A Decade of Music

Following the trend, and after much scouring of my iTunes,

I've put together a list of all my favorite albums from the last ten years.

1. bright eyes - i'm wide awake, its morning

2. sufjan stevens - come on feel the illinoise

3. bon iver - for emma, forever ago

4. jack's mannequin - everything in transit

5. death cab for cutie - transatlanticism

6. iron and wine - our endless numbered days

7. rocky votolato - makers

8. mewithoutyou - brother, sister

9. sweeney todd - revival cast

10. something corporate - north

11. coldplay - x&y

12. the rescues - crazy ever after

13. death cab for cutie - the photo album

14. john mayer - where the light is

15. radiohead - kid a

16. relient k - mmhmm

17. death cab for cutie - plans

18. keith urban - be here

19. the shins - chutes too narrow

20. the rocket summer - do you feel

21. jon mclaughlin - indiana

22. radiohead - in rainbows

23. john mayer - continuum

24. underoath - they're only chasing safety

25. coldplay - a rush of blood to the head

26. the postal service - give up

27. vampire weekend - self-titled

28. son lux - at war with walls and mazes

29. rachael yamagata - happenstance

30. neko case - middle cyclone

31. the album leaf - in a safe place

33. switchfoot - the beautiful letdown

33. beck - guero

34. kanye west - graduation

35. the fray - how to save a life

36. joshua radin - we were here

37. sigur ros - Hvarf/Heim

38. passion worship band - how great is our god

39. olafur arnalds - eulogy for evolution

40. michael buble - it's time

41. taking back sunday - tell all your friends

42. five for fighting - the battle for everything

43. jack johnson - in between dreams

44. sondre lerche - dan in real life

45. zero 7 - when it falls

46. maroon 5 - songs about jane

47. fun. - aim and ignite

48. brett dennen - so much more

49. wilco - yankee hotel foxtrot

50. coldplay - parachutes

Honorable Mentions:

josh ritter, ingrid michaelson, rilo kiley, girl talk, & the format

as well as other works by:

sigur ros, the shins, iron and wine, coldplay, beck,

taking back sunday, relient k, mewithoutyou, neko & soco

sanctification by grace

i believe in the sufficiency of grace.
whether or not i am living that out is always a challenge.

we find salvation by grace, but where i have fallen short is the sanctification of self that follows in response.

like salvation, sanctification can only come by grace.

i've spent much of my life believing in Christ, asking for his great help for my salvation, believing i am redeemed in his mercy, and then attempting to pull myself up by my bootstraps so that i might walk with the Lord, as if i could put together all my broken pieces on my own.

my logic here is that i want to be worthy of God's grace, although that is never something i could acheive on my own. yet because of my pride, i often try to make myself presentable before the Lord without his help in a way to prove my worth. but that in and of itself is contradictory to the sufficiency of grace.

i first sought Christ because i recognized i was powerless to save myself. that i needed help to deal with my deeply rooted sin. and in the beauty of his provision, i praise him that i am saved. but after that, i still operate under the assumption that my spiritual growth towards maturity still wholly depends on me.

but the truth is that i am no better at sanctifying myself as i am at saving myself. so if i am in Christ, if i am now truely "holy and blameless" as Ephesians 1:4 would indicate, why am i still trying to 'make myself holy' by depending on myself?

Tom L. Eisenman writes, "The beginning of holiness does not lie first in our determined effort to clean up our lives. The road to holiness always begins with submission to God as the prime mover in the sanctifying process. Our highest priority is our relationship with Christ."

to what avail then could i ever present myself worthy to the Lord? to whom am i trying to prove i've got it all together, and that i don't foremost need the Lord's help? since when did following the commandments of the Lord imply one must first be holy and righteous on their own before they can follow in the way of God? this has never been true. all are broken before they ever receive the Lord, and will continue to be. grace may not be an immediate fix to the sin-problem. but it is sufficient.

the truth is that as a christian, i am broken. 1 John 1:8 says, "if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." the christian life carries the expectation of lingering sin. like an injury you can't walk off.

but Eisenman notes: "the interesting thing about God's healing [is that] when he heals, he leaves the broken thing in place. Instead of fixing the broken thing, he brings his power through the Holy Spirit to overpower the brokenness..."

