I listened to a powerful sermon, well actually, a bunch of sermons this week from Elevation church. Great stuff that God has used to speak to me (www.elevationchurch.org) or download the app.
I realized this week that I have still been holding on the bondage of my past and shame. I let self-hatred and lies shape and overshadow my identity. It is continually holding me back and keeping me stuck, especially with career and finances. I have held back out of feelings of inadequacy and shame, rather than "power, love, and sound mind." I have not been living as a free man, saved by Christ. The prison doors are open but I keep walking back in. Jesus died to take away my shame, but I keep picking it up!!! Not good!
I have decided to change the title of my blog. For now, it is called, The Wounded Saint. It is a reflection of who I am in Christ, while a reminder of the painful past THAT GOD HAS REDEEMED. I can't deny my sin and painful past, but I don't have to let it define me. God is bigger than my sin. His grace is sufficient. What I did was awful, terrible, and hurt so many people. However, His promises have not been nullified by my sin. I am not that powerful. He is faithful to Himself and His truth and promises even when we are not. Therefore, I can and want to honor my wife and family by walking out of the darkness and into the Light of Christ.
God is good. He is ever present. My circumstances are not what I want them to be, but I know God is working on me. When He answers my specific prayers about career and money (and my internal world of self-hatred, doubt, inadequacy and shame), it will be a blessing to me and not a "curse" that I mishandle. I pray for the faith to hold on, place my identity in Him, and live life to the fullest. I will have to wake up each day and go back to the "well" of His grace and truth, but that's okay. That's how He wants it because He likes hanging out with me. Now, it's my turn to learn to like myself and look through His filter and not my jacked up one.
Are you there yet? Keep pressing on and pressing in, to Him.
PS - This weekend marks the three year anniversary of when I confessed to Amy and the church. It is so hard to believe it has been three years. What a ride!!! Thank you to those who have walked it (and limped it) with us. You are a blessing.
1 Corinthians 1:9 (NASB)
God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
For years, I kept my secret sins hidden until God busted them wide open in 2011. God used my public and private confessions to begin my healing and redemption. I learned that what happens behind closed doors at home, the church, the office, and everywhere else can "make or break us." God works in the Light (1 John 1:5)while evil thrives in darkness/secrecy (Ephesians 5:8-13). This is a blog about my journey.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Our hope is not in the "boat"
Here is a great sermon on having hope and faith despite the circumstances. It was timely for me this week.
http://elevationchurch.org/sermons/crash-the-chatterbox
http://elevationchurch.org/sermons/crash-the-chatterbox
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Surprising Struggle
I never could have imagined that the summer of our third year of recovery would possibly be the hardest two months of the entire process. I have hit lows that I didn't anticipate and have challenges that have stretched me beyond my limits at times. I am grateful that God is still at work, though I regularly pray for insight and relief. I want to be in His will, but I frequently waiver in unbelief, anger, doubt, fear, confusion, and distrust. I wish I was less volatile emotionally. Thankfully I have seen God work when things seemed hopeless. That keeps me waking up each day with a renewed focus and purpose - and hope.
If this doesn't get the best of Amy and me, then we will come out of this stronger than we ever imagined! Pray for us to stay the course and not give in to "hopelessness and despair" or spiritual and emotional fatigue.
If this doesn't get the best of Amy and me, then we will come out of this stronger than we ever imagined! Pray for us to stay the course and not give in to "hopelessness and despair" or spiritual and emotional fatigue.
Sunday, August 3, 2014
Amy's blog post
My wife Amy posted on her blog this morning. Wow. Powerful stuff. I am beyond grateful. God is good.
Check it out : www.rogers5online.blogspot.com
Friday, August 1, 2014
Keep Knocking (i.e. Praying)
This is a great devotional (see below) that helps me feel better about my repeated "persistent" and/or repetitive prayers about the same things it seems. Keep pounding the door! God can handle it!
_______________________________________________________________
Ask Seek Knock
by Philip Yancey from Prayer
Jesus’ story about village neighbors must have provoked smiles and chuckles in his first-century audience. A man opens his door to an unexpected guest late one night - not uncommon in a desert climate that encourages travel after sunset - only to find his pantry bare. In a region renowned for hospitality, no decent person would turn away a weary traveler or put him to bed without nourishment, so the host strikes out to a friend’s house to ask for bread.
Kenneth Bailey, a Presbyterian missionary who lived in Lebanon forty years, illuminates some of the cultural nuances behind the story. Palestinians use bread as Westerners use silverware: they break off bite-sized pieces, dip into a common dish of meat and vegetables, and eat the entire sop. The man with empty cupboards was likely asking his friend for a main course as well as loaves of bread, and even that was typical. Villagers frequently borrowed from each other in hospitality emergencies. Bailey recalls one instance: “While living in primitive Middle Eastern villages, we discovered to our amazement that this custom of rounding up from the neighbors something adequate for the guest extended even to us when we were the guests. We would accept an invitation to a meal clear across the village, and arrive to eat from our own dishes which the villagers had borrowed quietly from our cook.”
