Listening to some sermon a thought process started and ended its way here to this prayer over my live.
My prayer is that when I get to heaven and I’m held accountable for my life and God asks me what I’ve done with it. My response won’t be “I did my best.” but rather “God you did your best.”
About a month ago the PH Champs went through this thing about what a leaders greatest fear is, which we found to be to fall into a shadow mission - anything off from the mission God has called us to. That was good and all however, last night during my QT I found my greatest fear and it was in Judges 16:20. It’s the story of Samson and its just after his hair gets cut off and he is about to go beat the Philistines down as usual but v20c “…he did not know that the LORD had left him.”
That is my greatest fear that I wouldn’t know if the Lord is with me or has left me. I think it came down to the relationship Samson had with God. I believe that he started off well but somewhere along the line he fell off the bandwagon. When he is young and without his incredible strength he was doing things right (to some extent) or else why would God bestow power on him? After this power is placed on him, things start to go downhill, he starts getting vengeance for himself and the way he sees fit (15:3). There was no consultation with God. So that was the start of his decent to the point where he did not know if the Lord had left him. There was a happy ending, somewhat, Samson’s eyes get gouged out goes to prison there he realizes how much he needs God and at a banquet he asks God to strengthen him once more and collapses a pagan temple and kills everyone inside including himself.
For me this scares me, will I ever get to the point where I’m so distant from God that I don’t know if He is here or not. This is my fear and my driver. My fear, cos if I start doing things my way I’m screwed. My driver cos I don’t ever want to end up like Samson (far away from God) that it’s driving me to God, and that relationship, that dependence on Him, His judgment, His methods, His will.
I want to know Him so closely that it becomes a sixth sense. It’s like when you can just feel someone’s presence in the room, someone who you’re really close to like a family member or a BFF forever. You know when they leave to go the toilet or a snack even though they say nothing or make it obvious by making noises as they go but just walk out silently and you know they have gone. You just know, you can’t smell, see, hear, feel or ??taste?? them go (I thought I’d go with all five senses cos taste would feel left out). That’s the way I want to be with God that even if He steps out of the room for a toilet break – I’ll know, or even in the loudest, busiest, craziest situations and He goes to grab a bite to eat – I know. I don’t need anything or anyone to tell me He is gone cos I just know.
This whole thing scares me cos if I fail in this area, I fail in every area. God’s call for all of our lives is to have a relationship not fulfill a mission. If I succeed in my mission, not falling into a shadow mission for my life but sacrifice my intimacy with God, I may as well have played pokemon on my DS my whole life, or played CS till the day I die. It pointless to trade a relationship with a mission.
This whole thing made me ask myself a few questions. How is my relationship with God? How is my relationship with God, really? Do I know Him? Do I really know Him? To me what do I desire more: a deep relationship with God or the fulfillment of a mission? To me what do I really desire more: a deep relationship with God or the fulfillment of a mission?
You may think I’m a spastic for asking myself the same questions but with the word really in them to make myself seem more reflective and deep, but when people ask you ‘How are you going?’ the standard, pre-thought about, textbook answer comes out as a reflex. You don’t think about it, it just does - ’How are you going?’ ‘Not too bad’. Then when they ask again ‘How are you really going?’ you answer honestly and openly.
So here are the questions I asked myself honestly and openly again. How is my relationship with God, really? Do I really know Him? To me what do I really desire more: a deep relationship with God or the fulfillment of a mission?
Life is full of big, honest questions that we must ask ourselves and most of the times these are the things that stretch and grow us the most. For me at the moment the question God has asked me is “Am I being a good leader or am I doing my all to help release the potential in the people under me?” There is a big difference a good leader means you can lead people from point A to B. A GPS is a good leader it helps millions of people get from A to B each day but a GPS can’t release the potential in people. So I am helping release potential in people? How effective am I? What more can I do? Who should I helping to release the potential in? What am I doing to help release my potential? That’s the questions that have been bothering me and making me think over the past week or so.
If we aren’t regularly messed up by the Word of God, we need to check our heart condition.
Here is a question that God asked me after watching an anime that explored the same thing. “If you had one wish for happiness, what would it be for?” Let me rephrase that for you, ‘What one thing do you place your happiness in?’ the thing that once you get you’d be happy. I’m referring to happiness in the sense that once you get that one thing you’re set, that if nothing else went right you’d look to that thing and be happy, that if you were to die today you’d die happy. It’s one of those questions that if you answered honestly you don’t want to answer, that you fear to know what your answer is because once you say it you realize how self centered you really are, that the answer is rarely for anyone else but me. We can blame the world for instilling in us the culture of ‘me first’ that the culture tells us that if you had $100 million dollars that you’d be happy, that if you famous that you’d be happy, that if you had the girl/guy of your dreams that you’d be happy, or that position of power, or that you were the best in something. This is the answer for some people.
