PIgNot everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father, who is in heaven.  Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, didn’t we speak in your name, drive out demons and do many great things in your name?” Then I will say to them plainly, “Depart from me, I never knew you, you evildoers!

-Matthew 7:21-23

The Bible is very clear, there is power behind the name of Christ.  The name ‘Jesus’ is what frees us from sin and justifies us before God.  The name Jesus drives out demons and heals the sick. The name Jesus sends a shiver down the very spine of Hell.  The disciples were told by Jesus that they would do great things “in his name”… not their own.  Satan isn’t afraid of me or you, but he is absolutely terrified of the one we serve! That is why demons take their sicknesses and run when the name of Jesus pierces their ears… they don’t run from the name Ryan, only from Jesus.  In Matthew chapter 8, Jesus came upon two men who were possessed by demons.. there were so many demons inside them, and they were so violent, that nobody dared go near the men.  When they saw Jesus they were afraid that he had come to torture them! Hundreds of demons… afraid of one man… Jesus.  They begged him for “mercy”, and asked to be cast out of the men and into a herd of pigs that were nearby.  Jesus allowed them to run away into the pigs, and once in the pigs they kept right on running and went off a cliff into the sea!  The presence of Jesus on the road was enough to send Hell running… and he said that we would have the same effect, because we would go into the world “in his name”.

I remember when I was little and I was sent to tell my younger brother to do something, he never really cared what I had to say until I used the phrase, “dad said so”.  Suddenly the task took on a whole new meaning, because it wasn’t a command from a brother, it came from the father.  As Gods children, we are told to go into the world and our message is validated because we take the name of Jesus.  Repent, not because I said so, but because he said so!

Way back in the book of Exodus, God gives Moses a list of rules, we call them the “Ten Commandments”, and number three on the list is “You will not take the name of the LORD in vain”.  Most of the time we’re told this means that we’re not supposed to use the word “god” or “jesus” as a curse, but really, what it’s talking about, is misusing the power we’ve been given from the throne.  It’s about committing fraud!  When we go into the world to do Gods work, we “take the name of the lord”, we go as his messengers, his ambassadors, to speak for him and be his hands.  The warning is to be very careful what we sign his name to!

If I had gone to my brother when we were kids and said, “I’m going to play video games while you go mow the grass… Dad said so!” I would have no reason to be surprised when I end up getting punished for my lie and for using my brothers obedience to our dad to manipulate him… for taking my dads name in vain.

Echoing back to Matthew 7, many people will say, “didn’t we do great things in your name?” and Jesus’ response will be, “go away, I never knew you”.

People do a lot of things, a lot of really good things, in the name of Jesus, but we also have a tendency to sign his name to anything we feel like pushing.  The culture in America says that your faith is a very personal, very subjective thing and it’s completely taboo to suggest someone is wrong in what they believe, but the Bible is very clear that we can test and approve what Gods will is, the scripture it’s self is useful for correction and rebuke, and that there will come a day when Jesus says, “no, that wasn’t me, that was you and you blamed it on me.”

In his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer says that “...the essence of idolatry is entertaining thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him… The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.”  We spend a lot of time talking about what we think about God, but not nearly as much time seeking Him and learning what He is really like!  We come to worship some other god altogether that we have created in our own image out of horoscopes, Oprah book club books, happy feelings and pixie dust, and not the God of “love and thunder” we read about in Scripture.

Many people come to worship their idea of God instead of God himself, essentially they worship their own imagination, dressed up as deity.

I’ve been going through a pretty rough period in my life, and I cannot count how many times people have tried to make me feel better by saying something like, “Relax, God knows what He’s doing!”, or the classic, “This is all happening because God has something better on the way!” … I’m sorry, I call shenanigans, and stop signing Gods name to things He didn’t do.  I have heard, with my own ears, people say crap like, “God is leading me to move in with my girlfriend”, “God just wants me to focus on me right now”, “God is telling me I just need to leave my wife and find a more ‘godly’ woman”… no, I’m sorry, that was the god in your head, that just tells you what you want to hear to make you feel better about yourself and your selfish decisions.  You’re taking the Lords name in vain, and pinning your stuff on him.  Saying it’s God, doesn’t make it so.  Oh, I’m sorry, was I out of place to say you’re wrong about what God said to you?  ”…didn’t we do great things in your name?” “NO! Depart from me, you evildoers!” …you use my name, but you never knew the real me!  Too many people go through life, doing whatever they want to, and justifying it by saying it’s just between them and God, when it’s really just between them and their own conscience.

