I was reading through chapter 4 of Tim Keller’s book, The Prodigal God, this morning and was struck by his description and illustration of an elder brother’s prayer life in light of a lack of assurance of the love and acceptance of his father.  He writes:

Though elder brothers may be diligent in prayer, there is no wonder, awe, intimacy, or delight in their conversations with God.  Think of three kinds of people–a business associate you don’t really like, a friend you enjoy doing things with, and someone you are in love with, and who is in love with you. Your conversations with the business associate will be quite goal oriented.  You won’t be interested in chitchat.  With your friend you may open your heart about some of the problems you are having.  But with your lover you will sense a strong impulse to speak about what  is beautiful about him or her.  These three kinds of discourse are analogous to forms of prayer that have been called “petition,” “confession,” and “adoration.”  The deeper the love relationship, the more the conversation heads towards the personal, and toward affirmation and praise.  Elder brothers may be disciplined in observing regular times of prayer, but their prayers are almost wholly taken up with a recitation of needs and petitions, not spontaneous, joyful praise

The elder brother seems lost to the heart of prayer, which is aimed not at asking God to give to us but in us giving ourselves to God…being “lost” in the power, beauty, wisdom and love of God.  I wish that I could say that my prayer life always looks like that, but I find that it bears a striking resemblance to the elder brother-type, using prayer as a means to have my needs met.  It seems quite one-sided and doesn’t do anything for deepening my love for God.  If anything, it depersonalizes our relationship and I can only hope that Jackson and Anna Sloan don’t treat me that way as their father.

Posted via email from Brett Eubank’s Blog

Close contact with people involves an uncomfortable exposure of ourselves to them. It is much easier, in both fellowship and witness, to keep our distance. We are more likely to win the admiration of other people if we do. It is only at close quarters that idols are seen to have feet of clay. Are we willing to let people come close enough to us to find our what we are really like and to know us as we really are? True witness, born of friendship, requires a great degree of holiness in us as well as love. The nearer we get to people the harder it is to speak for Christ. Is not this the reason why the hardest people of all to whom to witness are members of our own family? They know us too well. 

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want people to like them and accept them.  Oh some may say that that’s not important, but their actions generally tell a different story.  If my goal is for people to like me then I generally will present the best possible version of myself to them so that they will find something to like about me.  I will try and say all the right things and have all the right views so that I will be accepted.  Of course, the underlying belief here is that if people knew the real me, they wouldn’t give me the time of day.  They would shun me and I would be alone.  All too often, this mindset shows up in our particular version of Christianity.  We try and hide our sin, our fears and struggles or at the very least downplay them, so that we will look good in front of other people.  In so doing, we are denying the work and reality of the gospel in our life and deceiving people into thinking that Christianity is about being good, when really it’s about the gospel making us new!  I was reminded of this temptation as I read the following quote from John Stott in his book, Authentic Christianity.  He writes:

Close contact with people involves an uncomfortable exposure of ourselves to them.  It is much easier, in both fellowship and witness, to keep our distance.  We are more likely to win the admiration of other people if we do.  It is only at close quarters that idols are seen to have feet of clay.  Are we willing to let people come close enough to us to find out what we are really like and to know us as we really are?  True witness, born of friendship, requires a great degree of holiness in us as well as love.  The nearer we get to people the harder it is to speak for Christ.  Is not this the reason why the hardest people of all to whom to witness are members of our own family?  They know us too well.

Oh that I might repent and believe in the reality of the gospel for my life.  Oh that I might be honest about my sin before God and before others so that they can see how great a savior God is.  Deliver me from goodness and make me new!

Posted via email from Brett Eubank’s Blog

The game of checkers is a brilliant game both in its simplicity and its strategy. Move as many of your checkers diagonally from one side of the board to the other without getting “jumped.” The game is won when one player “jumps” over all his opponent’s checkers. My favorite part of the game is when I advance my checker to the other side, my opponent has to “king me” by placing one of my previously jumped checker on top of that one (like a crown). Once your checker becomes “kinged”, you are pretty much invincible as the king checker can move freely in any direction. Oh to be kinged!

