On your mark, get set....

Hey everyone!

It’s time for our last meeting before the official inauguration of our community!

The date is Monday, December 27^th. Let’s meet at the Gunther house a bit earlier than last time, say 6:00. If that’s too early, please let us know. I just don’t want to finish as late as we did the last time. We’ll have refreshments and snacks. If you need directions, please email me at AirUnderMe@gmail.com. I can give you my phone number as well.

Things to talk about:

1. Do we need a name and if so, what should it be? Some suggestions are “The Upper Room”, Challenge, The Community, Radical. A suggestion was made to wait until our group formed a personality before naming it.

2. When, and how often should we meet?

3. What sort of business should we discuss at the meetings? Should we rotate sites for the meetings? Do we want to have:

1. group prayer?
2. Worship?
3. Individual prayer?
4. Prophetic prayer?
5. Meditation/contemplation?
6. Communion?

There is another group that is meeting every Wednesday night for prayer and prophecy only. Should we align with this group and make Wednesday nights our big prayer night? At this point, I’m going to both meetings.

Other things to think about and discuss:

4. How can we best serve each other?
5. How can we serve our community?
6. How can we serve the world?
7. How can we have accountability?
8. How can we avoid being just another group that talks a lot?

I have several thought trails concerning our community. One concern is the need to outline the process of resolving conflict. I have an excellent guideline from a Mennonite community in Phoenix that I would like to propose. Make no mistake, there will be conflict. This community has gifted people in it. But not everyone has the same gifts. Or vision. Or traditions. Or sensitivities. With so many talented people in the community we need to exercise GREAT humility, patience and grace, just as our Lord exercises with us. And LOVE. Please pray for this.

The other desire I have is, in the beginning, to simply stick to the 5 tasks on the Radical Experiment list. As we get our rhythm going, we will add our own radical challenges during the year. But at first, I think it is important that we simply follow the Radical Experiment. This will not be an easy task. I do have several materials to help us with the Radical Experiment throughout the year.

We’re also going to talk about commitment. How far, how deep, how much is needed. Pray for agreement in whatever we all decide.

If possible, I would love it if we were all finished with the book Radical before this Monday. Remember, reading the book is the only real requirement for joining this community. The door is open for everyone. But we need to be on the same page and we need to understand the depth of Radical that God calls us to. This community isn’t really a book study, it’s more of a group that is inclined towards pursuing God through 5 spiritual disciplines lived out in constant, honest and deep interaction with other people. As the year progresses, we expect to feel our walk with God deepen and deepen and our interaction with the world to become more like Christ. It is my prayer that we would learn to loosen our hold on our fears and our inner wounds and scars and learn to walk boldly in deep faith with our Lord and in doing so, change ourselves and our world.

“May Your kingdom come, on earth, as it is in Heaven”

See you Monday. Have a blessed, peaceful Christmas.

dan

More information about the new community.....

Hello Friends,

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out a message that a brave, new community was being born out of a desire by many to “go deep” into our relationship with Jesus. The inspiration for this group comes from different places, but mainly from a book by David Platt titled “Radical”.

We received some very heartfelt reactions to this proposed group and many people have purchased Radical and begun to read it and its “radical” message. We feel the next step is to meet together informally, in order to begin a dialogue for the purpose of getting to know each other and creating the framework for this community which officially starts January 1^st.

So, we want to invite all Going Deeper-community-interested people who have read or started to read the book Radical and/or are at least interested in forming a rather intense and God-focused group that will speak into each other’s lives and live out our faith in the world -to come to a meeting. I would like to invite you to our house on Monday night, December 6^th, at 7PM.

If you are planning to come, please email me at:

AirUnderMe@gmail.com

-and we will give you our address and directions to our house. In fact, we would love it if you would contact us even if you cannot make it that night. We just need to know who’s interested.

I know that many of you have questions and some are wrestling with the idea of taking on the challenges set forth in Radical. Some are questioning if you have time to take on another project or join another group. Please come and share your fears or misgivings and perhaps, as a community, we can sort out these issues.

