Day 34- I am...

I recently started my class on Spiritual Formation and the questions were:

Who am I? What am I searching for? Why am I here?
Here are my answers:

Well the answer to the first question would definitely have to be that I am a sinner saved by grace and nothing more. I don't deserve the grace that I have received however I have because He is that loving that He literally defines the word! I am a person who is letting the person of Christ indwell me so much to the point that He is changing the way I think, act, love and many more things. I am a man possessed with the Spirit and I'm acting out of the filling that I have of Him and splashing Him everywhere I go because the simple fact that He is so big I can't contain Him in myself that He just overflows. I am a student and am learning of areas of my life that could be considered the "dark corners" that I seem to hold on to and will give everything to Him except those. I am discovering those corners and repenting of those and giving them up to Him so He can dominate every part of my life even down to the food I eat! I am definitely a seeker of Christ so much so that I am addicted to Him and only Him so that He becomes so big in my life that I cannot see anything but Him. He becomes the gate for all other things in my life to flow through and get filtered out if they are not of Him. The entire reason that I exist or the reason that I'm here is to serve Him and to be transparent so that He can be seen in and through my life. I am the broken pot, empty vessel, or the unfinished clay that He continues to mold towards His very image. I am being stretched and grown continually in Him and realize that is it not constant tests but Holiness that drives me towards the person of who He is. I live only to glorify the name of Jesus and to have His story told in and through me. I testify to the gospel of God's grace that has happened and continues to happen in my life. I am a living, walking, talking, breathing, eating testimony of the person of Christ! 1 Corinthians 15:10 says it best "But by the grace of God I am what I am..." I am nothing without the person of Jesus!

Day 33- Shout!

As I was reading in the Old Testament today I came across my favorite Psalm that I memorized when I was little. It's Psalm 95:1-7, it tells us: "Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song. For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care." I don't know about you but that's powerful to me, how can I sit still and be in church and just cross my arms and not SHOUT?? I mean we shout generally when something is overbearing either in a good way or a bad way, so since Jesus is so good to me and love me so much and just overwhelms me I have to SHOUT!! Have you ever been overwhelmed so much that you've shouted? Sure you have, maybe you've been overwhelmed with pain, or so frustrated that you had to, or so joyful that the only thing left to do is SHOUT! I want to have that be the only outcome of my life is to live in a constant state of SHOUTING. Maybe not with words but with my actions and my lifestyle. I need to be SHOUTING up to Him with everything that I do, think or say!! Let everything that I have be a SHOUT up to you of just praise and adoration!! I don't want to live one more moment in silence because I'm just spilling over with Jesus and the only response is to SHOUT!!! So I SHOUT and SHOUT to the most high with my unworthy SHOUTS but I give all I am to the SHOUTING that You deserve!

Day 32- Demons In The Synagogue

In Mark 1:21-28 it talks of Jesus driving out a demon that was in a man. What part I found interesting on this was the fact that the demon was possessing a man that was in the synagogue. Have you ever thought that there is no way that a demon or satan himself could never be in church? I know I have before because we always view church as a sacred and safe place. However this tells us that the demon was in church, and I wondered how could this be? The fact of the matter is that we can bring demons, or even satan himself into the church. Then the question has been asked before what is church? Is church a building with 4 walls and a roof? Of course not, we are the new houses of prayer so WE ARE THE CHURCH. It is not the building we go to, we compile the church itself and when we get together we are a unified church because the Jesus that lives inside of me is connected with the Jesus that is inside you and it's a glorious time of worship and praise because we just can't help ourselves. So how then do demons or does satan break into this sacred ground that we call church? The answer is simple and disturbing, we allow him to come in, and of course when we allow him to come in then Jesus leaves. We often times have a hard time grasping this however you can't have both satan and Jesus living in the same house, I mean talk about a conflict of interest!! You can't have the pure divine nature of God living inside of you and the carnal, dark, self serving nature of the devil living in there also. It is impossible!!! I know that back in the 90s the popular thing was to have a ying yang. It is a circle and it's like two curved tear drops and one is black and one is white. In each side there is a dot of the opposite color in them and this signified that there was a little good in all evil and a little evil in all good. Of course I had one of these things and didn't comprehend the fullness of what it meant, but now I look at that "symbol" and get mad! I mean how can it say that Jesus has some bad in Him and that the devil has some good in him? That is just impossible, we know this because it says so in His word. 1 John 1:5-7 "This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin." So that being said, we cannot have both living inside of us, either we are this on fire beaming light for Christ or we are in the darkness that satan calls home. Which are you? Do you have Demons In Your Synagogue? Or are you a house of prayer that Jesus dwells in? Lord let me never think that I can be on the fence, or live in the gray area of You because I know there isn't such a thing. Let me be Your beam of light in a dark world!

