The Station Presents: Christmas

Want some free Christmas music? Anthony Celia, my good friend and partner at theStation, and Emkay Watson, another wonderfully talented musician working with our ministry in Denton have recorded a new EP filled with some Holiday tunes!

They wanted to release the album for free, as a gift to you and a tool to share the great news of the coming of Jesus, the Christ!

Download it for free HERE

One of the best things about this time of year is how easily a Christ-centered conversation can happen. I mean seriously, when else is can you sing an annoying song about Jesus, the coming Messiah, the King of Kings and Prince of Peace, without getting a weird look? Enjoy!

Oh, and if you get a chance check out Anthony's Blog for more music and updates on his ministry!

Count the Costs

One day a bunch of men and women went to listen to a preacher who had a growing reputation around their city. They had all heard stories of how eloquently he spoke, of how the truth he shared came with authority and insight. They called him relevant. He had a sense of humor.

Many were intrigued by his ideas (that they heard in bits and pieces) of a new approach to government, or his talk of “good news.” Some in the crowd even spoke of rumors that when this man was around wonderful things would happen: people were healed or miraculously fed or had their sins forgiven. Supposedly no one who listened to him speak was able to return home quite the same. And best of all, admission was free.

So the people came in droves to find out what all the hype was about. Some just to enjoy the show, others really hoping their lives could be changed. Many came only to see what this man could offer them.

The preacher stood up before the congregation and all the voices hushed. Now was his chance to give them what they came for. He had pulled the crowd, he just had to close the deal.

And then he did something strange. He asked them to count the costs. He asked that they consider their present circumstances, their comfort and peace and security and all of the things they held on to and loved with their whole hearts, their families and friends, their homes and money, even their very lives. He asked them how much they were worth.

“What King,” he continued, “before he sent his country to war wouldn’t sit down first and count his troops? Wouldn’t he need to know how much he stood to lose? Wouldn’t he need to know if the odds were in his favor?” (Luke 14:31,32)

We are going to war, he was saying, and I will tell you the cost: you will lose everything.

“Are you okay with that?” he asked, “Will you give up everything you have? All of those things? If you want to follow me, if you want what I have to offer, then that is exactly what it will take.” (Luke 14:33)

What was he thinking?

Jesus often stood before an audience that scripture said numbered well into the thousands, many of whom were probably waiting with itching ears to hear what they wanted to hear: that they would be blessed, that they would prosper and that God wanted their best lives now. Maybe if they heard it that way, if they heard that good news, then they would go out and tell their friends, they would bring more thousands upon more thousands and Jesus would have the biggest church in town. But Jesus wasn’t looking for bigger crowds, he was looking for disciples, so instead of a positive spin he spoke to them the truth.

Jesus wants men and women who have counted the costs and are ready to lay down their lives for the fight. Why? Because we have faith that the odds are in our favor. We know that our King will win the war, and that we share in his victory.

The focus of our hope isn’t the tiny blessings here and now. We put our trust in the enormous blessings of a God who is all about eternity. By faith we declare that His mission of salvation is what matters most to us. To follow Christ means following in his sacrifice. It means putting to death all that separates us from God and then giving all of ourselves for others that they may know our hope is real.

Jesus meant it when he said we must be willing to give up everything, because in losing all we have we stand to gain even more. We gain a place in the presence of God from whom all blessings flow. Any Gospel that says less is not the Gospel.

Now which Good News will you go out and preach?

Jesus Wept

This is part of a digital piece I've started working on depicting Jesus Christ's celebrated arrival into Jerusalem the week before he died. Check out Luke 19:37-42

As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out."

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace!" But now they are hidden from your eyes.

Hymn to the Works of My Hands

“Listen!” Chant the spectral choirs:

“Cast aside this ‘right and wrong,’

Come dance amid your heart’s desires,

Revel while we sing along,”

From canopies of fiber wires

Noisy with redundant song

Come hymns played on electric lyres

Lifted high by voices strong

Accompanied by violins

Tuned flat with strings of iron chains,

Thus my timeless waltz begins

With ghosts made real in tinted panes.

Mirrored rhythms meet my spins

That trace black swirls through carbon stains,

Earning looks that once were grins

From statues maimed by acid rains.

