This thursday we have a fellowship dinner, which is a fundraising dinner we host here in Wilmington in order to raise support specifically for the campus. So far we have about fifty confirmed guests. I am working on a video for the dinner where I interview random students on campus about God, Jesus, and Christianity. If I can I plan on posting the video on this website or putting a link to this website so you can see what the students here in Wilmington think about these issues. We are going to show that video and also have students involved in our movement share their testimonies and how God has been working in their life here at UNC-W. Please pray for our ministry here and for the dinner; we need funds so that we can continue to provide resources to our students and do events on campus that spread the Gospel.

Last week we did a short film outreach in one of the dorms here on campus. We showed four films that prompted discussion about purpose and meaning in life. The event went fairly well, we didn’t have as many students as I hoped, but the ones that did come provided excellent discussion, and at least one indicated wanting to meet up again to continue talking, which I hope will lead to an opportunity to share the Gospel. If you would like to learn more about ministry through short films and what films we used, go to www.globalshortfilmnetwork.com. We used ‘Dollface’, ‘Select Fit’, ‘La Liberte de l’interieur’ and one other that didn’t work too well, so I won’t mention it. I see a lot of potential in using films as a medium to spark spiritual conversation, so I would ask for you to pray for God to give me wisdom and discernment on how to use these films to give Him glory. Thanks everybody for your prayers, and I’ll send an update on how the dinner goes as soon as I can!

I was reading this chapter this morning as I was spending time with the Lord, and I just thought I’d say a little something about it. I think this shows a pattern to how God works in our lives sometimes. There are times that He denies us things that are right and good, in and of themselves, but because of our circumstances or what season of life we are in, he denies them to us. On the surface it makes Him appear cruel or uncaring, but that couldn’t be any further from the truth. In this instance, God was denying Adam and Eve, who are now spiritually dead and stained with sin, the fruit of life that would have made the reversing and redeeming of their sin and disobedience impossible. He desired to reconcile His creation back to Himself, and therefore he had to deny them something that under different circumstances He would have given in abundance. Because God held back that blessing from our ancestors, we now as believers have received the promise of the eternal life God always intended for us! When we pass from this existence into the eternal existence Christ is preparing for us, God will allow us to eat from the tree of life for the rest of our lives! (Rev. 22:1-5) Praise God in His sovereignty, and how He knows what is best for us, because he knows us better than we know ourselves, even the very hairs on our head He has counted!

What can you learn about a painter from his painting? Only a general understanding can be grasped, end even that knowledge is limited by the subject or theme of that painting, and how many of that painter’s paintings you might have access to. In order to know more about the painter we either have to talk to him, talk to others who know him, or read a biography or autobiography about him. So it is with God. We can learn about Him through the sciences: observations made in nature that reveal details about the earth, its formation, its laws and functions, etc which shed some light on His order, creativity, and complexity. In order to know Him though in any sort of personal or intimate way though, to know Him past the general revelations elicited from creation, we cannot only use science. God has provided three means similar to the way we would seek to know more about a painter after looking at his painting.

First, through prayer we speak to Him directly and that relationship begins when we know His Son Jesus Christ. Christ introduces us to Him in a way that lets us communicate with Him and grow more in our relationship to Him. Second, through fellowship and relationship with other children of God we learn more about God through their interactions and opinions of Him. Finally, and one of the most reliable and important, He has given us an account of Himself and His dealings with His masterpiece through His Word. In the scriptures we read about Him and accounts about His purposes from a nation (Israel in the Old Testament) and from people who knew Him while He was living in His creation (the apostles in the New Testament).

Hopefully this analogy serves to bring to light the advantages and the limitations of science as a primary or sole means of knowing God. For the non-believer I hope it causes them to seek to know God through the other means listed, and for the believer I hope it does two things. One, that we would not fear that science will undermine our faith as we recognize its proper place in the world and the impossibility of it disproving the existence of God. Second, through that recognition that believers would no longer reject science as a whole but would understand that it is another means for us to understand, appreciate, and give praise to our God.

