All Of My LIfe...

All of my life
I've been in hiding --David Crowder* Band (from Deliver Me)

A recent Barna survey has states that "American individualism shines through in people's self-image." At first glance, this does not seem like it would be a big issue, however, one must realize that we have allowed individualism to overtake our Christianity.

We like to believe that we can handle it all. We like to believe that we know what's right, we know what's wrong, and we are the only ones whom can determine how our lives will turn out. A bit of individualism hurts no one. It makes us work, it makes us who we are, but once we allow ourselves to become the measure of all things, we can very easily get ourselves into trouble.

Difficulty arises because once we become the measure of things, once we become completely and totally self-sufficient, we then determine that we need no one or nothing to help us get by. We then began to reason--intentionally or not, that we do not even need God. Not only does our rationale become inadequate and flawed, so does our Christianity. For once we realize that we do not need God daily, then we begin to wonder if we need Him at all.

It is very difficult for one to call themselves a Christian and not realize their need for God. If someone openly voiced this, they would be considered blasphemous. However, if we do it personally, it is no problem at all. At this point, we have enough Christianity to be ineffective, yet dangerous. Ineffective to encourage and bring others to the cause of Christ, and dangerous to our own impotent Christianity.

To fix this problem, we need a remedy. There is only one that is completely and totally effective and that is realizing that we need God. In fact, it is impossible to make it through life as it is without Him. We need to understand that God is to be our only source of reliance. If we are to be effective, then we must deny ourselves and take up our crosses daily, anything less would be insufficient (Luke 9).

Now that You're here
Now that I've found You
I know that You're the One
To pull me through --David Crowder* Band (from Deliver Me)

O Praise The One Who...

O praise the One
Who paid my debt
And raised this life
Up from the dead --Kristian Stanfill (from Jesus Paid It All)

Somewhere along the way, we got lazy. We forgot who God was. We began to not care. What's funny, or rather quite sad about this whole ordeal is the fact that this is how many Christians feel. These aren't people who have never heard of God, who never went to church, or never became saved. These are people like me. People who have grown up in church. We went from the church nursery, to kid's church, to youth, to college group. And somewhere along the way, usually between youth and college or maybe before or during college, we lost it.

I'm a smart guy, or consider myself to be, so I have spent many a sleepless night and many a conversation with people trying to figure out what happened. I believe that many people are having this conversation. We are not the unchurched, but rather, we are the ones whom continue to attend church. In fact, we are on staff or volunteers whom do many of the things that make various functions of the church work. Yet, we are going through the motions.

Worse yet, we do the motions so well that no one questions us. Worse yet, we even act human at times so that we show just enough of our humanity and sinful nature, so that we seem even more authentic.

We have to fix this, not only for our sake, but for our friends, family and even more importantly, those whom do not know God so that we can help them.

We want the world to know
That Jesus is our Savior
There can be no other
We will shout it out
We want the world to know --Hillsong United (from Revolution)