The New You

To those who read my blog,

Today I was walking with a good friend (one who I hope to spend a lot of time with this summer). He mentioned recently reading a verse he was in lately. It was Romans 6:1-4. I owe this man a debt of gratitude because he helped me work out a bit more of what I believe with what the Father does to us when we have the Son and the Spirit is sent to bring us back to where the triune God intended us to be. I am hoping I am not too off-base with this, but it really did strike me. So here’s the verse:

¹ What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? ² By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? ³ Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴ We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

A danger we have to face as Christians is that when we start thinking about grace, we see it as being this free gift. We distance ourselves from the ‘saved by works’ train of thought so much that we end up using this free gift as much as we want.

Let me make something clear: I do not for one second believe we are saved by works. I may feel that way sometimes in my heart, but in my mind I know that we are saved by grace and grace is a free gift.

But when we start focusing too much on the ‘free gift’ we sometimes throw morality out the window. We justify things in our minds even though in our hearts, we may know what we are doing is extremely wrong. We forget about morality.

And when that happens, we become something dangerous. We speak about a loving God who wants to bring peace into this world and redeem every man, woman, and child but we live in such a way that promotes violence and anti-Christ behavior.

I have experienced people who work in Churches who look down on people as if they are above certain people. I known of women who have been on worship teams but who have also cheated on their husbands. I have heard terrible stories of regular attendees to a local Church who have raped their little girl; their own daughter! I know of people who wear crosses or will have Jesus’ name tattooed on their body and they will do terrible things to another person or to people in general.

These people continue sinning so that grace may increase and in doing so, they damage themselves and the people Jesus also died for. They take down the Church with their actions because for them, morality can take a dive. They have grace to fall back on.

I am also one of these people. There have been times when I have spoken of God’s greatness or have gone to Church and sung my heart out, or have listened to a sermon with a friend and then I have gone completely against God’s design for my life and did a stupid thing that hurt someone who I should loves deeply and who God already loves much more than anything I can muster.

But that isn’t me. Or rather, it isn’t me anymore. Sure, it’s a mask that I often visit, but it’s not me. It’s not who I am. I still own the sin. It is still mine, but what makes this so tragic is that I am now a saint and should not have anything to do with sin and yet I sin nonetheless.

I am a saint. I became a saint and ditched the identity of sinner when I asked Jesus to enter me, to guide me. To form me. You see, what I realized today as I walked and talked with my good friend is that when Jesus came into my life, he brought me over to a new reality and I stood face-to-face with a man I have never seen before. Jesus introduced me into who I was supposed to be before I welcomed sinfulness as my identity.

Why would I for one second even think about continuing in sin when I have met someone who is me and is closer to who I was always supposed to be than I am right now? In verse 4 Paul says, “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”

A new life. The old me is dead, why would I ever go back to death when I have this brand spanking new life to live?

I’ll tell you why I go back. It’s because I look at this new guy (let’s call him Joshua) and I get scared.

Joshua Proper is good with his money. Joshua works hard on all of his assignments and gets the grades he deserves even if they are only worth a ‘c’. Joshua  thinks before he talks. Joshua talks to people as soon as he has issue with them and apologizes for even a moment of bitterness. Joshua  stands up to the people who mistreat him without being sinful in what he says or does.

In short, Joshua  is a really great guy and I don’t have the balls to be him when it’s so much easier to just be Josh. By the way, for those who wondered about this; you know how I go by Joshua and not by Josh? That was not an accident or a preference drilled into me by my parents. It was a choice. Josh was someone who lived only for himself whereas Joshua is a man who tries to live for Christ even when he spends a lot of time in failure which is why I actually do hate it when people call me Josh. That’s not who I am anymore despite all my sin.

I want to live as Joshua and not as Josh because God designed me as Joshua and not as Josh. I want to do it, but I’m scared and sometimes just plain stupid. I know the benefits of being a morally upright person in all ways and I know that is what Jesus had planned for me. I know that leaving sin behind will mean I will be showing more love to my fellow man and woman. I know that not sinning will help me enjoy life a lot more because even though there is a lot more hardship in what we do when we avoid the easy way, there is a lot more joy in knowing that we are acting in God’s plans and His plans speak love into creation. I know these things and I want these things but Joshua is a hard man to be and maybe I’m just lazy.

Should we continue in sin so that grace may abound? Not a chance! Jesus has so much more for us. He has made us new! We do not need to return to death at all! All we need to do is live the life Jesus wants us to live. That may be scary, it will require sacrifice, it may not be easier or even happier, but it will bring joy into your world, and that joy will spill out into the world of those around you.

-Joshua (not Josh)

The Toxic Substance Known as Fear

To those who read my blog,

I have not talked to you for quite sometime and in fact, I have not been talking to a lot of people for a long time. Namely I have not been talking to one person who has been wanting to have a sit down with me for quite some time, but I have been avoiding Him like the plague for a while. Before I get into that, I want to share with you something I learned a while ago and had ingrained within me but for some reason have personally ignored it completely while proclaiming the truth of it for all to hear, because apparently I like being a lousy jerk of a hypocrite.

