Tag Archives: My thoughts

The Journey chronicled…

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I am going to chronicle the journey I began last year in January when I began to investigate basically disproving a book given to me by a friend.  Yeah, now that I say that out loud it sounds wrong, but at the time I thought I was rescuing a brother from errant doctrine.  What I discovered was I really didn’t believe the way I thought I did, no I wasn’t poorly informed about what I believed, just horribly informed on what others would have lumped me in with.  Mostly I see now I didn’t place a great deal of emphasis where I now believe it should have been placed.  And oh well I should just admit it, I flip flopped completely on several issues that I now understand better.  Oddly, in my attempts to defend what I thought the book thought my beliefs were, I found I did not really come down in the camp as a true Armenian. I also discovered a new rich history of information about the God I love, and despite my efforts to deny it, I was left believing that which I was initially attempting to disprove.

The desire to place God as the center and object of my devotions seems plainly silly that I was not already doing that.  But my new discoveries I attribute to God blessing me with the grace to see a better way.  Now I sound emergent, but ironically it is a connection with our church history and prior teachings that I has led me to a new love that I feel compels me to look at the world through God’s perspective, rather than my own.

I believe embracing a “Soli Deo gloria” or “glory to God alone” viewpoint as well as many other differences has made a tremendous improvement on my life, I pray others will ultimately think so as well as I try and live for God, and not for John.  Hopefully I will begin listing some of the observations and scriptural references that affected the change here on Worthy Journey starting this weekend, March 19th, 2011.  I pray it may be informative for others out there who desire to consider the differences between the Armenian and Calvinistic views as viewed by one from what he thought was the Armenian position.  My old position truly wasn’t, albeit it was closer than to Calvinism; which is where a lot of confusion and heated discussion erupted from.  Your welcome and desired to add your thoughts and comments within the process.

SPOILER: I don’t think most people are in jeopardy of being heretical except when they are taken to extremes, if you really are a full Armenian as described by the Remonstrants please consider reviewing them to see if you really are.  I was not. Though I do feel one is more prone to lead to a distorted view of our relationship to God and his will than the other.  But, I know several that seem to have a remarkably reformed thought process for disliking the label Calvinist so.

Idolatry: A 21st century problem.

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Have you ever read a portion of scripture that warned against idolatry and thought how does this apply to us today?  In our daily lives there are no ashura poles, or monuments of baal, located in our neighborhoods, yet are there idols present?  Satan has pulled the wool over all our eyes and sadly we don’t want to see it, we like our idols, we keep them with us most of the time.

American idols, not the TV show, but the items we covet and long for that are present in our everyday lives are everywhere.  It may be a new gadget we really “love”, or a hobby that has us so enthralled we think about it every day and can’t wait to return pursuing it. We have become quite adept at pursuing things other than God and have now elevated it to national religion, bringing in the whole family. Placing family activities such as sports or hobbies ahead of worshiping and learning about our God is no longer unique, but but has become the norm.

I hear it all the time, how we need to live balanced lives, I myself had even bought into it.  But it is a lie, we need to live solely for God, and in doing so we will become the best spouses, parents and co-workers we ever could be.  If we do as God has commanded us we will ironically appear to lead balanced lives, yet God’s scales are different than the worlds. God doesn’t want our leftovers, he wants our first fruits, he wants and demands all of us, anything else is idolatry.

We somehow have made balancing our lives mean more of me and family and less of Him our Savior, which is exactly the opposite of what he wants us to do.  Sadly we are teaching this worship of self, couched as desiring quality family time, to our children.  What they see is a subordination of God to the wants of the family, nudging their own desires further and further away from our master.  All this is idolatry, the worship of self.

It is not a new problem in fact it is one of the oldest, and I think we all still struggle with it everyday, but don’t recognize it.  How can we overcome the secret sin we may all be partaking in?  I think the very first thing is to recognize our supplanting of God and recognize that he is our God, and that Jesus is our master. We have to toss our modern self reliance into the rubbish bin and begin to yearn to please our master. Our own selves and our families will be all the better for it when our balance is completely leaning on God rather than occasionally acknowledging we need him.

Your probably saying, “OK, how do I do that”, that’s where we have to break with what the world would tell us to do, “bear down and get after it, you can do it”.  No we can’t, we can further distance ourselves from a true dependent relationship with God, or we can admit we need his help and seek it.  Seeking God’s help begins with returning to prayer, frequent prayer, consistent prayer.  While doing this we will begin to follow with faith and belief and actually begin to trust that he will be in charge, that His will be accomplished through us.  And literally practice reliance, learning to look to him though prayer for direction and treating our family and friends and strangers as Jesus would have done.  It isn’t immediately easy, but I believe it does get easier as our God replaces our own will with his own, when we submit to him.

Prayer sometimes isn’t easy to offer to God, we wonder what to pray for or how to pray.  In my own life I have discovered that honesty to myself in my own requests has helped me expand what I pray about, there is nothing to small to give thanks for or too small to ask for guidance in.  Prayers offered frequently to God asking to reshape our desires to be directed toward him, not just our interests,  can begin to yield fruit almost immediately.  A prayer to build a hunger to please him, to get to know him through his word, and the strength to act upon our new desire.