But this sentiment isn’t just limited to checkers. In fact this is often the prevailing mindset in my life. I want to be “kinged.” I want to be able to move freely in any direction I please, even if that direction causes me harm. The Bible summarizes that very idea in an especially dark time in Israel’s history during the period of the judges. The writer declares in Judges 21:25, “in those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” This is a doubly ironic statement, because God had always been their King, but because of their open rebellion against God, they had rejected him as king and in essence set themselves up as their own monarchy. This is captured in the idea that, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Each person was their own little kingdom in which they ruled and reigned as they saw fit. “Right” was defined my might and delight. If something feet good or made you happy, then there is nothing to keep you from experiencing it. God’s message to the people then as much as it is to me now is to repent of my rebellion and trust in God as my King. We see that in Jesus’ simple and strategic words in Mark 1:15 when he declared that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

Like my pregnant wife who is due to deliver any day now, Jesus was saying that the time of God’s redemptive history was now “nine months pregnant” and ready to deliver the seed that had been planted long ago in Genesis 3. The kingdom of God that Jesus came to inaugurate was aimed at nothing short than overthrowing our own individual kingdoms and bring us into the safety and love of his own kingdom. Yet, unlike earthly kingdoms, God overthrows our heart not by force but by the fullness of his love for us in Christ Jesus. As we see his great love, we repent of our self-love and our desire to be our own king and we believe and trust in his goodness and grace. He calls us to “king him” and to the degree we do so, the more joy and delight we will experience in him.

The game of checkers is a brilliant game both in its simplicity and its strategy. Move as many of your checkers diagonally from one side of the board to the other without getting “jumped.” The game is won when one player “jumps” over all his opponent’s checkers. My favorite part of the game is when I advance my checker to the other side, my opponent has to “king me” by placing one of my previously jumped checker on top of that one (like a crown). Once your checker becomes “kinged”, you are pretty much invincible as the king checker can move freely in any direction. Oh to be kinged!

But this sentiment isn’t just limited to checkers. In fact this is often the prevailing mindset in my life. I want to be “kinged.” I want to be able to move freely in any direction I please, even if that direction causes me harm. The Bible summarizes that very idea in an especially dark time in Israel’s history during the period of the judges. The writer declares in Judges 21:25, “in those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” This is a doubly ironic statement, because God had always been their King, but because of their open rebellion against God, they had rejected him as king and in essence set themselves up as their own monarchy. This is captured in the idea that, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Each person was their own little kingdom in which they ruled and reigned as they saw fit. “Right” was defined my might and delight. If something feet good or made you happy, then there is nothing to keep you from experiencing it. God’s message to the people then as much as it is to me now is to repent of my rebellion and trust in God as my King. We see that in Jesus’ simple and strategic words in Mark 1:15 when he declared that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

Like my pregnant wife who is due to deliver any day now, Jesus was saying that the time of God’s redemptive history was now “nine months pregnant” and ready to deliver the seed that had been planted long ago in Genesis 3. The kingdom of God that Jesus came to inaugurate was aimed at nothing short than overthrowing our own individual kingdoms and bring us into the safety and love of his own kingdom. Yet, unlike earthly kingdoms, God overthrows our heart not by force but by the fullness of his love for us in Christ Jesus. As we see his great love, we repent of our self-love and our desire to be our own king and we believe and trust in his goodness and grace. He calls us to “king him” and to the degree we do so, the more joy and delight we will experience in him.

Posted via email from Brett Eubank’s Blog

You’ll have to pardon me while I cough my way through this entry, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to reminisce about the things we inherit from our families. As the recipient of the germ that causes acute bronchitis (thank you WebMD for that diagnosis) I have been sloughing my way through this week in a fog that rivals San Francisco Bay. While I’m grateful that I don’t have the discomfort that comes with a sinus infection, which is my normal disease of choice this time of the year, I’m not exactly thrilled to be hacking up everything but my lung, although that may come later. Judging from the other patrons in the Mudhouse Coffeehouse here in downtown Springfield, it sounds like I’m not alone in sharing some kind of illness as faint coughs and sneezes echo through the long narrow building, which by the way is very cool-the building, not the sneezes and coughs.

