Church Sign "All welcome...do not disturb"

We have some warped ideas of church, that its either for weirdo's. Or we have to dress a certain way, act a certain way before we can go to church.

I was chatting to someone at the skate park the other day, and they said “its only kooks that get saved” In others words people that cant really skate or the weird people in society” Part of me was like yeah I suppose you right…

I have always seen that as a bad thing, But rather through the love of God I am starting to see it as a compliment. That people notice that God’s love is for anyone. It is not exclusive. Jesus says “A healthy person does not go to the doctor, but rather the sick”

Does the world look at our church and our actions and go “All is really welcome there” Rather than just a sign that hangs on our door…

God so loved the world – There is nothing exclusive about a world embracing love. Our love very often becomes restricted to those we like, those part of our friendship group. To those that will not require lots of energy or our money.

We love the lovely, the lovable, and the loving but that is not agape love, that is not the love of God.

When we limit church to certain people it's about us, when we open it up it's about God

The love of God love is wide enough to welcome the unfortunate in large numbers. 


I go to church because I love God, I love his people, I love interacting, I love that church is where I can go and not have to wear a mask, not have to have money in my wallet, not have to have everything in order. Its about loving God... 

My God fits into a box

Recently I bought myself a new bible, the ESV study bible. It came it a lovely box and inside the box was a beautiful leather bound book of life, truth, love, hurt and pain. Exciting stuff I tell you.

I was chatting to my friend about when life plans change and when things don’t always work out according to our plans. Even when we think God has told us otherwise. So often we loose site of the mysteries of God and his will and awesomeness and try to impose our will and understanding on situations. We feel hurt by the current circumstances so therefore it has to be someone else to blame, rather than our own misunderstandings or personal pride to say “maybe I didn’t hear right”

So many people want the God that fits into the box the bible came in, rather than the God the bible speaks about. The God that inspired the word of God. The God that knows no limits.

What in your life needs to be revisited and given a fresh pair of eyes, perhaps a deep breath and a sigh of relief that things worked out the way they did. Perhaps a prayer to God for saying thanks for the bigger picture even when I was against it.

Time does not answer all questions, it just puts in into perspective. 

Proudness is a word...

My son crawled today for the first time in his life, and I was lucky enough to witness it. There is a sort of overwhelming joy that comes upon a person when are so filled with ‘proudness’ That it is difficult to explain.

I wonder though if God sometimes looks down on us with the same ‘proudness’ as I do with my boy. I love my son unconditionally and always, but surely ‘proudness’ is based in response to an action. Are we making God proud of our actions or does he get sad like I get for Seth when the dogs won’t come near him. All he wants to do is drool on them.

My concern is while we are not saved by works, surely there is something in us that wants to make God proud of us? A motivating factor in our lives perhaps?

Perhaps we are more concern with ourselves than with God and therefore by default don’t have to care what he think…

I hope and prayer my heart is never that hardened to the joy of God.

He might be the only reason that I dont get into heaven!

Do you have one person in your life, that no matter how much you try you can't be nice to them? You make fun of them? Or they make you so angry you want to punch them?

I would consider myself a relatively nice guy, friendly, caring, however sometimes there is just that one person. I am left wondering how am I ever going to show the love of Jesus to this person if I cant even look at them.

I think the answer is simple, the same way Jesus showed his love to me, the same way Jesus forgave all the stupid lame things I have done and turned them into Grace!

SO BASICALLY JUST STOP IT! PLAY NICE AND SHOW GODS LOVE! TO EVERYONE!!!

Faithless Prayers

Phillip Yancey once wrote "If there is no room for doubt there is no room for faith"

I read verses like James 1: 7 saying I must not have doubts when I ask God things? obviously according to his will.

So the question then I suppose... is...

Do I need faith in my prayers if it is in line with what God wants for me?

My faith is in the person to whom the prayer is directed at! Not in my prayer at all...

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Is God Boring

If a man goes to church in the woods and there is no one else there is it still boring?

I struggle with the concept (while my son struggles to sleep) that God is boring, Fair enough he can come across a little arrogant, but if u made everything then by definition of being God you would just be God. Not a little arrogant!

Back to my thought though, Chesterton once said something along the lines of 'I pity the man that thinks himself God, that god can not even fix his own life, let alone the world" I think it is that man that in the church is boring!

The challenge is to get off Gods throne and let God be God! Chesterton again said that "Christianity has not been tried and left wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried"

My fear for so many of us is that we are too apathetic in our relationship with God, that we just sit and wallow in our own pity and lives instead of living in Jesus "life and life to the fullest"

I cannot sit idly by as Jesus calls us to action in love, no matter how comfortable my bed is.

