A spiritual moment with my daughter

Tonight at church, we celebrated the Lord's Supper. In our church, we do not do this on a weekly basis as some do. Our 5 year daughter was with us tonight, which presented us an opportunity to "teach". As the bread was being passed, she grabbed for a piece which my wife and I had to tell her no, which my head-strong 5 year old did not like. She wanted to do what the big people were doing. My wife explained what the bread symbolized, the body of Jesus. Then it was my turn as I got my daughter on my lap and shared that born-again, baptized believers take part in this time to remember Christ's life, death, and resurrection.

What these moments did for me is to remind me of my need to pray for my child's salvation, but also her spiritual growth afterwards. Once we choose to make Jesus our Lord and Savior, this is just the beginning of our journey. So many times, when people make this choice, we forget that they are just babes in their spiritual journey. The important thing that we must do is to continue to help them to walk and grow in their relationship with Christ. We will never get to the goal until we stand before the Father. Until then, we must strive to become more like Him and die to ourselves.

This night as we looked back at the life of Christ, His death on the Cross, and His resurrection, we also looked ahead to His return. My purpose as a father is to prepare my children to be ready, to lead them to a place where they have opportunities to follow the King of kings and Lord of lords.

In this Christmas season, let's us not forget that Jesus is the Son of God and that He left the Father for us. There is no other faith/religion/god/etc that did anything for its followers except what we call the Christian faith. Allah did nothing, Buddha did nothing, the Hindu gods have done nothing, only the Father. This is not a Happy Holidays type of thing. This is the reason we have hope and can have peace. It is all about Jesus and we must not allow our world to silence us. We must stand up and speak out that Jesus is the only reason for this season or really any other.

Eyes

I recently had eye surgery. Not Lasik, but to minimize my double vision. I have always seen more than one image, but only until the last 6-9 months has it gotten to where I was seeing 2 images. I have had this surgery previously, but this was more difficult.

The entire process, particularly the healing process after surgery has had my mind thinking. How well we see is determined by several factors such as genetics, birth defects, prescription glasses or contacts, etc. But what about our spiritual vision?

I could not read the Bible until only yesterday, so I had to rely on my wife to read to me at night. It minimized my time with God and it affected my spiritual vision. I thought more through the lens of my flesh & bone rather than the spirit of God. Selfish thoughts crept in and took over more readily than the times that I am in the Word.

It affected how I treated my kids. Granted, part of this might have the fact that I was going stir crazy too, but my anger and lack of patience were more easily seen than when I am close to my heavenly Father.

But I wonder, what do we see and what are you seeing right now? Is your spiritual lens on? Is it clean? Are you in focus with Him?

Love or Duty

This thought was passed to me and others @ a conference for student pastors in Oklahoma City, OK. Jarrod Jones was our speaker. He warned us not to preach duty to God, but share the love of God and our need to love God. We must teach the Gospel as well as Grace. The key is that we do not focus on behavior modification. He focused on several passages but the ones that deal with this issue comes from Rom. 7:4, 14.

Here is difficulty. Behavior modification is tangible & measureable. A heart and love for God is not easily measured. As a minister, we want to neatly package things so that people can see immediate results and we as well. Yet, the spiritual journey of our faith and growth as followers of Jesus is nothing immediate and sometimes not measureable by human standards.

Just something to thank about.

the Inauguration of the blog

This should probably have a warning label attached to it. Maybe an age verification should be required prior to my blogs. Who knows what you may encounter in one of my diatribes of vocabulary. It might be serious, comical, just plain stupid, or one of my rants about our culture/political climate, or just a sharing of my family.

Regardless as to why you are reading this, I appreciate it. I hope to inspire, challenge, cause you to think, or just share in this journey of life. Inevitably I hope to cause you to think more like Christ, look more Him, and act like Him.

I am far from it myself and not the prime example. I am a sinner who was once condemned but has been set free by the generous and unworthy gift of Jesus Christ who is God's Son and lived a flawless life, and took what I deserved on the cross. It is the fact of His resurrection from once being dead that enables me to share with Him now, but even more in life after death-the joy of heaven.