sea-bound mountains

I need to bust loose of some stuff, and I've decided that I'm going to make a post out of it, mostly because some other people might be experiencing the same thing. So here we go. This is basically going to be the Holy Spirit straightening me out.

I have, for whatever reason, been allowing a spirit of anxiety, heaviness and condemnation to rest over me. I've been feeling overwhelmed by what I see in the natural- basically things that look contrary to what I am praying for. I've been focussing on the wind and the waves and what I can do about them. I've been feeling like what I say just goes through one ear and out the other. I've been feeling like I haven't been used.

Well blah with that. I just needed to get that out. So that's what I've been feeling.... now here is truth!

Praise the Lord for truth! Things that we don't see are so much more permanant than things we see! I praise the Lord for Mark 11:22-24!

"And Jesus answering saith unto them, 'Have faith in God.' For verily I say unto you. That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, 'Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, what things soever you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive them, and ye shall have them."

Glory to God! I thank God that I can speak to mountains in my life and tell them to move and they have to move because MY GOD IS BIGGER! Jesus said "whosoever" and I am a whosoever!!!! Praise God! That spirit of heaviness has to go in the name of Jesus! That spirit is a mountain, a lie that has to conform to the truth that God has given me "a spirit of power, love and of a sound mind!" Praise the Lord we can stand on His Word and know that He will bring it to pass! I will not be moved by what I see, feel or hear because all of that is temporary compared to the Word. I have acted on the Word and I "believe that I receive." Now I expect change because God's Word never fails. I may not see it right away in the natural but my spiritual eyes of faith see it and that's all that matters! When Jesus spoke to the fig tree it didn't wither right away but that didn't phase Jesus! He believed what He said would come to pass! Then He told us that we could do the same thing! Praise His name!

What can shake us when we have a passage of scripture like this? What can steal our joy? What can get us down? What weapon of the enemy can affect us? What mountain is big enough? I think I know the answer...

Well I realize that this was a very vulnerable to do on a blog but it's what I felt led to do. I just typed myself happy! If no one else got anything out of it, I did. Praise God that I have a spirit of power, love and of a sound mind. No weapon formed against me shall prosper! I have the mind of Christ! Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world! I am more than a conqueror in Christ! I will not look at the wind and the waves but at the one who gave His life for me because He is my hope!

"Now thanks be unto God, which always causes us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place." -- II Corinthians 2:14

grace and peace

faithful

Yes it has been a while... I've been meaning to post but haven't really been sure what I want to say. That's one reason. The other is that I had four tests last week.... but the three I've gotten back I've made A's on! Praise the Lord!

The Lord is so faithful. Take last night for instance. Some things had been weighing on me for a while and so finally I just told the Lord yesterday that I needed to talk to someone about them. Well a funny thing happened... I called a friend of mine wanting to play guitar with him but my cousin from Samford picked up the phone... kinda random but incredible considering that she's like my sister. So I ended up going over to where she was and we talked with another one of her friends for almost 3 hours. It is so amazing to see how the Lord works. In sharing with each other, we all three voiced things that the Lord had been placing on our hearts. It's one of the coolest things in the world to know that even though you feel isolated sometimes the same Spirit works in everyone, so it should be no surprise that we were sensing the same things.

Something good's about to happen. I'm not talking about Auburn winning a national championship either (even though that would be nice). It seems as though the Lord is stirring something and I can't wait to see what it is. I feel like some things are just too huge to post on a blog so I won't share everything, but it has been impressed upon my spirit (and the spirits of the two people I was talking with last night, and many other people I've talked to) that the church is reaching a turning point. The time is coming when people will have to decide what they believe, and there won't be any more hanging on the fence. The world will get darker but the church will grow stronger and brighter and we will see some things we have never seen. Some things in the Bible about the end-times will become clearer. Deeper revelations will be had and the eyes of people's understandings will be opened wider.

