Ordering Your Private World

My child, listen to what I say,
and treasure my commands.
Tune your ears to wisdom,
and concentrate on understanding.
Cry out for insight,
and ask for understanding.
Search for them as you would for silver;
seek them like hidden treasures.
Then you will understand what it means to fear the Lord,
and you will gain knowledge of God.

Proverbs 2:1-5

A few of us AUXAers went on a search for wisdom last night and we found it at Georgetown's Protestant worship service. Bestselling author, Gordon MacDonald was speaking on Ordering Your Private World. He reminded us that what we see on the surface of lives of those around us doesn't share the whole story. MacDonald encouraged us to focus on building our lives on a solid foundation and gave us four questions to help us put our private world in order. I thought I'd pass them along to all of you:

1. What's the organizing principle of your life? Determining your main goal is the only way you can set the course for your future.
   
2. What are you doing with your baggage? How you view the actions of others and circumstances you can't control will either bring freedom in your life or imprison you in bitterness.
3. What dream are you living for? Is there something that's motivating you to greatness? Finding your unique God given role in your current context will give you a reason to get out of bed every morning and enable you to reach beyond yourself.
4. How are you disciplining your life now, to allow God to make you the person He wants you to be? Sacrifice is necessary to free you to focus on what's truly important. Submitting to discipline in the little things is the only way to accomplish your dream.

It's wisdom to live by! Those questions gave me a lot to think about. I hope they're helpful to you too. I pray they will make this week and every week in your life full of purpose and joy.

Working together

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

1 John 1:7

Stefanie Chappell, our guest speaker @ this week's TNW touched on this verse as she spoke on living our lives openly before God and each other. When the message was over she invited us to move into the light by making a private confession to the masks we wear to hide our true selves. Anonymously we wrote down our inadequacies, our failings, and our sins and symbolically released them to God as we dropped them in the front of the chapel. It was a powerful act of choosing to walk in the light. For some of you, it was the probably the first time you've ever confessed to the things you wrote--maybe even to yourself. When the service ended the words a friend and mentor, Harvey Herman, wrote came to mind.

"For Jesus to bring freedom into our lives, we need both deliverance and discipline. Deliverance is an encounter with Christ by the Spirit. These are moments when Jesus comes strongly into our lives and breaks the power that has enslaved us in some way. God has intervened and we will be different from that time on. Discipline, on the other hand, is not instantaneous. It is by nature experienced over time. Discipline is repentance lived out. Spiritual disciplines in our lives are ways we continue to express repentance and turn our lives to the Lord."

It's easy to allow our personalities to move us to one side or the other. For those who are in the deliverance camp, this past Thursday night could mark a significant moment with God that can carry us along in our journey with Him for a little while, but if it's not followed up soon by another "God moment" we can find ourselves losing spiritual momentum. For those in the discipline camp, it's easy to discount what happened on Thursday as purely emotionalism or the power of suggestion and set about to focus our efforts on how to manage our relationship with God. What my friend Harvey is pointing out in the above paragraphs is both of these mindsets are lacking. We need those "God moments" to remind us of His love toward us and his desire to work on our behalf, but we also need to actively pursue Christ and the transformation He has promised by continually and consistently placing ourselves in a position to receive his freely given grace. My prayer this Thursday and always is that you would recognize the light our God lovingly shines on us and that you would choose to walk in it every day.

Good things come...

"..being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus."

Philippians 1:6

A little more than a month ago, Starbucks surprised me with a new product announcement. They introduced their first instant coffee. The claim, "Our new instant coffee is changing what people think about instant coffee." I have to admit, I was skeptical, but because they offered me a free sample, I thought I'd try it. The envelope came in the mail last week and I've got a cup in front of me right now. While it's some of the better instant coffee I've tasted, it's still instant coffee. Translation: Starbucks Via isn't very good.

Instant goodness is hard to find. The Bible often uses agricultural metaphors to describe the transformational process. It's not something that can be rushed, in fact, there are times when it looks like nothing is happening. But as long as the right conditions are present and the crop is cultivated it will grow. Paul is sharing the same idea to the Philippians. Don't worry, this process that Jesus started, He'll keep it moving along. There's more going on than what we can see. Even though it seems like nothing is happening, it's encouraging to know that He's still working. The change may not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen and unlike a particular brand of instant coffee, it will be good.