Deep-End Discipleship

  “ Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus: Though he was in the form of God, he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. But he emptied himself by taking the form of a slave and by becoming like human beings.” - Philippians 2:5-7a CEB - The worry of overcharging a device seems like such a first world problem at times. For someone who has grown up with always changing technology, I remember it taking me a while to realize that leaving something plugged in could actually degrade the battery faster. It seems so counter intuitive that something at full power could actually be getting too much power. However, the opposite can be equally scary. Having little or no power left, especially on something so seemingly critical like our cell phone, can feel like death to the outside world. But having your phone run out of power, as socially crippling as it feels, does nothing to harm one’s battery or the phone itself. The act of emptying and using a phon...

We have many parts in one body, but the parts don’t all have the same function.   In the same way, though there are many of us, we are one body in Christ, and individually we belong to each other. We have different gifts that are consistent with God’s grace that has been given to us. Romans 12:4-6 I was never very good in science classes. I struggled in physics, chemistry, and I especially struggled in Biology. While physics and chemistry were extremely challenging because of the math (which I am also pretty bad at), biology was a whole different struggle because of the complexity of the human body. I was not good at knowing where organs or bones were, I didn’t really understand how anything worked, and I was NOT good at memorizing. As a result of my struggle with biology, I never connected strongly with the imagery of the “body of Christ”. I always got that we are the hands and the feet of Christ but, if we are the BODY, who is the eyeball? or the kidney or liver...

The Lord said to Moses, "Make a poisonous snake and place it on a pole. Whoever is bitten can look at it and live." - Numbers 21:8 (CEB) -  When my neighbor was fifteen years old, she decided that she needed a pet snake. At first I was skeptical of my friend’s new pet, but to my surprise I learned that there is such a thing as a sweet snake. This snake, named Draco, loved people, sunshine, and tasty mice. Draco taught me that not all snakes are scary! However, it would be foolish of me to think that all snakes are nice. For instance, the snakes seen in this story in Numbers are not nice snakes. These are quite terrifying. The Israelites are in the middle of their forty years of wandering in the wilderness because of their sin and lack of faith in God. In the midst of their wandering, the Israelites sin again. The Lord sent poisonous snakes into the camp of the Israelites. The poisonous snakes did their job: the people realized they had sinned. They turned to...

“Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these ‘nobodies’ to expose the hollow pretensions of the ‘somebodies’? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.” - 1 Corinthians 1:27-30 The Message - As a person of smaller stature, I hate being overlooked. Some might argue that much of who I am is to stand out and be noticed. Yet no matter how great I think I am, the apostle Paul here reminds us that God has preferential consideration for those who are ‘nobody.’ God uses people who are lost, broken, and left out. Even if we are ‘somebody’ and think we have it all together, when we come before God we must recognize that our plans are silly foolishness compared to the work that God has for us. The trick of course is to not hate o...