Blog with Matthew

Focus on the Fundamentals: Thanksgiving 2008

My wife was over at a woman’s house from our church who had just lost her job last week to pray and support.  Yesterday I talked to a guy who for maybe the first time in his engineering career at a major manufacturing firm – they build really cool guy stuff – has some worries about his future.  Many of us seem to find a little less to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.  Maybe joy is becoming a bit harder to find.  That is no surprise as in harder times, life can hurt.

As I studied through joy in the Bible one thing struck me again and again: the simplicity of the “because”.  In FEEL I talk a bit about because joy, how God gives us good reasons to have joy about real stuff, how joy is not this spiritual state that God just blesses us with when we spend enough time in prayer and fellowship – although I do believe that there are those time when God just comes close with his presence and brings a fullness of joy that cannot be explained.

Most of the time, we find praise and joy in because, in thinking on the good things that God has done in our lives.  There are not many commands to have joy in the Bible that are not connected to something.  Most Christians in the first century were not affluent, they were not powerful,  they were not well connected.  The because joy for them could not be what many of us have come to rely on like buying something new, finding some success, or even going to a movie or on a big vacation.

Real Christian joy is joy that lasts and joy you can have even in hard times, that James chapter 1, “whenever trouble comes your way, let it be an opportunity for joy.”  The reason for that is “the because” cannot be taken away for those who have made a connection to God.  As Paul writes:

    All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ.  Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding. (Ephesians 1:3-8, NLT)

There is not one thing in these words that can be taken away from you by anything you are facing… sickness, financial chaos, loss of job.  Again and again the Bible takes our joy back down to the ground level, to the bedrock stuff we gained the day we put our trust in Christ. 

So my word to you is to focus on the fundamentals in order to find your voice to be thankful this year.  Absolutely, start with some great stuff in your life like good or improving family relationships, your kids, living in a country that is very blessed, gas that is once again under $2.00, and the fact that you have some really yummy pie to eat.  But when it comes down to it, get back to the best stuff, the truest stuff, the up there stuff, the things that Jesus did for you to give new life.  The hope we have from his promises even on the darkest nights, the joy in how he takes the really tough stuff and uses it for good in our lives, the love he is growing in us.  That is truly enough to bring great and heart-felt thanks into every Thanksgiving – enough to make it a real celebration of gratitude.

In the Blogs

I wanted to quickly share a nice summary of Faithful Feelings with you.  Enjoy.
Review of Faithful Feelings

You can also check out a good blog on FEEL  here.  If you do not know the Buzzard Blog it is time to check it out!

Amazon readers can go to http://oasisinternational.typepad.com/blogwithmatthew/2008/11/in-the-blogs.html for links.

And by the way, Jackson's 5th grade basketball team just won their Saturday game, they are 4-0 - go Nets!

Mario Kart and Life

I told my son Jackson that I would split the cost of a video game that all of us – Jackson, Evan, and Cailin and I - could play together.  He choose Mario Kart for our Wii.  It has become the boys’ new favorite game.   You can choose to be plumbers, or dinosaurs or bad guys or Princess Peach and race around on a hot motorcycle, dirt bike, cool muscle car, or even a turbo baby buggy.  Then you get to race in a shopping mall or a volcano, a water world, or cityscape. 

Once, yes only once, I got first place of the 12 human and computer racers.  My biggest obstacle to placing well is falling off the track.  Some tracks are just tracks and you can drive off the road without doing much harm to your speed or standing, but some have wild cliffs and drop offs into fiery graves if you stray over the edge.  I am especially good at turning short or long and falling off the edge.  There is this one mushroom level where you jump from shroom to shroom and that gets me out without fail.  While I am dying and coming back again, I fall back into 12th place as often as not.

I have been reading through the book of Judges and it has reminded me a lot of Mario Kart.  You know many of the stories – Sampson and Delilah, Gideon and his 300 men with lamps and horns, Deborah the woman who won battles.  It is all about the cycle Israel lives out as fallen people: following hard after God doing well, falling away from God, repenting before God, and God rescuing them from their enemies in compassion and hope. 

As I thought about falling off those mushrooms in Mario Kart it made me realize that Judges was maybe not as far away from my life as I might like to think.  The cycle of Judges in the Bible takes years and years to complete, many times Israel stays true for 10, 15, or 20 years through the lifetime of their Judge.  But I think part of the lesson for us today, part of the reason God allowed us to see the pattern of Israel in this book was to show us ourselves.

We are racing around the track in our frantic world and too often we find ourselves falling off.  We pick up an old sin, we get lazy, we stop loving God like we need to.  The result is trying to pick ourselves up again, feeling like we are back in last place;  totally dependent on God to pick up the pieces and rescue us from our own mess.  We are human, it is going to happen at one time or another.

One more lesson from Mario Kart and the book of Judges – there are power-ups.  If you run over these spinning block things you can get speed-boosting turtles or better yet a supper bullet.  You press go and the bullet takes over, sending you to hyper drive with no skill required.  You can go from 12th to maybe even 5th or 6th in a flash.  I live for those moments, and if I am in 5th or 6th I might even make 1st and beat my boys.

Mario Kart’s cycle takes a few minutes, the book of Judges’ cycle might take 50 years, and usually our lives fall somewhere between.

Do you find yourself at the end today, through your own rebellion or maybe just the harsh realities of life?  Did you think you could take a curve really fast and just fall over the edge, maybe even into the lava.  You have fallen off the track again – maybe you are like me in both Mario Kart and life.  For both of us, if we come back to him again his grace is strong and power is real.  God wants us to desperately need him, where the only way through is the hyper drive bullet.  When we forget that we are already into the downward part of the cycle even when we think we are on the way up and are needing God less and less.  The cycle of Judges and the cycle of our lives, teaches us that we really need him desperately all the time.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

“Come Thou Font of Every Blessing,” Robert Robinson, 1758