Don't underestimate...

Hey! This is my tenth post, so I thought I'd do something a little thoughty.

One of the things that I have realized more and more as I have looked at what the church has become today is that we way underestimate the power of sin as well as the power of God. I myself have been guilty of this. Words like “depravity” make many of us feel uncomfortable. This is because we do not like to relinquish control, even over our sinful state. This does not mean that there aren’t problems on both ends of that spectrum.

In Romans 3 Paul explains just how powerful the grip of sin is. Paul includes a large group of Scriptures from the Old Testament that describe the “depravity” of mankind. Words like “no one seeks God,” “all have turned away,” and “there is no one who does good” seem to imply that the effects of sin’s curse overwhelms the soul totally.  Mankind is so taken by sin that it cannot even do good on its own.

We as believers must be able to admit this to ourselves. If we allow our minds to tell us that there are good people out there, and that they just haven’t done good for the right reasons yet, we have already lost the battle. We cannot assume that people are in the world looking for God, and that all we need to do is make Him easy to find. Before we were saved we, like them, were at war with God. We fought Him with every “good deed” done because it was for our own glory. Apart from salvation we could not be righteous. But our sinful, depraved state is not the only effect on our lives that we have underestimated.

In a Wednesday night Bible study that I co-lead, I often like to throw out difficult to answer questions that spark some form of debate. One of those questions seems to fit right in as a counterpoint to this discussion of depravity. Knowing what we know about our sinful state, is it possible that, as true believers, there could come a point in our lives where we finished out our lives without sinning anymore? Initially most people quickly react by saying no, and that they know they still sin so that could not be possible. As much as we need reminding not to underestimate the depravity of an unbeliever, we need to be careful not to underestimate the grace of God.

Romans 6 provides many of the answers that we are looking for:

1What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 3Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

It seems almost noble to say that one could go on sinning to help God’s grace look even better, but part of being saved is also becoming a new creation. When we became believers we essentially “died” and were “resurrected” into a new life, which was symbolized through our baptism. The old us did not literally die, but rather we now have been enabled to live a wholly new type of life. As such, we should live in a new way, with new intentions.

5If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. 6For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— 7because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.

Furthermore, since we die to ourselves with Christ in His crucifixion, so also we are resurrected with Him into a new life. We are no longer slaves to sin because death frees from sin. We cannot overlook the enormity of what this means. WE ARE NO LONGER SLAVES TO SIN! Paul, in fact, goes further by saying that we are now slaves to righteousness (Rom. 6:18).

Does this mean that once you become a believer you are perfect? No, Christ was perfect for us. Is this “sinless” result something that will be recognizable? No, I don’t think we will be able to understand our hearts this side of heaven. Then why does this even matter? We should not accept that we will just go on sinning for the rest of our lives and cheapen the unmatched grace of God. If that grace is powerful enough to release us from sin, it is powerful enough to release us from ALL sin. We can do as Peter says in 1 Peter 1:15, “But just as He who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do.” God’s grace has made something that was impossible, possible.

This is a message of encouragement. I am not saying that I have attained some level of sinlessness that I can boast in, but I am encouraged to strive for it. If Christ should so miraculously grant that I fully become that “slave to righteousness” that Paul mentioned, it is only by Him and for His glory that it would be completed. We can be free from sin completely, and should not be afraid to know it.

Charlie Hall certainly seems to understand how
to enjoy grace AND take a picture.

I’ll leave you with this:

Sin has lost it's power,

death has lost it's sting.

From the grave you've risen

VICTORIOUSLY!

Into marvelous light I'm running,

Out of darkness, out of shame.

By the cross you are the truth,

You are the life, you are the way

                       Charlie Hall – “Marvelous Light”

It's football time in...

