the glory and the horror

I went to NBC again today, and I really enjoyed the service. They did an overview of all the major mission projects they have there, from Habitat for Humanity, to the partnership they have with a Spanish-speaking church in West Dallas, to trips to Monterey, CA for the junior high kids , a trip to Spain for the high schoolers, and trips to Guatemala, Japan, and elsewhere. They’re even sponsoring their own Habitat house for the spring, and the church is going to commit to building it in 9 days. Hearing about that sort of stuff invigorates and excites me. I feel joy coursing through my body when I hear about these sorts of endeavors, and my heart leaps and praises Jesus for the way He works through us, in spite of us.

Some excerpts from The Majesty of Man by Ron Allen:

“Here is the genuine paradox; here is the unsolvable riddle. The awfulness of fallenness is balanced by the awesomeness of image-bearing. The great depth of sin is matched by the great worth of man. These antinomies serves as God’s justification for the earth-and-heaven troubling that led to the Incarnation.”

“Man in the image of God is a majestic creature; he has great dignity in the eys of his Maker. Even fallen man continues to bear the image of God. It is that fact that deepens the disaster of man’s fallenness, and it is that fact that makes the concept of eternal perdition so truly awful. The eternal damnation of an image-bearer of God is an unspeakable horror. It is not just that a wicked man is lost forever; it is that a man made in God’s image is lost forever… When a person comes to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, he not only has life forever, but he is now more man than ever. Christ restores what it truly means to be human. In Christ we are given a new aspect of our history with God and parcitipate in a new way in waht Thielicke, following Luther, calls the ‘alien dignity’ of man.”

These concepts often collide in my tiny noggin.

Just thoughts.

Topics to be commented on later:

- Caedmon’s concert at the Baptodome
- Fahrenheit 451
- Purpose
- Majesty of man
- Dinner at the Michael and Jenn’s
- Philosophical bioethics

Just thoughts.

Seventeen’s opinion of Rice. Apparently, the print copy has a little paragraph on why Rice is cool for women.

The 2nd test came and went, and I think I did better than the 1st test. we’ll have to wait and see. I definitely finished it faster. I hope that’s a sign that I knew the material better.

I had heard something from someone a while back, maybe from Blake, about how we really don’t begin our true ministry in life until the 2nd half/last 3rd, because we don’t know what we’re doing before then. So between 0 and 20, you’re getting your basic education, and then from 20-40, you’re figuring out what it means to be a Christian, to live the spiritual life, to pursue God passionately, and to know Christ. From 40 on, you’re finally at the point where you know what God has been doing, where He’s been working on you, and you basically have better perspective on life, and the things of life. Plus, you have the life experiences (marriage, child-rearing, etc.) to talk from something beyond merely principles or ideas.

Karen and Tim are engaged. My team took 72 hours to tell me. That’s simply unacceptable for news of this magnitude.

Just thoughts.

Off the deep end has returned, if only as an archival thing. The formatting is a little bit of a mess, and probably won’t improve for a while, but I think y’all can read it just fine. Sorry about the ads, but it’s a free server, so I can’t complain.

Rereading some of those old entries is kinda fun, kinda scary, kinda encouraging, kinda not. There are many things that are different, many things that are the same. It’s funny, when you do a little introspection, what you can see after the actual moment in time has passed.

Just thoughts.

Oh yeah. We won our first softball game. And I got a job working in our new student center

Just thoughts.

I know what sort of relationships energize me. I’ve always liked taking personality tests, partially to see what I am, but sometimes, I like the questions as much as I like the test. The questions asked really do make me think through what I think about myself and others. Anyway, one popular question is “Do you prefer a large circle of not so close friends, or a smaller number of really close friends?” I definitely go with the latter, and in that, I am energized. Today, I spent almost the entire day with the same 4 people, studying, eating, and talking philosophy/theology, and I never got tired of any of them. However, the first week of school, I couldn’t stand meeting another new person and asking them the same shallow questions again about their school, major, and where they’re from, and never going any deeper than that. For a relationship to be most satisfying for me, I think I need to know more than just the basics. Merely meeting a person does nothing for me.

One of these friends, Joel, in our discussion today while not studying biochemistry for the impending test on Monday, thinks I am more Free Grace but don’t admit it. Maybe I am. I am also a firm believer in efficacious grace, which, to me at least, seems to imply a little more on the LS side. But anyway….

Just thoughts.

Reese and I had a couple more friends over for dinner tonight. I think I’m learning to enjoy being a good host more and more, especially in light of being intentional in my relationships. Not that I didn’t enjoy it a little before. Just more now than before. In the past, I think I had an aversion to hosting such things because I’m not a people person, and so these types of things are particularly draining for me. I think I’m still not a people person, but because of the relationship I have with Reese now, and his personality, and the “intensity” level of the sort of dinners we’ve been having (which is not much), it’s been quite enjoyable for me. A couple people over at a time seems to work very well for me. It’s enough to have good conversation, a fun time, and yet not be overwhelming. I like it.

Just thoughts.

So I had a conversation over dinner with my roommate tonight about the (seemingly never-ending) Lordship Salvation vs. Free Grace discussion, and I think I figured something out about myself.

First off, I don’t think that I’ve ever taken a side in this discussion, although if pressed, I think I might fall a little more on the LS side. But that’s fairly irrelevant…

Anyway, in talking and thinking through this issue some more, of what is the Gospel, and in a very practical sense, what would I say to non-Christians in America, I realized that I valued being able to speak the same thing to everyone, no matter who it was, Christian or non-Christian.

What I mean by this is that I didn’t want to have to try to “figure out” where the hearer was in terms of their spiritual life (e.g. saved? not saved? carnal Christian? spirit-filled? etc.), not that I could do that anyway, so I tried to find some overarching, more comprehensive presentation of not just the standard “Put your faith in JC to be saved” Gospel, but what Christianity itself is about.

So anyway, I was saying how I told people in East Asia, and have tried to explain to some folks in the US about what the Gospel is – the complete and total restoration of man to his rightful position in relation to God by way of faith in Jesus Christ as utterly reliable and supremely desirable as the one who died for our sins – in communion and fellowship as he was created to be, by God, transforming all of his relationships to everything around him – family, friends, gov’t, those smarter, those dumber, those richer, those poorer, creation itself, etc.

That, in a nutshell, is how I tried to present the Gospel to folks in East Asia toward the end of my time, once I’d thought it through some, and how I’d like to present it to folks anywhere (of course, tweaked for the situation/person a bit), but that’s what I want to present, because I want them to know what they’re “getting into” w/o witholding information, or watering things down, or implying that there’s such a thing as easy “fire-insurance” salvation that only requires this quickie prayer.

I’m still thinking through this, but one thing that Reese brought up that kinda bothered me, was that I had no single Biblical precedence to back me up in my approach, while he tended to follow more of the standard Free Grace approach of saying, “Come, believe in the free gift of God’s salvation,” citing Christ’s many invitations to simply come (come all who are weary and heavy-laden… I will give you rest)…

Just thoughts.

I was at Northwest Bible Church for the 3rd week, and I’m really enjoying it. But I don’t want to decide just yet. I want to go back to Park Cities Pres at least one more time and check out at least one other Sunday School class there. I did make it to Journey last Sunday, and found out that Ecclesia and them go way back. Back to Waco’s University Baptist, actually… common roots.

Weekends seem to fly by so quickly. Time in general seems to go by so quickly now.

Just thoughts.