The Great Romance

This past week, I have fallen in love with the concept of God being the Ultimate Romancer. I’ve heard people talk about this before, but today it became reality. Everyone, male or female, whether they want to admit it or not, wants to have an intimate relationship with someone. Someone they can confide in; someone with whom they know without a shadow of a doubt loves them unconditionally, knows the worst parts of their inner being, and experiences the greatest joys in life with them. Something innate in us wants this.

Everything that is created has stemmed from God. Romance, was created by God. Since it was his idea, it is safe to assume he is the best at it. We are always talking about falling in love, from every movie in Hollywood, to every book on the shelf. Falling in love seems to be at the forefront of our minds. Falling meant that something or someone was descending downward, typically rapidly and freely, without control. So in other words to fall in love meant that once you fell, there was no stopping it.

For the longest time, I could not figure out what my love language was. I had done the 5 Love Languages test multiple times and never really came to a satisfactory answer to what mine really was. It was mildly frustrating. But then after a conversation with a friend, I realized my love language was quality time. When I spent time with someone, I didn’t have to be doing anything with them, I didn’t have to say anything to them, heck they didn’t even need to acknowledge my presence. I realized I feel loved just by sitting by them and being around them.

When I came to that realization, I felt like I heard God asking: “well then why don’t you spend quality time with me”? I was cut to the heart when I heard that. I realized I had always wanted to do that, but I always found other things to do. I wasn’t really that desperate for God. I wasn’t really that hungry. Sure, I was studying the bible 8 to 10 hours a day and having worship on Mondays and Wednesdays but I wasn’t going out of my way to spend time with God. People have given the excuse that it’s okay, I had dedicated 9 months to study the Bible, which should be good enough. But if I loved someone, I would do anything I could to go out of my way to spend time with them. I realized I didn’t treat God in that way. I gave him a little bit of time here and there, but not in the same way I would treat someone I was falling in love with.

I wanted an intimate relationship with God, but I wasn’t willing to put in the time to invest in that relationship. So one day, I decided it was time. Time to stop saying I wanted to and actually do it. I kept telling myself I’d do it in the future, when I got home, when I’ve finished the SBS and my schedule calms down. But those were just excuses. No more games. The past is gone, it will never come back. The future is unattainable, I can’t do anything to make it come closer. All I have is the present. All I have is right now. So I sat down, put on some soft music and just lay down and asked God to join me. I didn’t need to pray, I didn’t need to sing. I just hung out with God in His presence.

During that time spent soaking in God’s presence, I began praying to God to make me become hungrier, more desperate for his presence. To need it. To not be able to go a day without it. And all of a sudden, I began to crave it. I became intimate with the Lord, the Creator of the universe. Grace Williams has a song called Lost and in the lyrics she says, “I want to be lost in your presence, I want to be found in your presence.” The only way to get lost in God’s presence, is to spend time in it.

God tells us to wait on him; it’s mentioned 92 times in the Bible.

“The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.” – Lamentations 3:25

“Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.” – Psalm 37:7

“But as for me, I will look to the Lord, I will wait for the God of my salvation, my God will hear me.” – Micah 7:7

The first commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. How can he captivate our hearts if we don’t spend time with him? The bible wouldn’t mention waiting on the Lord that many times unless it was important. I never really realized it, until I began to spend large chunks of time with God, just waiting on him. Just spending time in his presence.

God is waiting on us, to start waiting on him. He is looking at me saying, “Is he going to spend time with me now? What about now? Now? Yes! He decided to! Oh wait, he got distracted. When is he going to spend time with me?”

Don’t we do the same thing when we want spend time with the one we love? We count down the hours until we get to be with them next? If God loves us as much as He says he does, why would He be any different? He’s no different. How much more do you think He wants to spend time with us? He created us just for that purpose. When you spend time with someone you love with all your heart, spending even just a few minutes with him or her can absolutely change your day. But after a while, just spending a few minutes here and there isn’t good enough. We long and crave to spend hours and hours with that person.

God longs to be intimate with us just as much as we long to be intimate with him, we just don’t realize it until we begin to invest our time into spending it with Him. I never really wanted to do it because I honestly thought it would be the most boring thing ever; having to sit there and do nothing. But when I started doing it, I realized how wrong I was. God is the least boring person in the world. There is nothing like spending time with God. It gets to the point where you dislike having to do other things. You just want to spend all day in his presence doing absolutely nothing, just soaking.

