Brace yourself.

For the first time in a while, I’m making some time to write something somewhat meaningful here.

It’s strange. Although these past couple of weeks have had me busier than ever (lots of driving back and forth between Greensboro and Creedmoor and working really hard to get up to speed at work, plus focussing a little bit more on church stuff), I seem to be experiencing more clarity than I have in a while.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just ’cause of the John Mayer song. Actually, I hope not. (Isn’t the point of that song that as soon as you realize that you’re having a moment of clarity it’s too late, because that realization will take away the clarity?)

But I digress…

To be honest, it’s not nearly that complicated. I think the bottom line is that I’ve had at least 2 1/2 hours a day to sit in a car and think and listen to some fantastic teaching from guys like Mark Driscoll and Francis Chan. And at least equally importantly, God has been doing some amazing things in Stephanie’s life too. She might not even realize it, but she’s more beautiful than ever — in every way. I feel more encouraged and supported than ever, and that makes more difference than any woman will ever understand.

So, all that rambling because I want to ask for some feedback. I had a rare moment this week when a Bible story became completely new to me — the meaning and value for my life right now came through in a way it never has before.

In our ‘Spiritual Gifts’ Bible study that our men’s group is studying through at work, the author makes a point using the life of Moses, and he focusses specifically on the story from early in Moses’ life where he kills the Egyptian. The author challenged me to consider the question: “Why did Moses kill the Egyptian?”

It seems like a simple enough question, but the answer is powerful for me: I think Moses killed him because he was beginning to get a grip on God’s calling for his life. God put in Moses’ heart a burden for His people. Moses felt God’s compassion and righteous anger towards the conditions of the Israelites.

And before he probably realized that God had put this in his heart, and certainly before he consulted God about it, he did something rash and chalked it up to passion.

The result: a man died, and Moses spent 40 years hiding out in the wilderness.

And I got to thinking: Did it really have to be that way? If Moses had realized that his passion came from God, and asked God for direction on how to act, and then waited, could it have played out better? What if God was ready and willing to lead the people out in 1 year? What if those 40 extra years of toil and death that God’s people experienced weren’t necessary?

But then again, God is sovereign. Someone in our discussion put it this way: What if God planned for everything to happen just the way it did? What if He wanted Moses to go out to the wilderness so that He could mold him into the redeemer of His people that He wanted him to be?

This definitely seems reasonable. Think about all the people who spent time in the wilderness before God really fulfilled His calling in their lives. There’s Moses, David, Paul, John the Baptist… even Jesus it seems to some extent.

So all that leaves me in a funny place because I have such an overwhelming passion for God’s church. I seriously feel the Gospel like fire in my bones and everything in me screams to give my whole life to see the world changed by the Gospel. I want to spend my life being poured out for the Bride of Christ in America until She is a true reflection of Him, and truly cares about His bride around the world. And I try to wrap my head around the story about Moses, and how God seems to send His servants into long seasons of waiting where He prepares them, and I try to think about how that applies to me, and I just don’t know what to take away.

In the sermon I listened to this morning from Francis Chan, he said that in Uganda alone (I think — that part wasn’t clear), 43,000 children are orphaned every day, and 29,000 orphans die every day.

Every day.

Part of me fights God about that.

“What can You teach me in 5 or 10 years that is worth so many wasted lives?”

I know. It’s an audacious question to ask the Creator. I ask it respectfully. I know that I have so much to learn that I don’t even know how much I have to learn.

But what’s the balance in the meantime? How do I stir up the passions God has put in me and take full advantage of what’s available for me to do in THIS season, while simultaneously resting in God’s sovereignty and just waiting for His leadership?

I guess I already know what I would tell someone if they asked me those questions… but all the same, what do you think?

I’ve read on three blogs (here, here, and here) that Louie Giglio and Chris Tomlin will be starting a church fellowship together.

Human3rror reports:

It’s true.  Chris Tomlin announced today, in a partners/members meeting after the 9:30am service, that he is planning to leave the Austin Stone Community Church to pursue God’s calling to start up a new church with long time friend and partner Louie Giglio in the Atlanta, Georgia area.

Has anybody else heard this?

I’m skeptical, but really excited!

Money got really tight for us around Christmas time. We put a few gift purchases on our credit cards, and fully expected that when our tax refund came, we would pay down our credit card bills and put a little money in the bank, and start with a positive financial momentum in 2008.
Trouble was, we came up owing almost $1,000 on our taxes. I re-did the numbers twice, and yet Turbo Tax was insistent: we owed the IRS money we didn’t have.
So much for a positive momentum…
But then it got worse.

I was working like a dog at the time, and fully expecting to get a raise that I was up for in December. At our company, raises will often come a couple of months late, but they’re usually retroactive to whenever you were eligible. So when I sat down in my manager’s office in March, I was expecting to get a good raise that would be retroactive to mid-December. Or in other words, I thought for sure that God would use this to help us pay our tax debt by the looming deadline.
But that’s not what happened.