I’m also not alone in getting the dreaded disease bronchitis as my mother is an annual victim of it’s gut/chest/whole body wrenching effect. In fact, I’ve begun to wonder if I’ve inherited her disposition towards bronchitis? Somehow in the passing on of her DNA to me, I got the gene that makes me susceptible to the bronchitis bug. Now I don’t really believe that she did that, though I don’t any proof to back it up one way or another because I tuned out of my 9th grade Life Sciences class where we likely we went over stuff like that. However, I do know that in getting our parent’s DNA we do inherit things like hair color, eye color, personality, aptitudes and maybe a few other notable things. Most of the stuff my parents passed on to me I’m really happy about and some of the stuff that they didn’t pass on to me I’m even more happy about – strong stomach being one of them (I have a 15 year vomit-free streak going right now!!). Of course there are some things that my parents passed on to me that I’d just as soon they not have, and try as I might, I can’t undo those things. They are a part of who I am. This is true of all of us, but I’m speaking now on a more cosmic level here as my parents passed on to me something dreadful and unavoidable – the sinful nature they inherited from their parents, which they got from their parents, and so on all the way back to Adam and Eve, who were our first parents. It is the inescapable and intractable desire and bent towards being our own God, which they exercised in the paradise they were born into…the Garden of Eden. How miserable we all are because of their one act of disobedience in that Garden…relationships broken and severed, work that is more burdensome than joyful, illnesses that end in death…all of these things and more are true because of the sin we inherited from our first parents and now perpetuate on a daily basis. How sad! How tragic! How hopeless! … Well, not quite.

God as gracious judge, made a cosmic promise to Adam and Eve that one of their offspring would do what they were unable to do, namely defeating once and for all the presence, power, and penalty of sin in their lives and the lives of their offspring who would place their hope and trust in Him. Of course there was a cost associated with this provision…a cost greater than any of us could fathom or stomach. For God to fulfill his promise to Adam and Eve and to us, it required the death of His Son. What love! What mercy! What grace! But God didn’t let Jesus stay dead…He raised Him – and not because he loved him – but because the promise to us wasn’t just about doing away with sin and our guilt but doing away with death and our shame…forever. The gospel of God’s grace is the gift of real life…a life in which we flourish in every possible way…a life in which we perfectly delight in God. May God continue to stir up our wonder as we know the reality of God’s grace in Christ more and more!

You’ll have to pardon me while I cough my way through this entry, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to reminisce about the things we inherit from our families. As the recipient of the germ that causes acute bronchitis (thank you WebMD for that diagnosis) I have been sloughing my way through this week in a fog that rivals San Francisco Bay. While I’m grateful that I don’t have the discomfort that comes with a sinus infection, which is my normal disease of choice this time of the year, I’m not exactly thrilled to be hacking up everything but my lung, although that may come later. Judging from the other patrons in the Mudhouse Coffeehouse here in downtown Springfield, it sounds like I’m not alone in sharing some kind of illness as faint coughs and sneezes echo through the long narrow building, which by the way is very cool-the building, not the sneezes and coughs.

I’m also not alone in getting the dreaded disease bronchitis as my mother is an annual victim of it’s gut/chest/whole body wrenching effect. In fact, I’ve begun to wonder if I’ve inherited her disposition towards bronchitis? Somehow in the passing on of her DNA to me, I got the gene that makes me susceptible to the bronchitis bug. Now I don’t really believe that she did that, though I don’t any proof to back it up one way or another because I tuned out of my 9th grade Life Sciences class where we likely we went over stuff like that. However, I do know that in getting our parent’s DNA we do inherit things like hair color, eye color, personality, aptitudes and maybe a few other notable things. Most of the stuff my parents passed on to me I’m really happy about and some of the stuff that they didn’t pass on to me I’m even more happy about – strong stomach being one of them (I have a 15 year vomit-free streak going right now!!). Of course there are some things that my parents passed on to me that I’d just as soon they not have, and try as I might, I can’t undo those things. They are a part of who I am. This is true of all of us, but I’m speaking now on a more cosmic level here as my parents passed on to me something dreadful and unavoidable – the sinful nature they inherited from their parents, which they got from their parents, and so on all the way back to Adam and Eve, who were our first parents. It is the inescapable and intractable desire and bent towards being our own God, which they exercised in the paradise they were born into…the Garden of Eden. How miserable we all are because of their one act of disobedience in that Garden…relationships broken and severed, work that is more burdensome than joyful, illnesses that end in death…all of these things and more are true because of the sin we inherited from our first parents and now perpetuate on a daily basis. How sad! How tragic! How hopeless! … Well, not quite.

