Sermon on the Mount

"Now when he saw the crowd he went up on a mountianside and sat down. The disciples came to him and he began to teach them saying;

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for rightesousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted becuase of rightesousness for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you because of me. For great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

Matthew 5:1-12

I am required to memorize Matthew 5-7 for a class. Now I started off thinking that I would just be able to get away with memorizing it and not letting it memorize me. haha. That is not seeming to happen though. I can't help but meditate on what I am memorizing. It seems to be something I am breathing in now throughout the day.

So I am going to go devotionally through the book of Matthew. I am probably going to blog about it since that's what I do. I hope you enjoy it. If you don't well then don't come to my blog for a while because that is what I will probably focusing on for a while.

Something Misunderstood.

This morning I got overwhelmed with the reality that I feel like the church is faltering.

I am reading a book and I just got this overwhelming feeling that it's all hopeless. Now I write this while knowing who Christ is. I write this while having collided with Christ on countless accounts.

He is the truth.

But there are days where my sin gets the best of me. Where I feel like I am swallowed up in my transgressions and in the hopelessness of this world. It's kind of like quick sand. I feel like I am reaching out to something that I can't really reach and my lungs are filling with sand.

On these days my soul aches and the darkness of the spiritual realm becomes overbearing. I don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to interact in community. I don't want to live. I want to be what I feel. I want to let the darkness erode my being along with my soul. The hardest part of this process is the people that I am surrounded with. I try to communicate what I am going through and laughter precedes it because I am being over dramatic or unrealistic. When I get laughed at I pull back fast and I walk away and feel misunderstood. Sometimes the deepness of the spiritual warfare cannot be explained but needs to just be, and hopefully you will get through it. This spiritual warfare should be addressed communally but when your community finds you fantastical either because they are afraid of having these conversations or they simply just do not believe you, it's hard to be transparent.

I want to stick my head in the sand like an ostrich and let the world pass me by, but I know that I need to sit up and put my feet on the ground. I need to go through the day even when the day seems to allude my senses. I can no longer become lost in the opinions of what the Christians and the non Christians all push and pull around on their bandwagons.

So I will grapple for the truth as I sit here and combat the spiritual darkness that pierces every pore of my body.

It's one life that defeated the darkness and that life is the life that I find my identity and dive into.

Hey, I got engaged.

I have seen and heard about so many churches and how they have been slowly dying. These churches were at one point in history the thriving, communal place to be, but for some reason the old is really getting old and the newly birthed churches are blowing up. I sit back, in a town of ten thousand with at least five different denominational churches and realize even now that these churches are not reaching a good portion of the demographic. If it’s like this in Lincoln where one of the best Bible College’s remains what is like in other small towns where the strong presence of a bible college is missing? So I must come to some conclusion for the declension in the life of the church. I could easily say it’s the culture’s fault, but when has that excuse ever worked? I know I need to look deeper and the reality that I keep coming back to is that the church does not know how to dance.

I have always loved to dance with a partner, because it makes things so much more interesting. Everyone dances differently and so you get a different kind of dance with every single person. You could be dancing the same dance with two different people and it will leave you in a different state of being. The most interesting thing that I have noticed about a dance is that someone needs to lead. Without a leader the dance does not seem to go anywhere and body parts seem to flay in destructive ways. Heads bump into each other, arms flay and legs get twisted. Someone inevitably gets hurt and both of the embarrassed dancers walk off the dance floor, not only licking their physical wounds but also licking their wounded pride. But, when there is leader present the dance becomes a beautiful wonder. There is a movement that the audience can not deny and it sweeps both the dancers and the spectators.

The church has lost its vigor to dance. It has lost it's want to partner with the Holy Spirit and follow the Holy Spirit around in a erotic and sensual dance that will leave the church intimately reformed.

Missing the Holy Moment

I recently just went to a Switchfoot concert. The last time I went to one of their concerts was when I was a junior in high school in Chicago. The funny thing is that I have a specific memory from that concert.

I went with a couple of student community leaders from our student group and a couple other high schoolers. I remember that Nick and I were sitting on a bench at 11 o 'clock at night and we were talking about colleges. I still was wavering from the Bible College realm to the University realm. Journalism or Ministry? Nick told me that he thought I would grow more efficiently at a Bible College with a Christian roommate than with a roommate that came back to the room drunk.

Weird how that conversation stuck in my mind. It seemed to be a necessary Holy Moment, even though I didn't realize it.

Well I went to this Switchfoot concert with Waylon and his youth group. It was fun because the concert floor wasn't packed so you didn't feel like you were being suffocated by people. We heard Ruth, Reliant K and then Switchfoot came on stage.

There seemed to be a weight to there music that didn't seem to be found in the other bands. So we were watching them and thoroughly enjoying them and the singer started singing a song and started moving through the audience. He ended up about ten feet away from us and it was amazing how people gravitated to him and tried to touch him. It was a weird reality.

So the lead singer was having this moment in the audience and most of the audience was captivated by this moment. They understood the weight in the air and the mass behind the message. But, there were those who didn't get it, and didn't care much for the message. They were loud and obnoxious and extremely distracting.

It wasn't just that they were distracting it was that they were distracting the community from the Holy moment presented. From the Holy message that was trying to be relayed.

