And she said, “The Philistines are upon you, Samson!” And he awoke from his sleep and said, “I will go out as at other times and shake myself free.” But he did not know that the Lord had left him. (Judges 16:20 ESV) Each and every single one of us has an inner strength that cannot be broken because God has anointed us with His presence within us. That is a fact! It is the resolve that pulls us through all our difficult situations. It is the joy that pushes through when we are disappointed and sad. It is the reason, we often times find ourselves extending beyond our known capacities in crisis to be a part of something much more miraculous than we imagined. Our hubris lies in our betrayal of God’s presence in our lives. When we deny God’s grace by placing our unconditional hope, trust and salvation on somebody who is not God, we don’t notice the power of God leaving us and the power of the person we place our hope, trust and salvation entering into our souls. This is not me saying salvation by the blood of Jesus is conditional. This is me saying that we have the tendency to limit and push God out of our lives by making other people and other things gods in our hearts. Nobody can give us greater strength than God when His Spirit rushes into us. Yet, we so easily become disinterested in the power of God flowing through us despite what we witnessed in our lives and settle for a cheap knockoff lower case “g” god in the form of another person or thing. When we look at the story of Samson, whose great long hair was the source of his strength, we tend to write the fantastic story off as a mythological fairy tale in the likeness of Hercules. There is one difference between Hercules and Samson: Samson’s strength came to him out of grace, in a time of need, from the Spirit of God rushing to him for the sake of salvation and deliverance. Samson knew that he was nothing special. He knew that before God he was just some fool who got played and lost the love of his life to his so called friends. However, fully knowing this, he betrays God in his heart by pouring out his heart to the person who became his “everything”, his idol, and as a result he lost everything by his own accord. Don’t be confused today. Your strength comes from within you, but only by the grace of God rushing upon you. Your greatest strength cannot be summoned like Chinese food take out, so we need to stop treating God like week old leftovers in our fridge. Delilah’s greatest trick wasn’t one of cunning, it was one of dulling the agency of Samson’s life mission and seeping into his life like an idol. He put his trust in something other than God and that was all she wrote. If you found yourself or are finding yourself misplacing your trust, hope, salvation and strength, it is time to call upon God and ask for a new deliverance. You are called to do great things in His power. God’s strength is the only way you’ll get there.

Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. (Philippians 2:3-4) I think nothing irks me more than watching a person try to snivel away an “accomplishment” because they covet it more than other people. It’s so plain to everybody that he/she/it is motivated by a jealousy and conceited-ness; but who will waste their time to argue with that individual otherwise? Have you noticed that the very person who denies being motivated selfishly by jealousy and conceit is us on a good day? On a bad day, we just want to be better than everybody else so we do things in a rivalrous spirit, trying to one up our friends, family and colleagues. Don’t feel like I’m pointing fingers at you alone, I’m guilty of it too. In fact, I think I owe most of my success and achievements because of my conceited drive to prove I’m the best and out of a jealousy of not having as much. See, even this humble bragging makes me guilty of only having an ambition for myself and myself alone. Yet, here we find ourselves in an interesting predicament. Paul is telling the Christians of Philipia to stop doing this themselves– that is, only being significantly motivated by themselves and only themselves. This mentality of follow the Joneses or be the Joneses is not beneficial for anybody. Paul makes that clear. He says we have to be the Joneses and look out for people who are not the Joneses. It’s double duty for people who are half way apt to have ambition. We need to make our ambition larger than ourselves. This is what the Bible is saying here in this passage. We need our ambition to include people who are significant to us. We need our ambition to be significantly greater than our own lives. We need our ambition to have long lasting significance. You see, this is the mindset Jesus had and as his followers, this should be the mindset er have. Jesus, who is God, did not count himself in equality with God and made himself nothing for nothings like you and me. His ambition was to fulfill the law of death for all of humanity once and for all; a significant ambition for those who are significant to him and a significant change to the destiny of everyone significant in the world. So I ask you today, how significant is your ambition? Is your mindset above and greater than yourself? Let’s see how much more fulfilling your life becomes in doing so.

