God is Great

I distinctly remember the feeling I felt four years ago, as my knees shook inside an old train car. The air seemed a little colder inside the wooden vessel, but my blood was running a little hotter than usual. I could smell the wood was stained with the horror and the tragedy of a generation long gone. I was fifteen years old, and I was standing inside a transport car of a train used during the Holocaust. The reason my body felt so hot, was the amount of anger I was feeling towards those that could commit such an atrocity. However, the truth is, I was holding some anger towards a God that could allow something this horrible to take place.

When we stare in the face of crimes which rob families of their children, natural disasters which destroy the livelihood of an entire community, and horrifying, outrageous losses of life, how do we equate these events with the existence of a loving, all-powerful God? If there's a God who is all-powerful and created the universe, than how can tragedies happen? An even more pressing question would be: if I've served God and bend to His will, why are my parents getting a divorce, why did a loved one die, why did my Dad lose his job? How do we answer these questions?

We learned on Sunday that God created the world and everything in it (including humans) as a perfect creation, when sin entered into the world system, it corrupted every aspect of the universe (causing things like hurricanes, sickness, and even death). However, even though we can understand why tragedies would occur, it's hard to understand why God would allow one of His children to suffer. Well, as we know God is a perfect father, and in his perfection he allowed us to have free will, so that we could choose whether to love and follow Him or to follow our own path to destruction. Due to our free will, there are people who choose to cause suffering, and because of our sin, natural disasters are now part of our world system and often wreak havoc on our planet.

The good news is that God has provided us with a comforter when the world is crashing down and when our heart breaks. God has given us His Holy Spirit, so that we can be comforted in our sadness. Next week, we'll discuss this further, when we talk about what happens when tragedy does strike, where do we turn to, and what does God want us to do? But you have to be at HYPE on Sunday morning to figure out what God's plan is during our catastrophes.


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Pray
That you can begin to trust in God's love, when you don't know where to turn.

Lose Control

Having stuff is awesome. Especially when you worked hard to get it. The feeling of accomplishment that surrounds owning property and the attachment we hold to our money and material assets is incomparable to almost every other area of our existence. You've probably heard somebody or yourself say something like: this Xbox is my life!, this car is like my child (which I always thought was rude to their actual child), I would kill to protect this waffle maker! Okay, so maybe that last one was a stretch, but this explains why the idea of releasing our grip on our possessions is often a subject which brings fear and hostility. Due to our attitude towards materialism, God asks us to counter our nature, and become more like Him: to be generous.

The act of true giving is a practice in losing control. Godly generosity requires one to understand that everything we own comes from God, and, therefore, isn't ours to give. How ridiculous is it to believe, then, that we have any say over what happens with our money? If it's not ours what right do we have to keep our hands tightfisted, and refuse to give God a percentage back of what He's given us? The sad truth is, we have such an emotional bond with our possessions that we want complete control over them. God asks us to loosen our grip, and hand control over to Him.

The Bible gives two examples of two separate widows who had every reason to be tightfisted with what they had, yet they chose to release control over to God and our commended for it. The story we read on Sunday was about a widow who only had a few coins left, and still gave her offering to God (Luke 21:1-4, the second story is found in the contest link). Jesus commends her faith, and we our given an example of the kind of generosity that God asks of us. This woman didn't know whether she would have enough to get through the week, but she still had faith that God would provide for her and create in her a spirit which mirrored His own. This kind of open-handed mentality is the kind of generous heart that Christ wants to create in us. Jesus was the ultimate giver, He gave His life for us, and since we were created in His image, we should build a like-minded personality. Until we lose control of our finances and unclose our fists surrounding our money, we will never truly become the kind of generous giver that God wants us to be.

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Pray
That God will give you opportunities to unclose your fist, and that He will grant you a generous spirit which will drive you to give.

Becoming a Slave

"I just want to be myself!", "I don't want to just follow the crowd or fit into some mold", "I want to be my own person". These are the kinds of things I hear people, including myself, saying often. It seems that the atmosphere we live in is one of a people who are obsessed with being free, and ultimately one of a people who want to choose who they can be. No one wants to be someone else’s slave, however, the nature of debt, forces those within its confines to a life of slavery. As the Proverb that we read on Sunday explained, those who are in debt are slaves to their lenders, and this is contrary to what Christ wants for His followers. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus explains:

No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.-Matthew 6:24

Our Father in Heaven loves us so much He doesn't want us to be slaves to our debt; in fact, He states that in order to follow Him, one must choose to get out of debt. God made us and He knows our need to be free, and He wants us to be free of the fear, stress, and embarrassment, involved with debt. The crazy idea is that in order to be free, we must surrender ourselves, and become a slave to someone else. In a letter written to a church in Rome, Paul, an apostle, explains the importance of being a slave:

You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness-Romans 6:18

Wow, according to Paul, in order for us to be truly free, we must become slaves to righteousness. Slaves to Jesus. As Christ himself stated, we cannot serve two masters, we must choose. Debt is a prison, and it will keep us away from the things we truly desire. In order to be free men and women, we must first become a slave to righteousness. And what a beautiful contradiction, what sweet irony: I have found myself the most free, when I am a slave to Christ.

Being free from debt is not easy though, it takes strong discipline. It may mean that you can't drive the nicest car or that you have to flip burgers or that you won't be able to go out to every social event that you want to. In the end, as we learned last Sunday, our self worth is not found in these things, but in the love of Christ Jesus. We choose not to be slaves to debt, but to the love of Christ Jesus and His Righteousness.


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Pray
That God would allow you to be free of debt, and to live your life as a slave to righteousness.

Money, Money, Money, Money...

I remember when I got my first paycheck. The overwhelming feeling of joy as I bought my first hard-earned movie ticket, album, meal, and eventually my first car. There's some kind of pleasure we find in those little green slips of paper and plastic cards, and, unfortunately, there is an atmosphere of fear and despair that surrounds the idea of being without the security of money. In our world that equates success with wealth and self-worth with net-worth, it is often difficult to distinguish the way God feels about us and the way the world tells us we should feel.

Why is it that we often have a hard time feeling like we're important or that we matter? If we know that we matter to God, then why is it that we're still so wrapped up in the way the world measures worth? It's possible that it is because we live in this world, and it's the only tangible thing we have. However, I think the more accurate answer is that we don't truly understand what God's love cost Him. According to John 3:16, God loved (or valued) us so much that He left perfection to live among us in disparity, and eventually die a painful death on the cross so that we could spend eternity with Him.

The craziest thing about this kind of love is that Christ did this for his enemies, for people that would never come to know Him. Whether I ever came to believe and surrender to Him, Christ still would have died for me. That's how much I matter to Him. Jesus could have spent eternity living in heaven, yet He so badly wanted to be near us, that he struggled on earth with us. Therefore, if God loves me so much that He would die for me, I should never find my worth in any other power. And our hope is found in what we learned on Sunday, that nothing can ever separate us from that love.


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Pray
That God will help you understand where your true worth lies, in His love.