Fall is one of my favorite times of the year. I get to celebrate my anniversary with my lovely wife, the weather cools down, and it’s college football season. The NFL is great, don’t get me wrong, but the overall stupidity level of fans makes the passion, people, and the atmosphere of the college game so much more enticing to me.  Fortunately for me, the only real football left in the country is in the southeast where I live. If you did not know, I am a huge fan of the Alabama Crimson Tide (if you aren’t, we welcome you to the bandwagon at any time). My wife, however, is a Vol fan, but I’ll save her some day.

I am not here, however, just to talk football. I would rather focus on fans. What is the most thrilling moment of a football game? Scoring a touchdown. What is the typical reaction when your team scores? We leap to our feet and throw our hands in the air. Raising your hands is such a perfect reaction that the officials signal a score with uplifted hands.

Why, then, do so many of us, myself included, feel so uncomfortable raising our hands when we are worshipping with the body of believers? Below I offer some suggestions.

We aren’t actually all fellow believers.

This may sound surprising, but it is possible that not everyone in the church building is actually a believer. Some people may not understand the need to raise their hands to God because they do not know Him. We should not be so quick to assume that because we see someone every Sunday morning that they are saved.

1 John 3:9-10; Galatians 5:22-23

We don’t understand the purpose.

How often do leaders in the church explain why raised hands are important? Not very often. What is the international response when someone has a gun pointed at them? They raise their hands. But, why? It is a sign of surrender and submission to the authority of the person in power. Likewise, when we raise our hands in worship that act does not accomplish anything, but with the right heart is representative of our heart of surrender to God. We humbly submit to Him.

We don’t feel comfortable.

This is the area that I struggle with the most. Raising my hands in worship has always been something that made me feel uncomfortable. Part of me feels like everyone’s eyes would go straight to me if I did it. I also am never sure if I am raising my hands for the right reasons, whether for show or worship, and that scares me as well. Whatever the reason, this is a common response. Raising hands pulls us out of our comfort zone. It makes us vulnerable and open before the church and before God.

We think others are fake.

T-Pain certainly understands that when everybody's
hands go up... They stay there.

Sometimes during worship I can become very easily distracted by others around me. Often I find myself looking around the room and seeing the way they worship. Many times it appears they are just raising their hands for show, something I have done from time to time. It is easy to convince ourselves that we must raise a hand to fit in or make our worship count, but God does not require any particular work to legitimize our worship of Him. While there are certainly others around us who may not be worshipping honestly or are over-exaggerating their worship because they feel they must, we must remember that God looks at each heart individually. We should worship freely without care for those around us. We must be bold.

While that was certainly not exhaustive, I do think that covers some of the major reasons there is little expression during worship. What are the reasons we should raise our hands? Again this list won’t cover everything.

·      It’s a sign of surrender to God. We are letting Him be in charge.
·      It’s a sign of personal sacrifice. We offer our hands to Him.
·      It puts us in a vulnerable position, which is a healthy place to be when standing before Almighty God.
·      It’s mentioned in the Bible as a valid form of worship and therefore is acceptable and encouraged.
·      It’s a natural response of praise and should be directed toward our Creator.

After all of this has been said you may still ask, “That doesn’t mean I HAVE to raise my hands, does it?” I suppose the short answer to that would be no, but I would ask one question. Why would you not want to? If you are so busy legitimately worshipping God in other ways that you simply do not have time to lift your hands to Him, please continue. But if you are looking for a reason or an excuse not to raise your hands, then that may be exactly what God wants from you. He desires that you are willing to sacrifice your comfort and control that He may be praised. He looks at your heart. Is your heart completely His?

Below is my prayer for myself this week. If you would like to use it as well, please feel free.

May my prayer be set before you like incense;

       may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice.

             Psalm 141:2

Day Five: Learning what it all means…

I am grateful that I am
the way God has made me

Over the last several days I have talked at length about some of the most important parts of my life. These are certainly not the only times I have seen God working in my life, but in these I have seen the most profound changes in myself. These experiences would be worthless to me, however, if I did not realize what was to be learned through them.

