Freedom

There are at least four kinds of freedom. And each one adds a crucial dimension of freedom to the last until we get to the full freedom—"free indeed." Let me try to sum up these four kinds of freedom in one definition of full and complete freedom: You are fully free—completely free, free indeed—when you have the desire, the ability, and the opportunity to do what will make you happy in a thousand years. Or we could say, You are fully free when you have the desire, the ability, and the opportunity to do what will leave you no regrets forever.

• If you don't have the desire to do a thing, you are not fully free to do it. Oh, you may muster the will power to do what you don't want to do, but nobody calls that full freedom. It's not the way we want to live. There is a constraint and pressure on us that we don't want.

• And if you have the desire to do something, but no ability to do it, you are not free to do it.

• And if you have the desire and the ability to do something, but no opportunity to do it, you are not free to do it.

• And if you have the desire to do something, and the ability to do it, and the opportunity to do it, but it destroys you in the end, you are not fully free—not free indeed.

To be fully free, we must have the desire, the ability, and the opportunity to do what will make us happy forever. No regrets. And only Jesus, the Son of God who died and rose for us, can make that possible. If the Son shall set you free, you shall be free indeed. To be happy forever, our sins must be forgiven and God's wrath removed and Christ must become our supreme Treasure. Only Jesus can do that. In fact, he has already done it. He died for our sins. He absorbed God's wrath. And he rose from the dead and is today therefore supremely precious. And he offers us that now as a free gift.

John Piper, 2011

No more waiting...

I have had some interesting conversations lately about this "True Love Waits" thing lately, then read a blog that made me start to wonder and feel convicted...

What’s it “waiting” for, anyway?

I am working with the youth girls at my church now, and I want them to be waiting for marriage for true love and all that jazz but more than that I want to see them love Jesus.


I am afraid that there are a lot of girls out there who don’t know who God is anymore – the God of their youth group years just isn’t working out. I am seeing this with the college women that I am working with and have grown with. Back then, that God said to wait for sex until you are married, until He brings the right man along for a husband. I am beginning to be concerned with those of us who signed a card and put it on the altar and pledged to wait.

And wait we did.



And waited and waited and waited.

Some of them have prayed their whole lives for a husband, and he hasn’t shown up. We have heard it all, heard the advice to “be the woman God made you to be, focus on that, and then the husband will come.” They’ve read “Lady in Waiting,” gotten super involved in church and honed their domestic skills.

And still they wait.

They hold onto a poem written to them from “God” they received in Sunday School that said, “The reason you don’t have anyone yet is because you’re not fully satisfied in Me. You have to be satisfied with Me and then when you least expect it, I’ll bring you the person I meant for you.”

“You’re right, God,” they say. “We’re not satisfied in you yet. We will put you first and then you can bring us a husband in your timing.”

Its scary that this is actually wrecking our view of God.

If this is who God’s supposed to be, then He’s tragically late.

So some decide to chuck “Lady in Waiting” out the window … and possibly their virginity with it. What next? Church... God might go next, too. If He doesn’t answer these prayers after they’ve held up their end of the bargain, why would He answer any others?

Whether it was the fault of the leaders, the fault of us girls, or both, a tragedy has happened.

A lot of girls were sold on a deal and not on a Savior.



Who wrote that poem anyway?

Pretty sure it wasn’t God.

When Jesus was here on the earth, the crowds would follow Him because they saw He gave good things. But that’s not what He wanted. He wanted their hearts for Himself. So He would turn to them and say things like, “If you don’t love Me so much that every other relationship in your life looks like hate by comparison, you can’t follow Me.” (Matthew 10:34-39)

That sounds a lot different from the poem.

Christ is the source of everything we need and the giver of all good gifts … but in telling people about Him, it’s possible we’ve sold them on a solution for life’s problems and not life itself.

What if we as girls had learned early on that having Him was everything, not a means to the life we think He would want us to have.

If we had learned we don’t abstain from sex because we’re “waiting.” We abstain because we love Him.

If I’d learned, “Fall in love with Jesus.” That’s it. Bottom line. That’s everything you need to know, to work toward, to put your hope in.

If I’d learned who He is, what He wants, how to give Him everything, not “wait” so that one day I could give my everything to someone else.

If I’d learned that it’s not bad to pray for a husband, but that my greater prayer should be for Him to spend my life as He chooses for His glory.

If we as believers make that our message, things could be drastically different for a lot of girls wondering why the God they think they learned to follow doesn’t compute. It doesn’t necessarily stop the desire for a husband or end all feelings of loneliness, but it does show a God who provides, loves and gives infinite purpose even to our singleness rather than a God who categorically denies some who pray for husbands while seemingly giving freely to others.

It shows that while marriage is good, He is the greater goal.

I dont want to live like I am waiting for something... waiting on anyone to get here.

I already have Him … and He is everything.

Thirsty

My Church is awesome. I am learning so much from them. We have been studying Revelation over the last few months and this last one has stopped me in my tracks. I feel so incredibly real and loved while thinking through what the Lord has promised for His people.

