Testimony
There’s so much spiritual eye-candy and these platforms have us losing ourselves, reaching for things we’re convinced will bring us contentment, status, recognition..all the things.
That was me, wanting it all desperately.
@sharonkgilbert Found you guys on Skywatch. Admired his depth of knowledge where few had it. He said he just had good readership. Encouraged me to not be so lazy with my own reading.
Joseph of Arimathea pulled a corpse off a cross with his bare hands.
Blood under his fingernails. The weight of a dead man sagging into his arms.
He wrapped God in linen, pressed the fabric into wounds that were still wet.
Nicodemus brought seventy-five pounds of burial spice. A king's funeral for a man the world just murdered.
They carried Him into a hole in the rock and rolled the stone shut.
And everything you've ever done went in with Him.
Every night you can't sleep because of what you did. Every morning, you can't look in the mirror. The thing you did to her. The thing you did to them. The
lie you've been carrying so long it feels like bone.
The version of you that drinks alone and pretends tomorrow will be different.
That man was buried with Christ.
Stone sealed. Done.
Not managed. Not in therapy. Not on a payment plan with God where you slowly earn your way back. Buried. In a tomb. Under rock. Gone.
Three days of silence. Three days of a cold body in the dark.
Then the stone moved.
And when He walked out, the grave clothes were folded on the slab. He didn't stumble out tangled in death. He left it sitting there like a man who's done
with the clothes he used to wear.
Lazarus needed someone to unwrap him. Death still clung to him even after he was breathing.
Jesus folded His own burial linen and walked out clean.
That's the difference between religion and resurrection. Religion unwraps you slowly. Asks you to manage your sin. Attend the class. Read the book. Try harder next week.
Resurrection says the man who walked into that tomb is dead. The man who walked out doesn't know him.
You're not fixing the old you. The old you is in a sealed tomb in Jerusalem, and he's not coming back.
The man reading this, the one who thinks he's too far gone, you're not too far. You're already buried. The funeral happened two thousand years
ago.
Now get up. The stone's already moved. The linen's already folded.
Walk out.
If your theological convictions are not actively making you more gracious, humble, and repentant than your beliefs are not being shaped by Jesus they’re motivated by a desire to be argumentatively “right.”
I get asked this a lot: Can you be 100% certain God exists?
My answer in short is this: No, not in the scientific sense. But at the same time, you can't be 100% certain we're not living in a simulation.
Their response: So you admit you can't prove God’s existence?
I say: Can you prove George Washington was the first U.S. president?
“I wasn't there.”
I respond with: “Neither was I. But history, documents, and evidence make it the most reasonable conclusion.
The same is true for God.
If you remove faith from the equation, you can still examine the evidence and ask what's most probable.
When you look at the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of nature, objective morality, consciousness, and the historical case for Jesus, the evidence consistently points toward a Creator.
Faith isn't just believing without any evidence. Rather, it's trusting where the evidence leads.”
ISAAC NEWTON: "I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God. I study the Bible daily.
All my discoveries have been made in answer to prayer."
This is the Oxyrhynchus Hymn, dated to the late 200s AD. It is the earliest known Christian hymn manuscript with both lyrics and musical notation. A plain English rendering of the surviving words:
“Let all creation be silent.
Let the shining stars be still.
Let the rushing winds and rivers cease.
While we sing to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
let every power answer: Amen, amen.
Strength, praise, and glory forever to God,
the only giver of all good things. Amen, amen.”
Pastors: An enormous number (majority?) of pastors (and especially professors) are very, very out of touch with normal people and families, ESPECIALLY blue collar people.
So, to reach and disciple those people you are going to need to do some things that “pastor world” finds cringe (not theologically, but in things like style, tone, often emphasis), and you will be chattered about.
There will be a couple moments (not in everything) when you’ll have to decide which matters more: Being in the “inside circle” of pastor-world or actually reaching and discipling real people with real jobs and real sins and real problems in a real culture.
Charles Spurgeon summarized this dynamic well when he was viciously attacked by other pastors and newspapers for his jokes in the pulpit, his “vulgar tone”, and his sort of blue collar speech:
"I am perhaps vulgar, but it is not intentional, save that I must and will make the people listen. My firm conviction is that we have had quite enough polite preachers, and many require a change. God has owned me among the most degraded and off-casts. Let others serve their class; these are mine, and to them I must keep."
— Charles Spurgeon
@mans_wisdom_ The world has to use aura and strife all to gain attention. Just know Holy Spirit does all this for you when you know Jesus. And you’ll rarely care what others think about you. That’s true freedom.