The Grace of Hearing

by Todd Stewman

“This world is bursting with life for these few days because the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles the ground. It will not be so for long. But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!”—Aslan in The Magician’s Nephew

Have you ever stopped to consider what a gift it is to hear the voice of God in your life? God is not silent. He has spoken in the past at many times and in various ways. But, in these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son. However, not everyone hears the clear voice of Jesus Christ. Some may hear vague growlings that cause them to wonder about the idea of deity. Others may hear fearful roarings that cause them to run and hide from the perceived threat to their own sovereignty. Only God, though, can enable a person to hear and discern what the Lion of Judah is saying. This is grace. A God who speaks to a people who, left to themselves, would only close their ears to Him.

“‘For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’ But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.”—Matthew 13:15-16

“…his sheep follow him because they know his voice.”—John 10:4

If you follow Jesus Christ, it is because you have heard His voice. Your ears have been divinely tuned to receive what He is saying. He speaks to you by His written Word and He speaks to you by His Spirit. But, you only notice, you only understand, and you only care about what He is saying because of His grace toward you. This is certainly cause for worship! It is also cause to cultivate your ability to listen for His voice in the midst of our noisy world. I’d love to know what you have been hearing from God through His Word.

Cru Notes

Editor's Note: If you miss our weekly gathering (Tuesday nights, Garrison 1) you're missing some important thoughts on life and Godliness. If you miss class you can always copy someone else's notes... and while it's not nearly the same as being there, it's still helpful. With that in mind Annie Correa and Stephanie Dang will be sharing their notes from most Cru meetings. Read them for the first time, or by way of continuing to think about the things you heard last Tuesday. Add any of your own thoughts or fill in things they missed by way of your comments.

CHRIS THURMAN - INTIMACY IN RELATIONSHIP
the notes of Annie Correa, February 28, 2006.

REVIEW FROM LAST WEEK: Intimate relationships require integrity. To practice integrity you have to figure out and hold onto who God meant you to be and let go of the things that God never meant to be true of you.

THIS WEEK: Intimacy – closeness, fondness. Intimacy is the deepest thirst of your soul, your deepest ache. God wired you for intimacy. Our culture lies to you and says your deepest thirst is for power, money, and sex. These things do not satisfy people’s soul, only intimacy does.

Intimacy exists in two forms:

[1] With God (vertically): My soul won’t find rest until it finds it in Thee. Everyone has this ache for intimacy with the Maker; whether they acknowledge it or not.
[2] With other people (horizontally): This is God-wired (something we should hold on to). In Genesis, when God is talking about His creation, He says the first negative thing about what He created. He says …it is good…it is good…it is good…but that it is NOT good for the man to be alone.

[a] Adam’s relationship with God was perfect, there was no sin in the world
[b] Adam’s lived in a perfect world
[c] Adam had the perfect job, he was given the planet to oversee

but something is missing…so God creates Eve.

The abundant life is a close relationship with God and with other people. You are wise if you are working on both and a fool if only working on one or neither. To have a close relationship with another YOU MUST meet each other’s emotional needs.


You Cannot Earn:

[1] God’s love: God is love, He will not change this about Himself; cannot raise or lower His love.
[2] Salvation: Salvation comes in spite of our own efforts. Your most righteous behaviors are like filthy rags to God. Even your tears of sorrow over your sins are impure.
[3] Worth: We are given worth because we are God’s image bearers. You won’t have more or less down the road.
[4] Identity: We were born as a child of sin,when saved we became a child of God.

Everything else in this world must be earned!
We can’t ask God to grant us physical fitness or financial fitness, we must earn them. In this same way we must earn closeness with each other. Meet each other’s needs: we must serve.


Our Emotional Needs:
Attention, Acceptance, Affirmation, Appreciation, Affection, Comfort, Encouragement, Respect, Security, Support, and Understanding.

These are God-wired needs. You will injure yourself and others if you don’t realize that you have these needs and that other people have these needs too. We are called to love richly and deeply. Our rewards await us in Heaven. When we meet others’ emotional needs, it communicates that they are worthy.


