Posted by: jakinnan | October 16, 2012

Our Pictures of Love

The crisis of hope that afflicts the church today is a crisis of imagination. Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft writes: Medieval imagery (which is almost totally biblical imagery) of light, jewels, stars, candles, trumpets, and angels no longer fits our ranch-style, supermarket world. Pathetic modern substitutes of fluffy clouds, sexless cherubs, harps and metal halos (not halos of light) presided over by a stuffy divine Chairman of the Bored are a joke, not a glory. Even more modern, more up-to-date substitutes-Heaven as a comfortable feeling of peace and kindness, sweetness and light, and God as a vague grandfatherly benevolence, a senile philanthropist-are even more insipid. Our pictures of Heaven simply do not move us; they are not moving pictures. It is this aesthetic failure rather than intellectual or moral failures in our pictures of Heaven and of God that threatens faith most potently today. Our pictures of Heaven are dull, platitudinous and syrupy; therefore, so is our faith, our hope, and our love of Heaven.
(Everything You Wanted to Know About Heaven)

If our pictures of heaven are to move us, they must be moving pictures. So go ahead-dream a little. Use your imagination. Picture the best possible ending to your story you can. If that isn’t heaven, something better is. When Paul says, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9), he simply means we cannot out-dream God. What is at the end of our personal journeys? Something beyond our wildest imagination. But if we explore the secrets of our heart in the light of the promises of Scripture, we can discover clues. As we have said, there is in the heart of every man, woman, and child an inconsolable longing for intimacy, for beauty, and for adventure. What will heaven offer to our heart of hearts?

-John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance,  180-81

Picture Credit: Thomas Zimmer

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Posted by: jakinnan | October 16, 2012

Please Adventure Out

“And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

― Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road

Picture Credit: Kevin McNeal

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Posted by: jakinnan | October 16, 2012

10/16/2012 Scripture

But thank God! He has made us his captives and continues to lead us along in Christ’s triumphal procession. Now he uses us to spread the knowledge of Christ everywhere, like a sweet perfume.Our lives are a Christ-like fragrance rising up to God. But this fragrance is perceived differently by those who are being saved and by those who are perishing. To those who are perishing, we are a dreadful smell of death and doom. But to those who are being saved, we are a life-giving perfume. And who is adequate for such a task as this?

-2 Corinthians 2:14-16 NLT

Picture Credit: Michael Anderson

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Posted by: jakinnan | October 15, 2012

Filling the Void

Are you constantly asking yourself, “Is there more to life than this?” Are you trying to fill the void with every material possession this world has to offer? Stop searching and start living. Come and drink from the well of Jesus Christ, and never be thirst again!

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Posted by: jakinnan | October 15, 2012

A Place Prepared for You

There is the joy of having someone save a place for us. We walk into a crowded room at church or at a dinner party and someone across the way waves us over, pointing to a chair he’s held on to especially for us. For a moment we feel a sense of relief, a taste of being on the inside. Now consider Jesus’ words in John 14:2-“I am going . . . to prepare a place for you.” Christ promises that he is saving a place in heaven especially for each of us. When we walk into the crowded excitement of the wedding feast of the Lamb, with the sound of a thousand conversations, laughter and music, the clinking of glasses, and one more time our heart leaps with the hope that we might be let into the sacred circle, we will not be disappointed. We’ll be welcomed to the table by our Lover himself. No one will have to scramble to find another chair, to make room for us at the end of the table, or rustle up a place setting. There will be a seat with our name on it, held open at Jesus’ command for us and no other.

-John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, 182-83

Picture Credit: Farzin H. Montazersadgh

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Posted by: jakinnan | October 15, 2012

Forgotten Nature

“People today have forgotten they’re really just a part of nature. Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They always think they can make something better. Especially scientists. They may be smart, but most don’t understand the heart of nature. They only invent things that, in the end, make people unhappy. Yet they’re so proud of their inventions. What’s worse, most people are, too. They view them as if they were miracles. They worship them. They don’t know it, but they’re losing nature. They don’t see that they’re going to perish. The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water.”

-Akira Kurosawa, Yume

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Posted by: jakinnan | October 15, 2012

10/15/2012 Scripture

A gentle answer deflects anger,
but harsh words make tempers flare.

