 |
| Trust is the key to a person’s heart. We live in such an unsafe world of hurt. Negative messages attack us from every side. If you want to touch someone’s heart you must earn their trust. Before they will let down the walls they have built up, they must feel safe. You cannot make another person do anything, but you can help to create a relationship of safety, of trust. Love is about serving others. Love is others-focused. Love is about meeting the needs of others. Love someone, serve them, meet their needs, and you will create that trust. You will earn the key to their heart. |
Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
Trust - Key to the Heart
Comments (0)
Balancing Community and Isolation
 |
| Luke 5:16 “But Jesus Himself would often slip away to the wilderness and pray”Today we often call attention to Jesus’ habit of slipping away into the wilderness to pray alone. (Luke 5:16) This seems to have great appeal to our modern culture of individualism and isolation. Everything we do is about the individual. Marketing targets the individual consumer promising individual pleasures and fulfillment. The individual seeks to find meaning in his life, to find what he can gain, and to probe the depths of his soul. In faith we seek longer quiet times, reading the bible by our selves, and praying in solitude. Yet perhaps comparing this individualist culture to the culture represented in this passage is like comparing apples to oranges. The culture of Jesus’ day was about community. Prayer, reading, study, was done in community. For Jesus to seek alone time with God was a rare and special thing. Today Individualism and isolation is the norm of our society as we grow ever distant from community in our extreme individualism. I believe it is good to seek alone time with God to pray, study and talk to God, yet I believe we are perhaps missing something in our application of this scripture. I believe this passage shows us a balance between communal faith experience and the individual faith experience. We need both and in a faith built around communal experience Jesus sought to spend individual time with God. Yet with so much emphasis on the individual in our culture today, especially when the standard prescription for spiritual growth seems to be to dive deeper into isolation through closet prayer and study, that perhaps this scripture should inspire us to seek to balance our communal and individual experience of faith, rather than using it as a reason to dive deeper into self-focus, isolation and individualism. |
What kind of person are you?
 |
|
Are you a person who gives or takes? Do you give to those around you? Does your character overflow from your soul to touch others? What kind of person are you?
“For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love.” (Gal 5:13 NLT) |
Uncontainable
 |
| May “Your roots … grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.” Ephesians 3:17-18
God is truly uncontainable. He cannot be contained by the boxes we try to set around Him. We try to limit God according to rules and systems by which we think He should work. However God is beyond our ability to limit him, nor can anyone constrain His love or presence from us. If we truly knew how deep His love is for us, would we really try to contain Him, and would we really regulate who we think is deserving of His love? If we were to truly see how much we are all in need of His love, and that His uncontainable love is more than sufficient to touch each and every soul in this world, how would this impact how we love? Shouldn’t our love for others be a reflection of his uncontainable love? |
Take up Your Cross
 |
| Jesus said, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.” Mark 8:34
Take a look at your life. How much of your life is an excess? How much of what we do or have is a choice of indulgence and preference? Are you truly denying yourself and taking up the cross? Or are you selectively choosing inconveniences that you can endure for brief moments for the sake of ministry? What does it truly mean to take up the cross and follow Jesus? Perhaps our culture has confused sacrifice for discomfort. |
From Out of the Heart
By Josh in Art
Jan
29
 |
|
“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” Proverbs 4:20-23
“But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart” Matthew 15:18 What springs from your heart? |
Break Through
By Josh in Art
Nov
10
 |
| We live in an unsafe world. As a result we set up walls to protect our hearts. However, real connection occurs at the heart level. Unless we break down those walls, we will only continue to survive when we were truly meant to thrive. A Heart that is surviving, fights against the world, protecting itself from getting hurt again. A heart that thrives is one that joins with others, and through such connection is built up, grows, helps others to grow, and experiences life that can only occur in true heart-level community. Break through the walls to your heart and truly live. |
Mending a Broken Heart
By Josh in Art
Oct
11
 |