What Happens When Our Emotional Needs Go Unmet?
Our emotional needs will go unmet. Even the best parent, husband, friend, is human won’t meet them all perfectly. We respond by feeling hurt and angry. God wired us this way. It’s okay to feel this way, the wrong comes in how we deal with these emotions. We often fall into destructive coping, that is we cope sinfully. Never apologize for what you are wired for (needing closeness, having emotional needs, and feeling hurt and angry when these needs aren’t met) but do apologize for coping destructively.


When Coping Destructively You Will Tend To:

[-] Isolate yourself
[-] Attack (sin in your anger by aggression)
[-] Be passive aggressive (cold shoulder, aloofness, sarcasm…)
[-] Self medicate (instant relief/gratification): idolatry, everyone in this room is an addict in some way.
[-] Perfection (try harder; legalism): people should not have to jump through hoops to have their needs met.

Being Christ-like means serving. Seeking to serve, not to be served. Do what you can to meet others’ emotional needs, knowing that you won’t necessarily have all of your needs met in return.


[AN ASIDE] Love:

[1] Eros: sexual attraction and interest. This is not the highest version of love.
[2] Phileo: fondness or liking. This isn’t the highest version of love.
(These two come together to form romantic love, which is a form of insanity, makes you act goofy.)
[3] Agape: highest form of love. God has perfect agape love for us. “An act of will aimed at fostering a person’s growth”:

[-] Act of will: decision not based on loins or heart
[-] Has an aim: not aimless, target specific
[-] Foster: you can’t MAKE people grow, Christ never controlled people
[-] A person’s: not a car or food
[-] Growth: not “making someone happy” God values your maturity over your happiness. He values your health and joy in the long-term, at the expense of making you uncomfortable in the mean time.

Cru Notes

Editor's Note: If you miss our weekly gathering (Tuesday nights, Garrison 1) you're missing some important thoughts on life and Godliness. If you miss class you can always copy someone else's notes... and while it's not nearly the same as being there, it's still helpful. With that in mind Annie Correa and Stephanie Dang will be sharing their notes from most Cru meetings. Read them for the first time, or by way of continuing to think about the things you heard last Tuesday. Add any of your own thoughts or fill in things they missed by way of your comments.

CHRIS THURMAN - INTEGRITY IN RELATIONSHIP
the notes of Annie Correa, February 21, 2006.

INTEGRITY
Integrity produces intimacy. Integrity will make or break intimacy. If you’re not getting along with someone the problem is probably one of integrity. You can’t have intimate relationship without integrity. Let relationships end before you violate integrity. To have integrity means two things:

[1] You must hold on to those things about yourself that God meant you to be. Do not EVER let go of that in order to please another human being or keep them in your life. // Who did God make me to be? // “To thy “God-created-self” be true”

[2] You must let go of those things about yourself that God never meant you to be. The things that are wrong with you, your flaws.

Both holding on and letting go take courage.

We believe that God knit us together in our mother’s womb, that we were fearfully and wonderfully made, but that we all fall short of this original creation.

There are a lot of grey areas in figuring out the things we should hold on to and let go of in our lives. We must be spirit lead to discern whether to hold on or let go. Something can go from one category to another and can even be in both categories.

INDIVIDUATION:
A father should help his child know who they were and weren’t meant to be. If you know who you are meant to be you don’t have the fear of man and don’t need other people’s approval. You should know that:

[1] You have internalized a proper IDENTITY
-Identity is not the same thing as role (jock, nerd, so-and-so’s brother…), we are more than our roles.
-You have a God-given identity: Child of God

[2] You have internalized sense of WORTH
-our worth is not tied to our performance (though this is what we tend to think)
-but we have worth because we are image-bearers

[3] You have a PERSONALITY
-we all have different ones
-it’s okay to be who you are

[4] God gives everybody TALENTS AND ABILITIES
-God does not equally give out talent and ability, take what He gave you and use it
-to whom much is given, much will be expected (Luke 12:48)

[5] God gives us PASSIONS
-our passions don’t always line up with what we’re good at
-if you are good at something you are passionate about that’s something you should hold on to.

If you don’t know these things you feel like you have to find your from the world. This gives you anxiety and makes you incapable of healthy relationships. No one wants to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t know who they are.

ASSIGNMENT:
Write two essays (or construct two lists) answering the following:

[1] Who did God make you to be?

[2] Who have you become that God did not intend you to be?

