“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him – these things God HAS revealed to us through the Spirit.” – I Corinthians 1:9-10

I love to meditate on what it means to be sanctified. Once, before I was Nazarene, I wrote a love song called Sanctified. I wanted to write about a relationship, so full of love and innocence that the shadows and light could dance through it in rich healing motion. As I wrote, I realized I was talking to my First Love, to God. Now every time I sing that song, I realize that my heart was telling the truth all along, even back then, about the way I know God and responding to the way God knows me.

When you study the idea of being sanctified, it can turn into a word equation pretty quickly. Bless our religious hearts, the harder we try sometimes, the more we dilute and convolute the precious simplicity of our faith. I experienced an awareness of being sanctified before I could explain it in proper theological order. I was taught to ask for it. From God. So I did. And He did. And life changed. It was a sudden and gradual change, if you know what I mean.

Jesus didn’t get hung up on lingo, but He did use the word “sanctify” in His prayer in John 17. He prayed that we would be sanctified by the word, or by the truth.

Truth is an elusive concept these days. There are facts, and there is truth. Truth tells the real story, the non-negotiable admissions of the heart. For example, someone can give you a gift because they love you, or they can give it to manipulate you and make you feel obligated to them. Some gifts are free; some gifts are a power play. It can be very difficult to discern the difference, but time always tells.

God’s gifts have no strings attached. Sanctification is a gift to be treasured. It sets you free from the tug-of-war between good choices and bad ones. To be sanctified is to be graced with pure intention. It is non-resistant love. It is miraculously free of coercion and selfish motives but is the means by which you can be trustworthy with the gift of yourself to God and others. Pure intention. There is no “what’s in it for me,” but only the flow of a generous spirit.

I surrendered and was carried to a place I’d never seen.

I Corinthians 2:9

This Sunday, many churches around the world will recall the Baptism of Jesus. Jesus’ baptism by John is mentioned in all four gospels, though less detailed in the Gospel of John. It was a significant event. Everybody was talking about it. You don’t quickly forget a moment like that. John was baptizing people one after another, and here came Jesus. John was perplexed. Jesus should be the one baptizing him! But Jesus insisted. As the water touched the Holy One, the sky opened up and a dove descended and perched with insistent presence on Him. It was not your average ordinary water baptism; it was a baptism of the Holy Spirit, and John said as much. So did a mysterious voice in the clouds that said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” This was a God-ordained story in the making. It was another epiphany.

Poetically, this story is simply beautiful. Take it for what it says and enjoy the mystery woven within its pixels. You’ll lose some of the artfulness of it if you try to analyze too much. Life is like that. Life is art. Shadows and light, conscious and unconscious, hard as stone and porous as bones. Try to explain too much and you analyze it to death.

Yet, this little slice of life that day by the Jordan might raise more questions than answers if you think about it. Why would Jesus need to be baptized if He was sinless? Doesn’t baptism represent dying to the old sinful self and rising from the water clean and new…identifying with the death and resurrection of Jesus? Doesn’t baptism mean initiation into a life dedicated to God? Doesn’t baptism mean you’ve joined the church in its evangelistic mission to spread the Gospel?

What are you wondering right now? Why John was baptizing in the first place when Jesus had not been dead and raised yet? That one’s easy, though. Historically, baptism was a thing before Jesus made it a deeper thing. John’s baptism of repentance reflects the Jewish custom of ritualistic washing. Maybe Jesus’ getting in that water made the water holy once and for all, setting the way for us to connect with His perfect intention.

It’s worth thinking about what baptism means to you and how you understand this Bible story. I think Jesus was demonstrating with profound symbolism, a rite of passage, a divine surrender within you to participate in the presence of God in this world. Baptism is an acknowledgement for us like it was for Jesus. It is a way to acknowledge your desire to truly follow His footsteps. It is a way to respond to that voice from Heaven as though you heard it that day too. And all God’s people said, Amen.

Hi Everyone,

I hope your holidays were full of joy.

I grew up going to a little church in N.C. where every single service, two on Sunday and one on Wednesday, ended with an invitation. We often sang a verse or two of Just As I Am, (it has six), and it seems like someone always went up to whisper something to the pastor or to kneel at the altar without much prodding. The title of the hymn says it all, and makes you feel accepted, scars and all. Ironically, when you go to an altar just as you are, it is always to seek some sort of transformation.

Back then, “Invitation” and “altar call” were synonymous to me. The most significant thing about it was that I felt it was God Himself inviting me. I was too young to overthink this ritual in religious terms, as Baptist or Pentecostal or Southern, or as a marketing tool of the modern church. I simply felt that God was inviting me to some place or to something.

