Desperate Soles

When you think about it, shoes say a lot about a person. When you look at someone’s shoes, you can probably guess an approximate age, and usually if you are dealing with a he or a she. For example, little pink Crocs generally fit young girls. Massive black Nikes are more likely to go on a massive young man, and so on. If you take a closer look, you might be able to tell a person’s hobbies. Cleats suggest a football, baseball, soccer, or softball player. Jordans and the works suggest a basketball player. Stilettos suggest a businesswoman, black dress shoes, a business man. If you read the brand name, you can get a pretty close guess at a person’s financial life. Off brand shoes cry out, “This person has a low income!” while Chacos, Uggs, and Sperrys might as well be sandwich boards that say, “I just got a raise!” And then, if you get really, really close, you can find out the most important thing about a person—what kind of road he has been on, and how long. As you read this, it might be occurring to you that your shoes might need replacing. So if the shoe fits, maybe we should stop talking about footwear.

A common mistake Christians can make (and I’m not immune to this myself) is getting so caught up in the theology and theory that the gospel gets stomped down to irrelevancy. In the attempt to be wiser, we make ourselves fools—the gospel is the center of the relationship between God and man, and therefore the only reason we have any theology to argue about.

So, what is the gospel? In as few words as possible, I would point you to the Bible. Before you agree with or argue against anything I say, give it a read. Many people reject the Bible as an antiquated instruction manual. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. I’m sure I’m not the only one who searched everything in my home closely related to a wardrobe for Narnia and rummaged through the mail for a Hogwarts letter at least once. Many people want nothing more than to be a part of an epic story. Little do they know the Bible IS that story. It has a beginning, in which everything that was and is in existence was created except for the Creator, who is uncreated. The creation was perfect for a time, until the first ruler of the world disobeyed God for the first time. All of our past, present, and future hinged on the moment Eve took a bite of that fruit. The centuries following were filled with rape, murder, war, and death… not so different from the world we live in now. Man tried to climb back up to perfection through sacrifice and obedience, but always fell short. God’s people were thrown into slavery not once, but twice. And then… silence. Man didn’t hear from God for three-hundred years. So ends the Old Testament.

All seemed hopeless. Man had fallen too far. Had God given up? So begins the New Testament. But then one night in the town of Bethlehem, a baby was born in a barn. How climactic, right? But alas, this baby wasn’t born to be a shepherd and lead a flock of sheep; the ruler and king, the son of man God had promised as early as Genesis 3 had come. He came into the world and claimed to be the Messiah. After many witnessed miracles and sermons, he died on a cross. But he didn’t stay dead. After three days in the grave, he rose again. He later ascended into heaven with the promise to return.

One certainly can’t argue that these events were at the very least supernatural, but how did an entire religion stem from them? That’s where the gospel comes in.

As Christians, we do not merely believe that Jesus died on the cross. Something happened there: something we call the Great Exchange. Before his death, all the sin of the past, present, and future was placed on him. God himself took on every sin. That includes that time you looked your parents in the eye and disobeyed them. It includes the time you lied to your best friend, even though it was just a “little white lie.” It includes the murder and adultery you have committed in your heart. Every sin ever was on Jesus’ shoulders. He saw it all, felt it all, and took the blame for it all. How could he see that and still love us? I guess you could say God only knows. Because he does. Your sin was on his shoulders because you were on his heart. It wasn’t a general love for humanity that led the King of the Universe to die on the cross, it was you. It was me. It was each individual person that deserves death and hell but instead receives Christ’s righteousness in the Great Exchange. This is the gospel.

So what does all of that have to do with shoes? Well, if you thought your Converse sneakers needed some polishing, look at your life. Look at all of us. It doesn’t take a shoe expert to know our soles aren’t the cleanest, and it doesn’t take a moral expert to know the same is true of our souls. But Jesus Christ put himself in your shoes. Not your best dress shoes or your ratty old sneakers, but your own physical state of sin and death. Now you get to put yourself in his shoes and stand before God as a son or daughter. So stop looking at your shoes, and lift up your eyes to the Father.

