Wheels of Glory! Blog

Ruins

Posted in Product Reviews, Teaching & Musings | January 13th, 2021 | by

I don’t vividly remember the first time I heard this song.

All I remember was when its message came home to me.

My acclimation to the power of Ruins was actually relatively gradual. I kept hearing it because I kept listening to the EP it is featured on. I had run across Ledger’s music recently, and people kept talking about Ruins being their favorite song on the EP. I vaguely remember being disappointed and thinking that it was about a breakup. I guess I hadn’t really been listening to the lyrics.

Just stay there for a minute

And just don’t move any closer, move closer

I just don’t know if I can take it

It feels like overexposure; move closer

Brick by brick and scar by scar

It’s taken me years to put up these guards

I don’t want to be hurt again

It’s it disaster or destiny

I feel safer now You’re close to me

And fall apart –

Once again, I’m broken; I’m crumbled

I’m in pieces on the floor

Don’t You know the damage You’ve done is just irreparable?

You’ll find me in the wreckage of a love so severe

And it’s clear, I just don’t know what I’m doing

Your love left me in ruins

Won’t You ruin me again?

If you’ve ever experienced a real encounter with the Lord of Love, you will probably resonate with these lyrics to some extent. Every time I come in contact with that much raw love and power mixed together, I become aware all over again that He is capable of ruining me – in the best way possible.

I become aware that He will make me into His image, and that is the complete and utter antithesis of the image that the world will try to fit me into. I will never again fully ‘fit in’ with the world. That’s what it means to be ‘ruined’ for anything but Jesus. Nothing ever will take His place in my life, and everything else pales and vanishes in comparison to His overwhelming presence. But when you’ve looked on the Savior, you can’t ever totally look away.

Ruins certainly can seem like a terrifying prospect. Frankly, we don’t often think of ruins as a good thing. When the word ‘ruins’ is put forth, images of death and destruction come to mind.

And yet, that’s exactly what God is doing to us.

He is putting to death the things that would keep us away from Him. He’s destroying all that would hold us back.

But –

We like to be in control. We want to regulate how much we surrender to His refining fire, and we want to keep our tidy little world in our own hands.

But is to be ruined by such extravagant love really such a bad thing? Is giving up control to the God who created the universe eons ago so that it continues to work in perfect harmony so terrifying? When I really asked myself this question, all of my petty arguments suddenly seemed very weak and, quite frankly, absurd.

To tell the truth, God’s love, though beautiful and extravagant, is power unimaginable.

Violent like a tidal wave

You hit me, blitzed me, shattered in a hurricane

Your love is the frame that holds me through it

I’m perfectly ruined

When the love of God hits you, It is incapable of leaving its target unchanged. And through the shaking and the burning of the Great Refiner’s fire, His love is the frame that keeps us in one piece through it. Through His love, we can lay down our all and allow Him to burn away all of the chaff in our lives that isn’t what He wants to cultivate in us.

“As for me, I baptize you with water for repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove His sandals; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” ~ Matthew 3:11-12

Frankly, being ruined by God is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I’m so thankful that He came after a filthy wretch and ruined me for anything but Him. I’m more grateful than I can describe, and only one phrase remains in my heart and mind:

Won’t You ruin me again?

Watch my cover of this awesome song right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz4VXhAUkS0

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Wheels of Glory! Blog

Blindness vs. Sight in the Spirit

Posted in Teaching & Musings | October 6th, 2020 | by

“Be Thou my vision, oh, Lord of my heart. Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art. Thou be my best thought by day or by night; waking or sleeping, my vision, Thou art.”

Spiritual blindness abounds in the body today, and in many varying forms and degrees. One of my favorite passages of Scripture is John 9, when Jesus heals the man born blind. After the healing, the man’s fallout with the religious scholars, and his removal from the synagogue, Jesus comes to find him and makes this radical statement: “For judgement, I have come into the world so that the blind will see, and those who see will become blind.”

See, it’s only when we know how blind we are that we have the humility to let Jesus give us His eyes.

Why make those who ‘see’ blind? Because they only think they can see. Their pride has blinded them to the wonder and awe of the Gospel. They’ve gotten lost somewhere along the way. They can’t even identify Jesus for who He is.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding,” Proverbs 3:5 admonishes us. “Trust.” Don’t “Lean on your own understanding.”

It’s so easy to rely solely on our own experience and understanding of how the world or the Kingdom is supposed to work. We think we’ve got it all figured out. Those who disagree with our theology are “wrong.” We might even label them “deceived,” “demonically oppressed,” or “narcissists.”

