That Jesus Christ Swag

"Nobody comes to the throne of Grace with Swag." Dr. Matthew McKellar

My very white, middle-aged Biblical Studies professor said this in class today, and the class burst out in laughter. It instantly became my favorite sentence of the week.

It has been said that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. We hear this and assent to it conceptually yet, at least for me, it is much harder to live out in an honest way. I try to earn grace and to prove by my knowledge that maybe I don't deserve grace, but man did I use it well! But in fact, no amount of preaching, or teaching, or soul-winning can ever give me enough holy accessories to let me earn it.

My swag can't get me into that club.

But because I accepted Christ, my name is on that list.

I got that Jesus Christ Swag.

Grace

One of my favorite songs is Grace by Phil Wickham. Not only is he a brilliant singer, his lyric in the chorus is beautiful.

He says: Grace, I call your name, oh won't your smile fall over me. I'm cracked and dry, on hands and knees, oh sweet Christ rain down on me, I need you grace

I have heard all my life that there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and there is nothing I can do to make God love me any less. And this has become as meaningless to me as "everything happens for a reason".

Because I mean after all- the wages of sin is death. Faith without deeds is dead. I need to prove my holiness by my actions. God gives Grace, but in addition to grace I need my action.

RIght?

I mean, it's too good to be true that God just gives grace and that's it, right? There's that really fast disclaimer (this offer not valid in Puerto Rico, Guam or the Virgin Islands, void where prohibited, no purchase necessary, etc) at the end right? I ask this somewhat facetiously but I think I live my life and most people thinking that my actions are the determinants of my eternal destiny. The truth is that the only thing I contribute to my salvation is the sin that made it necessary.

I cannot do a special dance, say a special prayer or wish a special wish to activate God's grace.

I am not the enactor of God's grace. I am the recipient.

God is the actor, I am the object.

We love because He loved us first. He loved me first. And his Grace is a free gift given not by my meritorious behavior- grace is given despite of my actions. And nothing I do can make God's grace insufficient. That's not to say I will sin freely because of this- to the contrary, my gratitude should drive me to strive to please God even more.

But when I fail, let me not be surprised.

And let me remember that He never does.

The Lord's Prayer

So I don't pray enough. That's bad and I don't like this fact about myself but I get bored praying. I'll lift up little prayers here and there throughout the day but most of my life, I have found it difficult to pray for long stretches of time. I know it's important, I know it's necessary, and yet I have trouble with it.

Lately though, this is changing. And of all things, it's the prayer most people find most boring. The Lord's Prayer. Now, we never recited the Lord's Prayer in our church when I was growing up- it was deemed too Catholic and too formulaic. So although I knew they were the words of Jesus, I had a minor distrust in praying this prayer- it seemed like ritual and not Spirit.

But God recently changed my heart on this. I mean, if you just look at it, it's beautiful.

Our father in Heaven
Hallowed be your name
Your Kingdom come, your will be done
On Earth as it is in Heaven
And Father give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespassers, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

This is the way my God prayed. This is the way Jesus taught me to pray. So I started doing so every morning. And throughout the day, when I was stressed, when I became frustrated or just needed to feel Him close by I would pray the prayer. Sometimes I'd put it in my own paraphrase and sometimes I'd just recite it as is. But the thing I made it a point to do was not just say the words but feel their intent.

I need the daily provision He gives. He is Holy. I need His will done in my life. He is in Heaven, I am on Earth and only he can bridge that gap. I need His forgiveness, and I need to forgive. I need to be protected from sin.

I need Him.

I need His Word.

And through the Lord's Prayer, he is teaching me, that this is my prayer too.

The Art of Being

I'm a doer.

Always have been. When I was in high school I was an officer in the Student Council, was a member of LULAC, Choir, Wrestling, Key Club, the school's main Christian club and in my free time helped create a second Christian club.

At church, I sang on the worship team, taught a small group, taught a leadership class, attended a small group, helped lead the youth group and taught Sunday school.

Currently, I work full time, go to school full time, run a youth ministry and most importantly, I got married a year and a half ago so I have a wonderful wife with whom I like to spend most of my time.

As you can see, I keep myself busy.

This makes me feel useful and productive and it has helped a lot of people, thank God. But I realized with all that activity, I had forgotten something very important about myself.

My wife drives ridiculously fast. I mean, NASCAR fast. And it's not when we're in a hurry- it's everywhere. Of course, she tells me I drive like a tortoise and then I try to explain to her that the speed limit is a maximum, not a minimum speed. It does not work.

Since I'm so busy, I often have to sacrifice time with my family, with whom I am quite close. But I started noticing that over the last few years, I could more readily find times where I couldn't be with them than times in which I could. I also noticed that I was not as kind or tender to everyone as I had been in previous years. I had the convenient excuse of being busy, and needing to focus and that was mostly true. But in all my rushing to get school done, to get work done, to write my next sermon or finish my next paper, I had forgotten to pause to just be.

