flog me

i want you to pray that i will become an even more ridiculous person.
...allow me to explain:

according to the world's standards of acceptable behavior, peter and the apostles were ridiculous people. and that's because they learned from the Master.

towards the end of acts 5, peter and the gang were escaping prison just to go out and do the exact thing that got them imprisoned in the first place, which was teaching that Jesus was and is the Messiah.

if i ever go to prison, and then i escape from said prison, i probably won't be sticking around. but that's what they did. and then this dude named gamaliel, who was a respected pharisee, came up and said "listen, if these guys are doing the work of men, they'll fail. if they're doing the work of God, you probably don't want to be on the wrong side of that battle." now that guy was pretty smart. so then the men of israel said "ok, we'll let them go, but let's rough them up a little first."

i bring this up because i'm always wondering about how much persecution i'm facing for serving the Lord. not much, i would say. and here's the crazy thing:
after peter and the gang were flogged, they went out rejoicing and celebrating that they were punished for doing righteous work. and this wasn't some one time thing either, they did this crap all the time. todos los dias.
thanks for making me look bad, apostles.

i'm constantly asking God to deliver me before developing me. and that's backwards. i keep asking to be sent to south america to do missions, or to be given the opportunity to go to seminary and become a leader of a church or some sorta super-christian that goes around and slaps people's foolish ways with biblical wisdom. (in christian book stores you might find a comic called "bible man." i'm not kidding. it looks terrible.)

but i'm not even living like a missionary in my own home and workplace. i don't even know if the people i have personal relationships view me as a leader. i'm not trying to be hard on myself, because i really do strive to glorify God wherever i am and i think that some people do see something of a God-warrior in me.

but i am not ridiculous enough to be like peter and the gang, and i think that's what i'll be praying for in the mean time. but at the same time, i'm kind of happy to see such cool stuff coming from the people God used to write the new testament.

for lack of a better term, they were Jesus-freaks. and i feel really lame for using the term "Jesus-freak" like i'm some member of d.c. talk.

man, i think i deserve to be flogged just for that.

p.s. hey, another cool lesson from that story in the bible is that "the work of men will fail." even the pharisee's knew that, even if it took a really wise one to point it out. i just know that people who are putting their faith in things like "the secret" and "7 steps to become a better you" and stuff like that are going to realize they will end up just where they started. empty.