More Rid of My Disgrace Quotes

Despair

God has a plan to turn despair into blessings. He’s so merciful, creative, and sovereign that he uses everything, mo matter what it is, for your ultimate good.

If He can turn murder into salvation, you can be confident that he can transform and use things in your life.

Your future is not open to the winds of random change. All those in Christ had their futures absolutely determined before the world even existed.

Sin, Violence, and Sexual Assault

Evil and sin work to infuse disgrace and violate peace. Sexual assault is a powerful means of achieving such destructive effects.

As the pinnacle of God’s creation, human beings reveal God more wonderfully than any other creature-as they were created to be like God, by God, for God and to be with God.

Evil is an intrusion upon shalom.

Immediately after the fall, there is a radical shift from shalom to violence, as the first murder takes place in Genesis 4.

 

 

The River- first impression on abc’s new series and demonology

Just wanted to drop a real quick note as I watch abc’s new series The River follows a family looking for their missing father in the forests surrounding the Amazon 6 months after his disappearance. I’ve only seen the first two episodes (currently three about to be four), but I wanted to say a few things I’ve noticed about the characters in the show. 

None of them are religious, yet they are constantly encountering very spiritual situations. They continue to dive into the spiritual beliefs of the Amazonians. While this a very fascinating cultural lesson, it is also an interesting at how nonbelievers handle demons. I Corinthians 10:20 clearly indicates that any sacrifice made to an idol is demon worship. This has been encountered in The River, but in incredible fear and a desire to appease these demons. 

That is not the life of the Christian. 

I started thinking what the show would be like if a Christian actually called upon the name of Jesus to crush the demons, and beg His presence. 

I’ll tell you what would happen.

abc wouldn’t have a show.

Be careful when you mess with demons. It could get really real really fast. 

And with that, here’s a video by My Heart To Fear called “The Witching Hour”- written by the lead singer who invited demons into his home to prove God exists (“If demons exist, God does too”)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pRUxpHLrrQ

 

Rid of My Disgrace quotes pt 3

Heres more quotes from Rid of My Disgrace by Justin Holcomb:

Chapter 8: Anger
Because we are sinners, we frequently distort and confuse godly angry with our own desire for vengeance or control.

Hated its characterized by a general and long standing negative evaluation of a person, while anger is usually felt against a specific offense.

God’s vengeance makes the spiral of vengeance grind to a halt because the assurance that God will punish sin allows believers to freely love.

Christianity its not about Karma; its about grace.

Jesus received God’s anger and punishment so those guilty of cosmic treason would be forgiven.

The Gospel forgives and changes anti people into loving and forgiving people who are characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self control.

Crying out to God because of sins done to you will remind you that you are also guilty, but have received forgiveness.

So in the case of an unrepentant sinner unwilling to accept the blame in the first place, the blame and condemnation remains on that person. Forgiveness has been concretely given, but rejected. Because forgiveness has a necessary starting point, the condemnation of some evil, that condemnation remains upon the unrepentant sinner, even while the walks away having granted forgiveness.

If forgiveness is conditional on the perpetrator’s repentance, it once again places the victim’s under the control of their perpetrator, and books them Rio the destruction that bitterness and hatred bring.

Denying a victim the sense of freedom that only comes after biblical forgiveness has taken place perpetuates the suffering caused by the initial assault because it allows the poison of hatred to continue to fester.

Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice.

Forgiveness does not mean that you do not participate in activities that impose consequences of evil behavior such as calling the police, filling a report, church discipline, criminal proceedings, etc.

You can forgive your abuser without the expectation of pretending the assault  never happened.

Forgiveness its a precursor to reconciliation.

“Overlooking harm in order to achieve a sentimental but nonsubstantive peace actually encourages sin.”-Dan B. Allender

God’s interest in the abuse of power its not mild. Nor its he resigned to injustice in a fallen world.

God’s wrath is a source of positive hope for the victim. You know God loves you and will destroy there evil that has harmed you. God is the refuge of his people and shows steadfast love by destroying those who “strike terror.”

