On Sunday, February 12, 1809, two women on either sides of the Atlantic Ocean gave birth to two sons. Nancy gave birth in a one-room cabin in Kentucky and Susannah gave birth in a large home in Shropshire, England.

The names of their sons?

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

Ironically, one son born into privilege left a legacy about the ability to fittest to survive and adapt. Darwin’s work would not only be applied to biology but also sociology and economics.

The other son born into poverty discerned that all men are created equal. Lincoln gave his life to hold the Union together based upon this truth.

Today, I am pausing to remember that my son (to be born in a little over two months) has the opportunity to leave his mark in the world. You and I have that same opportunity – to make a mark, to leave a legacy. Our legacies, the mark we make will be largely defined by what we believe and how we live it out.

May we seize our opportunities today!

Some of the posts on this blog are connected to Crash, North Phoenix‘s Sunday night worship service. While many readers of this blog are not involved in Crash, I wanted to share something with you because I thought it represented our passion to challenge people to love, think and serve like Jesus. My friend, Kelly Young, shares with the children who attend Crash during the middle of the service each week. She helps us challenge them to love, think and serve like Jesus at this point in their growth and development. She wrote the following piece, which I believe clearly communicates our passion to partner with parents as we seek to merge the influence of the church and the family.

Our Crash Conversations are family conversations, for all ages. As we communicate the overall purpose of each series, we include a more concrete objective for our children. Each week, we unpack this objective through the Crash Kids Moment in the worship service. This object highlights one virtue or character trait that children of God should cultivate. Together, these virtues help our children anchor a confident faith.

Earlier this week, Scott shared about our upcoming series, Restless People, which begins Sunday, February 12. As families engage this conversation, we want to encourage our children to consider perseverance. Perseverance is refusing to give up when life gets hard. We can cultivate perseverance in our lives by remembering what Jesus did for us, what God wants to do in us, and what we can do to help someone else’s faith.

You and I can probably list dozens of tests of perseverance in our lives. Trials, heartaches, crises, tough decisions, they abound in our every day living. For children though, tests of perseverance are often physical, like running a mile in PE. In terms of facing long-lasting or deeply embedded personal struggles, that is something that many of our children have to “look forward to” with maturity and life-experience. Because we live in a broken world, some of our children already know those kinds of struggles all too well.

Regardless of their experience, we can anchor our children in a confident faith today, so that when they face a crisis, they will turn towards God. We can anchor our children in a confident faith, so that they live everyday with a deep desire for God. We can anchor our children in a confident faith, so that they shape their whole lives in response to God’s presence with them and desire for them.

How? By teaching our children to cultivate perseverance. We encourage you to consider some questions and activities to unpack as a family during this series at Crash to begin cultivating perseverance together.

* Remembering the life of Jesus, particularly what we remember at Good Friday and celebrate on Easter, what did Jesus do for you?

* Plan to join us on Wednesday Feb 22 for an Ash Wednesday service where we will pause and remember our need for a savior, that without Jesus we were destined to die, to return to dust.

* Remembering what we know about God and how he cares for us, what does God want to do in your life?

* Read Psalm 136 and write a prayer or sing a song worshipping God together.

* Remembering stories from people in our lives, including people from the Bible, who have encouraged other people in their faith, how can you help someone else’s faith?

* Tell your children about a time in your life when you chose to persevere and trust God.

We’ve all been there. In some place. During some season. We got complacent and started coasting. We felt like we knew what we were doing. We were doing just enough to get by. Maybe put it on auto-pilot too often. And over time, we lose some of that fire, that drive, that passion and desperation we once had.

Some of us rediscovered that desperation and passion through unfortunate life experiences. In those difficult moments or crises, we became desperate for God to do something…ANYTHING! But, all too often, that momentum ended too.

But does it always take crises and tragedies and suffering to awaken us to do something about our restless complacency? Are we simply victims of our circumstances and dependent on bad things to make us the kind of people who are hungry for God to move in our lives?

What would it mean for us to become desperate people? What would it look like to desire God more than anything else in our lives? What attitudes, habits, and disciplines have people who experienced the desperation engaged in to express their longing for God to move in a powerful way through them?

And how does Ash Wednesday figure into all of this? Why do we give up things for Lent? How do these traditions factor into our lives today? What is their value?

As we prepare to gather on Ash Wednesday and enter into the Lenten season, journeying towards Good Friday and Easter, we are going to engage these questions. We will see how people throughout the Scriptures were awakened out of their complacency, moved out of their restlessness, and experienced God in powerful and precedented ways. We are praying that we become people who are desperate for God to move every day.

