pharaoh's heart

i've been reading exodus
i read chapters 9-11 on the train the other day
i was meeting a friend so i printed them out instead of carrying my whole bible and i sat by the window. it was a sunny day for the first time in a while and i read these pages, the story of the plagues with the sunlight flitting on the paper.

i read about the first nine plagues where Moses keeps going to Pharaoh to warn him what will happen is he doesn't let the Israelites go. and it jumped off the page to me how terrifying Pharaoh's hard heart was.

Egypt is being destroyed by frogs and blood and boils and hail, and there are horrific smells in all the streets and animals are dying and no one can sit still in comfort for even a moment. and time and time and time and time and time again Pharaoh doesn't get it. and i just wanted to jumped into the scene and shake him by the shoulders and say "what. are. you. doing?! your country is destroyed! every time they threaten something new you know it ends up happening and you know that it ends up being so bad that you beg for it to stop! how can you be so blind? how can you be so foolish?"
but at no point in the entire story does he see things clearly and at no point does he relent.

and really the terror was the exemplification of a hardened heart.

i remember sitting there on the train and with a concerned frown that i couldn't shake i prayed desperately that God would soften my heart.

because hard hearts are just. so. blind.
no wonder Paul says that it takes a miracle on par with the creation of the sun for a sinner to believe the gospel. and thank God that He "made His light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ"

the race and the rescue

imagine if God said to you that there would be a running race in two weeks. a 100m race and the loser would go to hell and the winner would go to heaven. can you imagine how dramatically that would affect your life for those two weeks? you'd only eat healthily, you'd run in any weather and train as hard as possible in the time-frame.

if. you. lose.
you. go. to. hell.

and don't you wish in a small way that things were that urgent? or felt that urgent. because we are dealing with things of that magnitude, but it all feels a little vague at times.

the daily faith in the promises of God and the mortification of sin (the parts we play on top of the grace and cross of Christ) are the way we gain heaven and avoid hell, but it's not long before we tire of doing them. like salvation is too easy to be bothered with or something.

and i thought to myself that following Jesus is tough and it's relentless and sin's always at my door and my mind and values and priorities and perspective are always wandering. and i thought 'i can't handle this, i can't keep doing this my whole life and keep failing my whole life'.

and i thought - yes, knowing Jesus is amazing sweet joy.
but really, what's going on here is that God is saving real people from real evil and real destruction. and our whole lives here are not a game and we're not entitled to any comfort or respite, but every day is a day to hold on tightly to the rescue God has provided.
i don't know where the idea came from that we need to be happy and comfortable for Jesus to be worthwhile. i think maybe people have been selling the gospel wrongly. if God said He would forgive us and take us to be with Him forever, but in the mean time we'd be in agony for eighty years or however long we have, that would be infinitely worthwhile!

we are in an evil darkness being saved from an eternal hell.
why don't we have more of a war-time mindset?
i suppose the devil is the enemy or urgency.

and maybe Aldous Huxley had it right in Brave New World Revisited, when he noted that the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

when i think these things it makes me pray to feel the magnitude of the reality i'm a part of.

summer camp

in 2007 i talked to our youth leaders about making one of our weekends away a week away and having a full five days with the kids in our care. no one really had the time, so i said i was going to do it in the summer and whichever leaders wanted to come could and whichever kids were free could attend. around the middle or the end of 2007 one of the youth group kids asked me if i was still going to do that. i kind of laughed and said "oh yeah, i should do something about that". somewhere between then and january 2008 a lot of things happened and melinda was co-directing with me, we'd booked a site, gotten out notes and fliers and promotional videos, booked a coach, brought a team together and a speaker and a cook and it was all real. completely unknown but real.

the 20th-25th of January 2008 was one of the most beautiful and blessed weeks of my life and the fruit of it is still being seen today as a number out of the forty kids who first attended (and even some of the leaders) would place summer camp 2008 as the point in which they really met Jesus.

