Reminders in Discipleship

It is really cool when you bring something to share with a younger student and it is what you need to hear.

I have been asking one of my guys to consider three questions:

1. Who is God?
2. Who am I?
3. What am I here to do?

Those questions should be read as if you or he are asking them, not asking him about me.

And so I planned to discuss 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. This occurs after Paul is discussing sexual immorality in the Church, but I find it's impacts to go further.

"Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body." (ESV)

We started to discuss this verses implications for the three questions. And came down to a few questions we both needed to consider this week...

- What would it look like if we truly believed our bodies were the Temple of the Holy Spirit?
- What would it look like if we lived like we were not our own, but were God's?

I need to be reminded of these things often, I do not do either well. Thanks God.

I'm Content with Losing

Besides being an Underoath song, it is a good phrase to describe me. Check out the lyrics here.

I need to preface this post with the obligatory "I am not suicidal" statement (cause people always ask when I make a post that is at all depressing) but this is something I have been struggling with over the last few years and still am struggling with.

I feel I have Joy in the Lord, I feel it, and a few people have commented on a peace about me in different points in my life.

But I am rarely happy for a long period of time. My happiness is extremely fleeting. It comes and goes about as quickly as a smile or a look.

I will take an event or a relationship or a position and make it a source of happiness. And I will enjoy it for a while, but once I hit the point where I can take a step and see if that thing will truly be more, something that helps me grow and builds into long term happiness and joy or if the extra attention I am giving it is wasted, I back off and find ways to doubt.

Ways to doubt myself, that thing or person, that situation until that happiness turns to concern and worry.

Or I have a chance to take a stand up or do something that I feel needs to happen. I will generally doubt that I need to do anything, or that I should. Nothing happens and I add fuel to my future doubts.

I prefer to feel struggle and pain to happiness. Not that I really do, but my actions tend that way, almost every time I have a risk a choice before me I chose to do nothing, to let the chance pass. I would rather miss something than fail.... but in the end I still lose.

But that is not living out a passionate life, one striving after God.

I quote this verse regularly (Matt 6:25-34) to others to help them live in the freedom Jesus gives us, and I keep myself locked in by my fear, because I am used to it, I am content in my discontentment.

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (1 Cor 5:17, NIV)

It is time I gave up my fear, and my contentment with losing and being discontent and lived like the man of God that I am now... a man that can stand in the face of sin and fear in the power of Christ.


A man that goes not by names given by the enemy or his own flesh but...

by the name(s) God gave him...

Desirable, My Child, Enough.

Added 10/23/08:
It is hard to believe that for long when just about every time I take a chance with anything... I fail. Part of me thinks that at least losing only hurts me. Why are lies so much easier to believe than truth?