Hello everyone!
Thank you all for your prayers, our travels were blessed and we arrived safely and very well provided for. We had an overnight stay in the airport of Johannesburg, South Africa, and said airport just happened to have an out-of-the-way prayer room that was quiet and had long seats we could sleep on. We arrived in Nelspruit, SA, the day after Christmas and we have been here ever since. There is a new Iris Ministry base here that is starting to grow and take off. Instead of a contained, walled-in compound like all the bases in Mozambique, this one is right in the middle of a very poor village and they invite everyone in need for a meal every single day. They said they usually have about 350 take them up on the offer. Unfortunately we didn't get to experience any of these feedings because they were taking a short break for the holidays, but we'll be coming back here in May and we'll be able to help more then. We did get to play with the village children who still came to the base every day, a couple of whom spoke a little English and had fun teaching us their games. I also got to teach a bit of guitar to a couple teens from the church.
The memory that will forever stand out in my mind from these past few days was when we visited the children's hospital. Several of the kids had AIDS, some were abandoned or orphaned, and all were in desperate need of some love and attention. We brought puppets and stickers and played with them, and seeing their eyes light up and their smiles was so precious. One little boy in particular gripped my heart, he was absolutely the most starved and malnourished child I have ever seen. He was 2 years old, and his spindly arms were about as big around as quarters and his belly was so bloated below his sticking-out ribs. I wished I could have done something to help him, but for our short visit all I could do was hold his tiny hand and pray while tears ran down my face. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
We are supposed to go to Mozambique tomorrow, so please keep praying our visas work out, as we don't have them yet. We will be in the town of Zimpeto where Iris has a very large children's center and plenty for us to help with. We are excited to see all that God has in store for us there!
Have a Blessed New Year!
~Carla Reinagel
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Friday, September 7, 2007
What Ever Happened to that Jon Kid, Anyway?
Hey All!
I've lost contact with you, just talk to you every once in a while, or for some of you haven't talked to you much since high school when we were best friends. I just wanted to tell you what's been going on in my life since when you knew me and I'm sorry - keeping in touch with people hasn't always been a priority for me. But I figured now was a good time to start. If you get the chance, write me back and let me know what's going on in your life!
After graduating high school, I went on to an engineering school (University of Missouri - Rolla) to study aerospace engineering. Not much changed when I went to college - I still liked playing strategy games, still didn't really do any homework, and still enjoyed ping pong. I stopped going to church and started reading more, but that's about the extent of the change. I wasn't exactly happy though, and it really bothered me that my mom was far happier than I was even though I thought she had far less to live for than I did.
Well, I ended up getting so sick of being depressed that I went on a 5 day fast to find the truth. I figured that if there was a God, then He'd relent and tell me the truth if I read enough stuff and tortured myself enough. Looking back on it, that probably wasn't the best attitude, but oh well - it seemed to work and I somehow knew there was a God and that Christianity was true. I really didn't want that to be the case - I knew it gave my parents "I told you so" rights and that I'd have to change a lot of my life. But I didn't have much I really cared about so I ended up giving everything over to God.
It was really cool and I walked away from the experience feeling a lot better all the time. My life was still pretty much the same though. Since I wasn't all depressed all the time, I could focus more on helping others out which I really enjoyed. I joined the heavy-lift airplane competition team and got to work on making a radio-controlled airplane from scratch (we got to do it multiple times if the plane crashed, which wasn't as fun - however, I do have some cool videos if you're interested). I became a Resident Assistant in our residence halls and got to do some pretty sweet things there, too (if this note wasn't going to be so long, I'd include a list of pranks we pulled / had pulled on us).
Future career-wise, I met a guy from Boeing who was really impressed with me. He told me that if I filled out an application, he'd make sure I got an internship (which are very hard to find in aerospace!). The night I was going to finish the application, one of my friends got me to go to a Baptist Student Union meeting. The topic happened to be about summer missions, and God told me I should do that instead. I ended up dropping the internship opportunity and going to the Philippines for two months, helping teach subsistence farmers techniques to farm more of their land. The people we worked with got paid about $1 a day and they had to feed their entire family on that. Almost every family was heavily indebt to the one rich person in town. I wanted to help more, but I really felt helpless to do much lasting good.
Well, I switched my degree to Physics and education so I could teach. I also gave up the heavy-life airplane team in order to focus more on RA stuff. I planned on doing more missions work – I still wanted to help others, and I figured helping a little bit was far better than not helping at all. But I knew there had to be a better way to help, and found it a couple months later! Until that point, my religion had been pretty much 1-sided. I talked to God. He, well… didn’t do much. He gave me direction every once in a while. Anyway, I found out that God still spoke, still does miracles, and does them quite frequently! Of course, after realizing this (it’s pretty obvious from John 14, 1 Cor 4:20, 1 Cor 12, James 5:16), I wanted to try it out. I got the chance with my church’s next mission trip to Mexico.
Our premise in Mexico was simple – a lot of these people need help and we had a big God who wanted to help. We did a lot of stuff, but the coolest had to be praying for healings. That trip was pretty awesome – we saw arthritis, chronic back pain, and complete muteness healed instantly in Jesus’ name along with quite a few smaller things. I know some of you don’t believe in instant healings or a God or whatever, but I’m just going to write down what happened – you can debate it with me if you like :P. Anyway, I was super-pumped – Christians always say there is more to life, but I was seeing it with my own eyes. We just weren’t giving people food or a healed foot – we were giving them a supernatural Savior who had power to actually do something about the problems in their life.
When we got back, we got to see scoliosis, a 10 cm tumor, an incurable heart condition (with the pictures and doctor’s records to back it up), and several cases of depression healed. It was pretty crazy. That summer I went to Brazil on another mission trip that was a lot like the Mexico one but longer. It was then that I realized miracles are a part of life for Christians in other countries. We don’t really need them most of the time because medicine will take care of it – most of the time they don’t have a choice. I decided to go straight into missions from college at least for a while – not so much to help others as to learn from other cultures and Christians.
