An Embarrassment of Riches

I am with Leah almost every day.  We laugh, we talk, we hug, we kiss...and at the end of every date, neither of us wants to let the other go.  We know it must happen, but every parting is an exercise in willpower.  It doesn't matter that we know we'll see each other tomorrow, even if it's in the morning, such as it will be later today (oh the joys of typing past midnight!).

Why is it not like this with God?

When I'm with Leah, I feel amazing.  I'm entranced by her.  Every new thing she tells me about herself has my full attention.  Every serious conversation we have, every time we get lost in each other's eyes, even when we just watch a movie cuddling together on the couch - she is wonderful to be with no matter what we're doing.  I feel like I have an embarrassment of riches with her because of her intellect, sense of humor, how well we match, and how accepting she is of my flaws.  These would be enough already for me to fall for her, but she's generous, beautiful, humble, easy to please, and has several of the same hobbies I do.  That phrase, "waiting for the other shoe to drop" doesn't apply here because I'm still waiting for the first one to drop.  I'm not naive enough to think she's perfect - I'm learning her flaws as she's learning mine - but she's such a great match for me that I find myself in awe.

The problem is that, while I recognize she is a gift from God, I don't seem to realize in my heart that He couldn't have matched me up so perfectly if He didn't know me better than I know myself or if He didn't love me more than I love myself.  I have to fight to keep from losing sight of the Giver in the celebration of the gift.  I know in my head how important it is to keep God first, yet my heart seems to always have different ideas, self-destructive ideas of seeking joy and contentment everywhere but the true Source of them.

And all of this brings me back to my earlier question of why I can't feel the same about God as I do with her.

Don't get me wrong.  I love God.  Between God and Leah, I would choose God.  Yet I don't have the same passion for God that I do for her.  When my Bible study time ends in the morning, my thought is, "Ok, what do I want for breakfast?" not, "When can I do that again?  Tomorrow is too far away."

The problem is that I don't see Him for who He is.  I see Him still as the source of things that can give me happiness rather than the source of my joy and comfort itself.  I don't see Him as wonderful, merely His gifts.  In an effort to change that, or rather to at least begin the process of change, I'm going to go through some of the aspects and roles of God.

First, and the only one I'll get to today, is that He is a God of goodness.  He could have let us burn for choosing ourselves over Him, yet He redeemed us at the cost of His own life.  Imagine that you sign a contract with someone in which you'll wash his car, do his laundry, clean his house, cook his meals, and do all his shopping every day for fifty years and, if you can do all of these things flawlessly for that entire time, he'll pay you $100 million.  One mistake, though, and you get nothing.  You start in on the cleaning and on just the third day, you leave a smudge on his car.  Instead of tossing you aside, he cleans the smudge, then agrees to do all the chores required of you, does them perfectly, and hands you the money that you didn't deserve.  He made a covenant with you originally, then superseded his covenant by paying your share of it.  All you have to do is let Him.

Our deal with God is even more generous than that.  We get Heaven for eternity rather than the penalty for our sins.  We get life instead of death.  And we have to do nothing but believe in Him and accept the gift.

If God stopped there, that would be so much more than we deserve.  He's only just beginning, though.  This is not a name-it, claim-it message, but God wants to give you good things, beginning with more of Him.  He wants you to take hold of His strength (Isaiah 27:5) and ask Him for wisdom (James 1:5).  He wants you to come to Him for your needs because He wants to fill those needs with good things (Matthew 7:11).  He offers a relationship with Him, peace, wisdom, and our needs being met.  These may not always be our earthly needs (much less the desires we've misclassified as leads), but they are always what is truly best for us.

The children of Israel saw ten plagues on Egypt before Pharaoh let them go.  Then they saw the parting of the Red Sea and the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night.  They ate manna from Heaven and still they complained against God ten times within the first year, so God said only Joshua and Caleb would see the Promised Land of all who were 20 years or older.  Yet even though God had said they'd die in the wilderness, neither their clothes nor their sandals wore out.  God protected them throughout.  He let them eat manna, even after they spoke against Him.  He still led them with the pillar.  At every turn, God is gracious to them, giving them much more than just salvation.

Manna didn't have to taste like honey cakes, but the Bible says it did.  It was apparently delicious.  That was an unnecessary blessing.  It could have tasted like plain oatmeal and it would have been a miracle.  God just wanted to be good to them.  God is not the God of just enough, but of abundantly more than you could ever dream of.  At every opportunity, He is good to you without fail.  Once we realize that in our hearts, we can start to desire the other aspects of God.  Next post, we will discuss God's attention to detail.

My Tank Runneth Over

In The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman presents a concept he calls the "love tank."  It's the idea that in order to love someone, you have to have love in your love tank.  Your tank is depleted whenever you love someone and is refilled whenever you are loved.  It explains why it's so difficult for those who feel unloved to love others and why those who feel very loved can more easily do it.

One note I'd like to make on it, though, is that many Christians want to pour out a pure love for others, yet don't have enough pure love flowing in.  Imagine that you are a waiter or waitress going around the restaurant refilling people's glasses with water.  They want pure, clean water, yet you got the water from a rusty tap and the pitcher you're using had been used as a makeshift flower vase but wasn't washed afterward.  What are the odds that the water you're pouring out is even close to pure?

Your love is no different.  You can't give out any better or purer than you're receiving.  To truly love others, to give them what they really need, you have to be getting what you really need.  We so often look for love from other people and seek to fill our love tanks with friends, relationships, and family, yet we don't realize that all this love, wonderful as it may feel, is still contaminated if it is only human.  Love is only pure if it comes from the source of all love, God.  He can show His love through others, certainly, but these others have to have received it from Him.  You can't give what you don't have yourself.

I'm not going to offer the overly simplistic advice of "just get in the Word and pray" if you want to love God more.  It's good and necessary, but your relationship with God should be alive and real, not formulaic.  Besides, I'm still working out how to desire Him more myself.  This post is just to offer another reason we all need Him.  :)

A Foreign Language

This post isn't really that theological, just something I've been thinking about.  On my first date with my girlfriend, Leah, I asked her what her love languages are.  Her top one is my bottom one and my second one is her fourth, but my top one and her second one are the same.  It worried me slightly at first because it's a shift in how I usually express affection and so if one or both of us didn't successfully shift, the other could end up feeling unloved, despite the true feelings of both of us.

As I got involved with her, though, I found that the shift for both of us came easily.  It got me wondering whether we're supposed to have primary love languages or those that don't speak to us.  It seems that our love languages are set when we're kids by those who know how to express themselves well in one language or who express themselves terribly in another.  For example, I heard so many different things about myself growing up that words of affirmation started to be meaningless to me.  I'd be complimented to no end at home and then ridiculed by my friends.  It seemed over-the-top both ways, but I felt it was more likely that those insulting me were telling it like it is since it's easier to be nice (especially for family who love you) than to say hard things, so I started ignoring the words of affirmation.  It's been difficult for me to give a compliment since and they still don't mean much to me when I receive them.

But is this how it's supposed to be?

Somehow, I just don't think so.  Consider Jesus.  He showed all five love languages almost constantly.  He spoke kindly and encouragingly to those who were lost.  He served by walking to those who were sick and healing them and then by washing the disciples' feet.  He spent three years constantly with the disciples, giving them quality time.  When He healed someone, it was almost always through touch.  And He gave us Himself, salvation, and then the Holy Spirit, not to mention the two separate occasions he turned a small amount of food into enough for thousands.

He accepted their praise and when they touched Him (I'm sure He was hugged countless times by those He'd healed).  He accepted an act of service when the woman washed His feet.  He accepted gifts as well (unlikely that He had enough money to support Himself and twelve other men for three years from his earnings as a carpenter), including the expensive ointment the woman used on His feet.  And He died so that we could have an eternity up in Heaven with Him.

I think we were meant to show and accept love equally well in all five love languages and that we've been limiting ourselves and allowing ourselves to feel less loved than we are by ignoring some of these based on our past.

Here's what I want you to do: examine your love languages and ask yourself why you do or don't feel loved when someone shows their affection that way.  If the answer is something in your past, I want you to forgive the person (if they turned you off to that language) and then, either way, try to start balancing your love languages out.  Maybe you'll never get to the point where all of them are equally accepted and given, but we shouldn't be limiting how we feel loved because someone else failed in our lives.  It may take practice and reminding yourself at first, but I think once you realize where your aversion came from and have let it go, embracing love in that way will come more easily than you think.

As this is just a theory I came up with a couple days ago, I'd be very interested in hearing feedback, either here or on my facebook page.

Justice and Grace

It sounds like they're two opposites, doesn't it? Justice is getting what you deserve and grace is being shown mercy, i.e., not getting what you deserve. As Christians, I think we fall into one of two traps: we either ignore grace and try to earn everything or we ignore justice and forget that our sins, any one of them, are enough to earn us hell for eternity. In other words, we forget either grace or we forget justice because we figure that they both can't apply, being opposites.