We need a vision of Heaven. We have to be prepared for our future.

What we believe about the future determines how we live in the present. 
-because we can endure hard things and persevere through the present.

What is in Heaven?
1. A renewed creation
"I am making all things new" Things will be restored into what they were meant to be back in Eden, in Genesis 1 and 2.
-When Jesus comes back, we will have renewed bodies.
-New Jerusalem will come down to earth.
-Our future, our existence, it is so material > streets, walls, trees, leaves, fruit, feasts, people, nations, kings of all nations...
 -We will build houses and live in them
 -We will plant vineyards and eat from them
 -Animals will coexist

We will be surrounded by new things...without death, decay, sickness, violence, loss, disease, and the brokenness that defines this world.

We already know that there will be no tears from early in chapter 21. This is because He has restored all things so that there is no reason for tears. All things are restored to the state of being worthy of the presence of the Lord.

2. People Groups [will be in Heaven]
- God Himself will be with them and He will be their God
- great cultural creativity will be bringing their splendor of their culture to worship God...will architects build unimaginable buildings for us to experience, or will there be many more amazing Monet-artists and Motzart-musicians? What glories will the Lord command for us all to give and enjoy about Him?

Before sin and death entered the world, Adam and Eve walked with God. There was no brokenness.
We can see Him in the New Heaven and view Earth because we will have new bodies!
We will be restored. We will be changed.

A day is coming when the separation between us and God is not there. His name is written on our foreheads.
We will finally be who we were created to be.
We will be restored and made whole.
We shall be without sin, without brokenness, without shame.

Oh how I long for this day! When I see His face!

When we get to Heaven, we are going to be restored. We will be made whole. We will be free to walk, to run, to dance. Together. With Jesus, We will be made whole. This is a big deal.

Thats what we long for. We long to be made whole- to be redeemed. We long for this for ourselves, for our friends, for our family.

Am I thirsty fo the New Heaven and New Earth? Am I satisfied with Jesus? Do I long to be healed and be made whole more than I long for these fleeting pleasures of this broken earth?

Oh Father, make me thirsty. Make me long to be healed above all things. That I would have the courage and words to say come to Jesus...to the mirror and to my peers.

Happy August

I have some exciting news!!

More on this soon....


I got the job at the university that I have been praying for, for like a year. Amazing how the Lord works.

Because I totally wouldnt have gotten on my own without His grace.

So RUSH UNA!

may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven

Why do I only pray for God's will when I think that I know what it is and that I approve of it?


I guess this is what surrender feels like.

I know that things are going to work out because God is sovereign.

I just am at a loss for words as to what to pray. But praise Jesus that the Holy Spirit intervenes on my behalf.

I just have control issues. Lord help me.

advice from a tree

True Love.

What is love?

I cant love people. Not on my own. Not without realizing what love is. This year, I have seen a raw picture of love.

It started far too many years ago for me to imagine. It got real real in Gethsemane when Jesus was preparing to be crucified. He went to the garden to get away and pray to His Father for comfort. But He was met with silence. This began His drinking of the cup of wrath on my behalf.

Jesus prayed to His Father, pleading “Abba Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” Seeking a kindness from His Father, but only staggering to the ground as He stares into the detestable vessel that He will drink for us. This cup contains the full intensity and fierceness of God’s holy wrath poured out against all sin…that is intended for all of humanity. Ouch. Looking into this cup was as if all of the power of Mt. St Helens was contained in a coffee cup. Scary.

But what Jesus dreaded was the abandonment by His Father. See, we deserve death for our sin. Eternal separation from God. That is what Jesus faced on my behalf.

It was as if the often quoted verse, John 3:16, actually said “For God so loved the world…that He is silent to His Son’s agonizing appeal.”

This stress and utter abandonment is not something that I can grasp.

The Jesus said that He will drink my cup of wrath. He will drink it all. When He could say, “its your sin, its your cup, you drink it!” He says, I’ll drink it all.

This is love.

But there is more. Jesus rose again, defeating death. His life anew says that God has accepted His sacrifice. He gives us His righteousness. He gives me a new cup to drink. The cup of salvation. He gives it to me to drink consistently, endlessly, eternally, because it is always overflowing.

What?!

This love allows me to love. I have nothing to offer apart from this. I was dead in my sins until the Jesus who did this made me alive. He calls me to a life of repentance that I may be sanctified to be more like Him.

This is the gospel. That we depend on Christ for everything.

When we see how sinful we are, we see how great the cross is. This makes us love people and despise sin, sin that put Christ on the cross at all. All sin is the same. I want to hate it all the same. Mine, yours, theirs, ours, I just hate the brokenness of the world.

But through grace, I love you. I love people. And I just want to share hope with you. No matter your opinions, this is mine that I believe is based on truth. This is the plumline for my life that filters through all my beliefs and opinions on everything, relationships, politics, evangelism, parenting, working, all of it is filtered through this lens.

I will try not to offend any more than the gospel does because it opposes all sin.

But this is what I believe.