The rad group I told you about yesterday, Sanctuary, is doing an advent reading on YouVersion by this title….and I figured it would be fun for me to see if I could put my daily thoughts down for you and for me to read. I have to be quick for I need to get the kids up and ready for school…but this is good motivation to keep this short.
It would also be fun for you to follow along…whether you have found Christ to be true in your life or not…for if you have been reading my posts for a while, I pray you are seeing a different side of Christ…or maybe even a different Jesus all together than the one you thought you knew.
This is certainly been true in my life these last few months. I thought I knew who Christ was and what he meant to me and to the world…I mean, you think you would know a guy after spending 15 years with him. But the truth is, I am beginning to think that while yes, I did know him as this amazing person who came to save me from myself…there is another whole layer that I have been missing up until now. I cannot really explain it – not in so many words and not as in short of a time as I have here. But just this morning as I was preparing breakfast and listening to Pandora play “Amazing Love” (I think by Newsboys)…I was overcome with just so much love and gratitude and peace and joy for who God and Jesus are I had to stop and have a mini worship moment.
Now this has happened to me throughout the years…but it just seemed more poignant today. More as I contemplate this idea that I really do not know Jesus as well as I thought I knew him. That like so many others in my life I have judged him based on my own life experiences and what I have taken from others to be truth about him – instead of asking him to show me the truth about himself.
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| Jesus in the wilderness, fasting for 40 days and being tempted |
As part of the pre-reading stuff today, YouVersion asked me to spend time in prayer asking God to open up my eyes and reveal the Truth of scripture to me today. This is a prayer I started praying back sometime at the beginning of the year…and it has made a world of difference in how I look at God and his scriptures. I believe it has been the reason I was drawn more into the sermons at MPPC this year – for the pastors there have painted a very different view of Christ than I was used to seeing. I think it is why I am now on this next path of really looking at Rob Bell’s book and contrasting it to what I have learned elsewhere …and after all this really looking at scripture in a new light and seeing a Jesus I hadn’t seen before. A man that has all authority of heaven in his reach – yet was able to always extend love and grace in place of judgement. A man that was filled with desires for the promises God had given him (see the temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4:1-11), yet was able to always put those desires in a rightful order and resist the temptations. He was a man that was able to look at those around him and not see their tough, leathery exteriors, but see into their very souls and ask them questions like, “What do you want?”
This is what we talked about at Sanctuary the other night…about really looking inside our hearts and asking ourselves this same question, “What do I want? When it comes down to it…what are my deepest desires, ones that I feel I cannot live without? What injuries, pain, suffering and ‘holes’ are there in my soul that I would like repaired? And how do I go about repairing them?”
So, I leave you with these questions for today and pray that you will find some time to read the Advent reading and ask yourself these same questions as you go about this next month…leaving the door wide open to seeing Jesus and God in a different light than you have ever seen before.
And I am off!
