Ancient Truth | Modern Sound

It is common to think of love and hate as opposites.
Most people live their whole lives thinking that love and hate are as opposite as dogs and cats, salt and pepper or chocolate and vanilla. And they are. They are opposites in exactly the same way. They appear to be opposite, but they are not truly opposite like big and small, light and dark, near and far.

There are many things that God hates, and yet God in His very nature is love.
Love hates.

1st Corinthians chapter 13 is the very definition of love in action, and to do the opposite of those words is not to “hate” someone, but to be impatient with them, be unkind to them, envy them, put them below you, be rude to them, be angry with them, remember their faults, rejoice when they fall, fail to protect them, not trust them, and basically give up on them. Some of these things are pretty subtle, and most of them do not rise to the level of hating someone.

Love is self sacrifice.
We show love to our friends and family through small sacrifices of patience and kindness. Jesus showed ultimate love for us by His complete sacrifice through His life and death.

The opposite of love is not hate, it is selfishness. It is “me first,” “mine!,” “shut up,” and “whatever!” The opposite of love is evil.

We are to live our lives following God. We are to become more like Him. We are to constantly measure ourselves against the standard of who He is. In God’s character we find the truth, and the truth will make us free.

We can not be nicer than God. We must learn what God hates, and we must hate it, too.

Wrote a song about it:

Who is that skinny guy in the Underdog shirt?

I was really into Jesus when I was 14 years old. I was already writing songs and performing them in church. My Sunday School teacher, Rico Dunsmore, was a card carrying Jesus Freak. He was always loaning me his records (vinyl LPs) and introducing me to Christian rockers. He changed my life when he loaned me a small stack of Larry Norman albums.

Half the songs were acoustic guitar driven folk/protest music (Dylan), and the other half were rockin/pop songs (Stones, Beatles). They all felt so heavy with meaning that the net result was like a religious experience to me. I drank his music in like it was the elixir of life. My songs started having underlaying meanings and layers of lyrical complexity, I started wearing black, grew my hair long and dyed it blonde. I had already known that I wanted to be a Christian and a singer/songwriter, I knew that I wanted to be in full time ministry, but now I knew something else, too. I wanted to be Larry Norman. (more…)

Hey, brother, let me tell you about Jesus … Hey, wait a minute … where’re you going?

Speaking the message of Jesus Christ to modern ears can be a tricky thing to do. In a lot of ways it sounds contrary to the things that we have been told are true. We are several generations deep into ideas like “there is no absolute Truth, whatever works for you is fine,” and, “There are so many religions, who is to say that there is only one way to God,” and “Science, facts, what I can see and hear, these are the things that are true and can be trusted, everything else is merely opinion.” Words like “Jesus,” “Church,” “Worship,” “Sin,” “Preaching,” and many others carry so much negative baggage that most people stop listening at the first mention of them. In fact, they think they already know everything they need to know about it, and they wish they knew less. (more…)