A THING of beauty is a joy for ever...

Haven’t posted in awhile.  I’ve decided to start rewriting me little series “Romantics” and actually see what I can do.

Also, I would like to read a good book, but I haven’t the focus as of late to do so.  Nonetheless, I would like to.

Alright, that’s all.

D

So I’m up early and thought it would be cool to update and let y’all know how things went yesterday and where we are at.

We all got a later start yesterday just because everyone was a little sick and Stephen had some stuff to do in the morning. So we spent the morning just getting sounds, and then we went to grab some lunch at baja burrito… SO good, I had the fish burrito… We got back and listened to all the songs and made the final cut from 12 to 10.

deciding the order for the record was hard but I think we ended up with a cool mix of singable more corporate songs, as well as some songs of lement which I think are good because they speak to the human experience, which isn’t always pretty and nice. The vision God’s given me for the record is this idea of redefining “beautiful,” instead of thinking of beautiful as “pretty” and “delicate” I want it to be heard in this record as something “raw” and “difficult.” Real beauty isn’t something that should be easily taken in, because it isn’t tidy or clean, it’s messy, but amazing. I think we find this no truer than in the gospel stories of Jesus Himself. Jesus wasn’t pretty, but He was beautiful in the truest sense of the word. for me I think the final song list reflects that vision well.

Some songs from my EP that I thought would make it haven’t, but that’s ok because they are on the EP :) We ended the day working on guitars for the title track beautiful creations and it’s coming along well, it’s pretty gritty and driving which I like. Stephen, Nolan, Ben, and Clay all jumped into the creative process with me and we got some cool ideas down.

Everyone is sick and that worries me, but it actually worries me more for Laurie, Stephen’s wife. Laurie is pregnant and it’s obviously not good for her to be around all these sick guys, so please pray that everyone heals up nicely and we can all be healthy again! The Lord has kept me safe so far as well and I thank you all for your prayers, keep it up!!!

Today we start on a tune called the Offering that I’m really excited about, it’s a song I wrote as a kind of reminder for myself that as much as I find my calling right now in leading worship, and sharing God’s love within the context of the church, leading worship and the corporate church are not why I do what I do. Beyond that, leading worship and the traditions of the corporate church are not THE exclusive pathways to Jesus. I could very easily fall into the belief that what I DO saves me, instead of remembering that it is only through Jesus that I can do that things I do. Realizing that, and submitting to that truth is the key. I have to remember that worship isn’t a “song” but a condition of the heart, and a life that is submitting it self to God on a consistent basis throughout each day.

It is this truth that I think God has given me. In the same way that Luther believed in the priesthood of all believers, I think we are each worship leaders. No matter what we do, be it the work of a business man, a doctor, a plumber, a carpenter, a grocery store bagging assistant, worship leader, teacher, or pastor. All of these things are simply jobs, tasks that we are given to complete. But, it is when we allow the Spirit room into every part of our lives, even into our daily tasks, that we begin to see that what we have reserve for the walls of the church and for “qualified men” like our “worship leaders” and “Pastors” is actually available to all of us, if we simply allow ourselves to believe that the story WE are in is one that God has placed us in, and it is a story of epic proportions.

It isn’t “worship” that is amazing, it is truly engaging when we see someone working within their calling that it becomes something that is truly breath taking. It isn’t “Teaching” that is amazing, it is when we see someone working within their calling teaching that we are changed by simple ideas given on a stage by one man/woman who we have for some reason taken then time to listen to.

I’ll leave you with the words to the Chorus of The Offering:

“The offering is not the song we sing, but the life we live for you. The praise begins when we let you in till every piece of us is yours. So when we sing, we sing for you, and when we live, we live for you. Jesus!”


Grace and Peace,

D

(sorry for any typo’s)

We start recording monday, but we head down tomorrow. Prayer would be amazing as me and the guys start on this little two week journey. We’ll be in touch as we go through the process.

Cheers.

Daniel

9.Encountering a broken earth-

Bringing in the kingdom to earth.

Jesus didn’t just come to save our souls; He came to redeem the earth back to its original state.  Authors like N.T. Wright do a much better job than I will in explaining this, but it’s important as Romantics that we understand that the burning in our hearts to set things “right” is not something that should be ignored.  What I believe we do need to ignore is when we think that by “doing” something “right” we can accomplish our goal.  Only by accepting God as sovereign Lord and submitting ourselves to His will can we accomplish anything.  True our fruit will look a certain way when we are submitting to Christ, but we should not try to work out our faith in reverse and hope that our hearts will follow our actions. 

Bringing in the kingdom means we have an understanding that A: The kingdom is (as we’ve talked about before) a place for the weak:

20Looking at his disciples, he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Luke 6:20

B: We take the Kingdom everywhere we go, and our actions and hearts shouldn’t change based on where are.  We should be: understanding, open, respectful and loving to all people.  As Romantics we shouldn’t have an “on” or “off” button, but a lifestyle that is always understanding we carry the Gospel with us.

1After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God.

Luke 8:1

C: We need to remember the Kingdom is about reconciliation and healing.  Jesus didn’t just heal those who were physically sick, He healed broken hearts and minds as well.  We need to bring that love with us everywhere we go.

11but the crowds learned about it and followed him. He welcomed them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed healing.

Luke 9:11


D: Bringing in the Kingdom means we have no allegiance to anyone, anything, any country, any group, that is above our allegiance to Christ.


The Cost of Following Jesus
57As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”

58Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

59He said to another man, “Follow me.”
But the man replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

60Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

61 Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-by to my family.”

62Jesus replied, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

Luke 9:57-62

We have to believe and be confident in the cause we bring, and if we truly believe the words Jesus said, than the consequences are eternal, and mean everything.  We have to be bold and live out loud.  If we want people to believe the message we bring, we have to live lives that reflect attitudes that are serious about what Jesus came to do.  We have to get in the business of serving those around us and loving them, bringing Jesus’ hope to a world that only knows Christians as people who follow a moral set of rules and vote republican.

Reconciliation is our aim, redemption is the fruit, and The Kingdom is our goal.

Now what I just said is quite a loaded statement so let me be very clear.  I generally vote republican, I find nothing inherently wrong with being someone who calls themselves a republican, but there is a problem I do have, and that problem is this:  People outside of the church generally associate Christian with be republican, with people who aren’t accepting or open to them if they aren’t Christians.  The problem here is that Christianity has established itself more as a social-religious belief system than a personal relationship that pushes someone to usher in the Kingdom. The problem with that is that when we associate ourselves more as republican and American than a follower of Christ and citizen of the Kingdom of God, we act just like the people in Luke 9.  We are more worried about the lives we have socially than the life we have been given through Christ.  We become more fearful of losing the things we have as Americans than the things we can gain through Jesus Christ.  If we believe that the Kingdom we are to bring in is going to be led by the weak than I think we need to do less worrying about losing the things we have, and be more worried about sharing with others.  No, I am NOT saying you should hate your country, not at all.  What I am saying is that we should check our hearts and make sure that our first allegiance isn’t, as Derek Webb says, “to a flag, but to a Kingdom and a King.” 

Our goal is not to “fix” the world, our goal is to make sure no person is left with out the option for a home, no wounded person left with out the option of help, that no one would be left with out a door to run into for help.  Our goal is not to force everyone to get along; our job is to have sanctuaries open for people to come to.  Our “Aim” as it were, is reconciliation, and if you know anything about world history this is not something that can be forced.  Apartheid in Africa, The Nuremburg trails after world war 2, race relations in America, these moments in history have proven to us that you can not force reconciliation, but what they have showed us is this:  You can offer it.  We cannot slam the door of freedom on people by forcing them to swallow a pill they will never swallow.  If our salvation does not work in reverse neither will reconciliation.  Peoples hearts have to change first, then their actions or their “fruit” will follow.  This only happens by building relationships with people, it does not happen by preaching moral “gospel” at them.  If reconciliation is our aim, love, respect, and boldness are the weapon we will use, not man’s knowledge and plans. 

If reconciliation is our aim, redemption is the fruit, not moral people acting correctly.  Instead, broken people living in community.  Ellie Weisel said once (when I was blessed to hear him speak at Rochester College where I go to school), “Questions bring people together, and answers divide them.”  Our desire to become perfectly moral people, who “stack” up to some human standard of “goodness,” is in direct conflict with the work of the Kingdom.  If Christ is the only way we become truly “righteous” than our “evangelism” is loving like He loved, and “conversion” is when someone desires to love the way Christ loved above everything else in their life.  If salvation comes through Christ alone we can only teach by example, not through words.  If any fruit comes from our words, it is because the Holy Spirit has so transformed our words and peoples understanding of our words, that they are no longer a humans words anymore.  Instead, the Spirit takes those words and turns them into the very breath of God and uses them to soften the heart of the listener, but it is not because of our eloquence. Instead it is Christ choosing to work in mysterious ways that are beyond our understanding.  We focus to often on how to define redemption when the definition is only found in action.  Redemption is only truly seen when it is living and active, it cannot be quantified or reproduced under scientific circumstances, it is not a matter of chemistry, it truly is the work of God in us. 

