Smellmylife

This is by far my most personal post ever.  My guess is that many of you struggle with the same thing I do…the same thing I’m going to write about here.  For the last 10 years or so, I have been struggling mightily with my weight.  To those of you who know me, that’s not news to you.  You’ve seen the “growth” over the years.  I’ve always said to myself, one day I’m going to lose this weight, one day I’ll start going back to the gym, one day I’ll stop eating the wrong things and start eating the right ones….one day.  Today, I had an epiphany, a revelation, although it was something I already knew deep inside me.  As I was walking on the treadmill at LA Fitness and listening to my Workout Mix (that had lain unplayed for a long time), the song, “Master of Puppets” by Metallica came on.  As I listened to the words of the song, something inside of me broke and I began to cry.  Right there in LA Fitness on the treadmill.  Most people probably thought that it was sweat so I still have my man card in my wallet.

I never thought God would use Metallica to convict me of sin, but He did.  Here are a few of the lyrics that spoke to me:

End of passion play, crumbling away
I’m your source of self-destruction
Veins that pump with fear, sucking dark is clear
Leading on your deaths construction

Master of Puppets I’m pulling your strings
Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams
Blinded by me, you can’t see a thing
Just call my name, ’cause I’ll hear you scream

Master, Master, where’s the dreams that I’ve been after?
Master, Master, you promised only lies
Laughter, Laughter, all I hear or see is laughter
Laughter, Laughter, laughing at my cries

Hell is worth all that, natural habitat
Just a rhyme without a reason
Neverending maze, drift on numbered days
now your life is out of season
I will occupy
I will help you die
I will run through you
Now I rule you t

I know that this song was written about drug addiction, but in that moment I realized that I had become a slave to my weight, food has become my master.  I eat when I’m happy, I eat when I’m sad, when I’m bored, when I’m busy…you see, the food which God had intended to lead me to worship, was controlling me, even killing me…certainly costing me a certain quality of life.  My weight had officially gotten to the place I swore it would never be…319lbs.  I’m 6′4″, so people will tell me, “You’re just a big guy”.  I’m tired of that cop-out.  With added weight came health problems, a worsening of my asthma, the development of sleep apnea, and the aches and pains on my muscles and joints that come from carrying that much weight around.  Not to mention the thought of not being around for my wife and kids in the future.  Despite knowing this, I did nothing about it…you see, I was a slave…I was addicted, and I was lazy.

Ok, back to the treadmill.  At the end of the song, these verses from Romans chapter 7 came to my mind:

So, my dear brothers and sisters, this is the point: You died to the power of the law when you died with Christ. And now you are united with the one who was raised from the dead. As a result, we can produce a harvest of good deeds for God. When we were controlled by our old nature, sinful desires were at work within us, and the law aroused these evil desires that produced a harvest of sinful deeds, resulting in death. But now we have been released from the law, for we died to it and are no longer captive to its power. Now we can serve God, not in the old way of obeying the letter of the law, but in the new way of living in the Spirit.

I’ve been controlled by the old nature…just straight up laziness and glutony…that’s my confession.  But these verses reminded me that I have been released from that and I don’t need to be controlled by anything other than the Spirit of God.  So, my decision is this…I will no longer be controlled by food.  I will no longer use something that God intended for my good to lead me down a path of destruction.

My goal is to lose 100 pounds in 1 year.  I know that I can do this through the Spirit’s power.  I’m posting this to make my confession and goal public.  I hope it has inspired some of you to take off the chains of addiction to food and get yourself healthy so you can more effectively serve God.  For those of you who see me on a regular basis, I ask your help.  I ask you to care more about me than about my feelings.  Ask me how I’m doing, keep me accountable, help me make the right choices, exercise with me. For those of you who don’t see me on a regular basis, Facebook me, e-mail me and most importantly, pray for me.  Thanks for reading my confession.