JUST STOP IT

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Open my eyes God!!!

Once back when I was 18 I had borrow my moms car, she had just gotten it back from the garage where it had just had a major service. It cost loads of money and also gave issues so she was always a bit reluctant to let me or my brother use her car, but of course with our puppy dogs eyes and boyish charm we always got to use it. It also always broke down with one of us using it. More of a coincidence than anything else really, my car was this old black beetle. I loved the car because it was my first car and got it super cheap because my cousin owed my dad some money and was selling his car so I landed up getting the car. I was stoked and my friend Alan and I would spend endless hours working on the car and making it cool. Or at least what we thought was cool. One night we took the car out to the movies, it was the middle of winter and that’s when we figured out the vents in the car don’t close, we where freezing and our last resort was to put my girlfriends jersey (she left it in the car, this never happened again after that night). In the dashboard through where the radio should be. We had the radio in the cubby-hole, as it was easier to install there. So we shuffled the jersey in nice and tight and it was working well until it decided to rain. As it was raining we needed to use the windscreen wipers, it was only drizzling so nothing too bad. When we got to the movie place to meet everyone including my girlfriend, she sent me a message to say “please bring my jersey out the car. So I went to grab it only to find that the windscreen wipers had tangled up the jersey and it had gotten caught that I couldn’t get it out and it ended up getting ripped and broken. It is funny how we all have gaps in our lives that we try fill with whatever we find laying around and appealing? It always goes back to having a God space inside of each of us that we just try fill with whatever is around whether girls, booze, or even sports.

So this night it was raining and cold so I got to use my mom’s car for legitimate reasons. I cant remember where me and Alan where going, but we where going out none the less. When I got to his house the rain had stopped and the roads where slightly wet, just wet enough for some fun. So Alan gets into the car and we reverse out of his drive way, as we are going backwards I quickly throw the car into first and do a wheel spin, however the wheel spin is cut short because the car just cuts out. My heart starts to race and I start thinking up excuses to why the car just stopped working. We manage to get the car under some trees outside of Alan’s house. The rain starts to pour down again and Alan and me are just stuck there in silence. Rain is dripping through the trees and falling on the windscreen. Then it was almost simultaneously that we thought back to Sunday’s church service about prayer and how this guy prayed to God and he got a wife. We both thought wow, what we are asking for is way easier than that. So I prayed for us something along the lines of “Father God, we love you and just want you too fix the car, we wont wheel spin again and will try be better people”. I thought it was a good prayer, we where bargaining with God, giving him what he wanted to hear and in return we would get our small miracle. At that moment our faith was huge, I mean it was either faith or the wrath of mom. After the amen we tried to start the car and to our surprise it didn’t start. No what, we almost felt a little betrayed by the whole deal, we had done our part, had faith and prayed a sincere prey and nothing. We felt cheated out of a miracle and also new the trouble that awaited us because of the unanswered prayer. After a while it stopped raining and we figured that God would answer our prayers if we met him half way, so Alan jumps out the car and starts to push, we try a few times and Alan can’t feel his arms anymore. I just feel the sinking feeling of surrender coming over me. I have nothing left to try, its time to face the consequences and phone my mom. Just before I do that though I pop the bonnet in the hope I can see what the problem is. Even though I have no real clue, I thought 5 more minutes won’t hurt. The whole time everything is going on I am still praying in my head asking God for help. When I pop the bonnet and look inside I notice that the box for the airflow straight into the engine has come off. So I clip it back on and away we go. Turns out the guys that services the car didn’t put it on properly. Seems God did answer my prayers but the way he wanted to answer them not the way I wanted them answered. He gave me the insight into the problem and I had to go and fix it. I think a lot of times we sit by and want God to fix everything and do everything for us. But if God has answered our prayers the way we wanted him too. We would not have developed a dependence on him, we would have properly in all honestly developed big heads because God answered our prayers on our terms, instead he taught us everything in his time. Everything his way, we don’t always have to understand that but the more we know the easier it becomes.

ASKING QUESTIONS

When I think of growing up, we where told like any children what to do by our parents, whenever questioned they would respond with one of the following, and I am sure you can relate, either from hearing it or even putting it in your very own parents quick response handbook. The phrases being “because I said so” or “as long as you live under my roof you will do as I say” or some other variation of that. While that is all part of growing up it almost instills within us a fear of asking questions, or challenging the status quo. I think back to math’s class and it was not a very welcomed thing to ask questions if you did not understand, either you where ridiculed by your peers or the teacher. If you didn’t get it the first time you had to just pretend like you knew what you where doing.

