by Aarron Pina | Feb 17, 2014 | Uncategorized
Wolf Watching
“I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears. (Acts 20:28-31)”
Paul was clearly warning the elders at Ephesus that men bent on their own fame and agenda would come swooping in as soon as he left town to draw them away from the simplicity of the gospel. Paul broke down the gospel into two very simple principles a few verses earlier: “repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ”. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is a freedom bigger than many of us are prepared for. It’s so big, in fact, that in the flesh, it’s very easy to drift away from it. Enter, wolves.
Many had already picked up pieces of the gospel and tried to co-opt it for their agenda, taking grace alone and adding to it works. Some said that to follow Christ one would have to first become a Jew via rites and rituals including circumcision. This would have drawn them closer to men, not God (you’ve got to be one of us before you can be one of His). Paul outright condemns this practice and explains in later letters that it’s grace and grace alone via repentance and faith. Repentance turns us away from sin and faith knits us in to God.
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by Aarron Pina | Feb 10, 2014 | Uncategorized
Recap
Previously, we took a look at how the comparison game clutters the field of our minds with shame, doubt, and fear. Shame, doubt, and fear only take hold when we fall into the familiar rut of man centric thinking (woe is me, look what’s happened to me, why me?) rather than God-centric thinking. Through our troubles, God’s primary purpose and outcome for us is that we would know Him better. (See Eph. 1-16-19) Wallowing in shame, doubt, or fear can quickly become an obstacle to the main thing: knowing God and being fully satisfied in Him.
Roll your eyes and say “whatever that means”, please. But, I struggle with this, myself. In fact, I’m rolling in the deep of it right now.
When things don’t turn out the way we planned or those around us seem to have it all going for them there’s either a gap between expectation and reality or hope and reality. Either way, it’s an unpleasant gap that seeks to wedge itself between us and our Creator. I submit that the best bridge over this gap isn’t jumping into the canyon of anxiety or shame or doubt, but to span the canyon through proper mourning.
What’s So Proper About That?
Huh? “Proper” mourning? Does that mean, putting on your best “Downton Abbey” accent and weeping to your Puppah? Perhaps. But, as we look at some of the greatest mourners in history we find they didn’t ignore the gap or chide themselves “real Christians don’t fall all to pieces over small stuff.” We’re not called to fall to pieces over small stuff. But loss without mourning is self defense. Self defense is self deception. Job lost everything and his friends said nothing more to him for three days than harmonizing with his sobs. Jesus sweat blood in the garden. And, Nehemiah tore his clothes, wept, fasted, and prayed. All of them started with a proper attitude of mourning by simply calling out the gap for what it was.
“When I heard these words, I sat down and wept and mourned for days; and I was fasting and praying before the God of heaven. (Nehemiah 1:4)”
Mourning helps us to know God because it first acknowledges His sovereignty and second, empties our inbox of the demon of minimizing. Granted, these giants of the faith were mourning pretty massive gaps. But, saying “it’s really not a big deal” is tossing dirt in your inbox. Can you imagine? I’ve had a lot of different things in my inbox (even right now), but dirt? I can’t even think of a reason to put dirt there. And, that’s exactly what minimizing the gap does. We weren’t meant to hang on to ungrieved loss, un-mourned gaps between hope and reality or expectation and reality. It’s totally out of place and eventually spills out of our inbox, contaminating our workspace and the floor where we step.
Emptying Your Inbox
I’m big on clearing out clutter. I work on it regularly and even teach it. But, because this is the kind of clutter I can’t see, it takes a little more intentionality than “control, alt, delete”. Sometimes, I have to pull over (even literally) and admit that my disappointment is even worth the time with all I have going on. But, I know while a spoon full of dirt won’t upset my whole inbox, I’m a fool to let pounds and pounds of dirt accumulate for very long.
Proper mourning begins with proper attitude like Jesus, Nehemiah, Job, even David had – calling the loss by name without minimizing, denying, blaming, or excusing it. From there, processing it is like a really important phone call with God.
It can go like this: repeat after me – “God, it’s me [again]. I’m a little [anxious/ashamed/fearful/disappoointed] about x. This isn’t how I planned it. This isn’t what I wanted. Show me more of who You are in the midst of disappointment. Turn my disappointment with this moment into an appointment with You. I’m listening.” And, then, seriously listen. You’ll never catch a revelation on the run. Nehemiah had a lot to mourn about – so he fasted, wailed, and communed with God for days. Your situation may be much less consequential and thus warrant far fewer tears and skipped meals. But, it’s no less personal [pause…] nor valid.