I want you to look at this a different way. I want you to consider how meaningless grace is without justice. If you were in a foreign country and broke one of the laws they have there that they don't have here and a cop stopped you, told you what you'd done, and then let you go without a penalty, it wouldn't mean much if your violation was one that didn't have a penalty associated (there actually are such laws, oddly enough). You could do that violation over and over and the worst thing that would happen is an inconvenient conversation with an officer, asking you to stop but powerless to make you do so.

Now imagine the penalty was 20 years in prison. It wouldn't matter whether you thought the penalty was fair. You are in another country and subject to their rules. (Ignore for now things like your country's gov't stepping in to negotiate.) You're quickly found guilty and sentenced. As you're being hauled off to jail, the judge steps in front and says, "Let him/her go. I will serve the sentence in their place." The guards take off your handcuffs and put them on the judge. Then that innocent judge goes willingly to take your place while you are set free. How much does grace mean to you now? That judge took your place so you could be forgiven.

"Why didn't he just acquit me?" you may be asking. Because if he did, he'd be making a mockery of the law that he has sworn to uphold. The law, and by extension, the judge's integrity, demand that someone be punished for the crime. If there was no punishment, it would not truly be grace, but corruption. God did exactly this for you, but on a much grander scale, saving not just you, but all who would call on Him from punishments infinitely worse than 20 years in prison. He created the laws, knowing full well you would break them and be guilty of the punishment necessary. Then, because He cannot be holy or good if He is not just, He knew that someone had to bear the punishment for our sins, so He took it on Himself because He loved us.

"Why not just not make the laws in the first place?" 

Because in that case, too, God is neither holy nor good. You are without crime in a state without laws, but you're not law-abiding. You are in an amorphous state where neither good nor bad exist. God cannot be in this state and be holy at the same time. To be holy, by definition, requires the possibility of unholiness. 

Perhaps even more importantly, the core of God's laws are choosing Him instead of yourself.  The purpose of the Universe, after all, is to glorify its Creator.  If there is no law, then there is no difference in which you choose, which would greatly diminish Him, which is something that cannot happen since we will never be even fractionally comparable to God. Conversely, if God compelled obedience, then there would be no possibility of love, since love, like holiness, requires the possibility of its opposite to exist.

Thus, the laws are required for God to be holy and good.  His laws require both the possibility of breaking them and, once they are broken, punishment for those infractions, or else they are meaningless.  That punishment was taken by Jesus because He wanted to be merciful to us.  Without the law, though, that grace and His sacrifice would have been meaningless.

Render Unto Caesar

I was reading Matthew 22:15-22 this morning. In this passage, the Pharisees tried to trick Jesus into saying something against Caesar or the Roman government, so they asked Him if it was right to pay taxes if He doesn't regard men. Jesus asks for a coin and then asks them whose image and inscription is on it. They answer, "Caesar's." Jesus replies, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." For years, I thought this just meant that we were supposed to pay our taxes and submit ourselves to the governments where we live, provided they are not commanding us to do something against our beliefs. This morning, it meant something totally different. Jesus asked whose image and inscription was on the coin and when they said it was Caesar's, Jesus' reply means the coin is Caesar's because it has his image and inscription on it. The coin belonged to him. The Bible says we are created in the image of God. Also, God created us, much like an artist creates a painting. In most paintings, the artist signs his or her name, even though they often leave signature strokes in various places that separate their works from the works of any other. You won't find some small tattoo of God's signature on you, but you can see His signature in the brilliant complexity of everything in your body, from larger organs like the brain to almost infinitely complex human DNA strand that the body replicates perfectly countless times a day. If you are imprinted with His image and have His signature on you, you are His. The Bible says we are to give Caesar what is Caesar's and give God what is God's. If we are God's, then we are to give ourselves to Him. Another aspect of this is Jesus didn't say, "Cut the coin in half, then, and give half to Caesar." The whole coin was given. Likewise, we are to give all of ourselves to God, not just a certain portion. Here's where the analogy breaks down a little: most people had multiple coins, only some of which were required in taxes, but you have only one you and God wants far more from you than Caesar ever did. Your entire self belongs to Him. The advantage, though, is that He knows what to do with you far better than you know what to do with yourself. In a movie, one kid picked up a guitar and started playing, but the music was awful. A father figure came in, took the guitar, played a few bars perfectly, and handed the guitar back to the boy, saying, "It sounds fine to me." The guitar was the same, but one player was a novice and the other a master. In your life, you are that novice. You pick at a few strings and try to find the right chords, but you're slow, clumsy, and sound flat or sour notes more often than pure ones. God is the master. He knows exactly what to do in your life to make the most beautiful song possible come from it. It doesn't mean you'll enjoy every bar as it happens to you, but the end of the song is going to be triumphant on a scale that the Hallelujah Chorus can only dream of...but only if you give your life to the Master. It's His anyway.

Moving On

My life has been tumultuous over the last two weeks. I was set up with a potential girlfriend, had a great first date, but things fizzled from there and ended last night. My landlords moved back and announced that they're not renewing our lease. Then I found a new place that's even better than this one. A few days after that, I found out I had only been looking at one region for my book sales, so what I thought was 1600 downloads in the last six weeks was really over 1900. I finished a query letter proposal for this book and did one round of editing on the proposal so now all that remains is a second round of editing and then researching agents and publishing companies. Then today, the woman I volunteer for at the church bookstore let slip a secret she had promised to keep, which led to several unpleasant conversations with a couple other parties, one of whom wasn't even involved. Lastly, it came out that I'm going to another church, so the boss of this bookstore manager fired me. That's an awful lot in two weeks. And now comes the part that I've been most looking forward to and least looking forward to: returning to Virginia, which I still think of as home. I'm looking forward to it because I'll see my friends again, some of whom are like family to me. There will be hugs aplenty, which I get maybe once a week around here if I'm lucky. There will be laughs and deep conversations and lots of catching up. But then comes the part that makes me not look forward to it: leaving. It's not just that I will have to say goodbye again to these people; it's that when I say goodbye this time, I don't know when I'll see them again. One friend has already moved away and another is moving in a couple of weeks, so it's actually likely I'll never see them again after this weekend. It's almost like in the winter when you've been out in the cold for a while, knowing that there's a merry fire crackling in the fireplace. You were there once, but had to leave to shovel snow. You're invited back in, but it's almost worse to go in again because you're finally used to the cold, so getting warm and then going back out again makes it that much worse. Yet I need the warmth. I need the friendship and love that I've been almost entirely without for the last seven months. I know God is in control. The way He handled my future living accommodations is amazing and how the book has been selling is encouraging as well. For the other situations, I may not understand why they happened, but there's a reason somewhere. There's not really a Christian point to all of this. If anything, it's that I'm growing in my trust in God. Through everything that's happened this past couple of weeks, I've remained calm and my faith in God hasn't wavered. All I have to do is trust in Him to not let me fall, and then do what He bids me to do. Much easier and more productive than kicking and flailing and fighting Him every step of the way... :)

Scar Tissue

Hundreds of years ago, princes had whipping boys to take their punishment for them. They messed up in school, the whipping boy would get hit. They lashed out at the servants, the whipping boy got the belt. They talked back to their parents, it was the whipping boy who got stripes. No matter what the young prince did, he was pretty much immune to being punished himself, at least as far as corporal punishment. One result of this was that princes had few scars. Oh, they might get some from sword practice or from any rough-housing they may have started with siblings, and perhaps one from clumsily tripping on the stairs or falling off a horse, but their sins weren't punished. This meant that not only did they not feel the pain of what they did wrong, but they didn't bear the marks of it, either. We have a volunteer whipping boy, who has already taken the punishment for our sins. His name is Jesus. We may still face correction from God or the results of our actions from the world, but the penalty for our sins has been paid already. The stripes have been taken by someone else. This means that we shouldn't be bearing the scars of our sins. So many of us, however, bare our scars to the world, almost proudly. We talk about our past, not just when it will help bring people to God, but anytime a related topic is brought up. We mention them not just with the hurt that our sins caused us and how far they took us from God, but with a certain longing for those good times that we left behind. Some of us, on the other hand, are so ashamed of our past that we don't bring it up to anyone. We act as though our past can never be erased, like we are tarnished for all time. If you do either of these, I'm not judging. I have been guilty of both myself, especially the latter. What I'm saying is that God doesn't want you to live this way. He doesn't want you wearing the scars, whether you show them to the world or keep them hidden. He wants you to remember where you came from, but not to live as though the past is your future. You don't have to bear the pain from what you did because He already bore it for you. To continue to claim those scars is to say that His blood isn't good enough, that it can't wash away your past. God the King made you His adopted prince or princess, and then Jesus volunteered to be your whipping boy so you could be presented without scar or blemish before God. To do this, though, you have to let go of your past, forgiving yourself for it, whatever you've done, and walking away from it. No more shame or berating yourself and no more boasting of all that you did and got away with. You have to let it all go, or you take only half the gift that Jesus offers you.