If this is the first you’ve heard about this new community, or if you would like to refresh your memory as to what this new community is about-please check out my blog at this address:

http://konduit.blogspot.com/2010/11/starting-new-community.html

Feel free to pass this information on to anyone who you think may benefit from it.

Grace and Peace to you!

Dan Gunther

Starting a New Community

Okay, I’m taking a deep breath and bracing myself and my family for what could be our greatest adventure ever….

There has been a lot of talk from friends lately about starting a fresh new community of Christ followers in Tucson based on the recent Spiritual movement in our Worship community at Pantano Christian Church. As my wife puts it “some of us want to go deeper”. Well, I think I’ve finally gotten the practical inspiration to begin this community. Or life group. Or small group. Or big small group. What ever you prefer to call it. I’m just calling it a community because I like the word.

The inspiration I received for forming this community came from a book I recently read called “Radical’ by David Platt. After reading this book and the challenging steps at the end of the book called “The Radical Experiment”, I began to see a possible framework for a group of people that want to go all the way in our walk with Christ.

The Radical Experiment is a one year program outlined in the end of the Radical book that emphasizes prayer, scripture reading, financial discipline, world and local community involvement, and getting involved in a close-knit community of fellow sojourners. Trust me, I’m not doing it justice. You need to read the book.

So here’s the deal: If you feel a stirring in your heart to explore the idea of taking the gospel seriously, taking a second look at the American Dream and contemplating what is meant by taking up your cross and really following Christ wherever He may take you and doing it in a community of like-minded flawed, broken, but brave and inspired people like yourself, then perhaps this is the time for you to start wading into the water. So here’s what I’m asking you to do:

Get a hold of the book Radical by David Platt. Here’s the website, where you can get more information about it:

http://www.radicalthebook.com/

Start reading it. It’s an amazing book. Try to read at least two chapters a week starting this weekend (November 20/21). My wife and I would love to give all of you an opportunity to meet at our house from time to time as a group to discuss the book and encourage each other and discuss the nuts and bolts of this potential community. If all goes as planned, we should be done with the book and inspired to begin the Radical Experiment by January 1^st, 2011.

At that time, there will be another open invitation to any and all persons who have read the book and are interested in seeking out a very deep, life-changing and extremely challenging, experimental and transformational period of one year. Reading the book and making your decision based upon the challenges outlined in The Radical Experience is the only requirement. Young people, older people and everyone in between are invited. By the time you finish the book, your heart will let you know what to do next.

During this year we will venture to apply the 5 steps of the Radical Experiment to ourselves and our community. We will help each other, challenge each other, pray with and for each other, worship together and keep each other accountable. You do not need to belong to a particular church to be part of this community, although we highly encourage you to belong to some church family. Our community is not a substitute for a church.

I (Dan) have already read the book Radical, and I am excited with the idea of investing myself in going deeper with Christ in this community. These are the expectations I have for myself this next year:

To be challenged in many aspects of my life.

Learn healthy self-restraint and learn how to resist unhealthy self-restraint. Taking my thoughts into captivity and allowing Christ to free me.

Pray everyday. Unceasingly.

Read scripture every day. Even if I don’t want to.

Worship everyday on my own. I should want to.

Engage in Spiritual warfare. Our enemies are not flesh and blood.

Meet once a week with the community to break bread, worship, pray and learn. 2^nd chapter of Acts.

Challenge myself financially. 2^nd chapter of Acts. It’s there, we have to talk about it and explore it. I don’t know how it works. But I want to know.

Learn to accept and understand how broken and sinful we really are. All have fallen short of the Glory of God. We had it, but we lost it.

Learn to discern spiritual things around me. Our enemies are not flesh and blood.

Learn the difference between spiritual joy and human joy (both are good). I prefer the kind that is beyond understanding.

Listen to other people’s hearts. Some of us have to learn to have better “ears to hear”.