It’s your inbox. Let’s clean out the clutter, shall we?in Christ,
AP
by Aarron Pina | Jan 13, 2014 | Uncategorized
“When he [Noah] drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked. When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him,“Cursed be Canaan! He also said,may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth. (Gen. 9:22-27)”
A friend asked last week why Noah would curse Canaan and not Ham. As I read through the passage with him, I couldn’t tell. But, on a second reading in a quieter time, a couple of things became apparent to me, so I wrote down my observations and did some research. While some of my conclusions were confirmed, I stumbled on a few additional points for your reading pleasure.
Noah’s blackout is the first mention of drunkenness of a Holy man in scripture. Moses doesn’t record it as sin in his account. So, why was Ham in trouble?
The Crime
Noah wasn’t just an important person. He was the only man chosen by God to have his family saved from the flood and by extension, the only man chosen before Abraham from whom the Messiah would come. He is a patriarch. While his sons could not have known God’s plan through their father, they did know that their father’s family was the only one who would repopulate the devastated planet. Noah was God’s man, their father, and to be respected and revered as such.
Ephesians 5:12 warns us against tabloid journalism, slander, gossip: “don’t even mention this stuff…” So, we find Noah in an undignified state and Ham given an opportunity to honor or dishonor his father, the Patriarch. Rather than keep it quiet, he tweets it to the only other two men on the planet. This is not the “exposure” Paul talked about in Eph 5:11-13. This is the first case of tabloid journalism. “GUYS – DAD WAS PASSED OUT, NAKED!!!”
Observe: Shem and Japheth took such care in restoring their father’ dignity that they didn’t even want to accidentally see their father naked. Thus, they approached him walking backward, treating their father and his privacy with great care.
Curse or Prophecy?
Following this episode, Noah blurts out a curse than many might presume to be residual alcohol, but it is not. Noah appears to bless two of his sons and curse one of his grandsons. It appears that he punishes the guilty son by cursing his youngest son. But, that is actually not the case.
As we read further in the genealogy, we note that from Shem comes Jacob’s line – the Shemites (Semites) and from Japheth come the gentiles. That the gentiles would one day live in the tents of Shem is a picture of what is also reported in Ephesians 2:14-16 that through the cross, both Jews and gentiles would have access to God through the cross. This is a prophetic utterance. The curse on Canaan was not placed on him by Noah, but by God. Noah was merely prophesying what we now know about the Canaanites – that they would become a wicked, God-hating, idolatrous people.
The Punishment Fit the Crime…
So, is Ham off the hook? No. Though Noah did not actually curse Canaan, Ham was still punished by his words. History would prove that Ham would have been long dead before the wickedness of his progeny would come to fruition. Therefore, Ham’s punishment was much like his crime: he would now know what he did not want to know and would otherwise never have known.
For Ham to die before seeing the wickedness of his offspring would have been God’s hand of mercy. But, because of his rebellion against God vis-a-vis his slander against Noah, He was made to know what the tabloids would only hundreds of years later report.
Honor your father and mother… that it may… go well with you…
in Christ,
AP
by Aarron Pina | Dec 16, 2013 | Uncategorized
What’d You Expect?
I promised a post about my top 4 Christmas songs. We should be on #3 right now… What gives? I’m getting there. You were expecting one thing and you got another.
So, how’s that going for you?
How we react to unmet expectations tells everything about our theology.
“To man belong the plans of the heart,
but from the Lord comes the reply of the tongue. (Prov. 16:1)”
The Gap
The gap between what we expect and what we get is either counted blessing (when we get what or more than we wanted) or bother (when we don’t). Our response to this gap exposes what we believe about God and what He, the world, or life owes us. Shift gears with me for some background.
A Mark, Two Joes, and Questions for Mary
Mark Lowry was 20 years old when a car accident left him with 11 broken bones. I don’t think he was expecting that when he got in the car. You? Six years later, in his mid 20s, he wrote the lyrics to my number 3 favorite Christmas song.
In Genesis, God called Joseph to become Prime Minister of Egypt, but not without decades of trial, testing, and waaaaaiting… In the Gospels, He called another “Joe” to marry the only pregnant virgin in history. Mary was visited by an angel who told her she’d become pregnant outside wedlock, but remain a virgin… and the angel didn’t even have the decency to walk her home and explain the “miracle” to her dad. REALLY?!
Months of physical therapy to recover from an accident…
Years in prison over a false accusation waiting for God knows what…
Years raising a family in Egypt waiting for Herod to die…
The eyes of everyone on her knowing she was pregnant outside of marriage waiting for prophecy fulfilled…
They all experienced the gap.
What do you do in the gap between the miraculous and the mundane?
Hitting the Mark?
