The Hill

A Change Is Gonna Come

adoriot — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:14:34 +0000

The Coca Cola Freestyle machine is much cooler than it looks in the slightly boring video above. Coke has revolutionized the fountain drink machine. Instead of just offering the typical six or eight drinks at your local fast food restaurant, the new machine gives you the choice of a mind-boggling 140 flavors of Coke, Sprite, Vault, Powerade, Fanta, Dasani, and just about every other Coke brand you can imagine.

The Freestyle machine is a jaw-droppingly awesome invention, but I don’t think of it as one that people were really clamoring for. I mean, I never really saw a problem with the fountain drink machine the way it was. It never occurred to me that it could be any better. Someone at Coke, however, saw an opportunity for change. Someone far smarter than me was brave enough to see that just because something has been done successfully the way it has for years does not mean that it can’t be improved. The people at Coke have proven that they are not afraid of change. My parents on the other hand are not as brave.

Every year, without fail, my parents undergo a severe bout of depression for about a week in the fall. That’s because, every year, without fail, one of their favorite tv shows undergoes a time slot change. This year the the battle against tv-timeslot-induced stress disorder was particularly severe, as “The Mentalist” and “The Big Bang Theory” both moved later in their respective nights (my parents have a problem staying up past 9 pm) and “NCIS” now goes against “So You Think You Can Dance”, and it is still wreaking havoc on their life and their DVR.

Every year the complaints are the same: “Why do they have to go and change the tv schedule? What was wrong with it the way it was? Why does it have to change?”

Every year I make fun of my parents for their complaints, but truthfully, their complaints over what I deem trivial matters are not that different from mine when things in my life change without my permission.

Often I find myself too saying, “Why, why, why? Why does everything have to change? If everything would just stay the way it is, everything would be fine.” Most of us, whether we care to admit it or not, have written a script to our lives. For some we’ve only written the day out, others may have years in advance outlined. All of us, though, wake up each day wanting to be the director of the film of our life and like many directors, we don’t appreciate any improvising to the script.

No matter how good our script is, it could always use some editing. It is hard to take criticism, especially in an area which we have spent so much time crafting such as the script for our life, but when God wants to bring about changes, we ought to be grateful for them even if we do not understand them. We rarely trust that God has a better plan for our lives, but it is rare that he does not.

This is not something to be ashamed of, this lack of trust. Really, it’s been going on for years. We’re not that far removed from Jesus’s best friends, his disciples. They too often failed to see the intricacies of God’s plan even when it was right in front of their eyes.

Take this verse of scripture, Zechariah 9:9, for instance:

Rejoice greatly O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Zechariah prophesied that a savior would ride into town humble and mounted upon a donkey. As disciples of Jesus, his friends like Paul and Peter and John would have been intimately familiar with this and other scriptural prophecies. Surely, when the time came for Jesus to fulfill this prophecy as chronicled in John 12:12-15, it must have been an awe-inspiring sign for the disciples:

The next day the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!” And Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as it is written, “Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt!” His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him.

Well, it should have been an awe-inspiring moment for the disciples. But they, like us, did not see what Jesus was doing until weeks after the fact. When we reflect on the changes Jesus has made in our life, if we look hard enough we can often see something that he was doing that we couldn’t see at first. With a little perspective, though, Jesus’s plan becomes clear, and we see how our plans are pitiful in the light of his.

Like the disciples, we do not always see the grand nature of what Jesus is doing. But he is doing something. Nothing of what Jesus did was without reason, and nothing that he does in your life is without reason either.

You can take that to the bank, because no matter what changes come about in your life, there is one thing that does not change. Malachi 3:6 puts it best:

“For I the Lord do not change…”

God does not change. He is the one constant in this world. His love does not change (it is steadfast). His feelings for you do not change. His salvation does not change.

The unchanging nature of our God is such a vital truth to remember, especially as changes go on in our life and at this church. Because this is a season of change at The Hill Baptist.

Our church (and the church in general) is at a crossroads. In many ways we are facing the same challenge as Major League Baseball.

