walkie talkie?

 

Enjoy.

Scholarly?

Wow! This semester has been NUTS!!!! Which explains my complete lack of posting anything in the last two months. Lucky for me the semester is over and I can be mellow for a bit. Unfortunately school really cuts into my sitting around time, funny how that works.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about who I am, and what it is I’m doing with life. Thus far I have come to one conclusion: I want to be a scholar. I know that saying that can make me sound really arrogant, so let me explain. I don’t want to be a scholar in the sense that many people think of a scholar (if that makes any sense). Rather I want to spend a lot of time reading, writing, and chewing on tough bits of doctrine for the whole of my life. I want to mine the depths of Scripture. I want to be so immersed in my Bible that the meta-narrative of Scripture is constantly be rolled over in my mind. I want to be so immersed in my Bible that I ponder the implications of one verse for weeks and weeks until I finally get it. Then I want to take all the knowledge that God has poured into my head and teach it with clarity, poignance, and passion. I want all the Theology that I have learned to well up inside of me and set fire to my soul, I want my heart to burn with love for Christ and His Church. I want to be able to look around me and see shadows of Christ and the Gospel in every nook and cranny of life; I don’t want a moment to go by that isn’t marked with the sweet fragrance of Christ’s unending grace. 

That is what I mean when I say that I want to be a scholar. It isn’t that I want the degrees, or that I want the recognition, although the selfish pride in me sure does, I just want to understand the Gospel. I want the power of the the Gospel to root out the selfishness in me. I want the Holy Spirit to enlighten my heart so that I can understand the Scriptures with greater depth. In short: I want to love God and know His word. That is the cry of my heart. Strive together with me-that we might all love Christ more and know His Word better. 

 

Brent

 

Augustine is…wordy.

“But there is nothing in your word that passes away or returns to its place; for it is truly immortal and eternal. And, therefore, to the word co-eternal with you, at the same time and always you say all that you say, And whatever you say shall be made is made, and you make nothing otherwise than by speaking. Still, not all the things that you make by speaking are made at the same time and always.”

My head is spinning.

Are we so callous?

So I was eating breakfast this morning (Kashi cereal rules) and looking through a catalog for Family Christian bookstore and when I noticed the banner on the front cover of the catalog, which read; “prepare your heart for the Lord”, which was an advertisement for Bibles(the Scripture quoted below it was from Ephesians 4:12 …prepare God’s people for works of service… Since when did it become OK the use Scripture to sell stuff? Honestly, why is it all of a sudden OK to use scripture to advertise, even if it is a Bible? What happens if the heart isn’t prepared for the Lord? Hell. A heart that isn’t prepared for the Lord is a unregenerate heart, a heart that is still sin-stained and wicked. Where do the wicked go? Hell. How come we take this lightly?!!! Oh its OK, we’ll use this to be cute and advertise stuff, its not irreverent, we won’t think about what we are doing, because then we would have to stop. Maybe I’m taking this too far, but what if I’m not? It scares me to think what will happen to us if our hearts become callous. It scares me because Christ flipped out on the people that were selling merchandise in the Temple, they had become calloused, its a scary place to be. Maybe its OK to advertise like Family Christian did, maybe, but I think we run the risk of numbing ourselves. I think that when Scripture is used outside of teaching, correcting and leading people towards Christ, and instead is used to sell our little “Christian” things we step into extremely dangerous territory. God doesn’t take lightly a callous heart, especially when it is the heart of His children. He will discipline us for our good, the fire will be lit and the dross of sin will be burned away, all so He can become our treasure again. Oh how I pray we will understand our Lord, His love for us, and the lengths that He will go to in order to bring us back to where we ought to be. Read Isaiah 40, His word stands forever, He holds all of creation in His hands. May we have a Holy fear of the One that bought our salvation with his blood, and correctly handle His Word.

I wrote this a while back, but never posted it. In light of recent events I have decided to let my rant go.

Dear Family Christian Stores,

Please remove all of the heresy that lines your shelves. If you would like, I can do it for you, granted you won’t be left with much but at least you won’t make money by leading people astray.

All Grown up

So I’m reading a boy-hood classic, The Adventures of Tom Saywer. I was never able to get through it when I was a kid, I was too busy chasing/killing things, so I figured the best thing to do as an “adult” was to read it.  What I like the most is that it reminds me of when I was a kid. Growing up in Oregon my friends and I went on crazy stupid adventures, like setting booby traps for our unsuspecting enemies (there weren’t any) or playing war in the woods with pine cones and sticks. If done right a pine cone is a perfect grenade and a stick, depending on size, is a great rifle or grenade launcher. We would also fish, catch crawdads, tromp through briar patches just to follow a stream, sneak around on peoples property, or really anything else that was remotely dangerous or just plain stupid. However, my favorite thing was jumping bikes in the backyard, not a lot has changed.

Although it’s fun to read and reminisce about how it was when I was a kid, I’m haunted by something, and I think it began with my generation. The children of the 80’s took a weird turn in middle school, a turn that I don’t think our parent took. Although it’s true that my parents were faced with the sexual revolution and all that came with it, their life in middle school and even high school was pretty tame. Drugs were present, and sex could be had, but it was considerably easier to avoid than it was when I was in school, and especially now for my brother and sister.

The 90’s saw the rise of grunge rock and a subsequent spike in depression and teen drug abuse. Divorce crashed on the shores of many marriages, leaving chaos and destruction in its wake. Many of us grew up in homes that were split, or on the verge of splitting, and we didn’t know how to deal with the pain and emptiness that was left. Many turned to drugs, sex, alcohol, aerosol paint cans, really anything that would numb the pain we didn’t know what to do with. All this came crashing down while we were still children, we made decisions that our parents didn’t have to make until they were in their late teens or early twenties.

