Session Notes

Bulletproofing Our Schools … With Faith:

“”Any sane culture is going to say we must move heaven and earth to get to our children early in life, before they are permanently and irreparably damaged,“ Gulker says. ”By abandoning public schools, you create a culture, a society, where your children and grandchildren can be sure they will not be safe.“Gulker is founder and executive director of an unprecedented mentoring program, Kids Hope USA, that beguiles public educators and church leaders alike with its simplicity. Volunteers from neighborhood churches are paired with an at-risk student and spend an hour a week with him or her at school: reading, doodling, working math problems, shooting hoops or just listening. The aim is to become the child’s friend, a dependable source of encouragement and love.What has stunned not only teachers and administrators, but Gulker himself, is the payoff from such a meager investment. Teachers consistently report significant improvements in attendance, truancy and academic achievement.”

This is an encouraging article on preventing criminal activities through the unconditional grace of time, fun, presence, and education.

Denver Post

Mike Jones, who has a forthcoming book, told The Denver Post that several people shook his hand and told him, “God bless you.”

“I had read a lot about the church, but there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself,” Jones told the newspaper. “It wasn’t to rub anyone’s face in it by any means. I was wanting to get some perspective, to see where they are coming from, what the magnet is.”

Haggard resigned last year as president of the National Association of Evangelicals after Jones alleged Haggard paid him over a three-year period for sex and sometimes took methamphetamine during the encounters.

Interesting how we have a double standard for grace isn’t it. We talk about grace and even (Correctly) show such along with strikingly unconditional love to the non-Christian broken in a welcoming of Haggard’s accuser to his home church. (The same church that just fired Haggard because — like all of us — he couldn’t perform…)

On the one hand, the entire story has stunningly ironic elements of, “You made your [legalism and performance based] bed, now lay in it…” Not that two wrongs make a right or anything but, maybe the experience will finally break his heart of legalism and heal him. (In any case, we can always hope that the new pastor will actually get the Gospel and rescue the congregation.) That being said though, it is a useful case study of our true beliefs here in the church so we can proclaim them to the world:

So, after all these years of mistakenly listening to Paul, let’s get this message of the Gospel straight once and for all: Now that grace and freedom has touched your life and brought you to Christ, the Jesus who died to set you free from the law now (apparently) wants you to get off your butt and perform to measure up to it?

I think the technical term for that is, “Bait and switch.” Trouble is, it’s not even that simple:

On the other hand though, Haggard has obvious talents given to him by God to do what he was doing. I’d love to see Haggard finally get the Gospel and, with all of his broken heart, be restored to ministering to others — but that’s not gonna happen either. Here in the church, we shoot our wounded; then keep them on life support so we can demand they perform anyway.

He’s as good as dead: Dead as in an outcast forever and dead as in forever consigned to the ongoing legalism (as penance and proof of a heart change) that will keep him trapped in the brokenness which was wreaking his life in first place. (Kinda like a wounded soldier being required to shoot himself dead as proof he is still alive…)

Now, we’d like to welcome Haggard’s accuser to join the same system? Do we really think Jones is that crazy? Are we???

Jason Upton Lyrics
Freedom Lyrics


Freedom!!

Back in the bible there was that old Pharaoh
Who ruled over Egypt and Israel
God spoke to Moses through fired up bushes
Said kick off your shoes and stay awhile

All of humanity was made to worship me
Pharaoh get outta my way
(God is sayin’)

Chorus

Freedom to dance
Freedom to sing
Freedom to grow
I’m telling you Pharaoh let Gods people go!

Worship now
Worship now
Worship your God (x4)
(let ‘em go)

Well, we live in a country supposedly Pharaohless
But all over town and in churches abide
Powerful weeklings who practice they’re politics
Stealing from Jesus his beutiful bride
Whether you’re Pharisees, Sadducees, heresies
You best get outta God’s way!
(God is sayin’)

Chorus

Worship now
Worship now
Worship your God (x4)
(let ‘em go)

Well, we live in a country supposedly Pharaohless
But all over town and in churches abide
Powerful weeklings who practice they’re politics
Stealing from Jesus his beutiful bride
Whether you’re Pharisees, Sadducees, heresies
You best get outta God’s way!
(God is sayin’)

Chorus

Worship now
Worship now
Worship your God (x4)
(let ‘em go)

I just ran into these lyrics this weekend and I’ve played it over a number of times. All I can add is that we need a lot more artists calling our church leadership just as clearly.

It’s time we faced the reality that the Gospel really is Jesus plus nothing. Worship is not praise — it is coming with open hands longing to be filled just as the people of old came to idols to try and get their longing for fertility etc. filled.

We worship when we come with nothing (No performance, no goods deeds, no wild eyed strategies to be good in the future, no plans to impress God and none of our irrational beliefs in our own ethical progress) and ask for everything (Someone to love us, transform us, heal us, to free us from even the demand to be good and the cognitive dissonance all of us experience when confronted with our obvious inability to measure up.)

Any one that preaches anything other then this is a human reflection of all three: Pharisee, Sadducee, Heresy. Personally, I can’t wait for the day when the growing wave of believers (who have finally had enough of all of the above) reaches critical mass and most of our pulpits stand almost empty — because the congregation has emptied them.

“Almost,” because there will still be people in those churches capable of filling those pulpits — I think a little girl out of the sunday school class singing, “Jesus loves me, this I know,” will fill it nicely.

