Earth Hour 2008

Ok, honestly, I don't know what I think of the whole global warming thing. I think that there is evidence to prove it right and evidence to prove it wrong.

I do know that humans are irresponsibly using our resources and that scares me. I know that there is trash coming out of our ears because we haven't found ways to dispose accurately yet.

I don't know what the answer is. Frankly, I don't know that I'm sure what the problem is. But I do know that we can be more responsible, more aware, not just about Earth, but about the things and people in it.

This is just a small step, but small steps start big revolutions.

I turning my lights out on Sunday. Why not?

Idealism

This has been the hardest week of my life, by far. I won't take the time to get into the details, but I'll just sum it up by saying I feel misunderstood, resistance, and loneliness. But in my loneliness I have done some thinking, so here I go.

Recently I have been accused of being too idealistic. I've been told that I have unrealistic expectations of people, the world, myself. At first, I was really disappointed and hurt that someone could try to tell me something like that, but now, I am taking it as a compliment. I think it is just an indication that I get it. Let me explain...

This past week in Juarez, I talked about returning to Glory. What is Glory? I don't really know. I think I've experienced small doses of glory in situations. When we handed the keys to the house over to our family, that was glory. When I saw the youth putting other people before them and truly serving, that was glory. When a group of people gathers to praise God in whatever way, that is glory. Dictionary.com defines glory in 12 different ways, but my favorite is #7: the splendor and bliss of heaven; heaven. AMEN! My gosh, is that not dead on? Glory is when we get a glimpse of what heaven is like; glory is when we get a glimpse of what God created the world to be like.

In Genesis 1, God creates the world. He creates light, the sky, land, vegetation, stars, the sun, living creatures, animals, etc., all along saying, after each completion, that "it is good." Then something really cool happens. "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). And when He finishes creation, he sits back, looks around, "saw all that he had made, and it was VERY good" (Genesis 1:31). Did you catch that? When God made man, things all of a sudden became very good. God thinks we are VERY good. Not just good. But an integral and absolutely essential part of creation that is even better than good. God thinks that I am an integral part of creation. He thinks that I am absolutely essential, and that I'm better than good. That's intense, and it's also very exciting.

So then shortly after things start to venture off the path that God intended. We get excited about the idea of being able to play God, so we try to control things (hence the story of the Garden of Eden). Things are so out of whack that, at one point, the Bible uses an illustration of God clearing the Earth with a flood, with the exception of a righteous man named Noah and a couple of smelly animals. Hmm...seems like we may need to re-evaluate things a bit.

Ok, so clearly we need to think about our purpose. Rob Bell says in his book Velvet Elvis, quoting his counselor, that "Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God has made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it" (114). Repent. What a word. Ironically, repenting is the first step to forgiveness. We tend to throw this part out most of the time. In order to truly be forgiven you must repent, or turn away, from the sin. And, fortunately for us, if you are repenting of a sin, you are turning toward God. Think about it...if your only job is to relentless pursue God, then if you aren't, you are sinning. But if you repent of your sins, then you are turning toward God. Returning to God, if you will.

Sounds easy, right? Yeah I know. It's not. It's really hard. In fact, I think the closer you get to relentlessly pursuing God, the harder it gets. But the point is not "not sinning." The point is not trying to avoid things, stop doing things, getting rid of things in your life, etc. The point is filling yourself with God. In the New Testament, Jesus often told people "Shalom," or He would say, "Now go in peace." But, as Rob Bell describes in movement 4, Shalom isn't accurately translated as "peace." I love peace. I get made fun of for wearing peace signs so much, and being slightly hippy at times, but that is totally not what this means here. When we talk about peace, we are talking about the absence of something - war, violence, resistance, agony, etc. But the word "Shalom" means something way more than that. Shalom is not about the absence of something, but the presence of something: GOD. So when Jesus said "Go in Shalom," he meant to go forth in the presence of God. Not to go forth without resistance, without sin, etc. Just to go WITH God.

So when we think about sin, we have to think about it in the peace v. shalom sense. There are all kinds of peace advocates that miss the whole point of God completely. But we want God. So let's stop trying to avoid sin, and start trying to relentlessly pursue God. If we are doing that, we aren't sinning.

This seems intangible, impossible. It seems hard to fathom that we could be sinless. But God says that we are very good. Jesus tells us, "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father." (John 14:12) We will do GREATER THINGS THAN JESUS, if we just have faith in Him, relentlessly pursue Him. Whew.

