|
Kevining
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Kevin ING
Birthday: 4/5/1989
Gender: Male
Interests: Water polo x 100000000, sleeping, guitar, saxophone, food, spacing out, time with my main man Jesus, trying to be the most workable clay i can be for God's purposes, MISSIONS TRIPS
Expertise: haha nothing really, i do a bit of everything, except for procrastination, i've perfected that one to an art
Occupation: Executive
Industry: Business
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  agentkneo
Member Since:
6/6/2003
|
|
| Wow! Augustine is so beast!
How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose.... You drove them from me, you who are true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood, you who outshine all light, yet are hidden deeper than any secret in our hearts, you who surpass all honor, though not in the eyes of men who see all honor in themselves.... O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation.
St. Augustine, Confessions 181 (IX.1), John Piper's emphasis from When I Don't Desire God.
| | |
| Haha, spontaneous summer thought blogs. Here goes.
So john piper says there are only three types of people: those who really send, those who really go, and those living in disobedience to God. it was so funny when dave and katherine said that. haha, what a perfect quote to put when you're making missions presentations at churches! (no, actually don't do that. what a guilt trip =P)
anyways, i've been thinking about how i'll be in houston working all summer, and i realize this is the first summer in 5 years i won't be on a short term missions trip. first summer in 5 years where i'm one of the senders instead of the goers. i'm actually really excited. its cool having all these people down on your notebook, all off to different places of the world proclaiming the Good News of Christ, bringing light to dark places, and hope to hopeless places, and shaping the paths of lives eternally . its cool knowing that as you pray for them, things are happening, the front lines are advancing, life and new birth are happening where there was once only death. it's like holding down the fort, like watching the view from headquarters or the operations base. of course, i've got my own very real and desperately needy missions field right here in houston, but its exciting being at home while in direct spiritual partnership with Kingdom work in places overseas.
i'm stoked for the end of this summer. i can't wait to hear the stories when they come back. i want to hear them testify of God's work, to hear about life-changing transformation and eternities redirected and new Damascus road experiences and Christ being exalted in places and persons' lives we would never have dreamed.
| | |
| five months is way too long without a blog entry. i think i'm gonna try to be more regular with this thing. there've been so many thoughts this semester that i've passed up, little insights and tiny revelations of God showing me his divine glory and little instances of sweetness in his Spirit that i've totally slipped by and forgotten about. so i'm gonna try to write them down more often.
one of them is ezekiel 16:6. i've been learning a lot about the new birth lately, and i love how its put here:
"and when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, Live! I said to you in your blood, Live!"
just like that. one word. Jesus commands the dead man in his blood, "LIVE" and the dead man obeys the command. just like that. because he can. he's the humble servant in philippians 2, lifted up to the highest place, the name above every name, the highest authority. Adonai. exalted so completely and entirely that sin will not in the least way be able to say they triumphed or diminished the joy of heaven. he has conquered death. 1 corinthians 15:54-57:
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
Death is swallowed up in victory.
55
O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?
56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
what a miracle! dead men rise and walk when Jesus commands them. how empowering that is for evangelism. you speak the words of Christ to them and God speaks his word of command to their souls and dead men become alive. just like that.
i pray this summer doesn't go to waste. i'd like a God-entranced vision of all things. just like jonathan edwards. man could that guy write! he saw things the right away, or more rightly than most do. he saw things as they really are. he saw the world as it really is, in the hands of an infinitely holy, invincibly powerful, exuberantly happy God, to whom the entire universe is as nothing.
he hoped and gloried in a future of heaven's joys with such greater joy and greater expectation than i do. and he saw the realities and felt singed by the flames of hell with such greater heat than i do. and he relished grace with such soul-staggering, heart-enriching delight that i do. because he was a sinner. and so he loved the Gospel.
