thoughts on "the christian life"

Here are some scattered thoughts i've been processing through lately.

Ive been thinking about what it means to follow Jesus in this American culture. The question "what does it mean to daily love God" keeps coming up in conversation. I don't really know the answer to that question. But I have a lot of questions about that question.

Is it more than being faithful to one spouse for life?
Is it more than living based on what you need rather than what you want?
Is it more than giving to the needy?
Is it more than being honest and having integrity with your money, your word, and your commitments?
Is it more than being a hard worker at your job, supporting a family, and not cheating the system to put a little extra away.

Frankly, I know many unbelievers whose lives look a lot like what I just described.

I think there has to be more to following Jesus than that.

But is it just reading the bible, praying daily, and fellowshipping with other believers?
Is it speaking the gospel to those who do not believe?


I feel like there is more to loving God than this. But I don't know. I often feel like these things are elementary in the faith. Whenever I am asked the question or ask the question "how are you doing in your faith" usually one of the answers above follows. "This is what i've been reading in the Word. or i need to grow in my prayer life. or i need to be a better steward of my money."

But i think there is more than that. I dunno, maybe there is not. Life seems pretty simple. Enjoy God. Try to enjoy your job. Enjoy people. Wait for Jesus to come back. I don't know what else there is.

Any thoughts on this one, please comment.


JN

life

so its 2 am. i have a 10 page research paper due tomorrow at 2:15. well, i guess that would be today. i got tired of writing it so, naturally, i am doing something else. i took a 5 hour energy drink at 11 and it didn't really work at first, but now i feel awake. i got a lot of thoughts tonight.

i am amazed at life. life constantly changes, and so do our relationships with people. i have only been out of high school 2 years, and there have already been a few people who have entered into my life, made a lasting impression, and are slowly leaving.

i haven't been home in about 4 months. this has been the longest stretch of time since i moved to ohio. i miss home, but its more than that. i feel like a piece of me is there, waiting for the rest of me to return. i know who that piece is, but i need to return to familiar faces and places in order to feel whole again. i know i am speaking metaphorically and all of me is right here in ohio. i just feels like once i step of that airplane, i will be able to go "oh yeah. now i remember".

God has a way of using people and places to teach us about life. a familiar voice can bring so much comfort and peace. the same with a familiar scent or sight.

i am learning how once you really start to love people, you never fully separate. there are times of long absences, but love bonds people together forever.

i think that is all i got for now. im gonna get back to that paper. my mother is probably reading this and i know she would probably want me to. and i dont wanna get an F.



JN











hi mom. :)

reflections on easter

so today is easter. about the 1,981st one since humanity started celebrating it. i was thinking today about the holiday. over dinner the practice of communion came up. i live in a predominantly Anabaptist area, and communion takes place about once or twice a year around here. this is much different from my home church in Massachusetts, which was Baptist, that celebrated communion monthly. one person thought communion monthly was a good idea. another said she would like it weekly. someone else made the comment that weekly was to much. that it would become a ritual if we did it that much.

and that made me think.

I think we need to be reminded of the cross more, not less. If doing communion weekly would become a ritual, then we have completely missed Jesus. If our response to weekly communion is apathy, then our souls are what Jesus called the Pharisees "white washed tombs."

i look around at our world today, it seems that Christianity is getting significantly less tolerated than it used to be. more countries are becoming closed to the gospel, Islam is spreading like wildfire, and relativism is the God of the west. so when a holiday like Easter is still celebrated, it makes me think.

i was searching the web the other day and i came across a term i had never herd of before. New Atheism. Basically, it is a movement of atheism which encourages atheists not just to live with religion, but to actively oppose it. CNN described it as follows: "What the New Atheists share is a belief that religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises."