So for you girls I sent this to, you’ll probably want to know about other parts of my life. This last year, our team won the MCC math competition – we thought it was funny because I wasn’t even a math major! Now for you girls who aren’t Rachel, Laura, or Mary, I met my wife two years ago at church and in my education classes. Carla had just got back from spending 6 months Bangladesh helping out the Christian church there. When she transferred to UMR, she was working on an English education degree and taught ESL on the side to international college students.
Anyway, I met her at lunch one day. We talked for several hours and I didn’t know her name. One person called her Carla, and I thought “Oh God please don’t let that be her name!” – I liked her a lot but it would be weird being friends with or dating anyone with the same name as my mom! It was a couple weeks later before I found out her dad’s name was John – if Freud were alive, he’d turn over in his grave! Then probably scream for help getting out of the coffin… We hung out a lot, especially after I crashed her car into a tree and had to give her a ride everywhere (I’d like to say it was planned). Long story short, I told her I was going to be single the rest of my life, she didn’t buy it, and now we’re married. She finishes her student teaching in December, and we’re planning on going to Mozambique this winter for a 9 month stay. We’ll be doing a lot of work with AIDS orphans, food distribution, disaster relief work, and of course, showing the people a Savior. Mozambique has recently been hit with multiple serious floods, and the number of people left homeless rose above 1 million. There have been several instances where food and Bibles were flown in to places where people hadn’t eaten in months, and the people ran for the Bibles instead of the food. The group we are going with has planted over 7000 churches in the past 12 years, regardless of constant death threats to Christians in the area. http://www.irismin.org has more info if you’re interested.
Currently, I have graduated, and Carla is student teaching while I act as house husband. We love having people over and working at camps for high school and middle school kids. We would like to know more homeless people, but Rolla isn’t exactly full of them. We don’t have very much stuff and we are debt-free, making it possible for us to get up and move whenever we need to. For the most part, we lead pretty simple lives.
Lastly, thank you Laura for dragging me to church even when I didn’t want to, Hannah for being the first to talk to me about truly important things, and Lisa and Raj for being my friends when I was determined not to have any. If you get the chance, please write back and tell me what’s going on in your life / what life-changing things you’ve run into!
I've lost contact with you, just talk to you every once in a while, or for some of you haven't talked to you much since high school when we were best friends. I just wanted to tell you what's been going on in my life since when you knew me and I'm sorry - keeping in touch with people hasn't always been a priority for me. But I figured now was a good time to start. If you get the chance, write me back and let me know what's going on in your life!
After graduating high school, I went on to an engineering school (University of Missouri - Rolla) to study aerospace engineering. Not much changed when I went to college - I still liked playing strategy games, still didn't really do any homework, and still enjoyed ping pong. I stopped going to church and started reading more, but that's about the extent of the change. I wasn't exactly happy though, and it really bothered me that my mom was far happier than I was even though I thought she had far less to live for than I did.
Well, I ended up getting so sick of being depressed that I went on a 5 day fast to find the truth. I figured that if there was a God, then He'd relent and tell me the truth if I read enough stuff and tortured myself enough. Looking back on it, that probably wasn't the best attitude, but oh well - it seemed to work and I somehow knew there was a God and that Christianity was true. I really didn't want that to be the case - I knew it gave my parents "I told you so" rights and that I'd have to change a lot of my life. But I didn't have much I really cared about so I ended up giving everything over to God.
It was really cool and I walked away from the experience feeling a lot better all the time. My life was still pretty much the same though. Since I wasn't all depressed all the time, I could focus more on helping others out which I really enjoyed. I joined the heavy-lift airplane competition team and got to work on making a radio-controlled airplane from scratch (we got to do it multiple times if the plane crashed, which wasn't as fun - however, I do have some cool videos if you're interested). I became a Resident Assistant in our residence halls and got to do some pretty sweet things there, too (if this note wasn't going to be so long, I'd include a list of pranks we pulled / had pulled on us).
Future career-wise, I met a guy from Boeing who was really impressed with me. He told me that if I filled out an application, he'd make sure I got an internship (which are very hard to find in aerospace!). The night I was going to finish the application, one of my friends got me to go to a Baptist Student Union meeting. The topic happened to be about summer missions, and God told me I should do that instead. I ended up dropping the internship opportunity and going to the Philippines for two months, helping teach subsistence farmers techniques to farm more of their land. The people we worked with got paid about $1 a day and they had to feed their entire family on that. Almost every family was heavily indebt to the one rich person in town. I wanted to help more, but I really felt helpless to do much lasting good.
Well, I switched my degree to Physics and education so I could teach. I also gave up the heavy-life airplane team in order to focus more on RA stuff. I planned on doing more missions work – I still wanted to help others, and I figured helping a little bit was far better than not helping at all. But I knew there had to be a better way to help, and found it a couple months later! Until that point, my religion had been pretty much 1-sided. I talked to God. He, well… didn’t do much. He gave me direction every once in a while. Anyway, I found out that God still spoke, still does miracles, and does them quite frequently! Of course, after realizing this (it’s pretty obvious from John 14, 1 Cor 4:20, 1 Cor 12, James 5:16), I wanted to try it out. I got the chance with my church’s next mission trip to Mexico.
Our premise in Mexico was simple – a lot of these people need help and we had a big God who wanted to help. We did a lot of stuff, but the coolest had to be praying for healings. That trip was pretty awesome – we saw arthritis, chronic back pain, and complete muteness healed instantly in Jesus’ name along with quite a few smaller things. I know some of you don’t believe in instant healings or a God or whatever, but I’m just going to write down what happened – you can debate it with me if you like :P. Anyway, I was super-pumped – Christians always say there is more to life, but I was seeing it with my own eyes. We just weren’t giving people food or a healed foot – we were giving them a supernatural Savior who had power to actually do something about the problems in their life.
When we got back, we got to see scoliosis, a 10 cm tumor, an incurable heart condition (with the pictures and doctor’s records to back it up), and several cases of depression healed. It was pretty crazy. That summer I went to Brazil on another mission trip that was a lot like the Mexico one but longer. It was then that I realized miracles are a part of life for Christians in other countries. We don’t really need them most of the time because medicine will take care of it – most of the time they don’t have a choice. I decided to go straight into missions from college at least for a while – not so much to help others as to learn from other cultures and Christians.