All these things are good, but if that’s the one thing you are waiting to come along to be happy then we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and rethink this thing through. Life is too short to be chasing these meaningless things, that all can be lost in an instant.
Just had one of the biggest wake up calls in regards to my intimacy with God. A sermon I was listening to said something that I’ve heard a million times then gave it an example that made me take a long hard look at myself. The thing was this; ‘Our Christian walk comes down to one thing – intimacy. Not the accomplishments we have reached, the tasks we have done, the people we have saved etc. it comes down to intimacy.’ Now we have all heard that before and they usually use David as the ideal example as he is described as a man after God’s heart. Here is where it really hit home, the example that was used not the typical David example but it was Judas. It went something along the lines of this, ‘Judas performed miracles, cast out demons, healed the sick, saved people. Judas stayed when people left, he gave up everything to follow Christ, he did so many things for Jesus yet he is in hell.’
Will I be like Judas? Or like David?
This is something that I shared with the PH champs last weekend. I got some pretty good feedback and thought that it would be good to post. NOTE: its now 34 from 03/05/09 to the end of the year not 36. Also regardless of what people say I’m not artsy it was a box + mentos + ribbon. That’s all.
I’ve only got about five minutes so I’m going to cut to the chase go into deep and meaningful mode and just talk about what I wanted to talk about. All I want to talk about is the number 36. God told me about this number on the Sunday night after LG after our discussion about stewardship. This number over the last week has really impacted and changed the way I think and do things and has really simplified LG for me.
The significance of this number is that in 36 weeks 2009 will be over. That from today on you only have 36 more weekends to grow, to nurture, to affirm, to encourage, to rise up, to make any sort of difference in your LG. That in 36 weeks we would have either let 36 opportunities slip by or we would have used 36 opportunities to the fullest. In 36 weeks 2009 will be no more. Since we are on the subject of numbers here are some stats that give the number 36 more impact. In this team there are 11 in total, three of which are planned to take a more supervisory roles for each university as we wish to rise up student leaders (Chris, Lisa and Leon), of the remaining eight there are five that are graduating at the end of 2009 (Rosie, Mae, Julie, Sop and myself), this leaves three (Tim, Trung and Tash). This means we really have to uses the remaining weeks to rise up the next generation. Whether we are champs, LGL, UL whatever we each have 36 opportunities to make a change in our LG
For each of you I have a gift. Under the cover of the box there is a note written there which reads ‘This is how many weeks left to make the most of every opportunity’. In the box there are 36 mentos. Each mentos represents one week, one opportunity. I’m going to ask you to do a really simple task and that is as each week passes by I want you to take one mentos out, eat it, bin it, I don’t care. As you do take time to reflect on how you have used that one week, that one opportunity to build something great in your LG.
There is a second part to the gift, a picture of your LG. Each week you take a mentos out and think about the week that just past it’s these people that you are analysing, critiquing, scrutinizing, examining, and breaking down every part of LG for. It’s these lives that we are using every week, every opportunity to grow, mature, rise up and build into something that will last the test of time.
As I said before there are 36 mentos in the box but today it has been cut down to 35, so take it home, take out a mentos and as you do, reflect, think, analysis how you used this one week, this one opportunity to build your LG into the Godly community that we are strive for and how you have invested into the people in your LGs.
Hope all this made some sort of sense usually I suck at writing and it was written as I would have said it.
Ok so in my previous post I said I’d blog about the topic ‘growing up’ and I’m going to …NOW. So at the end of last yr I got two prophecies both on the same topic of growing up. The first one was ‘grow up’ and the second was ’stop mucking around’. Both within the span of approx one month. So I thought I’d better listen and start doing something about it. I took big chunks of time thinking through how I could grow up and become mature like the leaders that I look up to. I looked at all the people who influenced me and those I looked up to analysising how they did thing, what they did, how they responded etc. trying to find out what a mature person would do. I also looked at what I did do that i needed to grow up from. This helped heaps in the question of what a matured person would do cos I’d just look at what I did and just do the opposite. After all this I thought I had the perfect formula of maturity and how to achieve it, how long it would take and what it would look like.