Every single moment of my existence has been orchestrated by God to lead me to where I am. By even changing one decision or one reaction, I could be a completely different person right now. If God had not allowed me to become lazy with my schoolwork in the 7^th grade I might not play the guitar today. That would drastically reduce my coolness factor and likely have made me utterly uninteresting to my lovely wife, who has better standards than that.

If God had not allowed me to become selfish and break up with my lovely wife while we were dating. I would not have had the time to mature and fully grasp the concept of the Biblical role of a husband. It would have been far less painful immediately, but so much more later on.

Even if it can become
embarrassing

By changing any one moment I would not be the person that God has created me to be. I praise Him everyday for each good or bad thing that continues to mold me into a more passionate worshipper who seeks to bring Him glory in all I do. I hope that by reading this you will see how seamlessly God has strung my life together up to this point. He has proved himself faithful over and over again. He can do the same for you if you will let go and let Him be in control.

Question of the Day: Why is it often difficult for people to let God be in control of their life?

Day Four: Learning how to love…

Still with me? This is the portion of my life that I most love to tell. At no time in my life have I been more drastically changed than in the story to follow. Even though I believe I was saved quite young, this period is when I think the Holy Spirit truly opened my eyes, and I finally “got it.”

I have dated only one person in my entire life, and I dated her three different times. I don’t know exactly why, just to be unique I suppose, but by the time I had made it to my sophomore year in high school I decided I wasn’t going to date until after I graduated. That said, it took me all of… a month, maybe… to start dating that summer. I had no idea how to be in a relationship at that point, and after a little more than a year, thought I should break off the relationship. I didn’t believe that she was the “one.” On top of not knowing how to be in a relationship, I didn’t know how to break up either. Basically we kept hanging out just the same, but didn’t say we were dating. A few weeks later we were back at it.

After a while longer I again became restless with our relationship. This time I decided that we would break up and make a point not to hang out. I thought a clean break would make all the difference. What made it even worse was that we broke up just before opening night of Star Wars III, and she had purchased the tickets! Needless to say, that was an awkward evening.

After several months of uncomfortable passes in the hallway and me not being able to shake thinking about her, God punched me right in the mouth. I don’t remember the chapter title, but I know my pastor was preaching out of the book The Life You’ve Always Wanted by John Ortberg. He was speaking on pride, or at least that’s what God was talking about to me. I realized that when we had broken up, I was purely caring about myself more than her.

Knowing I had hurt her deeply I knew the only way I could apologize to her would be with more humility then I had ever mustered before. I hand-wrote her a letter and had it given to her that evening at church. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but amazingly it was like all the tension between us just vanished. We had a real, mutual conversation among friends for the first time in months. Several days later we hung out at the same friend’s house for an evening. That was the night that God was like, “DO YOU GET IT YET?” I had this brand new feeling that I had never experienced before. I couldn’t sleep that night. All I could do was see what it was going to look like the day I asked her to marry me, something I knew was going to happen. I knew that I wanted to take care of her more than myself, and that God wanted that too. We got engaged on the floor of my graduation amidst all the new grads taking family pictures and were married in September of that year.

Question of the Day: What is a time in your life that God drastically changed you in a way you were unable to change yourself?

Day Three: Learning to be a computer nerd…

One more day… one more story about ME! Well… it’s more like one more story about how a merciful God has shown me His power. Today we are exploring the way the hand of God has led me to the present in my professional life. It still amazes me how one decision led to another, and yet all of those decisions have worked together to turn me into who I am.

I don’t know how it happened, but it turned out that East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, TN had one of the best Digital Media programs in the country. I really don’t remember when I decided that was the program I wanted to be a part of, but for some reason I had this tug to head in that direction. It is basically a rule that whenever anyone enters the DIGM program they must have overinflated expectations of how they are going to do 3D animation and work for Pixar. I learned very quickly that I desired more to stay near to home, have a life, and actually get a job. I found that my passions were actually to do video and web design.

