Moving My Cheese

Matt Chandler preached at Southern Baptist Seminary's chapel in Louisville, KY last week, and it was very good: entertaining and biblical. The primary audience is definitely those training for vocational Christian work, but it's encouraging and convicting for about anyone who's willing to be encouraged and convicted.

In Collin County, one of the major struggles I see is that we don't seem to see God at work. Matt's message from Hebrews 11 is a great reminder that God is at work, has always been at work. But one of his primary points is one that maybe too many seminary students and too many Christians have not heard: the progress of the Gospel involves suffering, poverty - and those who suffer are doing it just as well as those who don't. Not exactly "your best life now." And technique is not the determining factor.

He then wraps it up with a call to personal holiness - again, a departure from the sad emphasis on technique that has more in common with management theory than the Bible, and which has done so much damage to evangelicalism.

You can listen here, although SBTS doesn't make it easy to link to specific chapel messages.

Labels: Matt Chandler

Pretty much all of us can say we're too busy to pray.

We mean to pray more, but, well, life is busy. Something at work blows up and we go into disaster clean-up mode. Or your kids gets sick and you spend all day worrying about fevers, running to doctor appointments and wiping noses. Life is busy and full of variables that don't stick to the schedule.

And I complain a lot about busy-ness, because it keeps me from prayer.

But would I see incarceration as a great chance to finally do some praying?

This guy did.


(via John Piper)

“What one thing about God in Christ speaks directly into today’s trouble? … Just as we don’t change all at once, so we don’t swallow all of truth in one gulp. We are simple people. You can’t remember ten things at once. Invariably, if you could remember just ONE true thing in the moment of trial, you’d be different. Bible “verses” aren’t magic. But God’s words are revelations of God from God for our redemption. When you actually remember God, you do not sin. The only way we ever sin is by suppressing God, by forgetting, by tuning out his voice, switching channels, and listening to other voices. When you actually remember, you actually change. In fact, remembering is the first change.”

- David Powlison

(via FirstImportance)

Labels: Quotes

You probably know someone who uses food, or alcohol, or shopping to cover up insecurities or medicate emotional wounds. They eat not because they're hungry, but because they have an emotional attachment to food. Or they shop because buying new things makes them happy, even if it's fleeting and a terrible waste of money.

What about noise?

I've written a few times about noise, and there's a great Nooma video (called "Noise") that illustrates this well. Here's a test for you: in your evening commute, turn off your radio and don't call anyone on the phone. Uncomfortable? My guess is yes.

How about running? A guest blogger on my friend John Dyer's blog wrote this:

In the April issue of Runner’s World, Olympian runner Kara Goucher made this comment when talking about her music playlist for running:

I listen to music on my easy runs. I’d love to on my long runs, but I think it’s better for me to be self-aware.

Though Kara was not against music, she helped me realize that running with music made me less of a self-aware runner than I wanted to be. The bigger epiphany for me that moment as well was that we often use outside stimuli to block out certain feelings, emotions, thoughts, pain, etc. in our life, and in the process it makes us less self-aware as a human being as well.

What are you using noise to drown out? If you had to sit quietly for 1 hour - no cell phone, no music, talk radio, facebook, twitter or texting - how easy would it be? Are you scared of what thoughts your mind might bring up if you couldn't drown them out? As John writes in another post about another (largely) technological addiction:

Pornography is not just about lust. It is also about the power of images to connect to the deepest parts of a person’s soul through the intensity of story. My suggestion is not to merely try harder to avoid lust, but to think about how you can avoid connecting to the stories of naked women and instead reconnect your life story – both the pain and the triumph – to the Gospel, the story of God working in the world to save his creation through Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That story alone has the power to heal.

Are you using technological noise to avoid God's healing?