So for you girls I sent this to, you’ll probably want to know about other parts of my life. This last year, our team won the MCC math competition – we thought it was funny because I wasn’t even a math major! Now for you girls who aren’t Rachel, Laura, or Mary, I met my wife two years ago at church and in my education classes. Carla had just got back from spending 6 months Bangladesh helping out the Christian church there. When she transferred to UMR, she was working on an English education degree and taught ESL on the side to international college students.
Anyway, I met her at lunch one day. We talked for several hours and I didn’t know her name. One person called her Carla, and I thought “Oh God please don’t let that be her name!” – I liked her a lot but it would be weird being friends with or dating anyone with the same name as my mom! It was a couple weeks later before I found out her dad’s name was John – if Freud were alive, he’d turn over in his grave! Then probably scream for help getting out of the coffin… We hung out a lot, especially after I crashed her car into a tree and had to give her a ride everywhere (I’d like to say it was planned). Long story short, I told her I was going to be single the rest of my life, she didn’t buy it, and now we’re married. She finishes her student teaching in December, and we’re planning on going to Mozambique this winter for a 9 month stay. We’ll be doing a lot of work with AIDS orphans, food distribution, disaster relief work, and of course, showing the people a Savior. Mozambique has recently been hit with multiple serious floods, and the number of people left homeless rose above 1 million. There have been several instances where food and Bibles were flown in to places where people hadn’t eaten in months, and the people ran for the Bibles instead of the food. The group we are going with has planted over 7000 churches in the past 12 years, regardless of constant death threats to Christians in the area. http://www.irismin.org has more info if you’re interested.
Currently, I have graduated, and Carla is student teaching while I act as house husband. We love having people over and working at camps for high school and middle school kids. We would like to know more homeless people, but Rolla isn’t exactly full of them. We don’t have very much stuff and we are debt-free, making it possible for us to get up and move whenever we need to. For the most part, we lead pretty simple lives.
Lastly, thank you Laura for dragging me to church even when I didn’t want to, Hannah for being the first to talk to me about truly important things, and Lisa and Raj for being my friends when I was determined not to have any. If you get the chance, please write back and tell me what’s going on in your life / what life-changing things you’ve run into!
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
The Real Hope and Power of the Gospel
This was written for a small group lesson during summer break. I wrote it up and expanded on some of the main points because not everyone could make it.
This lesson contains the real hope and power of the Gospel. Ironically, this lesson is on everyone’s favorite topic – sin. Actually, we as a church need to talk about it more because of how prevalent it is in the New Testament. The early church leaders beg the people constantly to turn from their sins. Strangely enough, the true message of sin is not a message of condemnation but hope – “There’s a way out of the junk in your life!” It is completely possible to get rid of the addictions, anger, frustration, and hurt that seems to follow everyone around! But as the church, we need to eat some humble pie, stop pretending we’re perfect, and get our own sin out into the light so God can deal with it:
Genesis 3:6-13 – This is the first time in human history that sin was introduced. There are several very immediate consequences – brokenness in our relation to God, our relations to others, and our relation to our self. The first two are pretty obvious – the brokenness with ourself is seen because they felt shame at who they were. The moral of the story? If you have brokenness, it’s the result of sin – yours or someone else’s!
Jeremiah 2:13 – cisterns were large brick holes in the ground used to collect rain water and hold water hauled from a stream. If a cistern gets broken, it leeks out all its water and is quite useless. It is also important to understand the Hebrew concept of living water vs. cistern water – living water was fresh and clean (and moving), and cistern water could be easily contaminated and was often breeding grounds for mosquitoes. This is an incredibly important passage – God is looking at all of Israel’s sins (which were a lot) and sticking them in two important categories. Broken cisterns are our sins of choice – they are counterfeit means of trying to find what only God can give (peace, hope, purpose, identity, value, acceptance, worth etc). They will never provide and we’ll always be thirsty no matter how many we dig or how deep we make them.
This verse also explains why secular counseling or any help not having to do with God doesn’t work. You can’t just decide you can live without water – you can either find it in God or find something that won’t work! As Christians in our own lives and helping others as well, we are really good at just dealing with the surface problems instead of the sin, because sin is a difficult topic. This is the true hope of the gospel – real change!!!
We as Christians have to be careful not to help others build better empty wells. For example, consider a man who is always at work and never spends any time at home with his family. We would usually give suggestions of a reasonable work schedule rather than addressing his attempt to find his identity from his work. But even after he adopts a normal work schedule, he still hasn’t found his identity – the problem is still there. We are called to practice the presence of God but because of the fall we practice the presence of the created instead of the presence of the creator.
Galatians 6:7-9 – Reaping and sowing – sin will always produce bad fruit. This means someone else’s sin can produce bad fruit in your life! However, what goes on between God and the person who committed the sin is out of your hands - He wants to deal with you. For most of our lives, we have been blaming bad things that happen to us on sin or someone else, then sweep the emotions under the rug and pretend they’re not there. If we let God, he’ll pull up a part of the carpet at a time. When talking to others and helping them through, we need to only be doing what God is doing – ripping up too much of the carpet can be very painful. How do you know when there is more to a certain situation than you thought? When your response (or someone else’s) to a situation is out of proportion to the situation, you know there’s a sin or a hurt from a sin there. For instance, if your boss walks in and asks you to type something up for him and you fling a pencil jar in his face and start yelling at him, there is definitely something else there.
Colossians 2:6 – Just as we received Christ, walk with Him. How did we receive Christ? By working really hard? By getting in an accountability group? NO! We received Him by faith! (Eph 2:8) This is another place we usually mess up – we all accept that God did someone supernatural in our lives at conversion, but think that it’s up to our hard work and dedication after that. Nope! It’s still God – He’s the only one that can bring about real change! What do all the other things help with? They’re like doctor’s instructions before surgery – they don’t actually heal anything, they just make it easier for the surgeon (Jesus, in this case).
