And he said to them, "You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother'; and, 'Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.' But you say, 'If a man tells his father or his mother, "Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban (an offering )"' (that is, given to God)— then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do." Mark 7:9-13 (ESV).
The chief complaint amongst the future generations of Christians, or those who profess at least a passing allegiance to the faith of Jesus Christ is rigidity of beliefs amongst those who still claim to be followers of Christ. It is the notion of absolute moral and spiritual truths that are evidence to the growing share of young people, such as Jesus being the sole path to Heaven and the immorality of homosexuality that is redefining the boundaries of American culture---opening the door to the moral and relative decline in understanding the concept of historical warnings.
A generation, pursued by the Church by redefinition and reinvigorating its 'stuffy' image, is further and further away from the basic tenements that once defined the strong evangelical Christian. Well known names as Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyers, and Rick Warren find no moralistic danger in avoiding moral boundaries as a wrathful God, and His decrees of moral absolutes in favor of attacking the declining membership levels in the church.
So, instead of preaching the absolute Gospel of Christ, they are a growing number of Pastors and Ministers who have an liberal and flexible moral standard. So, in favor of reaching those who wouldn't attend churches of old, the new model has attendance with no moral growth. The dangers and warnings of the Bible go unheeded.
"For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ." Galatians 1:10 (ESV)
Any history buff will tell you; Ignore history and you are doomed to repeat it.
Tradition in the church now is anything with love, anything without judgment, anything without substance. We all can make our own relationship with God, ignoring if we chose the structural guidelines for that relationship. After all, God loves us. He would do us no harm, He says so. His plans are, after all, not to harm us, but to prosper us.
We assign human standards to God, who is beyond all human comprehension. We limit God to a humanistic worldview and declare it good.
We want to become God. Maybe the Latter-Day Saints have it right. We are simply the future gods of future worlds……
To borrow a phrase from my step-mother, "Heaven help those poor souls."
Because if we are what gods are to be, there will be many, many worlds that repeat the history of this one. Warfare, deceit, humanistic absolutes absolutely defined by individualistic needs, and a host of diseases that defy our valiant drugs that were the 'miracles' of the past because we couldn't foresee the danger of reliance rather than prevention.
A religion that rises in membership with the blatant declaration all who are opposed must die.
A people who live more for doing something to help a wrong than fixing what caused the wrong in the first place.
A country that continues to cry out for comfort and understanding and turns its back upon the very foundation by which those answers were definable.
This all from a future cabal of gods. Is there any wonder that all of creation groans?
As a parent myself, I want to raise my son and two daughters in the right way, doing a great job at seizing the title of "Father of the Century" upon my departure from this world…….. And, in the search to find the way that is correct, I rely on historical evidence, absolute truth, and moralistic metrics that pervade our world. And it rounds out to the Bible as the absolute authority that defies even the boldest of the disclaimers.
"You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." Deuteronomy 6:8-9(ESV)
I also establish boundaries, give instruction, and train them to support themselves in a world increasingly hostile to our follower of Christ worldview. I expect, accept, and counsel them in a relationship they need with the Creator, which will hold them well in their later years. It is this that reflects to me the opening verse. They respect their father, and hold him to the standards by which they are held.
Ask any parent, they would probably tell you the same thing. They want to do a great job, but somewhere that desire falls short. In a Barna study, parents of children under 18 revealed that they don't have a strategy or plan for how to accomplish that lofty goal. Here's some ideas from the biblical source of Deuteronomy:
"Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life Make them known to your children and your children’s children—" Deuteronomy 4:9(ESV)
"You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise." Deuteronomy 6:7 (ESV)
The problem that most parents face is that they don't agree that they are key to their children being well-rounded. According to the Barna study, it is "developmental environments" that will develop their children. Too often, those environments are not in the Christian community, but very secularized. It is the tutelage of these 'subs' that the children are engaging the future.
Instead of being intimately involved in their children's instructions, parents now-a-days exercise spin control like politicians and jockey for position to set them and their children in the best possible light. "Let's not show what the world has labeled intolerance by sticking to an absolute worldview" and "We'll pass on Church because of the 'holiday' inconvenience of being on the 'same day'." Instead of fostering a deeper understanding and relationship with the Creator, parents are throwing in the towel and allowing others to help define their children's worldview. And we sit in our circles of community and wonder why the membership is declining.
While faith, according to this Barna Research Group study, is acceptable among the attributes of the younger generations, it is that notion of faith that ceases to be a progression of their parents faith and becomes something beyond a mere reflection of biblical foundations. They are directly opposed to church traditions, biblical teaching, and rules or behaviors that are based upon these things.