And in the glow of soft fluorescent

Lights I turn through listing haze,

Echoes from an ancient essence

Beckon in mathematic phrase.

Neon shifts of phosphorescence

Guide me through the narrow maze

To the foot of that steel presence

Where I marvel at my ways.

Revelations now translated

Fell upon me like a dove:

The glory due these things created

Is not to one who waits above.

More than God I stand equated

Loosed now from the shackles of

His hold on me through time abated

In the wake of freer love.

This world sprang forth from my own toil.

I made shores of separate seas

That at my slightest touch would boil,

On a whim be asked to freeze,

And when the sun become my foil

Found not shade in glens of trees

But towers grown from tougher soil

That did not falter in the breeze.

As my dominion greatly spread

I made the means to meet my goals,

Crafting beasts with hooves of tread

To work to death in certain roles.

So let my might be always read,

As it is written in my scrolls:

I filled such veins of copper thread

With sparks of life resembling souls.

Go write on stones of all my fame,

Carve in hurried hand of when

I the king of kings became

And conquered all this world within.

May the mention of my name

Outlast the memory of my skin,

For I did all the forces tame

Excepting one: the wage of Sin.

A Comforter is not a Blanket

I pushed my bed right up against my one big window and laid there patiently as the cold-front climbed in through the screen and settled over me like a haunting. I was suddenly reminded of the presence of my own skin. I felt clean. I realized then that the air from the vents in my ceiling had always been a dusty substitute--an artificial respiration--and now my lungs were shuffling off their atrophy and filling my veins with autumn. I opened my mouth wide and let it expand my chest with crisp and significant breaths.

Somehow this air was more real, this night was more real. Even the plucky guitar playing from my speakers and making its way to my ears was more real as it danced on the ceiling with the sound of the bushes and trees outside. It took me forty-five incredible minutes to fall asleep. That whole while I was thinking of glaciers and the New Jerusalem.

But when my alarm clock went off the next morning I started cussing the guy who invented windows. I jumped up shivering and slammed my hand on the snooze button before practically backflipping into my warm bed again. I curled myself up in a lump beneath every inch of blanket I had and fought failingly to fall back asleep. There under those blankets I realized that all of the plans I had made for that day, the people I wanted to see and the work I wanted to do, were all just going to have to wait until next year. There wasn’t a chance I was getting up from where I was. If I so much as took a step out from my bed there’s no telling what could have happened. I had a friend who got frostbite once.

I was comfortable where I was. But where did my comfort come from? Blankets. Blankets that in survival-mode desperation I had grabbed and wrapped around myself as insulation from the cold. Blankets that I put all of my trust in, but blankets that only worked if didn’t move too much. Yeah, my plans were just going to have to wait. My day was going to end right where it started.

There’s the tension. So long as we’re comfortable we’re probably not getting a whole lot done. More often than not if our main concern is being comfortable then all of our effort goes into maintaining our level of comfort. But what is that comfort? By wrapping myself in covers I hadn’t done anything to change the temperature in my room, I hadn’t put on a sweater or even closed the window. I was just ignoring the cold I didn’t want to face and letting a day’s worth of opportunities pass me by.

The sin in this attitude comes up when you realize that my plans for the day weren’t really that big of a deal, but God’s were all about eternity. I was telling God that I didn’t want to strike out on His plan, to be put in the places that He needed me to be. I didn’t want to carry out His mission, I really didn’t even care all that much about the people I would talk to that day or the work I was going to get done. All I cared about was staying there in my bed. And If you’re keeping up then you’ve realized that this has nothing to do with sleeping in and has everything to do with blankets.

What are the blankets we’ve wrapped around our lives? What are the things that keep us insulated but stuck to the place we started? Is all the work we do only to try and grab more blankets?

I don’t think we really know how much money to call a “living wage,” but we know how much would make us comfortable. And if we could save up a little more first, have our little safety net, then we could really start taking the time to live the mission--maybe even give some money to the Church. But we’re not quite there yet.