"Ponder the path of your feet,; then all your ways will be sure." -Proverbs 4:26

"Good News Changes Everything"

This weekend, my church had a youth event called Impact. It's similar to what other churches call Disciple Now. The theme at Impact this year was "Good News Changes Everything."

In light of the Gospel, this really is true. The Gospel changes everything.

The Gospel isn't just about how we are saved. It isn't just a cute little list of steps that gets us to heaven.

The Gospel is the great story of God's incomprehensible, incredible, mind-blowing miracle designed before the beginning of time and fashioned entirely out of love.
The Gospel the front page headline that we don't even deserve to be alive to read that says "SIN IS DEFEATED, WE ARE FREE."
It is the victory in a war mankind fought and continuously lost from the early chapters of Genesis to approximately 33 A.D.
It is the story of Jesus Christ, who, according to Ephesians 2:1-9, didn't merely save us, but makes us alive.
The Gospel is a massive, flashing arrow back to the King of the Universe who made you and me and everybody else and the world we live in for the sole purpose of his glory, which is our sole satisfaction. It is only through Jesus's blood and righteousness that we are made righteous before God. Through this God is glorified, and through this and only this we are satisfied. Not only that, but now we are truly alive and truly free.

We are free to enjoy God's creation as it was intended.
We are free to feel unspeakable sorrow and rest in Christ.
We are free to feel indescribable joy and sing loudest praises to our King.
We are free to love one another unconditionally.
We are free to build each other up.
We are free to proclaim this good news of freedom from the rooftops and along with the mountains.
We are free from sin,
free from death,
free from hell.
We are free to live eternally with our creator.
We are free to someday see our savior face to face.
We are free to enter the courts of the King unashamedly robed in Jesus's righteousness.
We are free to rejoice,
free to love,
free to hope.

Good news changes everything.

"We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." -Romans 6:6-11

A Question of Vacancy

"Each of us is an innkeeper who decides if there is room for Jesus." -Neal A. Maxwell

This time of year, the story of Jesus Christ seems to get more attention than it does throughout the year. Families all over the world here the story of the birth of Jesus, beginning with the census all the way to the wise men and everything in between. Most everyone is familiar with the story of the innkeeper and how he told Mary and Joseph there was no room in the inn. So now we have turned this story outward, and each of us now decides if there is room for Jesus. But that isn't how it really works.

Each of us does not decide if there is room for Jesus. There IS room for Jesus. In fact, Blaise Pascal said, "There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus." A vacancy in the heart is not optional or dependent upon anything. Each of us has a God-shaped hole inside of us. Our role then is not to decide if there is room for Jesus, but to boldly proclaim that there IS room for Jesus in every heart and in every place, and nothing else can fill it.

This Christmas, as you open your gifts and spend time with family and friends, keep in mind that the conflict that led to the coming of Jesus was not the lack of vacancy in the inn, but the vacancy in our hearts that we have attempted to fill with sin. Bear also in mind that Jesus didn't come to earth and fill just any vacancy. He filled the vacancy on the cross as the atoning sacrifice for the sins we commit attempting to fill the God-shaped hole with other things. This Christmas, celebrate that there is room for Jesus, and as a believer, celebrate that the hole in your heart is filled.

If the empty space in your heart is not filled, I implore you to look nowhere else. This season, we are reminded that a baby boy came down to earth, but we often neglect the purpose. He came for us, so someday we can stand before our Creator and no longer have a space in our heart. Because of the baby boy we celebrate this time of year, we will one day stand before the throne of the king of the universe pure and whole. That's the true reason we celebrate Christmas.

