place of nathan.

Today Perry Noble said this:

The world is watching…and when Christians cause Christians to get mad at other Christians…somehow I just don’t believe God is pleased.

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Contrary to popular belief in some Christian circles, seeker churches actually can teach doctrine.

NewSpring in Anderson, South Carolina (home of my favorite blogger Perry Noble) will teach on Hell this weekend.

That’s not a very seeker message, eh?
If only Christians could get along and actually try to learn from each other?

DISCLAIMER: There ARE seeker churches who are wacked off doctrinally–just like there are wacko Pentecostals and wacko methodists and wacko baptists and wacko whatevers. I am not implying that all seeker churches are doctrinally sound. what i am implying is that just because a church is seeker, it does not mean they are doctrinally weak.

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I have been running for about six weeks now. I am running a 5K race next Friday night!

Normally when I run, there is no one to push me. If I want to slow down, I just slow down. If I want to walk, I walk.

But this week, when I was Running with Friends, it was much different. I had to think about it before slowing down, ‘What will they think if i stop now?’, ‘I’m supposed to be the one in shape here,’ etc.

When Running with Friends, it no longer becomes easy to slack. It is much harder to slow down. There is power in peer pressure.

That is why I think it’s important for us to not attempt to do our walk with Christ all on our own. If we’re on our own, it’s very easy to slow down, or to stop and walk altogether. There is power in peer pressure. When you don’t feel so great, there’s someone else there pushing you along.

I needed that peer pressure when I ran with friends a few days ago. And I need that peer pressure in my every day walk with Jesus, as well.

Questions:
What happens when the people we run with aren’t like us, i.e. we have no positive peer pressure, but only negative peer pressure?
What happens when we try to avoid all peer pressure completely? Is this a good mechanism, or a poor one?

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The other day, i went to turn on the water faucet so i could water our herb garden. To turn it on, i have to lean over our air conditioner unit. As I bent over and extended my hand, i saw a snake jump and slither away. That made me jump back!
The interesting thing about that is I am not afraid of snakes. It’s not like I have a pet snake or something, but I’m not one of those crazed snake haters or anything, either. But yet I was genuinely frightened by a small garter snake.
Why was that? Something I’m not afraid of frightened me? eh?

It wasn’t the fact that I saw a snake–it was the fact that i saw an unexpected snake.

I think often time in our lives, God does something for us that is unexpected, and because it’s so unexpected, we don’t know how to react. We are unable to tell if it ‘just happened,’ was a coincidence, or what. We just assume it happened, so it happened. Perhaps we don’t react scared, but perhaps not reacting at all to God is worst of all?

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Last night I went for a run, and it was a hard one. I felt horrid. Possibly the worst I’ve felt in my six weeks of running.

You know what is really striking about that? The first five minutes, I felt the best I’ve felt in the past six weeks.

I only ran four miles, but I stopped about six times for a breather and to stretch my legs. My legs were very sore and were very tight. Needless to say, I had a lot of time to think about why my legs were so sore.
I finally came to the conclusion I need to stretch more often than just before I run. I run several times a week, so it isn’t that I just need to run more often–there was something else affecting my ability to run last night. I need to properly warm-up and stretch.

That conclusion got me thinking about my spiritual life. Is it possible we need to do a spiritual warm-up prior to digging into deep things of God? Are there times when we aren’t getting something simple, but find ourselves too stubborn to just do the simple (and, we assume, boring) things in favor of the deeper, more ‘glamorous’ spiritual things?
Do we tend to skip over praising and worshiping God and go right to asking God to give us what we want? Is my spiritual life all about me, or is it about God?

Do you ever find yourself having a hard time doing the simple things, even though you know you need to do it, but you’d just assume do the things you want to do?

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This morning I sent in my registration for my first 5K race in eight years. EIGHT YEARS! I will be running in the Ashley-Hudson 5K Classic on Friday, July 27.

Probably the biggest reason I am looking forward to it is it gives me a purpose to train. I have been running, but running without a purpose is somewhat empty for me. Now that I have a goal, it re-energizes me and helps me train more effectively.
With a goal in sight, it allows me to focus my efforts on attaining the goal. Without a goal, I’m kinda just aimlessly running.

I think that’s considerably like our walk with Christ. As we go about our life, if we don’t have a goal ahead of us, I think we tend to end up just aimlessly following Christ. What is our goal? What small steps do we take every day, one at a time, to get there?

Where are you going?

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This weekend Emily and I went to see Evan Almighty. It was a good movie, and entertaining.