That may sound wierd to you but that is the burning impression on my Spirit. That might have been too deep for a blog but oh well! Praise the Lord for what He is doing!

grace and peace

chase

glory in tribulation

I'm convinced that when hunger, nakedness, physical abuse and imprisonment couldn't shake Paul and the early Christians, Satan decided to come up with something else, a tribulation so vile and monstrous that people quivered at the sound of it..... and here we have the origin of ORGANIC CHEMISTRY. Yes, I know I'm being overly dramatic, and yes, I know I've brought a lot of my bad grade on myself but still.... its hard. Oh and as if an organic test on wednesday weren't enough, I have 3 more tests Thursday and Friday. You're probably thinking "why is he posting on his blog then?" Hmm... and to that i say.... nothing at all because you are stinking right... you always are.... thats why I come up here... ahh will ferrell.

Speaking of Saturday night live they had the best of David Spade on Saturday and it was ohh so good, except for the fact that I couldn't really enjoy it because I was studying organic chemistry... i can't escape. But hey, Auburn won, so its cool.

I'm really trying to stay focused on the ministry aspects of my life right now (this is just a random thought post in case you can't tell). I have pledge Bible study and Encounter small groups tonight, both of which are going really well. I have loved every minute of it. I feel so alive when I talk about the Word of God. Something in me just lights up and my spirit just clings to it. I know that ministry is going to have some part in my future (and it should with everybody, I just mean one of the five-fold operations- apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers as in Eph. 4:11). To what degree, I'm not sure. I could eventually just drop the med school pursuit and go to Bible school. Hey, it could happen... ah angels in the outfield.

Well thats probably enough for now... here's a discussion question for a future post:

What is "fruit" in the sense of "you shall know them by their fruits," and what is the difference between that and "do not judge?"

Comment!

chase

Hakuna Matata

Ohhh what a wonderful phrase. Yes I went to see the Lion King in B'ham last night and yes it was oh so good. I took my sister and we met my two cousins who go to samford, and it's always great to spend time with them. We didn't get to go to Cheesecake Factory like I had hoped but oh well.
So this week has been awesome, a calm before the storm of my 4 tests next week you might say. Pledge Bible study went really well Monday night, which is huge because I've been praying about it for a long time. I received a lot of awesome feedback so that was good. It gave me a huge confirmation that I was being led by the Spirit as far as the direction of our study goes.

Being "led by the Spirit" has always been an intriguing statement to me. Of course if you know me, you know that the Holy Spirit is probably one of my favorite things to talk about, so naturally I love learning and seeking more about Him. But that phrase just seems to take our relationship with the Lord one step deeper. It moves it beyond just text written on a page (which I'm not demeaning because that's the holy Word of God) to something more intangible, something alive and active in our lives. Something "now." And if you think about it, it magnifies the Word all the more because the Holy Spirit is what makes the Word alive and "now" to us (i.e. "He will lead you and guide you into all truth").
But phrases like "led by the Spirit" and especially "pray in the Spirit" really just grab my Spirit. I think there is something to the preposition "in." It doesn't say "by the Spirit" or "with the Spirit" but it says "in the Spirit." It's almost as if "in the Spirit" were a place- a certain place of prayer where we are "in" the Spirit. Wow. That just kind of hit me when I was typing. Think about it, how many times is prayer just something we do? How many times is prayer just one person activating his spirit while everyone else's minds just wander (i know because it happens to me!)? How many times does prayer seem like a chore, like everyone can't wait for the prayer to be over? This happens because we pray so many times with our own minds, and we pray "in knowledge" instead of praying "in the Spirit." I believe we could pray "in the Spirit" all day long, because then its not our own selves praying but the Spirit of God praying through us! We can't afford NOT to pray this way! There are things the Lord wants to do on this earth but His vessels clog themselves with their own head knowledge, and things that need to be prayed out and spoken out aren't because we aren't being led. The Word says "you have not because you ask not." Lord forgive me of that.
Wow, that got deep really fast... I think I might have to digest that one myself for a while because that was not me speaking. I think I might do a follow-up later.

Feel free to respond

"He who finds a wife finds a good thing"

Wow this is like two posts in one day... thats probably a little wierd but I'm just in the mood.....