i want to melt away in the truth of the Gospel. how i hate the things that i waste my mind on. when there are these things. these glorious, soul-staggering, mind-shattering, wonderful things. and instead i trade all the treasures of knowledge and wisdom and grace and its like i'm giving them up for a bowl of cereal. literally. if that God-entranced vision consumed me, then maybe i would really understand what the cost and reward of discipleship mean. what it means to live and to die and to find out that only then i truly live. how else did the martyrs do it? how else could they be tied to stakes, burning alive, their skin melting unto their bones, their nostrils filled with the scent of their own flesh being scorched, and in those very moments, sing hymns with faces full of joy, experiencing simultaneously their greatest moments of earthly joy in the fellowship of Jesus? they believed in a big God. they believed in a wonderful heaven. they believed in a very real, very terrible hell. and so it was no sacrifice. only gain.
let's not waste this summer.
Behold Him there the Risen Lamb!
My perfect, spotless righteousness,
The great, unchangeable I AM,
My King of glory and of grace.
One with Himself I cannot die.
My soul is purchased by His blood.
My life is hid with Christ on high,
With Christ, my Savior and my God!
| | |
| So this past week I saw Disney's somewhat recent Pixar-animated movie, Meet the Robinsons, and it was freakin awesome. Better than the Incredibles. Probably one of my, if not the favorite Disney movie of mine. No kidding, I don't even understand it, but in the end, somewhere around the last 20 minutes I could hardly contain myself.
No, seriously. I know I'm a total sucker for the really feel-good family oriented movies. I'm about to ruin it right here, if you haven't seen it, but I was watching this one and it was getting to the end where Lewis the orphan meets his future family for the time. And then Rob Thomas's song "Little Wonders" starts going in the background and poor Lewis, after years of rejection after painful rejection and no hope at all for a future or a loving family, he finally meets an awesome family to call his own. And years of pain and grief and loneliness and despair are stripped away in an instant as he's swept up in these loving arms of parents who understand him and take him to the house where every deepest dream in his heart will come true. I haven't really teared up from a movie before, but it was right around there when I felt the shivers crawling up my spine and a dry lump to gulp down form in the back of my throat, and everything else that happens when you start to tingle with the anticipated happiness of a bright future of hope and optimism. Yep, its like I told you, I'm a sucker for those things.
But I think the reason the whole adoption thing hit me so strongly was because its what I've been studying and meditating on recently. Its astounding isn't it, that God takes me up like that? That he carries me in from the streets and from pain and loneliness and rejection and decides, mystery or all mysteries, to adopt me into His family as His Son and to share in all the glorious inheritance won by Jesus on the cross? It's unfathomable.
I think these days I've really run out of profound, or attempts-at-profound, things to say. I'm struggling to even halfway articulate myself and I think its because I'm starting to learn just how deeply, deeply profound are the statements in the Bible.
"How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him." 1 John 3:1
That we should be called children of God! That's inconceivable, isn't it? That God, in his totally free and undeserved love, not by any result of our character or record proven worthy to receive it, should decide to love and exalt us sinners as He has loved and exalted Jesus. That's ludicrous. It's ludicrous and wild and crazy and I'm not sure how to respond sometimes.
And I surely don't respond in a way that reflects the reality of how ludicrous it is. Maybe I got a glimpse of it after watching and reflecting on Meet the Robinsons. But really, my spirit should grow wings and take flight at such a thought. Its love too impossible for words to express and I long for that reality to take root in me and shine out in praise, uncontrollable, effusive, pouring endlessly out because that's really the only possible logical response to such an illogically beautiful thought. Me, adopted? Me? Pulled out of the gutter, selfish and ungrateful and guilty and rude and ugly and hideous and perverse and defiant and cold and callous and disgusting? Me in my state as a child of wrath? I don't get it, I scarcely know myself, I don't even know how bad I am, continually hiding in rationalization and so wrapped up in the filth and folds of sin and ugliness so deep in me I can't see it myself. Me, so completely utterly self-deluded and stubbornly opposed to the truth in the ways I carelessly brush off a thousand terrible offenses of selfish thoughts and black and white lies and sexual laxity and foolish pride and then toss a dime in a some goodwill offering and then refuse to take seriously that there is anything much morally wrong about me.
