From Mark Batterson’s blog evotional.com (You should read his book Primal):

Is anything more exciting or more scary than the prompting of the Holy Spirit?

Got to tour the Birmingham Dream Center this afternoon and met one of the staff. Amazing lady! She sharedone of the most amazing Holy Spirit prompting stories I’ve ever heard. One morning she felt like the Holy Spirit was prompting her to take her woolly socks to work. She thought she was losing her mind. She got to the Dream Center and one of the prostitutes that they minister to literally collapsed inside the door. She held her, fed her, and then asked her: if you could have anything what would it be? She said her feet were freezing and all she wanted was a pair of woolly socks. Not only did she give her the woolly socks. They matched her outfit.

Don’t tell me God doesn’t care about the little things! A sparrow doesn’t fall without Him seeing it. Nothing is too big for God. Nothing is too small for God. Praise God.

If you want to live a more adventurous life, obey those Holy Spirit prompting. You’ll feel crazy at times. You’ll feel foolish at times. But there is nothing like it.

I’ve just returned from a wonderful vacation in Mexico. The closer you get to the equator in February, the more clothing becomes optional. So, at a Mexican beach resort you see some interesting things. There are middle aged guys like me wearing trunks pulled up past our navel (except when we go out to eat at night, then we wear leather dress shoes and white socks); middle aged European guys over 30 years beyond the expiration date on their Speedo; and their European wives/girlfriends/consorts who…..well, the girls at my southern Missouri swimming pool weren’t allowed to do that when I was a kid. Oh, and then there are the thongs. You’ve gotta love butt floss.

Whatever.

The most interesting things I saw on the beach were the tattoos (and, that tattoos were the most interesting thing may actually be a bit telling about my advancing age, but I digress). Wow! People are painted up. Alot. And, it’s not pretty. Usually.

I saw one guy who had a huge tattoo across his back—-literally looked like a billboard. It said “Only God will judge me, and he doesn’t exist.”

If he’s right, then he’s right. But if I’m right, then he’s gonna have some ‘splainin’ to do.

Wouldn’t that be a cool talking piece if that guy became a follower? The amazing thing is that Jesus can forgive idiots who paint stuff like that on their body in permanent ink, and idiots like me too, of course.

I’m no expert on Haiti, earthquakes, or really much of anything for that matter. However, watching the Haiti earthquake coverage has brought some thoughts to mind.

Heartwrenching. How could anyone feel anything but great sadness for the people whose images overwhelm your TV screen? Oh my.

There’s nothing we can do about earthquakes but respond to them when they’ve happened, pick up the pieces, bury the dead, bind the wounds of the injured, and cry with those who’ve lost the people they’ve loved. But there is something that people—governments in particular—can do: be prepared. I love the fact that America is prepared. When we have disasters in America people run into the fray with their resources. Here in Tornado Alley citizens load their trucks with chainsaws, diesel fuel, and all manner of disaster recovery equipment. The national guard shows up. The president and governor talk and work out the disaster declaration—-aid comes!

Where is the aid in Haiti? Oh, I know that all manner of U.S. based charities are running toward the Caribbean. Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse was on CNN tonight begging the U.S. Government to open Haitian airspace so his organization could put plane loads of aid into the country in the morning. Convoy of Hope from here in Springfield, Missouri where I live is already on the ground in Haiti. But where is the Haitian National Guard? Oh, I forgot. They don’t have one. The people in charge over the generations haven’t cared enough to educate, organize, train, and lead their citizens to build a better Haiti. As a result, simple commodities like gasoline are in such short supply they can’t even run the generators so badly needed to care for the injured. No water. No food. No tools—they are digging people out with their bare hands. Why?

For generations all manner of dictators and potentates have ruled Haiti. My guess is that—as is typical with dictators and potentates—they were in it for what they could get, instead of what they could give. There is gasoline in Haiti; to power the cars of the ruling elite. And, I’ll bet that—outside of Port au Prince—their toilets still flush.