That’s where fruit comes from. It doesn’t come from ministries or evangelism, preaching, teaching, praying, reading our bible or jamming our schedule full of activities and projects that we do for the kingdom. Fruit in ministry comes from spending time in God’s presence. The fruit begins to become apparent in our character and life because we spend so much time in God’s presence. We begin to reflect Him. Then fruit begins to pour out of our lives because our hearts begin to beat with His heart, our breath becomes in sync with His breath and our footsteps begin to aligned with His footsteps.

The more time we spend in God’s presence, the more we fall in love with him. The more we fall in love with him, the more time we will want to spend in him. It’s an endless cycle. But since God’s presence is infinite there is no opportunity to get bored with him. He longs to speak with us, so how much more will he speak to those who spend as much time with Him as that they can.

The best part is, it doesn’t end there. When I get ready to leave my soaking time with God, I get to invite God to come along with me and spend the day with me in everything I do. It makes our relationship with God real. It is no longer an abstract, hyper spiritual idea, instead it becomes something that can be understood and grasped. All God wants is to captivate your heart. So let him. This is just the beginning. We get a lifetime to fall in love with the greatest romancer of all time.

A Little Bit of Freedom

Freedom. 

That’s what we all want, but so few of us have it. That’s why everyone wants to come to America, or at least, used to, because we could believe whatever we wanted and not be harassed. Freedom is seldom thought about, unless it is infringed upon. Then, all of a sudden, it rubs us the wrong way and we bristle at it.

This week, God has put on my heart the idea of freedom. Us Christians like to think we are free in Christ. And we are. But do we act like we are free? We are free from sin, but how many of us are chained down by addictions? We are free from the things of the world but how many of us are afraid of other people and that keeps us from acting upon the commands of Jesus? How often are we afraid of other Christians during worship when we want to act out but are afraid that they might think we are just “acting”? We have been set free but how often do we worry, stress and are anxious or scared about something? We are quick to put off those with the excuse of well it’s impossible to not feel those things, everyone feels those things. You can’t not worry about things. We have convinced ourselves that it is natural.

What if I told you, you were wrong?

There is freedom in Christ. I had grown up in the church for my entire life. I love church. It is a great place. A place to meet with other believers, worship our Lord and Savior, experience Holy Spirit moving, and hear a well thought out sermon. I've always had the mindset that every sermon had to be planned out, three points A, B, C, practiced, enough scripture included, a few jokes and stories to keep the audience entertained. If you didn't plan, your sermon would flop and no one would learn anything.

I had that idea in my head for as long as I can remember. Because of that, speaking has always terrified me. I never knew what to talk about, always trying to think of a funny joke to engage the audience or not run out of words and end the sermon early due to lack of material.

But all that changed.

There is a woman by the name of Heidi Baker and her husband Rolland Baker who both have their doctrine, went to seminary, did church, went to Mosan Beak, Africa and lived there for 20 years. I could go on and on about these two people but they aren't the main idea behind this blog. Anyways, they walk into the room and Holy Spirit descents into the place. They have countless stories of resurrection of the dead, healings, I could go on forever. But it was not the stories that really spoke to me. I was how they handled the conference. They had the same Spirit inside of them that I have. But they know him in a different way than I do, I think. After the worship set, she walked onto stage and picked up the microphone. She looked around at us and smiled. Then she sat down on the stage. She kicked her legs back and forth and sighed happily.

The first thing she said was, “Hmm, what does Holy Spirit want me to talk about today?” I sat there dumbfound. Here, this woman was going to run this three day conference and she had no idea what to speak on? She didn't prepare, organize her notes or tell us to forgive her if she went on any rabbit trails. She sat there for 5 minutes just smiling at us. Finally she said, “Ah! Okay, I know what we are going to do now…” and then she started. One thing she said that will forever speak to me was when she said, “There are no such thing as rabbit trails, that’s just Holy Spirit speaking.”

