Face to Face: Encountering God’s Nature–Adam & Eve

In 1984 I found myself on the National Mall in Washington D.C. with 750,000 other people. While they were all clambering to see the Beach Boys in concert my attention was stolen by another. It was on that fateful day I first encountered the one and only Mr. T. In my memory we fist pumped each other & hung out, but in reality I only saw him from a great distance as he was on stage. It may have only been a brief encounter, one in which we never actually talked, made eye contact, or even got within 100 feet of each other, but it was still a powerful encounter.

It was that encounter that drove me to pursue further encounters with him through his t.v. show, The A-Team. Just like any meaningful encounter I began to be shaped by these interactions together. Before long I found myself reflecting the image of Mr. T by wearing a chain like his.

We have all had encounters that shaped us. These encounters or meaningful interactions leave an imprint upon us. Regardless of whether these encounters are full of life or death they have the power to shape who we are and how we see the world–more importantly, they have the power to shape how we see God. And that is why God is so adamant and consistent about pursuing us in order to reveal to us his true nature to us. It is these God encounters that allow us to see God’s nature, because when we experience his true nature, transformation occurs in our lives. The scriptures are full of people who had transforming encounters with God, and as we read about their encounters, we can learn about who God is.

One such is example is found at the beginning of time, when God creates Adam and Eve. It was in this first intimate encounter of creation that God reveals his nature as loving–He gave identity to humanity as he made Adam and Eve in his own image. God then revealed his nature as provider by providing them with a purpose–the purpose of re-present his image in all the world. He continued to unpack his nature to them as generous, trustworthy, and present by placing them in an idyllic home in Eden where every need they had was provided for in abundance.

We also see in the creation story how God’s true nature has come under attack from the beginning of time. The serpent comes to Eve and attacks God’s nature as generous when he twists God’s words (Gen. 3:1). He distorts God’s trustworthy nature when he accuses God of being a liar (Gen. 3:4). God had created humanity to be his presentation on earth and so he had made Adam and Eve in his image. The serpent took a version of the truth (that humans were to be like God) but he removed God from the equation–by proclaiming there was another way to be like God–by eating the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:5). He exchanged the truth for a lie and both man and woman devoured the lie as they ate the forbidden fruit.

By eating the fruit that God has commanded them to avoid, Adam and Eve stepped into sin, and brought all of humanity with them. But it was then that God reinforced his nature as one who is always loving and always providing. In the middle of sin, God pursues humanity. He shows up and covers their shame, he reveals his trustworthiness by being faithful to hold them to consequences he promised and he showed them how he would always be with them as he prophesied about the one who would come to crush the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15).

God is coming, always coming to reveal his true nature to us. He is coming to redeem every negative encounter you have had. He is coming to give you hope. He is coming to show you who he really is. He is coming because he loves you.

Will you receive his coming? How will you make space in your life this week to position yourself to encounter God?

Orlando & the lessons learned

To start of the year I (Chris) lead the Elevate students to Orlando in order to share Jesus, encourage the church there & help move forward the work God is doing through Antioch Orlando (our most recent church plant). This trip was deeply impactful for me and very encouraging about what God is doing in Orlando. I have been on many mission trips and have lead almost as many as I have been a part of. But after this trip I can easily say this was the best trip I have ever lead. While I want to unpack why but first I want to share a one personal highlights from the trip.

On this trip our focus was not to build anything or do any service projects but rather to connect with students on the University of Central Florida campus then connect them to Jesus & the local church. One girl that myself and an Elevate student connected with was able to see Jesus as he reveals himself in the Bible for the first time. This girl had previous experiences with Christians before but unfortunately those encounters did not show her that it is God’s kindness that leads to repentance (Acts 2:4). We were able to share with her that Jesus loves her so much that he came to earth, took all her sins on himself, died on a cross, & conquered sin & death so that she might know the fullness of that love. We were able to express to her that God has a good plan for her life. That Antioch Orlando is a church that believes that God delights in all people and wants to see them come fully alive as they encounter the love of God. I wish you could have seen her expression as these truths touched her heart for the first time. She was blown away that the so-called Jesus she had encountered before was not what the Bible reveals about the true Jesus. She was able to see for the first time that God is good and he loves her. Wow, what a moment that I will for sure never forget. The look in a persons eyes as the realize that Jesus is much more than they could have ever imagined. While I could go on sharing stories like this I would like to share some lessons I learned on this trip.

