Parenting is hard and long, then they leave and you want all the time back. Which side of this are you? How can we infuse a bit of the opposite side into our current thinking?

Currently Pam and I are in the long and hard portion. Pam just posted on Facebook a good brief view of craziness.

Is it just me or are two of the most challenging times of the day getting the kids ready in the morning and getting them ready for bed? “Focus Kohl focus. What do you need to do next Sweetie? Why is your shirt on backwards? Why have you pushed out half of the toothpaste? Why do you have both feet in one leg of your pants? Why are you putting both socks on one foot? Why are you washing the wall with soap?”

Welcome to the Feather household. As much as I love my kids, bedtime is a bear. I want to like it. I want to be able to pray and rejoice in God’s goodness, but often at that moment I am just trying to survive with my sanity. All of you probably have glorious times of putting your kids to bed, thanking God for such obedient children. I’m glad for you. For me the hour before bed is like me getting closer and closer to being tortured. It is waiting for those who hold me captive to come and get me, taking me to the rack for a good stretching. Only slight exaggeration there.

What makes this time so frustrating? It is simple, really. I want my way and my children want something completely different. Why bedtime? Because we have a deadline that I am trying to meet and all of their energies converge to miss that deadline.

So how is this a gospel moment? Let me count the ways.

1. My kids are sinners, just like me. I don’t know why I get amnesia and think that things are going to go smoothly, but often I assume without any extra work on my part that they will just wise up and stop their actions. Not gonna happen. They come from me. They get their disobedience honestly. The faster I recognize my own sinfulness and the need for God’s grace in my life, the more the gospel is dictating my response to them.

2. I have an agenda. Most often when I am frustrated over something, it is because I have a plan and whatever is frustrating me is simply getting in the way of my plan. I want a calm, restful bedtime for my kids and then to be able to go work on what I want. This is just a tiny little bit selfish, don’t you think? I can have a plan, as long as I realize that God’s plan trumps mine. If my children are particularly squirrelly one evening, God must want me to pay more attention to them. My plan goes out the window and I embrace God’s plan. At least this is how it is supposed to work. Pray for me.

3. My frustrated response. It is going to bother me that things don’t go my way, but my frustration shows that I am unwilling to die to self. I hold on to my ideas so much that even when given the opportunity to bend toward God’s, I fight against it. Not too different than my children fighting against me. I am the child and I am typically unwilling to give up my longings.

There are more ways this hour each night can be a gospel moment, but right now these are my focus. What would you add? Are there ways you fight this?

“Our love must be characterized by a responsiveness that not only loves God but also all those He places in our path.” Page 89 emphasis added

The story is told that John Newton, while he was working along, always welcomed people who came to see him. He would invite them in and basically say, “Let’s find out why God has brought you to me today.” He saw every moment with others as a “divine appointment.” That is a bit convicting for me. Too often, I see people who come to me as a hindrance to what I am trying to get accomplished. They are getting in my way of my agenda. Not exactly pouring out love, am I?

As a Christian who values the sovereignty of God, it is amazing how I forget that He places people in my path. I often get so focused on doing something for God that I forget to pay attention to what He is doing. We are to be a people characterized by love. No one on the planet has been more loved, so this same love should just pour out of us into the lives of everyone we meet. What gets in the way?

Loving God I get. I don’t always do it, but I understand that is important. Loving people, real, sinful people, that is a bit more difficult. To be honest, my struggle comes from the fact that I want my way and difficult people don’t want to do things my way. I have to die to my own wants in order to love the way I have been loved. While I want the results of such a love, I don’t always want to sacrifice like that.

What will help me? Only God. What does it look like?

I need to dig deep into Scripture and pray for wisdom to see His heart toward me. I need to plead with the Holy Spirit to open my eyes to apprehend the amazing love that surpasses knowledge.

“and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3:19

With diligence on my part and the illuminating work of the Spirit in my life, only then will I have the ability to love others even when they are difficult. Only then will I see how difficult I have been and how God loves me. That well is deep and will flood over into my relationships with others. I pray this for me and for you. Who do you struggle to love? Who does God have in your life right now to help you see this point?