You know how people say beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Well, it’s true. The sad part of that statement is that we want the wrong person to be beholding our beauty. In fact, we often times choose a beholder that doesn’t consider us to be beautiful. This leads to disappointment, betrayal and depression. I know you think you can’t choose who beholds your beauty; but what if I told you otherwise. That there is one person out there who looks into the depths of your being and says that you are beautiful beyond expression? If you’ve spent any length of time in church, then you will say that God doesn’t count because His beholding of our beauty is more esoteric and abstract than the tangible gaze of a lover; yet God’s love and His beholding of our beauty is the most tangible type of love and adoration we can ever receive.

My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away, for behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. – Song of Solomon 2:10-11

If you read the Song of Solomon as I do, that is literally, then it’s pretty clear that it is a really romantic poem between two lovers. Pretty obvious, I know. In this case, the lovers are a king and a girl in the order of Cinderella (that is to say that she does all the work while supporting the family). If you walk past the lines that look like Shakespeare or a Zane novel, you begin to realize the embodiment of intent behind the sensual language. Their expressions come from seeing each other through where they currently are and what they were created to be. What I mean by that is simply: they see each other in light of what God created them to be even though their circumstances may not lend themselves to be what they were meant to be. More plainly, they love each other for what is possible and in what is implicitly stated. They love each other in the here and now and are willing to walk together to get there. If it weren’t the Bible, you may call this a fairy tale. Yet this is what God intended love to be from our perspective onto other people– we are to behold people in the beauty God created them in. We do this because God sees us in this beauty. In order to find love like this, we have to first accept love like this. We accept love from God in this way– a passionate pursuit of inner beauty within us despite what we portray on the outside. He in turn, gives us the capacity to pursue others in this way. What I am advocating is not the romantic ideal of love. I wouldn’t advocate for that at all. What I am advocating for is a love that surpasses the pros and cons of a romantic love and embodies a love that is willing to see past character faults, shortcomings and mistakes to see the beauty behind what we plainly see and behold what God intended to be and walk with this person or people until they see it. Jesus calls out to our hearts and tells us to arise out of the waste our lives have borne and bred and walk with him out of love. If your life seems to be an eternal winter, then listen for the beholder who calls out to our beauty. If you’ve spent your life hiding in a shelter from what seems to be torrential rains, then take Jesus’ hand and take a journey with him because the rains will cease and a time of singing is coming.

If you’re one of those people who have ever wondered whether God is still out there intervening in your life, this is the prayer we need to be praying: For this reason I bow my knees before the Father…that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:14, 19b).

Let me back track from the conclusion I just made to where we currently find ourselves or have been finding ourselves frequently and persistently through our journeys for spiritual significance. We would not need to pray this if our lives were fine and dandy and filled with beauty and blessings and happy things.

But our lives don’t reflect that type of butterflies and kisses type of design. They are filled with turmoil and suffering at worst, and at best, our lives are filled with little bits of annoyances that constantly break the camel’s back. So we lose confidence, our boldness is gone and glazed over our eyes is the empty, tired look of defeat and monotony.

Our inner being is sullen and downtrodden and the youthful exuberance that once filled us is strength-less. I mean that is the price we pay for living in this world. We wonder about God existence and if we do believe in God’s existence, we wonder about whether He even cares about what happens to us. Constantly playing in the background of our minds is the Biblical passage that our lives are nothing more than mist passing through the air and this obviously doesn’t help our discomfort nor our afflictions.

However, I tell you that God still searches for you and longs for you even though you do not notice. He is working in you and around you to give us opportunities to grasp at an understanding of His true love for us. God wants us to have “fullness” in our hearts that only He can provide. He wants us to feel the power at work within us. What we need to do is recognize His love pervading through our circumstances and reaching out towards us.

Unless we’re attentive to it and are framed to identify it, we will never catch it. We become attentive to it when we “bow our knees” in humility. Humility is knowing that God is working in us and through us even though we’re messed up and not up to par with the holiness standard God set for us in the beginning. It is not calling ourselves unworthy. It is not fuming at our own mistakes and missteps.

Humility before God (bowing our knees) is an act of accepting God for what He does how He does it in our lives– that is to be open to God’s way of loving us. Once we are open to the way God loves us, we begin to understand how Christ loves us in our fallenness.

When we experience how Christ loves us, we become filled with the “fullness of God” — an all encompassing love that cannot be expressed in any way except by experiencing it with an open mind and heart to the power of it all. If you want to live a fulfilling spiritual life, you have to experience the fullness of God.

