IS FLUENCY MY GOD? | PART 1

This was originally intended to be a stand-alone post. But the moment I got into it, I became overwhelmed by how much bigger the topic is than I could have imagined. So instead, I’ll let this post serve as a much-needed introduction to the series to come.

Like any other Christian, I didn’t know anything of the Christian life when I started living it. It’s not hard to find a person who lives as a Christian simply because they’ve known no different - maybe they were raised in a Christian home: going to church, saying a prayer before eating and sleeping, and being spoon-fed Bible verses. But if these people were challenged to a more convenient lifestyle of less ritual, there’s no root to keep them where they are.

I have the opposite background - I wasn’t raised in the church. And when I started living for Jesus, it destroyed the comfort I had living apart from Him. It was like being jettisoned through the windshield of a car in the midst of a head-on collision. Truly, I was heading the opposite way when I ran smack into Jesus. The only difference is that it didn’t all happen at once; I had to change so many seemingly small things about how I live and what I believe. But much like a change in the arrangement of tiny subatomic particles seems small and yields such enormous change, my life had to change because of the rearrangement of my very core. And this is all a process that is still happening every day. There were (and still are) a lot of things I had to directly face - issues from which there’s no hiding for the follower of Christ. I think of matters like evolution versus creation, abortion versus life, marriage, election, entertainment, and the lot. Whether or not you like it, you must confront these things; you must decide what you believe or allow others to decide for you. I’m not here to push a conservative or liberal agenda - but I will tell you that you must decide whether you believe the messages God has left us in Scripture. Any true follower can confirm from experience that there are many practices and beliefs of the world that are irreconcilable with what God has told us is true. And in this window of time, there’s beauty in the freedom we currently have to choose to say “yes, I believe.”

And if you believe, will you stand up for what God tells us? Will you defend His Word when your prosperity vanishes? Will you believe His Word when it is not popular?  Will you remain faithful when you are persecuted for doing so?

There are so many things that had to change when I stopped living for me and started living for Him. I didn’t simply change. I died. And now it’s by Christ’s life that I live.

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” - Galatians 2:20

Looking back, I see that I literally experienced what Paul talked about in his letter to Galatia. I truly have the joy of living that piece of Scripture.

And one thing I had to learn about, in the midst of the collision, was prayer. Don’t get me wrong - I had prayed before. And it would be a dramatization if I said that my prayer was spontaneously painted with awesomeness the moment I got saved. If anything, it was the opposite; I realized that I had no idea how pointless and muted my prayers were before I got saved. Seriously - I remember being a little kid and praying that God would give me the ability to turn into a cat whenever I wanted. Obviously, my prayers changed with age. But that cat prayer wasn’t such a far cry from how meaningless my prayer time was before I gave it to Jesus.

I remember a time that I confronted one of my colleagues about a misunderstanding she had about the Gospel. She said “I don’t think you realize how religious I am. I pray a lot.” What she didn’t know (and what I wasn’t quick-on-my-feet enough to think to tell her in that moment) is that Jesus spoke directly to that in His dealings with the Pharisees. We know that the Pharisees did a lot things for the wrong reasons - but nevertheless, they did them well and with great consistency. We know “they preach[ed] but [did] not practice” ( as in Matthew 23:1-39).  We can assume that Jesus was talking about the Pharisees when He tells the disciples that “when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites” because “they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, they they may be seen by others” (Matthew 6:5). 

The next thing Jesus does after telling the disciples these things is teach them how to pray.
Why? Because prayer is something you must learn how to do. I wish somebody told me that a long time ago. And I’ve yet to even mention stuttering. 

For the stutterer who follows Jesus, prayer is not simply a supplement. Prayer needs to be the only way you get the next word out. Many times have I bowed prostrate and strained out words to God. Many times have I relied on “utterances too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). I’ve spent much of that time praying endlessly for healing without receiving it. Likewise, I spent a lot time before and after I got saved being angry that God didn’t heal me after hours of prayer. In some of my copies of the Bible, the page with red-word dialogue about what God told Paul when He didn’t heal the apostle in 2 Corinthians 12 has seen the moisture of tears many times. Learning to pray has been a recent edification in my life. And I want to share what little I know.

As pastor Buddy Gray says “If you try to use God to get something, then that something is your god.” Too many times have I let my desire for perfect fluency become more important to me than what God tells me is important. And that’s most evident in my prayer closet. More times than I know have I prayed the way my desire for fluency leads me to pray in spite of the way Jesus commands me to pray. And that’s exactly what this series is about. If you’re a stutterer, you need to know that Jesus is bigger and more important than you’ve ever felt your stutter to be no matter how broken it’s made you feel. If you’re a follower of Christ, you need to know that your prayer to God is more important than words you say to anyone else. How much closer must the Christian who stutters hold to these truths?