And I'm so blind and its awful, and then I see this thing called grace right in front of me. And its mind-boggling. Me, adopted? From child of wrath to child of God? How callous I am! How can I not see that and just absolutely melt with undying affection and joyfulness and gratefulness? How is it that my soul does not explode in spontaneous effusive praise and joy pervade every fiber of my being until my heart is racing uncontrollably with the music that resonates with every question I have to ask about the state of my unhappiness, and no symphony or song or dance is enough to express that delight-filled heart?
God, this is so much bigger than anything I've ever known or will know and surely it must appear so foolish to rant on and on in this blog until I don't even make sense about how supremely precious and how supremely valuable You are to me. But let it be completely and utterly foolish then, because it certainly makes no sense that You would love me. That you would send Jesus to bear terrible and righteous wrath meant for me, and justify me by his blood, and then call me your Son so that I can say: I am a child of God; God is my Father, heaven my home, every day is one day nearer, Christ my savior my brother, the best is yet to come, eternal divine joy in God mine forever.
God let me sing that song now. How long I've called myself a Christian, and how long I've let my lukewarm joy in You, my stubborn clinging to worthless things, betray me to it all. I want my life to be lived with a sense of that weight, with a sense of the gravity of that glorious grace You've given, in a way that might reflect the reality of the sheer vastness of it. I want to hope in something different. I want to hope so radically that they would question. I want to hope in that all-surpassingly glorious adoption that I'm a son of God, so that the world would turn its head and coming running to ask why.
| | |
| "Blessed is the man who finds wisdom,
the man who gains understanding,
for she is more profitable than silver
and yields better returns than gold.
She is more precious than rubies;
nothing you desire can compare with her.
Long life is in her right hand;
in her left hand are riches and honor.
Her ways are pleasant ways,
and all her paths are peace.
She is a tree of life to those who embrace her;
those who lay hold her her will be blessed."
-Proverbs 3:13-18
This is one looong overdue entry.
As I sit back and relax and think about all that's transpired in the past three odd months, I'm finding it extremely hard to really express and convey and characterize all the incredible growing and learning that's happened in the past few months. I hope I'll be able to, I really do. I know I'm one of the worst people ever at keeping in touch with others, or even keeping in touch with myself and taking time to stop and reflect and process what's going on. I haven't had a good chance to do that since the last long entry I wrote after thinking about the application process. And now here we are, some odd 8 months later. The last class attended, the last exam taken, the last paper handed in. In some ways, it's been more learning than I've ever learned in a semester, in other ways more playing than I've ever played in a semester. Either way, I'm done with my first semester at Yale.
The first day of college was for me, as I'm sure it was or will be for anyone else, overwhelming and slightly intimidating and undeniably exciting and packed to the brim with activity. It's a cool feeling you get stepping onto Old Campus; you get a small (or large) bit of the sense of enormous history and greatness that seems soaked up in every little tiny stone fixture. There are these huge, gorgeous buildings of neo-Gothic architecture, with spires and pillars rising up and tons of ornaments and tiny laced carvings hidden among spidery vines of ivy wrapped around ancient, crumbled-looking (but only crumbled-looking and not crumbled at all) stone walls. I remember taking a look and soaking it in for a second and marveling at the thought that I'd be living at a place like this for the next 4 years, tied irrevocably to a tradition centuries-long. It's a feeling I still get, and as I hear from some seniors, a feeling that they still get as well.
It's a bit hard to characterize what I expected to find and how it differed from what I found. Certainly, God surpassed my wildest expectations. I was expecting to meet people with amazing abilities and intellect and insight and I definitely met some. I was expecting to meet believers who truly delight and love God with whom I could fellowship and sharpen and be sharpened by. And boy, I definitely met some. But what I didn't expect was how God would open my eyes to the indescribably glorious, wonderful treasure that is His Bible or how He would give me grace to taste just the most infinitely thin tip of how sweet the sweetest Words ever written could be.
