The City

Awesome! Way to go everyone!

Most challenging message for me yet, maybe because I’ve been chewing on this idea for a while lately. God has challenged me every time a curse word, angry words to my kids, snarky comments to my wife, or when I say frivolous empty words to seem worldly come out of my mouth.

The devil doesn’t need to bring pestilence, war, and hunger to keep us fat americans from following Christ. Instead, he’s brought cocktails, Netflix, and sporting events. I think distraction is the biggest thing that keeps us from Christ.

How to get rooted? I come back to Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline each time— prayer, meditation, fasting, journaling, solitude. These are the things that break us away from being rooted in the world and it’s shallow soil.

But, as I’ve discovered lately, knowing the answer is much harder than implementing the action. I think confession and time away with God and time away from the world helps me break into a place where I can put thought into action through the disciplines.

This doesn’t mean that meditation, fasting, solitude make us holy, but they thin out the noise of the world so that we can hear God’s voice, and so that God can get through the clutter in our minds.

Good comments from both of you, especially reaching for that perspective, Nate. I feel I can do this in a situation where I have time to prepare my heart and consider the outcome. For example, just now a co-worker went off on me a little bit. She had the right to let me know I had stepped on her shoes, but she was over the top in her delivery. She later called me down to her office and was nicer and apologized. The first confrontation, I did what the world does— I denied my bad behavior, I minimized my actions, and gave a half hearted apology. In the second situation, after I’d had time to digest things, I apologized from the heart.

I have to confess that, under stress, I really don’t act much differently than the world. I wonder if I’m not “walking in the Spirit.” For a more serious example, yesterday I was walking down the street downtown close to the Salvation Army, and had to pass two loud-talking, tough-looking young men. I didn’t think about how I could love them, but instead I squared my shoulders, pushed out my chest, and swaggered (God help me.) I wanted them to know I wouldn’t be a push over if they wanted to do violence on me. As I passed them, I relaxed and remembered Andy’s message. It is very difficult to put this into practice. In a split second, you can’t put yourself in someone’s shoes or think, “What would Jesus do?”

These situations remind me that we need to pray constantly and walk in the Spirit, or our instant chances to make a change in the world at the point of sudden life intersection will be ruined.

“I think the issue with how government and law-enforcement responds to evil is interesting but much much much different than these (you can ask me what I think and I’ll tell you but it would turn this whole conversation)”

So….spill! (That’s my vote)

I love that. Very artfully spoken.