As we begin this journey together, I encourage you to reflect on this prayer from Sir Francis Drake. My pastor, Dan Yeary, shared it during NPHX‘s morning service yesterday and it reminded me of the first time I heard it in a message from Pastor Craig Groeschel at a Catalyst Conference.

Disturb us, Lord,

when we are too pleased with ourselves,

When our dreams have come true

Because we dreamed too little,

When we arrived safely

Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord,

when with the abundance of things we possess

We have lost our thirst

For the waters of life;

Having fallen in love with life,

(When) we have ceased to dream of eternity

And in our efforts to build a new earth,

We have allowed our vision

Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,

To venture on wilder seas

Where storms will show Your mastery;

Where losing sight of land,

We shall find the stars.

We ask you to push back

The horizons of our hopes;

And to push back the future

In strength, courage, hope, and love.

This we ask in the name of our Captain,

Who is Jesus Christ.

Join us Sunday night, February 12th, for the beginning of our new Crash series, Restless People. 

I do my best to keep my blog posts here as open and relevant as possible to all of my readers. But today, I feel compelled to share how with my pastor and church staffer friends. Many of us suffer from a weekly phenomenon I call “Monday morning hangover”. A long Sunday leads to a full calendar Monday without a full energy tank.

I know that I have Monday morning hangover from several symptoms. First, I get in the car to drive my wife to work and instead of turning towards her office, I instinctively turn towards the church. She corrects me and we get a good laugh out of the experience. Second, I get in later that I want, lack the focus I desire and get behind in my task list by the time I hit the meeting schedule that takes out most of my day. Third, I don’t have the creativity and imagination to find words for sermons, lessons, emails or blogs that I normally find easily. Work is tougher than normal. Four, a disappointing conversation, lackluster attendance numbers or an error on my part devastates me in an unreasonable manner.

So, how do you kick the Monday morning hangover? I do it in five ways.

1. Exercise. I do my very best to exercise every Monday morning. I need it most on Mondays and if I get Mondays in, I typically make it happen the rest of the week. Currently, I am running 5-5.5 miles on Mondays and that 50-55 minutes is a great time to push back the fatigue and get a fresh wind for the week. Whether you lift weights, walk, run, or do a program like P90X or Insanity, break a sweat on Monday morning.

2. Get into the Scriptures. And not just for your next sermon or lesson. This month, I have been reading the book of Acts. So this morning, I listened to Acts 16-23 during my run. Allow God to minister to you before you attempt to minister to anyone else.

3. Pray. Take time to get before God and thank Him for a new morning, full of new grace and mercy for you and all you lead. Pray for the needs you discovered on Sunday, for the people who made decisions and commitments. Repent for the blunders you made and thank God for using someone like you to further His kingdom.

4. Spend time with some people encourage you or in some activity that encourages you. In 2010/2011, I tutored a 2nd grader on Monday mornings. If nothing else, I knew that hour was well-spent. I knew that for those 60 minutes with that one boy, I was making a difference by helping him improve his English, gain confidence in reading and feel valued by someone older. I take time on Mondays to call or IM friends who will encourage me. I make sure and laugh with co-workers. I read a few blogs that renew my perspective and fill me with hope. I talk with teammates about good things God did over the weekend and we celebrate them together.

5. Drink some coffee. If you knew me, you knew I had to put it in there. I don’t overdo it on Mondays, since I typically do caffeine in the morning AND afternoon on Sunday. But I grab some java after my run on Monday mornings. It definitely takes the edge off and I love that bean water.

Regardless of whether you are a pastor or church staffer or a teacher or involved in business, I hope that today is day full of encouragement and hope for you. If you are struggling, consider one or all five of these things as some ways that God could renew you and your perspective today.

“Preach the Gospel at all times. And when necessary, use words.” -St. Francis of Assisi

I bought a t-shirt with this quote on it when I was a teenager at a conference for Christian students. I heard these words repeated many times in books, sermons, arguments, and blog posts. These words were used to justify being an example to others, not ramming the good news down someone’s throat (ramming and good news never go well together). During a different season in my life, I used this quote to question the motive what I called “drive-by evangelism”.

Somewhere along the way, the original saying (attributed to Francis) got shortened to – “Preach the gospel; if necessary, use words“. St. Francis was a well-known monk, whose work and writings in the Middle Ages continue to influence many today. There is just one problem with this popular and well-known saying – St. Francis didn’t write it.

Those words cannot be traced to any writings or sermons of St. Francis, nor any stories told about him within 200 years of his death. The first appearance of this phrase with attribution to St. Francis was 200 years after his death. Long after those who lived with him were dead as well. Many believe that someone said this and tagged St. Francis’ name on it, so it would get more press.

