Today's Supreme Court's Non-Ruling and What it Means to You

The Supreme Court today refused to hear cases involving appeals by states who had their bans of Same Sex Marriage overturned.  Unless they take up a future case which seems unlikely, every ban of same sex marriages will be overturned and homosexual "marriage" is effectively the law of the land.  What does that mean for Christians?

1.  We must teach by precept and practice, God's definition of marriage.  Our children and our children's children have and will continue to grow up in a society where the definition of marriage is radically opposed to God's definition.  God's definition of marriage is that our marital unions should picture the union between Christ and the Church.  That is marriage is to picture Chris,t the groom, loving his bride, the church, so much that he sacrificed everything for her, and his bride, the church, responding to that love.  Obviously we cannot model perfect marriages, but we can model marriages of love, respect, forgiveness, and patience, where a man and woman work through their differences and struggles to forge a life long marriage.

2.  We must recognize that even though we may hold up God's standard for marriage, we fall short of holding up all of God's standards.  As Jesus said, "He who is without sin, cast the first stone."  It is not my job to condemn those who support or live in a same sex union.  It is my job not to agree but to love.  I realize that often times is a hard position to take in our culture.  Too often, people believe tolerance is not simply agreeing to disagree, but having to support and condone their behavior.  While we cannot condone, we can in humility and love genuinely care about people.

3.  We must recognize that in the end same-sex marriage leads to brokenness and hurt.  This is true not because it is "same-sex" but because it is a violation of God's standard.  My sins, which are many" lead to brokenness.  My brokenness was healed by a God who says, you don't have to meet all my standards because I know you can't.  So I have met them for you in my son Jesus.  Believe, trust and find healing now and complete restoration one day.  The Bible says, there is a way that seems right to men, but in the end it leads to destruction.  The more our society condones sinful behavior, the more people will be hurt by it.  The good news, there is a healing balm for our wounds, and we as followers of Christ must put ourselves in a position to bring that healing to hurting people.

Measuring the Right Things

As many of you know, I have begun walking in preparation for participating in a 5K event.  As I walk, I use a pedometer to keep up with how I am doing. Since my goal is to run the 5K and not be in last place, I have to measure myself against certain criteria.  If all I measured was distance, I would not achieve my goal.  I have to also measure my time.  I want to make it 5 kilometers but I also want to run it faster as I progress in my training.

In the Christian life, too often we measure our success by the wrong things because we are not clear in our goal.  We measure how much we read the Bible, how long we pray, how well we witness, how often we attend church.  These are admiral measurements, but a person can do all these things and still not achieve the goal of the Christian life.  The goal of the Christian life is not to develop Christian disciplines.  The goal of the Christian life is to love God and enjoy Him forever.  One can read their Bible every day just to say they did it, without their Bible reading helping them love Jesus more.  One can pray and check it off their list of things to do each day, without it helping them to fall in love with Jesus.  One can witness, attend church or develop any other discipline but fall in love with the discipline rather than fall in love with Jesus. 

Reading our Bible is good, but every time we read it we must ask ourselves how does my Bible reading help me to love Jesus?  I can read the words on the page without falling in love with the person the book is about.  When I pray, am I praying to get to know and love Jesus more?  When I witness, am I telling people about the one that I love more than anything else in the world?  When I attend church, am I falling in love with Jesus more and more?

The goal of our discipleship is not merely to obey commands, but to love the one we are following all the more.  After all Jesus said, if you love me, you will keep my commandments.  So how do I measure my love for God?  How can I tell if I am loving Him more and more each day?  Jesus said, by this all men will know you are my disciples by your love one for another.  The Apostles John said, “How can you say that you love God whom you can’t see, if you can’t love your brother that you do see.”  The measure of how much I love God is how much I love my brother.  Think about it.

Satan's Best Weapon

When I looked at Facebook© this morning, I saw everyone responding to responding to Victoria Osteen’s recent comments.  I especially enjoyed this video. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00-6OyXVA0M 

As I heard her comments I wondered why so many people are fooled by her words.  The answer is that Satan’s best weapon is a half-truth.  There is some truth in her words, being obedient to God does bring us joy.  Jesus promised us both joy and abundant life.  Stephen Nichols said, "We were made for God, made with a singular purpose, to glorify Him. And as we glorify Him and as we live for and live toward Him, we find our soul’s true joy."

Victoria Osteen’s problem is that she makes the byproduct or result of living out our purpose, the goal and purpose itself.  God wants us to have joy, obedience brings joy so be obedient not for the glory of God but that it brings you joy.  We are obedient to God because it is right to be obedient and it is our purpose to bring Him glory.  If I do it for my joy, I become God and ultimately lose joy.  If I live for his glory, I recognize Him as God and in the end I have joy.