I got the raise I expected, but my manager told me that it wouldn’t be retroactive. I was kind of puzzled, and I asked if I was being punished for something. He said that I wasn’t. That I was doing a great job, and something along the lines of “this is just how we’re doing it.”
That left me pretty discouraged.
So we put our tax debt on a credit card. So much for paying that thing down…

And then my brakes went out. So I put those on the credit card.
And then our home owner’s association dues came. Can’t pay those on a credit card, so I paid some other bills on a credit card so we could write a check for that.

And I started to carry some serious anxiety, and thought that surely if I trusted the Lord through this and was obedient He would come through in some supernatural way.

That’s about the time we got a bill for our baby. No, you’re right — the baby hasn’t been born yet. It was actually only 10 weeks in the womb when we got our bill. The doctor’s office informed us that they had negotiated with our insurance, and our portion of the cost would be about $2,000. We could feel free to bring it to our next appointment in 2 weeks.

At this point, I was pretty discouraged.

I was more than discouraged.

I felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders.

1/3 of the year down, and we have spent more than we’ve made just about every week. Way to go, Zack. Don’t you deserve the ‘Provider of the Year’ award…

Then May rolled around. I got an extra paycheck in May, because I get payed every two weeks, which means that I get two paychecks a year that don’t fall into the ‘twice a month’ pattern.

Then, a week later, we got our tax rebate check.

Just like that, $3,000 that our budget wasn’t counting on. And God gave us some room to breathe.

But that’s not all that happened.

I got a call from a recruiter who asked me if I was interested in a job. This is important because I didn’t apply for anything (except a couple spots at SAS, but that’s another story). I didn’t put my resume on anything but this blog right here. Not on Monster or JobFinder or anything else.

He couldn’t explain where he got my resume except that it turned up in his database.

As it turned out, the position he described was a somewhat unstable, contractor position that seemed like a bad idea with a baby coming.

So I turned it down.

And asked God to stop teasing me.

But then he called back and asked if I would be interested in taking the same position as a full-time salary position. Good pay, but I’d have to commute to Greensboro.

Gas is $4 a gallon. And I have a baby coming.

“No thanks.” Hang up. “God, please stop teasing me!”

A week goes by and he calls back again. “What if you could have the same job, but work from Raleigh?”

So I drove all the way to Greensboro to interview… for 4 hours.

Came home, and waited for the call.

For three weeks.

“God, this really isn’t funny. I’ll gladly keep the situation I’m in, but please stop teasing me.”

But He wasn’t. The call came last week.

To be continued…

I came across this today.

I like the idea of it, because we often wear our faith as a brand — as if we’re in the ‘christian fish ‘ club, and that makes us better than people in the ‘Buddha’ club or the ‘Rainbow’ club or the ‘Liberal’ club…

And what’s heartbreaking about that is that many of us wear that ‘christian’ brand as the extent of our faith… it doesn’t go any farther than a bumper sticker and a trip to church every week (the club meeting) — and when that’s the case, it usually leads to the judgmental attitude that christians are often known for.

But…

I do choose to wear a brand. I am branded by Jesus. He is my Creator, my Author, my Artist. He created me and branded me with His name. Then He pursued me, ransomed me, and signed me with His blood. His brand on me means that I am the least of the least in this world. I am nothing. I am called to be a fool. I am called to love to a degree that is impossible in human power. I am called to be compassionate, and to look up to everyone — from my knees — because I’ve seen the cross, and I know Who is was that gave His life there… and I know He did it because of my junk.

The Jesus brand means that I am adopted as a child of the Most High.

It means that I am not home yet.

It means that YOU are my neighbor, and I am responsible for your well-being.

It means that I have a purpose.

Am I in the small-c ‘christian’ club? Not the way most people think of it.

But I gladly wear a brand: Jesus Christ

Admittedly, most of us wouldn’t be this honest. But if we were…. well…

I believe the guy on the right represents a LOT of the people we encounter every day.

What do you think?

Steph already mentioned today that when I go to a christian bookstore, I can be a little like a kid in a candy store. That isn’t to say that I like everything they sell in those places. In fact, I’d say at least 50% of it outright unbiblical… but even the unbiblical stuff engages me because it helps to think through what I believe and why I believe it…

So, this weekend, the stars lined up: we were at a christian bookstore AND had a few extra dollars

…And that’s when I cam across this DVD from Louie Giglio.

As far as I know, this is the ONLY DVD from Louie that I haven’t listened to at least once. And what makes it even more exciting is that there are tons of people in my life right now who could really use some hope, and I could really use a good tool to help point them at the one True Hope.

So we snatched it up and we’re looking forward to watching it tonight. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here’s the description from the 268 store:

Life isn’t easy. We experience problems and setbacks every day. But during the hardest parts of life, when the bottom seems to fall out, where do we turn for peace? Although God doesn’t offer any easy solutions, He does offer Himself and His cross as an anchor of hope no matter what we face in life. And more than simply enduring suffering, the hope we find in Him allows us to leverage our darkest moments for His fame. When life hurts most, the world listens most intently to our message, allowing us to broadcast through our pain the goodness of the One who loves us the most.

I came across an article by this title this week (I found it here). If the title doesn’t get you, it will once you learn that the article is in Rolling Stone magazine.

