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.

Trusting In Truth

Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I am all about truth. I want facts, clarity, a stark representation of what is right or correct. The world around us holds a very different view. The world wants to cast everything in shades of grey. The world wants everything to be relative and arbitrary.

The troubling aspect of truth, however, is that it is persistent. Call a chair a flower, but it remains a chair. You can spend a lifetime convincing others of the flower-ness of the chair; even if the whole world comes to agree with you, the chair will still be a chair. You see, real truth is something that exists independently of how man chooses to accept or define it. We have lots of theories about how life began on this planet. Without getting into that discussion, the truth is that life did begin somehow, and whether or not our studies or our faith lead us to the correct answer is irrelevant. Simply put: our behavior or belief has no impact on the truth. Truth simply is.

Could this be why God tells Moses that he should be known to the Israelites as “I AM” (Exodus 3:14)? God was declaring that His existence was sufficient evidence of His power and authority. The bedrock of the Judeo-Christian belief system is that God exists. As we worked through our Collide series the past several Sundays, we were able to hear the stories of several Old Testament men and women of faith whose actions were predicated on the foundation of a very real and interactive God. While these individuals were far from perfect, their starting point of belief in a known truth gave them confidence in the outcome of their situations.

What an incredible blessing and challenge this is for us today. If God simply is, then surely He has characteristics. If that is true, wouldn’t it be great to know more about who He is? Fortunately, the Bible is filled with just such instruction. As we learn more of God’s character, we learn of His intense love for us, a love so sacrificial that he sent His son Jesus to die for us. As believers, we can strip our truth down to its simplest form: God is, and He is love (1 John 4:8).

My prayer for the Midtown Bridge family, and for anyone else who may come across this post, is that we would root ourselves firmly in the truth of God and His word. I pray we hold to the truth of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and that this truth would inform and shape our thoughts, words and actions on a daily basis. And I pray that during these times of relativity, where man is his own god and the path to heaven is wide and varied, we would cling to the truth that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6).

“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)