2 The tongue of the wise makes knowledge appealing,
but the mouth of a fool belches out foolishness.

3 The Lord is watching everywhere,
keeping his eye on both the evil and the good.

4 Gentle words are a tree of life;
a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit.

-Proverbs 15:1-4 NLT

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Posted by: jakinnan | October 14, 2012

God As Lover

John Wesley was thirty-five when he experienced the now famous “warming” of his heart-not his mind-toward Christ, and knew in that moment he had become not merely a Christian, but something more-a lover of God. Shortly after, he penned the hymn “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” whose first verse goes like this: “Jesus, Lover of my soul/Let me to thy bosom fly.” Down through the years the hymn has left many a hymnologist reaching for a more palatable translation, “the difficulty,” as John Julian said, “is the termLover as applied to our Lord.” Revisions now in hymnbooks read, “Jesus, Savior of my soul” or, “Jesus, Refuge of my soul,” which are touching but nothing close to what Wesley meant. He meant Lover.

You’ll notice how dominant the “reason and knowledge are everything” approach has been by noticing that men who have fallen in love with God are often referred to in the church as “mystics,” a term that gives a sort of honor while at the same time effecting a dismissal. Mystic, meaning “inexplicable,” which devolves into “unreasonable.” Mystic, meaning also “exceptional, as opposed to perfectly normal.” Odd, even. Difficult to analyze.

David would have had no problem at all understanding this. The poetry that flowed from the heart of this passionate Lover is filled with unapologetic emotion toward God. He speaks of drinking from God’s “river of delights” (Ps. 36:8 NIV), how his Lover has filled his heart “with greater joy” (4:7 NIV) than all the wealth other men have found, and he writes in many of his love songs how his heart sings to God. He cries through the night, aches to be with God, for he has found, really found, his life in God: “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence” (16:11 NIV) to such a degree that his heart and soul “pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God” (42:1-2 NIV), his body even longing for God. These are not the words of a dry theologian or moralist. These are not the words of even your average pastor. For him, God’s love “is better than life” (63:3 NIV). David is captivated by the Beauty he finds in God. On and on it goes. The man is undone. He is as smitten as any lover might be, only-can we begin to accept this? do we even have a category for it?-his lover is God.

-John Eldredge, Fathered by God

-Picture Credit:Duncan McKinnon

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Posted by: jakinnan | October 14, 2012

10/14/2012 Scripture

The Lord is my shepherd;
I have all that I need.
  He lets me rest in green meadows;
he leads me beside peaceful streams.

He renews my strength.
He guides me along right paths,
bringing honor to his name.
 Even when I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will not be afraid,
for you are close beside me.
Your rod and your staff
protect and comfort me.

-Psalms 23:1-4 NLT

–Picture Credit: Mike Putnam

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Posted by: jakinnan | October 13, 2012

Exploring the Hidden Questions of Our Heart

It is possible to recover the lost life of our heart and with it the intimacy, beauty, and adventure of life with God. To do so we must leave what is familiar and comfortable-perhaps even parts of the religion in which we have come to trust-and take a journey. This journey first takes us on a search for the lost life of our heart, and for the voice that once called us in those secret places; those places and times when our heart was still with us. The pilgrimage of the heart leads us to remember together what it was that first engaged us in deep ways as children: “. . . anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it,” said Jesus (Mark 10:15).

Our journey will take us to explore the hidden questions of our heart, born out of the stories of our lives. It is only by leaving home and taking a pilgrimage that we will begin to see how our own stories are interwoven with the great Romance God has been telling since before the dawn of time. It is on this pilgrimage that we begin to see that each of us has a part in the cosmic love affair that was created specifically with us in mind. Last, this pilgrimage brings us to the destination, set within all of our hearts, which in some way we have known, longed for, and been haunted by since we were children.

…Our journey begins by asking questions, putting words to the movements of the heart. “What is this restlessness and emptiness I feel, sometimes long years into my Christian journey? What does the spiritual life have to do with the rest of my life? What is it that is set so deeply in my heart, experienced as a longing for adventure and romance, that simply will not leave me alone? Does it have anything to do with God? What is it that he wants from me? Has he been speaking to me through my heart all along? When did I stop listening? When did his voice first call to me?”

-John Eldredge, Fathered by God, 10, 11

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