What Would Jesus Google? - for Marty

Ok, so I said I was going to write something and asked for ideas. The idea that was posted on my Facebook was this - 'how about Jesus using google'. So here goes.

Would Jesus use Google, and if so then what would He Google.

Well for some people they might get upset at this very question. After all, why would the God of the universe who was before all things were made, (even Google)have the need to look up anything on the internet. Why would I even consider such an insane notion.

Well, here is what I think. If Jesus were alive today, under the same circumstances that He was alive 2000+ years ago, then absolutely YES, JESUS WOULD USE GOOGLE.

THUD!! did I hear someone hit the floor? Why? Why would that surprise you? I guess that people would think that the Son of God would know everything, why would He have need of a computer or a search engine? well, here is why.

When Jesus came to the earth 2000 years ago, He did so under some specific conditions. According to Philipians 2:6-7 we read this:

"Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing,taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness."

When Jesus came to earth, He was fully God, but He set aside everything that was in Him that was God and became FULLY MAN. Jesus had no greater ability while here on earth than you or I do. He set aside everything that was divine in Him - he did not consider equality with God something to be grasped - He did not believe that having equal power with God was something He should hold on to. Jesus came to be just like us - how could He be just like us if He had all the power of the creator of the universe?

Jesus emptied Himself and took on human form.

So, if Jesus is just like you and me, and He was on earth today, where do you think He would go for His information? In His day He spent time with the scholars and teachers of the law - in the temple. There are not that many wise men hanging out in churches these days - probably get in trouble for that - but lets face it, there are a lot smarter people that we can learn from out there online.

I think that if Jesus were living on earth today and He had a question He would do two things - ask His Father in heaven, and use Google - and in that order.

Which order do you use?

Maybe the real question is not would Jesus use Google, but why dont we seek Jesus for answers.

See you in Mt Oak this Sunday - 10:30am - be there, Jesus will be, Google wont.

Naked and Unashamed - how church should be

In Genesis Chapter 1 we read the story of how God created the world. We read how He made the sun and the moon, and the land and the sea, the birds of the air and the fish in the sea, and after every day of creation there was one comment that God made - it is good. Everything that He made was good. Now if we read in Gen 1:26 we see these words,Then God said, "Let us make man in our image..." Have you ever wondered who He was talking to? Well, He was talking to Himself really - He was talking to Jesus and the Holy Spirit. God is not separate, He is three persons in one. He is three persons living together in perfect harmony. He is three persons who exalt each other above themselves. The Father glorifies the Son, the Son glorifies the Father, the Holy Spirit glorifies the Son. They all raise each other up, they all glorify each other, there is no hierarchy, there is no selfishness, there is no me, there is only WE.

Read on a little further in Genesis 2 we see in verse 18 that God utters these words for the first time - "It is not good for the man to be alone..." Everything so far has been declared good by God, and now there is something that He declares is NOT GOOD. What is that thing? How can something which has been created in the image of God be 'NOT GOOD'? Well, the thing that was not a true reflection of the person of God was that man was alone. God was three persons in one, together, connected, in fellowship. He realized that the man He had created was alone, separate, isolated. That was NOT GOOD.

The story goes on that God causes man to fall asleep, takes a bone out of his side and creates a helper. God created woman - named because when Adam saw Eve for the first time he exclaimed, "Woah!! Man!!! Look at that!!!!" This was shortened to woman.

Man was now like God, man was in fellowship, man was together with someone, man was no longer isolated. Now here is the greatest verse in this story - Genesis 2:25 says this, "The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame."

What does this mean? Well, for the first time (and pretty much the last time) men and women were together with nothing between them. There was nothing separating them, they had nothing to hide behind - and they were not ashamed. This moment in time saw perfect relationship between men and women, there was no hierarchy, there was no shame. They were also for the first time naked before the Lord. There was nothing between men and God. There was only perfect communion. There was perfect relationship. This was VERY GOOD.

Sin entered the world - relationship was fractured, separation occurred.

Jesus entered the world, destroyed sin and made a way for us to enter into that perfect beautiful, unencumbered relationship with God again. We can once again approach Him naked to all the things in the world, we do not have to hide any part of our lives from the Father. Our relationship has been restored.

But what about our relationship with each other? What about our relationship with our brothers and sisters in Christ? Have we not been set free? Have we not been made whole? Have we not been restored once again? Isn't it time we were able to have relationships with each other where we prefer one another above ourselves? Isn't it time when we should stop putting each other down, or assuming the worst, or standing on top of each other? Isn't it time to lay down ALL of the hurt from the past and stop laying it on top of anyone we think owes us something? Isn't it time that we had relationships that were 'naked'? Isn't it time when we had relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ and we would not be ashamed because, "If only they knew who I really was?" Isn't it time we were the church?

