We leave next Monday to spend a week at The Tiki and purposefully spend time relaxing, playing, laughing, and learning who we are in Christ. The theme, blatantly stolen from Spencer over at The Ooze, is SOULARIZE.

In preparation for my teaching, I’ve been looking at the beginning of our relationship with Christ. What is the core of salvation? Why have we boiled it down to a simple prayer or some cognitive recognition of facts…like our personal ‘state of the union’? Could there be more to it?

The bottom line is this: salvation is substitutionary. God provided a substitution in Christ (2 Cor 5:21, Isaiah 53:12) to accomplish what I could NEVER accomplish. My righteousness in Christ’s righteousness, not ‘self-righteousness’ done through doing good things (btw…we do ‘good works’ out of obedience, not in order to make up for the bad things we’ve done. See Romans 3:10)

It’s good to remember this: the lie of self-righteousness says that you must do good in order to please God. But God doesn’t love me when I’m good.

He just loves me. Not because of me, but because of Christ in me. My identity is in Christ, he is my substitute, so my righteousness (right standing with God) is His. My righteousness is as filthy rags. (Isaiah 64:6).

Yes, we MUST read scripture, pray, share the good news, and give. But those things are NOT what fulfills me: God fulfills me. Those things are merely the menu that leads to the meal.

Don’t stop at the menu. It never satisfies.

Get to the meal.

Why is it that Krispy Kreme won’t sell t-shirts bigger than XL….but Nike will sell sizes up to 5x??? Go figure.

But it’s gonna be awesome…

I *knew* it. The illustrious Steve Camp has put together the most concise rewiew of the DaVinci Code movie thus far: “40,000,000 people can be wrong.”

But the best line in the review *has* to be the following:
“The experience of watching this movie is kind of like listening to the Caner brothers: it is wearisome, nonsensical, arduous, historically twisted and in the end is unproductive.”

It brought a smile to my sun-dried face.

You can read the entire review here.

Plus, a huge list of 80′s music videos. Flock of Seagulls. Autograph. Power Station. Hair bands to new wave. Viva Los Ochenta! Thanks to the midway-cleansed marko for the link…

1. Life is not fair- put on your big girl panties and get over it!
2. The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
3. You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t become a vice-president with a corner office until you earn both.
4. If you think Mrs. Bradley is tough, wait till you get a boss.
5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents
   had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
6. If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them. Besides, your boss doesn’t speak WHINESE.
7. Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are
   now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes
   and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So
   before you save the rain forest, try cleaning up your own room.
8. Some schools may have done away with winners and losers, but
   life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and
   they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer.
   This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
10. Television is NOT real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to their jobs.
11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

It’s an excerpt from the book “Dumbing Down our Kids” by educator Charles Sykes. It is a list of eleven things you did not learn in school and directed at high school and college grads.

By the way….the ‘big girl panties’ line is mine, not Mr. Sykes….don’t want to get him in trouble…

If you haven’t already, meet Douggieboomer (a.k.a. Doug Royer), our newest intern here.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Douggie.

This afternoon, I’m beginning to take one of our interns through Wild At Heart for the summer. Great book. Last night, I ran across a ministry/blog entitled Outfitting Your Faith which focuses on reaching men, either uninvolved or marginally involved in the church, and creating relevant, authentic, godly friendships among the testosterone camp. And, this morning, I find this on Joe Thorn’s blog. How cool would that be for us guys?

So, I’m (still) churning around the question in my mind: What makes a godly man? How do we define Biblical manhood? Look at Jesus’ relationship with the disciples. Look at the early church fathers. Even the earlier fathers of our faith such as Abraham, Moses, Jacob, David, Solomon, etc.

In a world where boys who grow up fatherless (the father essentially betrays his son into life as a half-man), where do they look for manhood?

Evidently, Pastor Mike Sares, 52, the a former Denver English teacher and musician…and buddy Spence was talking about.

The article I found is here.
You can get a peek at what’s going on at scumoftheearth.net .

For any conspiracy theorists out there who may think that the church is teaching pablum-laced, watered-down theology, feel free to download sermons and/or subscribe to the podcast. You’ll find some great teaching, such as :
“Stuff Jesus Said”
“Being Drunk vs. Being Spirit Filled”
“The Problem With Suffering”
“Speaking in Tongues and Other Nonsense (and sense)”

…I think I’ll forward that last one to our IMB Trustees.

powered by performancing firefox

Thanks to the SBTC for putting this together again for the 4th year. Wolf, Lasater, and all the staff have done an outstanding job.

We’re heading back home after lunch….good times.