My Bible-in-a-Year reading today took me to the end of Joshua.  Many people have found inspiration in the last words of Joshua, as he confronts the nation and demands that they once again declare and covenant before the Lord to keep him as their God and not chase after the other people who they live amongst.

It certainly is inspiring but for some reason it was another verse that God drew me to this morning.  In verse 13, Joshua writes, “So I gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build; and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.”

It feels to me like what we’re being called to in Medicine Hat is like this.  We are going to a city we did not build and a land on which we did not toil, and we will live there and reap a harvest that we did not plant.

That kind of sounds like a negative, but in reality it is a testimony of the plan of God.  We are following his lead to a land we are certain he wants us in.  It is a land which he has already prepared before us.  It is a land where he has been working for years in people’s hearts, building a thirst and a hunger for himself in them, and we are coming to reap that harvest.  It is a testimony that God is going to build this church, just like he built the nation of Israel.

That is a very comforting thought.

We just sent out our most recent e-newsletter, and I had a reply back from a very old friend who also serves the Lord in Alberta.  He is on a worship team in Lethbridge, and similar to us, he has a houseful of children as well!  He asked me what was new – I had to assume that he meant beyond what we wrote in the e-newsletter.  My answer may have been for a completely different question, but I think it spoke in a real way where my heart is at today.

And as for us?  Beyond what’s in the newsletter?  Heh.  It’s going to be a very busy fall, winter, spring, summer, … I was just mowing the front lawn and thinking to myself, “What an awesome privelege to be risking my entire family for God!”  It is sickening, yet thrilling trusting him with my livelihood, my family, and moving away from all of the familiar, to bring him Glory and build a new church.  One second I can’t believe what I have purposed to do, it is beyond insane, but it occurred to me that will be my testimony to my workmates, who I have prayed for … for years now.  I will be able to say to a couple of good friends who are atheists, “Would you risk your entire family, your money, your home, your family for your belief that God isn’t real? Because I am staking everything on my faith that he is, and that he loves me and will keep us all in his hand.  If you wouldn’t risk, you might want to consider Christ, seriously.”

It would be nice to just do my job, come home, coach my kids’ soccer team, play a game on my computer, and love my wife.  It would be peaceful, and restful and safe.  It would be a good life.  But what is this short life here on earth anyway?  A few moments in eternity?  I’ll rest when I am with him in heaven.

Don’t ask me where that came from.  Maybe it’s simply my rationale for putting way too much on my plate and then trying to cram it all in at once.

Or maybe God’s going to help me finish it off.

Thanks to Team Pyro I read through an article on the coming collapse of evangelicalism.  There is much truth there but also a lot of pessimism.  I still hold out hope that the picture will not come to pass with that much failure.

Two things from the article and where it intersects with myself.

We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

I do not question this in the slightest.  The failure I see here has come from the home, though.  It has come through disengaged parents who bought into the concept that children need to be given the freedom to choose their own path, with regards to their faith.  There is a difference between giving your child the freedom to inquire and question, and refusing to teach your child the truth.  If you let your own faith in Jesus just be “an option” to your child, you are doing not just a disservice, but you are blindfolding that child and pushing him into a furnace.  He may find his way back out the door before he burns to a cinder, but the odds aren’t good.  If Jesus isn’t the way, the truth and the life for your child, then how can you claim he is yours?

After thinking about what I wrote, maybe I can blame the church after all.  The church failed to teach parents to disciple their kids.  That is a failure of the church.  They failed to communicate to parents the essentiality of passing on their faith to their children – to “Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” (Deut 11:18-19).  How could we miss teaching this to parents?  How did we allow parents to abdicate their roles as their family’s spiritual leaders?

I myself am a product of that.  I am 34 years old and only recently have I really begun to be equipped to really share with someone that faith that I have.  Only recently have I begun to understand why church isn’t just an option for a Sunday morning.  Only recently have I really begun to realize that the Bible isn’t just something to read, but it is LIFE.  What have all these realizations done?  They have spurred me to live my faith in a way that others might call vocationally, but dang it, we ALL need to be living this way!  Our church isn’t can’t be just a few leaders actually following God and the rest just following the leaders.  We need to grasp hold of the treasure we have been given!

A third point – the phrase “…a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.”  Take out the young part.  It is the young and old who have fallen into this trap of relying on their emotions as their guide instead of their will.  Through many many books, lessons, and sermons, I have been convinced that love and marriage is not about “falling for someone” and then living in that passion for the rest of your days.  Deciding to marry on that basis is folly and the reason why marriages are failing left, right and centre.  Ever since culture accepted the premise of emotion as the basis for marriage, marriages have been falling apart.  The truth is that love is a choice.  Entering into marriage with a decision and not an emotion lends stability to the marriage, and insulates it against the ebb and flow of emotion, which is fickle and we all know it.

