Radical Christian Living By Learning How To Live For God By Learning How To Worship God » Radical Awakening

Do We Love Our Life Too Much?

Jason Koeppe — Sun, 16 May 2010 07:06:14 +0000

I used to fear the return of Christ.

Then, at some point later in my walk, the fear of His return turned into resistance for lack of a better word. In other words, I had (and have) a great life here on Earth and so while I would have told you I loved Jesus dearly (more on that a bit later), I wasn’t quite ready for Him to come back.

Looking back, I do believe that a large part of it was that I wasn’t well versed in scripture and had always heard about all the “bad stuff” in the book of Revelation. So I figured there would be a lot of “bad” before we got to the “good” of Jesus returning. However, this lack of biblical understanding and being infant in my faith so to speak wasn’t the only factor. I now believe I suffered from then an addiction of sorts. An addiction to “the good life” here on earth I had built for myself.

This is going to be a short post and as such, let me throw out some tough scriptures that the Lord is allowing me to chew on these days. Scriptures that I’ve both read and heard HUNDREDS of times before now, but somehow I’m just now recognizing a HUGE blind spot in my life up until now. Let me openly confess that I have asked God to forgive me for any willful disobedience to His word and any continued resistance even now as I wrestle out what they mean to me, my family, and how we live.

I want to make sure that no one that reads this blog ever feels any condemnation from me or anything I post and I wanna also remind you all to follow Christ not Jason Koeppe. Scripture is what guides our lives not what some blogger or even a pastor says. HOWEVER, one of the reasons I started this blog was because I felt deep in my spirit that I/we were and are being called to more and that there are, as a result, a LOT of sleeping Christians (not sure that isn’t an oxymoron) who think they’re ok (translate saved and going to heaven) because they prayed a prayer, go to church and tithe.

Anyway, here is the question I pose to you with these scriptures…”What Does the Gospel Demand”?

Luke 9:57-62

Luke 14:33

Matthew 10:37-39

As I walk through and unpack all I can in these and other verses in scripture, I’ll record what God is doing in my life as a result. The question is simple, but the answer might take us places we have never been. Here’s the bottom line…

Do I/YOU believe the Bible?

May God give us ears to hear and eyes to see the truth found in His word. I pray God that I nor anyone who reads these posts would ignore them or willfully disobey them but rather be transformed by them and let it completely change the way we live. More to come…soon.

The Goal of God’s Love May Not Be What You Think It Is

Jason Koeppe — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:00:47 +0000

Do people go to the Grand Canyon to increase their self-esteem? Probably not. This is, at least, a hint that the deepest joys in life come not from savoring the self, but from seeing splendor. And in the end even the Grand Canyon will not do. We were made to enjoy God.

We are all bent to believe that we are central in the universe. How shall we be cured of this joy-destroying disease? Perhaps by hearing afresh how radically God-centered reality is according to the Bible.

Both the Old and New Testament tell us that God’s loving us is a means to our glorifying him. “Christ became a servant … in order that the nations might glorify God for his mercy” (Romans 15:8-9). God has been merciful to us so that we would magnify him. We see it again in the words, “In love [God] destined us to adoption … to the praise of the glory of His grace” (Ephesians 1:4-6). In other words, the goal of God’s loving us is that we might praise him. One more illustration from Psalm 86:12-13: “I will glorify your name forever. For your lovingkindness toward me is great.” God’s love is the ground. His glory is the goal.

This is shocking. The love of God is not God’s making much of us, but God’s saving us from self-centeredness so that we can enjoy making much of him forever. And our love to others is not our making much of them, but helping them to find satisfaction in making much of God. True love aims at satisfying people in the glory of God. Any love that terminates on man is eventually destructive. It does not lead people to the only lasting joy, namely, God. Love must be God-centered, or it is not true love; it leaves people without their final hope of joy.

Take the cross of Christ, for example. The death of Jesus Christ is the ultimate expression of divine love: “God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Yet the Bible also says that the aim of the death of Christ was “to demonstrate [God's] righteousness, because in the forbearance of God he passed over the sins previously committed” (Romans 3:25). Passing over sins creates a huge problem for the righteousness of God. It makes him look like a judge who lets criminals go free without punishment. In other words, the mercy of God puts the justice of God in jeopardy.

So to vindicate his justice he does the unthinkable – he puts his Son to death as the substitute penalty for our sins. The cross makes it plain to everyone that God does not sweep evil under the rug of the universe. He punishes it in Jesus for those who believe.

But notice that this ultimately loving act has at the center of it the vindication of the righteousness of God. Good Friday love is God-glorifying love. God exalts God at the cross. If he didn’t, he could not be just and rescue us from sin. But it is a mistake to say, “Well, if the aim was to rescue us, then we were the ultimate goal of the cross.” No, we were rescued from sin in order that we might see and savor the glory of God. This is the ultimately loving aim of Christ’s death. He did not die to make much of us, but to free us to enjoy making much of God forever.