Planting, Watering, and Increase

One of Jesus' parables was about a wealthy man who entrusted three of his servants with some money and then went away on a trip. The first man received five talents, the second three, and the third got one. A talent is about 75lbs and, if it was silver (most translations don't specify that it was and gold, of course, would be over 50x more valuable), each talent comes to about $36,400 by today's valuation. It's a significant sum of money to leave to people. You probably know the story. The first servant went and bought and sold and doubled his master's money. The second servant bought and sold and doubled the money as well. The third hid the money and returned it to the master, who was very angry with him and gave his talent to the one who now had ten. Much is made of this last servant, but it is the first two I want to focus on. You see, the point of Jesus' story is that the real sin is not even trying to use what you're given for God's kingdom. Now, if he wanted to really show that this is the worst thing and not failure, you'd think he'd have one of the servants lose the money or try but not turn a profit. No, both of the first two servants double their initial capital. Why is that? I think it's because the master, an obvious representation of God, is the one they're working for, and He doesn't allow failure. I don't mean that you won't fail in serving Him. I mean that when you are serving, everything you do will work out in the end because He has willed it to. These first two servants, so long as they did their honest best to serve God, could not fail. Times may have been tough and the Gospel doesn't promise smooth sailing and fat wallets, but it does promise that your efforts for God are not in vain. In the early church, sects started rising with some people claiming to follow Paul's teaching, while others followed Apollos or another early pillar of the church. When Paul was asked about it, he replied, "What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe--as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow." 1 Corinthians 3:5-6. His point is that both he and Apollos had their missions and were performing them as well as they could, but after they had put forth their effort, it was God who was responsible for what happened, not them. When I was a co-leader of a young adults group in Virginia, I failed in large part because I was trying to put the pressure of providing an increase on myself and the other leaders. "If only we were trying harder," I reasoned, "if only we were doing something different that drew more people in. Is our teaching too soft? Is it boring? Are we unfriendly? (I know I was at times, but that's another story.) What are we doing wrong?" It turns out I was doing two things wrong. First, I was measuring success in numbers, rather than letting God define it however He wanted to. Only He knew what was going on in people's hearts. Only He knew the seeds that were being planted and the growth that was taking place. And I am sure that part of His plan was to prepare me for what He had next for me. God's more interested in hearts than in head counts. Second, I wasn't letting Him do His job because I was too busy trying to do both of our jobs. My place was to do His will, nothing more. Whatever results came of it would be on Him to produce. Think about that in terms of your life. Are you trying to measure your success based on something that God never intended for you to use? Are you hiding your talents because you are afraid that nothing will ever come of them or that you will fail somehow? Are you trying to both do what God has called you to do and provide whatever increase comes from your actions? If you're doing any of these things, stop! God has a plan and knows what's really happening, even if you don't. So you don't have to keep score; in fact, you shouldn't. If you're doing what God wants you to do, then you can't fail Him. Only He could fail because only He is responsible for what comes next. If you stay in His will, everything that comes from it is on Him...and because He can't fail, you can be absolutely certain it will work out to His will in the end. And if you're trying to do both jobs, relax. You only have one job to do here and it's the easier one. Use the gifts God has given you to serve Him in whatever way you can. You may never see the results you were expecting, but God sees them. One heart touched by a song, one decision made because of a point in a sermon, one relationship saved because of timely and caring advice...these are the things God uses to change a person...and it is these broken people God can use to change the world. Odds are you are not the next Billy Graham. You don't have to be. The master didn't demand that the servant who had three talents produce five talents like the first guy. He knew he'd given him less to start with and was just as happy with his increase. Besides, God can do whatever He pleases with or without you. He doesn't need you. Your service, therefore, doesn't matter in terms of whether you're benefiting Him; your service matters because it shows your devotion and love to Him. That's what God is really after. As you plant or water, it's not just the kingdom that grows; you grow as well.

Letting Go

I was at a camp once where you could do a "trust fall", closing your eyes and falling backwards into the arms of your friends. Most such falls happen with the faller's feet on the ground, but this one...well, for this one, you had to climb a short ladder nailed into a tree, stand on a platform about five or six feet off the ground, and then fall backward. I didn't do it. I didn't have the faith that my classmates would catch me. (Looking back on it, I was a real pain at the time, and can hardly blame them for not wanting to.) They encouraged me to do it, but I was not about to put my safety in their hands. Fast forward about 18 or 19 years to last night. I finally forgave myself. I know I've written about it before on here and it's even one of the (biggest and hardest) steps in becoming confident, yet I hadn't finished it for myself. I'd written down pages and pages of what I had done to others and a little of what I had done to myself, but I really hadn't forgiven myself for anything more than not getting perfect scores on everything in school. I started up Monday on finishing the list of my failings and made up excuse after excuse to distract me from it. Yesterday, I worked on it a little more steadily but still got distracted often. Then last night, I finally buckled down and got to it seriously. I had to stop posting details. It wasn't just that it was too long of a project; it is that it was too painful to deal with. My list of failings could fill several books. Every time I thought of a particular year or a person I had once been close with, another way I had messed up came to mind. I started writing in generalizations...only to find that that, too, was too much. I forced myself to finish that list, wondering how I could forgive myself of all of it. In Word, it was 20 single-spaced pages, with so many incidents left out or lumped together, and I didn't even go through my time in my last young adults group or last job carefully. I started writing that I forgave myself, but could only forgive myself for not getting 100s all the time. I took a walk to pray and meditate. On the walk, I realized what I was doing by not forgiving myself: I was putting more faith in myself to ruin my life than I was putting in God to fix it. With all the things I've done, the more common theme is not what a jerk or loser I was, but that by being a jerk and loser, I had wasted so many opportunities, so many years, and I didn't believe opportunities like these will ever come again. I'm 30 now and will be 31 at the end of next month. I've had so many chances over the years and, one way or another, either missed or threw away all of them. Even if I'm given a pass until I turned 18, that's still about 13 years, about 1/6 of my expected life, thrown away, and not just any sixth, but arguably the most important one. It was the lost time, the lost chances, that I could not forgive myself for even more than all the actions or times I didn't act and should have. But in that unforgiveness was a lack of faith in the Creator of the Universe. Here in Colorado Springs, the city glow prevents one from seeing as many stars as you might in the country or up in the mountains, but there is one particular star that burns brighter than I've seen any star burn in Illinois, Oklahoma, or Virginia. All of the stars seem brighter, in fact. As I was looking up at this one, though, so many trillions of miles away, I realized that God formed it with a word. Some stars are so large that if they were to replace the sun, they would swallow Earth as well, and God created every last atom in them. That same God created me, took the time to count the hairs on my head, sees each heartbeat, records each thought...and loves me regardless of what I do. When I got back to my room, I forgave myself, knowing it was the biggest step of faith I had ever taken in my life. All of the things I have done wrong in the past have been forgiven by God for a long time; now I've forgiven myself, too. For all the time I've wasted and opportunities I've missed, for what I've done to others and myself, for everything. I'm believing that the God who created the Universe has the power to change my life. I'm letting go of all the daydreams of how I wanted my life to be, letting go of the past, too. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth

Thomas Jefferson cut out sections of the Bible that he didn't agree with. The result is the Jefferson Bible, which omits the resurrection, Jesus' divinity, and other concepts many Christians hold as core beliefs of Christianity. He wanted to boil the Gospel message down to Jesus' teachings but, while a book on the teachings of Jesus would certainly have value, dismissing the rest of the life of Jesus and who He really was corrupts the message.

Yet I believe we often do the same thing in reverse. We accept Jesus' divinity and resurrection, at least on the surface, but not His teachings. In so doing, we indirectly call into question His divinity because if we believed with all our hearts that He was God and truly wanted the best for us, would we not listen? We read Scripture about loving our neighbor as ourselves and agree with it, then we go out and call someone a moron for cutting us off in traffic or judge someone based on their clothes or haircut or job. We listen to the story about the good Samaritan and then choose to sleep in on Saturday rather than distribute food to the poor. We are humbled when we remember how much we've been forgiven of, yet we harbor grudges against those who have abused our trust.

In my book on confidence, I wrote that it was not meant to be taken as a buffet of advice, where you select the two or three morsels that make the most sense to you and disregard the rest, but that it was meant to be taken as a whole. The same holds true of the Gospel message. You cannot take just the parts that you would agree with even if you weren't a Christian and claim the rest are only for that time and culture or that they somehow don't apply to you.

One note needs to be made here: I'm not suggesting we go back to Leviticus and never touch pigs and stone people who wear clothes made of different materials. We are no longer under the old law and the point of the law was never that we had to keep it to be holy; it was that no one could possibly keep it and so we needed a Savior. We are, however, to abide by the teachings of Jesus, not that we may enter into heaven, for that is based on grace and faith, not works, but that we may please Him and that our obedience will help us grow as Christians.

The same messages of loving your enemies, forgiveness, giving freely to those who ask, abstinence until marriage, submission to husbands, putting your wife's needs before your own (the Scripture reads "as Christ gave himself to the church" after all), and always being ready with a reason for your hope all still apply. If you haven't lived up to these, this is not judgment or condemnation. I haven't lived up to them, either. No Christian ever has perfectly. What it is is an exhortation to not dismiss parts of the Bible you find inconvenient or that mess up your fun. It is an encouragement to accept all of the truth of the Gospel because only when all of the truth is accepted is all of God accepted. He is love, but He is also the ultimate truth, and you cannot know Him the way He wishes you to if you reject whichever of His words that get in your way.