Learned so much about forgiveness… I’m just so humbled and encouraged that God has a powerful answer foot injustice and abuse.

 

Rid of My Disgrace quotes pt 3

Heres more quotes from Rid of My Disgrace by Justin Holcomb:

Chapter 8: Anger
Because we are sinners, we frequently distort and confuse godly angry with our own desire for vengeance or control.

Hated its characterized by a general and long standing negative evaluation of a person, while anger is usually felt against a specific offense.

God’s vengeance makes the spiral of vengeance grind to a halt because the assurance that God will punish sin allows believers to freely love.

Christianity its not about Karma; its about grace.

Jesus received God’s anger and punishment so those guilty of cosmic treason would be forgiven.

The Gospel forgives and changes anti people into loving and forgiving people who are characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self control.

Crying out to God because of sins done to you will remind you that you are also guilty, but have received forgiveness.

So in the case of an unrepentant sinner unwilling to accept the blame in the first place, the blame and condemnation remains on that person. Forgiveness has been concretely given, but rejected. Because forgiveness has a necessary starting point, the condemnation of some evil, that condemnation remains upon the unrepentant sinner, even while the walks away having granted forgiveness.

If forgiveness is conditional on the perpetrator’s repentance, it once again places the victim’s under the control of their perpetrator, and books them Rio the destruction that bitterness and hatred bring.

Denying a victim the sense of freedom that only comes after biblical forgiveness has taken place perpetuates the suffering caused by the initial assault because it allows the poison of hatred to continue to fester.

Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice.

Forgiveness does not mean that you do not participate in activities that impose consequences of evil behavior such as calling the police, filling a report, church discipline, criminal proceedings, etc.

You can forgive your abuser without the expectation of pretending the assault  never happened.

Forgiveness its a precursor to reconciliation.

“Overlooking harm in order to achieve a sentimental but nonsubstantive peace actually encourages sin.”-Dan B. Allender

God’s interest in the abuse of power its not mild. Nor its he resigned to injustice in a fallen world.

God’s wrath is a source of positive hope for the victim. You know God loves you and will destroy there evil that has harmed you. God is the refuge of his people and shows steadfast love by destroying those who “strike terror.”

Learned so much about forgiveness… I’m just so humbled and encouraged that God has a powerful answer foot injustice and abuse.

 

Rid of My Disgrace quotes pt 2

Quotes taken from Chapter 6 in Justin Holcomb’s book Rid of My Disgrace

The good news is that Jesus disregarded the shame of dying by crucifixion and in doing so, also took our shame upon himself.

When God’s people are being shamed, God rises up to act.

God takes the weapon of evil (shame) and uses it to mock evil.

Jesus endured the shame of the cross but also scorned it. He shamed shame and revealed God’s love for, not rejection of, you.

And my favorite quote taken from C.S. Lewis:

Every good thing we could think of or desire is to be found in this same Jesus Christ alone. For, He was sold, to buy us back; captive, to deliver us; condemned, to absolve us; He was made a curse for our blessing, sin offering for our righteousness; marred that we may be made fair; He died for our life; so that by Him fury is made gentle, wrath appeased, darkness turned into light, fear reassured, despisal despised, debt canceled, labor lightened, sadness made merry, misfortune made fortunate, difficulty easy, disorder ordered, division united, ignominy ennobled, rebellion subjected, intimidation intimidated, ambush uncovered, assaults assailed, force forced back, combat combated, war warred against, vengeance avenged, torment tormented, damnation damned, the abyss sunk into the abyss, hell transfixed, death dead, mortality made immortal. In short, the mercy has swallowed up all misery, and goodness all misfortune.