As a Braves fan my interest in the World Series this year has been minimal. From what I have seen though, the story of this year’s baseball championship has been the officiating (this link from Sports Illustrated should give you an idea of what I’m talking about). It’s not unusual for baseball fans to gripe about the officials. But if you really look at it, the umpiring for this year’s Series probably hasn’t been any worse than it has in the past. What is different about the fan’s complaints this year is the debate over instant replay.

Instant replay in baseball allows for umpires to review select calls, such as whether a ball is a home run or a foul ball, and reverse them if the wrong call is made on the field. Currently, instant replay cannot be used to determine if a player was out or safe, which is where the controversy lies. There are passionate proponents campaigning that baseball should change the instant replay rule to cover out/safe calls, and there are those who are just as strongly opposed to making this change. The opponents of instant replay say that the expansion of replay rulings would eliminate the “human element” of the game and that this “human element” is part of what makes baseball the sport that it is.

This is an utterly ridiculous argument. There is nothing noble about the human element. It’s a fancy way of saying that, “there are blown calls in every game and that’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it always should be.” To paraphrase what Colin Cowherd said on his ESPN Radio show The Herd a few days ago, allowing mistakes that could be easily corrected in baseball and calling it the human element is like getting into a car crash and breaking your leg but refusing to go to the doctor because, well, breaking your leg is just the human element of getting into a car crash.

If we have the means to fix something, we ought to fix it, even if it has been broken for a long time. And our church is broken. It may look noble and religious and holy on the surface, but if you look deeper you will see a problem that runs far deeper than the human element problem of baseball.

Our church, along with so many others, is rooted in manmade tradition rather than in scriptural truth. God never intended church to look the way it does now. A church was never supposed to be a building you came to twice a week or a group of people you hang out because your mom drags you to hang out with them . A church was supposed to be a body of believers sharing their lives with each other day in and day out. The book of Acts describes how church was supposed to look in verses 2:42-47:

All the believers devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe come upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

Why can’t a church today be the way it was back then? Why can’t we change things up? Just because we’ve been doing something one way for a long time does not make it right, and does not mean that we can’t change it. We ought to change the way we look at church, we ought to change the way that we do church, and I hope that you will join with us as we try to do just that at The Hill.

We are going to begin changing the way we do things a bit at The Hill. Do not be afraid of these changes. They may be awkward at first, they may be confusing, they may not always work. We must not be afraid of trying something different though. Above all else, keep your focus on what will not change – our Lord and his love for us – and pray for true change at The Hill. Ask yourself what you can change in your routine, and try something different. Look at your life not as a Coke machine with six flavors but as one with limitless options, and do not be afraid of change.

Not Subject To Change

adoriot — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:45:59 +0000

Are you anybody’s favorite person? Are you the favorite person of anybody? Think about it for a moment. Does anybody think you are the most special person in the world?

Wouldn’t that be a great thing to be? The favorite person of someone? We want to have someone in our lives who thinks we are special, who puts us at number one on their speed dial, who would put us at the top of their top friends on MySpace, if anyone still used MySpace that is. We want someone who will love us and take care of us.

This is a natural desire. God created human beings to be with other human beings. He said himself in Genesis after he created the first human that it was not good for man to be alone, and so he created for the man a partner (Genesis 2:18).

Being alone is a scary thought. Not having people in our life who love and care about us is frightening to think about. A life without love is probably my biggest fear. Ecclesiastes 4:7-11 (MSG) reinforces what a scary prospect being alone can be:

I turned my head and saw yet another wisp of smoke on its way to nothingness: a solitary person, completely alone – no children, no family, no friends – yet working obsessively late into the night, compulsively greedy for more and more, never bothering to ask, “Why am I working like a dog, never having any fun? And who cares?” More smoke. A bad business. It’s better to have a partner than go it alone. Share the work, share the wealth. And if one falls down, the other helps, but if there’s no one to help, tough! Two in a bed warm each other. Alone, you shiver all night.

