[Intro: Ravi Zacharais]
The biggest difference between Jesus Christ and ethical and moral teachers who have been deified by man, is that these moralists came to make bad people good. Jesus came to make dead people live
[Verse 1]
Man, first things first
The covenant was made, it was painful and hurt
The Savior was slain but he raised from that dirt
Now I’m covered in His blood, ain’t no stains in my shirt
He conquered the grave, now my faith is secure
Cause my God ‘s still alive while I await his return
So people think they safe cause they stay in that church
But if they only knew it was by faith and not works
By His grace and His mercy, the Father
He’ll take a sinful man and make him somethin’ he outta nada
He washed away the dirt that I did when I tried to
Satisfy my thirst ouside the living water
Oh, what a great mistake, I wasted so many years
I tried to do it my way instead of doing His
That’s probly why I tasted salt from my tears
But, now I be the salt of the Earth to my peers
Sin brought me so high, but when I came down
There wasn’t enough folly to keep my mind sound
I wanted all the hotties that could get a piece of mind
But there wasn’t one hot enough to give me piece of mind
I wanted fast money, but when I finally got it
The only thing that was filled was my front pockets
I threw all my cash onto kicks and the summer gear
By the time I got home I done got my eyes on another pair
Never satisfied in the pleasures that’s fadin’
Cause I can’t take them to the grave man
Faith in the stacks of the paper
Now I only put my faith in the Savior
It only makes sense
I really don’t care if I never make a cent
If my pockets full of lint I can still sleep well
Cause the God of the universe know me by my covenant
[Hook] (x2)
He saved me
He ain’t take a bad man, try to make a good man
He just took a dead man, then he let him live
He told me get up and walk
He told me get up and walk
He told me get up and walk
So I did
I grew up as Your child, resting in perfect peace on Your lap in my dreams
deeply loved and nurtured by parents who sought Your heart.
But the more I learned in college, the more conceited and skeptical I grew.
Doubt poisoned my soul and I ran away from You. I decided I was smarter than my family, smarter than Your scriptures. I forgot Who You Are and sought my own idea of transcendence. Attempting to divinate my way to eternal bliss with my own sense of knowledge and forbidden substances, I plunged into a fearful spiral of demonic voices and psychosis.
In the psych ward, the only book on the shelf that seemed safe to read (to the demon voices I misconstrued as evil extraterrestrial hackers of my brain) was Your Word. Surely it wouldn’t afford them any esoteric scientific secrets that they could use to destroy the world. I opened to the Psalms, and found every word straining to explode in the overwhelming expression of Your majesty
Adonai,
You drew me out of that darkness
While I smoldered in the depths of despair, humbled into the dust,
You filled my heart with hope when I turned to You.
Thank You for shattering my idols, my delusions of grandeur. Thank You for opening my eyes to see what infinity looks like without You.
The sinners in Zion are terrified;
trembling grips the godless:
“Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire?
Who of us can dwell with everlasting burning?”
(Isaiah 33:14)
As my heart began to open to You like a flower blooming, You showed me the futility of my wisdom. “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:20-21).
I finally took an honest look inside and saw the evil in my heart. I was a slave to sin and filled with death. But You saw my repentant heart and rescued me from bondage. Now I’m no longer a slave to fear, selfishness, confusion, depression, bitterness, and conceit. Your Spirit filled mine and I overflow with Your living water: Your Spirit (John 4 & 7). I’m still learning to abide in You and walk in Your Spirit; the war with the flesh is real, and the spiritual battle is realer (Ephesians 6:12).
For FREEDOM Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore,
and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Galatians 5:1
when I meditate upon Your presence
ABBA
Fountain of all being
beyond eternal
infinitely holy, loving, merciful and just
I can rest in Your power
I can see Your works unfolding
and minister with You.
You breathe life into dry bones (Ezekiel 37)
You know the stars by name (Isaiah 40:26)
You command the wind and waves (Matthew 8)
All of creation sings of Your glory (Psalm 19)
Abba I beseech You to help us bring this silent genocide to an end. break my heart with what breaks Yours. fill us with Your love to speak Your truth. for Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever. amen
our daily bread: simple and easy tortillas:
2 c flour + 1 tsp salt: sift and mix
(for whole wheat variety, .5 c whole wheat and 1.5 c unbleached white)
heat 2/3 c water and mix it with 1/3 c oil (sunflower is great)
pour into flour/salt mixture. mix up. press with tortilla press and/or roll out with rolling pin (or tall glass bottle….a heavy marble rolling pin works best).
cast iron is my pan of choice for frying these babies, they never stick to it. on medium heat give it about 3 min per side or until obviously cooked, make sure it’s cooked through: if it’s only seering the exterior reduce heat and give more time.
another one:
i lack muffin tins, but i’m actually glad b/c that made me think outside my box and discover: blueberry muffintop cooooookies
The Wisdom of God 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, 27-31
The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction! But we who are being saved know it is the very power of God. As the Scriptures say, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and discard the intelligence of the intelligent.”
So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish. Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never know Him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save those who believe. It is foolish to the Jews, who ask for signs from heaven. And it is foolish to the Greeks, who seek human wisdom. So when we preach that Christ was crucified, the Jews are offended and the Gentiles say it’s all nonsense.
But to those called by God to salvation, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. This foolish plan of God is wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God’s weakness is stronger than the greatest of human strength. God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And He chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God.
God has united you with Christ Jesus. For our benefit God made Him to be wisdom itself. Christ made us right with God; he made us pure and holy, and he freed us from sin. Therefore, as the Scriptures say, “If you want to boast, boast only about the Lord.”
1 Corinthians 2:12-16
we have received God’s Spirit (not the world’s spirit), so we can know the wonderful things God has freely given us.
