The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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Us With God

December 28, 2007 / / 0 Comments

For the past couple of weeks here at Legacy we’ve taken a close look at the birth of Jesus in an effort to see God’s Incarnation, not as a complex and confusing theological abstraction but, as a way of looking at life and living life that changes our whole worldview. We’ve seen in all of the contrasts between human and divine at the stable scenes that the birth of Jesus shows us the low condition and the high potential of God’s creation. We’ve noticed in the genealogies that our God jumps right into the middle of our sin and grief to save us. By looking at all the different kinds of people in the birth stories we’ve concluded that the saving gospel of Jesus is for all. And in the vulnerable infant Jesus we’ve seen our own neediness and utter dependence on our Father God.

We’ve seen what God is doing by becoming human and living with us here on earth.

And this coming Sunday we’re wrapping up this short three-part series by identifying ways to live into the story, finding ways to jump in and join what God is doing in the Incarnation, how to embody this and live this out in our individual lives and as a church family.

Emmanuel is God with us, not God instead of us. And God with us means us with God.

In 1 Thessalonians 3, the apostle Paul uses a phrase that presents a striking way of viewing our partnership with our God. He refers to Timothy as “God’s fellow worker.” The idea of God and Timothy being co-laborers or co-workers with each other in the Kingdom—equals, if you will, in service—is such a scandalous thought that several later manuscripts of Paul’s letter change the wording to identify Timothy as Paul’s fellow worker or as God’s servant. But the earliest Greek manuscripts of the passage are crystal clear: Timothy is God’s fellow worker. It’s the same designation Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 3:9 when he describes Cephas, Apollos, and himself as “God’s fellow workers.”

That language should fill us with a tremendous sense of confidence and calling.

As God’s children we are in a partnership with him. God is a God of reconciliation. God’s work in the Christ is a work of reconciliation. And as God’s fellow workers, that’s our work, too!

Doing the work of Jesus, with Jesus, is the greatest part of being transformed into his image. We reflect his glory and are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, because of the ministry we’ve been given. Living like Jesus is not something we do to get salvation. It is our salvation! We are “being saved.” It’s a process—one that clearly sees the destination, but never at the expense of the journey. Jesus preached all the time about the Kingdom of Heaven. But all his teachings had to do with living right here, right now, with people on this earth, not in the afterlife.

Our calling as God’s children is to behave as a people who realize God made us to be his partners. Fellow workers. Co-reconcilers in the world.

Peace,

Allan

Grace & Peace

December 21, 2007 / / 0 Comments

“My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is his name.”  ~from Mary’s Magnificat, Luke 1:46-49

Our Father blessed Mary, the mother of Jesus, in ways that you and I cannot understand. Yet as we now enter the Christmas weekend, may we seriously and reverently take her words as our own. May our lips and our hearts understand and proclaim both the language of praise and the attitude of obligation.

May we comprehend fully the depth of our condition—our sin, our grief, our lost-ness—and understand completely the heights to which our loving and merciful God has lifted us. God has delivered us with a great salvation! He has reconciled us back to him through his holy Son. He has saved us! We are blessed with a conscious, eternal life with God and all the goodness of the eternal Kingdom of Heaven.

He has rescued us and enabled us to “serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” 

May we rejoice in the truth of his great love. May we find in God our Savior refuge and strength. May we welcome him, trust him, and rest in him. May we praise him for his faithfulness and grace. And may we honor him before the world.

May we “magnify the Lord” with the praise of our lips, the obedience of our lives, and active service in his Kingdom.

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Due to all the activities of the upcoming week—I’m not JUST watching football—the blogging will be sporadic at best. Please know that you have my family’s best wishes for a wonderful Christmas season and we pray for you all the grace and peace from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ.

Thank you for reading the blog. Thank you for your kind and thoughtful comments. Thank you for participating in reflective thought on the faith. May our Father bless us to better understand the faith so as to better live the faith.

Peace,

Allan

The Break & The Bowls

December 20, 2007 / / 1 Comment

FootballI love Christmas break.