In Jesus’ story, though, the neighbor stubbornly refuses the request (see Luke 11). He has already gone to bed, stretched out with his family on a mat in the one-room house - and, besides, the door is bolted shut. “Don’t bother me,” he calls to his neighbor outside. “I can’t get up and give you anything.”
A Middle Eastern audience would have laughed out loud at this lame excuse. Can you imagine such a neighbor? Jesus was asking. Certainly not! No one in my village would act so rudely. If he did, the entire village would know about it by morning!
Then Jesus delivers the punch line: “I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness [his persistence, his shamelessness] he will get up and give him as much as he needs.” The application to prayer follows immediately:
So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
Luke positions this story right after Jesus’ teaching on the Lord’s Prayer, drawing a sharp contrast between the reluctant neighbor and God the Father. If a cranky neighbor who has turned in for the night, who wishes more than anything you would go away, who does his best to ignore you - if such a neighbor eventually rouses to give what you want, how much more will God respond to your bold persistence in prayer! After all, what earthly father would sneak a snake under his son’s pillow when he asks for a fish, or drop a scorpion on his daughter’s breakfast plate instead of an egg?
The Lord’s Prayer, often reduced to a mumbled ritual, an incantation, takes on new light in this story abutting it. We should pray like a salesman with his foot wedged in the door opening, like a wrestler who has his opponent in a headlock and won’t let go.
The God “who watches over you will not slumber,” promises a psalm of comfort. Even so, sometimes when we pray it feels as if God has indeed nodded off. Raise your voice, Jesus’ story implies. Strive on, like the shameless neighbor in the middle of the night.
Keep pounding the door.
* * *
Your Turn
Ask seek knock... Easier said than done when it seems that God isn't answering the door! Have you quit praying about something because you didn't get an answer right away? Don't stop! Be persistent! Keep knocking!
_______________________________________________________________
Ask Seek Knock
by Philip Yancey from Prayer
Jesus’ story about village neighbors must have provoked smiles and chuckles in his first-century audience. A man opens his door to an unexpected guest late one night - not uncommon in a desert climate that encourages travel after sunset - only to find his pantry bare. In a region renowned for hospitality, no decent person would turn away a weary traveler or put him to bed without nourishment, so the host strikes out to a friend’s house to ask for bread.
Kenneth Bailey, a Presbyterian missionary who lived in Lebanon forty years, illuminates some of the cultural nuances behind the story. Palestinians use bread as Westerners use silverware: they break off bite-sized pieces, dip into a common dish of meat and vegetables, and eat the entire sop. The man with empty cupboards was likely asking his friend for a main course as well as loaves of bread, and even that was typical. Villagers frequently borrowed from each other in hospitality emergencies. Bailey recalls one instance: “While living in primitive Middle Eastern villages, we discovered to our amazement that this custom of rounding up from the neighbors something adequate for the guest extended even to us when we were the guests. We would accept an invitation to a meal clear across the village, and arrive to eat from our own dishes which the villagers had borrowed quietly from our cook.”
In Jesus’ story, though, the neighbor stubbornly refuses the request (see Luke 11). He has already gone to bed, stretched out with his family on a mat in the one-room house - and, besides, the door is bolted shut. “Don’t bother me,” he calls to his neighbor outside. “I can’t get up and give you anything.”
A Middle Eastern audience would have laughed out loud at this lame excuse. Can you imagine such a neighbor? Jesus was asking. Certainly not! No one in my village would act so rudely. If he did, the entire village would know about it by morning!
Then Jesus delivers the punch line: “I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness [his persistence, his shamelessness] he will get up and give him as much as he needs.” The application to prayer follows immediately:
So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
Luke positions this story right after Jesus’ teaching on the Lord’s Prayer, drawing a sharp contrast between the reluctant neighbor and God the Father. If a cranky neighbor who has turned in for the night, who wishes more than anything you would go away, who does his best to ignore you - if such a neighbor eventually rouses to give what you want, how much more will God respond to your bold persistence in prayer! After all, what earthly father would sneak a snake under his son’s pillow when he asks for a fish, or drop a scorpion on his daughter’s breakfast plate instead of an egg?
The Lord’s Prayer, often reduced to a mumbled ritual, an incantation, takes on new light in this story abutting it. We should pray like a salesman with his foot wedged in the door opening, like a wrestler who has his opponent in a headlock and won’t let go.
The God “who watches over you will not slumber,” promises a psalm of comfort. Even so, sometimes when we pray it feels as if God has indeed nodded off. Raise your voice, Jesus’ story implies. Strive on, like the shameless neighbor in the middle of the night.
Keep pounding the door.
* * *
Your Turn
Ask seek knock... Easier said than done when it seems that God isn't answering the door! Have you quit praying about something because you didn't get an answer right away? Don't stop! Be persistent! Keep knocking!
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