http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJOhF_PAmXs

Hosea was asked by God to marry a prostitute!

What if you were asked to marry a prostitute? Every Friday night you would come home from work and you wouldn’t know where she was. You would go to the city, to the streets, only to catch her getting out of some sleaze balls car or you would find her with some guy in a club. What if she told you she was pregnant, but you knew that the baby probably wasn’t yours? This isn’t some song or movie; this is the opening of the book of Hosea

God chooses to represent our relationship with Him, through the concept of marriage. God choose the deepest, most intimate relationship on planet earth to illustrate the closeness He has with His people. This idea flows from God like a wedding dress flows from the shoulders of a bride. It is beautiful and full. God loves us the way a husband loves his wife. There is no deeper way to express love for His people! With this however comes a God who actually cares what His people / bride does! God is a jealous husband and he does not tolerate His people going to other lovers or going to other gods!

What I find interesting is that God uses the marriage relationship to explain the relationship with Him, but also other relationships too. For instance we think of Jesus as our brother and as our friend. We think of God as our Father. We think of God as our master and king. The Holy Spirit is our teacher! Jesus even teaches that the way we treat our neighbors is the way we treat Him. So in a way we know God as a neighbor!

We cannot escape from a God who is completely relational. God wants to know us and us to know Him. He will not remain distant. He will not remain unknown or unknowable. So when we talk about God, from the book of Ezekiel, we see a distant mysterious God. But in Hosea, we see a God who wants us to love Him like we are married to Him. We see a God who gets crazy jealous over who we love and who we spend our time with. We see a God who loves us as a husband who has fallen head over heals in love for a woman who is less than faithful and less than worthy of a husbands love.

Then our gaze turns towards our end of the relationship and in every relationship we have toward God, in every metaphor we have spoiled something. We are enemies towards God, until we come to Jesus. As brothers we are like Cain, murdering Jesus! As friends we are like Judas or Peter, selling or being ashamed to talk about Christ! As children we are like the prodigal constantly turning away from our loving Father. As members of the Kingdom we are treasonous, betraying our King and living for the world. And as students we talk out in class and are always being sent to the principles office! As a wife to our king we have committed adultery!

I say all of this not to shame your or to proclaim who good I am but to admit and confess to you that I need my God to rescue me from my adulterous life. I need my God to come and take me away from those other lovers so much less wild. I need my God to buy me and keep me from every other god and distraction. I need to love God half as much as He has loved me. I have wept over this, because I am not as faithful to God as He has been to me!

I want to encourage us to stay faithful and true to our God!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOWguZP-yx4

     Ezekiel and the Dry Bones is an unbelievable story from the Bible. God brings dead, dry bones back to life. Putting together bone to bone than bringing on the flesh and the skin, then breathing His very breath into these dead bones.  One of the most paradoxical parts of this story is the lack closure!  What happened to the skeletons?  Did they go back to their respective families?  Did they go back to battle?  Did they live happily ever after?  When you ask these questions you can either doubt God and the legitimacy of this story or you can realize that God’s miracle is not dead bones coming to life.  That is a no-brainer for God.  He did that already when He created us

      The miracle is that God does for our spiritual beings what He did for these skeletons! We are dead in our sin. We are powerless in our actions. We try for good, but we are continually bad. We are depraved. We are as dead in our spirits as those dry bones. We follow every distraction clicking along to the next page or signing up for the next big thing. We think half-heartedly about our souls and our spiritual condition and expect God to dispense Grace like a vending machine. But God doesn’t want to just give us our whim and fancy; He wants to make us alive. He wants to breath the Holy Spirit into our very souls to revive our hearts and minds. He wants to take us who were dead and make us living to Him.  

     This is the miracle that isn’t just for Israel, but for all people that God is calling!  And for those of us who are alive, this is an invitation to live that life out fully and to put aside the gods of distraction, and to worship God alone!

www.ghosttownrevival.wordpress.com

You should really check this sight out.  It is a collabrative art project chronicalling the lives of the inhabitants of ghost town…

This town is beautiful, mysterious and strange, but sometimes redemptive.

