Life Blog

So I'm back from Soul Survivor and Momentum. Instead of going straight back to Sheffield I have ended up at home for a few days. I have been back two days now and feel as though all the anointing that ever was upon me has been sucked out of me long ago, leaving me in a state of being spiritually: empty, dry, baron, void. Having said that, this is the feeling I have usually come to associate with 'being home'. It was a quick and heavy transition after having been slowly spiritually built up over a long, well planned 10 days to have it all undone so quickly in the less than 24 hours.

Like a tone of bricks.

Anyway, I did feel moved to write something down on a piece of paper on the first night that I was back from Soul Survivor and Momentum (while I was still "feeling it") and I made a point of remembering to blog it but I can't seem to see the piece of paper I wrote it on lying around anywhere right now. It was marking the page of a book I bought on the last day of the festival; it is an absolutely amazing book by the way, it is called Storylines, it's written by Andy Croft and Mike Pilavachi and it basically tracks theological links throughout the Bible. So each section of the book goes through the whole Bible looking at each event from the perspective of each continuously identifiable theme such as; Jesus, covenant, kingdom etc. I recommend it.
By the way, I will write up about my 10 days at Soul Survivor and Momentum but there is an awful lot to tell so will leave it till I have time to thoroughly enjoy writing up a lengthy blog (in a format that makes it seem really short; I find plenty of spaces between very short paragraphs a good tactic).
(pause...space...next line)

So this piece of paper, I'll just go find it...brbz...no, can't find it, which is a shame because I worded it so well when it came to it (it felt very divinely inspired actually). Anyway, I will paraphrase as best can (oh I wish I hadn't lost it!):

ok, not being able to let this go I have turned my house upside down for the past hour looking for that piece of paper. I am having a clear out of the loft at the moment, 70% of it is all my old school work which means there are just books and books and about 9 years worth of pieces of paper ALL over the house, and today most of that got burned in the incinerator so I feared the worst, but in one last act of hope I went through one more box of loose pieces of paper (due for burning tomorrow evening) and found it! I am SO glad. It reminds me of Luke 15:8-10; the parable of the woman who loses 1 out of her 10 coins and flippin' tears the house apart until she finds it.

Right, this vision; so yesterday, when I was back this came to me as though God just dropped it into my head and I felt prompted to write it down (read Habakkuk 2:2-4 MSG.) so I put pen to paper "and the words come out like this" (to quote "The Vision"):

Living for God is something you are, not just something that you are into. It is not as though when your friend says "I'm really into football" you say "football is good, but I prefer Christianity" as though it is a music artist that you prefer over another. It is something that you are. No more than you can help being human, or breathing to stay alive can you help being a Christian and having the Holy Spirit living inside you.

OK? So since being a Christian is what I am intrinsically then it should be the case that people can't help but see that I am Christian anymore than they can help notice that I am a human being. What this should look like in practice is that everyone we talk to should be given the chance to be invited to Jesus through exposure to Him through us. What this means is that if they do not come faith that on that final day when the earth and sky is moved away and there is nothing left between them and the Lord and they are asked why they did not choose Jesus, even despite meeting us, that their answer can never be that "they never gave me a reason to".

So this isn't a challenge concerning evangelism particularly. The point isn't about the final judgment or the unsaved. The challenge is to live so dangerously and undeniably for Jesus that we grow to be more like Him to the point that we are Christlike in the way that the Bible teaches us that we should be; in fact, that we conform more to the image of God's only Son Jesus than we do to the world around us. Eugene Peterson in his Message translation, in Romans phrases it like this:

Rom 12:2 Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

I think I'll finish there for the night. Peace and love to everyone x