Underground ReLOVEution

So I've been thinking about my message yesterday and I feel like there is something I forgot to say.

Everything that people do has a motivation behind it. I will go eat lunch soon. Now maybe my motivation is that I'm hungry, or maybe it's because it's noon and that is lunch time. Maybe it's because I'm bored and I want something to do, or maybe because I'm depressed and eating makes me happy. Regardless, there is a motivation for what I do, it's the same way for everything we all do.

Motivation can also be sin. If we do the right thing but we do it for wrong reasons, it is sin. It's not just action that can be sin, but motive is important too. If we read our Bibles but we do it so that people will see us and think we are good people, that is sin. Our actions are great, but our motives are evil.

The reason this is important is because I want to come back to what I talked about on Tuesday. When people fall on the side of legalism, they tend to ignore motive when thinking about sin and focus more on action. They know what sin is because they see people doing bad thing and that is obviously sin so they call them out on it. You can find legalism a lot in Evangelical churches because we've focused so much on "doing" good things.

On the other hand, there are the License people who forego action and look at motive. "I'm motivated to love Jesus, so that's all that matters." It doesn't seem to matter to them that they don't give glory to God by making out with their girlfriend or gossiping about their friends. People who are on the side of license tend to think that if they feel good feelings in their heart, then they are ok. God didn't come to save us to "good feelings" but rather to a life of good deeds.

Ephesians 2:1-10
1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ— by grace you have been saved— 6and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

So what is important about this? We need to have a proper idea of sin so we can realize our relationship to God and realize our own identity. Like I said at the beginning, we are sinners. Sin is not just bad things we do, but it is our deeds, our words, our motives, and even what we choose not to do. When we are not good friends, we are sinful. When we withhold love from people, that is sin. It is not enough to simply say that our sin is not just bad actions or just bad motives. Rather, we are sinful because of all those things.

So as Christians, we need Jesus. We might be able to avoid bad actions or bad words. Christians have been really good at trying to avoid bad actions. But we also need to see our sin as bad motives and sin of ommission.

My final point of application. Grow closer to Jesus, live for Jesus, love Jesus, pursue Jesus... and most importantly, realize every day that Jesis is your ONLY hope. He is my only hope. We cannot hope in political leaders, in good pastors, in our own goodness, in our dumb luck, or in our awesome abilities.

We need to pursue Jesus with everything, in action, word, and motive.

At the time when I saw this sinking dock I felt the same inside. The next time I returned the dock was fixed. Even the seemingly hopeless things have potential to be restored.

The Ragamuffin Gospel
A ragamuffin is a disreputable person, often a dirty poor child. The author of this book points out how Jesus ate with sinners: prostitutes, tax collectors,etc. those people no self-respecting person would have any contact with. I think of today's homeless as an example. How often I try to be "sensible" in my dealings with 'ragamuffins'. But Jesus took risks and welcomed them. He didn't care what others thought or what society said. If only His bride,the church,were more like Him! Whom can I welcome today,invite into my home or at least into my sphere of conversations, beyond "have a nice day"?

So this guy comes up to me and says "what's the vision? What's the big idea?" I open my mouth and words come out like this…
The vision?

The vision is JESUS – obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus.

The vision is an army of young people.

You see bones? I see an army. And they are FREE from materialism.

They laugh at 9-5 little prisons.
They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday.
They wouldn't even notice.
They know the meaning of the Matrix, the way the west was won.
They are mobile like the wind, they belong to the nations. They need no passport.. People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence.
They are free yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying.
What is the vision ?
The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes. It makes children laugh and adults angry. It gave up the game of minimum integrity long ago to reach for the stars. It scorns the good and strains for the best. It is dangerously pure.

Light flickers from every secret motive, every private conversation.
It loves people away from their suicide leaps, their Satan games.
This is an army that will lay down its life for the cause.
A million times a day its soldiers

choose to loose
that they might one day win
the great 'Well done' of faithful sons and daughters.

Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night. They don't need fame from names. Instead they grin quietly upwards and hear the crowds chanting again and again: "COME ON!"

And this is the sound of the underground
The whisper of history in the making
Foundations shaking
Revolutionaries dreaming once again
Mystery is scheming in whispers
Conspiracy is breathing…
This is the sound of the underground

And the army is discipl(in)ed.

