Archive for community
FlickrFriday: Day 259 by BillMcCarroll…
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Thanks to BillMcCarroll for submitting this great image of St John of Damascus Orthodox Church to the Flickr group. You can browse Bill’s entire photostream here.
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Cultivating Discipline, Part 7: A Sound Mind…
Posted by: | CommentsFor God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self–discipline.
– Paul, The Bible, 2 Timothy 1:7
Why is it that all of the Christians that I know seem to struggle through life? With rare exceptions, we all have some area of fear or weakness or wounding… And I have my doubts about the exceptions…
A Christian teen who is a contact on my social-grid made an interesting statement about sexual abstinence this week… He said it “doesn’t work.” It wasn’t completely clear whether he was talking about “abstinence education” or individual, moral abstinence… But here are a few little factoids to chew on:
The Bible clearly teaches that 1.) the Spirit of God dwells in the heart of everyone who submits to the Lordship of Jesus (Romans 8:9). 2.) This Spirit is characterized by power, love and self-discipline (2 Timothy 1:7). 3.) Self-control is evident in the life of a person who is filled with this Spirit, in the same way that you can tell that a tree is an apple tree because it has apples on it (Galatians 5:22-23).
In the life of a believer, something like abstinence certainly does work… At the very least, it can work… it should work… A Christ-follower who believes that it can’t work or doesn’t work doesn’t understand the power of God’s Spirit at work in a person…
(At this point, I cannot emphasize enough the power of God’s grace at work in us when we fail to walk in self-control… but that’s a different discussion.)
I’m talking about the potential power that lives in your heart… Potential for power over our weakness… Potential for love to heal our wounds… Potential for self-discipline and stability…
The trick is tapping into that potential.
Our culture has conditioned us to follow our urges… emotional urges… financial urges… sexual urges… But God has called us to a life of potential and tapping that potential requires that we control those urges. So, God expresses the expectation that we control our urges and then provides us with the means to do it…
Got that? We experience the power of self-control when we practice self-control… The willingness to obey God’s expectation fuels the spirit of self-discipline, which gives us greater power to obey under greater pressure…
Older English translations of 2 Timothy use the expression “sound mind” instead of “self-discipline” but the intended meaning is the same… A person who has a “sound mind” is consistent, purposeful and not a slave to “urges”… and that’s what self-discipline looks like too.
Jesus promised that we’d have trouble… But the wacky, constant struggle to make it through another day that some Christians experience is the very opposite of what God desires for us. That’s the reason He gave us this Spirit of power and love and self-discipline…
Cultivating discipline is a process with many nuances, but the most important thing to keep in mind is this:
God is for us and has given us what we need to finish well.
Psst... Pass it on...FlickrFriday: Child of God by Travis Silva
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Check out Travis Silva’s (Forgiven! on Flickr) mission trip images from Gulu, Uganda… Beautiful and poignant images of children living in poverty…
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Psst... Pass it on...What the heck is “vocation”…
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Once upon a time, I had an office with “Pastor” emblazoned on the door… Not that there’s anything wrong with that… But I was under the mistaken impression that the only true Christian “vocation” was being on-staff in a traditional church setting…
Forgive me for being a bit obvious, but that’s simply not the case… In fact, it never was. A few weeks ago, I had a long talk with my own pastor about my heart for ministry. I told him that while I would never discount the possibility of serving on a church staff, I am absolutely convinced that my ministry will not be one of a traditional pastor…
I see my own calling as a “pastor” to artists in the sheer numerical response to the content here on WOP… There is a hunger among artists to discover ways that their talents and gifts can translate into something transcendent: calling and vocation.
While I was interviewing Jason Tockey for the FeaturedArtist post, he talked a lot about this idea of calling and vocation. He believes that the main Biblical emphasis “in understanding what it means to be a Christian, stems from our creation as image-bearers of God.” In other words, the big epiphany is that we should and CAN reflect what Jesus is like in everything that we do… We were literally created for that and then REcreated for it when we started following Jesus…
And by everything, I mean by my relationships, my speech, my ethics, my morals, my work, my play… my artistic pursuits… everything.
So, it’s not just the Pastors and the church-staff that surrender their “vocation” to Jesus… It’s the ditch-diggers, the daycare teachers, the bus drivers… Yeah, it’s the painters and dancers and filmmakers and writers…
Which is not to say that a Christian who is a filmmaker should only make “Christian films”… But shouldn’t her films reveal something of the nature and truth of Jesus? Not in a trite or canned way, but in a truly artistic and authentic way…
For Jason, that means that finding his identity in Jesus’ kingdom is centered, at least in some measure, on discovering what it means to be “a photographer who is a Christian.”
What does it mean for you?
Psst... Pass it on...A Short Definition of “Worship”…
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Is this guy worshipping
As I work on my book (which btw now has a working title: Reigniting Renaissance), I’m trying to develop a “short definition” of what worship is… apart from how it is expressed…
I think that the distinction is important for several reasons:
1. The expression of worship varies between different traditions and denominations of Christ-followers… A Pentecostal expression, just for example, will be radically different from a Catholic expression… We might be able to find some “common ground” but I’m looking for something more foundational… I want to be able to use the term “worship” and have it mean something specific to my readers, rather than have it mean 10 different things to ten different people…
2. Not to keep beating this drum, but the expression of worship in most traditions is still largely dominated by music… If we say our church is “traditional” or “contemporary” or “blended,” we are talking about musical style more than anything else… If artists in any medium are going to “worship” through their dance, drama, painting or photography, then the meaning of worship has to be broader than this…
Now, a definition of worship has to be based on what the Bible says about worship… Which, for the record, is mostly anecdotal… Paul didn’t give us an easy theological foundation and Jesus just said that “true worshippers will worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4: 23-24)
There are a few definitions out there that I like:
According to Worship.com, “worship” is:
Everything you think, everything you say, and everything you do, revealing that which you treasure and value most in life.
-Homepage, Worship.com
This is obviously a definition of “lifestyle worship” or the idea that an authentic, Jesus-following lifestyle is what Jesus was talking about in John 4.
In terms of a more specific “act” of worship, Vineyard worship leader, David Ruis, says that
…it’s just giving God all of your attention…
-David Ruis, Winds of Worship 3
I thought you guys might have something else good to add… or maybe a good way of combining the practice of lifestyle worship with the act of worshipping…
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