Well, maybe you need to put yourself in a group where you can develop authentic friendships, where you can take off some of the layers that you hide behind. Maybe it is time that you carved a portion of time out of your busy week and joined with other people to learn how to have authentic relationships together.

Maybe it is time to join a small group.

Just maybe.

Who is Church For?

I was listening to a couple of podcasts on my way to/from work. It was a slow traffic day so I had plenty of time to flick though my selection and play podcast roulette. Two of the messages I listened to asked the same question - "Who is your church for?"

Is our church for church people? By that I mean, is our Sunday morning service designed for those who go to church, understand church and need little instruction as to what to do when in church? Or is our church service designed for people who dont go to church? Are we set up as a welcoming place where people who do not normally come to church will feel right at home? Do we have simple things like clear signage pointing to the tea/coffee or the bathrooms? Do we lead people through our service and announce what is going to happen as each thing takes place? If we don't then I suggest that we do not do that because we expect everyone present to know what is going on and why we do those things. If we think like this then we have answered the question posed above - and the answer is that our church is for church people.

If we have purposely taken the time to explain what we are doing at each point in our service - worship, offering, message, announcements - then maybe we are designing our worship services for non-church folks.

Maybe we should begin to change things up a little to ensure that we are truly making non-church people comfortable at our services. If it is possible then maybe it would behoove us to investigate how we can do it better.

Leading From Brokenness

During the past couple of Sunday morning services, as we have been in worship or transitioning from worship to the message I have been broken by God as I have tried to lead the transitions. One week I was broken as we prayed for our family and friends who do not know Jesus. Then just yesterday as we moved from a new song written by AMPED Worship into the message I prayed and thanked God for His mercy. In the midst of that prayer I could see Jesus on the cross and things that I had done just that week, attitudes, actions, words, sins, were being placed on His shoulders and the weight of my sin was adding to the suffication that Jesus experienced on the cross. My sin was, in my vision, literally killing Jesus. His response was, "Father, forgive them ..."

As we sang this new song taken from Habakkuk 3:2 "... in wrath, remember mercy." I could see the pain that the Father felt as He placed sin upon sin on Jesus, then turned His back and separated Himself from His Son. My heart broke, my sin had caused that, but the gift that I received in return was freedom, life, the chance to be a new creation free from sin and death. God had remembered mercy.

I found myself in the midst of prayer, standing at the front of church, barely able to get the words out as the tears flowed down my face. I must confess that inside my head there was a voice that accused me of being 'unprofessional' or weak in front of so many people. A voice that said that the people do not want to see a grown man cry, and there are probably some who might even consider the tears were part of an act meant to manipulate their emotions.

In the midst of all of that internal turmoil I could still see see the image of Jesus on the cross carrying my sin, but the image changed. The crucified Savior was transformed into the risen Lord. Death could not hold Him, my sin did not bury Him. He was alive! He was risen! He was also reaching out His hand to me and raising me up from my death and setting me into His resurrection. His life was bringing me life! I am free, I am alive because of just one thing - Jesus loves me.

Through the tears came a deeper understanding that I am a child of a King, that I do not need to fear anything or anyone. I also realized that I was not alone. That my sin was not the only sin that was carried on that cross that day. The same event in history also transformed, or had the power to transform, everyone in the auditorium that day.

I realized that I need to allow God to break me wherever He wants to break me. I need to allow people to see God at work in my life whenever He wants to demonstrate His love for me. I hope that people can see that even those who are in a position of leadership do not have it all together. Those at the front do not always get it right, we make mistakes. I only pray that the biggest mistake we avoid making is one of portraying to people that we are ok. Let us lead with authenticity and when that requires brokenness, then Lord break us.

Getting Back to the Important Things

Yesterday and today I have had the privilege of spending two days away from all of my jobs - paid and unpaid - and have been attending the Catalyst leaders conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It has been a very challenging two days and while there have been a number of very informative and challenging talks given, there has not been one session of one speaker that has really shaken me, but it seems that God is using a number of the sessions to drop in a couple of lines of the picture. I thought I would jot down where I was as of tonight.

Yesterday one line that was going over and over in my head was this - we have replaced the important with the urgent. A simple statement but a very indicting statement when you delve into it. Essentially what the speaker was saying through this statement was that we have some very important things to do and things that we should be giving our lives to. There are things that we are involved in that are so important that we should be setting them as priorities and yet we have not given these important things the place that we should. We have allowed ourselves to be distracted by the latest Twitter feed, or the latest Facebook status update, or the latest Facebook game, or the latest e-mail - these are the urgent things. Through our social networking and our drive to be on top of everything we have allowed ourselves to take our eyes off of the important things in life and move from one crisis e-mail to the next, from one Twitter post to the next and we spend all of our time on the urgent.

