Category Archives: Quiet Time

Role Models

I have become a sign to many; you are my strong refuge. – Psalm 71:7

I think anybody who knows me personally can tell you that I am probably not the ideal role model for non-jaded youngsters brimming with life. If anything, they could point to me and say, “do not become like that guy because this is what happens when you don’t live morally.” I remember a time, when preaching, said something like, “don’t be a flip flopper when it comes to making decisions.” Seriously, it was in the realm of “let your ‘yes’s be ‘yes’s and your ‘no’s true ‘no’s. Of course, not more than an hour later at a church staff meeting, no less, I’m sitting there giving both “yes” and “no” to the same question in alternating fashion. I know that’s minor, it’s not like I was caught doing something atrocious which speak to the moral shortcomings of 21st century religious leaders. But let’s be real, we all have horrible experiences with being role models and/or watching our role models fail miserably and succumb to a horrific moral shortcoming. You and I could rattle off a few off the top of our heads where role models failed over the past several weeks. Am I right? But here’s the interesting thing about being a role model; you don’t have to be a beacon of moral superiority. In fact, the only thing you need, to be a role model is an idea of where to get help when you need it. The Psalmist writes that we are role models when we proclaim God to be the place where we go when we’re tumultuously placed in life. But that is not entirety of it. We don’t just proclaim God to be our “refuge” when we are desperate, nor do we only turn to him in 50 Hail Marys when we need a quick fix miracle. The Psalmist wants us to know that we can always go to God and our confidence in ourselves don’t have to stem from our inner-selves, but be sourced out of the hope in being a child of God. When we have hope in God for everything, despite of and because we are who we are, we begin to live thankfully and gratefully. We read here in this chapter that “praise” forms on our lips and our lifestyles begin to reflect something different and apart from what the rest of the world is used to seeing. There is a swagger that sets you up to be followed as a role model that was never about how much you fall short, but about how much you rely on God despite your shortcomings. But this only happens when we make God our refuge. I want you to be a role model. We should all want to be role models. It doesn’t mean that we will never fail morally or at a task assigned to us. But where we fail, we should know where we can get help and to whom we can rely. Christianity differs from each and every other religion and philosophy in this aspect– we don’t have to be superior and indestructible on our own. We are given specific information on who and where we can go when we realize that we will always fall short and never be the emblem of perfection everybody wants us to be. We cry out and call up to Jesus and into the mercy of God and because we turn that way and defer ourselves to God’s grace, we become role models, exemplars to other people on how we should live. It’s true, we may mess up here and there or everywhere in between here and there, but if we have on the tips of our tongues, the understanding of God’s grace despite ourselves, we are role models aptly able to show other people how to praise God.

Entrusted

…but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts. – 1 Thessalonians 2:4 Why do we seek to be entrusted with more in life? Is it a secret desire to be counted as worthy? Is it to fill a longing within us to hold power? Perhaps our motivations for wanting to be entrusted with more comes our egotistical cravings for wanting to be needed. Whatever the reason, whether we welcome it or not, and regardless if we even deserve it, we find ourselves being entrusted with big things, important things, difficult things. For example, we are charged with managing people, budgets, policies, children, parents, and homes! We lose our minds and bend over backwards trying to be responsible for the things we have been entrusted with and in an act of pure lunacy, we forget that the very things we have been entrusted with are not worth the price of our meager lives. Now we get a little stupid here because we’re running around like rabid monkeys trying to accommodate everybody and everything entrusted to us but the biggest thing we have been entrusted with goes largely ignored and forgotten, trampled in a sense, by the multitude of smaller entrustments. I mean just think about. How much time do we spend handling the vast minutiae of responsibilities entrusted to us? I can probably say with a fair amount of certainty that we don’t give the larger, grander things we’ve been entrusted with much more than a quick glance. So these larger things don’t get the attention they really deserve. I mean how many times have we been caught out there dealing with smaller less important issues that we forget the larger picture? What are we really doing with the biggest thing we’ve been entrusted with? We have the most important thing entrusted to us by God and we will blatantly neglect it like roadkill on the side of a highway. We have been entrusted with the duty to give people the good news and we don’t do anything with that responsibility. That’s the problem. We don’t think enough about the people in our lives who we’ve been entrusted with to share the gospel– they get trapped underneath the clutter of smaller entrustments and our biggest responsibility becomes forgotten. We have been entrusted, as Christ followers, as messengers of Good News. The good news is that we would be dead, unforgiven, broken and spiraling towards death, but for the work of Jesus that redeems us into a new humanity and a renewed lease on life. Yet we don’t share that hope with people who desperately need it! I miss so many opportunities and often ignore opportunities to share that and live into the things that were entrusted to me. We have influence over people’s souls in disposition towards God’s heart! We can’t forget that we interject into people’s lives for a greater purpose than to simply pass them by and limit ourselves to mere conversation. We need to add to their lives as they add to our own. How you handle this responsibility dictates the answer for the real question at hand: whose trust do you want more? People or God’s? We’ve all be entrusted by God with the full glory and weight of His Good News, it’s time to do something with it.