Jesus

People who forgive

a good book

my boys laughing and playing

a nice 75 degree and sunny day

people who are willing to step out on faith, even though it may cost them something.

Ollies

Good music

My beautiful wife

The Beauty of Creation

giving and givers

when I live the gospel and people take notice.

Opening Day!

a well timed phone call

People who don’t merge

Church politics

Family Christian Bookstores (no, for the love of God NO, I don’t want the “FireProof Gift Pack!!!!!”)

The Newsboys (seriously, Micheal Tait?  It was time to hang it up guys.)

Rain

The fact that there aren’t more hours in the day.

Testamints, Stupid christian t-shirts and bumper stickers

Poverty

My lack of action to alieviate poverty.

Digital Hymnals (what???)

consequences

Christian “celebrities” and their “groupies”

when the UPS man doesn’t knock.

cowards

crime in my neighborhood

comfortable Christianity (check yourself)

Satan

25mph in a 45mph zone

fear

that I’m my own worst enemy

wet mail

what grinds your gears?  All in good fun!

In honor of my favorite band releasing their new CD, “Picket Fence Cartel”next Tuesday  I have put together a little P86 Top Ten.  You can listen to all 10 song through my box inthe upper right hand corner of the blog.   Enjoy!

Men, remember the message from Saturday?  We all know where we are weak.   If you say you don’t you’re lying to me and to yourself.  We know if we have pride issues, anger issues, etc.  If we know where we are weak, why do we not do a better job at building safeguards and defenses in our lives to protect us in those weak areas? None of us is Superman!   As a man myself, I will be honest…I don’t know a man alive that doesn’t struggle with lust.  If you are that guy then awesome!, please pray for the rest of us!  Men of Journey, let’s not let this area of our lives bring us to defeat.  Go with basic cable and get rid of Skinemax and HBO, because it’s too tempting!  Avoid those stores that display porno mags!  Make sure your internet access is filtered, with a password that only a trusted friend knows.  It shouldn’t be embarassing, it’s the way we are wired.  Remember, Jesus said, it is better to cut off your hand and go through life with one hand than to be headed to hell with our whole body.  How important are those things to you?  Cut them out of your life.  Here is a great resource if you are a fellow struggler with lust.

www.xxxchurch.com

I was flipping through the tv channels the other day and just like every other time I’ve been flipping through the channels, “Forrest Gump” was on.  I’ve seen this movie a thousand times (not as many times as Robby has) but if it’s on, it’s one of those movies that if it’s on, I’ll watch it.  It just so happened that the scene that was playing when I tuned in was the one where Lieutenant Dan, who is now in a wheelchair asks Forrest this question.  “Forrest, have you found Jesus?”  Forrest’s answer stirred something up in me.  He said, “I didn’t know I was suppossed to be looking for him.”    That statement just hit me like a ton of bricks.  So many people need Jesus.  They need His grace, His mercy and the forgiveness and wholeness that He offers, but they don’t know it.  Maybe, they’re not suppossed to be looking for Him.  I mean, if you know Jesus, did you find Him because you were looking for Him?  I didn’t.  Maybe He’s looking for them.  Maybe He wants to use us to bring himself to others.  But, my fear is, as the church we sit back and have our services and are just waiting and expecting for people to come to us looking for Jesus.  We give some of our money to missionaries that go for us, but we aren’t going.  Not even across the street…not even next door.  I think we have this warped view of lost people.  One where they are curled up in a fetal position in the corner, sucking their thumb, crying about how bad their life is, and how empty they are.  That may be the case sometimes, but I know lots of lost people that love life.  They have happy families, great jobs, great relationships, and they simply don’t feel they have a need for anything outside of themselves.  But, we need to bring Jesus to them, through our lives, through our friendships, through our prayers, through our actions that are so kind and selfless that they can’t help but want what we have.  Jesus came to give them life to the fullest.  How about you?  Are you developing relationships with your unsaved friends and neighbors in order to point them to Him?  Or do you even have any unsaved friends?  Just remember…they don’t even know they are suppossed to be looking for Him.