 Satan twists the truth by taking a kernel of truth out of context and makes it the whole.  We should know that this is his modus operandi, for this is what we see in scripture.  When Satan tempted Jesus, he quoted Jesus.  Satan pulls scripture out of context and twists it for his purposes.  He still does that today and as a church we must be careful to know the whole counsel of God so that we will not fall for half-truths. 

The Ice Bucket Challenge and the Gospel of Jesus Christ

Every day for the past two weeks, I have seen a new video on Facebook© of someone taking the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise money to find a cure of ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.  Before you think I am going to criticize people for taking up this challenge, I want to state from the beginning that I am very happy that people want to do something to help those suffering from this terrible disease.  My prayer is that the awareness and dollars raised will help us find a cure.

My question is this, would a challenge to share Christ with people go viral like the Ice Bucket Challenge?  You may say that these are two different things.  They are but there are similarities.  People say that sharing your faith is both frightening and embarrassing.  Well the Ice Bucket Challenge is a little bit of both.  Dumping ice water on you is a little frightening because it can be painful and it is a little embarrassing because I have seen what people do after having the ice water dumped on them.  People have overcome those obstacles in doing the challenge rather quickly and easily but sadly too many believers don’t overcome these obstacles in sharing their faith.

We get frightened because we don’t know how or believe we are unable.  We get embarrassed because we don’t know how people will respond.  But we can easily overcome these obstacles when we realize that all we have to do is tell our story.  When Jesus changed the life of the woman at the well in John 4, she simply went back to her town and told the story of what happened to her (John 4:29).  That is all we have to do, tell people our story.  I can tell people what Jesus has done for me. 

We know the story.  God created us to live in harmony with Him, each other, ourselves and all of creation.  But because sin came into the world, our relationship with God was broken and so was our relationships with others and our world.  God desires for us to be restored to a right relationship with Him so he sent Christ into the world to live, to die and to be raised again so that if we believe in Him we will be brought back to Him.  And one day, Jesus is coming again to make all things new, to bring us back to the purpose for which we were created.

The challenge is, with whom can I share my story and His story.  We have good news to share.  We have a Holy Spirit is at work in people’s lives around us.  I can share the story in the power of the Holy Spirit and leave the results to God.  My prayer is that this challenge will go viral.

Random Thoughts on Today's News

It has been a long time since I have written, so instead of commenting on one news item, I feel the need to share a few thoughts about several.

Last week, Ann Coulter, wrote a blog criticizing an American missionary who contracted Ebola while serving in West Africa.  She basically said that it was idiotic to put yourself in danger in another country when there is needed missionary work here.  What is sad about her comment is that I have heard the same sentiment from people in the church.  "Why do we want to send missionaries over there when so much work needs to be done here" is a refrain that is heard too often among believers.  When Jesus said, "you will be my witnesses, in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth" I am sure that he did not mean that we would finish in Jerusalem before we could move on to Judea and so forth.  We are called to go and to send missionaries both at home and abroad, not to the exclusion of either.

Speaking of Ebola, some have wondered including Coulter whether it was right to pay the expense of bringing the missionaries home.  I am sure if you would have asked the doctor and nurse, they would have told you leave us here.  I am reminded of the story of Father Damien, the Belgian missionary who served in Hawaii 150 years ago.  He served among the lepers, ministering to them every day for 15 years.  He risked his life and contracted leprosy.  Once he knew that he had contracted leprosy, he gathered the people for worship.  For 15 years he began the service, saying my fellow believers.  That morning he said, welcome my fellow lepers.  Jesus said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."  These missionaries served like Jesus by laying down their lives for those they treated.  In so doing, they communicated by example the gospel of Jesus Christ.  I pray that in being brought home, they have raised the awareness of Ebola and the treatment that they received will now be used on all who have contracted the disease.

This week the attention has come to two stories.  First, we are hearing reports of believers in Iraq are being tortured and killed for their faith.  How do we honor the sacrifice of our brothers and sisters in Christ.  We need to remember their friends and families and seek for ways to minister to them.  Just as important, we must never allow lesser things (the pleasures of this world) to make us compromise our faith.  I pray that we will stand firm to the end.

Finally, today we learned that actor and comedian Robin Williams has died of an apparent suicide.  At this point, this has not been confirmed, but if true my initial though still stands, how.  The picture I have of Robin Williams is full of life, vitality and joy.  It is a reminder that pictures can be deceiving.  We don't really know what is going on under our masks.  In the church, we should never take for granted the masks, we sometimes wear.  We must make sure that all believers in the church are in close relationships with someone else so that we can lean on each other and help each other.