The words I’m about to write are risky, so please read them carefully and weigh all of them in light of Scripture. But I’m writing them, because I believe they need to be said.
Sometimes young people need to step up and make a decision for God, despite the advice of their parents. Ohh, I can hear groans from parents and youth pastors on that one. Let me explain.
Here is my weekly Crosswalk.com column:
Expecting Crosses
I’ve read John 12:25 quite a few times in my Christian journey and yet I never fully grasped its meaning until recently.
We all know Jesus is reminding his followers that to be a disciples means to sacrifice, to take up the cross, to surrender. And I know that. I remember walking down the aisle at camp every year, pledging to live my life for the Lord.
And I really meant it. I really do want to serve Christ. But I’m finding that my willingness to serve has a lot of conditions.
It can’t come with problems.
There can be no interruptions in my day.
Nobody in my family is allowed to get sick.
And I always have to have enough money to pay my bills.
When any one of those things occurs, I get upset and complain. But Jesus challenges me. He says, “Take up your cross.” He says, “Lose your life.”
What I’m finding is that Jesus’ challenge isn’t just a one-time pledge. It’s a daily commitment. Paul said that he “died daily.”
So it is that Jesus asks us to take up our crosses and lose ourselves every single day. That means every single day, there will be hardships, trials, and things we hate and hate to do. These are the crosses we can expect. These are the crosses Jesus asks us to bear.
Jesus said that if we stop trying to protect our lives we’ll actually experience real life, the divine life, down there on earth.
I can tell you that the days I lose my life are the days I experience that life. They are the days that the peace of God rules my life. When I trust God’s sovereign control.
The key is to wake up every day and surrender that day to the Lord. To toss aside our expectations of normalcy and comfort. When we do that, we relieve ourselves of the stress and expectations and we open up the storehouse of Heaven for spiritual blessings.
There have been many days lately when I’ve felt life was out of control. When things just didn’t go the way I needed them to. When problems arise. The natural reaction is to get angry, to try to protect our lives from such terrible things.
But the spiritual thing to do is accept each problem as a God-ordained cross and to set aside our desire for comfort and “lose ourselves” in God’s total control.
So surrendering your life in service to the Lord in an altar call is a good and great first step. But having the discipline to yield to the work of the Holy Spirit each and every day is even better.
Because along the way of life, you will get fired from a job unjustly. You will have people say stuff about you that isn’t true. You’re car will get stranded on the highway. Your kids will throw up at 3 am. You’re wife will get crabby. You’re kids will get in trouble in school. You’re church won’t play the music you like.
And each time you can stomp around. You can quit on that relationship. You can get angry and resentful.
Or—or you can accept those as crosses God designed to produce death to yourself and Christ’s life inside. And you can lose your desire for normalcy and comfort and experience the divine life of peace with God in an restless world.
This is an excerpt from my new book, Crash Course
When I got out of high school I had the bright idea of learning to Rollerblade™. Now if you know me, you know I’m about as coordinated as a giraffe on a skateboard. So I bought some Rollerblades™ and set off for the biggest hill I could find.
The downhill part was cool—all 4.5 seconds of it. But when I ended up in a heap at the bottom of the hill, I realized two things. 1) Pavement really hurts, and 2) As hard as I tried, it just wasn’t in me to Rollerblade™.
I packed up the blades and sold them on E-bay.
A lot of religious people think if they work really hard, they can get to heaven. They think that if they pull a Mother Teresa, God will overlook all of their sin.
There’s a problem with that. Everybody has a different standard of what’s right and what’s wrong. So who’s to say how many good works are enough?
Actually, you’d have to be perfect your entire life. That’s the unreachable standard. The Bible says that our attempts to make God happy with our good works are like “filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). That doesn’t mean we should stop doing good things. It means what we try to do falls way short compared to what God expects.
Here’s the deal. Becoming a Christian is not about trying harder. It’s not about digging in and doing better. It’s about realizing how sinful we are and how holy God is. It’s about calling out to God and accepting His gracious gift of forgiveness.
This is my Crosswalk.com column for this week:
My wife and I recently viewed the movie Amish Grace, based on the tragic massacre of five little girls in the Amish community of Nickel Mines in Lancaster County Pennsylvania.
We were deeply moved by the powerful story of forgiveness. I must confess I know little of the Amish, but what little I have experienced; I’ve often found their version of Christianity a bit more performance-based than grace-based. And yet, this movie moved and challenged me in ways I can’t begin to describe.
If you’re not familiar with the story, in 2007, violence and mayhem, two elements typically isolated from the Amish community, entered their world. Five of their precious little girls were ruthlessly gunned down by a milkman everyone thought and knew to be a good Christian, husband and father.
The movie swings back and forth between the home of the gunmen and the home of the Gruber family, who lost their daughter. Each home is wrestling with their faith. But the most poignant struggle is with the mother of the daughter, who can’t abide the forgiveness her faith requires.
It is one thing to talk and preach and write about forgiveness as if it’s some abstract spiritual quality. It’s quite another to live it out, especially when it requires you to forgive your child’s killer.
What is evident is that this level of forgiveness is not a work. It’s not a quality that springs naturally from the heart of man. It’s a forgiveness so powerful it must come from God. It’s a forgiveness born on Easter, wrought in the unjust, wretched death of Jesus Christ, who was killed for sins you and I committed against a holy God.
When we view our own injustices through that prism and when we allow the power of the Holy Spirit to penetrate our hearts, then and only then can we forgive those who wrong us.
Today, as you read this, I know you are struggling to forgive someone who has hurt you deeply. Perhaps there are some who have even experienced the pain of seeing your child gunned down in cold blood. How in the world can you forgive such a monster?
Then again, how in the world can God forgive you? How can he forgive me?
Someone has rightly said that television is a vast wasteland. But in Amish Grace, the filmmakers have produced a movie of tremendous quality. If you struggle with forgiveness, I urge you to watch it. You will be moved in ways you didn’t imagine. And you will appreciate the forgiveness offered on Easter by your Heavenly Father.