The Kingdom, in the end, is our goal, to be a people who’s doors are open to all people, who have no concern for ourselves, or worry of “loss.”  We need to be people who offer God’s love constantly, not with words, but who literally always have our doors open, our ears ready to listen, and our hearts ready to serve.  That is how we will change the world around us.


Stop pretending to have answers.
As products of our western culture we often times believe it is our duty to have answers for people.  We think if we are to bring hope to the world it means we have to bring a blue print for success.  The problem with that belief is that Jesus did not come with answers that our minds could understand, He actually came with questions most of the time, or offered us dilemma’s that needed fixing.  Jesus came not to give a blue print but to offer a love, and a relationship.  As Christians our hope to the world is not our ability to fix the worlds problems, it’s our ability to step up in the times of need and help and engage people (the way Christ engaged us with questions rather than giving us answers.)  We can’t fix the broken world around us, but we can be the movement that comes in the wake of tragedy to help those in need.  That should be the work of the church.  We think we comfort people by giving them answers, but the great philosopher Soren Keirkegarrd once said something to the effect of this: “The more understanding I have, the less faith I have.” By supplying people with answers we don’t lead them to God, we lead them to man’s understanding, which ultimately always leaves us wanting more.  Yes, sometimes a definition is needed, and yes, sometimes our logic totally has an answer for us.  But, too often we are more inclined to offer an explanation than to just offer a shoulder to cry on, or a bed to sleep in, or a table to eat at.  We talk very well in the west, in fact one might say we speak too much.  We could shake the world as we know it if we tried actually living what we say.

Our theology has begun to work against us because many times we search to find answers and not God.  We search to find reasons rather than hope.  We are motivated more by fear than by trust.  There is no problem with questioning God, in fact throughout Scripture He blesses people who engage Him with questions.  But we miss the point of God’s interaction if we think God is going to supply us with a blue print for life.  God wants our hearts, He wants us to love Him, to engage Him.  God doesn’t want a group of people checking their guide book to see if everything looks right, He wants us to be asking Him for directions.  He wants us to think, to discuss, but the heart behind those thoughts and discussion has to be the desire to see more of God, not to get answers for all our problems.  The answer is already given in Jesus Christ.  Death has been conquered, we have no more fear, Sin has no power, and we have no shame.  Our only answer is that Christ is risen and because of that everything we have known is different, and because of that freedom from rules, from laws, we are free to love people with out fear.  Because there is no blue print, because we have a God who is alive and engaging us, and not a script that gives us all our lines, our role is to LIVE!  This is why Jesus is the way, the truth and the life!  Because in Christ we are encouraged to finally LIVE!  No longer are we doing things and check them against a list of “do’s and don’ts” Instead we can simply live, and live to the full by loving those around us and living lives as open doors.

So then if all of these things are true, if Jesus is truly alive, and we are truly and fully convinced He is real, than our faith is no religion.  When we pray, we speak to the living God.  When we fast, we worship God not as a way to become more righteous, but because we are so convinced of His being, we long to be closer to Him.  When we give we do so not because we “ought” to, but because we have no other choice than to give.  We do our God a great dis-service by boiling down our interaction with Him to rituals and religious movements.  We serve a living God who freed us all from deaths sting and sin’s power, let us begin to live like that is true each day.

8.Encountering immortal souls-

No Ordinary People

As I quoted earlier C.S. Lewis wrote in his book “The Weight of Glory”

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinners—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat, the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”

I want to come back to that because we are in need of a humbling when it comes to how we interact with each other on a daily basis.  I speak this truth with my own heart at the forefront of my mind.  What the Spirit of God spoke through C.S. Lewis in these words is a beautiful paragraph that represents a call for us to both feel the weight of the responsibility we bare and to transform that weight into a reliance on Christ.  In the midst of such a call most of us would read it as some sort of personal challenge to become humble.  The wonder in this statement is that it is not a call to human action, for humans to get up and instantly do something based on the emotional high we get from reading such words.  No, the words we find here are meant to stop us in our tracks, to truly humble us, to set us in a place of awe and wonder at what God has done.  By stopping to think over these words we allow the noise of the world around us to lower and our ability to hear the Spirit increase.  When ever I take the time to do this one important thing happens, I realize that there is no earthly way I could comprehend what the true weight of what Lewis has said is, and in truth, though Lewis would be worlds more capable of comprehending the words He wrote than me, only the Divine Mind can grant us the moments of clarity to grasp it.  So it is only by God’s grace that we can see people not as simply what we see, but also for what they are and will be.  By allowing these words to soak into our minds we will hopefully be drawn to the feet of God, praying, listening, and waiting for God to give us the words to speak to people in our every day lives.  Not that we should be as Lewis says “perpetually solemn,” always trying to remind ourselves that we are nothing, but again it comes back to the tension we live in that pushes us to keep our eyes squarely fixed on God. 

When we accept redemption and love through God, not morality or religion, we allow ourselves the ability to have relationships rather than “convert.”  This is key in our pursuit of God.  Man times we quantify “savedness” by how many people we convince with our words to say a prayer of salvation.  The problem with this theory is that if we focus only on apologetics to convert people then all salvation becomes is a game for the smartest people.  Think about it, if I prove God to you by sharing a great story, or parable to you, or if I use great analogies and allegories that really, really pierce your heart, and if the end result of that is that you are convince by me that there is a God what does that do?  I spoke of 1 Corinthians chapter 2 before, but lets go back to Paul’s warning.  If we think that we can win people over by convincing them of their moral depravity through stories and so called “evangelism” then all you are really doing is being a smooth talker.  Once someone smarter than you comes along and disproves the arguments you shared, that persons world will be shattered and your work will be undone.  True, God will use our efforts for His glory as I stated earlier, but the point is we need to approach people as PEOPLE, not blasted check marks on a bloody piece of paper, or a number we give at the announcements on Sunday morning after youth rallies.  If you don’t take the time to know someone or at least point them in the direction of someone who can mentor them than we are being wholly irresponsibly as Christians.  It might be true that your gifting isn’t so much on the relational side of things, but I would challenge you that you need to become relational.  In the same way, earlier in these essays the Spirit was challenging you and I to act, to produce fruit, we have to produce hearts that beat along with Christ’s.  We can no longer afford in our modern day to hold on to traditions that do not allow us to engage culture.  If the traditions we hold hinder us from reaching out in ways that relate to people, the traditions must be washed away, rethought, or re-envisioned.  Of course being relational is really not something that goes out of style so in the end the key might just be to shed our pride, fear, and religion, and simply love the people around us.  We don’t have to take on the world, but if we start small and focus on God, you will find that the impact that arises from a humble heart can change cultures and usher in new eras.


Our Guilt is our sin.

Religions, traditions, and all things that come out of these for the negative are in my opinion the result of something I quoted earlier.  Karl Barth stated in his book “The Epistle to the Romans”:

“My guilt is my sin.”