Go out into the community and serve the poor, the hurting, the lost and the rejected. Not to mention the widow and the orphan.

Go far away from the U.S. and do the same. To the ends of the earth.

Read the entire bible in a year. I can’t share what I don’t know.

Struggle with temptation. Jesus left us His Spirit to help us.

Overcome. Jesus took the big step in allowing us to overcome. Everything we do is a reaction to His action.

Be misunderstood by friends and relatives. Jesus said this would happen.

Learn to love.

But I can’t do this alone. I don’t think anybody can.

I want you to know, I never saw myself as a leader, pastor or administrator. I don’t particularly see myself as the leader of this community. I just feel the Spirit pressing me to get the ball rolling. I just want to serve God the best I can. I think my wife feels the same way.

Know that I don’t go into this adventure with a great deal of fear and trepidation. If fact, the only thing that scares me more is what will happen to me if I don’t do this. Or even more important, what WON”T happen to me. So here I stand at a Spiritual crossroads in my life. A new beginning. And the Holy Spirit has somehow given me an uncharacteristic dose of courage to embrace this new beginning.

If you are interested in this community, please email me at AirUnderMe@gmail.com and we will start to get organized. I would like to know what time/day of the week you are willing to sacrifice to meet and support each other and the community.

God bless! Dan and Lisa Gunther

Radical by David Platt

I don’t read as much as some of my friends do, but what I lack in quantity, I like to think I make up for in quality! In fact, it feels at times as if the Spirit is leading me to certain books. These seem to be books that truly challenge the church and challenge me to go deeper in my walk with Christ, to probe my heart, to pursue God more aggressively and to take scripture more seriously than I have before, and most importantly, to avoid becoming “lukewarm”.

As it so happens, I am reading one of those books right now. It’s called Radical by David Platt and it is one of the best books I have read in years. I HIGHLY recommend it. But do not buy this book and then whip through it for content. Instead, read it quietly and slowly and close it often to ponder what is going on in your heart.

I pray you will not be the same.

http://www.radicalthebook.com/

True Wisdom

From the book of James:

3:13 Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct he should show his works done in the gentleness that wisdom brings……..3:17 (the) wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, accommodating,²⁵ full of mercy and good fruit,²⁶ impartial, and not hypocritical.²⁷ 3:18 And the fruit that consists of righteousness²⁸ is planted²⁹ in peace among³⁰ those who make peace.

If they could just take this verse out of scripture..

Matthew 25:31-46. Otherwise known as “The sheep and the goats”. That’s a verse that I seem to stumble on whenever I cross its path. No matter how I bend it or mix it up, I always end up being a goat. There are actually many more verses which give me a gut check when I read them, but the most challenging is the one where I get led off to the goat door.

What scripture causes that kind of reaction? You know, the kind where you find yourself thinking “if it didn’t say that I’d be okay, I think I would have a chance to avoid the whole ‘gnashing my teeth’ fate, but nope..it says that all right. Says it right there”

Looking out for #1

We all have something we center on. If it’s self, we consider that being self-centered. If it’s family, then you are family-centered. Work-centered, health-centered, fear-centered. We’re all centered on something. What is God centered on? Hmmmmm…..

“Can I do it? Can I really have a day that is totally dedicated to bringing glory to God? I mean, no matter what I do, can I make that my focus, my purpose for an entire day? If you really sit down and think it out, it seems at the least, pretty difficult, at the most – kind of crazy. I’d have to be on my best behavior and treat absolutely everyone with kindness and love. I’d have to drive differently. My conversations will have to be carefully self-monitored. I’d have to work in such a way that takes everyone else into consideration and not myself. I’d have to die to temptation, to laziness, to selfishness.”

(And that’s not even taking into consideration Just How Is Everyone Going To Know Why I’m Behaving This Way.)

I can tell you this much, I wouldn’t be able to do it on my own steam. I would need a lot of spiritual protection and inspiration. I would need constant reminders during the day. And I would need to pray for all these things. But I’m pretty sure that the Spirit would be very helpful because this is how I should be living my whole life!

