altar brawl.

There are "altar-calls" and then there are "altar-brawls." One resurrects souls, one buries them alive. One shuts up long enough to hear you surrender to God, the other tries to shut you up long enough to force your surrender to itself. At their most extreme the both of them will bludgeon your ego and make you cry. A few weeks ago one of my posts turned into a theological cat fight... an altar brawl. The Sonship Diaries was an ugly attempt at beholding the silky maleficence of sin and the glory of grace all in the same breath. I admit not only that I communicated poorly but that the reason behind my rhyme was peripheral at best. 

So I've been reading, thinking, and talking to Jesus. Flipping theological pancakes, if you will... And realizing that I've still got some exploring to do before I wrap my upper story around the whole mess. Yes, flipping theological pancakes. Don't think too hard about it. 
 
I'm sure tomorrow the whole knot will untie itself and God will throw the last punch. But today I'm re-reading forgotten pages in the Psalms and holding a match between my grubby little fingers and up close to the very combustable pages of "My Opinions" - a book authored mostly by me and mostly for me. 

Psalm 105, 106, & 107 retell the entire story of Israel... Start to finish. It's ten books condensed into three nail-biting chapters.  Somewhere in the middle of the story I tripped over this little biblical shoelace: 

In the wilderness their desires ran wild,
testing God’s patience in that dry wasteland.
Psalm 16:14

their. desires. ran. wild.  

Imagine. It overtakes you. An overwhelming, devouring, consuming desire. Adrenaline coursing through your veins. Mouth salivating. Heart pounding, harder and harder, in your chest. Eyes glazing over… And your mind becomes completely overwhelmed with ravenous lust. An ex-slave-master come to give you a taste of aged wine. Your entire being longs after it. It’s undeniable… you like the feeling. You let go... you give in. Wrong feels so right. 

Can it satisfy?
Who gives a rip?

This was Israel's attitude towards the God that fed them with magical bread and had worked no less than twenty monumental miracles for their sake in a matter of days.

Some nights I hear rapping on the door of my heart. Nearly Midnight. The old Slave-master waits outside uninvited. Dressed to the nines and whispering through the mailbox slit. His words are an intoxicating toxin. 

And then I awake from the dream at the mention of the name of Jesus. The old Slave-master is a dead man. His epitaph reads "It is finished" - chiseled into stone with diamond. His whispers are heard neither here nor there. He is dead, thus saith the Lord...

I forget often that I am not like Israel. Because somewhere between Exile and Pentecost something actually happened. Something actually changed... drastically.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Galatians 2:20

So today I reckon him dead because Jesus reckons him dead. 

And as He stands in victory, sin's curse has lost its grip on me. For I am His and He is mine, bought with the precious blood of Christ.

death by books.

Hi, my name is Kyle and I have a problem... I have book-paralysis.  

Book-paralysis stinks. 

It's a natural response to being smothered by your own inflated literary ambitions. It means I have accrued a mountain of unread books and now my desire to read is being suffocated by a torrential downpour of options. See, I want  to read more... I want to be "that guy" who reads his weight in poignant and well-reviewed books every month. However... my passion for books seriously overpowers my passion for reading them.

My machine starts to sputter when what began with a new book-interest ends a couple weeks and a few pages later with a disenchanted pit in my stomach that says, "I really thought this book would be the one." In short order the book makes its way back to the snowy peaks of my book-mountain and I start shopping around for another book... or two... or ten... Really it's just a bad love story. I have commitment issues. 

Yesterday I was in a bookstore drooling over books I loved the idea  of reading but knew I would probably never read... and it broke my heart. At this rate in fifteen years I'll have a Smithsonian-sized library and a pea-sized brain... So there I decided I've got to do something to overcome this crippling problem. Because, if I think about it, I realize that my book-mountain is teaming with untapped literary gold-veins, ideological treasures, theological and philosophical masterpieces, priceless relics of brilliance. 

So today I'm resolving not to buy another book until I dismantle my own heaping book-mess. Mark it down, today the demolition commences. Bring it on, book mountain... ya, I'm talkin' ta you.