The God of the Bible, from what I’ve come to know, doesn’t destroy relationships, he doesn’t torment His children or give conflicting instructions.  He doesn’t control our lives like puppets on strings and make us periodically dance around in fire just for fun.  I don’t find comfort from any of the things I hear people say about God or what they think He is doing… I find comfort in the things God says about himself…

Blessed are those who suffer for my names sake.

Let not your heart be troubled.

In my Fathers house are many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you! I am preparing a place for you…

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding. Acknowledge him, and He will make your path straight!

We do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weakness, but Jesus, who was tempted in every way as we are, and persevered without sin.

His faithfulness endures through all generations.

There is a worship song that contains the line, “you make all things work together for my good”, we sing it in church, but it’s total crap, it’s just another example of what we wish the Bible said becoming what we believe it says.  The Bible never says that “my good” is the priority, the priority of the universe is that God will be glorified!  What the Bible says is that if we love and serve God, even our tragedies will bring glory to Him… all things work together for the good of the kingdom, not of me.  Jesus didn’t come to earth, die on a cross and rise from the grave to make you happy, he did it to make you holy.  ”Me” focused Christianity is selfish paganism.  It’s not about your life, your decisions, your happiness, it’s about Jesus.  It’s about God being glorified.  Does God really care who you marry? NO, as long as your marriage glorifies Him! He doesn’t care where you go to school, where you work, where you live, what kind of car you drive or what kind of clothes you wear, he cares about you giving him glory with all you’ve got!  He cares about you taking his name! Being his child! Speaking His truth into the world, healing the sick, bringing light to the dark and driving Hell into the sea!   …and the promise of scripture is that chasing God leads to glory, but chasing yourself and pretending it’s him leads to nothing but death.

 

 


TelemetryScreenIn the sixth chapter of Matthews gospel, Jesus gives his disciples some advice about prayer.  He begins by telling them how not to pray… which to me, would seem to indicate there is more that is okay than there is that’s not when it comes to prayer.

This advice comes in the middle of a section of scripture where Jesus is telling them that they need to be careful not to “practice their righteousness” in a way that they get attention for it.  He says that if your religion is about getting attention, then whatever attention you do get is also all the reward you ever will get.  He addresses such things as prayer, giving to the poor, etc.  He says you shouldn’t “sound a trumpet” before you when you come to give your offering.. can you imagine someone actually having trumpets blast to announce them as they walk down the main isle at church to drop their money in the plate?!?! Apparently, people actually did that! He calls these people hypocrites because they pretend to honor God, but they’re really wanting to be honored by men.  He says that when you give, don’t even let one hand know that the other is giving, he says to be sneaky about it! Don’t let anyone see you, give cash instead of a check, wrap a $1 bill around the outside so nobody can see how much you give.. it appears that God is less concerned with what or how much you give than He is with how you give it.  My church has an app for my phone for giving your tithe, I love it because A) I don’t have to remember to bring anything with me on Sundays, but also because B) I can give right out of my bank account when I get paid and nobody sees me giving or knows how much. The only one who would ever know would be some nosey accountant rooting through a list of bank transactions.  Jesus says God knows and rewards what is done in secret.

Jesus goes immediately from this discussion on giving onto the topic of prayer… again he warns his followers to make sure they aren’t like the hypocrites and the religious elite when they pray, people who are flamboyant and dramatic in their prayers to get attention from anyone listening (and they would do it loud enough to make sure everyone was listening).  Again he says that whatever attention they get from this is their reward.  It appears that not only will God not answer prayers like this, since prayer draws us near to God, which would be a reward, God does not even listen to these prayers!  I know of people who are very poetic when they pray… very rehearsed… they bow their heads and start monologuing about love a grace and sin and forgiveness, like they’ve got a thesaurus and a concordance open in front of them.. and after the second or third time they’ve used some word like “propitiation” or “fellowship” the rest of us start thinking “would it be rude if I just start eating? …the Wendy’s staff is staring…” .

“Do not practice your righteousness before men to be noticed…”.  It goes against everything we know to keep things to ourselves… especially today where we have smartphones and things like Twitter and Facebook and FitBit, Foursquare and Instagram, where every bodily function is photographed, tagged, geolocated and posted on the web for everyone to see… as if anyone really cares.  I’m just as guilty as anyone when it comes to being lazy about this… I just don’t pay attention and make sure I’m not drawing attention to myself… I don’t think twice about sharing a Bible verse or checking in at church.. but why do we even do that? God doesn’t stalk your Facebook page to see if you’re being faithful, he doesn’t read your posts to see how holy you are… we can’t trick God with our words like we can with others… He knows what is done in secret, and that is how He will judge you.  Why did you post how far you ran this afternoon or how many sit-ups you did at the gym? Why did you really send that email, leave that comment or post that photo? Why did you really volunteer to help or drive the van? Why did you really ask that person to have coffee with you?