Mainichi Daily News

If theta waves are taken as a criterion, the entire brain emits theta waves when women reach an orgasm that are close on 10 times stronger than when men climax. So, if theta waves are an indication of an orgasm’s strength, then women experience an orgasm that is physically impossible for men to go through. Putting it a little crudely, if the intensity of a woman’s orgasm was played through a man’s brain, there’s a danger that the shock to his system would kill him. That risk makes it impossible to experiment on a man at the moment. And men can never become women. But my co-author, Kaneko, used the experience of people who have undergone a sex change (either a woman born with a man’s brain or vice versa) to explain the pleasure women feel.

Just in case you ever bought into the myth that women hate sex because they get little out of it and thus avoid it, step back from your preconceptions and observe what nothing more then our shame based (and highly sex negative) socialization can do to those who biologically are clearly the beneficiaries of God’s greatest gift in terms of desire for and capacity to experience sexual pleasure.

VirtueOnline

“The thing that has sustained me through all this is God has seemed so very close that prayer has seemed almost redundant. … Sometimes God calms the storm and sometimes God lets the storm rage, and calms the child.”

Personally, “I couldn’t be happier. I think that’s the best revenge,” he said.

He said his 15,000-member diocese was healthy, but the news he seemed most eager to relay was that immediately after the luncheon he was leaving for the Sundance Film Festival, where a documentary film, featuring his story and those of four other gay families, has been nominated for a grand jury prize.

Titled “For the Bible Tells Me So,” it is about families split by their beliefs about homosexuality and Scripture. He said his own parents talked more openly to the filmmaker than they had to him after his own announcement at age 39 that he was gay and getting divorced.

Well, it’s happened again. This time it comes via the Sundance Film Festival. A new movie is released about the lives of a number of families who have had their children come out of the closet. The same tired, thirty-four year old arguments have yet again been trotted out by the left (E.g., Paul was only talking about homosexual prostitution) to try and make the Bible say God thinks homosexual sex is a wonderful idea and the same well worn rebuttal (Original design) issued by the right. The media is all over it with CNN devoting almost 20min to it.

Honestly, I wonder what’s next? “Gays can sneeze; details on channel four news at 11:00pm,” perhaps?

Frankly, it isn’t news and it hasn’t shifted anyone’s mind. It’s more of a tactic — a tactic to, yet again, pit two sides of evangelicals against each other. On the one side is the fundamentalist right ranting about how Gays are breaking the law of God. On the other is the liberal left trying to show how the law of God is actually not being broken. Strangely, neither side seems to see that they are both on the same side — and it’s the wrong one — and it’s making them both look like idiots.

Even more strangely, neither side has figured out that making them look like idiots was the whole point. As long as they are debating their respective standing as to the rules, they are essentially neutralized and the message of the Gospel is going nowhere.

A message that would clearly say:

God loves you regardless of what you have ever done or failed to do, He just loves you for no good reason and so do we.

He has set you free from the law — and that freedom is total — so that you would no longer have to run from relationship with Him based on your obvious inability to be good as measured by such.

He knows what it means to be fully human and fully alive and longs for you to move closer to such and thus closer to the fulfillment you were created for.

The gay life is so much less then what you can have — can we walk with you and love you towards all that God has for you?

But, of course, it’s just so much more fun to measure ourselves with the wrong measuring stick that the, “Healing of the nations,” can wait…

God’s Will for My Life Part 2 of 3:

“Excuse the cliché of a sports analogy, but I really think this’ll be helpful. Think of your life as a football game. The first 20 years could be thought of as your warm-ups — you’re getting ready for the game. The second 20 years is the first half of play. During your 40′s you make a few halftime adjustments, so that your second half — 50 and beyond — is strong and powerful. As a male (as is the case with females too), in each stage of”

This is a good guideline. we need to be open to redirection at any time in life I find.

God’s Will for My Life Part 3 of 3:

“The key to each fulfillment of calling was a willingness to say ”yes,“ and a trust in Him who calls. Maybe people recognize your skills, and maybe they don’t. The most important thing is that God knows what you are capable of, and will equip you for the task. All you have to do is take that first step of faith. Stay open to His direction and re-direction, and He will take you on an adventure that satisfies your unique design and surpasses your wildest dreams.Blessings,JOHN THOMAS

This is a good article which encourages one to seek their own answers with confirmation from others. Rather than getting discouraged and immobilized by confusion/unhelpful advise one needs to be open to being redirected.

Who’s Calling?:

“Discernment has its own spiritual laws, and of course they have to be followed. If you want to call that a method, you can, but it’s not like what you’ve been calling methods. Those so-called methods are just gimmicks — not ways of discerning God’s will, but ways of avoiding discernment.”“

This is a good article with the exception of the deceitful heart/ sin for believers aspects. It discusses various ways to discernment.

Telling Young Children About Miscarriage:

“If you do suffer a miscarriage, I’d encourage you to be honest with the girls. Tell them that God knew this baby was very sick, and so He decided to take him to be with Him in heaven. Grieve the loss together, but if you find yourself overwhelmed by intense feelings of sadness, share those feelings with your husband and your pastor, not with your girls. A two- and four-year-old aren’t mature enough to understand or process a parent’s intense grief.

I Never Knew You, Still I Love You:

“there were others who provided deep comfort. As hard as it was to repeat the story of our loss, our friends’ responses — prayer and practical help — lightened our burden. ”We understand that this is a real loss of a real child,“ wrote one, ”and that you are grieving. It is amazing how much sadness the heart can hold for someone whom one never got to know.“ These words, written by someone who lost a child to miscarriage years earlier, were further permission to grieve … and grieve deeply.”

This is a good article on giving others permission to grieve. It is unbelievable that one can feel grief/love more for one, who is not even known, compared to knowing a grandmother, in my case, all your life.