That is just scary. three of the four leading proponents of New Atheism are, you guessed it, Americans. Richard Dawkins, the lone Brit of the bunch, wrote a book a few years back entitled "the God Delusion." Our American rights will not be inalienable much longer.

it is just crazy to see the world just as the bible depicts it. Christians truly are foreigners here. The world system operates totally anti God.

so as today is easter, i was thinking that we, the Church, need to live louder lives. especially in the west. we can't be ashamed of what we believe. God has blessed us with an incredible freedom to meet in public, fellowship, and partake in celebrate of our risen Savior. we are not in danger of being sawn in half like many believers in communist and Muslim countries are today.

i was thinking about the words of Paul today. "If Christ has not been raised, then you are to be pitied more than all men." That is so true. I don't know if we realize it, but often times we live like that. I live like that. The church of the West lives as if the gospel is just a story to make us feel better about life. We live as if it isn't real. We live as if the words of the Bible are dead words that carry no meaning beyond bringing us temporary comfort. We live as if Jesus is still buried in a tomb somewhere in Jerusalem. But the verse doesn't end there.

"Christ has indeed been risen!" "Therefore my beloved brothers, be steadfast and immovable always abounding in the work of the Lord because you know your labor is not in vain."

It is not in vain because we do not serve a dead God. We serve a God who is very much alive. A God who is very much on the throne. And a God who more real than the world around you.

we need to wake up America. We are called to more than this. He deserves it.


JN

roots

I was reading Acts this morning and I came across a passage that speaks incredible truth about the mercy and providence of God. In Acts 13, the people in Antioch ask Paul to speak to them a word of encouragement before they left again on their travels. Paul starts by reminding them of their Jewish history, from Abraham to Saul to David, and then to Christ. But in verse 37, he tells them something that often goes overlooked by the american church today.

"For so the Lord has commanded us, saying

"I have made you a light for the Gentiles,
that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth."

And when the Gentiles heard this they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed."

What struck me about this passage is we, the American church, are the Gentiles Paul is talking about. The message of salvation did not start in America. It came from a few, poor, radical Jewish men in Israel. In America, I think we often forget that. We forget where we came from. We forget that we were Gentiles. I think we bring a sense of entitlement to God. We have this idea that because we are American, we have the whole Christian thing down the right way. We think other nations should be doing church like we are. We forget that as Ephesians says "we were separated from Christ, alienated form the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world."

The amazing thing about this passage is that it was not first written by Paul. Paul quotes it from Isaiah, who prophesied that the Jews would be lights to the Gentiles, 700 years earlier. To the Jews, this idea would have seemed crazy. To think that their God wanted to bring salvation to the ends of the earth and use them as an instrument to accomplish it. And here we are, 2700 years after that prophecy was made, the so called "The Christian Nation". I think if we understood our roots, we would fall flat on our face in the thankfulness before the living God. He didn't have to choose us, but he did. He didn't have to send anyone to tell us about Jesus, but he did.

Know today that you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, and a holy nation. Not the nation of America, the nation of the redeemed of Christ.



JN

Come On

One of my favorite bands is Rend Collective Experiment. They hail from Bangor, Northern Ireland... the land of rolling emerald hills, shamrocks, and spuds. Not really (about the spuds so i hear.) They have a song called Come On that has been so relevant to my life recently and I think is relevant to all those who long to worship Jesus.

The song is very simple, yet in it is a profound truth.

The lyrics are:

Come on my soul
Come on my soul
Let down the walls
And sing my soul

Come on, come on, come on, come on
It's time to look up


I love this song because it declares the truth of what we want our hearts to be in our worship of Jesus. There are times when I am either leading worship (musically) or just in the congregation and I feel like I am so far from a place of worship. I feel distracted, disengaged, and just plain distant from God. Sometimes there is no desire in my heart to worship at all. Before I had ever heard this song, I was talking to a worship pastor about this place of the heart. I asked him about those times when we feel out of it and distant. What should we do? He said that sometimes we have to force our heart to worship God. We must tell God "I know I don't feel like worshiping right now, but I want to want to worship. Take me to that place Lord." He said that there times when he will do whatever is necessary to get his soul in a place of worship, even if it means lying prostrate on the ground in front of everyone starting at him. If that is what it takes to force our heart to want to worship, then that is what we must do.