God as gracious judge, made a cosmic promise to Adam and Eve that one of their offspring would do what they were unable to do, namely defeating once and for all the presence, power, and penalty of sin in their lives and the lives of their offspring who would place their hope and trust in Him. Of course there was a cost associated with this provision…a cost greater than any of us could fathom or stomach. For God to fulfill his promise to Adam and Eve and to us, it required the death of His Son. What love! What mercy! What grace! But God didn’t let Jesus stay dead…He raised Him – and not because he loved him – but because the promise to us wasn’t just about doing away with sin and our guilt but doing away with death and our shame…forever. The gospel of God’s grace is the gift of real life…a life in which we flourish in every possible way…a life in which we perfectly delight in God. May God continue to stir up our wonder as we know the reality of God’s grace in Christ more and more!

Posted via email from Brett Eubank’s Blog

I received a much-needed reminder that the kind of discipleship we are to pursue for ourselves and for others must be rooted firmly in the gospel for it to take root.  The reminder comes from Jonathan Dodson, a pastor in the Austin, TX area.  He writes:

Making disciples requires not only “sharing our faith”, but also sharing our lives – failures and successes, disobedience and obedience.  Discipleship is not a codeword for evangelism, nor is it a hierarchical system for spiritual growth, a way for professional Christians to pass on their best practices to novice Christians.  Real discipleship is messy, imperfect, and honest.

I received a much-needed reminder that the kind of discipleship we are to pursue for ourselves and for others must be rooted firmly in the gospel for it to take root.  The reminder comes from Jonathan Dodson, a pastor in the Austin, TX area.  He writes:

Making disciples requires not only “sharing our faith”, but also sharing our lives – failures and successes, disobedience and obedience.  Discipleship is not a codeword for evangelism, nor is it a hierarchical system for spiritual growth, a way for professional Christians to pass on their best practices to novice Christians.  Real discipleship is messy, imperfect, and honest.

Posted via email from Brett Eubank’s Blog

I heard a sermon Sunday on the subject of service both to and for the church. One of the applications the pastor gave in his sermon was that we need to create margin in our lives for service. His premise was that his congregation had very little time to give to service because their lives were fully committed elsewhere. Of course, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to this church or even to this area. Busyness is the norm for most of us, whether we claim the name of Christ or not. It seems being American is synonymous with being busy. In fact, there is a certain pride that comes with being busy. If you’re too busy for something, it communicates that you’re important. Olds and Schwartz in their book, The Lonely American, discovered that people wear their busyness as “a badge of toughness, success and importance.”

But the downside to our busyness isn’t just that we don’t have time for service, we also don’t have time for relationships. Our busyness leaves little room for us to deepen or cultivate new relationships. It’s no wonder that our busyness leaves us feeling alone and somewhat isolated. We lament the lack of time for those relationships but generally nothing changes. The awful truth is that we love our busyness. But why? Why do we need to stay busy? There are myriad reasons but they all coalesce into one…our idolatrous hearts. We have used busyness as a functional savior and we look to our busyness to “save us” from our fear of rejection and failure and our sense of self-importance. But as with any savior other than Christ, we are disappointed because our busyness doesn’t save us from our fears, but it enslaves us to our fears, so that we continue on in our busyness until we burn out. The only savior that is powerful enough to deliver us from the fears and pride that produce busyness is the grace of Christ. In the gospel of grace, our fears are vanquished because in the cross we see that Jesus has made us acceptable to the Father. We experience His delight in us so that our identity is no longer defined by our fears but by our Father.