This Joy Is Not Naive My Friend.

This joy is not naive my friend.

It’s not based on happiness or circumstance

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It is not swayed by the winds of today or the pleasures of the past. No, no, no, no, no. No, this joy is based on the future.

A future that will not change.  That cannot change. It’s a joy rooted in hope.  A confident  expectation. Based on the truth I Know.

Hope that Jesus is coming back and that He is who he said he was. 

Hope that this world will be restored.

Hope that the pain I experience is only temporary and but a drop compared to the ocean of eternity with him.

Hope that Jesus is better.

Hope in the fact that I am receiving the goal of my faith, that is the salvation of my soul.

I Hope in a God who saves, 

a God who loves,  

and a God, who unlike anything in this world, fully satisfies.

My friend it is not naive to be joyful.

Truth Like A River

TRUTH LIKE A RIVER

There once was a powerful river that ran through the country of My Life. It has no particular name. This river cut its way jaggedly through the middle of the country and its branches trickled outwards across the countryside.  There were many villages along the banks of this river. To name a few they were called, Love, Hope, Identity, Joy, Belief, and Desire. 

This country was faring well and had done so for some time now. The villages also fared well themselves. But something was missing and despite the best efforts of the country it could not figure out what it was. One day, a storm began to brew on the border of My Life. This was not a rare occurrence because storms came almost every day to this country. They usually brought a slight degree of damage, but nothing that a little bit of work and time couldn’t repair. However, there was something about this storm that appeared to be different. It looked to be stronger and fiercer than any storm the little country had seen before. It loomed dark and powerful in the sky. The breeze began to quicken and large trees swayed in the wind. The storm was coming.

It began to rain. The rain saturated the country side and the river began to swell. The water in the river was churning and rapids began to form. The water splashed against the rocky bank and the mist sprayed the trees hanging over the river before returning to the pool of churning water. The rain continued all day and as it did, the water gradually yet forcefully overcame the banks of the river that ran through My Life.  

The water continued to rise as the storm continued throughout the entire day. Soon the water reached the villages that lay on the banks of the river. It began to puddle the floor of huts and shops in the villages. The foundations were beginning to rot. The river would not stop rising despite the best efforts of the country. It continued to rise. All day long it rose. Before sunset the churning, saturating river could be seen covering all but the roofs of the village huts and shops. All My Life could do now was watch and hope for the best and that some villages would be left. Or at least a hut to live in.

In the morning, as the sun cracked over the horizon the whole scene could be seen. Debris, from the villages bobbed up and down as it was taken down the river. Over the next couple of days the water began to retreat back into its banks and along with it the hope that any hut in any village would be left standing.

When the river was almost back in the confines of its banks, the villages of Love, Hope, Identity, and Joy were desolate. Not a structure was left standing, not even the foundations. The huts and villages had been swept away by the powerful current and rising water. There was no remnant of a village ever existing, with the exception of a clearing in the trees, where huts had once proudly stood. What a fragile thing in which so much time can be spent building and yet so quickly destroyed.

However, when all appeared lost and as if nothing would remain to rebuild My Life the villages of Belief and Desire were found to be completely intact. The huts and shops that stood there before the storm and the flood, stood proudly still. 

In the village of Belief the most peculiar thing had happened. The huts and shops appeared to be rotated. They were facing a different direction than they had before the storm. Some that were before facing the west were now turned to the East as if to watch the rising sun. Some were hardly turned at all. But no hut was completely exempt from this peculiar rotation.  Crazily enough, in the village of Desire not a single hut was moved. However, in some miraculous way the water and debris that rose and swept by the village had scrapped an inscription on the city gate. It read, “Delight yourselves in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” The huts had not changed and they looked no different, but now they understood why they were created and carefully placed in My Life.

The flooding river brought change and renewal to the country of My Life. As the villages of Belief and Desire began to grow stronger and larger, so too did the villages of Love, Hope, Identity, and Joy. In fact, Belief and Desire had a particularly large influence on the development of these newly created and refreshed villages. These villages were all more fervent and steadfast than before. So much so, that, they began to consider the flooding river as a vital blessing. It was decided upon to give the river a name and it was so named The Truth of God.

John 16:13
But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth.

Ephesians 1:13-14
And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession-to the praise of his glory.

Finding Jesus Under the Bed

Last year, we lived in a small house on a busy road. It had four bedrooms and there were six roommates. It was small, but it was comfortable. When summer rolled around it was time for us to go our separate ways and head off to camp, home, or internships. To save money we decided to sublease the house. The guys who were subleasing lived on campus and had no furniture of their own. It worked out perfectly because we could keep our stuff there which eliminated the hassle of having to move out and they could use our furniture instead of having to buy new furniture. We left the house with much of our things still in it.

Fast forward through the summer: my roommates and I were sitting around in the new house we had just moved into. We were watching the television and talking with each other, when my roommate Cory sat up excitedly and said to Will, another roommate, “Let’s go check out that book that Joe was talking about.”  Will instantly became as excited as Cory. They jumped up together and sprinted for the stairs. Not fully understanding what could be so exciting about a book, I nonetheless found myself caught up in the excitement and running up the stairs behind them. When we got to Will’s room he pulled out a book called The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. Will flipped open the cover and pulled out a folded piece of notebook paper that was placed inside. Cory explained that they met someone the day before that was one of the guys who had subleased our old house over the summer. Cory described how the guy told him that he found this book under Cory and Will’s bunk bed (it’s a wonder he found anything under that bunk bed) and how it turned out to be just the thing he needed to read.

This is was the letter read:
  
To the owner of this book,

             I am writing you this to tell you that you have saved my life. 
Here is my story:

            Throughout my early years, I was raised in the church. I was taught how to take communion and how to say my prayers. I never questioned the culture in which I grew up, and needless to say, as I got older, my faith all but evaporated. I was trying to live my life by the merit system and existed under the promise of “relative morality”. However, the love and Grace of God was nowhere to be found. I had become a skeptic of the Christian faith and at the same time there was a void in my life that I could simply not fill. All of this is changing. It began one Sunday afternoon when I was feeling alone and empty when I realized out of nowhere that earthly wants could no longer keep me blindfolded. I prayed the Lord’s prayer and immediately felt comforted. This was a very exciting moment, but I did not know where to go from there. 

At this point is where I felt God reach out to me for the first time. The very next morning, a Monday, I was looking for my glasses under the bed in the room I was staying. I had lived there for about eight weeks and not known that anything other than my clothes were under there. It was there that I found this book and it was then that my walk toward/with Christ began. It is now Thursday and after having just completed [this book], I can honestly say that my doubts of Christianity have been extinguished and I am making a dead sprint to heaven through Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior.

            Yours in Christ,

            TX AG ‘12

He was looking for his glasses under the bed. Instead he found a book that led him to faith in Jesus and a vision for life that is clearer than one any pair of glasses could produce.

Go Tell it on the Mountain

This video is both challenging and convicting:

This video was shown at church a couple weeks back.

Penn is an atheist that has his own talk show. He believes there is no God. This video was made after he received some genuine compliments and a bible from a man who follows Christ.  He makes a very powerful argument for the importance of telling people about what you believe to be truth. Listen to what he has to say.

 

“If you believe there is a heaven and hell and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life or whatever. And you think that uh.. well its not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward…How much do you have to HATE someone, to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them about it.”

Convicting eh? I claim to love people, but so often I fail to share the truth that has transformed my life and filled me with joy, hope, peace, and purpose. I have a story. A life changed by grace.  People have a desire for purpose and truth. Oh how I need to tell them the truth that I know.