A life lived without love. A life lived alone. No family, no friends, no one around to share in the joys of life with. Working and working but no one to share the profits with. Coming home to an empty house, eating at an empty table, and sleeping in an empty bed. It’s a bleak image that anyone in their right mind would want to avoid.

In trying to avoid being alone, we look for love anywhere we can find it. And, as human beings so often seem to do, we royally screw up this pursuit. We look for love in all the wrong places. We put on identities that don’t really fit us, looking for approval from others. Our value in life becomes defined by the love we take from others, and we do whatever we can to find that love from anyone. Sometimes that leads us to look for love that’s not even real.

Chuck Klosterman talks about this phenomenon of fake love in his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. He posits that our generation has been warped by the entertainment we’ve been exposed to into pursuing a highly romanticized love that has never and will never exist:

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no “normal”, because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can’t compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they’re probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Gellar. Real people are trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. (Klosterman, pgs. 4-5)

The love that we so often search for, the love we see on “Friends” or in “The Notebook” or in a catchy Taylor Swift song is a love that does not exist. It’s a beautiful creation, this love that rises and falls and rises again across three acts, but it is a figment of our collective imagination. Love is not this easy, love is not this perfect.

If fake love is what we’re searching for we will forever be unsatisfied. Since we are searching for something that does not exist, we are doomed to forever follow a cycle of disappointment and heartbreak when do not find this love. That’s a scary thought.

People convice themselves all the time that they’ve found this cinematic love, but I have yet to meet one person who truly has. People who have filled their lives with this fake love are all around us. They may end up married with children and a wide array friends, but they are truly alone. There may be people all around, but inside their heart still aches for something real. It’s scary, almost disturbing to think about.

The good news is that all of these fears can be abolished. You see, you are someone’s favorite person. You are God’s favorite person! There is a first place tie in his heart for all of his creation. He thinks you are special. If he had a wallet it would have a picture of you in it that he would pull out whenever he met someone new so that he could show them your picture. If he had a refrigerator he would put your A+ grades on it. It sounds kind of cheesy but stick with me. You are God’s favorite person.

What’s even better is there is nothing you or anyone else can do to change the way God feels about you. There is nothing that can be done to undo God’s love. The Psalms rave about this steadfast love. Psalm 36:5 (ESV) says, “Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds.” And Psalm 100:5 proclaims, “For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.” And Psalm 145:8 exclaims, “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

God’s love is steadfast. Look up the word steadfast in the dictionary, and you’ll find that it means, “not subject to change.” God’s love is not subject to change. There is no chance that it will change. Have you ever heard those radio commercials for a special sale at certain store or car dealership or restaurant that has some guy talking really really super duper hyper fast and the end of it about all the terms and conditions to the sale? The ones where the guy talks about the sale not being valid in South Dakota or after 4:05 in the afternoon or on the third Sunday in July? These sorts of deals are subject to change – the stores tack on these disclaimers so that they can change the terms of the deal whenever they want to. There are no such disclaimers on God’s love. It is not subject to any change.

God loves you so much that he wants to be with you. He wants to be with you all the time. God gave everything to be with you forever. In John 15:13 Jesus says, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends.”

Jesus loves you so much he died so that you would not have to be punished for your sins and so that you could spend eternity in heaven with him. Eternity. All time. Can you fathom loving someone so much you want to spend all time with them? I have some pretty fantastic friends, but after spending about a week nonstop with them I need a break. I need to hang out with someone else. There is no one in my life I love enough that I could spend every moment with. God loves you this much, more than any of us could possibly love anyone.

You can be very certain that you are someone’s favorite person. You can also be certain that there will be times in your life that you will feel alone. There’s no avoiding it. Your girlfriend or boyfriend will break up with you. You will have to move away from home to a scary new place. You will experience the deaths of those close to you. But though you may feel alone, God wants you to know that you are never truly alone. He is always there for you, and his love is all you need.