God hates fear. What God provides is love and that is the opposite of love. If you want to make any true impact for God in Jesus’ name, then get fear out of you and know His true love. Fear is only going to hold you back. If Jesus is calling you to more, then you must sacrifice anything that resembles fear because it does not belong in you and it’s going to make it hard for God to use you in what He wants you to do.

To illustrate, I want to quote something out of the book of Daniel found in the Old Testament. The story should be familiar to anyone who grew up going to Sunday School, but here it is. I stop at a certain place and if you don’t know the story, then please don’t read any more right now but wait until you’ve read the last of this blog entry before looking it up on biblegateway.com or your fancy non-electronic version of the Bible you might have (you lucky person, you). If you do know the story, pretend that you don’t when you go through this. It will help illustrate my point a bit better.

Daniel 3:8-18

^“8 At this time some astrologers came forward and denounced the Jews. ⁹ They said to King Nebuchadnezzar, "O king, live forever! ¹⁰ You have issued a decree, O king, that everyone who hears the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipes and all kinds of music must fall down and worship the image of gold, ¹¹ and that whoever does not fall down and worship will be thrown into a blazing furnace. ¹² But there are some Jews whom you have set over the affairs of the province of Babylon—Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—who pay no attention to you, O king. They neither serve your gods nor worship the image of gold you have set up."

¹³ Furious with rage, Nebuchadnezzar summoned Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. So these men were brought before the king, ¹⁴ and Nebuchadnezzar said to them, "Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, that you do not serve my gods or worship the image of gold I have set up? ¹⁵ Now when you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipes and all kinds of music, if you are ready to fall down and worship the image I made, very good. But if you do not worship it, you will be thrown immediately into a blazing furnace. Then what god will be able to rescue you from my hand?"

¹⁶ Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to the king, "O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. ¹⁷ If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. ¹⁸ But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." ”

Did you notice how the story is not over yet? If you stop reading here, you don’t know if Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego make it out alive or not and I am not going to tell you whether or not they do.

That’s not the point. The point is their attitude towards the whole thing. They know that they are going to be walking into a furnace, but they do not know if they are going to be walking out again.

I mean, read verses 16-18 again. The three guys basically say, “Our God will probably save us from this mess, but even if He doesn’t, the furnace is a lot better than serving something false.

The king tried to put fear into the hearts of these guys by threatening them with a painful death. They responded in loving obedience to God by not even entertaining that fear for a second but trusting that their God loves them too much to want them to devote any attention to a god that is not the true God of Israel.

So now here it comes. “How is Joshua T. Aitkenhead a hypocrite?” you might be asking. Well I’ll tell you. Although I have been pretty harsh to some people (one person in particular) for entertaining fears instead of trusting God (when they may have been trusting God the whole time anyways and I’ve only been thinking that they were not) I have not been living a life without fear. My fears are different. I fear God, but not in a good and respectable ‘Old Testament, fear the LORD almighty” sort of way. No, I have been fearing that He will not provide (which is utter bull crap). I also have been fearing myself. I fear that even if He does provide, I will just end up messing up His provisions so much that they will be utterly useless. Because I think I have screwed up everything He has given me.

Here’s just one example of a billion illustrations from my life where I feel I have screwed everything up beyond redemption:

A few weeks ago, I treated a person like utter trash because of a rumor about his friends that wasn’t even true. I had no reason to treat this excellent human being like any less than what they are, but I did and not even because he did anything to me, but because of rumors of what his friends apparently did to me (but they really didn’t). Lucky for me, God is forgiving and so is this man, but I look at experiences like that and I feel as if I just messed things up beyond the point of redemption.

And so I have not been talking to Jesus. Because I fear He will not provide, and I fear that even if He does provide, I’ll just throw it out the window or mess it up in some way.

In the middle of writing this blog, I took a break to stop and talk with Him. Things are about to get a lot more intense for me if I listen to what He had to say to me tonight. I just hope I can ditch these useless fears in order to walk in what He wants from me.

Much love from a place of great pain and confusion,

Joshua

Do You Remember That Time We Were Supposed to be Love to the World?

To those who read my blog,

It’s been a while, but something has come up that I needed to address: Love and our lack of it.

As many of you (if not all) should know, Japan had suffered a major natural disaster of an 8.9 level earthquake in Northern Japan which also resulted in a powerful tsunami. I may have been one of the first Canadians to hear about it as my roommate is a missionary kid from Japan and his family is there right now. I was beside him when he was online late at night getting the news.

The next day all the facebook statuses changed. Here in Canada they changed to things like, “praying for our brothers and sisters in Japan♥”, “God please help Japan...”, and “…is joining in prayer for Japan”.

That last one attracted the attention of an atheist who asked what would prayer do which then had Christians responding in a way to defend their faith, which then turned to insulting the atheist in question.

The important matter of Japan needing prayer and other forms of help was put to the side so people could defend their faith by insulting a fellow human being. Let that sink in for a moment. We completely ditched the Jesus inspired action of looking out for a fellow human beings in order to tear into a fellow human being. That is terrible.

