Broken and Free

Loved this message from Tullian Tchvidjian, talking about his mom (Gigi Graham Tchvidjian, Billy Graham's daughter). There are lessons here fro all of us broken people. - Your Brokenness Taught Me More Than Your Put Togetherness

Mom, your brokenness and your failures have taught me more about grace than any of your put togetherness ever did.

Sometimes we think that being good is the qualifier for us having an effective ministry… The truth is that no one is good. And our ministries become effective when we acknowledge our badness and when we live out of our brokenness. And that’s what you do.

The biblical definition of Christian growth is not what they told us it was. It’s not: I’m getting stronger and stronger, and more and more competent every day so that I need Jesus less now than I did when God first saved me—that’s not Christian growth—Christian growth is: As I get older and become wiser, I become increasingly aware of how weak and incompetent I am, and how strong and competent Jesus is and continues to be for me.

Mom, you’re honest because you’re free. And you’re free because you don’t pretend that you have it all together. And you don’t pretend that you have it all together because you understand that who you are is not anchored in what you do, or who other people think you are. It’s anchored in what Jesus has done for you.

Basis For Identity

Paul Tripp on Who You Really Are - Great stuff!

Grace Based Prayer

Well worth watching- Scotty Smith on Gospel Prayer



 HT Liberate

Grace Abounds

From @Liberatenet

A Necessary and Comforting Reminder

From @Liberate

The Meaning of Grace

From Liberate- Justin Holcomb on the meaning of grace:

Everyone Needs Grace From Everyone

From @LiberateNet

Not Our Strength

There Are No Strong Christians - Tullian Tchividjian at Liberate

In this four minute video, Pastor Tullian suggests that, really, there’s no such thing as a strong Christian. Christianity isn’t about our strength…it’s about Christ’s.

The Burden of Getting It Right

From Nathan Mann at the Liberate website - God's Will for Your Life:

“I feel like that’s God’s will for my life.” “I just need to find God’s will for my life.” “I don’t really know what God’s will is for my life.”

As a college student, these three phrases can be heard regularly from my circle of Christian friends whenever the topic of what the future holds comes up in conversation. Common in our shared Christianese, “God’s will for your life” is a mystery everyone is trying to figure out.

That’s a problem.

God’s will was never meant to be a mystical enigma that we try to decipher. It’s not a magical recipe and we need to discover and then follow in order to please God. Unfortunately, in many of today’s churches, that’s exactly what “the will of God” has come to mean. When we ask ourselves what God’s will is, there’s a subconscious follow-up question beneath it: How can I do things that will make God happy with me? Christian culture is so keen on “application”—another Christianese word that might be translated as “making ourselves better people”—that we overextend it to areas that God never intended.

But Jesus has already clearly defined God’s will:

“For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:40).

God’s will is for people everywhere to come to salvation through saving faith in the work of Jesus Christ.

But there’s more.

Look two chapters earlier, John 4:31-34:

“Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, ‘Rabbi, eat.’ But he said to them, I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, ‘Has anyone brought him something to eat?’ Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.’”

Don’t miss the tremendous implication of these verses: the overwhelming task of saving sinners was food to Jesus, his very sustenance. A task that would crush anyone else literally fed Jesus; it was his life’s mission to save the lost (Luke 19:10).

This is the profound, life-altering truth about God’s will: God’s will is Jesus’ job. It’s his sustenance. It’s done.

In light of this, we can finally be honest and admit that the question we really want to ask—the question we’re masking by asking “what is God’s will for my life?”—is simply “what do I want to do?” And that’s ok! In Christ you are free to live life without the overwhelming question mark of “am I getting God’s will right?”

Take the Easy Yoke

A prayer for today by Scotty Smith, based on Matthew 11:28-30 

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Matt. 11:28-30

Dear Lord Jesus, how can we not respond to such a grand and grace-full invitation? Your gentle, lowly heart is irresistible to us; and your “easy yoke and light burden,” alone, provide the rest for which we long. Thank you for being so welcoming, understanding, and kind.

Some of us are paralyzed from the lingering pain of old relational wounds—seemingly unable to get unstuck and free. Some of us are reeling from the impact of fresh betrayals and knee-buckling hard news. Some of us are much more lonely in our marriages than we ever were in our singleness. Some of us are undone by the injustices and evil we see paraded throughout the world.

Some of us seem permanently allergic to your grace—so unable to really believe you love us as much as you say you do. Some of us are quietly suffering the destructive shame of embarrassing weaknesses and uncontrollable obsessions. Some of us are tired, spent, and disillusioned, from the unrealistic demands and unexpected sucker-punches of serving you. ALL of us need you, and ALL of us are objects of your affection.

Jesus, we need you in this moment. Flood our hearts with your presence and peace. Grant us the assurance that you are enough. Give us the daily mercies and sufficient grace you have pledged.

Be the great Warrior of our hearts as you rebuke the devil on our behalf. Don’t let the dark one seize our current situations for spewing his toxins and accusations, lies and condemnation.

