA), based on the physical and biochemical rules by which genes and proteins behave, to design new proteins (and hence new genes) that have not been found in nature. By comparing these "virtual genomes" to those found in nature, we can gain a much better understanding of how natural genomes have evolved and how natural genes and proteins work. Some important applications of the Genome@home virtual genome protein design database:

-Engineering new proteins for medical therapy
-Designing new pharmaceuticals
-Assigning functions to the dozens of new genes being sequenced every day
-Understanding protein evolution

To design these large numbers of protein sequences, we need lots of computers. By running the Genome@home protein sequence design client, you can lend us your computer while you're not using it, for as long or as little as you like. ...A day or two's worth of running Genome@home is enough to design new protein sequences that the world has never seen before. All the sequences get added to the Genome@home database, so every little bit helps.
http://genomeathome.stanford.edu/


3. FightAids@home:

Now more than ever, your help is needed in the fight against AIDS. In the mid 1980's, HIV infections exploded and have continued to rise at alarming rates. Nearly twenty years later, technology has reached a point where you can make a difference by contributing the idle processing time of your computer.
http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/help.html

People I admire- Rita Springer

Last night I was at a Rita Springer (www.ritaspringer.com) concert at my new church. I am not a fan of her music, and last night only served to confirm that. However, her testimony of adopting and raising Justice, her 2yr old Zimbabwean baby boy, as a single woman at the prompting of God made me a fan of the woman in spite of the music.

Really, I just admire people who express a simple faith in the Scriptures and/or the leading of the Holy Spirit. I also admire people who express compassion for people that are not their own, people that they have no reason to care about except they do, people that they have adopt for the purpose of loving them.

On unliking people

There are a few people who I once liked very much. As I got to know them better, I liked them less but loved them more. They used to be people I wanted to be around because of commonalities. Upon closer inspection, their uniqueness became apparent and distasteful. By then, it was too late. I'd already decided to love them. Now, they're stuck with me.

I think like this

I saw this comic at http://xkcd.com and i could relate.

multigenerational family and friends

I'm in NY with my parents, my brother and his fam, and a bunch of cousins and old family friends for the holiday weekend. I know I've posted about this before, but it is great to spend time with people that have known you and a couple of generations of your family all of your life, care about you, and feel like they have some stake in your life.

I don't know exactly how to quantify the benefits of this, but they are huge. It's like an underground kindness/community economy. People trade time spent looking after each others kids in lieu of daycare, laughing with family and friends instead of therapy, and family favors for financial support. You yield a certain measure of control over your time, money, and privacy, but you as long as you don't feel that you're giving more than you get, it works.

I'm sitting in the house I grew up in and I'm sleeping in the same bedroom I had when I was 5. A number of the neighbors have lived here for the past 40 years. Parents have passed away and their kids have taken over the homes. That is amazing to me. I wonder if I'd love it so much if I actually lived here. The tough thing about being together with people for decades is that you may end up having a few decades-long disagreements and contentions. It requires greater relational skill and dexterity to avoid being entangled in other people's offenses than is the case where the neighborhood turns over every 5-10 years.

The funny thing is that I didn't even want to come to NY this holiday. Sometimes, I have the most fun doing things that I didn't want to do.

submission11-17-06

I don't really know Him well at all. I thought that He exercised power differently. His Way is unlike my own. His manner and methods are not those that I would have chosen. Submission is the model, the method, and the goal. If I had it, I think that I would use power to satisfy immediate desire and remove any impedence. That isn't His Way. Odd, yet refreshing.

-Rev 1:1, John 8:38, 10:25, 10:37, 14:10,

on preparing messages and prayer

I was told that last week when I spoke at "Pimp My Life", the campus student meeting, I delivered a great message. As a follow up to the complement, she asked "What did you do different to prepare?"

Now my pride was a little injured at that last question. I happen to believe that I gave great messages at our previous meetings as well. Apparently however, this opinion is not as widely held as I had believed.

As I began to prepare next week's message, I thought more about this and came to some conclusion. Maybe this will be useful to someone, or at least the principles behind it will be. When attempting to speak the Truth from the Scripture to others with the intent that it be applied, the preparation of the man is vastly more significant than the preparation of the message. The role of prayer should not be underestimated. The manner of prayer should not be taken for granted. Prayers to seek God's blessings to achieve my goals generate less peace than prayers to seek God's goals and His favor that I might perform them.