Whittled

by Patrick Frasier

There is a driving force within all of us that makes us want to continually strive to be a better person. Even if we are happy with the changes we have made in our lives, we have a cricket on our shoulder shouting out an infinite amount of blurbs making sure we don’t regress.

Colorado is my God place. It is virtually impossible to seclude yourself these days because of email or because a cell phone ring destroys any chance of productivity that alone time might bring. I only bring that up because in Colorado I get no cell phone reception and have no computer. It’s really a beautiful thing. Trees, river, me, God. That’s all that’s there and that why I like it. My grandparents have a house in southern Colorado right on the Rio Grande River. If the river rose 10 feet their front deck would be in the water.

So I go to this place to hang out with God. No interruptions. I had a feeling something big would happen this past summer during my visit. I think that maybe because I was expecting a big epiphany, that when God spoke I missed it.

I was sitting with my grandpa at the kitchen table looking at all of his amazing carvings that line the giant windows that overlook the river. I asked him how he did it. How did he go from a simple block of wood to a mountain man, a longhorn, a fisherman, a cowgirl or any of the other elaborate objects that were before us. He said, “Well Patrick, it’s kind of simple, I know what I’m going to make so whatever doesn’t look like it I take off.”

It’s that simple? I don’t know about you, but to me all of that sounds crazy. Sharp knives and different varieties of wood, fancy names for cutting techniques and all it boils down to is taking off whatever doesn’t look right? The only epiphany I had that day was that my 80-year-old grandfather is an amazing man.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on the deck watching my grandpa whittle and listen to him tell stories about Colorado, superstitions about carving wood and other things only 80-year-old men can say out of experience. I thought about what he said, “I know what I’m going to make so whatever doesn’t look like it I take off.” I thought about it for months. It wasn’t until I heard a talk about the Holy Spirit that it began to make sense to me.

Most people forget about the Holy Spirit. They focus on God the Father, and claim Jesus as their savior, but I never really hear much about the Holy Spirit. That’s the part of God that’s in us as followers of Christ. He’s constantly trying to show us the light, the way to righteousness, the way to be closer to God, the way to be more like Jesus. I thought, "it is that simple.” We just have to let the Holy Spirit carve us. We have to allow the parts that are not like Jesus to be cut away. Whatever is not a part of the person God made us to be, we can just take it off. So you’re a negative person? Cut. Done. We have to have faith that with the Holy Spirit in us and with our love of Jesus, we are capable of anything.

We Win

by Cristina Mojica

Lately I have been bogged down with thoughts of how my life should have been. I had expectations of life at twenty, but nothing is lining up. Everything the world said I would have by now didn’t come to pass; but something better came into my life, I fell in love with Christ.

I’m not going to really talk about that process or the journey, that’s another post (or several), but what I want to talk about is how my expectations have been causing unnecessary tension in my life. In a few days I’m going to be twenty, and for some reason this has put me into a funk rivaling the one Walker went through when he became thirty. My reaction to this farewell to my teenage days has brought me to tears and left me with an unsettling feeling that would suggest twenty is the end of life. Which is ridiculous.

So yesterday, I’m contemplating why things are so difficult, and I can’t understand why, even though I know the truth, my life doesn’t reflect it. I’m not letting go of my pride and ambition with joy because I no longer have to be perfect. I’m not cheering at the top of my lungs because there is freedom in Christ because He died and rose again. I’m not satisfied with being the righteousness of God in Christ. I’m worrying about why my life isn’t the way I had planned it.

At the height of desperation, I flipped through the pages of my Bible. I was looking for the verse that says God’s power is made perfect in my weakness. I thought it might give me the perspective I needed. Instead I found Romans 8:18-39; I read through the passage aloud and the pieces started fitting together:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

The passage goes on, but the first verse already encouraged me. My suffering is nothing compared to the glory God has revealed in me through Jesus Christ. These desires for normalcy are remnants of the person I was, trying to gain control over who I am in Christ. The mental fight I go through daily is a result of my sinful nature. The very reason I’m not perfect. And my redemption, my only hope of survival is my relationship with Christ:

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. (Romans 7)

It wasn’t until I heard Matt Carter speak on the power of the Cross tonight, that it all hit home. I can’t breakdown the talk because I couldn’t do it justice. I’ll just let you know what I got out of it. (I suggest going and listening to the sermon in a few days when it gets put up on the church website.)