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT–It’s not like you don’t the premise of the movie, but I do talk about the end here, so if you don’t want to know anything, stop reading and come back after you’ve seen it!

At the end of the movie, I particularly enjoyed Evan’s revelation as he is talking to God: You were trying to save me this whole time. If I hadn’t listened to you, my wife and kids, they would have been gone. Evan argued with God, telling him he could not build the arc. he had more important things to do.
The movie had some great spiritual truths in it, and also some biblical embellishments (to port the movie to current time), and it was a great movie.
i do recommend the movie to all!

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This morning i was reading Job 16. Something jumped out at me in these verses, as Job is going back and forth with his friends:

Then Job answered and said:
“I have heard many such things;
miserable comforters are you all.
hall windy words have an end?
Or what provokes you that you answer?
I also could speak as you do,
if you were in my place;
I could join words together against you
and shake my head at you.
I could strengthen you with my mouth,
and the solace of my lips would assuage your pain.
Job 16:1-5, ESV

What kind of a friend am I?

‘I could strengthen you’
or
‘I could…shake my head at you’

made me take a step back and look at my life.
Optimistic or pessimistic, the choice is mine.

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I’ve been running the past month or so. Running keeps getting easier for me as i continue to do it.
last night marked four days in a row of running–the first time i’ve done that in likely eight years. seriously.

My knees no longer are aching. my legs are so sore right now, it feels really great. I have been going out slowly and coming back moderate to hard. it has been a very good week of running for me. I am getting much closer to hitting the 20 miles/week mark.

As I am training, there are two different things i have to work on. They are really completely separate, but completely related, too. I need to get my lungs in shape, and also need to get my legs used to running faster. I could easily–very, very easily, get in 20 miles each week, just by running very, very slow. But running slowly actually does more harm than good, due to the pressure of pounding on the knees. So i need to train my legs to run faster. I can run very fast (let me know if you want to race 100 meters sometime!)–but only for a short amount of time, because my lungs get tired.

I can’t run faster without my lungs supporting the sustained speed. These two things are related, but i have to train very differently for each type of improvement. It’s worthless to have lungs in shape if i’m just running slowly (jarring my knees and doing tons of long-term damage to the knees!). One without the other gets me nowhere.

That got me thinking about my walk with God. What if all I do is go to church and that’s it? Is that enough? What if all i do is read the Bible, is that enough? What if all i do is pray, is that enough? Is it enough to just send in a tithe every month?

Or, is getting off-balance in my spiritual life actually doing more harm than good? Is it even possible to get off-balance in my spiritual walk?

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My wife Emily and I like to eat ice cream. It’s a nice treat for us. Last year, we stopped by Zesto Ice Cream in Auburn, and enjoyed our ice cream cones. Zesto is our favorite place to ice cream because it’s so creamy and smooth.

After we finished that ice cream cone, we decided to eat another cone as a race–to see who could eat their cone quickest. But since I’m a cheapskate, I decided we should race to a McDonalds cone.
We got our McDonalds cones, both took a large lick/bite/gulp, and both went, ‘Gross!’

The McDonalds cone was so grainy.

I have had a McDonalds cone probably 10 times in my life. I’ve never minded the texture before, but on this particular day, I did. I hated the texture. The McDonalds cone was always okay with me previously, but now that I had a taste of what real ice cream could taste like, the McDonalds cone was no longer enjoyed as much.

This got me thinking–often our walk with God entered the same place. After we have had a particularly great God experience, we try to go back to what we used to do, and it just isn’t the same any more. Once we’ve experienced what could be, we have a hard time settling for less.

If I could find an ice cream shop serving ice cream better than Zesto, I would switch. So the question is, am I looking for a better ice cream shop, or am i happy where I am?

Am I happy where my walk with God is, or am i looking and searching for more?

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I just upgrade my blog to the newest version of WordPress, 2.2.1, released just a few hours ago. There were some security fixes, so i thought it was important to get it upgraded quickly.

That got me thinking: Do we ever need to ‘upgrade’ our walk with God? Will the things I did in my relationship with God when i was six get me by today? are the spiritual disciplines i practiced when i was ten sufficient and enough for me today and when i’m 70? Or are there logical next steps–upgrades, if you will–to my walk with God?

I think it is important to note at this point, the older things are important–note WordPress 2.2.1 didn’t change everything–it just tweaked things. It adds to the old, not replaces the old with new.

What have you found? Do you need an intermittent upgrade?

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