Jonathan (http://jkotulski.wordpress.com/ ) is the musician and main song writer,

Ian (http://refugeearts.blogspot.com/) is the story teller,
and I (www.josephpetepickle.blogspot.com ) am the photographer.  We have been working on this blog for a few weeks now.  I hope you all like it!

As I was praying out in the field, my fingers grasped at some twigs and straw.   I was transported to a place  of wonder, for in my memory was a similar event. As a child I would build small huts and houses out of twigs. I would build them in between the fingers and toes of the roots of trees. This was something that I did by myself, and it brought wonder. Not wonder in my cleverness or my skill in building such things. But the wonder came in the totality of the activity and the mystery and greatness of what I saw and what could be done, but with the smallness of myself. The tree and the world were greater than me, but i got to partake in them. I was allowed to grasp and hold and this was truly wonderful. I on many occasions yielded to this beauty…

Children have a complete and natural tendency toward wonder. Part of it is that they have experienced so little, that when they do they are easily caught up in the rapture of wonder! Children also are much more humble. They are not afraid of getting dirty and being close to the ground. They can easily see that they are not kings or queens of the universe. They can easily see that they are small and dependent! This makes yielding easy! Children also have no systems for covering the truth. When a child lies it is so obvious. They do not know how to adequately explain away the beauty they see or rationalize the mystery that they feel. Thus it is, that children will yield to the wonder of a moment where adults blindly tread down everything in their path

So now I, as an adult seeking the face of God, I am surprised by childlike wonder. Wonder which I so often knew as a boy, but now seldom see. It pains me that I do know Wonder, and makes me question if I know God. For wonder concerns itself with indescribable beauty, not whys, hows, or right and wrong. It doesn’t get wrapped up in how you should express yourself, why something is the way it is, or with any other judgement. Wonder is a simple response to God’s hand in all things mysteriously beautiful! Wonder doesn’t even need to know that God’s hand was behind the beauty. Much of the time wonder never identifies God as the originator, but wonder doesn’t need to do this in order to be wonderful! When you see something beautiful, whatever it may be, your mind simply yields to the moment. You do not worship what you see, you simply yield yourself to what is far greater and far more beautiful than you are anything you have seen. And in this yielding to indescribable beauty you are yielding to God. For it is God who made this beautiful beyond your comprehension. Behind every flaming sunset and silent, cathedral-like pine forest, and rushing water of many oceans, is God. God is not these things but He gave them. A pagan might follow these thoughts of wonder and try to worship the thing rather than the maker, but this is only a suppression of truth, a suppression of wonder! A scientist might fill his lab with wonders and mysteries unexplained, yet if he doesn’t yield to their originator he is only pushing away the mysteries and suppressing the wonders and suppressing the knowledge of God! A church goer may wave hands and utter words in a mimicry of worship, but if they leave and never wonder and never yield, their hearts are cold and do not know the God that made all things wonderful and glorious.

Let us preach wonder. Let us display wonder in our services. Let us glory in the wonder of each other. Let us wonder in Christ. Let us be more characterized by wonder than law. Let us yield to Wonder. Let us yield to God…

What would you do?

This is what Kinetic Church (kineticchurch.com) of Charlotte, North Carolina did:

It is edgy and maybe even a little bit gritty. They are communicating with the thief and the community at large in a humorous way that it is not good to steal from a church.

But more than that, when you go to their website or stumble on the YouTube video you find that behind this billboard is a message that is divine.

This made me weep.

This made me happy to be a Christian. The church reached out and extended themselves to sinners. The church forgave like Jesus forgave. This is beautiful and so good that it is inspiring. This is the radical forgiveness that Jesus requires.

I want to be this forgiving…

This guy must be a pervert. Some of his other videos suggest this.

This is both funny and sad.

FUNNY:

Can you see this sermon done as a SNL skit? Maybe with Will Farrell as the Pissing Pastor? I think that I would laugh so hard I would pee my pants. (standing up of course)

Or could you imagine the object lesson you could give for this sermon…! It is a built in sermon illustration! AWESOME!

SAD:

This is immensely sad because this guy is preaching his own doctrine and not God’s Word. The immediate context of every person that “pisseth against the wall” is death and destruction on their heads. (1Sa 25:22, 1Sa 25:34, 1Ki 14:10, 1Ki 16:11, 1Ki 21:21, 2Ki 9:8) This guy is a very poor student of the Word. There is actually more of an argument against peeing on the wall than for it! Although clearly that is not even the point. The point is destruction against the men in those families or towns!

