The First Year of Grace

September 22, 2015September 22, 2015 ~ sloggett ~ Leave a comment

We made it, it being one year into marriage. We made it through some tough times. We lost some friends that honestly we thought were going to be “ride or dies.” It’s the natural rhythms of life it seems, as the Spirit moves and our sinful hearts pull things happen and it’s good.

So here are a few things that I have learned from our first year of marriage:

I am a terrible God. So is Taylor. Grace has to abound in marriage for it to be healthy and happy. Yes, you can stay together and be miserable for the rest of the days… but I’m not all about that. Call me a hedonist, I’m good with it. Marriage without grace is like playing wack-a-mole with your spouses heart. Every time that you feel offended, they get smashed. It’s literally our Jekyll and Hyde hearts, with deep repercussions for the entire family and it starts with a heart that is tuned and nurtured to be it’s own God. If your spouse is your God, you will murder them on the cross and without Jesus, they just stay dead.
Family worship is hard. I’ll admit and confess, I thought I had a plan for family worship. My plan sunk faster than the Cubs in October. Still working on it, still learning Taylor and how she worships best, still learning me… still learning. It’s apparent to me that learning each other continuously is key. If the Spirit is active, change is constant and you have to be willing to be quite and humble during the process.
Taylor is my best friend and because she is my best friend, she is not my sounding board for everything. If you love your wife, you protect her heart violently. We as men need to be at war with our sin natures, daily. Every time that you sound off on your wife about struggles with other people, you are setting the stage in her heart for resentment that can last much longer than yours. You don’t however start blasting co-workers, ministry leaders and your friends if you are walking in grace, with the Spirit as your guide.
If you aren’t visibly and audibly reliant on God, you can’t expect your wife to be.

My prayer is that this quick little list is just really a reminder of things that seem to fall in the cracks during the grind.

Come as you are

December 26, 2014December 26, 2014 ~ sloggett ~ Leave a comment

Reading through the scriptures today and preparing for the Christmas Eve service has me spinning on an idea that is a familiar stream woven throughout scripture, the idea of coming as you are. The gravity of the Jesus’ ministry, the incarnation of God coming to people is nothing short of breath taking. It’s one of those themes that we can quickly gloss over, as we run to the more exhilarating passages of scripture. It’s one of those themes that should shape our ministries and our communities as we live life.

The commands of Scripture, as we should read it, are almost always plural. Set to be done by God’s people. Jesus’ ministry in a sense should always be considered in a communal state. Jesus, the lamb of God, came down to the earth so that he would reconcile His people to Himself. The miracles that he performed brought great glory to His Father, opening the eyes and the ears of some of the people around Him. The interesting part of this is that the people did not do anything to warrant forgiveness nor did they do anything to clean themselves up. Jesus called them “as they were.” If we take this theme and apply it to our communities, I think that what we will find is that we require people to act a certain way for us to welcome them in. We might mask our expectations with calls to the alter or charitable giving, but ultimately within the Church we expect that people will act a certain way. This way is vastly different among churches, some churches require that you keep your hands down while worshiping and yet others look down on outward worship. Regardless of the expectation, we as a church frown on and ultimately miss opportunities to engage one another because of our presupposed expectations. The most evil and dangerous part of these expectations is that they evolve within a community. As communities grow and become bonded, they develop their own expectations. When the expectations of the community are not met within the community, there is hostility and often shunning, until the expectations are met. This is not a hard and fast rule, just a simple observation.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine recently and I made a statement similar to the one that I just wrote, and it made him angry. Angry at me and he was rightfully so. I joined in on the communal expectation, ultimately ostracizing my own because they failed to meet the standard that I had set for them. Of course, realizing my error, I apologized and repented for failing to see the error in my ways. The conversation didn’t end there. We talked and I pondered about what the implementations of my blindness has for the communities that I’m involved in. How had my worship slipped back into self righteousness? The question is answered in the beginning of this writing, it’s an indicative/imperative assessment.

I failed, and we fail because we do not allow people to come to us as they are. We suppose that they will act a certain way, react a certain way or at least pretend to act a certain way. This creates communities that are not built on trust, but rather behavior. It’s simply going back to behavior modification on a communal level. It’s an issue that stems from original sin, we want to be God, and in doing so we throw burdens on people that aren’t theirs to carry. We want the clean, and yet we are called into the dirty.

My prayer is that our hearts will be broken for the broken. As broken people we will realize our faults and repent of our sinful ways. That we will yearn to be in the front lines of ministry, open about our brokenness and always on guard for the sin that is crouching at the door. That we will be people that look more like Jesus and less like the religious leaders. That God will move people into our paths, to challenge the norm and to force us to see the log that is in our own eye. Let us not be a people that misses the point, that gathers around expectation and in doing so, fails to point people to the one that never failed. His name is Jesus.

