I’ve been reading and journaling on the book of Romans for a little bit now. Maybe I should have done better to choose a different book. In spite of the fact that I’ve read the book many a time and spent … 20 hours in Bible school studying it, when I take the time to read and understand it, I feel that I only get to see a tiny bit more of the treasure that can be found in this epistle. I was reading W. Graham Scroggie’s  ”The Unfolding Drama of Redemption” (that I got for 4$ at Value Village!) as I was walking my way through the book of Romans and last night, commenting on Romans 14, where Paul speaks of the great freedom one can enjoy in Christ and the reality that those who are strong in faith cannot destroy the faith of their fellow brothers and sisters who have different beliefs when it comes to food and special days to observe, Scroggie writes:

There is something greater than liberty, and that is love.

That’s all that needed to be said. I’ve known people who (and I myself do at times) find it difficult to reconcile our freedom in Christ and the fact that we’re called to not be stumbling blocks for our brothers and sisters who don’t have the same thinking. Our freedom is constrained to what other believers think, as if we’d be free to live outside the box but had to live inside it in certain circumstances for the sake of our brothers and sisters’ faith.

Well, Scroggie’s words are quite appropriate here and what’s neat about it is that it reminds us that love indeed is greater than liberty. We would naturally think the other way around, but no, love is indeed greater than liberty and so we’re called to think of loving before thinking of personal freedom.

That’s obviously taken from Desiring God website

“He scarce had said, when the bare Earth, till then Desert and bare, unsightly, unadorn’d, Brought forth the tender Grass, whose verdure clad Her universal Face with pleasant green, Then herbs of every leaf, that sudden flour’d Op’ning thir various colours, and made gay Her bosom smelling sweet…”

John Milton’s Paradise Lost – Book 7, lines 313-319a

I was at the banq (Bibliothèque des Archives Nationales du Québec) today in between my translation and psychology class, reading a book I started two years ago in my English literature course. I only had to read the first two books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost for the course, now I’m working my way through the 12 books that make up the whole book. I was sitting in a comfy banq chair by the large windows facing the bus depot on the third floor and those lines (313-319ff) really struck me.

I don’t know about you but my life can most of the time be defined by Robert Coles’ words: “… the only consistency in my life is my inconsistency”. I know that from the outside I’m a pretty boring and stable person, but inside, my relationship with God and this “new creation” that I am, is more a constant struggle of flesh against Holy Spirit, lots of ups and downs and redefining what I think I believe and being confused and not trusting God enough and not expecting great things from God and wanting to be 24/7 in God’s Word for a few days and then just totally waste my time and not caring about giving Him more than my 25-minute reading and praying a day. I don’t know, that’s just me right now, and it’s been me for … several years. So that’s me, reading those lines of Milton’s book.

At the same time, I think of people around me who are going through some tough times, waiting for God to act on their behalf or freeing them from A, B, C or D, crying over their sins, needing liberation, or bearing some health problem burden when it just seems to get worse or having to deal with some emotionally heavy issue in their lives or having to bear that with someone else. Life’s full of ups and downs and sometimes those downs and struggles, whether they be on a spiritual, relational, emotional or physical level, just seem to be never-ending and impossible to get through, seeing some light just seems impossible, we just don’t see how things could change, how springtime could come.

Milton reminded me that when the earth was still formless and as a “Desert and bare”, God, out of nothing, “Brought forth the tender Grass”. There was nothing to make the earth produce grass and trees and vegetation of its own. Nothing. It was bare like a desert, dry and cold. On its own, the earth was just a mass of I don’t know what without life. But when God simply spoke the word, grass appeared. Life appeared.

I know this sounds cheesy, but I really think that cheesy’s good a lot of the time: No matter the inconsistency I’m going through or the burdens I’m bearing, there’s always, always hope. God speaks and the earth lives. God only needs to will it and springtime appears wherever He desires and that can be in my life, at any level, because of Jesus who became sin for me and covered me with His righteousness so that God’s justice could be satisfied in Him and I, become an heir, a daughter of God. Crazy. That’s why I can’t give up clinging to Him and seeking after Him, because He gives life, He gives healing, even in the most barren of worlds.

I really should be reading stuff on second language acquisition or working on my anglicismes assignment, but it’s a grey Saturday. Instead, I’d rather think about confession. I usually would prefer doing assignments than having to think about confession, let alone actually confessing my sins. It’s not something I’m prone to do, it’s not natural for me to want to confess sins, so assignments looks more interesting or at least, easier to deal with than confession.

But confession is good. It’s more than merely ‘good’, I just don’t have the words. I remember that as a teen I’d “confess” my sins (that is, I believed that confession was the ‘reading’ of a list of sins to God) every night and I couldn’t believe how a person could fall asleep without going though that kind of confession. I suppose it wasn’t a bad thing for me to go to God and tell Him the sins I’d done during that day and ask for His forgiveness, but confession has taken on a different meaning or depth maybe in the last few years for me.

Confessing my sins to God (that is, acknowledging that God is in the right and I am in the wrong about a bunch of stuff I’ve thought, said and done), can be easy. I don’t see God and I don’t have a great enough fear of Him and understanding of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, so that makes confession seem easier. I do realize that my sins are always done in rebellion against Him, no matter who else is involved, but confessing to God often seems easy. At other times, confession is tough and doesn’t want to get out of me, but those times aren’t as frequent as the other times.