and six months later i was leading the country for England. and it was possible that summer camp would never run again (it had faced serious opposition when we had proposed it and the idea of another one was even now being opposed).
but praise God, there has been a summer camp 'o9 and just these past few weeks a summer camp '1o has taken place. and it has grown from the original 40 kids to 80 this past summer.

and Melinda who was there with me on the ground floor was co-director again for summer camp '1o. since my heart's in it, she wrote to me about how camp had gone and i sat and read it tonight. for the first time in so many days i was dealing with really real things. it was so refreshing. and i said to her in response:

i was reading your chronology and it was so ... substantial. it was all this weight of things that matter and real things and big and tired and raw and earthy things. i was listening to a song and reading your account and it made me feel things so deeply.

i guess the things is - this is it.
i mean, this is real life. if we're dealing with real life, that's all there is.
there isn't more than real life. than deep reality and real issues.
there isn't more than people coming to see themselves and to see Jesus.
even when you were tired and it was all so hard and such a 'mess' it's all there is.
and it made me think what an amazing thing it is that these kids get to come away and just have the opportunity to be vulnerable and be cared for and see real love, God's love for a few days.

and that's true. and it was amazing to see life as life is, again, for a while.

sin

the thing is, sin does list a series of appealing promises. what you need to remember though is that they're always empty.

[as i fell asleep last night i thought about sin being a series of inflatable fruits. and each time you bite into one you realise you got nothing. but more and more these realistic ones come along and tell us that we could have them. they sell us on this idea that they're real and they'll be satisfying and worthwhile.
but they all turn out the same]

promises

psalm 13

"how long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
how long will you hide your face from me?

how long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
how long will my enemy [read: 'sin'] triumph over me?

look on me and answer, O Lord my God.
give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;
my enemy will say, "I have overcome him,"
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

but I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
for he has been good to me.

two years ago

"on wednesday i woke up and drove to an all girl's private school up the highway. i spoke at their outreach focused christian group. a 7 minute presentation on God's existence and the gospel. immediately after that i walked into two year ten english classes who were combined in a lecture theatre and i talked about why i am a christian and how my faith impacts my life - that was 80 minutes. i got home, exhausted and i had to sit down to write/finish my final english essay worth 80% which was 5000words. i hadn't read the texts and it was an honours course so the standard would be high. finishing that early thursday morning i drove into uni for my 10am tutorial for psychology. i handed my english essay in and then went to the computer lab where i watched two hours of rehearsal videos. when i got home i wanted to die, but i had to write my final performance studies essay due the next day, based on the two hours of rehearsal i had watched. 2500 words, worth 50%. i wrote half of it that night and the next morning i couldn't finish it because i had to get up early and drive to my sister's school in the inner west because i was speaking at their junior and then senior chapel services. after both of those i got home and was still tired, believe it or not, but i had to finish my performance studies essay. i finished it eventually and drove it into uni, when i got home i had about half an hour before i had to leave for our junior and senior combined youth group outreach night which i was running and MCing and playing drums in. before i left i got asked to make a video for it, so i did that, picked people up, got there, set up, music practice, videos, MCed and by 9pm it was over. and i was tired."

sick

woke up at 5am and threw up for a while
and kept doing that over the next few hours
i was exhausted, but couldn't sleep when i felt like that
and my dreams would become an uneasy feeling that something was wrong, and i'd wake up to find that my body wanted to be sick again.
so i was there, sitting on the bathroom floor next to the toilet with my eyes watering and my stomach raging and i thought "i don't want to keep doing this. i already threw up a few minutes ago", but we kept going until i was just throwing up water i'd drank and bile.
so i didn't make it to cornhill - my first sick day ever. and i won't make it to acorn tonight to lead and play guitar.

the question is - am i praising God for this? in this?
here's the chance to put my other post into practice.

heaven outside

for me it's always hard to think of what heaven will be like. i can get a vague picture of bright clouds and a soft-focus, dream-like, obscure dimension. but we're in the shadowlands now and the new creation will be the substance. we're not heading to a white room; we're going to a real reality. the air will be cool and full and you'll feel it fill your lungs. it will be sensory.