Motivations Behind Actions

I hate it when people pretend like there are no motivations behind their actions. Do they seriously think I was born yesterday and that I can’t see right through their blank eyes? What I love to hate most about those people is the smugness they show when gloating over their perceived victory when I verbally agree with them to get rid of them from my life. Then they get mad! Let’s be real, your intention was to get over, how are you really going to get mad because I got over on you and left you holding the ball you were supposed to take care of in the first place? But all of us have motivations behind the actions we take, don’t we? We’re no better than the very people we hate. We are motivated by selfish desires and that’s what we act on. Often times we act on them to our detriment. Just look at the stock market if you don’t believe me, how many big banks posted major losses based on a blind trading fury fueled by speculative greed? It’s really awesome how hypocritical we are when it comes down to it. We need to stop playing games and cease to pretend like our actions are randomly poised through benevolent chance. We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. – 1 Thessalonians 1:3 The Apostle Paul demonstrates what our motivations should be as Christ followers and what they aren’t as depraved humans. What we see here is a pointed dichotomy of motivations demarcating people who act with power and good news and people who act with no semblance of power or good news. Actions that bring good tidings and supernatural power stem forth from a faith, love and hope in a Savior God that is Jesus Christ. This should be the underlying rationale behind all of our motivations for action. I understand we’re all human and running in some large rat race where cheese is constantly being moved; but shouldn’t we be trying to make Jesus the motivations of our actions as best as we can? Of course we should! If our motivations lay in Jesus’ redemptive work in society; that is, to see God radically change the fundamental principles guiding this world through His mercy and grace, then we must act like we want to see it. Our motivation is to see that radical change through the power of love. Our actions must become extensions of that longing to see this redemptive work through. Just think about how differently you would approach situations and circumstances if this was your sole motivation. It may be difficult for us to wrap our heads around how each and every action we take is motivated by faith, love and hope in Jesus Christ, so let me break it down further. A “work produced by faith,” or actions motivated by our faith in Jesus, are activities that stretch us beyond the scope and nature of our being. That is, we do things (positive things) that are uncharacteristic of us because they go beyond the scope of our norm. When we are motivated to engage in activities that stretch us this way, we are producing work through faith. It takes faith to do something that would stretch us. Likewise, a “labor prompted by love” is not love of self. It is anything that you do self-sacrificially. Meaning that you may lose yourself in the process. Yet you lose yourself knowing that it was Jesus who first lost himself by giving up his rights as God to walk amongst us as a man. Finally, we must make light of the fact anything and everything we do, regardless of how shameful we may think it is, is done so knowing and trusting that one day God will show His power in this world in a very unexpected and glorious way. Our motivations are often protections for our ego, but do we need the protection? The implications of this is simple: every time we decide to act, we should consciously make the choice to be motivated by faith, love and hope in Jesus Christ. If you truly want to bring glory to God, let people see these as the motivations of your actions.

