mattreis.shiftinggray.com

Wow that’s hard to realize.  Now I don’t mean the city, it’s not going anywhere, at least I hope not.  

My time here is quickly drawing to a close and as per usual I’ve become very introspective in hopes that I can really capture what the Lord has taught me while in Rome.  Not unlike most of my life, I’m at a loss of how to gather my thoughts and rightly summarize  this past year.  First let me start by saying that I’m not even sure if I need to have closure but I think I’m finding that I need it for my own sanity.  Secondly, God is so good.

Really, my life is in shambles most of the time and regardless of how it looks from a distance, inside there is usually something I’m working through.  I’m confident that it’s the Lord perfecting me into the image of Jesus but sometimes I’m not as quick to believe it when pain comes.  I’ll try not to be so melancholy and sentimental, rather I just want to rejoice in where the Lord has me.

This past weekend we had another Agape gathering for all the staff here in Italy and as always it was awesome.  It’s still a shock that I get to work with such great people that care about the heard of God and want to see him glorified in this country.  We spent our time in the Word looking at 2 Peter, obscure I know, but man was it rich.  Scott Ketrow led us through the book with a perspective of how Peter was wanting to bring stability of faith to his audience.  How Jesus is stable and that life can be and is stable when you put your faith in him.  One of the questions we talked about was, “What if Jesus came back tomorrow, how would your life look differently?”   Most assuredly we would feel a stronger sense of urgency to reach people we love and tell more and more people about eternal life offered through Christ, but something really challenged me.  Usually when I think about Jesus’ return I think about it in terms of my own freedom from sin and deliverance from evil but something changed in my mind this weekend.  What about righteousness reigning?  Christ is coming back so that righteousness can reign on the earth.  He’s coming back to defeat sin and take His place as king!

We’re studying Philippians as a team and we just finished the second chapter where Paul talks about Christ’s example of humility.  On a side note, I think I’ve seen first hand how the Lord WILL answer a prayer for humility-try it.  But Paul says that Jesus has been highly exalted so that every tongue in heaven and on the earth and under the earth will worship Him.  That’s a staggering thought.  I almost want to just start telling people that you’re going to praise the name, it’s just a matter of where you do it.  Now I would never do that because people don’t need a scare tactic, they need an encounter.  They need an encounter with the living God and they need to see how real and how stable Jesus truly is.

Okay, I’m done for a bit.  I’m just learning so much over here and it helps to get it out.

Now I usually write some of my thoughts here in hopes that people read it but I’m thinking I might try a video post…I’ll be back…  Hi Judy! 

So for the past three weeks we’ve been having groups of Americans come to Rome and help us in growing our ministry.  It’s been so wonderful to have familiar faces and people from home come here, God is so good!  We’ve been able to make contact with so many more people than we ever could on our own so it’s been really refreshing.  I’m in the middle of some big decisions right now so life is interesting.  Struggling with what I’m going to do with my life and living in a tension that makes me want to throw in the towel.  I was recently asked the question of how do I deal with life when everything is falling apart.  My only answer to this is to cling to Jesus.  In the midst of trouble it’s easy to turn from God and blame Him for all the hurt but I think it’s harder to turn to Him and thank him for everything.  It’s a lot harder to continue to believe the promise that God will never leave us or forsake us because pain sucks.  We want the quick out and we chase after something that will relieve the pain but really what we’re looking for is Jesus.  Not the Jesus we’ve packaged up and sold, but the Jesus of the Bible who healed the sick and raised the dead.  There’s real power found when Jesus is the Lord of the universe and not some dude sitting on a rock debating the meaning of life.  JESUS is the meaning of life, eternal life.  I’ve got a lot of things going on right now in my head and I have a lot to process through.  Life is good and God is even better.  I think I’m learning so much about who I am as a man and how I’ve been fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of the Creator!  Wow, that’s awesome.

Life is hard. Without Jesus, it’s impossible.

I’ve been learning about humility and pride and loneliness and walking with the Lord so much that’s I’m struggling to put together a coherent thought. I keep wrestling with it and I have to believe that Jesus has to be the answer to all the problems the world can ever come up with. And no, this isn’t a stretch. A lot of the people I have met working with CCC and Agape have a lot of issues with this idea of a loving God. Things like how could a loving God allow so much pain and suffering in the world? A lot of the questions are smoke screens that people throw up just to ignore the fact that they actually need to respond to why Jesus had to die on the cross. Now for others, there really is some barrier that is keeping them from embracing the Truth of grace offered by Jesus. Well the answer to all of the questions that people pose is sin. God allows bad things to happen because we fell short thousands of years ago in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve ate the apple and sin entered the world. We have such a hard time disconnecting the personal implications of this word “sin” because we have a whole host of experiences that tell us to equate it with a man carrying a bullhorn bringing down hellfire and damnation and saying you’re going to Hell and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s great power in words like sin and repentance, but unless these words that heap condemnation on people are followed with the lovely words of hope found in Jesus, people will continue to turn for the door rather than drop to their knees and humbly ask Jesus to forgive them of their sin.

