Who Am I?

After last week I was not sure if we would have another speaker as good and Jefferson Bethke, but I would say that BJ Thompson has been just as good. It is incredible having one amazing speaker after the other. BJ has tackled some huge questions this week such as: Who am I? Who are we as believers? And why are we here? The question that has impacted me most is who am I? This is a question that I know I have to constantly be asking myself or I will forget, like I so often do. When I forget I fall into living the performance lifestyle. I see my relationship with God as a performance relationship. I work so hard on doing good things and go before God and say, "Look God, look at all I have to offer." Unfortunately it is never enough, because there is no way I can perform my way to God. When God looks at all my good works and says they are worthless, it leaves me with only my sin, which is pretty depressing. I know that there is a standard that I can never reach on my own. At this point there are three things that we tend to do. We run because we know there is a standard and choose not to live by it. We sit because the weight of the standard overwhelms us so we become depressed and don't do anything. Or we make up a new standard to make us feel good about ourselves and become self-righteous. How do we get out of this mess of living a performance based life? One thing that I realized, when BJ mentioned it, was that our biggest issue is not understanding that God loves us unconditionally. It is believing that God loves us unconditionally. Not many of us truly believe that there is nothing we can do to change how much God loves us. BJ left us with three things we need to do to experience God's grace.

1) Understand that we are a mess. Jesus came for the sick. He does not want us to come to him acting healthy. However this is so contrary to human nature. We don't want to admit we are a mess. We like to see the mess in others to make ourselves feel good. But we need to understand that our ability to admit we are a mess is to the degree we understand grace.

2) Understand that although we are a mess, we are deeply loved. Again, this is so opposite what we naturally think. When we really understand that we are a mess, the last thing we feel is loved. But, as we see in Ephesians 1, God loved us and adopted us into His family before we were born or did anything for Him. We did not have to prove to Him that we were worthy of being loved. He loves us no matter what.

3) Let grace transform us. When deep mess and deep love meet, grace transforms. This transformation can only point to God, because there is no way we could do it. The most powerful testimony is a life changed by grace, because it cannot be credited to us.

That is how we avoid the performance life and live in the identity God has for us, which is that we are His dearly loved children.

Thanks for reading!

Jefferson Bethke

Time continues to fly by here at Link Year. Just a few short weeks until Thanksgiving. Then Christmas follows only 3 weeks after that and my year is half over. Really makes me want to use my time well because Link Year will be over before I know it.
This week we have had the incredible opportunity to listen to Jefferson Bethke speak to us. This is the first speaker who is here a full week, which is neat because he can really go deep into certain topics. Jeff is amazing at communicating and keeps his audience drawn in. Our 45 minute sessions felt like they were only 10 minutes. One of the topics he spoke on was how the Bible should be seen as a story or narrative. If we look at it as a narrative, when we read certain parts we have to see how they fit into the whole story. We can't just take what we want. When reading a story, you don't start in the middle. You start in the beginning. When we read little bits all over and choose what we take from the Bible it becomes like a math book in that we can create formulas to say whatever we want. We need to read it in the scope of the whole story. I have never put much thought into this before. I often have seen the Bible as a bunch of little separate stories. However, now when I read from the Bible I will constantly be thinking of how it all fits into the scope of God's whole story.
Another topic that Jeff talked about was temple. In the beginning heaven and earth were created to be together. They were to be one in the same. However, at the fall of man, they ripped apart, but not completely. They are still together wherever there is a temple. The temple is where heaven and earth meet. In the Old Testament, the temple was a building. However, in the New Testament Jesus became where heaven and earth meet - the temple. That is why the Pharisees questioned his authority so much. He claimed to be able to do what only the temple could do, such as forgiveness of sins and debt collection. The temple was now in flesh and could go out to the world and further the area where heaven and earth meet. After Jesus leaves earth, guess who becomes the temple. Christians do.  We as believers are now where heaven and earth meet and have the job of increasing this area. God's goal is not us eventually going up to heaven. His goal is to fully restore earth to what it was. The fact that we as believers have Jesus living inside of us and we are were heaven and earth meet should drastically change how we live. How different should we be than the rest of the world? I was pretty convicted on that point this week. If I am God's temple - literally where heaven and earth meet - then I want to honor and glorify him in any way possible. It really puts my life goals and want I want to accomplish into perspective. They are pretty small in comparison to God's plan.
I wish I could share all that Jefferson spoke on but unfortunately that would take hours. So I will leave you with that.

Thanks for reading!

