Missional Living

5-0…in case you missed it.

I'm having some problems getting email notifications when someone comments on a post…I'll work on figuring it out, but in the meantime, please be patient. It's not that I'm not interested in the discussion, it's just that Mr. Wizard jacked something up…

Sorry for the inconvenience! 

I read somewhere that if Jesus were here today, he'd be born into the hip-hop scene. Hmmmm….

Maybe Pharrell and Mary J. Blige would've had a baby boy, looked for a room at the nearest NY hotel, but couldn't find a place because the VMAs were in town. Maybe we'd have ended up with Scriptures that read completely differently. Instead of a decidedly Hebrew/Jewish flavor to the Torah/Pentateuch/Prophets/Psalms (not to mention the entire NT), things would have had a different contextualization…

In fact, the 23rd Psalm might even read like this:

The Lord is all that, I need for nothing.

He allows me to chill.

He keeps me from being heated and allows me to breathe easy.

He guides my life so that I can represent and give shout outs in His name.

And even though I walk through the hood of death, I don't back down, for You have my back.

The fact that He has me covered allows me to chill. 

He provides me with back-up In front of player-haters, and I know that I am a baller and life will be phat.

I fall back in the Lord's crib for the rest of my life.

I don't know about all the theological implications in that. But one thing is sure. My Daddy is a beast. And for all you sick boys who don't back down, it's like this: one day we're gonna all be bangin' at His crib, y'all. Phat eats and everything. Until then, it's on. 

Today has been much too crazy to blog anything of depth. We are in our pre-game rituals for middle school camp next week, preparing the band to make it’s full debut next Sunday, as well as me preparing to preach both morning services and teach next week at camp.

So, in lieu of deep, philosophical-theological-homiletical-hermeneutical rantings,….enjoy this.

Part One here. Part Two here.

In the spring semester, a guy named Scott entered the dorm. His upper body shriveled with Muscular Dystrophy (the fascio-scapula-humeral kind), Scott was the grinning preacher boy from Shreveport who played golf, loved to fish, and took it as his personal mission to ‘redeem’ Dave from the pits of Hell he evidently teetered on. But Dave wouldn’t have it. He seemed to instinctively know just when Scott would show up….and he’d disappear outside for a smoke. The rest of the God Squad figured Dave felt convicted of his sinful life. Perhaps. But I also think Dave just didn’t like the smell of spiritual arrogance.

One night, Scott catches Dave and I in our room (217 to be exact…up the stairs, 2^nd door on the right.) Dave is sitting on the window sill, smoking what must have been his 5^th Marlboro since dinner. We’re listening to Phil Keaggy’s The Wind and The Wheat album. The March of the Clouds is playing and Dave is ruminating about what it must have been like to be one of the angels looking over God’s shoulder during The Creation.

Scott busts in the room. “At least you’re listening to some ‘Christian’ music for a change…” he says.

Dave gets up and puts on some Dead Kennedys. (I don’t remember the exact album.)

Scott says, “Dave, you really need to give your life to Jesus, man. He loves you.”

No response from Dave.

“Dude, are you even listening? You know Jesus died for you, right?”

Nothing.

“He knows what you’re going through…… He knows what it’s like…. He knows your pain…”

Still nothing.

Scott rolls up his sleeve and shows Dave a scar on his left bicep. “This is where they took out live muscle to test it for MD. …in all that pain, Jesus was there for me.”

Dave then rolled up his sleeve to reveal a small bullet wound on the back of his shoulder. “You ever been SHOT? That’s pain.”

Scott then lifts his shirt to reveal his ribcage, a mere collection of rib bones with a thin veneer of skin stretched tightly across the middle. Like someone had a backyard BBQ and wrapped all the leftover bones in flesh-colored Saran Wrap for the family dog.

Christianity Today interview with Mark Driscoll…

Some great thoughts about living missionally within our culture. Especially since this new blog of mine is titled Missional Living…I especially like the closing few lines as CT asks, “What authors have most shaped your life and work?”

“I appreciate John Calvin for his Bible teaching, Charles Spurgeon for his gospel preaching, Martin Luther for his insights on faith and grace, and Billy Graham for the witness of his life. I have thousands of books in my library and lean most heavily on dead guys for theology and modern stand-up comedians for preaching tips. In the end, I am an old-school, Jesus-loving Bible-thumper with a penchant for the portrait of Jesus in Revelation as an ultimate fighter with a tattoo down his leg.” 

Subscribe to the Mars Hill podcast here.

This will be a fast and furious week before we head out to Padre.

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.

On Monday, I took Darien on a ‘man date’. We picked up a couple of cherry slushes from Sonic, went to pick up some fishing lures, bike inner tubes, and a new soccer ball. On our way home, we spoiled our lunch by stopping off at Krispy Kreme. We spent nearly an hour sitting in KK and talking about all the random things in a 5-year-old’s head. Good times.

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

Today is Thursday….feels like a month since my last post, but it’s only been a few days. We’re in the middle of a tech remodel in our youth center (screens, DLP projectors, PA, etc.). Thank you, Jesus. But it’s a slow-going work. We’re trying to get it online by Saturday for a SBTC Disaster Relief Conference….right now WE could use a little Disaster Relief.

But it’s gonna be awesome…

Aha!

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.