I was living my life the way my wife drives.

So I decided that this year (let's not call it a resolution, let's call it a commitment instead) that I would spend more time with my mom, dad, brothers, sisters and friends and less time "keeping busy".

It bugged me a little bit that I would not be achieving something with that time, but I noticed something. In the down times, I felt my family relax. I felt them open up to me. And I had opportunities to speak into my friends' and family's lives not as the achieving Superman youth pastor but as husband, brother, son, and friend. I am realizing now that sometimes, I don't need to do anything (or everything) to feel right. I don't have to always be going, going, going full speed to be significant or to have an impact. Sometimes, I just need to be and that is enough.

So this year, I'm learning the Art of Being. Wish me luck.

The Old Man That Made Me Cry

My day job involves working with people trying to keep their homes, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Doing my job, you develop a thick skin and learn how to ask the customers for the info you need to process their modification applications. I talked to this man on the phone who was out of options, but I still needed something from him.

He was an older Latino man, and he kind of sounded like my grandpa. Maybe that's why I reacted so strongly to him. I'm not sure but I do know he had zero incentive to work with me, and he had already moved out of the property. Most people in that situation are at best apathetic and at times quite brutal, but this man was so kind it moved me. I asked him if he received any kind of assistance since he said he was no longer working. "No" he said, he lived at the church. He thanked me profusely for my call and was intent to do what I needed for my purposes. Again he had no incentive. He had no money. He had no job, yet he was supernaturally kind to me. He was grateful. He was a living epistle.

I never realized how often I complain until I saw myself through the prism of this man. I realized I'm not that grateful. I understood at that moment that if he can be such a beautiful example of a Christian in his situation, it means I can never complain, because I have too much to be grateful for.

When I get to be that age, I pray that I am half as strong as that man was, half as humble, half as noble. When I hung up with him, I was moved nearly to tears. I'm not sure if he will ever know how much he impacted me, but I will not soon forget him or his example. He was amazing. And that's how the old man made me cry.

Could it be that we're broken?

You know, we always think that things are pretty much going as they should be. On some level, most of us accept that since things are how they are, that this current state of being is normal, to be expected and acceptable. And we have this expectation that we are able to get things to where we want them to be if we just try hard enough.

Yet we look through history and see that all of our repeated attempts at perfection always come up short.

Always.

I'm no math whiz, but I think that's almost 100%.

Every time men come up with rules for living together in perfect harmony, it fails. Socialism is a beautiful idea, but it doesn't work. The Tower of Babel was supposed to be an incredible testament to the strength of humanity, but instead, it became the eternal symbol for our disunity and fallenness. Jews came up with 613 rules of behavior in order to keep the Law. Not one of them was able to keep it. Muslims have sharia law, but in the places that it is practiced it is failing to maintain a peaceful society, let alone a perfect one. Why is it that every time we try to achieve this harmony that we all desire, we fail?

Could it be that we're broken?

Maybe we can't achieve perfection because we are all imperfect. Maybe we are made in such a way that attaining perfection is outside of our grasp. Romans 3:20 says that the Law allows us not to be justified but "to become conscious of our sin." No matter what we do, we will find sin. And nothing we can do is able to remove our sins. In fact, even if we do nothing, that is a sin.

We have had thousands of years to try to create the perfect society. But across the globe, across religions, across time all of our efforts have failed to produce one single example of perfection. Maybe we've gotten close, but even if the society functions well, within each individual member, sin is present.

We cannot be justified by works. And maybe all of our failed efforts to produce perfection will allow us to see that.

We are broken.

We are fallen.

We need a Savior.

And his name is Jesus.

Greater is He

Two nights ago, I preached at a youth event I help lead. One of the largest groups we were expecting could not make it and it had not been as well publicized as previous events had been, so frankly, I was really nervous that it would be a letdown from some of our previous events.

I felt like I hadn't put as much daily effort into it as usual.

It kind of snuck up on our whole team.

It was at a new location.

There were some communication problems in the planning of it originally.

As the worship team was ministering, I was praying desperately in the background for God to use the team in ministering and me in preaching to glorify Himself.

In a lot of ways, I felt like I was in over my head because the night before, there was a pretty significant change in the way my sermon was going to be done. But it didn't matter. Because Greater is He that's in me than He that is in the world.

Sometimes, as a spiritual leader, people constantly need you for guidance and decision-making. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your are self-sufficient. It's easy to think that because others rely on you, that you do indeed have it all figured out. And it's easy to think that the world is dependent on your efforts.

Among spiritual leaders, the "Superman Complex" is the really strong, and I count myself chief among those that have this disease.

God used me that night, and many people commented on how much I had grown as a preacher. The fact is that I hadn't grown. I had diminished. God had grown inside of me.

He used that night to remind me of my dependence upon Him. I'm not Superman. He is. And sometimes, it takes the feeling of being unprepared for me to realize that God is God, and He doesn't need me. I need Him.

How beautiful.