Maybe we too have surveyed the land, we taken into account the risk, and worked up the courage, but when the moment comes we shrink back.  We make excuses. “The timing wasn’t right.”  Or, “I don’t want to rock the boat just now.”  Certainly the case can be made to count the cost.  We might lose the respect of our roommate.  We may lose a friend.  Clearly, wisdom must also be considered.  ”Fools rush in.”  Sometimes it is not what we say that offends (although the gospel is offensive), but how we say it that drives most away.  However, someone must say something regarding the truth of the matter.  A decision must me pressed.  Will internal fears for acceptance overwhelm the urgency of eternal matters regarding those we live and work near?  

Jesus threw down a challenge to those who would follow, it is a risk.  It is never a question of fearing and not fearing.  It is always a question of who we will fear the most in each moment of life.  Will we fear people or fear God?  Will we let the powers of influence bully us around, or will we order our lives under the omniscient gaze of Christ, who goes with us to the pockets of the world to be his witness?  Lucy in the Chronicles of Narnia asked about Aslan, the Christ figure in the story, “Is he safe?”  ”Safe?” was the response.  ”Who said anything about safe?  ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”  Following Christ pushes us out to public humiliation.  We should ask ourselves why we are afraid.  We should ask ourselves, did God consider us worth the risk.  Yes He did.  He took the risk of personal scorn and even death to win us.  He or she is worth the risk.Let

Family during the holidays is a gift of God. Enjoy each one. And everyone’s family presents a different set of challenges. Some love God and some don’t really care to. Some show up to church just out of tradition … but deep down their own family traditions take priority. I know the temptation to get absorbed, caught up in the holiday spirit and lose sight of Christ during Christmas season.

Jesus would not have us do that. Jesus denied his family tradition to accomplish his plan of saving us.  Jesus was not pressured by his family to avoid loving His Father.  Jesus has made you his priority. He entered into this painful, confused life, and took it on. His approach to our confusion, half-hearted faith, and self-absorbtion … is to move even closer to us. Do you really believe this?  I In view of this incredible love … let us make Christ a priority in our hearts and actions – even above our family traditions.

Go to Church and sing with all your strength of his great glory and love. Remain in the Word daily. Go away and meditate … set your mind of God more often. Make Jesus your highest ambition. Make his Church your most important community and family.  God the Father has given his own Son over to death for our salvation! This is the gift of Christmas. Soli Deo Gloria.

I am going to reflect on some of the popular misconceptions of God found in the little book Your God is Too Small by J.B. Phillips and The Attributes of God, by A.W. Pink.  In the coming weeks it my hope that these reflections might increase our desire, knowledge, and love for the God who disclosed himself in humanity.

Does your concept of God resemble something like a  ”resident policeman?”  Phillips argues in his first chapter that many have developed an experience of God through an “inner voice” we call our conscience.  It can be our omniscient “party pooper.”  It goes with us everywhere and seems to spoil all our fun.  It seems that the conscience’s usual tactic is to snooze while we indulge or binge ourselves on something, and then the next hour, conversation, or morning commute, we are racked with guilt, feelings of unhappiness, to the point of self-hate.  Worse it stays with us like a dark cloud ruining our day maybe week and controlling the way we love others or even treat people whom we stand in line with at the grocery store.

Our conscience feels as though God is speaking right to us.  ”Ugh,  I shouldn’t have done that or said that.”  We need to try harder or work off that misdeed committed yesterday.  So we do.  We go off and volunteer time somewhere.   We give $5 to the homeless guy with the sign.  Then we feel better about ourselves, and that little voice goes quiet.  It feels like God is happy with us … for now, or until we mess up again.  So God becomes like that cop who makes his appearance on the freeway and we wonder … how long has he been watching me or following me.  Deep down we know our conscience may be right, but is our conscience God speaking to us?

Should we interpret our conscience as God, or at least the medium by which God speaks?  Not exactly.  Our consciences were created originally to see God and play in his world.  But in our lapsed world from God the human conscience is sufficient just enough to condemn us.  Due to our rebellion from God our conscience has been distorted and our apprehension of God now is disfigured.  God appears to us like our own reflection in the carnival mirror at the country fair.  When we gaze into it, the image is horrifying.  We see shapes that are hideous and gross caricatures of our true image.  Simply put, our consciences are sufficient just enough to give us a sense of an eternal standard to the degree that we don’t like what we see, feel, or sense, about ourselves and God.  As the apostle Paul argued we are without excuse to live as though God doesn’t care about how we live.  And it will be our consciences that will be the evidence that will be brought against us in the courtroom of God’s justice.

