It’s 5am and time for bed, but I need to write this while my thoughts are fresh. Tonight was the RSD Senior Banquet :). RSD’s commencement of sorts. It was just such a blessing. Seeing everything come to an end, it made me think about the past 4 years and how RSD’s been critical to my life. I am forever on a different track of life because of how God shaped and molded my life around RSD’s college ministry.

I remember when I first came to The Remnant Presbyterian Church on Aug 24th, 2008 (I looked up the exact date) and RSD was comprised of 5 people. That day, we all ended up going over to someone’s house in Jersey City and that was cool. A bit weird now that I think about it.. Just met someone at church and then you go over to another state to hang out the rest of the day with a complete bunch of strangers. Not just a bit weird.. but that’s really abnormal… but this quirky, fun, unique community of strangers turned out to be my bests friends in college. People that I could really share my deepest concerns and not be judged. People that I could really rely and lean upon to love me even when I couldn’t love myself. People that influenced my convictions that will affect the rest of my life. People who kept me accountable and challenged me in my walk with God. I’m so thankful for each and every person at RSD that God has worked through to grow me and draw me closer to Him.

My first impression of Remnant (for those who are curious), was just simple. It’s just a church, didn’t really understand the message (because of my immaturity and lack of knowledge), and just okay. Nothing popped out at me. No one was particularly friendly, message wasn’t convicting, worship was okay,  fellowship was aight, but nothing special. I’ve thought about it before and how I’ve come to love this church and community. It really is through my relationships with RSD, Pastor Yooey, and through God. The beauty of it is that nothing about this church could attract me to it, but God had His sovereign plan and I was meant to be here with this community. Among the multitude of churches in NYC, I can’t imagine being at another one.

Thank you for all those who contributed to make Senior Banquet awesome! Thank you for all the gifts and the videos and all the love. Thank you for being brothers and sisters in Christ that sharpen and encourage me to keep fighting the good fight of faith. I’m so thankful for my family group for teaching me so much about ministry and for just being themselves. [be]loved for life cause that’s our status in Christ Jesus our Lord. Thank you for always keeping me humble and at the feet of Jesus because I definitely could not have led family group on my own strength. Ministry really brought me to my knees this year and it continues to do so. I want to rejoice in constantly staying in the presence of the Lord. Thank you for my apprentices for just being those who put up with my weird, quirky, and sometimes selfishness. Thank you for my fellow family group leaders who really stretched me this past year. Shout out to Paul, Hannah, Joe, Amy, who were a constant inspiration even though I’ve never said this to them personally.

I couldn’t have done this without Pastor Yooey who always kept me in prayer. I’m so thankful and blessed to have had him as my mentor and leader for the past 4 years. He took a seed and planted it, watered it, pruned me, and I’ve grown to be who I am because of God who worked through him. Acts 22:15 - “You will be his witness to all people of what you have seen and heard.” In these 4 years of college, I have witnessed God work through the minuscule details in my life and I’m excited for the future. I don’t know what it beholds, but I know that God is with me. I have nothing to fear. In Christ, I am secure and I wanna witness what God has in store for me.

After watching Avengers, I came to Parc East and just worshiped to Unchanging and Your Beloved and it was good. Great is His faithfulness. True is His promises. Wide is His love and grace. He is unchanging through the ages and I am His beloved. He loves me as I am. He is unashamed to call me His son. Praise and glory to God!

This has been a good senior year of undergrad. At the beginning of the year, I was introduced to this song “Set A Fire” by Will Reagan & the United Pursuit Band. As this year comes to a close, I continue to sing this song. “Set A Fire,” “Break Every Chain,” “Fill Me Up,” and “Running in Circles” have been my theme songs for this year for me.

Set a fire down in my soul that I can’t contain, that I can’t control. I want more of You God, I want more of You God.

No place I’d rather be, no  place I’d rather be, no place I’d rather be, here in Your love, here in Your love.

There is power in the name of Jesus. There is power in the name of Jesus. There is power in the name of Jesus to break every chain, break every chain, break every chain.