Or maybe this thing with our boyfriend or girlfriend isn’t working anymore, in fact it’s kind of just hurting us. But it sure does make you feel safe. If it ended where would we be? Alone and in the cold missing something that’s been there for a really long time so we decide it’s probably just better to deal with the consequences of a dysfunctional relationship than start all over from scratch with someone else or--even worse--not find anyone at all. “No I’ll wait it out,” we say in the back of our minds, “at least I can play the martyr for sympathy with my friends.”

And then there’s that thing, whatever it is, that we’re not quite proud of but let happen over and over again to get that cheap, momentary peace from all the stress and pressure and pain we experience in life. But the feeling doesn’t last and the hard stuff we’re too chicken to face head on all comes flooding back as soon as we try to move forward again. Rinse and repeat.

False comfort we secure for ourselves. It’s an idol. We’ve put trust in things we’ve made right out of stuff from the world that caused us the discomfort in the first place. And again, it keeps us stuck where we are, worrying about ourselves, and hiding beneath things that really are as thin as blankets.

The Apostle Paul knew exactly what it meant to be uncomfortable. We grab blankets when it gets sort of cold, but Paul was beaten within an inch of his life, stoned nearly to death, shipwrecked--not once but three freaking times--and then thrown in jail (I’m assuming without a blanket). After all of that he never forgot all the times that God had proven He was completely sovereign--in complete control of everything. Paul knew that a God who is sovereign is the only thing to trust in, and the only place to look when you really need comfort.

In a letter to the church at Corinth, Paul says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation,” but he continues to explain that God didn’t come to just make us comfortable in a world that wasn’t. He says God truly and eternally comforts us, “that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” (2 Cor 1:3-4) You can’t comfort anyone else hiding under the blankets.

And God’s plan to use us as comforters in the world, to have us turn our eyes and our hearts to other people instead of just worrying about ourselves is in fact a way better plan than anything we could come up with on our own. Let's face it, the world is uncomfortable, but you’ll find things a lot less uncomfortable when you’re not so focused on the state of your own comfort. And to top it all off, our actions when we comfort others are ultimately telling the world the truth about a God who is Love and His wonderful Son who died for our eternal comfort.

I have one of those alarm clocks where the snooze button lasts for a completely arbitrary nine minutes. Who decided nine minutes was the appropriate amount time it took to sleep in? Why not eight or an even ten? Either way, my alarm did go off one more time that morning, and as the sunlight finally started hitting me through the blinds I threw off the blankets.

And then I made the twenty-foot sprint to my hot shower.

Cold Call

I went to a concert the other day with Aaron, a friend of mine from class. Aaron happens to work as a barista at a coffee shop. It’s not one of the local neighborhood trendy coffee shops you can find in Denton but a corporate-run, franchise-owned fast food sort of coffee shop in the suburbs because apparently in the suburbs you can’t do anything hip. That’s not to rag on this particular chain of coffee shop (they make an amazing americano), more to rag on the suburbs.

I've really come to love spending time with Aaron. He’s very open-minded and great for conversation and has that kind of I don’t care attitude you find in poets or indie rock stars. He told me in the car on the way to the concert that he sees Christians come in to his coffee shop all the time to have their bible studies. He said he didn’t mind at all that they were there, even though he wasn’t a Christian. He said that one time even one of the leaders of a bible study tried to talk to him about Jesus:

“It was an older guy, he just walked up to the counter out of nowhere and asked if I’d heard the ‘good news.’”

I wondered if it was because Aaron has messy hair that hides part of his face and is covered in tattoos.

“I told him, ‘Well I know what I’ve heard,’” and he sort of laughed at that because we both know no one can grow up in Texas and not hear about Jesus. But like I said, Aaron is very open-minded and he listened to everything the bible study guy had to say, and then we talked for a few more minutes about the conversation, about the finer points. It bugged him that we focus so much on Jesus’ death. I thought that was really profound, but I didn't really know what to say.

We rode down the highway for a few minutes not talking, just listening to the music.

“Why do y’all do that?”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Just start talking to complete strangers about the ‘good news.’ It’s like you’re trying to sell us something.”

Hide and Seek

Sometime after all this started I met with my friend Shane at a Taco Bell to discuss why he didn’t believe in God. He was only a few years younger than me, and there was something familiar in the way he couldn’t quite look up when he said God didn’t make any sense.