Give up the quest for fake love. Stop trying to find something that does not exist. Take comfort everyday in the fact that you are God’s favorite person, for his love is all the love that you need.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. – 1st John 4:18

“You’d Go Crazy Trying To Explain Penguins…”

adoriot — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:41:41 +0000

Did you ever see that movie “March of the Penguins”? It’s an engaging documentary about the fascinating process penguins go through to have babies. Here’s the gist of it as best as I can remember: the female penguin lays an egg. She then passes the egg over to her husband. He tucks it safely in between his legs. The female then leaves to go on a journey for a few months, leaving the man to take care of the egg (as usual). Penguins live in large colonies, and most of them have babies around the same time, so while all the women are off traveling, the men huddle together to try and keep themselves and their eggs warm in frigid conditions. The penguins rotate on the inside and outside of the huddle so as not to hog the warmest parts. Finally, just when the baby penguin is about to hatch, the mother penguin returns to take care of it.

Here’s the amazing part – the mother penguin just happens to know exactly when her baby is going to hatch. There’s no real explanation how penguins just seem to know when to come back to their babies; they just do it, and have been doing it for as long as anyone knows. It’s like they have some sort of built in radar that tells them just when to come back, even though they’ve never had a baby before. It’s beyond explanation. As Donald Miller puts it in his book Blue Like Jazz, “You’d go crazy trying to explain penguins. It’s best just to watch them and be entertained. I don’t think you can explain how Christian faith works either. It is a mystery. And I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul.”

Penguins are a beautiful mystery, and so is our faith in God. Faithfulness is hard to explain, but it is one of the fruits of the spirit, and if we want to be the people God wants us to be, we ought to examine this fruit and figure out how to exhibit it in our lives.

But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV)

Faithfulness is something we can’t see, we can’t hold onto, we can’t really put into words. It is something that we feel. Faithfulness is exhibited when our own plans have crumbled, and all of our other options have run out. At this point we must rely on something else, we must have faith in someone or something that will pull us through when we know that there is nothing else that we can do.

Faithfulness is sort of like that scene in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” where The Terminator and John Connor come to rescue Sarah Connor from the insane asylum. At first Sarah runs from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, seeing as in the first movie he had come to kill her. But in this movie he has been reprogrammed to save her. She of course has no idea and runs for her life from him. But, when another Terminator, the T-1000, comes after her with intention to kill her, she must throw all her preconceived notions to the wind and have faith in Arnold when he says, “Come with me if you want to live.”

Sarah Connor’s life is on the line, and she must have faith that something she doesn’t understand will save it. We don’t understand a lot about God, but with our lives on the line he calls us to have faith in him. Faith is following Jesus when he says, “Come,” believing that he will protect you, and that you are better off with him than on your own.

More than that, faith is believing in more than what we see or what we deem possible. The story of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac is a great example of this faith.

Abraham is a God-fearing man. He’s also an old man, around a hundred years old to be exact. One day, however, God decided he wanted old Abraham and his wife Sarah to have a son, saying in Genesis 17:16 (NIV),

I will bless [your wife] and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.

Abraham did what most of us would do if God told us something ridiculous like this: he laughed, saying in verse 17,

Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?

When Sarah heard about the news, she laughed as well. But even though Abraham and Sarah might not have thought it possible, they had faith that their God did not joke around. And so, a year later, the two gave a birth to a son and named him Isaac as God had commanded.

Great story huh? That’s not the end of Abraham and Isaac’s story though. A few years later Abraham learned that faith is not just believing that God will provide in unexpected ways; faith is also taking what God has provided and being willing to part with it, knowing that he will take care of you.

In Genesis 22, God appears to Isaac and tells him to take his son and sacrifice him on top of a mountain as a burnt offering. There is no mixed meaning here – God is quite precise in what he wants Abraham to do. Having seen God’s power, and having faith in God though he did not understand, Abraham followed God’s instructions.

Abraham walked with his son Isaac up to the top of a mountain. All the while Isaac is questioning his father as to the purpose of their journey, and as to why they have not brought along a lamb, the normal sacrificial offering. Abraham does not have the heart to tell his son Isaac what is about to him, and you can’t really blame him.