And so He was. It was both. The somewhere was Heaven, of course, but it didn’t end there. I sensed that I was not being invited merely to get on the road to Heaven for the sake of my soul, but that I was being invited because God wanted to be with me right here right now, and, you know…do stuff. And be together in communion. I was being invited to a banquet table full of the finest soul-food and to a relationship full of love and adventure.

It’s nice to be invited to things. It means you are wanted, and that your presence matters. It means you will make a difference just with the gift of you, and that the energy in the room will shift in a positive way when you walk in. It also means you have a choice. An invitation is not a mandate or an obligation. To accept the invitation is not only so you get that good feeling of worth, but so that you can honor the host, or the honoree, or the occasion in their worth, too.

Sometimes it seems like many of us have forgotten that church is an invitation. It is an invitation in the best way. You are invited to come just as you are. You are being invited to a transformational experience, to friendship, fellowship, and hope. You are invited to come just because you’re awesome and some other awesome people like sharing a little time with you for such a worthy cause. You are invited because when two or more of us get together for some holy moments with the Holy, it is a miracle of the highest value. Just what the world needs.

Life is good. Soak it in.

Happy New Year!

Pastor Kim

A colleague of mine recently said, “My friends tell me I’m a terrible atheist.” He was being both humorous and serious. He had tried to doubt the existence of God, but in the end, his belief in God was not as disposable as he thought it might be. Given the freedom of doubt, his faith only grew stronger. Like Einstein, he concluded that belief in God is more logical than not believing in God. What you do with faith after that basic point is another matter. The question becomes relational. There is God, for sure, but did God create and then go on vacation, or does God actually care about how who I am and what I do with my days and nights and attitudes and lifestyle? More importantly to most people, does God care about what I go through?

This is where theology comes in. Theo means God, and -ology means the discussion of, study of, or interest in a subject. So theology is a deep dive into the search you find yourself on after you’ve realized you’re going to have to contend with this power greater than yourself, this God of God’s understanding, and either stop with a “Thank you for creating us,” or go on with a “What now?”

It’s hard to believe there can be love so big that the Northern Lights keep dancing in the sky, the sparrows keep singing, babies keep being born, and for the most part, people are decent and care about one another. It’s hard to believe that on your worst day God wanted you to be okay and find peace, and on your hardest day, God cried with you and for you and wanted you to be happy again.

How many “yeah buts” come to mind when I make such an innocent assumption of God’s heart?  And the search goes on.

In my experience, theology is a search to understand God’s heart. A bunch of terrible atheists asking, “Now what?” as they work studiously to understand the indisputably existing God. We seek a revelation of God. I get the idea that God is all up in the study, perhaps smiling when a preacher gets a nugget of inspiration or a congregant lights up with an ah-ha moment during a message.

But there’s just no explaining some things. The truth of it all comes when Jesus touches the broken places of your heart, the darkest places of your past, and the scariest places in your mind. Don’t give up on the miracle of truly knowing God. Your eyes cannot always see the love that is right in front of you. Just ask the blind man.

John 9:3 Jesus answered, “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

“In love we learn who we want to be; in war we learn who we are.” – Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

This is the opening line in a historical fiction novel I started reading this week. I was intrigued and paused to think about this statement for a while, to consider why it rang so instantly true. The narrative of the book is set in wartime, so of course the context is that tragedy brings out the worst and best in people. I guess it’s the first half of the statement that grabbed my heart.

Love is an ideal. Many great writers, teachers, and speakers apologize for using the word “love” to explain anything, because they say it is overused, misused, watered down and abused. Yeah. I know. But I’m not going to stop using it, because I think we still believe in it. We know what we mean when we say “love.” No excuses. No mystery.

The real mystery is our tendency to go against the flow of love so easily when it is our truest nature by God’s design.

Context is everything. You don’t love chocolate, a song, or a team the way you love your loved ones, or yourself, or God. And loving yourself opens another complex perspective that can be good or bad depending on where you are on the narcissistic spectrum. But my favorite context for the word love is from I John 4:7, “God is love.” God’s love is agapé love, the kind that created a beautiful world and people on whom that love is lavished. Unconditional love. Now that I think about it, it may be the word “unconditional” that we don’t understand.

Love has a curious way of exposing the war within. You say you love someone unconditionally and then the moment comes when they defy your sense of fairness for how they should love you in return. There is a “what about me” war going on in us, aka selfishness and self-seeking. We are not naturally “go the extra mile” kind of people. We are quick to calculate our generosity and draw the line if love asks too much of us. And dear loving friends, hurt people are going to ask too much of you sometimes. But don’t lose heart.

