http://kpld.tumblr.com/post/84103909664/when-the-servant-of-the-man-of-god-got-up-and-went

"But one day as I was passing into the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul: Thy righteousness is in heaven. And methought, withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God's right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, he wants my righteousness, for that was just before him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, 'the same yesterday, today, and for ever.' (Heb. 13:8). Now did my chains fall off my legs; indeed I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God." 

- John Bunyan, "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners"

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

- D.A. Carson

 He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter….If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we keep complaining that everything is paltry and petty, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross … At the foot of the cross, we shrink to our true size."

 - John Stott

Devo Post #16

9/8/17

1 Cor 4:16, 1 Cor 11:1, phil 3:17

I urge you, then, be imitators of me.

Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.

Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.

Right now in Chicago, and probably all over the US and the world, there are many disciples who lack mentors or disciplers to look up to as examples of godliness. I think it was interesting I was talking about godliness with S the other day during lunch, and it was hard for both of us to pinpoint what godliness even means or looks like. For me at least, the 2 sections of the Bible that speak to godliness would be the book of James and Matthew 5-7, the sermon on the mount. But to get to godliness, which is somewhat a combination of holiness (what does holiness mean?) and knowing God, one must go through Christ and the Cross, the message of the Gospel.

I worry sometimes that COTB, as a church plant, doesn’t have elders who can disciple its members. I also worry that BCF also needs disciplers too, like how ACF in Pittsburgh, I can talk to D Song or P Chang and E Gan and how they were discipled by older ACFers or Pastor L or Elder G, or even how J Mao has a discipler in NYC. This is the church I’m used to, or got the privileged to see and experience. “Ah this is what true discipleship looks like,” I would say to myself. Now it feels like the blind leading the blind, instead of brothers and sisters like Paul who live out an example of godly living instead of a worldly kind.

Should I be worried? Or should I trust in God that He will raise up leaders like how I’ve been praying for the churches in the world? Or how God raised up so many leaders in Cornerstone, why can’t He do the same at COTB? Even COTB downtown is struggling, and Pastor L. Cruzat was pulled from STL to help with the Wicker Park church plant. God bless him and his family.

Better question: am I equipped to disciple people at COTB and BCF? Sure I have the scriptural and theological knowledge, but am I truly living a godly life? Am I representing Christ as an ambassador and foreigner in Chicago? Am I using work and health and sin (pride/envy/lust/lack of forgiveness) as excuses to not live a godly life and disciple others? Do I truly believe in the Gospel daily and rely on the Holy Spirit and message of the Cross to guide my daily footsteps?

Devo Post #15

4/12/17

Phil 2:12-13

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

If we stop at the end of verse 12, this passage would almost point towards works-based salvation. But the addition of verse 13 shows us that in the end it is still God, and always been God, who has been working our salvation for us and in us.

Paul is talking to his beloved, which is the Philippi church, but by extension we the modern church can gain insight as well. I wonder how obedient the Philippi church was, but seeing the lavish praise Paul gives them throughout the Letter to the Philippians, it would seem this was a group of strong Christians who understand the Gospel and are living out their calling to preach the Gospel and support Paul’s missionary journeys.

What does it look like to be as obedient as the Philippi church? That is what I want to know. That is seriously the question I want answered right now. We know the American church sucks. We compromise. We push against legalism but then fall into complacency and nominalism. We don’t trust God. We don’t trust Jesus. We want to live like the world and by the world’s standards. We want comfort, riches, acceptance by culture, the american dream of having a nice car, house, and family. But God doesn’t call us to that kind of life, and I see a distinction between how Paul describes the Church of Philippi and my own churches here in the US. At the very least, we don’t send young men to give missionary funds to imprisoned missionaries in dangerous countries (I mean...when your dictator Nero likes burning Christians on posts to light his garden or send them into the gladiator ring to get eaten by lions, that’s kind of a dangerous country to be strolling into).