Reconciliation From the Heart

December 23, 2014 ~ sloggett ~ Leave a comment

There comes a time and a place where one must sit down and consider the past. For many, this comes during the end of a season or the end of a year. As I sit and think about the past year, I am baffled by all that has happened in my life. I think that sometimes we live our lives moment to moment, constantly driving towards the next accomplishment and goal. This rhythm produces a profound effect on our lives and the lives of the people around us. We become producers of content, from our 140 character tweets to our daily conversations and we become content in our lives of producing.

The good Lord has provided many opportunities to develop relationships, and in doing so, many opportunities to fail at developing relationships. It’s in that space, when we can quietly reflect on things that we could have done better, times where our worship went astray that we can learn from our mistakes. Time that we can repent, confess and return to worshiping the Creator. It amazes me that throughout my life, God continues to bring leaders that are patient enough to walk through the maturation process and loving enough to love, even when my heart is not in the right place. It amazes me that God was gracious enough to provide a wife for me that loves me regardless of how she feels about me in that moment. It amazes me that I have the family that I have, knowing that I don’t deserve that gift. There comes a time when you have to reflect on the gifts given.

The idea of radical reconciliation is so foreign to the world that we live in. The world that produces content at 140 character tweets and insta-everything. We take in and we push out more information than ever in the history of the world and in that process we lose part of the commitment that our words have had in the past. It seems to me that friendships and family are disposable terms in our current culture. That the words, “I love you” are little short of, “we are friends now, because you are doing what I want.” This systemic interaction produces the same level of commitment that our 140 words do. Approximately 7 minutes of life in the twittersphere. So the question begs, how do we radically reconcile our relationships and bring them to a point where they mean more than the tweet? It’s a complex problem, as all human interactions are. There are endless possibilities, more numerous than the sand of the sea. I don’t think that the solution is as complex. I think that the solution is rather simple, actually. The solution is found in our understanding of ourselves and the willingness to accept our condition.

In short, God has given us everything that we have. Our relationships, our material goods and the life that live. We manage to only bring destruction to the table. Our sin nature to put it simply. If this is true, the order of reconciliation should look something like, I have committed so much destruction and sin in my life that there is no room for me to judge you on any level. Therefore, because of my condition, I have no right to do anything except forgive and reconcile. In doing so, I will go out of my way to ensure that our relationship edifies the people around us.

The problem with radical reconciliation is that forces us to move from the field of competition, to the field of reconciliation. It forces us to put down our pride, our self righteous indignant flesh. We don’t live in a reconciled world, because we still want to live in the world of “me.” Unfortunately, the world of me creates destruction. The world of me wrecks lives and causes discontentment within our communities. The world of me rips through the relationships in our lives, producing communities that can’t trust and don’t want to live together. The world of me, disrupts and ruins the world that I live in.

There comes a time and a place that we have to reflect on the past, and my prayer is that as we look at the past, as we gaze into the future. A future where all things will be made new. A future that the brokenness of this world will be no more. In doing so, we gaze at the One who can change our hearts radically, so we might be able to reconcile our relationships.

Wild and Wrecked

August 15, 2014August 15, 2014 ~ sloggett ~ Leave a comment

I have to admit that last week was rough and this week seemly is rougher, but something is different. Something is different, because I’m different. Last week I was bent on taking on the world. I was going to do something about everything. It was me against the world, and I was going to walk out all the world problems in a fit of rage.

This week someone said something to me, a comment that changed my prospective across the board. It’s not like it’s the first time that this particular person has said something like this to me, in fact I’m pretty sure that it’s the rock that smacked my soul around during sermon prep.

God is God and He loves His people, regardless of what side they are on currently.

In the midst of war zones in Iraq, St. Louis and Israel, (just to name the headlines) God loves His people and my job is simply to pray and witness the Good News of the Gospel. The change that is so invigorating in my life, so undeniably real, that I cannot help but tell someone about it. And that leaves me humbled in complete submission to the Creator.

Who am I and where did I go? That seems to be the question lingering in the air, the question that ultimately falls back into what is my identity in. Does Christ define me or have I attempted to hijack my identity again? It all boils down to who I rest under, is it Adam or is it Christ. If it is Christ, I walk out my prayer in humble submission to the one that paid it all. I begin to see people differently, and my thoughts and actions are transformed through my interactions with the living God. If I rest in Adam, my thoughts and my actions reflect the broken nature of my flesh.

Let us not forget our identities as we walk out our faith, minute by minute, day by day.