Everything I Need - Kutless

http://www.amazon.com/It-Is-Well/dp/B002R2IGXW/

When every step is so hard to take
And all of my hope is fading away
When life is a mountain that I cannot climb
You carry me, Jesus carry me

You are strength in my weakness 

You are the refuge I seek
You are everything in my time of need
You are everything, You are everything I need

When every moment is more than I can take 

And all of my strength is slipping away
When every breath gets harder
You carry me, Jesus carry me

You are strength in my weakness 

You are the refuge I seek
You are everything in my time of need
You are everything, You are everything I need

I need You 

You are everything I need
I love everything about You

You are strength in my weakness 

You are the refuge I seek
You are everything in my time of need
You are everything, You are everything I need

Fruit of the Spirit: Love

I'm hoping to gain a greater understanding and awareness of the fruit of the Spirit.  I thought I would start with the first one from this list, love.  I suppose volumes could be written on what love is and what it isn't, but I thought I would cover it today by taking a quick spin through (yes, again!) 1 Corinthians 12 & 13.  But first, here is Paul writing about the works of the flesh and then the fruit of the Spirit:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. (Galatians 5:16-26)

In the accountability group I am a part of one of the questions I chose a while back to have asked of me is as follows (I came across it somewhere online and "borrowed" it):

Friendship: Part 2 - Discernment in Choosing Friends

I have not always had the ability to be discerning when it comes to choosing those friends that I seek closeness with.  Often, the qualities I looked for in a friend had nothing to do with Godly pursuits or a mutual betterment of each other.  This is nothing shocking as their was no reason for me to have sought out such qualities before coming to faith.  However, now that I am seeking to walk in obedience to God, it is critical that I surround myself with others who have the same goal.  This is not to say that I shouldn't go out among unbelievers and seek to impact them for Christ; just that my innermost core group of friends with whom I commit to give and receive love, truth, comfort, encouragement and hope, must be seeking the same goal as I - continued sanctification in Christ.

What this means to me is not that these friends I seek be without sin (as if that is possible) or that they will fill every expectation that I am looking for in a friend, but rather that they share a commitment to follow Christ and look at friendship with me as a means to build each other up in our faith and hope in Him.  Essentially, that through good stretches and bad, we are committed to applying Biblical principles to the relationship including: selfless love, honesty, forgiveness, mercy, kindness, exhortation, rebuke, encouragement, compassion, comfort, truth, and patience.  It is not an expectation of continuous perfect behavior, but just that the friendship is generally oriented toward growth and transformation in Christ - with a realization that neither of us has yet attained perfection in Him, and because of this reality, some poor choices may be made from time to time despite the presence of love - but the relationship shouldn't be dominated by bad choices.  As love grows within the friendship, so should each of our love for Christ be growing as well.

Friendship: Part 1

Greater love has no one than this, that
one lay down his life for his friends.

Looking back on the friendships of my past, they were often marked by great happiness and conversely, great sadness and pain; sometimes in rapid succession.  The happiness was in spending time with a friend who's mere presence can brighten my mood and give me a sense of being loved and accepted.  Sadness and pain upon the realization that the label "close friend" or "good friend" seems to have a totally different meaning to me than it does for so many others.

"Love does not give up on people when they are struggling. It does not give in to despair in the face of extreme difficulty. It does not declare that someone’s heart can never change or that a broken community can never be healed. Love hopes all things. Understand that whenever we give up hope, this is really a failure to love, because love hopes."

I suppose it would help if I clarified my ideas of what types of friendships I have experienced.  First, "friend" is not a label that I throw around loosely.   I try to be realistic in identifying the type of relationships I have with people.  For the most part, I don't consider co-workers to be friends.  With few exceptions, I always look at them as acquaintances.  I would also apply the acquaintance label to most people I socialized with at certain places such as bars.  These were people with whom my contact was limited to certain times or places.  If I removed myself from those places, whether it be the bar, work, or even church, I would not necessarily maintain contact with them or continue on in any type of relationship.  They are all relationships that are conditional on some factor other than a mutual, voluntary choice to have someone be a part of your life.

