psalm 42

“Why do we do this? I’ll admit why I do it. It’s because the Gospel makes me disappear. The gospel obliterates me, in a sense.  Suddenly life is no longer about my little world and my standards and rules and goals and preferences…true spirituality is not introverted, but extroverted.  It doesn’t take us deeper into ourselves; it sends us further out.  It doesn’t make us more introspective but more extrospective- looking outward.  In fact, real spiritual growth happens as we look up to Christ and what he did, out to our neighbors and what they need, not into ourselves and how we’re doing.  The world says the more independent you become, the freer and stronger you’ll be; the Gospel says the more dependent on God you become, the freer and stronger you’ll be.” - Tullian Tchividjian (Jesus + Nothing = Everything)

“He must increase, but I must decrease.” (John 3:30)

john 13

“Of all the illustrations He could have used, of all the miracles He could have performed, He washes feet. Jesus Christ says ‘love’ is washing feet. People usually say that the most unsightly part of the body is your feet.  It’s not the attractive part.  Feet are wounded, blistered, ugly, dirty.  Why would Jesus wash feet? Because he is trying to say that the essence of “love” is action, a service- it’s not just a feeling of attraction.  In the world there’s something that people call love, but is really ‘hunger’.  Hunger says, “I love you”.  Which means you make me feel good about myself. You fill me up.  You make me feel significant.  I want to own you. I want to have you to deal with my emptiness.  I want you to help me feel like an individual, to become myself.  But that’s not love.  That’s hunger. It doesn’t love for itself, it loves for a commodity.” (Tim Kellar, 1998)

by faith.

“Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One Who is leading. It is a life of Faith, not of intellect and reason, but a life of knowing Who makes us “go.” The root of faith is the knowledge of a Person, and one of the biggest snares is the idea that God is sure to lead us to success.” -Oswald Chambers

Re-reading The Holiness of God (Sproul)…

What is that which gleams through me
and smites my heart without wounding it? 
I am both a-shudder and aglow. 
A-shudder, in so far as I am unlike it,
aglow in so far as I am like it.
-St. Augustine

A-shudder:
“So I said: Woe is me, for I am undone!  Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5)

Aglow:
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor. 5:21)

Praise Him, He who creates ex nihilo, for He is nothing like me, and yet through Christ alone, we can drawn near to Him.

“And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” (Rev. 5:13)

A time to long and live for.

Laptop: A Hate Letter
by Stacy E. Park
(part 2 in a series of poems based on various office supplies)

Lappity tapitty, or lappie tappie, or whatever.
The connection with you I wish to sever.
You tell me you love me, well, honestly, never.
I tried to tear down the walls of your memory since forever.
But you’re password protected everyday and whenever.
The encryptions you create on your server
Only serve to block me out of your core’s fervor.
You see, love requires a sort of lever
To calm the lows and highs, together.
And before my heart gets too involved and tethered,
I’ll walk away now and wish you luck on all your technological endeavors.

yet He is still good.

“There is nothing, naturally speaking, that makes Christians lose heart quicker than decay—the decay of bodily beauty, of natural life, of friendship, of associations, all these things make a man lose heart; but Paul says when we are trusting in Jesus Christ these things do not find us discouraged, light comes through them.”
-Oswald Chambers, The Places of Help

“Thou art the God of the early mornings, the God of the late at nights, the God of the mountain peaks, and the God of the sea; but, my God, my soul has further horizons than the early mornings, deeper darkness than the nights of earth, higher peaks than any mountain peaks, greater depths than any sea in nature – Thou Who art the God of all these, be my God. I cannot reach to the heights or to the depths; there are motives I cannot trace, dreams I cannot get at – my God, search me out.”

Stanley Kubrick photography.

Help me to walk in truth, never to stray from you
Lead me in righteousness, I want to follow
Teach me to lose my life, that I would be found in You.
Better to lose it all, to be found in Jesus.