Hope is More Than a Clever Presidential Campaign

January 18, 2010 – 6:29 pm

I get a lot of texts, emails and phone calls from friends, blog readers and fans of the bands I work with, asking me to pray for them or asking me advice on a certain spiritual subject. After a few years I have started feeling overwhelmed with all of this, hearing some depressing stories or stories of despair, struggles and addictions that seem like nothing good is coming out of any of them.

 

When I was a kid I used to have a glass piggy bank, after praying for something or someone I would write it on a piece of paper and put it in the bank. When it got full I would break it and read all the things I prayed for and what ever came of those prayers. 100% of them were answered. I am not saying I got everything I asked for, but I knew exactly what God did through those prayers. An example is that I wanted to learn how to kickflip on my skateboard so I can meet other skateboarders and show them God’s love through skateboarding. When I read the piece of paper with that prayer, I realized that I still didn’t know how to kickflip, but I knew how to do a one-foot nose-manual, an Impossible and other uncommon tricks. And I met more people through those tricks, I knew what God was saying to me, “if you knew how to kickflip you would just be a dime-a-dozen skateboarder, but knowing the tricks you know is what will break the ice with conversations”.

 

Every time someone asks me to pray for them I tell them, “I will pray for you, but please keep me updated on this situation”. I feel like a prayer is incomplete without an update. It seems like people ask other people to pray for them because it’s the Christian thing to ask for or it’s a way to share your hard times with someone without having to bring it up at random. So to offset that, I ask people to update me, if I am praying for something I want in on the end result, the testimony of it. If I am going to share sorrows with you now, I want to share triumphs with you later. I believe a huge part of prayer is seeing how God answers that prayer. After the piggy bank, I had a respect and belief for the power of prayer. So I always see updates are very important. Prayer brings Christians together, prayer teaches us and it especially does when everyone is updated. I truly believe updates are how God gets the glory. Just like in John 9. Jesus says “this man is blind so God might get the glory”. When people saw the update that that man was no longer blind, Jesus got the glory. Prayer is admitting our weakness and updates are admitting God’s strength.

 

After asking everyone I prayed for for an update, almost 90% of them have never given me one.

 

After about 3-4 years. I have heard a ton of stories and prayer requests of depression, addiction, struggles, despair and received only a handful of updates. After that time, without realizing it, I’ve lost hope in people, I’ve lost hope in myself and hope in God. About a week ago I was going to write a blog about how I used to selfishly desire for people to seek my advice but after hearing all of these stories I wanted this burden to be taken from me.

 

I have been praying for around six months for a revelation, I knew I wasn’t loving people as God had me love them in the past and I missed that. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong until a few nights ago, God showed me how we can’t love someone with hope.

 

Basically after all these stories of addictions and struggles without any updates, I lost hope. When I heard yet another story of a struggle or trial, I didn’t see any lights at the end of any tunnels. I just thought, “I’m sorry to hear that, that sucks”. (Ironically at the same time I would pray asking God why I can’t love people like I used to, I hope you can see the connection).

 

If you meet someone with a struggle or an addiction, you might pray for them or try to help them, but unless you believe and have a hope that they can be saved from that, then your efforts will be mediocre. Sometimes it’s so hard to help the homeless because we think ‘they will always be like that’, but we give them a sandwich and let them go about their day.

 

Paul says, “out of faith, hope and love the greatest is love”. It may be true, but let’s not discount the other two. Unless we have faith that God’s kingdom can come onto Earth as it is in Heaven, then we won’t have the hope for it to, and we won’t make the efforts to love and bring His kingdom onto Earth as it is in Heaven.

 

When I started thinking that ‘they will always be like that”, I started to think with my own struggles and addictions that “I will always be like this”. Believe me, when you think like that, you don’t make much efforts to change, you stay stuck, you stay addicted and stay struggling with those things. If you don’t believe that God can redeem you and free you, then you won’t get out of His way and allow Him to.

 

How does Jesus love the hopeless? Because he doesn’t consider anyone hopeless. Your love for someone can only be as big as your hope for their lives.

 

I had a friend that was very selfish and rude. Everyone thought, “I’ve known him for 10 years, he will always be that way” but this was a few years ago when God changed my life and I had a fresh hope. I believed and had faith that God can change his also (even though he was already a Christian) and after 6 months, he is still a totally different person.

 

If you see your efforts as another drop in the bucket, your efforts won’t take much effort. We got to believe that every act of obedience to love our God and love our neighbor will change the world. But if we don’t believe that, if that faith and hope isn’t in us, then how much do you think we will love one another?

