What is Love?

Love is blood flowing out of hands nailed to a cross.
Love sacrifices
Love is dancing for a friend when you are internally crying for yourself
Love hurts
Love is staying up all night praying for your spouse instead of watching a movie
Love perseveres

To summarize love in one word my choice would be PAIN.

Love is pain because it requires us to do that which is not in our nature to do and that is to be selfless.

What is love to you?

In this week lesson

On Sunday, love is multidimensional: It demands your heart(emotions), your soul (each breathe you take), and your mind(each thought and every decision) to be tuned in to God.

On Monday, love shows up: In truth, kindness, preservation and in long suffering. Love is all of this. It’s the cake, not just the flour or the eggs, it includes all of these ingredients. You can’t pick and choose which part you will live out. It is all or nothing.

Love is non-negotiable.

“You can’t argue against love; it’s the most powerful force in all of creation. People can agrue against your theology, your lifestyle, your belief, your faith - everything.”1

Do you exemplify this love that cannot be reasoned or explained away?

On Tuesday, love is absent: Because envy, pride, conceit, self-absorption, manipulation, deceitfulness moved in. To piggy back on Monday’s lesson and stretch the analogy a lil’ bit further. Love is the cake, a cake without eggs isn’t the same and when you substitute sugar with salt, the cake isn’t the same. So it is with love, when you substitute humility with pride, love ceases to exist.

On Wednesday, love is a litmus test: Friends are easy to protect but enemies help us to realize that we can’t do this without Christ. We called to a higher level of sacrifice, which demands us to love those we can’t stand.

On Thursday, love is action: Shown  in the story of the Good Samaritan told by Doctor Luke.

Ask yourself

Who is your neighbor and does he know you exist?
Why does Jesus portray the church (Levis and Priests) as the bad guys?

Love isn’t a discussion but action, it isn’t founded in committees or debated by theologians it needs to be seen each day in you and me. The doctrine is not love, your knowledge of the state of the dead isn’t love, your ability to recite scripture isn’t love. Your actions whisper or scream or shout your true feelings.

On Friday, love is forgiveness: Forgiving the undeserving like Stephen did when he was stoned to death. Love is radiating Christ, not using Christ to elevate ourselves. Love is reflecting Christ, making the invisible God visible to a dying world.

On Sabbath, love is ______________________

You fill in the gaps, it’s tomorrow.

1 Adult Sabbath School Quarterly

Not are, but is
Not fruits, but fruit.

Pause for a second and let that sink a little deeper.

This quarter we are not discussing a list of things that we are suppose to do to show the world that we are Christian. That is NOT what this is about. Unfortunately this isn’t one of those checklists in which we can grade ourselves. We can’t say we have love and not have kindness, or that we patient but not at peace.

Sorry, this is an all or nothing game.
The fruit of the Spirit is all of these things.

The fruit of the Spirit is a spirit of surrender and when you surrender all of these guys move in and take up residence in your character. It’s about dying daily to self and realizing when all is said and done you need Christ by way of the Holy Spirit to enact lasting change.

This quarter is not about doing but about being.

It’s not about the church and its doctrine or its history. It’s about you and your relationship with Christ.

My favorite passage in the Bible that I love to hate is in Paul’s second letter to Timothy the third chapter.

Don’t be naive. There are difficult times ahead. As the end approaches, people are going to be self-absorbed, money-hungry, self-promoting, stuck-up, profane, contemptuous of parents, crude, coarse, dog-eat-dog, unbending, slanderers, impulsively wild, savage, cynical, treacherous, ruthless, bloated windbags, addicted to lust, and allergic to God. They’ll make a show of religion, but behind the scenes they’re animals. Stay clear of these people.¹

What aggravates me the most about this passage is that Paul is telling Timothy this is the church. These are the characteristics of people going to church. Verse 5 shows us that these qualities do not define the heathens but the church goers. This is because the majority of self professed Christians aren’t connected to the Vine.

An analogy:
As each fruit is connected directly to the vine and not to another fruit we are charged to focus more on our relationship with Christ and surrender daily to him. I can’t be connected to Christ through the church I must be connected to Christ. The truth of the matter is that this is hard and so instead we create rules to change behavior in an attempt to color the true nature of ourselves. Just like we can’t paint an apple orange and expect it to create orange juice we change legislate a relationship with Christ.

So as you study this quarterly each week please remember that it’s about surrendering to Him and not checking off a list.