I’m not a member of the ruling elite in the U.S. For the most part, we don’t have a ruling elite. But I am a member of the blessed, and my guess is that you are, too. Our obligation my friend is to exercise our leadership, and utilize our resources and abilities for the benefit and betterment of others. God blessed us so we could bless. We need to get our minds around that. It’s Core Value #1: It’s about the people depending on us! I have to believe a similar attitude by the rulers of Haiti would have built a country that lifted its people out of poverty and created the resources so that Haitians could participate in helping Haitians.

I think there is a spiritual component here. The philosophy of Core Value #1 (It’s about the people depending on us) is rooted in my faith. Whatever God has given me is so that I can be a channel of His blessing to others. I’m not a reservoir of blessing. I don’t contain it. I channel it to where it is needed. I’m not just talking about money here. I’m not even primarily talking about money. I’m talking about resources—-intellect, ideas, inspiration, energy, solutions, brain power, and ability. Those things are vested, I should say “entrusted” to us so that we’ll deploy them in lifting others up.

I wonder if their dictators and potentates had their countrymen on their mind when they took power in Haiti? I doubt it. Generation after generation has grown poorer and less able to help themselves because there is no sense of “us” and of “God in us” and “God for us” and “Us for God and them.” (Well, I misspeak. With dictators and potentates there is an “us” but its a pretty small circle, and if it comes to down to you and me, it’s gonna be me.)

Sanitize American history and detach it from it’s roots however you want. At the end of the day American’s rush to aid each other and the rest of the world because inherent in our DNA are Biblical Judeo-Christian values like “us” and “us as the image of Him.” We are better. Not inherently, but fortunately. We are better because our imperfect forefathers did plant seeds of righteousness in the ground from which we continue to reap a crop of blessing today. I’m grateful for that blessing and for the heritage from which it comes. I didn’t choose to be born here instead of Haiti. It was a gift to me for which I am grateful, and responsible.

I don’t know what you and I can do about Haiti. Perhaps not a lot. But we do have an opportunity to make a difference tomorrow in our workplace and communities. We’ll be wise if we recognize our responsibility to advance the ball for others and make the world a better place for the people who are depending on us.

No dictators. No potentates. Just servants using our gifts to make a difference.

Oh God, help me to be a Difference Maker.

Won’t you join me?

We had an awesome training event in our company yesterday. The team brought their goals (personal, professional, relational, financial & spiritual) and discussed them with one another. Then I fleshed out a couple of our key corporate goals. There was a great energy in the room; not a fizzy excitement, but more of a determined yet upbeat resolve and assurance that yes, what had been written would come to pass. You see in our company we know that the first step to achievement is writing it down, and our team has learned how that works. 2009 was an incredible year. Profits were up ten fold. Accomplishment was everywhere. I can hardly wait to see what 2010 will bring.

Will every goal be achieved exactly as it was written down? No. And that’s not the point. The purpose of the goal is progression—forward motion toward the desire. But any variety of things will then come to bear on that goal that might change it’s measurement, it’s time frame, or even its exactly purpose.

In pursuit of your goals there’s gonna be some hiccups. Call ’em failures if it makes you feel more comfortable. And I’m a big fan of failing early so you can get it out of the way and get on with pursuing that which is most important. That’s why I believe you should never exercise, read your Bible, or pray on January 2nd, and you should always eat chocolate cake on that day. Each of those things represent failures.

Hundreds of millions of people established diet and exercise goals for the new year. Tens of millions of people make spiritual resolutions. By this time…..writing on the 6th day of the year….many of those goals and resolutions are already weakened because we’ve already faltered or failed. Somewhere deep in our psyche is a warped, perfection-based notion that any failure to execute the goal activity or resolution blows up the whole goal. But that is nonsense. All it did is delay it by a day. Since such delays are inevitable—it’s not realistic to think that you’ll execute your eating or exercise, or devotional intention perfectly—-I advocate failing early. January 2, is a good day. Then, on January 3, get right back in pursuit of the thing that was so important that you wrote it down in the first place.

