 | Let Your Dreams Take You Soaring There is an ever present calling and desire of our hearts. Something calls us to belong to something deeper, something greater than ourselves. We seek to fill it with the artificial moments of this world. We seek to fulfill this longing with what we feel is comfortable in that which we can control. We seek to be a part of things greater than ourselves at work, in sports, in organizations, and yet the calling still remains. It is the calling of God to our hearts. He calls to us with a passion that is unceasing, pursuing us even in our darkest moments. It is a love that is wild and untamable and it calls us to greater levels of faith, love and life. God is ever calling out to us in the romance of our hearts. Lyrics Let Your Dreams Take You Soaring |
 | Would We Dare We live in a world of walls. We focus on the differences between each other. We live in anger against those who are different. We cry out for equality, while demanding special treatment because we are different. We see evil people doing evil things, and somehow we think not involving ourselves in the problem somehow makes us better. With such division, segregation, and separation will we ever see equality, freedom and peace? What if instead of always focusing on what makes us different, we start with the love that we share? Would we dare to seek unity through love? Lyrics Would We Dare? |
 | Wishing on a Star When you wish upon a star.... you are left with a kink in your neck and a lot of wasted time.... its your life, so live it. Let it be a blessing to others by the love that shines through it. Lyrics Wishing on a Star |
 | Together We are made for community. The human heart thrives best when it is in connection with other hearts. It is through the support of others that we find strength to carry on, hope in a harsh world, and a joy in community that could never be found in solitude. Lyrics Together |
 | Today, Today There seems to be a language that we see used in prayer that is often solemn and lofty in wordage. Perhaps there is good reason, as God is Lord. However God is also our Father, and our Friend. Would you talk to your friend with lengthy and solemn repetitions of holy verbage? Maybe what God wants from us is not the manner of our words, but rather the content of our hearts. Perhaps He wants us to truly know and understand that He is a friend to be desired. He is a friend you can dream of being with. He is the friend you want to have next to you above all other things in this life. Lyrics Today, Today |
 | I Got A Hole In My Head We each have holes in our heads. Are you taking into your head and learning? Are you giving out in love? Or are you taking in only what you want to hear, and giving out what you think others should know? What's in your head? Lyrics I Got A Hole In My Head |
 | Would You Love Me Still There is a bitter-sweet moment where an intense sorrow and deep joy intersect in true understanding of the hearts condition. If we honestly take a look at just how lost we truly are we come to realize just how intimate and personal the love of God is that he would reach down into our darkness to hold and comfort us. It is a moment when we truly understand God's love for us in the midst of who we really are. Lyrics Would You Love Me Still |
 | Seeking Truth on a Rocket Ship Are we truly seeking truth? Are we reaching for the stars? The church teaches as if it has all the answers. But in the attempt to categorize everything and everyone, we pigeon-hole people and limit our expereince of God. Is there really an answer to every question and a solution to every problem, or does our heart revel in the mystery of approaching God openly? What good is it to have the answers if those answers and traditions become the box within which we limit our experience of God? Do we allow ourselves the privilege of dreaming about life? Would we go so far as to dream about the mystery of God? 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. Lyrics Seeking Truth on a Rocket Ship |
 | Hello Lord (A morning talk with a friend) God isnt just in the experiences of the fantastic or the extraordinary. He is in the everyday experiences of our lives if we but open our eyes and our hearts. He is in the sunshine that brightens your day or even in the warmth of a good cup of coffee that reminds you that He is with you. We cannot limit the experience of God to the displays of something fantastic or the emotional-high of a few good "worship songs" on a few given hours of a Sunday morning church service. God is much bigger, much more real, and much more personal than that. Experience him in the daily matters of life. Have a simple conversation with Him. Lyrics Hello Lord |
 | Encounter A look into the soul and an encounter with Christ. Where guilt and shame are replaced with a glint of hope at the words of acceptance of a God who loves us unconditionally for who we are where we are at. Lyrics Encounter |
| Why This Way? Why do we do church the way we do? Maybe we have it all wrong? Maybe we are too caught up in doing church a certain way because that is just the way we think we have to do it. Maybe its not even about anything we do. Maybe we need to understand that the church is God's people, and that true worship is a continuous thing we do every day with our lives in real life encounters with real people, yes, even with all our ugly imperfections that we try to hide when we put on our church faces. Lyrics Why This Way? |
| How Do I Follow You, Lord? Inspired from a vision I was called to ask myself, "What does it mean to follow Christ?" Is it really the polished shining clean faces and nice suits we make it every sunday? Or does it call for something deeper, something harder, something uncomfortable? What did Jesus have in mind when He called us to take up the cross and follow Him. Lyrics How Do I Follow You Lord? |
| Trust in My Lord We can trust the one who never fails us. Joshua 1:9 calls us to be strong, but the world is so hard without the help of a friend to walk with us. But we can trust in the greatest friend who despite our weaknesses, loves us, died for us, and even conquered death for us. In His love we find strength, and in Him we can trust. Lyrics Trust in My Lord |
The Music of Jesus Crash
Seeking Truth - Reaching for the Stars
By Josh in Art
Feb
23
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| 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 |
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An Alien Landscape
By Josh in Art
Jan
30
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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. |
Stained Glass Life
By Josh in Art
Dec
8
| Our lives are constructed by a myriad of pieces that have come together to shape and build who we are. In themselves, they may appear to be broken and significant pieces, but together they paint a portrait. Even then the portrait is stained, But with the light of Christ shining through the stained glass portrait of your life, you become a beautiful piece of art for all the world to see.