¹ Message Translation

Numbers 11
Lesson 1: Complaining about your lot in life makes God angry.
Comprehensibility of this lesson is easy, compliance on the other hand isn’t.
We love God so we shouldn’t complain but it seems
that we complain because we feel that God doesn’t love us the way we expect Him to.

Verse 1 says “…the people complained about their hardships in the hearing of God.”
Does this mean that we can’t complain at church but everywhere else is fair game to our grumbling?
To the best of my knowledge God’s ears are universal and so He hears everything we say so unfortunately for us it doesn’t really matter where we decide to whine, he still hears it.

The complaining of the Israelites causes the Lord to send fire from heaven that impacts the outskirts of the city, they cry for deliverance, he listens and then in verse 4 they start complaining AGAIN about meat.
I wonder why?
Could it be that our attitude in hard times becomes our character that eventually pervades the good times. They complained for 400 years during slavery and when they were being blessed and being led visually by God they couldn’t stop complaining.

Numbers 12
Lesson 2: Your ambition shouldn’t conflict with the Will of God.
Aaron and Miriam have an axe to grind with Moses and the cover story is his choice in spouse.  There is nothing new under the sun and just like our 21^st churches, they dress it up and masquerade it as a legitimate issue while privately seeking to usurp power from the Lord’s anointed. They feel that they are more qualified to serve as leaders; this thought plants seeds of rebellion similar to that of Lucifer. Moses was God’s choice and their need launch their political career and agenda comes in conflict with the will of God and instead of humility they choose rebellion.

So I ask myself, when does my ambition come in conflict with God’s will?

Numbers 13
Lesson 4: Your perspective is poisonous
Moses sends out 12 men to scout the Promised Land. 12 men went to survey the land promised to them and 10 came back blinded by their own perspective. God says this is the promised land yet 10 men come back and say “..the land we explored devours those living in it.” They feel that it is impossible to conquer the giants they encountered.

One thing to note is that all 12 men saw the same situation but being that the majority was  looking at the situation through their earthly eyes they couldn’t fathom how God who has led in the past would continue to lead.

How many times has your perspective of a situation polluted the vision that God has laid out?

Numbers 14
Lesson 4: Selective Amnesia leads to irrational behavior
They can almost smell the honey flowing down the streets of the Promised Land.  11 days after leaving Egypt they are within dancing distance of the realization of the promise made to Abraham. Delivered from Pharaoh by the 10 plagues, through the Red Sea, across the wilderness, with a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, with water, manna and quail they had seen the Lord lead and provide for all their needs.

The poisonous report from the 10 spies caused the children of Israel to forget it all and so panic sets in. They feel abandoned and allowed their fear to overshadow the promise of God.

Wrapping it up

1. The Israelites felt God was being unfair because of their erroneous expectations.
2. Aaron and Miriam felt Moses was unduly honored because of their ambitions.
3. The 10 spies felt that the promise land was hell because of their perspectives.
4. The children of Israel felt that God had abandoned them because of the report.

Somehow we need to not allow our feelings to control us because it is a slippery slope.
Somehow we need to reassess our expectations of what God’s plan is so that we don’t become disappointed when he doesn’t give us a Ferrari.
Somehow we need to figure out a way to view our feelings through a heavenly perspective.
Somehow we need to have an indelible marker write on our thoughts and in our psyche that He really does love us and that He does not lie.

So, if you know the sequence that needs to be encoded into the brain to produce this desired thought process, please contact me, better yet share it with those you love.

Thanks

Overrated. That’s the word I use to describe this whole discussion.
OVERRATED.

Seriously, the social club that is the SDA church has become like the English nobility of old when it comes to the topic of marriage. We’re inbred. We all go to Andrews, Oakwood, Loma Linda, Southern, Babcock, Valley View and then marry each other and inbreed. There, I said it and if you were 100% honest with yourself, you would agree that this is true on so many different levels.

As someone who is a third-generation born and bred SDA church-going sanctified saint, I have been a party to this to marital philosophy for so long and it ends today. There is only one verse in the Bible that we use to defend our position, I don’t even need to quote the whole thing, all I need to say is “Do not be unequally…,” and anyone over the age of 15 in the Adventist church will be able to finish it for me.  Right about now I can almost see the blood rising to your face and the fumes coming out of your nose as you pick up a stone and try and stone me, the Adventist heretic, but hear me out.