Imagine if God asked you to sacrifice your son or daughter. Heck, just imagine if God asked you to sacrifice your pet. Could you have faith enough to take them up the mountain to the brink of death?

Abraham did, and his faith was rewarded. Just as he was about to slay his son, an angel of the Lord appeared to stop Abraham in his tracks, saying in Genesis 22:12 (NIV),

Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.

The angel goes on to say in verses 16-18,

I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.

God blessed Abraham and his descendants beyond belief because of his act of faith. God blesses the faithful.

There are great stories of faith like Abraham’s all through the bible. There’s people like Mary, Joseph, Moses, Noah, Paul, and so on and so on and so on. Their faith was rewarded, and their tales offer encouragement and reason for us to be faithful as well. As Hebrews 12:1-2 (NIV) puts it,

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Faithfulness in God is a fruit of the spirit. It comes only from knowing Jesus and having his spirit inside of you. Faithfulness comes from trusting in God even though we do not see him. And if we are faithful in him and in his promises, in all that he has done and all that he promises to do, only then will we also be able to be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, gentle, good, and self-controlled. It is because of faith that we are able to exhibit all the other fruits of the spirit.

Only by faith can we experience the life God has marked out for us. A life lived by faith is a wild, unexpected ride that will not always make sense but will be richly rewarding in the end.

I took a wild ride like this a few weeks back. I was visiting one of my best friends Josh up in Gainesville, GA for the weekend. Josh had just moved to the area and was feeling really homesick. He desperately wanted to do something crazy and adventurous. We decided (over a 2 am Waffle House meal, where the best decisions are made) to travel to Tallulah Gorge, about 45 minutes up the road, to see the sun rise.

We killed a couple of hours by playing Wii at Wal-Mart and practicing our ghosting skills on unassuming employees before finally driving up to the Gorge around 6 am. We arrived just in time to see the gate to the park locked. Undaunted and still desiring to see the sun rise, we took a left turn out of the parking lot not knowing where it would take us. We drove on for another hour and a half or so through the mountains and finally saw the sun begin to rise.

Pulling over into a grocery store parking lot Josh and I took in the sunrise in wonder for a moment, and then realized we ought to start figuring out how to get home since we were beginning to get sleepy.

About five minutes after we pulled back onto the road we saw a sign for “Brasstown Bald Up Ahead”. I paid no attention to it as I had no idea what Brasstown Bald was. But Josh thought about it for a moment and remembered that Brasstown Bald is the highest point in Georgia. So we pulled into the Brasstown Bald park and hiked to the top of the mountain, taking in the sunrise from the highest point in Georgia.

There was a good bit of fog as you can see from the picture, but we didn’t care. The sun crept through the clouds every few minutes for a momentary glimpse of what led us to where we were. It was a beautiful, serene moment that I will never forget.

We finally found our way back to Josh’s apartment, ate a sandwich, and crashed around 11:30 am. It was a wild journey, and it only happened because of faith.

We had no idea where the road would take us, but we had faith that God would lead us somewhere special. He did lead us somewhere special and unexpected. And at the end of our journey, God gave Josh and I rest.

This is what God wants to do for you, if only you will have faith. He wants to take you on a wild and crazy ride holding your hand all the way. He will lead you somewhere beautiful, and at the end of your journey he will give you the rest you so strongly desire.

Have faith in God, buckle up your seat belt, and set out on a wild, dangerous ride with him. He’ll take care of you.

The Introduction Of A Lifetime

adoriot — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:34:08 +0000

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” – Hebrews 11:1-3

Our God is powerful beyond any platitudes we can laud upon Him. His accomplishments are limitless. Though we have not seen many of these accomplishments with our eyes, we have faith in His power. Though we do not see where He is taking us, we ought to have faith in where He is leading us.

A Game Of Faith

adoriot — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:47:34 +0000

Before our discussion of faithfulness, a few of the guys played a game where they had to have faith that their leaders would take care of them. The students had to spin around 25 times while holding a pool stick in their hands and looking at the top of it. Then they had to put the pool stick down, do 3 jumping jacks, and try to jump over the stick. Easier said then done.