Acts 13:9, "Then Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elymas (the sorcerer) and said, "You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord? Now the hand of the Lord is against you. You are going to be blind, and for a time you will be unable to see the light of the sun." Immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he groped about , seeking someone to lead him by the hand. When the proconsul saw what had happened, he believed, for he was amazed at the teaching about the Lord." Acts 9:3, "Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him (Saul). He feel to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" Who are you, Lord? Saul asked. "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do..." Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing...and later...Saul, the Lord-Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here-has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit." Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul's eyes, and he could see again. He got up and was baptized." There are a lot of interesting parallels in these two stories. Do you see how Paul uses the method of his own conversion to proclaim the gospel to the proconsul? Paul was a vicious enemy of the gospel; Elymas was also a man working against the ways of the Lord-both were effective in hindering the spread of the gospel: Paul as a persecutor, Elymas as a false prophet. Paul was struck with blindess and heard the voice of the Lord, leading to his conversion and call into Christian service. Paul struck Elymas with blindness as a sign of the gospel he was preaching to the proconsul, leading to his conversion and belief in the gospel. What can we learn here? I think that, at some level, whatever means God used to bring you to repentance can be useful in leading others to Christ. I think we need to embrace the work of grace in our lives and seek out opportunities to minister to others in a similar context. Will God always have us minister from the familiar? No. But I think there is definite power when we proclaim the power of God to minister to a person, or situation, that we have personally seen manifested in our own lives. Simple Application: Is your grace encounter leading you to extend the love of God to others, or is it just an exhibit in your personal museum of spirituality?

Why is consistency so often replaced with complacency? It's almost like it takes over. You desire to consistently do a thing, and instead it seems like the only thing that is consistent is the complacent. I wonder what happens in the transition? What motivates a thing to become stagnate and eventually forgotten, needing a jump-start intervention later on? Do we train ourselves to rely on our own personal focus intervention to set things right again, jumping from peak to peak, rather than being steadily taken on a journey from one stop to the next? I think things get damaged in the process of setting ourselves up on a mountain top and having to jump all the way back up again when we fall off. We need to stop relying on the "jump" to redeem us, to put us back on track, or to make us consistent-AGAIN! We've got to find the balance of being consistent-which means finding the triggers for whatever causes the complacent to swell and suck the breath out of a life of consistency, whether it's because of routine, boredom, a lack of vision, pride, spiritual emptiness, or whatever it might be... Simple Application: Are you being consistent? A person of prayer? A person in the Word? A good spouse? Dedicated to God's plan for your life? Join me in fighting complacency!

The fact that I have an affinity for fast food is no secret. I'm sad to say that it is a thing of the past. My wife has convinced me to start living a healthier lifestyle. I have to admit I was nudged a little by a post from Jesse Watson telling men to get healthy and be there for their families for the long haul. I am now four days in and actually feeling pretty good. They say it takes 3 weeks to solidify a habit, we'll see...Shannon has even starting making my lunch. I'm not sure if it's to help me out, or to catch me cheating if I come home with a full lunch box!

I wasn't able to post last week while I was at camp so here's a little catch up: God's presence was refreshing this past week. I felt almost re-introduced to the awe of just enjoying the presence of God. Kind of sad that I haven't been "there" more often as of late. God is doing deep works in my heart and life. I am feeling the pressure of making sure things are ready in the next two months to "officially" launch our ministry this fall. We have made incredible leaps forward and now is the time when things will take off or remain the same-and it all hinges on my ability to effectively cast vision and have the systems in place to carry it out. We are working on it.

I think I might be a Pharisee. Not on purpose, but merely by a series of simple compromises. According to Timothy Keller's definition I might have slipped deeply into serving God out of a Pharisaic motivation: "Despite all their legal righteousness, then, Pharisees have lives that are, if anything, more driven by the despair of sin. They build their sense of worth on their moral and spiritual performance, as a kind of resume to present before God and the world...Pharisees know deep down that they are not fully living up to those [standards]. They are not praying as often as they should. They are no loving and serving their neighbor as much as they should. they are not keeping their inner thoughts as pure as they should. The resulting internal anxiety, insecurity, and irritability will often be much greater than anything experienced by the irreligious." wow. How often can we find ourselves in this cycle? I think the danger lies in the fact that since we have experienced a very real conversion experience, and maybe even many fulfilling moments since in our Christian life, we can begin to place our value on the standards of being devoutly religious, finding our identity in those things. As time evolves, our motivations, even if they lead us to the same intended results, have the power to cripple our spiritual life. A motivation to gain approval before God and men that leads us to "acts of intimacy" with God is still fundamentally flawed. To base our identity on service to God, or even the amount of time spent in prayer and the Word can only create spiritual pride or spiritual faking. Our identity must be firmly rooted in the unmerited grace of Jesus Christ, changing our motivation and putting a heart within us eager to love and serve God. I am struggling right now with really understanding where I sit in the equation. I know the sincerity that rests in my heart, but I also know all the other junk that lives there too. I need a fresh outpouring of grace to check my motives. Simple Application: What are your motives? Are you creating spiritual pride and spiritual faking?

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I'm reading Timothy Keller's , The Reason For God, and am thoroughly enjoying it. I find it an easy read, which for a book with an apologetic nature that is a rarity. Here is a great illustration the author quotes from philosopher Alvin Plantinga on the issue of the creation of the universe, "He imagines a man dealing himself twenty striaght hands of four aces in the same game of poker. As his companions reach for their six-shooters the poker player says, 'I know it looks suspicious! But what if there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of poker hands, there is one universe in which this possibility is realized? We just happen to find ourselves in one where I always deal myself four aces without cheating!'" This argument will have no effect on the other poker players. It is technically possible that the man just happened to deal himself twenty straight hands of four aces. Though you could not prove that he had cheated, it would be unreasonable to conclude that he hadn't." Another illustration by John Leslie, "imagine a man who is sentenced to be executed by a firing squad consisting of fifty expert marksmen. They all fire from six feet away and not one bullet hits him. Since it is possible that even expert marksmen could miss from close range it is technically possible that all fifty just happened to miss at the same moment. Though you could not prove they had conspired to miss, it would be unreasonable to draw the conclusion that they hadn't." Of course these illustrations are in a context of examining the "clues for God", one of which is the incredible way we exist in the midst of the perfect combination of elements and conditions. While I suppose it is possible that life could have "happened" without a Creator, I find it hard to trust the one in a trillion-trillion chance, but more difficult to understand is the way this potentially random formation is sustaining itself: the clues lead to a Creator.