Learning Just About Everything

The last week has had a wide variety of speakers and topics. Last Thursday we had the opportunity to hear Andrew Munneke unpack the Gospels for us. He talked about different topics such as why the Gospels were written and what is the synoptic problem and how it affects the validity of the Gospels. Well all of that was incredibly interesting and I learned so much from it, my favorite part of his time here was when he got into the teaching of the Gospels and talked about how they applied to our lives. There were a couple things from what he said that really convicted me that I will share, first of which is from Matthew 5:13-16. This is the passage in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says we as Christians are the salt and light of the earth. What I did not realize until Andrew mentioned it was that Jesus does not say that we should be the salt and light of the earth. He says we are the salt and light, whether we want to be or not. When He says we are the salt, he is saying that we are the ones who will preserve the earth. If there is a a lack of salt or preservation in our culture, the fault does not rest on the culture, but on the church. Since we are salt, we will preserve something - whether it is ourselves or the world. We as Christians should never create a subculture where we surround ourselves with other believers only. How will be preserve the world and make it salty that way? We need to go out into the world and make a difference. Not just stay where we are comfortable around our Christian friends. That was pretty convicting for me because I tend to stay where I'm comfortable and where I don't have to worry about being influenced by the world. But do we ever see Jesus do that? He spent most of His time with sinners and tax collectors. That is something that I need to improve on.
Another thing that Andrew mentioned which really stuck out to me, was when he said, "Don't let your faith become a vehicle for your flesh." What he meant by this was not to try and look righteous to impress others. I fall into this trap quite often. There are so many times where I think, "If I do this, I'll look really good. If I memorize this passage of scripture I'll impress so many people. If I know more of the Bible I'll be able to answer tons of questions with scripture and amaze  everyone around me." That is exactly what the Pharisees did, and Jesus didn't think too highly of them. It is not that those are bad things to do and get good at. In fact they can be incredibly good things. But what is my motivation for doing them? Is it to glorify God or to impress others? That is why I constantly need to check my heart and make sure my motives are pleasing to God.
So far this week we had The Joe White speak to us on leadership and how having a heart of grace is the most important characteristic of a good leader. It was an incredible talk and it would take such a long blog post for me to even scratch the surface of all he had to say. I pray that I am able to apply it all to my life and let it transform me into the leader God has called me to be.
We also heard Adam Martin speak on money management. All I can say is that budgeting is so important and something I need to get way better at. Fortunately there are things to help me with it. If you are a terrible budgeter also, I highly recommend using Mint.com. Here is a short video that shows how it works:

That is all I have for this week. Thanks so much for reading!

Learning From the Best

     As I mentioned last week, on Saturday, October 4th, we had the privilege to hear both Josh and Sean McDowell speak at a Heroic Truth Conference. The amount of knowledge and wisdom they both had was incredible. Sean spoke a lot on what is truth and how our culture tries to change the definition of truth. Josh spoke on how we know the Bible is true. He talked about how there are hundreds of prophecies in the Old Testament that were fulfilled in the New Testament. What is mind-boggling is that the chance of just eight of those prophecies being fulfilled is the same as filling the state of Texas two feet deep with quarters, marking one of them, and having a blindfolded person find the marked quarter on his or her first try. What Josh also mentioned that is incredible is how there are thousands of Biblical manuscripts (a few of which he has and showed us) that have been found dating back to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th century AD. What is neat about that is what those manuscripts say match what is written in the Bibles we have today. What was written not long after the life of Jesus has not been changed over hundreds of years. Also, the fact that there are thousands of Biblical manuscripts dating back to the first few centuries is important because to test the validity of historic works or literature, you must go by the time span from when they were written to when the earliest copy of them were found and also the number of copies that have been found. Here is how the New Testament compares to other great historical works:

      As you can see, the New Testament blows all others out of the water. After going to the Heroic Truth Conference I feel like I have a much better grasp on the validity of the Bible and what Biblical truth is. However, there is so much more to know and I am excited to continue learning by reading some of Josh and Sean's books. 

      One other thing that I want to share this week is how I was impacted by a Louie Giglio sermon called "The Dash" that I recently listened to. If you don't know, Louie Giglio is on of my favorite pastors and I love listening to his podcasts. The one that I listened to this week challenged me in so many ways that I couldn't help sharing part of it with you. Here it is: 

