Are we our parents?

I think for everyone, but especially for people who get in to natural explanations of personality, the temptation to believe that our behaviors are somehow pre-determined is very strong. Whether it's your MBTI or your mother's anxiety or distance or your father's passiveness (or aggressiveness), it doesn't take too much until you're understanding, settling for, and accepting the way you are with all your sinful tendencies and dispositions.

Here's the thing: For the normal person, I actually believe most of that stuff is true.

BUT. Here's another thing: If someone were to walk by the Spirit, they would not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. (Gal. 5:16 paraphrased)

Look at it- the sinful nature. It is as you thought. There is something that threatens to pull you down into habit, into selfishness- it looks different for everyone but it's there for everyone. And yet...

And yet, there's a way out- and get this: becoming a Christian is not enough! (though that is a requisite step for the real answer).It's a simple, hard thing-

Walk by the Spirit.

Here's the real article: A Big Fat Lie of Satan

The Vulnerable God

Does God need us?
Simple answer: no.

Does God need us?
Real answer: (below)

I love reading this old book called "The Knowledge of the Holy" by A.W. Tozer. It's a great old classic on the attributes of God. Each chapter is dedicated to a single attribute.

The book takes off with with chapter titles like "The Self-Existence of God", "The Self-Sufficiency of God", and "The Immutability of God". For nineteen chapters he describes our high and holy God, infinite and never-changing, completely satisfied in the Trinity, sufficient, above, and wholly other than humans. And while it really is a conservative picture of the untouchable God that we know, He really is an awesome God.

At chapter 20, though, something changes.

Suddenly, in the chapter titled "The Love of God", it's as if Tozer has found himself in a wrestling match with the constraints of human language, trying to somehow describe how this high and holy God feels about us. While Tozer is careful to maintain God's self-sufficiency and everything else he's described to this point... there's something that he won't- that he can't gloss over.

There's something that Tozer sees in a sheep that was worth risking everything for, in a lost coin that's celebrated over, in an old man who runs down a driveway to kiss his son- that while God doesn't depend on us, his feelings for us are approaching, similar to, whole lot like, and dangerously close to... a need.

This God loves so much it hurts him- he is jealous, he pursues, he shows his heart, and he puts it on the line for you to accept or reject. This awesome and majestic King of Kings has chosen to tie his heart to us in a way that makes him vulnerable.

Somewhere between "want" and "need", between "I'd like" and "I-must-have",  between "be mine" and "you will be mine" is Yaweh's love for sinners like me and you.

Of course, the epicenter of this tension is the cross of Jesus Christ. For most of us, whether we believe it's possible or not, we're looking for a love that throws itself out there- that risks everything for a chance that we'll love back. A love that's not indifferent, that's not halfway. That gives everything and that tells our heart that we matter- that we're known- that we're wanted.

And at the cross, we see God's bleeding heart for sinners. For God, it's his vulnerable moment. It's his DTR. It's at the cross where we see God sharing his heart- and then tragically... we see it mocked, spit at, humiliated and killed.

But God has left the invitation open- the invitation to believe and enter into what another of my favorite authors calls "crazy love" remains.

It's not a need. But it's love.

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It is a strange and beautiful eccentricity of the free God that He has allowed His heart to be emotionally identified with men. Self-sufficient as He is, He wants our love and will not be satisfied till He gets it. Free as He is, He has let His heart be bound to us forever. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. “For our soul is so specially loved of Him that is highest,” says Julian of Norwich, “that it overpasseth the knowing of all creatures: that is to say, there is no creature that is made that may know how much and how sweetly and how tenderly our Maker loveth us. And therefore we may with grace and His help stand in spiritual beholding, with everlasting marvel of this high, overpassing, inestimable Love that Almighty God hath to us of His Goodness.”
-A.W. Tozer, Knowledge of the Holy

Calling us back

So things, though certainly not perfect, are pretty ok for me right now. Man, though, what a gut check to ask a few simple diagnostic questions:
Does Jesus + Nothing = Everything for you, Brett?
Who is Lord (ie calling the shots) in your life right now?
Are you living out of God's smile and approval of you?

Wow. Convicting, because I think the answer has honestly been "no" for awhile. It's not that I was a total atheist Marilyn Manson fan. It was that I slipped into religious motions without simply sitting with my true Dad.
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God, bring us back to you. You know we're weak and frail and how easily we get tied up in other things. Thank you that you keep saving me, that you keep coming to get me, that you don't let me go. I pray for the readers of this blog that you would keep calling them back too- to put their lives, desires, passion, and direction at your feet and to ask, "Lord what would you do with this life?"