In Matthew 6, Jesus lays out the model of how we are to pray. That’s the quote in bold (if you’re reading this on thestutteringchristian.com. Other wise, you’ll see it somewhere else.) My vision for this series is to study each section of this prayer with a magnifying glass, line by line, looking at the anatomy and physiology of prayer - and look at what each line means for our prayer in practicality, apart from abstraction.

[END OF PART 1 OF SERIES]

ENTERTAINED or ORDAINED | PART 2

In part 1, I spoke a lot about how our relationship with God is not about being entertained. But there’s an even more pervasive danger out there.

For all of you who have iTunes through any sort of device, you may have fallen in love with Podcasts much like I have. I simply love them. Then when I discovered iTunes U (the link is for anyone who was under the same rock I was), I locked myself in my bedroom for a while and geeked-camped on a C.S. Lewis biographical class. Not everyone is that into Podcasts -- but if you are, you’ll really appreciate this next part.

I want you to do an experiment; go to the iTunes Podcast store and look under the “Religion & Spirituality” category. Look at the titles of episodes from some of the most popular feeds.

This ebbs and flows throughout the year, but the majority of the most popular feeds have titles like “Overcoming Fear”, “Focusing on Positive Things”, “Living your Best”. Go to Barnes & Noble and look at the most popular spiritual titles. You’ll see Joel Osteen’s smiling face next to the words “Your Best Life Now” in a big glossy font.

Say what you want about the well-intended folks behind these materials. This post is not about them - it’s about the false teachings to which they’ve fallen victim. Adam Ford of Adam4D.com said it best in one of his comics: the phrase “I have these new theological ideas” is best translated “I subscribe to some old heresies.” The problem with the aforementioned ideas is that they all spike the pool of good resources for the learning Christian with the Prosperity Gospel.

There’s little need for another blogger pulling apart the Prosperity Gospel. But if you’re like me and weren’t brought up in church, you may not know what that is. The Prosperity Gospel takes the idea of “Jesus died for my sins and now the Holy Spirit has transformed me and continues to make me look more and more like Christ” (2 Corinthians 3:18) and twists it to say “God wants what is best for me and will give me a nice life because He favors me.” I’m sure there’s a better way to explain it, but that’s the gist of it.

And for the stutterer, this idea can be poison. It leads you to think “If God values me and favors me, He’ll heal me someday.” And then when God doesn’t heal you, you turn your back, mutter something awful about “fundamentalists”, and crawl under your agnostic rock. 

What if I told you that being a Christian is nothing like signing up for boy scouts? I love how scouts are taught to do so many things that improve a young man’s character, momentarily looking past the recent controversies surrounding Boy Scouts of America.  But mere character is not the point of following Jesus. It’s not about self-improvement and it’s not about feeling good about yourself. When I attended church before I was a Christian, I was disappointed that the messages didn’t help me in a practical way. I didn’t feel better about myself and I certainly didn’t feel any different about my stuttering. I assumed that meant that I was in a bad church and the teachings were outdated.

Looking back, I realize the reason I didn’t like messages: They were about Jesus and not about me.

1 Thessalonians 4:3 says “This is the will of God, your sanctification...”. Some translations say “The will of God is for you to be holy...”. The rest of the verse talks specifically about keeping out of sexual sin, but even the first half of the verse strikes home when you see that it doesn’t say “The will of God is for you to be happy/comfortable.” Look at the life of Jesus. Read the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I challenge you to find a passage in which Jesus talks a lot about his disciples.

When you realize that following Jesus is about Jesus and not about you, your life will change. And not because you’re changing you, but because you have been changed because of what He has done. For the stutterer - God may heal your speech. But if He chooses not to, you have/get to keep His words even closer; When Paul begged for healing, the Lord told him “My grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in weakness.”

I touched on that verse in my first blog post. I love that it’s not simply comfort for a person who has not been given healing from some sort of ailment. It goes beyond comfort. It gives purpose to my “thorn in the flesh”. That truth takes me to my knees. Every day, my prayer must be “Lord, I need you for literally every word I say.” What the Holy Spirit has done in me tremendous.

He has taken my plea of “Lord, why did you make me like this?” and made it “I would rather struggle to speak Your words than say my own with ease.”

[End of PART 2 of series]

[Mirrored from thestutteringchristian.com]

A Very Important Non-Post

I'm pleased to announce that The Stuttering Christian blog now has a new a home at thestutteringchristian.com!

But not to worry, every blog post will be mirrored on Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, and Facebook - and then announced on Twitter.