Go to Galilee

I could almost smell it, this pervasive stench of doubt and second-guessing. Amidst the rank odor, I know deep down in my heart that if I had only jumped on the opportunity that had been placed before me, my life would have been vastly different. I’ve said this about more than one business proposition, and more than one job offer. I’ve lost sleep over regret and countless “what ifs:” “If only I could’ve been brave enough,” I chastise myself. Perhaps it was a matter of timing: if the timing had been better, things would’ve been different. The relationship would’ve worked out and we would not only be together, but dating, engaged or married. Or, maybe it was a matter of decision-making: we were unable to see past the logical confines and elaborate implications of our decisions, so we took the low road of making no decision at all. The stories are all similar and they all continue to go on and on with similarly dissatisfying results: we never get around to experiencing that life-changing event. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.” – Matthew 28:10 This story depicts two women, friends of Jesus, at his tomb on Easter Sunday. We’re probably all very familiar with this scene: when two women find the tomb empty, the resurrection movement, which we know as Christianity, is begun. The context of this verse demonstrates the teleological implications for God’s active engagement within our lives: in other words, there are intersections in our lives at which we can directly and very tangibly experience the movement of God in our lives without stretching forth in faith. What? That’s right, we have opportunities in our lives where we don’t need faith to experience God, where God is so blatantly working and moving that it’s obvious and plain to anybody and everybody. We call this a life-changing event. Most of the time, this life-changing event is the moment in which you accept Christ as your savior. God actively gives you the faith in the form of some type of truth and BAM, it hits you harder than an anvil across the bridge of your nose and suddenly you’re crying because you experience God’s life-changing activity for the first time in your life. This same thing happened to these two women. They didn’t have an out-of-body experience attainable only through an individualized faith; rather, they had a real, tangible experience birthed from God’s working. Here’s what I’m getting at: in our hearts, there are leanings and inclinations that are not simply ill-defined sensory perceptions. Rather, they are instructions for us to go to Galilee, where we can experience God in a very real and tangible way. Galilee, if you don’t know already, is “the right place at the right time.” However, it’s not just the right place and right time for any ordinary opportunity, but the God-ordained place and time for a receiving of authority. When we go to Galilee to receive Jesus and see him personally, we are granted the same authority that is granted to Him by God, the Father. There’s no doubt about that: it’s in the Bible, just a few chapters after today’s verse. Ultimately, the choice of whether you receive that authority or not, is yours. The opportunity to choose only comes when you take that plainly obvious feeling to do something beyond the ordinary, and go to Galilee– the place you know in your heart you have to go! I know this Devotional has been a largely abstract one, but here’s the point: we will experience the power of God in our lives, if we are not be afraid to go. We live too many waking hours in fear. We spend too much time in-between here, where we are, and Galilee, where we can experience God. I want to challenge you – and perhaps this is what you need – to come with me to Galilee and see what Jesus has in store for our lives. You need not be afraid to go. You need not faith to receive. You need only a desire and curiosity to see God actively engaging in our lives. Make the decision today: come to Galilee. Jesus is waiting, and so is a life-altering opportunity.