For years I was hampered by perfection. I didn’t know that was what it was, but that was it. I remember my spiritual mentors encouraging me to read the Bible and pray daily, and if I really wanted to do it right, I’d do it “a great while before day” because the Bible told of Jesus going out to pray “a great while before day.” (Notice it wasn’t just “before” it was “a GREAT while before”—apparently the effectiveness of prayer diminishes with each extra ray of light as the sun rises.)  If I wanted to be like Jesus, I needed to emulate Him in rising early to pray. But that didn’t work really well for a college student who stayed up until all hours of the night. I’d feel guilty that I wasn’t disciplined enough to get to bed early so I would have enough sleep that I could get up and pray “a great while before day.” Then one day I realized that God didn’t keep time. It’s always day in Heaven. There was no need to focus on the WHEN of my devotions, and that frees me to focus on the WHO—Jesus. I’m released from my perfection, which—in reality—I didn’t have to begin with or I wouldn’t have needed Jesus to come and die for me in the first place.

The mantra of my mentors Lee Brower  and Dan Sullivan is “Progress, not Perfection.” That’s a good way to think about it. You haven’t achieved your goal yet? So what? Are you closer to it now, than you were before? If the answer is “yes” let’s celebrate that progress and figure out how we can get more of it—moving ever closer to the goal.

I really don’t care what your failure, sin, or shortcoming was yesterday. What’s really important is your tomorrow. Make tomorrow’s achievements your total focus, and make sure the steps of today are pointed toward them.

An interesting conversation erupted during a recent celebration among friends. The topic was Calvinism—a particular branch of Christian thought taught by a devout Christ-follower named John Calvin who lived in the 1500’s. Calvin, like all of us, had some right ideas and some wrong ones. In a world run amok with fuzzy thinking about God, Calvin’s cut and dried theses have recently gained renewed interest among people who are serious about following Jesus. Even TIME magazine has weighed in with an article on The New Calvinism in a larger piece about the Ten Ideas That Are Changing The World.

The piece of Calvin’s teaching that seems to garner the most interest is an idea referred to as “election” or “predestination.” It is the notion that long before the foundation of the world God decided who would be eternally saved and who would be forever damned. Proponents of the theory cite God’s (arbitrary?) selection of Noah to build the ark and survive the flood, his (arbitrary?) selection of Abraham to survive the wrath that rained down on Sodom & Gomorrah, and Paul’s discussion of pre-destiny in Romans 9 which was set in the larger context of understanding the juxtapositions between Christianity & Judaism. What they miss is “the rest of the story” that isn’t there. We don’t know the larger context of God’s dealing with humans around Noah and Abraham. We only know of God’s interaction with them. So the notion that God’s selection of those men was arbitrary is an argument made from silence; a largely unconvincing approach to forensics. (An example of an unconvincing and I believe fallacious argument from silence would be the notion that since Jesus never preached against homosexual behavior it must not be a sin. It is wishful thinking that won’t hold water against the light of all scriptural evidence. But I digress.)

Calvinistic thinkers ask some good questions, many of which I don’t have the intellectual capability to answer. I’m an armchair theologian at best. Nevertheless, I have a problem—a very serious “I don’t want anything to do with that kind of God” problem—with the notion that God in His sovereign omnipotence made a list and put some people on the list for damnation, just because He could. It is inconceivable to me that a God who is presented in the Bible as loving toward His creation, and whom I have personally experienced as incredibly loving, kind, gracious, and gentle-handed, could behave with such capricious insensitivity. Yet my Calvinist leaning friends persist, in a non-arrogant  but matter-of-fact manner, that this is just the way it is: God picked some and He didn’t pick others and “Boy isn’t it lucky for us that we got picked. Thanks be to God for his gracious mercy—-to US.”

Hogwash!

This Calvinistic form of predestination is unsupported in the whole of the scripture which instead portrays a God who created people ostensibly because He wanted to be with them, who created them with the capacity to reject Him, and who actively pursues those who reject Him bidding them to return to Him, voluntarily subjugate their will (desire to “be” God themselves and exert their own form of weak-potency) to Him, and allow Him to again enjoy their fellowship as He watches over and cares for them. This is a picture of God that I believe to be Biblical and which is antithetical to the notion that “God’s got a “damn you” list.”