The Sonship Diaries

It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.
A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

 It's never fun to die. Never fun to take our dear little sins, our precious little pleasures, our delightful little dark "things", drag them out of their closets and hiding places and out to the woodshed, and murder them. When they die, it feels like we are dying. Our flesh squeals, grovels, and begs not to go... its last stand is to persuade you with crooked semantics and lustful fantasies that you can't live without it... that you need it. 

I generally like to write as though our battle against sin were a heroic one. It is not. It's not particularly a victory-march by still waters and pastures green. Most often it's a very undesirable crawl through the black and thorny corridors of my sinful little blood-pumper. When it comes to my sin, I am a real groveler. Like ROFG - rolling on the floor groveling... Like, GMFAO... ya. When I'm feeling particularly dirtied by my sin, I medicate with self-pity and netflix. God couldn't possibly love me, could He?  I stuff another chocolate in my mouth and try to forget how pitifully sinful I am.  

A year ago I was groveling about my sin with a friend. He sympathized and then went to the store. He came back with... well... a shark hook. Kyle, this is your sin... it's not just a little vice... you can't man-handle this... He hooked it around my neck and pulled my head towards his and gave me a talk that every man needs to hear. Sin is out to KILL you, Kyle. It wants to MURDER you. Barbed fangs and twisted talons... and in an instant it would pull you to the bottom of the ocean and break you to bits.

The battle is not heroic. Not if I'm the hero. 

The war is set to kill you. Rip your soul to shreds. Destroy your family. Shame you. Defecate on everything you hold dear. Smear everything sacred and holy. Kill your reputation. Make your Savior look like a fool. Chew you up, spit you out, and bury you. Then on your epitaph it cuts the stone to read in gangly lettering: "Failure." 

Your flesh will kill you. Unless by the grace of God you kill it.

Kill your sin or it will be killing you.
Jonathan Edwards, The Mortification of Sin.

But really, it's not as if this battle was yours in the first place. Christ started it, Christ will finish it. Even the desire to be free from sin can be riddled with self... "This is MY struggle." And then our prayers reflect our pithy little self-battle: Lord, help ME kill MY sin...  So we relinquish every particle and tendril of responsibility into the hands of our Dad... with abandon and recklessness. And here still at the same time we give it our all... We fight like dying men, we give it our dogged all, we don't stop, don't let up, don't quit until we see our flesh breathe it's last. But all this we do by the power and for the pleasure of our Papa. 

Grace is not opposed to effort. Grace is opposed to earning.
Dallas Willard

Yeah, it's a brutish war. Good thing Jesus Christ is a brutish warrior. Fighting a battle that's already been won... clothing you with His righteousness... filthiness for a king's regality. King's eye's hit sinner and His voice cries "My Child!"

I used to think that John 15:1 was a pretty verse. I am the True Vine and my Father is the Vinedresser. That's nice, isn't it? Poetic. Charming. God's got a little set of pruning shears and He's at work in the flowerbed of your heart... right? A couple years ago a friend told me a story of a real "Vinedresser": 

Walking through the family vineyard and her Dad turns to her... "Do you understand that if I want these vines to bear any worthwhile fruit, I have to prune 90% of their growth?!" WHAT. THE. HECK.... Hold the phone... NINETY PERCENT? This isn't a game anymore. God isn't a kind, neighborly groundskeeper anymore... He is the proverbial Merchant of Venice out to take His pound of flesh... 

A pound of flesh here, a pound of flesh there... pruning blades and blow torches well at work on your flesh, bleeding it of everything that starts with the word "self". Self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love. He is out to murder them ruthlessly. With blood, with broken bones, with fire, with affliction. That is why the Flesh is called "flesh" - because when God takes it from you, it hurts like Hell. 

I think we often welcome God in to change us and then notice that life's junk hits the fan... suddenly we tap out before God can even start answering our prayers for heart-change. We start crying out for God's mercy to end the pain rather than crying out for Him to do what He must to take us deeper. A man has been taught wrong if he believes that the removal of flesh is anything short of excruciating. 

The groveling must stop.
The pruning must go on. 
So welcome Him with a gritted grin and clenched fists. 

 "Choose this day whom you will serve," says He.
 "Oh Papa, give me grace to choose You each day," says I.