I can’t believe this, or actually I can… I found this article on FoxNews.com. This article is talking about how Obama doesn’t need to learn anything from Jesus, but in fact Jesus needs to learn from Obama. Well first of all, not as a rant or anything, what in the world could our Lord and savior learn from a mear man? Nothing! You know why? Because he created him, and he knows everything that Obama is going to do in this life time. I think if anything, the writer of this article needs to get his facts straight about who Jesus really is, and he needs to stop taking scripture out of context!
If you have been following my blog for awhile you most likely remember a post that I wrote about placing Christ as the center of everything that we do, just in case you don’t here is a link to check it out. But you know what I have been realizing? If you have at one time in your life before placed Christ in the center of all that you do, it doesn’t guarentee that you are still in that same situation.
I feel like I’m a person that does place Christ in the center of a lot of things in my life, but you know what? I have realized that I am failing at placing him in the center of ALL things in my life. So the question arises: How do you place Christ into the center of ALL things?
I will be honest. I don’t know exactly how. But I think I have some good advice. But first off, please forgive me for not having a Bible verse for this, but I know that we need to have him as the center of all we do, so anyway… How do we do this? How do we get to a point that Christ is thought of and centered in every aspect of our lives?
The first step I am going to take will be studying the Bible more thoroughly. I am going to study things that are in my life. By doing this I am taking the word of God and letting it teach me and guide me through certain situations. Another step I am taking is going to be fasting more. I want to fast just to seek God. I don’t totally understand fasting, but I do know that when people begin to seek God in the Bible, they often fast. And the last thing I can think of right now is getting an accountability system going in my life. This accountability system isn’t because I have such a hard time struggling with so many different sins, but it is a way for me to be accountable on a weekly basis for my walk with Christ. It will help me keep in perspective what I am actually doing.
How else can we keep our selves seeking Christ’s will in all things that we do? Any suggestions? Bible verses?
Have you ever been in a good healthy relationship as a Christian before? Well… I have. Let me lay out the details for you. About 5 months ago, I began “dating” a girl whom I really enjoyed being around. I absolutely thought that there was more than just potential with the two of us. We had some extrenuating circumstances, and we both talked about it and we said that we were willing to not let them affect us. So as our relationship moved on, we got closer to each other. I thought it was great, and I am pretty sure she did too.
Through the relationship I learned something about myself though. I struggle with jealousy, and anger. As you may all know, these are not talked of very highly from a biblical standpoint. So as soon as I realized I had these issues I began to work on them. I found myself struggling with them, but I wasn’t ran by them.
This past week, I really had a hard time with it. I let my emotions control the way I acted, and I let myself treat that person whom I care about so much like she really didn’t mean that much to me. I saw this as a problem obviously, but I didn’t think that it would be so bad as to end our relationship. But it did.
I understand that my anger was the root of this. I am not sure what else could have been. Even if she doesn’t know it, I am pretty sure that it is what really moved her to make the decision. But whatever, I could sit around and wonder why forever. But I am going to just have to move on even though I don’t want to. I am going to have to trust God more than I have lately, and I am sure that he will bring me through this okay. I hope that he does the same with her. As much as I wish that this could all be undone, I need to stop worrying and rushing it. That will do no good because that is not God, that is me!
Do any of you have any encouragement? It would really be appreciated… Thanks!
So this past week, as most of you know, I was at youth camp as a counselor. At the least the experience I had was extreme. The services were great, to food was at best okay, and we had some sweet pillow fights and candy wars. I gotta say, it was not what I expected at all. Do you ever have an image of something in your mind and then when you actually see it, it looks totally different? Well that is what happened to me. But it was good. I really enjoyed to go to services two times a day for a whole week, and I hope that some of the lessons that we all learned will last for a lifetime.
