Passed Over, Not Passed Up (Dear God - 2)

Dear God,

You are mighty and strong. Nothing can withhold you. You are out of our control, but sovereignly in control of everything. You are holy. You are loving. You are just. Nothing escapes your eye. Nothing escapes your attention. Nothing is left uncovered. Nothing is swept under the rug. I am unholy. Love would not define me. I do not see everything. I do try to sweep things under the rug. Responsibility is only taken when it is to my advantage. I rebel against you. I seek to supplant your position. I do not remember what you have done for me. I am a sinner, and a strong river of eternal wrath would have kept me from passing over to know you. I should have been passed up. But in your steadfast love you have passed over my sins. No different than the Israelites, YOU were the reason we could pass over. It was you who took on the waters until the Israelites had passed over. It was you who took on my sin so that I can pass over. My sin was not swept under the rug, it was taken on. What great lengths you go so that we might know you and fear you and love you and remember you. You laid down your life so that I can pass over and become your son. I am forever grateful.

In turn, help me to lay down all of me to know you more. Teach me to follow you with all of myself: my heart, my mind, my strength, my actions. Teach me to lay down my life for others. Teach me the great lengths of your grace that have caused me to know you. Take me into deeper joy, do not let my capacity of joy decrease. Increase yourself in my life. Nothing can separate us from you. Not sin, not death, because you have made the way for us in Christ. Your son has absorbed the wrath I deserve, so that you would pass over my sin. Thank you for passing over, and not passing up.

Joshua 4: 21 - 24 “When your children ask their fathers in times to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we passed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty that you may fear the Lord your God forever.”

Exodus 12:27 “you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.’” And the people bowed their heads and worshiped.”

Romans 3:25 “whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins”

Mediocrity: An Enemy to My Joy (Dear God - 1)

Dear God,

I come before you with a broken and contrite heart. So many of Psalm 51, I can feel. I was brought forth in inquity. Against you have I sinned. I have done what is evil in your sights. Blot out my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart. Renew a right spirit. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. It has become blatantly obvious with my lack of convictions, my drought of Word saturation, my neglect of prayer, and my forgetfulness of the Gospel, that my joy in You that was once ablaze has been reduced to barely a simmer. My JOY for YOU is almost gone, and I have fooled myself into thinking that it was ok.

Mediocrity never leads me to joy, it always leaves me settling for less. And settling for less has proved to be far more dangerous than it sounds.

Mediocrity is never ok with you God.

You were not mediocre in the way you lived and laid down your life for me. 

You did not call your disciples to mediocrity. My mediocrity is the fruit of my own foolishness. I have fooled myself into believing that my sin is in fact not sin at all. And with that deception there comes no need to seek and drench myself in your good news of grace or recognize my desperate need for you Jesus, the Savior. Especially, as long as I am not commiting adultery or murdering someone, my most preached and proclaimed gospel to myself, is the gospel of mediocrity.

That I am ok, and do not need desperate reliance upon the grace of Jesus Christ, I do not need to seek the will of my sovereign Father, and that I do not need the empowering of the Holy Spirit. This is a trinitarian tragedy. 

Lord I pray that you would create in me a new heart, that I would seek your sovereign and good will, and that I would not sink in the quicksand of mediocrity, but that I would sprint and dive into the deep waters of laying down my life and following you. Because it is in that pursuit, in which I will find myself swimming in the deep ocean of your joy.

GRACE

“I am not worthy of the least of all the deeds of steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed the Jordan, and now I have become two camps.” – Genesis 32:10

- This is the grace of God. He came with a freakin staff, and a past filled with deception and fakeness. There was no merit for the love and faithfulness of God, and yet the Lord loved him, the Lord was faithful to him, and the Lord promised good to Him. That is the grace of God. Grace is grace when the prerequisites for blessings are not met, and yet blessings are given. 

The Forgetful Peripheral

                     All through out Psalm 106, there is a recurring theme: forgetfulness and rebellion by the Israelites and justice, remembering, and atonement by God for the Israelites. Again and again God intervenes and saves His people with mighty works and to make His name known among the nations, but the Israelites again and again forget the wondrous works of God and the steadfast love of the Lord. And as they forget God, they begin to consequently put other things at the center of their lives, essentially rebelling against the only One who is worthy of centeredness. Their forgetfulness gives way to peripheral worship, aka idolatry. They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox. When we forget the only one who is worthy to be center and begin to center our lives around other things, we are exchanging the glory of God for infinitely and drastically lesser things. But God, amidst the continual forgetfulness and rebellion of the Israelites, responds with love. Amidst their forgetfulness, He remembers his covenant with them, and amidst their rebellion He redeems them. Amidst our forgetfulness and rebellion, God remembers and redeems! (Psalm 106). Is it fair that God loves us like this, that he loves us when we are least worth? No, but He does. May I not ever forget that. This is why we fight to remember the steadfast love of God. Fighting to remember the steadfast love of God is fighting to keep Christ central. Fighting to keep Christ central is to fight idolatry. Fighting to keep glory of God the center is fighting to increase joy. 

