How are the Pharisees doing?

Last night and this morning, I had an opportunity to hear John Ortberg speak at Buckhead Church to a small group leader training and then at church this morning.  He was talking about some of the thoughts from his new book "The me I want to be" - and how it relates to how we approach our lives and our transformation into the people that God uniquely created us to be.  What's really cool is that at the re:group small group leader training, we all got a copy of the book for ourselves and now I really want to digest it.  


There were a lot of thoughts that Ortberg said during those two sessions that are resonating with me, but one that is especially ringing is this thought about grace-based transformation (or sanctification if you're using "churchy" terms to talk about this) and how grace is as much required for us to be transformed into the people God designed us to be as it is to initially rescue us from a life separated from God.  And then he talked about the questions we ask to assess "How am I doing spiritually?" and how often we ask questions that if we were to survey a room of people with those questions that we'd find that the people that would be considered  "Pharisees" in Jesus' day would come out on top when we conducted a spiritual maturity census.  


You know... questions like
- Are you having your quiet time every day?
- How well do you know the Bible?
- How's your church attendance/are you in a good Bible study?
- Are you tithing 10 percent? 


Now, there's nothing wrong with any of these things... In fact, these are some great things to include in your life if you are seeking to grow in your relationship with God.  However, if you asked a Pharisee about how he (or she) is doing, then they're going to probably look better than most of the rest of us, and yet when Jesus looked into their lives He had nothing good to say.  


So... to quote something else John Ortberg said this morning:


"We have to define spiritual growth in such a way that the Pharisees do not win."  Because if we look at many of the systems that we adhere to, they almost indefinitely would.  Jesus said it this way:  "For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matt. 5:20)  


So what was the Pharisees' deal?  It was all about what you did do and didn't do.  What you participated in and what you abstained from.  While it looked internal and talked a pretty good game about the internal, in reality it was all about external works you did to try to gut out righteousness on your own and attempt to be better than the next guy.  These guys weren't happy... and trying to keep up with their long list of rules wasn't producing much good fruit out of them.  In fact, if you read between the lines when you read the gospels, you would get the impression that they were a pretty miserable (but externally righteous) group of people.  They had a system set up that if they followed the rules better than the majority of folks, then they could feel pretty good about themselves, except there's that "how good is good enough?" question so it creates (or can create) this never ending circle of frustration.  


As a recovering Pharisee myself, I can tell you from my own story that doesn't produce the kind of life that God describes as the life He wants to give us.  


A life that looks like Jesus.  Think about what that would look like.  Would it look like what we see in most of our churches, singles' Bible study classes, small groups, and ministries in America?  Read the gospels and ask yourself if Jesus's life looks like what we see in our churches today.  Do you think He was ever stressed out over having to conform to an expansive set of rules?    


So - there's got to be a definition of spiritual maturity that does not allow the Pharisees to come out on top.  In that assessment, what questions do you think you would ask?  


Here are some questions that I ask myself... maybe they're still a little pharisee-ish in nature but I'm a work in progress:
- What has God been showing/teaching me lately?  
- Is my personality centered around the fact that Jesus loves me?
- Am I a blessing to other people or am I using them to meet my own needs?
- Are my emotions stirred when I hear God's word or a worship song or am I just going through the motions?
- How big are the external things in my life compared to knowing Christ?


You may have some different questions... but I'm sure that if your spirituality is being evaluated like the Pharisees evaluated theirs, then some of these questions wouldn't make your list.  Maybe some would, but I'm not perfect.  But the critical thing that rescues us from Pharisee-esque legalism is a realization of our complete dependence on grace for everyday life and our running to that well often.  That's what was missing... they thought they would make this thing work through doing the right things.  It was never about allowing God to work in their lives to create a new life within them, which made the things that Jesus talked about seem crazy because they are things that we'd never do naturally.  


That's what makes grace so amazing.  And it's probably why that, if you were to meet someone who was truly living out this life, not perfectly but you could see this joy, peace, etc. radiate from him or her, you would meet someone that was aware that they did not produce it themselves and were completely in awe of the God who took their old broken life and replaced it with something very amazing.  And when that happens and we take notice of it in our own lives, it drives us to humility and worship because we know that we got a gift and we couldn't make this happen ourselves.  

Because keeping a list of disciplines, as good as having disciplines are, cannot ultimately transform our lives.  They can only make us more disciplined.  While that's a great thing, I'm betting that when we are really honest we ultimately want more than that.

Miniscus

This is going to be a short blog this morning.  I am finally going in for surgery on my knee on Friday to repair a torn miniscus that I injured a week before the Silver Comet Half Marathon that I was supposed to run.  I appreciate your prayers and notes of encouragement :-)

I'm looking forward to being on the other side and back on the trails.  I've already got plans in place to run the first LA Rock & Roll 1/2 Marathon in October... it should be fun.  

Texas Aggie Football - Why I'm Optimistic

After watching my beloved Aggies get shellacked by a subpar 2009 Georgia Bulldog football team sans D.C. in a toilet bowl, you would you think that I'd be ready to jump off a ledge.  Well, perhaps then I was pretty upset, but "jump off a ledge upset?"  Not so much.