When praying we need to understand and believe he will grant our request, remembering he is faithful and able to renew our mind and spirit.  Practicing the reflection of his love for us, we have to begin to change the way we live our lives, accepting we are not in control and looking to him to provide that desire for us.  We have to commit to no longer short changing our God with slices of our thoughts and the leftovers of our time, all the rest will come naturally as we begin to truly trust and pursue him.

Technology and activities aren’t our idols unless we place them on the pedestal, they can be blessings handed down from our generous God when we are in the right attitude toward Him.

Helping others by focusing less on myself.

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Recently there has been some discussion around me of where our focus lies on helping others. There is a new program out that is called “one laptop one child” and for a limited amount of time you can buy a laptop for $400 and one will be given away to a child in an impoverished country for your efforts. Now this is certainly a commendable thing to do, children who are given a tool to help them embrace learning or are given an opportunity to learn at all will indeed have a better chance to succeed. Ultimately this success would allow them to prosper and possibly continue to help others from their home area lifting the whole region from the bottom up, rather than the top down.

I would certainly not argue that there is any flaw in that assumption, helping people help themselves through education should work and be less prone to influence from potentially corrupt officials who might choose to not distribute raw funds. But what I don’t understand is why we choose to not pay attention to the millions of children here in our own neighborhoods that could benefit from some form of assistance in this regard as well.

This notion of programs that exist to assist others in a far off location brings me back to my opening comment. A friend of mine is a youth minister (Jason over at talkinthewalk.com)and has discussed on his site the issues of youth missions and the perceived need to have their missions in some remote location. The further the better it would seem if you talk tot he right people, and I have often thought it was easier to minister to those in far off regions where I am certainly the outsider or foreigner. I felt it would be easier to be like Jesus if I already didn’t fit in, that the difference between how I treated others and he way they were would be more obvious.

The embarrassing truth is I should have that same advantage here. Even though everyone (surely not so) seems to have what they need (materially at best) and I have plenty myself there are tremendous opportunities here locally. You don’t even have drive downtown, there are people living around me on all sides. I know I am speaking about getting to know the folks that live right next door to us, and they may even already be church attending individuals, but they may not. Within our own church itself why are we not thinking of spending our efforts to improve the lot of those we purport to love and care about. Most likely because we do not.

We are a nation of weekend warriors for christ. It is like we have formed a national guard unit that we hope will only be deployed once or twice a year in the battle to save the planet. We are in the front lines and don’t even realize it. The only reason I can see in myself as to why I don’t do more is selfishness. It sounds so harsh, and I don’t want to believe it, but it must be true. I care about me more than I care about you. That certainly isn’t Christ like, now if there were only one soda left on the counter I would let you have it. If you needed a ride to the airport at 11pm or even midnight I am your man, but that’s because I know you probably. We are going to have decide if we really want to be full-time Christians or just weekend warriors. And if I want to be a full-time Christian then I am going to have to start thinking about those that are around me that I don’t know and those I do know more than myself.

I am reminded of a song that says “more of you and less of me”, if we can just get that straightened out in our lives we won’t need to go out of town to make a difference. We will be making a difference year round everywhere we are, with or without a programed effort from our church to accomplish it. A small plug for a ministry at my church that I hope could be a part of this solution, small groups.

In a small group you can get to know people in a more personal and intimate way, but no program will substitute for the fact the answer lies in our own decision to become like Christ and place ourselves behind others. It is not an easy answer, but it is the one he gave me. First to Love him and his father will all my heart, no mention of me there. And then to Love others like I love myself. If that were true the local churches would be bursting with programs that went beyond the superficial. The momentum would be again like that of the early church bowling over governments, changing lives, and bringing the lost to the father.

Pray for our own selflessness.

A Worthy Journey…

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Welcome to worthyjourney.com. I have been blogging for the past 5 years under a site that focused mostly on my technical opinions and general observations about a host of subjects. Sometimes my beliefs fell amongst the myriad ramblings regarding the latest macintosh computer, watch review or even occasionally the best frozen pizza to buy.

All of those things were my thoughts and opinions at the time, and represented pretty accurately where my mindshare was spent at that time. I have matured a bit since all that began, and I find myself wanting to express the things that I feel matter most in a forum that people may stumble upon and either agree or disagree. No matter how they arrived, my hope is they were seeking something that will lead them to a closer connection with the most important thing in my life.

The Lord of my life, Jesus the risen Christ.

I fear that in todays world of mass communication my former site distracted from what I might want to say, rather than focus on what I feel needs to be said. This is just the initial post. It doesn’t illustrate the meat of my beliefs yet, but I hope to update the site with them in short order. If you found this already your truly a sojourner that was searching and found the husk of a new site. Comment and come back, discuss your beliefs, make a difference in those that travel here as well.

Ultimately the thing that matters most is your making a difference in your own life by becoming a believer and follower of Jesus, then becoming a worker in the fields of our saviors harvest. Learn, teach, minister, Love, reach out to your family, friends, co-workers and community; and start making your life a worthy journey until you are called home, or our loving Savior returns and brings us all home.