1. Bible verse: Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers: What does this mean to you? The Bible does not say, “Do not marry someone who isn’t an SDA,” but it says do not yoke yourself to someone who is not a believer.  A believer is not limited to SDAs, but instead is a person who BELIEVES that Jesus Christ is the son of God. End of story. Stop trying to add more to scripture, because in Revelation 22 it tells us that those who add to scripture, God will add to him the plagues described in the book of Revelation (i just had to throw that in there).

2. Numbers don’t lie: The divorce rate for Christians and Non-Christians are only a couple of single digits away from each other. The General Social Society (GSS) recently released a study that puts the divorce rate outside the church at 48% and divorce rate inside of the church at 41%.¹ So please stop limiting your options by stressing over a 7% window of happiness, because that is all you get if you just pick someone based on the fact that they go to your church. When it comes to percentage of actual divorces, 34 % of Christians interviewed had been divorced in comparison with 30% of atheists. So with all our bible thumping and professing, atheists have a better marriage record than we do.²

3. Sabbath, who cares? The day you go to church means absolutely nothing if you are screaming at each other the remaining days of the week. Love trumps religion, if you and your spouse go to church on the same day but can’t stand each other during the week what does it really say about your relationship with Christ? You show your true love for Christ by loving those in your life so let’s stop pretending that sitting next to your spouse in church fixes your problems. If we do that we are only skirting around the major issue.
4. Pretense: The social club church is a dying institution that fails to meet the challenges of the 21^st century, as the numbers in the previous point show. The church is not immune to divorce, child abuse, pre-marital sex, drugs, alcohol, abortions, pornography? These all occur within the walls of our social club church, and in most situations we are too scared of being unsacred to ask for help and those who see it choose to ignore the issue until it becomes public and then our cure is to convene the BOARD to dis-fellowship the individual instead of dealing with the major issue. We wrote the book on hiding your sins so why would you want to align yourself for the rest of eternity with someone who has the same problems as you do (pretense). As a whole, we are fake so wouldn’t you want someone who doesn’t have this disease?
   
   Wouldn’t you want to be with a person who complements your need to keep up appearances with their need to be real?
   Why in the world would you want to marry someone else that would also approach your marriage like a PR event, only caring about what the outside world thinks?
   
5. Fortress cycle: The average SDA church is like a fortress - we are adverse to the outside world and only admit a few people who have agreed to jump through our hoops. That is why we encourage our grown children (18+) to attend institutions of higher learning where they will be surrounded by people who talk exactly like them, eat like them and read the same literature. We say it’s because we want them to have a deeper relationship with Christ, but is that the whole truth? It is like on some level we are scared to allow them to mix with the world for fear of contamination and so we tell them lies that all they have to do is marry within the church in order to stay happy while ignoring the major issue.
   

Let me wrap this up. I know SDA pastors that married within the confines of our denomination and are miserable. I know women in our church who physically abuse their husbands. I can name 3 “aunties” right now who have their social club status but are miserable with their spouse. It really will not take me too long to tell you all their business because as a pastor’s kid, I’ve been privy to the real story that isn’t talked about within the boundaries of the sanctuary.

So here’s the conclusion of it all. The major issue, which I have been alluding to all this time, is the truth that a relationship with God isn’t osmosis. It doesn’t happen just because you marry someone in the church or go to church; this relationship with Christ isn’t defined by the label you stick on your forehead, your church attendance, or position on the church board. Our churches today are FULL of people who profess to be followers of Christ but are empty. Looking for a spouse in the world is a tad bit easier, in a sense, because those in the world don’t pretend to love the Lord or dance to our tune of pretense so it is easy to spot a genuine soul. Finding a spouse in the SDA church is harder, because we have been indoctrinated to always put up a good front and some of us are really good at it. The result? Tread softly and slowly because it is hard to distinguish the knock-off from the original. I’m almost done with this rant so I’ll stop typing soon.

Marriage is a union created by God which can only reach its full potential if the 2 major parties have a relationship with Christ and are continually seeking His will above their own. If you find this in the SDA church, congratulations but if the person isn’t a member of our social club his/her desire to be like Christ will continue to evolve as they uncover deeper truth about Christ. So men look for a women who loves God more than she loves you and ladies look for men… (oops I forgot we aren’t suppose to search ‘cuz King Solomon tells men to find a good thing, and ladies are just suppose to sit there, be cute and become the Prov. 31 lady).
Okay let me try one last time to summarize this rant. God is not concerned with the label you give yourself , but with the life you live, so marry a person whose heart is so lost in God, that you must seek Christ in order to find them. Anything else is a waste of your time.