He asked me how I knew God was real. I asked him who else he’d talked to.

“Adam. Steve. Pastor.” I turned to stare out the window, stalling. If those guys couldn’t change his mind then what did I know? Through the glass I saw my car in the parking lot where half an hour before I had been praying out loud with my forehead on the steering wheel that this kid would hear God when so many other’s couldn’t. I saw the cars parked next to it, all bigger than mine and past the street I saw chimneys, then steeples and cellphone towers all built for people who never talked to each other.

Beyond all of that the sun was starting to set. The clouds were orange and pink in a way I’m convinced they can only be in Texas. It all looked like if you drank it up it would taste a lot like citrus.

“What did those guys say?”

“Adam said something about prophecies coming true, and Steve just said it felt right.”

“And Pastor?”

He didn’t answer, he just looked at the burrito still on his tray. I knew exactly what the Pastor said: everything he could. No one in this city could have said it better, but his whole argument fell apart when the hard-sell got to the last line. When you’re eighteen the last thing you want to hear is that it’s a matter of faith. He asked me again how I knew.

“I don’t know how I know, man.”

“Then why are you here?”

I was there because he looked just like I used to, angry and hopeless and scared wondering why anyone would want to believe something so foolish. I was there because I had been that sad before and that was why I prayed more for him in the last few months than anyone else I could think of.

“Do you want God to exist?” I asked. He paused.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like the idea of nothing after I’m dead.”

“So why don’t you believe it?”

“How can I believe in a God that won’t talk to me?”

I told him that God was trying to talk, that if he really listened he would hear but I knew as the words were coming out of my mouth that he’d heard it all before. His hands were resting on his knees, far away from each other. It’d been a long time since those fingers had come together.

“I want to hear his voice. He could do that, right? A big booming voice in my bedroom. He could do that if he’s really God.”

“Yeah, I mean he’s done it before.”

“Then why not for me?”

“I don’t think it works like that anymore.”

“Then how does it work, Chase? I need to know he’s there.”

I saw in him then a bit of Thomas, and in that I saw myself not long ago demanding the bloody palms on the table in front of me where I would poke my fingers through. And when I’d touched the wood on the other side I’d start for his ribs, then wave my hands around in the air checking for the fish wires just trying to find some reason to quit all of this so I could get on with my own life.

When I was younger I used to tell God that if he was what he said he was then he should just write a flaming message in the sky. Not anything poetic (a psalm would have been overkill), just a pragmatic “I’m here” in a serif font burning right over the tops of all the houses. Best around the time people get off work.

But now I wonder what we would really do if, in those moments, he did actually speak. What if we saw the pillar of fire or heard the booming subwoofer voice in our bedrooms? Would we fall to our knees and tremble or would we be like the men in the Bible who heard His voice and said, surely not. It must have only been thunder.

The thing about God is that He hides himself. And if God is hiding then we are playing seek, but not in a way that makes us lonely more in a way like children: laughing because we know our friend is out there somewhere, maybe curled up in the yard or buried beneath the towels in the cupboard. We’ll spend a whole afternoon searching every familiar hole and corner until we finally find the spot then explode with delight already counting with our hands over our eyes again so that the game can keep on going.

And this isn’t trivial. I think God knows this is something we enjoy--in fact He made us to enjoy it. Think about it. Isn’t there something really profound in the way a child never wants to stop playing the same old game? It’s only when we try to act like grownups that we lose that sense of joy and instead get frustrated at the effort involved in playing, or maybe the discrepancies in the rules. It’s when we think ourselves too mature that we get mad at a God who is hidden. Maybe that’s why Jesus told us to come to him like children.

But even still--if we’re really being honest--with every sleepless night and every shout of anger at a God who’s just out of sight I think we see the truth at least in glimpses. We see the perfect in His nature even if we can’t see His face: If God didn’t hide then men would call Him a tyrant.

God never did write anything with fire back then, but as I sat there with my friend and told him that story of my doubt, I looked out the window one more time and saw the sun still setting.

“That’s how I know.” I said, nodding at a horizon so bright you could barely keep looking. Then he got it.