1 Thess. 1:5 – Woot! We’re not alone – we have help! Just as the Holy Spirit is there to take over and transform you at conversion when you give your life to Him, He’s there to seal wounds and heal hearts when you give your unforgiveness or sin to Him!
1 John 1:9 –
Matthew 18:18, 35 – We do things that have heavenly consequences. One of the most important aspects of this is forgiveness. Forgiveness is more between you and God than it is between you and the other person. It is natural to hold a grudge when we are wronged. Out of a sense of fairness, we judge their action and say they deserve a punishment. Forgiveness is completely unnatural – it’s a choice to release that person or that act to God, no matter how He chooses to deal with it. Unforgiveness is our way of usurping God’s job as judge. When you choose to forgive, you also end up breaking the bind of sin over your life. If you are still holding a grudge or bitterness towards someone for a certain action, it still has power over you! Forgiveness is our ticket to freedom from the things that haunt our past. It’s pretty powerful stuff!
1 John 1:9 – If we confess, God will put us in right standing with Him again! We give God our sin through confession and repentance, and He gives us forgiveness and supernaturally cleanses us from unrighteousness from the inside out – it’s quite a deal! This isn’t just about feeling better, it’s God’s invitation for us to restore intimacy. We need to repent not only of sin, but sinful responses to someone’s sin. Also, it doesn’t matter whether it is acceptable to society – if God says it’s wrong, we need to step into agreement with Him and repent. Again, this isn’t so much about clearing our record as it is restoring our intimacy with God.
Put together, this message isn’t a meticulous step by step way through hurts in your life or others, but it does shed light on what’s actually going on in every situation and the general steps we need to take to be free. So say I’m dealing with absolutely hating someone else. How would you help me as a Christian help me through that? What if I have every right to hate that person? What can secular counseling do in this situation? These are tough questions, but they really need to be asked. While some people are walking around looking for the way to heaven (the way we usually phrase the gospel), most of those are already in church. The people that approached and followed Jesus were the ones who were broken and knew they needed help, and those are the same people we as the church are called to reach out to today! We can’t really reach out to them in the way Jesus did unless we can understand the power of the gospel to transform and apply it to our own lives.
So what do you do with this lesson? Be silent for a bit and let God tell you what He wants to do. If you’re honest, you know something that God’s been tugging at you to give up or get rid of – a bit habit, a vice, unforgiveness, bitterness, etc. Just as a last point, God wants us to be well and whole far more than we want to be! That’s why in our Christian walk, we almost always begin to feel His working and leading in the area of purity and getting rid of sin first. After all, he’s not called the Holy Spirit for nothing! One last thing - if you're struggling with sin or there's a part of your past still haunting you, there is definitely freedom - God tells us there is no matter how messed up our life has been! While this model often works to get sin out of your own life, it is more intended to help others through their problems. Find a godly person you trust, let them know the situation, and let the healing process begin!
This lesson contains the real hope and power of the Gospel. Ironically, this lesson is on everyone’s favorite topic – sin. Actually, we as a church need to talk about it more because of how prevalent it is in the New Testament. The early church leaders beg the people constantly to turn from their sins. Strangely enough, the true message of sin is not a message of condemnation but hope – “There’s a way out of the junk in your life!” It is completely possible to get rid of the addictions, anger, frustration, and hurt that seems to follow everyone around! But as the church, we need to eat some humble pie, stop pretending we’re perfect, and get our own sin out into the light so God can deal with it:
Genesis 3:6-13 – This is the first time in human history that sin was introduced. There are several very immediate consequences – brokenness in our relation to God, our relations to others, and our relation to our self. The first two are pretty obvious – the brokenness with ourself is seen because they felt shame at who they were. The moral of the story? If you have brokenness, it’s the result of sin – yours or someone else’s!
Jeremiah 2:13 – cisterns were large brick holes in the ground used to collect rain water and hold water hauled from a stream. If a cistern gets broken, it leeks out all its water and is quite useless. It is also important to understand the Hebrew concept of living water vs. cistern water – living water was fresh and clean (and moving), and cistern water could be easily contaminated and was often breeding grounds for mosquitoes. This is an incredibly important passage – God is looking at all of Israel’s sins (which were a lot) and sticking them in two important categories. Broken cisterns are our sins of choice – they are counterfeit means of trying to find what only God can give (peace, hope, purpose, identity, value, acceptance, worth etc). They will never provide and we’ll always be thirsty no matter how many we dig or how deep we make them.
This verse also explains why secular counseling or any help not having to do with God doesn’t work. You can’t just decide you can live without water – you can either find it in God or find something that won’t work! As Christians in our own lives and helping others as well, we are really good at just dealing with the surface problems instead of the sin, because sin is a difficult topic. This is the true hope of the gospel – real change!!!
We as Christians have to be careful not to help others build better empty wells. For example, consider a man who is always at work and never spends any time at home with his family. We would usually give suggestions of a reasonable work schedule rather than addressing his attempt to find his identity from his work. But even after he adopts a normal work schedule, he still hasn’t found his identity – the problem is still there. We are called to practice the presence of God but because of the fall we practice the presence of the created instead of the presence of the creator.
Galatians 6:7-9 – Reaping and sowing – sin will always produce bad fruit. This means someone else’s sin can produce bad fruit in your life! However, what goes on between God and the person who committed the sin is out of your hands - He wants to deal with you. For most of our lives, we have been blaming bad things that happen to us on sin or someone else, then sweep the emotions under the rug and pretend they’re not there. If we let God, he’ll pull up a part of the carpet at a time. When talking to others and helping them through, we need to only be doing what God is doing – ripping up too much of the carpet can be very painful. How do you know when there is more to a certain situation than you thought? When your response (or someone else’s) to a situation is out of proportion to the situation, you know there’s a sin or a hurt from a sin there. For instance, if your boss walks in and asks you to type something up for him and you fling a pencil jar in his face and start yelling at him, there is definitely something else there.
Colossians 2:6 – Just as we received Christ, walk with Him. How did we receive Christ? By working really hard? By getting in an accountability group? NO! We received Him by faith! (Eph 2:8) This is another place we usually mess up – we all accept that God did someone supernatural in our lives at conversion, but think that it’s up to our hard work and dedication after that. Nope! It’s still God – He’s the only one that can bring about real change! What do all the other things help with? They’re like doctor’s instructions before surgery – they don’t actually heal anything, they just make it easier for the surgeon (Jesus, in this case).
