This Sunday in church, we were singing a song about lifting our hands. Now, I’m not much of a hand raiser in worship. I’m not opposed to it; it’s just not the way I worship personally. But I was thinking about it, and I had an incredible thought on the subject based on something Nathan says that makes me melt.
When he wants to be picked up, Nathan will run in front of me and say, “Hold you, Daddy.” When he says that, it makes me melt, and of course I pick him up and give him a squeeze. Then we walk for a while with him holding me and me holding him.
The part that makes me think of God is not so much that Nathan puts his arms up for me to hold him. He knows that he’s saying, “Hold YOU.” He wants to show affection to me just as much as he wants me to show affection to him. When I lift my heart and hands in praise, it is because I want to hold onto my Creator and show Him how much I love Him. In the process, He lifts me up and squeezes me. It’s a two sided sharing time. So, when we are singing to God, either with our hands up or not, we are telling Him we want to hold Him and be held by Him, sharing some time together.
All over the world, people are trying to earn their way to God. All over the world, they are trying to pay an impossible debt.
In Mexico, as we visited the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, we found two teenage guys crawling on their knees on the concrete. They had rolled up their jeans, hoping to show even more of their devotion and trusting that this might possibly earn them forgiveness.
A few minutes later, I saw a family of four, with a little girl not much older than Nathan. The mother and father were teaching their daughter to crawl on her knees towards the Basilica. As they held her hands and I watched her crawling, I was reminded how much God loves us and the lengths to which He has gone to give us forgiveness of sins.
We cannot pay for our own sins. No amount of crawling or sacrifice will ever pay the debt we owe to God.
The scene was similar in Cuba, where an elderly man had a rock strapped to his leg. He would kick the rock a ways and then drag it back to his original starting point, hoping to appease a saint and pay back a little of the wrong he had done.
These images will forever be etched into my mind, and they will serve as a reminder of the beauty of the gospel.
The gospel, in a nutshell, is that God has come to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He sent His Son Jesus to pay for our sins because we cannot pay for them ourselves. He validated this payment with the resurrection of Jesus, and we can now have peace with God through Jesus.
All over the world, there are people trying to be good enough. But it is impossible to be good enough. No amount of rock kicking or concrete crawling will pay for us.
Besides, the debt is already paid in full. The old song is true. “Jesus paid it all. All to Him I owe.”
I read “You Can Childproof Your Home, but They’ll Still Get in” by Dave Meurer today on my way to Mexico City. It’s an easy read book with some pretty funny insights into the world of fatherhood.
My favorite part of the book was this:
The reality is that the little kid loves his dad. He loves being with Dad, and doing what Dad does. If Dad took him fishing, he would love fishing. If Dad took him to the zoo, he would love the zoo.
Our job is to help our kids love the right things. To guide them toward God, toward the good and noble. To teach right and wrong and honesty and kindness and respect and generosity at the youngest ages.
It is a high calling to be a parent. If you don’t plan on being a good role model, don’t have kids. It is hard work to be a hero, but it is in your job description. Parenthood is not for wimps.
If you’re looking for a book that is easy and fun to read, you should check out Dave Meurer’s book.
Before I left for Havana, I was searching my house for some reading material to take with me on the trip. That’s not so much of a problem because I have subscriptions to magazines that I get sent to the address in Florida even when I’m in Mexico. So, there’s always a stack of magazines sitting around waiting to be read while we’re in the USA.
So, I picked up a random Group Magazine to take with me. It wasn’t until about halfway through my trip that I decided to open the issue and look at the table of contents. I noticed the name of Russ Cline, a friend of mine who lives in Ecuador. So I turned to his column, which was debuting in that issue. It was on Youth Ministry Heroes. It’s a column where he will profile different youth workers around the world.
As I read the name of the person he was profiling and looked at the picture, I realized it was one of the students involved in the very program that I was teaching at the time. I immediately felt the goosebumps on my skin as God was once again confirming what we are doing in Latin America.
I heard this yesterday in church, and it impacted me a lot, so I thought that I would share it with you:
If you were the only one of the 6 billion people on the planet who had sinned and everyone else didn’t need a Savior, Jesus would have come and died for you. That’s how much He loves you.
If God had a wallet, your picture would be in it.
That’s how much God loves us. Incredible, isn’t it?
Tuesday, the sermon in chapel was about the failure of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The main point was that God chooses to use failures so that He gets the glory. I was thinking about how those people probably felt in the times of their failure. Probably not too different than how I feel when I fail in my journey.
Here are some of my thoughts about success and failure.
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