taking it with me

My hero, Matt Chandler, just put up a new blog post.  It so stirred me, that I left this comment on the blog, which you can find here: dwelldeep.net

As a young single man in seminary whose father struggled and miserably failed at fighting the sins of his father and grandfather, I wrestle with this often.  As I grow older, I see more and more in me that which I hate in my father.  From a young age, I began hoping against hope that the Grace of God would be upon me such that this curse would end with me- that I would be the first real man of God my bloodline has seen in generations; that my mother’s sacrifice to stay with my father and endure hell at his hands for the sake of her children would not be in vain; and most importantly, that my God would be seen and shown as worthy, lovely, more beautiful, and more desirable than the curse and sin of passivity, anger, and pain so inflicted upon us.

So yes, this makes sense and resonates in me as I hope to maintain this heart towards my True Father long enough to have the same mind as you with the love of my life and my children to come.  Thank you for this.

–paul

yeah, i want to be kind of a big deal

I broke my own rule as far as double posting on both sites, but nevertheless, this is also on my other site: Reform & Revive

————————-

I fight with pride a lot. As I was telling a friend today: if you take a guy that is fairly smart, can put disparate concepts together, can talk well, and you make him a Christian, you get something very dangerous. He starts believing the press others say about him and begins to think he is much more mature than he actually is. This is me. My entire life people have set me apart for “something big for God.” Being able to understand and communicate even the deepest truths of God and His Word doesn’t equal maturity one bit. Seminary has certainly been showing me just how independent I try to be from God.

But nevertheless, something does resonate within me when I think about my place on the national/world stage. I feel like I’m being tailored by God for big, visible things out there in the world. I don’t know for sure what this means, and I’m fine with it not coming to pass, but I feel like I’m being prepared for a weight I could not bear apart from prior work by God.

But that’s not the point of this post. Now, like I said, I was grabbing coffee with that friend of mine – a friend who is quite visible on the national and international stage. But he’s been struggling with something recently that really struck me. He pointed out that no person ever used by God for really big things ever did it apart from great levels and displays of suffering. His problem was that he shirks from suffering while seeking comfort – the very thing that is antithetical to what he’s called to. I have a similar problem.

I’m only 22 and I feel like I haven’t suffered much. Some really dark family stuff, spiritual dark months of the soul, and severe emotional pains (loneliness and heartache, mainly), but really no classic forms of real suffering. Yet, in spite of this, God has given me a very developed theology of suffering and God’s Sovereignty within it. This terrifies me. I can not get away from this haunting sense deep in the recesses of my mind that severe trials lie ahead of me. So severe that God needs to prepare me now to survive the pains to come.

In one sense this reaffirms my desire to be well-known, influential, and in front of many people. On the other it sobers me, realizing (perhaps for the first time) what it means to “count the cost.” So perhaps all those that have been praising and building me up for big things in the future have actually been painting a target on my soul for the refining pains and trials of God.

So for those of you out there seeking renown, fame, and exposure. Know that if you really are doing it to God’s Glory, then no servant is greater than his Master, and you should expect nothing less than fulfilling in the body the sufferings of Christ, that His life might be seen through your death for your good and God’s Glory.

Get yourself some Metzger

I was reading this in an article by Bruce Metzger on the formation of the Biblical Canon:

“In short, the status of canonicity is not an objectively demonstrable claim, but is a statement of Christian belief.  It is not affected by features that are open to adjudication, such as matters of authorship and genuineness, for a pseudepigraphon [a letter written under a different author's name, as some claim some of the letters of Paul to be] is not necessarily to be excluded from the canon…To some scholars the seemingly haphazard manner in which the canon was delimited is an offence.  It is sometimes asked how the canon can be regarded as a special gift from God to the Church when its development from a ’soft’ to ‘hard’ canon progressed in what appears to be such a random and, indeed, haphazard manner…[But, as] William Barclay [said]: ‘it is the simple truth to say that New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them from doing so.’…If this fact is obscured, one comes into serious conflict not with dogma but with history….

The word and the Scripture are united in such a way that they constitute an organic unity; they are related to each other as the soul to the body [and] that relation is unique; its closest parallel is the relation of the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the Word incarnate.”

I love our messy, sloppy, confusing, and authoritative Bible.

Get ‘em, Bruce.