Consider the steadfast love of the Lord...

Consider the steadfast love of the Lord. He has redeemed us from so much darkness. He has brought us into the light.


The love of the Lord is delivering:
        Psalm 107:6,13,19, 20, 28
The Love of the Lord is satisfying:
        Psalm 107:9
The Love of the Lord is illuminating:
        Psalm 107:14
The Love of the Lord is bond-breaking:
        Psalm 107:14
The Love of the Lord is healing:
        Psalm 107:20
The Love of the Lord is transforming:
        Psalm 107:33-38
The Love of the Lord is humbling:
        Psalm 107:12
The Love of the Lord is redeeming:
        Psalm 107:2

Jr. High + POP = God's Sovereignty

"Calvary SLO Jr. High 2010!" "Whoo Whoo"!

This is how Jr. High Group starts off now. It's pretty exciting, or at least more exciting than my preaching. But even more exciting than both of those was that I decided to surprise them with a movie night, with popcorn and gushers. Gushers for the one lactose intolerant kid! But before I put on the movie, I preceded to convince the kids that I was going to teach through the entire book of Leviticus in one night. They did not look too excited. And so as I do every time we meet, I asked the group if someone wanted to open us up with some prayer, and as previously, no one wanted to pray. SO being the opportunist I need to be, I used this time to talk about prayer. We talked about what prayer is...that it is conversing with God, it is praising God, it is reminding of ourselves of His promises. And then we talked about why they do not like to pray. There were the different responses that ranged from not knowing what to say to being ashamed from a past experience an so ensued another facet of the conversation, in which we talked about how it does not matter what people say because prayer is not about what others think of us, in fact Jesus instructs us to not pray so that we sound glamorous on the outside, and that He is after the heart. And so the kids prayed for the night.

So you're probably wondering what the heck does POP mean? If you know me, I like acronyms, hence my blog name, and hence POP. POP stands for Power Of Prayer. Because one of our kids, Ryan, had just had meniscus surgery a couple weeks before, and was finally off of crutches and at youth group on this night. During the movie, on his way back from the bathroom he fell on his bad knee and it hurt really bad. So we stopped the movie and gathered around and we prayed for him and his knee. Soon after his parents came to pick him up. But the next day, his knee no longer hurt, it was totally healed.

And so as i look back on that situation, I begin to see how God was sovereignly working. THat God would provide an opportunity to talk and address prayer, and then allow Ryan to fall on his bad knee in order to provide us with an opportunity to pray for him...applying what we had talked about. ANd then the next day Ryan was healed. I think God's purpose in us talking about prayer at the beginning of group, and His purpose in allowing Ryan to fall on his bad knee was to ultimately show us how He works in prayer, His power through prayer!

SOML

Sincerely,
JDV

Slammin for Jesus...

So i had to write a poem for my poetry class. Poem writing is hard stuff. Especially rough, when you're trying hard to be extra creative in a "poemy" kind of way. You know like "Two roads diverged", or "Half a league onward", or "O Captain, my captain". So after failed attempts at creativity (3 hours) I finally got back to my roots. I love acting ghetto, I love being called "hood", and I'm beginning to love slam poetry. Theres just a deep, distinct feel to slammin. And so I wrote my poem...slammin style.

GLORY

Meticulously articulate, exquisitely particulate,
Particularly intricate, His divinity implicitly explicit.
In his creation…

Self-inspiration, from creature to nation
Not a drop of tired perspiration, simply divine configuration.
Of a story…

God, self-contented full of glory. Life-giving oratory.
None is more holy. All deserving of all glory.
But humanity…

Instantly, relational calamity,
total depravity, eternal cavity.
Chained…

Man sinfully stained with disdain, unmerited self-proclaim
By nature, woefully maimed, life of sinful refrain,
Their lusts uncontained and untamed: fig leaves of shame
his divine name, they profane, blindly insane.
But now…

The perfect creator, heavenly Narrator
Writes Himself into redemptive character
Called Christ….

Who took on death, so we can have life,
Called Christ…

Who became disunioned, so we can have communion,
Called Christ…

Who took away the sin in me, so I can enjoy His Trinity,
Called Christ…


In love and glory, sincerely,
The Author of Divinity
Called Christ.