In order to experience the fullness of God, you have to open yourself to how God loves you. To open yourself to how God loves you, you must accept that God loves you knowing you better than you know yourself and accepts you for it. Become full of God and see where a full life can take you in your circumstances.

Somebody had asked me, “how long and how much am I supposed to ‘deal with’ another person’s weakness and shortcomings?” That is to simply ask, at what point does the cost of ignoring a problem (character flaw and/or weakness) outweigh the consequences of a potentially explosive action by which a relationship can be rocked into oblivion? Therefore we look at Romans 15:1 where it reads, “We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.” And again, we are begged to asked the question, “for how long and what are the limitations?” It is clear from this passage alone that there are no limitations and the length of time is indefinite. Yet, what we find here from a simply literary analysis of this letter from the Apostle Paul is that there is a fundamental, underlying reason by which we are called to “deal with” other people’s shortcomings and weaknesses indefinitely: because “Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God” (v 7). We deal with other people not to please ourselves, in that, other people’s blatant shortcomings would cease to annoy and frustrate us, because Jesus could surely have been frustrated with us, and we would even admit to the fact that we are indeed frustrating people; but in working with these people we may find God’s mercy pouring upon their lives and into our lives for the truth, mind and voice of God that radically redefines our lives towards God. Allow me to explain that to you in simple terms: if we don’t deal with them, then it’s our fault that they (other people around us who we are peeved and annoyed by) are still that way and will continue to live that way. There is a supernatural imperative for us to constantly engage with people we don’t want to engage with because it is evidently clear that nobody else wants to deal with them either. If we must indefinitely deal with other people and their apparent and not so apparent shortcomings for the rest of our lives then we ask, “how do we deal with them?” Rather, is there a way to work with people without being frustrated by a person’s inability to modify their own behavior? Paul says in verse five that we should just pray to God and ask for “endurance and encouragement” — obviously because we need it to deal with them the rest of our lives. The answer again is simple. We deal with them “hopefully” believing that we are helping them build themselves up for something good. The people receiving this “deal” should be made aware of it, knowing that you are dealing with them because you want something better for their lives. Our intention must be towards helping these people reach a new plane where they are accepted and brought closer to God. We do this because Jesus accepts us in our shortcomings (our sins and stupidity) and brings us encouragement and endurance to move closer towards our Heavenly Father with mercy and grace. When we deal with people in a way that is not self-motivated; but other motivated, we will find ourselves pleased with our efforts and the people on the receiving end will graciously embrace our methods of building them up. As believers of Christ’s salvific work in our lives we are considered strong. It is our obligation to mind each other and bear with people’s failings and weaknesses. We don’t do this for people who don’t want it because that’s just plain annoying. We do this out of love and in reciprocation of God’s love for us. We do this to make other people better. So in dealing with other people’s weaknesses and failings, we do so in love, letting them know our intent is to make them better and build them up. In doing so, there is safety and hope for a stronger relationship. More importantly, God will be glorified by the miracle of a person’s transformation. Hope will fill you and you will be at peace and filled with joy because you no longer have to “deal” but you have extended God’s promise into their lives which was unavailable to them before. This is how Christ dealt with us and this is how we need to deal with others.

“All complain — princes and subjects, noblemen and commoners, old and young, strong and weak, learned and ignorant, healthy and sick, of all countries, all times, all ages, and all conditions.” – Pascal

If Pascal is right, then how do we keep from this annoying tendency in our daily lives and from the lives of people around us because the act of complaining pervades through various socioeconomic classes, cultures and epochs. In fact, the mere instance of complaining being present over such a broad spectrum in life suggests that the existence of a universal thread which can be identified and thereby clipped so as to remove the pretense of complaining. If we look at the Book of Proverbs, there is a way by which we can remove complaints from our lips– contentment in the small things.

Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God. (Proverbs 30:8-9) Jesus teaches the disciples to ask God for their Daily Bread and this prayer is recited by Christians everywhere without understanding the twofold nature of what is really being asked. The first thing and most obvious is that we be fed. People who have ever eaten and known what it is to be full surprisingly become agitated when they are hungry. For real! Have you ever tried working with a hungry person? They are irritable! Secondly, the more important reason is so that people will understand that there should be no complaining from the hand that provides. Notice the language here in this proverb– it is one of receiving without any reason for receipt. It is the embrace of humility. We are so arrogant to think that we earned anything, as if we’re entitled to it and so we complain like we’re justified. We need to stop complaining about our lives, the things we have and the things we don’t have. Rather, we need to pray for receiving just what we need to rely on God for our everything. We need to ask God to give us exactly what we need so that we don’t do something hideously unrighteous. We need to break the cycle Pascal describes as the human condition. We need to take the cues from the writer of this proverb and ask for two things for our lives: Truth and Contentment. I believe God will give us these things and in receiving them, we will understand that we should not complain, because we don’t have the right to do so. We receive without earning, and as such a freely receiving people, we need to stop complaining and receive our lives with gladness and contentment because God sustains us and we know the Lord provides in our prayers of petition to Him.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live… – Ecclesiastes 3:11-12 Leo Tolstoy once asked, “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?” This is the statement also found in Ecclesiastes 3: “There is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live.” The problem is finding that which makes us “joyful” and finding the work that is “good.” “Joy” is a state of mind that we dispose ourselves towards and therefore is a crooked type of contentment that shines forth despite of any emotion of happiness. For example, the father of an infant isn’t necessarily happy when he is awakened at 3:42AM to a baby’s crying; however in holding that child, he is joyful of having the opportunity of being with the baby. As a result, the “good” work to be done is to live into the present state of our lives and savor the flavor it leaves behind in our mouths and in our lives because it is the disposition of joy towards what God has gifted to us– an opportunity to live in and through circumstances. I know that sounds highly ethereal and too farfetching to be practical, so let me present to you what we need to think about when Solomon wrote this. The mindset of having “joy” comes from seeing the beauty of our lives in the awkwardness and uncomfortableness that we experience. If you think back on your life, you recognize, almost instantaneously, that we are shaped to be who we are by our pain and suffering. What if we look into our life and see the beauty that came from that pain and suffering– as if there can be any. My pops recalled often a time when my brother and I were young and I had suddenly fell ill– like I stopped breathing and just passed out and so he called 9-1-1 and they waited and waited, fearing the worst. EMS arrived and took me and my mother toward the hospital, but we never got there– the ambulance got into an accident with a drunk driver. En route to the hospital, my brother falls into a coma, for some unknown reason and in a blink of an eye, he was at the brink of losing two children and a wife. The chaos, agony, and uncertainty would certainly change a man– drive him mad; yet there was beauty in those circumstances and an eternity put into his heart by God that he did not realize– the brevity of life was given to do something good because death destroys. There is nothing better in life we can seek than the beauty found through reality and working to do good through them in our lives. Pleasure finds itself when we are disposed toward joy the innate joy of eternity in our hearts.

Take this logical reality check: you can’t know hope until you suffered hopelessly! That’s right, hope can only be known to people who lacked it and can’t grasp the idea of it. Hope can never been known to somebody who never had any need of it. This is not the type of hope where you “wish” upon a shooting star and you get a new car; this is the type of hope where you struggle to get by and keep suffering and bite your lip because one day, just one day, you may have an opportunity to afford better. Now this begs two questions: first, do we throw ourselves into an intentional hell in order to experience hope?; and, secondly, why do we need hope if it is only produced by suffering? More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. – Romans 5:3-5 The first question of intentionally seeking suffering for the purposes of obtaining hope: the answer is “no.” Don’t you have enough problems that you don’t have time to go seek out some more on your own? Paul writes to a largely egalitarian crowd in Rome and says its not about the type of suffering, but our response to it. For Rome, just like it is for New York, suffering does not mean becoming limbless or being diagnosed with a disease, although it can be, rather, it is the situation where one finds him or herself that is beyond the scope of discomfort– that is, pain and anguish! This is tangible suffering. We don’t avoid suffering through situations, we endure them and let them pass by and through our lives. Having survived the pain, whether it is real or fantastic, we change and develop a kind of grit and complexity of character. This is what we want in our lives if we all got 99 problems. We want to have something to show for our sufferings, to know that our time and energy was not spent in vain! Moving on to the second question then; why do we need hope in our lives if we live happy lives without any suffering? That answer is a bit more easier and a little bit more illogical– to be reminded of something better that awaits than the pleasure of our current situation. Look at what the Apostle Paul writes, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.” (Romans 5:6, 10 ESV). We suffer in life regardless of whether we want to or not. That’s just the way it is, suffering cannot be avoided. So if we have to suffer, we should suffer in hope of knowing something better is coming. If we let this “hope” blossom into the full consummation of sanctification in our lives, that is to become become much more than our wretched shortcomings through the blood of Jesus spilled at Calvary for a life worthy to be lived; then we have achieved the purpose of suffering and can be hopeful for it. We suffer to hope and hope comes from suffering.