First, Exodus 13:17-18; 20-22

“When Pharoah finally let the people go, God did not lead them along the main road that runs through Philistine territory, even though that was the shortest route to the Promised Land. God said, “If the people are faced with a battle, they might change their minds and return to Egypt.” So God led them in a roundabout way through the wilderness toward the Red Sea. Thus the Israelites left Egypt like an army ready for battle. [...] The Israelites left Succoth and camped at Etham on the edge of the wilderness. The Lord went ahead of them. He guided them during the day with a pillar of cloud and he provided light at night with a pillar of fire. This allowed them to travel by day or by night. And the Lord did not remove the pillar of cloud or the pillar of fire from its place in front of the people.” 

A couple of observations from this passage. First, God took them on the less-direct route on their way to His promises. There was a season of preparation that the Israelites needed before they would be ready for battle, and the Lord in His infinite wisdom knew this and took them through a wilderness period before battle. Even Christ, the Son of God, had a wilderness season as preparation to his earthly ministry (Luke 4:1-13). For us, sometimes we might know the destination or have plans on what God’s promises should look like for our lives or when we should receive them, but God might have other plans. In his sovereignty over all things He might know that now is not the season for you to enter into something He has promised you, and therefore He might lead you down the less-direct path to that goal, in order to prepare you to receive it.  Second, the Lord went ahead of them during their time in the wilderness, and never left them. He guided them with clouds and with fire so that they could continue on their journey regardless of circumstances. God never asks us to go in a direction that He is not willing to lead us through, and He never abandons us along that path either. I think its important to note that God expects them to not only travel during the day, but expects or anticipates that they will have to travel by night as well. I don’t claim this next part to be the best interpretation of the passage, but it has helped me so I will share it. During our wilderness journey, we will experience darkness and light. Some days on our journey might be good or easy (daytime) and other times might be confusing, difficult and scary (night). Regardless, God is ahead of us, and will lead us no matter what. He will guide us in the daytime, or light our paths at night with His presence.

One final observation. As I thought about the seasons of wilderness travel that all of us as believers endure during periods of our life (I am most certainly going through one now), something bigger dawned upon me. “It was by faith that Abraham obeyed when God called him to leave home and go to another land that God would give him as his inheritance. He went without knowing where he was going. And even when he had reached the land God had promised him, he lived there by faith-for he was like a foreigner, living in tents [...] Abraham was confidently looking forward to a city built with eternal foundations, a city designed and built by God [...] All these people died still believing what God had promised them. They did not receive what was promised, but they saw it from a distance and welcomed it. They agreed that they were foreigners and nomads here on earth. Obviously people who say such things are looking forward to a country they can call their own. If they had longed for the country they had come from, the could have gone back. But they were looking for a better place, a heavenly homeland. That is why God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.” -Hebrews 11:8-10;13-16

What I realized when reading this was, even though we go through specific wilderness experiences, life as a whole is one big wilderness season! That might sound discouraging, but only without the lenses of an eternal perspective. Israel spent a season in the wilderness that was drastically shorter in comparison to the time they occupied the Promised Land. Our life here is not separate from our life in heaven, one is the continuation of the other! Our earthly life is like the length of a shadow before the sun sets when compared to all of eternity in heaven! Even if our life here is all in wilderness, its nothing in the light of eternity! That’s not to say that life here will be constant misery, because God does provide happiness and joy in the journey, and he does answer promises on this side of heaven too. But to mistake those joys and fulfillment as the goal or the destination is to lose sight of our foreign status here on this fallen earth. Look at Abraham! God promised him a land for his descendents, and even allowed Abraham the privilege of settling there for a while, but did he build a city or put down roots, as if all of God’s promises had been fulfilled? By no means! “for he was like a foreigner, living in tents” (11:9). Abraham reconized that God’s true Promised Land lay beyond the veil between heaven and earth, and so he stayed nomadic until he reached his destination. Through all of this, the one thing I hope we can take from this and apply to our lives is to see life as a wilderness journey. Sure, there are trials and seasons in the wilderness that are a wilderness in and of themselves, but once we come through them we must keep moving. Hopefully, this motivates you when times get tough, because “our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever!” (2 Cor. 4:17)

Once, and only once I pass;

If a kindness I may show,

If a good deed I may do

To a suffering fellow man,

Let me do it while I can.