Let me recommend you check out this post by Joe Thorn and definitely listen to the audio that he links.  It is helpful in thinking about the right way to do theology and also the dangers that can grab us. I just listened to it a few days ago. Great stuff.

“We can never show the love of Christ until we understand the love of Christ. And we can never understand the love of Christ until we understand His death. And we can never understand the death of Christ until we understand why He died. And we can never understand why He died until we understand His holiness and our sin.” Page 53

My struggle is somewhere in that quote. The reason I don’t love like I ought is included in one of those phrases. I don’t understand something. I may know it and be able to state it, but some truth there has not penetrated into my soul. It has not gripped my heart so that I live it. Using the words of Scripture, some part of the word of Christ is not dwelling richly in my heart. (Colossians 3:16)

My particular problem right now is the struggle to love those who are difficult. Recently I read an article by Tim Lane about this very topic. Looking at the quote above from Stetzer and Nation, I think my struggle is that I don’t understand/comprehend my own sinfulness so that I treasure His love for me. See, I look at my sin as minimal and therefore I refuse to see myself as the difficult person Jesus loves. If I can truly see things this way and live out of that, I will be able to be patient and loving to all the difficult people in my life. Not that it will be easy, mind you. It will be hard because I am hard headed and change always takes time to occur, but I will be able to fight that battle when I see Jesus loving sinful, difficult me.

What this means is that my struggle to perfectly love others stems from an incomplete acceptance of the gospel. I believe the gospel. I know it and could give it to others. I even give the right answers when talking to my “Christian” friends. But I am failing to live it out and that means the gospel is on some level just a statement I claim. It is hard, maybe impossible, to clearly see how Jesus loves me every day and still refuse to love others that same way.

“Love like this is hard! I don’t want to love this way! It is not rewarding. I am not able do it so I always fail.” (Who wants to continue trying when they always fail?) “God can do it, but I can’t. He is God after all. People just take advantage of it. They never appreciate what I do.”

Any of these ring true for you? Loving like God tells us to love is a real battle!  I have had all these emotional and rational responses at one time or another. It just seems more difficult than life should be. Doesn’t God want me to be happy some of the time?

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s step back a moment and contemplate that love.

In Compelled By Love, the authors point to one passage to show their point.

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:14-21 ESV

The love that Jesus the Christ has shown for me is the love that I am to show to others—all others. God’s amazing love for me compels me to love others. My ESV says, “For the love of Christ controls us…” 2 Corinthians 5:14 Paul is saying that Christ’s love for him controls his actions toward others, most specifically those in the Corinthian churches. Instead of living for himself, he now lives for Jesus Christ. He is bound to Jesus because of the cross, but that is a good thing. This bondage is a freeing bondage. In my sinfulness, I am so bound by how people respond to me that I am not free to love others this boldly. I am always looking at how they will respond. I am not free to truly love them unless I experience this love of God. Every Christian has received this freeing love and can therefore love others completely.

But I don’t always want to love others this way. That is where the responses at the beginning of this post come into my life. Is there any hope for me? Absolutely, and you too! We will talk more, but that will be tomorrow.

About our approach to this book…

We plan to read a section every other week and then post on those sections, but each post will be short and to the point. This means the best way is to have a few posts on each section. If any of you want to write your thoughts in a post, send it to me and I will review it and then post it. This is a great way for us to focus our discussion as much as possible. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for reading along.

“Anyone knows that ants can’t feel. You’re so tiny you don’t look real. I’m so big and you’re so small, I don’t think it’ll hurt at all.” Quote from Hey, Little Ant. If you don’t have children, that book is probably not on your bed stand. But it fits the basic idea of Under the Dome. “Ants are people too so you shouldn’t punish or kill them.” While not a direct quote, that summary gets the main idea across. Sound familiar?

King compares the characters that we know and love to ants. Ants that have no real life. Ants that can be played with and you never have to worry about consequences. Ants that are expendable.

Is King on a campaign to get us to watch where we walk? Did an ant capture his heart? Are we suddenly to think about how small we are? Maybe there is a different connection.

“God is a mean kid sitting on an anthill with a magnifying glass, and I’m the ant. He could fix my life in 5 minutes if He wanted to, but He’d rather burn off my feelers and watch me squirm!” Bruce from Bruce Almighty. It could have been any one of our characters.