My friend in Austin whom I was watching the game with was a little more so... the only mistake I made was allowing him to use my TexAgs account to berate our coaching staff and risk my account being tagged as a troll and getting banned for life.  Fortunately, the latter didn't happen.  Can't say so much for the former.  But that's okay, when you love your friends you let them sometimes act out.  Don't you? ;-)

After seeing the state of Aggie football over the last month since that poorly executed football game in Shreveport, I have a lot of reasons for optimism and yes, faith in Coach Sherman.  We'll see if that plays out but looking at what's going on behind the scenes I think we're not only going to be "just fine," but we'll be very successful.

First off is the Defense, hardly a strength of our team last year.

Last year, we were ranked #105 out of 119 teams in FBS.  After the Independence (toilet) Bowl, Joe Kines retired, making way for the newly hired D.C. Tim DeRuyter, who turned around Air Force's defense from a poor 78th ranked unit to the #11 defense nationally.  Those stats are not an indicator that he's going to turn this ragtag group into the "Wrecking Crew" of the 80's and 90's, but he brings the attitude and philosophy that made those defenses great.  Gary Patterson, TCU head coach, denoted that DeRuyter's AFA defenses "hunted together" and DeRuyter himself said that he wants a team who goes into every game "ready to rip someone's head off." (not literally) - that kind of a killer instinct in a defense is what we need if we are going to return to being the Wrecking Crew again.  Come to think of it, isn't that the attitude that Bo Pelini brought to return Nebraska's defense, which was very porous under Callahan, back to the glory of the Blackshirts that played for Tom Osborne?

In addition, DeRuyter has a lot of raw material to work with.  If you look at the depth chart of the 2009 Texas A&M defense, 9 players on the 2-deep chart and 2 starters were either true or redshirt freshmen.  This can explain why they could play lights out and shut down Texas Tech's spread (so to speak, holding them to 30 is an accomplishment for any team), and the previous week get a 62 point egg dropped on them from a less talented Kansas State team.  These players bring to A&M what has been missing in the disasterous FranPhoney years:  Team Speed (which is something you need when defending a lot of pass-happy offenses every week).  These guys will get better as they get stronger and learn the game... a good mentor like DeRuyter can only help them more.

And you wonder why FBS sack leader Von Miller, who is being projected as a second-to-third round pick in the NFL Draft, is staying in Aggieland for his senior season?  :-)

And then there's the offense:

Did you know?  Our top four recruits committed for 2010 are Offensive Lineman?  All four stars.  All blue chip potential.  One of them, Luke Joeckel (6'6" 280#), has already signed a Letter of Intent and is going to be on campus for spring workouts.  Our OL hasn't been great since the final years of the Slocum era, but we can see that Mike Sherman, who rose through the ranks as the Offensive Line coach under Slocum in the glory days, is committed to winning in the trenches and opening up Mack Truck sized holes for our already good stable of skill players like Christine Michael (who we all know is a stud).  I can almost guarantee that at least one of these OL recruits will start in 2010 (in fact, we had one Fish OL as a starter on the depth chart in 2009) and most will make the two deep roster (as Sherman unlike Fran doesn't believe in automatic redshirting... he is just going to put the best players on the field).

Just wait till this talented group gains some experience and is blocking for Michael in his junior season... look out Big 12!  Not only that, Tannehill, who will take over for Jarrod Johnson at QB, will have a seasoned group to lead, a darn good line in front of him, and an experienced defense with good team speed on the other side of the ball.  It could be a special year for A&M.  I don't think next year could be too bad either, we will make strides on defense as the "kiddie corps" matures and hopefully embraces DeRuyter's philosophy and the old Fran regime offensive lineman graduate and are replaced completely with Sherm's guys.  Johnson will be a senior and will return every skill guy on offense and that chemistry can propel the Ags to improving on what was already a great offense last year.

Aggie Football's future can be really good... it just needs to now happen in the weight room, in practice, and on the field.   We have the pieces in place - now we have to go make it happen.

Labels and Ingredient Lists

I am reading through this book by Francis Chan for small group... you may have heard about "Crazy Love."  Can I tell you... this is a challenging book.  I'm loving it, but it's not a comfortable book for me to read.

I read through the chapter "Serving Leftovers to a Holy God" this morning, and as a person that has been in food marketing and a guy that is really trying to eat healthy one of the analogies he used really got me thinking.

Francis was talking about a bag of potato chips he ate, which on the front of the bag in big bold letters touted "Zero Grams Trans Fat" - as if to denote that these chips are not bad for you.  As we now know, trans fat is really bad for you it obviously should be avoided if you want to live a healthy life.  I was interning in the marketing department at a big packaged rice company in Houston when the news about trans fats came out and that the FDA would start requiring that trans fats be listed on the nutritional information.  It was a good thing... and it got all of the nutritional analysts and food marketers running at a fast pace for a while back in '04/'05 as the new informational guidelines were being rolled out.

