NEXT Highlights

I just came home from the NEXT conference in Baltimore, MD. The past few hours were spent "debriefing" with my family, eating dinner, enduring a fairly severe thunderstorm (wow, it feels like summer here, hot, humid, and stormy), and checking my work inbox, which is flooded with 40 new messages (I'm happy to report that they are mostly notifications). Despite feeling an oncoming cold, most likely my body's response to not getting it's fill of rest this weekend, I am very refreshed and thankful to God for his faithfulness and kindness to me in so many ways over the past few days.

I want to pour over my notes and the scripture passages from this weekend in the upcoming days, weeks, months, etc. (I love how I can often come back to NEXT messages throughout the year). Please follow-up with me on this; good intentions are not enough. But before I go dig back into the specifics, I want to recount the highlights, so I can remember how the Spirit ministered to me. He did meet me - very deeply, graciously, lovingly, and oh so clearly did he meet me where I was and reminded me of his love and gospel mission in my own particular circumstances.

So, the highlights for me were CJ's message on Sanctification, Kevin DeYoung's message on the Church, and the fellowship of my family group. I'm so thankful for CJ. I feel his pastor's heart when he preaches, and I'm so glad to be under his care in Sovereign Grace. He's such a spiritual father type figure - I love how I've benefitted directly or indirectly from his ministry for my entire life. In this weekend, I was served immensely in how he fleshed out Sanctification. I've been needing this so much, to see broken down before me how man's responsibility and God's sovereignty play out in my life. To leave behind discouragement and be encouraged that God is constantly at work - his part and my part are not equal. God fed my soul through CJ's message, and I thought for sure that it would be my highlight sermon to take home. It was, but God was not finished. Kevin DeYoung spoke on the Church. And the Holy Spirit melted my heart. He cut me open and placed a direct IV line to my soul, that is how specifically his message ministered to me. I do believe that it, at least by the end of his message, affected my soul in the same way as a specific prophetic word, and the tears flowed. "Do not despise the little things." "Be plodding visionaries." "Get on the right road and keep going." "You can be just part of the crowd because God knows your name." I was reminded that the mundane is glorious; the little things are not insignificant, no matter how much they seem to be so. I am not alone, but Christ's church is filled with servants, plodding visionaries.

God did much in my heart through these sermons, but I am also so thankful for CJ's exhortation to not give more credit to speakers like these at a conference than to our own pastors at our home churches. They have faithfully been planting the seeds. Those who get to reap the harvest did not play a bigger role than those who planted and built.

I am also very thankful for how God used my family group. By halfway through NEXT, our group had dropped in numbers significantly to be only 5 people. I like small groups best. :-) We were able to genuinely spur one another on, and I developed new friendships that span across the US. Even if these cannot be continually built upon here on earth (although modern technology may assist with that), they certainly remind me of one of the joys that await in heaven in the fellowhship of the saints.

oh, another highlight was that we only needed to drive 1 1/2 hours to get there and the same to get home! I soaked that in, especially on the way back, knowing that next year's conference is in Orlando, FL.

The kitchen is calling me, dishes in a household of 7 do not pause. And interestingly our dog is currently giving birth to her first litter of puppies. There is much activity in this home. I hope mine will be the same someday.

photo: NEXT 2008

(sorry, I did not bring a camera this year)

physical and spiritual

In Mere Christianity:

God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

This makes me think of Heaven by Randy Alcorn. Reading his book was one of the first times I really spent some significant time thinking about how heaven will be a physical place. (I have not finished that book by any means - it's on my shelf of books that I have started and have yet to finish)

photo: driving from Seattle to George, WA 2006

I'm Calling Out

I was listening to Everlasting on my drive to work this morning, and this song ministered to me and drew my heart to trust and praise:

When this world is filled with change
And so much I can't explain
From the peaks of joy
To the valleys of pain

Your faithfulness remains

Your faithfulness remains

When my strength is dry and drained
And my hope begins to wane
You are always near
To lift me again