Romans 6:6 notes that with Christ our old self was crucified so that sin would be katargete, rendered powerless. it no longer has the power to control our lives. we gain new eyes to see it for what it is, and by the grace of God it has no control. Eisenman describes it in this way:

"God does not remove the boulders from the rapids of life; 

he raises the level of the water."

God is not the cleaning lady here to throw out all our junk, and clean house for us so that we are suddenly spotless and clean. no, God instead visits us and fills us, and by him the level of water raises, and all those boulders and those burdens have no affect on our lives anymore. they are rendered powerless to change us, and we are free to live our lives as his will originally intended.

as a christian, have i lived a life free from all my burdens? have i trusted everything to the Lord? the answer is no. in fact, often times following God becomes my burden! but the source of my anguish is not the Lord's commandments, rather the posture of my heart in following them. i wholly desire what 1 John 5 indicates for the christian life. that the commandments of the Lord would not be burdensome and that my life could rise above its boulders. but for that to be true, i need to return again to the sufficiency of grace. 

relevant to this discussion, C. S. Lewis compares a life of overcoming temptations to be like a child constantly falling down on a road traveling home. He writes,

"No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be v. muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the v. sign of his presence."

he first asserts that the more we fall, and as the journey seems long, and everything gets difficult, and we keep on falling, our largest temptations involve giving up. this is an example of what it is like to seek after the Lord. but if we cannot accept that both salvation and sanctification are products of grace, the journey on which we fall and have to pick ourselves back up will not lead to righteousness but frustration. to the guilt of not being able to achieve a self-setermined level of unreal perfection.

what i love in his analogy though, is that the very dirt we recognize to be covering us when we fall is the very proof that God is in us. our sensitivity to sin is a gift of God's spirit, and a sign of our salvation. without an inner struggle, we would truely still be lost.

my resolve: 

2 Peter 3:18 is a command. i need to return to the joy i've known to be found in submission to Jesus Christ. therein lies true freedom from my frustrations, and the ability to let the Lord deal with my brokenness without any walls, without having to do it all on my own. to let him raise the level of the water, that the waters may be peaceful and calm again. that is sanctification by grace. that is the will of God. who are any of us to stand in the way?

Christ died so that we might live. 

Christ died so that when i fall, i can pick myself up again. 

again i ask who are any of us to stand in the way of the Lord? when Peter challenged Jesus that he should not have to die in Matthew 16, Christ's reply was simple: "Get behind me satan." who are we to stand in the way of the Lord? who are any of us to deny God the rightful ability to share with us his grace.

The Lord is good. 

Eternity

From A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken:

"Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures?"

~ C. S. Lewis

Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest?

It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we hurried by time, we seem unable even to get use to it. We are always amazed at it - how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it. 

If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.

Thurible

I carry you with me, and it has me in pieces
my heart swinging like the reverend’s thurible
encased in metal, it censors my emotions
as they seep out pores in my side, drifting in the air
to those who do not have ears to hear
as the Father takes me down the aisle of my peers

They have not eyes to see me smoldering
the charcoal at the pit of my desires
as I throw caution to the wind 
and offer this holy sacrifice to God in fear:
“Lord I believe, help me in my unbelief,
give me a tongue and let my heart speak.”

Oh contradiction,

you have become the parish bell I ring;

but they hear not the bell I toll, they have only mouths to sing

can they not smell the incense burning, or even feel

my pain, for it's on the straight and narrow

I swing, like a ball and chain

(2/22/09, 5/12/09)

the fall.

i left my bike in dried up flower bed

the tires digging into the soil

treading on the easter lilies that once grew.

the metal kickstand dug like a knife into the dry ground

and the handle bars leaned against the house

white stucco flakes sticking to the rubber grips.

i had fallen.

the wing of my right arm scratched and bruised

rocks from the cluttered soil beside the path

embedded into my skin

and i carried the weight of my failure

until i reached the shower to wash myself clean.