Go Forward

This morning I prayed to God asking for deliverance out of the situation I perceive myself to be having. For some reason, I feel trapped and strangled by it. I applied what all the Christian people tell you to do in situations like this, which is to pray like you never prayed before, asking God to deliver you from the hands and grips of your situation and then I realized I was wasting my time. I wasn’t wasting my time because I don’t believe God will deliver me. I was wasting my time because God has already delivered me and I was sitting there waiting to be delivered from something I was only perceiving to be a situation whereby I had no tools to escape. I know this is how we all feel when the stress is up, the deadlines are knocking and nothing that should have been safely assumed to go right actually goes right. So we pray and pray and then we get frustrated and sit there. Then we get dealt the final blow and it stings, it hurts, it paralyzes and we sit there wondering whether we even had enough faith to see this through. Only problem about this scenario is that the logic is all out of whack. It’s wrong and stupid to be thinking this. The Lord said to Moses, “Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward. Lift up your staff, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, that the people of Israel may go through the sea on dry ground. – Exodus 14:15-16 The Israelites had just left Egypt. The Bible says that they “ran away” from their Egyptian slave masters. Upon figuring out that the Israelites were not coming back and the slave labor force was now nonexistent, Pharaoh got 600 chariots and started the pursuit of escaped slaves across Egypt cornered them against the Red Sea. The Israelites, in fear and in desperation, cried out to God and blamed Moses for leading them into calamity. They would rather live as a slave, than die fighting for a chance at their freedom. This is a place most of us know all too well. We would rather be slave and be miserable, hating the rest of our long pathetic lives rather than take a shot and do something we find worthwhile. The Israelites wailed and became petrified despite seeing how far God took them out of Egypt. Then God says something funny, “Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward.” Isn’t it obvious? They are crying because they don’t know what to do. They don’t see the potential escape. They can’t figure out what to do because they’re panicking and they only see death and demise! God then asks “why do you cry to me?” like He doesn’t know! He does know why they’re crying. God knows why we cry out to Him. But His answer is not, “sit tight and watch what I will do.” His answer is, “go forward!” There’s a reason God tells His people to go forward and it’s not to push them into a type of blind faith. This isn’t the occasion for that. God tells His people to go forward because He had already provided the tools for the solution and placed them within their grasp. You see God had already given them His power. God gave them power through Moses staff in this instance. The same staff that showed God’s power in Egypt was going to be the conduit for God’s power in this circumstance. They already had the answer, they just needed to creatively apply it. In the end, God told them what to do with the tools that they had, but it was up to them to actually do it. This same concept applies to us today. We are God’s people and He has already equipped us with the tools to face life’s most challenging circumstances. Unfortunately, we would rather cry to God about delivering us instead of finding the tools, skills and knowledge God had already given us and apply it. The question then becomes, if this is how we intend to live out a life of faith– what faith do we have when we’re not bothering to apply that which we know we already received in faith in terms of gifts from God? We have an imperative from God to go forward despite the circumstances. You have the tools from God to go forward, are you still crying to God, shaking without life or are you creatively applying His power already present in your life to watch miracles unfold? It’s time for us all to go forward.

The Hiding Place

You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance. Selah (Psalm 32:7 ESV)
When my brother and I were younger – this was pre-video games – we would use furniture, blankets and couch cushions to construct elaborate “bases” where we could hide from the world, and then traverse in and out of these secret bases. As we got older, we grew out of the “bases” we’d created as kids; in an evolution of sorts, we each moved onto the local park, then the school playground, then a friend’s home, then to a school far, far away. Now, the “base” is the office at work, the gym, the bar, the train station at Newark where there is no cell phone coverage, and so on and so forth. We all have hiding places, these bases, that we turn to in search of quiet solace and comfort. These places give us freedom from the pressures of the day and relieve the tensions built up within our minds and hearts. Here’s the problem: very few of us effectively use our hiding places. Moreover, we’re too caught up in our day-to-day to even have time to find refuge. And it is to those of us who are too busy to hide, that I write this morning: you can be hidden anywhere, if you know how. I promise that the following won’t be an advertisement for Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility. If you feel that you are wasting away while quietly suffering the futility of life, and you believe that the only thing you can do is bite your lip, clench your teeth and hope that your grit whisks you away from your predicament; then, you have to find your hiding place: you need to pray! But, you knew that already. You and I both knew that. It’s such the obvious solution, yet neither of us do it. We’re both too engaged with “living life,” and we don’t pray. When we do pray and actively engage God about our inequity and shortcomings, we find that God actively covers them up for us. In His covering up our weaknesses and inequities, we regain strength. Our dried-up and wasted minds become refreshed. Our burned-out, lackluster passions begin to rage like a wildfire. But God’s offer of true refuge, rest and refreshment work only when we are candid about our assessments of our needs: if we play games and beat around the bush, there is nothing. I know what you’re thinking: that the last time you’d tried praying, there was no response. That God is either dead or doesn’t care about our insignificance, because if He were alive He would have changed your life. Unfortunately, that was never His way of doing things. In fact, the writer of this Psalm says to pray honestly and then contemplate how God will be your hiding place. He writes that God has already provided you with some relief: deliverance and victory. You can hear the victory march, you can see trouble running away, and you are experiencing your hiding place in God. All you had needed to do was to be more honest with God, than you are with any other person you know. Find your hiding place. The rejuvenation, comfort and satisfaction is something we all need. Selah.

Isn’t It Obvious?