We’ve taught this and I think that most people in the church get that.  But what many, especially the young, but also those who perhaps have experienced major spiritual and emotional highs with their faith, have fallen into this exact same trap with regards to their faith.  Faith is a decision that is not based on emotion, not based on an act of God.  It is based upon your deciding to believe in the cross, in Jesus’ atonement, death and resurrection, and all that comes from that.  If you base your faith in even small part upon the experience of God, or of emotion related to God, then when that goes, you conclude your faith is gone, or diminished somehow.  That means when you do something “spiritual” like praying or singing a worship song and don’t feel anything, you question whether it is all fake because the emotion isn’t there.  How fragile is that?  Where is the bedrock of your faith?  If it is an emotion, then it is here and gone like a breath.  That is not the faith that the Bible describes.  When the Bible speaks of faith, it speaks of a volitional decision.  “…As for me and my house, we WILL serve the Lord.” (Josh 24:15b) Our Lord gave us all a choice – that was why he made us – so that we could choose to love and serve him.  If our choice is based on how we feel then there is nothing to keep it from blowing away.

I’ve gone on pretty long here.  I’ll save the other piece of the article for later.

Every time I head Casting Crowns’ “Voice of Truth” I experience a restoration of confidence.  It really is miraculous.  The song always reminds me, after I have been lulled into listening to voices of judgement and doubt, when I need to hear, “Do not be afraid: this is for my glory.”  It struck me again this morning.  I didn’t even realize I needed to hear it until the longing of my heart came out in the first words of the song, “Oh, what I would do to have the kind of faith to climb out of the boat I’m in, and on to the passing waves.” I want that faith, and it comes when I listen to the voice of truth.

It occurs to me when (and I mean when, because I have no doubt in my mind that Cheryl and I will be putting together a vision video before the summer of ‘09) I have a chance to talk about how I got to where I am, I will have that song playing in the background.

I went to work and sat at my desk for nine hours today, in an effort to make up for how badly sales have gone this month.

I made seven dollars.

Was it worth it?  I asked myself as I drove home, was the fact that I was at work an expression of a lack of faith that God would provide?

Then I remembered that I had a ten minute conversation with my co-worker, a lapsed Catholic, about what it means to follow Christ.  We talked about the question, “Isn’t it enough that I am a nice guy, I mind my own business, and I don’t do anything to hurt anyone else?”

That’s why I was there today.  Not to make money, because God will provide in his own way.  But because someone needed to hear about God today.

This weekend might have easily been considered overwhelming.

We had so much on the go.  Friday night was our first small group meeting of the fall, which went smoothly, but it was interesting forging a new dynamic for the season with much more concrete goals and planning.  We’re much more comfortable in doing what is being asked of us as small group leaders, and it feels good to have answers to questions that come from experience.

The fact that my laptop is slowly dying has been eating me alive for a week.  It was very distracting and my incessant attempts to rejig our finances to accommodate the purchase of a new laptop was driving my wife insane.

Then on Saturday I had to go to work, which quickly got exciting (and not in a good way) when we had to deal with a crisis.  I left work for a couple of hours to do what I could, and spent quite a bit of time in prayer over it.  It was good that this happened, in a way, because it completely got my focus off my own materialism (thinly disguised by a need to access my Awana documents and finish the paper I have been ignoring.)  Anyway, with all that going on, we had to hustle to find a babysitter and get out of the house that evening, but everything turned out marvellously in the end, and Cheryl and I had a very valuable pastoral experience.

Saturday night, after we got home, my wife whispered something very exciting in my ear.  No, I am not going there.  It was her agreement to allow me to get a laptop on Sunday.

So on Sunday, church was a run-run-run networking and troubleshooting experience, wrapped up around a very nice time of worship to the God we serve.  Two of our Awana leaders were cancelling out that evening, so we had to scramble to replace them.  We also shifted another of our leaders into a director-role, and freed up Cheryl to cover another place that needed doing.  That afternoon, I did a bottle depot run, picked up a bunch of flannelgraph pieces, shopped for cloth in a tent in some guy’s backyard, stapled it to a board, shopped for the laptop (including an intense half hour negotiation with the manager featuring all 4 of our kids, which did net us a 2 year service agreement worth $140 for free), prepared a council time talk, and picked up two of my leaders with 5 minutes to spare before Awana.

Praise God, my friend from work that I invited out to Freedom Session showed up!  That was exciting to see.  My talk in council time involved a lot of shouting and teaching, along with me throwing myself on the floor at least 3 times to illustrate 1 Cor 15:3-4.  Finally, I wrapped up the night with fetching sandwiches for my secretaries.

On top of all this, I had the joy of hearing from my wife’s lips the long awaited agreement on the need for us to have a shared devotional and prayer time together.  That to me was a huge blessing.  But really, when it comes down to it, nothing this weekend would have gone right without God’s hand working behind the scenes.  I can’t count all the moments where we could have done whatever we wanted, but if God had not been at work, this whole weekend would have burned to the ground.  It’s so much fun to see him come through!

And I have a new toy laptop.  Giggle.