Thanksgiving Challenge 2014

As you scroll through your Twitter timeline, it's highly likely that you can separate the tweets you see into categories as follows:

1) Countdown to Christmas
2) Black Friday advertisements
3) Complaints about school
4) Complaints about work
5) Complaints about the government
6) Complaints about the constant complaining

There are undoubtedly a few other categories depending on who you are, where you are from, and who you follow, but if you were to pull, say, the 20 most recent tweets from your timeline, a heavy majority of them would fall into one the aforementioned categories.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, whatever you are doing, I have a challenge for you this Thanksgiving. Let's start a trend so big people all over the world can add a new category to the list. On Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and whatever else the kids are using these days, take a few seconds to post what you are thankful for this year. Spread the word. Tell your friends, family, and co-workers. Share this blog or summarize it. Do whatever you can to get out the message that we are content right here, right now with all that God has given us. We don't need to complain or count down to a better time because in this moment each one of us is blessed beyond belief.

Will you accept the challenge? Tweet, post, and share right now. Let's make God's provision a trend.

Where Sin Runs Deep

The internet is a scary place. Now, you have accessed this blog through the internet, and hopefully you don't view that as a bad thing... But let's use this blog as an example. These are my words, but I have put them on the internet. Now you and everyone else in the world can read them. I can delete them, but they won't really go away. You will have read them, and they will be permanently stored somewhere in cyberspace.

Words are a scary concept. Various arrangements of the same twenty-six letters build us up and tear us down so quickly and easily. Word vomit happens, and you can't take it back, and you may have just destroyed a life with those words. You can crush self esteem, end friendships, break hearts, and totally lay waste to lives.

The internet is just a big cloud of these words, sitting here saying things to us and about us. The words on the internet can criticize our race, our gender, our politics, our actions, our faith. That's what everything comes down to: our faith. We all believe in something, and none of us wants anything said to hit close to home. But one of the scary things about the internet is that it always does.

Right now, people everywhere are hurting because of today's tweets, posts, and headlines. Right now, people everywhere are confused, angry, sad, and even apathetic. Right now, that might be you. If that is you, dear reader, I pray that you will hear what I am about to say.

From the national television to the lunch table at school, Christianity takes a lot of heat these days. Someone makes a mistake and naturally, a lot of unanswerable questions arise. Is there a God? If so, why did he let this happen? How could a Christian do that?

We could have a walk-through on apologetics, but I will be honest with you and say you might not find the answer to your questions there. You might not find them anywhere. But I can guarantee that if you are looking for answers in a person here on Earth, you aren't going to find them. Because here on Earth, we are not free from the presence of sin. Romans 3:23 says that all have sinned. That exempts a sum total of one: God himself. That, dear reader, is the gospel. That we couldn't be perfect. We couldn't attain righteousness. And Romans 6:23 says that the consequence of that is death- permanent death. Separation from God. But Ephesians 2:4-9 says that God sent Jesus and only through him are we saved. Only by faith are we made righteous.

That said, it is obvious that we still sin. We still mess up. There are two responses when that happens: we can run from God, or we can run to him. We can say that God must be angry or that he is too confusing or lofty or that we just flat out don't love him, and we can run. Hear me when I say to you that this will never satisfy. The farther we run, the emptier we will feel because we were made to love something greater than ourselves. Our only other option then, is to run to Jesus. Oh, I pray that you would today.

The simple fact of the matter is that there are some things we just cannot understand. I promise you that there is nothing more comforting than to throw your hands up and acknowledge it. It's okay to be honest with God, because he knows your heart right now. It's okay to tell him you are angry or confused or hurt, because he knows. He isn't surprised or angry. He loves you. He came down to Earth to die on the cross for you. He didn't come with the promise that things would be easy or fun; in fact he promised that they wouldn't be. And that's obvious in our lives today. But oh how he loves you in the midst of that. Romans 8:28 says that he is working all things together for your good, and you need to understand that he means that in the eternal sense because he is eternal and he loves you eternally.

Words can still hurt. Tweets, posts, and headlines can still shock and destroy. To say that it shouldn't affect you would be cliche and false. But when you are shocked, confused, hurt... When you don't know where else to go or what else to do, run to Jesus. You may not find answers, but you will find peace.

"And those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you." --Psalm 9:10

Come Together

Imagine for a moment, if you will, your favorite song. It is probably your favorite for a reason. It probably speaks to you in some way. If you were asked to describe the significance of that song to someone, you could probably talk for a fairly long time about it. You could probably talk about it until the rest of the world tuned you out. That's probably how my friend feels when she talks about the Beatles, which is pretty much always.