No delay, for it is plain

I shall not pass this way again.

-Unknown

I ran across this poem tonight and it really opened my eyes. This side of heaven is the only place we can be the loving light of Christ that shines into this ever-present darkness. Once we enter the glorious realm of heaven-haste the day!-there will be no darkness to shine into; all will be alight with the eternal luminescence of the glory of God! Light-into-darkness is something we only get our season here on earth to do, so burn brightly for God’s glory with the deeds of light that shine into the darkness of despair!

Or in the words of Paul: ‘How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”‘ -Romans 10:14-15

“This is the thing to mark keenly for those who may go [onto the mission field], and for those who must stay: no matter where you are you do more through your praying than through your personality [or in other words your physical presence]. If you were in [Japan] you could add personality to your prayer. That would be a great thing to do. But whether here or there, you must first wib the victory, every step, every life, every foot of the way, in secret, in the spirit-realm, and then add the mighty touch of your personality in service. You can always do more than pray, after you have prayed. But you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed. and just there is where we all seemed to make a slip at times, and many of us are yet making it-a bad slip. We think we can do more where we are through our service than prayer to give power to service. No-with the blackest underscoring of emphasis, let it be said-NO. We can do no thing of real power until we have done the prayer thing.”

Prayer is like an electrical switchboard that harnesses the power of an electrical plant. Though the man at the switchboard might not fully understand the intricate properties of electricity and how it goes from one point to another, he can pull the switches in the room to send power to the places that need it. In that room, unbeknownst to the recipients of the power, he pulls a switch, the most simple of acts, a lever moving but a few inches, and an entire city receives power. We as believers have that opportunity to send the power of God all across the world by the simple act of praying. How do we expect to do anything anywhere without first sending the power of God through the switchboard of prayer? We pray so little but then expect so much! It would be like sending a battery-sized amount of power somewhere and being surprised when it does not power the entire city! What a terrible error we make in our prayer life.

-A summary of an analogy given by S.D. Gordon

This passage has been on my mind a lot. Jesus describes us as salt and light. I looked up the meaning and function of salt; knowing from my own experience that salt functions as a preservative and as a means of adding flavor, but wanting to see if there was more meaning available. I found that the greek word for salt is halas, which figuritively is another word for prudence. I looked up prudence and saw that it originated in 1340 as a way to describe “wisdom, to see what is virtuous, or what is suitable or profitable.” So now, instead of having only two interpretations of our function, I now found three. The idea of us as salt really fascinates me. First, we are a preservative to stall or stymie the natural (or in context of God’s ideal purpose of His creation, unnatural) process of moral, social, and physical degradation in this world. We are like salt put into meat in order for it to keep longer than its natural shelf life. The same holds true for our world, due to the fallen nature of our existence, our world will rot all the more rapidly with our absence. One only has to consider when Christ will come and rapture His people from the earth before it ends. Once he removes a vast majority of believers it only takes a possible seven years for the world to come to an end.