1 Thess. 1:5 – Woot! We’re not alone – we have help! Just as the Holy Spirit is there to take over and transform you at conversion when you give your life to Him, He’s there to seal wounds and heal hearts when you give your unforgiveness or sin to Him!
1 John 1:9 –
Matthew 18:18, 35 – We do things that have heavenly consequences. One of the most important aspects of this is forgiveness. Forgiveness is more between you and God than it is between you and the other person. It is natural to hold a grudge when we are wronged. Out of a sense of fairness, we judge their action and say they deserve a punishment. Forgiveness is completely unnatural – it’s a choice to release that person or that act to God, no matter how He chooses to deal with it. Unforgiveness is our way of usurping God’s job as judge. When you choose to forgive, you also end up breaking the bind of sin over your life. If you are still holding a grudge or bitterness towards someone for a certain action, it still has power over you! Forgiveness is our ticket to freedom from the things that haunt our past. It’s pretty powerful stuff!
1 John 1:9 – If we confess, God will put us in right standing with Him again! We give God our sin through confession and repentance, and He gives us forgiveness and supernaturally cleanses us from unrighteousness from the inside out – it’s quite a deal! This isn’t just about feeling better, it’s God’s invitation for us to restore intimacy. We need to repent not only of sin, but sinful responses to someone’s sin. Also, it doesn’t matter whether it is acceptable to society – if God says it’s wrong, we need to step into agreement with Him and repent. Again, this isn’t so much about clearing our record as it is restoring our intimacy with God.
Put together, this message isn’t a meticulous step by step way through hurts in your life or others, but it does shed light on what’s actually going on in every situation and the general steps we need to take to be free. So say I’m dealing with absolutely hating someone else. How would you help me as a Christian help me through that? What if I have every right to hate that person? What can secular counseling do in this situation? These are tough questions, but they really need to be asked. While some people are walking around looking for the way to heaven (the way we usually phrase the gospel), most of those are already in church. The people that approached and followed Jesus were the ones who were broken and knew they needed help, and those are the same people we as the church are called to reach out to today! We can’t really reach out to them in the way Jesus did unless we can understand the power of the gospel to transform and apply it to our own lives.
So what do you do with this lesson? Be silent for a bit and let God tell you what He wants to do. If you’re honest, you know something that God’s been tugging at you to give up or get rid of – a bit habit, a vice, unforgiveness, bitterness, etc. Just as a last point, God wants us to be well and whole far more than we want to be! That’s why in our Christian walk, we almost always begin to feel His working and leading in the area of purity and getting rid of sin first. After all, he’s not called the Holy Spirit for nothing! One last thing - if you're struggling with sin or there's a part of your past still haunting you, there is definitely freedom - God tells us there is no matter how messed up our life has been! While this model often works to get sin out of your own life, it is more intended to help others through their problems. Find a godly person you trust, let them know the situation, and let the healing process begin!
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Praying with Power
Also written as a small group lesson:
Last week we learned that God wants to be with us on Earth – that we’re advancing the Kingdom. For Michael, we’re Israel and desperately in need of some help, and today we’re going to be talking about how to get weapons from the US (God) to us. For Hannah, Shoes R Us is giving away all their shoes and today we’ll be talking about how to get them from the store to our house. For everyone else, we serve a God who loves us – we want to be loved. We serve a God who wants to bring the people around us into a relationship with Him – we want our friends to know Him too. We serve a God who wants to radically change us – we want to be radically changed! If you both want the same things, why’s it not happening? Today we’ll be talking about linking the two up.
What’s the number 1 mistake we make in reading the Bible? Not believing it, not acting on it, saying that it was only applicable 2000 years ago. We sweep all the fun stuff into the past or the far future. Honestly, it’s more comfortable this way. If God doesn’t do much in us or around us today, then we have no reason to expect that He would be intricately involved in our lives. Read Revelation 1:8 – the normal way for God to introduce Himself would be in order; who was, who is, and who is to come. He chooses to introduce Himself first and primarily as the God who is. God is mainly a God of today!
If you’ve never been to church a day in your life, how would the Christian life look according to these scriptures?
1 Cor 4:20 – Christians have the ability to do things about their situation. Christianity isn’t just a way to make you feel better about a situation – it’s got power to change the situation.
John 10:10 – The Christian life should be far more fun and more exciting and more fulfilling than its non-Christian counterpart. We usually see Christianity as full of misery and sacrifice; “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints – the sinners are much more fun” – Billy Joel. If you just took the Bible for its word, we should be having a blast!
Isaiah 61:1-3 (knowing it’s about Jesus) – People who follow Jesus will have their mourning turned to happiness and their sadness turned to joy.
If you’ve never been to church a day in your life, what would these verses mean?
Matthew 19:26 – With God, all things are possible
Luke 1:37 – Nothing is impossible with God
Do you see these things in your life right now? Do you see them in their fullness? No! So what choices do we have? We can either overlay our own experiences on the Bible and let our experiences dictate what the Bible says, or we can choose to believe the Bible over our own experiences. The first is safer and means we can keep on living life as we always have. If we choose to believe the Bible over our experiences, we have to grapple with the frustration that, honestly, we don’t see everything in the Bible. However, that’s what the Christian life is about! It’s about bringing God’s rule and reign down on Earth. Abraham, Mary, Joshua, Gideon, and Peter, among others, chose to live by what God had told them instead of what they knew to be true from their experiences.
Prayer: connecting God’s will and our life.
Most of the time, we pray prayers like “God, if it’s your will, ….” While those prayers sound good and everything, there are a couple things wrong with that. First of all, that’s not how Jesus taught us how to pray and that’s not how the apostles prayed. Their prayers scare us – they commanded things to leave or be healed in the name of Jesus. Those prayers leave an exit for us – if the prayer didn’t get answered, then we can go on with life without loosing any of our faith. But our faith isn’t grown when prayers are answered, either. Also, we’ve left out the step of listening to God, which is the most important part. Without asking God, we’re no doubt praying our will and hoping God wants it too instead of praying God’s will. From last time, God doesn’t want servants, He wants friends and friendship requires two-way communication. The apostles were confident of God’s will in the situation and confident of His power to move, because they were listening to God! See Ecclesiastes 5:2, John 16:13&14, and John 15:15.
