“Clearly there is a direct link between the profession of faith, the practice of faith, and the plausibility of faith. Practice what you preach and you commend your faith; don’t and you contradict it. ‘By this all men will know you are my disciples,’ Jesus said. ‘if you love one another.’ Or as Erasmus reminded his contemporaries a millennium and a half later in a more corrupt generation, ‘If we would bring the Turks to Christianity, we must first be Christians.’”
The Call by Os Guinness: 108
Are we living as Christians or just professing to be so? What does it mean to truly be a Christian? These are questions that have struck me repeatedly in my search. The church so many times seems full of hypocrites and liars. But are we not all hypocrites at some point? Christian does not equal perfect. I believe a better definition of Christian, though anything is probably better, is a sinner who acknowledges that they are a sinner and will be until they join God in heaven. The difference is that Christians know that their sins are forgiven and when Jesus died on the cross this allowed us to enter into eternal life with God.
This world is so sinful and wrong for us. Try to wrap your mind around the fact that we wake up in the morning to sin, we live through temptation, our actions, words, and thoughts are all possible methods to sin. How impossible is it to go a day without sinning? How many times do we sin to only realize we have sinned afterward? The point of faith in God is not to make us perfect statues on pedestals for the world to admire, but to be a light onto the world. We are not to hide in our own little enclave and leave the sinners to themselves. We need to go amongst others to cultivate relationships, spread the good news, and show the world what it truly means to be Christian. We need to practice what we preach and admit when we are wrong because we will do wrong at some point.
What a difficult calling. Then again, it’s not like we have to do it on our own. God calls us to him and wants to help us. He wants us to succeed. He is not there getting a giggle out of our failures. He has given us weapons and armor to succeed and he wants to hear us cry out to him. The Lord has also given us community, the church, our friends, a mentor. We are not meant to do this alone.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Why do we worry so much?
Why worry?
Lately I have been thinking a lot about how difficult it is to not worry about what the future holds. There are quite a few uncertainties at this stage of life. Unfortunately, it’s not just college students wondering what they are going to do now that they need full time jobs, but it’s many people who have been in the workforce for years. It’s difficult not to spend your days worrying.
I came across a great verse a couple of days ago. It’s Phillipians 4:6-7 “Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.” This verse touches on so many important lessons to remember.
Worrying is natural, but I also heard once that it is almost like you don’t trust God. That’s pretty harsh, but then again when you think about the way in which people sin there are so many times when we believe that we know better than God what is best for us. These are other instances in which our trust in God comes into question. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a Christian, but that you’re a sinner like everyone else.
I have come to realize the importance of prayer. It isn’t a last resort, but should be the first defense. God wants us to pray to him anywhere and anytime. Prayer keeps us on track. I also read yesterday in The St. Cloud Times that people who pray are less likely to be so stressed.
So many times we go before God in prayer and forget to thank him for what he has already done for us. The fact that we even can speak to him should be an instance of thanksgiving. Can you truly wrap your mind around the fact that we can speak with our Creator?
What an amazing promise that God will use his peace to guard our hearts and minds. How great is it that God loves us enough to carry our worries for us?
I think this is such a great verse to remember and try to live out. Wouldn’t it be great to cast all of our anxieties on God? Think of how your life could be changed by simply praying more and giving your worry over to God.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about how difficult it is to not worry about what the future holds. There are quite a few uncertainties at this stage of life. Unfortunately, it’s not just college students wondering what they are going to do now that they need full time jobs, but it’s many people who have been in the workforce for years. It’s difficult not to spend your days worrying.
I came across a great verse a couple of days ago. It’s Phillipians 4:6-7 “Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.” This verse touches on so many important lessons to remember.
Worrying is natural, but I also heard once that it is almost like you don’t trust God. That’s pretty harsh, but then again when you think about the way in which people sin there are so many times when we believe that we know better than God what is best for us. These are other instances in which our trust in God comes into question. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a Christian, but that you’re a sinner like everyone else.
I have come to realize the importance of prayer. It isn’t a last resort, but should be the first defense. God wants us to pray to him anywhere and anytime. Prayer keeps us on track. I also read yesterday in The St. Cloud Times that people who pray are less likely to be so stressed.
So many times we go before God in prayer and forget to thank him for what he has already done for us. The fact that we even can speak to him should be an instance of thanksgiving. Can you truly wrap your mind around the fact that we can speak with our Creator?
What an amazing promise that God will use his peace to guard our hearts and minds. How great is it that God loves us enough to carry our worries for us?
I think this is such a great verse to remember and try to live out. Wouldn’t it be great to cast all of our anxieties on God? Think of how your life could be changed by simply praying more and giving your worry over to God.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Quidditch and Faith
Why Harry Potter is not adverse to Christianity:
How Quidditch can be used as an analogy.