“God’s a kid with an ant farm, lady. He’s not planning anything.” John Constantine in the movie Constantine. Get the feeling that this is a common thought?

Piper Libby, the faithless reverend, could have made these statements. I can’t find the reference now, but didn’t she connect her “god” to these alien kids playing? If you find the reference, put it in a comment.

Did King intend to mock the God of the Universe? Is “god” like those children who play with us and have no compassion, acting distant and unfeeling, cruel, unattached? (Pg 1062) It is hard to come to any other conclusion from this book. At best, God is ignored. At worst, He is just like the alien children.

So I guess we are to ignore everything God reveals about Himself. I wouldn’t suggest it. This view of God is unhealthy because it completely misses His love for mankind clearly presented in life and in Scripture.

We humans look at our lives, consider the pain and suffering that happens, and think God must not care, if He exists at all. We are very selfish and suffer from tunnel vision. We can’t see anything except what is happening to us. We refuse to see the tapestry that God has put together to actually care for humans. We can’t see His amazing love, because we don’t want to.

“The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.” Psalm 19:1

Maybe they just couldn’t see it because of the filth on the dome. Can we see it?

I hope that God opens our eyes before it is too late. We need to see from His perspective to understand. God’s gospel is the means for this sight. I hope we can see it.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16

Hey everyone! We have chosen the next book. It is Compelled By Love by Ed Stetzer and Philip Nation. The subtitle is The Most Excellent Way to Missional Living.

Over the last few months I have been thinking about what “missional” is and why it would be important. The more I thought about this and wrestled with it in Scripture, the more I came back to what love is. In the very beginning of the book, the authors state that the theme of the book is: “The Love of Christ Should Compel Believers in All Things”. I want to test this thesis and work through it practically. How would the love of Christ impact my every day living? How should it? Where am I in applying the love of Christ every day?

If these are of interest to you, pick up the book and join us for the discussion. The book is broken into three parts and that is how we will read it.

March 5th will be the first post on this book and it will cover pages 1-78. March 19th we will talk about pages 79-158 and on March 29th we will discuss pages 159-211. After that we will have a series of posts that summarize and discuss the application of all that we have read. This gives us a couple weeks in between each post and helps us to read and process what we are learning.

I hope that you will consider reading this with us. It should be a good time and I hope it will stretch each of us in our love motivated by what we have received. Thanks.

Wow! What a start. (Sorry woodchuck!) We are pulled right into the story. No playing around here. This is an ambitious book. I am intrigued and want to know where we are going. The characters are believable, for the most part. Right now in the book it has the feel of the beginning of The Stand; we are meeting the characters and sizing them up. Who is on the “right” side and who is on the “wrong” side. Personally, I like the book. I have my issues with it, of course, but the overall story I think is good to contemplate. It really does bring out the “real” attitudes of people when they are placed in a situation like this. It is at these moments when we find out what kind of fruit we will produce; the fruit of the Spirit or the fruit of the flesh. Galatians 5 lays this out for us.

Let’s get this out of the way early…

I think Christians everywhere would be bothered by the way people who claim the name of Jesus are acting. I agree, but I also find that professing Christians do act in the ways described here. If Stephen King is going for realism, he is doing it pretty well. I pray that these descriptions do not describe me or people around me, but I will leave that to others to decide.

Honestly, this is an issue that seems to come up all the time. People constantly claim that the reason they don’t accept the gospel is because of the way other Christians act. The thought is that since Christians are hypocrites, God can’t be real. It is a weak argument, if you ask me, but it is used all the time. How should we respond?

In a sense, all Christians are hypocrites. We tell people what they “should” do according to God and then we proceed to disobey exactly what we just said. Our problem is not knowledge, it is obedience. In that way, we are all hypocrites. From another point of view, we are being totally consistent with what we say is the gospel. We tell people that the gospel proclaims we are all sinners who cannot make the grade on our own. Even after our conversion, our sin is still too great to appeal to God. What makes us different is not our lives: our knowledge, our passion, our dedication or even our actions. What makes us different is Jesus. He took our sins. That is why we are accepted before a holy God. This means that even on our best days we are totally dependent on the amazing grace of God. When we look at it this way, we see that all Christians are being totally consistent with what they say because we all display our great need of a gracious God who saves us, not because of our own goodness, but purely based on His grace.

