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So, it’ 8:30 on Saturday morning and I’m sitting here in the dining room watching Laura finish her breakfast. Her normal schedule is 16 oz of formula in the morning, but she’s drinking out of a 7 oz bottle. That means the real trick for mom and dad is to notice when the bottle’s getting empty so we can refill it before she throws it on the floor. Then she’ll eat her Cheerios, so I guess she’s doing like I do and having her bowl of cereal in the morning, she’s just having it separately whereas I put my milk and Cheerios together. :-)

I think it’s going to be a fairly slow Saturday, which will be nice. Just some odd tasks to complete around the house, and I need to go to the music store and buy a new microphone boom since mine at church has totally stripped out and won’t hold my mic up. Oh, and I have to type up the powerpoint slides for tomorrow’s church service…. such are the hazards of getting a new projector.

Well Becky just got up now so I suppose that means it’s time for the day to start. Thank God for weekends. :-)

Within the last 7 days I’ve heard three separate sermons from the same passage. This doesn’t happen all the time. Well, for starters, usually I don’t even hear three sermons in a week. But the Moody conference last week gave me 12 general session messages to choose from. And when I get three in the same week, I think it’s time that I sit up and listen a little more closely.

The third sermon of the bunch was from a guest speaker at our church on Sunday. It honestly wasn’t even that interesting, was pretty shallow. But, it got me turned back to that passage. The other two messages were from D. A. Carson and Tony Evans. Now those will get your attention. :-)

The passage in question is Ephesians 3:14-21:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith–that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Tony Evans laid it out this way: Paul is praying for us to have more intimacy with Christ. Intimacy provides capacity, and the capacity provides power - God’s power. In other words, if we are lacking intimacy with Christ, our capacity for God to work in our lives is diminished. On the other hand, if we pursue intimacy with Christ, our capacity for God to work in our lives is increased, “more abundantly than all we ask or think”.

D. A. Carson, though, had the illustration while teaching this passage that will stick with me the longest. His question was this: why does Paul pray that “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” when he’s talking to Christians, who presumably already have Christ in their life? He told this story, which I’ll paraphrase in the first person:

“When my wife and I bought our first house, it was what they call a “handyman’s dream”. You know what that means… it needed a lot of work. There was black and silver wallpaper in the bedroom. The previous owners had two dogs who were rarely let out - there was still dog poo in the corners of the house. The walls were dingy. It needed lots and lots of work. When we bought the house and moved our stuff in, it was ours, we lived there, but we didn’t really inhabit the place yet.

“But as we continued to live there, we starting working on the house. We knocked down a wall to expand the kitchen. We painted. We took down the black and silver wallpaper. We cleaned up the dog poo. Had we stayed there longer, we undoubtedly would have built on an addition when the kids were born. After some period of time, we could step back, look at the house, and say, ‘wow, we really live here.’”

This, Dr. Carson says, is the difference Paul is talking about in Ephesians 3. When we first accept Christ, our lives are a lot like that handyman’s dream house. There’s black and silver wallpaper on the walls. There’s dog poo in the corners. (“Dog poo” is an exact quote from Carson, by the way. :-)) Christ is living there, but He doesn’t really “inhabit” the place in the way that Paul means. What God wants to do is to clean us up, to do that painting, take down the wallpaper, and remodel the place so that our Christ is really inhabiting our lives.

This illustration was the most striking, insightful picture to me from the whole conference. I want to let Christ continue transforming my life, until it just radiates from me that “Christ lives here”. With three sermons in a week, I think God was trying to tell me something. I hope I’m paying enough attention.

Gary Haugen spoke to us last Tuesday afternoon at the pastor’s conference at Moody. Gary is the president of the International Justice Mission, a Christian organization dedicated to providing “investigation strategies, legal expertise, and cutting-edge technology to rescue individual victims of injustice and abuse around the world.” His topic: God’s priority for justice, and how his organization is working in that area.

A little background on Gary first; the guy is a pit bull. He’s rather a small man, but his physique and flat-top haircut would lead you to believe he’s done a stint in the Marines. (That’s purely conjecture on my part, but you get the image.) He grew up in a Christian family, graduated from Harvard Law, went to work for the Department of Justice, and was the head of the UN task force that went to Rwanda to investigate the genocide back in the 90’s. He’s obviously seen a lot in his time.

Gary described his work in Rwanda briefly; harder than sifting through the dead bodies, he said, was having to interview the ones who survived. He then told us about people who have been subjects of persecution and injustice in various places: an african man who was randomly shot by the police and then jailed so he couldn’t talk about it; a 9-year-old girl sold into slavery, forced to roll cigarettes 12 hours a day; young girls sold into prostitution rings; our stomachs were turning after just the first description or two. I think we often choose to forget or ignore these brutalities, here in the USA. And in a sense, I can understand it. (More on that later.)

Gary then walked us through several scriptures that point out God’s concern for justice, for protecting the innocent and “defending the orphan and the widow”. Key among his texts was Micah 6:8: “He has shown you, o man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Justice is mentioned first. So why do we ignore it so often? I need to examine this in my own life.