It is profoundly wrong to turn the cross into a proof that self-esteem is the root of mental health. If I stand before the love of God and do not feel a healthy, satisfying, freeing joy unless I turn that love into an echo of my self-esteem, then I am like a man who stands before the Grand Canyon and feels no satisfying wonder until he translates the canyon into a case for his own significance. That is not the presence of mental health, but bondage to self.

The cure for this bondage is to see that God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving act. In exalting himself – Grand Canyon-like – he gets the glory and we get the joy. The greatest news in all the world is that there is no final conflict between my passion for joy and God’s passion for his glory. The knot that ties these together is the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. Jesus Christ died and rose again to forgive the treason of our souls, which have turned from savoring God to savoring self. In the cross of Christ, God rescues us from the house of mirrors and leads us out to the mountains and canyons of his majesty. Nothing satisfies us – or magnifies him – more.

By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org

Originally published in Dallas Morning News.

It’s Crazy…Isn’t It?

Jason Koeppe — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:19:50 +0000

I recently heard about a book that seemed to really speak to the heart of what this site is all about. It’s called Crazy Love by Francis Chan. I haven’t finished it yet, but I want to share just a small section of content from the back of the book and one quote from the inside. Check this out:

Have you ever felt like we were missing it?

It’s crazy if you think about it. The God of the universe – the Creator of nitrogen and pine needles…galaxies and E-minor – loves us with a radical, unconditional, self-sacrificing love. And what’s our typical response? We go to church, sing some songs and try not to cuss.

Whether you’ve verbalized it yet or not…we all know something’s wrong.

Why are there are over 350,000,000,000 BILLION galaxies…that we know of, most of which the human race has only seen in the last few years due to the Hubble telescope?
Why does a caterpillar have 228 separate muscles in it’s head (that’s a lot for a bug don’t you think)?
The average elm tree has approx 6M leaves on it
Your own heart generates enough pressure to squirt blood up to 30 feet
He didn’t have to put over 3,000 species of trees within 1 sq mile in the Amazon jungle or so many different kinds of laughter (you know…wheezes, snorts, quiet, loud, obnoxious), but he did.
Did you know that spiders, when spinning their web can produce up to 60 ft of silk per hr while simultaneously producing a special oil on their feet so they don’t stick to their own web…that deserves some respect!
When you get goose bumps, the hair in your follicles is actually helping you stay warmer by trapping heat.
Or have you ever marveled at the fact that plants take in Carbon dioxide and produce oxygen?
And those same plants started as a seed in the dirt, some watered some not, that transformed and defied gravity and poked their head/sprout out of the ground and into the sunlight.

The rest of the back cover says…

Does something deep inside your heart long to break free from the status quo? Are you hungry for an authentic faith that addresses the problems of our world in tangible, even radical solutions? God is calling you to a passionate love relationship with Himself. Because the answer to religious complacency isn’t working harder at a list of dos and don’ts – it’s falling in love with God. And once you encoutner His love as Francis describes it, you’ll never be the same.

Because when you’re wildly in love with someone…it changes everything.

And here’s a quote from the book:

“Whatever God’s reasons for such diversity, creativity and sophistication in the universe, on earth and in our own bodies the point of it all is His glory.”

Radical Awakening – You Betchya

Jason Koeppe — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:04:56 +0000

So I’m sifting through my email one day after I wrote the about page for this blog which attempts to describe why this blog exists; and that is:

To help Christians who are hungry for more of God and are searching to find information that will disciple them and help them grow.
To help wake up sleeping Christians who aren’t hungry enough and have fallen into a spiritual lethargy of sorts.

Anyway, as I’m going through my email I come across this Facebook email with this subject:

“Radical Awakening” sent you a message on Facebook…

Now I found out that is was an invitation for a webinar that was going to “be talking about a new evolutionary impulse coming through humanity now that is giving birth to a new paradigm of consciousness and a new paradigm of living. This new frequency is calling us to make fundamental changes in all aspects of our lives.”

Wow…not sure what the webinar was about (very much doubting it had a biblical basis but I don’t know), cause I didn’t attend. But this much I know…I LOVE the term/concept “Radical Awakening”. I love it cause that’s how I’d describe my experience with Jesus over the last 2 years and it’s how I’d describe one of the primary purposes for this site.

A bit down the message the webinar inviter says “and you’re being called to awaken to your true nature and transform your relationship to Life! ” I’d probably re-phrase this slightly to read more like this:

“and you’re being called to awaken to your spirit and inner person by the renewing of your mind and transform your relationship with Jesus! “

No matter where you are in your walk/relationship with the Lord, it can and should grow stronger. There is no coasting with God, you’re either drawing nearer to Him or drifting farther away from Him.

So which are you doing…drawing closer or drifting farther away? The day of the Lord’s return is close…it’s almost as if the world even senses that something’s up.

Chime in with your thoughts and feelings on this by commenting below!