Second, we are to add flavor to the world. What sort of flavor do we as Christians have to offer? Salt, eaten by itself, is rather unpleasant, but given a context or a medium through which to operate, it becomes more palatable. Of course this analogy is not perfect, but a mere paradigm to perhaps ascertain a certain truth to our purpose here on earth. If we as believers remove ourselves from society and the means by which to influence it, then we are like salt that has lost its flavor. Salt takes meat and vegetables and things like french fries and enhances the flavor. I think we are obligated to enhance the flavor of the things our society consumes, things like art, music, movies, conversation, philosophical thought, science, etc. When we only offer the same thing the world already has, with an application of Christian lacquer, is it any wonder that the world would rather keep its own inventions? Putting a cross or a cliched Christian euphemism on a shirt, cup, bumper sticker, etc. does not make it Christian, just as putting salt on a plate by itself doesn’t make it filet mignon. Can’t we recapture the counter-cultural essence of what makes the Message of God so transformational instead of diluting it into just another sub-cultural mimic of the world in which we live? We have a God-given ability to imagine, and we most bear the image of God when we exercise our inherent creativity. We need to put ourselves back into society and offer a flavor to the society we have effectively removed ourselves from. If we don’t, then we shouldn’t be surprised when our society tosses out all things Christ-like with the junk we have for Jesus.

Finally, we are supposed to be the prudence that salts the wisdom and discretion of our age. Sure, we rally to the causes of preventing gay marriage, keeping the Ten Commandments in government buildings, speaking out against Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code, but is that the best prudence we have to offer? What do you think better compels people to take as true the claims of Christ: our railings against what we see as enemies to our belief, or the steadfast, consistent application of the prudence, discretion, and wisdom offered by our Lord and Savior? Even if we win out in these things mentioned previously, do we really expect transformation to take place in our neighbors? Is that loving them? I believe that the only way to expect prudence from others is to exercise prudence ourselves. That’s one of the vital ways we keep our flavor as well. As I talk with students at UNC-W, students who will be the leaders to come, one of the consistent arguments I hear against Christianity is the apathy believers have in living out their faith through the keeping of the commands of God. Nothing discredits the claims of Christ faster than the walk-without-talk lifestyle that has become the norm of Christianity. I do not expect this argument to ever cease, as I recognize our inability to ever perfectly demonstrate the law to others (we will always be works in progress), but I think we can do better as the body of Christ.

It amazes me just how deep the analogies of Christ can go. How easy it is to read right over something as simple as the analogy of believers as salt. I simultaneously feel excited about these things mentioned above that I am called to be for the world in which I live and convicted about how often I have lost my flavor. I don’t say these things to berate or denounce my bretheren, but I implore you, as Jeremiah did his brothers and sisters, to repent from casual Christianity that ultimately makes us casualties, and to embrace the preserving, flavorful, prudent saltiness of our belief.

To sum it up: “Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness?” -The Message

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the point of everything. Why am I here? What is life about? Why am I restless with the status quo right now? I’ve been frustrated with myself and with life in general. It all seems so futile. So last night I turned to a book on the futility of life: Ecclesiastes. Besides the Song of Solomon, this has to be one of the least read or understood books of the bible; I admit to not understanding it fully. This is what I got from it: Everything is futile, so be happy, enjoy food and drink and a hard day’s work. Overall, fear God and obey His commands. I finished it and I thought, “is that it?” I jumped ahead to Ephesians and read all of it, and then Phillipians. Looking at Ecclesiastes in light of the New Testament, this is what I saw. The law is what love would do. The law can only be fulfilled by love. Only Christ has ever fulfilled the law, and He did it by love. If we believe in Christ, then we have the power, the Spirit of God, to fulfill the law through love. Paul keeps calling us to do that over and over again in his letters. He says it gives God glory, that it proves our citizenship and adoption into the kingdom of God. So here’s the point of it all:

Obeying the Law,

Motivated by Love,

Empowered by the Holy Spirit,

For God’s Glory,

Until He calls us Home.

If we are doing that, then we can, as Solomon puts it, “be happy, and enjoy ourselves as long as we can [...] eat, drink, and enjoy the fruits of [your] labor, for these are gifts from God” (Eccl. 3:12-13). It’s so easy, yet it takes a lifetime to practice. And that’s the point. We do these things now in preparation of our citizenship in heaven, for this is how we will act while in the presence of God for all eternity.