“In love we learn who we want to be.” To be in Christ is to be in love (not romantically, but in our spirit’s posture). When you participate in church and the fellowship of this community of faith, you are putting yourself in love’s way, or where love is. We are becoming what we want to be.

Love,
Pastor Kim

Someone said, “Life isn’t built in lifetimes; it’s built in moments.”  It’s so true. If you don’t take in the moments, you can miss so much goodness.

Moments are so persistent. They just keep coming, one after another, every single one like a tiny capsule holding a lifetime somehow.

Persistence is an idea I associate with bills and bad colds. But when I was reading Luke 18 the other day, I found a story that gave me a new perspective. Jesus tells the story of a widow who pleads with a judge for justice. She is ignored time after time but keeps trying until the annoyed judge grants her request just to get her to go away. Jesus reassures his followers that God is never annoyed with our persistence, but that we, like that widow should ask and keep asking, seek and keep seeking.

With steadfast love, God refines our attitude, faith, and desire. The Lord teaches us, much like a great music instructor reminding us that practice makes perfect. Every time we come to the Father we are building a trustworthy relationship with Him.

Persistence is about believing and longing and trying and waiting and hoping and caring and never giving up. That situation or person you’ve been praying about for the longest time has the attention of Heaven. Keep praying. Someday we will understand the power and mystery of such relentless faith.

It takes patience and determination to stay on a pathway to peace because we lean toward things that take away our peace. Through persistent trust, the Lord is teaching us to lean into Him.

“Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest.” – Hebrews 4:11

A brief departure from the cacophony

“The Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness.” Matthew 4:1

I heard myself lamenting the loss of poetry in these times. Ranting disguised as pragmatism is the vapid norm, and it leaves my soul empty in the worst way. So I’ve been doing a mental detox. There are several ways I like to do this. First, get still. Once the furious waves settle you start to hear the wisdom of your own heart echoing the whispers of the Holy Spirit.

I understand the value, especially monetarily, of “being relatable.” But these days, “relatable” is tangled up with “status quo” and manipulation and things that take you farther from the beautiful mystery of who you are.

When you find God, you find the truth of YOU, too. You discover the joy of your unique “you-ness.” In his collection of short essays, Leap Over a Wall, Eugene Peterson reflects on the lessons we learn from David. In the wilderness where David gets alone with God, he learns “holiness.” Not “holiness” in the religiously crass way some say it to mean “too good for this world,” but “holy” as in finding yourself in God. Peterson says, “Holy is our best word to describe the human aliveness that comes from dealing with God-Alive. WE’RE MOST HUMAN WHEN WE DEAL WITH GOD. Any other way of life leaves us less human, less ourselves.” (Emphasis mine).

THAT’S the poetry of who we are. “Poetry” is the art of saying more than words can say. It’s the 3D-ness of life, the shadowbox view that tells the whole story behind your tears, your smiles, and your choices.

We are, in any time and culture, a work of art. I refuse to believe otherwise, even when I feel the flatline hopelessness of a world full of opinion that has so little to do with the magnificent everything of life.

God is the Master artisan. He called everything He had made “good,” including us. When we make ourselves available to this goodness, God continues to design a wonderful world through us.

Maybe I should offer more commentary on the pollical-religious issues of our times. I probably will. But today I’m taking a break to gaze into the Truth behind all truth. I’m headed to the wilderness with wild abandon and desperate joy to get my mind quiet enough to listen to what God has to say about all of this. The answers won’t come in bullet points and legislated non-negotiables. It will be, instead, the fluid always and forever changing blue-sky, soft clouds, loud thunder, a song, a prayer, a conversation, a hug from my grandkids, or sitting with a cup of coffee, a journal and Bible for a little stroll in the wilderness with Jesus.

“You shall be holy, for I am holy.” ~ I Peter 1:16

Holy is one of those words that gets tossed around as though it is common, attached to mundane words as an adjective to make a phrase prettier. Holy cow, for example. There is nothing religious intended by this expression, yet in certain circles both words represent something sacred. But for some Christians, the word holy carries a multi-dimensional meaning which, by definition, can’t be fully explained. How ironic. I love words like that.

Language tries so hard to explain what only hearts can tell.

Holy appears in the Bible right from the start in Genesis, where God finishes creating everything and calls the seventh day holy. Some translations say hallowed, which you might remember from the Lord’s prayer: Hallowed be Thy name. It was a special day of rest, set apart for honoring the Presence and the blessings of life.

