Warfare - Just Expect It

Expect warfare when you embark upon a journey of #sexualpurity. Satan wants to keep you in bondage and is not willing to let you out easily. Jesus can break the bonds and will walk with you on this lonely journey. Invite Him for a walk.

Crazy Love Week 5

We all knew it was coming. We knew #crazylove would have to take us into a deeper look into ourselves. We knew the profile of a lukewarm Christian was too general to create change in us. So Francis Chan hits us with chapter 5. Serving leftovers to a Holy God. Ouch. Yikes. Oh Man....

I found it interesting that for the dreaded chapter 5, we were missing several members of the group... for various reasons, all good reasons, and understandable given how busy all of our lives are. (See Crazy Love week 4 post for more on that!) But the absence of a few left a very intimate discussion of the ones that were there...and in small group, there is absolutely nothing better than intimacy in sharing.

One of the key discussion points of the evening is the section that Chan writes "Let's stop calling it a 'busy schedule' or 'bills' or 'forgetfulness'. It's called evil." When we prioritize nearly every other thing in our life ahead of God, it is sin and evil.

For example, I have a choice every day before I go to work to 1. Pray with my wife, and 2. (At a minimum), spend some time alone with my Bible and with God. It is so sad that most days, I choose to leave for work without doing either. Yes, I choose that, maybe not in my thought process, but certainly in my actions. Sad.

Chan also uses the metaphor of swimming upstream. To be a Christian, you are constantly swimming upstream. It is a constant battle against the world, against the flesh, and against ourselves. Someone posted the other day that only dead things float with the tide. Interesting thought, is it possible to take short "breathers" on our journey? Some R&R for a few weeks a year? What are your thoughts on that?

So Chapter 5 is done, and we survived, hopefully with the insight in our ability to make the necessary changes in our lives to allow God to be our top priority. One would think this would be easy since we just experienced Easter.

Marriage Conference – part 2

I wrote on Friday about day 1 of a marriage conference my wife and I attended, about Eph 6 and the belt of truth. The next day the speakers went through the rest of the armor of God and how it applies to us and how we can use to strengthen (or save) our marriages. It was an excellent conference with a funny, fresh approach to the armor of God. After the conference, my wife simply said, "I thought we were doing all that and it still didn't work". Ouch! Not good. As you can tell, I led a double life while I was on the road, and many, many men that I knew did too. Did you know that 50% of hotel rooms on any given night have porn showing on the hotel TV? I wonder how many of those are of Christian men who want to break out of the bondage of their addiction and sin.