Archive for April, 2008:
My Little Man
There is a little man who has captured my heart. He has blue eyes and blond hair and little peachy cheeks. He looks up to me and likes to hold my hand. Last night, we watched Toy Story and played on his drum-set while singing, “Little Bunny Fou-Fou.”
He is two-and-a-half years old.
He is my baby brother.
Last night, we shared snack time. He climbed up into his little chair and wanted two Go-Gurts. “One for you and one for me!” he said.
I look at this little man and I love him. We have the same father, and we have the same blood. We are bonded together forever in that way, because we have the same family. We are also bonded by the bonds of love. I understand this best when we spend time together, singing songs and sharing snacks.
So it is with the family of God. By Jesus’ blood, we believers are bonded together and share the same Father. We have the same blood forever. However, we don’t fully understand this joy until we spend time together as brothers and sisters enjoying this special bond and sharing our love for each other and for our Father—sometimes this involves singing songs and also sharing snacks! (Colossians 3:16, Psalm 34:8, Mark 14:21-23)
Abiding in the Father
One doctrine I was not familiar with growing up in a church was the reality of adoption, or sonship. This is the reality that when one becomes a Christian, he or she becomes a son or daughter of God. God becomes our father, our daddy. As Christians, we are his children.
J.I. Packer, in his book Knowing God, explains it this way,
“What is a Christian? The question can be answered in many ways, but the richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God for his Father.
Lessons of Life
While we’re a few weeks into April now, I am still recovering from March:
3/2: Massive car wreck that totaled my car (see pic).
3/8-9: Painted new apartment and began packing.
3/10: Found out my spine is jacked up from the accident, and I’ll need six months of physical therapy.
3/12: Two massive papers due.
3/15: We moved to St. Louis City.
3/18: Worship Band Rehearsal.
3/19: Special midweek service for Holy Week.
3/21: First chance to breathe in four weeks.
Now that I am getting a chance to breathe, I am starting to reflect on all this, and am starting to realize some difficult lessons God has been teaching me throughout the month of March. Read more »
Where is the Hope?
I despise news documentaries.
All the 20/20’s and Dateline’s of television “infotainment” get on my nerves. Give me a sitcom and I can forget about reality for 30 minutes (20 minutes after commercials). But with a documentary, I am forced to think about the real world.
My wife and I were watching one of those shows a few weeks ago, and I learned an amazing truth that I never knew. Somewhere in southern California, there is a facility that could freeze and store my body after I die until science discovers a way to bring me back from the dead. The cost for this process is about $75,000.
Now I recognize this might be a medical advance to defeat “premature” death. Isn’t death life’s greatest enemy? Death will claim us all, and we are correct to resist it as much as possible. On the other hand we forget that it has already been defeated.
During the program, they interviewed a particular family. This family of five had already paid so that they could all be frozen at death. Their children were all interviewed; the 12-year-old girl said that being frozen and preserved was “better than no hope at all“.
Please understand that nothing was wrong with this little girl. She does not have some other tragic illness. She just knows that one day she will become sick and die, and the hope of being brought back to life by a medical professional is the only hope she has.
I was horrified to hear this.
Even if this little girl gets cancer in her mid-forties and 70 years later is thawed out and cured, will she not then face Alzheimer’s or heart disease? No, this is a tragic viewpoint that fails to recognize that no advance in medicine will ever make this world right again.
Death is a result of sin.
Thank God for the resurrection of Jesus! Death will be with us until the day we follow Jesus in his resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 15:19 Paul wrote that if Christ did not rise from the dead we (Christians) are to be pitied above all others. One version says “we are a pretty sorry lot”
Maybe you read that and you pity me because you do not believe in the historicity of the resurrection. Maybe you read that and you think I am insane. Maybe you have neither of those reactions. But the reality is that death will take you. If you freeze yourself, death might delay, but it will take you. We all have no hope of defeating death.
Those who believe in the resurrection know specifically that there is more life to be had than here on earth. At the very end of the Bible we are told that one day God will make things right. There will be no more pain, death, or tears.
This is the hope of a Christian. We trust in a future when death will die and things will once again be the way we always knew they should be.
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