This is also sad because this shows the world that Christians are unloving and strange and more concerned about the way we pee over the condition of our hearts. This is evil masquerading as Christianity.

It must be stopped.

The only way that I know how to counter things like this is through love. I will show the love of Christ to the people in my context so that they will know that I Christians are not like that. I will spread love in my town so that all will know and see the love of Christ. No cliche. This is the power to change the world.

Go out and Love!

When one looks at the trees and fields and birds and the pine needles, you see beautiful, complex, mysterious, good, and true things.

Sometimes these things can be explained. (photosynthesis)

Sometimes nature remains an utter enigma. Think about a place you have been where the beauty is astounding, where the place holds its secrets. Where you know there is much more to what you see. You see Truth. You feel Truth.  But you can’t understand it fully and you cannot fully grasp it…

This same feeling and knowing about nature should be true about the Bible and Bible studies. There should be such an overwhelming feeling and knowing of truth. There should be a pressure of honesty and humility and goodness from studying the Bible.  There should be this astounding beauty that is not fully comprehensible…

But instead it seems like we get nothing but what we came with…

We are self righteous and pompous.

We are hypocritical and we don’t want truth.

We want to confirm that we are centered in our own theologies and opinions…

Do you read this verse and think BORING…

There is a good chance that you do.

I have.

I have even recently.

I was taught to think that it is boring to delight in the law of the LORD.

I was taught to act like I was getting ready to lift a heavy burden. I see this verse the same way that I see all the boxes on moving day. As only work that will not end even after I have filled the truck… With this verse I am on my own and I am supposed to like it because I am a good Christian…

Recently I ran into a pastor who explained this verse in similar terms.

He said delight in the law of the LORD is like following the speed limit.

We know that it is good to follow it.

And that’s it. No other explanation.

I was let down.

Dissatisfied.

Hungry.

Heart broken.

I came across a Truth of God and all I got was a face full of rules and vague moralizing. I got the “rules of the road” instead of a passion for driving. I got a let down, a heart break, a hag instead of a princess. I yolked to the burden that carries men to the grave

All because I missed a crucial part of this verse.

Psalm 1:2 ” But his DELIGHT is in the law of the LORD; and in his law does he meditate day and night.”

Yeah, its right there. Delight. Take joy in it. Love it. Yearn for it. The law of the LORD us for us to want. It is not a dusty book in some other realm that makes no sense and has nothing but codes and meaningless trivia in it. We treat it like that. But it is actually more like water to a tree. Deep cool satisfying water for the roots that are stuck in this arid dry earth. (read the rest of the text Psalm 1)

Sure it is open-ended.

It leaves you with something that you know you don’t have yet.

It leaves you wanting more…

• They can’t get past the issues.

• They can’t get past the rules.

• and worst of all they can’t get past Christians!

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Some how Christianity has gotten to be about passing the plate or building a program or

fighting __________(name that issue). All of which has its place.

But None of which is Christ!

We have built houses on the sand and defended them while Christ stands in the rain. And the people who would come to Him can’t see Him or be warmed from the cold and relentless rage of this world.

Every little while, one of these houses falls and everyone is dismayed for it seems like the kingdom is crashing down. But fear not for the Kingdom of Christ will out last anything we build on our own.

Every new medium for communication and entertainment is viewed suspiciously by mainstream Christianity.

When Rock n’ Roll was new, it was an abomination. 

When Movies were new they were evil.

When the Internet was new Christians said that it was the tool of the devil.

(I admit there is bad in some of these things, but they are not bad in and of themselves.)  Look at Cain in the Bible:  He brought God an offering of vegatables from the ground and God was not pleased by it.  If mainstream Christians were around they would have outlawed vegatables, and said that it was evil and that they have no place in our lives, because of their wickedness…

God never said that vegatables were bad though! 

And he never said Rock was bad: (that’s why this song was written!)

He never said that Movies were bad.

and He never said that the Internet was bad either. 

That is why I write…

Get out into the world, and create and speak out in ways that will be understood…