The 12th definition of Glory on dictionary.com reads as follows: "go to glory, to die." If we go to glory, we must die to something. We must die to sin. Jesus did! For us. A lot of times we get into the habit of thinking of grace as just this thing that we use in exchange for forgiveness, but that is totally missing the point of the crucifixion. Rob Bell says "There is Jesus' death on our behalf once and for all, but there is the ongoing work of the cross in our hearts and minds and souls and lives. There is the ongoing need to return to the cross to be reminded of our brokenness and dependence on God. There is the healing we need from the cross every single day" (108). After everything started to get out of control on Earth, God sent his son to show us how to live. He sent someone to give us a tangible and very obvious example of how sin and death must be conquered to be alive fully in God and to sit in God's heaven. So every day, we have to return to the cross, dying to sin, returning to relentlessly pursuing God. It's possible to do it. God promised us it was. He sent his son to prove it.

18Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. 19 For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. 20Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, 21the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. 22For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. 24We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. 25But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)
Romans 8:18-25

We do all of these things in hope. We do them because God promised us that if we are released from the groaning and suffering of sin, we will reveal his Glory. When I was in Juarez last week, I spoke on Friday night, our last night of the trip. I told the group that the one thing I was returning with is hope. After watching the kids serve like Jesus served, putting others before them, I know that things can be different. I know that they don't have to be this way. In my van, we counted up the number of people that we were going to show and tell about what had happened on the trip. Not the showering part, or the building and dusty part, but the Jesus part. It was 126 people. From 1 van. Just think if we all did that? That's a revolution. That could be 5%, the 5% that it takes to change a society (that's a statistic from a human rights activist organization).

So am I idealistic? HECK yes. Because Jesus was idealistic. God made this world to be "on Earth as it is in Heaven." So I have the right to be idealistic. Jesus promised me that. But that doesn't mean it is going to be the easy road. Just in the last few days, I've experienced some of the most resistance I've ever seen. But that's ok, it's supposed to a hard path, and I want to be one of the few that find it.

Ready to RETURN...

Can I just say for a second how excited I am about Juarez? Oh man, I'm so dang pumped. No showering, no bed, no phone, no computer, no school, no nothing. Just me, my church friends, youth, people in need, and Jesus. SNAP!

I'm ready to go. And Kelsey, my sister, is coming with her friend Jessica. Oh man...6 days...

Built-In.

The final product for our One Show TV Spot. 3 months of concepting, a Christmas break of tagging, 30 hours of stop motion animation, a day of sound design, and hours color correction later.

I've got...Spiritual Healing: Sunday School, March 2

Ephesians 4:17-24 (The Message Translation)
17 -19And so I insist—and God backs me up on this—that there be no going along with the crowd, the empty-headed, mindless crowd. They've refused for so long to deal with God that they've lost touch not only with God but with reality itself. They can't think straight anymore. Feeling no pain, they let themselves go in sexual obsession, addicted to every sort of perversion. 20 -24But that's no life for you. You learned Christ! My assumption is that you have paid careful attention to him, been well instructed in the truth precisely as we have it in Jesus. Since, then, we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything—and I do mean everything—connected with that old way of life has to go. It's rotten through and through. Get rid of it! And then take on an entirely new way of life—a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you.

From this we get a few things:
1. We can't go along with the crowd at all. We have to turn to God. Head his way.
2. Often times, we don't even feel how sick we really are. "They feel no pain."
3. If we KNOW Christ, we can't use the excuse of ignorance. (If you don't know Him, get to know Him. That's what we're talking about. Build a relationship with Him.)
4. Take on an entirely new, healthy way of life. A life RENEWED. Do you want to be well except for a runny nose, or well except you're coughing? No. That's almost even more annoying.

So last week we talked about quality relationships. We talked about how it's important to have people who validate you, who build you up, and who help you strengthen the most important relationship we have, and that's with God.

But sometimes having a relationship with God is hard. You can't see Him, sometimes you can't feel Him, you can't actually talk to Him or hear Him. It's kind of like having an imaginary friend. You know he's there, and you still have a relationship with Him, but whenever your relationship with Him is made public, it can be really embarrassing, because most people don't understand that.

So instead of just standing up for yourself, I think sometimes we just take the easy route and give in to the world. We let the world tell us that following God is weird, or different, and so then we try to go on doing both things. We're like "I'll just keep my relationship with God private, and that way I can still keep my friends and do what I want to do." And I'm not saying that you have to completely abandon all of your friends to follow God, but this morning I want to talk more about how we're drifting away from God and more and more into the ways of the world. And by the world, for some of you that means your families, or your friends, or your teachers, coaches, teammates…I could go on and on. I know what that means for me right now. But I can't tell you what that means for you.