It gives me chills to think about what's just around the corner for us.

People are going to be reached.

A community will be forged.

Souls will be saved.

And the best part: It's being done by the God who made us and bought us back.

Here's the site. 

Beginnings - ENTERTAINED or ORDAINED? | PART 1

As you know from my last post, Blogger (or Wordpress or Tumblr, depending on how you're reading this) is but a temporary home for The Stuttering Christian Blog. I realize that my blog is only a few days old and I've only made one real post.

But it's like this:

I believe that God - the only true living God - has put it on my heart to create this blog (and soon, the website) as a way to bring many to Jesus.

So at 12:00AM EST on Wednesday October 16th, TheStutteringChristian.com will officially launch. At that time, I'll fire up the Facebook/Twitter beacons and we'll truly begin this journey together.


-------------

But in the mean time, I want to leave you with this:

I know a lot of people who, upon waking up, can't get to their Bible quickly enough in order to start their devotion time. I know people who, no matter how late they stay up, are never quite deep enough in their prayer time to reach a stopping point and go to bed.

But what I've realized is that none of these people feel good from their time with the Lord. Maybe you just "amen"ed a little in your seat. But if your head is cocked to the side, let me explain.

When we watch television, it's to be entertained.
When we eat snack when we're not really hungry, it's to be entertained. (Or Entenmann's'ed. But that's different.)
When we take a pill, take a stroll, or see a movie, it's to be entertained. 
We want to be entertained by anything onto which we can latch our mind's teething attention. When I workout (I did that TWICE this week) I normally have my earbuds in. Shoot, I even find myself falling asleep to music. I was listening to Spotify when I started typing this. Then the "TROJAN MAAAN!" commercial came on and I muted it. Nothing ruins your worship music playlist like that. But you get what I'm saying, right?
So let me ask you this:
When your addiction to entertainment becomes so dire that your time with the God who made you and bought you back is driven more by a need to be entertained than a desire to be ordained, could it be that you're not really worshipping God at all? Maybe you're worshipping a momentary emotional response. (Let's just call that an MER. I'll be using that term a lot.) So then, what's to be said about time spent well with the Lord?

I'm sure you've heard the phrase "I can't define porn. But I know it when I see it". Well, I can't define "true devotion time". But I've always found that when God speaks to me, I become convicted. Rarely do I leave the prayer closet with a word from God and a smile on my face. When I know God has used something or somebody for my growth in Him and for His purposes, it normally doesn't occur to me until I've had a good cry about it. Normally while hunched over on my face. (Which reminds me, I have a funny story about that involving a toenail. But that's for a different post.)

Don't misunderstand me; I'm not saying that God loves to bum me out and kick my dog. God the Spirit yields fruit that consists of "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (Galatians 5:22-23). That doesn't sound like a God who likes to steal your sunshine and rainbows. What I am saying is that the things of the flesh are at odds with the things of the Spirit. And it's not I who have said it. It's God who says it in Galatians 5:16-18. Wow! Those verses are close to each other! I think that's called context!
This is as good of a place as any to end part 1 of this post.

Bear with Me - Bigger than Blogging

My vision for this blog is bigger than blogging.

Truth be told, I would love to create a website that encourages, challenges, edifies, and convicts the person who feels like there is no hope; and bigger than that is the truth that this blog can not be hope. But it can direct people to Jesus, in whom hope is abundant.

That being said, I'm pleased to announce that I'm in the process of creating a website. Like a real website. With a domain and everything. For the purpose of blogging, I would mirror nearly every post on Blogger, Wordpress, Facebook, Tumblr (to an extent), and Twitter (to much lesser extent). In fact, Twitter can pretty much be left off of that. I can't even reduce a Starbucks order to 140 characters. Let alone a blog post.

Within the next week, I plan to officially launch the site. Until then, I will continue to post primarily on Blogger.

The Comfy Christian | E-Church

The Stuttering Christian

Most people who know what "stuttering" is have done one of the following things:

A.) Seen The King's Speech 

or

B.) Read something about James Earl Jones


Both of those are fine.

But if you're one of the 0.01429% of people on Earth who "stutter", you need no explanation of what sits so plumply between those quotation marks. And those people are my target audience; just in case anybody thought I'm out to make a side-profit by blogging about a high-traffic topic.

So instead of explaining what stuttering is, I will simply tell my story.

I can't remember a time when I didn't stutter. Allegedly, I was an early speaker who knew more words than meanings of words. As a young child in a full, small-town public elementary school, my broken speech was unremarkable among a plethora of kindergarteners who could not successfully pronounce "kindergarten." But as things tend to go, I was discovered. My parents and I were summoned to one of the inner-offices of the small school building and, apparently, offered speech therapy.