Afterwards, I went online with a buddy of mine and looked up youtube videos of Rolland Baker speaking. A lot of craziness went on at the conference that I’m not going to get into, but it got me to want to see what her husband was like. He was even crazier than his wife. I watched one video and for the first 40 minutes of the clip he just walked around and laughed. He would chuckle and make comments such as, “Ho, you people who came expecting a message aren't gonna’ be happy tonight!” and then he would laugh again. At one point during his wandering around the room, while laughing, he said, “You lose your fear of speaking when you don’t care if you ever get invited back again!” and started laughing again. You would think the guy is crazy. But he is filled with the joy of the Lord. I used to be the type of person who would give anyone a black look when they seemed to disrupt worship or act too crazy for my taste, like they are trying to bring attention to themselves. But I have been radically changed by the love of my Father and now I’m that guy. I can’t help but dance and shout when worshiping the Lord, it’s just not natural. We are commanded by Paul to rejoice! We think of Heaven has a great party, right? Singing and dancing and shouting to the Lord? Shouldn't our worship be the same? Rejoice!

Getting back on track, Rolland Baker didn’t just laugh. He also spread that laughter and joy with others. While wandering, he would touch someone with his hand or microphone and they would fly backwards, off their seats onto whoever was behind them or beside them, convulsing as if they had been electrocuted. But they would be laughing hysterically. They would lie there for anywhere between five minutes to thirty, just on the floor twitching laughing, laughing, laughing.  He would stand over them and chuckle, holding the microphone down to them so you could hear their laughter in the amps.

That went on for forty minutes.

Let me be clear, I know my doctrine. I don't take any speakers word on anything. I test everything against the Bible and the Truth and see if it lines up. I am not some star struck youth who is wow'd by something cool I've seen or a convincing point. If it doesn't line up with the Truth, they can do whatever they want to try to convince me otherwise but they would be wasting their time. I don't say that boast but to demonstrate that Rolland Baker is on point. He knows the Truth and he isn't afraid to share it.

I used to be a huge skeptic when seeing people being slain in the spirit, tongues, outbursts of laughter. You name it, I was the skeptic rolling my eyes. It has been something that the Lord has slowly been chipping off of me. Who’s to say the Lord can’t do those things to people? I’m sure not going to. Sure, there are people who fake it. But there are a ton who are genuinely being rocked by Holy Spirit.

The man brought the spirit of joy upon that place. He didn’t prepare anything for that meeting. He just showed up and expected Holy Spirit to show up. He didn’t stress over building the perfect sermon for a people who have heard a hundred sermons in their life. Instead, he brought what they needed. He brought joy. A joy that comes with not caring what man thinks about him. A freedom from the judgment. With that freedom, comes joy. When you don’t care what other Christians think about you when you sing and dance and shout to the Lord during worship, when you go to a coffee shop, stand up on the chair and proclaim the gospel and not care what the people in the shop are going to think of you.

There is a joy that comes with true freedom. Our Father in Heaven gave his only Son to die for us on the cross so that we might have freedom. Do we use that freedom? Did Jesus die on the cross for nothing? We say we do but are held in fear of other men. We don’t surrender our lives completely to the Lord. People say well that life isn’t for me, I have a different calling. Are we not all called to proclaim the message of Jesus? Is that not what all Christians are called to? Some would say well they would prefer to do that on an individual level. To those, I would ask, when was the last time you told someone that you loved them so incredibly much and meant it because Jesus loved them, who died on the cross to save them from death to give them freedom from their old life and allow them to be filled with a joy that nothing else in the world can compare to?

Fear holds them back, simply put. We care too much what people think, even what other Christians think of us. But with true freedom in Christ it won’t matter. There is too much joy to care what other people think. The more freedom you experience in Christ, the more joy you will have. Joy is different than happiness. Being happy is based off your circumstances. Joy isn’t affected by circumstances. It is based off the love from the Lord that he gives.

Going back to Rolland, he didn’t just wander around laughing, if you were to skip the first 40 minutes of the video, you would see him give an “ordinary” message about a pure heart. He joked, “Now for all of you who need to hear a message in order to feel like you gained something here tonight…” and laughed. He knew his doctrine. He was incredibly knowledgeable. He knew his Hebrew and Greek lexicon, he knew his scripture. He had done church. He just didn’t conform to it. He knew that there was more to it. He brought what the people in that church needed. They needed joy. They needed freedom.

This is all recent revelations the Lord has been speaking to me. I have gained an incredible amount of freedom these past couple weeks. I am still being freed from the fear of man and being judged by people. It is a journey. Our life with God is always a journey. I’m still learning. This revelation is still new to me and I’m guilty of all the things I have mentioned above. This letter is more to myself than any one person or people group. I want to be set free. I want more freedom. The Lord is releasing me from the fears that hold me back from truly living the life the apostles lived. They brought love, joy, peace and Holy Spirit. That’s what I want. I need it. Otherwise this life is nothing.