From growing up and heading into church, we tend to take that mentality with us, that it is wrong to ask questions, if you don’t understand, then the problem is with you, not the preachers or the bible. As like in math’s class you land up failing. Failing to fulfill the purpose God has for you, this is just one of the reasons I am putting forward and by no means am I shifting the blame to someone else, but rather helping you understand perhaps why we are so afraid to come to God with questions. Sometimes we fail at school because we are just plain old lazy.

The church has grown up in an era where children are seen and not heard, they are not meant to ask questions. We have taken that attitude with our relationship with God the father and have just taken everything at face value instead of asking questions for the fear it is not allowed.

In the bible Jesus gets asked lots of questions, in the book of Mark Jesus speaks of his death for the third time. But his close followers called the disciples do nothing. Makes me wonder exactly what the disciples did with these insights to the future? I mean if I told you the winning number of the lotto would you go and get the ticket? But in Luke we get a special insight that they did not understand any of these things; the meaning of the words where hidden, like if I just went 7 21 36 87 and walked out you would not know those are the winning lotto numbers. The words where hidden from them. Perhaps because they would have tied Jesus up and stopped him from going to Jerusalem? Or maybe Jesus wanted the disciples to start to take ownership of things and ask him more questions, instead they start worrying and arguing about who is going to be the most. Who is going to be the greatest after Jesus, totally missing the point of what Jesus was trying to teach them. If we look at the majority of Jesus stories he told, they didn’t make sense out right. A lot of times the disciples had to come to Jesus and seek him and ask more questions about what it is he meant or to get a deeper understanding. It also says in Mark 9: 33 that they where afraid to ask him? How many times do our fears stop us from coming closer to God? From asking questions?

If we are all honest we all have questions for God, and I think a lot of the time we are told its wrong to questions God. That we must just believe everything hook line and sinker without actually taking ownership of it. If we stand for nothing we will fall for anything. That means if I don’t know why I believe something, it I haven’t wrestled with it I am properly not going to risk anything for it. In the Old Testament there is a story about a guy called Jacob, in short one night he has a wresting match with an angel, some people say it could have actually been God he wrested with. Either way Jacob has questions for God and wrestled all through the night. As a result from seeking God his hip was thrown out of joint and he was left with a limp. This is not too say that it was wrong of Jacob to ask thinks of God, but rather when we start to ask God questions it will start to have an impact on how we live. Martin Luther once said that there is nothing worth killing for but plenty worth dying for. That statement can only come out of knowing what you believe. I can tell people why I think drinking coke is bad, but when it comes down to it and there is choice is coke or water they will go with the coke. Not because they hate me, least I hope not, but rather because they don’t believe what I believe. They have not asked the questions that I have asked to bring about my dislike for coke.

There is another story in the Old Testament of a guy called Job, he basically looses everything and has warts and boils and is not a happy guy at all. He calls out to God with questions but his friends tell him too shut up, as if asking God questions are wrong. God goes on not really to answer Job’s questions but rather to ask Job a few questions. Do we realize that if God is a personal God and if we can ask Him questions, then he can ask us questions? When we ask questions and get an answer, regardless of what that answer is we then become accountable for the answer, in the same way as if I get study and go for lessons to get my drivers license I then become accountable by law for how I drive. We become accountable for the answers we receive to act them out, and we are also accountable for the answers we give back to God.

Asking questions is cool if its asked for the right reasons, but if we can ask God stuff, he can ask us stuff…

Does God want us to be happy

A friend of mine recently wrote that "God is more concerned with our Character than he is with our Happiness" I have not stopped thinking about it since I read it! 

First read leaves you going wow, yes God wants me to be the best little Jesus I can be and because of that I need to go through hardship to develop me! I need to shout along side James and rejoice when I face trails and tribulations because my faith will see me through! My faith in God, my faith that requires me to believe God has my best intentions at heart! Even if what is best is not always fun!

An example will be school, very few people enjoy studying for test! So it is fair to say in general studying is not fun (unless you have a hot study partner :) ), It is in your best interest for your own future that you study hard and get good marks! 

However, perhaps God does care for our happiness and that happiness is directly tied into our character and relationship with him! It is a happiness that transcends understanding and general happiness! it is an inner joy that comes from trials and tribulations knowing that you are becoming more like the person Jesus wants you to be!