138 Challenge

Where did all the time go? The year 2016 felt like a blur. There was so much that happened in 2016, yet days felt like hours, while hours felt like seconds. It is hard to believe we are now in 2017. The clock will not turn back. We must embrace each moment because they are fleeting. If you are wired like me, then perhaps you use the turn of a new year to evaluate and plan for new opportunities to come in the months ahead.

Did you know that there are 8,760 hours in this calendar year? If you slept 8 hours a day, you would sleep 2,920 hours, which would leave 5,840 waking hours. If you worked 8 hours per day, 6 days a week, with no vacation, that would come to 2,496 hours, still leaving 3,344 waking hours. If you spent 4 hours a day, 6 days per week in traffic, that would come to 1,248 hours still leaving 2,096 waking hours remaining. If you spent 5 hours per day, 7 days per week with family or friends, it would come to 1,820 hours still leaving 276 hours remaining. By now, you either feel excited or overwhelmed by these possibilities. Hopefully, you heard these statistics and came to the realization that you have more free time available than you thought! Perhaps you realized how much time you have available that could be reallocated toward accomplishing something greater.

What if you invested just half of those 276 hours (138 hours) into something eternal? What if you committed that time to the Lord? What if you used time in traffic for communing instead of complaining? What if those 138 hours were given to prayer and meditation on Scripture? Just like spending time around a campfire will make you smell like smoke. If you spend more time with Jesus, you will become more like Him. We position ourselves around Jesus through prayer, meditating on Scripture and gathering with God’s family (local church).

What do you have to lose by trying something different? I am not promising you a better job, which will lead to more money, leading to a newer car or a newer home. These financial status changes may come for some of you, but certainly not all of you. However, I know your relationship status will change: from lonely to loved, from forgotten to forgiven. The Gospel changes us from the inside out. It changes us well before our circumstances. Will you take the challenge to commit 138 hours (or more) to knowing the Lord better this year? I promise you, accepting this challenge will change everything!

Undetected Spiritual Cancer

There is a cancer that is ravishing our society. Now, I use the word cancer hesitantly because I have not physically experienced the ravishing effect of cancer, but I have had loved ones suffer from cancer’s cruel hand. It is a dreadful disease that eats away at the physical body. However, there is a spiritual cancer that is subtle, but much more devastating. It goes undetected, and has been known to destroy families, organizations, and take the lives of those contaminated by it. This “cancer,” called materialism, is so dangerous because our human nature allows it to grow. To make matters worse, our culture feeds materialism 24 hours, 7 days a week.

So what is the cure? How do we treat this dreadful disease? Paul provides some encouraging words in Philippians 4:17. Hear and hearken to these words. “Not that I seek the gift itself, but I seek for the profit which increases to your account.”

This verse follows perhaps the most quoted and misapplied verse in all of Scripture, Philippians 4:13. This is the one we read on sports paraphernalia, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, laptops, pens… I could go on and on! “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” Before I completely offend you, let me be transparent and say that I too have misapplied this verse in the past for those very uses mentioned above. However, Paul was pushing the Philippians (and us!) toward something greater than a first place ribbon, dream job, new home, the survival of a devastating breakup, and the host of other reasons we attempt to apply this verse. Paul was pushing us toward heaven. He was reminding us of WHO we have, and WHO has us. He was encouraging the faithful family of God to keep sacrificing for what is eternal and not what is temporal. He was training their eyes to look past earth and focus on Heaven.

God graciously allows us to enjoy nice things- even material things! He loves us more than our feeble minds can fathom. However, the problem arises when I start to believe I deserve nice things. Believing I deserve anything in this life is the gravitational pull of the cancer of materialism. It makes us want what we don’t need and despise what we have. Hearken to the encouragement and warning of Paul in Philippians 4:17.

We have two accounts. One is temporal while the other is eternal. Aim to fill the right account with deposits. The cure to the cancer of materialism is CONTENTMENT and radical GENEROSITY. Contentment is always a heart issue. Contentment is attained by looking for God’s grace in every season, then responding to that grace with gratitude. Generosity is leveraging your time, talents and treasure for the Kingdom.

 Consider this, giving is less about getting something from you and more about getting Heaven in you.

Satisfies

“SATISFIES”. That’s what it said on the back of a popular brand of candy bar I picked up not too long ago. Somewhere in my heart, the Holy Spirit laughed. The advertising people who came up with this campaign know us all too well. When our bellies rumble, what we really need is nourishing food. But this particular bit of marketing has us pegged pretty well. We as humans will all too often settle for something that bears some resemblance to what we need, and certainly does sound delicious, and even tastes great in the moment! But that vain attempt at a substitute leaves us with the same (or worse) hunger a very short while later. Now, there is nothing wrong with a candy bar if we take it for what it is. It only becomes a problem when we start to believe that it can satisfy our deeper hunger and need for food.

You probably already see where the Holy Spirit took me when I picked up that candy bar. Our deepest hunger, our most basic need is God Himself. But like I said, these ad people are very good at their jobs, and they picked up on what God has said about us all along – we think something else can satisfy. To borrow a phrase I heard recently, “We take good things and make them God things.” We do it with money, technology, sex, sports, jobs, spouses, children, friends, cars, houses, food, knowledge, status. The list goes on and on. People have been trying to get more out of this world than it can give for a very, very long time because God made us with a deep longing that can only be satisfied by Him. These other pursuits have their places in our lives, and in their proper contexts, they can be called gifts from the Lord. But we don’t usually sit at the table and let Jesus fill us up before we reach for what my 4 year-old calls a “treat”. No, we tend to unwrap whatever other thing seems like a quick and easy (and pleasing!) fix. Then, we find ourselves with that same deep longing shortly after, and maybe even some guilt we didn’t have before.

When we find ourselves back in that hungry place, we have a choice to make. Do we go back and have another serving? Or do we admit our mistake, and admit that what we really need is Jesus, and then sit at the table and let Him teach us what real nourishment is? When we start to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8), an interesting thing happens – our desires shift. We start to learn that what we really want and need is Jesus, and by training, we become unwilling to settle for anything less. This process, called sanctification, takes a lifetime, but the first thing we have to do is drop the candy bar. Then, we have to come to the table. Jesus will never leave us hungry (John 6:35).