It's funny, I'll probably never understand just how little I know of the glories of Christ, how heavenly delightful they are. I can't take it in, my mind is so dead, so blind to it all. My nature is so depraved, so stubbornly seeking its own way that without God in His perfect grace illuminating it, I would never see the awesome beauty of the words that lie in those pages. That I am a "child of wrath" as in Ephesians 2:3, that I am completely and utterly "dead in trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1), that my heart is an unfeeling stone, so utterly dank and dark, so rooted infinitely deep in a pit of mud and filth and blind to the glory of God in Christ (Ezekiel 36:26, 2 Cor 4:4-6). These are things that are slowly coming clearer. And I've said this before, but every time in this Christian walk that I think I'm starting to get it, God tosses the curtains wide open and lays bare another level to the depth of beauty that this thing called being a Christian really encompasses.
Of all the lessons I've learned so far this semester, there is none that holds a dime to the way God's been teaching me to look at the Bible and really, and I mean reeally, embrace it. I'll make a blanket statement here and say that it's probably the first time in my life that I've wanted to wake up early to read the Bible rather than stay up late playing video games, or watch a sermon more than watch a movie, or memorize verses until I drop rather than play my guitar. To dive into those words and just love them. To cherish them and "write them on the tablet of my heart" and "meditate on them day and night". To really, really adore the deep things of God.
This entry would not be complete or have any form of integrity at all if I did not in some way acknowledge Dave Kim. I've got to give him a shout out, its completely unavoidable. To anyone who knows this guy I'm sure they'll nod their heads knowingly. It's interesting too because I'm sure it must be a crazy perspective for those of you who knew him last year, unlike myself. But basically, Dave is my Bible study leader and one of the most interesting and quotable people you'll ever meet. Quotable in part because half the things that come out of his mouth are quotes from John Piper, but also because the other half are statements that ring solidly with the truth of someone who has diligently and faithfully studied the Scriptures and desires above all else to spread a passion for the supremacy of God through Jesus Christ in all places for the joy of all peoples.
Anyways, he modeled and taught me things from the Scriptures that blew me away. Simply blew me away. Verses that I had casually glanced over, passages that I had flipped breezily by. They contained the most incredible and beautiful things ever. And its amazing because I'll grab my Bible and take a look at some of those things, and I'm stunned speechless and motionless with no thought to think or words to say, because I my heart simply aches at what I missed before. And I almost can't bear to believe that some of those promises lay there, real to believe and free to take and to claim for here and now and to eternity. They are too good to be true.
Oh the staggering promises of the riches of glory and the everlasting rewards that lie in the Gospel! I wish I could verbally just shout it out write now so that it would be heard instead of reading exclamation points. Because really how can I keep from shouting? How can I keep from singing? There's a parable that describes it in simplest terms that really captures the whole thing:
"The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field which a man found and covered up. Then, in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field." Matthew 13:44.
Joy for goodness sakes, joy like that certainly must be worth everything you earthly possess. And I just imagine what that joy must be like for men who see the kingdom of heaven in such a way, as it really is. What it must have been like for that man! On his way, on his own business, his own life, and in one eternity-changing moment finds what is priced beyond priceless. And in his joy, gives everything up in an instant. Why? 'Cuz of such perfect joy. He can't stop his hands shaking, his heart cannot stop its rapid beating, The sweat races across his forehead and his entire body clamors because he's about to go into some kind of freaking virtual epileptic seizure because he simply cannot contain the depth and breadth of the ecstasy built up in him. Every tiny fiber of his being, every fleety thought in his mind, and every biggest dream and yearning in the deepest cavern of his soul is about to explode with gladness because of the joy of the treasure before Him. This is the Gospel!