So we are left with a generation that is rapidly developing the consistentcy of dough; meanable to the touch of any baker's hands and without the moral absolutes of their professed faith.
And we wonder why?
Remember, the Bible tells us to "Train our children in the way they should go and they will not stray in their adult years." (paraphrase mine).
The Barna Research Group) conducts primary research, produces media resources pertaining to spiritual development, and facilitates the healthy spiritual growth of leaders, children, families and Christian ministries. Located in Ventura, California, Barna has been conducting and analyzing primary research to understand cultural trends related to values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors since 1984. www.barna.org is their website.
Tuesday, December 4
Monday, December 3
Its ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” Ephesians 5:25 ESV.
Just remember this magic formula and your marriage can be nothing short of spectacular.
Stray from it and you’re doomed, with only the option of divorce left in your future if you want to feel at all.
Most Christian men have heard this verse before and many have left confused with the vague answers given by Pastors and Ministers. Men are told to provide agape love, the unconditional love that Christ emulated during His ministry on earth, to their wives. But too often, that presentation is never taught or even emulated for those who would learn and the process of the devolution and secularization of marriage as an institution rather than a spiritually God-ordained process of relationship continues to crash upon the modernistic rocks of instant gratification and self-expression.
Many have an answer though, couched in several expertly written novels and self-help style reading materials. Pastors with well meaning intentions call us to search for God’s voice in the midst of the storm, straining our ears to catch the whispered directions on how to be MEN moving into the residence of our wives’ heart, to move without painful stumbling within their delicate beauty in loving respect and desire. And the churches are littered with destroyed, wounded, and dying hearts that were unintentionally killed through ineffective and incomplete movement towards that ill-defined and poorly shown model. If you want a perfect marriage, you’ve simply seek the most ‘compromising’ position you can find, so that you can become one mind and one body.
At least, that is what we are told. No broken, heart weak marriages can exist in a conflicted and desperate world…………
But I experienced a weekend, culturally opposite of what society declares safe and correct, with other hearts that came together in defiance of what conventional wisdom and counsel would tell them. Hearts, broken with the wounds of their past and crying out to the Creator’s own heart, who came together to fight, for restoration and for the weapons to defeat the war declared upon the sanctity of their union with another, in God ordained and designed marriage.
And that was the ‘normal’ couples with newness to their relationship that was still full of wonder and grace, exploration and realization……..
But others, battered to the point of exhaustion and despair, came to soothe their painful wounds in a vain hope that the end would be reached less painfully and with some dignity for both, but that the end would indeed come. Some came to realize in the sorrow of their unions, that there still was a flame—a spark of hope that the door hadn’t completely closed on and a course of action was need to recover the battered souls clinging to the rocky shore of marriage gone cold.
All came to realize, by the end of the first day, that their marriage was something more than they even realized upon the declaration of their vows. More vital than any other pursuit they have ever undertaken. That their marriage, broken and bruised or almost naïve in its newness, was the most important thing in their lives.
To lose the relationship of marriage would mean to lose LIFE.
No mere thrusting a book into the hands of eager, even desperate couples.
No throwing a tool to them in a quick and descriptive way.
Not even an expression of hope to help warm them on the cold wintry night.
No, this weekend was about the down and dirty, the slogging through the muddy landscape of marriage in unbiblical disarray or in a distorted hope of the future. Two couples, joined through a common desire of emulation and representation, took these fifteen couples in hand and walked with them through the picture of God’s design and desire for marriages, giving vision to the hope of achieving the intended, God designed relationship, a process that they themselves continue to evolve through.
Your marriage broken, that’s nothing unusual. Not feeling happy all of the time? Do you expect more from a joining of two damaged people coming together with two different views, often on the same subject? Not feeling that the one sleeping next to you at night is your soul mate anymore? Guess what, they probably weren’t in the first place.
More than simple counseling, less than dictating a regulated path of instructional steps, this marriage retreat became a full engagement in pursuit of the marriage God has given each couple to live and express. Not just some ideas that the two couples facillating the weekend espouse to the eager mass of couples seeking mentoring and discipling. No, these couples moved in the circles that the group has or will face in the course of their marriage. Romance, Conflict, and Maturing.
Movement in fear, to reach to the hearts of the spouse that was chosen, to express and expose their own hearts in relation. Connection, within the bounds of the seeking heart of the spouse. And, realizing that the soul mate you thought you had found was indeed the one sitting next to you, they just hadn’t been ‘made’ into that capacity yet. In the midst of understanding what the purpose of marriage was, each couple was given the gift of example in using the tools and helps given in direct sunlight of God’s healing grace.