Young people who beat their bodies into submission.

Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrade at arms.
The tattoo on their back boasts "for me to live is Christ and to die is gain".

Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their upward eyes. Winners. Martyrs. Who can stop them ?
Can hormones hold them back?
Can failure succeed? Can fear scare them or death kill them ?

And the generation prays

like a dying man
with groans beyond talking,
with warrior cries, sulphuric tears and
with great barrow loads of laughter!
Waiting. Watching: 24 – 7 – 365.

Whatever it takes they will give: Breaking the rules. Shaking mediocrity from its cosy little hide. Laying down their rights and their precious little wrongs, laughing at labels, fasting essentials. The advertisers cannot mould them. Hollywood cannot hold them. Peer-pressure is powerless to shake their resolve at late night parties before the cockerel cries.

They are incredibly cool, dangerously attractive

inside.

On the outside? They hardly care. They wear clothes like costumes to communicate and celebrate but never to hide.
Would they surrender their image or their popularity?
They would lay down their very lives - swap seats with the man on death row - guilty as hell. A throne for an electric chair.

With blood and sweat and many tears, with sleepless nights and fruitless days,

they pray as if it all depends on God and live as if it all depends on them.

Their DNA chooses JESUS. (He breathes out, they breathe in.)
Their subconscious sings. They had a blood transfusion with Jesus.
Their words make demons scream in shopping centres.
Don't you hear them coming?
Herald the weirdo's! Summon the losers and the freaks. Here come the frightened and forgotten with fire in their eyes. They walk tall and trees applaud, skyscrapers bow, mountains are dwarfed by these children of another dimension. Their prayers summon the hounds of heaven and invoke the ancient dream of Eden.

And this vision will be. It will come to pass; it will come easily; it will come soon.
How do I know? Because this is the longing of creation itself, the groaning of the Spirit, the very dream of God. My tomorrow is his today. My distant hope is his 3D. And my feeble, whispered, faithless prayer invokes a thunderous, resounding, bone-shaking great 'Amen!' from countless angels, from hero's of the faith, from Christ himself. And he is the original dreamer, the ultimate winner.

resolved: i will not compulsively share my problems with every single person i pass on the street.

Okay, so I read this quote in Pilgrim's Progress. One man is showing another man a picture of Jesus and says this to him:

"...the man whose picture this is [Jesus] is the only man whom the Lord of the place whither thou art going [heaven], hath authorized to be thy guide in all difficult places thou may'st meet with in the Way: wherefore take good heed to what I have showed thee, and bear well in thy mind what thou hast seen; lest in thy journey thou meet with some that pretend to lead thee right, but their way goes down to death."

I know the English is funny and it may not make sense out of context. But here's the bottom line...

At a certain point in our life we get a glimpse a picture of Jesus and this is what God says: See this guy? This is the one you want to follow. Sometimes a thousand voices will flood your mind with bucketloads of advice and opinions. Plug your ears, turn down the volume. Let the periphery fade to fuzz as you focus singly on him. He's your travel guide in this life. Your *only* leader.

I have been listening to lots of sermons and reading a ton of books lately in order to become wise about life. I want to know everything so that I don't make any mistakes. I'm searching out every potential problem before it even happens so that I might avoid it when the time comes. Stress! Panic! This approach doesn't lead me to God's peace. It just makes me want to pull my hair out. Or become a cow. Cows seem to have really uncomplicated lives.

I'm able to breathe so much easier when I realize once again that I'm accountable to Jesus. *Only* to Jesus. I don't have to please everyone. Just him. At a certain point I can choose to consider and then respectfully ignore the opinions of others and instead shut myself up in my room with Jesus. I get to leave everyone else outside the door as I lay myself down on the carpet and breathe. Just me and him. This is what the whole "easy yoke, light burden" thing is all about.

Pursue God only. Listen to his words to you. Press into him in quiet places and live directly from what he puts in your heart. Don't be swayed or confused.

We have only one Guide.

I'm sitting in a coffee shop, enjoying some beautiful latte art with my headphones on, listening to Hillsong United's new CD, surrounded by people as isolated as me. What is it about the cafe culture that causes us to desire singularity. I find that I love to be in community, to hang out with my friends and live life with them, yet there are moments when I need to step away and just be by myself. Where should this fit into my life with Jesus? Is this ok? Is it ok to be a loner?

