tuesday, september 5th, 2006

i just found this in my old jesusy-blog archives.

i think i wrote it and never posted it, or wrote it and posted it on my old myspace which i then deleted when i was convicted about spending too much time on there.

...regardless.

this is why i switched to a biblical counseling major in the first place. this is why i should enjoy writing papers like the one i'm supposed to be writing right now. but i don't anymore. i am tired of doing this because i'm required to. i miss writing about the Word because i am just.that.excited, thankful, joyful, and overwhelmed at how good the Lord is to me. but here i sit, ten more pages to go, and i found this as i was looking for an excerpt i could take and put in my "personal application" section. i'm sick of theology for the sake of theology. i want to know my Jesus again like i did when i was eighteen, before i came to master's, before i knew how to define "the sufficiency of scripture", before i knew what calvinism was, before i knew how to write papers like this and answer everything right and talk about how God is so great without even feeling an ounce of change in my heart.

i fear myself becoming jaded, and i don't want to do any of this anymore. i want to go back to monterey and spend time with high school girls helping them apply the bible to their lives and showing them the love of Christ with mine. i want to talk to them about how real Jesus is, how the love of God transform lives, how He is so much more worthy of our time and attention than anything else ---

but i sit here, frustrated, exhausted, with a headache and an empty stomach, trying to finish this paper so i can graduate.

Lord, help me to do this because i love You.

give me a passion and fire for Your Word like i had three years ago.

thank You for reminding me of the fact that the Bible is true and real and living and active, regardless of how old i am, where i live, or how close to You i feel at the time. thank You for reminding me of truth. Your Word is truth. let me speak (and write) of it with joy and thankfulness.

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9/5/06

God has been showing me, more and more lately, the important reality that I NEED the Word in my life. How can I call myself Christian – a true follower of Christ – unless I KNOW His words… unless I MAKE them a priority, if I desire to be like Jesus? The desire will come out in my actions. My actions can’t get to a place of emulating Christ unless I am spending time with Him, hearing from Him. My prayer needs to be, and is, that my desire would become strong for His word, and it would show in my actions. Not just in the way that I act, but in the priority I place in being in the Word. Do I really believe that His words bring life? That they are my daily bread; that I honestly need them to survive? This week, I have seen that it is actually true… as much as I try to convince myself that I am fine without them. Oh sure, I can physically live without the Bible… but eventually, I know that a few months down the road, I will not be at a place spiritually that I want to be. However, what God has been showing me lately is that every day I think that my agenda is more important than God’s, and I fail (or don’t even try) to make time for His Word… that I am that much more focused on myself, my wants, rather than on God’s… and Satan gets an opportunity to get in there, and convince me, that I’m okay.

I’m not.

The other day at church, our youth pastor was talking about how important it is to show others love, put them first, and have humility. He wanted us to commit to doing two things that would bless someone. Well, that is great, and loving others should be a natural fruit of living a Christian life… but we can only grow in that fruit of love and humility by abiding in the vine. By being in the Word. We cannot bear the fruit of the Spirit by our own mere motivation. It’s the fruit of the SPIRIT – NOT the fruit of “Megan”.

It’s so clear in scripture:

“Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me, you can do nothing…”

This is straight from the mouth of Jesus – not something I just came up with to sound intelligent!

God MUST want us to understand this – he repeats it almost three times in these verses. “REMAIN IN ME. REMAIN IN THE VINE. REMAIN IN MY WORDS.” They all go hand in hand, you cannot do one without the other. It is so true, and this verse makes it clear: The best way for me to show love to my friends and family, is to make it a PRIORITY for me to be in the Word. The more I read the Bible, the more my mind and heart is given the opportunity to be transformed to be like God’s. And His mind, and heart, is for others.

“If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” John 15: (emphasis mine).

Does this mean, that if we keep reading the Bible, that we will get whatever we want when we pray for it? Um, I think the obvious answer is no. But then why would Jesus say something like this? Does this mean He wasn’t being sincere? Of course not! The answer is simple, but takes a lifetime to truly grasp: If we remain in God’s Word, the things that we ask for will not be out of selfishness, but out of love! It can’t be done any other way. On my own, with my own me-focused heart, I will NOT be prone to asking for God’s will.

But, if I am constantly reading, meditating on, praying through the words of God – my will, will start to be transformed to His.

(I just have to point this out here, how amazing it is in the way that scripture works together: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world (which tells you to only look out for yourself; that everything is about your wants, needs, and desires; that YOU decide what is right and wrong…) but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. Then your will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – His good, pleasing, and perfect will.” Romans 12:2, emphasis and parenthesis, mine.)

There is no other way for our mind to be renewed than by scripture. By God-breathed, Holy-spirit inspired, straight-out-of-the-mouth-of-Jesus words. There is nothing here on earth that can benefit us, the others around us, and matter more for eternity than to find out what our Heavenly Father wants for our lives by spending time reading His words…

I have so much more to say on this, but I will put the rest in another blog, since its so long already. Hey... if you know me, I write a lot. :D and I don’t even know how all this came about. I was just looking for this one verse, kept reading, and God was like “BAM, I have something to show you.” And I just started writing, and kept writing, and getting excited, and therefore, I just decided to share it with anyone who is reading this. To say the least, I was pretty surprised and eager to get this out. Now, I need to pray that I will allow God to let this sink into my own life to where I don’t even have to think to myself the stupidest question of all time: “let’s see. The bible, or myspace?”

Pfft. :D

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(praise the Lord for the days when i didn't care about being cheesy or taking myself too seriously...)