A modern equivalent would go something like this. You create a cool gadget or device. You want it to be successful and marketable. So you say Steve Jobs helped design it. You share a quote from Steve, about how he thought it was pretty cool. Since he was the brains behind the iPhone and the iPad and the MacBook Air (and those are all pretty cool), the general public believes this must be pretty cool too. The only problem is that Steve Jobs didn’t really make it and the product is nowhere near incredible.

The problem with those infamous words from someone other than St. Francis isn’t just that Francis didn’t say that (although we could argue whether the words reflect his spirit). The problem is that it puts into question whether our words are necessary. And words are incredibly necessary. They are essential.

Now, I have seen some people who have been all words and no action. They preach at a person about hell and sin, while the person is hungry or thirsty or in serious physical need. It’s like the infamous quote from Peanuts where Snoopy is begging for food and Charlie Brown tells him to “Be of good cheer” and then goes on his merry way. That’s not the right approach. However, some overreact and say “we are just going to show them the gospel, show them love, and if we need to, we will open our mouths too.”

But that’s just as much over the edge as the person we are reacting against. Both matter (words and deeds), both are important. And you are going to have to determine which are needed in the moments and relationships you are in. In the book of Matthew, chapter 5, Jesus says the following.

Many of us have forgotten that we celebrated Christmas a few weeks ago. We have a struggle keeping that season and reality in mind throughout the whole year. For example, if you attend church, you will hear sermons from passages of the Scripture during the Christmas season that you will not hear from during the rest of the year. It is as if those passages are seasonally, not perenially, relevant. Even the concept of the Incarnation (God taking human flesh in the person of Jesus) gets a lot of noise and attention during December but much less fanfare the other 11 months.

One of the most significant verses that we read during the Christmas season is John 1:14. In the NIV, this verse reads, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” But we miss the rest of the verse – “We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” 

It is that final phrase “full of grace and truth” that I have been chewing on lately in my personal moments of reflection and prayer. Maybe I find those words to be timely because they are so absent in election season and political campaigning. Maybe it is because I have been in conversations or relationships where just one or the other was present, not both. I have talked with people who classify themselves as a “grace person” or a “truth person”, as if it were only possible to be one or the other.

When someone asks me about my religious stance, my answer is typically, “I follow Jesus and I happen to attend a Baptist church.” I have overheard many that I know use the phrase “follower of Jesus” or “Christ-follower” to describe someone that might also be known as a “Christian”. From where I sit, if we are following Jesus and becoming more like him, it is always BOTH, full of grace AND truth. We do not have the luxury of embracing just one or the other.

What I find even more intriguing is that Jesus was full of grace and truth, but he seemed to express different postures and responses to different groups based upon their response to Him. To those who broken and knew it, he was full of grace. To those who were arrogant and religious, he was brutally truthful. To those who were open and listened, he was full of grace. To those who were closed off, he was full of truth. To those who said, “Please forgive me”, he extended grace. To those who said, “I will not forgive others”, he brought harsh truth.

In a world where anonymous comments viscously attack one another on blogs, where wusses turn into warriors behind a keyboard, in a culture where we attack first and ask questions later, where we reach for labels and judgment quickly, where we seek to condemn before we seek to understand…what would it look like to follow Jesus? To be like Him? To be full of grace AND truth?

I think this one verse, John 1:14, is a picture that we need to embrace and meditate on in 2012. I think we all need to be full of grace and truth, as we follow the One who can do more than we ask or imagine within us by the power of his Holy Spirit.

Where does this idea challenge you the most?

What’s your biggest roadblock to being a person that is full of grace and truth?

Over the past several months, I have discovered a conversation taking place in several venues regarding the state of manhood in America. Some venues are very religious and others are incredibly secular, even anti-religious.

At TED, an incredible conference for leading thinkers in the area of technology, education and design, Phillip Zimbardo asked the question “Are we headed for the demise of guys?” and challenged the TED community to pursue solutions. You can watch the 5 minute video here.

Later, I discovered an article in Relevant Magazine which created a great deal of buzz, regarding the ongoing conversations regarding gender roles and our conceptions of what manhood looks like. You can check out that article here.

I have continued to reflect on these two pieces again and again over the last month. I know this can be a fairly polarizing issue. But I feel drawn into defining the problem and addressing solutions. As a 27 year old husband, soon-to-be father of a son, a pastor who primarily works with young adults, and a friend to so many twenty-something men, this is not a theoretical issue. But it is a difficult challenge nevertheless.

So, I would love to know your thoughts on it and I look forward to fleshing out mine in a future post here on the blog. For now, watch the video and read the article. THEN, share a comment below. I am going to moderate comments on this one to keep everyone honest!

In light of these two pieces, what do you think of the state of manhood in America?