Me Being Me (pt. 3)

Maybe you should read this slowly or something because you might get a little dizzy.            

So back to this idea of righteousness.  I decided to look up the word in the Greek and it told me that the word meant…drum roll…righteousness.  Awesome.  Then I decided to look up righteousness in my Webster’s dictionary.  Now I don’t know if it is because my Webster’s is really old or just lame, but the word righteousness could not be found in my dictionary, buuuut it did include, “right.”  The word right is defined as, “Proper and fitting, properly adjusted, disposed, or placed; orderly; sound in body or mind.”  This started to make sense. 

See in Romans chapter 6 Paul says, “When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.  What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of?”  Things that I am ashamed of.  These tend to be things that I wish I would never have done.  Things that seem to be out of character.  These are things that I do and then find myself saying, “You shouldn’t have done that, that’s not like you.” 

Then in chapter 7 Paul goes on this somewhat confusing rant about the things he does and things he wishes he would do instead.  It’s almost like we’ve walked in on this conversation he is having with himself.  After it’s all over though Paul says something really interesting.  In verse 22 of chapter 7 Paul says, “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law.”  This is interesting to me because there is this well-known Psalm, Psalm 139, and in verse 13 David says, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”  It’s this intimate picture of God creating someone before they were born, knitting together the deepest parts of what it means to be a human being.

So maybe righteousness has something to with all of this.  Maybe following Jesus, becoming a slave to righteousness, is reconnecting with something that was created even before I was born.  Maybe it’s being the kind of person that God has always intended me to be.  I wonder if it’s not necessarily about following some list of rules, but instead what if righteousness, what if putting my faith in Jesus is me being…me for the first time?

To be continued...    

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I really don’t like to admit that there are times that I struggle with doubt.  But I do.  I don’t so much doubt the existence of God or whether or not Jesus is God; I really do believe that, but I sometimes find myself questing whether or not He cares about me.  It’s usually when I’m not enjoying my circumstances; when things aren’t the way I want them to be that the pity party starts. 

There is a really interesting account in Mark 9.  This father whose son has been possessed by a demon since he was young approaches Jesus.  The father says that the disciples tried to cast out the demon, but they couldn’t.  He says to Jesus, “If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”  Jesus replies, “If you can?  Everything is possible for him who believes.”  Then the father responds in a way that I automatically relate to, but then ask, “Well, what does that mean?”  He says, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief.”

How can you believe something and not believe something at the same time?  I mean either you do believe or you don’t…right?  I think perhaps if we put ourselves in the father’s shoes we might be able to understand where he’s coming from.  The Bible says that the boy has been possessed since he was a small boy and that often the demon tried to kill the boy by throwing him into the water or into fire.  Imagine that.  Imagine being a father and watching your child go through that…over and over again.  And then here come some men supposedly sent by God who can’t do anything about it.  I have to wonder if the unbelief that the man is speaking of isn’t directed toward the existence of God, but whether or not He cares about what is going on.   Have you ever been there?  I know I have.  Now compared to the situation in this story my circumstances can seem somewhat trivial, but I can relate. 

I can assure you that God is here, and God does care.  One of the names for Jesus is “Emanuel.”  It means, “God with us.”  Not only is God real, but He is with us, and He genuinely cares.  So much that he often puts us in situations that only He can handle so that we will begin to only have faith in Him.   See the man saw that it was Jesus who drove out the demon.  I’m sure that man went home believing that Jesus was God and that He did care about him.  The most loving thing God can do is put us in situations where we have no other choice but to trust.  These situations produce faith. Faith that Jesus is who He says He is and that He can do what He says He can do because it is only by faith that anything and everything is possible.    

Me Being Me (pt. 2)

Here’s what I’ve come to learn about Scripture; it reveals to us what is true about life, reality, and the world we live in.  The words don’t make things true, they tell us what is already true.  For example, the Bible says things like, “God is love.” God existed a long time before these words were ever written.  God didn’t just become love after John wrote his first letter to the church, but the Bible reveals to us what is already true; that God is the essence, the originator of love.  Why is this important?  Because we aren’t supposed to just read scripture, we’re supposed to discover the truth of it outside of the pages; we’re supposed to actually live it out.  So when I read things like Romans chapter 5 when it says, “Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character hope”, I can believe it because I haven’t just read the words on the page, but I’ve discovered the truth that they reveal in my life and the world around me.       

I’ve come across a word that has grabbed a hold of my attention and won’t seem to let go.  Righteousness.  It jumped out at me while I was reading Romans chapter 6, which makes sense because I think that righteousness is just about every other word in that chapter.  As I read this word over and over again I couldn’t help but ask the question, “What is righteousness?”  I’ve heard this word so many times and it seemed that I could tell you what it meant, but when I tried to explain it to myself, I did a horrible job.  Kind of like someone who pretends to know about something just so he can be part of a conversation.  The way I seemed to understand it was that it was synonymous with obedience.  Someone who was righteous was someone who followed the rules; who didn’t break the law, but as I read through the chapter I began to think that I had fallen incredibly short in terms of understanding the depth of righteousness.  See I don’t think Jesus came to make us into rule followers, but I think he came to do so much more.  He wasn’t about behavior modification; he came to make us into new creations. 

How do you understand the idea of righteousness?

To be continued...

Me Being Me (pt. 1)

So, I've been hearing a lot about how long my bloggs are.  I am truly sorry, right from the bottom of my heart.  I've decided to break them up for those of you who can't stand to read more than a paragraph at a time :).  Here's the first of a series of something I've been thinking a lot about.  Hope it gets you thinking!

I’m really not a big fan Scrabble or crossword puzzles, but I love words.  I can remember a time when I would actually read through the dictionary for fun.  I don’t say this to present myself as smarter than you because most of the time I was looking up words that cause the male mind to snicker.  Come on, who hasn’t looked up flatulent in the dictionary?  If you haven’t, you most definitely should. 

But I really do love words.  They are incredibly powerful.  They can inspire and move us.  They can’t paint pictures and tell stories.  They can build people up and they can tear people down.  Words separate themselves from noise and raw sound in that they communicate meaning and truth.   Well, at least they should.  

There are certain words that seem to become less understood the more you hear them.  There are probably a lot of these words floating around for those of us who have been immersed in the Christian subculture for a descent amount of time.  These are the words that we glance over as we read the Bible, words that we throw around during theological debates, or have screen-printed on our t-shirts.  The sad, and very dangerous thing about this is that these words become just words.   It’s like they become so familiar to us that they lose their power and fall like dead leaves back to their one dimensional prisons. 

To be continued...