“Know that showing up is half the Battle!”   I have seen this quote on the walls of many a gym or weight room and it never fails to inspire me.  For me, showing up is the hardest part of the equation.  Whether it’s getting out of bed early, giving up time with my family, or time to rest…that’s what’s hard.  I don’t show up at the gym and then sit around…no, once I’m there I work out hard.  I know that 99% of you reading this can relate (the other 1 % are gym rats!)  I have been thinking about this quote and it has occurred to me that it’s true spiritually as well.  Showing up is truly half the battle.  Are there days that you just don’t feel like putting forth the effort spiritually?  Are there days that you don’t feel like it’s worth the effort to obey God and to apply the Word to your life?  Ever want to take a vacation from your faith?  Tempted sometimes to take a permanent one?  I know I do.  But, showing up is half the battle.  Refusing to quit, no matter how many times you’ve failed, committed that same sin, fallen into that same pattern of addictive behavior….that’s half the battle.  I want to be like Jesus, but sometimes I’m sooooo far away.  Just the realization that I’ll never fully get there in this life, so for now the journey is the destination.  But, I’ve got to let go of the shame and condemnation that I pile on myself, that I pile on others, and that others pile on me for not being perfect.  God may be leading me toward the peak, but maybe getting there is less important than getting up every morning and being willing to continue taking steps, to gut it out, even when I feel like turning back.  So, to those of you feeling discouraged, feeling like a failure, feeling like you’ll never be able to do this thing called following Christ…just get out of bed and make the choice to show up again today. After all, it is half the battle.

I’m not making this up, I promise!  I read an article the other day about a 6 pound Chihuahua from Michigan who was literally blown away from her owner by a strong gust of wind.  The dog was eventually found nearly a mile from where “Tinker Bell” had last been seen.  Now, Chihuahuas are naturally small and light dogs and can’t help being blown away!  But how many of us are lightweights in our faith?  How many of us really have not progressed in our faith since the moment we called on Christ to save us?  Some of us are perpetually in the infancy stage of faith, not feasting on the deeper, meatier things of God’s Word, but still sucking on the bottle that we should have been weened off of long ago.  We don’t make time for silence, solitude, service, Sabbath, prayer and meditation on God’s Word in our lives and then don’t understand why we aren’t close to Him.  We rely solely on our pastor each week to spoon feed us and then complain if you want something deeper.  Here’s the newsflash…”the deeper comes in the silence, the solitude, the study, the serving, the prayer time…not from a pastors message.”  You are where you are spiritually  because you have taken the steps to get exactly where you are.  No one else is to blame…you are.  Sorry, hard to swallow, but the truth nonetheless.  So maybe it’s time to get out of the highchair, stop making excuses and start chasing after God…pursue Him, make Him a priority, get desperate for Him.  Ephesians chapter 4 tells us to “no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching…but to grow up into Him, Christ, who is the Head”.  So, are you a spiritual Chihuahua?  Maybe you need to put on some weight!

Please, please take 4 minutes and watch this clip.  It really sums up why we exist as a church, and what drives us to do what we do!

I spent a few hours today sorting through my baseball card collection.  I haven’t really actively collected in a few years, but I still have hundreds of thousands of cards.  As I sorted through these cards I started to realize how many of these players I had never heard of and had not really made it in the big leagues.  I’d say a good 40% of the players I was seeing, never realized their potential.  I then started to think about spiritual matters.  I wonder what the percentage of believers out there never really realize their God-given potential (myself included).  How many of us never truly step out of our comfort zones…you know, the place you have to go in order to realize that potential?  How many of us just are full of excuses, or are too lazy to really do the things that we know we should be doing for God.  Many of us are too comfortable with where we are currently and will never realize that potential because it takes obstacles, sacrifice and hard work to get there. So my question to you and to myself…”Am I living up to my God-given potential?”  If so great.  If not, why?  What is holding you back?  What is holding me back?  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be just another career minor leaguer that never lived my dream.  Maybe our dreams are too small.

