I don’t feel very emerging.
In sitting under the teaching of Sean Cordell this past weekend at the annual 20/20 conference, I have become convicted of my current lifestyle. I spend more time and money on my own pleasure than on the things of God. I am convicted that I spend far too much time on trivial things. Facebook, blogging (hmm), TV, Halo3, and even poker have become substitutes for an active life in the Kingdom of God. How can I call for a generation of young people to live radical lives for the Kingdom of God, and yet regularly spend $12 for a plate of noodles?
Apathy is a curse on my life. I just don’t give a damn. Every time I think about the problems in the world, the lostness all around me, I commit to making my life a difference. And yet, every morning I wake up, roll out of bed and go about my business, irreverent to the world around me. Why do I ignore the cries of the world around me? I see people everyday who don’t know Jesus, who haven’t been changed by grace, and yet I keep silent. Why do I obsess with being perceived well, yet not care about those same people’s eternal future?
What witness is it to the lost that I own a MacBook, that I have an iPod, that I own musical equipment, but don’t give consistently and faithfully to my church or to the poor?
While I am not saying that any of my above habits are in-and-of themselves wrong, I am beginning to see a pattern. I am seeking to find pleasure, even fulfillment in material things.
And then I come to the most painful issue.
Being single sucks.
I am desperately working to make my life and character into the man that God wants me to be, so that when I begin pursuing a wife, I will be able to spiritually lead her in the way God desires. Unfortunately, up until this point I have made certain young women into idols in my life. As I begin to get to know godly young women, I immediately begin pondering the chances for success if I were to pursue her. If the chances seem even remotely favorable, I begin to concoct plans and dreams for said women. This cycle of scanning and planning has become a sinful habit in my life and must stop. As I begin to work through the sin and problems in my own life, I must be willing to wait for the wife God has for me.
And yet in this to I am hypocritical, I am currently considering a young lady, yet my scheming continues even though I know I’m completely unprepared.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The Vision?
The vision is Jesus: obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus.
The vision is an army of young people.
You see bones? They are an army.
And they are free from materialism. They laugh at the markets.
They hardly care! They wear clothes like costumes:
to show and to tell, but never to hide.
They know the meaning of the Matrix; the way the West was won.
They are mobile like the wind; they belong to the nations.
They need no passport.
People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence.
They are free, yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying.
What is the vision?
The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes.
It makes children laugh and adults break and cry.
It scorns the good and strains for the best. It is dangerously pure.
This is an army that will lay down its life for the cause.
A million times a day its soldiers choose to lose that they might win, one day
the great "Well done" of faithful sons and daughters.
Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night.
They don't need fame from names. Instead they grin quietly upwards
and hear the crowds chanting again and again: "COME ON!"
And this is the sound of the underground
The whisper of history shaping
Foundations shaking
Revolutionaries dreaming once again
Mystery is screaming in whispers
Conspiracy is breathing...
This is the sound of the underground.
And the army is disciplined.
Young people who beat their bodies into submission.
Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrades at arms.
The tattoo on their backs boasts "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain."
Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their eyes.
Winners. Martyrs. Who can stop them?
Can failure succeed? Can fear scare them or death kill them?
And this generation prays like a dying man with groans beyond
talking, with warrior cries, sulphuric tears
Waiting. Watching: 24 - 7 - 365.
Whatever it takes they will give: Breaking the rules.
Shaking mediocrity from its cozy little hide.
Laying down their rights and their precious little wrongs,
laughing at labels, fasting essentials.
The advertisers cannot mold them.
Hollywood cannot hold them.
Peer-pressure is powerless
to shake their resolve
Material clothes matter not
Would they surrender their image or their popularity?
They would lay down their very lives,
swap seats with the man on death row;
guilty as hell.
A throne for an electric chair.
With blood and sweat and many tears,
with sleepless nights and fruitless days,
they pray as if it all depends on God
and live as if it all depends on them.
Their words make demons scream in shopping malls.
Don't you hear them coming?
Here come the frightened and forgotten, with fire in their eyes.
Their prayers summon the hounds of heaven and invoke the ancient dream of Eden.
And this is the sound of the underground
The whisper of history shaping
Foundations shaking
Revolutionaries dreaming once again
Mystery is screaming in whispers
Conspiracy is breathing...
This is the sound of the underground.
2 comments:
Traitor 313
That’s what I call honesty!
Tim,
Wow. We need to talk. Sorry I've neglected it for this long. I'll be back in town Monday, March 24. I will call you.
Billy
Post a Comment