New Testament Verses About "Brothers"

I have been interested in working out the relationship that God calls me to have with my fellow brothers in Christ.  I did a quick search of the word "brother" in the ESV New Testament and below are the relevant verses that I found.  I just thought it was interesting to read them and hopefully I will have more time to study this in the future.  I thought I would just list them out for now:

But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. (Matthew 5:22 ESV)

So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. (Matthew 5:23-24 ESV)

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. (Matthew 18:15 ESV)

Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times. (Matthew 18:21-22 ESV)

Encouragement For Struggling Friends

In many ways, my first year of following Christ seemed (to me) to be marked by a lack of encouragement from other Christians around me.  Not that encouragement was non-existent; more-so just muted, conditional, or somewhat reserved.  I think several factors played into this, one of which was the unfamiliarity of many at my church with homosexuality and how it looks to transition from the "gay lifestyle" to that of committed follower of Jesus.  At times I felt that it was up to me to prove to my brothers and sisters in Christ that I was serious about my new life.  While never outright told this, I sensed they felt I had to first "fix" certain aspects of my character, attractions, and sexuality in order to prove myself worthy of their encouragement and praise.  This deficit of encouragement that I perceived often contributed to a lack of hope on my part and caused me to question whether any of this transformation was even possible.  Rather than being pursued by my bothers and sisters at the church, I felt that I was always in a struggle to stay connected to the Body.  I often wanted to leave the church and find one where I would be embraced on terms equal to the embrace of sinners who struggled in more "comfortable" ways.  It was often a struggle to stay a part of this community of believers.  It was as if I had to constantly remind them "Hey, there is hope for me too! I am not beyond God's power to save and heal!".  Being a new believer, I was perplexed by this as I thought that these statements were ones they should have been loudly proclaiming to me, not the other way around!

Hope and Singleness

A friend recently asked me the question "What gives you hope?". It came up during a discussion about my outlook on marriage. I expressed that I don't have a pull to get married, and in fact I don't suspect that it is God's will for me to do so in the foreseeable future, and likely ever. It struck me that what my friend was really expressing through this question was his view that without a spouse I was facing a future of uncertainty, loneliness and incompleteness; that I was somehow falling short of God's plan for His children.

It has been my observation that the church in general does a rather poor job of expressing God's gift of singleness to people.  Christians often make assumptions that singleness is a temporary condition.  Temporary in that, under "normal" circumstances, it is only to be experienced while one seeks out that significant person to join with in marriage.  This attitude implies that marriage is the highest of callings and leaves singleness as some sort of inferior state of existence.  I also see the idea expressed, often subtly, that upon reaching a certain age, one who is still single must be in that situation because they are somehow damaged, are sinful, or otherwise "broken".  Even those well intentioned phrases of referring to one's spouse as "my other half", or the statement that the marriage partner "completes me" further perpetuates this myth of single people being somehow only half a person or incomplete.

Love

All of my life I remember periods of falling in and out of "love" with other guys.  I thought highly of myself for these feelings of love I had for others; that I was somehow superior in my caring for others due to this "love".  What I wasn't so conscious of at the time, though, was just how self-seeking my love was. Sure, I was a nice guy in many respects.  A certain aspect of my love was geared toward helping the person I was loving.  However, I have more recently come to see that the ugly side of this love was a desire to get something from the other person.  I had that powerful "feeling" of loving someone, but unfortunately this "love" was not what is spoken of in the Bible in the following text:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

God's Patience

I have been bothered since writing my last post that I missed the real truth of patience.  The amazing story is not the patience that the Spirit develops in us (although it is vital), but rather the awesome patience that God displays toward His creation.  How quick we are to lose patience with our fellow brother, friend, coworker, or loved one when they don't live up to our expectations?  What hope would we have if God's patience looked more like man's?  How much more have we fallen short of the Fathers expectations and hopes for us than our fellow man has fallen short of ours?  It is immeasurable.