I learn alot of spiritual lessons from my 6 year old son, Lincoln.  It’s funny how God brings spiritual things to my mind from some of his comments or actions.  I picked him up from school the other day and he was so excited to show me what he had found on the playground during reccess that day.  I have to admit, I thought that he had found a shiny, pretty rock or something that was mildly attractive, but he pulled out 3 or 4 broken pieces of plastic.  It looked like what once was a plastic ball of some sort with a picture on it,  Lincoln was so excited because he wanted to take it home, piece it back together with tape and glue and see if he could make it pretty again.  Then he told me that he wanted to go back out to the playground tomorrow to see if he could find more pieces!  My first thought was to say..”Oh, that’s nice”… and not think twice about it, but something kept coming to my mind.  This was a perfect picture of God and His people.  He finds us broken, scattered, meant to be beautiful, useful and whole.  He longs to pick us up and put us back together again, to glue those broken pieces of our souls with His grace and His love.  He wants nothing more than to see us restored and whole, living the life that He had imagined for us to live, reflecting His majesty and beauty.  Once He has restored one of us, the search for more broken pieces continues.  I then prayed and thanked God for gathering up the broken pieces of my life, of my soul and for continuing to repair those seams that seem beyond repair.  What about you?  Have you allowed God to gather the broken pieces of your soul?  Have you given your fragmented life to Him to make whole?  He is ready to begin….are you?

This past week I spoke about being a church….a people that has a taste for truth, even the difficult ones.  Sometimes we don’t really want to hear or know the truth, because it cuts us, it wounds us and it just plain hurts.  The Bible is full of truths that we would really rather not accept, but ones that we must embrace if we are to truly wrap our minds and hearts around the gospel.  Here are the 4 hard truths that we covered on Saturday;

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1.  That there is one truth, an absolute truth.  Not all roads lead to heaven.  As arrogant and intolerant as that sounds, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father,   except through me.”

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2. You’re not a good person. I know that one hurts.  It hurts me too, but even though some of us might behave “better” than others, we are all still wicked at heart. Paul writes in Romans that “There is no one who is righteous, not even one.  There is none that seeks after God.”

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3. God is not really interested in your happiness. What?  How can a loving God not want us to be happy?  Well, if you are a parent are you always interested in what will make your children happy?  Or what is best for them?  Wanting us to be happy and making our happiness priority number one are two different things!

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4. You have nothing. Simply put…God owns it all.  Your possessions, your money, your resources, even your children are God’s and are simply on loan to you from Him.  What kind of steward are you?

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You see?  Not easy to swallow, but truth nonetheless.  The cool thing is, if any of these weren’t true, the gospel wouldn’t be the gospel and we wouldn’t have forgiveness and a new life in Christ.  Over the next few weeks I will be posting a new hard truth for us to chew on.

The next  several blogs will be repeats from my entries over at The Journey Church blog over the last couple of months.  I’m just putting them on here so I have a record of them.

Something has really hit me today.  Sadness.  Sadness, not because of the untimely death of Michael Jackson.  But sad at the reaction and the comments of so many “Christians” to his death.  Many have stated, “How can that molester get such a great send-off?”,  or  “He doesn’t deserve a tribute like that after what he’s done.”  I don’t know anything about what Michael Jackson did, just what he was accussed of doing.  And while the things he was accussed of are sinful…who of us isn’t a dirty sinner at heart?  Who among us has the right to throw stones at Michael Jackson, when truth be told, if we aired your dirty laundry out in public your face would get pretty red!  I know mine would.  When will we as Christians begin to love people the way Jesus did?  He wouldn’t have thrown stones at Michael Jackson…He would have wept with his family.  He wouldn’t have made insensitive comments, he would have used his words to comfort and to testify to others about the grace and forgiveness of his father.  When?