In exactly 2 weeks I will be somewhere on the 5, 101, 129 or 1 Freeways on my way home to Santa Cruz with a car containing my belongings (which consists of 3 things: Clothes, Books, Golf Clubs, in ascending order of importance).

As much as I like to complain about LA, about traffic, weather, distance from everything I was involved in, and pretty much life in general, the past 10 years and 4 months that I have lived in socal have been very good to me. I believe God is calling me back home to San Jose, to what specifically He has yet to reveal to me, but I’m going now and letting Him work out the details in His own timing.

I heard these words in a sermon I listened to today that were utterly convicting and relevant.

“I will bless you that you may be a blessing, because through you all the families and peoples of the earth will be blessed.” To become a Christian is to be changed so that now you are not making your decisions on the basis of “what is the most comfortable for me, where do I live that is most comfortable, what job do I take that is best for my safety, my comfort, and my influence, and my status.” You don’t make your decisions like that anymore. The call of God reshapes you, so you’re asking yourself the question, “where can I most be a blessing?” The call of God goes like this, “if you seek to be blessed, you will be empty. If you seek to bless others, I’ll bless you.If you live for the blessing of others, if you live to fill others up, I’ll bless you, says God. I will bless you that you may BE a blessing.” God ONLY blesses that you might be a blessing. And you say, “well then how can I be a blessing?” and the answer is “you gotta get out! Get out, and I will bless you that you might be a blessing!”

– Rev. Tim Keller on Genesis 12 “Real Security and the Call of God”

For everyone that I have had the privilege of meeting in LA, thank you for being so good to me. God has blessed me with the most incredible relationships and experiences that anyone could ever want. I will miss you dearly but I know that this is not the end for many reasons!

Time to get out!

ohhyemin:

samleewrites:

Kevin DeYoung took the words right out of my mouth. I love that new viral video “Jesus hates Religion” because the infrastructure of its poetic verses is the amazing grace of God. It is a glorious reminder to myself, as I remember that those who do not abide by the law are cursed but that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us when he hung on that tree. (Galatians 3:10-13) I also love the speaker in the video simply because I’m convinced that he just wants people to know the unfathomable love of God in His Son, Jesus. Lastly, I’m thankful that such a video has gone viral because whatever the case, the name of Jesus is being proclaimed all throughout the internet.

But I’m also hesitant to completely advocate it because it can be misleading. It can be received (note: received, not transmitted) in a skewed manner to think that institutionalized church should be hated and working out your salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12) should be ignored and that faith without works is encouraged (James 2:14-26). It’s daunting to think that some would even receive it as a license to sin because pursuing righteousness is apparently synonymous with religiosity. 

That’s not true. To say that would be like portraying a building—yes, with a grace-built infrastructure, but without the cement and walls and windows and floors and elevators and a rooftop and an air ventilation system and anything else that is part of the complete composition of the most grandiose skyscraper in all the universe, the beauty and majesty of Jesus Christ. It is otherwise merely a dead, towering skeleton that is as cold as its naked steel exterior.

So please, with humility, give ear to what this Christ-exalting, grace-loving, Scripture-revering older man of God has to say with the wisdom that God has granted him.

Food for thought.

vacation was a whirlwind. tried to spend as much time with family as possible (success!) and tried to see friends that i will not see for a long period of time. i didn’t see half the people i had hoped to while i was home but it was a lot of driving back and forth between santa cruz and san jose and semi-restful at best…

so ive more or less been graduated and off of any kind of regular schedule for the past 4 days. 3 of the days have been well spent, including a day of golf and watching bcs games with friends, doing some heavy sermon prep and exegesis, and tearing out one of the walls at alpha blueprint. the other day was video games and movies and i felt very unfulfilled at the end of the day.

i had an unemployed friend who talked about the importance of mini goals. while not having a job, it is important to make the most of the time and be paying bills, shopping for groceries, etc. i agree with this. having not been unemployed for about 5 years (and i still have a few more days at the blueprint shop) i have to say that i agree with this. we cannot spend our time off doing nothing. i think God invented goals so that we can feel good about them when we meet them or make progress in them. this is something i hope to do this month. the trick is to know that He still loves us when we don’t because i really believe God wants us to feel good about ourselves. thus, i will set goals daily, and i hope this will last well into the rest of my life…

i’ve spent bits and pieces of the winter break hanging out w/ channing and playing the Wii Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword game. the game is fantastic! i have been away from video games for so long that i suck at it which is thoroughly entertaining for channing to watch me fall off of cliffs and die.

i’ve been thinking about why we like video games so much. the graphics, the story line, and the music are absolutely incredible. it’s like you’re in a whole different world. and that is where i think our love for video games lies. we like to immerse ourselves in the story, in an alternate world/universe, an alternate reality.

this reminded me of a sermon that Dave Huynh preached on Revelation 3, when John writes to the church of Laodicea that they are “neither hot nor cold.” Dave described this as when you’re there but not really there. he talked about how so many people live their lives vicariously through other things on the internet, or how people have secret lives that no one knows about. this is a dangerous thing. it’s dangerous because we’re saying that our present lives are not good enough, and that we would rather escape to an alternate reality and lose ourselves in it to hide ourselves from the things we face in our actual reality.

it was good for me to have these thoughts. it’s good to not fully immerse myself in some other world when God wants to do so much in the real one that He’s given us. we need to know that the power of the Holy Spirit is so powerful that we can experience a rich and meaningful life in actual reality and not in alternate reality. i will enjoy playing this game in bits and pieces with channing laughing at my skills or the severe lackthereof. however, we can never allow video games (or any other idol) to be anything more than a hobby or a temporary relaxation so as to take the place of our actual reality.