If only that joy would be real to me everyday. If I only I would delight in these words of truth and treasure them. And I praise God 'cuz of how He's been revealing them to me this semester. How He's really been helping me to understand the workings of the Gospel and the great transaction that happened. That I've been redeemed because a precious, precious, holy, holy Lamb without blemish or defect was the propitiation for my transgressions, and appeased and satisfied God's holy wrath, too just and too terrible for Words, that my soul would live. And to what effect? To praise Him unceasingly for a gift beyond the scope of a limited English vocabulary's capacity to describe in full.
I dear-heartedly wish that I had any sort of clever or imaginative writing ability to clearly and vividly describe the treasures that God has been revealing to my heart this semester. I mean, these are big adjectives, probably over-used and trite-sounding and ineffectively-applied already. And that's the last thing I want to do. I think the most wonderful thing though is that its all about the Gospel. It really is; its not some kind of forward progress thing. It's not a quest for innovative thought and a revolutionary idea or a repainting of a new interpretation. No, in that sense, I really haven't learned anything new about Christianity or about God. No, its the timeless truth of Gospel slowing coming clearer. And the clearer it comes to me, the more I realize that there is a staggering depth to the Gospel. Such simplicity to the beauty of grace, and yet, to fully realize the paralyzing width of the gap, the heights of such inspiring love, the colossal magnitude of an incarnate Christ who is God come to earth as a man - no, to fully realize it all would take more than an innumerable number of lifetimes could suffice.
And maybe that's why a million gazillion years from now, when every triviality of this fading earth has passed away, we'll be singing the same new song of praise to him of "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise! ....and To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!" (Rev 5:12,13). Forever and forever! It's a blissful thought isn't it? I hope the glory of that song would be one I start singing now. I know I posted this only a little while ago, but after attending Passion Conference, Psalm 40:1-3 revealed it to me a new way:
"I waited patiently for the Lord;
he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
and gave me a firm place to stand.
He put a new song in my mouth,
a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear
and put their trust in the Lord."
What a perfect thought that is, isn't it? I'm sitting here and I'm seeped in death, surrounded by death, headed for death and indeed dead already. And my heart is so dark that I do not even know what truth or beauty is but have instead exchanged it all for the lust of my flesh and and the selfish desires of my depraved humanity. And lo and behold, mystery of mysteries, what a glorious glorious recollection! He lifted me out of a pit! Don't you see? Would that my heart understand the beauty of that thought and then my soul resonate back with every ounce of the feebly inadequate praise I have to offer?! I was in this pit, and he lifted me out! The infinity of the hugeness of that thought, that God would reach down, not for anything that I have done and indeed inspite of everything I have done, and for no other reason than his perfect, incomprehensible love towards us, and get his hands dirty in that muck and pick me up out of that pit of death, so I might declare His praises forever.
So yea, I don't know, I'm not quite sure why I keep writing these long stream-of-consciousness sentences anymore, except for the hope that in spite of these convoluted ramblings, I might get across some of the glorious beauty that I know I have only just begun to understand in reading the Scriptures this semester. There is such a painful revolt in my soul against that truth. The rebellion in my nature is really starting to come clear. I've been singing a lot of that one verse from Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing lately:
O to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be;
Let that grace now, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to Thee!
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it;
prone to leave the God I love -
Take my heart, oh, take and seal it,
seal it for Thy courts above!
And that's just it. God let that grace be a fetter, be a chain, that binds me like a slave to Your truth because I know my heart is unfaithful and wandering and so brokenly prone to run back towards death if you do not bind me to Yourself by Your grace.
What pleasure there must be in simply delighting in God at the utmost treasure of your life! That's where I want to be, and I know I've got a long way, indeed an infinitely long way to go. And in the end, that goal is one and the same as seeking the most pleasure in your life isn't it? Because God is the most perfect treasure. Period. And maybe I'm starting to get a glimpse of that. Because when Christ is your master and your treasure, your whole world changes, and you're no longer looking through a drab world of dark and gray, but suddenly the colors are more vivid, the grass is greener, the sky is bluer, the stars shine brighter, and the darkness is nothing more than a more dramatic and beautiful backdrop to which the beautiful light of Jesus will shine. And life suddenly means something again.
| | |
|