¹http://publicdata.norc.org:41000/gssbeta/aboutNORC.html,  A summary of this report is available at http://www.brewright.com/research/divorce.html

² Barna Group 2008 Study http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/15-familykids/42-new-marriage-and-divorce-statistics-released

Children of God 1 John 3:1

I love my father, when I was a kid I used to be his shadow, I used to watch his lips when he talked and loved to hear the rise and fall of his voice echo in his chest. I still love my dad, I do. It is just different when you become an adult; listening to his every word has lost its wonder, instead of following him everywhere he goes I find myself asking him why he does what he does. Somehow and somewhere I evolved from this girl who wanted to follow his every command without question to one who wants to make her own decisions regardless of his advice, mercy, on some days I even want to make my own mistakes just because I can.

I wonder, as a child of God if I now suffer from the same ailment. Instead of following God just because he says so, I now expect explanations and instead of acquiescing to his every command I offer rationalizations and justifications just ‘cuz I think I’m grown. A child trusts is based on the character of their Father and being that God’s character has never changed, I wonder why my response to Him has. First question, is your relationship with God based on His character or on your need for control and independence?

Adoption Rom. 8:15-17

We’ve heard it a billion times that adoption is a special kind of love because it means a conscious choice was made to add you to the family. You are now a joint heir with the Kings of Kings and the Redeemer of Mankind, you have been accepted into His family and yet we still walk around this world on our tippy toes trying to avoid making our presence known, scared that we might scratch the marble floor or break the gold plates.  We have been adopted and the  spirit given to us is not one that leads us to fear but one of courage so the question is, do you live like you know you are His or are you shackled by fear and uncertainty?

Choices  Josh. 24:15

Each choice brings you into a closer relationship with your family or widens the divide. No excuses. If you decide not to call your mother today or skip thanksgiving you are making a choice, whatever your excuse may be it doesn’t change the fact that your family is not the top priority  (because once there is a will there is a way). Here’s the sum of it all, there are only two families and you are either drawing closer to one or to another.  I love the way Eugene puts it in the Message
“This is war, and there is no neutral ground. If you’re not on my side, you’re the enemy; if you’re not helping, you’re making things worse.” Matt 12:30So here’s the third and final question the choices you made today, what family do they place you in?

Hopefully y’all passed the test.
Have a blessed Sabbath.

Great Sex God’s Way.

A couple of months ago I saw a headline of a Southern pastor causing a stir in Alabama for preaching about sex. For real, sex in the church, it seems just like yesterday that Ted Haggard was coming out of his meth and homosexual closest and all of a sudden the South has its panties in a bunch cuz a pastor is preaching about Great Sex God’s Way. I have to admit that my first response was to blog about it, which i did but it’s been four months since the controversy and I have to admit that I still don’t know if talking about sex in church is a bad thing. I have a premonition that this article is going to get pulled because i used the word more than 3 times but I have to give it a shot. I’m just wondering if the church is the Sanctuary and if back in the day the high priest could be struck dead for any unconfessed sin on the day of atonement, is it cool to come to church and hear a pastor preach about sex.

I have opinions and so do you on this issue, I’m just wondering. What Would Jesus Do and what do you think is right, from a biblical heavenly point of view.
So yeah, is it cool for pastors to talk about Sex in church, is it cool for them to have billboards saying Great Sex God’s Way? One pastor in Cali went so far as to tell married couples to have sex for seven straight days to save their marriage. This might seem extreme, but sex is everywhere, so how come we keep it out of church, do we really put on a different body when we walk into church, does our mind all of a sudden get sanitized?

This could just be a publicity stunt to get people to come out to church,
or
this is watering down our values and trying to make church seem like a place where people can bring their dirty laundry and get comfortable.
or
this is sin.
or
this is just the church finally dealing with issues that matter to the average human being with a pulse over the age of 12.
or
this is the mark of the beast
or
this are the false prophets talked about in Matt 24
or
…

Here’s the article
http://news.aol.com/article/sex-sermons-in-alabama-church/378163

Here’s the church’s website
http://www.greatsexgodsway.com/

Here’s a video from part of the church service

i’m all ears

that’s all the text said and surprisingly that was enough to get mii thru the day, knowing that somewhere someone was praying about the issue that matter the most to mii, just gave mii peace. i don’t know call mii weird but i still have the text 3 months after the fact

some days i don’t pray ‘cuz it hurts too much
and it’s good to know that i have friends that are praying for mii

so this is a shout out to anyone who needs prayer
whether you have prayed today or have just cursed today
drop a line and let us petition God on your behalf
you don’t need to add your name, the beautiful thing is that God knows who you are

so yeah

have at it

Sabbath

Sunset to sunrise
A 24 hour block of time?

