Life-Shaping One-Liners

I was thinking the other day about how much my life has been shaped over the six years I’ve been here at IHOP. The great part is that none of it has happened through large, complex, sweeping illustrations and arguments. It’s never a matter of “This teacher put together all those passages, read it through this lens, retold it with a certain kind of spin, and BAM! Suddenly I hang on his/her every word.” It’s a matter of simple, one-line statements that basically say, “Yep, the Bible actually means what it says when it says XYZ.”

When I’m in the middle of an emotional swirl, I don’t have the patience or brainpower to summon that fantastic six-point sermon. What I remember is that handful of words with the umph (and sometimes the “ouch”) behind it to pierce my own mental fog and keep me clinging to Biblical reality.

…I figure I’ve got a few more months of quoting them before I get to pull the preacher trick and just say, “It’s like I’ve always said…”

- I am loved by God, and I am a lover of God; therefore I am successful.

- God is not mostly mad or sad, but mostly glad.

- Love does not have to be mature before it’s real.

- There is a difference between weakness and rebellion.

- God’s correction is not God’s rejection.

- God will use the least severe means possible to bring the greatest number of people to the deepest level of love without violating anyone’s free will.

- Tithing: You can’t afford not to.

- We need a Judge.

What about you? What one-liners stick with you (IHOP or otherwise)? Please share in the comments.

The Power of [Doing the Dishes]

So Mike Bickle has this series called “The Power of a Focused Life.” If you haven’t heard it yet, get ahold of it. A big part of the focused life means keeping a schedule — this is what makes having a prayer life practical.

I didn’t always feel that way about it. As a matter of fact, when I first got here for Fire in the Night (coming up on six years ago… yikes), I did not like living by a schedule. I did really care about keeping my appointments such as church and dance class, and I hated being late for things. But so long as I made it where I was supposed to be, when I was supposed to be there, I would much prefer to play the rest of life by ear and do whatever I felt like whenever I felt like.

Never mind that I was bored a lot and rarely prayed or got into the Word.

God is not Less Emotionally Capable than Humans

So this title is a pretty pronounced statement of the obvious. Obvious, at least, to most people who follow this blog, and definitely to anyone who regularly tunes in to IHOP-KC teaching.

It has not always been obvious to all theologians. There are still some today who hold to the reasoning of the Stoics, claiming that God cannot both be truly God and be truly affected by emotions. The reasoning goes like this: If something causes God to feel emotions, then that thing has temporarily become greater than God. Therefore God has to be emotionally detached from this fallen, sad world.

That reasoning might gel with Greek philosophy, but it sure doesn’t line up with the self-revelations of the God of the Bible (see, for instance, Zech 1:14-15; Hosea 11:8; Ps 147:11; Matt 9:36, and too much more to list here).

Observations from Today

Hello, almost-April

Observation #1 – Just because a bunch of sun-deprived, stir-crazy people decide it’s time to be Spring (which applies a number of us here) — there is no guarantee that the Lord will agree. Photographic proof is above.

…and at last, an answer

I say an answer on purpose (as opposed to the answer). I don’t claim to have an exhaustive revelation on what was going on in the heart of God at creation. But I think considering who He is, what He wants from humanity and what His emotions are like sure give us a pretty good picture.

As a recap, the question was: Why did God create Adam alone, especially since He knew that such a thing was “not good”?

My good friend Tom Snow already said it so clearly and concisely in the comment thread, I figured I’d repost it here.

My thought is that he was created without Eve to produce longing. Longing for partnership. God wanted Adam to feel this because God himself longs for a bride. God was giving Adam an invitation to the emotions of God.

I absolutely agree. And I would add that if we think of God primarily an authoritarian ruler, we are all the more prone to miss this beautiful picture.

Oh the places a typo can take you

Spell check: it’s a great thing when it works. However, it has one massive handicap. I speak, of course, of the English language.

English has roughly a bazillion words in its vocabulary. Maybe more. And like any langauge, it morphs and changes over time. Now, our poor spell checkers try to stay on top of that mess, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out. The only word processor component I have greater sympathy for is the grammar checker. That thing doesn’t have a chance. I mostly ignore it.

Anyway, back to spell check. There’s only so much room in its little electronic brain. Archaic words have to go. Quirky, specialized, out-of-the way words never make it in. And this leads to amusing things.

For Friends of IHOP-KC Everywhere

My beautiful mother is creating an email list, looking to connect with other people who are not able to be at IHOP-KC but have a heart for it. If you fit in this category and would like to fellowship online with some other folks in the same situation, check out her post here.

Takeaway Points from onething

In the post-conference aftermath as I’m crashed on my couch and fighting off a cold, I’ve been musing over the past few days. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts with you all. In no particular order, they are:

THIS IS NOT SPARTAAAAAAAAAA!!

…but it is the 300th post on this blog, so of course a Sparta joke had to come up somewhere.

A celebratory post is definitely in order. But three hundred is kind of a big number to do the list thing — I’m not sure anyone is interested in a list of three hundred things I’m thankful for, or three hundred things I’ve learned while blogging, or three hundred of my favorite quotes, etc. I think I would probably get bored reading it myself. Lists are fun, though, so I flipped things around a bit and decided to make a list about cool things about the number 300.

• Since I titled this post with an unforgivably bad pun about a movie I’ve never seen and have no intention of seeing, I figure I’d better make amends by starting out saying that “the Three Hundred” is the name given to the Spartans who fought at the Battle of Thermopylae. But you probably knew that already.
• Christine probably knew this already: 300 is a triangular number. It is also the sum of two twin primes (149+151) and is the sum of 10 consecutive primes (13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47). It is also now one more reason I very much enjoy Wikipedia.
• 300 is a perfect score in bowling.
• CCC is pretty fun in Roman numerals.
• Three hundred miles is roughly the distance between me and Wakeeney, KS.
• Noah’s Ark was three hundred cubits long.
• Jim Palmer, a Major League pitcher, gave up exactly 300 home runs during his career — but not one of them was a grand slam.
• Three hundred is the number of soldiers Gideon could take against the Midianites.
• Samson tied torches to three hundred foxes and set them loose in the Philistine fields.
• 300 miles high is the average orbital distance of space shuttles. It is also the name of a pretty cool website that features photography form those orbits.
• This guy spent 300 hours building a record-setting penny pyramid. I didn’t even know penny pyramids were a competitive thing. Or more accurately, I didn’t know they were a real thing at all.
• As of the year 2002, the world record for a group skydive was 300 people.
• Three hundred different movie sets were built for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Amusing Verbiage

I really enjoy words. I care quite a bit about how they are used and what they communciate. This is why I both notice, and get a good chuckle out of words that are not well thought-through.

- Seen on an ad that showed up in our mail, an encouragement to share a “wonder-full” gift. I can almost imagine a marketing team getting excited about this one, going, “Yeah, it’s a word play on ‘wonderful’. ‘Wonder-full’! Like, full of wonder!” …which, incidentally, is technically what the word means in the first place…

- A complaint about the Twilight movie, which, for those of you who blessedly haven’t heard of it, is based on a series of books about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire. The complaint? “The movie made Edward [the aformentioned vampire] all creepy.” No kidding? I mean, they made the vampire creepy? Go figure that one…