Wrapped in Trinitarian Love

I recently was looking through the new book by Max Lucado called Fearless.

What I have been facinated by for years is the issue of worry, anxiety, and the living of the Christian life.    Here is part of the book description:

Each sunrise seems to bring fresh reasons for fear.

They’re talking layoffs at work, slowdowns in the economy, flare-ups in the Middle East, turnovers at headquarters, downturns in the housing market, upswings in global warming. The plague of our day, terrorism, begins with the word terror. Fear, it seems, has taken up a hundred-year lease on the building next door and set up shop. Oversized and rude, fear herds us into a prison of unlocked doors. Wouldn’t it be great to walk out?

Imagine your life, wholly untouched by angst. What if faith, not fear, was your default reaction to threats? If you could hover a fear magnet over your heart and extract every last shaving of dread, insecurity, or doubt, what would remain? Envision a day, just one day, where you could trust more and fear less.

Can you imagine your life without fear?

If you have ever read any books by Max Lucado, then you know the quality of his writing.  To me, this is one of Lucado’s most practical book to date.  While many of his books have dealt with great theological themes, we live in a society dominated by fears and worries.  Here is a quote from the book:

“Fear, at its center, is a perceived loss of control. When life spins wildly, we grab for a component of life we can manage: our diet, the tidyness of our house, the armrest of a plane, or in many cases, people.”

I would recommend this book to anyone who has struggled with worry.  It is possible to break free of this trap!  This book is a great starting point on that journey!

To really understand this Christian life, we must come to fully understand sin. Unfortunately, the church has defined “sin” more as to how we express it … getting drunk, sexual misconduct, lying, murder, gossip, … All of those things are just the way in which “sin” is expressed.

One of my favorite Christian singers is a guy named Steve Taylor. Steve Taylor had a way of sarcasm that I loved. He coined a phrase in one of his songs called “I Want to Be a Clone.”

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I own both the audio CDs and MP3’s of The Shack which were recently released.

There are a total of 7 audio CDs, unabridged. The book is read by Roger Mueller, who is a well-known stage and television actor in Chicago. In addition, his radio and voiceover credits include Unshackled! (WMBI), the Left Behind series, and the Morrisons with wife Jill Shellabarger in the audio series Down Gilead Lane (CBH Radio).

Whenever a medium switches from print, I’m sure there may be a let-down for some. Imagination is such a powerful thing when we read. But I have been pleasantly surprised with this audio series. You can tell that this is a quality product, and that is obvious since Oasis Audio put it out.

Mueller does a wonderful job in capturing the spirit of the book, and his voiceovers of the various characters are indeed inspiring. The audio still leaves much of the imagination intact … something that will be hard for the movie to do.

The pace of the audio is pleasant. Mueller does all the voices of the characters, and displays a wide range of talent in this. None of the characters are unbelievable with his voiceover.

I have been enjoying the MP3 version in my car on the way to work each morning.

My only complaint is that I wish there were more background music or sound effects at times. But perhaps that is a good thing as well.

I would encourage everyone to check these out!

Blessings,
Brandon

http://windblownmedia.com/orderus.html

Someone writes: I am confused. I have discovered the grace of God, that all things are freely mine in Christ, and then I hear you say that God does nothing on this earth except through prayer. Isn’t it just the old legalism all over again? If you do this, then God will do that? Is prayer just another way of saying that you earn all the blessings that come from God?

I do understand your confusion, but it is not where you think it is! The problem is in your understanding of what prayer really is. If we look at it from a self-centered point of view, we see prayer as a means of getting things from God for ourselves, or for those we care about. In His mercy, God answers us, even when we pray with that mindset.

Prayer must be understood as the method God has ordained to bring to pass on earth His desires for the creation. When we pray, we are not earning the right to have the desired blessing … we are not paying the price by so many minutes or hours spent in asking a reluctant God to release what we want. Prayer, in fact, does not begin with us, but with God. He reveals His desire for the human race through the Scripture, and then makes a particular part of that desire alive to us in our specific situation through the nudge of the Spirit in our hearts. “This,” He is telling us, “is what I will to happen now.”

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If ever there was a time for believers to understand this dimension of new covenant living, it is now. The United States is filled with the disastrous results of turning to its own way. The drug scene as it stands today is the in-vogue way of seeking meaning and inner harmony, while others get rich servicing the willing.

Burnout among executives, at least in part, is coming face-to-face with the sickening realization that our dream of success, and maybe it realization, is only a minuscule drop in the vast emptiness within man that only God can fill.

Spiritual burnout is the realization that the emptiness within the human heart cannot be filled with the religious rituals, church activity, and endless promises to be a better Christian. That hole within us can only be filled by the Spirit of God.

We can thank God for the collapse of all creature-focused and, therefore, sinful alternatives, that have been substituted for God Himself. Thank God when life fragments and is seen to be empty; it is then that we repent and find reality in Christ.

If you as a believer feel disillusioned and empty, it may be that the Spirit has brought you to painfully discover that whatever created thing, or person, you have set up as an idol, to be the integration point of your life, is not enough. It is time to repent, turn from it and be filled with the Spirit.

But how? What steps must a person take to live in Holy Spirit fullness? What is it anyway?

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The essence of the Fall is spelled out in Is. 53:6: “All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way . . . ”

Having turned away from God as the source, the center, and the meaning of life, man gropes for other “ways.” Created to stand upright, eye-to-eye with God, he has now bent away like a hunchback spirit seeking his wholeness in the created rather than the Creator.

“For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” Romans 1:25

The heart of sin is believing that an alternative to total dependency on and intimacy with God exists as a viable way of life, and setting out to find it.

Man in general and the Church in particular have labeled the alternatives man has turned to as “sin”; and in doing so, they have missed what sin really is. Created to submit to the God who loves him, man has turned to other roads for the fulfillment of the devil’s lie. It may be a lifetime before he discovers he was cruelly tricked and is on a path going nowhere but to destruction.

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“… be filled with the Spirit.“ Ephesians 5:18

Man was created to enjoy a relationship with God the Holy Spirit … to be filled with Him, living under His gentle embrace. Human existence was to find its meaning in man living in a functioning union with God, his body the dwelling place of God. The fall of man was essentially a separation from that purpose … from that adventure … from that “great dance” as C. Baxter Kruger would say.

With man separated from his purpose, what was man left with? Man was left with finding his meaning and purpose in himself … in what he did, his success (or failure) in life, his possessions, and so on … or in his relationships with others … who he knew, in their acceptance of him, their approval, and so on. The Biblical idea of this is that man sought his purpose in his “flesh” existence, and there was a great void where once the Spirit made His home. The search to find an adequate substitute for the Spirit is the obsession of man’s existence from the awakening of self-consciousness to the grave.

The Ephesians passage above tells us of how one substitute (among many) for the Spirit filling our lives is to become drunk with wine. But this text is not so much dealing with only this particular substitute; the text is calling us to be done with ALL substitutes and to return to the meaning of our existence … being filled with the Spirit.
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Welcome to the blog for Brandon Vaughn and Covenant Love Ministries. This blog will serve mostly as a journey into practical living in the love of God. You can read more about me in the “About” section above.

Blessings,
Brandon