Intertwined with His mercy, God's patience is displayed throughout the Bible.  Toward the Israelites in Nehemiah 9:17:

        They refused to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them, but they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt. But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them. (Nehemiah 9:17 ESV)

In 1 Kings, God displays His patience with Ahab.  In Genesis 6, He was patient with His creation before the flood.  Also, in Psalm 103, we see God's patience described by His mercy, slowness to anger and His steadfast love:

The LORD is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
(Psalm 103:8 ESV)

In 2 Peter 3, God is described as patient in His desire that all should come to repentance and salvation:

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. (2 Peter 3:9 ESV)

God's patience toward sinners is a great gift to us.  He wants us all to come to repent (Acts 3:19) and gain eternal life with Him (Jn 3:16).  Where would we be and what chance of salvation would we have if God had the patience of you and I?

It is a part of the Divine goodness and mercy, yet differs from both. God being the greatest goodness, hath the greatest mildness; mildness is always the companion of true goodness, and the greater the goodness, the greater the mildness. Who so holy as Christ, and who so meek? God’s slowness to anger is a branch of His mercy: "the Lord is full of compassion, slow to anger" (Ps. 145:8). It differs from mercy in the formal consideration of the subject: mercy respects the creature as miserable, patience respects the creature as criminal; mercy pities him in his misery, patience bears with the sin which engendered the misery, and giving birth to more.

Personally we would define the Divine patience as that power of control which God exercises over Himself, causing Him to bear with the wicked and forebear so long in punishing them. In Nahum 1:3 we read, "The Lord is slow to anger and great in power," upon which Mr. Charnock said,

Men that are great in the world are quick in passion, and are not so ready to forgive an injury, or bear with an offender, as one of a meaner rank. It is a want of power over that man’s self that makes him do unbecoming things upon a provocation. A prince that can bridle his passions is a king over himself as well as over his subjects. God is slow to anger because great in power. He has no less power over Himself than over His creatures. 

-Stephen Charnock (1628-1680) (1)

(1) The Attributes of God, A.W. Pink 

Patient With God?

I am often reminded that I have to be patient in waiting on God.  That is certainly true and is repeated throughout the Bible (Ps 37:7, Rom 8:25, Jas 5:7-8, Gal 5:22).  And not only are we to wait patiently, but we are told to wait quietly (Jas 5:9, Jas 5:12, Lam 3:26).  No grumbling, no swearing, and no complaining.

I have never been one who has been good at waiting patiently - for anything.  Like much of today's society, my life has been marked by getting whatever it is I want at exactly that time which I want it.  I can't tell you how many times, even in my new life as a follower of Christ, impatience has gotten the better of me - and in many ways continues to.  I prove my impatience by occasional sadness or anger over my current situation.  Also though focusing on my desire to do the "big things" for God's Kingdom while passing up on doing the "little things" which God puts in my path to provide me with needed spiritual training.

How much more I could have done for God and His people had I simply opened my eyes to opportunities to serve Him during my periods of waiting.  How many hurting people could I have comforted? How many people searching to feel loved could I have displayed God's love to?  How many lost souls could God have impacted through me if only I was more patient, less complaining, and more focused on His will rather than mine.  Impatience with where God has me at this moment is surely a sign of pride, lack of trust, and a desire that my will be done rather than His.  Not getting exactly what we want at this very moment is surely not a legitimate excuse for inaction.

I have to continually remind myself that truly trusting the Lord through faith means having a certain contentment with where He has me right now.  This contentment does not mean a complacency about the areas where I need spiritual growth...but it is a realization that I am where God has me, that I can impact others for Him right where I am, and this period of waiting may very well be God telling me that I am just not ready for that next step yet.  That He has more work that He needs to complete in me before I am ready for whatever it is I am waiting for...

Whether we find ourselves impatient in our desire for a better marriage, greater opportunities to serve the Lord in the area where we feel called, for better health or whatever the case may be, God may simply be telling us to open our eyes, look around and serve Him right where we are at.  Only then may we find our relationships restored, opportunities to pursue our calling presented to us or our prayers answered in all of those areas we desire change.