1. Time spent with God is priceless. As a cornerstone of all the short-term mission trips I have been on has been the high need for time in the presence of God. There is truly nothing that changes & catalyzes people more than the presence of God. How we did this is simple. For started we started our mornings late. Many missions trip have people out the door and working no later than 8am. We however did not start until 9am at the earliest. We did this because we wanted each person on the trip to get an hour in the presence of God before seeing other people. After that how we started our day was 2-3 hours of worship, prayer, encouragement, and equipping for the word of God. I know for many this sounds a bit extreme and impractical. To be honest on the average work day 3-4 hour of total uninterrupted time in God’s presence is not practical. But this was not a typical week. This was a week that was meant to be a life changing experience so we did thing out of the norm and boy did they ever pay off. As people encounter the presence of God they are changed and our students (plus myself) were no exception to this rule.
2. Mission trips are meant to stretch people and push them out of their comfort zones. I wrote down at the end of the trip my “wins” for the trip. One was absolutely seeing our students do things and flourish in ways I had yet to witnessed. Whether it was sharing the good news of Jesus with joy and boldness with anything that moved. Or praying and prophesying over teammates for the first time. Each of the students pushed themselves to love people with move intentionality than they ever had before and I noticed the difference. Mission trips are not designed to help people feel completely comfortable but rather to push us into something new so that we must press more into God than we ever have before.
3. Team matters! This one was huge for me. In my history of leading I have not always been the best at delegation. However before the trip I had a series of events that help me recognize my need to delegate more to my team. I learned my lesson from those events and with joy in my heart released my team to run with many aspects of the trip (most of the things I am not strong at doing anyway). This choice freed me up to connect at more of a heart level with the students and to gauge the temperature of the overall team in a much more effective way. I was also able to have a better vantage point to know how to lead us and to hear from God as to what the team need in order to keep flourishing on this trip. For the first time a trip I lead did not have a day where most everyone blew it relationally with one another. It is quite amazing how much more powerful we is than me.

What a joy it was to not only be a part of this trip but also to lead it. Leading others is not a right but a privilege and I am thankful that I am learning to lead others more effectively with great love. I am thankful for a job that “requires” me to go and share the love of Jesus with others. I truly am living a blessed life. One of which I am not worthy.

What has been fueling my fire

I thought I would share a few resources that have been fueling my fire over the past couple months. I hope you enjoy them and they inspire or equip you.

Give Me Some Good Stuff, article by Carl Lentz, Pastor Hillsong NYC

• I encourage you to follow what God is doing in NYC. There is a move of God going on in that city and not in just one church. Pray for the people who have been blasted by storms recently as many are still struggling to meet basic needs.

Avoiding the false proxy trap, article by Seth Godin

Michael Hyatt’s blog

• Subscribe to this one. I get the once per week recap which works well for me because it comes on Saturday morning & doesn’t clog up my inbox everyday of the week.

Brian Houston, Senior Leader of Hillsong Church

• As a pastor myself I love learning from him because his history of devotion to Jesus & the local church inspires me. The fruit of his life lived for building God’s house is undeniable.
• I highly encourage you to listen to Brian’s teachings on Grace & living the “Grace Zone”, these teachings are changing my life.

Antioch Church Planting blog

• I love the Antioch movement of churches we are a part of & I love staying connected to what God is doing in & through people in this movement.

Again these are just a few of the resources that are currently fueling my time with God & equipping me to be a better leader & lover of people. I hope they help you too.

New roles & responsibilities

It is that time of year again we most of find ourselves shifting gears as the new school year begins. For most of us we continue to order our personal schedules not by quarters, as in the business world, but by semesters. With the changing of semesters it usually means a shifts in roles and responsibilities. Sometimes these shifts are minor and at other times they require a complete restructuring of our priorities. As the Otts’ Family gets ready to kick off this fall we find ourselves in the complete restructuring of our priorities and we are excited about what lies ahead.

