Year: 2013

Categories
Worship

The Good God of Good Friday

scrabble tiles spelling friday, as a visual representation for Good FridayA very few of you that have been following me for the short time I’ve been posting on facebook may have noticed that I have been adding my prior facebook posts into my blog. Going back through some of my posts that I wrote for facebook before I started the email subscription and blog, I felt they would be useful to share with everyone. So when you read today’s post and wonder why I am posting about Good Friday several months after it has occurred, it is because it is a “recycled post” but one with ideas that are applicable for today. So…   What’s So Good About Good Friday?

The reason we celebrate Good Friday as a holi-day (Holy-Day) is because of Jesus – His Goodness. His goodness to leave Heaven and put on humanity; His goodness to come to earth as its Eternal King yet not to be served but to serve; His goodness to take the punishment of my sin though He was sinless.

And it isn’t just that His greatness is to be remembered only on Good Friday or on the days when I feel blessed, but God is good all the time!

Corrie ten Boom reminds us of this when she says:
“Often I have heard people say, “How good God is! We prayed that it would not rain for our church picnic, and look at the lovely weather!” Yes, God is good when He sends good weather. But God was also good when He allowed my sister, Betsie, to starve to death before my eyes in a German concentration camp.”
the inside of a concentration camp barracks
What an amazing outlook on this sin-filled, evil world where God’s goodness is evident even in the midst of our circumstances. We invited sin into His perfect world. We chose to listen to and trust Satan instead of God. And instead of blasting us into oblivion, He becomes our righteousness in the midst of this perverse earth. We still have to endure the consequences of living in a sin-soaked world. We still have to endure the consequences of our own poor choice of choosing sin. But thankfully, we can do so knowing that our God of goodness will walk with us through every difficulty.

Corrie ten Boom knew that God was good even though she and Betsie had to endure the evil of the concentration camp. What an amazing statement she made showing that she was allowing God to transform her mind, and therefore change her entire outlook on life.

God, change our outlook on life so that we better understand your greatness no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in. And Thank You for Good Friday!

(Thanks to my friend Mariah Fields for sharing this wonderful quote with me from Corrie ten Boom!)

— brian rushing

Categories
Relationships

True Love Ain’t Free

free parking 2
There ain’t much in life that is free.
Certainly not love.
True love demands commitment.
True love is an active choice of binding oneself to another.

“They have invented a new phrase that is a black-and-white contradiction in two words—”free love.” As if a lover had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself….”

The quote is from G.K. Chesterton. And I love how he finishes this thought about the binding nature of love. He says that “the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.”

When we say “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, & in health,” we are making an active, binding statement. We are giving our word that we will be bound up with the other person for a lifetime.

Ravi Zacharias reflects (somewhat deeply) on this idea of binding love:
“Unfortunately in the English language we have cheated ourselves by using the same [word] to cover a wide variety of relationships. In the Greek language there were four different words, each describing a different kind of love:
      ‘Agape’ refers to a pure love with particular reference to God.
      ‘Phileo’ is the love of friendship.
      ‘Storge’ describes the love of a parent.
      ‘Eros’ is romantic love.

“Note carefully that although only one of the loves [eros] is physically consummated, all of them involve commitment. However, in our culture when we say “love” it is most often physical love that is implied, and that devoid of commitment. How strange that we call the sexual act “making love” when in actuality if that act is without commitment…it is a literal and figurative denuding of love in which the individual is degraded to an object.”

“When love is shallow the heart is empty, but if the sacrifice of love is understood, one can drink deeply from its cup and be completely fulfilled.”

I hope that my love for others will always be a love that has commitment backing it up.
How has someone shown you that love is a commitment?

Tozer: The true follower of Christ will not ask, “If I embrace this truth, what will it cost me?”

— brian rushing

Categories
Relationships

Letting the Overflow Spill Out

Do you remember Rainman . . . “I’m an excellent driver… Dad lets me drive slow on the driveway every Saturday. …But not on Monday, definitely not on Monday… Uh oh, fifteen minutes to Judge Wapner.”

Ha! As for myself, I might change the phrase to something like – “I’m an excellent reader.” What I mean is that I love to read, and I hate to keep the great stuff I come across to myself. Some of it makes its way into sermons, but there just is not enough time to share it all. Therefore, the overflow spills out into my posts.
the overflow in the bucket is pouring out
That might answer your question as to why I sometimes quote from one person for several days in a row. As I am reading a book, I might come across some powerful ideas that I want to share with you, and so that is when the overflow spills over.