Then came that day when God (as He usually does) messes with everything we have been trying to do. He gave me this thought “Will you ever become ‘mature’?” It was a little wierd cos everything I was thinking/analysising for the past few months was to become mature. During a shower think this is what I believe God really was trying to tell me. Maturity can never be reached.
Maturity is a concept that is only valid when its compared to something else. Everytime you reach a point where we think we are mature its only because we can look back at how immature we were. So 2 or 3yrs down the track we will look back on this time now and think again how immature we were. Also if we think we are mature we can always find someone else who is more mature making us immature. So in the end of the day if we ever think we are mature we really are immature for thinking we are mature… think about it. The thing we shouldn’t be trying to acheive isn’t maturity but growth. The fact that people call themselves/others mature/immature is measured by the amount of growth that they have acheived over a certain period of time with respect to a standard (for all you nerds this can be written as: ΔG/t wrt k [where G is growth, t is time and k is a constant]). Therefore we need to define the standard. There are two options someone of immaturity or someone of maturity and depending on this we define ourselves (as either mature or immature).
So here comes the most important question where have we set our standard? If we set it as a person who is more mature than ourselves then our level of growth will forever be capped by their level of maturity. If it is set at someone lower than ourselves we are also capped by their maturity because for us to be mature we only need to stay one step ahead of them. Then by these two statements there is nobody in the entire world we can pick that won’t cap our growth. BUT if we set God as our standard our growth can NEVER be capped.
When we set the standard so high we lift our game, we aim higher and even when we miss we still get so far and grow so much. Higher standards mean we train longer, push ourselves further and go the hard yards. So it comes back to this question again – Where have we set our standard? Furthermore - What are we doing to acheive it?
So my blog really died but lately God has sorta prompted me to get it going again. I thought I’d better listen to Him so I’m going to try and make this a bit more regular. Ok lets get into it…
I’m so guilty of this (selfish thinking), at times I think the world revolves around me or should. This train of thinking all started from something really small, something looking back make me think ‘how retarded of me’. So here is the stiuation. I thought being so important I didn’t need to pick up the house phone, and the less important people in the house would. In the end it resulted in an arguement because the phone rang out. The reasoning aside and who was at fault God spoke to me saying ‘What makes me so important that I am number one?’ I didn’t pick up the phone because I thought “I” was too busy, “I” was doing something more important or ”I” wasn’t the closest, it was all cos I thought I was number one and didn’t need to ‘lesser’ tasks. When it came down to it getting up and getting the phone would have taken me 1min max compared to the 10min arguement about who was at fault. Pretty small right?
Well, during my shower think (shower think = thinking in the shower, its actually really good to just sit there for an extended period of time thinking while letting the water run over you, this is really good in winter when you sit under the hot water late at night… slight tangent but you should try it)… ok during my shower think I thought about times in my life when I was a selfish thinker. Most if not all of the times when I messed up real good it came down to my selfish thinking. I thank God for them cos I did grow up (I’ll blog about me growing up another time… if anyone makes a comment about this I’m so going to stab you) and mature heaps. However, there is one bad side affect about thinking selfish, its that its at the expense of someone else and most (not all) of the time its someone whom we love/care deeply about.
I don’t know about you but it really makes me think each time I do something now the implications of my selfish thinking. When we think selfishly we take something from them that we can’t return or fix up. It has really made me think that when I have the selfish mentality how much others around me really do lose.
I pray I won’t have selfish thinking.
As I’m writing this I’m still experiencing the trail ends of a God moment. Today I was talking to a friend about how God has a race set out for us and how its ours to run and its different to everyone else’s and that we shouldn’t compare etc. At the end of it all they were grateful cos they were a bit down and then mocked me cos thats what everyone does. But near the end I got a bit of an eye irritation and my nose became runny (this a manly way of saying I was crying not full crying cos I’m a real man but the eyes were watering) because God was really moving and there was something more happening.
After we finished I went away still half shell shocked that during that God moment of about 5-10mins God moved so much. I just sat in awe of God for the next 30mins totally zoned out and probably looking like a complete retard to anyone who saw me. That case was strengthened when I kept opening my mouth to say ‘thanks God’ but then would close it cos I didn’t know exactly how to express it. In the end it was really good, God is truly good. Made me take a step back and realise that even though we think we are saying the right things God is really giving us the words and setting the atmosphere for it to happen.