In Matthew 6 Jesus tells us to practice our religion in a closet.  Does the language of a closet sound familiar? Pop culture associates closets with shame… it’s a big deal today when someone “comes out” of their closet, usually in regards to being homosexual or bisexual, which is really the exact same thing Jesus is talking about, it’s about making a public statement about your private life… and Jesus says the attention you get is all the reward you’ll ever see.   Some things do belong out in the light, they should not be kept a secret, but when they’re broadcast for the attention, that’s when we start wading into the areas of pride and hypocrisy.. and that’s a very dangerous place to be.  It’s nearly impossible to ever convince someone (or ourselves) they’re behaving like a pharisee and they need to repent.. because it really does produce a lot of “fruit” that looks healthy… but Jesus words should send a little chill down our backs any time we’re complimented on our faith or our “religiosity”… “I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full… they’re Father in heaven has nothing for them…”  It’s difficult to realize when our good intentions become empty works, and when the fruit of our labor is attention in bloom instead of invisible seeds planted.

It’s interesting to note that after Jesus instructs us to practice our religion in secret, he gives some practical advice about things to pray for. He says, don’t just recite the same things over and over, because more words won’t get you more attention from God.  He then says a prayer, which has become knows as The Lords Prayer and has become one of the most recited passages in all of scripture!  I think we’ve sort of missed the entire point!

God doesn’t care about the words you use, or if you’ve memorized the exact prayer Jesus said in Matthew 6.  God doesn’t care about how much money you drop in the plate or how many weeks a month you sit in a pew.. what gets Gods attention is what is done in secret… what your heart looks like when the money drops, the tears you cried in bed last night when you couldn’t even find any words to pray at all… He doesn’t give a crap how many Bible verses or “encouragements” you post on Facebook to be seen by your 17,000 friends… He cares about what runs through your head while sitting at your desk, He cares about the state of your relationships, your intentions… in everything He cares about the reason why, and no matter how hard you try or how much you talk, you can’t hide it from Him.

The world really is a stage, and you have an audience of only One.  At this very moment the Creator is there with you… He is the origin of life and love, time, galaxies and the sound of E minor. He tossed the stars in the sky and keeps the entire universe spinning… and at the same time he knows your name.  He is wrapped around you, enveloping, penetrating and sustaining you… you cannot see Him, but he is looking you square in the eyes, every thought laying bare before him… Even now, He’s listening to the very beating of your heart…  He knows you, every single thing about you… everything you have ever done and why you did it…  you cannot hide from Him or run from Him any more than you can run from your own skin..

“…and your Father, who sees what is done in secret will reward you accordingly.”


bodyguard7The fastest way to completely pollute your Facebook news feed is to “like” a celebrity. Celebrities have these things called “ghost writers” who handle all of their press releases, and guess what… Facebook is just a press release.  It’s basically advertising.  Once you like that person you’ll be flooded with all sorts of info you never wanted to know.  For example, if you follow Adam Lavigne from Maroon 5, you’re going to learn a lot about his band, his album releases and TV appearances, but not much about Adam… I’m sorry to say, but he still won’t actually be your friend, that’s not him posting on Facebook.  It’s the same for a whole gambit of people from the POTUS, the Pontiff, to your local news anchor, even your pastors… yes, your pastors.

It’s been the trend in the American church recently to be a celebrity pastor.. everyone has a “platform” and a “ministry philosophy” and a dozen other heady words they learn in Seminary “how to be a celebrity pastor” class.  When Mega Church became the fad suddenly you had these pastors (servants?) rolling around in cars with drivers, body guards and personal assistants… they stopped pastoring people so that they could keep up with the schedule of a celebrity.  They hired gatekeepers instead of secretaries and put their face on every piece of mail the church sent out.  They became a brand instead of a person, on billboards, CD covers, books.. we even got to the point that we needed to televise our celebrity pastor into peoples living rooms and even into other churches, so that he could preach at even more people.  Suddenly the Church was centered around one man, and he wasn’t Jesus.  He became more popular than Jesus because he could water down the message and make everyone like it.  He was a lot more camera friendly than Jesus ever was and he always made everybody leave feeling good about themselves, which Jesus never really managed to do.