So what does that look like? Prayer time shouldn’t be entirely spent talking to God. Effective prayer is finding out God’s will in a situation then praying expecting that to happen (expectation is a good synonym for faith). I remember the first time I prayed like this – I was in the Philippines with a Southern Baptist group who stressed the absolute importance of memorizing scripture. We had to memorize a scripture every two days, and I couldn’t do it at all. When I told my team leader, he said, “Pray about it. What could be more in God’s will than memorizing His word?” That second part was the key – I began praying for an ability to memorize scripture and totally expecting God to do it because I knew it was in His will. And it happened! To this day, I know a ton of scripture but can’t memorize anything else.
When asking God’s will, be prepared to do things if He asks. Sometimes His response will be to tell you to do something and you don’t just get to sit in your little prayer closet. Also, be prepared to believe His word over your circumstances. Yes, you may know that spitting on blind people does not heal them, but that’s what God said to do. It may look like God doesn’t want to do something because He didn’t answer your prayer the first time, but then again, what did He tell you? If you know it’s His will and He hasn’t given you other instructions, keep praying – you know He’s going to answer it (Luke 11:9-11)! This isn’t about bothering God until He gives you something, it is about accepting His word more than your circumstances. “Wait, are you sure you didn’t get healed? That can’t be right - let’s try that again”
Promises in the Bible:
Biblical promises are an awesome place to begin – they always reveal God’s heart in a situation. We need to stop ignoring them or believing God’s saying something else than what is written. However, the promises don’t always reveal God’s execution. For instance, the great commission reveals God’s heart to spread the gospel. However, in Acts 16:6-7, Paul and company were prevented by the Holy Spirit from going into Asia. God’s heart was to spread the gospel to all people, but He had a different plan to execute it. Listening to Christ is absolutely crucial.
What does applying this look like? When you find a promise in the Bible, ask God to show you how this will apply to your life, then pray about it / do it! By praying to get God’s will done instead of our own, our prayers become much more powerful. George Mueller, 19th century missionary, said not one of his prayers went unanswered. For additional reading on this topic, I’d highly recommend “Like a Mighty Wind” by Mel Tari.
Last week we learned that God wants to be with us on Earth – that we’re advancing the Kingdom. For Michael, we’re Israel and desperately in need of some help, and today we’re going to be talking about how to get weapons from the US (God) to us. For Hannah, Shoes R Us is giving away all their shoes and today we’ll be talking about how to get them from the store to our house. For everyone else, we serve a God who loves us – we want to be loved. We serve a God who wants to bring the people around us into a relationship with Him – we want our friends to know Him too. We serve a God who wants to radically change us – we want to be radically changed! If you both want the same things, why’s it not happening? Today we’ll be talking about linking the two up.
What’s the number 1 mistake we make in reading the Bible? Not believing it, not acting on it, saying that it was only applicable 2000 years ago. We sweep all the fun stuff into the past or the far future. Honestly, it’s more comfortable this way. If God doesn’t do much in us or around us today, then we have no reason to expect that He would be intricately involved in our lives. Read Revelation 1:8 – the normal way for God to introduce Himself would be in order; who was, who is, and who is to come. He chooses to introduce Himself first and primarily as the God who is. God is mainly a God of today!
If you’ve never been to church a day in your life, how would the Christian life look according to these scriptures?
1 Cor 4:20 – Christians have the ability to do things about their situation. Christianity isn’t just a way to make you feel better about a situation – it’s got power to change the situation.
John 10:10 – The Christian life should be far more fun and more exciting and more fulfilling than its non-Christian counterpart. We usually see Christianity as full of misery and sacrifice; “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints – the sinners are much more fun” – Billy Joel. If you just took the Bible for its word, we should be having a blast!
Isaiah 61:1-3 (knowing it’s about Jesus) – People who follow Jesus will have their mourning turned to happiness and their sadness turned to joy.
If you’ve never been to church a day in your life, what would these verses mean?
Matthew 19:26 – With God, all things are possible
Luke 1:37 – Nothing is impossible with God
Do you see these things in your life right now? Do you see them in their fullness? No! So what choices do we have? We can either overlay our own experiences on the Bible and let our experiences dictate what the Bible says, or we can choose to believe the Bible over our own experiences. The first is safer and means we can keep on living life as we always have. If we choose to believe the Bible over our experiences, we have to grapple with the frustration that, honestly, we don’t see everything in the Bible. However, that’s what the Christian life is about! It’s about bringing God’s rule and reign down on Earth. Abraham, Mary, Joshua, Gideon, and Peter, among others, chose to live by what God had told them instead of what they knew to be true from their experiences.
Prayer: connecting God’s will and our life.
Most of the time, we pray prayers like “God, if it’s your will, ….” While those prayers sound good and everything, there are a couple things wrong with that. First of all, that’s not how Jesus taught us how to pray and that’s not how the apostles prayed. Their prayers scare us – they commanded things to leave or be healed in the name of Jesus. Those prayers leave an exit for us – if the prayer didn’t get answered, then we can go on with life without loosing any of our faith. But our faith isn’t grown when prayers are answered, either. Also, we’ve left out the step of listening to God, which is the most important part. Without asking God, we’re no doubt praying our will and hoping God wants it too instead of praying God’s will. From last time, God doesn’t want servants, He wants friends and friendship requires two-way communication. The apostles were confident of God’s will in the situation and confident of His power to move, because they were listening to God! See Ecclesiastes 5:2, John 16:13&14, and John 15:15.
