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."