Route1520

Recently a Christian journal featured the work of two Christian counselors. Here’s how the reporter saw the essence of their work:

“Their vision of God is not that of a vengeful force who punishes man for his sins, but rather one who loves, forgives and guides. So often, people have a distorted image of God…Therapy may help overcome that.”

The phrase, “their vision of God,” puzzles me. Am I as a Christian counselor supposed to order up my own god? Is God merely a projection of my own problems and moods? Or do my clients determine the kind of god I see?

Then there are the situational adjustments. Although I may tilt in favor of a loving, forgiving God, are there times when a vengeful one comes in handy? If so, when? I guess a personally customized God comforts some people, but it (he? she?) leaves me anxious and confused.

People smarter than I tell me that we live in a “post-modern” world. The Enlightenment jettisoned God in the eighteenth century and replaced Him with reason. The twentieth century threw out reason and replaced it with relativism. There are no timeless truths today; everything is relative and every person decides for himself or herself what makes life worth living and who God is. (Sounds a lot like the book of Judges, doesn’t it?)

This relativism I see reflected on fundamental believers bumper stickers:

“God says it, I believe it, Therefore, it’s true.”

Do you see the relativistic error? We have made God’s truth conditional on our believing it! It should read:

“God says it, Therefore, it’s true.”

And His Word remains true whether you or I believe it or not.

Culture corrupts the church as much as the church changes culture, unfortunately. So we shouldn’t be surprised that modern relativism shapes the thinking of many Christian counselors and other church ministries. Systematic theology (much too rational!) has been junked; you may as well burn your Hodge and Strong. Instead, welcome to the world of Chinese take-out theology, where you can order the god who fits your taste.
Are you in the mood for a stern god? Maybe your neighbor did something to offend you and he needs some punitive justice to put him in his place. Then choose from Column A. Or maybe you are in a tight spot and need some rescuing. Look to Column B. There you find the Omni-God-you know, all powerful, all-knowing, etc. Or maybe you want some warm fuzzies. Column C is loaded with them: love, mercy, compassion, patience, and all the other comforting stuff of which a victimized culture believes it has been cheated. Pay your money and take your choice, but be sure to ask yourself,

“Is this really the God that I will meet at the Judgment?”

Who is that God? He is the God of the Bible who is perfect in all of His attributes. He is both loving and jealous, merciful and angry, transcendent and imminent, vengeful and forgiving. He is all that He is, and He encounters us in the completeness of His being, not merely as our alter ego. Your ministry becomes robust and far-reaching when you embrace the fullness of God, but it becomes still and ineffective when you narrow God to those attributes that you or your parishioners find personally comfortable. Let God shape your ministry; don’t let your ministry shape your god.
Encounter all that God is in Jesus Christ, “for God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him” (Col. 1:19). Follow Him in a discipling ministry that comforts, confronts, challenges, forgives, calls down judgment and offers the touch of mercy. In Him “loving kindness and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (Ps. 85:10).

With that kind of theology, you won’t feel hungry an hour later.

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Picked up a memoir yesterday of a man who has battled addiction to cocaine and alcohol. The name of the book is “Broken” and this quote is on the first page…

A disciple asks the rabbi, “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?”
The rabbi answers, “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”
—From “The Politics of the Brokenhearted,” by Parker J. Palmer

This speaks to the painful “beautiful undoing” that each of us must experience in order to truly know ourselves and our desperate need for God’s amazing grace. In recovery circles, we refer to this as our “bottom”…that point in time where we realize that not only have we put it in the ditch, but that we are powerless to get our lives out of the ditch. As God lovingly exposes our desperate need for Him, our self-sufficiency is stripped away and we begin to understand in new terms what a daily life of faith looks like.

Unfortunately, so much energy is spent among Christians trying to hide weakness and brokenness, rather than embracing it and connecting with others at that level. At the heart of our hiding is a deep unbelief of the Gospel. We say we believe that God loves us as we are, but live as if God is disappointed and even angry when we fall short. This line of thinking causes us to live as orphans separated from God trying to manage sin on our own and keeps us on a perpetual cycle of shame. We then put on our masks and “Sunday Best” and parade into church comparing what we know to be true about ourselves with what we think is true about those around us. What we fail to realize is that comparing our true selves with someone else’s pristine mask is always an unfair comparison. We are left believing that we must be the only one struggling, which causes us to retreat even further into the shadows.