I am currently reading The Call by Os Guiness. He discusses how we are called first to seek God and our secondary calling is our vocation. He uses the term seekers for people seeking God. As Harry Potter fan, this naturally made me think of the game of Quidditch in which Harry plays Seeker. The Seeker’s job is to search for the Snitch which will end the game and earn his/her team 150 points. In the same manner are we seeking God.
However, I realized that this cannot be right. We are not seeking God to win a mere 150 points and God is not running from us. The whole difficulty of catching the Snitch is that it is elusive and does not want to be caught. God is not at all like that. God seems to continually hound us. When I know I am sinning and I try to rationalize it, I usually then realize that God knows exactly what is going through my head. He knows I am trying to get out of holding myself accountably. Despite how I try to pretend that it does not matter and I can ask for forgiveness later, I know that that is not how it should work at all. God is continually working on my heart to mold me to become more like him. He does not leave me alone and he does not run from me.
Imagine all the stories you hear about the people who try so hard to believe God does not exist and how they are dragged kicking and screaming to believe that he does. A great example is CS Lewis. He used to be an atheist and he became one of the great Christian thinkers of our day. He wrote books such as The Screwtape Letters and The Chronicles of Narnia. Those books and movies are so well known that the word Narnia doesn’t even come up on my computer screen as being misspelled even though there isn’t a definition in my online dictionary. How amazing is God that he can take a resolute atheist and change his heart to influence others for God to the extent that Lewis did?
Returning to my Quidditch analogy, therefore, I came to the conclusion that God cannot be the snitch because I am not doing all the work to seek him. I may be a Seeker, but he wants me to find him. So perhaps the better analogy would be that I am a Seeker and God is a bludger. Unlike the elusive snitch, the bludger repeatedly comes at you, never stopping. It may hurt very badly to get hit, but it’s part of life and the pain can bring you back to God.
I recently read The Problem With Pain which is also by CS Lewis. It is a book that I highly recommend. In the book, Lewis discusses how pain can be a reminder that earth is not heaven. Though we may enjoy our time here on earth, we are destined for something far greater than this life. We will find a pain-free, everlasting life with God our father in heaven. The pain we experience on earth can be our saving grace when it reminds us of what we have to look forward to after this life.
As Os Guiness writes in The Call, “We not only have Jesus’ explicit promise that seekers will find (“seek and you will find”), but we also have his direct example to show that seekers themselves are sought” (16). God is not an elusive God who gets kick out of watching you jump through hoops to find him. Instead he is searching harder for you more than you can ever search for him.
How Quidditch can be used as an analogy.
I am currently reading The Call by Os Guiness. He discusses how we are called first to seek God and our secondary calling is our vocation. He uses the term seekers for people seeking God. As Harry Potter fan, this naturally made me think of the game of Quidditch in which Harry plays Seeker. The Seeker’s job is to search for the Snitch which will end the game and earn his/her team 150 points. In the same manner are we seeking God.
However, I realized that this cannot be right. We are not seeking God to win a mere 150 points and God is not running from us. The whole difficulty of catching the Snitch is that it is elusive and does not want to be caught. God is not at all like that. God seems to continually hound us. When I know I am sinning and I try to rationalize it, I usually then realize that God knows exactly what is going through my head. He knows I am trying to get out of holding myself accountably. Despite how I try to pretend that it does not matter and I can ask for forgiveness later, I know that that is not how it should work at all. God is continually working on my heart to mold me to become more like him. He does not leave me alone and he does not run from me.
Imagine all the stories you hear about the people who try so hard to believe God does not exist and how they are dragged kicking and screaming to believe that he does. A great example is CS Lewis. He used to be an atheist and he became one of the great Christian thinkers of our day. He wrote books such as The Screwtape Letters and The Chronicles of Narnia. Those books and movies are so well known that the word Narnia doesn’t even come up on my computer screen as being misspelled even though there isn’t a definition in my online dictionary. How amazing is God that he can take a resolute atheist and change his heart to influence others for God to the extent that Lewis did?
Returning to my Quidditch analogy, therefore, I came to the conclusion that God cannot be the snitch because I am not doing all the work to seek him. I may be a Seeker, but he wants me to find him. So perhaps the better analogy would be that I am a Seeker and God is a bludger. Unlike the elusive snitch, the bludger repeatedly comes at you, never stopping. It may hurt very badly to get hit, but it’s part of life and the pain can bring you back to God.
I recently read The Problem With Pain which is also by CS Lewis. It is a book that I highly recommend. In the book, Lewis discusses how pain can be a reminder that earth is not heaven. Though we may enjoy our time here on earth, we are destined for something far greater than this life. We will find a pain-free, everlasting life with God our father in heaven. The pain we experience on earth can be our saving grace when it reminds us of what we have to look forward to after this life.
As Os Guiness writes in The Call, “We not only have Jesus’ explicit promise that seekers will find (“seek and you will find”), but we also have his direct example to show that seekers themselves are sought” (16). God is not an elusive God who gets kick out of watching you jump through hoops to find him. Instead he is searching harder for you more than you can ever search for him.
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