Hey everyone! I just want to let you all know that we went out to the Sparks Farmer’s Market last night, and it was great. We once again rose $65. It is funny. We rose that exact amount last time too! I just wanted to let you know that it went great, and we even had some good conversations with people about Jesus and our church.
As a Christian, there are many things in my life that I wish I didn’t struggle with. To be honest I hate the fact that I struggle with certain things at all! These struggles can be small and personal, while others can be large and known by all. To me though, it doesn’t matter the size or how many people know. All that matters to me is that these things continue to be constant stumbling blocks in my Christian walk.
I hope you are not getting the wrong picture. I am not saying that I am addicted to porn, that I have fits of rage constantly, or that I find my self contemplating murder. But I find myself stumbling less often everyday with the less evident versions of these like lust, frustration, and jealousy. Although I am a Christian and I know that I am not saved because of how good I am but by the grace of God, I still feel like the world is over when I realize that I have been stuck in a rut with these hidden sins.
So what should I do? The first thing I always do is pray. I know that God wants to see me live for him. So I ask him to give me the strength to not fall back into these sins, I also ask if he could help me discern situations that would tempt me to fall into these as well. Then I will usually think about it and feel bad about it for a long time, but I don’t think God wants us to linger on the sins of our past.
Although the sin may have been committed 2 minutes ago, it still was in the past. If we sit and linger on that sin we will only let the glory we should be giving to God, go somewhere else. And that is no good. We should glorify God in all things, including our sin.
How do we glorify God in our sin? We can glorify God in our sins by not continuing to sin. We can strive to live pure and holy lives, and when we come to a point where we stumble we shouldn’t allow it to take our eyes off of the greatness of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ who died for the forgiveness of our sins. If we get stuck and depressed because we have sinned in such a minute way, I don’t think that we really are glorifying the work of forgiveness which he accomplished through his love for us, on the cross.
What do you think? Is it possible to glorify God through our sin by seeking to become more pure? And if so, is it also possible to steal his glory by lingering in our past sin?
This past Monday was what our church and several others call City Wide Prayer. It is when people from a handful of churches get together and pray corporately for the cities of Reno and Sparks. I really enjoy these meetings, but I will be honest. There always seems to be, without fail, something I notice that will amaze me.
This time I noticed something, and I am not quite sure what to think about it, but I will tell you what my gut reaction is. I saw a man, from my church, who brought in a cloth. This cloth looked somewhat like something that a Jewish Rabbi would wear. It was white, long, and had stripes and tassels on it. As he began to pray he took the cloth and placed it over his head, and he placed his hands in the front of it so it wouldn’t touch his face, and so that he would still have room to pray.
I remember my Pastor once talking about how when Jesus talks about prayer in Matthew chapter 6 he brings up this same exact situation. To be more exact it is actually Matthew 6:6:
6But when you pray,(A) go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.(B) And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
You see, some people will say that you are supposed to go into your prayer closet, and that is what Jesus was talking about. I will be honest. I don’t know if that is what he meant. It sounds to me like he was saying go pray in private, but it isn’t too specific into where or how. But what I found to be interesting is that this man must have felt so strongly that Jesus was saying that we must go and pray in our prayer closet that he went and found out how the Jews would enter into there own prayer closets. I found this on the internet which talks a little bit about what the “shawl” was for:
In biblical times, Jewish men wore this garment called a TALITH, TALIS, TALIT or PRAYER SHAWL all the time — not just at prayer. TALITH contains two Hebrew words; TAL meaning tent and ITH meaning little. Thus, you have LITTLE TENT. Each man had his own little tent…
Six million Jews could not fit into the tent of meeting that was set up in the Old Testament. Therefore, what was given to them was their own private sanctuary where they could meet with God. Each man had one! His Prayer Shawl or Talis. They would pull it up over their head, forming a tent, where they would begin to chant and sing their Hebrew songs, and call upon Elohim, Yaweh, Adonai. It was intimate, private, and set apart from anyone else — enabling them to totally focus upon God. This was their prayer closet! (http://www.msgr.ca/msgr-8/Prayer_Shawls_2.htm)
Why did this man feel that he had to imitate Jewish traditions to be biblical? I will be honest. I see this as very Pharisaical. By this man doing this and not one other person, I felt that he was trying to make a point, he was trying to say that he had the right way. And you know what is funny about right ways? There is usually only one. So that means that if he was right in doing that, then we were wrong by not, and that is not something that I believe. I believe that we pray correctly. We don’t need our prayer closet. We need the Holy Spirit! That is how we communicate and enter into the presence of God, not by some shammy or shall, or whatever you wanna call it.