Not only are they tainted by sin, but our consciences have been handled by others.  As children we developed a sense or vision for what is good from our parents and family. We have collected a snowball of convictions handed down to us.  Our consciences are like “Playdough.”  Our parents did so many great things like teaching us to share, be honest, and to brush our teeth.  Yet, we also inherited all their failures.  These impacted our consciences and so our image of God.  Our Dad’s taught us that God is a regulator and tends to be uninvolved.  Our mothers taught us that God is micromanager and at times has fits of anger for our annoying habits.

No wonder God seems to some of us like that highway patrolman.  He is overbearing.  He is uninvolved unless we do something wrong, then he is at times tired of us.  He is that nagging presence we prefer to ignore or suppress.  Right?

So our consciences can can be accurate to the point of condemning us but can also cast a very hideous portrait of God.

That being said, God should not be measured or known through our conscience.  Our conscience rightly used should lead everyone to repentance and away from self-reliance.  Freed from the self-made prisons of our conscience we know God through the bible and especially through Jesus.  Thankfully, we find that he is not uninvolved, but very involved, so much so that he gave up the eternal majesty to enter our world and mess.  Thankfully, he is not overbearing, but kind, patient, and very generous with our failures – even to the point of our impatience in his own death for us.  Jesus is the concept we should aim our hearts and worship.

Next time you are invited to go off to a quite place and listen to His voice,  like we were told to do at youth camp, instead open your bible.  Look for Jesus there.  Let him speak to you there. Jesus is our “resident intercessor.”  He knows all of our failures, which sends shivers down our spine.  But his voice can be strong and corrective but always assuring, kind, and filled with promises.  His voice actually enters into our conscience to heal with the same Words that created worlds, even our life.  We draw near to His voice by faith again and again until we match that voice with His face … we behold his glory.

“The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.”  John 10:3-4

Our team this week served at a homeless shelter in the middle of Athens Wednesday night. It is a ministry done in the old fashion style of gathering men and women from the streets, preaching at them, and then feeding them with a warm meal. Whether we agree with this approach to the oppressed we had the opportunity to serve Jesus with other Christians filled with compassion for those hit hardest. Our team was able put bread before those who had not eaten in days. We were able to share our story with them concerning a loving God, and sing to them Amazing Grace. Even more, we were able to sit with them and hear their story.

This is where Soliman comes back into our story. I sat down next to a man and asked him if he spoke English. He said yes in a rapid style. He also spoke Greek and Arabic. He was from Iraq and Iran. He is a builder of homes. He told me he came to Athens 12 years ago to build for the Greeks. I asked him what went wrong? He replied, “I finished the job, and no one needed me again.” This is the cruelty of the Greek recession. This is the cruelty of sin. We talked more. He told me how much he wanted to come to America. I pointed to Christi and son Carter and said we loved his new country. I asked if I could share a piece of bread with him and he and I talked and ate bread. In that moment, we shared our common value as image bearers of God. We were two men separated by drastically different cultures, languages, and wealth, but united by need, united by bread. I inquired of God. He repeated over and over, God is Great, and One. Soliman clearly was Muslim. We finished our bread and I gave him a hug. God is love … I told him and I love Jesus as God. I was soon called to another task. Our conversation ended there.

Where does the Muslim concept of God and the Christian part ways? Our Great God also condescends to us. He is great. He did not need to Create, but He did. He did not need to endure this race, this broken and hungry world, but He has. In fact, He became hungry, poor, and lonely. He ate bread as an equal, even though He was not our equal. For He had designed our inward most being and plotted the very course of our lives! He is the eternal God who condescends to us in pain and searing loss. He not only gives us His bread, but eats with us.

Pray for Soliman. That he might know that Jesus is Great and from that Greatness bled and died to fill him and make him great. Soli deo gloria!

Sunday marked the 5th full day we have been in Athens, Greece. We worship at the First Evangelical Church in Athens, right under the shadows of the Acropolis. The Acropolis means “edge of city” or height of city. And it is. It is an amazing cite in the center of Athens. The ancient engineers of the 5th century BC (430 years before Jesus) knew what they were doing in order to bring glory to the goddess Athena, the god of culture and the symbol of Athens. It is magnificent and glorious.

The Greek people, however, are in turmoil and under the shroud of uncertainty. Their glory is bound up in their past. Protests, strikes, and unemployment (16%) mar the reality of Greece’s future glory. The pastor spoke from Psalm 82. It was a reminder to the Grecian Christian community to not look to politics or the gods of promises for their glory but to God and His Son.