When we tell you these things, we do not use words that come from human wisdom. Instead, we speak words given to us by the Spirit, using the Spirit’s words to explain spiritual truths. But people who aren’t spiritual can’t receive these truths from God’s Spirit. It all sounds foolish to them and they can’t understand it, for only those who are spiritual can understand what the Spirit means. Those who are spiritual can evaluate all things, but they themselves cannot be evaluated by others. For,
“Who can know the Lord’s thoughts?
Who knows enough to teach Him?”
But we understand these things, for we have the mind of Christ.
1 Corinthians 3:11-23
For no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have—Jesus Christ.
Anyone who builds on that foundation may use a variety of materials—gold, silver, jewels, wood, hay, or straw. But on the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done. The fire will show if a person’s work has any value. If the work survives, that builder will receive a reward. But if the work is burned up, the builder will suffer great loss. The builder will be saved, but like someone barely escaping through a wall of flames.
Don’t you realize that all of you together are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you? God will destroy anyone who destroys this temple. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.
Stop deceiving yourselves. If you think you are wise by this world’s standards, you need to become a fool to be truly wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. As the Scriptures say, “He traps the wise in the snare of their own cleverness.”
And again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise; He knows they are worthless.”
So don’t boast about following a particular human leader. For everything belongs to you— whether Paul or Apollos or Peter, or the world, or life and death, or the present and the future. Everything belongs to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.
Jesus drank the cup of God’s wrath for us so that he could extend the cup of God’s fellowship to us. It might include suffering, but not wrath. We don’t get wrath anymore — now we get God. We get the sweet, satisfying reality of his eternal fellowship in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit.
This is the cup we drink now and forever. This is the cup that we offer to those who don’t know him yet, imploring them in God’s mercy, Come, drink this cup with us because Jesus drank that cup for us.
Above is a series of videos that explore overarching themes in the Bible. I experience serious metanoia/paradigm-shift with each one! It’s so refreshing how these creative insights help me understand scripture more holistically.
It can seem overwhelming to open and try to read through the Bible without contextual commentary. This team has done the hard work of artfully revealing deeper truths that are often lost in translation.
Cocoon in the Spirit: rest in what Jesus won for you. You must allow His beautiful truth to permeate your heart on the inside before change on the outside is even possible.
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
Galatians 5:1
For FREEDOM Christ set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:16–18, But I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would. But if you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law. read more
And you were dead in the trespasses and sinsin which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind,But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us,even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,so that in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,not a result of works, so that no one may boast.For we are His creative work, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
“What we don’t need is superficial religion. Throughout history, people have tried to cover up their sin before a holy God with religion…offering sacrifices, singing songs, doing deeds, attending churches. None of these things work.
God says in the middle of Isaiah 1, “(Your sacrifices are a) trampling of my courts…an abomination to me…my soul hates” them. Same thing in Jeremiah 7. We don’t need to try harder. The problem is much, much deeper than that. Jeremiah 17 says, “Sin is engraved on the tablet of their heart.” We don’t need superficial religion. We need supernatural regeneration. We’re dead in sin, and we need to be born again. We need a new heart.
Jesus says in John 6:25-35, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” Oh, when you are born again, the deepest desires of your soul are met in Christ.
Regeneration. It’s like you’ve been wandering in a desert, and you’re looking for water in all these different places: relationships, this man or this woman, money, greed, success, approval. Whatever it is, whatever it is for all of our lives, it looks different. We’re looking, and then, regeneration is when we realize that the water is found in Christ, and we drink, and we drink deeply. We come to Him. He’s bread from heaven, living water. These are the pictures we see in John. Which is why when you hear somebody say, “Well, I guess I’ll trust in Christ. I want to go to heaven. Even though it’s going to be tough to let go of the things of the world,” you know that regeneration is probably not happening here.
We have this idea of salvation, as getting out of the line going to hell, and getting in the line to go into heaven, and we’d really kind of rather be enjoying those things over there, but we’re going to do this over here to save our skin. That’s not salvation. Salvation is a revolutionary new taste capacity, where you realize that the world doesn’t satisfy, and Christ does, and you drink from His water, and you eat from His bread, and you say, “Why would I go back to that? I’ve got Christ! and a new heart.”
We don’t conquer sin by working hard to change our deeds. We conquer sin by trusting Christ to change our desires, and He gives us a new heart. He satisfies the thirst of our soul, and when He does…don’t miss it…He breaks the power of desire for sin. How do you break the desire for pornography in your life? How do you break the desire for lust and greed and this or that in your life? How do you break that? You break that by having your heart conquered by a superior desire, by realizing, “That doesn’t taste anywhere near as good as He does.” This is the Christian life. After this, we find ourselves every once in a while going back to this, and we taste what this world offers. “No, no, I’ve got a new heart. He’s the one who satisfies my soul.”
One of my favorite quotes from C. S. Lewis,
“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
If you think pornography satisfies, it’s because your desires are weak. Your desires are so weak. It takes so little to satisfy you.
Colossians 1 says, “He is the image of the invisible God.” Colossians 2:9, “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” Hebrews 1:3, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”
Jesus says in Revelation 1, “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’” Which is why John Owen, commenting on the cross, said, “He suffered not as God, but he who suffered was God.” So, when you think about the person of Christ on the cross, don’t think Jesus alone, as if He had no divine nature. Don’t think God alone as if He had no human nature. But think God in Christ—this is Who was on the cross. Not man alone or God alone, but God in Christ, fully God and fully man, Who was therefore uniquely qualified to mediate between God and man because of Who He is.
“What we don’t need is superficial religion. Throughout history, people have tried to cover up their sin before a holy God with religion…offering sacrifices, singing songs, doing deeds, attending churches. None of these things work.
creative love 