LIBROS EN BREVE

4. Personal Jesus

"The Joyless Pursuit of Creating God in Our Own Image" by Ronnie Martin

+What I rememeber is that I had a relationship with Christ that was based more on my fear of not performingwell than a godly fear and love for a Savior who had already completed the performance for me.

+I had been taught the verse about obedience being better than a sacrifice, but nobody ever told me that there was thing called grace that transformed our acts of obedience into offerings of joy.

+My identity was so tied up in my persona as an artist that the idea that it also doubled as something I was "doing for God" simply gave me the justification neccessary to continue down my well-trodden path of self indulgence.

+Had stopped lying to myself for even a miunute, I would´ve been face with this sobering truth: My heart had grown far from God as it swelled up in glory for me.

+The rality is that God blesses us with joy so that regardless of amount of material blessings we receive in ths life, our hunger and thirst for Him is never replaced by those material things.

+When a Christian is truly immerse in the pursuit of the gospel, those material blessings function as occasions for thankfulness.

+Instead of glorifynig God for the small talents He had graciously given me, Iinstead worshiped what came as the result of that talents. Worse still, my life pursuit had become doing everything I could so others might worship my talent. The result? Anger, resentment, pride, arrogance, and a lifestyle that kept me pursuing self-worship like a drug addict searches maniacally for his next fix.

+One of the things we can count on God to do in the life of a beliver is to get really sever with our sins. Things like anger, pride, and arrigance don´t go unchecked in God´s economy forever. As a loving Father, God disciplines us and takes things away that hinder our growth, maturity, and love for Him.

+In reality, it´s only by God´s amzing grace we´re given anything at all. Sadly, our base tendency is to hoard, feed on, and become gluttons with the things god has privileged us to be stewards over.

+Instead of praising Him dor the portion He´s given us, we indulge in it because we don´t think God has been generous enough. We love our goods more than our God.

+Anytime we love our gifts more than the Giver of gifts, we eneter into a state of disharmony, dissatisfaction, and disarray, and plumge headlong into the dark side effects of those heart conditions. Becasuse we were created by a God who is above all else, we were never meant to put anything else above Him.

Leer: 3. How You Doin´?

ACERCA DEL AUTOR: Ronnie Martin

3. How You Doin´?

"Culture´s Obsession With Self-Sufficiency" by Ted Kluck

+ As Christians, we´re the onés who say we´re pilgrims in an imperfected, sinful woeld. Yet we´re the ones who want to go to the church on Sunday as though our lives and ourselves are unblemished and unaffected by the blight of sin. It´s been our experience that only the most extreme of challenges (public sin, death, etc.) cause church people to really become honest with eachother.

+ Let´s this become the typical "old guy ranting about Facebook" essay, he point here is we are our own American idols, and much of what we do, we do under the guise of self-sufficiency. We want people to know we´re okay.

+ Still, I think as a memoirist it´s important to be honest and not fabricate a version of myself that everybody will be more comfortable with. So far the record, if you love Great American Hero, send your Christian hate mail to anybody, because what happened with Hero (Christians hurting other Christians) is just an example of how life in a fallen, sinful world works. It´s an example of why we all need a Savior.

+The only problem with this perspective, for the Christian, is that it´s not only wildly unbiblical , it also negates the posibility of our ever being satisfied or ever giving God glory.

+ God, in His infinite wisdom, was using the circumstance to bring me to a place of total and complete brokenness and contrition before Him. But first He had to show me my bitter heart of stone, and begin to replace it with a heart of flesh. The process was the most painful yet redemptive, thinh I´ve ever experienced.

+ My mission, as I see it, is to abide in Him day by day, going to Him for forgiveness of my many sins, and sharing the hope of salvation with others.

+My role isn´t to wallow in despondecy (more on the not wallowing later) or my church´s imperfections. My church´s job is to help me fight despondecy, and to battle the Enemy´s chief lie: that God cannot be trusted to meet my needs or satisfy me.

Leer: 2. How Soon is Now?

Leer: 4. Personal Jesus

ACERCA DEL AUTOR: Ted Kluck

2. How Soon is Now?

"When God´s People Quetion the Reliability of God" by Ronnie Martin

+ The reason we take things into our own hands is that we don´t believe God´s hands are really at work. Or in my case, it can be like what C.S. Lewis wrote: "We´re not neccesarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."

+I Had place all my hope in the talents He had given me and the identity I had drawn from them. Like Tim Keller says, "Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially ´deify´. We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think ourselves as highly irreligious.".

+There´s nothing quite like the church being the church. It´s one of the ways God restores us.

+If we take a closer look, we discover God taking painful yet drastic measures to destroy our idols, level our doubts, and show us the incomparable bluntness, brightsness, and beauty of His grace.

+ The Holy Spirit supplies us with vision of the heart to see the unseen thing of God. (Ephesians 1:18)

+ God wants us to glory in the hope of himself. He wants our eyes to be continually opened to see the evidence of His goodness. We don´t have to look far. Our lives are saturated by it, but many times it´s most visible in hindsight.

+Most of us really believe in the partial sovereignty of God. We belive He´s doing work in our hearts and lives, but when problems and difficulties rear their ugly head, we feel it´s time to take matters into ourown hands, because God must have decided to take a break for a while. It´s in these times that we live like functioning unbelievers and experience the hopelessness that God already save us from.

+The problem was that there were barriers in my life that needed to be dismantled and destroyed.

+Paul [the apostle] changed the world while he was locked up, writting letters that have altered the fabric of Christianity. It was never so dark in Paul´s life that allowed himself to believe that God was absent. Instead, he prayed for the eyes to see God´s sovereign hand, a mind to comprehend His un ending goodness, and a heart to overflow in greatfulness.

Leer :1.You Gotta Have Faith

Leer: 3.How You Doin´?

ACERCA DEL AUTOR: Ronnie Martin

1. You Gotta Have Faith

"The Struggle to Believe When Life´s Falling Apart" by Ted Kluck

"Cast all your anxieties on him because he cares for you". 1 Peter 5:7 NIV

+I knew in my head that God was real, and even believed that he loved me.

+At the time I questioned two essential biblical truths -that God was good, and that He loved me. I was refusing to cast my anxieties on Him, because I struggled to fully trust Him not to hurt me again.

+ I believe in His sovereignty... I belive that God is ruler of all, even the enemy. Though, to be honest, it would have been easier to be mad at the devil. I think being mad at God, in the absence of hope and trust, is the darkest, loneliest place of all.

+I still believed, but I need help in my unbelief. I needed to cast my anxieties on Him, who cares for me. Scripture had given me a framework for praying through my unbelief, but I was refusing to see it and use it.