Thankfully, we’re a few years past the mega church craze, but the attitude has trickled down and now it’s common for even small church pastors to act as if they are a celebrity..  we still have the gatekeeper secretaries, pastors keep their phone numbers unlisted so, should someone need a pastor, they have to jump 30 hoops to get an audience.  And, sure enough, if you like one of them on Facebook, you will get the deluge of press releases.  I am SO THANKFUL for the “remove from feed” option they’ve written into Facebook! Having been to Bible college and spent years working in churches, 90% of my Facebook friends work in full time ministry positions and most of everything they ever post is nothing but an advertisement or a plug for some church or church program.  In the odd moment they do actually post something personal about their life it’s got a #community at the end… or an #ironsharpensiron  or some other buzzword, promo, marketing reference.  Never a single “im tired of the rain” or “having a crappy day”or “I just ran over the neighbors cat”… it leaves me wondering if I’m friends with the right facebook account… is this my friend or their promo page? Are these even real people? They haven’t posted a single photo that wasn’t of either the stage at their church or their small group.. it’s all so two-dimensional, like having coffee with a cardboard cutout wearing a church-logo tee shirt…

Jesus was a celebrity because he walked through the mud with the filthy, stinking people he came to serve.. and he never sent a single Tweet to advertise it. “Just washed 24 feet before dinner, LOVE these guys! #humility #POW”.

Thanks for being a real person. Keep it that way.


old people walkingI love the old movies about the late 1800s and early 1900s… back when things were made of wood and leather, stone and steel… not plastic and laminate sawdust with a woodgrain sticker holding it together. It was a better time, I think… everything seems like it was so much more real and authentic… from the things we had to the work we did.. our relationships, friendships and families… life was a lot harder, but better at the same time.

A hundred years from now nobody will have antiques from now, because nothing is meant to last… our lives are disposable. We stamp furniture out of a mold when it used to be carved by an artist’s hand. Instead of shelves of leather bound books and journals containing our stories and memories scratched in ink, we have little screens that don’t really hold anything at all. Cars are made out of plastic, homes are built by robots and show up in snap-tight pieces. We microwave our food and eat in front of a television… everything is becoming cheap and hollow… and nothing means anything because nothing is worth anything. We aren’t taught to take care of our stuff because we can always just go to Wal Mart and get another one.

Sadly, we’re even starting to look at each other as disposable… we’ve all got a thousand friends living there in our smartphones, who cares if we lose a few? Why go through all the work to build a solid relationship when it’s so much easer to get a new, easy one every time another gets stale? Why are there so many kids with no dads? Because relationships are now plastic and disposable. When a plastic chair breaks you throw it out and get another plastic chair. When an antique oak chair breaks you get out the tools and you repair it to last another hundred years. When we look at our relationships as plastic, they aren’t worth repairing and so they never last.

When nothing costs you anything, it’s not worth anything. People are losing their value because we don’t learn to respect each other, we don’t learn to grow up and carry the world, we learn how to argue about our rights to do our own things, say our own things, and behave however we feel like behaving… and anyone who tells us differently is a bigot… because correction and accountability dont mean anything to us… why do we need to listen to those old people? They just want to kill all the fun! Why would I grow some humility and apologize to someone I hurt when I can just unfriend them and forget about it? We look for reasons to burn bridges instead of reasons to build them, because they don’t matter to us. Once upon a time, your reputation was important… what kind of man people thought you were effected your family, your business, everything all the way down through your grand children… today we just say “who cares what they think? I’m just being me!” ..and we burn the bridges and look for easier ones to cross. Once upon a time our words mattered… when we sat down with a pen and paper to write a letter, everything you said mattered… today we fire off a Tweet or a post or a text and start forrest fires we can’t ever take back. We curse each other and swear and tear each other down with every other word..

Once upon a time, men taught boys how to grow into men themselves. They taught them how to get up early and work hard, how to respect women and fear God. When a boy (or another man) got out of line, the other men would show up at his door and set him straight. How many disagreements were settled with a fist against a jaw, a handshake, and a return to work? Now its words and swearing and threatening, shooting, more arguing, lawsuits, on and on… Part of learning how to be a man is learning how to be corrected… but that’s an absurdity to our world today, because nobody is ever wrong…
…and so women are beaten, kids grow up without fathers, drugs fill the streets, we flip on the TV and have a side of pornography and violence with our microwaved dinners. We redefine what a family is, we let boys grow up to be 30 year old boys playing video games all day and teach them that being a man is a gold chain, a flashy car and a woman on each arm and teach our girls that being a woman means finding one of those boys arms to hang onto.