The result can be devastating. We take a normal work day and clutter it up with urgent work and we fail to give the important work any of our time. The important work will be the work that will last. This is the life changes that we see in people's lives - if we take the time to spend time with them. If we fill our day with urgent work then we squeeze out the important and we miss out on what God has for us.

As I thought about this line, another one came to mind - "We need to fight for our families". God has placed us in families and He does not expect us to be perfect, but He wants to write His story of grace and transformation on our family. God wants to take our broken families and write His story through them as He restores them, as He builds them, as He heals the dysfunction. We need to stop trying to write our own story for our family and create the perfect 2.2 children family picture and allow God to create His family picture using our families as the lead characters.

As I pondered these two statements I was struck by a very painful truth about our church and the latest discussions that I have been involved in. We are in the process of preparing our 2010 budget and there have been discussions on costs for this and costs for that. We have discussed air conditioning and grass cutting and fought to include or exclude such items from the budget (depending on your view point). What brought me to tears during this evening's sessions was that while we fight over air conditioning, I know of at least 4 families where the husband and wife partnership is in disarray and for some has become separation. We are fighting over air conditioning and we are not fighting for our families. We are fighting over how much money to spend on grass cutting and no-one is talking about how much we should be investing into our people to help heal their marriages. We are fighting for the urgent and we have failed to see that we have set aside the important.

God please forgive me for placing the urgent in front of the important. Please forgive me for fighting over air conditioning and not fighting for our families. Help me Lord to lean all of my leadership, all of my influence, all of my energy into fighting to restore families and not wasting time on the urgent.

What a month!!

I cannot believe that it has been almost a month since I last posted a blog. Where has the time gone? Well, I know where it has gone to be honest - college started back up again, clinic takes up my other available mornings and today is the first time in a month when I have had a morning off of work/clinic/church/family to do my own thing, and guess where I am. Yup, that's right. I am sitting in my Bowie office enjoying some coffee, reconnecting with some of PG County's finest detectives, the mayor and some other church pastors who frequent 'my' office.

So this should be more of an update than a posting with an attempt at some in-depth meaning, I think. This past month has felt very hectic - only because I am teaching for 30 hours or so on three days and then treating patients for 10-12hours on two days and still trying to accomplish my tasks at church and my role as husband and dad. I have learned that trying to squeeze an extra 30+ hours a week into what was an already busy schedule doesn't really work too well. Something had to give - and the thing that gave for the first few weeks of this madness was actually sleep. For the first two weeks of college I survived (best word to describe it) on about 4hrs a night. Not too good, but just one of those things.

I have been trying very hard to not eat into family time, but I know I have sacrificed some of that too. Julie and I went out on our first date night in months two weeks ago. It was a beautiful evening and one that I would love to do every week, but at this season I dont see either of us making that regular a schedule. We just try to make the limited time we seem to have as effective as possible, knowing that Christmas is coming and a new semester with less pressure is lined up for the Spring.

Julie and I took on some additional responsibility this summer too - we are helping to coordinate our small group ministry in the church, really in the hope of setting up a good structure and format that can be taken on and run with by someone else. It seems that I have a ministry of short term fixes, ship-righting and passing the ball. Dont get me wrong, I love to start new ventures, but sometimes I wonder if we have started something that no-one else in the church wants to do. I'll talk about that in another post some day.

StreetReach continues to develop - some times in a positive way and then sometimes I wonder if we should just shut it down until next summer. The last Saturday we had arranged to go out and serve I had lined up three houses - not a large number by any stretch, and I expected about 12-15 people to show up. Pretty easy - 3 teams of 4-5 and these projects would be done pretty quickly. 5 people showed up. 5 people. Out of a church of some 200 adults and a youth ministry of some 60 teenagers - 5 people showed up. Disappointing to say the least. Having said that though, those 5 people served their hearts out and around 2pm that afternoon we completed the last of the three jobs and headed for home. So I need to be thankful that we served and reached out to three people in our community. There are three more people who know that they are loved by God. So we will focus on that instead of the paltry numbers in attendance.

Tonight we head to Catalyst 2009 - a leadership conference with some 12,000 other leaders gathering for 3 days in Atlanta for training and encouragement. I wonder what sort of challenges I will personally receive. I wonder what sort of challenges we as a church will receive. God bring it, and bring it full on!

I need it, we need it.

I'll write more later.