This is such a powerful statement to unpack.  It is our lack of acceptance, our lack of believing that God is bigger than our sins that hardens our hearts and pushes us from living in the tension between reason and faith, and refuses Christ’s place as the thing that holds us together and forces us to choose a side.  It pushes us to either religion or reason and whispers in our ears that there is no earthly way we could have both, closing our minds to even thinking of the possibility that we can have both, that God appeals to both places of our lives.  It is our lack of acceptance, our pride, that chooses to make our sin the cause of worldwide debates, our belief that some how people can actually get away with sin?  That man’s justice somehow trumps God’s?  That just because we can get the visceral satisfaction of seeing someone repent to us, or admit to us their fault, that means their hearts of changed?  The belief that our ways are superior is our reenactment of what happened in the garden of Eden, and it happens daily.  Though we walk with God each day and are offered His grace, love and mercy, we would rather have knowledge of good and evil so that we might be God, so that we can judge the living and the dead.  It is my belief that we were never intended to bare the weight of the knowledge of good and evil, because of that truth when we are placed under it we are crushed and separated into two parts, sacred and secular, flesh and spirit, whatever term you use the end result is the same, when man plays God death is sure to follow.  Our finite minds lack the infinite state of God’s, our intelligence has limits, God’s has none.  What we miss when we read the Gospels, what we miss when we read the New Testament is that we are not given rules until we ask for them, and that rules are indented to be a way for God to interact with us, not the means of salvation.  God gave us worship and traditions to be ways that we are sure God loves us.  In other words it’s like kids who become away that a drawing of their family house and tree actually has no real worth but they want to be able to do SOMETHING for their Dad so they ask Him what He wants, the Dad of course doesn’t need anything from His kids that is physical He just wants their love.  So the Dad says “oh, just get me some cologne this year.”  So the kids get the Dad cologne and they feel better, the Dad feels loved because of the heart in which the Spirit was given.  But, the Dad who’s money the kids used to buy the gift anyways, could have gotten that gift Himself, but because He loves us gives us the chance to love Him in a way that makes us feel interaction.  Religious practices are the same thing.  God doesn’t need the act that you do to show Him you love Him, He just wants your heart.  In the same way there is a burn in each of our hearts to love God, to be loved, and to show love to others.  Yet, the weight of sin makes us believe that the cologne we buy our Dad is what matters most, not the heart that wants to bless our Dad.  In the same way those of us who are split to the other side feel like nothing matters, My Dad never loved me the way I wanted to be loved, He never gave me all the things I wanted, so why should I love Him?  These people reject God because He hasn’t given them specific things that would hinge their faith towards Him.  These people are those who miss all the things God HAS given them and want God to reveal things to them that would prove God exists.  The problem with these people is that they learn so heavily on their reason that they see no need for faith at all, and in the end no need for Love.  Everything boils down to benefit, they reduce everything to math, science, etc…  I have to be honest with you at this point, in my heart, this is the person who I long to be at times.  I admire these people because they make it seem like they have all the answers and they draw me in.  I long to have these peoples certainty, their wit, their charisma.  But whenever I read their works, I realize they are just like the overtly religious people I grew up being tormented by, they offer me one end of the spectrum.  They offer me something that satisfies “A” need, but not THE need in my heart.  They cannot be the glue that brings together the Spiritual and the Physical in the way that Christ can.  In the end I can’t bare the wait of what is purely reasonable, and I think its ridiculous for me to think I am smart enough to define what reasonable is.  As Romantics and as Christians we have to recognize this as the center of our brokenness, an inability to truly carry a weight we were never meant to bare and at the same time dealing with a pride, that was the result by taking that weight, that won’t let us think of giving it up.  That conflict lays within each of us, on so many levels, that we all give in and take a side at points in our lives.  The key again is to live in the tension and choose to not allow ourselves to be judged by our standards, to remember that God loves us and wants us, that God is pleased with us.

The fact that we can see failure, the fact that we can discern excellence and have a qualitative value of goodness and badness, is a result of the curse we placed on ourselves in the garden, we bare that weight, and feel it so much because our intelligence, our minds, our souls, are not capable of dealing with it.  Thus, contentment and discontentment will always be our apart of our daily struggle.  Choosing to live in the freeing power of grace will be our fight each day is the thing we all face each day, and we can’t take it on by ourselves.  We need each other, the brother or sister next to you is not only an immortal soul destined for heaven and hell, but they are also vital to your survival.

Iron Sharpening Iron
So we spoke earlier about how we were meant to live in community, and to be honest we all know that, we all love the idea of it.  Heck, most “romantic” people by the world standards LOVE people, as an audience, or a fan base.  Or maybe we like people as a safety net, or an identity.  We like people as targets of our criticism, as the butt of our jokes.  But, what we don’t like is the tension.  The tempering that happens when iron sharpens iron, when truth is spoken in love, we have no argument.  True love disarms us, because it is not easy and yet we can’t truly critique it.  Believe me I know from experience, when I am faced with truth I am tongue tied, I pause, I disagree, think, try to come up with something else, but in the end I always know it is truth.  The problem with the tension of iron sharpening iron is that we think it means we have failed, when the truth is all that is happening is we are being loosed from the flesh that hampers us from being the beings we were made to be, and that is a scary thought  to us, why?  Because the Bible says that our sin is the thing that we allow to define us (find Will verse.)  It says that the wicked are known for their sin, and my friends though we are saved we are still attacked by the desire to be defined by our past sins, our current sins and our fear of future sins.  The sharpening process shaves away old dullness and brings fourth fresh iron, that is new and sharp, that can cut, but that is wholly unfamiliar to us.  The process of being sharpened by the Spirit via our brothers and sisters is not painful but it is uncomfortable.  We make it painful when we reject the Spirits work and close ourselves off to it and run.  Yet it is critical to our walk that we allow ourselves to be sharpened by the Spirit and by our brothers and sisters.  This doesn’t mean we become people pleasers or that we listen to everyone who critiques us, but it does mean we do listen to those in community around us, that we listen to those in authority over us and that we listen to the wise ones around us and the meek ones beneath us.  Perhaps listening may also mean observing and listening to the actions of those people as well.

Warriors in need of Sages, Sages in need of warriors.
As we begin to experience and get used to the sharpening of being challenged by our fellow brothers and sisters there is one thing we each long for, young or old, the mentoring of an elder.  As a young man I know I am full of energy and fire, I want to take on the world, I want to fight, to win, to take rescue people, to be strong.  We are eager as young people, but we lack the wisdom of those who have come before us.  We need the insight of those who have come before us, and we need to open to their thoughts.  Too often as young Romantics we desire to just create a new box all our own, the sad thing is we end up creating something that has been around for years!  Many of us never take the time to experience what it means to live in submission to the elders around us, to apprentice with those who have come before us and to soak in their knowledge and wisdom.  We don’t live in submission well, and we don’t value the old age.  In fact we are obsessed with being young, with staying young and not getting old.  We think the old are worthless, in some places in the world they refuse health care to the elderly because they are going to die soon and they see no value in keeping them around.  What we fail to see as young people is that if you take the time to ask these brilliant sages the right questions you are offered a well-spring of knowledge that you cannot receive elsewhere.  Because we don’t value slow conversations where listening is key, and ask questions our job, we never realize the beauty that is offered us in the minds and lives of the elderly.  We want sound bites, we want noise, we don’t want a symphony.  We need to train our hearts and our minds to value the Sages around us, and stop reject them.  One of the things that our elders bring us is peace in the midst of new challenges, they calm us when we feel like the world is crashing down on us.  Our elders know how precious life is and they will teach us to savor life in ways we don’t know how to yet.

“Fear Not”

If guilt is our Sin, fear is the thing the spawns doubt in our minds and brings us into its grip. 

I went to cornerstone this year and I was blessed enough to be able to see a group of artists called “the Square Peg Alliance.”  Derek Webb, Andrew Peterson, Eric Peters, Shive, and a bunch of other great artists got together and were playing each others songs, it was a beautiful night.  Before one of Ben Shive’s songs he shared a story about how on the way up Andrew was sharing a thought about how he believed you could some up the message of the gospel in the phrase “Do not fear.”  At the core of us there is this battle between our understanding of the weight of our sin and the grace that God’s offers us.  We are constantly asked to step into the realm of faith and to trust that God’s mercy is enough for us, that God is in control.  Our pride will lead us to believe that because we can perceive a problem that it must be true, that God HAS to play by our rules.  Satan constantly is after us trying to make us feel the weight of the wrong things we do, to turn us from God, to separate us, to make us focus on ourselves.  Try to get us to believe we are either great people who don’t need anything, whose reason is above everything, who can explain away all spirituality because there is no room for it in their world.  Or, we can be people so convinced of our faults that we believe they are so powerful only our works can redeem us.  Both attacks effectively take our minds off of God and on ourselves in dysfunctional ways.  Fear then is our daily battle, yet as the Bible says we ought to only have fear in the one who controls the reality we live in.  As you read scripture you will find that the God you find in those scriptures is a loving and understanding God, and that there is truly nothing to fear when you are in God’s presence.

The summation of the freedom of the work Christ did on the cross, trust in Christ, push away fear.

As Romantics it’s important that we connect with that it means to be human, what our human condition is, and what the people around us face.  This kind of understanding can be something we are gifted with, but for others of us we don’t have it.  But we need not worry, as we focus more on God and learn more about Him and develop our relationship with Him more we will find out hearts and minds opening in ways we never thought possible.  We will receive a wisdom from the Spirit that surpasses our previous understanding.  As we engage people we need to remember their worth as immortal souls, and as we encounter them we need to see them through God’s eyes and offer them the respect and love they deserve.

7.Discovering who we are-

We are made to be who we are in Christ, not what we desire.
The world around us wants us to believe we are the sum of our desires.  Advertisers believe if they can harness our desires and make us believe we need something that they can convince us to buy their product.  They pin us by making us believe we will be happier, more satisfied, stronger, better looking, or a host of other things, if we buy their product.  The interesting thing about all of these beliefs is that our base desire as living beings is to survive and to hoard things to ensure our comfort.   The message of the gospel is totally opposite of what our base desires naturally are.  It is true that in nature you see groups of animals or insects working together for the pack or the groups greater good, but even within those systems we find a harsh “carry your weight or be forgotten” mentality set in.  The Gospels presentation of a community that is centered around saving the weaker vessels is something completely other than our core desires.  In essence the command to Love one another, is in a sense God’s gift of election to us as His people.  God is saying to us, you are my people and I will set you apart and how I will set you apart is by making you love in a way that defines your new life, your humanity and your son-ship and daughter-hood.  Yes, it is true that as humans we can realize that for a time it is good for us to give of ourselves humbly to benefit ourselves, but what I’m talking about when I say we are made to be who we are in Christ, not what we desire, is that when Grace steps into our lives we step out of the debate of what is good for us, or even the worry of whether we are being humble.  Instead, focused on God we step out into the world around us with a desire to serve. 