so sometimes when i am in a room somewhere, or deep in a forest where life seems neutral - i like to think that i've died and i'm in heaven. and i imagine that outside or far off in the distance all the noise and life and whirr of heaven is taking place. and i imagine that when i go outside of the room, or get out of the forest, i won't be met with the regular world that i'm expecting, but i'll be in a perfect place. the people on the street will be the saved family of God, and the Lamb will be the light of the city. we'll have all different things to do, places to travel between and people to see. because the thing is that one day i will be there in heaven, and i will be conscious and alive and maybe in a room somewhere, or amongst trees. and even though i don't know what it will be like, it's much more exciting to imagine i'm there and be reminded that it will be no less real than my present lived experience.
even the small thought of jostling in a crowd as we all pour into the heavenly city thrills me. because it takes my knowledge of things being real (like being in a crowd) and glues it to my concept of heaven (being a flawless place)
and when i feel the reality of that hope i am full up.

ali cried

on our weekend away we looked at revelation 21-22
and ali came up to me with a question:
would we be sad in heaven to think about our friends and family who weren't there?
and i told her - no death, mourning, crying or pain.
and she began to cry
i wasn't sure what exactly had made her cry, but it hit me then that all of this is so real.
there are the people who think it's all made up, but here was ali, expressing the deepest emotions about these questions because she knows that this stuff is true. and it is. and there's no more justified cause for her tears than these truths. and i prayed that i'd believe it that much.

churches

not the church, but church buildings.
i got talking to some guys at cornhill the other day and we thought about how most modern churches are hanging onto a gothic/catholic style of building. and now people are thinking that there's something in that. you need sandstone to meet with God.

i guess there was a public forum. they had synagogues back in the day. in acts 20:20 paul talks about his ministry being in public and from house to house; large and small-scale.
someone said that churches that meet in schools are probably closest to what the original church was.
and it's the convenience of having your own building that drives people.
convenience over the congregation's concepts of 'church' being accurate.

but really, it is the people.
and i thought it'd be cool to gather in a different place every week.
whenever i read about Israel coming together in the old testament it sounds exciting and like something's about to happen. there's expectancy and intentionality.
but church feels like a tired show. if it was a casually created social group, everyone would have jumped ship years ago when it got stale.
Israel assembling never feels stale when you read it.
and people say "yeah but if you changed the location every week people couldn't make it depending on where they were coming from"
but this is what's backwards about church - we're meant to be dedicated to meeting the people there each week (i could say a lot here about 'performance v family' but that's for another time).

just think of the thrill if the church leaders called an emergency meeting at 10pm on a tuesday night and everyone came out from their houses and everyone would be buzzing and excited to see what would happen and why we were all there together. together. there'd be that sense that we were sharing this together. i want that feeling every sunday.
yeah, so there are no answers here, only thoughts - but that's just the nature of the game.

psalm 9

"the wicked return to the grave,
all the nations that forget God.

but the needy will not always be forgotten,
nor the hope of the afflicted ever perish.

arise, o Lord, let not man triumph;
let the nations be judged in your presence.
strike them with terror, o Lord;

let the nations know they. are. but. men."

praise God

maybe this is all a bit heavy,
but i think that when something goes well for us we say "praise God"
and rightly so.
but when things go badly we all believe that we can and should praise God, but we don't. we talk about how we're sure that God is doing something good here. the words that a christian dreads hearing when everything has gone wrong are "romans eight, twenty eight" because it's just so token. and maybe we're supposed to praise God for His character when things are hard and praise Him for what He has done in the past and the nice things He continues you to do even in difficulties - like allowing us to breathe, and sending the sun on the earth.
but really, when we really think about it, and His sovereign control and limitless love; we should praise Him for each situation, not just in them.
but maybe i have that wrong. and it's definitely easier to talk about.
we don't praise Him for sin, but we trust Him like Job did and we know He's the God who gives and takes away.