So I've been thinking a lot lately about my wife. It's a funny paradox actually, because I've never felt this inadequate in being a boyfriend or even the "h" word but I've also never felt more confident and at peace about my relationship with my future wife and who she will be. I have a deeper peace that the Lord has somebody very specific for me than I've ever had before.
A while back I started praying for my wife. I pray that the Lord would bless her that day and that He would allow her to experience something cool that she could tell me about one day. Back when I started, the prayer seemed kind of empty, like I was praying for something that didn't exist, which of course it didn't. Then all of a sudden it started to seem like I was actually praying for a living breathing person that exists and the more and more I pray the more I feel like I know this person. It is one of the coolest things ever. I can't really see her face in my spirit but it's like I know her spirit.

So here is my wife: she has a confident assurance that marks her countenance because she has a genuine relationship with the Lord and she knows who she is in Christ. She is fun-loving but knows when to be serious. She loves to have deep conversation and could talk about the Lord all night long. She respects people but also respects herself enough to not be satisfied with any less treatment than she deserves. She is loving but bold. She is sensitive to the Holy Spirit.

This is just a small glimpse of the person that I pray for. Even still, I am completely trusting the Lord as to who I am supposed to be with and I trust Him to place me with the person I need to be, but I really believe this is the girl, whoever she may be.

If you think about it, the fact that there is substance to my prayer is scripture. In essence I'm believing by faith for my wife, and Hebrews 11 says "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." So in other words, there is a substance of faith on the inside of me which gives me evidence of my wife that I do not see yet. Kinda cool.

And for all you guys who are making fun of me right now you just wait and see how incredible this girl is..... then we'll see who's laughing.... and yes i'm a hopeless romantic... but not really

oh and feel free to leave comments, i'd like to know who reads...

grace and peace

life hidden

"My life is now hidden in Christ. It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me."

I don't think we fully understand the implications of that. I don't think we can understand fully. I mean to try and wrap your mind around the concept that the savior of the world, the Living Word lives through me is quite impossible. I've been thinking about what it means to have Christ live in you. Now obviously we can take the reigns from Christ in our lives and shove him to the background, but what would it look like for us to totally allow Christ to live in us. Thankfully we have the Word to turn to, so that we can get a glimpse of what our lives should look like, or what His life should look like in us. So let's think about that.....
Christ's character is essentially described in the fruits of the spirit, which would make sense seeing as how the Holy Spirit lived on the inside of Him. Jesus truly portrayed what it meant to be in the world but not of the world. We see this by His command over the elements of the earth, and consequently His command over Satan's perversion of God's creation (i.e. sickness, disaster, death, etc.). We see Jesus never being moved by any troubling situation. When things rose up against Him He spoke to it and told it to go. We see Jesus patient in affliction because He fully knew that the Lord would deliver Him.

So now what is the implication of "Christ lives in me"? Yeah there's where my mind is blown.

My mind is basically blown from seeing everything I just listed about Christ and comparing it to me. My tendency is to say that that is impossible. My spirit always catches me though and forces me to see that that is the potential God sees in us.....yeah another wow....... So am I saying that because Christ lives in us we can exemplify His character in our lives? Yes. Am I saying that God has given us the name of Jesus and the power to speak in faith and situations and mountains actually move just as in Jesus' life? Right again. Why do we shy away from that though? Could it be that we have not moved up higher as a church because we have seen our potential IN CHRIST as something unattainable, and we have seen the life of Christ as something to just be in awe of and not as something that should be seen in our own lives? Could be.

grace and peace

i've been sucked in

Ahh you've got to love peer pressure. I've been telling myself "no I am not getting a blog, I'm just not doing it." Funny how things work. I guess its what I get for quitely sitting back and reading other people's blogs while not actually writing anything myself. Whatever it is, here I am with my very own blog, something that I hope will be a tool for the Lord to use.

Well I just wanted to kind of get the ball rolling tonight, but I'm going biking in the morning so I need sleep. But be prepared for mind boggling entries later....ha