This past Sunday we made it official before our church that we are moving into a new role and taking on new responsibilities. Our new role at ACC-W is Family Zone Pastors. We accepted this role knowing that we were taking on greater responsibility for spiritually carrying not only families within our church but also the youth & children’s ministries. It is a great honor to be entrusted with such outstanding people and we believe that we have been given the best job in the world.

So what is a Family Zone Pastor? Within the context of our church we have 5 different zones of ministry: families, young professionals, college, youth, and children. As Family Zone Pastors we will provide oversight, vision, and leadership for the families, youth & children. Since these zones of ministry are already so tied together it only makes sense that they more synchronized. We will provide leadership for our youth pastor & children’s director as well as for the leaders serving in the families lifegroups. We will also be organizing the momentum building events for these zones of ministry. We view momentum building events as intentional times of accelerated spiritual and communal growth. For example these are things like marriage & parenting conferences, women’s retreats, men’s gatherings, & mission trips.

Chris has also been asked to join our churches teaching team that provides biblical teaching and instruction for our congregation on Sunday mornings and in our training schools. This is something Chris is quite excited about especially after the opportunity he had to teach during our Tijuana mission trip this past summer. He will be consistently teaching on a number of different topics in Elevate and will be teaching a couple of times a semester on Sunday mornings. One of the main reasons he is excited about this is the weight that teaching the scriptures bring. It is a great honor to equip the saints for the work of the ministry and it demands a greater level of accountability on a teachers life. He knows that by accepting this responsibilities he is saying yes to greater dependency upon Jesus to live out what he teaches.

Please pray for us as we embark on these new roles & responsibilities.

Expectations vs. Expectancy

Over the past 5 years of my life I have been on a journey of learning how to not live in disappointment. During these past 5 years I have been learning how to obey God quickly, cheerfully, and completely. Because I have been learning how to do this and the fact that I am a dreamer I often slammed into disappointment. For a good bit of this journey I had a really hard time reconciling the promises of God for my life with what I was actually experiencing.

During these years I have consistently had people tell me that my faith inspired them. This was encouraging but also confusing because the risks I was taking were not turning out like I had anticipated. While I was thankful that my life and choices were causing others to obey Jesus in new ways it often left me with more questions than answers.

Part of the problem was that I had a wrong understanding of what faith is. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.” I was getting hung up on the words “will actually happen” and not the “confidence” piece. This is where expectations vs. expectancy comes into the equation.

What I have learned through this process of risking and “failing” is that I was living with expectations not expectancy. I know those might sound like the same but they are actually quite different.

Living with expectancy means that we are confident that God will do what he promised. But living with expectations means that we are requiring it to look a certain way. Do you really think that Moses expected to roam the desert for 40 years with a bunch of whining people? I have no doubt he had his own journey with disappointment but in the end he was confident that God’s promise would be fulfilled even if it looked different than the way he had always envisioned it.

What is something God has promised you? Have you placed an expectation upon God that it has to happen in a certain way and in a certain timing for it to be a fulfilled promise? Letting go of your expectations do not mean that you are losing faith but actually quite the opposite. When we relinquish our right to have expectations and we live with an expectant heart it thrusts us into greater relationship with Jesus. Each day we live with the thoughts that today God is going to move and do something that blows us away. We become aware of the ways God is moving in our lives and we stop focusing on the ways he is not moving like we expect him to. We see that he is more beautiful and more generous than we could have ever imagined. We see that the process of the promise is just as important as the promise.

off we go

So my Monday morning has consisted of talking with a friend living in a town of 50k in Afghanistan & another who lives in a city of 14 million in east Asia. This can only mean one thing.

iCON12 here we come

Wrestling for the blessing

I want to share with you an excerpt from a devotional book I am going through (again). It is called Igniting Faith in 40 Days by Steve and Wendy Backlund. They have some excellent revelation from the scriptures that will really help you tap into who God is and how he sees you. The following one is particularly good.

“How would God choose to bless this person who would not take “no” for an answer? Money? A long life? A new camel? Victory of his enemies? A resolving of a difficult matter? No, his blessing was a revelation of this real name, his true identity. His name would no longer be Jacob, but it would be Israel (Prince With God). His blessing was this: he would receive a new sense of who he was – which would produce a change in his thoughts and vocabulary about himself. This, in turn, would cause a change in his actions and destiny.