(5/12/2009)

Hosea 2

¹ "Say of your brothers, 'My people,' and of your sisters, 'My loved one.'

Israel Punished and Restored

² "Rebuke your mother, rebuke her,
for she is not my wife,
and I am not her husband.
Let her remove the adulterous look from her face
and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.

³ Otherwise I will strip her naked
and make her as bare as on the day she was born;
I will make her like a desert,
turn her into a parched land,
and slay her with thirst.

⁴ I will not show my love to her children,
because they are the children of adultery.

⁵ Their mother has been unfaithful
and has conceived them in disgrace.
She said, 'I will go after my lovers,
who give me my food and my water,
my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink.'

⁶ Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes;
I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.

⁷ She will chase after her lovers but not catch them;
she will look for them but not find them.
Then she will say,
'I will go back to my husband as at first,
for then I was better off than now.'

⁸ She has not acknowledged that I was the one
who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil,
who lavished on her the silver and gold—
which they used for Baal.

⁹ "Therefore I will take away my grain when it ripens,
and my new wine when it is ready.
I will take back my wool and my linen,
intended to cover her nakedness.

¹⁰ So now I will expose her lewdness
before the eyes of her lovers;
no one will take her out of my hands.

¹¹ I will stop all her celebrations:
her yearly festivals, her New Moons,
her Sabbath days—all her appointed feasts.

¹² I will ruin her vines and her fig trees,
which she said were her pay from her lovers;
I will make them a thicket,
and wild animals will devour them.

¹³ I will punish her for the days
she burned incense to the Baals;
she decked herself with rings and jewelry,
and went after her lovers,
but me she forgot,"
declares the LORD.

¹⁴ "Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
and speak tenderly to her.

¹⁵ There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will sing as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came up out of Egypt.

¹⁶ "In that day," declares the LORD,
"you will call me 'my husband';
you will no longer call me 'my master.'

¹⁷ I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips;
no longer will their names be invoked.

¹⁸ In that day I will make a covenant for them
with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air
and the creatures that move along the ground.
Bow and sword and battle
I will abolish from the land,
so that all may lie down in safety.

¹⁹ I will betroth you to me forever;
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
in love and compassion.

²⁰ I will betroth you in faithfulness,
and you will acknowledge the LORD.

²¹ "In that day I will respond,"
declares the LORD—
"I will respond to the skies,
and they will respond to the earth;

²² and the earth will respond to the grain,
the new wine and oil,
and they will respond to Jezreel.

²³ I will plant her for myself in the land;
I will show my love to the one I called 'Not my loved one.'
I will say to those called 'Not my people,' 'You are my people';
and they will say, 'You are my God.' "

I posted my commentary in the comments section

click the "Hosea 2" title at the top to view both the passage and my comments at the same time.

Hebrews 11:17-19

  ¹⁷ By faith Abraham, when God tested him, 

offered Isaac as a sacrifice. 

He who had received the promises 

was about to sacrifice his one and only son, 

¹⁸ even though God had said to him, 

"It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." 

¹⁹ Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, 

and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.

Abraham had received an incredible gift from God, a son, which the Lord asked him to sacrifice for His sake, despite what he'd thought he'd heard from God. In fear, and in faith, he obeyed, and prepared the death of his son on the alter. 

The case of Abraham presents two reasonings for sacrificing his son for the sake of obeying the commandments of the Lord: 

1. That God has the ability to raise people from the dead, and therefore could raise his son from the dead if he were to lay down this sacrifice at the alter, and the the Lord would fulfill His original promises of future generations being born through Isaac. 
2. That Abraham had heard wrong about the Lord's promises, and the future generations to come, and that God had other, greater plans, and that God could be trusted to provide in spite of the death of his son through the sacrifice he would make. 

Regardless of the outcome, Abraham trusted in God. 

He had faith, he had fear; he obeyed even when the commandment of God 

seemed contradictory to everything he knew

and the Lord provided.