Your faithfulness remains

Your faithfulness remains

So I'm calling out
To You who called me
I'm holding on
To You who holds me
I'm seeking You who came and
Sought me in my sin
And You've been faithful
Again and again
So I'm calling out

I'm Calling Out; Mark Altrogge 1999 Sovereign Grace Praise (BMI)

I Come By the Blood

In the few minutes of quiet, when I had the office to myself first thing this Monday morning, this older worship song came to mind. Peacefully alone and doing dishes, I was singing these wonderful lyrics:

You are the perfect and righteous God whose presence bears no sin
You bid me come to Your Holy place, how can I enter in
When Your presence bears no sin?
Through Him who poured out His life for me, the atoning Lamb of God
Through Him and His work alone, I boldly come

I come by the blood, I come by the cross
Where Your mercy flows from hands pierced for me
For I dare not stand on my righteousness
My every hope rests on what Christ has done, and I come
By the blood

You are the high and exalted King the One the angels fear
So far above me in every way Lord, how can I draw near
To the One the angels fear?
Through Him who laid down His life for me and ascended to Your side
Through Him, through Jesus alone I boldly come

-I Come By the Blood; Steve & Vikki Cook (Sovereign Grace Worship 1994)

How gracious of God to bring this to my mind and lips, especially on a Monday morning after a highly active weekend. God knows when I need to calm and quiet my soul with the truth of his gospel.

Biblical Productivity

A week or so ago I left the office on a Monday struggling to fight dissatisfaction with what I accomplished that day. This can happen often, and often I tell my heart to embrace the simple grace of reaching the end of the day and leaving work behind until the next day. I need to let it go, because that's all I can do. Well, on that occasion I remembered a series of blog posts by CJ Mahaney on Biblical Productivity that he did about a year ago. I read them last spring while I was still in college. Actually, I read them mostly while I was in my 400 level Strategic Management class, and I did not feel guilty for giving less than 100% of my attention to my classmates' presentations or professor's lectures on common sense management systems that you really just cannot learn in the classroom in any depth that would compare to plain and simple learning through experience. It was a senior level class, but still very general education-like.

Anyway, back on topic...I decided I should look up CJ's posts again, and I was delighted to find that they had compiled the series into one pdf document which I could print out. Tonight I read through about half of it in less than an hour, and it is just full of great reminders of truth and strong application in daily responsibilities.

Here are some things that stood out, this time around.

• Busyness does not mean I am diligent
• Busyness does not mean I am faithful
• Busyness does not mean I am fruitful

What came to my mind is that it works the other way around as well. I do not need to be busy in order to be diligent, faithful, and fruitful. I'm thinking of busy in the sense of constant activity and never-ending possibilities of tasks.

CJ says:

When considering our schedules, we have endless options. But there are a few clear priorities and projects, derived from my God-assigned roles, that should occupy the majority of my time during a given week. And there are a thousand tasks of secondary importance that tempt us to devote a disproportionate amount of time to completing an endless to-do list. And if we are lazy, we will neglect the important for the urgent.

He later asks, "What distinguishes a fruitfully busy schedule from a non-fruitful busy schedule? I think it comes down to two important points: understanding our sin and understanding our roles." (emphasis mine)

He talks about the importance of acknowledging your dependence on God each day, and he quotes Charles Bridges, "It is nothing less than self-idolatry to conceive that we can carry on even the ordinary matters of the day without his counsel....Be in the habit of going to him in the first place - before self-will, self-pleasing, self-wisdom, human friends, convenience, expediency."

CJ also quotes R.C. Sproul as saying:

I realize that all of my time is God's time and all of my time is my time by His delegation. God owns me and my time. Yet, He has given me a measure of time over which I am steward. I can commit that time to work for other people, visit other people, etc. But it is time for which I must give an account.

Under his post on Roles, Goals, Scheduling, CJ says "getting more things done does not mean we are getting the right things done. . . . . My busyness may be procrastination in disguise. . . .Each day the number of requests we receive normally outnumber the time allotted for the day." I find these all to be true in my work.

