Time to Go to the Beach

Have you ever felt like there was more to life?

You fall into a routine and you get comfortable as you navigate the responsibilities, joys, and frustrations of every day life. Yet, even in the midst of the comfort, there is a gnawing in your heart causing you to wonder if you are missing out on something larger.
I know I have.

C. S. Lewis wrote; “We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

I have settled for a life that is far less than the life God desires to give me. This isn't about how successful my life is, but about how closely I am living out God's purpose for my life. I am content to live a moral life and enjoy time with my family, but often I miss out on the life that God is calling me to live.

This is true for many American Christians. Our lives are so easy and smooth most of the time that we are able to live life on cruise control and pay little attention to God. We have settled for a life of moral living (when it suits us), attending Sunday worship (when we have nothing better to do), and giving $10 (if we can spare it). We have made Christianity something we do rather than who we are. In the process we have settled for life in the slums, when God wants to take us to the beach.

Finish reading at Paul's Ponderings: Time to Go to the Beach

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Created to Crave: Part 10

Seeking Significance

Do you remember that anti-drug campaign from several years ago where the announcer said: No one says, “When I grow up I want to be a junkie.”


I would think that is true. Everyone wants their lives to count for something.  We desire to have meaning and purpose woven into our lives. I remember in 4th grade telling my teacher that when I grew up I was  going to rid the world of crime. It was an ambitious dream, but one that would give my life significance. 


This desire for significance looks different for different people.  It could look like raising a family or being good at our jobs or becoming famous.  We all want our lives to matter.

This is that question I want you to consider today: What gives your life value?

Created to Crave: Part 7

Expecting Intimacy

On June 25, 2011 after years of waiting I married my dream girl.  I came into our marriage with many different expectations.  There were expectations ranging from what household responsibilities each or us would take on to how we would spend our vacation time.  It is a reality of the life that we enter into experiences with expectations.  These expectations are both spoken and unspoken.

One of the expectations we put on marriage is that of intimacy.  We want to be known, loved, and accepted unconditionally.  Marriage seems to be the accepted place for this expectation for intimacy to be met.  While marriage is perfectly designed to help meet this desire for intimacy we have to remember that each person, both husband and wife, come into marriage with this same expectations.  The problem being how they expect this craving for intimacy to be met will look different for each of them.  So it is essential for both people to make the time and to be intentional about speaking one another's love language.  That will enable both husband and wife to have their craving of intimacy at least partially met.

It will only be partially met because our craving for intimacy extend beyond marriage.  We want our friends and collegues to accept and value us as well.  This is why peer pressure doesn't disappear when you graduate from high school or move beyond college.  We will do crazy things in order to be accepted by the group of people we are with.  Let me ask you this question: What have you done in order to be known?

We have all been created with cravings.  These cravings come from our innermost being: soul cravings.

No matter how much we try to indulge these cravings or no matter how we try reign them in through self-control these cravings never seem to be fully satisfied. The leads us to conclude what C. S. Lewis said, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." (Mere Christianity, p. 121). The deepest desires of our hearts point us to the reality that we were created for a different world.  We were created to be part of God's eternal Kingdom and only there will we find the satisfaction to our hearts' deepest desires.

From the very beginning of the Bible we see that we were created with the desire for intimacy. Genesis 2:18 says; Then the LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is just right for him" (NLT).   Our Creator declares that it is not good for people to live a life alone.  We need intimate fellowship in our lives. The best possible life that we can live is a life lived in relationship with God which flows out into relationship with other people.  It is not good for us to be alone!

Why do we have such a hard time with satisfying this desire?  The reason is because of sin.  Since sin is rebellion against God, His purposes, and His ways then sin destroys our relationship with God.  A broken relationship with God leads us to have broken and selfish relationship with other people.  Sin makes it impossible for us to satisfy this craving here one earth.

Created to Crave: Part 6

Made for a Different World


The Christian writer and thinker C. S. Lewis wrote: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." (Mere Christianity, p. 121).  That is what this blog series is about.  I want us to look at the desires we have in our lives and begin to develop a new longing: God's New Creation. The deepest longings of our souls and the cravings of our hearts point to the reality that we were designed for something more.  We weren’t met for this world, so we shouldn't expect for our desires to be satisfied here.

The follower of Jesus Christ discovers that satisfaction can only be realized in Christ Jesus.  Jesus said:

"Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me is thrown away like a useless branch and withers. Such branches are gathered into a pile to be burned. But if you remain in me and my words remain in you, you may ask for anything you want, and it will be granted! When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father." (John 15:5-8; NLT)

One of the truths we get from this is that source of our lives is Jesus.  We cannot hope to have life and to be satisfied apart from him.  We must intentionally stay connected to Jesus through prayer, study, and obedience, and as we do we will grow more content and discover the satisfaction we long to have in life.  This will be only a foretaste of what life will be when the old earth passes away and we find ourselves living in the New Creation God has promised.