We will be told that we should and ought to go with what is natural and what comes us, that we will subject ourselves to unneeded stress and that religion is the cause of the guilt we feel, that our Christian roots in our culture raise us to believe in a certain value system.  I would agree, that our religious pursuits have led us to become increasingly less respectful of those around us and loving.  But I would also say that I believe that our religion as it stands is wrong.  Keep in mind our religion being incorrect and God being incorrect are not the same thing, and when brilliant men like Richard Dawkins critique our faith for being intolerant, violent, the cause of paralyzing guilt, and not using our minds, we need to take a listen and examine ourselves.  If we are found to be religious people before we are found to be loving people who are reflective of Christ, than we have an issue.  However, the life I know God calls you and I to is not an overtly religious life, or a life driven by a desire to be moral.  Instead, we are called to be people who live out a relationship, not a religion.

We know we were made for worship, but we were also made for community.
We already established that God has called us to lives of worship, but a huge piece of who were are is the God imprinted desire for a community.  When God saw Adam God say that it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone.  In the same way we are not meant to live lives on our own, we were meant to live in submission to a group of people who are living with the Spirit active in them.  By doing this we will hopefully have a group of people who can act in our lives as God’s voice.  By being humble and living with out worry we can speak freely to each other in love.  With no ego’s in our communities we can, by God’s grace, become people who are better themselves everyday.

In the same way, as Christians we need to set aside the idea that WE bring the gospel to people.  Indeed this is the farthest thing from the truth; instead it is the Gospel brings us to people.  Every interaction needs to be an experience where we enter in with love, desiring to learn from the other person and love them.  As Christians we need to change the mindset we have ingrained in us of imperialism or colonialism, assuming that we need to westernize or help everyone else to become more like us.  Instead we need to become Romantics who look for beauty in all things and learn to appreciate it regardless of whether it has “Christian” on the label.  Gabe Lyons speaks of this truth much better than I, but what little I’ve heard from him I hope has been translated.  As Christians we must be humble, not boastful, and if we boast we need to boast in a God who is the source of all beauty we come into contact with.  God is huge, and as I’ve said before we lack the ability on our own to fathom the expanse of His being.  If this is true, than the beauty and the extent of His love exceed all of the boundaries we could put on Him.  If we believe that to be true, that means that when we try to limit God to just our western idea of what following God is, or if we limit worship to our contemporary version of it, we are limited the scope of God’s beauty and depth.

What we say matters, why? Because God spoke us into existence.
God spoke, and the stars, the earth, light and darkness came to life.  God called out and it was.  Regardless of your interpretation of the book of Genesis, whether it be literal or allegorical, the importance is laid clearly at the beginning of scripture.  By words the reality we know was brought to life, hence Jesus is known as the Word.  Because of this we find throughout scripture a call to be people who speak truth out of love.  We are called to have no slander, gossip, or course jesting in our language.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I find that to be a task that is very hard to accomplish.  For one I find sarcasm so darn funny.  I crack up, I love it when I can be sarcastic with friends.  I love teasing people, heck I love using sarcasm to speak truth to people with out being upfront.  The problem is that sarcasm in most of it’s forms comes out as passive aggressive, it is normally a way for us to say what we know we ought to but to say it in such an obscure manner that we can skirt the issue.  Another way we can break people down with words is through just not being loving, we can allow little things to go by that bother us, maybe we say something sarcastic and just blow it off, but eventually what bothers us builds up and we blow up (trust me I do this way to much.)  This again is the result of being passive aggressive.  Now I understand that sometimes we aren’t aware of what bothers us in moments, sometimes we blow up and we even surprise ourselves and those things happen.  However, the issue with speech is not that we can’t be forgiven when we make mistakes, it’s that as Romantics we need to learn to value the people around us by being people who are both loving and honest.  These two things are hard to combine because we tend to either want to be truthful and condescending, or truthful and sarcastic.  On the opposite side we want to be loving but not cause any problems, or we see a problem but just think that if we ignore the situation, and ignore the fact that the Spirit is calling us to speak, that God will work it out and we won’t have to raise a finger.  In other cases we sometimes feel a need to speak when the Spirit actually wants us to be silent.  There are a host of other possibilities but the key being that as Romantics we ought to look to Christ as our example when it comes to speech.  First off, Christ was slow to speak, and slow to anger.  This was possible because Christ was God incarnate, but also because as a human Christ was walking in the grace of God and constantly interacting with the Spirit, praying, not concerned with being right, or saying a profound word.  Instead Christ was waiting on the Spirit to move Him to speak, knowing that the most profound intellectual argument means nothing with out the Spirit of God moving through it, changing peoples hearts.  This truth is found to be no truer than in the gospels as we find Jesus speaking plainly to thousands of people about the Kingdom of God.  Secondly, Christ never ignored conflict, He always addressed issues plainly and out in the open.  Christ was an intentional man, a deliberate man.  These are qualities we need to learn to acquire.  Thirdly, although Christ was intentional He was also intentional about almost always uplifting the person He was speaking to and whenever He challenged someone He always gave him or her a way to the Father through Himself.

In the end, as people who were meant for community, our words matter, our actions matter, because they are reflections of our hearts.  When we find hurtful words we ought to not allow that to drag us down, instead we need to offer them up to God and ask Him to continually change our hearts.

Made to love.
We know what love is because Jesus’ life is our definition of love.  As He is love so we should love.  We cannot be the summation of what Christ is, but we can in moments be love to people.  Because of love is in the character of God, we also have that character in us.  Though we are broken, and not functioning as God wanted us too, we will function best when we operate in love.  I touched on this when I spoke about how we are meant to live for others, but I think we need to be reminded of this as often as we can be.  When we act and work outside of love we will find ourselves becoming dull, cold, hardened, and cynical.  By not loving we become like an athlete who doesn’t train, our bodies become lethargic and we begin to lose the desire to even go and work out.  When we love someone we will undoubtedly be hurt and though the Romantic can be hurt many times, we all have moments where we break.  In the midst of this brokenness we will desire to not be ourselves, to become cynics, and we will find ourselves becoming dull.  In the midst of this the worst result is as we harden our hearts from love, we are harden our hearts to God and we lose our connection to Him.  Static and noise in our lives will build up and we will lose our desire to want to hear God.  This is why in the end love is not an emotion.  In 1 John 3:16 it doesn’t say, “because God so had a feeling in His stomach for us and felt all warm and fuzzy in side, so we should wait for those feelings and love the people we feel that way about.”  (Wow what a horrible sentence.)  Love is the choice to lay down our lives for people, will we be blessed with amazing emotions at times?  Yes, but when we feel like loving people it’s easy.  Love glows brightest in the dark, when we don’t even remember what it looks like to love someone, when we couldn’t even THINK of loving someone, when we submit to love in those places and choose to love, it is there that the Glory of God is shown through us.  Why?  Because in those moments it is so obvious that we don’t want to love, that we are incapable of loving with out God’s Spirit working in us.  It is in these moments, where a normal human becomes something more, where a woman sitting down on a bus becomes something more than ordinary, where a young man standing in front of a tank becomes something more earth shaking than any work of fiction we have ever read.  It is in these places where we mistake the work of men for something to be worshipped rather than worshipping the source of those men’s strength, which is the light of God being shone through them, the grace of God choosing to work in them.  We were not made to be salvation for people, we were made to be instruments of love, the extensions of the hands of God to all creation, made to spread His light to everyone we meet.

Made to create.
Like our God, whose image we bare, we were made to create.  We were made to invent, to progress, to reach out, to dream, and to make things.  Because our creator is not static neither are we, we as humans find our peace when we find our calling.  In every instance that means we find what it was we were made to create.  There is a reason why for some of us a sunrise makes us want to paint, or an experience makes us write, or why love makes us write songs.  It is because our creator was inspired to make the same things.  In this sense we are all artists, we are just search for our medium in which to work.  Some of us have found our voices, while some of us are waiting to find it, but we are all artists.  Some work with children, others with their hands building roads, some of us make music, while others tell stories.  Whatever your medium, one things for sure, within each of us is the heart of an artist.  Now, despite what you think that fact that we are all artists does not give us a license to become art snobs.  No, indeed we should run as far as we can from that idea.  Instead we should be people who find inspiration in everything we see, inspiration that should flow into our medium.  It’s true that our art will come in many different types, some of us will find joy in every detail, some of us will have divine discontent, and these people will be prophets who will challenge us.  Still others will seem to have the gift (and sometimes the curse) of bearing others burdens with them and experiencing others suffering.  Whatever the side of life you are inspired by, the key is to take that inspiration and go with it.  Do not allow fear to keep you from your “pad and paper” whatever that may be.  In the same way that we can’t allow fear, pride, jealous, malice, or gossip in our lives.  The same truth applies to our art.  We cannot allow the struggles of life, the disappointments that come, our fear of wrong approval, or our fear of pride to get in the way of what we were made for.  We were made to create, to form things with our hands, to dream of odd stories with dragons, to write songs about life, and to help the needy.  Whatever it is you were made to create, write on fellow artists.  The God we serve looks down on your work with the approval of the Dad that some of us had, and others wished they had.  He takes our work, puts it on His fridge and smiles as He gazes at it each day.  So, singers sing! Writers write! Dancers dance! Preachers preach! Builders build!  Scientists discover! Helpers reach out to the needy!  Whatever your medium may be, paint on.