Day 31- No Real Estate In Heaven

We have all heard about the "mansions" in heaven that there will be. It is so funny because we often think of an actual house. However if you get to the root of the word it means "Dwelling Place". I love this concept, this concept of Dwelling Place gives the idea that there won't be a physical house up there, but yet that WE will be the dwelling place or the mansion. Now you might be thinking that if we are "mansions" then we're going to be huge and it's going to be one huge buffet in the sky. No no, this just means that when we get up there He has a perfect body ready and waiting for us so that He can live inside of us even more because it's not a body cursed with sin. Man I know how this must be to so many songs out there that focus on the actual house itself but that isn't what He's talking about at all. Another thing too we often get wrapped up in the streets of gold and pearly gates aspect of heaven too. I find this amusing because up there do you really think we'll have a need for money? Will the worth that it is down here be the same up there? I doubt it, we look at those as a precious thing, but I want to be so into Him that those things don't matter. I feel like those are things that we just relate to and that heaven will be so much more than fine jewelry and gold. The true value of it will be that we get to see our Creator and Savior. I can't wait to see Him and just to bask in the presence of His glory up there and be able to with a perfect body. Wow that will be quite a time. We often sing of how we will have victory up there some day. But I think again that's so off because I have victory down here right now because my victory rests in the person of Christ!! And if I have Him now then I have VICTORY!! Jesus never let me focus on the perishable things of heaven, or even heaven itself. I want to be completely focused on You, wrapped up in You, honed in on You!! Let that be the center of my living and my life and not material things because I know that there is No Real Estate In Heaven!

Day 30- Pervert Of A Preacher

I listened to a "preacher" the other day and was disgusted at how he was using the scripture. He took a topic and wrapped various texts around this to make it sound like he wanted it to. As I sat there I realized that he was perverting the Word and making it say something that it wasn't. This really bothered me and I almost stood up and said something, in hindsight I should have. But the fact that he was wrapping the Word around his idea and not the other way around made me think of him as a Pervert. He was misusing and violating the Word of God to make himself look good in a sense, and make him feel good about his topic. I feel very strongly about this and I think that is obvious by the words I'm using. But I believe it goes even more so into our lives when somebody does that, it shows that we seem to wrap the Scripture around our lives and not the other way around. I believe that we need to wrap our lives around the Scripture and if we need to bend or even break because of it then so be it! I don't want to be perverse in my preaching, I want Him to speak out of me so I'm not taking a chance to making the message polluted with my thoughts. If I speak out of my knowledge then it is only limited to the amount of wisdom, and insight that can be and it might not reach every person. But when we preach the Word or use the Word in our lives then it can't be limited because He is not. We can't keep on living like we do in a world where this is OK that "preachers" will get up on Sunday morning or whenever it is and pollute the Word. I have said this before in previous blogs but we must be so rooted in the Word that we see a wolf in the sheep's wool! Lord be so big in my life that I do nothing but emit an odor that is You. I want so deeply to wrap my life around You and Your Word! Don't ever let me get in the way of Your teaching and NEVER let me be a Pervert Of A Preacher! Let Your pure words come from my mouth so that it touches everyone on every level of their life.

Day 29- So Righteous I'm Sick

In Mark 2:16-17 it says: "When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the “sinners” and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?” On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” I found these verses so interesting because Jesus said He's not calling the righteous, but sinners. I wonder why that is? Could it be because people that are "righteous" are so wrapped up in themselves and think they operate out of their own power? And that maybe "sinners" realize they need something more and just don't know what it is? So why call a righteous person when they think they're being called because of the works that they are doing, when that's not the case at all. They are being called because of God's love for them and wanting them to draw closer to Him. I am not sure, I haven't go this far in my studies as far as expositionally but reading it over and seeing that makes me think so much. I don't want to be so righteous that people look at me and think that I'm doing something out of my own means. I want them to realize that I'm just a sinner saved by grace and that without Him I'm nothing. I don't EVER want the focus to be on me but always pointed back to Jesus. These verses also speak to me in the sense of witnessing. Why do we always focus on the people who have good jobs, or can pay the most tithe and blow off the homeless person who is begging for food? It bothers me that we brush over these people and think of them as less than the guy with the eel skin wallet who has 100s in there. The homeless person who stinks, is hungry, and has no teeth is just as loved by God as the other. They are on an equal playing field when it comes to Him, but I seem to treat them differently. Why is that? If God lives in and through me then I'm making Him out to be a liar by saying the homeless person isn't as important and that we should keep our heads down and walk right by them. I need to be ridded of that mindset of somebody being better or more important than someone else. We are all equal in God's eyes and I need to be that equality in the world. Because if I'm not then I'm saying that God isn't either if I'm declaring to be a Christian. I'm tired of being So Righteous I'm Sick! Let me be a "sinner" so You can call me to what You want!

Day 28- The "At Once" Point

I was reading Mark 1:17-18 and it says: “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him." Mark is thought to be a book that is the perspective of Peter, and that possibly Mark was just the scribe. I can see this the more I read it because I think Peter probably had what we like to call ADD. He was always the first one to act and speak. There are so many times in the book of Mark that the words Immediately or At Once are used that Peter was probably writing this to ADD children ha ha ha. But this instance is pretty awesome, Jesus is telling Simon and Andrew to follow Him and they just drop what they were doing and do it. How often do we do that? How often do we "At Once" for Jesus? How often do we question what His logic is behind it all or wonder why in the world He wants us to do something? I know in my own life I question so much it isn't even funny and I need to get to the "At Once" point that I don't think about if God has had His morning cup of coffee yet or if He's had a long night and isn't thinking straight. I just act because He is acting through me and there aren't any questions or even reasons of why I'm doing something, I'm just a man possessed by the Spirit of Christ acting like I can't act. Doing things that don't make sense to me but are in His divine plan!! What would it take for us to reach the "At Once" point where we throw our worries or concerns into the wind and just, well, "At Once". Let that be so in my life, I toss my cares up to You and will let You be the "At Once" point every moment!