with me? It looks hilarious!

That is, my first RUF newsletter. As soon as I put the finishing touches on it I'll put a link to it on here. Expect to be underwhelmed, I had a month to do it...and of course, because I am a pathetic procrastinator...I waited till [3 days past] the deadline to start work on it. When I get some time this week I'll give a quick update on how things are going.

It's 60'F in Athens...Fall is here...I'm sleeping with the windows open tonight...and I'm so excited I had to share it with the rest of you. God's grace toward this fallen world is shockingly tangible. Both His sons and His enemies in this town will go to bed tonight with a gentle, cool breeze carrying them off to sleep. I'm beginning to realize why a good friend of mine objects to the term "common grace". It's becoming clear to me that any grace at all that God shows this world is extraordinary, miraculous grace. - Goodnight!



But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

-Matthew 5:44-45


As long as the earth remains,
there will be springtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
winter and summer,
day and night.

-Genesis 8:22

The Athens City Council is considering adopting a new measure that would ban panhandlers from asking people for money in downtown Athens. My naivete was shattered a year ago when I finally asked Mike, a local homeless guy I'd gotten to know, what he did with the money he got from students. Mike's reply? "Get drunk or go buy a crack rock two blocks north of here." "How much is the cheapest crack here in Athens?," I asked him. "About 7 bucks, that's why these guys only ask for 25 or 50 cents at a time. Barely anybody's gonna walk away without givin' you at least somethin', and you can round up $7 pretty quickly." I've spoken to several other homeless guys over the years and I hear the same stories.

Don't misread what I've written above. The sad truth is that I...or is "we" a more appropriate pronoun...avoid "these people" and where they hang out like the plague. We actually walk out of our way so we don't have to encounter the reality of intense suffering in the very midst of our lives of relative luxury. We make up our little "personal policies" against giving to them. I ignore them many times, refuse them other times, help them when I feel moved to pity, and (regrettably) seldom enter into their brokenness and suffer alongside of them. And sometimes sin deceives me twice...I give them a dollar or two just to shut them up so I can keep walking, or eating, or reading without being interrupted or having to listen to their sob story (which admittedly is nothing more than a fabrication most of the time).

Why do we respond to homeless people like we do? Yeah, sin is involved. Yeah, we are far more protective and selfish about our time than our wallets. And we acknowledge that a simple change in His gracious providence and God could be providing our daily bread through the generosity of strangers walking by our cardboard sign. But something else is in play here, I think. In most cases, I really don't believe it's loving to give panhandlers money. Isn't it simply financing their enslavement to sin that is physically and spiritually and mentally destroying their entire being?

Homelessness confounds me. I'm frustrated by how perennial it is. I wish it was more black and white. I don't understand the wisdom of God in allowing it to persist. I get angry when I consider that it is yet another disasterous effect of the Fall. What are we, the people of Christ, to do? What does mercy here look like? What shape does love take on? Is our hesitation in acting legitimate, or are we just afraid and reluctant to OWN UP to our calling to daily deny ourselves and pick up OUR crosses and follow the One who pours out to us "new mercies every morning"?

“We must all come to the place in our lives where we realize that we are dealing with One who is outside of our control. His will is not subject to ours. God sovereignly elects. He cannot be changed. He cannot be challenged. He cannot be manipulated. He cannot be controlled. This is a frightening thing. I am completely subject to the sovereign mercy of this God. I cannot argue with Him. I cannot bargain with Him. I cannot even understand Him. He transcends my logic. He exceeds all the categories of my experience and even my imagination. His ways are ‘unfathomable’. I may be one of the great ones of the earth. I may have great power and authority in this world. When I bark orders, people may fall all over themselves trying to obey. I may always get what I want. I may always get my way. But with God this pattern comes to a screeching halt. He is in absolute control and I am helplessly at His mercy.

Do you know this God? I am not asking if you know Him intellectually or in theory. I am asking if you have looked into the face of the One who is Absolute Will and Absolute Power and felt your knees buckle? Nothing will cause you to bow in worship like the conviction that God is sovereign.”

-Terry L. Johnson, When Grace Comes Home, p. 24 (see link on menu to the left)

What would you do if God, in His perfectly loving providence, exposed your deepest, most secret and humiliating sin before everyone you know--family, friends, children, spouse, pastors, neighbors, coworkers? What if God, in His magnificent grace, took away your reputation and your good name, your job in Christian ministry, your pedestal that others put you on and that you secretly enjoy standing on? What if the Lord lets others see what only He has seen and dealt with great longsuffering over?

I'll write about my response later (which would basically involve me hiding or changing my name or something outrageous)...but I don't think these are bad questions for us to ponder for awhile. I think it helps shed light on some of our nearest and dearest idols: our reputation, pride, latent self-righteousness, and self-sufficiency to name just a few. I believe, with the faith He gave me, that the Triune God who saught me out loves me unashamedly and unconditionally.