 

Active Forgiveness

Active forgiveness is one of rest things humans can do. For the unredeemed, it is nearly impossible, and for the redeemed, it is tremendously difficult. It goes against our first nature (that of sin). I call it active for good reason. For example, a man rapes a woman. If forgiveness is asked, it is never right to reject forgiveness. After all, we’d be in a very dark place had Jesus done that to us! So what does forgiveness eness look like? It looks like progress. It hard to explain and almost impossible to grasp unless you’re in a situation like that. The relationship is broken forever! Horrible physical and emotional scars are formed. It is very easy to choose not to deal with the situation. In fact, it’s the trends in America. Very few rape cases are reported for many reasons, but among them are instances of forced forgetfulness. If this occurs, the relationship is at a standstill. But with active forgiveness, the victim chooses to live life not as if the wrong never occurred, but in a way that does not hold that persons sin above their head to prevent growth. This is different than acting like nothing happened. This is still taking wise actions to help the rapist repent and never do it again by setting forth earthly limitations on what they do. But with active forgiveness, you pour out Christ on the other person. You shock them by your love. You can’t act like nothing happened, but you can act like Christ loves the perpetrator. This is hard, but not forgiving will only lead to bitterness, anger, and violence. I know how hard it is. I’m doing it right now.

 

Trying something new: Rid of my Disgrace quotes

I’ve been reading through Justin Holcomb Rid of My Disgrace and I’ll be posting some of the quotes I’ve highlighted. Here’s tonight’s read. Maybe tomorrow I’ll backlog all my highlights

The final word on you is not that you are a victim, but that you are the righteousness of God.

You are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. Therefore you can say the words of the psalmist in confidence, “This I know, that God is for me.”

The story of Jesus on the cross is a story of victimization and shame.

 

Musings on a Multi-Worldview Concert

This week I went to see For Today and The Devil Wears Prada on their Dead Throne tour. Touring with them were Enter Shikari and WhiteChapel (both very “secular”).

While I’m not object to listening to “secular” music at all (I have ADTR, Parkway Drive, and All That Remains on my phone currently), I am aware of their different beliefs. Don’t go listening to music willy-nilly now. I try to be smart about it. I tend to stay away from nasty violent stuff, as well as anything grossly sexual in nature. I also try to stay away from anything blatantly opposed to my God, the God of the Bible.

I wasn’t expecting much out of the two “secular” bands that I was going to see. What I did notice was that they weren’t purposeless.

For Today (my fave) opened up the night. Mattie Montgomery (frontman) always preaches eloquent, and didn’t disappoint. He boldly stated that no matter who you were, where you were from, or what you’ve done, you need a Savior named Jesus, and He’s waiting for you with open arms. Beautiful.

Enter Shikari was next. I must admit I was kind of enjoying myself. Their awesome dub/metal combo really tickled my ears, and there were surprisingly no gross profanities spilling from the stage. However, they too preached their message. They tried uniting the room with a “We are one one species and should live in unity” line. I was surprised that they would be taking time from their set to actually explain their beliefs, interesting though they were. They got the crowd involved by having them raise one finger in the air to symbolize unity, harmony, and peace under the banner of the human race… Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of unity, harmony, and peace, however the human race doesn’t seem to be great at any of those things. It seemed a futile plight, and (as a Christian) I would say it was. You can’t tell a thing that only destroys to unify with no other catalyst. It’s like telling a wrecking ball to build a skyscraper. It doesn’t work unless you have the right tool.

WhiteChapel was next. I wasn’t as musically impressed with their black metal sound, and was confused as to why they had three guitars all playing the same chords…but I digress. I could barely make out any of the growling, other than “America! F— yeah!” and “You are all worthless”. They didn’t really do much preaching, and in all fairness, I don’t know the context of either of these songs (and never will), however, these two lines don’t impress me. Neither seem to be building anyone up, and even Enter Shikari had a cause, but I found none in Whitechapel. Again, it’s possible that these lines have their place, and may possibly mean something, but just tell me because I’m not going to filter through their lyrics to find out.

Finall TDWP came about with utter fury and epicness. They too took a few moments to proclaim Jesus, which was a surprise to me (not that they love Jesus, but that the headlining band preached it), amidst applause and disgust all in one crowd. What confused me is when Mike Hranica said “We’ve toured with a lot of terrible bands, but all of these bands (touring w/them currently) make music for the right reasons…” I was definitely confused. So here’s the breakdown:

For Today=Jesus

Enter Shikari= Humanity

Whitechapel= I don’t give a f—-

TDWP=Jesus

And yet all of these bands are making good music for the right reasons? I respect TDWP a lot, and they make some amazing music, but this concept will forever haunt me. How can three opposing views all be making music for the right reasons? I don’t know. You tell me.