I hope you will do the same – pouring into the lives of those around you the overflow of what God is showing you or teaching you. How well are you doing that with your children? with coworkers? with social media? If you look back over your own facebook posts or tweets from the past month, how could you have changed a caption to one of your posted pictures to let your friends know that God is the One who has blessed you with that beautiful child or family? Are you using your overflow to exalt Him? Are you being intentional?

As I have said before, we need to keep praying: “God, Help Us To Change Our Conversations!”

Today, I hope that you will strategically use your conversations to show that Jesus is your greatest Treasure.

— brian rushing

Categories
Sharing Jesus

Celebrating Failure

Fireworks are one of the ultimate expressions of celebrations. We are getting close to July 4th where many people will set up some amazing firework shows to celebrate the independence of our nation. We might also send up some fireworks for other personal celebrations, such as a birthday. But we don’t usually light off the fireworks when we experience some sort of failure. …Could that be a mistake? Fireworks representing our need to celebrate our failure in witnessing

Thinking about the issue of teaching our children how to fail (yesterday’s post) got me to thinking about another type of failure – the failure of sharing our faith and getting a “no” answer when asking if someone is ready to confess Christ as Savior and Lord. Is it possible that we should be celebrating our “failures” in witnessing?

Christians want to be obedient to share their faith beliefs with others. We want to share, and we want to lead others to know Jesus. But I have heard that it takes a person at least 8 times to hear the message about Jesus before they are open to the idea and in a mindset where they understand it well enough to even consider a personal relationship with Him. So from a statistical standpoint, that means that at least 7 out of 8 Christians need to be willing to share their faith while knowing that they will NOT lead the person they are speaking with to know Christ at that precise moment. But if we know this to be true and choose to be willing to speak the gospel message anyway, our “failure” has the possibility of moving them one step closer to trusting in Christ.

I know that sharing your faith is not a matter of math, but we need to realize that the statistics indicate that sharing your faith will lead you to hear the words “no” more often than “yes” when you ask for a response. But if we let that discourage us, we might stop witnessing all together. In fact, maybe that is one reason so many people do not share their faith… the fear of failure.

So maybe we start celebrating our failures and encouraging each other to fail more often. Maybe we say: “Hey celebrate with me – I failed in three different conversations with people about their desire to know Jesus!” And other believers would respond: “Hurray! Keep it up! We need more failures! More failures lead to more ‘yes’ decisions in time!” The more failures that we are willing to endure, the more chances that we will have a success. Let’s plant seeds no matter what the soil conditions, because if we choose not to plant due to our fear of failure, we will continue to find this next statement to be truth: With no planting comes no harvest.

“Time is too short; and the weather is too turbulent for business as usual in our Christian community.” (Mississippi Pastor Nathan Barber)

— brian rushing

Categories
Parenting

Teaching Children To Fail

Are you teaching your children to fail?
A paper with a grade of F = fail
K-Love has “Life Change Moments” and one from earlier this year was a good reminder of a powerful lesson that we all need to teach to our children – Teaching our children to fail well.

The statement made was that we go get our child ice cream they win the basketball game with the final shot, celebrating their victory. However, if they miss that last shot, we hang our heads and try not to talk about it, indicating to them our shame and disappointment. What we need to do instead is to teach that failure is part of life. We need to be honest and transparent with our own failures, telling our children at dinnertime about the bone-headed mistake that we made at work today.

I agree with this “Life Change Moment.” I’m not saying that we need to congratulate our children’s failures, but that we should be realistic and let them know that failure is normal and not shameful. I’ve seen too many children & teens brokenhearted due to seeing their parent’s intense disappointment due to the child’s failure (or lack of success) at a sporting event or some other competition. It is so easy to show our disappointment with our children’s failures and poor choices without ever letting them know that we adults also make poor choices and have failures. So let’s be honest and transparent and teach our children to fail well – learning not to be shamed, but rather to use failure as an instructor and motivator to help us learn how to succeed in the future.

God, Help Us To Change Our Conversations – even with our children!

Parents, any practical suggestions on how to do this?

“Spare the rod and spoil the child – that is true. But, beside the rod, keep an apple to give him when he has done well.” –Martin Luther

— brian rushing