Finally, part of patiently waiting is believing that God can accomplish all things (Mt 19:26), expectantly hoping that He will answer answer our prayers (2 Cor 4:16-18; Rom 10:12), and trusting that He will give us whatever strength we need (Is 40:28-31).  In whatever circumstances you find yourself waiting, do it with confidence that God loves you and promises to meet your needs (Phil 4:19), to not allow you to be overtaken by temptation (1 Cor 10:13), to work all things for the good of those who love Him (Rom 8:28), and that we will have eternal life with Him through His Son Jesus (Jn 10:27-28; 1 Cor 6:14).

Your hope as a believer is in the Lord. He causes all things in your life (including problems and trials) to work together for good as you continually respond in love (demonstrated through obedience) to Him. Out of the hope that God provides, your faith and love can be biblically expressed in any situation. Understanding and responding biblically to problems glorifies God while He further conforms you to the image of Jesus Christ.

The hope that God has provided for you is not merely a wish. Neither is it dependent on other people, possessions, or circumstances for its validity. Instead, biblical hope is an application of your faith that supplies a confident expectation in God’s fulfillment of His promises. Coupled with faith and love, hope is part of the abiding characteristics in a believer’s life.

-Biblical Counseling Foundation

What I've Been Looking At...

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Sin Wants To Be Your Friend - by Tim Challies
A compelling look at how sin entices us, seeks to know us and eventually often destroys our credibility, friendships, and ability to positively impact others for Christ.

"Sin makes so many promises. Sin promises joy, it promises fulfillment. Sin promises to be your friend. When you first meet a new friend you reveal only little bits of who you are, what you believe, what is important to you. But over time, if that friendship is to grow, you need to reveal more and more of yourself, you need to open yourself up. Friendship grows out of the vulnerability of allowing another person to see who you really are beneath the polite exterior. Sin asks you to give just a little bit more of yourself to it every time. Just a bit more. Just a bit more after that. But over time sin comes to own you. It comes to know everything there is to know about you. And then it stabs you in the back and laughs with glee as you are left sputtering and humiliated and destroyed. It laughs as your marriage is destroyed, as your church is shamed, as your friends are betrayed. That’s the kind of friend it is."

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Being "Gay" Is Not Just About Sex - by Matt Moore
I have been reading Matt's blog for awhile now and sometimes felt that he was over-simplifying this by making homosexuality out to be something that was just about sex.  It is so apparent that it is much more than sex.

"What I’ve not been remembering when recollecting my experiences in the “gay life” is the desire that I had—and still have—to be loved, to be shown affection…to be wanted." 

I found this particular entry by him to be refreshing and much more true to my experiences in many ways.

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37 Ways To Love One Another - by Paul Tautges
I have felt that some of the greatest growth I have experienced in the past couple of years has come as a result of learning to better relate to my fellow man.  Paul does a great job in reminding us how we are to love our Christian brothers and sisters...

The Christian life is all about relationships. It’s God’s design for our personal growth, which then translates into church growth—the real kind. Loving one another is a powerful evangelistic tool, as Jesus says: “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another”.

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You Are Not Alone - by Alan Chambers
A good post by Alan reflecting on his preparation and address at the 2012 Exodus Freedom Conference which was also the first conference of this kind that I attended.  The conference was undoubtedly one of my most pivotal experiences since becoming a follower of Christ in 2010.  Prior to the conference, I felt that I was very alone in my struggle with homosexuality, however, since attending I know that I share my struggle with many others.  Probably the most important change resulting from the conference was a diminishing of that feeling that my problems are totally unique.  This allowed me to turn my focus from myself and from the ways that I felt others were letting me down, toward a more Christ-like posture of focusing more outwardly on the brothers and sisters that the Lord has brought into my life with the goal of loving them.  I definitely still struggle at times with that distressing feeling of being alone, but not with the severity that I had.

"But, if nothing else, I pray that you don’t feel alone anymore, that you don’t feel an island unto yourself.  That you don’t feel abandoned, forgotten, left behind.  That one of the encouragements that God instills in you is the understanding that with Him you are never alone and that there are people He will provide to walk along side you on this journey towards holiness, fullness in Him and a life that glorifies Christ."

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