..purposefully and constantly giving God the glory for everything.

Why? Because that’s why we’re here. We exist for two reasons, to enjoy God’s grace and to extend God’s glory in the process. And in the modern western church we constantly forget this. We focus so much on receiving from God we forget that He is the one truly worthy of receiving. Instead, we bask in God’s grace and forget what it is actually for. It’s not about us. It’s about God and His glory! If we disconnect God’s grace from His glory we have a very self-centered Christianity that bypasses God’s heart.

David Platt, in his book titled “Radical” puts it this way:

“If you were to ask the average Christian sitting in a worship service on Sunday morning to summarize the message of Christianity, you would most likely hear something along the lines of “The message of Christianity is that God loves me.” Or someone might say, “The message of Christianity is that God loves me enough to send his Son, Jesus to die for me.”

As wonderful as this sentiment sounds, is it biblical? Isn’t it incomplete, based on what we have seen in the Bible? “God loves me” is not the essence of biblical Christianity. Because if “God loves me” is the message of Christianity, then who is the object of Christianity?

God loves me.

Me.

Christianity’s object is me.”

So I’m going to try it. I’m going to try to push God to the forefront of everything I do for one day. It’ll take a lot of prayer and effort, but unless I miss my guess, I’ll be a lot happier taking the focus off of..

Me

…..so just what is God centered on? God is centered on one thing.

God.

(Maybe we should follow His example)

Praying for change

Ericka, your response inspired me to jot down some thoughts about prayer. Sometimes I find myself in the same position as you are, wanting to make a big step toward God but struggling to come up with the courage to do it. Those are the times when my first step should be to get down on those knees. So, maybe I can share some things I’ve discovered about my own prayer life.

Prayer is a huge topic to tackle, and there are countless books on the subject. Instead of trying to cover every aspect, here are just a few things from my own perspective that help keep me on track with my own prayer time. To begin, I’d like to share a few scripture references which shape my prayers:

MT 18:13 “I tell you the truth,¹ unless you turn around and become like little children,² you will never³ enter the kingdom of heaven!”

MT 21:22 “And whatever you ask in prayer, if you believe,³¹ you will receive.”

JM 4-2…You do not have because you do not ask; 4:3 you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, so you can spend it on your passions.

LK 11:13-36 Too long to print here, I highly encourage you to look it up and read it slowly, as if you are reading it for the first time. Or even better….

I would highly recommend listening to the following podcast from Shane Hipps on the Luke passage. It’s a wonderful explanation of the text with a few surprises. It has a permanent spot on my iPod. Here’s the link:

http://marshill.org/teaching/2010/07/25/a-scorpion-and-the-egg/

If you’ve got time, listen to it now. I’ll wait.

These scriptures and teachings bring me to the best prayer posture that I can have – that of a child looking up at their parent and asking for help and advice, having a solid faith that the parent wants to help them. There are plenty of scriptural references that point to the fact that God wants us to grow up and mature in our relationship with Him and with others. How could He not? If this is what you want, than God is truly with you on this.

So, now that I have carved out some time alone with God and I have a desire to grow closer to Him and to learn at His feet, what do I want? One of the things that I want to most from Him is Wisdom. This is a tricky world, full of snares and smoke and temptation. Navigating our way through this world requires a pillar of fire at night and a cloud by day (EX 13:21-22, PS 119:105). So…

“My amazing, wonderful Father, I want Wisdom.”

Here’s some more “wants” that I constantly bring to Him:

“Lord, you say that I should love You with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and all my strength. And to love everyone around me as I love myself. I don’t know how to do that. But I want to learn how. I want to love You more and more. I want to love all the people I meet as You love me. Teach me how to love You. Teach me Love. Show me. Take me there. Help this love to grow in my heart everyday. Help me. Help me!”