I know the Gospel is very important. It is the most important news of our life. We are never to move from it, but come back to this message daily, using it to empower us to get through each day with fear and trembling as Paul writes in the passage. But to know the Gospel means we have the Holy Spirit in us, and Christ watching over us from above, and God the Father providing us with gifts and calling and direction to do ministry for His glory. Mission and obedience need to naturally (or supernaturally) flow out of the evidence of the Gospel in our lives. If there isn’t...then who can say we have the Gospel at all, but are just faking it. Paul has extensively written of people who fake the Gospel. Let us not be one of those people. Let us not be one of those who come before Jesus saying we did so many things, only for Him to say to our faces “I do not know you, away from me you evildoers.” It sounds like these people weren’t doing anything out of the Gospel, but only pretending to know Jesus but still continue to work their lives exactly like everyone else. To be Christian is to be called to a radically different life from those around us. We must not love the world, for we love Jesus, and then the world will hate us (should we hate the world too? I don’t know, but we should hate evil and Satan and the forces of darkness which the world embodies).

The Worship Experience

Worship is an action we do in response to God's Glory (infinite greatness and worth).

Let us replace the word worship with praise. At least in Protestant circles those words can be interchangeable. We give praise to our favorite musical bands or sports teams. We give praise to leaders who make good decisions. When we do, we aren't inherently focused ourselves but the object of our praise. When a baby coos, we respond by saying "awww". When a firefighter saves someone, we response by calling him/her a hero. Why then when we give praise to God, it all of the sudden requires the right mood, or song, or ambiance, or "experience"?

So our worship/praise/adoration is our response to God's Glory, and naturally if our worship is sincere and real, we will be filled with joy.

When you come to church, when you worship Him, you're not doing it for God really. You're doing it for yourself, because that's what makes God happy. - Victoria Oesteen (see the irony?)

With everything that has been going on within the last 2 years (and will continue), I am going to put this here:

Soon the activists, progressive movements, and humanitarian groups in the United States will turn on Christians en mass. It will mostly be because of false/fake Christians whom they use as the face of Christianity. We already see this with Trump and Republican "Christians." We saw this with Joel Osteen after Hurricane Harvey. Neither of them are anywhere close to living out the faith that Christ envisioned us to embody, but because they are now the face of Christianity in America, all Christians are going to suffer. Those who will suffer most are Christians who are truly filly with love and who wish for social justice in America and partner with the movements that will one day not discriminate and persecute all Christians. They are the ones who will be caught up in between lukewarm/fake Christians whom they've tried to distance themselves from, and the social justice movements they long to be a part of. I pray that they will not lose hope in Christ (as they will lose hope in humanity) when that day comes.

I guess I will use the words of Peter, Paul, and John...come quickly Jesus.

Edit: After meditating on this, I realize that God may be using this as an opportunity to unify the American Church, whether or not we want to be unified. The church will be smaller, but it will become more real, and we will start to rely on one another instead of being individualistic or combative, fighting against one another along lesser ideological points. I understand the history of the American Church, how there was a growth in fundamentalism, legalism, escapism, and fatalism. I understand that my generation is one that sees all of those things, along with the fakeness of cultural Christianity, and pushes back against it, and in many ways over-swinging to the other extreme of the spectrum to progressivism, liberalism, and compromising Scripture for culture. Yet Jesus has time and time again (and I guess Paul and others too...though my generation seems to be more Red Letter than anything) warn us that the world will hate us (because of Him). We saw this with the Woman's March, how Christian woman groups who wanted to stand for gender equality and stand for social justice were forbidden to march because they were Pro-life. We will continue to see more of this, whether we like it or not, and unfortunately for my generation, the world (the politicians, the rich, the activists, the scientists, and the humanists) will shove us back to our roots, and that will be at the foot of the Cross where the Jews crucified their own blood-related Savior. I just hope there won't be too great a hurt and distrust within my generation (and those after me) towards all people by then.