Cues are so hard to decipher. Especially the non-verbal cues that you’re somehow supposed to understand. But how could you understand them when nobody explained it to you? Have you ever been in a meeting and your team is giving you signs and you’re just staring at them, hoping they would say something, but you keep talking and they keep looking at you, and you just sit there having a staring contest because whatever needs to be said isn’t being said and after the meeting one of your team says to you, “isn’t it obvious? Why didn’t you understand?” So you sit there wondering whether you even knew what the signs were. If it hadn’t happened to you in an all important business meeting, it happened to you in your pursuit of a romantic relationship. Or it happened to you in your chase for a new job. It happened at some point where you needed to take the cues, understand the signs and you just didn’t get it because it wasn’t obvious. More than that, it wasn’t enough of a sign for you to go by. And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. – Matthew 16:3 This is what Jesus said to the religious people who wanted Jesus to perform some great miracles and heal some more people. The problem was Jesus was already performing miracles and healing people, the religious people just decided they were going to write those things off as flukes and serendipitous. It’s ironically funny because it is the religious people who should know the best and have the most belief, but it turns out that they were the most skeptical. They didn’t understand the obvious signs being performed in front of them because they chose not to believe it. Jesus storms off after making this statement by telling the Scribes and Pharisees, “no sign will be given to you except the sign of Jonah.” To us that statement is cryptic and something that needs to be deciphered in it’s own quiet time, but to the religious professionals of the first century, he was pressing upon the single greatest religious debate within the Jewish faith. This begs two questions this morning: do we choose, as modern day religious people (because if you go to church more than twice in a month, you’re considered religious), to not believe that there are real problems in the world that we should be responding towards? I mean, just think about this for a few minutes: we sit on our neatly ordered pews every single week, hoping for some type of divine revelation that the pastor is somehow supposed to bestow and we hear what the pastor says but we don’t use it for any type of change in our lives. It gets worse when we sit there and the morality that is supposed to be of God is relegated to relativism in our hearts because the signs of the times were written for God’s people who are other than us. Guess what, we just missed the obvious– we are God’s people and the signs are for us. These signs are not supernatural; rather, they are the remnants of an endemic plight of human depravity. Second, as religious people, are we not understanding the obvious cues written into our so called faith? Here’s what I mean by that: isn’t Jesus’ life, death and resurrection the obvious cues by which our course of action in our lives are vibrantly altered? By saying we believe this, shouldn’t that produce a reaction from us? Shouldn’t this be the calling on our lives to be more than what we dreamed of being? Jesus frees us to be truly who we were made to be and yet we choose to be who we are not, isn’t there a problem with that? It is pretty obvious, isn’t it? We have divine opportunity led to us by divine signs and we choose to ignore it. We’d rather demand more proof before we act. The problem is, we’ve been given the greatest proof and still we find it easier to not believe than to stare into the face of reality and believe. What signs and cues are obvious to you that are being neglected in your life? Find the strength and choose to correctly address the obvious.

The Butterfly Effect

And David said to God, “Was it not I who gave command to number the people? It is I who have sinned and done great evil. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand, O Lord my God, be against me and against my father’s house. But do not let the plague be on your people.” -1 Chronicles 21:17 Sometimes we do asinine things and others take the blame for it. We do things where the implications of our actions stretch far beyond our own self and pervade the lives of the people living around us, oftentimes leading to devastating consequences. This is the butterfly effect, in which your action sets into motion a chain of unintended reactions that alter both your present and future. King David orders a census in this story. But the census in itself is not the problem: the intention he has for conducting this census is what brings about the devastation. You see, God had told David not to conduct a census. Unfortunately, David was tempted away from God’s instruction and did what he’d wanted: basically spit on God and show irreverence to the reason he was even king in the first place. The result: punishment. David was given three options for paying the penalty, and he chose, “I want the punishment to be supernatural.” So the kingdom came to be plagued by pestilence. It’s not enough for us to simply talk about the butterfly effect, because situations and things that “spill over” as a secondary or tertiary consequence is out of our control and beyond the scope of most of our decisions and actions. Simply said, we believe that “It’s not our problem.” Except, it is. Here’s the point that we can’t lose sight of: we’re responsible. We may not be able to control what other people do; heck, we may not even have anything to do with the calamity that befalls people. But we are still responsible. If you want to see your actions have a butterfly effect on others’ lives, I challenge you to act by praying over their lives. I challenge you to act by bestowing grace on them. I challenge you to take a hit and offer yourself, as the responsible party, before God. I promise you that when you do these things, there will be a chaotic immersion of new blessings from God. Be responsible: let your butterflies be the purposeful effects of God’s change.