I looked quite attractive driving
 this beast around

After placing most of my study in these areas, I graduated from ETSU and found a job… as a delivery driver for Office Depot. While I continued looking for a “real” job I wondered why it was I was there. It turns out this was a great job for me at that time because it taught me how to function as a “grown up” and get my work done. It also showed me that I needed to rely on God and not my own plans. He had me at Office Depot until a specific job was ready for me.

This is the student activities page
that I got to design

While they didn’t realize they designed the job just for me, I was the first person ever hired into the position of Web Developer back at ETSU. When I had graduated I had hoped to some day be able to come back to work at the university, God actually wanted me back right away. One of the best benefits of working for the state is that they will pay for graduate level courses. This is what has allowed me to begin studying at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, seeking my M.Div. degree in Worship studies. This is something I could never have planned. God gave me a desire to enter a field that would eventually pay for education in the other field I am passionate about! Examining the path that has brought me to this point is a constant reminder that He knows best, and I do not.

Question of the Day: What has God done in your life to place you where you are?

Day Two: Learning to express myself…

It’s time to get right into the heart of how God has molded me over the years. Today is an epic (or legendary) tale of scandal, remorse, regret… That may be building it up a bit too much, but this is about how I learned to play the guitar!

No, we are not a black family...

When I was in the seventh grade my sister, who made a point of noting that she was not mentioned in yesterday’s post, and I began homeschooling. This was the logical thing to do since my mom wrote the book on homeschooling… literally, no really, buy it. There were many great aspects about homeschooling. More relaxed schedules, easier vacation planning, and curriculum that was still challenging showed why this was great for our family, but without adequate supervision that whole sin-nature thing can really kick in.

Over the course of many weeks I began to slack off on completing my work. I was still doing fine on my tests and quizzes, so little attention was paid to my daily lessons. It eventually got to the point where I was not doing any of my actual schoolwork throughout the day. As always happens, I got caught. As it turns out, the punishment that I received was one of the best things that could have happened to me. Not only was I provided AMPLE time to catch up on my schoolwork, but it provided me the time to learn to play the guitar, something God would use in my life for a long period of time.

Not long after I learned to play, and definitely before I was very good, I found myself playing guitar in the youth band at church. This not only forced me to develop my guitar skills more rapidly, but also thrust me into a position of leadership, another skill that God desired for me to develop. I went through band splits and three youth pastors during my time leading. Once the band all graduated, we headed to college and in different musical directions.

Since then God has placed me in the perfect situation. Leading the Simulcast service for the last several years has been amazing. It has challenged my leadership abilities, pushed me to play new music that I otherwise would not have, and taught me a new reliance upon him. I can see daily how God is continuing to make me into a better, more knowledgeable, and more passionate worshipper.

Question of the day: When has God used some sin that you were caught in to help you grow into a deeper relationship with Him?

Day One: Learning about me…

I thought it might be a good idea for you to know who I am and how I have arrived at this point. I’m going to break this up into five parts and we are going to go with one part each day. So keep checking back and hearing more. Let the focus on me begin!

Yeah...

I was raised in the church from the time I was born. My mom had a mullet with a perm, and my dad had a Geraldo mustache back then. I am the oldest of four, though the two youngest came when I was twelve and fifteen years old, respectively. I was born in Alabama, lived in Georgia, and spent the last fifteen years here in Johnson City, TN, though I’m still a huge Crimson Tide fan.

Having grown up in church, I do not remember a time when I did not believe in God. One of my earliest memories was praying to God (every night) that I would get to go to heaven when I died. Though it is difficult for a kid that age to have a firm grasp on the concept of sin, I truly believe that I was saved at that young age.

Throughout my life there have been some major storylines that have been used by God to define who I am. For the next week you will get to hear some of the ones that I believe have had the most profound effect on me.

Question of the day: When were you saved? What do you remember about it?

Please leave a short paragraph in the comment box and we can share in God’s goodness together. Hearing other people’s stories will only reinforce our knowledge of the power of God to save!