I love the truth that this song captures. The only response to God is worship, and when we don't feel like, we need to beckon our hearts and say

"Come on my soul! Let down the walls. It's time to look up!"



JN

Seasons

In the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, Solomon speaks about the different seasons that we encounter in our lives. In verse one, he says

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven."

He goes on to say

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.



These verses have really been relevant to me recently as I feel I am entering into a new season of my life. For a while now, I have really been in a season of growth in my mind. Over the past year and a half I have learned so much about the Word of God and yet sometimes I feel like I am just scratching the surface. But in the midst of learning and growing in knowledge, I had lost a sight of something that has always meant so much to me, and something that defined who I was for a long time. I had lost sight of the journey of life.

One of my favorite quotes is "life is not a problem to be solved, but an adventure to be lived." For the last year and a half, most of the time I have viewed life, as well as people, as problems to be solved. I don't think God made life that way.

So I am really excited that The Lord has broken through all the intellectual restraints I put up sometimes. He has a funny way of doing that. :) He used a band from Northern Ireland to remind me that worship is a lifestyle meant to be filled with joy and life is truly a journey we must embrace as we cross the thresholds through this side of eternity.

So as life moves, and we are taken through the seasons it brings, may our lives sing jubilant melodies to our marvelous, boundless, wonderful, sacrificial Savior, and may we know that He loves us.



filled with the joy of our Lord,

JN

The Battle

It has been a while since I have been on here. The last few months of my life have been quite busy, as the ministry has been growing. This past year, the Lord has really been teaching me a lot about myself and about some of the learned behaviors I have grown up with. But in the midst of realizing I need to unlearn some things in my life, there is a deeper issue in my life the Lord has been unlayering.


I have a tendency to view the Christian life as us humans trying to be better people, to be godlier in our actions and lives. While this is true, the Christian life does not stop there. Ephesians 6 tells us that there is a spiritual battle going on all around us. It tells us Satan is trying to deceive God's children into believing lies. There is a very real supernatural force of darkness that we are battling daily. And the battle is for our heart. If Satan can get believers to be unproductive and ineffective for the Kingdom of God, then he has succeeded.

I have a tendency to merely acknowledge the existence of Satan, but significantly play down his role in my life. Whether Satan or his demons, the truth is there is a spiritual battle going on. This cannot be ignored. And this battle is not only within me, it is outside of me. When the enemy gets my eyes off the eternal and focused on the temporal, then I tend to get discouraged, self focused, lazy, and just down. But if my eyes are fixed on Jesus and the eternal reality of the spiritual battle, I see things much differently. I see the Christian life as not just me wanting to become a more godly man. I see it for what it truly is, a battle that I must fight.

In my past, I have had a real fear that I am inadequate. Much of my life has been lived out of this fear. It was not until recently, that The Lord has shown me that this fear does not only come from within me. It is comes from without. This new truth has changed the way I look at that fear. I used to see my fear that I am inadequate as inadequacy itself. In other words, because I had that fear and I thought it came from me, I thought there was something wrong with me. Something that I had to try and change myself. Much of my Christian life has been me trying to overcome this fear. It never works. Now, I recognize that that fear is a lie that Satan wants me to believe. That battle is not a fight against myself. It is a fight against the demonic strongholds of the spiritual world.

In 1 Timothy 6:12, Paul exhorts us to "Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses."

I love this verse because it demands action. We cannot expect God to do all the work, while we sit back and relax. God has empowered us to fight the good fight trough His Spirit, and by Him, we must take hold of the life to which we were called. This is a daily battle. This is our lives as followers of Christ.

The question is, are you fighting? And if you are, who?


JN