Now, this is not to say that Christians don’t have a change that happens to them. I believe at conversion we long to obey God. We just struggle to do it. There is a difference in motivation for Christians; we love because we have been so loved. That changes us. But, we still struggle and are going to act contrary to what we say. We will always be open to the charge of hypocrisy to those who want to avoid Jesus themselves.

Back to the book…

How would you react in this kind of situation? We all like to think that something like this could never happen, but we need to realize that impossible situations happen to people everyday and they bring out our true character. What would this kind of thing bring out of me? How about you?

Would you lead? How? Would you follow? Would you challenge those who are in the wrong? What would be your part to play? It is wonderful to contemplate, but it might be convicting. Are you ready for that?

Well, I would love to hear your thoughts if you are reading along with us. What are your first impressions of the book? Is it one you would continue to read if you were not planning on reading it with us? What do you like or dislike about the book so far? Anyone stand out as far as characters in your mind? For me, Barbie is most likely the stand-out hero right now. It will be interesting to see where we go and who else stands out.

Thanks for joining us on this journey. We have now begun and it will be a fast ride even though the book is long. Make sure you contribute to the discussion if youa re reading along. It is always better to read something like this with others.

I look forward to your thoughts and impressions. Until next time,

michael

This is a continuing series. If you want to read the letters that came before, here is the first letter, the second and the third. Enjoy!

James and Lily,

Thanks so much for the passages and encouragement! The passage that struck me most was 2 Corinthians 1. Why don’t we here more about that book? I started reading it and just wanted to keep reading. Wow! Anyway, it helped me to think about my need for Jesus more every moment. I can see that even these troubles, which I would not wish on anyone, are already helping me to trust in God alone. I’m glad you are seeing the fruit too.

Thanks for the passages and thoughts about the “Papa” question. I am a bit uncomfortable with that kind of closeness to God. It seems like it brings Him too far down to my level. If I am honest, it also makes me uncomfortable because He is so holy. If He is that close to me, it makes me want to watch everything I do and say. I can handle others being that close to me because they don’t know everything about me, but God knows it all. That is a bit scary. I still don’t know what to think about all that.

Also, do I have to call Him “Papa” to recognize how close He is to me? It almost seemed like you were saying this is how we all need to pray and talk to Him. I would love to hear your thoughts.

I don’t have any more questions about chapter 1, but I have been reading ahead. Chapter 2 was more interesting. What is the deal with Mac using this myth to relate to Jesus? It seems like it confuses more that it helps. It made her think that Jesus’ story might be a legend too. And why would he say he thinks the Indian princess story was true too? When I was in college, one of my professors was always calling the stories of the Bible myths. The more I have thought about it since becoming a Christian, the more it bothers me! Myths aren’t true! Isn’t this just another way people try to downplay the Bible?

I have a hard time relating to Mac. He seems so inadequate. He can’t answer simple questions. He is full of despair. He thinks he knows what God will or will not do. The only thing I can relate to is his guilt and regret over whatever happens. After the accident, that was all I could think about. Why couldn’t I have just seen that other car coming a moment sooner? Was I distracted with the music that was playing? Is it my fault they died? Could I have done anything differently? Why didn’t I die too? I still don’t have answers to most of these questions. Anyway, I struggle with Mac except in this one area. Why does the author present him this way? Is this why some people have such a problem with the book from a Christian perspective?

I have nothing else from the book right now. I will be praying for you. It must be so hard being held like that against your will. I don’t understand what you are able to do and what they prevent you from doing. It just seems strange to me.

I love you two and hope to see you soon in God’s timing. I really hope they let you go. I am trying to take every day and turn to God. It is still really hard most days. I find that I can turn to Him when I wake up, but when I actually start into my day, so often I forget and struggle. It is still so painful and hard. Pray for me. I don’t even know what to pray for. I would ask about taking away my pain, but I remember what you said last time about this kind of prayer. Pray whatever you think is best.

Your friend,

Tim