Instead of endlessly trying to find satisfaction here on earth we begin to hope for heaven.  As we begin to hope for heaven we begin to enjoy the things of this life a little better because we no longer expect them to satisfy our souls, we don’t expect them to do something they weren’t designed to do.

Here is what I want you to remember: We find ultimate satisfaction in Jesus.  Following Jesus will make our lives better, but we will also realize that He is leading us into a brand new world.  It is in that place our desires will finally be met.

Daily Thought: Pride Prevents Us from Know God

The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.  Other vices may sometimes bring people together:  you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people.  But pride always means enmity—it is enmity.  And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself.  Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all.  As long as you are proud you cannot know God.  A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as longa s you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

C. S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis, HarperSanFrancisco (2003), p. 90

Daily Thought: Freewill is Necessary for Love

God created things which had free will.  That means creatures which can go either wrong or right.  Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot.  If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.  And free will is what made evil possible.  Why, then, did God give them free will?  Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.  A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating.  The happiness which God designs for  His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.  And for that they must be free.

C. S. Lewis, A Year With C. S. Lewis, HarperSanFrancisco (2003), p. 57

Daily Thought: Christ Assisted Living

"Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam—he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.  And that has practical consequences.  As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that body.  Cut it, and up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not.  A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself.  In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble—because the Christ-life is inside of him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out."

C. S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis, HarperSanFransico (2003), p. 29

Daily Thought: The Queer Twist of Reality

"Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd.  It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.  For instance, when you have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you would naturally expect that ll the planets were made to match—all at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go further from the sun.  In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four , one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.

"Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed.  That is one of the reasons I believe in Christianity.  It is a religion you could not have guessed.  If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up.  But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up.  It has just that queer twist about it that real things have."

C. S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis, HarperSanFrancisco (2003), p. 27

Daily Thought: Over the Horizon

"I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond.  One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke.  Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light.  But they do not call it goodness.  They do not call it anything.  They are not thinking of it.  They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.  But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world.  No one's eyes can see very far beyond that." ~ C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Daily Thought: Vigorously Do God's Will

"'Thy will be done.' But a great deal of it is to be done by God's creatures; including me.  The petition, then, is not merely that I may patiently suffer God's will but also that I may vigorously do it.  I must be an agent as well as a patient.  I am asking that I may be enabled to do it.  In the long run I am asking to be given 'the same mind which was also in Christ.'" ~ C. S. Lewis; The Joyful Christian, p. 87

Daily Thought: A New Chapter Has Begun

"The New Testament writers speak as if Christ's achievement is rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe.  He is the 'first fruits,' the 'pioneer of life.' He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man.  He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death.  Everything is different because He has done so.  This the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has opened." ~ C. S. Lewis, The Joyful Christian, p. 65

Daily Thought: Present at the Creation of the World

"Most of our prayers if fully analysed, ask either for a miracle or fore events whose foundation will have to have been laid when the universe began.  But then to God (though not to me) I and the prayer I make in 1945 were just as much present at the creation of the world as they are now and will be a million years hence.  God's creative act is timeless and timelessly adapted to the 'free' elements within it: but this timeless adaptation meets our consciousness as a sequence and prayer and answer." ~ C. S. Lewis, Miracles

Daily Thought: The Moral Law

"There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law won't sometimes tell us to suppress, and not which it won't sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some impulses--say, mother love or patriotism--are good, and others, like sex or the fightint instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they'll lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there aren't such things as good and bad impulses." ~ C.S. Lewis; The Case for Christianity (pg. 9)

Daily Thought: Divine Humility

"I call this a Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up 'our own' when it is no longer worth keeping.  If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even through we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and to come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had." ~ C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pp. 86-87

Daily Thought: Moral Choices

"People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, 'If you keep a lot of rules, I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing.' I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a Heaven creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other." ~ C. S. Lewis; The Joyful Christian; pgs. 123-124

Daily Thought: Towards Perfection

"On the other hand, you must realize from the outset that the goal toward which He is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal." ~ C. S. Lewis, The Joyful Christian, p. 78

Eternal Vision

Originally posted on September 25, 2004

Consider for a moment something Rick Warren wrote in The Purpose Driven Life; “God has a purpose for your life on earth, but it doesn’t end here. His plan involves far more than the few decades you will spend on this planet. It’s more than ‘the opportunity of a lifetime;’ God offers you an opportunity beyond your lifetime”

Please remember that our lives are more than the time we live on this earth. God did not create us for a short physical life, but an eternal life with Him. When we view our lives in the context of our life right now we only get part of the picture. The greatest part of our lives will be spent in eternity.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think about the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one.” When our focus is the here and now, on the physical world in which we live, our perspective becomes distorted. The reason it is distorted is because all we can see is the here and now and we are unaware of what God is doing in eternity.