5.Discovering God-

A huge piece in being able to be a romantic means being people who aren’t bored or uninterested in taking a look at the basics and the foundations of our beliefs.  We need to come back to God with fresh eyes daily, to look into what we can know of God and search for deeper, new truths we haven’t noticed before.  Many times the best approach is to take the simplest things and rest our hat on those things.  So lets take a look at our foundations rather than the pretty bells and whistles.

God’s reason
Why did God create?  Why would He make this world, the animals, and humans?  In many ways there is a mystery in that question, but one thing we do know is that the Bible tells us God created the earth, and everything in it for His pleasure.  Another cool illustration my friend Adam said to me once is, God is so great, so full of love that He was compelled to pour Himself out and create.  We were made then for interaction with God, to worship Him, to be stewards of His creation.  We were made to be little moons that reflect the light of God to everyone we come into contact with.  We were made for worship, not in the sing-song sense, but in that our lives were meant to be megaphones announcing the greatness of God to everyone we meet.  In Isaiah it is clear what God wanted His chosen people to be.

Isaiah 42:6 (New International Version)

6 “I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness;
I will take hold of your hand.
I will keep you and will make you
to be a covenant for the people
and a light for the Gentiles,

Isaiah 49:6 (New International Version)

6 he says:
“It is too small a thing for you to be my servant
to restore the tribes of Jacob
and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,
that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.”

The reason we are here is because He created us to live in relationship with Him and praise him, He is our source and we were meant to bring honor glory and praise to the source.  This isn’t really big news, most of us know that our job was to be stewards of the earth, but many people still forget that as stewards our job is to glorify the owner of the goods we are caring for by being people who are responsible, and by connecting and interacting with God.

In light of this fact we have to ask ourselves how we are taking care of the things God has placed before us.  As Romantics we have to understand that how we act and how we take care of things, and how we care for the people around us, reflects our love for God just as much as our words, fasting or prayers.  (Again I want to clarify that our salvation is not graded this way!  If you have made mistakes you are offered a clean slate.)  We will all struggle with acting out this idea.  But the key is understanding the foundations of our beliefs so we know why we are doing the things we do.  We do what we do because God first loved us, because God created us for mercy, and after we fell sent His Son to die for us.  God sent His son because He loves us and longs to be in a relationship with us, His people who He made to worship Him.

God’s Mercy
It’s important for us to go back and understand that God is a God who showers Mercy down on us in failure and success.  But it is also interesting to notice that He will let us fail as well.  God’s love for us doesn’t always take the form of success, but sometimes in the failure we experience God uses the failure to temper us and mature us.  No matter how God’s shows its face in our lives, one thing is for sure. God’s mercy acts in our lives in interesting ways.  Let’s look at a few of the ways it works in our lives.

As inspiration:

Romans 12:1 (New International Version)

Romans 12
Living Sacrifices
1Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.



As paradox:

Romans 11:31 (New International Version)

31so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you.

As confidence:

2 Corinthians 4:1 (New International Version)

2 Corinthians 4
1Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart.

As patience and comfort:

Jude 1:21 (New International Version)

21Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.

God’s mercy ultimately is something we cannot grasp in full.  How we are all rejected, and yet also offered election as Sons and Daughters.  But, one thing that we can rest in is that God’s mercy is perfect because God is perfect. 

As inspiration God’s mercy is the fuse that when lit sends us racing to the paper and pen, to the pulpit, to the streets, to the ends of the earth, and to our neighbors door to serve them.  When we experience moments where God’s mercy is clear to us we will be pushed to action, pushed to move.  In this way God’s mercy is something that overwhelms us and shakes us to core in ways that move us to action.

As paradox God’s mercy is something that is completely beyond us, a mystery that both confirms God’s place as sovereign Lord above us and yet also confuses us, and thus compels us to get closer and try to fathom the Eternal Being.  As a paradox God’s mercy is the drive for us to gather and learn, to read and pray, to fast, to doubt, and to ultimately engage God in a non-religious way, to engage God in a relational way.  In the face of God’s paradoxical nature we are driven to be irreverent at times and non-religious, to raise our fists and shake them at God, and it is at this door way that the heart is either hardened or softened.  Where skeptic either accepts or rejects the grace and love offered them, where the believer stumbles or rests, and where the non-believer mocks or bows.  At this door way we accept God as real, active and living, or we reject Him as myth.

As confidence God’s mercy allows us to not have all the answers but be confident that God does.  God’s mercy becomes the affirmation of God’s place as Lord, and in that moment where we place all confidence in Him we can rest.  God’s mercy becomes the reason for us to not place trust in ourselves, but wholly in God.  A confidence that is not based on a God who makes complete sense to us, but a God who has revealed pieces of Himself to us and who is fully beyond us at the same time.  This confidence is a steadying anchor to our lives, God’s mercy allows us to not focus on ourselves, but to focus on God and others.  Jesus’ work on the cross allows us to take our eyes off ourselves to be able to do the work of true praise and worship, to honor God and love others completely because we know what we are given has nothing to do with us.  In the wake of this truth our confidence rests in something completely beyond us.

As patience and comfort God’s mercy is the steady and sure rock that we know we can build our foundation on.  We know that God’s mercy is not contingent on us, that the grace and love of God was not offered on some sort of action of our own.  Our purity is not the contingency of our contract with God.  God and God alone is the supplier of our salvation.  Because of that we can wait, and will wait on God’s perfect providence in our lives knowing that He will provide for us as He sees fit as He always has, and that His plan for us is much better than our own.  Trails come, God may not be visible, but God’s mercy will always come.  Though the night may fall, we know there will always be a morning where the Son of God will rise and we will be called Sons and Daughters.


God’s Breath, God’s Fire

God’s Breath, God’s Fire, God’s Spirit, The Holy Guest, this is God’s movement through us Spiritually.  The power that opens our eyes, that allows us to see and comprehend in a way that will cater to our human minds one minute and push us beyond all our understanding and reveal to us things that we could never say, do, or receive outside of the Spirits movement in us, God’s Spirit works for us in spite of our short comings and continues to listen anyways. On our own we would be completely incapable of knowing what we need, yet when we speak God is working and honoring our efforts and sending help to us in the perfect way.

Romans 8:26-28 (New International Version)

26In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. 27And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.
More Than Conquerors
28And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him,[a] who[b] have been called according to his purpose.

God’s Spirit also doesn’t come to enslave us but to free us.  Though being sons and daughters of God will open us up to attacks from the world around us and the dark forces that are at work in it, we can have confidence through the Spirit’s ministering work.  The Spirit will remind us of the truth and be our guide in times of trouble, allow us to see the end will in the midst of trials if we will open our eyes.

Romans 8:15-18 (New International Version)

15For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship.[a] And by him we cry, “Abba,[b] Father.” 16The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. 17Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
Future Glory
18I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

God’s Spirit will also remind us and be our guide in moments where we are about to hurt ourselves, or others.  Through God’s love God will reveal to us foolishness that the world might recognize as wisdom.  God’s wisdom is beyond mans and only through humbling ourselves to His will can we truly understand God’s work.  God wouldn’t have it any other way and we ought to think the same.  Paul reminds us of the necessity of this truth so that no man says he is saved because of another man, instead God’s Spirit works so that we may never boast in human understanding.

1 Corinthians 3:16-20 (New International Version)

16Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? 17If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.

18Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a “fool” so that he may become wise. 19For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness”; 20and again, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.”


It is also important to note that in my opinion we will see God’s Spirit move in people that don’t come under the banner of the Christianity we know it.  This might seem difficult to grasp but I think C.S. Lewis’s example in The Last Battle in the Telmarine guard is something we should think about and allow the Spirit to speak to our hearts on.

“…even as the rose in bloom surpasses the dust of the desert. Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of Thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou has done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reason of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites. I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if a man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.”


God’s Compassion
God’s compassion for the weak, the sick, the lowly and the needy are hallmarks in His character that we need to remind ourselves of DAILY.   God loves the week above the strong, God loves those who do humble themselves to Him, who don’t pretend or try to stand on their own too feet.  The world may see these people as weak, but God calls them His beloved.

