Dear Paula,

Thank you for loving me with one way love. Thanks for divorcing law and grace in our marriage. For not mixing law and grace in your love toward me.  When I have frustrated you with my own mess, when I’ve judged you, when I’ve presumed upon you, you don’t return law with law, you never multiply the trespass (Rom.5:20).  Thank you for not speaking law to this sinner and expecting me to hear it as grace. Thank you for never lecturing me with Christianized law masked as doing something for my good; for never speaking of holding me “accountable”, “discipling” me, or “speaking the truth in love.”  It is indeed cliched but true; your unconditional love has set me free to love you with a vicious passion and desire to love every crevice and nuance of you.

Your living of grace toward me in our marriage is the gospel of Christ applied to my life everyday. Your grace is heard, felt, received and so free. Your physical beauty adorns you, but your grace is the timeless beautiful symphony that expresses love, joy, peace, meekness, kindness, and creativity. You have actively formed our marriage by grace. I am graced by you. I am drunk on it, established by it (Eph.4:16), and can’t get enough of it.

So looking forward to the Avett show with you.

I love you.

Spence

Line of Fire by Junip

What would you do
If it all came back to you?
Each crest of each wave
Bright as lightning

What would you say
If you had to leave today?
Leave everything behind
Even though for once, you’re shining

Standing on higher ground
When you hear the sounds
You realize its just the wind
And you notice it matters who and what you let under your skin

If put to the test
Would you step back from the line of fire?
Hold everything back
All emotion set aside it

Convince yourself
Someone else
Hide from the world
Your lack of confidence
What you choose to believe in
Takes you as you fall
Takes you as you fall

No one else around you
No one to understand you
No one to hear your calls
Look through all your dark corners
You’re backed up against the wall
Step back from the line of fire

What would you do
If it all came back to you?
Each crest of each wave
Bright as lightning
Do the same as you

What you choose to believe in
Takes you as you fall

No one else around you
No one to understand you
No one to hear your calls
Look through all your dark corners
You’re backed up against the wall
Step back from the line of fire

Helping to set others free, free to launch into dreams and lifelong desires, is incredibly fulfilling.  I consider my own entrepreneurial spirit to be a gift from my mother, as my brother inherited it as well. Beyond my own desire to launch things, I love experiencing those around me launch into their dreams.  Whether it’s launching a dream to a career, to adopt children, a Waterproof Bible, a summer camp, an electrical business, a brewery, an artistic passion, or a band, being a part of the lives and stories of those who have launched their dreams, keeps me dreaming. Sometimes these dreams fly far away. It’s always sad to see them go, flight is sometimes dangerous and unpredictable. But every flight encourages me beyond measure and reminds me of what God is doing around me.

He is redeeming the world. When I left seminary I wrote out seven points of what I felt “called” to in this world, so that I might review them year after year.  One of those points was and is “being a part of cultivating within churches, organizations, and individual lives those practices that are aligned with the enduring design of the world, who grieve over the agony of evil, pain and failure in the world, and who bring hope and healing through the gospel in their spheres of responsibility.” I can’t help but thank God for the gift of being a part of just that.  I can’t wait to experience more dreams, more launches, and more flight. But today I will raise a toast to all my friends who are soaring.  I’m incredibly proud of you and what has become of your dreams.

The posted video from John Piper accomplishes all of the above.

And if you want to dress up your tech gadgests, find your customized costumes from Reformation Brewery here.

Answers can sometimes be easy or sometimes a challenge. Cynicism pulls, love is hard. But brokenness continues. Where is grace? What does it look like here in their stories, where their stories are just down the street? Is it easier when they’re pain is a plane ride away? Is it easier in your car to just keep driving, don’t look?

Maybe it’s time for you to listen? Not so that you can necessarily help or fix it, maybe it can’t or doesn’t need fixing, but just experience the desperation of life expressed in one minute on a prepaid phone. Let it shred you and measure your love. I know the cynicism well. But what about Jesus? He still came to us, desperate and broken. Love compelled him to be and to do.

I’ve tried telling their story to dry bones, I’m dried bones, so I’m going to let them tell you for themselves.

Here is tonight’s story. I’ve protected the name and any personal info.