Are you living today as a beloved child or as an abandoned orphan? In what ways are you hiding in the shadows instead of living boldly in the Light?

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(This post also posted on Reflections of a Ragamuffin.)

I heard this catchy tune today and it reminded me of a great talk my friend Jim Doggett gave a few weeks ago…

One of the main points that Jim made to that room full of young men has been on my mind since…

“Evil wants to make little of where you have been and much of what is left to do. God wants to flip that and make much of where you have been and little of what is left to do.”

Our growth in the Christian life and the daily transformations that God is bringing about are never as quick or as dramatic as we would like for them to be. Evil is constantly whispering in our ear…taunting us with our past failures and shortcomings and encouraging us to give up and throw in the towel. When we look to the future, evil shouts “you’ll never get there”, or “it will be too hard”, or “how will you ever figure out where you are going?”

My youngest two have been at my parent’s farm all week this week. When I see them tonight, I will most likely notice slight changes because in the last week that they have been gone, they will have grown. This growth is happening all the time, but when I see them everyday, I don’t notice the subtle changes that their growth brings about. When I see them in the morning and my mind is comparing their image to what I saw the night before, the change is so slight that I can’t see any contrast. When a week goes by, however, enough time has passed for me to pick up change that their growth has brought about.

Rather than allowing evil to beat us up over our past, let’s take a long look and realize “just how far we’ve come.” Instead of comparing yourself to the way you were yesterday, why not remember where you were 6 months ago…a year ago…5 years ago…20 years ago. If you keep a journal, go back and read entries from June of 2009 or even June of 1999. Most likely you will be amazed and encouraged by the growth you have experienced spiritually between now and then.

As you look to the future, God wants you to realize it is not a big deal because He is leading the way. Your recovery…your sanctification…your changed life is in His hands and is in His control. Ours is to simply live in the moment in absolute freedom because of the finished work of Christ.

Watch the video again and remember. Remember how far you’ve come and celebrate! God is at work in you and no matter where you find yourself today…He is not finished with you yet!

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Here are a few new badges to help us spread the word about Route1520 and the recovery movement that is currently underway. Please feel free to grab any of these that you like, post them to your site, and link back to us here at www.route1520.com. The code is available at the end of this post.

To post any of these badges on your blog or website, follow these instructions for the HTML code:

• Decide which badge you want and hold your mouse over it until the filename appears.
• Substitute the name of the badge that you want with “FILENAME” in the following code:
  <a href= “http://www.route1520.com” target=”blank”><img src=”http://route1520.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/FILENAME.jpg” border=”0″/></a>
  For example: If you wanted the first graphic that says “grace”, this is what your code would look like:
  <a href= “http://www.route1520.com” target=”blank”><img src=”http://route1520.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/grace21.jpg” border=”0″/></a>

Please let us know where you post these badges! Thanks in advance for helping us get the word out! If you have ideas about more badges, send them our way!

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As startling and eye-opening as these statistics are, they don’t accurately reflect what is actually going on when it comes to pornography on the Internet. Frankly, so many new adult-related sites are going online daily that it is almost impossible to accurately keep track of them all.

Via: Online MBA

At Route1520, we see the effects of these statistics daily as we journey alongside men and women whose lives have been shattered by pornography and sexual addiction.

Join us in offering hope and recovery to those whose lives have been wrecked by this addiction.

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Ok, so this is you fighting porn/sex alone. Maybe you are an addict, and maybe you are not, but if you try and fight it alone, this is what you look like. Really, if you fight any sin issue alone in your life, this is what you look like. The Gospel, my friends, is meant to be lived in community. We are to be Proverbs 27:17 people – iron sharpening iron. We are to encourage each other on in the race to win the prize.