The Time of Your Life

I just got done watching In Time, a new sci-fi action movie where people stop aging at 25, but only have a year to live...unless they get more time, which is the new currency. The heroes, one from the slums and the other the daughter of one of the richest men in the world, set about robbing banks and distributing the time to the poor. Basically, a futuristic Robin Hood story.

One of the lines in it is, "You can do a lot in a day." That got me thinking about how much I do in an average day. In some days, I can move mountains. In others, not so much. What if I only had one day left, though? Would I waste it? Would I have a leisurely breakfast, set about my normal day, and then end it by watching a couple sitcoms? No. I'd spend some of it contacting those I care about one last time, and the rest doing everything I could to make a difference.

I'm pretty sure I have more than just one day left. And maybe that's the problem. Or part of it anyway.

The other part is I don't get the urgency of my calling. I honestly believe that my calling is to help people learn who they are in Christ, yet I don't seem to get how much they need to learn it. The reason I had to edit my confidence book is because someone I used as an example was offended at what I'd written about them. If this person really understood the message, they would not have taken it as an accusation and, more importantly, wouldn't have been bothered by it even if I had meant it as one. (I had meant it only as an example of why I became what I was, not to point fingers. I never even placed blame, but what I had written was seen as such.) I don't mean to sound condescending in any way, but there are Christians who need to find out who they are in Christ. Knowing Christ is only half of it, and so many Christians live only half the life they're supposed to. Every day, they're struggling with their issues and I have help to offer, help that I need to offer as much as they need to get it.

The point of this post isn't that you need help if you're reading this or anything arrogant like that; it's that the world needs you to do your calling. In the movie, those people would have died without getting more time. It made them slaves to whoever had the time to offer, much like people who are unconfident are slaves to those who make them feel better about themselves. The poor needed the system to be changed, and two people set about changing it. What kind of difference would you make in someone's life if you pursued your calling like you only had one day left?

And that is why you need you to do your calling every bit as much as others need it. We aren't here on this earth to live for ourselves, but to find something greater than ourselves. If you're a Christian, you've already found something worth dying for. Now it's up to you to do something worth living for.

Learning Curve, Part 2

I figured out why, at least in part, I have such a shallower learning curve for life lessons than I did for math ones. The answer is simply that I don't want to learn them as much. With math, I wanted to learn as much as I could as fast as I could. It wasn't even to show off or to feel smart; it was because I liked the challenge and saw the beauty of math. I wanted to learn almost everything I could.

Also, life lessons are often seen as humbling experiences. We can see sometimes how they make us stronger, but we still see the potential payoff in ignoring the lessons we've been taught. For example, "I know I've spent too freely in the past and it's caused me to barely scrape by, but this concert is for my favorite band. I can't pass up buying a ticket, even at $100."

So with math, I saw no payoff to not learning (since even playing outside paled in comparison to going through math problems to me; I know, I was an odd kid.) and I wanted the lesson because I could see the benefit. With life lessons, the payoff is more readily seen in ignoring them, and then the lesson is humbling once I have ignored the previous lessons.

This leads me to the next question: how do I want the things of God more? How can I want them enough to be willing to learn my lessons through instruction and study rather than experience or, worse, not learning them at all? It may be a little longer before I come up with an answer to this one...

Learning Curve

I enjoy math. The answers are either right or wrong, with no gray area. There can be multiple answers to some problems, but most have only one solution. Yet, there is a beauty in the math that I think a lot of people miss. There are just so many ways there are to come to that solution, as well as all the patterns that develop even in the most mundane things. 11*11=121. 111*111=12,321. And so on.

I remember learning multiplication when I was a little kid. I already knew addition and subtraction, so after my mom taught me multiplication, I asked if division was simply the opposite because it made sense to me for it to have an opposite, since addition did. She said yes, gave me an example, then gave me another one with longer division and that was it. My learning curve was very steep.

Well, in math, anyway. In life, it seems to be a different story. I've learned about God's goodness over the past few years and how futile it is to fight against God. I've learned about how He wants the best for me and how His love for me isn't dependent on what I do. I've learned about His power and faithfulness and how He's better than the other things I'm seeking. And yet...

And yet, I get distracted from His calling on my life. I forget some of the lessons I've learned and have to re-learn them. I forget how seeking my value in what my friends think of me will never make me happy or feel valuable enough. I forget that the money is really His and I'm just a steward.

I'm not beating myself up over this. It's not what God wants me to do. I do, however, have to question why my learning curve for this isn't as high as it is for math or Excel. How is it I can learn those lessons just once, but I have to learn life lessons over and over, despite getting sharper repercussions for failing life's little tests?

I know it's a heart issue. (Always is.) And it's now time for me to get back to school, learning about God, whether for the 1st time or the 100th.

Meant for Something More

Facebook is meant for certain social interactions more than others. A status, for example, can be many things: a mundane update, a thought for the day, a joke, a celebration, a complaint about something not too terribly personal or serious, or even a veiled mourning oft disguised in song lyrics...but you almost never see one that is deeply personal and serious. You can talk about that over Facebook chat or messages, but most people prefer to have such conversations in person or at least on the phone.

I've been going through a lot lately. I'm now missing my friends in Virginia for an entirely different reason: I have no one to talk to about serious, personal things out here. One of those things is that my grandpa on my mom's side is close to passing away. I was talking to my mom about it and she said we were actually meant for heaven and that earth is just a pit stop.

The odd things about that statement is it's not how it originally was. We were created to live in a paradise on earth forever. Then Adam and Eve ate the fruit and changed all that. I'm not criticizing them. We all would have fallen sooner or later. Yet that action so defines our human condition in that even when we have it all, we don't seem to be satisfied. And so we opened the door to sin and made ourselves dependent on God not just for life, but for salvation.

The amazing thing is that Jesus didn't restore Eden to us. He gave us something better. Adam and Eve were not meant to die, which means they weren't originally going to heaven. We get to. Usually, I try to end with some way that turns the meaning of something I said earlier in the post or at least mentions it in a slightly different light, but I honestly don't have a clear point in this. I guess it's just something for me to be grateful for in a hard time.

Something to be Mad About

I had a bad week last week. I still haven't fully recovered from it. The two worst things happened Wednesday and Thursday and I've been mad since when I think of them. Yesterday, in an effort to get my mind off these things, I watched a Bulls game and was getting pretty mad at them for a lack of effort and sloppy play. I went to get a drink at halftime and it struck me that I wasn't really angry with them. Disappointed, yes, perhaps even a little frustrated because this was a big game, but not angry. I don't really get angry at sports teams unless they play dirty. No, I was still mad about these two situations and looking for something to take it out on.

I try to not get too political during these posts, but I'm afraid my time in Virginia has irreparably corrupted me in that regard. I pay attention to politics now and it shows from time to time. In the past year, voter outrage seems to be at an all-time high. There was the debt ceiling crisis, California's gay marriage bill being passed then overturned (and that last decision is now being appealed), other states allowing gay marriage, the score of Republican Presidential nomination debates (I wish I was exaggerating on that number), the Occupy Wall Street movement, Greece and Italy near financial collapse, our market teetering between recovery and downturn, and a number of things I'm sure I'm forgetting. The latest one is whether employers or the government (read: taxpayers) should be required to provide contraception to women. Whether you're for or against it isn't the point; it's just another issue that not only seems to divide people into two basic camps, but inflames their anger to disproportionate levels.

I'm sure there are people who believe that certain of these issues really are of monumental importance. For example, for people who have lost their retirement savings because they invested in companies that went belly up because of their executives' criminal actions and then watch as these executives get only 2-5 years in prison, I totally understand the outrage. For most people, though, it seems that each controversy isn't so much a big deal on its own, but just something for people to get riled up about.

I go to CNN.com daily and regularly post comments on articles. I try to be logical and even-tempered, knowing that very few people on there respond well to, "The Bible says..." Yet every article that even mentions God or a religious person has a swarm of people saying everything from, "Religion should be banned; it is the cause of all evil in the world," to the relatively tame, "You have no right to tell me what you believe. Believe it all you want, but keep it to yourself." On ESPN, every article mentioning a known Christian athlete, such as Tim Tebow, gets the same treatment.

There's so much anger in the world. I'm sure not everyone is just waiting to explode, but there are so many people who can be easily riled up over things that don't even affect them personally. Or who get so furious over issues that they can't discuss them without resorting to name-calling and insults, let alone rationally and logically.

I've written before (at least on fb) that if our beliefs were stronger, it wouldn't matter whether someone disagrees with us. To quote from the Matrix: Reloaded,
"Not everyone believes what you believe."
"My beliefs do not require them to."
No anger from Morpheus in his reply, no shaking of his faith, no demand that his commander believe the same thing. No insults. No name-calling. No judgment for not sharing his faith.

It makes me wonder how much faith we've lost, how scared we as a society have gotten that things won't work out for us. How insecure many people, both Christian and non-Christian, must feel deep down if they can get so upset so easily.

