Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.

Yesterday afternoon, the boy wanted a “popcircle” (Popsicle). We’ve been working on getting him to say “please” and “thank you” when asking for something, so when he came up and said “I wanna popcircle”, we said “say please”. Now, you or I would simply turn around and without really thinking about it say “I want a popsicle, please” and we’d get one. Not the boy, no way, no how was he going to say please. “I don’t wanna say please!”, “I wanna popcircle!”, accompanied by screaming, collapsing on the floor and just generally throwing a fit. And every time he’d scream “I wanna popcircle!”, we’d calmly tell him, “say please”, at which point a fresh round of screaming and flailing would ensue. This went on for a couple of hours (being a horrible father, I took video of him for a couple of minutes) and he never did say please. He also never got his “popcircle”.

The point of this is, I wonder if sometimes God doesn’t feel like Kara and I did. He wants to give us good gifts and to bless us, but we just won’t ask in the right way. We refuse to say please (figuratively) and scream and throw ourselves on the floor when He doesn’t do things our way, right away. Maybe if we took to heart James 4:3 and stopped asking for things with the wrong motives, God would be willing to cheerfully grant our requests. So, the next time you’re asking God for something, examine your heart and determine why you’re really asking. And always say please.

A lake without an outlet dies, think of the Dead Sea, Great Salt Lake or the Salton Sea. All that pours into it remains even as the water evaporates away, leaving only pollution and corruption fit for nothing. Even so a Christian must constantly pour themselves out to others and accept an inflow from God to cleanse the pollution of the world from their hearts.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind — 2 Timothy 1:7 (KJV)

Why do so many Christians live in fear? Or better yet, why do Christians concentrate so hard on the evil around us, to the exclusion of God? If all you can see is the Devil and his works, I suppose you might live in fear. But that’s utterly contrary to the way a Christian is meant to live! Instead of Satan behind every bush, we should be seeing God in all His creation, rejoicing in His creation and its beauty. But no, too many Christians have forgotten 1 John 4:4: Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world. Remember Jesus walking on the water? Peter stepped out of the boat at Jesus’ command, putting his fears and doubts aside. And as long as his focus was on Christ, there wasn’t a problem. However, as soon as his gaze wandered aside, he began to sink. He stopped focusing and Christ and began looking at the storm around him and that was his undoing. As Christians today, we have the same problem, the minute we stop focusing on Christ, we’re toast, that’s when the enemy can come in and do damage. Satan has no power over us, for “greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world”. God is for us, who can be against us? It’s time to stop living in fear and to start focusing on Christ. If He’s the center of your life, you have nothing to worry about. There’s one important thing to remember about this world, in the end, it’s all gonna burn. It’s time to distinguish the temporal from the eternal and start living for the eternal.

“But Jim”, I can hear some of you saying, “isn’t that an awfully simplistic way of looking at things?” Well, yes, it is. I don’t believe God intended for salvation to be intellectually challenging. He intended it to be simple enough that anybody could understand it and be saved. It’s mankind that has complicated the message of Christ, not God. Now, I’ll be first to admit that living as a Christian can sometimes be complicated, but most of those complications we bring on ourselves. The actual plan of salvation is astoundingly simple: believe in your heart that Jesus Christ was the only son of the Living God and was sacrificed on the cross for our sins and confess the same with your mouth. Everything else follows from that, if you believe, you’ll want to do those things that please God. And if you’re doing the things that please God, frankly, you’ll be too busy to do the things that don’t please Him and certainly too busy to worry about the Devil!

It’s never easy to lose someone. Yesterday, my wife and I lost our baby. Yes, the pregnancy was only seven weeks along and I know, intellectually, that at least 25% of first pregnancies end in a miscarriage in the first trimester, but it still hurts. However, we know that God works all things together for the good of them that love Him and are called according to His purpose. So, we’ll continue to trust Him and believe that He will grant us children when the time comes. Both Kara and I thank you for your support in this time.