At the end of my life when I’m asked to give an account for why I should be allowed into heaven, the only answer I can give is Jesus. I’ll have the eternal joy of praising the Godhead three in one simply because of the work of Jesus on the cross. The Bible is very plain about what I deserve because of my sin (death) but because Jesus humbled himself and took the form of a man and died on a cross, I get to have life. Not just life in the here and now, but life forever. I don’t know how many times I’ve shared about how Jesus has changed my life, but it never gets old! That’s the beauty of the Gospel, it’s the same today as it was yesterday and it will be the same in ten years. Another reality I’ve learned is that I need the Gospel in my life every single day just as much as the people I’m praying will embrace Jesus do. We’ve ALL sinned and we ALL have fallen short of the glory of God.

So in my pursuit of Christlikeness I like to listen to sermons because I find that I learn a lot from the faithful teachings of men who have been digging into the Scriptures far longer than I have. It’s a real joy to hear perspective from the Word that’s applicable to my life. I’ve been listening to Mark Driscoll from Mars Hill Church in Seatle and let me tell you…this guy has something going. It all started when my mentor and friend from college gave me his book, “Confessions of a Reformission Reverend.” It’s a retelling of how he got his Church off the ground and got it to be one of the fastest growing Churches in America. Ultimately, the answer is that the Lord is blessing Mark and his ministry and honoring the labor that he and many other faithful men have put into the furthering of the Gospel in Seatle. There’s just something to be said about the authenticity this man brings to the word and his teaching. I mean authenticity that’s bread out of a deep devotion to the Scripture and study of the Word that leads to the transformation of the soul. I’m talking about a powerful movement of the Holy Spirit that cannot be stopped because, well, the Lord can’t stopped. It’s found in humility and considering everything rubbish compared to the surpassing worth found in Jesus.

I’m done for now, but I’ll be back…

I’ve been reading through and studying the book of Nehemiah and it’s been great.  I started out thinking that the book is all Old Testament narrative telling the rebuilding of the wall and not much more.  Nehemiah was always a great model for leadership and what to do when given a task and things like casting  vision and following it through by getting others to join you to accomplish something great, but is that it?  Now don’t get me wrong, all of that is true and very practical for people who are called to leadership but I think the model Nehemiah gives us is so much deeper than we let on.   Nehemiah was a man who feared the Lord.  He feared the God of the Scriptures and lived a life that modeled that fear.  Moreover he fought for a life devoted to the Lord and His goodness.  Nehemiah gets opposed time after time by this guy Sanballat and his butthead friends.  These guys never give up in trying to thwart the plans to rebuild the wall and they make up lies and throw all kinds of problems his way.  They even higher a man to act as a false prophet to trick Nehemiah into going into the temple to take away his reputation and discredit him and his position of leadership.  I don’t know about you, but if I was in that place I would complain and groan, not Nehemiah.  He turns right to God and asks Him to deal with and to remember the guys giving him trouble, like Old Testament remember.  He trusts that the Lord who has given him the task of rebuilding the wall is infinitely more than capable to see it through.  Really, Nehemiah just walked with the Lord… 

So I’m trying to keep this thing updated.  I think the hardest thing about keeping a blog and keeping it updated is the fact that I’m not sure if anyone reads it.  Seeing as I’m lazy and I’m not really doing this because I need to know what’s going on in my life, I chose to not write in here.  Maybe it also has something to do with that fact that I write like a 4th grader and I have to stop to correct my spelling and or typing every few words (thank God for the spell check on my Mac)!  Anywho, I’m going to try and commit to keeping this thing updated.  Maybe it will keep me busy and stop me from watching 2 1/2 seasons of “How I Met Your Mother.”  Then again, I won’t have to worry about keeping up with American TV shows because of the strike.  Life is awesome…

So I just got back from our all Italy conference and it was awesome. As per usual with these things I’ve come back with more in my brain and on my mind than I ever know what to do with. That’s why days like yesterday are so good for me. Days where I can just go and be. To have no agenda but really sit and listen to the Lord. I’ve found as I grow in my relationship with Him that the more time I spend just sitting with Him and being, the more I get out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there is no more room for time in the word and study of the Word at all. What I’m saying is that sometimes we just need to sit and listen to what He might be trying to communicate to us. I believe that if we’re so busy doing things for the Lord we never have the time to do things with the Lord. It may sound like nothing but semantics but there is a huge difference. Right now, I’m not too sure what it is but I know there is something profound in actually taking a Sabbath or just spending time with the Lord being rather than doing. If anyone else out there is anything like me than the last thing we need is more things to do. I’m sure there’s more to come with this one but this is where I am right now….

Rome is incredible. Italy is incredible. Our staff team is incredible. I’m humbled at the thought that I get to be a part of this awesome team God has put together to serve in Italy. Better yet, I’m amazed that I get to be a part of the work that the Living God is doing all around the world. I think back to before I knew the Lord and it just gets me every time. It gets me thinking about why God would chose to yank someone like myself out of the darkness and being me into the light.

Now don’t get me wrong, I was a great person before I knew the Lord. That’s what’s so hard for people to wrap their minds around. They think that if I wasn’t that bad off before I met the Lord why should it be that different after walking with Him for 5 years? Well I don’t know. I wish I knew the secret of life and why it looks so much different for so many people. If I did I guess I would go by a different name, God. Please don’t start calling me God… Read more »