when people die

we've had a couple of people die in our church this past month.
one was an old guy called Christian who was one of the first people i met from church, we bumped into him on the street. people said he was lovely but had been fading since his wife died a few years before. i saw him at the 'old men' bible-study when philippe and i would wheel another member around. when i told him that jonathan had given me a hairbrush for christmas so i'd look neat and presentable he said "that'll be the day". the other was emily's mother. emily and i lead youth group for a year together and she's one of the few who has down-to-earth conversations. she interviewed me in youth group the day i landed. and her mother got cancer and died a week before christmas. it all happened really fast.
there are memorial services soon.
it made me think about when i die.
i hope that people understand what has happened
i once wrote this:

"today i had a moment where i felt that i could sum life up into a word or a feeling. something happened, clicked, changed and it was as though i realised the driving force behind all that we do. i was listening to a song and seeing a scene, it was a funeral. nothing was very specific, there were no faces per se, but the mood was obvious. it was a group of about twenty people standing together around a grave – there was a sadness but a determination and a likemindedness.

here’s my point – we’re in a battle. we are in a spiritual battle that is real whether we like it or not. here we are, beings created by the One, True, Living God. that’s just how things are. we live on this planet in this universe that He has created that He has come down into and died for and will return to in glory.
we are in the last days. the plans of God are all that matter since He is in all and through all and before and above all and in Him everything holds together. everything. and His plans are coming to a climax.

here we are, caught up in something so beyond us but it doesn’t stop it being real. we forget so quickly. how much weight all of this holds. if we truly understood a single percent of all of this it was be impossible to forget.

so where do these two thoughts relate? well, the image I had was of some characters from a great story, some heroes on a quest dealing with life and death and striving for a cause of the utmost importance. in that situation you need to depend on the people around you, to rely on those who understand. you need support because it’s anything but easy, you need encouragement because it can get so discouraging. but what is shared among each character is perspective. the ability to press on because first of all you’ve understood that the stakes are so high and it is worth it. in fact, nothing else is worth anything. and somewhere in there along the way perhaps someone dies – what are you to do? one of your number is gone, no longer there to strive with you. you join together, you grieve together – but you realise and remind each other that – that person has made it, they’re home. this is where I saw what fellowship should be. i saw it in the extremes because the reality that we live in is extreme. but we so quickly forget – it is real"

and i believe that
i hope that when i die people come together and they understand that i've made it and i'm safe and i'm infinitely alive.
i hope some people pray for my family if they're still around.
i'd want "no fear of falling" by I Am Kloot to be played, just because i love it.
and i want the congregation to sing "O My Soul (Arise and Bless Your Maker)". and they should also sing "How Great Thou Art" because that's the perfect song for a time like that. especially because of (but not limited to) the last verse

When Christ shall come with shouts of acclamation
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart!
Then I shall bow in humble adoration,
And there proclaim, my God, how great Thou art!

because i'll be home.

Jesus' trial

today i read Exodus 19:16-24 where God meets with Moses at Sinai. and it is terrifying. thunder and lightning and a deafening trumpet sound and God’s voice bellowing from fire and smoke on the top of a mountain with the threat of death if anyone touches the mountain. and then i read John 18:28-40 where Jesus is before Pilate and he says “you are right in saying that i am a king, in fact, for this reason i was born, and for this reason i came into the world, to testify to the truth” ... and it’s that same God with such terrifying power who is veiled in weakness and 19:1 ‘then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged’ and 19:3 the soldiers said ‘hail king of the jews and they struck him in the face’.

how do we deal with that? how do we deal with the cross?
we’re too academic as we recognise that Jesus’ ‘i am’ statements reveal his identity as God. they reveal Him to be the I AM of history, YHWH Himself, in flesh. cut, beaten, bleeding. His voice nearly scared Israel to death (Ex20:18-19)
and here He is, in a man’s body, on trial, being condemned to death.

the tenses

i've been thinking about tenses in this new year; the past, the present and the future.
and i think that's the balance we need in the Christian life.

