I Am Living Proof

Tagged by Ric Booth for a very cool conversation starter:

What is your favorite book of the Bible?

Not to over think it, I had to really ask myself, “What is my favorite book?”. If I am really honest with myself, this is different than asking:

Favorite prophet: Isaiah
Most quoted from: Jeremiah
Most identifies with: Hosea
Mark myself against: Mark
In Awe of God: John
Wraps up everything about God: 1 John
Absolute giddy about: Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation
Thinks is not boring: Numbers, Deuteronomy
Keep going back to: Acts
Currently stuck in: Psalm
Taught by: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon
Could spend a year on: Genesis

Even despite my constant temptation of getting Isaiah 53 tattooed on my back in Hebrew and English, my favorite book has to be Romans.

When I think of what I am placed on this earth to do, nothing but absolutely nothing is more important than sharing the gospel of my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

It is this Epistle to the Romans that two things are established:

• Puts everybody on the same playing field when approaching the Most High God - It removes all excuses. Not only it establish how we stand with God but it challenges us into answering one very important question.  That question is not whether we can be saved but rather do we think we need to be saved. In other words, how is salvation possible if you don’t think you need to be saved.
• Despite it laying out the path to salvation in order to get to God, this letter is written out to believers - It essentially lays out the basics of Christianity: hope, faith, love, spreading the gospel, promises of His love, His holiness and righteousness, wrestling between flesh and spirit and the dismantling of religiosity by separating law and spirit. One way I have heard it put: The Gospel According to Paul. It is very good news, indeed.

Above all, Romans contains the single greatest passage in the Bible, in my opinion. We can put our faith in that when all else fails and everything is being destroyed around us, it is just God and us and nothing can separate us from His love:

Romans 8:31-39 (NKJV) What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

As it is written: “For Your sake we are killed all day long;
We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”

Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Caught this little jewel of an article, entitled “Indefinite Detention? That’ll Set Those Damned Kids Straight” from a local Dallas paper called The Dallas Observer. Richardson is a suburb that sits not 10 minutes from downtown Dallas (that is if Central Expressway had zero traffic). Really, this makes me proud to be in North Texas. *sniff

Excerpt:

Last March, an immigration lawyer named Griselda Ponce testified before the U.S. District Court in Austin about conditions at Hutto, and told of an occasion when the five- or six-year-old daughter of a woman she was interviewing had to go to the rest room. The captain on duty told the girl that she could not do so during a head count. Ponce said that the girl made “six or seven requests,” and was rebuffed each time; after about fifteen minutes, the girl “smelled of urine.”

Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells. And they were not allowed to take the pictures they had made back to their cells and hang them up. When Hutto opened as an immigration-detention center, children attended school there only one hour a day. Detainees, including children, wore green or blue prison-issue scrubs …

Detainees said that when parents or children broke rules guards threatened them with separation from their children. Kevin Yourdkhani, at the prompting of one of Hines’s law students, wrote a brief description of one such occasion. “I was in my bed and my dad came to fix my bed,” he wrote. “When the police came and saw my dad in the room, he said, ‘If He comes and see my dad again in my room His going to put my mom in a siprate jail and my dad in a sipate jail and me a foster kid.’ I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy. I went to sleep. I felt If I will be siprated I can never see my parents again, and I will get step-parents and they will hurt me or maybe they will kill me.”

What did God say about immigrants in our country:

Leviticus 19:33-34 ‘And if a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him. The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

If you think you have seen that before, you are not crazy.

Allow me to be harsh here. If you think that commandment was for the Israelites in the Promised Land, let me respond to that by asking one simple question: “Do you believe the Word of God is timeless?”

Can we pick and choose what applies to us and what doesn’t? Or does is the Torah is the absolute standard of God which is absolute perfection.

What about immigrants? What about capital punishment? What about divorce? What about tattoos? How can we possibly live up to that standard?

Short answer: we cannot live up to that standard. That is impossible.

Long answer: we cannot do it without God. God never intended to lay down His law for us to mindlessly follow him. God wanted us to love Him and fully depend on Him. By God, we are righteous and not by what have done or will do.

By what we know of God, how would His heart respond to our treatment of immigrants that we have labeled, ‘illegal’? By His heart, how we suppose to treat immigrants?

I felt about Prosperity gospel in the same way John Piper does. When I talk about it, I start cussing. When John speaks about it, he does it with a whole lot less cussing.

Thank God.

Jeremiah 13:17 But if you will not hear it, My soul will weep in secret for your pride; My eyes will weep bitterly And run down with tears, Because the Lord’s flock has been taken captive.

ht: Hope Road

Funny. There is this thing called the Bible. You know, the Word of God. If I read, it might have answers in it like:

Isaiah 53:2 (NKJV) For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him.

I swear, I am so tempted to get Isaiah 53 tattooed on my back in Hebrew, Greek and English.

God speaks to us:

Jeremiah 16:1-2 (NKJV) The word of the Lord also came to me, saying, “You shall not take a wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place.”

I am of the belief that being married is not a result of a series of random events. Everything that happens happens for a reason.

I am knee deep into the Book of Jeremiah and this verse jumped out at me (as well as chapters 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 21, 22, etc.). This got me to thinking:

If we are obedient to God, call on His name, are utter dependent on Him and abide by His will and not our own, then if He needed you not to marry, He would have said so directly.

If we listen to God when we want to, lean on Him only when times are tough, try to live this life by our own strength and just do things when we want to, then life is going to be a series of random events that might include getting married.

I get this strange feeling that because we Christians lift and exalt the idea of marriage (some as a backlash to the easy going nature of the world when it comes to marriage and divorce) to such a level that once we get into marriage and that was a covenant with God then our lives will be blessed.

In other words, are we putting marriage and the idea of being married before our God? Are we making it our idol?

Writer Ashley Weis said it best in a recent article:

I want to be enough. I want my husband to love me, to notice me and only me. I want to be the most beautiful, astounding, heart-throbbing woman in the world to him. I want to be enough!

When thoughts like those enter my soul I step back and realize that every one of them begins with “I.” None has to do with God.

My idealistic view of marriage was selfish. I wanted my husband to validate my beauty as a woman. I wanted to feel loved and enough. I made his struggle with sexual sin about me. How could I ever support him if I kept making this about me?

Being married doesn’t automatically make it the will of God. The entire life lesson about abide and submitting to the will of God that is learned is that it is not about me but it is all about Him. It is not mine but Thine will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

When God started quickly answering my prayer requests not too long ago, it broked and humble me again. I soon realized that I was afraid to go to God with the big and scary questions not because I couldn’t ask God but rather I was scared to get the answer I wasn’t looking for.

In this last week, I took it all to God: the big and the scary questions. Whatever I came up with, He answered them one right after the other. God kept confirming what I was doing over and over again. “Search My heart. Love others as I love you. That girl you keep asking about? Continue to honour and lift her up. Keep serving your ex-wife. Keep showing others My heart.”

Strangely enough, none of the answers were “Wait”.

For the last year, I was all set out to wait two, three, five years or the rest of my life to let God complete His work within me. But all of a sudden, God kept encouraging, edifying and strengthening me and keeps blessing me with His knowledge, wisdom and endurance over and over again. I keep getting pushed into ministry opportunites over and over again. (The salvation of one 6 year old girl weighs heavily on my heart.) Holy Spirit keeps telling me to talk to this person and that person. I keep engaging and uplifting others.

Yet, I never grow weary or tired of it. Yet I want to do more.

Again, the journey is incredible. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.