I often wonder if we are missing the blessing of godliness in the present moment.  Living from event to event, program to program, entertainment to entertainment, stimulation to stimulation without ever giving a second thought to the present grace of God.  We are much better at talking about grace in the past or even in the future, but few of us live in present grace.  I wonder if our pressing for holiness often misses that amiable mark by our absence in the present.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade in The Sacrament of the Present Moment writes:

God’s order, his pleasure, his will, his action, and grace; all these are one and the same. The purpose on earth of this divine power is perfection. It is formed, grows, and is accomplished secretly in souls without their knowledge. Theology is full of theories and arguments expounding the miracles it works in each soul. We may be able to understand all these speculations, cogently discuss, write, teach, and instruct souls through them. But with only this in mind in relation to those in whom that divine purpose exists, I suggest we are like sick doctors trying to cure patients in perfect health.

God’s order and his divine will, humbly obeyed by the faithful, accomplishes this divine purpose in them without their knowledge in the same way as medicine obediently swallowed cures invalids who neither know nor care how. Just as it is fire and not the philosophy or science of that element and its effects that heats, so it is God’s order and his will which sanctify and not curious speculations about its origin or purpose.

To quench thirst it is necessary to drink. Reading books about it only makes it worse. Thus, when we long for sanctity, speculation only drives it further from our grasp. We must humbly accept all that God’s order requires us to do and suffer. What he ordains for us each moment is what is most holy, best, and most divine for us.

I think I’ll be looking more at Caussade’s thoughts in the days to come.

Luther taught that every time you insist that I am a sinner, just so often do you call me to remember the benefit of Christ my Redeemer, upon whose shoulders, and not upon mine, lie all my sins. So, when you say that I am a sinner, you do not terrify, but comfort me immeasurably. -Thomas Oden, The Justification Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 5

Of First Importance

1. The key to understanding this whole vision is to understand western culture from the standpoint of the gospel rather than the gospel from within the presuppositions of modernity. In other words, the worldview baggage that we all carry from our lives prior to believing the Gospel combined with our daily struggle with competing worldviews cannot supplant the gospel as the foundation for understanding culture. We understand the world through the gospel, not the gospel through the world.
2. This vision is centered in the confession of the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all of life. There is not one molecule or atom outside the authority and sovereignty of God.
3. To understand salvation to be restorative and comprehensive. The Kuyperian tradition has developed over against the Platonizing of salvation. Platonic thought understands salvation to be an escape from this world while the vision laid out by Kuyper and others saw that redemption had come, is coming, and will come to the world.
4. To understand the church to be more than a “religious” community, but rather the church as gospel community which represents a new humankind that shares in the comprehensive redemptive purposes of the kingdom of God.
5. To recognize the antithesis—the struggle between the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness—even in this already/not yet time of the kingdom. Since redemption and sin are comprehensive in scope, there is an encounter at every point in creation. Recognizing this reality protects us from running from the enemy as well as the false hope that we can barricade out the darkness. Sin is too comprehensive to run from, redemption is too comprehensive to be walled by tradition.
6. The vision holds a high view of Biblical authority. If the church is not to be absorbed into the reigning idolatry of culture, the Biblical story must become the starting line and the finish line. This does not mean a fundamentalist surrender. Rather to recognize that the Bible tells one story about the whole creation (universal history) with a creation, fall, redemption, new creation story line.
7. A recognition of the creational good and the distortions of idolatry in the public square lead to an understanding of the missional task of the church. In the public square this means that the people of God are subversive agents who neither pursue revolution nor conservatism. Rather “inner reformation” seeks to preserve what is good (by it’s nature as being created by God) and to oppose what has been distorted by idolatry.

When studying The Kuyperian vision it quickly becomes apparent that the vision stresses the doctrine of creation which has enabled a much more positive and defined agenda in politics, education, art and other areas of public life. And while the original vision is beautiful in and of itself, it has deepened since Kuyper. More thought has been given regarding the Cross of Christ as well as more developed eschatology and a deeper understanding of how both the cross and eschatology influence our daily encounters in the public square. Also the vision has evolved with a greater emphasis on the local church as the primary instrument of the church’s mission in the public life instead of specialized organizations disconnected from the local body. The glaring weakness in the Kuyperian vision was a lack of connection with the local congregation, a weakness that has been recognized and hopefully corrected.

Have you ever heard this vision presented? Thoughts?

Part 1: I Brew Because Jesus is Lord

Part 2: Jesus is Lord So What?