Jesus, help us walk today as a people of faith, hope, and love. Give us the wisdom and power you promise. Bring much glory to yourself, as we bring our restless selves to you. Write stories of redemption, refreshment and renewal, by your hand of mercy and might. So very Amen we pray, with thankfulness, in your most worthy and gracious name.

HT: Liberate 

Cause and Cure for Broken Relationships

From Tullian Tchvidjian at Liberate:

It doesn’t matter where you live, what you do for a living, or how you spend your free time, you have experienced, are experiencing, or will experience the wreckage of broken relationships. Infidelity, divorce, misunderstanding, fragmented workplaces, even death…these things touch us all, even in the “safe haven” of church. Broken relationships are everywhere.

But what breaks them? And how can they be restored? This is the question taken up by James in the fourth chapter of his epistle. James is a “horizontal” book, in that it is primarily concerned with the love that people ought to have and show for each other. Of course, as I’ve said before, the horizontal hinges on the vertical: where there is no faith, there can be no love.

Listen to what James says: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (4:1-4).

I can almost guarantee that you do not believe this. Not for one minute.

In November of 2012, The New York Times published an article by Lori Gottleib entitled “What Brand is Your Therapist?” In the article, Gottleib discusses something that she learned from Casey Truffo, a branding consultant:

This is something Truffo discovered in her own former private practice of 18 years, during which she saw a shift from people who were unhappy and wanted to understand themselves better to people who would come in “because they wanted someone else or something else to change,” she said. “I’d see fewer and fewer people coming in and saying, ‘I want to change.’ ”

From a branding perspective, the fix was simple. At professional-networking events or in newsletters, her pitch went from “I treat people with depression and anxiety” to “Are you having trouble with the difficult people in your life?”

Like Truffo’s patients, we all desperately desire to locate our problems outside ourselves. You know what I mean: it’s not you, it’s him. It’s her. It’s this. It’s that. That’s why we disbelieve James. When Babu Bhatt tells Jerry Seinfeld that he’s a “very bad man,” Seinfeld is stunned. “Was my mother wrong?” he wonders. We’ve all been told our whole lives that we can do and be anything we want — in short, that we’re wonderful — and that we just have to overcome those external obstacles in our lives. If we can just fix those people (or remove them altogether from our lives), alter our circumstances, elect a different President, get a new job, and so on and so forth, then — and only then — will we be free and happy. James’ words — thatwe’re the problem — are horrifying.

Unfortunately, they’re also true.

Let the Bomb Go Boom!

"The Epistle to the Romans has sat around in the church since the first century like a bomb ticking away the death of religion; and every time it’s been picked up, the ear-splitting freedom in it has gone off with a roar.

The only sad thing is that the church as an institution has spent most of its time playing bomb squad and trying to defuse it. For your comfort, though, it can’t be done. Your freedom remains as close to your life as Jesus and as available to your understanding as the nearest copy. Like Augustine, therefore, tolle lege, take and read: tolle the one, lege the other–and then hold onto your hat. Compared to that explosion, the clap of doom sounds like a cap pistol."

     - Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace

Hat Tip: Liberate

All Need to Hear

RT @liberatenet:

Because Christians and non-Christians are both sinful, all people need to hear the law.

Because Christians and non-Christians are both sinful, all people need to hear the gospel.

In Christ and the Neighbor

The Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and the neighbor. He lives in Christ through faith and in his neighbor through love.

           –Martin Luther, Freedom of the Christian 1520.

Hat Tip: Liberate

Grace is a But, Not a Therefore

"God’s grace always, always, always comes as a contradiction to what makes natural sense to us–it always comes as a but, not a therefore.....

....Not long ago a gentleman approached me after a talk I had delivered and said, “I’m 60 years-old and have had great success as a businessman and I’m here to tell you from experience that grace doesn’t work in this world.” My immediate response was, “Well maybe it appears that way only because grace isn’t from this world.”"

-Tullian Tchvidjian at Liberate

Same Message

A wise and valuable message from Tullian Tchvidjian:

A friend of mine was walking down a street in Minneapolis one day and was confronted by an evangelical brother who asked, “Brother, are you saved?” Hal rolled his eyes back and said, “Yes.” That didn’t satisfy this brother, so he said, “Well, when were you saved?” Hal said, “About two thousand years ago, about a twenty minutes’ walk from downtown Jerusalem.” This is the gospel message. It’s just as important for Christians to believe for their sanctification as it is for pagans to believe for their justification; for it is the same message, the same salvation, the same work of God. It’s just as important for the evangelical church today as it was for the reformers in the sixteenth century. Without this simple, but mind-boggling message, there is no hope, not for the sinner nor for the saint.

 The entire article that paragraph is excerpted from is amazing, and very instructive. Please follow the link to read it.

Love and Grace Trump Karma

"You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics; in physical laws every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “as you reap, so you will sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff."

Bono, “Grace Over Karma.” 

Hat Tip: Liberate