Where am I going with this? I have watched my brother and sister deal with crap that has absolutely stolen their childhood from them. No longer do kids hang out and play with sticks and pine cones. Instead they get locked into a weird virtual world with video games and computers. Although it doesn’t seem bad, I think they have destroyed our ability to communicate, to really live with depth in a community of people. How can we live in community if we never talk? How can we uphold society if our only conversation is during a video game or through text messages? I want kids to climb trees again. I want to see kids play some ridiculous game that they made up, that doesn’t make any sense and lasts for hours. I don’t want America, or the Church for that matter, to be consumed by the junk we set in motion, I don’t want my kids to fall into the same crap I did.

So I pray that Christ will restore the hearts of children, I pray that He restores families so that children can be children. I don’t want life to be about video games that are detached from reality, I want life to be about Christ and drinking in the wonderful world that He has created. I want my kids to live deeply, I want them to understand their depravity, but I also want them to understand Christ’s mercy so they can fall on it. Basically, I want kids to love Jesus, and I want them to be free to be kids. I don’t want them to worry about which parent they will stay with, or who is sleeping with who. To worry about such things destroys the soul. Father I pray that Your Holy Spirit will renew our minds, I pray that we will submit ourselves to You, I pray that would free us from our junk so we can follow and love You.

Throwback

I’m a child

So…this is my dream. Who wants to buy a house with me and ride bicycles in the backyard?

Oh life, you’re crazy.

So, life is officially nuts. All I can say is that I’m really glad that I didn’t take 15 hours this semester. I don’t think I’ve ever read this much in my entire life, seriously, and I read quite a bit before I came here. But, through it all the Lord has given me strength and diligence to study. Seriously though, I get to study really cool stuff, so I’m not going to whine about it.

One of my favorite things in life presently is making fun of my roommate, mostly because he is from Africa and doesn’t speak English well. He will say things like, “are you engaging some one?”, when he meant to say, “are you getting engaged to somebody?”. It’s mean, I know, but can you blame me? I live with a guy that constantly gives me things to make fun of, how can I not take advantage of it? Another thing that brings joy to my life is taking whatever he is studying and throwing it on the ground. Haha!! He’s really diligent, so when he studies he focuses really hard and it’s hard to distract him, so when all else fails I just throw his crap on the ground and laugh. Then, I taunt him to fight me and tell him that he is going to get beat up by a skinny white American kid, and that he won’t be able to go back home and face his family. The funny thing is that he used to box in Africa, so he knows that without a doubt he could beat the crap out of me. So instead of saying anything, or actually fighting me, he just shakes his head and chuckles under his breath. Oh how I love being obnoxious!!!

Keep your ear to the grindstone.

Hoot!!

What I think is stupid.

So…I’m going to be honest, this is going to be a rant. I have been a little more sarcastic and dry the last couple of days, largely due to some information that I happened upon. I won’t go into detail about the information, although nearly every cell in my body would like to, I don’t want to be a proponent for dissension in the body of Christ. With that said, I am going to vomit all of my frustrations onto this blog, and hopefully be done with it. My frustration is this: the presence of politics in the Bride of Christ. I have had a glimpse into the horrors of ministry. What are the horrors you ask? Church politics. The stupid, ridiculous, un-biblical way that Churches can be run. The way that a man can gain control over any entire denomination is infuriating, not only does it feed the self-righteousness that is prevalent in Baptist Churches it breeds it as well. People by the thousands walk around with their noses in the air thinking that they are more spiritual than everybody else. Why? Because they dress up on Sundays, or because they don’t dress up, or because they have a traditional worship, or contemporary.

There is a serious risk of spiritual elitism in America. What is the risk you ask? It’s this: when we think that we are better than another denomination because of our model of worship we forget one crucial truth, that all the believers together make the Body of Christ. Not the Baptists, or the Lutherans, or the Presbyterians or the kids that don’t claim a denomination. All of us together, who have been saved by grace through faith in Christ, we are the body. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t confront and correct doctrinal errors, we should, it is of the utmost importance that our Theology is sound. However, our Theology should never become a point of pride. If it does then it shows our Theology is a facade, our right words and Sunday school answers are covering a deeper truth, that we are far from God. Our correct Theology ought to aim at this “But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith”. If the goal of our instruction isn’t this then we can find ourselves in a dark place, where all that we say and do serves us, our Churches and Bible studies all serve to make us look cool. Maybe we couldn’t be cool in other realms, but in Church we can really be somebody, we can tell people what to do and have control.

Now why do I say this? Why do I rant? Because I have seen this in myself, I have seen this in Christ’s beloved and I hate it. I believe that God is actively apposing the pride of His beloved, and I want to be a part of what my Lord is doing. Because in the end, all of our religious activity may have been a big sham. Maybe we have been just been religious for our own sake. That’s a scary place to be, I don’t want to hear “I never knew you” to which I reply, “but look at all the stuff I did for You!”. I’m not saying that I wrestle with whether or not I’m saved, well…there are dark nights of my soul when I do wrestle, but I know that’s satan and his lies, so I ignore it. But we should examine ourselves. We should press into Christ here, because if we are going through the motions we need to repent. We need to ask forgiveness and sit at the feet of Christ, all so that we may know Him better. When that happens we can rest in the beautiful assurance of our salvation, and we can serve our Lord with a sincere heart.

So my plea is this, “let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need”. Draw near, find the things that stir your affections for Christ and do them, don’t talk about doing them, actually do them. Ask for Christ to stir your affections for Him, to draw you near to Him. Oh that we would find life in Christ!!! How I wish we could love one another the way that Christ loves us, how beautiful life would be if that could happen. So lets strive for it. Let the pursuit of our lives be to love God and each other until we all go home and He makes everything perfect at the end of the age.

Brent