There are things that it is right to be upset about. If you're one of the people that gets angry easily, is upset over things that don't personally affect you, or gets too upset over them, though, try to figure out what's really going on in your life. What are you really mad at? Is that anger based in fear of something either happening or never happening? Are you even positive your position is right (and if you are, why are you angry with others for disagreeing with you)? Why do you feel superior to those who disagree with you? Since a need to feel superior comes from a fear of inferiority, who do you feel inferior to? If you are willing to answer all these questions, you just might find what you're really so mad about.

In Focus

I love tower defense games. For those of you who don't know what they are, the basic premise is you build a bunch of towers to prevent the bad guys from reaching your base. With each passing level, the bad guys get stronger, so you have to keep building more towers or upgrading them to keep up. I can literally spend a couple hours on a good TD game.

Yet these are hours I will never get back. Hours that I could spend doing something else. I could be learning another language, reading the Bible, helping people on Excel forums, writing, editing, sending my work off to publishers, promoting my online work more, volunteering, getting in shape, or even just cleaning my room. Instead of taking steps to become the man I want to be, I sit around dreaming that I am already that man.

This isn't to say that all diversions are wasteful. I don't advocate a Spartan, fun-free lifestyle. I think it is well past time, though, that I call into question how I spend my time. Certainly, I have done things that required hard work and dedication, so I cannot say all my time has been wasted, but I know I am capable of accomplishing so much more.

Are you? I don't mean this in an accusatory way, nor do I mean to doubt your abilities, but are you spending your time well? This doesn't simply mean that you're not wasting hour after hour playing games or watching TV; you could be working on something that has no real meaning or bearing on your life. It could be a dead-end job you stay in because you're too afraid to use your gifts to their full potential. It could be a relationship you don't end because then you'll be alone. It could be friends you hang out with, but who don't challenge you to grow as a person.

We are supposed to move forward with our lives. For far too long, I have been moving forward only incrementally, then patting myself on the back and rewarding myself with some downtime. The next week starts in an hour. I'm going to spend a little time in the Bible and get ready for bed. For this next week, though, I'm going to give up all online games. I'm going to use that time to do at least a couple of the things I mentioned in my second paragraph and see what kind of change it makes.

I challenge you to do the same thing. Find one frivolous activity in your life that is taking hours each week and either cut it out or severely limit it for this next week. Use that time to do what you know you should be doing. I'd be very curious to hear your stories.

Forgiven?

This is, so far as I know, the last part of the book I'm going to share on here. It's one of the 11 steps to become more confident, and it's one of the hardest for me. To have real self-confidence, you have to forgive both others and yourself.

Here's why this is so important: most of the grudges we have stem from things that made us feel bad about ourselves. For example, I kissed a girl in 4th grade who swore she wouldn't tell anyone and then she immediately ran all over the playground shouting, "Johnathan kissed me!" I was humiliated and my standing in the class only went downhill from there. I held onto this for almost twenty years. I felt so embarrassed and betrayed, like no one who claimed to like me ever would but was just waiting for a chance to hurt me.

What I was doing was saying she had the power to determine my self-worth and she had found it lacking. If I had already determined my self-worth and knew it was enough, first, I wouldn't have been pressured into kissing her, but second, if I had kissed her, I'd just own up to it. I'd take the teasing and it would blow over because it wouldn't affect me. I could forgive her, too, both for lying and for trying to humiliate me.

Think of the grudges you have in your life. It could be against a romantic interest who lied to you. It could be against a boss for treating you unfairly, or against a friend for turning against you when you needed them most. It could be against someone for an insult or cruel joke at your expense. It could be against your family for not supporting you enough or paying as much attention to you as you would have liked. All of these things need to be forgiven because none of them determine your actual value. If you hold onto them, you're claiming they still have the power to lower your self-worth, that their opinion of you is more important than God's opinion of you.

Here's what I want you to do: take a notebook and just start writing the names of every last person you can remember from your entire life. If you remember a person, but don't remember the name, write down a description that you'll understand when you go through the list again. It's important to do this first because remembering everyone will help make sure your next list is complete. Then, go through the list carefully and think about every person. If you get even the slightest twinge of not liking that person, regardless of whether you remember exactly what they did to you, write their name on a separate list (I recommend a computer for this one). This is your grudge list.

For all the people on it, write down any and all offenses you can remember, anything that shapes your opinion of this person in a negative light, as openly and honestly as you can. Don't be nice and euphemistic about it; this list is for your eyes only. Say whatever is on your mind. Then write down how it made you feel, detailing exactly why it hurt you. Let out all your feelings here. And then, the final part is forgiving them.

This is tricky, I know. Some people you won't want to forgive, either because they hurt you so deeply or because there is no reason but malice behind it. Most hurts are unintentional or caused by selfishness and stupidity, but some people hurt others just to make themselves feel more powerful and these hurts are hard to forgive. Forgive anyway. And this forgiveness can't be, "Well, I have confidence now, so you don't matter. Neener, neener, neener!" You have to forgive from your heart. God loves you, so what they did doesn't affect your value, but God also loves them and wants them to have the same self-confidence He wants you to have.

This may take just a day or a week. In my case, I've been going through it off and on for months, the product of a very good memory and very low self-esteem. You'll find a couple things happen as you go through it, though. First, it gets easier the more you do it. The message will start to sink in that only God's opinion matters. Letting go of these grudges is going to feel like dropping weights from off your shoulders and you'll notice a difference in how you treat people. For some of them that made the list, you may have to reread your section for them several times for it to soak in, but when you really have forgiven them, your relationship should see improvement.

Second, you'll be able to more easily see where you've gone wrong. Many of our grudges are times we've taken offense for something that was unintentional. We assume the worst about the other person when they were simply thoughtless or they wanted to avoid hurting our feelings so they didn't tell us the truth we needed to hear. For a number of these grudges, you might need to include another section, put just above the forgiveness, on your own failures. In a few of your grudges, you might see that the fault was almost entirely yours or that there was a simple misunderstanding and nothing to forgive at all.

Being able to see your own shortcomings honestly will help you in the next, and probably most difficult part of this. Add another name to your grudge list: your own. You'll probably have more to say about this name than any of the others. I know I did (and I'm still not done yet). Of all the people on this list, though, this name is the most important to forgive. God doesn't hold your sins against you, and He doesn't want you to, either. Confess them all, every one you can think of, including why you did it and how it made you feel. Then forgive yourself, making it a point to write down how your value doesn't come from your mistakes or all the time and talent you may have wasted or all the money you've burned through. It comes from God and God alone.

Last, but not least, add one final name to the list: God. You don't need to forgive God, of course, because He's never done anything wrong to you. You do, however, need to let go of any grudge against Him. For me, I have to write down all the times it seemed He didn't come through for my family and I when I was growing up and for my long-time belief that I might as well have been made of estrogen repellant. The reason is that you can't want to draw close to someone that you have a big grudge against. Having real self-confidence requires knowing God because you are trusting in His opinion of you; you can't trust an opinion of your value from someone you don't know at all. You have to realize that all of the times you think He's failed you are really times when He was looking out for your needs over your wants, like a good father should. You have to know that He's always been there for you, guiding you to where you are now. And you have to remember that many of the bad things in your life have been because you've made choices other than Him. He never has and never will do anything that requires forgiving, but you have to let go your grudge against Him all the same if you want to know Him...and if you want to have the confidence He wants so much for you to have.

The Core Truths, Part 4 of 4 (You know you were expecting it)

Time for the last of the core truths: Confidence is something you have, not something you keep having to prove. This goes back to the driver's license example I used a few posts ago, about how you don't pull out your DL every five minutes to prove who you are, either to yourself or others. If you believe you have real worth, you don't have to prove that worth to yourself or those around you. Neither do you have to say, "Look how confident I am now!" all the time. You can simply be who you are.

To be honest, there's really not much more to say on this. Besides, I'm starving and have had a really bad day so far. Tomorrow, if I can, I do have one more message to share with you, and that's the importance of forgiveness in having self-confidence. That will be a long post, so if I keep this one short, it evens out, right? :)

The Core Truths, Part 3 of 4

Time for the fourth core truth about confidence: Aside from God, whatever you base your sense of self-worth on will fail you at some point and heap pressure on you every time you feel it is threatened.

This is another one I've mentioned several times in the last few weeks, but the reason I want to bring it up is to focus on our failures as humans. It's axiomatic to say that everyone screws up. We know it. For most offenses and most people, we're even willing to give them second chances. We know we screw up ourselves, too, yet for whatever reason, we seek our self worth in methods that require absolute perfection to achieve. It could be a certain figure you'd like to see in the mirror but never seem to manage to achieve, let alone keep. It could be being the best employee in your office, but that's always one failure away from changing. It could be having the coolest toys, but new technology rolls out every month. It could be having the hottest girlfriend or boyfriend, but there's always that risk they'll find someone else or someone else will be hotter than they are. The risk of failure is everywhere...No, let me rephrase...Risk implies the possibility of it not happening. Failure is imminent. It will happen. And it won't just happen once, but time and time and time again. You're too human not to fail.

This, though, is where we need to start being honest with ourselves even though it hurts. I'm not just talking about a failure to accomplish something a few times, but that you'll eventually get. This is not like Michael Jordan not making his high school basketball team, then going out and busting his rear for a year to get better. This is about becoming Michael Jordan, but still not achieving what you really wanted.

