Life needs a man to be fierce – and fiercely devoted. The wounds he will take throughout his life will cause him to lose heart if all he has been trained to be is soft.
We reframe everything by one simple choice: I am accepting God’s invitation to become a man. From there we interpret jobs, money, relationships, flat tires, bad dates, even our play time as the context in which the boy is becoming a man. We take an active role, asking our Father to speak to us, speak to our identity, to validate us. We step into our fears and accept “hardship as discipline.
To put it bluntly, your flesh is a weasel, a poser, and a selfish pig. And your flesh is not you. Did you know that? Your flesh is not the real you.
When it comes to happiness, our soul is like a colander, a tire with a nail in it, our grandfather’s memory. It feels like there is a homeless person inside of us, wandering around pushing a shopping cart.
So you can’t demand the broken to live as if they were whole. Discipline is not the issue; apply discipline and you’ll make it worse. What is needed is healing.
Who am I really? The answer to that question is found in the answer to another. What is God’s heart toward me, or, how do I affect him? If God is the Pursuer, the Ageless Romancer, the Lover, then there has to be a Beloved, one who is the Pursued. This is our role in the story.
The vast desire and capacity a woman has for intimate relationships tells us of God’s vast desire and capacity for intimate relationships.
A boy wants to attack something – and so does a man, even if it’s only a little white ball on a tee. He wants to whack it into kingdom come.
Our lives are not a random series of events; they tell a Story that has meaning.
You’re going to be okay. You’re going to find your way. You are not alone.
I believe Christianity is at its core a gospel of life. I believe great breakthrough and healing are available. I believe we can prevent the thief from ransacking our lives if we will do as our Shepherd says. And when we can’t seem to find the healing or the breakthrough, when the thief does manage to pillage, I believe ours is a gospel of resurrection. Whatever loss may come, that is not the end of the story. Jesus came that we might have life.
The truth of the gospel is intended to free us to love God and others with our whole heart. When we ignore this heart aspect of our faith and try to live out our religion solely as correct doctrine or ethics, our passion is crippled, or perverted, and the divorce of our soul from the heart purposes of God toward us is deepened. The.
For above all else, the Christian life is a love affair of the heart.
Sartre felt that Hell is other people, but precisely the opposite is true. Hell is being left alone forever with no other reality than your own consciousness of yourself. It is being locked in a casket of your own internal chaos with no hope of a window, or door leading in light from outside to give you a moment’s respite from yourself. Hell is the refusal of the gift of the other.
The Lover of our souls, the One who has pursued us down through space and time, who gave his own life to rescue us from the Kingdom of Darkness, has made it clear: He does not want to lose us. He longs for us to be with him forever.
And certainly we see that God wants not merely an adventure, but an adventure to share. He didn’t have to make us, but he wanted to. Though he knows the name of every star and his kingdom spans galaxies, God delights in being a part of our lives. Do you know why he often doesn’t answer prayer right away? Because he wants to talk to us, and sometimes that’s the only way to get us to stay and talk to him. His heart is for relationship, for shared adventure to the core.
Here’s the test – if you can’t take your church culture and language and drop it in the middle of a bar or a bus, and have it make winsome sense to the people there, then it’s not from Jesus. Because that is exactly what he could do. That’s what made him the real deal.
You must ask God what he thinks of you, and you must stay with the question until you have an answer. The battle will get fierce here. This is the last thing the Evil One wants you to know.
There are no formulas with God. Period. So there are no formulas for the man who follows him. God is a Person, not a doctrine. He operates not like a system – not even a theological system – but with all the originality of a truly free and alive person.
Until a man learns to deal with the fact that life is hard, he will spend his days chasing the wrong thing, using all his energies trying to make life comfortable, soft, nice, and that is no way for any man to spend his life.