Here’s another very important prayer for me to ask:

“God, show me the truth about myself. If I am hiding any pain or hatred, or dark desire deep in my heart, bring it out, show it to me so we can get rid of it. Put your mirror in front of me so I can know all the ugly details. I don’t want to have anything, ANYTHING that hinders our relationship. Take down the walls, the barriers between us. Do whatever it takes. Whatever it takes!”

Here’s the kicker, the most important part of this prayer, the part that truly makes a difference to me:

“God of love, if you show me these truths and I shrink back, if I hesitate or retreat from my resolve, GIVE ME THE STRENGTH TO MOVE FORWARD THROUGH THIS PROCESS WITH YOU. No matter how scary this spiritual cleansing is, give me the COURAGE to face it. I can’t do this without your strong arm under me.”

I cannot emphasize how important it is to pray for the courage to face God’s answers to your prayers. Looking back on my life I can see many instances where God began to work in my heart and I began to protest the process and falter in my walk. Sometimes I pray for God to help me to recognize His work in my growth so that I know what is happening.

I want to finish by sharing some rules about prayer that I try to follow at all times. Again, these are very important to me and they have made a huge difference in my prayer time.

First, as much as possible, I try to – PRAY OUT LOUD. This is not always convenient, but if you have to be creative, find a way to make this possible. God spoke creation into existence. To me, when I pray out loud there is more power to my words and my conversation. I don’t do it to show off. I do it to help God see that I’m serious about what I am asking of Him. Although I believe that God can hear you when you pray silently, the vast majority of scripture has people praying out loud to God.

Second, I really, really, really try to make EVERY prayer a sincere one. We’ve all heard them, and I’ve done my share - of prayers that we just throw out there as a sort of obligatory formality. If you pray with others, take a second to focus and PRAY AS IF THE GOD OF CREATION HAS PAUSED AND IS LISTENING TO YOU. Pray as if you were talking to Him in person. Because YOU ARE. Don’t offend God by tossing a casual, half-you-know-what prayer His way, hoping it will miraculously stick. Make every prayer count.

Thirdly, if you tell someone that you will pray for them, DO IT RIGHT THERE AND THEN. Because if you put it off, well, we know what happens.

The last thing is just a personal think with me and I don’t hold this against anyone. But, Jesus asked us to pray in HIS NAME. His name is Jesus or Yeshua. It’s not “His name” or “Your name”. It’s the most beautiful name in the world.

It’s Jesus, isn’t it?

Crossing the 3rd line

Greetings! Let me tell you, I could not decide on what the purpose of this blog would be. Goodness knows, there are so many blogs out there. Why do I need to join all those fish in the big pond? What do I have to say that will make any sort of difference in this world? I’m not a biblical scholar or a theologian and I didn’t go to seminary. I’m not even a college grad. What I have is a love for Jesus and an insatiable desire to go ever deeper in my relationship with God. And a hunger for Real Truth. This passion fuels what has been, and continues to be, an interesting journey on the road towards that goal. I keep it simple - Love God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength. And love all people as you love yourself.

I recently read a great article by Craig Groeschel wherein he describes our growth in Christ as crossing 3 lines. Check out the article here:

http://www.neuemagazine.com/digital-archives/issue-03-summer-2010

(Just click on “Index” on the black strip in the middle of the page and scroll down to the article entitled “Walking the Fine Line” and read. Go ahead, I’ll wait.)

Challenging isn’t it? After reading this article, I decided the purpose of this blog is to chronicle, in a way, my journey towards the crossing of the 3^rd line. That would be a crossing that I would not take lightly. I want to be true to myself and to my Lord. And this is not a journey where you can just turn around and go back. If you want to become the best lover that God can mold you into, you have to go all the way. No compromise. Dive in and keep swimming. Put your Reeboks on and start running. And don’t look back.

I am always being inspired by something during the week. Some of these discoveries can be challenging to me and to others as well. As I share these little signposts I would love to get feedback from fellow sojourners. It is my hope that you would all keep me accountable on this journey. Perhaps along the way you might be inspired to start (or restart) your own journey. We could call these “Travelblogues”.

God bless!