Kneading Bread

A youth pastor shouldn’t be too competitive… the story is almost too good to be true. I pray that this gets sorted out without becoming a complete joke.

I lead a small group bible study that meets at my home. I use the word bible study only to give you a frame of reference, it tends to be much more. We just finished studying the Book of Micah and we are moving on to a new subject. I was looking for ideas for the next subject when a dear friend, and a pastor at the church I attend, tossed me a DVD from Nooma. Despite suffering from some temptations to be overly trendy, the teaching was sound and definitely worth the $10 cost for the 12 minute DVD. Check out DVD 8, Dust, it is the best $10 item at your local “christian” retailer (excluding the Bible.) Rob Bell, the pastor at Mars Hill Bible Church, has a unique method of presenting the scriptures that will penetrate the hearts of both the intellectual and the emotional.

Professional, clean, simple, and unpretentious CBC radio 3′s podcast is the most enjoyable podcast out there right now. Grant Lawrence doesn’t gravitate towards one coast or genre, but brings the spectrum of music into my favorite hour of new music.

Now, if you ask me about what the best Christian music podcast is I would have to say, The Bored-Again Christian. I think the main reason why I can’t say it is the best indie podcast isn’t a lack of vision on behalf of the host, Just Pete, but rather an overall lack in the Christian music realm. That’s a topic for a new post (so keep your eyes on the site), but it has a lot to do with what happens when you label something.

I’ll be honest, if I was to name a big issue with myself it would be my pride. I’ve fought against it for years with some success and some failures and lately it has become apparent that many of my other sins tie into it and are cultured in it. I think pride, in both Christian and non-Christian circles is the core sin of whole lifetimes, keeping people from peace and salvation, all the while they are ignorant to the impact it is happening maybe even enjoying their self-centeredness.

Pride is a weed, its impact seeps into our daily lives, sapping relationships, both personal and private, of their spiritual fruit. I’ve seen business meetings derail because of pride and I’ve seen heart-to-heart talk of salvation be crumpled because of pride and in both cases it was me at fault. Years have past and I constantly fight against this pervasive destroyer of spiritual fruit.

I’ve been asked what is sin, and after years of looking at definitions I think it is selfishness. Look at the ten commandments and you’ll see that they act to define our interaction with our Creator and our interaction with others He created. Even these simple rules cause us to chafe with discomfort as they essentially state “you aren’t the center of the universe, I am.” We’ve been tricked into Satan (just as Adam and Eve were) that we are the most important, most capable, and most self-sufficient creatures in the universe; the problem comes in when God is quite clear that we are operating under a false core of lies from the great deceiver. Sin itself may be undefinable, but its symptomology of selfishness is quite clear.

To all of those who struggle with these things as I do – I cannot give a magic bullet, I can however give you encouragement. The secret to victory is Christ. He’s God, we’re the man, and we can’t have to do anything to prove otherwise. Accept God’s precepts and will, remind yourself that He’s the best at everything. If you’re an artist then it is His work you are poorly imitating. If you are a musician it is his work you are poorly imitating. God is the best Architect, finest theologian, and most careful physician. I cannot say that just by acknowledging these things pride will go away, but in seeking to understand them the sin of selfishness will have less of a hold. Pride (for me) takes constant vigilence because I must watch over the smoldering ashes of my selfish and sinful nature, if I leave it alone it will spring back. Christ may one day grant me victory, but in the meantime I have been blessed with the knowledge of just how selfish I am, but in seeing my own sin I see all the greater the glory of God.

While my wife and I were in Philly on Friday our car died and it was taken to a dealership in the city where it waited until Monday for them to hook the computer up to it. When it was hooked up to the diagnostic computer they told us it had a bad fuel pump and it would cost $900 to replace it. This seemed astronomically high so I arranged to have it checked out by a family friend, he checked it out and told us that the computer reported no issues and maybe it was water in the fuel, and to top it all off it started just fine after being towed from Philly. So now our car is fine after being towed all around south-eastern PA, but I now will never buy a car from this unmentioned dealership which, when all is said and done would have gotten well over a grand of our money.

Update: Well, it broke down again shortly after this was originally posted and even after all of this, it was fixed for cheaper than the dealership could do it.

From Relevant, worth checking out. The author connects Abraham, a successful man of antiquity to today’s successful “everyman.”

Attached is the notes from today’s study of Micah, chapters 3 and 4. Text is from the English Standard Version.
Micah_3-4.pdf

I am currently living in a large city and, as my friends can attest to, do not really plan on staying any longer than needed. It is a deeply rooted urge to leave the city and find myself a nice plot of land and enjoy it, but I am not sure why. The following became apparent to me as I was riding the escalator up from the metro:

The Bible tells us that the heavens are telling the glory of God, as well as that God values even the grass which is here today and gone tomorrow; when I look around me, all I see is gray buildings declaring the pride of man and ignorance towards the beauty of that which we have not ourselves made.

Things have at work have been a little rough the past few weeks, not because of anything overtly bad happening, just that I have been very busy and it has been taking a little bit of an emotional toll. I am not one gifted in bizarre realpolitik of the of the large enterprise that I find myself a member of and times like the past few weeks make me more and more frustrated with the internal hierarchies I realize are all around me. That being said, I received a wonderful little moment of divine comfort, today’s sunrise.

I normally take a 6 AM train to New York every couple of months for business, but because of an event I am attending I left at 5 AM, this gave me the chance to watch the entire sunrise. I deliberately sit on the eastward side in order to see it and today’s early departure allowed me to observe it in a more complete fashion.

First hints of blue on a black field, followed by a more defined cloud cover, gradually getting towards a blush with hints of green, yellow and blue, going to deep crimson, receding to a more defined red band with yellow edges and a blue-tinged sky, finally the sun broke the horizon spilling orange light across the edges of the sky that gradually dissipated the tinges of carmine and gold that hid.

Moments when you feel the presence of God are many times fleeting and ephemeral in our minds. I think this has always been the case, the old testament Jews would see miracles and yet forget and the early first century Christians would many times do the same. Sometimes you witness something incontrovertible in your soul, as the apostles did in the resurrection of Jesus, and it seems that that is more and more uncommon these two thousand years later.

More often I fear that I am am like Noah, in that God has saved me from a mighty disaster and within a few short pages of my life you will find me drunk and naked, passed out and exposing myself. I think part of this stems from the fact that we are so self-centered in our thinking, this makes it easier to file away our interaction with the divine. A sense of selfish-preservation kicks in, our pride will not allow our lives to be impinged upon. If we fail to recognize our pride and tear it down we will find ourselves in an ungrateful position in relationship to our creator. It takes an effort, like a curator of a museum or a librarian, to file away our experiences with God into a place where they can be easily recalled by our future selves. The preservation of artifacts from antiquity does not happen without effort, likewise, the preservation of moments, such as today’s sunrise, do not happen without effort either.