new beginnings

This morning I moved into my friend's apartment for a summer sub-lease. It's a very interesting feeling - taking over someone's home. It sort of feels like taking over their life. But that's not true.

Today I begin a new chapter in my life. School's out, my summer job starts on Monday, I've got a new place for a few months...now is my new year's, now is my time of new beginnings. For the first time I am COMPLETELY on my own - no roommates, a job - and I'm really at a loss as to what to feel. Should I be excited? Terrified? Feel like an idiot for writing this at all? Possibly all of the above. At any rate, this is an exciting new time for me, so in keeping with new beginnings, I would like to offer my own resolutions - a hope of what is to come. Perhaps the legacy of this summer will be something that God will use mightily in my life. I pray it is so.

1. Looking at my health as a way to glorify God, not to pick up girls. This means working out to build my strength and stamina for His glory, buying food that glorifies God and prompts me to eat in a healthy manner.

2. Learning to organize, both as a work ethic and as a personal choice. Since God has given me the blessing of a space to call home for a time that I am solely responsible for, I must make it usable always.

3. Pursuing knowledge. I have time this summer to spend preparing myself for the challenges ahead of me, or I have time to waste in pursuit of meaningless mediocrity. The answer I choose will have great bearing on much of my life.

4. Journeying into a closer walk with God. Again, I have time - but much of it will be taken up in doing much FOR God, not necessarily getting to know Him or being with Him. From spiritual disciplines like fasting, prayer, and the reading of God's word to simply taking time during my days - perhaps taking entire days - to simply get alone and listen to Him, I want to get to know Him again as one would begin anew a relationship with an old friend, a lover lost and found again.

If you are reading this, you probably know me, and are thus a part of my life more than you know. Hold me to these things. Help me become the man God wishes for me to be.

reflections on prayer

I had a habit growing up of taking notes on books and then never reading them again. To counter this (I think), I started leaving notes within the books, writing them on pages crammed in the covers or scribbled in the margins. Something huge is about to happen in my life regarding discipline, and my best friends and I are beginning to really dig into the need for prayer, so I offer these reflections on prayer from FreshWind, Fresh Fire by Jim Cymbala, copied by me years and years ago. Have they shaped me at all?

"The condition of the church may be very accurately gauged by its prayer meetings. So is the prayer meeting a grace-ometer, and from it we may judge of the amount of divine working among a people. If God be near a church, it must pray. And if he be not there, one of the first tokens of his absence will be a slothfulness in prayer." Charles Spurgeon

"God likes to see His people shut up in this, that there is no hope but in prayer. Herein lies the church's power against the world." Andrew Boner, 1853

"The greatest answer to prayer is more prayer." Samuel Chadwick

"If I say ' I ought to pray' I will soon run out of motivation and quit, the flesh is too strong. I must be driven to pray." Jim Cymbala

"The best style of prayer is that which cannot be called anything by a cry." Spurgeon


Wow...what if we prayed expecting things to happen?

falling fire

When I was a kid, I had this crazy idea: I would own a record company. I would sign a few praise and worship bands, get some big names to cross over to me, and have the coolest Christian comapny in the world. I would call the company Falling Fire Records. Yeah, I was a crazy kid.

I convey that long repressed memory to you because of a conversation I had with a few friends last night. We talked about the Holy Spirit. Who is He (or "it" as we seem to regulate Him to in worship)? Why do we not talk about Him or sing about Him other than the quick prayer or song for God to "send His Spirit down"? I'll admit it; I don't understand.

Many of you know I'm Baptist by now - and probably more than most denominations, we try to avoid talking about "the Spirit". Spirit issues are shakey ground, conjuring up images of faith-healings, speaking in tongues, exorcisms, and being "slain in the Spirit". To be honest, outside of goin to a friend's church once in a while and hearing people speak in tongues, all I learned about this ambiguity in my faith came from TBN specials showing people having seizures in church! I didn't want that. I don't still.

What I do want, however, is a fresh movement of God in my life and in the ministries that I am a part of. And, as my friends and I discussed yesterday, the "phantom problem" that we have been puzzling over in these ares may very well be that we have little concept of walking with God, of practicing His presence, of conversing and being taught by the Holy Spirit. We see someone as spiritual if they read large chuncks of Scripture and memorize them, or if they are particularly intellectual when it comes to theology, or if they always come to church and are on some kind of committee. But the people in the Bible who were filled with the Spirit of God were so filled because of their love of spending time with God. Enoch. Moses. David. The apostles. These men spent time with their Lord, and were used in amazing ways as a result. Change happens when zeal is mixed with truth (the whole "worship in spirit and truth" thing?).

I...we...all of us, need to experience God through the person of the Holy Spirit. Oh how I long for a day when I can be moved to tears over the lost, over a people or place! That I would be "led by the Spirit" somewhere, and that leading would be more than a spiritual guessing game! My question I leave you with today is this:

TODAY, what does a tongue of fire look like?