Matthew 5:1-8 (New International Version)

Matthew 5
The Beatitudes
1Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2and he began to teach them saying:
3”Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
7Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.

When we experience trails we ought not complain or feel like God is doing horrible things to us, or allowing something that we can handle.  Again this goes along with the paradox within God, we have to be empty to be filled, and we have to be rejected to be accepted.  When the world pushes us down, Christ is there to pick us up.  The world around us doesn’t value the weak, they value the strong, through Christ we know that again, although we may be in the wilderness there is a paradise right here right now, if we choose to look at life through God’s eyes.

Luke 6:19-22 (New International Version)

19and the people all tried to touch him, because power was coming from him and healing them all.

20Looking at his disciples, he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
21Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
22Blessed are you when men hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.

It’s also important to know that as God’s people, as Romantics, God’s love and grace are offered us, but that God also desires for us to go out and help the needy, NOT just because we have food, clothing, or help to offer but because they have so much to offer us.  It’s interesting what Jesus says at the end about the righteous and the sinner, because to Jesus there is no righteous one, we are all lost.  Those of us who have been so blessed as to see Christ and live for Him are only given what we have by grace, so when we go on “missions” or when we “evangelize” it’s interesting to me that we think we approach people with a spirit that presupposes that it is somehow better than them, as if we were able to help them on our own accord.  More importantly I find it interesting that some of us go on missions to “do God’s work,” as if to say we don’t do God’s work, or can’t do God’s work in our current situation. 

When we travel to other areas of the world it should not be driven by a mission that is separate from our mission here at home, if we are going to Africa to serve the poor we ought to also serve the poor here, if we go to India to feed the hungry we ought to feed the hungry at home, if we go to help the needy in Palestine we ought to also help the needy here at home.  Now, as Americans I understand we have been given so many blessings that allow us to go out into the world and help, that is an amazing gift that we ought to use.  But, if we think that we are going to Africa to “help” those “poor” people, I think we will be surprised to find that when we return it is them who have helped us, and it is not we who are rich, but them.  In that again lays the Paradox of following God, the weak feed the strong, and the broken will lead the whole. 

Matthew 9:10-15 (New International Version)

10While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” came and ate with him and his disciples. 11When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?”

12On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”


God’s Grace
If God has compassion for the poor then God also has grace for those who should know better and have become so full of pride that they become more interested in their religion then their relationship with God.

Acts 4:33
With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all.

When we go out and proclaim the gospel we will not say all the right things, we will by our own hype, we will get lost in theology and philosophy, but in the midst of all of that, God’s grace will remain and as always work in spite of us.

Romans 3:23-24 (New International Version)

23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

It is by grace that we who know better, who have seen God work in our lives, and who still choose to sin, are granted forgiveness and freedom from our sin, our guilt, our shame, and ultimately our pride.  Grace works on our behalf because although we will think we are strong for a time, our strength will betray us, we will begin to believe our own knowledge and understanding, we will create new laws, new theologies and new philosophies that will ultimately be our undoing.  We will never be able to live up to our own expectations or God’s level of purity.  Jesus comes and brings us grace, from the Father, and through the Spirit.  It is by this grace that are given peace, and through this peace we are able to become humble, having realized we can not do it on our own we will daily lay our lives back down at Christ’s feet, realizing how much we come up short.

God’s Redemption
We have to remember that God longs for all of creation to be reconciled unto Him.  God’s plan is to redeem all of creation back into Himself, and that is not something that we have to wait for either.  As Christians it is our job to try our best to be life Christ and be what Isaiah 42 prophesies about.

Isaiah 42
The Servant of the Lord
1 “Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him
and he will bring justice to the nations.

2 He will not shout or cry out,
or raise his voice in the streets.

3 A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.
In faithfulness he will bring forth justice;

4 he will not falter or be discouraged
till he establishes justice on earth.
In his law the islands will put their hope.”

5 This is what God the LORD says—
he who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it,
who gives breath to its people,
and life to those who walk on it:

6 “I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness;
I will take hold of your hand.
I will keep you and will make you
to be a covenant for the people
and a light for the Gentiles,

7 to open eyes that are blind,
to free captives from prison
and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.

8 “I am the LORD; that is my name!
I will not give my glory to another
or my praise to idols.

9 See, the former things have taken place,
and new things I declare;
before they spring into being
I announce them to you.”

We need focus on God so that we can be the tools God uses to free those captives, we accept the gift we have been given through Jesus Christ so that we may receive the gift of life, of true purpose, of living for something other than our own happiness and tranquility.  When we accept the gift of grace and love from Jesus and choose to live for Him we are choosing to offer ourselves as tools that will be used to bring redemption and reconciliation back to the world.  The only way to do so is to be people who are humble, who are full of love, mercy, and compassion.


God’s Love
Ultimately God’s love for us is so perfect we can’t really understand it, but one thing we can be sure of is that God loves us and is pouring out His love on us daily.  When we allow God’s love to capture us, when we take part in what Phil Wickham describes as “The Devine Romance,” we take part in the greatest love story ever known.  The love between God and His creation, the love of Jesus, the love that drove the Son of God to the cross, that changed the heart of a murderer like Paul, a love that used a fisherman like Peter, is the same love that calls you and I to be used for amazing adventures.  It’s amazing how often I forget that, but again, as romantics we have to go back and remember who God is daily, to never take our eyes of Jesus.  If we forget who Jesus is, or stop trying to learn more about Jesus, we will fall apart.

4.Epic lives vs. Humble lives

I believe another misconception about romantics is that we are people who long to live huge, epic lives.  But despite the rising trend in Christian circles I don’t think that is something we ought to shoot for as believers.  Yes we ought to desire to live lives of epic sacrifice, but we should not LONG to be people in the spotlight, or people with great reputations in the public circuit.  Why?  Namely because when someone gains fame and fortune, and public recognition that person becomes a target for many different type of attacks and that person can’t help but become someone who is worried about their reputation.  Plato taught of how there is no such thing as a truly good man, because once a man gets the reputation of being “good” and he becomes aware of it, that man is no longer doing good deeds out of a righteous heart, instead he is doing good to maintain his status among the people.  This type of mind game always leads to corruption on some level. 

Now, we may be people who God has chosen to bare such a burden and who God intends to use for His purposes, but we shouldn’t long to be in the front.  That is something our generation longs for far too much.  Our generation wants to believe they are unique and the easiest way for us to feel unique is to live epic lives, or so we think.  Don’t believe me?  Just watch American Idol for one season and you’ll change your mind.  We believe that will make us unique because it will make us important, and if we are important we are special and if we are special we are, Ta Da! Unique!  This isn’t what Jesus wanted, and this isn’t the example Jesus set for us.  Jesus lived a life of humility and gained recognition because of it, but Jesus was constantly ducking out of crowded situations to be alone.  Jesus never bought the hype. He knew the same crowds who were praising Him would be the crowds that condemned Him.  Jesus got popular with out even trying because Jesus was a person people wanted to be around, a person of great character, gentleness, and wisdom.  If you want to lead an “epic” life, stop trying to be “epic” and start trying to be insignificant.  Choose to serve those around you and love them more then yourself.  Ask for permission, ask what you can do to help, but do it because you love the people around you, not because you want anything.  C.S. Lewis said this about what a truly humble man would look like,

“Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call “humble” nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.”

Lewis here is describing someone who is not consumed by a need to live an epic life, and someone who isn’t consumed with his own sin.  The person here is living under grace in such a way that they no longer worry about themselves the way they used to.  This person understands they come up short and have moved on.  This person is looking to love others because they look to God to define and find love.  When you look to God, He always points back to people.  But if you try to just love people without looking at God, you’re going to be let down.  We know this truth, but many times when we long to live epic lives we end up wanting to receive the acceptance and love of people more than God, or we think we can some how earn God’s favor when we already have it!  When we live humble lives we lay everything we have down at God’s feet and receive as God gives, if God desires to place us in positions of leading lives that are front and center, He will generally use the people who least expected to have those lives and who least desired them, in other words He will use the humble and those who we perceive as weak. 