The first image we see in Psalm 82 is God. He is the one who assumes the global throne and He alone sits in session with his divine council, God in three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We might also presume He takes council with His elders as pictured in Revelation 4. In the midst of the gods, politics, kings, promises, and powers of the world, God rules! The gods of human power rule from darkness. They rule for their own glory, which result in inequity and power games. The poor are downtrodden and used as political human shields for their own advancements. Where is justice? God will have it in judgment. He rules and there will be equity.

Revelation 4 and 5 come to mind. Exploding out from the midst of this scene is the Lamb. Jesus alone is worthy to crack open the seals of the scroll of human history. And in His right hand He wields the globe. He rules by power and reconciliation. Justice will be established, now or later. Now by His blood alone can we be friends of God. Yet, that same gentle ruler, Jesus, the wounded King will return to establish beauty, glory, and shalom to our world of riots, wars, and unemployment.

As His body, united together for this hope, we gathered on Mars Hill after the service to bring beauty to the world through a cleaning project at the site of the ancient Aeropagus. It was here that Paul stood up and preached of the eternal God who is “a sei” the God of Himself – “I am who I am.” He is a knowable God, revealed now through His Son Jesus who rose from the dead. We stood under the shadows of the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and Nike – the god of victory. We live in a Nike world, a world of human pride and resistance to God’s reign of mercy and goodness.

Yet as we stood there it started to rain, heavy. Thunder clapped. As I gazed up at the Temple Nike nearly 100 feet over us, this ancient symbol of the gods dedicated to human achievement, a lightning bolt tore threw the clouds and plunged down striking the ruins of Nike. Shards of that ancient limestone came tumbling down. And we were at once all reminded in that moment who was in charge of this earth. The Lamb of God.

Keep our team in your prayers. Today (Monday) we go back into that city to visit the Red Light District. 

The Temple of Poseidon

It has been too long since I last blogged.  But I am now returning to this discipline of grace as I make reflections of God and life.

I am in Athens, Greece with my family and our team from Mission to the World.  Our team is comprised of 8 college students from all over the US.  Most of our team arrived a week before we did.  We have arrived as of June 8th for just over 6 full weeks to serve the First Greek Evangelical Church and the mercy ministries they are involved in near and around Athens.

The Pastor is Giotis Kantartzis.  He is a native of Greece and has been a catalyst and visionary for the Reformed Evangelical presence.  We are excited to be here.

We are living outside of Athens, in a town called Pikermi.  Here is the Greek Bible Institute, the only Greek bible college in the entire country.  My family and our team will be cared for by the President Argryis Petrous.

Over the course of this trip I will be posting some of my reflections in Greece.  Soli Deo Gloria!

1) Hell is a problem for secular westerners not the rest of the world.  This is true.  If you were to go to the middle east or even the center of Islam they would have no problem with a God who punishes those who refuse to submit to God and his standard.  In fact, many cultures in the world demand a God who does justice and has a consequence for the oppressors, warmongers, murderers, rapists, slave-traders, and just flat out evil.  To those who are oppressed in Darfur or Sudan ask them if they want a God who ignores oppression and the accumulation of wealth for the few and mass starvation for the rest.  None of us have a problem of demanding justice in this world, why then do we have a problem with justice carried into eternity?  If we are eternal beings and our moral spiritual sin affects our eternal lives, it makes sense that there are spiritual consequences for spiritual evil.  

2) The bible actually tells us that those who are going to Hell actually want it.  The bible is quite clear on this.  We don’t go to Hell kicking and screaming – against our will.  We actually have been living for, demanding, and desiring Hell.  Due to our overt desire for autonomy in life, to make our own decisions, and live out our desires, God gives us over to them.  If we don’t want God and want to determine our our lives apart from him – he gives us our desires, even if it contributes to our eternal separation from him.  The bible tells us that separation from God gave us spiritual and physical death.  This separation from God’s good designs has resulted in an exchange.  We have exchanged God for our own autonomy and we become more like “Gollum,” autonomy and selfish desires become the life in the end we crave more than God.  We don’t go into Hell kicking and screaming, we go into Hell demanding God out of our lives for eternity.  

3) A loving God must send people to Hell.  As I have somewhat mentioned already, a loving God that sort of ignores or overlooks evil such as murder and oppression is not loving, he is negligent.  You see it is a loving God who sees with hatred sin which can be compared to something cancerous, something if left alone would eat away and devour life.  This is how God reacts and moves against sin.  He reacts to the destructive and oppressive nature of sin that seeks to devour and destroy all that is good, and all that he loves and made.  Hell is justice to those who have made a life of living outside of God’s designs for life that was meant to flourish. With Hell we have a God of justice, a God who moves out of love to eradicate evil on an eternal scale.