That’s not to say that deception, demonic oppression, or narcissists aren’t out there – they most certainly are. But I think that one of the greatest deceptions out there is that we can see when we’re really blind.

In Jesus’s time, blindness didn’t mean quite the same thing that it does today. Blindness essentially meant that you couldn’t see well enough to perform normal tasks. Because there were no such things as corrective lenses, that meant if you had astigmatism or were near or farsighted, you were labeled blind. For example, I wouldn’t have been blind because my vision isn’t that bad (though I wear corrective lenses). My mom, on the other hand, can’t function normally without her glasses, and in Jesus’s time, she would have been considered blind.

As I said earlier, blindness comes in varying degrees, just as it did in Jesus’s time. The same principle applies here: we’re all suffering from one degree of blindness or another. “Now we see dimly, as in a mirror,” Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13. Our understanding of the Kingdom – of anything – is fuzzy at best.

Road, lake, and tree in the spring sunshine

Blindness isn’t (obviously) desirable. But in our quest for sight, let’s not forget that it is only the revelation of the Holy Spirit that can give us true sight. He’s the only one who can help us understand, and He gives us knowledge so that we can see.

From this story of the man born blind, one might almost infer that this man’s faith and thankfulness (his worship) were what gave him his spiritual sight. Doubt and unbelief were what blinded the religious scholars. They put too high and emphasis on proof and not enough on trust. I love how an ignorant, blind beggar knew more about the Kingdom of God than the scholars did. One touch from Jesus and this man knew who’d touched him. He may not have known who Jesus was or that Jesus was the Son of God, but he knew that God had healed him. I wonder if this was when he received the revelation of who God is.

Ask God to show you where you are blind – where you have doubt and unbelief that will prevent you from seeing clearly. Often, we can’t identify them ourselves because we can’t see them. We have to have the humility to admit those places when we ask, thought. Admitting that we’ve been wrong takes considerable humility – and it’s an area that I think that most people are still working on. I know that I am!

God, open my eyes to see the truth. Don’t let me be too proud to admit that I’m wrong. Help me to identify areas of blindness. Give me light to illuminate those places. Help me not to judge others for their blindness since I know that I’m in the same boat. We’re blinder than bats without You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

All photos courtesy pixabay.com

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Wheels of Glory! Blog

Christian Unity

Posted in Teaching & Musings | July 23rd, 2020 | by

Unity is probably one of the most contentious issues in the Body of Christ today. One quick Google search reveals this, and spending much time on social media makes it painfully clear just how un-unified the Church is today. Arguments and petty disagreements proliferate. Differing points of theology have split churches, communities – even families. It’s heartbreaking, but how, in a divided world, do we practically apply the command of unity to our lives?

Clearly, it’s an important thing to God – the word appears in a number of different passages of Scripture, from various authors, in both Old and New Testaments.

woman reading Bible with pen and journal

“I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.” – 1 Corinthians 1:10

“Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.” – 1 Peter 3:8

“Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!” – Psalm 133:1

“Complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” – Philippians 2:2

Even Jesus said it when he was praying for His disciples – “That they may be one, even as we are one – I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” – John 17:23

But what is it really? And how can we practically apply it to our own lives?

Purple and yellow flowers in child's hand

Merriam-Webster defines unity as being oneness, accord, unification. Often, I think that we get unity and being carbon copies mixed up. Christian unity does not look like stamping out all individuality. It is oneness despite the fact that we are different.

I’ve heard a lot of people wax eloquent on how to get church bodies to unify – how to get the Church as a whole to become one. Usually, they attack what has been known as the “Identity Movement,” which has recently been a popular message encouraging people to find their identity as sons and daughters of Christ. (I’d just like to note here that their main argument is that the Body of Christ is supposed to be a family, not a lot of individuals. More on this in a second). The “Identity Movement” is creating selfish people, they protest.

And they aren’t wrong – when identity is preached apart from Jesus. When it is preached within the confines of our humanity, it really can be a very harmful message because it does create a lot of selfish individuals. It can tear down, rather than build up, unity in the Church.

We have to face the hard fact that oneness will never come out of our focus on unity. We are utterly incapable of achieving it. So how, you ask, do we get unity if Jesus Himself commanded us to be one?

The answer is a lot more simple (though perhaps easier said than done) than it first seems. The answer is Jesus. We will never become one if we focus our efforts on unity, but when we all focus our eyes on Jesus instead, unity is a direct result. It’s actually a natural progression. The same thing is true of any of the fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, etc. When our gaze on the face of Christ is unwavering, these things will happen naturally because we will begin to emulate Him.