This week, the title of our series, "A Heart of a Champion" is "Heart for Spiritual Change." I want to talk about making decisions that are going to lead to developing this segment of your heart where you can grow spiritually. Spiritual growth just means growing closer to God. Not closer to church. Not closer to better attendance. Not closer to religion. But closer to God.

Head your life God's way

Talk about being sick.
• How does getting sick really work? You have it for a while, but you may not feel it. Like last Saturday. "I think I'm getting sick, or I feel like I am getting sick."
• Eventually, you get sick, and it sucks.
• Then, you start evaluating your symptoms to see how the best way to cure it is. You say what hurts, feels weird, is bothering you, etc. Some things are very generic, others are weird.
• You take medicine according to what your problems are. You go to the store and you buy medicine to match your symptoms. You don't buy Could and Cough medicine for when you're throwing up. You get the right stuff. And the best stuff, even if it requires a little sacrifice (money).
• You rest and wait to be healed. Most of the time, you remove yourself from the world, because being out there could make you sicker, and you could spread what you have to those you care about.
• The ones who truly care about you come and bring you soup and spend time with you. For some reason, it always makes you feel better.
• You start to see a glimpse of what being well feels like, and it is glorious. It's like Friday night and Saturday. I wasn't well yet, but it was so amazing to be feeling better that I was ecstatic.
• Your body is sore and tired from healing itself. Your body has to work in overtime to help you get better, and so you are going to feel the effects of this.
• Then you get better, and you talk about how much it sucked being sick, and how much you hate it, and how glad you are that you are better.

Relate being sick to Spiritual Change
• How does getting sick really work? You have it, but you may not feel it.
• Eventually, you get sick, and it sucks.
• Then, you start evaluating your symptoms to see how the best way to cure it is.
• You take medicine according to what your problems are.
• You rest and wait to be healed.
• The ones who care about you come and bring you soup and spend time with you.
• You start to see a glimpse of what being well feels like, and it is glorious.
• Your body is sore and tired from healing itself.
• Then you get better, and you talk about how much it sucked being sick, and how much you hate it, and how glad you are that you are better.

2 Corinthians 5:17
"If anyone is in Christ he or she is a new creation. The old is passed away. Behold the new has come."

Absorb God's Way

Ephesians 6:13
"Use every piece of God's armor to resist the enemy in the time of evil so that after the battle you'll be standing firm."
• What medicine are you going to use to get well? RICE: Rest, Isolation, Compression, Elevation.

Proverbs 17:22
A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person's strength. ?

Psalm 141: 3-5
Take control of what I say, O Lord,? and guard my lips.? 4 Don't let me drift toward evil? or take part in acts of wickedness. Don't let me share in the delicacies of those who do wrong. 5 Let the godly strike me! It will be a kindness! If they correct me, it is soothing medicine. Don't let me refuse it.

That verse says that the Godly may strike you! That's intense! Remember that when you're getting better, you often get sore or tired. No one said that healing would be easy. They just said that when you are healed, your life will be a thousand times better than it is now or when you were sick.

Reflect God's Way

Finally, what happens once you are healed? You reflect Jesus. Two weeks ago, in week 1 of our series, Tova talked about being Spiritually, Emotionally, and Physically well so that you can be someone's Jesus. Well, here you are. How are you going to get there?

When I learn your righteous laws, I will thank you by living as I should! (Psalm 119:7).

If you know me, then you may have noticed that within the past couple of months I have experienced some pretty drastic spiritual changes. I have changed things, quit things, added things, and I have been very focused on God and what He needs me to do. Even the decision to work here again was a decision that was based on my spiritual growth. Unfortunately, though, the more I follow God the harder it gets. I have lost friends, sensed some major resistance with my family, and it can be pretty rough. I love my life now, but there are tough times. In the last couple of weeks, I have really been in a race towards God, and I feel like He has really been working in me. But, again, it is so hard. About a week ago, I was just in a "funk," because I was just worn out. I was tired and frustrated that I was feeling so beat down by the world. Then, on Wednesday, I was praying with Pitch, Molly, and Bagwell before LOOP and Bagwell gave me the best words of encouragement. She said, "Hill, I don't know what's changed in the past few weeks, but I like it. It's good. I see Jesus in you now."

I'm telling you this, not because I want to build myself up. Honestly, I don't think this has anything to do with me at all. I think it has absolutely everything to do with God and what He is doing with me.

So that's my words of encouragement for you. This process of spiritual growth, healing, change can be daunting and overwhelming, but it will bring you closer to God, and others will see it.