 

Love is the car we need to be driving, hope and faith are the fuels. God is the giver of all three.

 

your friend,

 

-Isaac

By Isaac Deitz | Posted in I've been learning about | Comments (5)

Finding a needle in a stack of needles.

January 2, 2010 – 4:17 pm

It’s funny how easily someone can spot a fake. I guess what I mean it is hard to spot a fake in a crowd of fakes. Just like it’s harder to find a specific needle in a stack of needles. When looking for a needle in a hack stack all you have to do is jump in and wait for it to stab you. I think Jesus’ name has been said with a lot of different motives and intentions, it’s become a stack of needles now it’s hard to find that same name but with honesty behind it. Sometimes we can read blogs, listen to songs, look at art and enjoy them and God still uses them. But it’s so refreshing to see some things that are honest, real and pure.

 

Jesus’ name has become like a celebrities name. People use it in jokes, stories and to name-drop. Name-dropping is when someone says they know someone when they really don’t, they’ve just met them or something, but name-dropping gives them street-credit. People hear you say “I know Jennifer Anniston” and freak out, they give you more respect and for some reason want to know you better. That is how we treat Jesus. We drop his name for street-cred and respect when we might not actually know him personally. It’s funny because if someone is truly friends with a celebrity they mention them only when they mean it. You can walk into a conversation and say “I know Brad Pitt” and say it to make friends or get people to remember you. But if you really knew Brad Pitt and someone was talking about funny stories about going to Wal-Mart, you would bring up the story of the time you and your friend Brad went to Wal-Mart. The difference is intentions. People all the time wear Jesus T-shirts, bracelets, hats and tattoos to make friends with other people that respect Jesus [not everyone that wears the Christian clothes have these intentions, but it happens a lot]. But people can tell when you really know him. I knew someone that wore the tackiest Christian T-shirts, but for some reason he pulled it off, everyone knew that it was genuine. Maybe because he wore them when he was in a secular hard-core band that played in bars or he had a certain demeanor to him. It may be hard to tell when someone is singing and name-dropping Jesus’ name, but it certainly hits a chord [no pun intended] when they are singing with complete honesty, conviction and a desire to write the song to God instead of their Christian demographic.

 

There are about 10 songs I have ever heard with this honesty. I have heard a lot of songs that may have been written with honesty but performed and recorded to please people instead of please God. There is one recording of a song that has brought me to tears with their honesty and desire, that also makes me just dance and feel true joy, but the album version though almost similar seems tainted with record sales, producer opinions, and radio plays.

 

“Purity of heart is to will one thing” -Sören Kierkegaard

 

Sometimes we want good things but for wrong reasons or we attach our agendas along with them. Like I want to see people reconcile with their creator to experience true love, hope and joy but I want to be the person that introduces them. Kind of like how people want their friends to hear good music but they want to be able to say “I am the one that told you about that band”. I think my will has been changing. I have been realizing how depressing it is to have more than one reason for doing something. It is very draining to do something with that mindset. I think that is why God says “love me with all your mind, heart and soul” and “you can’t serve two masters”.

 

I believe you can take any simple piece of art, whether it’s music, film, painting, photography, etc and make it incredible with one intent. Having multiple intents is my definition of selling-out.

 

Honesty in friendship, one intention is also what makes some of the realest friendships. I have friends that talk to me about their struggles, fears and doubts and it gives me hope to know I am not alone. I think this is why Jesus says to “walk in the light”. To be honest with each other. It’s funny how many times we are trained as Christians to give the appearance of perfection. We assume that to have everything under control is what other Christians will look up to. So we put our skeletons in our closet, go to church or dinner with friends and just smile and wave. We don’t let people know who we really are, which is flawed humans that need Jesus just as much as everyone else.

 

I read the Bible and read about Lot sleeping with his daughters [Genesis 19:30-36], Noah getting drunk [Genesis 9:20-23], Moses murdering an Egyptian [Exodus 2:11-15], King David breaking all of the Ten Commandments including having someone killed so he can sleep with the wife [2 Samuel 11]. The point of the Bible is to show that we are not made righteous by our prayer life, our devotions, our church-going, our friends, our ministry, our charity work, our abstinence from certain things, or our religious status, but by Jesus alone. When we stop believing that we need to attempt righteousness to become righteous and believe that Jesus makes us righteous, we should stop getting in the way and allow him to truly change our lives and make us righteous. When we think ‘repent for our sins’ we think repent from our hate, jealousy, gossip, lust, etc. I think that is only half of it, we should also repent from our charity work, Bible reading, praying, giving to the poor and everything else we do to try to make us righteous before God without Jesus Christ.