Many times we get it in our heads that we need to be unique because of how we are raised, as we grow up we become overtly focused on our own situation and we are very individual in our mindset.  There is a process that happens in our lives psychologically where we isolate our desires from other peoples and believe that our pursuit of an “epic” lifestyle is somehow unique.  In America we aren’t generally raised to think in terms of a community, instead we are generally raised to explore and find our own individuality and discover our own identity.  Because of that fact many of us live lives that are actually very closed off to the pursuits of other people around us, and those pursuits that we do see we are generally highly critical of and are quick to pick them apart, when the truth is that most of our pursuits are actually the same.  The issue is we are all out trying to become a star that we fail to see the person next to us isn’t as different as we think.  We all want to lead unique epic lives, but the problem with that is that there isn’t anything unique about the pursuit of glory.  Most people want to be known, but few want to do the things to lead real epic lives.  The humble person is much more unique than the person who is out to find their own epic life, because unlike the majority of people in the world, the humble person is seeking to serve people.  Like Jesus, the truly humble person will draw people to themselves because they will be truly unique, and like C.S. Lewis’s humble man, they won’t really be aware or concerned with the idea of being humble.  The truly humble person is unique in that way, and rare to find.  As Romantics we need to stop falling in love with the epic and become enthralled with the modest, weak, and lowly.  By becoming people who are disciplined and patient we will become people who draw people around us to ourselves and hopefully to God.  That means we need to learn to value character traits that the world generally rejects.  Learning to be a humble person is completely counterintuitive to our normal desires. Nietzsche was correct in his assessment of man in the sense that he believed we are essentially primal beings.  We long to play the alpha role in the pack, we long to be important, to be strong and to not need anyone.  In the same breath we shouldn’t be passive and non-engaging, instead we ought to be people who are humble AND bold, who speak out of love, with no course jesting or immature language.  We need to be intentional people in a world that is arbitrary and random.  We need to allow our reason to fuel our emotions, and our wisdom to help guide us through tough times, to submit our desires to God and be happy with the lives we have been given.  I find it very funny and sad that in the most affluent nation in the world we have so many people who simply want more: more sex, more money, more things, more adventure.  Instead of more for us, what if we thought about what more we could do for the people around us, how we could serve the people around us.  A friend of mine told me a story about someone who did just that.  I won’t use real names because I want to honor my friend telling me the story, and the person who he was talking about.  But, My friend knows a guy who at a pretty young age decided that a friend of his whom he had known for awhile was someone worthy of giving his life up for, so he pledged his life in service to his friend, where ever his friend moved throughout there lives he would follow.  Because of this guy sacrificing his life for his friend, his friend was able to become someone of great influence in the world around him and the church.  I mean this guy has served some very important people by the world’s standards and has been a light in some really dark places.  What most people don’t know is the friend who pledged his life to him at a young age who was the catalyst to him being able to do many of the things he did, and that my friends is a truly epic life, because it was something where you receive no credit, no glory, and no praise, but you don’t care.  Service to the people and the world around us will cause us to live truly unique lives.  Romantics aren’t power hungry individuals who are looking to further their agendas and their dreams, they are humble people who lay down their lives and allow God to do with them what He chooses and they follow.  Romantics aren’t people with stars in their eyes waiting to be the important people who have a stake in changing the world, they are the people behind the scenes sweating and bleeding for the people around them, earning their respect by showing their love. 

Most people also believe that they are someone entitled to live an amazing life with out putting in any effort work.  We live in a world where people believe they should get the things they desire because they want it.  There is no longer a sense of humility or a sense of earning the respect of those people who have come before us.  Young people don’t respect the people who have lived longer and experienced more than them, and most adults don’t know how to mentor their children correctly because over the past few generations there has been a turn from traditional values and by default mentoring has gone the way of the dinosaurs for the most part.  Parents are throwing parties for their kids where they know alcohol and drugs will be present, sometimes they even provide the condoms for the kids because they know sex will happen at these parties.  All the while it never enters the parents minds that maybe they shouldn’t be having a party, that the fact that these kids can’t control themselves means they haven’t earned the right to experience a party yet.  We have bought into this idea that some how learning by trail and error is better than learning to submit to the people who have come before us.  I would agree with you that we all learn by trail and error to an extent, but we aren’t born with the right to make dumb choices.  Plato spoke about how it is our job as adults to provide young people with the ability to think and discern and make good choices, to deliberately teach things as black and white at a young age and then gradually introduce them to the more complex grays in life.  The main point here is you are not entitled to make stupid choices; you are not entitled to be someone who people listen too.   If we want respect, if we want influence and if you want to be taken seriously you have a difficult road ahead of you.  Along the way you’ll be given options to take short cuts, but those short cuts will slowly but surely affect you and your character.  Living a life of integrity doesn’t mean you have to be perfect, and we certainly shouldn’t expect people to be perfect, and if you’ve made mistakes that doesn’t mean you have to be left out.  But, the point here is that when people make demands and are abrasive about getting their own way, or if they are frustrated because they want to be heard and aren’t, we have to look at them and ask them if they have done the things that earn the respect of people around them?  Have they respected authority above them?  Have they served those below them with a heart of humility?  Have they showed a wisdom and maturity that deserves our focus?  Yes we need to listen to and be open to be people, but we also need to have an understanding of how to get the respect of the people around us.  If we are to be romantics, if we are to be Christians, we have to strive to be people who want to have great character.  In the midst of this a huge piece of being someone of great character is understanding the push and pull between a grace that is offered us on a consistent basis, and a faith that is dead with out works.  We are always offered forgiveness and love, we are offered a blank slate, but as we explore our relationship with a God who loves us so much that He reaches down to us, and as we explore the depth of that love, it should inspire with in us a want to push the things away from us that keep us from Him.  Pride, Jealousy, Immaturity, and Foolishness ought to be chief things that we work to push out of our lives.  Though we will fight to keep them out all our lives, our focus has to stay on Christ.  Christ has to be the reason for each movement.

In the end, wanting to live an epic life is a worthy thing, but outside of God’s providence we can’t truly accomplish such a task.  We will eventually sour the drink we have spent our life creating.  We were created to be stewards of God’s gifts for His glory, and as stewards we can only fulfill our task under the blanket of God’s mercy and guidance.   Now sometimes God will use us and we won’t even be aware that we are being used, these blind agents will be people who are going about their daily lives, maybe even doing things in the name of their own glory, and God will use their efforts for His glory (as He always does.)  However, we, as God’s redeemed people, who are aware of God’s mercy and grace, should not take advantage of that grace and act as we want when we want.  We need to submit ourselves each day to God and not take advantage of God’s grace.  Living a truly epic life, a truly unique life means living a life contrary to everything your body, heart and mind tells you that you should do.  Replacing those desires with God’s is the fight we constantly face as believers, but we need to keep fighting.  Many times the fight lays in the little things.  Gandhi once said,

“Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.”

Many times we don’t want to be faithful in the small things, we want to just take on the world.  The hard lesson we need to learn is that the world is much bigger than us, and if we are to face it and try to change it we need to have strong foundations that have been tested, tried, and found to be true.  The key to living an epic life is humbling ourselves to the point where we distinguish ourselves from a world that is constantly consuming people, longing for more.

What is Religion-
In James 1:27 it says this about Religion,

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

Many times we look at religions as big issues that we have to overcome in order to reach people in the name of Christ.  That is an unfortunate thing when you really boil down what Jesus came to do.  Jesus came to show us that a set of laws could never be the bridge that would restore humans to their creator.  Instead Jesus came to be that link, not a set of rules and not a set of laws, Jesus came as a person to be that bridge.  Now it can become confusing when scripture gives us what seems to be so many examples of what good people will do, but a key to remember in this process is that the order is supposed to go something like this.  We are lost beings searching, and wanting to be whole.  We encounter God.  When we encounter God we are faced with some questions that need answering, those questions can be anything, maybe your question is “Are you really my Father? Because my Dad wasn’t very nice to me and I have tough time believing you’re my heavenly Father because my earthly one really sucked.”  Maybe you have a different question, but whatever the question is we have to find our answer.  A friend of mine who I work with at Kensington Community Church Steve Norman informed me about this next point.  He has a friend named Abdu Murray who is a brilliant speaker and teacher (Steve is pretty amazing too!) who says everything is about cost.  Choosing Jesus is a tough thing to do because it means we have to give up a lot.  Abdu gave up a whole lot to accept Jesus, he was raised a Muslim and when he came to Christ after college and told his parents they wailed and I mean wailed and yelled at him at their house for hours, 12 hours in fact.  Abdu essentially had to live out the verse in Luke 14:25-27 where it says:

Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Those words seem harsh, but it means that when encounter God He will have answers for our questions, we just have to decide if we are willing to deal with the cost of following Him.  whether that cost is changing something about your lifestyle and realizing maybe you shouldn’t drink anymore, or maybe you need to work on not having sex in your relationships with the opposite sex.  Whatever the cost is you are going to have to give up things that are hurting your pursuit of God, and if you don’t do it now, He will put you at a cross roads further down the road and make you choose.  After we face the cost of following God, and we accept God’s answers to our questions, a relationship begins.  And it is out of that relationship that love begins between us and God, slowly we begin to realize what it means to love God and what God means when He says He loves us.  Out of that relationship real changes happen in our lives, and it is out of that desire to change, fueled by a deep love, that we should begin to see ourselves acting out our love to others.  It is in that order that the people who speak about doing the right thing want us to act.  We can’t just put up a stiff upper lip and put our nose to the grindstone and start working out our faith on our own strength.  Yes it does take work to follow God and we need to work hard, but it is first by giving control to God and submitting to Him that He then transforms our hearts.  After we conform our hearts to Him in complete surrender God then begins to credit our actions as righteousness, this is explained in Romans.  Loving God doesn’t work backwards from this point.  We might be able to go for a while by choosing to try to live right and hope that our hearts come along with us.  But with out understanding who God is and what He has done for us and really diving deeply into that truth, and without understanding that following God means we have to give up things that are keeping us from Him out of love, we won’t last long in my opinion.

