Library of Thoughts

“ Simplicity and Purity of devotion to Christ ”… A call for faith to make it’s home in Christ alone. A challenge to replace  a self elevating life with a God elevating life. It’s simple, because it focuses on a person, and it’s pure because it leaves no room for any other obsession!  Stop and look at yesterday. Cast your minds eye to time spent, thoughts gathered, and passions directed in that 24hr period. As a follower, was some of your time spent being absorbed in the “blueprint” of the finished work of Christ? If it was, then you likely set your heart right to filter the place of everything else. Rejected other blueprints, turned away from other devotions. Pride has found a ready home in the discipleship movement. Decades of happy activity helping others mature in Christ has led to a murky devotion, a lack of simplicity, and way to many blueprints.  I am guilty of it, as are you. Overlays on the gospel, and complexities of plan stealing a heart of de...

The false dichotomy of grace vs truth is prevalent in the western church. It’s frequently seen in my church. We pit grace as the undeserved work of God in our lives against truth, which is confrontational and requires action. But it is not an either/or choice in terms of how we view our lives as disciples. It is just easier to choose one over the other. “I’m striving for obedience”, or “I choose grace”. So we get woo’d into choosing pleasing God over trusting God, or the opposite. They are not in opposition, but in partnership. There is tension in our understanding of them, but not in the reality of them. For they are two facets of the person of Jesus Christ. As John tells us Jesus was, “Full of grace and truth.” Not only descriptors of Christ, but of His glory. The emanation of His greatness. So vast and immeasurable that we had to create a word that did not define it, but described the eternal experience of it. Blasted backwards like the guitar scene in Back To The Future. O...