| Mending a broken heart takes two. Its is not something that can be done in solitude. When a heart attempts to mend itself without the love of another it merely attempts to cover over and hide the scars, or to replace hurt with bitterness, anger, pride, or any other self-deception. A heart cannot mend itself without the love of another because where a heart has been hurt only love can heal. Whether it is by the love of another person, the love of God, or both, a heart can only be mended within the context of another because love is about the giving of oneself to another person. God offers himself to each of us, and when we love others we give of ourselves to them. Godly love occurs when we take the love God has poured into our hearts and we pour the overflow of that love into others. This is when true community, healing in community and service occur, and it is through the hearts of people that God desires his love to manifest. Mending a broken heart takes two. |
Breaking Out of the Bubble
By Josh in Art
Sep
7
 |
| As Christians do we really love the people who go about their daily lives around us? We’ve dichotomized the world into the Christian Church and the World. But are we not all in the same world? We might have a calling to follow Christ, but that does not call us to withdraw from the world into little church bubbles of Christian sub-culture that exist as alien worlds within the greater world. The Church exists to be a dangerous force of love, ready to impact the world through service and caring, and yet perhaps we have turned it into a sanctuary for ourselves where we feel comfortable and safe. Within this bubble we lose touch with those around us, and we become strangers to them. We speak with our own language (Christianese), we have our own customs, and we have very little in common with those we seek to love. What we offer seems very foreign indeed because we have come to show God’s love in the context of our own cultural bubble, rather than a deeply powerful love that impacts the cultures of the world around us. |
Sacred-Heart Cross
By Josh in Art
May
18
 |
| Not much to say about this piece. It was inspired from a bit of South-American art. I love to see religious art of other cultures and it reminds me of the incredible diversity of cultures and peoples that God touches. Some people get on my case for having a crucifix, or a latin sacred-heart, but I wonder why we come to see the elements of our own culture as the only correct way to worship. There is something unique about viewing the cross from the perspective of other cultures. We see things we often forget in our own cultural bubbles. We might enjoy the victory of Christ’s resurrection, but we should also remember His suffering on our behalf in the crucifix or in the crown of thorns that wreaths the sacred-heart. Maybe it is just this one artist’s perspective, but shouldn’t the Art of Worship be as diverse and wonderful as the cultures and peoples God has created? |
Seeking Truth - Reaching for the Stars
By Josh in Art
Feb
23
 |
| Are we truly seeking truth? Are we reaching for the stars? In general, the modern church has been raising generations of believers who have it all down. The modern-age filled our world with answers. We categorize everything and we know how things should work. There is an answer to every question and a solution to every problem. However, is this how our hearts work? Does the heart interact with world in such a cold and analytical way? The complete person should rather interact with the world in a holistic blended working of logic, reason, intuition and emotion. What is reason without conscious? What good is it to have the answers if we are not open to learn more? Where is the motivation to truly live, if we have determined to know exactly where we are now, yet we do not allow ourselves to dream into the mysteries of what could be? Do we allow ourselves the privilege of dreaming about life? Would we go so far as to dream about the mystery of God? Are we reaching for the stars when we seek to experience God, or do we constrain our experiences to the grounded formalization of tradition and legalism? God is a God of mystery and wonder who is not defined merely by our traditions and doctrines. Scripture is the pad from which your heart will launch, setting your trajectory skywards, but if you truly want to experience God and seek His truth, your soul must be willing to be set free to reach for the stars.
Yet when I am among mature believers, I do speak with words of wisdom, but not the kind of wisdom that belongs to this world or to the rulers of this world, who are soon forgotten. No, the wisdom we speak of is the mystery of God — his plan that was previously hidden, even though he made it for our ultimate glory before the world began. 1 Corinthians 2:6-7 |
An Alien Landscape
By Josh in Art
Jan
30
|
|
Why do we as Christians talk about non-believers as if they live in a world outside our own. We treat them as if they live in an alien world, and we live in a bubble of normality. We talk about the world as if there is “us” and there is “them”. We call ourselves “Christians”, and we call them “Sinners”. But aren’t we all sinners? Perhaps we need to stop looking at them from our perspective and begin looking at the whole of humanity from God’s perspective. If we are all sinners, then really there is no “us” and there is no “them”. We are all sinners before God, but the good news is that God loves each one of us. He plays no favorites so salvation is available to all who seek it. Perhaps we need to rethink how we view ourselves in this world, so that we do not appear to be alien to the world, and instead view ourselves from God’s perspective. Perhaps, then, we would be more sensitive and compassionate to others when we realize that we are no different than they are. |