I feel like today really started with Nick’s sermon tonight. Well…”sermon” doesn’t exactly fit, when you think about Nick Cooper…message…Yes. Message is a better word I think. After a day of physically getting down to business at Trinity Baptist (after, of course, my day of evangelism…which lead to the tears) we met in the sanctuary for Nick give us a pretty powerful message. He began by saying that powerful people aren’t tired. Which really slaps you in the face when you feel like you want to sleep on the floor…and when you may or may not have fallen asleep on the steps outside the church with a paintbrush in your hand. If you think that’s a joke: nope. Legitimately happened. To be fair though, it was only for about 3 seconds when my painting partner woke me up. Does it count? You decide. My vote is no, however.
Anyhow, Nick opened with the powerful people bit and then went on to say that powerful people impact the world. And to be a success he referenced Romans 5. He said you have to
1. Go after peace.
2. Stand in Grace and
3. Have hope.
Which, coincidentally, you can only get when you’re chasing after peace and running behind the safety shield of grace when you feel yourself slipping. It’s weird how Nick can completely captivate a room by breaking all the rules. It’s something to be admired, I think. Countless people try to break rules every day and in their radical quest to reach people, they often turn them away. But Nick has this ability to reach every person sitting in the room merely by saying he doesn’t care what we think, as long as he is spreading God’s light to the world. The message was awesome. But what really got me was the realization peace is only achieved when you go after it. It doesn’t fall into your lap.
More often than not, I have the tendency to love the grace, and have the hope. But the hope continually falters and the grace becomes an excuse for messing up. I think that this is where most Christians fall short in making a difference, they forget that to get peace, you have to bow down to God and give him what is keeping you from having the peace that is yours for free, that Christ died for. It’s like today when I was laying down tile (tangent: construction work is definitely not my strong point). First, you have to peel up all the tile, and it was pretty hard to get up. This can be compared to the obvious sins that take prayer and a little work, but are pretty easy to overcome. Then, you have to scrape all the old glue off the floor that that held those tiles down. Now that is some work. That is like the deep sin of your heart: the hidden sin that makes you have no peace. You can’t really see it, but when you start scraping, it comes off little by little. And your hands hurt, your back hurts, your knees hurt. It literally hurts when you have to scrape away the deep sin. So once your floor is all clean, you have to fill the holes and the cracks with cement filler. Just like that filler, Christ comes into your life and fills all the cracks. All the holes and all the ugly spots that the glue of deep sin once stuck to. But even after the holes are filled, and God has some time to fix your heart, He goes back and scrapes the holes. He continually perfects them and makes them smooth. It’s almost as if the holes never even existed. Only after every bump is smoothed, that the new glue, the Glue of Christ is reapplied and the new tile, the new life is laid down. See, the hidden parts, the holes and the glue hold down the outward appearance. The part that the world sees. And if you don’t keep up maintenance on the tile, taking care of it, the process has to start all over again. It’s extremely tedious and painful. But the end result is a beautiful peaceful tile design. The only way to get all this accomplished is by letting God fill the holes that the deep sin filled for so long, and may still be filling. Once he fills those holes, once you let him scrape your heart and take away the bumps and the ugly parts, the new tile/life can sit beautifully and evenly. That peace that comes with God filling your heart comes from allowing him to take away the bad, and add the new.
I know that this analogy may be a little far-fetched, but when you think tiles for a few days straight, it makes perfect sense! I just know that God has to continually scrape my heart and make it smooth so that my life matches my heart. Sometimes it’s so easy to walk around and have God in your heart, but not allow him to smooth you out, or still have the old glue holding down the old sin that your heart and your life don’t match up. It’s up to us to allow God to do all this work, and it’s going to hurt, but I know that the end is worth the pain and that waking up every morning knowing the ultimate God loves me and wants me for his own is something that needs to be shared with the world.
It’s Wednesday night, and as far as I’m concerned, LA 2010 has been a success!!