Is it a chore you abhor
Or done to adore the savior
A day to “hang” with the your chosen elect
or a day to connect and reflect
what is the Sabbath to you

Have you ever been driving, look ahead realize that there was traffic ahead and in an attempt to avoid being held up for a while decided to take a different route. In most cases the route we decide to take to avoid traffic is longer but we embark on this new journey because for each stop light and mile we pass we feel a lil’ bit closer to our final destination. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that being stuck in traffic on the freeway is much worse than a couple of extra miles within the city full of traffic lights, stop signs and bumps.

Fast forward to today, May 3^rd 2009.
yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
Today is my birthday and I am a quarter of a century old. Mercy, I am getting old and when you get as old as I feel you start to look at your life introspectively (okay enough of the psychological babble) I really think I am more of a stuck in traffic kind of a person for the last five years than a person who got off the freeway and is now meandering through the city in an effort to get to their destination. I’m not 100 percent sure which way is better but one thing I do know is that life is just like traffic sometimes, some of us get off the freeway and in an attempt to avoid waiting we have to deal with multiple traffic lights, pedestrians, and stop signs, others of us stay in traffic and end up feeling stuck, and then feelings of helplessness give way to frustration and despair. It seems that regardless of the way you choose to go you always see the person in the other lane as in a more advantageous position.

I could stretch this analogy a little bit further and launch into a story about how God is our GPS system and how the high occupancy lane requires that Jesus and the Holy Spirit be in your vehicle but I will spare you that today and just remind you that at the end of it all, all that matters is the destination and whether or not you are heading in the right direction. So if you feel stuck because you are on the freeway of life’s traffic or if you opted out of the helplessness and are now at the mercy of life’s milestones, signposts and stops signs. Breathe in, breathe out and when the going gets rough, tough or slow breathe in again, breathe out again and please stay in your car.

And the list goes on and on.

Somehow we got lost, we went from the Bible teaching, Scripture referencing people to the doctrinal I’ve-got-to-shove-it-down –your-throat legalistic bunch. We like to think that this is a recent development but at the GC meeting in 1888, the Seventh-day Adventist church had their hands full trying to understand this concept of grace and the law. The founding members of our church including the then president of the GC Elder Bulter and Uriah Smith believed that the Whites, Waggoner and some others were involved in a conspiracy to usurp power and undermine the leadership. The message of 1888 as given to Waggoner and Jones was to correct the misconception that the SDA church taught the law but did not believe or teach Christ. Somehow 121 years later we find ourselves with the same dilemma, how do you minister to your Baptist friend about the Sabbath and still let them know that salvation is a gift, a free gift from God without sounding overbearing?

I don’t understand the concept of a non-denominational church mostly because it is an oxymoron, by worshipping on Sunday you are claiming a particular doctrine and I would say denomination and so I’ll never be swayed to see the relevance of watering down Christianity in an effort to appeal to the masses. You see without a solid foundation based on Scripture (doctrine) we are like a house built on marshmallows. Our doctrine is important, the state of the dead, the importance of Sabbath and its origins, the second coming are not just topics for interfaith discussions but the bedrock because they point us to the One that saves us. On the other hand our doctrine sometimes serves as a handicap. It’s a fine line between cheap grace and legalism and in most situations and even in our evangelistic series we forget the central theme. We tell people about the Mark of the Beast and the NEWSTART holy lifestyle and then we sprinkle Jesus on top. The only way we don’t fall to either side  of this thin line is to keep the crucified Christ the center and not the cherry on top. Yes, it might seem like a cookie cutter answer but without a true personal experience with God we have nothing, the closer you walk with God the more you will want to be like him. The drama of the 1888 GC Session led many Adventists to open scripture and study for themselves and connect personally in the Word, with the Word. Doctrine can only take you so far, we have to have that personal connection and not be swayed by leadership, or manuals, or books, or pastors, or seminars. We have to connect to the Vine.

I don’t have questions to ask this week, I just have one appeal, as you study this lesson and learn about prophecy, doctrine and its place in our church history never lose sight of the central theme, never lose sight of Christ’s redeeming blood.

If you have the 2009 Devotional “Lest We Forget” skip over to August and read August 24-30, oh and then trust mii when I say you will find yourself reading the first week of September also. J

Happy Sabbath

oh one more thing don’t try and figure out the coloring I’m just happy its Sabbath