In another post, he writes about the theology of work and how we are all called to the vocation that God has us in. That is helpful to reflect on. He also helpfully pointed out that I am not called to do everything. "It is liberating to know that God has called me to fulfill specific roles." He makes a good connection that "If I'm not fulfilling my roles, my goals will be misdirected, and I will be vulnerable to all manner of requests and fail to devote myself to what is most important."

And this is where I stopped reading tonight:

...our biblical productivity depends upon a schedule, which depends upon clear goals, which depends upon clearly defined roles. Working toward clarity on understanding my present roles is my first (and most important) step in developing biblical productivity. Defining our roles helps to ensure that we are doing stuff that matters each day, knowing we have in some small way advanced the gospel and served others.

Right now, I think my schedule is the area that is most foggy to me. However, I thank God for clearly establishing several different roles in my life right now, as well as some goals that go along with them. It's very helpful to evaluate how I approach my days in connection to the gospel truths that I believe. This blog series on Biblical Productivity serves me to make important gospel connections from the everyday and even mundane activities in my life. If you like, check out the full series for yourself.

Also, CJ's wife and daughters wrote a nice little book relevant to this topic called Shopping for Time: How to Do It All and NOT Be Overwhelmed.

photo: Salzburg, Austria 2007

thoughts prompted by C.S. Lewis

I picked up my copy of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity recently, which I have yet to finish reading. I'm about 1/3 of the way through. I remember getting this book sometime after Creation West '05. Those of us heading back to the east coast had to kill some time before our red-eye flight, and so we were wandering through Borders (I think, or another bookstore). I remember talking to Kurt about this book, and, being the great book promoter that he is, I ended up with my own copy some weeks or so later. That was in July of 2005, almost five years ago, and I have not gotten past reading 1/3 of the book. The same is true of other books. With this one, I think I realize/remember part of the reason I stopped when I did. I had a somewhat difficult time sifting through which of his logic was biblical and which was not. A page before my bookmark, he was writing on free will. He says,

"Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata - of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating."

On why God allowed free will, he says that "apparently He thought it worth the risk." Risk? God takes risks? That is scary.

But within the same chapter, and only a 6 page chapter at that, he beautifully writes on some biblical truth:

God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing (page 50).

God is so loving to not let us find happiness and peace in any idols, broken cisterns. He keeps our souls restless until they rest in Him alone.

Starting on page 51, Lewis also writes wonderfully of how Christ could not have been only a great human teacher.

We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself.... But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money?... Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Christ says that He is 'humble and meek' and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Lewis is standing up for the deity of Christ. Bravo! I know that my view of Christ needs to be widened to see more of his majesty. Kevin DeYoung, at NEXT 2009, said that "you may not know who Jesus is if he has never made you feel uncomfortable." There are those just preaching moralism today, and what we need is fear of the Lord. Fear of the Lord positions our hearts to be awed and humbled that he would die for us, call us his own, and love us.

photo: Burano, Italy 2007

Faith is Weak

Christ is all that I need. It is so good to be weak. So good. He is glorified in inescapably obvious weakness. When my weakness is a banner over my life, it draws me to faith and displays ever so much more clearly the reality that God is strong and I am a frail sinner, lost and despicable on my own. Sweetly broken is sweet blessing.

Wednesday night at Sola Doug spoke on how faith thirsts (John 7:37); it feels its weakness. Then we had discussion groups. People shared very openly, specifically, and clearly. I could relate so much, but I am weak in communication and being concise. But I did share. And I received wonderful exhortation to not neglect fellowship because I do not have my thoughts already clear and compiled. Rather, I actually need others to contribute to the process.

I thank my Father for ministering to me through the church and His Spirit. How beautiful it is that His glory and our good are wrapped up in the same. Mysteriously and undeservedly beautiful.

Why should I gain from His reward?

I cannot give an answer

But this I know with all my heart

His wounds have paid my ransom