Hong Kong John

It’s laughable how often and easily I fall back into thinking that my walk with Christ would be easy if I could just do ________. For me that blank usually contains “sleep better” or “be more disciplined” or “get a routine”. Yesterday at the 11:30am service at Island ECC Michael Ramsden from Ravi Zacharias’ ministry spoke. He referenced a portion of scripture that I think about often but saw in a new light yesterday, Romans 7:15-25. As I’m thinking about how to express what I’m feeling and thinking in words it sounds really stupid but here goes. I was quite a scoundrel in college and did a lot of things that were not only sinful but foolish and I can only conclude that I was out of my mind now that Christ opened my eyes. I have typically defaulted to those grievous sins of my college years as my struggle with my flesh. When Christ pulled me out of the mire about two and a half years ago virtually all desired to do any debautery if the former kind I had been enslaved to vanished. I suppose I thought Paul was referring to some typical fleshly/wordly desire that he listed in Romans 1:29. I doubt Paul was struggling with the desire to go stone the very Christians he was converting and discipling and in jail for. I think Paul’s struggles were probably in his mind, to be more specific maybe he struggled with living by the law instead of living by grace, that is what he struggled with previously in his life. My faith growing up was based on the law, the moral code of the Bible, which is why when I fel,l I fell hard because I was falling into two stone tablets and not the arms of Christ. In Romans 7:21 Paul says “So I find it to be a law…”. I don’t believe he’s referring to “the law” as in Romans 7:14 or 7:16 because he says “a law”, profound huh? He’s just saying that in living he’s found that it always works out then when he wants to do good/right that evil is close at hand. I’m recognizing that at this point in my life and faith that evil is living by my own strength and not the Lord’s.

I also recognize that evil as the desire of my flesh, not for lust or drunkeness, but for easiness and comfortableness. As simply being that when I realize I should pray I also get a desire to listen to check espn.com, which one is easier to do? When I get a thought that I should read the Bible I realize I’m tired and want to take a nap. I don’t know if this is the same kind of struggle Paul is talking about in Romans 7, but I know that doing the things I know I should has felt impossible lately and I don’t think it’s by chance that pretty much coincided with my blog post on December 3rd entitled “Put My Flesh To Death”.

I haven’t really known what to think about things feeling so hard to do lately. To clarify I don’t want to do these things, prayer, studying the Word, acts of service, to earn anything but because I know that He’s my only hope in this world and I hope to draw near to Him and glorify Him in those things and others. So I have been struggling with the basics lately, but I didn’t believe I was turning to sin because I wasn’t struggling to resist any of my old trappings. I was discouraged by this greatly and really didn’t know what to make of it. Honestly I still don’t know, but it was encouraging to think maybe this was what Paul was talking about in Romans 7. I thought about this versem, work out your salvation with fear and trembling” with emphasis on “work” and I think that’s probably more akin to working in the field in the blazing sun of the Middle East then most of us air conditioned office dwellers would care to think about. I even think some of these thoughts were going through Jesus’ mind when the Disciples didn’t get what He was saying for the 3789th time, it was probably pretty hard to have to walk for hours in the hot sun with guys asking, or having their moms ask, if they could sit next to His thrown in the kingdom.

I struggled in worship to sing words like “I give my life to follow, Everything I believe in, Now I surrender” from the song Mighty To Save. Those are big statements. I’ve sang that song lots of times, but I usually am not do contemplative during times of worship and I couldn’t but be frustrated that people could sing those words so easily. I know those things aren’t true in my life, I want them to be but they’re not right now. A friend of mine said he’s had a dream where he and I get martyred while serving as missionaries in Africa, but I’ve struggled with the thought of dying for my faith recently. That’s what I was thinking of when I saw the words “I give my life to follow” yesterday. I live in Hong Kong, make more money then I care to spend (though I am pretty thrifty), and don’t feel I embody those words at all.

I’ve struggled for weeks now with the question, do I live like heaven is real? Paul says we’re citizens of heaven and should no longer live as citizens of this world, which I think is what Jesus was saying in His instructions to live in the world but not of the world. I struggle with how much I think I look like everyone else. I have a comfortable life, but should I be so comfortable? Thousands and thousands and thousands of people die because they don’t have clean water to drink and I have thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in my bank account and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stuff and paid thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to go to college where I didn’t do much more than skip class, take 5 years instead of 4, fall into sin I wouldn’t have ever thought I could fall into, and go the the gym 5 days a week. That doesn’t seem right to me, and honestly makes me feel like someone is rubbing sandpaper on the inside of my stomach. Not only did my Savior get death on a cross and I get eternal life, but I get a nice comfortable life with great food and friends and people that love me and laugh at my jokes and can spend five dollars on a beer(s) or a coffee and read books and sleep in a airconditioned/heated room and people that are the same as I am drink dirty water, have worms, curable and preventable diseases, and can work all day in blistering heat and still have nothing to eat.

Americans, I am one, have for decades been fighting over the right to have an abortion. They are not dying of starvation or unclean water, but are instead dying of the effects of having too much to eat and too much besides water to drink.

I started this post off talking about how I was encouraged yesterday, but ending it with only being able to acknowledge that I’m encouraged that I think I’m at least frustrated and discontented by the things I should be, both in my self and in the world. I think I should get the phrase “Progressive Santification Isn’t Easy” tattooed on my forehead so everytime I look in the mirror I could be reminded.

I get the feeling of deja vu a lot. In the past I really haven’t enjoyed getting this feeling, but while on vacation in Malaysia a few weeks ago some thoughts came to me that have changed my perspective on what deja vu could be.