However, if you have seen the Smart Balance margarine ads, you know that "Zero Grams" is not necessarily zero grams.  Apparently, the regulations allow the food companies to round down and there is a minimum acceptable amount of hydrogenated (or partially hydrogenated) oil that is allowed in a product in which it can continue to be marketed as "zero grams."  Same thing with the bag of chips that Francis was writing about... when he turned the bag around and read the ingredients list, he found a lot of stuff like "Yellow Dye #3,"  some stuff that you'd have to have attended Mister Bill's chemistry tutorial at A&M (Aggie Fish Engineering students will get this reference) to know what they are, and "partially hydrogenated oil" (aka - trans fat).  You see, the attractive packaging on the front of the bag told one story... the ingredient list (in small print where you have to look for it... this is required by government regulations) told a different story.

Are our lives the same way?  I confess that there's a little bit (perhaps a lot) of chemistry list items, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated oil type of items in the ingredient list of my life, while on the outside shining out labels like "Goes to Buckhead Church," "Mission Trip guy," "MBA," "Knows the Bible," etc.  But God isn't looking at, or interested in, the packaging claims... He's going straight for the ingredient list.  When He sees it, how much love, grace, mercy, passion for the glory of God, zeal for His Kingdom, etc. will He find?  And will He find it at the top of the list or at the end?

The reality, and grace of the matter is that whatever's in my life that is produced by the Spirit of God "Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, etc." is there because God put in there as a result of my giving my life over to Him.  The chemistry list... that's what me apart from Christ put there.  This is very freeing and convicting at the same time, because the degree to which my ingredient list looks like Christ is a direct reflection on the degree that I am wholeheartedly giving Christ control of my life and what goes in and out of it.

So today, Jesus, I give you my life today... create in me what you want to create.  Make me more like you today.

Single guy cooking tips

A couple of months ago, I made one of the best cheap purchases at Target that I've made in a while.  $20 has changed my life - in the form of a waffle iron that I use very religiously now.

It's easy to clean.  Simple to use.  And it just sits on my counter and calls my name in the morning.  And the results are really awesome...

I made this waffle out of Trader Joe's multigrain baking and pancake mix and frozen fresh blueberries from Publix.  I got the fiber, the antioxidants, and the yummy goodness all in one plate.  It's awesome.

Now you're probably asking, where do you have time to make this great waffle batter every morning?  The answer... I don't have to, but the waffle mix is pretty easy to put together.  I picked up an interesting tip from an article on reusing consumables and one tip that they gave I thought was pure genius.  They recommended repurposing a Heinz ketchup bottle as a waffle batter dispenser, so I tried this and it works like a charm (it doesn't hurt that I love ketchup).  So, I have about 4 waffles worth of batter in a recently finished ketchup bottle

and now all I have to do is get the batter bottle, spray on some non-stick on my Oster waffle maker, pour, make my coffee, and go.

And as a single guy with a busy life, I love finding great ways to live healthy & convenient, and create margin.

And by the way, I did try that "Batter blaster" product when I originally bought my waffle iron and it is UN-worthy.  There is so much air in that batter that it makes very substandard waffles.  If you care about quality, don't buy that stuff - even though the spray on thing I have to admit is pretty cool.

Lane Kiffin

Did I call it or did I call it?  In my October 2009 blog about Lane Kiffin at Tennessee, I called out this guy as "unworthy." 
http://cdubsmusings.blogspot.com/2009/10/worthy-and-unworthy.html

Yesterday, Kiffin solidified that position.  One year, and a 7-6 (4-4 SEC) record, and Lane Kiffin and his daddy are bolting from Rocky Top after getting beaten like a stepchild by the Florida Gators, whom Lane Kiffin won't ever be getting to beat the Hell outta because he's LEAVING.  For... USC. 

Nevermind that Pete Carroll is bolting that program now that he has to compete with Rick Neiuhesel for recruits and the coaching talent pool in the Pac 10 has greatly improved.  I wonder if Southern Cal is going to want him back after tanking another NFL stint (did you see what he didn't do with the talent that Bill Belicheck had won 3 Super Bowls with in New England?).  Pete Carroll... definitely unworthy.  You should have stayed in school. 

And Lane... I can continue to dis you and like the Vols, because a coach with a LOT more class is going to be taking over.  And I'm happy you're at a school that I dislike as much as you (boo to the University of Spoiled Children).  As for the Vols, I'm hearing some rumors of Will Muschamp... he'd be a STEAL for Tennessee (much better than the Horns stealing weak take Chris Simms from Rocky Top in the 11th hour recruiting wars a few years back)

As for the players you left, I hope that you (unlike Pete) didn't notify them of your departure with a text message.

My favorite memory from Passion 2010

Monday night.

Being led by the Hillsong worship team.

Thousands of students

Hands raised

Voices united

Passionately focused

Singing to the One who is worthy of our lives

In one voice.  In one accord

So I’ll stand
With arms high and heart abandoned
In awe of the One who gave it all
So I’ll stand
My soul Lord to You surrendered
All I am is Yours