STOP THE TRAFFIK

YOUTH CENTER "GLASNOST"

A voice in the urban desert

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Monday, November 27, 2006

Getting the bias right - Intimacy and involvement

These are bowling balls from a sport called lawn bowls. Lawn Bowls is a game played by old people dressed in smart white suits and is much harder than it looks!
The secret to Bowls is in the ball, each ball is weighted to one side. This means that it will never roll in a straight line and one must aim to the side to compensate for the imbalance and allow the weight to draw the ball back to the centre.

Last night I spoke about making sure we get the balance in our lives right between Intimacy - Loving God, and Involvement - Loving our neighbour. When the Pharisees asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was He said we should love God with everything we are and everything we have. BUT he also said, without pausing for breath, we must love our neighbours (i.e. everybody else)
Each of us has a natural imbalance; we tend to favour intimacy or involvement, and left to our own devices we can neglect the other. So inorder for our lives to run true and for us to hold our lives in balance we must compensate and just as you roll the bowling ball off centre to allow the weight to curve it back to centre we must concentrate on areas that come less naturally.

My challange to you this week is to do just that, if you are an 'intimate' person sacrifice time with God to spend with people, you might well find you see God in the face of others. If you are a people lover, cancel all meetings, hold all calls and get before your God to hang out with him to worship, pray and listen to what He wants to say to you. Let him give you His heart for the people around you.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Dying to self

"Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified."

Dying to self, refusing the desires of the flesh, and instead choosing to follow Christ is not easy. anybody who tells you it is is a liar!

I read this quote from CS Lewis last week:
“The Christian way is different: harder and easier. Christ says ‘Give me all. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked – the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact I will give you, Myself: my own will shall become yours.”

When we realise that we were crucified with Christ on the cross and that we no longer live but Christ lives through us we find release, things do get easier! we can then choose to join with Paul and say that 'for me to live is christ and to die is gain'.

(Thanks to Guildford Boiler Room for bringing the quote to mind)