In these therapy sessions, I sat at a round table with a handful of children I already knew while an SLP (speech language pathologist) went around the group encouraging them to pronounce their "R"s and "L"s correctly. During my turn, I normally was asked to "take a big breath" and "speak as slowly as possible." Truth be told: most of us were just happy to get out of math.

But as my friends' speech anomalies went away and my companions were removed from the sessions, I entered private meetings with different speech pathologists. They gave me and my parents a number of explanations as to why I had such a hard time speaking. They told me I spoke too quickly. Then they blamed my parents' divorce. Then it was the next thing. And the whole time, I didn't really care all that much.

Truthfully, my single-digit-year-old-self didn't think about it too much.

But as I began to notice the unreliability of my ability to speak, I began to slip into what I now realize was the self-proclaimed identity of a "stutterer" - or as I've read among the online community, a Person Who Stutters.

And the more I stuttered, the more I feared.

Anytime we read aloud in class I would do a head-count of the remaining readers until I had the floor and quickly find the selection I would end up reading so I could scan it for problem words. This strategy, as most of us know, yields mixed results.

When called upon in class, I retorted incorrect answers I could pronounce in lieu of the correct answers I feared to say.

In restaurants, I insisted my parents order for me. When that got weird, I would order entrees I could pronounce without regard to whether I wished to eat it. On the bright side, I often appeared to have a very adventurous tastes in food.

Just as unsettling as the impediment itself were the results of my therapy. Now don't misunderstand me: the right therapy is a good thing. But the wrong therapy is certainly not a good thing.
Years later, I remember still being called out of recess, lunch periods, and class time to a multi-purpose mobile trailer behind my school's main building where I would read children's stories aloud while a rotating cast of well-meaning pathologists asked me to "breath" and "speak slowly".  All the while, nobody could answer my questions.

Why is my speech broken?
Why is it so hard?
Is something wrong with me or have I just learned how to speak wrong?
Where is God in all of this?

Since it is beyond the scope of this blog to deliver an all-inclusive autobiographical account, I will summarize: I graduated from high school having experienced the expected difficulties of any other stammerer -- many of which being grossly inflated versions of the aforementioned difficulties.

But in the Summer between high school and college, after a lifetime of claiming to be a "Christian", I accepted Jesus Christ to be my personal Savior. But not like you read about on blogs (except this one, of course.) I mean my heart actually opened to the truth that the God who made me also purchased me back by stepping out of Heaven into a human body, living a sinless life, and letting the very people He intended to redeem carry out His excruciating execution as a sacrifice on my behalf. But not only did He physically suffer, for the Father poured out every ounce of His wrath that I deserve onto Jesus in my stead.

Accordingly, my account is washed and I am made righteous in the site of God. Jesus traded me His clean account for my unforgivably stained account. It's a concept called "Grace". And it didn't make a "bad" version of me "good". It took me, a dead person, and made me an alive person. 

You're probably saying "That has nothing to do with stuttering."

But in reality, it has everything to do with stuttering.

It's east to be closed up in a mindset set of "There is no god. I'm here by accident and incident of nature. At best, my speech is a result of a genetic predisposition and there's nothing that can change that nor is there a particularly meaningful context for any speech impediment I may or may not have."

But in fact, you are created by a God that holds everything seen and unseen, known and unknown, discoverable and incomprehensible in His hand. Should you wish to deny that, so be it. It is not a task charged to me by Scripture to persuade you. Those who contest it should celebrate their freedom to do so. But for those who celebrate, instead, that very truth: do you not realize that it is God who makes a person mute or deaf or blind? That's exactly what the Lord told Moses when he doubted God's command to go to Pharaoh on behalf of the Israelites (a different post for a different time).

Consider the Apostle Paul's words in his second letter to the Corinthians in chapter 12 concerning his own infirmity which he simply calls his "thorn in the flesh":

So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

The words that bring me to my knees on a nearly daily basis are "my power is made perfect in weakness". Take time to digest that truth; the God who spoke everything into existence and invented existence itself allows my weakness to be the "perfect" stage for His strength.

So now you can see that this blog is not simply about stuttering. Nor is my stuttering about me. If I am to boast in my weaknesses then those within earshot of me should grow weary of my boasting -- for if there is any who can be considered "weak", it's me. And if God's strength is made perfect in my weakness, then God is truly infinitely strong.

I realize that this is long first entry that few may read. But I would be acting outside of my obedience to my God not to post all of this in its entirety. I, like many others, am a PWS. But my identity is not a "stutter" who is also a Christian. My identity is in Christ. I am not a Christian stutterer, but a stuttering Christian.