For a couple of weeks nobody has to wake up super early and rush around to get ready in the mornings. There’s no agonizing at the kitchen table doing homework in the afternoons. Everybody stays up a little later in the evenings. We all get to spend much more time together playing games, laughing, sharing, relaxing. Everything slows way down and we get to enjoy each other in the family so much more. The trip to the mall to see Santa Claus always happens the afternoon of the last day of school, straight from the school after early release, and then out to eat and look at Christmas lights to kick off the break. One or two of the days is spent wrapping all the Christmas presents, which is always fun, anticipating together how this cousin or that grandparent is going to love this or that gift. There are those three or four days in the middle when we get to hang out with uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters and cousins that we don’t see nearly as often as we’d like. And everything just seems so relaxed.

And right in the middle of all that, TV gives us 32 college football bowl games!

How beautiful is that?

The bowl season coincides so wonderfully with the school break. It’s perfect. Very few commitments to interfere. Extra food and snacks all over the place. I love it.

The bowls start slow with a couple of matchups between lightweights in games with funny names. But then they increase in frequency and intensity—games with traditional names in familiar stadiums with floods of attached memories—before climaxing with the big four and the national championship. 32 of them! What’s not to love?

We’ll pick the kids up at 1:00 today, head straight to the mall, get our family picture made with St. Nick, eat a big meal together, check out the beautiful Christmas lights in the fancier neighborhoods (David & Krista, make sure your blowup Santa in your front yard is turned on), and then head home for the Poinsettia Bowl tilt between Navy and Utah. Nothing wrong with that.

In honor of the bowl season kicking off this evening, here are several of my favorite quotes from college football coaches. When the success of your career is predicated on being able to predict what 20-year-old boys are going to do you have to have a sense of humor.

“At Georgia Southern, we don’t cheat. That costs money and we don’t have any.” ~Erk Russell, Georgia Southern

“I don’t expect to win enough games to be put on NCAA probation. I just want to win enough to warrant an investigation.”  ~Bob Devaney, Nebraska

“There’s nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the snot beat out of you.”  ~Woody Hayes, Ohio State 

“They cut us up like boarding house pie. And that’s real small pieces.”  ~Darrell Royal, Texas 

“We played like about three tons of buzzard puke this afternoon.”  ~Spike Dykes, Texas Tech

“If lessons are learned in defeat, our team is getting a good education.”  ~Murray Warmath, Minnesota 

“A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.”  ~Frank Leahy, Notre Dame

“It’s kind of hard to rally around a math class.”  ~Bear Bryant, Alabama

“Take the shortest route to the ball and arrive in a bad humor.”  ~Bowden Wyatt, Tennessee

“The only qualifications for a lineman are to be big and dumb. To be a back, you only have to be dumb.”  ~Knute Rockne, Notre Dame

“It isn’t necessary to see a good tackle. You can hear it.”  ~Knute Rockne

“Gentlemen, it is better to have died a small boy than to fumble this football.”  ~John Heisman

John McKay, the legendary USC coach, was probably the funniest football coach who ever lived. His deadpan and self-deprecating humor was always perfect in its timing and pointed in its message and absolutely knock down funny. Following a 51-0 loss to Notre Dame one afternoon he told his team in the lockerroom, “Those of you who need showers, take them.” McKay is also remembered for telling reporters once, “We didn’t tackle well today but we made up for it by not blocking.” My favorite McKay line, though, comes from his days as the coach of the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers. During the middle of that first 0-14 season, McKay was asked about the execution of his offense. His reply? “I’m all for it.”

Peace,

Allan

Little Replicas of Himself

December 19, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Screwtape“One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.”  ~Screwtape

It’s easy to sense the senior tempter’s frustration in C. S. Lewis’ masterpiece. Screwtape and the other devils in Hell can’t comprehend why in the world God would expend so much energy on loving and caring for all these dispicable humans. Instead of using people and exploiting people and sucking them dry of all energy and life, God nurtures them and provides for them and longs for actual relationship with them. We are God’s children and he wants us to be just like him. But he wants us to make those decisions on our own. He doesn’t “override a human will.” As Screwtape observes about God, “He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For his ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve.” And the devils don’t get it.

In working to conform our wills to our Father’s and in striving to be like him, his perfect son, Jesus, is our example. When we look at Jesus in the flesh, incarnate God, we see what God created when he created us. Or at least we see God’s intent. And we see our own high potential, our high calling.

