Jesus is not a new butler

Millions of nominal Christians have never experienced a fundamental alteration of that foundation of happiness. Instead they have absorbed the notion that becoming Christian means turning to Jesus to get what you always wanted before you were born again. So, if you wanted wealth, you stop depending on yourself for it, and by prayer and faith and obedience you depend on Jesus for wealth. If you wanted to be healthy, you turn from mere human cures to Jesus as the source of your health. If you wanted to escape the pain of hell, you turn to Jesus for the escape. If you wanted to have a happy marriage, you come to Jesus for help. If you wanted peace of conscience and freedom from guilt feelings, you turn to Jesus for these things.
In other words, to become a Christian, in this way of seeing things, is to have all the same desires you had as an unregenerate person—only you get them from a new source, Jesus. And he feels so loving when you do. But there’s no change at the bottom of your heart and your cravings. No change in what makes you happy. There’s no change in the decisive foundation of your joy. You just shop at a new store. The dinner is still the same; you just have a new butler. The bags in the hotel room are still the same; you just have a new bellhop.

How much does God love this church ~ John Piper.

Rethinking Retirement

Finishing life to the glory of Christ means finishing life in a way that makes Christ look glorious. It means living and dying in a way that shows Christ to be the all-satisfying Treasure that he is. So it would include, for example, not living in ways that make this world look like your treasure. Which means that most of the suggestions that this world offers us for our retirement years are bad ideas. They call us to live in a way that would make this world look like our treasure. And when that happens, Jesus belittled.

John Piper - Rethinking Retirement Pg. 5

Aku tidak menyukai istriku lagi

Suami : Aku tidak menyukai istriku lagi !
Sahabat : Pulang dan cintailah dia!
Suami : Anda tidak mengerti aku, aku sudah tidak perasaan itu lagi!
Sahabat : Pulang dan cintailah dia!
Suami : Tetapi secara emosi aku berarti tidak jujur kalau aku memperlakukan istriku seperti itu, padahal aku tidak merasakannya.
Sahabat : Apakah menurutmu Ibumu mencintaimu?
Suami : Tentu saja (dengan mantap )
Sahabat : Kira-kira 1 minggu setelah ibumu pulang dari Rumah Sakit dan membawamu pulang, dan kamu menangis menjerit-jerit di tengah malam karena popokmu basah dan dia terpaksa bangun walau tubuhnya masih sangat letih, berjalan di lantai yg dingin tanpa alas kaki untuk mengganti popokmu dan menyusuimu. Apakah menurutmu dia sungguh-sungguh menikmati itu semua?
Suami : Tidak (menunduk)
Sahabat : Kalau begitu. Apakah Ibumu secara emosi juga tidak jujur?

Ukuran besarnya cinta bukan karena dia menikmati mengganti popok di tengah malam, melainkan karena Ibumu RELA melakukan itu semua meski dia tidak begitu menyukainya. Pernikahan tidak hanya didasari perasaan Cinta, lebih dari itu yaitu KOMITMEN.
Saat pertama seseorang menikahi istrinya pasti karena cinta, tetapi cinta yang menggebu-gebu akan padam seiring dengan berjalannya waktu. Hanya Komitmen yang membuat Cinta manggebu-gebu menjadi Cinta yang matang dan dewasa.

Lalu.. Apa yg disebut dg Cinta Sejati? Cinta sejati adalah cinta yg tdk memikirkan untung rugi, cinta yg rela berkorban demi seseorang yg dikasihinya. Inilah cinta yg harus diusahakan dalam setiap Pernikahan.

Ada orang berkata "aku cinta kamu".. berarti : "aku ingin memilikimu & biarlah kamu kumiliki" adalah cinta yang egois karena hanya bergantung pada perasaan seseorang. Sebab perasaan akan dimakan oleh waktu dan bisa saja perasaan ini muncul pada diri orang lain/pasangan orang lain.
Suasana hati mudah berubah, kondisi fisik semakin tua dan tidak menarik, komitmenlah yang menyelamatkan pernikahan.Berani melakukan sebuah "tindakan" baik dalam keadaan suka maupun tidak suka dan tetap mengasihi pasangan & mempertahankan Pernikahan yang telah Tuhan anugrahkan.

Source: Unknown

Jesus and Prosperity Gospel

Resentment

"Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies." Augustine of Hippo

Tuhan yang merubah

"Wah, itu mah orang bandel banget, auban bener, hanya Tuhan yang bisa merubah!", seringkali kita mendengar pernyataan seperti ini, seolah-olah ada orang tertentu yang harus dirubah Tuhan, dan ada orang-orang yang mungkin tidak begitu 'bandel' yang tidak perlu Tuhan untuk merubah. Cobalah dipikirkan lagi apakah benar pernyataan seperti ini?.

A Happy Marriage

"A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers."Robert Quillen

Life is not a straight line

"Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us feel in our bones (not just know in our heads) that God is for us in all these strange turns. God is not just showing up after the trouble and cleaning it up. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far-reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ." John Piper  (A Sweet and Bitter Providence: Sex, Race, and the Sovereignty of God) : Exposition Book of Ruth
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Switchback \ˈswich-ˌbak\ : a zigzag road, trail, or section of railroad tracks for climbing a steep hill

The danger of love Loving God

Grace is not free

"Grace is not free, it cost God His only begotten Son" AT

Love like you've never been hurt

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth." Mark Twain

Lyndsay

Do I have a free will?

I'm always wondering, do I even have free will, if all thing works for good for those who have been called according to His Purpose, where will human's responsibilities fit in God's master plan. This is sounds very unsettling between God's sovereignty and Human's responsibilities.