If I were to introduce this friend to you, I wouldn't even tell you her name before I told you she is passionate about music. That's really all you need to know about her, because it's all she ever wants to talk about. You would probably think that gets old really fast, but with her, it doesn't. Everything she says is either a Beatles reference or a potential song idea for her own future career. Though I can't complain about the Beatles, I'm hardly a fan, and though I love music passionately, I certainly have no future career in it. Yet, I never tire of hearing about it from her. Why? Because it is her passion. She eats, sleeps, breathes it, and finds it in everything she does. But why is that special?

The unique thing about my friend is that she isn't satisfied simply to love music. One day, she could go deaf; the music she listens to would be silenced. One day, she could grow too weak to play guitar or sing; the music she creates would be gone. So she doesn't obsess over what she hears or creates. Rather, she relishes it and is in turn thankful, because the music came from somewhere- moreover, from someone. She uses her music to give back to and pursue the heart of it and reason for it: God.

1 Corinthians 12:4-11 talks of spiritual gifts, and it says that there is a vast variety of gifts, but that they are all from the same spirit. I can carry a tune, but I can't draw people in with my music the way my aforementioned friend can. Some people can create beauty in the form of art; others words. Some have been gifted with minds for science and math; others sports. Some are given wisdom, some knowledge, some faith.. But all these gifts are from the same Spirit- the same God.

So I ask you, dear reader: What is your heart pursuing? When you reach that double bar line, when the end credits roll, when the last line of your last page is full, your pen is out of ink, and your mind is out of fuel, where do you turn? God has given us each such an incredibly unique gift, and each of them is worth celebrating. But in the end, the common center of all our gifts is the God who gives them. So, regardless of our gifts, let us use them for the common cause of pursing Him.

"Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit." --1 Corinthians 12:4

What Makes You Beautiful

Beautiful is a very powerful word. It is used to refer to such a wide variety of things; there are beautiful songs, beautiful art, beautiful culture, beautiful clothing... Beautiful people. Naturally, such a strong word has an opposite. Music can be called unappealing. Art can be called unpleasing. Culture can be called grotesque. Clothing can be called unattractive. And people can be called ugly. Words can profoundly affect people, but none are more potent in today's society than these two antonyms: beautiful and ugly.

As a girl in a public high school, I have some personal experiences with these words. Beautiful. It builds people up. It lifts shoulders and corners of the mouth. It inspires people. Ugly. It tears people down. It crushes confidence and lessens laughter. It motivates people to be more or less of certain qualities they have. This doesn't seem so terrible, but consider this: What constitutes true beauty, and who decides?

Girls years younger than I am are dealing with self-esteem problems because they don't think they are beautiful in society's eyes. By the time they reach my age, some girls have given up. Boys and girls alike try to change their identities to fit in with this mold society has for them. If that's you, I say to you: Break the mold. Society's definition of beauty is so drastically twisted and wrong, and you will never be satisfied while you pursue it. There is a better beauty to pursue.

The beauty of the gospel is that society has one thing right: we aren't good enough. We aren't flawless. But the gospel refers to flaws in God's eyes. God is not looking at how well we can apply makeup or what clothes we wear; God sees the flaws on the inside: the insecurity and the idolatry of this concept of beauty that we pursue. The Bible says that we were created in the image of God, but the history of mankind up to the life of Christ is us pursuing God in all the wrong ways, and running completely the wrong direction. But then Jesus came. He lived a righteous life, and he died on the cross, trading the sin of those who are in him for his righteousness. So now God looks at us and doesn't see flaws. Instead he sees the righteousness of Christ, which is true beauty by definition because it is flawless.

God himself came down to earth for each of you. Still feel like you aren't worth it? If yes, you're still looking in the wrong place. Proverbs 31 says that charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting. So rather than looking to be some molded plastic thing created by people's standards, look to Jesus. True beauty is found in Christ alone. So if you are in Christ, know this: You are covered with Jesus' righteousness, and therefore you are beautiful.