Dying to Live

The following is something I wrote for Easter a couple of years ago. I decided to post it again here for those who might not have read it before.

One of my favorite quotes about the cross comes from A.W. Tozer. He wrote:

The spiritual giants of old would not take their religion the easy way nor offer unto God that which cost them nothing. They sought not comfort but holiness, and the pages of history are still wet with their blood and their tears.

Though the cross of Christ has been beautified by the poet and the artist, the avid seeker after God is likely to find it the same savage implement of destruction it was in the days of old. The way of the cross is still the pain-wracked path to spiritual power and fruitfulness.

So do not seek to hide from it. Do not accept an easy way. Do not allow yourself to be patted to sleep in a comfortable church, void of power and barren of fruit. Do not paint the cross nor deck it with flowers. Take it for what it is, as it is, and you will find it the rugged way to death and life. Let it slay you utterly. Seek God. Seek to be holy and fear none of those things which you will suffer.

Certainly we wish to celebrate the empty tomb on this Resurrection Sunday, but I wonder if perhaps the greatest folly of modern-day Christianity is that, too often, we look to the empty tomb without first pausing to contemplate the rugged ugliness of the cross. It seems there is a lot of belief in a cheap grace these days. It’s true that grace is free to all who seek it, but it cost our Savior more than our finite minds could even begin to comprehend.

The danger of looking to grace without understanding what it cost is that we too easily take it for granted. The beauty of grace is that it is free, but the power of grace rests upon the fact that its cost can not be measured by any human calculation. However, to fail to reflect on what it cost our Savior, is to fail to understand the nature of our fallen condition and utter sinfulness prior to grace being poured into our lives. When we fail to understand the nature of our prior condition or truly understand that our only hope lies in a grace that we can never earn, we risk living a shallow Christian life at best. We will never know the full importance of forsaking sin until we first understand the pain our sin brings to heart of God.

We must not fail to wholly embrace our personal cross and allow it to slay us completely. We must allow it to drive out anything and everything that would keep us from being entirely surrendered to God and to His leadership in our lives. The cross we must endure will be harsh and ugly and painful; dying is never easy or enjoyable, but if we embrace the cross and remain there until we have fully died, we will finally live. The cross does not last forever. The dawn of resurrection will come to all who choose to embrace it.

Those who have already allowed the cross to slay them can rejoice on this Resurrection Sunday in a way that others can only envision from a distance. Those who have not yet fully embraced the cross need not despair, for you may choose to embrace it even now and let death on the cross lead you to a glorious resurrection of new life; a life entirely surrendered to God. Jesus paid the price and grace is free, but each of us must personally choose to die to sin so that we may live forever with Him. If you do not know Him as your personal Savior, what better day than this to get acquainted with Him? Christ the Lord is risen! And because He lives, we may live also.

School News

I have officially decided to change my major. When I started taking classes through Liberty University's distance learning program last year, I enrolled as a psychology major. As I began taking various courses, I've found that I enjoyed the theology and philosophy classes as much as, if not more than, the psychology classes. I began contemplating various scenarios in which I might pursue both my interest in counseling and my new-found love of theology and philosophy. I was looking into the possibility of a double major, etc. Liberty solved the problem for me by adding a brand new degree program: Bachelor of Science in Religion - Biblical Counseling Specialization.

OK...so they didn't add the program just for me... In fact, I had no idea they were going to add it until I just happened to stumble across it on their website one day. But I'm pretty excited about it. I'm still not sure what direction I want to head in ultimately (grad school), but my interests are in counseling and teaching. I had thought originally that I would probably go for a MA in Marriage & Family Therapy and focus primarily on counseling. However, with my new-found love of theology I must confess that Liberty's Master of Divinity in Theology & Apologetics is looking pretty good to me at the moment.

Either way, I don't plan to give up my interest in counseling. I've already got a pretty solid background in psychology and I'm also currently working through a program with AACC called, Caring for People God's Way (it's designed to help lay-people in the church become equipped to help counsel others). I think most teachers are placed in the unique position of also serving as counselor for their students in many instances, so I plan to include counseling as a continued part of my studies regardless of which direction I decide to take when it comes time for grad school.

On a less positive note, there is some chance that I may have a more difficult time getting financial aid for the 2008-09 school year than I have in the past. It's a long story. In a nutshell, when I lost my job last May I withdrew the money I had in my retirement fund to pay off the majority of my debts, buy a used car so I would no longer have a monthly car payment to worry about, and to have money to survive on until I find another job. Finding another job has taken a lot longer than I anticipated! But the point is, since I used the majority of my money to pay off debts, I no longer have that money on hand. The problem arises from the fact that when I file my tax return for 2007 it's going to look like I made a huge amount of money last year! Besides throwing me into a higher tax bracket and making me have to pay huge amounts to the government in taxes, it could end up hurting my financial aid application by making it appear that I should have plenty of money to pay for classes myself when in fact I don't.

