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Now that I have seen, I am responsible. Faith without deeds is dead.
I can’t listen to that song without getting chills. Yesterday morning I went to the church I attended from 7th through 11th grades, a church whose service I haven’t gone to since the summer of 2007. When the message began, I suddenly was struck with a quick stream of thoughts on church and the Christian life that I was sure were God speaking to me. I immediately seized pen and paper and wrote the following. My audience is specifically the Seven24 community, but I believe this applies to anyone who calls him or herself a Christian and is not a pastor.
~*~
What if a lack of ‘fabulous teaching’ is actually a good thing? What if we should only be fed like that every so often instead of every week? What if that means that we need to read our Bibles ourselves and ask God to speak to us straight from His word? Maybe Brian Kiley leaving us and taking his awesome messages with him is a good thing. Maybe God wants to stretch & mature us. Maybe He’s calling us to search the Scrpitures together and challenge each other instead of waiting for a pastor to do it all for us. Maybe He’s calling us to stop relying on everyone else to feed us, to step up and take responsibility for our growth. That’s what we’re trying to get our high schoolers to do, but are our college students doing it?
Also, are we getting spiritually fat? Are we putting feet to our faith? Faith without deeds is dead, the Bible says (James 2:14-26). Maybe as BK is leaving, it is time for us to do something different.
Here’s my proposition. Let’s stop placing all the importance on what the speaker says on Sunday nights. Church is what happens Monday through Saturday, outside the four walls of the Venue room. Let’s commit to small groups for real, and let’s actually study the Bible as if we had no Sunday night message. If we seek God, we will find Him, so let’s seek Him ourselves. And let’s not stop there. Let’s commit to loving people, not just in words or with warm & fuzzy feelings, but with actions. Let’s not just do it a few times a week when we volunteer, but let’s figure out what love looks like as a lifestyle.
God is poking at my heart, telling me there’s something missing, something more He has for us if only we’ll reach for it. We’re not totally getting it. If we commit to changing things, I guarantee you not everyone will follow. Some will disagree. Some will be “too busy” to commit. Some will not “feel called.” Some will say we’re being too harsh. But how can we call ourselves Christians, aka “little Christs” if our lives look nothing like His? No, I’m not saying we need to sell everything and wander the streets preaching. I’m saying our lives should look radically different from those of the world. Our lives should look like adequate responses to the incredible cross, and I think that looks pretty different from the way we live now.
I think it’s time to stop waiting for some sort of revival and looking forward to the next butt-kicking message. It’s time to get off our butts and become the revival.
What Seven24 needs, I think, is not another great speaker. What we need is a leader who believes in changing things, in taking us back to the way Jesus showed us how to live. We need to band together and commit to becoming ordinary radicals, responding in the only logical way to God’s crazy love.
For my sisters…
I totally recommend this website, Waiting for the One. The guy who taught junior/senior Bible class my last year of high school co-wrote this book with his wife, and though I haven’t read it, I know the website is pretty sweet. It’s geared towards girls but I think there are a couple things on it for guys too. “Kelly’s Blog” has a lot of good stuff in it.
And I totally recommend this song too! Love is Waiting by Brooke Fraser
I’ll waiting for you, baby
I’ll be holding back the darkest night
Love is waiting till we’re ready
Till it’s right
I can’t even tell you how much I am in love with the kingdom of God. Every time I talk about it, I bubble over with excitement. I start talking faster and faster, and my ears heat up and turn red, and sometimes my hands even shake. Today I even started crying. The kingdom of God does weird things to me.
I have learned so many things and grown in so many ways in the past week. I can’t even begin to attempt to share it all with you. God’s been weeding things out of my life lately, more than ever before you might say. He silenced the Enemy’s voice in my mind last week and gave me tools to combat it in the future. He healed a very tender open wound and purified my heart of any of its ugly remains. He removed my feelings of urgent frustration over an extremely difficult relationship. He reassured me that my basic needs will always be met. He revealed a couple of next steps in His plans for my life. He gave me confidence in my decision to stop being anxious for a romantic relationship and instead wait for Him to arrange it. He essentially took all the junk that’s been crowding my head and heart, boxed it up, and threw it in the spiritual woodchipper.