Here's what I mean: a few years ago, Jordan, John Stockton, and David Robinson were all inducted into the Hall of Fame together. John Stockton gave the status quo speech, thankful, with some humility (whether feigned or real, who knows?), and simple. David Robinson gave the class act speech, thanking pretty much everybody and deferring a lot of the credit to those who had helped him along the way. Jordan came up and basically tried to humiliate everyone who had said he wasn't good enough along the way. His speech was short on thanks, and even that was marred with self-aggrandizement. In short, he still wasn't satisfied that almost every basketball fan on the planet thinks he's the best player to every play the game; he had to rub it in the face of those who told him he wasn't.

The point is that you could achieve your dreams, the very thing you're striving so hard for right now, and it won't be enough. You'll be happy for a while and feel pretty good about yourself, but then that thing will be threatened somehow, or you'll at least perceive a threat, and then you'll try to hold on to that thing. This is a subpoint of this core truth: We cling to that which gives us our value. We are loathe to let it go for any reason, which is one of the reasons it's so difficult to switch over to having a true Christian confidence. It's also why it's so important that we let it go.

The Core Truths, Part 2 of 4

It's time for the third key truth about confidence, and this is the one that I put first in my book: Your view of God and your view of yourself will determine how you view everything else in life.

If you see God as holding out on you, as a great cosmic killjoy who burdens you with rules, as a weakling, or as cold and distant, you will not be depending on Him for your sense of self-worth. You may view Him as your source for things, but you view these things as giving you your value. I did this for years, pleading with God to give me a girlfriend. My value was in that, not from Him.

And if you can't depend on Him for your value, then you will turn somewhere else. God will be at best a source for the things you're turning to and at worst a hindrance to what you believe is your happiness. Either way, you won't want to get to know Him because a relationship with Him isn't important to you with these viewpoints. It's still all about you.

Which brings us to how you view yourself. If you think you're either better or worse than others, you're going to treat them in ways you shouldn't. For the former, you'll be proud and haughty, very likely unmerciful or at least condescending. For the latter, you'll get into either arrogance or self-condemnation because you're trying to earn affection and acceptance from others. With either path, when someone does something you don't like, there will be judgment, either against them or yourself. Also, whatever path you see as being most likely to give you happiness becomes right in your eyes, regardless of morality or how it affects others. You may care about people, but you care about yourself more.

Essentially, if you see God in any but the right light, He will not be enough for you to get your need for value met, and so you will turn elsewhere. And if you don't see yourself the right way, you can't love others. The affection and acceptance you're seeking you will see as existing in a limited quantity, and always at risk of being taken from you. It becomes this massive competition with no end game, no final victory, nothing but casualties and memories. You always have to get some share of the acceptance pie from people and you feel threatened when someone else becomes more popular or is better at your job or has the coolest toy or is better-looking.

If you try to avoid this by seeing everyone as equal in an evolutionary worldview, then we all have the same value, but that value is 0 because we're nothing more than the product of random chance. If you worship another god, all of them offer works-based salvation, so you don't know if you've ever done enough. Most of us, though, simply worship ourselves, trying to get all the glory and love we can.

The point is that you need to see both yourself and God the right way to have confidence. If you don't, everything becomes works-based and you'll see what you seek to be in limited supply. The truth is that there's more acceptance and love than you can even handle waiting for you for free, if you only know where to look.

The Core Truths, Part 1 of 4

I was going to do one post for each of the five core truths, but I already did one of them back on January 26: Your faith in yourself can never be stronger than your faith in God.

There's another one that I've been hammering pretty hard: that your value isn't based on a relationship, looks, possession, job, ability, or even what you do for others. This will be a short post about that, mostly because I think it needs to be focused on. We have been trained by people who have been trained by people who believe that we need to be good at something to be valuable. We need to be married or have kids. We need to have a good job. A nice house. A good figure. Sexy. Smart. Funny. All of this says that if we aren't at least some of these things, we're not valuable or, at best, that we'd be more valuable with these things.

And it just isn't true.

I'm not going to dwell on this as I did in other posts, but I do need to say it once here: your value comes from God, because He created you, died for you, made you and adopted child, and loves you with a passion you will never fully understand. This love cannot be earned, not even a small part of it, and that's the best thing about it: it's pure and unchanging.

What I want to focus on in this post is actually the importance of not going halfway with realizing this truth. It's one thing to say that your confidence isn't based on things other than God and another to say it comes from God.

If you went to the dentist with a cavity, she should drill out the cavity and then fill the tooth. If she just fills the tooth without drilling, your tooth will rot from the inside. If she just drills and doesn't fill it, the hole will be bigger than before and the rotting will soon start again.

It's like that with where we get our self-worth. If we just say it comes from God without actively getting it off these other things, we will rot from within. It may be slow, but it is inevitable. If you just tell yourself your worth isn't from these other things, but don't believe that it is from God (even if you tell yourself emptily that it is), you are digging a hole that needs to be filled, that will be filled with something.

You will always have a need to feel valuable. God created you that way. But He also intended for that need to be fulfilled in Him, in a pure and eternal way that no other source could hope to match, so you wouldn't thirst for it from anyone else anymore.

Because of this, though, if you don't really believe your value comes from God, telling yourself it comes from nothing else will set you up for failure because you will have that need and it won't be getting met by anything. It won't die, but become stronger and more desperate until it overcomes you, usually leading you into sin. I know this from recent experience. I thought I was good in my self-confidence. Then I tried ignoring God for several weeks as an experiment. My confidence slowly but surely crumbled, and I returned to several sins I had thought I'd kicked.

The point is that the need has to be met in one way or another. In our flawed human way, we'll always keep feeding it and it will never be enough. With God's way, we will never be perfect at this, but we can meet this need how it was meant to be met. This requires getting to know God on a deep and personal level, not just as holy Judge and Creator, not just as Savior, but as our Father.

Writing on a Sunday, Yep, That's How Awesome I Am!

And now we've come to the third and fourth masks. The third one, and the one my title jokingly refers to, is the mask of arrogance. This, along with exuberant extroversion, is probably the mask people fall for the most. After all, such a person has no problem telling you all of their accomplishments and they've led such interesting lives. Look how much they like talking about themselves. Surely, what they have to say on the topic must be interesting, right?

Here's the problem, though: if that arrogant person really is as confident as they claim to be, why do they need you to affirm it or even know about all their accomplishments? Why does he have to brag how badly he's beating you at even a simple card game? Why does she have to make catty, condescending comments about how to land a great guy? Why does this person need everyone to know about their gym routine or what they're doing at work, even when they're not asked?

It's attention that they're seeking, attention that they need.

There's an 80's martial arts movie called Bloodsport, where fighters from around the world compete in matches to crown a champion. The "bad guy", Chong Li, looks to be as strong as a gorilla and he's fairly quick with good martial arts training, the easy pick for favorite to win. Yet after each victory, he jumps around the stage, working up the crowd, feeding off their adulation. He needs it. He gets angry the one time he doesn't get it. And because he needs it, he enslaves himself to them. He depends on them for how he feels about his work, his effort, himself, and, because of this, no amount of praise will ever be enough. They could love him 1,000 times and if he doesn't get praised the 1,001st, he'll be upset.

A friend of mine once argued that confidence and arrogance can co-exist. I strongly disagree with this. If you're confident in who you really are, you don't need to prove yourself to anybody. If you're arrogant, you do. You can know that you are good at something and be arrogant in that, but the confidence in knowing you're good at something is not what I'm talking about. In fact, it's the antithesis of what I'm talking about because it's based on you and what you can do. Take that ability away and what becomes of your self-worth? That, to me, is why it is not real confidence. I know that I'm exceptional with Excel formulas, but that is no longer something that gives me value. If I couldn't do it anymore for whatever reason, my value is still the same.

Spotting a mask of arrogance is easy. Just look at whether the person can shut up about themselves, whether they can simply play a game without bragging, whether they feel they have to dominate a conversation, and how easy it is for them to insult (or how hard it is for them to compliment) someone else.

The last mask is not caring what other people think. I've heard so many people say that, to be confident, you just have to not care what others think of you (I disagree somewhat, but I'll get to that in a minute). Certain people, though, don't care what others think at all. These are the prototypical bad boys that women seem to fall for, especially in their teens and early 20s. They do what they want, when they want to do it, and don't care who doesn't like it. They're seen as people who know what they want and aren't afraid to go for it, but the reality is that they're just bullying their way through life, thinking they're better than everyone else.

A Christ-based confidence sees everyone as equals. There's no pride, nor is there reason for any.

I'm not saying a truly confident person can't go for what they want - they definitely should - but they won't feel the need to achieve it over a pile of bodies left in their wake. They won't have to order everyone around imperiously, berate those who don't listen to them, or try to control everyone. They'll have a faith that what God wants to happen will, regardless of whether people help or not.