Maybe the most important use of the word is when we use it to describe God. Songs say it best. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. When the ancient Hebrews called God holy, they were stating God’s otherness. God is other than us, other than everything, unique and present in a powerful way.

The holiness of God is more than an attribute of God, like kindness, compassion, and faithfulness. Holiness is the essence of God that generates all that goodness.

And here we are, created in the image of that which is holy. We are invited to participate, in that otherness that is beyond the mundane. We are called to rise above the crass fears and vindictive responses that stunt our divine growth and keep us small.

Your heart is designed to be God’s holy place. You are made to be a reflection of love, the pure kind, the other kind that breathed us all into existence in the first place.

Sheer joy. That must be why we are here. God created because God loved, and we are the expression of that love. We are called to be holy (I Peter 1:16), an expression of the pure love and otherness of God in this world.

The world sure needs it right now, something other than the predictable tragedy. There is something other than hatred, violence, revenge, and despair. There IS love. Carry hope with your words, your smile, your actions, and the energy you pour into the world with your life every day.

These days, this time, these tears shall pass, but that which is holy cannot be shaken.

I hope your heart sings today.

I love you,

Pastor Kim

 
Thy will be done.
I think most people still say “Thy” instead of “Your.” No matter how many new translations there are of the Bible, that line still sounds the best in King James’ language. Now and then I stumble into conversations and situations where I realize that many people do NOT know this infamous prayer of Jesus.

You’ll find its original version in the Bible in the sixth chapters of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Matthew’s is the most like what we say today, and it has been in this form for centuries now. It became a traditional part of Christian liturgy. Traditions like this are nothing short of a miracle if you ask me. A story is told, a prayer is spoken, and for decades it is repeated until it is such a part of a culture that is becomes almost…well…law. A standard by which to measure truth. The non-negotiable facts. The unshakable verified affirmed and approved reality. But there are the laws of man and the law of God, and certainly Jesus was not making new rules. He was stating eternal law, that which has always been and shall always be.

“Thy will be done” is a bold prayer. It can lead you into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. It can lead you to courageous campaigns for justice. It can lead you to Gethsemane.

Being a Christian is not always a spoonful of sugar, as Mary Poppins sang, but it is a beautiful fearless way to live. With a simple, timeless prayer we express our dependance, our gratitude, our trust, our commitment, and our hope.

I encourage you to take a few minutes sometime this week and recite the Lord’s Prayer. Pause and consider each line and what it means to you. Think about the story this prayer tells of your life with God.

With love,
Pastor Kim

THE LORD’S PRAYER
Adapted from Matthew 6

OUR FATHER
WHO ART IN HEAVEN
HALLOWED BE THY NAME
THY KINGDOM COME, THY WILL BE DONE
ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD
AND FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES
AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US
AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTAION
BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL
FOR THINE IS KINGDOM
AND THE POWER
AND THE GLORY
FOREVER
AMEN

You deserve to be loved with maxed out big outrageous unflinching love. God loves you like that. Jesus loves you like that. The Spirit teaches you to love like that.

Unconditional love is fearless.

We tend to look for what’s wrong with us and spend our lives trying to fix what we think is broken. There’s this feeling that we should and could be better. But let’s suspend that reality for a moment and imagine that you have been granted the gift of shameless faith. Shameless. No guilt. No shame. Forgiveness. Acceptance. Perfection in Christ.

It’s a thing. Perfection in Christ is a thing (Colossians 1:28; Hebrews 10:14; Matthew 5:48). But you’ll feel more comfortable swapping the word “perfect” with “mature” or “complete”. Me too.

So, assume shameless faith. You are squeaky clean, forgiven, and you are not living in the shadow of shame cast on you by the voices, the memories, the culture, the anything.

Now gaze into the new horizon with fearless faith. You’ve been given power and love and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7), and you can go steady on with a life that is full of grace and truth. Full of Jesus, that is.

Fearless doesn’t mean trouble free. Happy-go-lucky-everything’s-fine-when-it-really-isn’t-kind of thinking isn’t faith. Faith is meek and mighty, bold and humble, and brave enough to doubt sometimes…and admit it.

You’ll have to do the work of healing, and those struggles will increase your faith in God, in yourself, and in the trustworthy people in your life. That’s why faith and courage make beautiful companions.

Real courage is letting God love you just as you are. That takes a lot of faith. People often won’t. God always will. Then you’ll see what a blessing you are and how much theworld needs this beautiful light and strength of God that you carry.

Steady on!
Pastor Kim