“God’s purpose in all this was to use the church to display his wisdom in its rich variety to all the unseen rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 3:10 |
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| This picture represents the stained glass image of my life. The shadow is a shadow of the old heart once broken and dark, cleansed by the blood of Christ. The living heart is a heart renewed, in which God’s Spirit burns. It is a heart healed and held by the hands of God, from which all life flows as symbolized by the color green surrounding them. |
A Fire in my Heart
By Josh in Art
Nov
13
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| “And I can’t stop! If I say I’ll never mention the LORD or speak in his name, his word burns in my heart like a fire. It’s like a fire in my bones! I am weary of holding it in!” Jeremiah 20:9 (NLT)We are loved by a God who loves us and accepts us for who we are. There is nothing we can do to make Him love us any more or less. He accepts us for who we are. We do not have to earn His love, we do not have to be good enough. He accepts us, faults and all. Is that not exciting! We don’t have to pretend and we don’t have to have to worry that perhaps he wont be there for us because maybe we let Him down. We are worthy because God loves each and every one of us for who we are, not for what we can do, or become. In a world where we are valued for our skills, money, looks, or services, this is certainly awesome news. That gets me fired up! That gets me excited! Of all the things there is to know about God it is this unconditional love that He has for me that burns within me and just has to come out! |
Surreal Garden
By Josh in Art
Nov
12
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| As Christians we often sit in the comfort of our neat boxed-in cultural garden. We act like Christians, and we expect others to act like Christians, whether they are Christians or not. We claim to live to a higher moral standard and then we judge non-believers for not following those same standards as if they too were Christian. We claim we want to reach the lost, but we expect them to become believers first and live according to our ways before they can come to our churches, so that we can keep our churches looking a certain way; “clean.” How silly are we, living in our surrealistic little gardens, so culturally different and awkward to the world. We are so accustomed to our little Christian worlds we call church, that perhaps we have lost touch with the reality of the hurting world outside our gardens. We do things a certain way that only makes sense in our little worlds. We use certain vocabulary that only Christians would know. We expect certain things that only make sense in our Christian cultural contexts. We are living in surreal garden boxes within the lost and harsh world of reality. Perhaps we do not make the impact we desire to make because we just do not make any sense to the world. Perhaps we do not make sense to the world because we have sheltered ourselves from the world within the contexts of our own unrealistic little worlds. Perhaps instead of trying to pull people out of the world into our own little worlds, we should be focusing on bringing Christ into the world, where the lost are, where He is needed most. |
Dancing Spirits
By Josh in Art
Nov
11
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| Do we worship with dancing spirits that are free in God’s grace, or do we legalistically control and define our worship to forms and ways that we say are proper and correct? How many times have we heard a charismatic say that “God isn’t present if the people are not speaking in tongues or raising their hands?” How many times have we heard a conservative or liturgical believer say that “a person isn’t genuinely meeting with God if he isn’t taking part in the sacraments?” But is either one really right? Are we robots that we should all worship God in the same exact way? Or do we recognize our individual uniqueness’s as God made us and worship in a community of freely dancing spirits? |
Where did the Mystery go?
By Josh in Thoughts
Oct
26
Whatever happened to that passion for life that we had when we first committed ourselves to Christ? What happened to the endless zeal to seek out God that we once had? Where did that mystery go, that Christ first revealed to us in our wonder that was filled with hope despite uncertainty? Life was new, and we looked with hope to the new adventures Christ would bring us through despite the accompanying hardships and trials that we would be strengthened to overcome. But it is still there. It isn’t a thing of the past. The reasons for the zeal, the passion, and the excitement are still there if we just move past our legalism and rationalism. Proper living and proper doctrine are good things but not in themselves. Without the love of God that motivates one to such life, these things are merely the elements of a dead and pharisaic existence. No, God is there calling our hearts to that great mystery in Christ. God is tugging on our hearts calling us to that love which motivates us to zeal, passion and excitement. We seek to present ourselves as mature and rational people. We present a Christian faith which is emotionally calm and realistic. We stifle the passion and wildness of our hearts as something sinful and wrong, not recognizing that God is the author of our hearts. There is a wildness and passion waiting to cry out and to connect us to something much greater than we are. There is a wonderful story of God waiting to unfold within our hearts.
“It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name… That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.” (Fredrick Buechner. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale)
Hello world!
By Josh in News
Oct
18
Welcome to Jesus Crash.