How many times do we miss the Holy Moment because we are not looking for it, or because we like hearing our own voices more than anything?

Does the church ever get to lost in it's own 'mission' and 'vision' that it misses the holy moment?

The Beauty of Sacrafice Cont'd.

So, I was preaching at a local church near Lincoln and the topic that we were trying to hit was; What does sacrifice look like in your daily life?

There was a question-answer part of the sermon at the very end, and the question above was given to me. I actually received most of my questions a couple days beforehand so I could think about how I would respond in the moment.

While thinking about sacrifice, the first thought was children. So many times parents sacrifice everything for their children. They bank everything on their children's future because they want to see and give them the best.

God is kind of like that. He sacrificed everything so that we might have life, and have it to the fullest.

While this sacrifice actuality is looked upon negatively at first, when one looks deeper into this idea there is something much greater.

There is Beauty. This great beauty is the after effect of this sacrifice. This beauty emulates the life that is given after the death has been taken.

And this beauty cannot be tamed. Just like the life that is given cannot be tamed. It can be self-disciplined to obey it's master, but if the master has sacrificed everything for it's servant than the beauty of it cannot be denied. The loyalty of the servant cannot be deterred or hidden. The servant who fully grasps this beauty and this life will do anything and everything for it, including sacrificing anything and everything for it.

We can try to look at this life in a purely logical way but logic cannot analyze and determine beauty. It cannot take beauty and tame it. It cannot tell beauty where to go and what to do because there is too much overflow. True beauty cannot be tapped.

This is where I turn when I see despair and desolation around me. When I watch the news and all I hear about is more school shootings and sexual abuse. When I see sin encroaching in every relationship that I am in.

I go back to the sacrifice that was made and the life that was birthed and the beauty that was and is clearly showcased and overflowing.

Because there truly is beauty to sacrifice.

There is beauty in sacrafice.

More on this later.

On my own terms

So I went to a random class yesterday and heard this really smart, soon to be professor, teach.

And he kept using this phrase that I caught onto.

"On my own terms"

He was referring to Christ and was discussing the reactions of the many people in the Old and the New Testament in concern to this phrase.

I have always realized this and even lived it out myself but sometimes you hear something old for the first time again. When I look into the New Testament and see all of Christ's interactions with people it's amazing how many times people come to Christ with "their own terms."

And how many times do I come to Christ "on my own terms" hoping that what I imagine will come true. What I fantasize and romanticize might be the truth when in all actuality I'm totally off mark.

I wonder if we come to Jesus on our own terms as the church?

I wish none of this had happened... So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. -J.R.R. Tolkein

Jews and socialism

A freshmen just asked me if I hated Jews...

huh?

also I believe that our country is heading towards the slippery slope of socialism, this I concur from the fact that I think Hilary Clinton will get the presidency because there is a governmental conspiracy.

The government is unfortunately not for the people anymore.

Sorry to break the news I'm sure I'm not the first, but if i disappear you all know why.

Deterioration

Do you ever feel like you are slowly deteriorating? I mean your insides. On the outside you look normal, but the insides are being slowly chipped away. Most of us don't really know why that is, so we try to use a natural medication for a supernatural epidemic.

However, I don't really think it works out, because there will always be that one moment when we will be left with ourselves. There will be an eventual moment when everything is torn away and we are left with what we have and want we sadly do not have.

This is why movies like Garden State, Elizabethtown, The Last Kiss, and The eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are so stinking popular because, they are clips of that slight moment. This moment seems to strip us of our doing and forces us to reckon with ourselves.

This reality strips us naked and leaves us out to freeze in the cold of loneliness and desperation. This cold ripples our skin and strips the marrow from our bones. It melts our fleshy surface, and leaves us with our soul to dry up in the wind.

While we are caught up in this moment we have a decision to make. Now I could be very limited and tell you that you only have two choices, but that would be very sardonic of my own existence. So I cannot give you only two choices but I must realize that you do have to make a choice because repetition is not truly possible, and the ascetic cannot be lived out.

Alas, we are called to make a slight decision to determine how we are going to react to our 'real' selves if they even exist, outside ourselves.

A Dream

So, I had yet another dream. This is not unfamiliar in the life of one Alison Higgins, but this specific dream was more like a parable than a weird dream.

Let me paint a picture for you of what I saw.

The setting was a street. There was nothing around except for two lawn chairs on the opposites sides of the streets. One was white and orange and one was lime green and white. The street was in a dessert and there were mountains in the distance.

And a man walked up in a blue button down shirt. He was older and if you looked closely you would see that he had been weathered by the storms of life. However, if you looked closely at his eyes you would see the laugh lines around his eyes. He sat down in the lime green chair.

Then along came a young man. This man was wearing a pink athletic shirt. There wasn't many things defined in this young man. All I know is that he was big. Not fat but big.

He sat down in the orange and white chair.

There was a short exchange between the both of them.

"I really like your shirt," the young man said to the old man.

"Well, that's interesting. I would be willing to lend it to you."

Then suddenly the young man and the old man both took their shirts off and switched.

They put on the other's shirts and walked away. Leaving the two chairs and the sun setting in the distance.