Pastor Mark Driscoll said that all of societies problems can be traced down to one root problem, bad dads. He’s absolutely right. We learn everything we know about the world from our dads, including who we are and where we fit into the world. When we grow, it determines how we look at our families, our jobs, neighbors and coworkers, and the root of all of it is wether or not we ever learn to value the world around us… do we value our relationships? Do we value being corrected? Do we find any value in a broken relationship that’s been repaired? ..or do we find our value in the plastic, comfortable, easy things? Which is really more important, your right to do whatever the heck you want or your responsibility to do what is right?


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Knowing full well his purpose in life,

 

the silent white lamb ran straight at the knife.

 

He poured out his blood and filled up the ocean,

 

 

to wash us clean of our sins and forget them.

 

And for his bride he gave up his breath,

 

and went to the grave to strangle the life out of Death.

 

A blinding light then flooded the tombs,

 

 

and flowers that wilted began to bloom.

 

And all of the children, once dead, now sing,

 

 

GLORY to the Lamb who sets the captives free!

 

 

by Ryan Green


I’ve determined to resume the blog.
It’s good to take a break from things sometimes, even things you love… It gives you a different perspective and it keeps you grounded, even if the choice to step away isn’t really yours… If you don’t, you run the risk of becoming some tool whos so caught up in your own stuff you forget about what youre even doing in the first place.

I’ve had some time away from writing anything “public”, just my own journals and such, and it’s given me time to ask some questions about this blog and just writing in general… I considered changing things up and letting the blog fall to the side for a bit, but I think I need to keep it going… Questions I’ve been chewing on?

1. Why write at all? Writing for me is therapy. I don’t sit down to write because I’ve got some huge issue on my heart that I just need to share with the world, I sit down to write because I need to write… the same as when I get home from work and I fall on the sofa and grab my guitar, it’s not that I’ve got some song I need to sing, I just need to feel the strings at my fingertips and the hum of the wood against my chest and hear the intonation and the chords and spend a moment just letting go and creating something that didn’t exist before I sat down, and will never exist again. Writing is like that for me also.. it’s letting a part of my mind go lose and paint with words in a way that it doesn’t get to in any other area of life… sometimes I sit down to write and I don’t even have anything to write about! Just like playing guitar without having any specific song to play… it’s just the process of creating.

2. Why write a blog? When I was in college I would take a guitar and go sit in the front yard of the dorm and play for hours. I wasn’t performing for anyone and it didn’t matter if anyone else even noticed me, but I enjoyed it and from time to time someone else would show up with a guitar or mandolin or something and play along. Before long we could have several playing along together, maybe a group would gather to listen.. those were some of the best memories I have from college. This blog is my front yard. Maybe nobody will ever notice what I write, but maybe, just maybe, someone will walk past and decide to join in, maybe lots of people would join in, or even just read and enjoy.

3. Who is the blog for? It’s for anyone interested in the conversation, either joining or observing. I’m not writing this to convince anyone of anything, to impress anyone, to prove anyone right or wrong. I purposely ask questions and raise alternative ideas to encourage thought and discussion, so I guess this blog is for people like me, who want to teach and yet be challenged at the same time…. people who realize they don’t know everything but really wish they could! I’m not ashamed of my faith or my view of the world, and since that will influence everything I write, I make no apologies about it being a central aspect of the blog. When you read what I write, you get me, 100% me, not some scrubbed, polished, politically correct revision of me. I don’t have a publisher to bow to and the blog is free so it’s not like I’m going to lose business by saying something controversial, so the blog is for anyone who wants to read and discuss. If you want to argue, take it elsewhere. If you want to discuss and occasionally agree to disagree but keep on talking, welcome!

4. Whats the purpose of the blog? The Beautiful Ending is about life. The good and the bad, the happy and the sad, and everything that makes us feel human. I see to much “fake” in the world, everything is about advertising and trying to sell something… this blog is meant to make people think about everything beneath the wrappers, even the truth about whats behind our own images that we try to sell to the world. It’s about refocusing our conversations, our attention, even our lives on something bigger and brighter and more beautiful than we are, and chasing it down.

5. Where do I want to blog to lead? I haven’t answered that one yet.. I’m hoping to sort that out along the way.. If it leads to something else that’s great, if it fizzles any nobody ever reads it, that’s ok too… I guess we’ll see what happens.

That’s all I’ve got for today… thanks for coming back and checking things out! If you like the blog, keep coming back! Sign up for the email list so you don’t miss anything, and if you know anyone else who might enjoy reading, be sure to send them over! In the spirit of spring and making things new I’ll be changing up some of the look, feel and format of the blog, but never fear, it will still be me!

Grace & Peace friends.

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