     I wanted to begin today by bringing us back around this little, precious window called life. And I want to ask you today, what do you want your life to be about? Do you want to have said in that day (when we die) I wish I had cared less about what people thought. I wish I really hadn’t cared so much about what my neighbors thought about me going and telling them about Jesus.  I was so concerned that they were going to think I was an idiot, think I was a freak or some kind of bizarre Christian nut job. I wish I hadn’t spent all my money… on stuff. I wish I had looked into the eyes of Jesus more and gained the courage that he has to walk out in life in the highs, in the lows, in the good, in the bad, in the darkness, and in the light, and say you know what, it is hard right now but Jesus is greater. And this little life I’ve got, I’m going to proclaim that Jesus is alive and that my hope is in someone who has conquered death, hell, and the grave. I’m not going to be a complainer in this life. I’m not going to be beat down by my circumstances. I’m not going to be dragged under by the undertow of negativity and all the heartbreak of this world and seep into depression and denial and numb myself and go on autopilot and comatose living. I’m going to rise up out of that and say you know what, I’ve only got a certain number of heartbeats and maybe it is a hard life and maybe it is a broken world and maybe it’s not all adding up the way I thought it was but I do know Jesus, so in this life I’m going proclaim Jesus because I know there is eternity coming and I want in that eternity to have the reward of saying in life, I proclaimed Jesus… because this life determines everything about eternity. I don’t want to say God put me on a platform, he gave me opportunity, he gave me a chance, he gave me connections, he gave me conversations, he put me in rooms with people that I didn’t know, he gave me little moments to give a two minute answer. I’m so glad now that I didn’t bite my tongue, that I didn’t back down, that I wasn’t afraid, that I didn’t say well you know I just didn’t want to upset anybody. I’m so glad that I proclaimed Jesus with my life. I’m so glad that I talked about the things that really matter. I’m so glad that I invested in the kingdom because this life set the tone for eternity. And now it’s forever and I can’t go back. I can’t undo it. I can’t rewind. I can’t say please give me one more chance. So I just want to leave us with that tonight. Can we just maybe ask God over these next few weeks to awaken us to the reality of heaven, to awaken us to the reality of hell, to awaken us to the reality of eternity? To blow us up out of the little bunker of this world and to live lives that matter for him.

     That is my prayer. I don't want to live a life focused on myself and focused on things of this world because this life is too short and I don't want to waste it. It's all I've got and there is no going back. That is so easy to say but so hard to do. My sinful nature always brings me back to being concerned about what people think, or how much stuff I have, or whether or not I'm comfortable. I don't live radically abandoned to Jesus, but I pray that by God's grace I can get there. Hope that challenges you as well. 

Thanks for reading! 

Already Week 4

It is crazy that we are already on our fourth week here at Link Year. The time is flying by and information is coming at me almost faster then I can take it in. This week we had the privilege of having DA Horton speak to us. DA currently serves as the National Coordinator for Urban Student Missions at the North American Missions Board. Before that he worked with Reach Life Ministries and Reach Records, along with being an urban church planter and pastor. He is also the author of the book DNA: Foundations of the Faith, which I will talk about more in a bit. He has gained so much knowledge and wisdom over the years from his various experiences and commitment to studying the Bible and walking in tune with the Lord, so it was a huge blessing to have him with us. Here is a link to his website:

http://www.dahorton.com/

Due to a flight cancelation, DA was not able to get here until Wednesday, instead of Tuesday, so Adam spoke to us on time management Tuesday, which I will highlight first before getting into DA's teachings. To start off Adam's talk he gave us a sheet of paper with the seven days of the week broken down into 30 minute time slots. He then had us fill in everything we did that was necessary, such as class, eating, sleeping, work, etc. and see how much free time we had. It was amazing to see all the open slots of time I have throughout my week that I waste on useless things. He then told us about prioritizing. One of Adam's favorite lines is, "You will always make time for what is important to you." Therefore, he has a list of his top 5 priorities and before he commits any of his time to something he filters it through his priorities to see if it will hinder his ability to focus on them. If it does, he will say no to it. Saying no is something that is really hard for me because I am a people pleaser. Adam had two things to say on that. First, saying no or not now can lead to great productivity in the future. Second, when we say yes to something, we are indirectly saying no to something else. Hearing those two points was really eye opening and will definitely help me in my ability to say no to things of lesser importance. Also, using his method of filtering everything I do through my priorities will make me much more productive and able to focus my time on things of the greatest importance.

Now Back to DA, who spoke to us on Wednesday and Thursday. In his time here he gave us an overview of his book DNA, which simply breaks down theology into simple concepts and illustrations so that anyone can dig into scriptures and know the foundational truths that believers in Christ need to know. Having that book will be such a helpful recourse to turn to and I'm excited about working through it in the future. A few of the topics in it are: what is the Bible? who is God? what is sin? and many more. My favorite parts about his talk, however, were all the questions that came up about certain issues in the Bible and how he responded to them. Some of these questions were: should we believe in predestination? should women teach in the church? which view on the end times in correct? What I love about his responses (and Adam does this as well) was that he did not tell us his view as the correct view that we should all believe. Sometimes he didn't even tell us where he stood on certain issues. But he always pointed us to scripture and told us what the Bible said on the topics and encouraged us to wrestle with them and study them more. The reason he does this is so that we don't leave saying, "Well I guess predestination is true because that is what DA said."  That is not making faith our own. Rather he would have us leave saying, "I believe that predestination is true or not true because of what it says in scripture." I love that way of teaching and my faith will be so much stronger because of it.

This weekend I have the opportunity to go to a conference here in Branson with Josh and Sean McDowell teaching. I'm sure I will have a lot to write on that in my blog next week so be ready!

Until then,

Spencer