I’m sorry I didn’t mean to start ranting… But what do you think? Is it okay for people to feel that if they do things a certain way they will have more favor with God? Or is this even accurate? Is there another place in the Bible where it talks about this? Help me out!!!
Today I was browsing through a clothing site called www.EphraimClothing.com. I had never heard of these clothes until recently when a good friend of mine mentioned that she liked them. So today I didn’t have too much to do so I clicked over to see what was so cool about them. As I was browsing I found a t-shirt that was called, “Heaven in your Head, Hell in your Heart.” This t-shirt definitely caught my eye. The design was sweet, but the message was even sweeter.
I know that once we get a firm understanding of who Jesus is, and we begin to venture into a world of knowledge and not emotion it is really easy to forget about the condition of our hearts.
Do you know what I mean? It is seemingly so easy to take the time to read your bible, write a blog, listen to a sermon, read a book, and discuss issues surrounding theology; but it isn’t always that easy to actually apply what you are reading, writing, listening to, or talking about to your own personal life. For example, if you take the time to read the Bible you will quickly learn that lust and sexual sins are greatly hated by God, but it isn’t always easy to actually take that truth and remove that form of sin from our heart. We can also see that we are not walking in the footsteps of Christ if we have filthy mouths, but it isn’t always the easiest or most satisfying thing to try to control. But I want you to listen to what I have to say… It is so important that we do take the time and the effort to control all things in our lives.
We should not go around sinning against God, yet feeling justified because we do truly recognize that what we are doing is wrong. We must pray, asking Jesus to give us the strength to purge those sins from our hearts. We need to make sure that we don’t let the little things grow into larger things, which will eventually make us crumble, and the only reason that we will crumble is because we are not building our house on the solid foundation of truth of Jesus Christ, which we think we know so well, but instead we are ignoring what we have read and are building our houses on the sinking sand of our own knowledge and deceitfully apparent wisdom.
What do you think? Are do you see this in your life? How about in the lives of others? What have you done to get rid of this kind of sin?
This morning I was making an egg, and I began daydreaming…
…As the lights turned on I found myself so excited that I almost forgot the real reason I was there. I stepped forward and grabbed the microphone… “Thank you all so much for coming out here to see us!!!” And the show began. Hard song after song made for an incredible night, and everybody thought that I was the man! Wearing my crazy punk rocker jeans, and my little white t-shirt that was covered with sweat from rockin’ out so hard….
…”Woah! my egg is burning.”
The funniest thing about this was that I was thinking about one of my favorite Christian rock bands, and you know what I was most interested in? I was interested in the image of being in the band, not the image of Christ being set forth through the music. I found myself more concerned with the way people would perceive me as a rockstar instead of how people would hear the message of Jesus Christ.
I know that this is totally random and I’m not too sure if you completely understand why I’m getting at here, but tell me… Are Christians to consumed with the image which they have? Or are we not concerned enough?
The Fire of New Desire was started by me, Joey Francis, about one year ago. It is my passion to be able to voice a clear perspective on Christianity. As a young man I am tired of fake "Christians". I believe that we are to be in this world but not of this world. I hope that as you read my posts you too will become inspired to live to your fullest potential glorifying Christ in all that you do.
God Bless,
Joey Francis