I’ve always had sort of a built-in repulsion to “bleeding heart” presentations or pleas. Partly, I suppose, this is due to my engineering nature; I want the bare facts, not all the emotional things that can cloud the issue. But I think there’s another side to it; it’s not that I don’t care about the people; it’s more that I feel overwhelmed. What can I do? And so, if I can’t do anything, I’d much rather forget about it than be nagged by the reminders of a hopeless problem.

What Gary did on Tuesday was remind us that it isn’t hopeless. There are people who are doing good work. His mission is one. I may have to think about supporting it in the future. And prayer is our number one tool. Too often I forget to pray; I just get caught up in the helplessness of it all. Thanks to God for being the Helper of the helpless. There are no helpless situations with Him.

I got home early this morning… 1:45 AM. It’s sure good to be home. Everything’s pretty much the same as when I left, but the grass needs mowed again… oh joy. :-) But today starts a 4-day weekend for me, so, no complaints.

It’s Thursday afternoon and the conference is winding down. There’s only one general session left, and while there is anticipation to hear the speaker (Tony Evans), there is still the sadness, weariness, and relief that accompanies the end of a conference. How to describe it? It might be akin to the feeling at the end of a week at bible camp, at the end of a retreat, or even at the end of a college school year. Sadness because these past few days of enjoyment, learning, and fellowship with brothers will soon be over. Weariness because none of us have gotten enough sleep over the past few days. At 6:30 AM on Tuesday, the dining hall was full of breakfasters. By this morning, it was only half full at 7:00. Relief because I know within the next 12 hours I will be back at home, sleeping in my bed, with my wife at my side, and my daughter in the crib in the next room. Relief in getting back to a routine that is more “normal”, even if it means that I will again become the feeder instead of the one being fed. I think similar feelings accompany all endings; we look back with fondness and lingering regret even as we look forward, knowing that we won’t really be happy if things stay the same; life is made up not of stasis but of change. Memory provides the anchors that give us a mental, emotional, and spiritual stasis even in the midst of life’s perpetual motion.

Even for Thursday afternoon, the student center is still noisy with activity. Only the tenor of the noise has changed, from the buzz of Monday’s anticipation and the rumble of Tuesday’s discussion and rumination, to Thursday’s dull roar of completion and the rattle of luggage wheels crossing the tile floor on their way to the cars in the parking garage across the street. Still the people are here. Students reading. That software vendor finishing up a late lunch before taking down his display and heading home. Two young mothers sharing a table with three three small children and a double stroller. There are two men in a booth behind me who have been criticizing the worship band that’s been playing at sessions this week. “You can’t even hear yourself sing when they play.” “You don’t know whether you’re singing off or on.” “It’s only really good when you’re singing with the pipe organ.” It appears that some things never change.

There have been so many good teaching moments over the past several days, and so many ideas for writing, that I’m going to have to just write some short drafts of them right now, and then flesh them out as I have time over the next few weeks. It’s hard even to know where to start. We have heard from a huge cross-section of evangelical teaching. Ravi Zacharias, the Indian philosopher and logician. D. A. Carson, the intellectual professor par excellence. Gary Haugen, one-time leader of the United Nations team that investigated the Rwandan genocide. James MacDonald, the pastor of Harvest Church here in Chicago who at first glance would have you think that Tony Soprano, or better yet, Michael Chiklis’s character from The Shield had taken to preaching. Direct. Hard-nosed. Bang-on. Colin Smith, his Scottish brogue beginning to be tempered by 15 years in the States. Sam Solomon (I suspect somehow this was a pseudonym), an Afghani who warned us of the evils of the system of Islam. Joe Stowell, the long-time president of Moody, passing the torch to his recent successor. Each of these deserves an essay in their own right, and then separate essays for the things I learned from them.

I hope that, months from now, I can point back to this week as a defining point in my life this year. That sounds very dramatic, and I don’t mean it to be. But this conference has challenged me to a renewed passion for Christ, a renewed desire to lead in my family, a renewed desire to make a priority of the Word and prayer. I have been too dry for too long; when Erwin Lutzer warned this morning of the pitfall of losing clear focus, and neglecting the disciplines, I felt at the same time the prick of conviction that I have done so, and some small (though I keep thinking misplaced) comfort that I am not alone in that struggle. I get so caught up in the things of ministry that the time in prayer and the Word get neglected. I think of it this way: how many hours have I spent in the last month working on church stuff? I’ve worked on two websites, set up a blog, installed a new projector, led worship for an outdoor Sunday service, led a worship team practice or two, and that’s just what I can think of from the top of my head. I have spent hours and hours on good stuff like that. But how many hours have I spent in the Word and prayer? Honestly? An hour? Two? Certainly not more. I say this to my shame, and in the sadness that an active, busy life of ministry can be the mask for an inner man that too often is missing meals and not getting rest. I need to change some priorities. God help me as I try to get things balanced better.

This post is meandering more than the well-formed post would; I wander from observation to insight to self-examination and back again. Hopefully I didn’t lose you halfway through it; I guess I should remember that if you’ve gotten this far, you’ve read it. If you’re my friend and you read this, get back to me in a couple weeks and see how I’m doing. My only trouble with being consistent is being so on a regular basis.