Oh sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things! His right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him. – Psalm 98:1 It’s obnoxiously hard some days to have anything to be thankful for. The reason we have a hard time being thankful is because you and I look around and don’t find anything in our lives to marvel about. Everything loses its luster and the motions that take us through day to day, from and to, drains the energy from us drip by drip. You know that’s how you feel when the weather is dreary and wet, when there is nothing happy or enjoyable about your life and this is exactly the problem! The fissure between our so called faith and our reality is that we perceive the world differently than what our faith dictates. We then are responsible to turn around and adhere to a view that just doesn’t make sense. A prime example is this Psalm. It’s perfect when the roses smell like spring showers in our life, but when the world smells like deluge mixed with the right amount of chemical runoff, a Psalm makes us question what “marvelous” really means. This can only mean one thing for us who are trapped in between the spaces of believing truth, as it appears in the Bible, and our current reality: we need to make our reality the truth that appears in the Bible. It’s true– the Bible can sometimes sound a little bit too fantastic, but it’s supposed to. It does so for our sake. That is, it shows people coming to God when there is and should be nothing to be thankful for, God provides a reason for us to rejoice in a brand new song. It’s just how God interacts and wants to work with us. He wants to give us a new song to sing. In fact, the Psalmist writes that God, not only gives us a reason to sing new songs, but also works through situations where there is no thanks or hope because He is God and He wants to save us. I am not saying God causes the thankless, singles situations and circumstances in life; I am definitely saying that God redeems it and uses it for His purposes to hear new songs from our lips and our hearts. If you are facing situations and circumstances in your life right now that cause you to be song-less, bounce-less, and undeniably doubtful; you need to look for your salvation through the situation and circumstance. When you look, you will see God’s strong right hand (both figuratively and literally) amply able to pick you up when you grasp to it like a fish caught on a fishing hook. God will reel you into His salvation and you will be singing a new song because God will have done a new thing in your life. We all need to sing new songs every single day. How does your new song sound?

What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. (James 4:14 ESV) I want you guys to keep this in mind and think about this today and through June.

I know the school year is no longer in rhythm for you guys and you all beat to your own drums but this has eternal consequence if you think about this the right way: “what is our life?”Can you say it is anything at this point? Most likely, it is simply the sum culmination of eating and going to the bathroom?

I thought about this over the past few days and asked God, “what is my life?” because when you think about it, there are a lot of things in life that sort of randomly connect but you don’t know what that connection or what those connections are until you question, “what is my life.” When you go to that furniture purgatory known as Ikea and buy that quality Swiss engineered, Chinese manufactured piece of home comfort, you pick it up in a box with pieces and parts that you have to manually assemble. I don’t know why but the instructions are usually missing and if the instructions are there, in 8 languages but your own, you can’t seem to decipher it because it wasn’t written for a five foot eleven, Asian American dude born and raised on the East Coast.

You put piece 2f into the socket called Q, tying it widget B and your furniture doesn’t look like the picture on the box or the catalogue. So you take it apart and do it again with your own expert furniture engineering skills and you have left over screws and a few extra arms and now a missing leg. As soon as you sit on that baby, it’s done– you throw it in the trash a few months later; a mist that disappears after a moment.

Your life, until you can start piecing together the pieces, is meaningless. It’s like a breath that comes and goes like hot winter breath in the freezing cold. If that is the breadth of our life, then we must certainly do something with it because time is running short. But more importantly, we have to screw the pieces of our lives together appropriately or we won’t be useful for long. James, concludes with these fantastic ideas.

It’s one thing if we have no idea what we’re doing and them losing an opportunity on life given to us by the grace of God and the blood of Jesus Christ; it’s a totally other thing (sin) when we know how the pieces of our lives fit and fail to put it together properly or appropriately.

Life is short and we’re on God’s borrowed time, that is until the wind blows the mist away, what are we doing with it?