And, then with the fire of hearts aglow warming the snowy landscape, there appeared upon the hills surrounding this quaint little gathering life, green and new and fully exposed to the harshness of the world. But destined not only to grow, but grow abundantly in spite of the cold to bear the ultimate expression that a couple can give each other.
True representation of the love of a Groom to His Bride as Christ represented in His love to the Church, the true meaning behind the husbandly call of love and the wifely expression of submission…….
“Wives, in the same way, be submissive to your husbands……when they see the purity and reverence of your lives…….Husbands, in the same way, be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect…..” 1 Peter 3:1, 2, & 7 (NIV)
And this is the way we will redeem the hearts of the lost, by representing the design of true marriage by being in relationship with the heart that God’s given us as a gift to grow into the Christian men and women that He intended us to be…….
Restoration of Men to move into the chaos and darkness to protect and defend the beauty and order that God created in the embodiment of their wives.
As my wife and I drove home, she fell asleep in the passenger seat. I gazed over upon this sleeping form and the thought came to my mind via the pathway of my heart…….
In my search of a soul mate, God had given me the person in which that concept would discover life……..
I only have to reach out and touch her heart with mine. Broken, bleeding, and bruised. All I have to do is reach out……………
It is beginning……………….this marriage that God designed and brought together…. and it’s only JUST begun……
To LIVE……..
“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” --John 10:10 (NIV)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This post has NOT been approved by the ministry of Awakened Hearts and is solely representative of my experience only.
Another posting by one of the other couples there can be found at www.joshgraves.blogspot.com under the title "Covenant". You can access the site under Josh Graves, Rochester Church of Christ...under the title "My fellow brother's and sister's websites" to the left of the posts.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Awakened Hearts is the ministry led by Scott Engelman and Mark Jackson which hosted, with their wives, the "Getting to the HEART of Marriage" weekend, the retreat which my wife and I attended. Scott, who serves as director of Grace Counseling Center, is a graduate of Moody Bible Institute (BA), Dallas Theological Seminary (Th M), and Colorado Christian University (MA). Scott considers it most important though to bring other men into experiencing the journey of manhood with other men in pursuit of God's design, which led to the founding of the M3 (Men Molding Men) ministry and, as a result, the marriage weekend for couples.
Mark Jackson serves as Director of the Golf Division of Davey Tree Company, but his real passion is reaching out to isolated men to re-connect them, through the Awakened Hearts Ministries, with other men in a journey to re-awaken their masculine heart. Mark has over eight years of leadership experience in men's groups and is at the center of the growing movement to recapture the hearts of men for Christ. Many men consider him a second father.
The website, www.mmmministry.org, is undergoing a major overhaul, but remains accessible at the time of this posting.
Just remember this magic formula and your marriage can be nothing short of spectacular.
Stray from it and you’re doomed, with only the option of divorce left in your future if you want to feel at all.
Most Christian men have heard this verse before and many have left confused with the vague answers given by Pastors and Ministers. Men are told to provide agape love, the unconditional love that Christ emulated during His ministry on earth, to their wives. But too often, that presentation is never taught or even emulated for those who would learn and the process of the devolution and secularization of marriage as an institution rather than a spiritually God-ordained process of relationship continues to crash upon the modernistic rocks of instant gratification and self-expression.
Many have an answer though, couched in several expertly written novels and self-help style reading materials. Pastors with well meaning intentions call us to search for God’s voice in the midst of the storm, straining our ears to catch the whispered directions on how to be MEN moving into the residence of our wives’ heart, to move without painful stumbling within their delicate beauty in loving respect and desire. And the churches are littered with destroyed, wounded, and dying hearts that were unintentionally killed through ineffective and incomplete movement towards that ill-defined and poorly shown model. If you want a perfect marriage, you’ve simply seek the most ‘compromising’ position you can find, so that you can become one mind and one body.
At least, that is what we are told. No broken, heart weak marriages can exist in a conflicted and desperate world…………
But I experienced a weekend, culturally opposite of what society declares safe and correct, with other hearts that came together in defiance of what conventional wisdom and counsel would tell them. Hearts, broken with the wounds of their past and crying out to the Creator’s own heart, who came together to fight, for restoration and for the weapons to defeat the war declared upon the sanctity of their union with another, in God ordained and designed marriage.
And that was the ‘normal’ couples with newness to their relationship that was still full of wonder and grace, exploration and realization……..
But others, battered to the point of exhaustion and despair, came to soothe their painful wounds in a vain hope that the end would be reached less painfully and with some dignity for both, but that the end would indeed come. Some came to realize in the sorrow of their unions, that there still was a flame—a spark of hope that the door hadn’t completely closed on and a course of action was need to recover the battered souls clinging to the rocky shore of marriage gone cold.