When I first clicked the link, I realized that the article is 8 pages long, so I’ve been waiting for a chance to read the whole thing at once, which I did this morning.

The story in a nutshell is that the reporter went ‘undercover’ as a member of a neo-fundamentalist mega-church in Texas. He attended services for several months, and then went on a weekend retreat, which is meat of most of the article.

As you might expect, he completely rips what he believes to be modern christianity to pieces, and his criticism is just. I don’t really disagree with anything he says in the article. The major catch is that the church he chose to scope out is WAY out in left field. He gives a play-by-play of the whole retreat and “Jesus” only comes up one time, when someone is casting the ‘demon of homosexuality’ out of someone. The Gospel doesn’t appear anywhere in the article, and neither does the heart of God. And unfortunately, I think that’s a reflection of the church body that the reporter became a part of.

So, if you are of the same mind as the reporter in this article, please, please know that the people and the teaching described in this article — though an honest reflection of many ‘christian’ churches today — are in no way a reflection of Jesus. I would love to sit down and tell you more about that over coffee.

And if you are a follower of Jesus, I challenge you to read the article. And don’t read it to pick apart all the false assumptions and accusations made by the journalist. Instead, just assume for a moment that he might be giving his honest take on what the church looks like to a skeptic. And then let’s ask ourselves: What would we do differently if we were truly serious about reaching people like this journalist?

Here are several chunks that really stood out to me (watch out for the language):

With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.

One of the implicit promises of the church is that following its program will restore to you your vigor, confidence and assertiveness, effecting, among other things, a marked and obvious physical transformation from crippled lost soul to hearty vessel of God. That’s one of the reasons that it’s so important for the pastors to look healthy, lusty and lustrous — they’re appearing as the “after” photo in the ongoing advertisement for the church wellness cure.

Here your church leader is an athlete, a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull’s belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual — and if you want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness, financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex, and if you’re overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a way that you’re ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is from weakness to strength. They don’t want a near-complete personality that needs fine-tuning — they want a human jellyfish, raw clay they can transform into a vigorous instrument of God.

We were about a third of the way through the process when I began to wonder what the hell was going on. Fortenberry’s blowhard-on-crack-act/wound gobbledygook were all suspiciously secular in tone and approach. I had been hearing whispers throughout the first day or so to the effect that there was some kind of incredible supernatural religious ceremony that was going to take place at the end of the retreat (“Tighten your saddle, he’s fixin’ ta buck” was how “cowboy” Fortenberry put it), when we would experience “Victory and Deliverance.” But as far as I could see, in the early going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to “find your wounds” (“My husband hid my Saks card!”) at a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons.

The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world: Once a preacher says it, it’s true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a “rod of iron” to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing — but the audience ate it up anyway. When they’re away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That’s because they know that their audience doesn’t give a shit. So long as you’re telling them what they want to hear, there’s no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.

Here I have a confession to make. It’s not something that’s easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise — two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses — a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you’re a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene — even if you’re intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry — outwardly you’re swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that “inner you” begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest — in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the “work” of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your “sinful” self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

American Christians who speak in tongues basically all try to sound like extras from the underworld set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If you want to pull it off and sound like a natural, just imagine you’re holding a rubber replica of Harrison Ford’s heart in your hands: Umm-harakashaka! Loo-pa-wanneee-rakakakasha, Meester Jones!

By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you’ve gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no “anything else.” All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this “our thing,” a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that’s all.

I had the great privilege of teaching our main service this Sunday at church, and it didn’t take me two seconds to know that I wanted to teach on the topic of worship.

As luck (or providence) would have it, the mic battery went out half way through, so the sound guys or going to see if they can get me one mp3 file so I can share it with all you wonderful people.

But in the meantime, Flowerdust and Ragamuffin Soul have some fantastic dialog going on about the topic of worship.

In particular, Carlos is asking:

Question One: What do you see the purpose of a church weekend gathering is? (I emailed him and asked him to ask this question on the blog MONTHS ago :0)
Question Two: Do you believe God can engage a persons heart in a weekend service where there is a goal to help manifest this through musical worship, production, creative video elements??

This should be interesting and could be very beneficial!

JDGreear from the Summit Church in Durham, NC, has a post titled “The Book Besides the Bible to Take If You Get Stranded On An Island”.

He begins like this:

G. K. Chesterton was once asked what one book he’d take if he were stranded on an island. He said a book about shipbuilding.

Other than that, and the Bible… this is what I’d suggest you take: Tim Keller’s new The Reason for God.
If you read one book in your LIFETIME, THIS SHOULD BE IT. I know this sounds like I’m exaggerating, but this really is the absolute best book I’ve ever read at interpreting the Gospel for our culture.

He later goes on to write:

One depressing thing about reading this book is I realize how little many “evangelical” churches preach the actual Gospel (seems to me). I’m thinking even of those places that have high “conversion” numbers. People are moved to pray salvation, come-to-Jesus prayers and get baptized, but you don’t see a people falling in love with Jesus…

Ummm… yeah. I just said almost the exact same thing at Bible study Wednesday.

I believe I have identified that next book I’ll be looking to get.