But this unwavering gaze starts in our own hearts – rarely does it begin in a group setting, and even when it does, it usually is between God and the individual. In his book The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer states it this way. (Note that when he refers to ‘religion,’ he is using an old-fashioned term for ‘faith.’)

“Someone may fear that we are magnifying private religion out of all proportion, that the “us” in the New Testament is being displaced by a selfish “I.” Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshippers meeting together each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become “unity” conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship. Social [corporate] religion is perfected when private religion is purified. The body becomes stronger as its members become healthier. The whole Church of God gains when the members that compose it begin to seek a better and a higher life.” – A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God.

I have successfully managed to live in relative unity with a number of other individuals for the duration of my personal walk with Christ. These people are members of my family, and let me tell you, when our private walk with Christ is purified, our unity grows. When one (or several) of us are drifting from that close walk with Christ, we have more trouble being one with the people around us.

The Kingdom of Heaven does look like a family, as those who condemn the “identity movement” pronounce. But that’s the beauty of being a family – though we are massively different, we can be one as we run after the same goal – Jesus. And as our personal identity in Christ grows, our corporate identity in Christ grows as well.

And that’s unity in a nutshell. It’s oneness that comes from the gaze of our individual souls upon Jesus. Running after the same goal (any goal) is one of the best ways to connect with someone. Look at the number of sports fans, coffee connoisseurs, etc. So if we run after Jesus, who is the Author of unity, how much more will we become one if our wholehearted devotion is toward Him?

All photos courtesy Pixabay.com

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Practice Makes Perfect

Posted in Teaching & Musings | June 23rd, 2020 | by

I started my career as a novelist when I was thirteen. That’s right – thirteen. One January afternoon, I sat down at the computer, opened a blank document, and started typing. My first impression was that it took forever to fill just one page. But I chipped away at it, and I finished my first book when I was fourteen. Trust me, I was pleased with myself! I felt that I had poured my heart and my soul into it, and I proudly presented it to my siblings – and was rather crestfallen when they weren’t impressed. When they told me it had no plot. When they told me that I desperately needed to develop my characters.

You know, I could have given up. I could have said, “Skip it! I’ll leave the writing to the experts!” But I didn’t. I went ahead and wrote a second book. Actually, it wasn’t that much better than the first. It still lacked a believable plot, and the character development was abysmal. I could have given up again. But I didn’t. Instead, I wrote a third book. And then a fourth. And finally, a fifth.

By this point, I was sixteen, and it had been about three years since I’d first started writing. And I still hadn’t produced a decent book. I crafted words and plots in my head and tried to write them out. Dozens of stories flowed out of my fingertips, but I found that I was best at beginning books. Finishing them was quite another matter. My fifth book had been better than any of the others that I’d finished, so one day, when I was eighteen, I began its first major revision. If you would have told me that that was the first of six revisions that I would put it through, I would have laughed at you – and probably given up on the spot. But – I didn’t.

With fear and trepidation, I handed it over to be read by people with different tastes than me, and their reaction was relatively positive. I could hardly believe it. It had taken seven years, but I’d finally produced something worth reading. Within a couple of months, I’d finished up another book I’d been working on, and it was met with overwhelming positivity. I was ecstatic.

But as I thought back over my journey of learning to write, I knew that though I’d put blood, sweat, and tears into these narratives, it was the practice that had gotten me to where I’d gone. I couldn’t have sat down as a now twenty-year-old and written either book if I’d chosen to give up after my first failure – or even if I’d never tried. While the maturity that I’d gained in those last seven years definitely contributed to those successes, they hadn’t come out of nowhere. They came from practice.

If you would have told me that I was going to be twenty before I turned out a book that I could be proud to read aloud when I first started this crazy journey, I wouldn’t have believed you. And it would have been discouraging to hear.

But the truth is that practice is what makes perfect. Most of us aren’t born with giftings that they are just good at. They have to practice those gifts. I have. Don’t think that I haven’t thrown hours and hours at learning to play the piano and guitar. But practice doesn’t come by sitting around and pretending or imagining that you’re doing something. It comes through doing it. Even if you feel like a failure at first. Even if you need to improve. Because honestly, if God calls you to something, start practicing now so that you’ll be ready when you land in the place where He’s calling you to.

He spoke to me years ago and told me that I was going to lead worship. So I have trained myself in leading worship, selecting setlists, and guiding my awesome band as we play together both in the home and in public. I know that on that day when I land where God has called me to be, I want to be as ready as I can be. So I’ve practiced, because practice is what makes perfect.

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