As a baby in the manger in Bethlehem, Jesus is completely helpless, vulnerable, needy, dependent. A newborn baby is the absolute picture of total dependence. And as all the political and religious and military powers in Judea scheme to murder this innocent child, Jesus, as a baby, is completely dependent on his Father to protect him. What chance does Jesus have against the ruthless King Herod and the chief priests? His young peasant mother and his impoverished and unproven dad from the insignificant town of Nazareth are way overmatched. But we see clearly that the Father provides and protects. He thwarts the enemy’s plans. He rescues his child. He carries the child and his parents to a safe place and then destroys the enemies.

Our calling is to be just as dependent on our Father as Jesus was. The life of the Christ is a beautiful portrait of complete surrender to God, from the manger in Bethlehem and the temple courts in Jerusalem to the garden in Gethsemane and the cross at Golgotha. Total surrender. Complete dependence. Confidence that God will deliver. He will save.

“…we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord.”  ~2 Corinthians 3:18

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Excellent column by Gene Wojciechowski today asking the same questions I asked last night regarding Roger Clemens telling us he’ll address the steroid and HGH allegations in baseball’s Mitchell Report in “an appropriate way at the appropriate time.” What time could be more appropriate than right now? What way could be more appropriate than a common news conference? Click here to read the column.

Peace,

Allan

Salvation + Creation = Incarnation

December 18, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I think as children of God we’re usually more concerned with the destination than with the journey. “Heaven holds all to me.” So much so I’m afraid that a lot of the time we separate salvation from creation. Being saved, to a lot of us, means being rescued out of this world. To many Christians, the world and whatever is of the world or in the world is worthless and useless. We don’t care about the world. We’re being delivered from the world.

But the Incarnation drastically alters that viewpoint.

The birth of Jesus, instead of separating salvation and creation, connects salvation and creation. It joins the realities of heaven with the ordinariness of life on earth. It brings together the human and the divine. By becoming one of us, God reaffirms the original goodness and purpose of creation. Our human condition, even with all its flaws and shortcomings, even with all our weaknesses, this world and everything in it is not so sad and worthless that God himself is above becoming flesh. In fact, it’s Jesus taking on our everyday human condition that is the means for our salvation! God reclaims us as his own by becoming one of us.

God created the world and all the people in it. And that world and that people—all of creation—have been groaning, Paul says in Romans 8, as in the pains of childbirth to become what we were truly created to be. We were created to be truly divine children of God, just like Jesus. We look at Jesus, God in flesh, and we see what the Father created when he created us. Or at least we see his intent. We see our potential, our calling.

John writes in the opening lines of his Gospel that when we receive Jesus, when we believe in the name of the Christ, God gives us the right, he gives us the power, he gives the authority to become children of God, “children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” Just like Jesus.

Yes, Jesus preached about the Kingdom of Heaven. But all his teachings had to do with how to live here on this earth. How to get along as a child of God here in this world. Here in the middle of God’s creation.

Seeing Jesus as a human helps us understand why God made us. And it empowers us to reclaim that purpose for our own lives. It enables us to live our lives fully here on earth, with each other, in all of our mundane ordinariness, as children of God. Just as he intended from Day One. To live like him.

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Whitney experienced her first ever live Mavericks game at the AAC last night, compliments of our good friend and Small Groups Co-Leader, David Glover. (The Mavericks were able to pull out a nail-biter over Orlando, despite the fact that David’s been to two Cowboys games this year: Patriots and Eagles.)

Whit,Garrett,MavsManI love experiencing things through my girls. I’ve attended a couple of hundred Mavericks games through the years—pre-season, regular season, and playoffs. But I saw things from an entirely different perspective last night. Whitney was genuinely thrilled by the things I’ve always taken for granted. The player introductions, the drum line, the T-shirt cannons, Mavs Man, Champ (that thing still looks like a Dragon Tales character, not a horse), chanting “De-Fense” and “Let’s Go, Mavs!” (didn’t they rip that off from the Spurs?), souvenir cups, thundering dunks, a three-on-one break, player interaction on the bench, the guys who continually distribute and clean up all the towels and water bottles, even P. A. announcer Billy Hayes and sideline shill Chris Arnold. Everything that is the spectacle of a Mavericks game. She was completely involved from before the opening tip to well after the final buzzer. She was trying to distract Orlando free throw shooters from our seats, which were not anywhere close to behind the backboard. She yelled throughout the fourth quarter for the Mavericks to “get it to Dirk!” She never sat still. She never stopped screaming. She never stopped laughing. I’m sure right now, even as she’s probably in the middle of some math or social studies class at school, she hasn’t stopped smiling.