All sufficient sacrifice, so freely given, such price bought our redemption, heaven’s gates swing wide.

There’s an army rising up. There’s an army rising up. There’s an army rising up to break every chain, break every chain, break every chain.

You provide the fire, I’ll provide the sacrifice. You provide the Spirit, and I will open up inside.

Fill me up God, fill me up God, fill me up God, fill me up.

Love of God, overflow, permeate, all my soul.

I’m so forgetful, but You always remind me, You’re the only one who brings me peace.

So I come, Lord I come, I come, Lord I come

To tell I love You, to tell You I need You, to tell you there’s no better place than in Your arms.

To tell You I’m sorry, for running in circles, for placing my focus on the waves, not on Your face. You’re the only who brings me peace.

God, I love You. So often I fall short of that but still I come back because You remind me of who You are and how great Your affections are for me. Remind me time and time again that there is no better place for me than in Your arms, in Your love. May I find my rest in Your presence. May I find that every chain around my heart and soul would be broken at the feet of the Lord Most High. In the name of Jesus, I live in freedom because He was the atoning sacrifice. I am redeemed and I will sing of His great love. You’re the one who brings me peace in the midst of my circumstances. You turn my mourning into joy and You lift me up on eagle’s wings. Come live in my life and fill me up each day with Your Spirit so that I may walk faithfully with my heart and hope set on things above. Set a fire in my soul that cannot be extinguished, a passion that does not die because time passes by. I want a to live in a relationship that grows deeper and deeper to the end of my days. You lift my burdens when I trust and lay everything at Your feet. Help me to surrender the deepest parts of my heart so that I may be able to live radically for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Thank You for blessing me so much this year. I eagerly await an expect You to do immeasurably more than I can imagine because my God is infinite. You are with me, so why do I fear? Jesus, be my Lord and Savior, my best friend. Grow me and mature me. May I advance the Kingdom of God one step at time through Your grace that enables me. In Jesus name, Amen.

heartafteryou:

Hope is one of the theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not, as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

C.S. Lewis

Years ago, Dave Phillips and his wife, Lynn, had a talk about the callings they felt God was stirring in them. As they discussed what they were most passionate about, they agreed that bringing relief to suffering children and reaching the next generation with the gospel were at the top of the list. The thought of starting a relief agency was considered, but Dave’s response was, “But that would mean I have to talk in front of people.” By nature, Dave is a very quiet, behind-the-scenes man.

But after much prayer, Dave set aside his fears, and he and Lynn started Children’s Hunger Fund out of their garage. Six weeks after CHF was launched, in January of 1992, he received a phone call from the director of a cancer treatment center in Honduras asking if there was any way he could obtain a certain drug for seven children who would die without it. Dave wrote down the name of the drug and told the director that he had no idea how to get this type of drug. They then prayed over the phone and asked God to provide.

As Dave hung up the phone, before he even let go of the receiver, the phone rang again. It was a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey asking Dave if he would have any use for 48,000 vials of that exact drug! Not only did they offer him eight million dollars’ worth of this drug, but they told him they would airlift it to anyplace in the world! Dave would later learn that the company was one of only two that manufactured this particular drug in the United States.

Within forty-eight hours, Dave had the drug sent to the treatment center in Honduras and to twenty other locations as well. It was then he believed firmly that God was at work, validating his calling to this ministry.

Year after year, God continues to provide supernaturally. Today they have distributed more than $950 million in food and other relief to more than ten million kids in seventy countries and thirty-two states. Children’s Hunger Fund has distributed more than 150 million pounds of food and 110 million toys.

The uniqueness of CHF is that they train and equip volunteers from local churches to distribute the food through home deliveries in the United States and other countries. Going from family to family, they find the poorest of the poor and share not only food but love and the gospel. Forbes.com consistently rates CHF at the top of their list of America’s most cost-effective charities.

One of the most beautiful things about this story is that if you met Dave, you would never think he was the CEO of a major organization. He is a quiet, soft-spoken man—not the type you envision leading a movement. His power doesn’t necessarily come from a natural giftedness but from a dedicated prayer life. As a close, personal friend of Dave’s, I don’t know that I’ve ever spent time with him without spending time in prayer.

