September 15, 20099:30 am
Several years ago Caedmon’s Call came out with a worship album. On the album was an old hymn (I actually have no clue, but I am assuming it was) called (again no clue) The Lord Is A Warrior. At the time I really didn’t get it. I understood that he was with the Israelites as they took over the promised land and he was with them in battle over and over again, but I couldn’t figure out why that would make a worship song. Aren’t there more important things that we could be singing about? Love, patience, dying for us. But recently, largely because we are studying Revelation (just one) at church, I have been thinking about God a little bit differently. We typically think of the nice and loving side of God. We leave the scary God of Wrath and Revenge alone. That is hard to do when reading Revelation. But I think it is this side of God that is helping me to understand why “The Lord is a Warrior” would make a worship song. There will come a time when God will say enough is enough. The blood of my saints has been shed long enough and I am going to come down there and seek revenge. It is then that I am glad God is a great warrior. It gives me comfort to know that God will look at the evil and injustices in this world and correct them. I’m just as glad that the wrath he will unleash is not for me. (As well I don’t want this wrath to be for anyone else).
August 19, 200911:56 am
Studying Revelation you get a glimpse of God that can be quit scary. There are crazy scenes of God’s wrath being poured out onto the earth resulting in a lot of death, a lot of blood, and people who side against God are “tormented for ever and ever.” If you were to only look at this picture of God it is very clear how one could get a wrong idea of who God is. Don’t make the mistake of assuming this is the entirety of God’s attributes. I also feel the reverse of this needs to be true as well. We see stories of God’s love and assume he is only loving. We need to study all of scripture and develop a view of God that encompasses everything we know about who he is.
August 5, 200910:24 pm
Before worship this Sunday the congregation was challenged with a different way of thinking. We are usually taught that God wants us to worship him. And that is very much true and goes hand in hand with what I’m about to say.
God allows us to worship him.
In the Garden of Eden, he had every right to say never mind, this didn’t work out like I wanted. Good bye world. He didn’t have to create and go through with his elaborate plan of salvation, but thankfully he did. Thankfully he took it upon himself to allow us a path and a way to come to him and worship at his feet.
July 8, 200912:04 pm
Why do we lie to unbelievers? Accept Jesus as your savior and everything will be perfect. Your finances will be figured out, all of life’s problems will be erased. We try and sell Jesus as our personal problem solver. The problem is not everybody feels they need a personal problem solver. My pastor used this analogy: We are trying to get people to take a vaccine for a disease they don’t think they have. Why don’t we stop making God into something cheap and show the world who he really is.
In another direction, all of life’s problems are not erased. Christians get fatal diseases, we find cancer taking over our bodies, we get into car accidents, we lose our jobs and our houses. There are times when life is ridiculously hard and that is OK. A life free of strife was never promised to us. But the one thing we should have in these situations many of us (including me) is inexplicable joy. The world should see in us a joy that seemingly defy our situations because we have faith and are resting in the control of our God.
Again, hopefully there isn’t any blasphemy in here.
June 24, 20093:57 pm
Ok so this feels a little weird. I am typically not the type of person that preaches. In fact, I am usually a man of few words. (I am not sure how I got roped into this blogging thing). Plus most of these words and thoughts are not my own, but here we go anyway.
In Revelation 8:6 there are seven Angels with seven trumpets, each trumpet blast means bad things happen. Death and destruction are everywhere and then in verse 13, after the fourth trumpet, we take a brief pause. Seemingly out of nowhere, we find an eagle flying calling out “Woe! Woe! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth, because of the trumpet blasts about to be sounded by the other three angels!” In a moment of honesty our pastor admitted he had no idea what to do with this verse. Death and destruction everywhere and then a bird telling us it is only going to get worse. Awesome.
So we took a little journey over to Matthew 20 and the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. A landowner goes out early in the morning to hire men to work his field. He then goes out in the third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh hour to hire more workers. (There were twelve hours in a work day) We focused on the landowner because he does something a little odd. Typically in that day landowners would go out in the morning hire people and that was it. But this landowner is always going to out to find more workers.
Then we took a look at all of the prophets sent to Israel. They came with the message of “Woe to you!” Now this wasn’t a message of lookout destruction is coming and there is nothing that you can do about it. These were messages of look out destruction will come if you do not change your ways. Repents and return to the Lord.
So we added all these thing up and go back to Revelation and with all of this in mind, the eagle reads a little different. Woe to you, destruction is coming, but it doesn’t have to be for you. Repent and come to the Lord. He is here even in this eleventh hour searching for more people who want and need his salvation. Even in the midst of God’s righteous anger and judgement of the earth, he is still searching for people who want his love.
That is our God.
June 14, 200910:03 pm.!.
This is as good as it gets today. Sorry.
- This week has been way too busy. My posting has suffered significantly because of that. In fact I checked to make sure a SSS wasn’t my last post.
- Played on the worship team this weekend and in my opinion, we completely rocked. (more on this later).
- Colette and I really need to make more money. This is what I get for being a substitute teacher. I really hate looking for jobs.
- I am dying of thirst at this exact moment. It is probably all the chocolate and peanut butter toppings on my ice cream.
- I’m thinking of adding what will be a weekly post about something that caught my attention in church, preferably from the message. I’m calling it, “Thoughts From Church.” (Be jealous of my creativity, I give you permission). I think it will be good for me to dwell on these thoughts for a little while. I already have one brewing in my head.
- Gonna power through the rest of this email and then it will be bed time.
- Did I mention it was a long week? Well tomorrow it starts all over again.
Betrayal film