Forgetting

Then they believed his words; they sang his praise. But they soon forgot his works; they did not wait for his counsel. – Psalm 106:12-13
Every time I view the actions of very young children, I begin to understand the impulsive nature of humanity a little bit more. I mean, just think about the last two interactions you had with a toddler: weren’t they dichotomous? One week, you receive love and adoration when you give them a Starburst from your pocket; the next, they look at you with spiteful eyes and run away when you turn your head in their direction– even though you have another treat for them! The reason for impulsiveness lies within the nature of forgetting. God proves Himself to be who He says He is, over a period of time. We even choose to believe God because He has proven Himself to be true, time after time. We get caught in a jam, cry out to God, and He saves us. In fact, this is how most of us probably came to faith: while at a low point in life, we realize our futility and decide to get on our knees to try and conjure up anything we’d learned in Sunday School, twenty years ago. Then it comes to us: salvation! We begin our cycle of piety from there. We believe the Word of God, and sing songs as loudly as we can, belting words we barely know. They were wonderful, those days of piety, those days of fresh remembrance. Then, life became too good. It was filled with too much blessing. We found that being a Christ-follower in America is rewarding. Our humble curiosity, blossoming into a journey of faith with God, one day becomes a source of tyrannical pride. Our studies and our prayers into the things and nature of God ceased: we got wrapped up in our own lives and we forgot who He was, and who we are. In a dizzying descent into impulsiveness, we ignore God because we think we know God when, realistically, we have forgotten Him. This is the current state of our hearts. We have systematically become impulsive whores to ourselves and forgotten the things God has done for us, time and time again. Today we must remember. We must cry out to God, as we once cried out, and ask Him to save us. This is the only way we won’t forget; this is the only way we can continue to believe. Don’t forget.

Meeting Where They Are

Have you ever been in a situation in which you were going through personal issues and needed to be alone, but other people came along and you were “compelled” (forced, really, since they’d already shown up) to help them through their issues first and put your own problems on the back burner? With that, I’ve probably described every single day of your life! I mean, when was the last time any of us really got to withdraw from the grind of life to tackle our own personal issues without disturbances? When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick. – Matthew 14:14 Jesus had just learned that his cousin had been unjustly beheaded because an incestuous pedophile king couldn’t keep his pants on. Having made promises to his step-daughter who, for all intents and purposes, was a stripper for this king, Herod cut off the head of John the Baptist and brought it to his party on a platter– literally! Just imagine the angst, the anger, the sadness that probably had filled Jesus’ heart. He and John had grown up together, and had probably spent holidays at the same relatives’ homes. Jesus admired John, and was baptized by him. John witnessed the power and glory of God through Jesus. They were more than close: they were family. So Jesus goes away to be alone, but people just won’t allow him the time to heal and mourn for John. Jesus teaches us something important about life here: if you’re in the middle of retreating and healing from your own suffering yet people go out of their way to seek you out amidst their own afflictions, then you must meet them. Does that take your grieving or healing out of the periphery? It absolutely does. But here’s the key to loving other people like yourself: have compassion. Jesus had compassion for the people: He hadn’t feel sorry for them, because that’s totally different. Jesus had compassion, an emotion embodying understanding through love and expressed through a meeting of hearts. We need to stop meeting ourselves and filling ourselves for our sake; instead, we need to start meeting people where they are. People will go out of their way to seek you out: have compassion, and walk with them through their healing. I’m not saying that we have to meet every person who brings to us every insignificant problem that they’d caused: problems that, if desired to be corrected, could easily be controlled. Please use your judgment: you don’t have to meet people to entertain stupidity. However, we can’t ignore others and their real issues just to deal with our own: we need to have compassion, and meet with them. Have we been ignoring people and their issues? Have we failed to meet people where they were, because we wanted them to fix themselves before coming to us? Remember: that’s not how we came to Jesus. Let’s not forget that.