Dave lives a life we should long for and, incredibly, the kind of life that is offered to us as well. A life in which people know that our accomplishments could not have been attained by our own power. A life that brings glory to God in heaven.

- Forgotten God, by Francis Chan

One of the many testimonies of how God works through ordinary people through the power of the Holy Spirit. 

logicandheart:

So what we have in Romans 1:18 to 3:20 is a demonstration of sin and guilt in the heart and life of every human being, both Jew and Gentile. The beginning of that section is what we are taking up this morning at Romans 1:18.

Now what should I respond if someone were to say, “Oh no! We are going to be slogging our way through sin and guilt for months. This is going to be really oppressive”? To that person I want to say three things:

1. Superficial diagnoses lead to false remedies.

Superficial diagnoses lead to false remedies and no cures. If you want to find true remedies for a disease, and if you want to bring a lasting cure to the people who are diseased, then you need more than a superficial grasp of the disease itself. Those who care most about a cure for AIDS or cancer, spend almost all their time studying the disease.

2. Understanding sin and wrath will make you wiser.

Profound understanding of sin and wrath will make you a far wiser person about human nature - your own and others. And if you are wiser about the nature of the human soul, you will be able to fight your own sin more successfully, and you will be able to bless others more deeply with your insight and counsel. I have pled with women and men in this church in recent months that what we need to nurture and cultivate here at Bethlehem over the next decades is sages -men and women who ripen with years into deeply sagacious people: wise, discerning, penetrating, deep lovers of people and deep knowers of human nature and God’s nature, who can see deeply into the tangle of sin and sacredness that perplexes the saints and threatens to undo us. If you run away from the study of sinful human nature - if you say, I don’t like to think about sin - then you run away from yourself, and you run away from wisdom, and, worst of all, you run away from the deepest kinds of love.

3. Knowing the nature of sin and wrath will cause you to cherish the gospel.

Probably the most important thing I would say, and the most firmly rooted in Romans 1:18, is that knowing the true condition of your heart and the nature of sin and the magnitude and justice of the wrath of God will cause you to understand the mighty gospel, and love it, and cherish it, and feast on it, and share it as never before. And this is crucial because this is the way the gospel saves believers. If you don’t understand the gospel, if you don’t cherish it and look to it and feed on it day after day, it won’t save you (see 1 Cor. 15:1-3; Col. 1:23). Knowing sin and wrath will help you do that.

- John Piper, The Wrath of God Against Ungodliness and Unrighteousness

All of this strikes me as extremely true.  I see it in my own heart.  I would much rather skip over the “sin stuff,” the “diagnosis stuff,”  and simply hear the uplifting part.  But, as I sit here and think about it, and consider what Pastor John is saying through this text, it’s becoming slightly clearer to me how much I haven’t considered deeply the gravity and weight of my sin, and the futility and wrath that I have been saved from.  

How much of my shallow repentance has been fulled by a shoo-shooing of the bad and sad and discouraging thoughts of the reality of my sin?  

How much of my un-transformed heart has been able to hide from the bright, shining, surgical light of Jesus, because I don’t want to sit and squirm and allow his Holy Spirit to x-ray all the garbage that might be remaining?

How much have I shied away from preaching and speaking boldly about others sin out of a fear of man, a want for approval?

Oh Lord, give me faith-filled courage!  Courage to speak boldly that people are in  need of a Savior and this gospel message day by day, in order to fight the battle against the world, the flesh, and the Devil.  Courage to allow Jesus to examine my heart, to do as David asks for in Psalm 139 - 

Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!

“If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18).

Our God is not one of division, but one of unity. Our God is not a one of judgement and condemnation, but of grace and reconciliation. Far be it that we as His beloved children should stray from this truth. Let us seek to honor God in every relationship of ours, with the people we find lovable and those who we don’t. Jesus Christ died to bring us in our broken relationship into reconciliation with God. Since we have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, let us  keep in step with the Spirit.