As for not caring what other people think about you, I think a confident person should still care about it to a small extent. A friend of mine from Virginia, one of the few people who was bold enough to take me aside and correct (something for which I will always be grateful), once scolded me for being moody at parties and other social gatherings. And I was. I knew others noticed, but I had no idea it was actually bringing them down at all. I didn't know anyone aside from maybe two or three close friends cared at all. She pointed out that I was wrong to try to manipulate people into feeling sorry for me, which is what I was trying to do, even if at least partially unintentionally, and that others were indeed being affected by it. Had I not cared at all what she thought of me, I'd have ignored it and kept doing the same thing. Because I cared, I was able to listen to her correction and start changing.

The difference is that, with confidence, you don't have to be controlled by what others think of you. You can listen, then decide for yourself whether you need to change or not.

To put it another way, I've always believed that a good manager gives raises and promotions when they are deserved, not needing an employee to ask or have a personal situation that requires more money. If a manager is not aware of a specific employee's contribution, but then it is pointed out to him, that manager should decide the proper response to the new information. He shouldn't give more money to someone because they are getting married or for other personal choices, but for good work. If the money is deserved, it should be paid without the need for some personal life choice to call it into the light.

Likewise, you should be the one looking for your own flaws the hardest. That said, sometimes you will be blind to them and need others to point them out to you. When they do, you should decide whether you need to change. If you do, then change it, but don't change it based on whether the person pointing it out to you will be mad if you don't. Change it based on whether it's right to change it on its own merits. If it's not, then leave it alone and deal with whatever consequences. Take into account what others say about you, especially if you hear it more than a couple times, but don't let it control you.

I think it's time for another change of pace. I'm going to go through the five core truths of confidence next. After that, this series may well be over. It's not everything that is in the book, and that's the point. I want people to get the book. It's not because of money or fame, but because the more people buy the book, the more likely it is that complete strangers will buy it and so it will get out and help others. I'm still offering a free copy to anyone who wants it, though I don't know how much longer this will last. If you want it, buy the book, then send a screenshot of the receipt and a paypal email address to jnesscpoa@gmail.com and I will happily refund it, whether you like the book or not.

Hi, Look How Happy I Am!!!

Sorry it's been the better part of two weeks since I've written in here. I've been busy with other projects and, frankly, it's been a rather rough two weeks. But I'm back now and doing well again, which brings me to the next mask: being exuberantly happy and overly outgoing.

Now, it is possible for people to really enjoy being around others. I'm an introvert by nature and there's nothing wrong with that, just like there's nothing wrong with being extroverted. Where extroversion becomes a mask, though, is when a person is using it to keep everyone at arm's length. It could be by being the clown in your group of friends, that guy who says and does whatever he wants, pushing the limits of people's comfort zones, or the woman who wants to be the social butterfly, always flitting from one engagement to the next. It's a mark of confidence to be at least somewhat outgoing, since one of the results of true Christian confidence is liking people more, but if that extroversion is a means to keep others from knowing the real you, if you're uncomfortable with any silence, if you can't have a serious discussion but have to turn everything into a joke, then you're hiding behind a mask. At that point, even though it may look like confidence to those around you, it is really a mask based on the fear that if they knew the real you, they'd find you weren't good enough. The masked you is interesting and funny and charming while the real you is..."just" you.

I'm not going to go over how important or valuable you are to God again. You can all see my several previous posts for that. What I will say, though, is that the mask you're counting on to bring people into your life is the same thing that is keeping them out of it. This mask will seem to make itself necessary because, if you drop it, no one will recognize who was behind it because they don't know that person. Putting on the mask again makes them more comfortable being around you and so you keep it on because you want to be around people.

It's time to drop the act. I don't mean stop being friendly or outgoing. I mean stop keeping people out by pretending you're more outgoing than you feel like being. Let a few people in. Let them know you're human and that it's not all roses, sunshine, and apple pies for you. Be ok with not being the center of attention because your value isn't based on how many people are laughing at you.

Next time, I think I'll do a longer post about the other two masks, since they're related. Until then...

Masquerade Ball

It seems like most people are wearing some sort of mask. I've counted four distinct types: stoicism, overly friendly, arrogant, and doesn't care what others think. I know I used to try out a few of these. Once in a while, I still catch myself doing it. My particular mask of choice was one of stoicism. I did a poor job of hiding my emotions in my eyes, and there were times where I dropped the mask when I wanted pity, but most of the time, my face was blank and emotionless. Few smiles, a little bit of laughter, not too many frowns, just a straight face, hiding everything going on behind the scenes.

And there was quite a bit going on behind the scenes. It wasn't even the bad stuff that I was trying to keep in, though God knows there was enough going on with my mother, the rest of my family, and myself. It was the good stuff, too. It was all the happiness I got from being around my friends, all the respect and love I felt for them, but never wanted to show.

My decision to hide it all wasn't completely subconscious, either. Most of it was, but part of it was my showing nothing intentionally because I didn't want to be vulnerable. If you show emotion, others know where they can hurt you. The subconscious part followed the same logic, and probably went back to the divorce and how kids treated me (much of which I deserved) in school. I learned that if you care about someone, that person can use it against you. If you are happy, there's usually someone who wants to see you less happy. If you're nervous or scared, people will pick on you for it. Anger brought solitude and sadness brought pity, so I used both of those to control the level of attention I wanted at the time.

And when I felt ok, the stoic mask went on. I made few people feel warm and happy and came across as an automaton, a cold-hearted thinker who would do whatever was logical. I had honor, but it was honor without love or pity.

There were people who told me I seemed arrogant and a few who told me they thought I was confident when they first met me, but it was a mask to hide my utter lack of self-confidence. It wasn't that I had my emotions under control and didn't let them rule me - that would have been a good thing - it was that I was hiding everything and bottling it up until I'd explode.

This is the first mask of false self-confidence. Mine wasn't even a very good mask, but it was the one I knew best how to put on. If you know someone who is not very emotional, they may have self-confidence, but if they are always stoic, it is more likely they are hiding their emotions. True self-confidence can control emotions, but doesn't hide them. True self-confidence can be openly passionate and compassionate. It can let others know that you like them.

And it doesn't keep silent when something needs to be said.

If you know a stoic person, see whether that person is always stoic and never passionate about anything. Does that person speak up when something needs to be said? Do they have compassion on others? Do they let anyone in to what's going on behind the scenes? If the answer to these is no, that person isn't truly confident. You cannot know who you are in Christ and still be dispassionate about it. You won't remain silent out of fear of what others will think. You'll have compassion because He had compassion on you. And you won't keep others out because of fear that they may hurt you because you'll know where your value really comes from.

Something to Prove

Imagine waking up one morning, pulling out your wallet, flipping it open to your driver's license, and then reading your name. "Huh, so that's who I am," you say to yourself. And then you repeat these last four steps throughout the day, constantly needing to know your name. You also show your license to everyone else, very eager for them to know your name and realize you still are who you say you are. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

It's unfortunate that this is pretty much what we do. It's not that blatant, but the compulsive urge to prove ourselves permeates almost everything we do. We kill ourselves at work, we bend over backwards in relationships, we stay silent because we don't want to be looked at as fools or rock the boat, and we buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like. All of it says, "I don't think I'm valuable enough. I still have something to prove."

Why do you feel that way? Because you feel it is not yet proven, not yet believed by those around you, not yet believed by yourself. You don't look at your license several times a day because you already know your name. You don't have to prove it to yourself and you don't feel the need to prove it to others. If they doubt it, you have the proof on you if you really need to show them, but you don't shove it in the face of everyone you meet. Whatever doubts they have don't shake your faith that your name is what it is, either.

With our value, though, we often feel compelled to whip out whatever we think gives us value and show it to everyone because we're so afraid it doesn't really exist, that we're not good enough. I used to use big words all the time and do math in my head at every possible opportunity and bring up arcane facts, all to show that I was smart. I couldn't just rest in knowing I was smart, much less in knowing that my value doesn't come from my intelligence. Everybody had to know...all the stinkin' time.

I developed a reputation as being arrogant, especially as a college freshman. And that brings up another point: arrogance is not having a high value of yourself; it's having an opinion that you're better than someone else. You're not. You're worth no more to God than Stalin or Judas. You're worth no less than John the Beloved. But it is not arrogant to have a high value of yourself; God wants you to have a much higher value of yourself. He wants you to see yourself as a son or daughter of God, more valuable than anything you could ever do could possibly make you. Our problem is not just that our current value of ourselves is too low, but that our goal for our self-value is really no higher. If we were to prove to the world we were the best person out there, that proof is never final. It would have to be proven over and over and over and over both because there would be challengers to your claim and because you don't believe it yourself. Nor should you, since it isn't true. Even if it was, though, the value you should be aiming at is higher above this than an elephant is above an ant. God decided you were worth His Son's life. Do you really think having a nice stock portfolio or handsome husband is going to add more value to that?

Getting back to the main point of this post, if you have true confidence, if your value is based on how God sees you and not on yourself, then you don't have to prove a darn thing because you know your value is even more certain and unchanging than your name. You don't have to question it. You don't have to prove it to yourself or others. It is part of who you are. Because half of having this self-confidence is knowing God, there is work involved in maintaining this confidence because there is work in maintaining that relationship, but there's no burden of proof that you bear to the world that you have it. You know you do.

On Monday, I'm going to back up a tad and start going over the masks of false self-confidence we so often see and use.