Again as I said with truth we need to work out our religion in a way that engages God, but James gives us a blue print that really is something we can live by.  That creed simply is this:

If you are taking care of the needy and trying to keep yourself from being polluted by the world in the site of God, God is going to be happy and not many people are going to be finding huge wholes in your faith.

Essentially James is giving us the heart of God in a blurb.  It’s a simple philosophy to speak and moderately easy to unpack, but very difficult to live out without conforming our hearts in complete surrender daily to Christ.  It’s easy to see this truth in the life of Mother Teresa, and just think, have you ever heard of someone trashing her?  And if they were didn’t you think, “wow what a jerk!”  I mean she has the respect of everyone that has ever heart of her story, Christian or not, because people see a life that is dedicated to people.  That is the simplest and easiest way to share the gospel with people, to live a life that is about other people and not us. That is what James is saying in this passage, that it’s not that hard to live out a religion that people won’t have difficulty understanding.  We don’t have to have complex theologies or philosophies.  It’s awesome to see people with gifts in those areas worship God by trying to understand God as best they can, but if that pursuit isn’t fueled by a desire to experience more of God and is more about trying to make God smaller and easier to grasp out of a desire to seem like we are smarter then everyone else and therefore better, we are missing the point of Jesus coming to earth.  Religion is simply the social practice of our faith system and it can come in many different looks.  But, again James gives us a blue print for what the bare bones of our faith ought to be, protecting the weak and keeping ourselves from being corrupted.  Simple, easy, basic, a romantics dream right?

3.What is Truth-

I think in our lives as romantics and as followers of Christ it is important that we understand what Christ’s love looks like, what truth is, and what religion is.  I’ve touched on love and I’ll continue to play with that idea and see if we can learn more about what Love is and what it means for us.  In the following section we’ll talk about what truth is and how it can work in our lives.

The Truth-
Scripture tells us that Jesus is the truth.  Now that idea can get confusing for us in our lives, especially in a world that is so culturally rich.  A lot of times we can confuse what is familiar to us, and the truth.  Such is the case with a lot of arguments in the church.  Most people assume that the traditions in their church are the right traditions because its what they are used to, or what they grew up around.  The same is true in relationships, many of us don’t think of doing anything different in our relationships because we want to do what is familiar to us.  We’d rather go with what is familiar for a lot of reasons, the first is obviously because its comfortable, and I already mentioned that earlier being a pit fall we have to avoid, but its important to unpack the truth that can be revealed in that.  I think the fact that we look to traditions and actions as a way of defining salvation or how someone is doing in their walk gives us an interesting look into our own hearts.  Now keep in mind, I’ve spent most of my time writing about what we do and I know that.  But I’ve been referencing our actions as a way of understanding our hearts, not defining our salvation.  Actions can be an easy way of defining who is “right” and who is wrong, and that can divide us.  I think it’s important for you and me to understand my purpose for writing to you is to not divide you from people, but help us all understand how we can divide ourselves from our sin, from our selfish desires and how to more fully rely on the power of the Spirit in our lives.  In the end I believe that finding truth is a difficult process and I believe it should be a process that we wrestling with daily.  It has been clearly shown to me in my life that I am unable to define and clearly see the truth on a consistent basis, instead it takes constant interaction with the Truth (Jesus Christ) to help me keep my head clear and my eyes focused on God.  So in one sense understanding truth for us as Christians is not just a simple matter of dividing behaviors, actions, philosophy’s and theology’s into “good” and “bad” categories.  There is a mystical interaction we have to have with the Truth because we believe as Christians that the truth is living and active and that we are able to interact with it and connect to it. 

Now, that doesn’t mean that truth is something we can’t define.  It does mean that we should never be comfortable with our understanding of the truth.  We should never think that we are people who have the market cornered on truth because we go to church, have said a prayer, and live in America.  I think there is a tension we have to live in between mystic and empiricist, but at all times submitting ourselves to the person of Christ. 

In many ways the truth and what we’ve discussed about love intertwine here on so many levels because Jesus is defined both as Love and Truth in the Bible.  But I think we have to try to define some things as best we can.  I think a lot of times we try to build up a truth around our worldview as a protective barrier against any attacks so we can be comfortable.  But, that isn’t how truth should work in my opinion.  Instead we ought to be people who are always searching for new facets of the truth, because we know that when we find truth we find Jesus, no matter how that truth may change our world and how we live, or how it may destroy our previously held beliefs.  Truth is simply Jesus Christ, but that truth can come at us in many different ways.  New Scientific truths revealed to us aren’t things we have to be afraid of, instead we should embrace them and test them.  We should see how these truths affect our lives and see if they stand up.  Many times we approach looking for truth like a kid sneaking into a house, hoping we don’t do anything that will wake anyone up or startle them.  We can’t be afraid of waking people up or changing the norm.  In the end the God we serve is bigger than the world we live in, and we shouldn’t be afraid of new things or progression into new era’s.  At the same time we can’t be overtly arrogant people thinking we know better just because we live in a modern age.  We have to look backwards to gain knowledge many times, and that is an important thing.  Although I believe God is always using us here and now to transmit truth to each other in new and exciting ways, He has also spoken to us through the people who have come before us and we need to be students of those men and women because their lives and struggles are so beneficial to us. 

As Romantics we need to be people who are keeping ourselves in tune with God so that we can distinguish truth from falsehood.  We can’t be pluralistic, meaning we can’t just be care-free and say everything leads to the same place so believe what you want.  No, that isn’t an answer, pluralism is like tolerance, it sounds nice but when we simply tolerate everyone we end up not respecting anyone.  If everything leads to the same truth, then nothing matters.  We know that is a false statement because the Bible tells us almost everything matters to God in some way.  We also can become fundamentalists, people who think that we have every answer to every question, because when we boil our faith down to science we push out God and replace Him with what we do.  As Romantics we need to again walk to the point of tension and set up our tents and live there.  Because in the middle of that tension lays true faith, where our understanding drops off, faith in God begins.  In the midst of us trying our best to understand God and His wisdom, we will find that our journey leads us to a cross roads with many paths, that cross roads is the place where we choose to either rely on God or lean on some characteristic, philosophy or person outside of God that will make us feel secure.  Some of us will choose to become complete mystics and make the mystery of God our true god, becoming more obsessed with the mystical things in life rather than the tangible things.  Some of us will become as I said before, fundamentalists, choosing to rely on our own systems and understandings to make sense of the world.  Others my choose to become cynics or skeptics, people who just can’t believe that God really does all the things He says he does in the Bible.  Whatever we choose it’s important to say that being a mystic, being a fundamentalists and being a skeptic are not bad things.  They become bad when they become idols to us, or if they become our calling card, or our defining feature.  In other words, we can’t allow how we search for truth, which is ultimately how we search for God, to be the thing that defines us.  Instead it is simply the pursuit of God that needs to be the goal.  In the end we have to be all of those things I mentioned to be Romantics, we need to be skeptics at times, cynical and shrewd when we hear something we know isn’t truth, we need to be fundamental in our base understanding, but inclusive in our hearts willing to hear things that may prove us wrong.  You might be hearing me and saying, “that sounds crazy to me,” but the truth is that as a Romantic we have to be connected to the intellectual things in life, the mystical things, the relational things and all the other issues people face.  Because in between those categorical sections lays the glue that can keep us together as people, the piece the makes all of those pieces of life intertwine, Jesus Christ.  When we live in the tension of all of those things we see where they drop off and where Christ stands as a bridge to areas in our lives that we never thought connected.  Science and Religion, Mysticism and skepticism, Liberal and Conservative, Romance and Abstinence (I’m so funny)… these are all things we can achieve through Christ.  Truth in this sense isn’t a building that we have to worry about falling down, truth is the thing that bonds our life together. 

As Romantics it is important that we understand for.  There are some truths that Jesus talks about that aren’t things we necessarily need to be in touch with the Spirit to discern.  The Bible gives us examples of what is bad for us and what is good and it is important for us as romantics to live according to those principles.  We cannot waver on these issues and play in-between, we need to live lives that don’t walk the edge of stupidity or immaturity.


Truth is something that we will spend our whole lives pursuing and learning to understand better and better.  It is not something that is static for us, instead (as Rob Bell describes in Velvet Elvis) we believe that truth is living and moving in us.  Because of that fact, Truth is something we have to constantly interact with through prayer, community, study, worship, and song.