My Experience in the Chronological Biblical Core Course (CBCC)

Looking back, that was an incredibly fast three months. I had just gotten back from India in February and graduated my DTS on the 17th. While on outreach I had really gained a love for the Word of God and studied it as much as I could. I went through the book of Leviticus a few times. As difficult as it was initially, I learned how intricate and complex God is. There would be a few of us from our team doing our quite times together in the morning and I would always get excited about something I read and be like, "Guys! You got a minute? Okay, okay, listen to this..." And that would happen probably a dozen times in a very short time span. At first they were like, "Dude, that's awesome!" But after a while, it became a nuisance because they couldn't do their own quite times. At one point, they told me I should go to seminary since I loved it so much. I got super excited about the idea. Until I discovered I had to have a bachelors degree and I gave up on that idea. But then my outreach leader, Madison, told us she was staffing a CBCC (Chronological Biblical Core Course) and we should all do it.

I pushed it to the back of my mind, but there it sat for the rest of outreach and the remaining time back in Honolulu. I had always wanted to study the background and culture of the books but was always too lazy to get around to it. I still was uncertain whether or not I was supposed to do the secondary school. People kept telling me I should do it. In the back of my head I think I had already decided to do it, I just didn't want to commit myself to it. But after landing back in Seattle, WA I surprised myself a little when I told my family I was going to do the CBCC in April, only a month away. They were completely supportive and encouraged me to do it.

I still was uncertain on whether or not I should do it, but I told myself that if the $3,600 came in to pay for the school I would do it. Three weeks later, I had the full amount. I sold my car, got my tax return and even pulled some money out of my 410k plan. Everything lined up so perfectly that I was like well, guess I'm going back to Hawaii. So a week later I was on a plane back to dive into the Word of God for the next three months.

I was not prepared for what the school threw at me. I knew I was diving into the deep end but had no idea how deep that water was. The CBCC teaches the inductive method which is a way to study the Bible through the eyes of the original readers. We call them the OR for simplicity sake so if I refer to them as that it's out of habit from the 4" binder of homework I completed. We would read a text and pull out observations such as places, names, metaphors, difficult passages, analogies, key words, Strong definitions etc etc. After observing these things we would ask ourselves how is this significance to the original reader? How would this be important to them? What would it mean to them? How would they feel when they read it? We would not read a passage and then automatically try to apply it to us. The book wasn't written directly to us. It had an audience and author hundreds of years before any of us were here. So when we read it we need to understand who it was written to, what they were dealing with, understand their culture and mindset so we can better understand the text. Each text has what we call a timeless truth. That is where we pull a characteristic of God out of what we read that applies to every generation that has or will ever live. That is what can be applied, but only after you try to understand it from their perspective. If you read it through the wrong lens you will miss a lot and may come up with ideas that aren't actually biblical.

We read through 12 books, a book a week, and each one blew my mind. We read through one of each literature: Genesis, Deuteronomy, Proverbs, 1 & 2 Kings, Amos, Isaiah, Luke, Acts, Ephesians, Romans, Hebrews and Revelations. It was a sprint all the way through, I tell you that. Up until the very last day we ran, and we ran hard. Last day of the school our homework was due at 11 am, our final test was at 1 pm and we graduated that night at 6:30 pm. But it was worth it, every painstaking hour.

We would have lecture three days a week, but every day we would be in class at 9:30 am to 12:30 pm for lecture, do homework till 5 pm, have dinner and then normally be in there between midnight to 2 am. Every. Day. Six. Days. A. Week. It was vicious but the sheer amount of spiritual revelation was enough to floor you.

They say there are two different types of people who do the CBCC. The ones who do it and say that was awesome and great but I never want to step foot in a classroom ever again. And then there are the people who finish and say they can't leave until the finish the other 52 books. And that is me. I can't leave until I know the rest, there is just too much knowledge not to continue. But the ironic thing is, the more you learn the more you realize you don't know anything at all.

The CBCC was an experience like none other and I am so thankful for the staff and my peers would I got to experience it with. It was amazing and God has disciplined and expanded my mind like no other experience.

So finishing that, I realized I couldn't go home until I had had more. Three days after graduating there was a Chronological School of Biblical Study (CSBS) which is the same thing but a nine month school that does the whole Bible. The last of my CBCC friends have left to go home but I am staying here in Honolulu, Hawaii to continue and finish the Bible and see what God has in store for me in the next part of my adventure.