Meet Your New Family

First off, sorry for not posting yesterday. I went to a mechanic for what should have been a 1 hour stop and it turned into about 3.5 hours. With the other stuff I wanted to get done yesterday, this sort of fell by the wayside.

But I'm back now and with an important message: You have a new family. A new dad and new brothers and sisters.

We throw these terms around blithely as Christians: Father God, brothers and sisters in Christ, the church family. We often seem to forget what they mean.

Think of your own father on earth (or, for those of you who had no father or had a bad one, think of your mother or closest positive male role model). Did you ignore him every time he wanted to spend time with you? Did you want to get to know him? Did you ask him how to do things? Did you ask him for things you wanted? Did you get punished by him when you did something wrong? Do you now appreciate that punishment because you know it helped you become a stronger person? Was he there for you when you were sad or hurt or scared?

Not all of us had a father or father figure in our lives, and none of us had one who was perfect in all of these things, but God is and He takes that roll with us when we become Christians if we let Him. He becomes responsible for seeing to our needs and determining what's best for us, even if it's sometimes not what we want. He becomes responsible for binding up our wounds. He consoles us when we're sad and soothes us when we're scared. He wants to be everything to us, just like our earthly father was when we were little kids. Final authority in our lives? Him. Source for everything we want? Him. Person whose opinion of our value matters the most? Him. One who punishes us and decides what we actually get? Him.

We have to view ourselves as part of His family, though. We have to let Him play that role in our lives. He's not going to come in and take over and demand we love Him. That wouldn't be love on either our part or His. A lot of Christians don't do this, however. We don't see Him as our Father, as our source for all good things. We may seem Him as a restrictive overlord who doesn't want us to have any fun, as someone waiting for us to screw up so He can give us a good smiting, or as someone who may give good things on occasion, but either holds out on the best stuff or gives it arbitrarily. Some of us may even see Him as benevolent and kind. But how many of us truly see Him as our Father? That's something I'm still working on, honestly.

One that's even harder for me is seeing everyone else as my brother and sister. One of my roommates who just moved out stopped by today to ask us to pay his share of the rent. Our agreement says that it's split by those on the lease and he is still on it, even though he moved out. He's struggling to make ends meet with his new wife, though. I suggested he pay half and the rest of us split the other half and that was agreed on, but everything in me wanted to tell him to live up to his agreement, that I wouldn't even ask to get out of something I signed. I failed to see him as a brother. If my brother asked me to do something like this because he was having a hard time financially, I would have helped out willingly. I might not have just sprung for the whole thing, but even with the offer I made, it would have been done with a willing heart. Now, though, my heart is not loving toward him. It's proud and angry because his decision is costing me money and my love isn't strong enough to overlook that. Writing this has helped, though.

Do you do this with your brothers and sisters in Christ? Do you give your very holy advice willingly but withhold from them when they need something from you? Do you give excuses instead of help? Do you become proud more easily than you become generous and forgiving? Do you forget that these people need you and that you need them, that you may draw each other closer to God and be examples of God's love for us to one another? I know I do. Today I did, and yesterday after I left the mechanic, I was even worse. And yet, this is my new identity. I am a son of God. I am your brother. I love Him. I love you. God help me fulfill those last two.

The Other Half

There are, generally speaking, two ways to legally own something in society: to make it or to buy it. Even your paycheck falls into the latter because you have given your time and effort for that money. Then, of course, that money is used to buy things in the more traditional sense of the word.

God owns us by virtue of both means. He made us, and then He bought us back when we'd given ourselves away. There is no reason for us to believe we are not His.

I was intending to go through what Jesus suffered to show how much He loves us, but I think I may take a different track.

There may be no reason for us to believe we are not His, yet it seems most Christians do. I'm writing another book right now on confidence/finding your identity in Christ and this one is a re-telling of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, told through the journals of the father and his two sons. The story in the Bible doesn't really end, though, in the sense of all loose ends being tied up, so I take it a bit further, and use a little literary license to ask, "What would happen if the younger brother had woken up the next morning, not put on the robe, left the sandals, and taken off the ring, and gone to work in the field with the servants because he felt unworthy?" I think a lot of Christians fall into that category. We are grateful to be back with our father, but we forget our status as a son or daughter, we forget that our unworthiness doesn't matter to our father.

Or we forget that we have always been His, like the older brother, and we get frustrated trying to earn things that He wants to give us and will when our hearts are focused on Him.

Both ways speak of pride (in thinking we can ever earn something from God) and lead to frustration, anger, emptiness, and a life that is nothing like what God wants for us. This is not a name-it, claim-it message. I'm not saying God will give you mansions and billions of dollars if you ask and believe. Paul lived a life of prisons and beatings, yet he was so full of God's love that he could sing in prison, so full of faith in God that even when his chains fell off, he didn't leave because God didn't want him to. And I personally believe that he wouldn't have traded his life for that of a king's. No, your life may not be full of gold and vacations if you follow God, though there are some devoted Christians God has chosen to entrust a lot of money to, but how about a life of joy, a life where you can relax knowing you don't have to prove yourself to anyone, a life of freedom to love others and yourself purely? How much would that be worth?

That's our heritage in Christ. That's what we get when we both know Him and believe we're His. We were made by Him and bought by Him. And then He turned us from the slaves we ought to rightfully be into His adopted sons and daughters.

Picasso's Lost Painting

Imagine going to a garage sale and finding this ugly little painting in an old, worn frame. The thing is grotesque and you wonder why anyone would have it in the first place, much less be willing to buy it at a garage sale. You notice that the frame hides some part of the painting and, at first, you think, "Good! The less of it I have to see, the better!" But then you notice what look to be the tops of letters peeking out from the frame. You, ever so carefully, push that corner of the painting back and peer down, allowing just enough light for you to make out "Picasso."

Suddenly, your opinion of the value of this painting changes dramatically and you are astonished at your luck. You wonder if it's too good to be true and how the owner could possibly sell it here. It either has to be fake or she doesn't know what she has.

What changed? Certainly not the painting. It's as ugly as ever, with eyes, ears, and noses all over the place; sharp, angular features no human could possibly ever have; and what may or may not be a second mouth. No, what makes it valuable is the signature of the person who painted it. It's aesthetic appeal may be 0, but it's worth millions simply because it is a Picasso.

We're like that. Whether our particular painting is as beautiful as a Monet, as wonderfully detailed as a Renoir, or as hideous a thing as we can imagine, the value is the same because we bear the mark of the Maker. It was God who painted us. He didn't paint our lives to be the sinners we are, but He made us. However ugly our lives become, they are still lives created by Him.

Think about this for a second: God loves Hitler as much as He loves John the Baptist. Sound hard to believe? I know I have a hard time with it. And yet, even though I can't understand how, it's true.

You may be wondering how much God can really love you. Maybe you've done something terrible, or maybe you just don't like yourself very much, but God can and does love you and it has nothing to do with what you've done or what kind of mess you may have made of your life. He created you and chose to love you.

Next time, probably on Monday, we'll look at the other half of why you're valuable: because Jesus died for you. Then, the next session will be on what that means for us in relation to our identity.

In the Beginning...

I don't know your particular beliefs on Creationism or even on God for that matter. I've talked before in this blog about issues I have with the Big Bang Theory and evolution and, I'll admit, there are a couple things about the strict literal interpretation of the Bible's account of creation that I don't understand. That's not the point of this entry.

I take it on faith that the Bible's account is true, and, even if some of the things such as the literal interpretation of "day" aren't the same as we know them, I believe in the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve as the first people.

When I read other stories in the Bible, I see a lack of confidence in so many places. Gideon saw a miracle and then tested God twice before He was willing to follow Him. Moses saw and argued with a burning bush. He knew full well it was God and God was talking to Him like we talk to each other, yet he basically said, "Uh-uh. I'm not good enough to do that. I'm just a shepherd and besides, I stutter." Saul was so angry that David was more highly praised than he was that he sought to kill David.

You don't see this before the Fall, even though God's commands to Adam and Eve were more daunting. Gideon was told to lead an army, Moses to free a people, and Saul to rule them justly; Adam and Eve were told to name everything and conquer the planet. Their response? From all we can tell, it was, "Ok, we got this." No argument, no "I'm not worthy" protestations, nothing.

That all changed when they were tempted by the snake. They were told that God had withheld something from them and they believed it. Two things happened in that moment: they started to doubt God's goodness and they started to doubt whether they were good enough. They knew the tree was called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and they hadn't eaten of it to that point. They didn't know what evil was, and they had been content not to know. They had been content with God's goodness and with their own value, even though they didn't know something. They doubted God's goodness, and their value is automatically called into question. Faith in God and self-confidence have been intrinsically linked ever since.

The truth: Your faith in yourself will never be stronger than your faith in God.

You may believe in yourself to do certain things well, but if you feel you keep having to do them, what does that say about your belief in your inherent self-worth? If your life would utterly fall apart and you'd feel worthless if one person walked out of it, what does that say about where you get your value? The fact is that your value comes from something outside of you and anything you can do, have done, haven't done, own, or accomplish and is not dependent on who likes you, respects you, or wants to be with you. Your value is because God created you and decided to love you.

And that will be the topic next time.