This clip is such a great metaphor. The Black Knight initially does not talk with his adversary – that was the right call. But then, he engages in conversation, and ultimately in combat, and he winds up a bloody stump in complete denial. How many times have you been there?

Your alone, and the urge hits. You try and shut it down, or walk away from the computer. That’s the right call. Even better is to call your friends and accountability team. But you don’t, and soon the rationalizing begins and you stay at the computer, and you are engaging. Well, I’ll just look at a splash screen, and then I’ll stop. An arm falls off, and you claim it is only a scratch. Hours later, there you are, a bloody stump in denial.

Think about it – when you isolate yourself from your community, isn’t that when you get into the most trouble?

Watch this, get a laugh, and get a point. None of us are invincible…

Fight alone, and you wind up a bloody stump in complete denial. It’s just that simple.

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One of the primary questions that must be answered by any ministry, especially a ministry focused on an individual’s personal recovery, is “How do people change?” In his classic sermon titled The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,  Thomas Chalmers (1780 – 1847), does a fantastic and thorough job of answering that question.

Chalmers begins his sermon with these poignant words…

“A moralist will be unsuccessful in trying to displace his love of the world by reviewing the ills of the world. Misplaced affections need to be replaced by the far greater power of the affection of the gospel.”

Chalmer’s message meets the rampant moralism and behavioralism of our day head on and offers the only solution to change the hearts of men…the gospel of Jesus Christ. All too often we meet individuals who are struggling in the area of sexual sin who are completely debilitated by guilt and shame. The church has done a great job of telling them what not to do…what to “put off”, as Paul states in Colossians chapter 3. And so they spend day and night in a vicious cycle of acting out, promising vehemently to NEVER do it again, acting out again, making more promises, and ultimately coming to believe that God is mad at them because they can’t get their act together.

We want to help men and women who are currently trapped in sexual sin to expose the lies that God is somehow mad or disappointed in them and point them toward a bigger, more adventurous story. We seek to help them “put off the old” and “put on the new” by discovering that the gospel is a wonderful scandal…that God loves them as they are and is every day singing over them. This is indeed the “power of a new affection.”

As we prepare to celebrate Easter, may Chalmer’s message ring loudly in our ears and may we find this new affection ourselves.

Take the time to read Chalmer’s entire sermon.
For more information on Thomas Chalmer’s life and accomplishments, check out this link.

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“Just Stop It!”

Wouldn’t it be great if overcoming our sins and our struggles was as easy as simply telling ourselves not to do it?

This sketch of Bob Newhart as therapist is funny, but unfortunately, hits very close to home for most of us. How many times has the voice of our inner critic and our accuser yelled “Stop It” when we struggle with our issues? How often have we pictured God as being angry and disappointed with us because of our sin…sitting across the desk yelling “Stop It! When will you get your act together?”

For years I lived under the “if I know better I should do better” way of thinking and this video humorously points out that just saying “Stop It” to ourselves and others isn’t a remedy for sin. When we are simply trying to modify our behavior in our own effort and fail, we try to work even harder and find a different formula or way of doing things to make it work out differently next time. This leads to deeper shame and a feeling that we have let God down or that He is disappointed with us because we can’t deal with our sin on our own.

The wonderful truth of the Gospel is that we are powerless to deal with sin on our own and God, knowing just how helpless we were, provided a Savior!

Are you trying to deal with your sin by simply yelling “Stop It” or are you bringing the truth of the wonderfully scandalous Gospel into your struggle?

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This life, therefore, is not righteousness but growth in (an alien) righteousness, not health but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it; the process is not yet finished but it is going on; this is not the end but it is the road; all does not yet gleam in glory but all is being purified.

Martin Luther

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by Portia Nelson

Chapter 1

I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in.

I am lost …I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don’t see it.

I fall in again.

I can’t believe I am in the same place,

but, it isn’t my fault.

It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I see it is there.

I still fall in …it’s a habit.

My eyes are open.

I know where I am.

It is my fault.

I get out immediately.

Chapter 4

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I walk around it.

Chapter 5

I walk down another street.

Hallelujah!

So which chapter are you in right now?

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