.My Sickness.

I am Daniel Morrow, and I am people pleaser. I love people. I live my life to put a smile on your face. I live my life to make you laugh. I live my life to make you think I am a great person. I long to be wanted and accepted and I hate failure.

The devil knows this and he uses whatever grip he can find to cut me deep. Recently I have been in a battle with my thought life to fight the insecurity I have hidden deep within my soul. And it seems that every time I see a ray of hope, I read something, hear something or assume something that destroys how I see myself. The tongue is a weapon and my self-confidence often hinges on the words spoken around me.

I am addicted to compliments and reassurance; they have become the drug that gets me going, the buzz that gets me high and the crutch that I use for support. Sometimes I feel like I cannot be healed because it seems every time I start to win the battle, I meet a hardship that takes me two steps backwards.

Well tonight I have come face to face with an ultimatum. My confidence cannot hinge on what others might be saying behind my back, how people react in front of me or how I think people will accept me on any given day. By relying on others for all my joy, I am holding broken people to an unfair standard that will only end in heartbreak and frustration. Truth be told, my love for people and desire to be liked should be rubbish compared to the overwhelming glory, honor and desire of knowing Christ my Savior in a more intimate way every single day.

My God knows me better than anyone else on this planet. He knows my success and my failure. He knows my darkest thoughts. He knows the number of hairs on my head for crying out loud. Yet He loves me unconditionally and that kind of intimacy cannot be replaced.

So starting tonight I am done looking to the critics to define me as a person. I am who I am because God made me that way and I have to maximize the gifts He has bestowed upon me while offering my weaknesses up to Him fresh every morning. His glories are new every morning and I long to taste and see that He is good in every relationship and situation. I choose to focus on the One who loves me and is working all things for good.

When I fully submit to His will, He will take care of me. God is good.

Love God. Love People. Spread the Hope.

DBM

The free gift is not like the trespass...

Over the past few days I cannot get over the fact that I seemingly forget the importance and power of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Often I do not live my life as a man who has been set apart to proclaim Good News of my Lord and Savior. 


It is overwhelming to consider the deep, passionate, divine love with which my Savior loves me. Not a day goes by that I do not mess up royally and yet He still pursues me with a crazy love that words cannot contain. 


I am a sinner, doomed to dust, depraved from birth. And yet Jesus Christ took the weight of my every sin on His shoulders on Calvary. My thoughts are aptly summed up in one of my favorite hymns, "I Stand Amazed in the Presence":




I stand amazed in the presence
Of Jesus the Nazarene
And I wonder how He could love me,
A sinner condemned, unclean.

How marvelous, how wonderful
And my song shall ever be.
How marvelous, how wonderful
Is my Savior's love for me. 




My Savior offered His life as a free gift for my life. And praise be to God that the free gift is not like the trespass. 


So I stand amazed in His presence. Yearning for Him. Longing to walk ever closer with Him.








"But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. " Romans 5:15


DBM

Piece of Pie

I am blessed enough to have had the opportunity to be in attendance at David Crowder's "Fantastical" conference in Waco Texas this weekend. The main theme of the conference is "Church Music" and more specifically "Why do we sing?" In brief, the reason why we sing is because God has a song and He puts a song in us. And our natural reaction, as followers of Christ, should be to sing that song with all of our heart. But to go farther, the question would be why God chose singing, above say screaming, talking or anything other form of noise. There have been different breakout sessions that have been really awesome--I listened to a guy named Bob Kauflin, you should check him out. 


But all that aside the last thing that stuck with me on the day happened about an hour ago. John Mark McMillan was performing at the front end of a night-cap concert. During his most popular song (How He Loves) he said something that has permeated through my soul since:


"In the Bible it says that we are his portion. That means we His piece of pie."


We are His portion--His prize. We don't need to be any taller; any thinner; any smarter. He loves us the way we are. He loves us and He gives us a song. No matter where we are, where we have been, who we are or who we have been we have a song. 


He filled us with love. We are his chosen piece of pie. The least we can do is worship in response to that overwhelming love.

Lights, Camera, Action.

"2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money" 1 Timothy 2-3

I am currently sitting on the 2nd floor balcony looking over the basketball courts at the Student Recreational Center on the lovely campus of Texas A&M University. For reasons that I will leave undisclosed I am recording some basketball games happening on the court below me. I tried to stay incognito but honestly a video camera is an abnormal sight to see at the Rec center. Needless to say along with the highlight dunk I just got on tape, I am also capturing glimpses of guys who want some showtime or guys that think I am someone special.