When I ask God's blessing, I assume that I know what He is willing to bless. This is unwarranted overconfidence at best. I've misunderstood and misapplied Scripture often enough to provide no basis for such assumptions.

On the other hand, seeking God's goals assumes that I may not be continually aware of what is on God's mind. This is more in accord with the reality of my relationship with my Father. Following that search with asking for His favor to perform, assumes that I may not be in a position where His favor may be received. This could be do to doubt, unbelief, or some other of the many sins to which I am prone. Again, this assumption is safer being more likely to accord with my actual experience.

As true as I've noticed this to be in general with prayer, it is just as true when praying about a message. This stands to reason since the idea behind delivering a message in practical terms is that the message originates with someone other than the messenger. Understanding the intentions, desires, and emotions of the sender will help the messenger to deliver the message as the sender intended. My Father makes these known more often when I ask Him what He wants me to say, what impression He wants to make, and how He feels about the people that I am to speak to.

Hope this will be as useful to you and your hearers as it was to me and mine.

Just for Laughs-"White & Nerdy"

This is soooo funny! I'm not normally a fan of this guy but this video is great. "Weird Al" Yankovic's music video from his new album "Straight Outta Lynwood" (in stores Sept. 26)

His Name

I want to walk humbly before God content to bear His Name.

I'm not strong enough to create a lasting name for myself.

There exists no institution, organizaiton, family, nation, or race whose name is worth devoting myself to.

His Name is honorable and everything sacrificed for the sake of His Name is worthwhile. His Name is worthy of unreasonable extravagant expense.

Here are the clues I think I got

Thanks Mike for reminding me that I failed to mention the clue I got from that 5 hr drive I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. As I said in that post, I'm generally pretty clueless when it comes to the fairer sex. However on that drive, as I sat in the car those two women discussing what it means to be feminine, I think I got one. In fact, maybe I got two. The first is, I think, linked closely with the second. They are attention and approval. What I understand that to mean is described below.

Attention: They need a lot of it. This may includes a lot of talking to, listening to, touching, acts of kindness, etc. Basically, they have a greater desire to have a big fuss made over them. I used to think that was due to vanity, maybe, it's insecurity. Perhaps, it's just by design. If it is by design, then there are probably some good things that result from the need for attention.

Approval: They need it constantly. They want to know they are valued and accepted as is especially with respect to physical features, emotional fluctuations, and personality quirks. It helps them to be assured and reassured of this approval. This is the purpose that the attention serves.

If you are a woman, and/or you have access to one, I'd love to hear your opinion. I could be off here. If I am off and I've angered you, please keep the swearing in your comments to a minimum.

Friends

Until a few months ago, I think I was living the christian version of the sitcom "Friends." I was living within a 10 minute walk of 6-8 of my closest friends. Most of the group had lived together as roomates or neighbors for at least 3yrs and some as long as 5yrs. We had lots of funny stories about each other. We dropped in unannounced and went in each other's refridgerators. Okay, there was never very much in mine, but they were free to go through it anyway. In our version, we also worked/volunteered with each other in the same campus ministry and went to the same church.

We knew each others quirks. We knew how to work with one another. We knew how to work around each other. We knew the strengths and weaknesses of each. We lived together, worked together, celebrated together, laughed together. We didn't always get along; there were fights between us. Okay, they had fights between them. I refereed. How could anyone not get along with a sweet guy like me?

Now I live a more typical American adult life. This means that I live at least barely know the people that I work and go to church with. I live too far away to to drop in on anyone I'd like to be close with. The typical American adult life sucks.

One more thing bounded emotions

One observation from that car trip was the contrasting ways we seemed to approach managing one's emotions. The women in the vehicle seemed to have as a goal to live with appropriate boundaries around their emotions or at least their emotional responses like the upper and lower bounds on y = sin(x). It has been my practice to try to match my emotions and/or my emotional responses to that which I believe is appropriate in a given situation like the way the limit of y approaches 0 as x goes to infinity in the function y = 1/x. I'm not sure if this observation is characteristic of women and men respectively, but I found that contrast interesting to ponder.

We return home today, and we're adding another woman to the car. It should be interesting