But I really do cringe when I consider His promises that many of his sweetest blessings will come wrapped in excruciating suffering and utter humiliation. The idea of being a profoundly broken and charity-case-type guy doesn't sit well with me, but the Gospel won't allow it any other way. Part of me wishes He would display my sins...ALL of them...before the whole world. I think it would be the first time I could truly confess with Paul that I have no boast but Christ Jesus, who willingly intervened on my behalf. I think it might be the frist time I would tightly cling to Christ with white knuckles. Surely, at the very least I would better understand the depths of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit's love for me. Surely I would revel in the incomprehensible mystery of John 3:16..."For God so loved the world...".

Lord God, for your Name's sake please slay our arrogance. Give us your grace that our humiliation and affliction might expose our deep seated need for You...that it would gently lift our eyes to the You, who cares for us. Let us walk humbly before your majesty.

I Want a Broken Heart

My absolute favorite song...

Jesus Christ did not come into the world to make bad people good. He came to make dead people alive. He came to address the corruption of man's heart; that's why he didn't address many of the societal issues of the day. He rightly understood that you cannot change society/politics/the world from the top down. It must be done from the bottom up. Society will change when the hearts of men are changed and those men then labor to change the society in which they live.

-Ravi Zacharias

I shouldn't be apologizing for the length of this, but I feel I need to say "sorry" to those of you who read blogs like I do...for entertainment...for a quick and inspiring read. If that's what you're looking for today...it may be a good idea to go ahead and go to the next blog, because this is a bit long and involved, and it certainly doesn't "tickle the flesh"

During our RUF intern training this summer, we heard over and over again that before we ever begin to minister to students...we must first "understand our demographic". For the blogging public out there who may be unfamiliar with the RUF parlance, this basically means that in order to minister the Gospel to a person, you need to understand where that person is coming from. For instance, Paul cared about the demographic of the audiences to whom he preached. At the Areopagus in Athens, he preached the Gospel through the lens of philosophy. But when he was back in Israel and his audience was Jewish, he preached Christ as the fulfillment of all of the Old Testament prophesies. So in short, we've got to think about our audience before we think about our delivery of God's message of salvation.

What would move me to muse about such a dense subject at 9:12am on a Friday morning you ask? To be honest, it's because until yesterday afternoon I had (literally and figuratively) forgotten about the power of sin, the ruin it foments, the destruction it brings with it, the confusion it feeds. It scares me to own up to this...but for the past I don't know how long (read: a really long time), I've seen my sin and others' merely as an inconvenient nusiance. I saw it as more of a head cold than a brain tumor. I have been lulled to sleep. I've believed the lies sin whispered in my ear...the siren songs it sang to me. I swallowed the bait, hook...line...and sinker. I really did believe (not confessionally, but practically) the lie of all lies...the Original Lie: if you eat of this fruit, surely you will not die.

From the first days in the Garden, evil has always used the same spin..."this isn't as bad as you think"..."the pleasure is worth the pain"..."God won't care if you do it"..."I can give you meaning and control and entertainment"...etc. The first shot of the death cocktail that sin injects is always anesthesia. It knocks out our ability to recognize it before it does anything else, that way it can kill and destroy without us feeling much pain. The Bible calls this potent anesthesia a "hardening heart". Of course, for the sake of illustration I am personifying sin here. But in Reality, evil isn't some esoteric concept. Evil has a name. And it's shockingly similar to my name and your name. So our problem is not the concept of sin, our problem is our sin. You see the difference?

So back to the demographic thing...if we are to minister to those God has providentially placed in our lives, HOW are we to minister to them? Well, we must begin by asking the simple questions: "Who are they; where are they; how are they; why are they?" Let me make an attempt at defining my demographic (the people I am dealing with primarily for the next two years, Lord-willing): college students.

-they hide from Reality, from Truth, from themselves, from rebuke
-they are pretenders, confessing things they don’t truly live
-they would rather die than confess their secret sins to the world and risk humiliation and ridicule before men
-they don’t understand the depth of their sin problem because they don’t think about their sin problem that much
-they are truth polishers, they usually think they are more in control than they really are
-they are idol worshipers who are blind to their idols' impotence and deceitfulness
-they are often sexually perverted and are far more influenced by our "sex culture" than they admit to or are aware of
-they have hedonistic inclinations and yearn to be the center of “their own story”
-when they sin, they tend to run and hide instead of kneel and call out for help
-they are scared of change and resist things that challenge or threaten their expectation of comfort and security
-their pursuit of holiness falls flat on its face daily and they become quickly discouraged, forgetting who and whose they are
-their hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked above all things
-THEY ARE ME…and more than any other thing this life has to give us, they...and I need the person of Jesus Christ, the Friend of Sinners, who came to do this for the helpless and hopeless who long for redemption:

"...to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor and the
day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn,
and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendor."
(Isaiah 61: 1-3)

Believer in Jesus, we are a broken people. I had forgotten that. Have you? Has your sin left you confused again...hidden again..hard again? If it has, rejoice even still! Rejoice as the reformers rejoiced: "Simul iustus et peccator!" We are "simultaneously JUSTIFIED and sinful". We have a Hope who is as tangible as the flesh He dwells in. We have not been left alone to work out our own sanctification. Christ dispatched to our very hearts His Spirit, who is very really and effectually putting our sin to death with us. He is restoring us to Eden and even better! Praise God for humbling Himself, for taking on the flesh of a baby and the cross of criminal to redeem the "poor...the captives...the brokenhearted...the prisoners".