 

When I hear people, that haven’t allowed Jesus to make them righteous, talk about Jesus I just hear a name, just the pronunciation of “GEE-sus Kr-YST”. When I hear people say his name because he is their saviour, it begins to sound like a real person that walked the earth, instead of a name. If Jesus is your friend, your mentor, your teacher, your inspiration or anything else without first being your saviour, then you don’t know him, you don’t know his purpose for coming to this earth. When I hear it from people that know this I hear his name in association of the Lord that made me righteous, that reconciled me with God and showed me what true love, hope and joy look like.

 

your friend,

 

-Isaac

By Isaac Deitz | Posted in I've been learning about | Comments (4)

Forgiveness vs. Justification. Please God vs. Please people.

December 27, 2009 – 5:08 pm

Love God and love people, the two greatest commandments. I never realized until recently how important that order is. I have always known that loving God first is important, but I thought that it’s just as important to love people. But we should love people out of our love for God.

 

If you love God first, you will love people because it pleases God. If you love people first, you will love God because it pleases people. People sometimes pretend to love God because they will get more respect from other Christians, but not know they are doing it. I have heard sermons preached that seemed like they were written to make the congregation impressed with the speakers knowledge or relationship with God. When a Christian band gets on stage and says ‘Jesus’ it gets a thousand cheers and they sell a hundred records, whether they meant it or not. Some people stand up during worship because if they stayed seated it would seem as if they aren’t worshiping God.

 

A lot of us are taught that we shouldn’t worry about what the world thinks of us but we should just honor God. I agree. But how often do we worry about what the church thinks of us? How often does our fear of seeming ‘less-Christian’ stop us from honoring God?

 

If God calls you to be a office employee and you take the pastoral position, I would say that you are seeking to please people over God. You are seeking to look like a great Christian in front of people.

 

People have told me they look up to my relationship with God. I know why they do, it’s because anyone can look like a great Christian if they blog around 500 words every few weeks about God. They don’t see what goes on in my heart. Sometimes, without knowing it, I blog for my audience, if I haven’t blogged in a while I come up with something to write. I write for them, not God. I used to write when God taught me something, now I try to force up a lesson about God. I miss just seeing everything in life as a lesson. I want it back, I know it’ll come. I just need to worry about loving God above everything else, pleasing Him and only Him.

 

When we get in a argument with someone we usually try to get a second opinion and try to convince that second opinion that we are right in our actions. We have a longing for justification from our actions.

 

We don’t go to God for justification because God knows we are wrong and will be honest with us. If our actions aren’t justified, that means we will have to face up to our wrongs and that is never fun. So we go to people, that don’t know the whole story, and look for their justification. If we can convince someone else we are good Christians, then in a sense we have convinced ourselves. This is what drives us, this is what drives me. We write sermons, make quotes, say lengthy prayers, read the Bible, write worship songs, give to the poor, don’t sin and whatever else we can do to convince ourself and others that we are good people. After sinning we don’t seek forgiveness but justification.

 

Jesus said to avoid the yeast of the Pharisees, He also said that unless you exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. The Pharisees were the Pastors and worship leaders of Bible times. They memorized scripture, gave to the poor, obeyed the laws and taught others to also do so, they prayed long prayers, they worshiped at church and Jesus says we have to be better than them?

 

The yeast of the Pharisees is loving God because you are trying to please people. The Pharisees got their second opinion that they were good and that was good enough for them. They convinced themselves and others that they are good people. Exceeding their righteousness is by seeking the opinion of the only one who matters, Jesus. Exceeding their righteousness is not convincing people you are righteous, but convincing yourself that Jesus made you righteous.

 

your friend,

 

-Isaac

 

Side note: the thing that makes us believe we are not like the Pharisees is that we believe the Pharisees did it intentionally, sought out to be like they were. I believe they didn’t know what they were doing. It took me a few months to have God just say “look at your heart”. It’s very easy to be in a church for a period of time and hear people say nice things about you but forget to seek out what God thinks about you. Are we obeying the laws of our church, our legalism, our social circles? That will start to make you feel safe. But are we seeking to please God instead of people, instead of legalism and churches? Without Faith it is impossible to please God. It’s not the laws and our actions that please God the most, it’s our faith that His son didn’t justify our sins but forgave our sins. That the law and rules didn’t make us righteous but His son made us righteous because there is no way we can do it ourselves.

By Isaac Deitz | Posted in I've been learning about | Comments (1)