What is captivating me on this night is not the basketball. But the fact that I am garnering so much attention. It is funny how when we are aware of the fact that we are being watched, we tend to put on a show. The fact of the matter is that we are always being watched. Watched by and omnipotent, omnipresent God; watched by our peers; watched by those younger than us. With that in mind it makes my ultimate point so crucial.

As Christians, that is followers of Christ, we are called to live above reproach. Although we do not acknowledge it, we are constantly under close watch. And that means for good or bad. I do not know about you, but when people are watching me, I do not want them to see me. I want them to see my creator. I want them to see my loving father. Not the corrupt flesh that disguises the Holy in my heart. In order to make sure He is what they see, I must be careful to live above reproach. Even when "no one is watching".



.Grace and Peace.
DBM

Waiting...

Before man was created, God created things that are pleasant to man. There is nothing wrong with these things, as they are from God and all good things are from God. And the intentions of God are not inherently evil; the intentions of man are inherently evil. We take pleasant, good creation and pervert it to fit our mold, or idea of how the world should be. Along the way we fill our lives with these things, neglecting that the God who put them there is waiting for us to make an effort. Waiting for us to make time for Him. 

The Lord  has laid that on my heart. "Be still and know that I am God" For me, this means that I make time for rest, and meditation on who he is and what he is telling me right now in my life. It means I make time to meet with my God every day. Every day. That's my prayer for myself right now. And my prayer for you. Be still.

DBM

Be still...

So busyness  has started for me. This week I have officially started working 20 hours a week with my parents and in less than a week that will be coupled with 15 hours of school work and interning duties at First Baptist Church. Needless to say I am going to be on the go from about 8 until about 6 pretty much every day.

It seems that through the hustle and bustle of my life, I always have to compromise things. One thing that I have found easy to compromise is silence. I realized how accustomed I have become to noise in my life: TV, radio, ipod, computer, talking, xbox. In fact, if I am sitting in a silent room I always feel awkward and always want to interject noise that I deem necessary. (On a side note, this drives my sweet fiance crazy because she is very content with sitting in silence while I always feel the need to fill it).

What is truly disappointing is the fact that within all of this noise, is the voice of God, and I often tune out the voice of God to listen to other ultimately meaningless noise. In the 46 Psalm, we are commanded by the Lord to "Be still and know I am God". I am never still. I never even give myself the chance to be still. It's honestly one my biggest struggles. But as the psalmist writes, God desires us to be still. Because honestly sometimes God does not always speak through lightning bolts, thunder and big events. Sometimes He speaks in a still, soft whisper. And I don't want to miss Him when He whispers.

-DBM

And I choose obedience...

"Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power of say, Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of a man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst of his material, will stand naked." -C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity

I believe that a simple fact of life is that we as humans have a strong tendency to lie, cheat, and steal to get our way; in other words: we are selfish beings. And the reality of it is that when you strip away psychological material, for example phobias, from our inner being, our basic morality can still be, and often is still tainted. Yet another reality is that we, beings of tainted morality ourselves, deem it appropriate to judge others according to our own view of a higher standard. Even when our higher standard is a standard that we tend to break ourselves.

As C.S. Lewis notes in the above quote from Mere Christianity, perhaps some of us have made so little use of good heredity and upbringing. Good heredity and upbringing, things that I do not necessarily think should be condemned, have become something they were never meant to be: pillars of judgment.  Myself, being blessed with good heredity and upbringing, have no right to use that as means for my own personal gain or as standards upon which I can judge others by; especially those who have not been given the same heredity or upbringing.

But still I judge. Still I am wicked. Still I put myself on that pedestal and I judge. But the fact of the matter is that while I am judging, I am also building up a psychological make-up made of skin and bones. I am building my own wall of pride and self-righteousness. One day I will stand before my King, psychological make-up gone, stripped naked, left feeble, and He, being righteous and just, will show me my sin. Yes I know full and well that Jesus my Savior has covered my sin with his own blood, shed on the cross, but that does not mean that my King with utter the humbling words I so desire to hear: "Well done, my good and faithful servant."

Obedience is the key for being a faithful servant of my Lord and my obedience to my King should be shown in the inner renewal of my mind. As Paul states it in Colossians 3:10, "Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your creator and become like him".  Putting on my new nature does not mean sitting back and judging from my pedestal. It means being proactive; it means taking steps to change my judgmental tendencies; it means more of Him, and less of me.

DBM