Missions Blog

Taken from here by Vitamin Z.

Miroslav Volf is a Christian theologian from Croatia. He says that he used to hold to the fashionable view that dismissed the wrath of God, that the idea of an angry God was somehow incompatible with the love of God. But then war came to his country. Terrible atrocities were done. He found himself exceedingly and justifiably angry. Then he thought - if God is not angry at such injustice and cruelty, then he is not a God worth worshiping. Only if God is angry against such evil is he worth loving, or being loved by us.

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the form Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry.

Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.

- Dr. Christopher Wright, The God I Don’t Understand, p. 131

My friend Margaret Segrist’s facebook status

Margaret is remembering Tim Cunningham with thankfulness for the example of bravery, integrity, and love he lived as a husband, dad, soldier, and man of God.

I am thankful to God for the freedom He has blessed me with, both in this nation and through His salvation.  This year more than ever before I’m aware of the extraordinary sacrifice that some make to allow us to enjoy freedom.  What I wrote about TIm earlier this year is here.

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace driven effort people do not gravitate towards godliness, prayer, obedience to scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance. We drift toward disobedience and call it freedom. We drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation. We slouch towards prayerlessness and dilute ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism. We slide towards godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”

DA Carson

I’m reading “Kneeling Christian” by an unknown christian at the moment.  Found it at ccel.org, which if you have never been to is and incredible place to find old christian titles for free.  Check it out here.

This quote by Archbishop Trench is why I’m writing:

“We must not conceive of prayer as overcoming God’s reluctance,” says Archbishop Trench, “but as laying hold of His highest willingness.”

Why do we so often doubt that God has a desire to answer us?  We do not believe Him to be good or loving.

Overseas Missionary Fellowship, or OMF, is making a docudrama on the life of James O. Fraser and his ministry among the Lisu people.  I’m really excited about this project.  Check out jofraser.org for the trailer and more information about the film.  You can preorder it for $9.99, which sounds like a really good deal.

Mountain Rain is one of my favorite missionary biographies.  James O. Fraser life is inspiring and a testimony to what God will do if His people just call out to Him.

Thanks for letting me know Beth!

Since becoming a Christian in 1998 something “crazy” seems to happento me almost weekly/monthly.  Either I’m dramatic, or I just notice more than most people.  Well, actually, maybe it has to do with being a friend of God and His continual reminding that He is at work in my life.  I just figured some of them would be good to document.

So I spent this weekend in Dallas and my friend Jay spent the weekend in Houston.  I felt bad that we missed each other so I decided that on my drive back to Houston I would call him and we could catch up.  This is the first few seconds of our phone call

Me: Are you staying in Houston tonight or driving back to Dallas?

Jay: No, I’m driving back.  What about you?

Me: Yeah I’m driving back right now

Jay: Where are you?

Me: Not sure, uhh…

Jay: What mile marker

Me: Umm, hold on, 196.

Jay: Hey me too, HEY I JUST SAW YOU!  WOW THATS INCREDIBLE, I’VE NEVER EXPERIENCED ANYTHING LIKE THAT!”

Me: WOW THATS CRAZY!

You get the gist.  I decided to call him in a 20 second window for that to happen.  It was hilarious.  I was driving back to Htown for a friend’s going away party.  When I walked in I was like “Hey you guys would not believe what happened on my drive back.” A party goer to me “I know. Jay called me right after that to tell me how incredilbe it was”  Way to spoil it for me Jay, way to spoil it for me.

I wrote a number of posts in the past that I never published. This is one of them.  I didn’t want the details like Boot Camp to confuse anyone.

One of my favorite things in life is when people experience the presence of God for the first time in prayer. If you know me very well then you that I am burdened for people who know a lot about God, but don’t know God very well. Matt Chandler preached a great sermon about this. This can run the gammit from crazy legalistic rule followers to serious grace abusers. Either side is really sad. I love when people really connnect with the living God during worship and prayer and all the sudden they feel like their world is completely changed. A lot of the Boot Camp students here are experiencing that right now. They seek after the Lord and the find Him, it almost sounds like a scripture or something.

It is humorous in life how we interpret everything through our culture and experiences. No matter how much we want to be “all about what the Bible says” we are goign to struggle with this. A good example for me was when I would read biographies of great Christians. I would read how they prayed 12 hours a day and God moved mightily in these revivals. Well my experiencse in prayer for the most part had been boring, so I assumed these guys were just bored for like 12 hours. I wish the biographers had written “and they enjoyed it” after some of these stories.

To be honest, a lot of my time spent with the Lord were incredible and amazing, but not always. That was really frustrating. I just assumed the problem was with my sin and/or that Jesus didn’t like me that much. That whole Hebrews “they must believe He is and that He is a rewarder of those that deligently seek Him” thing seemed like an after death sort of thing. One time I was at a prayer meeting that was rather lifeless and the guy leading prayed to end us “God you are worth an hour and a half of hard prayer.” I wanted to yell “ITS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SO HARD!” I didn’t, it wasn’t really his fault. He didn’t know any better.

It wasn’t until my friend Chad started pray meetings at his house every Wednesday night that I learned a lot of the whys and hows of prayer. You can read all the books you like, but you are going to have learn this stuff through experience. You are probably wearing the glasses of “boy howdy prayer can be boring”, but you need to throw those off and remember again that you can encounter the living God.