If you’re not already reading Tony Woodlief over at Sand in the Gears, you really should be. Today’s essay has a wonderful insight into parenting and how it echoes the relationship between us and God:

Last weekend I stood behind him as he climbed a step ladder to the top rung, and then tried to climb atop the curved bar at its pinnacle, and all the while I thought: he’ll fall and I’ll catch him but on the way down he’ll learn a little something about not risking life and limb so readily.

But of course he didn’t fall, instead he twisted around to see me standing there and hooted and wiggled in his triumph over Mt. Stepladder, until the hubris was too much and I had to extract him, to wails of protest, followed by the stubborn set of chin and deliberate stomping crawl back to the bottom rung. And I thought, this is what God has to put up with, every single day. This is the point of parenting, from his perspective, his way of saying See? Do you see what you people are like?”

Read the whole thing…

In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one
Ephesians 5:16 (NIV)

When we think of a shield as part of a set of armor, we tend to think about knights and the shield on the arm protecting the bearer from injury in single combat. But that’s not the type of shield Paul had in mind. Roman shields tended to be fairly large, carried by the infantryman and basically useless in single combat. What the Roman army did was line up and “lock” their shields together, each man’s shield protecting not just himself, but his mates on the right and left. As long as they were able to maintain this shield lock, the odds of getting wounded or killed were pretty low, but let just one man panic and break lock and it provided an opening for the enemy to come in. This is one of the reasons the penalties for desertion were so severe, particular if it happened in combat. The deserter not only endangered his life, he endangered the life of all those around him, by leaving an opening for the enemy.

As Christians, our shield is our faith in God. But that shield is largely ineffective by itself. It must be locked in with the shields of other believers to truly protect us. We must share our faith with other Christians, shielding one another from the fiery darts of the evil one. A solitary Christian with great faith can do great things, but a group of Christians with solid faith, who are “locked” together and in agreement, can do even greater things.

Dory, of Wittenberg Gate, has a nice piece on how dogs reveal God’s grace. She writes:

I am convinced that God made dogs to enable us to see grace from the grace-giver’s perspective, rather than our usual position as a recipient of grace.

Natalalia over at Like A Fish In A Parking Lot has a great little note on how, as Christians, it’s not our light that should shine, but rather the Son’s light reflected from us. In other words, we should Be The Moon

Tony Woodlief over at Sand in the Gears has a great little essay about the very first command God gave mankind: Don’t Touch

I was just watching “Shrek 2″ and it struck me how similar the Fairy Godmother’s advertising campaign is to many people’s conception of God. “Help is just a tear drop away” is how her campaign goes, with the premise that when you shed a tear, she’ll come along and make everything perfect and you’ll live “happily ever after.” An awful lot of people seem to think that God makes the same promise to Christians, but if you look in the Scriptures, that’s complete nonsense!

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As you might guess from looking at the collection of photos that cycle behind the blog title, I have a thing for thunderstorms. I’m not sure exactly what it is that draws me to them, perhaps it’s just the display of God’s power reminding me of just how powerless I truly am. I remember going to the mountains surrounding Phoenix one year on the Fourth of July to watch the fireworks. As we were waiting for the man-made fireworks to start, a ring of lightning storms surrounded the Valley, presenting an incredible show of God’s fireworks that the mere works of man couldn’t hope to match. It’s invigorating to be out just after the storm, to taste the tang of the ozone, to feel the renewal of land and marvel in the wondrous works of God.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
Psalms 119:105 (KJV)

Isn’t this a great scripture? It reveals so much about how God shows us His will for our lives and does it in just a few words. When you’re walking along a path at night in an unlit area, what do you use for illumination? You don’t set up street lamps and light the entire area, instead you carry a small lantern or flashlight that illuminates your next step and a bit of the path ahead. Similarly, God doesn’t usually use His word to reveal all our surroundings, or even what He has for us around the next bend. Instead, He uses it to illuminate our next step and the path just ahead. We know our ultimate destination, indeed, we can see it shining on the hill above us, but between here and there is a path through the darkness that is this world that we must traverse.