The implications of this are revolutionary! One of the greatest things we can get from God is a new sense of who we really are. Once we call ourselves what God calls us, we will accelerate down the road of transformation.

We must move past just wanting God to fix our problems or to just have His blessing and anointing. We must get a hold of Him in our spirit and say, “I am not going to let You go until You bless with me a true understanding of who I really am in You.” Once this happens, everything changes.”

If you are anything like me this both stirs your heart and challenges your motives. My heart is stirred because I know that a true understanding of who God says I am really does change everything. But I also have to examine myself and ask if that true understanding is really all I want. Would I rather have the tangible blessing I can touch today or the blessing that allows me to see rightly?

We all know the answer but are we willing to wrestle for that blessing? Will you wrestle for that true understanding knowing that your circumstances might not change? Let us go for it and not be a people who settle for dollar store rewards when true gold is what God intends.

What is in a name? From Jacob to Israel

I recently listened to a teaching that hit on this subject. Jacob’s name meant deceiver and that name marked him. He made his choices and like all of us faced disappointment. Disappointment is a funny thing if left unchecked because it can grow into a spiritual cancer.

Why is disappointment such a dangerous thing to live with? It comes down to what that disappointment leads us to believe about God and ourselves. The primary lie that the devil would speak to us about God is that he really isn’t good. While with ourselves he will attempt to use that disappointment to name you.

So what is it about a name that is so valuable?

Look at Jacob. He was named deceiver and while I won’t go into the full story of his life, you can glance at it and see it was littered with deceptive actions. But since the devil is a liar and is wrong about God not being good we get to see a redemptive marking on Jacob and on ourselves.

Jacob had to walk a long road to be renamed and had to reap what he had sown. But he also had to go back to his place of greatest disappointment (hint — Esau). When Jacob walked his road and faced his disappointments something in him shifted and he received a new name.

What was the shift?

The shift was in his seeing. He was able to see rightly who God is and in turn was able to recieve who God said he was. When he journeyed back and humbled himself he was called Israel, meaning prince of God. And because he faced his disappointment and received the new identity it gave him the authority to place identity on others.

When Rachel was on her death bed with the birth of their son Benjamin she attempted to give him a name that meant son of my sorrow. But Israel knew the value of a name. He revoked that name and called his son Benjamin, meaning the son of my strength. Because he did not allow his disappointments to name him had authority to give his son a proper name.

So what is your name?

Rock climbing, disappointment, and lessons learned

Everyone wants to climb a mountain but the process is down right frightening. I recently went to an indoor rock climbing facility with a buddy of mine. This was something I have been wanting to do and something I want to do more of. But I had been hesitant because I have a small fear of heights.

Not to be deterred by this fear, mainly because I don’t want my children to be a prisoner to fear I went for it. After I my initial experience I am hooked and I want to continue this new hobby. But more than finding a new hobby I gained some insight. Climbing a vertical wall with just some tiny rock like holds is not something I would naturally do. In fact the first time up the wall I was short of breath and questioning my decision. Luckily for me my friend has been climbing for 20 years and was there to help.

As I have reflected on this I am seeing that in climbing the mountains in our life we are risking much. As with any risk there is the fear that we won’t make it and end up disappointed. If we let this keep us from trying then we become a slave to fear. If we go for it and fail then we are left with disappointment. That disappointment has the potential to derail us from all that God as called us to.

Take a moment and think of a time you have been disappointed. If you stay in that place of disappointment you will not likely risk big again. But if you journey back to that place of disappointment then you will find like Jacob did you are given a new identity (but more of that soon).

So what did rock climbing teach me about risking and facing disappointments…

You need encouragement. You need people around you who will tell you are gonna make it and you have what it takes.

You need to be challenged. I needed my friend to tell me he knew it was hard but to not give up. When it gets hard and I want to quit I need others who will not let me quit.

And I needed technique. I needed someone who knew more than me that could tell me what to do next and where to place my feet so I could make my next move.

In other words you need people and you need to receive from them.

We all want to leave our mark on this world but we can only do so by facing our disappoints and learning our true identity. By doing this we unlock the power of unlocking others.