I'm hoping that it won't end up hurting me as much as I fear it will. Either way, I would ask you all to join me in praying that God's will be done and that I will have the grace to accept whatever happens with the knowledge that God isn't surprised by it even if it's a big disappointment to me. Maybe I'm weird, but I'm really excited about my studies and if I don't get the financial aid I need for next school year it will be all I can do probably to take any classes at all. I definitely wouldn't be able to afford to take a full class load. I'm still hoping things will work out so that I can, but I'm also trying to prepare myself for the possibility that it might not happen.

At the same time, I do want to find and follow God's leading. If He knows that I need to slow down on the school work for a time so that I can focus on something else He wants me to focus on then I want to be open to that and accept it without complaining. From my viewpoint, finishing my undergrad degree as quickly as possible so I can move on to grad school seems like the best thing, but God knows better than I what I need. So, help me pray that I will know and gladly follow God's leadership no matter what happens.

Hungering for God

Over the past couple of months I seem to have entered a sort of spiritual crisis time in my life. Where once before, going to church and going through the motions of being a Christian seemed “good enough” to me, it no longer seems any good at all. Oh, I suppose it’s better to go through the motions and thereby maintain some proximity to Christianity than to abandon it altogether and not even try, but just going through the motions seems so shallow to me now. Several things have contributed to my growing sense of urgency to really know God rather than simply know about God and go through the motions of serving Him.

First of all, my age is a contributing factor. No, I don’t really think of 35 as being necessarily old, but when I look back on my life and realize that I’ve always had the opportunity to really know and serve God but have failed to take advantage of those opportunities, it seems like a lot of wasted years. If I can manage to really know and serve God from this point forward, in another 35 years I’ll be seventy and it is somewhat discouraging to me to think that by the time I reach 70 I will only have really served God with half of my life. At the same time, I know that God’s Word promises that He can and will restore the years “the locust have eaten” so I’m working on my faith to believe that He can take the next 35 years of my life and make them double what they would have been without Him as director.

Another contributing factor has been thoughts of death. Not my own pending death really, just death in general and knowing that the only thing that really matters once a person dies is how they lived while they had the chance. On the negative side, the deaths of actors Heath Ledger and Brad Renfro got me to thinking about how pointless fame and fortune really are. Here are two young men who had everything by this worlds standard, but who ended up dying much too young and I have to wonder if they ever really knew happiness at all? I know God is a merciful God and it’s my hope that both of these young men made peace with God in the final moments of their lives, but every indication seems to be that they were still searching for a happiness they never found.

On a more positive note, I recently read a book about another young man who obviously found that true happiness comes from surrendering all to God and living life for Him. Sadly, this young man also died much too young, but what he accomplished in his short fifteen years far exceeds what most accomplish in a lifetime. His name is B.J. Higgins and I highly recommend you read his story in the book, I Would Die for You. Reading this book has really had a huge impact on my desire to seek after God and to know Him in a way I never have before. The thing is, I don’t think BJ’s experience should be the exception. I think all of us have the opportunity to allow God complete control of our lives and it’s sad that so few seemingly ever make that kind of surrender. For all too long, my “surrender” has only gone so far and no further and I’m finding out that such a limited surrender is really no surrender at all. As long as I’m holding anything back, God cannot work in my life as He wants to.

So, I find myself in the midst of a transition period in my spiritual life. I wish I could say that huge changes have taken place and I’m making great strides forward. The best I can say right now is that I’ve begun to recognize a lack in my life and I’m trying to learn to seek after God, and only God, to fill that void. There are still many things that clamor for my attention and try to convince me to settle for something less than complete surrender to the will of God, but I’m actively trying to combat those “voices” through prayer and seeking God. I wish I could say my greatest hunger was for God. The best I can say right now is, I want that to become my greatest hunger and I’m asking God to make it so.

I will never do the things that BJ did during his life, but I do believe I can one day have the same kind of testimony if I will make the decision to surrender totally to God as BJ did. The biggest mistake we can make when reading about someone like BJ is to think that we can never be as good a Christian ourselves. When we do that, we end up thinking “what a nice story” and then just walk away from it and return to our lives, somewhat inspired but not changed. God didn’t show special favoritism to BJ; BJ simply discovered that any one of us can become God’s “favorite” if we simply give up our own “rights” and surrender completely to Him. The hard part is getting over ourselves; God is eager to fill us with Himself if we will simply step aside and let Him. My prayer is that God will help me to daily step aside and let Him. Not so I can find some kind of fame or fortune or blessing, but so that I can find Him and thereby become complete.