Greetings,
Six years. Wow! We have journeyed a long path since planting Way of Life in September 2013. To be honest, I am not very good at celebrating. Now, don’t hear me wrong, I love parties and gatherings and all that. But as a visioneer and a guy who likes to move to the next thing days ahead of schedule, stopping to celebrate--or stopping at all--seems like a hassle. I find the celebration is in the experience of being able to move on to the new thing. But that is not the view of most people.
I need to repent from this thinking because God cares a great deal for celebration. He orders His people to celebrate, remember, and rest--all things that require stopping and reflection. The purpose of festivals and celebrations was to provide a structure for God’s people to praise Him.
As we look forward in just a couple of weeks at our anniversary of the launching of Way of Life, we want to provide a celebratory time of praise. Every year we celebrate by having a baptismal service outside at Lake Charles. It's a celebration of our founding and a celebration of the foundation of our faith in Christ through baptism.
God has called us to celebrate and He has called us to be baptized. If you have not been baptized, please let me know and let’s get it done. We want to be a fellowship of believers that obey the Lord in everything that He calls us to do.
What a blessing to be in fellowship with you all and celebrate the past six years and look forward to this next year. Only God knows what it will hold and I am sure this next year will be a great one. Pardon me for getting ahead of myself. Let's celebrate together first and then we’ll look forward to this next year.
Love ya,
Chris
Greetings,
A team from Way of Life returned this week from Mexico and the trip was amazing. There were so many confirmations that we are doing what the Lord wants us to do with the neighborhood of Villa Bonita in Rosarito, Baja California near the neighborhood of San Miguel where Casa Jazmin is. We painted a city park and we were allowed by the government official to put a Bible verse from Matthew 22:37 & 39 on the wall where everyone driving by can see it. It says, "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your strength." (Check out the attached picture!) On the adjacent wall it says, "Love your neighbor as yourself."
It may not seem like a big deal to write scripture on a public wall to many people, but I think it is a significant deal. The word of God does not return void. The fact that we were able to write these specific verses, which according to Jesus sum up the law and the prophets, on a public wall, is a declaration to the community that the Lord has not and will not forget them.
The word of God is powerful and transforms our thinking. It helps us to take comfort in the fact that God is far bigger than us and even though we can’t fully comprehend Him and His ways, we can trust the He has our best interests in mind. When we are faithful, the Lord goes before us and paves a way for us to do a lot of good in His name and glorify Him above anything else.
How are you getting your fill of the word of God? Some people listen to the Bible, others read the word in small chunks, or in huge swaths. Some people focus on devotional verses while others like to dive into the more difficult passages. Whatever you choose to do, ask the Lord to stretch and challenge you. No matter if you read the Bible through every year or if you read one book of the Bible a year, commit to read scripture and you will grow.
Prayerfully, the Lord will provide us with more opportunity to replace graffiti with scripture all over Rosarito!
Love ya,
Chris
Greetings,
Feelings are a funny thing. If you could control them it would require a lot of energy. God designed our autonomic nervous system to operate without our attention. Of course there are things that we can do to mitigate our feelings, but controlling them is impossible. A thought pops into our head and automatically has attached to it a hurt or a joy that was associated with a past experience or trial. It isn’t the thought or the feeling that gets us into trouble with our feelings. It is what we do shortly after we think and feel. 2 Corinthians 10:5 reveals a tool that every believer should work to master, that is taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
Every sinful thought and every hurtful thought. Every time a thought pops into our minds and causes an emotional response that isn’t Christ-like we must train our minds and bodies to capture that thought, measure it against Christ’s standard and choose instead to think and act as Christ would given that thought, emotion or situation.
You see, it’s that’s easy. (Thick sarcasm implied)
It isn’t easy at all. Our hearts are deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
I tell myself and my children regularly, "you don’t have to act how you feel." That's a simplistic way of remembering that my body is to be controlled by me and given to the Lord as a sacrifice. Taking hold of our emotions and actions is a difficult task and we can’t succeed on our own. The Lord is with us so we shouldn’t be dismayed, He is our God; He will strengthen us, help us, and uphold us in his righteous right hand (Isaiah 41:10).
Believing that means putting it into action. Trusting the Lord is not a passive action. Trusting the Lord is taking thoughts captive. Notice, Paul does not say to the Corinthians, hold your thoughts captive until you either forget about it, or until it dies a slow painful death. He says take it captive to the obedience of Christ. It means actively sacrificing those thoughts to the Holy Spirit so He can transform, what we would “naturally” do with them, into what is supernatural, obeying what the Lord calls us to do regardless of the situation.
I believe this is how the Holy Spirit molds us into the image of Christ. The more we deny our natural urges, taking them captive to the obedience of Christ, the more we respond to trials and triumphs in a Christ-like way. The more obvious the impact of Christ on my life, the more people want to know about this Jesus that transforms people.
Love ya,
Chris