What’s worse are the facebook statuses I only presume came from  South of the Border. For those interested, here they are! The most disturbing comment came from one ‘Mike Sellitto’ in which he says, “Hell yeah that’s right japan 3-1 you may have had pearl harbor but we got Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and, since God is on our side, we have this. SCOOOREEEBOOOAARRDD” (emphasis added).

Really Mike? God is on our side? You just reminded us that we dropped bombs on Japan causing not just the deaths of not just people guilty of allying with the Germans in the war, but also the people in Japan who did not support the war (and if you tell me there was not a single Japanese person who was against a massive war who was also living in Hiroshima, then I will kindly tell you that you are full of it and if you ask me what “it” is, you will hear a slew of profanities not right for public speech). Not only them, but the generations who followed had a string of bad luck in getting leukemia (because of the after effects of a nuclear bomb being dropped).

Most of the people in that picture called it Karma. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and so 70 years later a tsunami hit. One guy even went as far as to say the war started because of Pearl Harbor (which is a stupid thing to me as I know very little about history and even I know that the war started before that in Europe and America did nothing about the cruelty put on the people getting hurt in that war until a few years later when Pearl Harbor got hit). What did the Americans do in response to Pearl Harbor? Well first off they made sure all the Japanese in their country were neutralized by taking people out of their homes and putting them in camps (basically imprisoning people because of their ethnic background… kind of like that guy Hitler was doing but not to the same extent). If you’d like to learn a bit about this without research, check out this song by Fort Minor called Kenji:

 

Here’s another history lesson: In 1945 The Americans ordered a surrender on July 26th and on August 6th the bomb was dropped. No warning shots, nothing. The worst type of bomb ever made dropped on a country because of a miscommunication (seriously, read this article on what happened when Japan was asked to surrender). The war was not started by a conflict between Japan and and America, but it sure as hell ended because of one!

I have a question. Where in all of this is Jesus? When a status is posted proclaiming that we should be praying for Japan and some goes on a rant about there being no god… is it our place to argue with them and forget about the bigger picture? Or do you think Jesus wants us to ignore those comments and maybe even delete those comments so that our eyes can be on the prize (the prize being coming to the aid of a nation who needs us?)

Ok so let’s do a little test. A comparison test. Here is an article that basically tells of how South Koreans are helping Japan. The test is to see which Christian culture did the best job of representing Jesus.

Pearl Harbor:

Pearl Harbor sucked. I would not know personally, but I bet it sucked a lot for americans. But do you know what else sucks? Because of Pearl Harbor, innocent Japanese people got placed in internment camps and their homeland gets bombed at a questionable time in the war (right near the end and only after around 11 days of negotiations).

A few years later a bad thing happens to Japan and a lot of people start saying the same thing in a different way: we will NEVER forgive you for Pearl Harbor!”

Major Oppression Lasting Years:

From 1592-1598 Japan invaded Korea. Between 1910-1945, Japan controled the nation of Korea. I’ve heard that one thing that Japanese would do is cut down all the trees in Korea because Koreans held trees to be quite special. This was a travesty and mean-spirited. I think a similar act would be if I went to the USA after it was taken over and started hunting the bald eagle to extinction.

A few years later a bad thing happens to Japan and how does Korea act? Well here's another thing you should look at to know how Korea acted. Basically, Korea showed that they had forgiven the Japanese for what they have done and even now offer support to people that were tormentors.

One of my profs once said, WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) is not the right thing to be asking. The right thing to be asking is WIJD (What is Jesus doing). Well, what is He doing? Is He busy getting into arguments with atheists to the point of insulting them thereby taking the stance that Japan is not worth talking about? Is He joining the whole karma kraze that seems to have swept into the minds of a few Americans?

Or is He doing something wonderful, like forgiving Japan for Pearl Harbor and a conquering of a people? Is he mending the hearts of entire countries who were at odds for so very long?

The first “Christian nation” North America (yes we’re lumped into this as well) has said, “We will never forget what’s happened and we will continue to hold you to your sins because of all that you have done to us”. They said it through their actions of being outraged with their governments support of Japan, and the fact that some people are keeping a score board.

Another Christian country took a stand and said, “though we will not forget our past, we will not let it dictate our futures. We will forgive Japan and show them love”. they said this through their actions of coming to the aid of Japan.

Where is Jesus in this? You tell me. Look at the story of the Good Samaritan…. a guy who got mugged and was ignored because of whatever reasons, but was picked up by someone whose ethnicity is at war with the ethnicity of the person he is now protecting and providing for. Tell me, what did Jesus mean when He said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”?

I will end this blog off with a video. I think it sums up for me how I feel about all of this craziness.

 

What will I do? I don’t quite know the specifics yet, but prayer is going to be there. Possibly my bank account will take another hit. Japan deserves our love not because they have earned it, but because Jesus wants them to have it. I want to get on board with what Jesus is doing and I think He is gathering people to help Japan and remind them that there is a God who loves them.

Please pass this blog around to friends so they can see this as well.

With Love,

Joshua

PS

Any sources I got were from Wikipedia (which I know is not the most reliable) unless it was a direct link in which case you can see where it comes from.

PPS

This blog has been edited on April 16th, 2010