And usually I would just sit there.

I saw it differently last night. It was a different game for me last night because I was sitting by Whitney.

And our Savior says unless we become like little children we can’t enter the Kingdom.

May our God grant us the vision, the humility, and the grace to be wowed by his creation and by his goodness and by his blessings. May we pay attention to all that is around us and recognize every bit of it as a wonderful blessing from our Father. And may others experience their daily lives differently as a result of watching us experience ours.

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In 2004, Cowboys safety Roy Williams tackled Titans receiver Tyrone Calico from behind by grabbing the back of his shoulder pads and yanking him to the ground. As a result, Calico suffered torn cartilage in his left knee and a sprained ACL in his right knee. That same season Williams took out two Baltimore running backs with the same style of tackle. Jamal Lewis suffered a sprained ankle and Musa Smith a compound fracture of his right tibia. That same season Williams broke the right fibula of then-Eagles receiver Terrell Owens with the same horsecollar tackle. In May 2005, the NFL made that kind of tackle illegal. It was called the Roy Williams Rule.

RoyWilliamsRuleGoing into this past Sunday’s game against the Eagles, Williams had been fined $27,500 by the NFL this year for making two illegal horsecollar tackles. The NFL sent Williams a letter two weeks ago telling him he would be suspended if he did it again. And he did. His tackle on Donovan McNabb is the very reason that style of takedown was outlawed. He was flagged at the time. And last night the league suspended him for one game. Williams can’t practice with the team and he can’t play in what is now a critical game Saturday night in Charlotte. It’ll cost him at least $35,000 in salary. It’ll cost the Cowboys one of their best run-stoppers against a Panthers attack that is running all over opponents.

I saw a quote from Wade Phillips this morning claiming that in Sunday’s situation with McNabb, and in all the others this season, grabbing the back of the shoulder pads is the only way Williams can make the tackle.

Isn’t it because Williams is always running behind the ball carrier? None of this would be an issue if he could just get in the proper position.

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Are Eagles Defensive Coordinator Jim Johnson and Austin Grad Professor Michael Weed the same person?

 JimJohnson MichaelWeed

Peace,

Allan

Jessica Ono

December 17, 2007 / / 4 Comments

Tony Romo went to the lockerroom at halftime of yesterday’s loss to the Eagles carrying a quarterback rating that was the same as his jersey number. He finished the game with three interceptions, two fumbles, four sacks, one bruised thumb, and a 22.2 QB rating, the lowest of his brief career. The Cowboys failed to score a touchdown for the first time since November 2004 when a team that finished 6-10 and seemingly started a new quarterback every week lost to the Bengals.

Are you blaming Jessica Simpson?

Is she going to be the Yoko Ono of the Cowboys as I heard someone say this morning? WadePhillips

How much time did Romo have to put in Saturday night and Sunday morning arranging for tickets, transportation, meals, and other stuff related to the game for the Simpson family? Was he trying to show off for his new girlfriend and wound up pressing too hard and blowing it? If he was distracted by her being at the game, what was it specifically?

JessicaSimpsonThe theories are numerous. Did her pink Cowboys jersey offend the football gods? Is spending time with Jessica rubbing off on Romo in a way that’s making him dumber every day? She can’t tell the difference between chicken and tuna. One month with her and he can’t read a tackle-stunt or a corner blitz. Coincidence?

All I know is that the beautiful girl has always brought down the superhero. Everytime a superhero gets in trouble, you can always trace it back to the distraction of a pretty girl. It happened regularly to Indiana Jones. Indy and Superman both spent way too much time and energy trying to rescue the girl who was distracting them from the big picture of what they were supposed to be doing, mainly because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the way. It happened to Batman. It happened to Spiderman. It happened to Frank Drebin.

If it’s not Jessica Simpson, what was it? Romo’s never looked as awful as he looked yesterday. Ryan Leaf never looked as awful as Romo looked yesterday.

There is one other theory out there. And I must give the credit for this one to Norm.

He claims it’s Avery Johnson’s fault.

Avery Johnson, the Dallas Mavericks coach, was also at yesterday’s game, also sitting in a very prominent place at Texas Stadium. And the Cowboys spent all day settling for 3s.

Coincidence?

Peace,

Allan

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