Video clip of our August baptisms.

On August 16th, 2012, we had the privilege and honor of holding our second annual summer baptisms as a newly forming church in the heart of downtown Seattle. Simply speaking, it was an amazing evening. This was likely the most gospel-centered baptism celebration I have ever been a part of. You can catch a glimpse of it here.
Video credit: Peter Isaza (www.peterisaza.com)

 

Lewis Smedes on pride and vanity

“Pride in the religious sense is the arrogant refusal to let God be God. It is to grab God’s status for one’s self. In the vivid language of the Bible, pride is puffing yourself up in God’s face. Pride is turning down God’s invitation to join the dance of life as a creature in his garden and wishing instead to be the Creator, Independent, reliant on one’s own resources. Never does pride want to pray for strength, ask for grace, plead for mercy, or give thanks to God. Pride is the grand illusion, the fantasy of fantasies, the cosmic put-on.

The fantasy that we can make it as little gods leaves us empty at the center. Once we decide we have to make it on our own, we are attacked by the demons of fear and anxiety. We are worried that we cannot keep our balance as long as we carry no more inside our empty heart than what we can put there. We suspect that we lack the power to become what our pride makes us think we are. So we learn to swagger, to bluff, to use symbols to cover up our fears that we lack substance. We force other people to act as buttresses for the shaky ego that pride created by emptying our soul of God. In the words of God’s love song, we become arrogant.

Vanity is emptiness. A person who is empty at the center of life is vain, and a vain person is almost always arrogant. Every new situation calls forth the questions: ‘What can I get out of this to support the need of my ego for power and applause?’ As he encounters new people, he wonders, ‘How can this person contribute to my need for applause and power?’ He projects his own anxieties onto other people, so when others come to him he wonders, ‘What is this person’s pitch? What does he want from me?’ Life becomes a campaign to use people to support oneself and a constant battle to avoid having others use oneself that way. Vanity creates the need to use people because we cannot keep our balance spiritually if we are empty at the center.”

— Lewis B. Smedes, Love Within Limits: Realizing Selfless Love in a Selfish World (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1978), pp. 34-35

My favorite text message ever

“I have come to realize that walking with Jesus is like riding in a car with someone that you just met and have no clue where you are or where you are going. You can get out of the car but then you are stranded with no direction at all. Or you can stay in the car and get to know Jesus and be humbled, surprised, blessed, terrified, beat down, built up and eventually end up where you are meant to be with Jesus at home.”

— Anonymous

I received this as a text message today from a friend, also a new follower of Jesus, who is learning what it means to live out his faith on a daily basis. This was so good that I just had to share it. So much truth and wisdom here.

Photos from our August baptims

You can catch the entire photo stream of our August baptisms HERE.

CS Lewis on getting your head set right

“In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that - and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison - you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

— CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, 96

Christians, We Are Not Profesionals...

I recently picked up John Piper’s, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry, again. It’s good. I have it on a regular rotation of books I revisit every couple years. If you haven’t read it, you should, particularly if you’re a pastor…or a follower of Christ.

How often, and easily, do we professionalize our faith? What follower of Christ does not know the daily fight to enter into the deep currents of God’s grace - and instead choose what is predictable, manageable and approved by the world? Who is not prone to be more impressed with performance, applause, and strategic plans to the neglect of genuine passion, sincere faithfulness and love in action? Clearly, they aren’t mutually exclusive but, if we’re honest, they often are.

This is something I have to watch carefully in my life. I fail at times, but he gives more grace. What I want for my soul, and those of my people, is a deep hunger and thirst for God. I want my soul more impressed with Jesus than any other thing in the universe. That will never happen if we’re satisfied with a mere professional faith.

Are you captured by him and his infinite excellencies? Are you daily practicing heartfelt repentance and faith? Is the Spirit moving you toward God and away from sin? Is the Bible the God’s Word to you? Are you passionately committed to your local church? Is there a growing burden for the lost taking root in your soul? Are you growing more suspicious of yourself and less of Him?

Or, are we living just like everyone else.

Christians, we are not professionals.

Here’s how Pastor John says it:

We pastors are being killed by the professionalizing of the pastoral ministry. The mentality of the professional is not the mentality of the prophet. It is not the mentality of the slave of Christ. Professionalism has nothing to do with the essence and heart of the Christian ministry. The more professional we long to be, the more spiritual death we will leave in our wake. For there is no professional childlikeness (Mt 18:3); there is no professional tenderheartedness (Eph4:32); there is no professional panting after God (Ps 42:1).

But our first business is to pant after God in prayer. Our business is to weep over our sins (James 4:9). Is there professional weeping? Our business is to strain forward to the holiness of Christ and the prize of our upward call of God (Phil 3:14); to pummel our bodies and subdue them lest we be cast away (1 Cor 9:27); to deny ourselves and take up the blood-spattered cross daily (Luke 9:23). How do you carry a cross professionally? We have been crucified with Christ; yet now we live by faith in the one who loved us and gave Himself for us (Gal 2:20). What is professional faith?