Mark Lowry was asked to write a song. He started with a list of questions he’d like to ask Mary, the mother of Jesus. We all tend to judge the gap. I don’t know if Mark did after his car wreck. I don’t know what Joseph was thinking in prison. Scripture doesn’t tell us what Joseph was thinking in Egypt. Mary broke out in an song of amazing faith. Holidays tend to magnify the impact of unmet expectations… that either make us bite our tongues or unleash on people who ultimately might not deserve it. What if we could take a lesson from Mark?
He asked a ton of questions that put the downside of the situation out of the spotlight (for the most part). What if we could do the same? What if this Christmas we could all suspend judgment of the gap – I didn’t get what I wanted, they didn’t act the way I wanted, they didn’t say what I’ve hoped they’d say, they still haven’t trusted in Jesus… etc… What if we could, as Mary did, trust in the God who is sovereign over the gap and simply say – “May it be as you have said”?
Take a look at the questions Mark Lowry penned when he wrote “Mary Did You Know?” and do your own homework… “Aarron, did you know, that that thing you wanted to happen this year at Christmas is really just a blip on the map and will serve to bring someone you love to Christ in a way you never imagined or hoped?” Can you trust that God’s ways are higher than our ways and His plans always work out better than our fallen, imperfect expectations? Will you trust Him in the gap, the uncomfortable gap, the pregnant lady riding a donkey forty miles over the mountains gap, the cousin-in-law-twice-removed who always makes awkward and insulting remarks at your dinner table gap?
Can you forgive? Can you articulate your expectations of what you’d like in the future rather than dwelling on the gap of what “should have” happened this time? Can you trust that even though you don’t see a miracle in the middle of the mundane that God is still at work?
Enjoy one of my favorite renditions of “Mary Did You Know”? And, make a list… and check it… twice…
by Aarron Pina | Oct 28, 2013 | Uncategorized
Good morning –
Last week’s performance of “That Day” was a tremendous success. So many people showed up, we needed more tables and chairs! Our heart’s desire was that it wasn’t in the quantity of people who showed up, but that the people God wanted to see it were there. Mission accomplished. He is sovereign.
The audience was wowed. As the performer, so was I. God has inspired so many poignant changes to the script over the past three years (especially the past three weeks), that I’m amazed all the right lines came out of my mouth that night. There was laughter, tears, a little uncomfortable laughter, elbows to the people next to us, and a whole lot of wonder inspired by the main character’s journey through his look at eternal rewards at the judgment seat of Christ.
The worship team – Ryan and Crystal Casey and former boy-band member Kevin Swan, gave their best and created inspiring punctuation for story. We are grateful for their service to the kingdom.
For more details on “That Day”, go to www.thatday.info.
In the coming days and weeks, we’ll have photos (possibly videos), testimonials, and commentary regarding the show, as well as detailed information on how you can bring this story front and center for your church or organization.
This morning, as we regroup from a very busy month, I leave you with some uplifting thoughts from Boyd Bailey – author and President of “Wisdom Hunters”.
http://www.wisdomhunters.com/2013/10/humble-and-gentle/?preview=true
in Christ,
AP
P.S. For now, keep us in prayer for the upcoming One Thing, Pier Foundation, Seasons of Life fundraising event in November: “The One Thing-a-Thon”. To participate, volunteer, donate, or just attend, go to “http://www.onethingathon.com/”.
by Aarron Pina | Sep 26, 2013 | Uncategorized
Thinking this morning on God & how big & great He is! He redeems the time. He loves us in our brokenness. He loves us when we are unlovable. He loves us when we hate ourselves. He loves us back to life. (I know this for a fact personally). And in response to that love- then & only then can we love Him back & truly love one another. He has shown me this great love & in response I give Him my life. I confess my yuck to Him. I ask for His forgiveness of sin in my depravity. He not only forgives me but takes the shame & condemnation. Along with forgiveness, He adds to it His power that allows me to walk in obedience to His Word. He keeps me humble. He holds me & sustains me. He renews me day by day. And yes… He even disciplines me because He loves me. He fills my heart so full of Him that I cannot help but praise Him & thank Him. Does that mean everything is perfect? Nope. Not even close. But is there light in the darkness & peace through the storms?
Yes.
Ya’ll! God loves us, our spouses, our children & loved ones. Remember that He holds the world in the palm of His hand & still has every hair on our head numbered! So, my prayer today is that through faith in Christ, we would trust, love, grow in, serve & live for Jesus & also one another. (This is not that salvation comes through our works because we know it only comes through faith in Jesus’ blood & finished work on the Cross; His taking our sins upon Himself defeating death & reconciling us to the Father.) Then, as an overflow of that amazing grace God give us, we can be a place of refuge for our prodigals, the lonely, the orphans & the widows. May those who are far off receive what His Spirit who calls us unto Himself has been longing to give them all along: Everything He is!
Ephesians 3:
16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