Confessing my sin to the person I’ve sinned against is one, tough thing. But when my sin is just between me and God, I’ve found that confessing those sins to a trusted sister (well I’m a girl eh) is like being put through fire to be refined. For me, it’s so much more demanding to confess to a human being than to God. It should be the other way around, but I’m obviously a human being and a great sinner. So I’ve discovered a bit more, how that kind of confession is good and healthy for me. It’s not that my friend has the authority to forgive my sins, but having to humble myself before that other human being provides me with a proper shame and repentance that should accompany confession… such things, unfortunately aren’t necessarily with me when I only “confess” to God. It’s no fun to have to confess, once again certain sins to someone who keeps me accountable, but it’s helped me a great, great deal to deal with certain sins.

Anyway… those are some of my thoughts.

I was talking on the phone with a friend and we happened to discuss church membership. I don’t particularly have a strong conviction on either of the positions (church membership is not needed and unbiblical or church membership is important and biblical). So I was wondering if any of you had any thoughts about this topic. Does membership in a church promote the idea that a church is a business? Does membership in a church put you in a box as being “Lutheran” or “Baptist” or “Mennonite”? is that such a big deal, does it matter? What are the biblical foundations for church membership? If it has none, then when did it start and in what context? … I don’t expect answers, but who knows, a couple pastors read my blog every once in a while eh.

“… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith.” Romans 3:23-25

I do get confused and unsure about what the Bible reports and teaches. Sometimes I’m just really at lost when it comes to thinking about the Gospel, not that I don’t know what the Gospel is, but rather how we can back it up since verses sometimes can seem to contradict one another and I wonder, “Man, how do we know what’s really true?”. I do have a little faith crisis here and there but it is at those times that straight forward verses such as Romans 3:23-25 hit me hard.

It’s easy for me to know and believe that I’m a sinner, that my redemption was bought by Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross and that is all a free gift from God. But the part that I keep forgetting is that it is “to be received by faith”. I got to remind myself of that every single day, otherwise I forget it and then get confused down the road. Yes God’s grace doesn’t make sense to me and it actually frustrates me at times, but I got to remember that it is by faith that God justifies me, through Jesus Christ and he does it freely. Faith’s got to be active and it’s tough to just believe, to just accept God’s grace in light of my sins and rebellion, but I got to repent and receive God’s grace by faith, daily.

“For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.” Romans 14:7-9

“Foolishness!” Isn’t it what most people in our Western society would exclaim after reading that small passage? Most probably. Our society advertises for something that’s standing on the opposite side of what that passage teaches. Society pushes us all to become successful, independent, distinct individuals who don’t need a thing outside of themselves. We are evaluated by what we accomplish, our worth is in our abilities.

The reality though is that we are foolish for believing that we can do it all by ourselves without any outside help. For sure we can all be cool people on earth, but when it comes to meeting God, our abilities amount to nothing. As Philip Yancey writes, “The height of Mount Everest and the troughs of the Pacific Ocean are very impressive to those of us who live on this planet. But from the view of Andromeda, or even Mars, those differences matter not at all. That is how I now see the petty behavioural differences between one Christian group and another. Compared to a holy God, the loftiest Everest of rules amounts to a molehill. You cannot earn God’s acceptance by climbing; you must receive it as a gift.”

Society says to live for ourselves, to be our own master, to belong to nobody. The Word of God says we, as Christians, must live and die to the Lord and that we belong to Him. It’s hard to have this perspective but it seems to me that the more we understand who God is the less we feel the need to feel good about ourselves and to be of any importance or distinction.

Let’s just live to the Lord.

“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly … God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:6,8)

You know, sometimes I’m prone to complain. Complain about things, situations, people, but especially this summer, about my kids at camp. Some days some of them just don’t want to cooprate and act in such an immature way in comparison with their peers. On those days I’m quick to be frustrated and complain in my heart about those kids. Why can’t they just listen when I speak? Why can’t he just participate as everybody else does? Why do I always need to remind her not to mock people? Ah man, I get tired of their attitudes sometimes. But then I think of Jesus and how God in Christ died, (DIED!) to receive the condemnation that was mine, to clothe me, a sinner, with His righteousness, to reconcile me to my Creator and bless me with blessing without number. I meditate on Christ and how He died for me, (ME!) even when I was still not born, even when He knew I would reject, mock, hate and despise Him until the day He would bring me to Christ. Jesus rained down grace upon me even when I was still a sinner and is now still blessing me in amazing ways day-by-day in spite of my foolishness and lack of love for Him.

So when I have those tougher hours with my kids, I try to remember Christ and how in fact, I am not more righteous than any kid I have no matter how much they disobey. I don’t have any reason to complain about the slightest thing because I used to be a “son of disobedience” myself until God freely gave me Christ.

It seems that all there is left for me to do is rejoice in God’s grace.

My friend was spending her last full day in Québec on Monday before leaving for Ecuador for the summer. She likes going by the river near my place and sing songs. So we decided to go on Monday afternoon.

It was not long after we were both sitting on a cement block by the river with our feet dangling right above the water that a guy, guitar in hand, joined us. He was about to play by the river too and thought it’d be a better idea to play with us instead of playing over us. So anyways, we just played a little bit together. He didn’t know the songs I played, so he concluded they were compositions of mine. I told him they were mostly songs we sing at church. He then asked us to sing a song for him, which we did. Later on I asked him to play us some of his songs and etc. We had a nice little time.

At one point the guy told us about some people he knew who went to a Baptist church and how no matter the religion, what was important was that they all brought good to the world. I never know what to say to that kind of thinking so I just said that all those religions that brought good to the world was a good thing of the short term (people are fed, helped, loved, clothed, etc. by all sorts of religious organizations, what they do is good) but that in the long run it was not going to be so good, ’cause if they didn’t preach the truth, then at the end all those people they led astray would be lost. I guess he didn’t say anything and jumped to something else, he asked us to sing a song about God’s love. So we sang him, “L’amour de Dieu”.

I thought our little encounter was interesting. I hope it was interesting to you. Maybe I should go by the river more often and sing this summer.