We were near the end of our whitewater rafting journey down the Padas River. The landscape had changed considerably since we started rafting around noon that day. The river had slowed to a crawl and things seemed to be changing to a more coastal feel, but we were still surrounded by tropical forest. There were birds swooping in and out of trees and the guide pointed out a monkey. I had recently read Robinson Crusoe and couldn’t get away from imagining this to look similar to the island Daniel Defoe was imagining when writing the book.

My friend Bobby who was sitting opposite of me in the raft said that he could have sworn he had dreamt this before. I’m not sure if that sparked my memory or if I had already been thinking it, but I also swear I had dreamed that place before. I don’t remember very many dreams, but this one sticks out very clearly because it was so real feeling. I had it over 10 years ago, but everything from the jungle, to the color of the river, to the birds were the same. I realize that this was something different from the typical sense of deja vu, but I think it’s very similar and a much more tangible feeling than my typical deja vu experiences. In the next few paragraphs I’ll explain two ideas that came together for me to help me see deja vu in a new light.

Last month I began reading What’s So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey. In this book he briefly talks about the idea that since as humans we are bound by time we also bind God up in the same way (heavy paraphrasing on my part). He goes on and says that God is outside of time and He knew the end when He made the beginning so that He can see the whole person, i.e. when He looks at 5 year old John, He can see 50 year old John and know everything in between. This was a new idea to me, and made perfect sense. I would have fully admitted that God was outside of time and new the beginning and the end because I believe the Bible and the Bible clearly states those things, but I admittedly often allow God to be bound with the same things that bind my mind and body. This theory shared by Yancey was very eye opening to me, and when it was paired in my mind with the following it began to make real sense.

My pastor back home, Matt Chandler, talks often about the idea that God has left these fingerprints, shadows, images for us to point us back to Him. In one sermon he talked about how a photograph of his wife couldn’t capture every reason he’s passionately in love with his wife, but it would serve to remind him of her. He talks about how he teaches his children that all the things they love most were made by God to let them know how much He loves them. I fully subscribe to the idea that God created this world to reveal Himself. From God making man in His own image (Gen. 1:26&27) to God creating the world and saying it was good and saying it was very good when He created man and woman (I will testify to God’s creation of woman being VERY GOOD) to Romans 1:20 where Paul says ” For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” The beauty of a sunrise/sunset, the AMAZING complexity of the human body, the feelings of love/pure joy/excitement, our conscience all these things are free and experienced by everyone and to me clearly point to God. I skipped over the beauty of women because I wanted to point out that God’s creation was so very good in this regard that millions if not billions of men allow their worship to terminate on the created work of women instead of on the creator of women.

With these two ideas in mind, God not being bound by time and able to see all of eternity at one moment and that God’s fingerprints are everywhere in all times and in all things, the idea struck me that what if dejavu is a fingerprint of God. This feeling that I’ve experienced something before, what if that’s just a glimpse at how God views everything. Everything that I do and that’s happened to me God has already seen and knows, wouldn’t it make sense that God would give a taste/glimpse/picture of something outside of ourselves/our time-bound selves to point us back to Him, the timeless eternal God? That He might give us just a snapshot of how He sees. My previous explanation of dejavu, brain waves colliding/mis-firing, has now been trashed for this new theory which I believe gives much more Glory to my Lord and Savior.

A funny thing always happens when I lose self discipline, it feels like I have to climb a mountain to get it back. I know this to be true for physical self discipline as far as working out, or spiritual self discipline as far as praying or studying, or self discipline in regards to saying no to sin. In reality all you really have to do is say “No” to your flesh. Colossians 3:5 says to put to death your flesh, and the only way to do that is by being able to deny it. Recently I’ve been struggling to pray and read the Bible consistently, when I felt like I should do it or I even knew I should do it, it always felt like it would be so hard to do in my head. I had a really great time of prayer today though, and all it took was saying “No” and getting on my knees and starting to pray. I was tired as usual and wanted to just go to sleep. As usual my flesh gave me bad counsel and told me I could just pray when I woke up, and I’ve listened to this bad advice many times and I think I’ve actually prayed after waking up maybe twice in the last 3 months. My prayer time felt a little awkward at first and I started to run down my usual list of prayers, but something happened while I was praying. It got easy and felt a little more natural. Towards the end I really felt like I was talking to my Father in Heaven. I know that my flesh is stubborn and lazy and doesn’t know what’s best for me, and I don’t know why I keep forgetting that. So for this season in my life my life verse is Col 3:5, and I’ll be begging God to help me to put my flesh to death.

I’ve been trying to prayer following the guidelines Jesus gave us in Luke 11 in the “Lord’s Prayer” since I heard Matt Chandler preach on it a month or so ago. Tonight while I was praying for my daily bread and thinking on that verse I realized that I need to ask for faith to make it through tomorrow on whatever bread I’m given. I started thinking about the Israelites in the desert gathering manna, and wishing that I viewed everything I’m given as from the Lord and depended on it the way they had to depend on it. I wish I would realize the extreme and utter dependence I have on it so could truly pray desperately for the faith for the Lord to provide it tomorrow.

My first ever journal entry written while on the plane ride to Hong Kong.

“This is Day 1 on my new adventure. I’ll be landing in Hong Kong in 1 hour and 18 minutes. Staring out the window I see a beautiful blue sky. At the horizon clouds gather in shades of pink, still bathed in the remnants of the sunrise. Instead of seeing the Pacific below I see a rolling landscape of snow, clouds that will soon be chased away by the sun’s rays. I’m comforted and made confident in this moment, that the Lord has gone before and prepared the way. I know that He too has been making me ready for this journey that is sure to be filled with challenges, temptations, lessons, successes, and failures. I’m thankful that though my circumstances and surroundings change He remains the same.”