the present is only a third of the things we need to consider. most of our motivations for living life now the way we do come from what God has done in that past. now that covers a lot of things, His faithfulness to His promises, His revealed character, so much of it is tied up in Christ and His cross and resurrection. if all these things are true then what impact should that have? i should live like i know the Creator God who makes covenants with sinful people and who always comes through on His promises. i should live like i've been forgiven because Jesus' scars show that someone has experienced God's wrath, but it wasn't me. i should live like death's been torn in two and life leads on to eternal life.

and in the future what is there to motivate us? there's a kingdom that cannot be shaken, there is an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade, there's full adoption and being a co-heir with Christ, there is true life and immortality and sinlessness and seeing Jesus face to face, being known as i am known, the wedding banquet of the Lamb, the New Creation, thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, a kingdom of precious jewels and walls to keep out every evil, the abolition of death, mourning, crying and pain.

and there's present day. where the light on the horizon could be sunset or sunrise. where the appearances speak of insignificance and unlikely promises. there are persecutions and famines and war and pain. but life is never face-value for us. and there's also a people gathering with nothing in common except love for Jesus and there's a new power in us to kill sin and a displaced feeling where more and more we're unsure where our home is, because it's not here. and there are answered prayers and a joy in suffering and we read from a living word and all around us the dead are hearing His voice and coming to life.

and when we're told to have faith, hope and love i think it makes sense that we have faith in what God has done, hope in what He is going to do and in the present we love. faith and hope allow me to love. our present day is completely affected by the past and the future. if all you do is stare at yourself in present day you're missing two thirds of the picture. if i look at me now i see mostly a sinner who has reason to be thankful for God's grace. but when i look back i'm dead-certain that i'm forgiven because Jesus did hang on the tree, and when i look ahead i see that this is not the best i'll ever be. but right now versus who i will be is comparable with a seed and the flower it becomes.

there is so much more to things than meets there eye and there is so much more to here than now.

psalm 5

i read this today and i think this is my new favourite psalm.
in the first half David says this:

"You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil;
with you the wicked cannot dwell.

The arrogant cannot stand in your presence;
you hate all who do wrong.

You destroy those who tell lies;
bloodthirsty and deceitful men
the LORD abhors."

and that's pretty much everyone. or at the very least it is completely me.
so i start to think about how God doesn't take pleasure in me, i can't dwell with Him, or even stand in His presence.
but more than that He hates me. He abhors me and He will destroy me.
and for one reason or another i just didn't see the next verse coming, and it floored me.

"But I,
by your great mercy,
will come into your house"

progress

"we all want progress. but progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. and if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road: and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. we have all seen this when doing arithmetic. when i have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner i admit this and go back and start over again, the faster i shall get on. there is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. and i think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. we are on the wrong road. and if that is so, we must go back. going back is the quickest way on."

- c. s. lewis

snow fall and flood

i woke up this morning to more snow.
last year this was the most exciting thing i'd seen but even since being back we've had so much of it that it's beautiful, but less inviting.
i also started a bible reading plan today - one of those bible in a year things - but it's January 13th, so i already have some catching up to do.
i read Genesis 1-9 and i saw the flow of those events so much clearer than i have before.

as i read the creation account i thought about Aslan singing Narnia into being and instead of it being slow and specific categories and days the words all ran into each other and i realised that God made something out of nothing and light into darkness and pushed back the sea and filled it up with billions of creatures and then threw birds into the sky and animals on the land and plants and trees and seeds and then made man to be in charge. it's all such an amazing story, with this beautiful garden that man's in charge of, but God's the one who planted it.
then when you hit chapter three the things that happen are unbelievable, the lies the devil tells, how quickly they give in and then man and woman are on the run, naked and scared and hiding from God.
Adam and Eve's kids who are meant to be serpent crushers go out into the field and one kills the other. then you've got a list of all the people after Adam who all died. and then he died. and then he died. and then he died. and then he died. and God's grieved because every inclination of the thoughts of man's heart is only evil all the time. and it feels like just a moment ago God was working to place the great lights in the sky to govern the day and the night. now look where we are.