So what does that look like? Prayer time shouldn’t be entirely spent talking to God. Effective prayer is finding out God’s will in a situation then praying expecting that to happen (expectation is a good synonym for faith). I remember the first time I prayed like this – I was in the Philippines with a Southern Baptist group who stressed the absolute importance of memorizing scripture. We had to memorize a scripture every two days, and I couldn’t do it at all. When I told my team leader, he said, “Pray about it. What could be more in God’s will than memorizing His word?” That second part was the key – I began praying for an ability to memorize scripture and totally expecting God to do it because I knew it was in His will. And it happened! To this day, I know a ton of scripture but can’t memorize anything else.
When asking God’s will, be prepared to do things if He asks. Sometimes His response will be to tell you to do something and you don’t just get to sit in your little prayer closet. Also, be prepared to believe His word over your circumstances. Yes, you may know that spitting on blind people does not heal them, but that’s what God said to do. It may look like God doesn’t want to do something because He didn’t answer your prayer the first time, but then again, what did He tell you? If you know it’s His will and He hasn’t given you other instructions, keep praying – you know He’s going to answer it (Luke 11:9-11)! This isn’t about bothering God until He gives you something, it is about accepting His word more than your circumstances. “Wait, are you sure you didn’t get healed? That can’t be right - let’s try that again”
Promises in the Bible:
Biblical promises are an awesome place to begin – they always reveal God’s heart in a situation. We need to stop ignoring them or believing God’s saying something else than what is written. However, the promises don’t always reveal God’s execution. For instance, the great commission reveals God’s heart to spread the gospel. However, in Acts 16:6-7, Paul and company were prevented by the Holy Spirit from going into Asia. God’s heart was to spread the gospel to all people, but He had a different plan to execute it. Listening to Christ is absolutely crucial.
What does applying this look like? When you find a promise in the Bible, ask God to show you how this will apply to your life, then pray about it / do it! By praying to get God’s will done instead of our own, our prayers become much more powerful. George Mueller, 19th century missionary, said not one of his prayers went unanswered. For additional reading on this topic, I’d highly recommend “Like a Mighty Wind” by Mel Tari.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Worship and Relating to God
Hey all,
This was the Lifegroup message from Saturday. It's of course in a little different format without all the questions etc. I've embellished on it a little and added a number of insights others in the group had. For those of you who were there, I've attached all the verses I used and a couple others in case you wanted to look them all up. So without further ado:
4 Kinds of people approaching Christ:
Mark 9:20-27 – “if you can”
Mark 1:40-42 – “you can – if you are willing” – most Christians
Mark 5:25-29 – “if I can only ____, He will”
Mark 10:46-52 – “I can’t – He can”
Each of them showed completely different levels of faith. Normally, we’d say that the last two got healed because of their faith. What about the first two examples? The first guy didn’t even know if Jesus could heal his son. It was Jesus and His presence that resulted in the healings – that is the only constant in each story. So, what does that mean if you’re getting prayer for healing? Don’t worry about how much faith you have! What about if you’re praying for others? Don’t worry – it’s not about you; it’s about bringing the person you’re praying for into the presence of Jesus.
We’ll come back to that: Jesus healed far more people than actually followed him. In fact, he healed everyone who asked, but tried to drive away people who were trying to follow. Why do you think that is? Today, far more people follow Christ than have actually seen His power - why? Jesus never left a shadow of a doubt to whether or not He was the Messiah to anyone actually looking for Him. The question was always “how important is the kingdom of God to you?” It should be the same now.
What kind of people was/is Jesus looking for? Exodus 20:18-20 – Israel chooses safety instead of intimacy with God. Israel was willing to obey God – they just didn’t want to get close to Him. God wanted them to go up the mountain, but they didn’t want God – they wanted someone who would protect them and guide them without actually getting to know Him. We do this in our own lives – a lot of times we go to God just wanting direction or comfort when He wants to spend time with us and actually have a relationship. God’s looking for people like Moses and Joshua who went up the mountain.
Exodus 32:1 – God is still in a cloud on top of the mountain in view of the Israelites, but the Israelites decide to make another god. What’s the reason they give? They want someone to lead them. That’s the same thing God wanted to do! Before then, He had been leading His people by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He told the Israelites that He was going to lead them into the Promise Land. The only problem is the people didn’t want to wait for God’s timing. We often know what God wants to do and try to do it without Him. God’s looking for people who will wait on His timing. See also Acts 1:12-26 when the apostles tried to choose their own replacement vs Acts 9:1-6 when God chose his own. See also the story of Hagar and Sarah (Genesis 15:4-5, Genesis 16:1-3, Genesis 21:1-7).
Exodus 33:7-11 – Israel worshipped God, but from a distance. God doesn’t desire many many followers, but a few who are like Joshua. What is the difference in our own lives? The Israelites (which almost always represent us – we’re God’s people, grafted in. See Romans 11) worshipped God only when He was doing something and from a distance. We often only worship and praise God when He’s doing something cool in our lives. Do we want a relationship with Him or do we just want occasional direction? A relationship isn’t just 1-sided and isn’t completely focused on doing things. Also, how much are we willing to pay for that relationship? To get any closer to God, the Israelites would have had to sanctify themselves, going through the cleansing rituals and offering sacrifices, etc. To them it wasn’t worth it. It’s the same way now – if we approach God and honestly seek him, He will definitely pull stuff out of our lives and ask us to give other things up. Is it worth it to us?
"Give me one hundred men who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not whether they be clergyman or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of Hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven upon the earth.” – John Wesley
God desires several things from us, and none of them involve miracles or bringing people to Christ (Matt 7:22). John 4:23-24 – He desires worshippers in Spirit and in Truth. Worship that’s not in truth is telling God things we don’t mean or promising things we have no intention of keeping, especially in worship songs. Worship not in spirit is doing things grudgingly and without the right heart. The Lifegroup came up with a ton of really awesome things about worshipping in spirit and / or in truth, but I forgot them…
So what’s so important about worship? Psalms 22:3 – God inhabits the praises of His people. If God’s spirit comes, what happens? God’s kingdom comes, His will is done. Anything not from God starts to get pushed out – worship can be a little uncomfortable because of this. But it’s really good and the only thing that really changes you (Isaiah 6:1-7 is one instance of this). But there’s another really cool thing! In Jesus’ time, the view of the world was that humans lived on the ground, the air (Ephesians 2:2) and essentially the kingdoms of this world (Luke 4:6) were ruled by Satan who was more powerful than any human, and God was in heaven and far more powerful than Satan, but pretty inaccessible because of the cushion of Satan’s kingdom. God inhabits the praise of his people – basically we become a point of contact between God and the people around us. Christ in us (Col 1:27, and all over the NT) isn’t just a theological point! The more of God inhabits us, the more love and the more of Christ we can spread to others.