Do we have so called 'a power' to change His plan in our life? Is it true that faith is required our will to believe otherwise we will not be born again? Can I choose to believe in Him? I don't think this is a very simple question to answer.

If we define 'free will' as - I want to eat noodles instead of rice. I want to go to school instead of to work and so on, then yes I believe in 'free will' - because I have a capacity to do those activities. But if I say, I will choose to fly or not. That is not free will since we don't have a capacity to fly like a bird (not in the aero plane).

It's the same as a spiritual death. We have no capacity to do spiritual things, since we are dead people spiritually (I wonder why it doesn't call Spiritually fainted or Spiritually coma). How can dead people asking for a food, how can dead people talk to us? When Jesus resurrected Lazarus, Lazarus didn't have 'time' to think, I want to wake up and walkout from the tomb. There is no decision. There is no free will for Lazarus, he can not choose not to rise and live again. It's up to God's grace upon him.

So I believe there is no such thing as a 'free will' when we talk about spiritual death. These 2 verses in the bible that I believe as a ground that we don't have 'free will' it's only because of Grace when we believe.

John 6:44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.

John 6:65 And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

Jesus is not giving a bread, He is the bread

"I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst." John 6:35

Spiritually sick vs. Spiritual heroes‏

“Grace is given to heal the spiritually sick, not to decorate spiritual heroes” – Martin Luther

Why would you like to change

Think about it for a moment.
Why do you want to be more like Jesus? Why do you want to keep a lid on your temper or overcome lust or stop living in a fantasy world? Why do you want to feel less depressed or bitter or frustrated? Why do you want to be a better parent, a better husband, a better wife, a better employee?

1. I would like to change to prove myself to God.‏
You may want to change so God will be impressed with you or bless you in some way or save you.

Many people think that good people go to heaven—so if you want to go to heaven, then you need to be good. We might think of heaven as a fancy nightclub with a bouncer at the door. The bouncer
lets in only smartly dressed people. Anyone in jeans is turned away. So we have to smarten ourselves up to get into heaven. Or you may think you’ll be accepted on the last day because of
God’s grace. But you still want to impress God so he’ll bless you in the meantime. “I’ve tried living God’s way,” one woman told me, "but He's still hasn't given me a husband" She wanted to impress God so He'd give her what she wanted.

The instinct to self-atone runs deep in our hearts. We want to make amends for our sin on our own. But God has done it all through Christ because of his grace, his undeserved love to us. Grace is so simple to understand and yet so hard to grasp. It’s not its complexity that makes it difficult. The problem is that we seem to be hard-wired to think we must do something to make God favorably disposed toward us. We want to take the credit. But all the time God is saying,
“In my love I gave my Son for you. He’s done everything needed to secure my blessing. I love you as you are, and I accept you in him.” God can’t love you more than he does now, no matter how much you change your life. And God won’t love you less than he does now, no matter what a mess you make of your life. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

2.I would like to change to prove myself to other people‏

This is often the reason I want to change: I want people to be impressed by me. We may want to fit in or win approval. We certainly don’t want people finding out what we’re like inside. We wear a mask to hide our real selves. Wearing the mask can be a great strain; it’s like acting a role all the time. But we dare not let people see us as we really are.

One of the problems with trying to prove ourselves to other people is that they set the standard. Their standards may be ungodly, but we adopt their behavior to fit in. Or their standards may be godly, but we’re living in obedience to people rather than in obedience to God. Often what happens is that we settle for living like other people even when that falls short of living like Jesus. Or we measure ourselves against other people and decide we’re more righteous. We may point the finger at others’ faults so we can feel better about ourselves.

Instead we should be comparing ourselves to Jesus, finding we fall a long way short of God’s standards and discovering that we desperately need a Savior.

3.I would like to change to prove myself to myself‏
Another common reason why we want to change is so we can feel good about ourselves. When we mess up, we feel the shame of our sin. So we want to put things right. We want to think ourselves as
a "former user of porn" rather than a "porn addict" We want to say, “I used to have a problem with anger” rather than “I have a problem with anger.” So when we mess up, our primary concern
is that we can’t think of ourselves as “a former sinner.” We can’t feel good about ourselves until we’ve put some distance between ourselves and our last “big sin.” For us, sin has become first and foremost sin against ourselves. If I sin, then I’ve let myself down. What I feel when I sin is the offense against me and my self-esteem, not the offense against God.

Justified by Grace
What's wrong with wanting to change so we can prove ourselves to God or people or ourselves? It doesn't work. We might fool other people for a while. We might even fool ourselves. But we can never change enough to impress God. And here's the reason: trying to impress God, others, or ourselves puts us at the center of our change project. It makes change all about my looking good. It is done for my glory. And that's pretty much the definition of sin. Sin is living for my glory instead of God's. Sin is living life my way, for me, instead of living life God's way, for God. Often that means rejected God as Lord and wanting to be our own lord, but i can also involve rejecting God as Savior and wanting to be our own savior. Pharisees do good works and repent of bad works. But gospel repentance includes repenting of good works done for wrong reasons. We need to repent of trying to be our own savior.

Excerpt: You can change - Tim Chester

Proud self-justification

People don't like to think of themselves as bad people. We don't want to think of our hearts as evil. So we don't take responsibility for our sin. We may admit we need change, but we don't want to admit that we are the problem. And so we have a number of avoidance strategies. Self-reliance says: "I'll do OK by myself". Self-justification says:"I'm doing OK by myself." Making that claim involves excusing, minimizing or hiding sin.
Tim Chester