 

What do we have?

I was thinking about my generation and those upcoming. What is there for us? I feel like the trend is that each generation is growing up in the church wanting to do something big. We want to get up and go. We have so much potential! Yet we are stuck in the church of the generation before us, and until that dies, we wont get a chance to do the big things we know we can do. By the time we have a chance to change our churches, we will be our parents age with little to no tools to help us achieve what we know we could have 20 years ago.
Am I longing for the perfect world?
Look at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Their 6+ campuses are packed with thousands of college age people every single week, several times a week. Why? What makes them different from my church or your church? They speak to where the people are living. They are actively involved in their communities because their leaders are involved in their own communities and they share the joy of that with their congregation. They speak truth in a way that relates and provokes their people for action. They have leaders people want to follow. They are wisely proactive. The lead where they want their congregation to follow. They use social media effectively. They have a plan. The list goes on.

My fear is that as generations progress, we become more liberal, with hardly any mainstream Bible teaching liberal examples to follow, so we try to be conservative and become either one of two things. Boring or hateful. Either we conform to conservative or we rebel against the God we want to serve but “can’t”. Either way we reject who we are and who God wants us to be.

I’m doing a lot of complaining, and I apologize, but there’s one thing I’d like to offer as a way to change things. Get up, and change things! Ambition isn’t a bad thing. Because I think women can wear pants, people can have tattoos, and I can listen to metal, doesn’t mean I should be outcast. It means that 1) I need to get I to get into Scripture and follow it 2) get a plan together either large or small scale 3) do the plan! I can sit here and complain all day, but it does no good if I don’t get moving.
Excuse me while I go get stuff done.

For all you go getters out there, pick up Close Your Eyre’s new album Empty Hands and Heavy Hearts. Great Godly motivation.

 

Don’t Know What to Believe?

I know it’s been a while since I’ve written a blog (my time has significantly shriveled up and almost completely died), however, I did want to share a few ideas tonight.

Have you ever talked to someone about something important like homosexuality, election, or abortion and come away from the conversation thinking “This person is so ignorant! Their argument is just dumb!” or am I the only one? I know it sounds like I’m a total jerk (this may be true), however I think it’s really important to know why you believe something.

Why would you say “I’m Pro-Choice,” and not have researched the intricacies that come with that discussion? Is it because you or your parents had an abortion? Is it because it’s the most tolerant view? Is it because they taught it to you in school? None of these justify ignoring the real issues.

Are you against Gay Rights? Why? Is it because you’re a Christian, and “Christians hate gays”? Is it because the Bible says homosexuality is wrong? Is it because it’s what your parents believe, or what you were taught in school? Why are gay people less of people that porn-addicted Christians? Aren’t those Christians worse than a gay person?

I remember one New Year’s Eve someone started talking about Calvanism and Armenianism. She started the conversation with “I hate Calvanists because they think they’ve got it all figured out.” One question: If you hate Calvanists, then shouldn’t you also hate Armenianists who can be just as dogmatic as some Calvanists? I mean, by saying you’re an Armenianist and saying how the Calvinists have it all wrong, doesn’t that mean that you think you’ve got it all right? The argument is flawed from conception!

My question is this: If you present a “fool’s argument” then won’t you lose your credibility with the person you’re trying to influence?

This happens all the time in Christianity: you say you believe in a 24-hour, 6 day Creation, but can’t back it up with anything but the Bible. You say you’re Pro-Life, but can’t explain why you think it’s an actual baby in the womb. You say you don’t believe in sex before marriage, but can’t think of one good reason for abstinence.

The list continues.

I would encourage that you start listening to these debates and discussions, read (yes, actually read something) on topics that interest you. Become and “expert” of a certain position. Own it like it’s yours, like it means something to you. Otherwise, you’re just as much of an ignorant jerk as the person who says “I hate Calvanists.”

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