Matt made two statements that really resonated with what I was going through:

[1] Personal gain pales in comparison to what Jesus did on the Cross.
[2] Personal defeat loses its sting in relation to what Jesus did on the Cross.

And Matt’s application for the night – “We win!” It was finished on the Cross, and it was determined long before in the garden of Eden:

And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel. (Gen 3:15)

That’s exciting news! That is something to cheer about! Everyone loves a winner. Most of Austin jumped on the bandwagon of the Rose Bowl victory. The celebrations went on long after the game. So I don’t see why we can’t bask in the glory of the victory of Christ all the longer. The cause is more worthy, the truth runs deeper and the Victor deserves his recognition above any man or woman on earth.

My application of tonight’s talk is to repeat “We win!” until my life starts reflecting my belief in Christ’s victory. Because as soon as I forget that in Christ the victory has been won and Satan has lost his power over God’s children, I fall back into a state of defeat. We win, children of God! Let’s start living our lives like we believe that.

Finding God's Will

An American Evangelical Obsession
by Jonathan Dodson

Editor's note: Jonathan is a recent graduate of Gordon-Conwell and a friend of a friend. This post first appeared on his blog The Creation Project. He has some good thoughts, which we thought we'd share with you:

Our culture is obsessed with the notion of choice. This becomes especially apparent when you’ve been out of the country for a while. I can remember returning to the states after spending a couple of months in the hills of Northern Thailand and Burma. My first trip to Target was overwhelming. I distinctly recall standing on the toothpaste isle overcome. There must have been 40 different choices. I felt immobilized by the number of options. However, it didn’t take long for me to settle back into the decision-driven, choice-filled ways of our culture. We have an abundance of choice in America. This past week when I was in Texas, our rental car had XM satellite radio. There were 100s of channels to pick from. There was XM1 and XM2 including a station for every major city, news station and even sports teams. Cable TV offers well over a 150 channels and that’s not even the deluxe package. Much of our time is spent weighing our options, balancing pros and cons, whether it’s picking out toothpaste, choosing what channel to watch, renting a movie or selecting what college course to take. Americans spend more time shopping than any other society. They frequent shopping malls more often than houses of worship and 93% of teenage girls say that shopping is their favorite activity. So, in a decision-driven culture what frequently figures foremost is our life choices, US! He is a means to an end, the end of our choices. In fact, comparison shopping fuels the sense of self, the rush of choice, the power of purchasing. It is inevitable that this shopping-soaked, decision-driven culture will influence our perception of God and his will.

Projecting our consumerism and decision-driven lifestyles onto God’s will, we continue our obsession with choice. We seek God for answers, directions, “wisdom” BUT we do not seek God for God! We end up treating God like a Mall Information Booth Attendant. He is not a person to relate to, to know, to understand and enjoy, to worship; He is there to give us direction. We cry out to God, “Just show me where the GAP is so I can get there!” Other times we treat God like a comparison shopping chart or website. He exists to help us line up the products and possibilities of life, compare and contrast their features and options, and wallah- we make our choice! God is not the ultimate comparison shopping chart or website, dispensing wisdom for us to make decisions about what kind of toothpaste, computer, or movie we want to buy or what elective to take. God’s will for us is infinitely greater than supplying directions or narrowing down choices. Desiring help in deciding what God wants us to do with the myriad of choices set before us is understandable. Life is complex and God is sovereign and wise. And yes, God is sovereign over every hair of your head, but does not mean that He is constrained to tell you where it will part or fall. Often God is not primarily concerned so much with what we choose but how we choose it and with whom. God’s will for us is much greater than helping us execute a series of decisions to be made in mapping out our lives. Which raises the question, what is His will and how do we respond to it?

Pass Christian, December.

There was a pretty extensive feature in the New York Times on Tuesday about Pass Christian, and the clean-up effort there. The article and accompanying pictures and video essay focus mainly on the tent city that's been erected there for those that FEMA was unable to provide trailers or other housing options for. It's worth a read:

In Mississippi, Canvas Cities Rise Amid Hurricane's Rubble
[NY Times]

It seems like a long time since sixty of us piled into a bus and headed down there for a few days, but I think there will for a very long time be a piece of our hearts that remain down on the Mississippi coast. Keep Pass and the people there in your prayers this Christmas.