This is what the apostle John wrote in his first epistle:

Stop loving this evil world and all that it offers you, for when you love the world, you show that you do not love have the love of the Father in you. For the world offers only the lust for physical pleasure, the lust for everything we see, and pride in our possessions. These are not from the Father. They are from this evil world. And this world is fading away, along with everything it craves. But if you do the will of God, you will live forever. (1 John 2:15-17; NLT)

The apostle John makes it clear that our focus should not be on the world that is around us. He says that this world is ‘fading away.” In other words this reality will not last forever. If that is true then I believe we need to consider what the point of life is. Does it matter if you have the new BMW you have always wanted, the job you would love to do, the championship trophy you have won, or to spend an evening at the prom? All these things, and many more, are fading away, but when they we focus on is right now they become the most important things.

Why is this life so important? It is important for two reasons. It gives us an opportunity to learn to live our lives by faith. If we can learn to obey God now, when we cannot see Him, then we will obey Him when we finally do see Him. The second reason is that it gives us the opportunity to learn to love people. When we can train ourselves to love sinful and imperfect people, then we will be able to love people when God transforms into the righteous and holy people He created us to be.

John tells us that one thing will survive or endure from this world. That is the person who does God’s will. When eternity is our focus our priorities change. Instead of making decisions based on our lives right now, we base our decisions on eternity.

I believe that it is only when we start living for eternity that we put ourselves in the position to allow God to transform our lives. When eternity is our perspective we will be able to understand what is truly important. Understanding what is truly important helps us to accomplish what really matters. If you want to make a difference in this world, look to the next. If you want to make a difference right now, focus on eternity.

Sunday Quote: Prayer is a Request

"The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them. Invariable 'success' in prayer would not prove the Christian doctrine at all. It would prove something much more like magic--a power in certain human beings to control, or compel, the course of nature." ~ C. S. Lewis, The World's Last Night, p. 4

The Good Side of Pain #1

After losing his wife the late Christian thinker CS Lewis wrote a book entitled A Grief Observed. The Following quote is taken from that book:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, if you turn to Him then with praise, you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away.

C.S. Lewis had a difficult time dealing with his wife’s death. It presented him with a crisis of belief, because the pain was real and immense. But C.S. Lewis’ experience is not any different then the rest of humanities’ experience. Everyday people experience pain and suffering, crying out to God and finding no answer.

Let’s be honest, when tragedy happens, when pain enters our lives, God doesn’t always feel close by. Where was God when the World Trade Center was burning in New York? Where was God when a drunk driver killed your friend? Where was God when your parents got divorced? Where was God when your brother got involved with drugs? Where was God when my uncle got cancer and died?

If we were all powerful like so many people claim God to be, then we would use that power to make the world right and good. When we see a friend of ours hurt and suffering we want to do whatever it takes to fix the situation. We love them, and want their lives to be good. Haven’t we heard that God loves us and wants our lives to be good? If that is the case why does God allow suffering to happen?

I know that pain is not a pleasant experience. It hurts! You are out there thinking, “Thanks for pointing out the obvious. I knew that before I came to this class.” Here is my point, even though pain hurts, it is valuable to our lives. One of the worst Star Trek movies made, is Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier. The only redeeming part of the movie is a line the Captain Kirk has. The crew meets up with Spock’s half-brother, a Vulcan who has discovered how to take away the emotional pain that we all have. Imagine what your life would be like if all the emotional baggage you carry could suddenly be taken away. You simply forget about that time you father yelled at you and called you sissy boy. You forget about the deaths of your grandma and of your dog Spot. You don’t remember the betrayal by your best friend when she stole your boyfriend. The fact that you other kids call you fat vanishes from your mind. Wouldn’t that be great!? This Vulcan offers to take away Kirk’s pain, and the Captain looks at him and says, “No! I need my pain. My pain makes me who I am.” Pain is valuable to our lives because it shapes our character. Though to be honest, it isn’t the pain that shapes our character, what shapes our character are our choices, suffering is the environment in which we have to make those choices.

James 1:2-5 says, Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing. If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking (NLT).

I want you to understand something, God’s greatest concern in your life is not your happiness. God does not intend for His people to constantly go through life feeling like they are on the top of the world. Why? Because that type of life does not create the type of people God wants us to be. If God immediately took away our pain and struggles we would never know what it would be like to trust Him. Pain and suffering often forces us to rely on God in ways we would never have before.

The struggles, trials, and pain of life is what develops Holiness in our lives. That is God’s greatest concern in our lives, that we be holy. We are created to be holy not happy. Because happiness is not the goal God uses pain to create us to be holy. Rebecca St. James wrote, “God really wants to mold all of us -- male, female, young, and old -- into what He created us to be.” Pain, trials, and struggles are one way God molds us into what He created us to be.

Sunday Quote: A First Fruits

"The New Testament writers speak as if Christ's achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the 'first fruits,' the 'pioneer of life.' He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has opened." ~ C. S. Lewis, The Joyful Christian, p. 65