Now, to fill the empty spaces the junk once occupied, He is teaching me constantly. Lessons like the value of accountability and what it means to FULLY trust Him. I’m learning the simplicity and importance of casting all my anxieties on Him and what my identity as His daughter means. He’s beginning to show me what the scope of the ministry He has prepared for me is. He is asking me to give Him more: more trust, more faith, more love, more sacrifice, more worship. He is asking me to expect Him to show up everywhere, to expect Him to do miracles around me. He is asking me to set my eyes on Him and forget that peripheral vision exists. It’s exactly like the song (as of course I relate everything to one song or another):
The cross before me, the world behind; no turning back, raise the banner high! It’s not for us; it’s all for You.
That is the perfect picture of my life at this moment. I long for it to always be the perfect picture of my life. There is nothing else worth gazing at but the cross. I have not a single urge to look back and even consider what things would be like had I not chosen to accept this calling, had I never written “COUNT ME IN!!!” on my bedroom wall. Any beauty that my heart reflects, any wisdom that passes my lips, any love that flows forth from me, is all because of Jesus. None of that is Courtney. I absolutely love that fact. Dying to self is an incredible experience. Each time I surrender another part of me to Him, He grows my maturity, and suddenly I am producing His fruit. It’s a beautiful gift; He rewards us for our submission by making us look more and more like Him. There is no way we can lay any claim to that kind of character, because it isn’t us. It’s God in us! How awesome is that? The God of the Universe wants to be reflected in us!
My life has taken its craziest turns in the past 3 years. I graduated high school at the tender age of 16. I moved to Canada all by myself and lived there for a year. I danced among some of the greatest professional ballet dancers in the world. I returned home with a severe injury. I started college (something I literally thought would NEVER happen). I finally fell in love with Jesus. I discovered Christ-centered friendships and the importance and beauty of church. I stopped talking to my dad for 8 months. I received a call to full-time ministry. I changed my major a hundred times (or so it seemed). My relationship with my dad was miraculously redeemed. I moved out of my mother’s house (much to her chagrin) and into my father’s. I stopped dancing for the first time in 16 and a half years. I quit school and then decided to go back.
And then there were the firsts. I was surrounded by all non-Christians for the first time. I experienced truly having more than just a “crush” on a guy and then got rejected, big time. I flew internationally by myself multiple times. I didn’t dance for six months. I didn’t guard my heart and fell in love. I began to rebel against my mother. I got asked out on a date for the first time and then it never happened. I was at the heart of a major “drama.” I dated someone. I dyed my hair and got my nose pierced. I became a night owl. I miraculously got over my first love. I knowingly hurt a friend deeply. I dated someone again. I got a piece of my heart broken.
Through all of these events, I could have been completely broken. I could have lost my way and gotten caught up in the rollercoaster of action that seemed to be the new normal for me. Instead, God moved. He gave me a gift of faith, and that is the only way that my relationship with Him is where it is. He used each one of the things to refine me and grow me- even the blatant mistakes! He redeemed all of it. On top of that, I have come through all of that chaos peaceful and assured of God’s plan more than ever before. I am so in awe of Him that I hardly have anything else to say. My only hope and prayer is that someone reading this will begin to believe in His power for their life as well! There is power in testimony.
(Again with the songs) There have been 2 songs that have struck me as perfect descriptions of my life. The first is “I Will Waste My Life” by Misty Edwards. Word for word, I could have written that song. It is my experience and my heart. The second is “I Don’t Regret” by Barlow Girl. Again, a song I could have written. I don’t think there is any better way to convey everything I’ve been trying to say to you than for you to simply listen to these, so I’ll close with this (couldn’t find the Barlow Girl one anywhere, sorry):
Ahhh it makes me so emotional! :)