God sends a flood which is the second scariest thing in the bible after hell - because it's a shadow of hell.

and then when it's all over in 9:12 God makes a covenant with Noah even though in 8:21, (after the flood, after the destruction of everything) He has recognised that nothing has changed and He says "every inclination of man's heart is evil from childhood". [is; present tense]

it's this tip of the iceberg stuff. it's these early early stages of restoration where in the space of 6 chapters the world has been created and destroyed and God's taking the first move to put the pieces back together. except this time it's not the world He first made that was good in every way, but when God now surveys the planet His judgment is that it is bad.
and here it is - He binds Himself to it with a covenant anyway.

i don't have any words to say how amazing that is. that's how much my God loves. that's His judgment and His grace.

the old heroes

i think that it's so easy to forget that the people in the bible were real and alive and they woke up and cut their hair and sometimes felt sick and sometimes snapped and they had good friends and favourite places and foods they preferred.
and maybe there wasn't this 21st Century individualism and they definitely didn't keep blogs or make all their decisions based on what was most comfortable. i'm sure that culture directed a lot of what they expressed when and what they felt when too.

but when abraham believed God and picked up His life and moved across the 'world' he wasn't a robot. and when Moses had the Egyptians coming after him at the Red Sea (which was still an uncrossable sea) and the Israelites were saying "we're all about to die, why'd you bring us out of Egypt if we were just going to die" - he didn't just stand serenely and smile and wait. he had emotions rising up in him.
maybe in their important moments there was something special going on and they didn't have the same nerves i would. but despite all the emotions and thoughts to the contrary, for thousands of years all of them made a stand to trust God's promises.

the moment i feel opposed i want to give up.
it scares me to consider what would be written of me if i fit into the biblical narrative.
but i'm encouraged to venture toward the promised land in that same pattern of faith.
isaac did it, daniel did it, joshua did it, david did it, isaiah did it and thousands more beside.
that's hebrews eleven i guess. real guys living real life trusted God and i want to be one of them.

new year, new location

it's not really a new location, but it's the old new one.
i'm back in london, as of december 31st.
summer and christmas and sibling wedding back in australia and now i'm 'home' again in tops of 1°C.
i got sick the other day, probably because despite being off work i haven't had much more than an hour to myself in a few months and i didn't catch up on much sleep. but that's not what this is, this isn't a journal.

so i came home to a much quieter setting with less motivation to go outside and i got thinking about sin.
mostly because i do sin and so it comes to mind.

i didn't know what terms to give it or how to express it.
i am always saddened by my sin and surprised by it.
how i keep choosing to hurt my Maker and Father and Saviour.
and i thought about how i have always been sinning and before God intervened i was just swimming in it without any changes.
and i guess the residue death that i keep seeing shows me how badly i needed saving.

if even after i've been picked up out of a pit and washed off and had my stone heart melted and made flesh and have experienced and loved hundreds of blessings and promises, after the Holy Spirit has made His home in me, if even then i still run at full speed away from God - how badly must i need a saviour?

it's something like we're speeding in a car and we jump out and hit the ground and roll. and for hours and days and weeks the inertia keeps us going and going and going. and after a while you reflect as you are still propelled, spinning and rolling and you think 'just how fast must i have been travelling before, if even now i'm seeing the effects?'
and i think that's me.
that's me seeing God's kindness in my sin, not that it still condemns me (even though it feels like it should) but that it keeps me seeing my need for Jesus and it should keep me thankful for Him and what He's pulled me out of.

why did i make this?

i don't know why i made this.

it seems like everything that's wrong with people today is analogised in blogging.

self-absorption, thinking that people are interested in their thoughts and thinking that their thoughts are intelligent.

i don't think that's what this is, but i think every now and then things come to mind that i'd like to remember. and sometimes the important things are clearer to me one from the next - and i want to be able to remind myself of them.