Exegesis that will Rock your World

"I Have Fought the Good Fight"

"For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come.

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith."

-Paul writing his last words to "his beloved son", Timothy

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If I died today, I wonder what would people would say of my life? I wonder what God would say of my life? For me, I wonder if people would remember me as a nice guy, or someone who was passionate about learning or ideas or books? Or a good beer? A great dealfinder? Financially savvy? Smart?

I think a lot of these are true of me. As I read an older man (Paul) encouraging a younger man (Tim), though, I wonder. You see, as I read it, my Spirit confirms that there's going to be a moment in my life- a moment where the only questions that will matter as I look back on my years on planet earth go something like this:

Brett, have you fought the good fight?
Brett, have you finished the race?
Brett Allen Ripley, have. you. kept. the. faith?


It's that day. My mind wants to think of this day as if it's a concept and not as an exact day on the calendar. But it is. We all have a day. There is a day on the calendar as real and concrete as our birthday where this organ in our chest beats just one more time and then stops. For you, this day could be March 11th or August 14th. Mine could be December 2nd. Though we don't know the date, He does.

It's the day where we look back on the years, the relationships, the lives we've touched, the things that we stood for. It's the day when the mystery of eternity is a door that we will walk through. It's the day when the next appointment on the calendar is with the one who made and orchestrated everything that you ever experienced up to this point. Your appointment is with Jesus. The subject? Your life.

How will you answer the questions?

The day is coming- and you know what? That day makes this day different.

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Father, there's lots going on down here. There's passions that you've put in me (lots of them). I think these are good- the will in me to learn a bunch and make a bunch of money and all these other things. Let me not squander them and get lost in them as an end in themselves. Help me to use these things as different ways to drive at the prize- Your glory through my life. I have botched this recently. Save me from me, Jesus- I will do what you want me to do and I will give it up for you because it's only on loan anyways. All Glory be to YOUR name and not mine. You are God and I am not. Have mercy on me, a sinner.

Learning to Love

Well, it's official- a few "tough" situations in my life have confirmed exactly what the Lord is doing in my life. I am learning a skill that is foreign to me: love. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I am able to really empathize with people. Not just fake empathy, but actually feel with them.

When I'm honest, I guess I don't know what to think about this. The plus? Well, it's certainly what we're called to (or did you think that "weeping with those who are weeping" were throwaway words). Paul is all over the place emotionally- his heart out in the sea, vulnerable to all the changing currents of the people he loved. Whether making the Corinthians' joy his own (2 Cor. 1:24) or experiencing the unceasing anguish that goes along with loving the Jews (Rom. 9), his heart is "wide open" (2 Cor. 6:11)

You know what, though? This way of life- of tying your joys and sorrows to others around you- it sucks. I'm not kidding. Love, relationships where you tie yourself to someone else? Let me tell you, it costs something. It really does. It distracts at work- it can make you less "efficient". It can take huge amounts of energy. I mean, think about it: you will actually have bad moods that you would not have had without hitching your heart and entering in to that person in your life. The easy way is to detach. To fake empathy, to just stick to what you're going through.

God, it's just so much easier to intellectually understand where people are at and throw some advice at them! It just is! But that only kicks a hurting soul when it's down. What hurting people need is someone who's in it with them. Speaking truth in love (Eph. 4:15).

I've always had friends like this, but I guess I just don't think I ever understood what it costs to love like this. On the other hand, I don't think I really understood the joy that went along with real love either.

I think- through Scripture, and increasingly through experience... that this is the better way. I think all of us at all involved in conservative Christianity would do very well to let these verses hang over everything they think of as progress in the faith.

But now I want to lay out a far better way for you.

1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.
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13But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Cor 13

Please don't gloss over the last verse without thinking about what it means practically.

Today, a memory

Today our life is normal. There is a day for many of us, God-willing, when we will look back on days like today as a unique, but passing moment in time. 

In my life, will I will look back on being a 24-year-old single guy as a time of joy and freedom? A time when things were good- or easy? A time when I was young and naive?

The truth is that I can't know. What I do know that there was a time when playing Saturday morning basketball tournaments and trading sports cards were normal. What I do know is that I look back on this little guy as a different person living in a small world. 

Where does that leave me? I think more than anything it leaves me not wanting to miss this- the 24th year of life. The end of the year called 2011. It's staggering to think that both will come just once in this great spectrum we call time. 

Whether your concern is making it count or just making sure it doesn't pass you by like the 3-hour Minneapolis to Pelican, it seems that the answer is the same. 

The only moment we have is this one- it is here. Don't miss it.