I have come that they may have life and that they would have it to the full

first 5 days of being an M.div:

some thoughts on graduation…

tonight at dinner, my grandpa (who paid for a good 25% of my M.Div) said that i am now qualified to pray for dinner for the whole family after graduating from Talbot.

it hasn’t fully sunk in. i didn’t invite that many people because i thought the winter graduation would be small/lame. it was anything but. it was a BEAUTIFUL ceremony with a challenging address from Roberta Ahmanson. i didn’t want too many people to come, not to be lame, but because i’m starting to hate attention. i get really awkward involving anything where i’m at the center (other than leading worship or preaching) and i try and avoid those situations as best as possible.

what i learned was that as a pastor, you can’t do that. you have to share your life with people. you have to share your joys and your successes because you are no longer your own person. you belong to God first and foremost, but you also belong to those whom you minister to. it’s part of the deal. i sent out a lame email to friends from church/ccm hoping they wouldn’t show up, and i was very happy that they did not comply with my wishes. God never fails to amaze me with the quality of people he has placed in my life.

it has been the longest, most difficult 4.5 years of my life, but i am now hooded. i know we like to say we’ve lived life with no regrets, but that’s just not true. i’ve made decisions during this process that were not good for me personally and i’m eager to take some time and get my mind right in the coming weeks.

that being said, it is now time to go and serve the Lord with the wonderful education that He has given me. if you read this, thank you for being part of the journey and supporting me because whether you think you have or not, you have helped me through these long 4.5 years. though utterly confused, i’m looking forward to the future and what God has in store!

I am and have always been a big sports fan. On most mornings, unless I feel the need to try and be spiritual, I usually tune in to ESPN radio and listen to Colin Cowherd, an eloquent and informed sports broadcaster who has great minority opinions on everything.

There are no minorities when it comes to the general perception of what took place at Penn State. For a school employee to have sexually abused a double digit number of young boys is unthinkable. It should make every single one of us sick to our stomachs. I was in the car for awhile due to traffic and my daily stop at Starbucks and so I probably listened to about 40 minutes of coverage. When I got to school, I went straight to the prayer chapel to pray. I felt a conviction of just how dirty my sin is before a Holy and Righteous God.

Joe Paterno, the head football coach at Penn State was an icon. In a sport that is filled with corruption (Reggie Bush, Joe Tressel, Academic Struggles, etc.), he was supposed to be the one person everyone could look to as the one who was a moral leader, as the one who is clean, as the one who always does the right thing. According to the grand jury report, what Joe Paterno did was not right. It was wrong. To have knowledge of sexual abuse of minors by a coach who was on his staff and to not aggressively pursue it and in a sense, stand by while it was covered up is just wrong. It’s wrong if it was just one kid. It’s even worse because by not going to the authorities, there were many other kids.

Whether we believe in morality or not, we look to our leaders to be morally upright. This is why presidents and senators and governors are vetted so heavily, because we want to at least have the appearance of a leader who is moral. We become hypocrites when we ask our leaders to meet a standard that they cannot keep. We are hypocrites because in the end, we are all broken people who all fall short of always doing the right thing. In no way does this mean I’m trying to rationalize what went on at Penn State within the administration. But what I want to say is that leadership is paradoxical. I wish that our leaders would be great moral examples. At the same time, if we create a fallacy in our minds that our leaders are morally good and can live up to a perfect standard, we are just asking to be lied to.

Some time after I switched churches in high school and stopped attending my parents church, my youth pastor was fired and kicked out of the church for sleeping with one of the girls in the youth group. It was horrible. In many ways, that church has NEVER recovered from that. As someone who wants to go into ministry, I need every single wake up call that I can get to know that my actions, good or bad, will always have consequences, again, good or bad.

We all agree that Joe Paterno was horribly wrong to not speak up and in a sense to sweep things under the rug. But what I want to ask anyone who reads this is what are you sweeping under the rug? What are you hiding? Does this mean that every single one of our leaders has moral flaws? Absolutely. Does it mean that every one of them shouldn’t be a leader? No. Because there are some whose flaws are greater than others. This is true for leadership. It is not true of sin. Sin and leadership capacity/qualifications are not the same thing. What did strike me in listening to the radio is that there are many more of us who sweep things under the rug than we might think. And that is a sobering thought. It means probably many more of our leaders do things that are not morally acceptable.

As I finish school and as I will apply for my first full-time ministry position starting this week, I realize that I need to make every effort possible to live up to a moral standard that man has set, while embracing the grace of God that will cover and cleanse me when I fail to live up to the moral standard that God has set. After this entire tragic situation, I am still convinced there are leaders who live with integrity and who are above reproach. But as a result of this tragic situation, I am also fully aware that this number is probably much, much smaller than I ever thought it was. I want to be and I need to be in the minority, for that is how we should respond to the grace of God.

In the end, I think there are two things we can really learn from this.

1) While we all need to condemn the behavior of Jerry Sandusky and the Penn St. Athletic Dept. and Administration, we cannot put ourselves on a pedestal. We should ask ourselves, what am I hiding? What is it that God wants me to stop covering up?

Tim Keller puts it this way: The Gospel is that I am far worse than I imagine and simultaneously more loved and accepted by God than I ever dared hope for — because of Jesus death for me. (mrlauterbach 11/04/2005)

2) Do we allow the egregious nature of the sin that took place, that we respond to so passionately, do we allow that to push us further and further from sin and closer and closer to a life of sanctification, and to the God who loves and accepts us more than we could ever dare to hope for?

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. - Matthew 7:13-14

i have come to see that more consistently making it a mere 7 days through the week without filling up on gas is better for my wallet, car, physical health, mental health and spiritual health. wish it didn’t take me this long to learn that lesson…