1) God calls his people to be in community.
One thing is clear from the Bible, is that God is a communal God. The trinity is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect unity and community, and before God made man, he had perfect relationship. It's important to know this because we need to realize that God didn't create us because he was lonely. Not only that, but the only thing that wasn't good in God's creation was the fact that man was lonely, so God made woman for the man to have community. Mark Driscoll states it that man had the creatures below him and God above him, but no one beside him so he created woman. When man fell, the relationship between man and God and man and woman was broken. Adam and Eve covered themselves up and there was shame where before they were shameless before each other. Since then, people have had a problem living in community with each other. People are sinful and do sinful things to each other, and so we have to deal with these things and sometimes community can get broken and messed up. At the same time, we can see that there is a yearning in everybody to have relationships and be in community. It is ingrained in us and God calls us to be in relationship as well. So isolation is not part of the equation in being a Christian. For better and for worse, God calls us to live in friendships with fellow Christians and learn to forgive and be forgiven by them when we sin/are sinned against.

2) On the other hand, personal quiet time and reflection was a huge part of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, so maybe we can learn something from that. It says in Mark 6:30-32 that Jesus calls his disciples to come with him to have some time of solitude after some awesome time of ministry. These disciples have been going out and doing the work that Jesus commanded and now they are tired so Jesus tells them that it is time to take some time to rest. Still, later on we see that the people come to Jesus as he and the disciples are leaving and Jesus has compassion on them and starts to teach them. The disciples get frustrated because they want their time with Jesus. I think that I can learn from this that Jesus desperately wants us to have time of solacy but he doesn't want us to ignore the needs of the hurting. Is my heart beating along with Jesus for the needs of this world and is my heart moved. If I view my ministry to the youth group as a duty, then when it's "my time" I'm going to get pissed off becasue "I've done my duty" rather than having compassion and time to spare. Solitude is great, but not at the expense of the heart of Jesus. The second example we have is when Jesus is talking to the people on the Mount of Olives and explains to them to not pray like the hypocrites who yell out in the streets, but rather to go into solitude and pray to Jesus one-on-one. (Matthew 6:8-15) This is a different idea but there are some truths we can glean from this. First of all, Jesus is calling us to pray, not to ignore it, but to do it for the right reasons. The Pharisees would pray out loud in the streets to look pious and make sure everyone heard them, so Jesus calls them out on it and shows us that prayer is between us and God, no one else. As I pray at youth group, it can become easy to get into the trap of praying so that people will hear and be inspired, but at the core of it, prayer is about my relationship with Jesus. In that sense, is your time of solitude used to grow closer to Jesus? Do you have a passion for God that spills into your "personal time". This isn't about daily quiet times, but rather having a heart for God. You can plan your schedule, but it doesn't matter if your heart isn't changed.

So where does personal time come into play. I don't know if it is ever spoken about or condemned in the Bible, but the message that seems to come through clear can be seen in Jesus talking about the Greatest Commandment. Love God and love your neighbor with everything. Is your time geared towards these things. Do you give of yourselves in your time? Do you look to serve others and grow closer to God with everything you do? If the answers are no to these questions, then like me, let's confess to God and ask him to change our heart and how we see our time and the people around us. Although personal time may not be a bad thing, we really have to search our hearts and see if they are beating along with Jesus'.

Since I'm too lazy to write something profound, a little humor to get you started. Courtesy of Meredith.

Hi, welcome to my house. I'm glad you could make it. Dinner is in the oven and the football game is on, but let me give you a quick tour of the place. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Jonathan, a youth leader at the Underground. We are a youth group centered in the 'Burbs of Seattle and we're all about Jesus. We eat, drink, sleep and breathe Jesus and we hope that you want to join us. I decided I would start this blog as an opportunity to expound upon ideas that can't fit into a Tuesday night or Sunday morning. This isn't your normal blog though; here we do things in community, and so this is a community blog. You may find a random video posted by Jacob, one of our youth leaders, or maybe a deep entry by Steve, or some great photography by Ruthann. Whatever it is, this is an opportunity for us to communicate and be with each other outside of youth group, so read, enjoy, and if you see something you want to talk about, add a comment and let's get this community started.