All came to realize, by the end of the first day, that their marriage was something more than they even realized upon the declaration of their vows. More vital than any other pursuit they have ever undertaken. That their marriage, broken and bruised or almost naïve in its newness, was the most important thing in their lives.
To lose the relationship of marriage would mean to lose LIFE.
No mere thrusting a book into the hands of eager, even desperate couples.
No throwing a tool to them in a quick and descriptive way.
Not even an expression of hope to help warm them on the cold wintry night.
No, this weekend was about the down and dirty, the slogging through the muddy landscape of marriage in unbiblical disarray or in a distorted hope of the future. Two couples, joined through a common desire of emulation and representation, took these fifteen couples in hand and walked with them through the picture of God’s design and desire for marriages, giving vision to the hope of achieving the intended, God designed relationship, a process that they themselves continue to evolve through.
Your marriage broken, that’s nothing unusual. Not feeling happy all of the time? Do you expect more from a joining of two damaged people coming together with two different views, often on the same subject? Not feeling that the one sleeping next to you at night is your soul mate anymore? Guess what, they probably weren’t in the first place.
More than simple counseling, less than dictating a regulated path of instructional steps, this marriage retreat became a full engagement in pursuit of the marriage God has given each couple to live and express. Not just some ideas that the two couples facillating the weekend espouse to the eager mass of couples seeking mentoring and discipling. No, these couples moved in the circles that the group has or will face in the course of their marriage. Romance, Conflict, and Maturing.
Movement in fear, to reach to the hearts of the spouse that was chosen, to express and expose their own hearts in relation. Connection, within the bounds of the seeking heart of the spouse. And, realizing that the soul mate you thought you had found was indeed the one sitting next to you, they just hadn’t been ‘made’ into that capacity yet. In the midst of understanding what the purpose of marriage was, each couple was given the gift of example in using the tools and helps given in direct sunlight of God’s healing grace.
And, then with the fire of hearts aglow warming the snowy landscape, there appeared upon the hills surrounding this quaint little gathering life, green and new and fully exposed to the harshness of the world. But destined not only to grow, but grow abundantly in spite of the cold to bear the ultimate expression that a couple can give each other.
True representation of the love of a Groom to His Bride as Christ represented in His love to the Church, the true meaning behind the husbandly call of love and the wifely expression of submission…….
“Wives, in the same way, be submissive to your husbands……when they see the purity and reverence of your lives…….Husbands, in the same way, be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect…..” 1 Peter 3:1, 2, & 7 (NIV)
And this is the way we will redeem the hearts of the lost, by representing the design of true marriage by being in relationship with the heart that God’s given us as a gift to grow into the Christian men and women that He intended us to be…….
Restoration of Men to move into the chaos and darkness to protect and defend the beauty and order that God created in the embodiment of their wives.
As my wife and I drove home, she fell asleep in the passenger seat. I gazed over upon this sleeping form and the thought came to my mind via the pathway of my heart…….
In my search of a soul mate, God had given me the person in which that concept would discover life……..
I only have to reach out and touch her heart with mine. Broken, bleeding, and bruised. All I have to do is reach out……………
It is beginning……………….this marriage that God designed and brought together…. and it’s only JUST begun……
To LIVE……..
“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” --John 10:10 (NIV)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This post has NOT been approved by the ministry of Awakened Hearts and is solely representative of my experience only.
Another posting by one of the other couples there can be found at www.joshgraves.blogspot.com under the title "Covenant". You can access the site under Josh Graves, Rochester Church of Christ...under the title "My fellow brother's and sister's websites" to the left of the posts.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Awakened Hearts is the ministry led by Scott Engelman and Mark Jackson which hosted, with their wives, the "Getting to the HEART of Marriage" weekend, the retreat which my wife and I attended. Scott, who serves as director of Grace Counseling Center, is a graduate of Moody Bible Institute (BA), Dallas Theological Seminary (Th M), and Colorado Christian University (MA). Scott considers it most important though to bring other men into experiencing the journey of manhood with other men in pursuit of God's design, which led to the founding of the M3 (Men Molding Men) ministry and, as a result, the marriage weekend for couples.
Mark Jackson serves as Director of the Golf Division of Davey Tree Company, but his real passion is reaching out to isolated men to re-connect them, through the Awakened Hearts Ministries, with other men in a journey to re-awaken their masculine heart. Mark has over eight years of leadership experience in men's groups and is at the center of the growing movement to recapture the hearts of men for Christ. Many men consider him a second father.
The website, www.mmmministry.org, is undergoing a major overhaul, but remains accessible at the time of this posting.
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