For example – mission trips. In Mexico (two years in a row) and in Brazil, we worshipped God a lot, then we saw a couple healings. Of course, that made us want to worship more, and we saw even more healings! This happened for the entire mission trip, getting even closer to God and getting to see even more stuff happen because of the amount of Christ in us. After Lifegroup when we worshipped for a long time, a couple of us were so pumped that we walked around the UMR campus looking for things to pray for. We actually did get to pray for a guy for quite a long time, but ask me or David or Lance for that story :P.
This was the Lifegroup message from Saturday. It's of course in a little different format without all the questions etc. I've embellished on it a little and added a number of insights others in the group had. For those of you who were there, I've attached all the verses I used and a couple others in case you wanted to look them all up. So without further ado:
4 Kinds of people approaching Christ:
Mark 9:20-27 – “if you can”
Mark 1:40-42 – “you can – if you are willing” – most Christians
Mark 5:25-29 – “if I can only ____, He will”
Mark 10:46-52 – “I can’t – He can”
Each of them showed completely different levels of faith. Normally, we’d say that the last two got healed because of their faith. What about the first two examples? The first guy didn’t even know if Jesus could heal his son. It was Jesus and His presence that resulted in the healings – that is the only constant in each story. So, what does that mean if you’re getting prayer for healing? Don’t worry about how much faith you have! What about if you’re praying for others? Don’t worry – it’s not about you; it’s about bringing the person you’re praying for into the presence of Jesus.
We’ll come back to that: Jesus healed far more people than actually followed him. In fact, he healed everyone who asked, but tried to drive away people who were trying to follow. Why do you think that is? Today, far more people follow Christ than have actually seen His power - why? Jesus never left a shadow of a doubt to whether or not He was the Messiah to anyone actually looking for Him. The question was always “how important is the kingdom of God to you?” It should be the same now.
What kind of people was/is Jesus looking for? Exodus 20:18-20 – Israel chooses safety instead of intimacy with God. Israel was willing to obey God – they just didn’t want to get close to Him. God wanted them to go up the mountain, but they didn’t want God – they wanted someone who would protect them and guide them without actually getting to know Him. We do this in our own lives – a lot of times we go to God just wanting direction or comfort when He wants to spend time with us and actually have a relationship. God’s looking for people like Moses and Joshua who went up the mountain.
Exodus 32:1 – God is still in a cloud on top of the mountain in view of the Israelites, but the Israelites decide to make another god. What’s the reason they give? They want someone to lead them. That’s the same thing God wanted to do! Before then, He had been leading His people by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He told the Israelites that He was going to lead them into the Promise Land. The only problem is the people didn’t want to wait for God’s timing. We often know what God wants to do and try to do it without Him. God’s looking for people who will wait on His timing. See also Acts 1:12-26 when the apostles tried to choose their own replacement vs Acts 9:1-6 when God chose his own. See also the story of Hagar and Sarah (Genesis 15:4-5, Genesis 16:1-3, Genesis 21:1-7).
Exodus 33:7-11 – Israel worshipped God, but from a distance. God doesn’t desire many many followers, but a few who are like Joshua. What is the difference in our own lives? The Israelites (which almost always represent us – we’re God’s people, grafted in. See Romans 11) worshipped God only when He was doing something and from a distance. We often only worship and praise God when He’s doing something cool in our lives. Do we want a relationship with Him or do we just want occasional direction? A relationship isn’t just 1-sided and isn’t completely focused on doing things. Also, how much are we willing to pay for that relationship? To get any closer to God, the Israelites would have had to sanctify themselves, going through the cleansing rituals and offering sacrifices, etc. To them it wasn’t worth it. It’s the same way now – if we approach God and honestly seek him, He will definitely pull stuff out of our lives and ask us to give other things up. Is it worth it to us?
"Give me one hundred men who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not whether they be clergyman or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of Hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven upon the earth.” – John Wesley
God desires several things from us, and none of them involve miracles or bringing people to Christ (Matt 7:22). John 4:23-24 – He desires worshippers in Spirit and in Truth. Worship that’s not in truth is telling God things we don’t mean or promising things we have no intention of keeping, especially in worship songs. Worship not in spirit is doing things grudgingly and without the right heart. The Lifegroup came up with a ton of really awesome things about worshipping in spirit and / or in truth, but I forgot them…
So what’s so important about worship? Psalms 22:3 – God inhabits the praises of His people. If God’s spirit comes, what happens? God’s kingdom comes, His will is done. Anything not from God starts to get pushed out – worship can be a little uncomfortable because of this. But it’s really good and the only thing that really changes you (Isaiah 6:1-7 is one instance of this). But there’s another really cool thing! In Jesus’ time, the view of the world was that humans lived on the ground, the air (Ephesians 2:2) and essentially the kingdoms of this world (Luke 4:6) were ruled by Satan who was more powerful than any human, and God was in heaven and far more powerful than Satan, but pretty inaccessible because of the cushion of Satan’s kingdom. God inhabits the praise of his people – basically we become a point of contact between God and the people around us. Christ in us (Col 1:27, and all over the NT) isn’t just a theological point! The more of God inhabits us, the more love and the more of Christ we can spread to others.
For example – mission trips. In Mexico (two years in a row) and in Brazil, we worshipped God a lot, then we saw a couple healings. Of course, that made us want to worship more, and we saw even more healings! This happened for the entire mission trip, getting even closer to God and getting to see even more stuff happen because of the amount of Christ in us. After Lifegroup when we worshipped for a long time, a couple of us were so pumped that we walked around the UMR campus looking for things to pray for. We actually did get to pray for a guy for quite a long time, but ask me or David or Lance for that story :P.
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