So, why doesn’t God just illuminate the entire path for us? Why just enough to keep us from stumbling or losing the path entirely? I believe that it’s because He knows our limits better than we do. Think back (if you’re old enough!) to when you were in high school or middle school; if you could have known then everything that God had planned for you for the rest of your life, what would you have done? I don’t know about you, but I think I would have rolled up into a fetal position and started sucking my thumb! Even with God, life is scary enough on a day to day basis! Repeatedly in the scripture God tells us to take life one day at a time, this verse is just another way of saying it. His Word illuminates our feet so we don’t stumble and lights the path so that we can find our way. It’s not intended to be a floodlight that banishes all questions from our lives, the Word is a flashlight showing us where to place our next step.

Ok, I can already hear the questions. “Alfred E. Newman? Isn’t that the guy from Mad Magazine? What does he have to do with Christianity?” I am so very glad you asked! It’s really just one aspect of Mr. Newman that I’m concerned with, his most famous quote: “What, me worry?”

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Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a doubleminded man, unstable in all he does.
James 1:2-8 NIV

Wait a minute! Who stuck that in my Bible? Isn’t Christianity supposed to be all rainbows and lollipops? What’s this talk about “trials” and “testing your faith”? I don’t want to be tested! Tests aren’t any fun!

Well, contrary to what sometimes seems to be popular belief, Christianity isn’t all rainbows and lollipops. Sometimes it’s hard and occasionally, it’s really hard. We in the United States have been fortunate in that we live in a country where it’s still pretty easy to be a Christian. Oh, we may gripe and complain about it, but we’re not being rounded up and sent off to camps. The problem with this is that it tends to produce weak Christians. We can talk a good game, but if our faith is truly put to the test, do we hold up under the pressure?

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Probably the most difficult thing to do as a Christian (or for that matter as a non-Christian) is to forgive. We all want to be forgiven our mistakes, large or small, but it’s so deucedly hard to do for others. And yet it’s essential to our lives as Christians. The Lord’s prayer says Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. God has given us an amazing model of forgiveness, forgiving all our trespasses both large and small, and yet, we often find it hard to forgive the merest perceived slight.

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Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Ephesians 5:21-24

I’d say this passage ranks up there as one of the most misunderstood and abused passages in the entire New Testament, if not the whole Bible. It’s been used far too often as a license for abuse and misogyny and all because submission is so misunderstood.

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How can God be all-knowing and mankind still have free will? This is a question that has been asked practically from the dawn of Christianity. Some will deny that we truly have free will in the long run, that we are predestined to our fates and that any apparent free will we have is merely an illusion. But, if this is the case, why would God bother to create mankind in the first place? And more importantly, why send Christ as the atoning sacrifice for mankind, if our fates have been determined in advance?

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It’s truly amazing the way God provides for us. He always provides what is needed, and always exactly when it is needed. Just like a loving parent provides for their children, God provides for us. Unfortunately (or so it seems to us), His timing isn’t always our timing and He doesn’t necessarily provide our wants, just our needs. Like the children we are though, we want God to do things our way and we want it NOW! Fortunately for us, though, God is a patient parent and ignores our tantrums and provides for us in His timing and in His own way. The hardest thing for us to learn as Christians is to how to wait on Him and then to accept the provision He’s made for us. The key is to always remember that He has made provision for us, we just have to wait on Him.

This all particularly applies to relationships, where it’s especially hard to wait for God’s provision. We want someone to share our lives with, to love, and be loved by, and we want them now! It’s a good thing God is smarter than we are about such things, it’s just too bad we rush things and get into relationships that aren’t what he wants for us. It’s when we are patient and wait on God for that perfect relationship that we can be truly happy in that relationship. Rushing God is never the wise thing to do and always leads to disaster in the end. And unfortunately, when we rush into a relationship, that disaster encompasses two (or more) people instead of just ourselves. But once again, God is good (all the time!) and He can bring us out of a bad relationship and back into what He has for us. It may not be what He originally planned, but it will always be better than what we provide for ourselves.