II Peter 3:9 says “….the Lord is patient not wishing for any to perish but all to come to repentance.” I Timothy 2:4 says that God “…desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” The notion that God wants man to be saved and that He doesn’t wish for any to perish is incompatible with the idea that God created some people for damnation. It is illogical.

Omnipotence and God’s Image

My Calvinist friends argue that God is omnipotent—all powerful—and that as such it’s not possible for man to reject God because somehow that makes God less than all powerful. That’s a limited and monolithic view of an omnipotent God. The many-faceted representation of God in the Bible is of a God who—though He is all powerful—doesn’t force His will upon people. He allows them to choose and then experience the positive or negative consequences of their choice. In creating man with the ability to make such a choice God paid man a great tribute: He gave us god-likeness. That’s part of what it means to be created in God’s image.

God creating us in His image doesn’t stop at our endowment with the power to choose. It also speaks to the inherent way that men behave toward their offspring: instinctively we protect them. It is inherent in my father nature to protect my children, ferociously, like a father. Not unlike my Heavenly Father. This “inherent” nature, coupled with the ten major laws God handed down to Moses are the root of our human law that prohibits infanticide (except in the modern, “enlightened” world where killing your baby before it is born is acceptable ) and homicide. How could it be that this inherent nature draped upon us with the mantle of God’s image, and the commandment “thou shall not kill” could have come from a God who is Himself arbitrary in his damnation of some men while saving others? Where I’m from we’d say “That dog won’t hunt.”

God’s “Choosing” of Us

One of the points of Calvinist contention is in the idea communicated in Ephesians 1 where it says “God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” and that he “predestined us to adoption as sons.” Calvinists view that to mean that God “made a list” and in a way I can concur. Where I differ from my Calvinst friends is in whose name is on that “list.” I believe every human was on God’s mind. He chose us all. But his choosing us doesn’t mean we chose Him. In college I repeatedly chose a lovely young woman named Bobbie to go out on a date with me. But she never would choose me. Instead she exercised her free will and said “no.” Repeatedly. I was powerless to change her mind because I’m not omnipotent. You see, “choosing” is a two-way street.

Man’s ability to choose or reject God doesn’t threaten God’s omnipotence. Rather it fortifies what I understand about the unique nature of His God-ness. The gods that men create tend to be all-powerful, and capriciously arrogant in the exercise of that power. They are gods like Calvinists describe. They have their way with men, with no respect for the nobility of the human they have created. They are unlike my God who chooses to yield His omnipotence to man’s will. This suppression of power is the notion that Jesus communicated in His famous Sermon on the Mount when he said “Blessed are the meek.” By definition “meekness” is “power with restraint.” God is unique when contrasted with the gods men create precisely because He restrains himself. He restrained Himself when He came in the man Jesus who Philippians 2 says though He was God “……didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped and put on the very nature of a servant….found in appearance as a man.” God coming to earth in the form of a man named Jesus and constraining himself to the daily rigors of life as a man didn’t make him any less God. Instead it portrayed a picture of a God who would lower himself on our behalf—-a God who would put our interest above His own—because He loves us, wants us, chose us, and pursues us yearning that we would return to Him and abandon our petulant insistence on being our own God in favor of voluntary surrender to His supremacy.

Wow! That’s a god worthy of my devotion. That’s the God of the Bible.

The Main Thing

Much loved friends who’ve read this far, I understand your desire to make sense of it all. I don’t pretend to know all or even most of God. But I do know that Jesus is His exact representation. Jesus who told the story of looking for the one lost sheep and the one lost coin; Jesus who endured separation from the Father and cried as He was forsaken; Jesus who smothered and bled on a splinter-filled timber for me. The God who He exactly represents cannot be the nasty God you  portray who choses (prefers?) that those who bear His image be eternally damned.

In our effort to understand God better, and our study under the many who would teach us about Him, let’s let them decrease as He increases. Let’s not fail to emphasize the study, and emulation of  Him. Let’s have less of John Calvin, and more of Jesus Christ.