The new is a function of the old

I am a new creation in Christ. I firmly believe that. Like a lot of people who come to Christ later in life, I NEED to believe that. I wasn’t an especially horrible person in my pre-jesus days, and I wasn’t suffering a whole heck of a lot, but I don’t like the person I was then.

I just don’t.

So I need to believe and live in the fact that I am a new creation. This is one reason why I have struggled so much with the question of identity and what it means to be a new creation in Christ. I do not want to be the person I was, I just want to be the new person that Christ has called me to be. I wanted have a Pauline type change where I get to go from mass murderer to apostle, church planter, and evangelist.

Superseded by grace

Some youth pastors I know get questions from their youth like “can I go on missions?” “Why does God love me?” “How can I better serve God?” My youth group skipped right past those questions and went straight to crazy questions like “Can we Sin in Heaven? If we do, do we get kicked out?” “What’s the trinity EXACTLY?” “If God is all knowing and exists outside of time, is it possible that he KNEW Adam and Eve would fall? Does that mean God created evil?” I mean seriously? A thirteen year old kid is asking me if God is the author of evil?!?! But at least all of these I had considered, thought about or read about, this is reasonably standard systematic theology type material.

Then one of the kids asked me “is polygamy sin?”

Go ahead. I dare you. Just TRY to answer that one, because the only thing I could say was “I don’t know, let me look some things up and I’ll get back to you.”

I was this close to starting a fast to try and figure it out (which tells you just how desperate I was about it) when the answered came to me in one of those flashes of insight that can only come from the Holy Spirit.

Regardless of our sin, it is superseded by Grace.

In other words: stop focusing on the problem and focus on the solution. Now I understand why so many people out there are busy arguing about the topic but I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I have THE answer. All I know is that Love covers a multitude of sin, that Grace is given for all who believe, and that Christ stands in the gap for us bridging the distance between us and the father.

My sin is superseded by Grace.

Good news: so is yours.

I said that? Wow, guess i did….

This weekend, I got into a conversation about identity and someone there asked me what my opinion was.  This in itself is not out of the ordinary; I’m a guy with an opinion so it’s usually pretty safe to ask me my opinion on something and expect to get an answer.  If I don’t have an opinion previously formed, I’ll ask some questions and form one in about ten minutes.  (I try not to do this, it’s usually a bad opinion when I do, but there you go.)

What was out of the ordinary here, was that this person did not ask me to contribute to the conversation because he was curious about what I thought, he was curious because he knew I sat around thinking about the question of Christian Identity.  “No I don’t” I said.  “Dude, don’t you read your own blog?” he replied… The conversation may not have been quite like that but that’s how it went in my head.

This above all else

“This above all else: to thine own self be true.” Hamlet Act I ScIII

“Know Thyself” The Oracle at Delphi

Do you find it interesting that the Bible doesn’t really talk about self-realization?  The western church talks a lot about “identity in Christ” and what it means to be a child of God and what that means for us as individuals, but I found very little scripture that could compare to the age old wisdom of my friend Polonius.   The reason I bring it up, I’m sure you’ve noticed I’ve made some changes to the old blog here.

I changed the name, the look, pretty much everything except the content.  That’s because the content is right where it needs to be and the rest of the page needed to match.

I was going to say that this was a moment of being true to myself, and realizing who I’ve been called to be and to step up in that.  Essentially all I’m doing is realizing that Peter was a fisherman when Jesus said “come and follow me.”  He wasn’t a seminarian.  He wasn’t a great leader of men.  He was a fisherman.  So I need to stop pretending that I’m some kind of great inspirational type, and realize that I’m just the guy writing what he hears.

A storyteller? Perhaps.

A pen? The tool that the Father uses to write? Definitely.

big dreams = big reality

At a evangelism training workshop that only five people attended, the teacher started off by asking “how many people do you want to save?”  He got the following answers…. Or She got the following answers…. I’m not sure who the teacher was but that’s beside the point.  The five people attending gave the following answers.

• One
• Six
• Three
• A dozen
• A million.