Mike Browning

Tag: Christian Living

  • Red Cars

    Red Cars

    Helpful. Just not the secret.

    Most of what happens around you today, you’ll never notice.

    There’s a part of your brain called the reticular activating system that’s involved in deciding what gets your attention. Your brain filters an enormous amount of what’s going on around you because it can’t pay attention to everything.

    But you can influence what you notice by intentionally looking for it.

    Say I call you over to the window of an office building and have you look out at the parking lot for a minute. Then I turn you around and ask how many red cars were down there. You’d have no idea. You weren’t looking.

    But send you back to the window and tell you to count red cars first, and it’s easy.

    Nothing about the parking lot changed. What you were consciously looking for did.

    Paul told the church at Philippi to think about whatever is true, whatever is honorable and right and pure and lovely, anything excellent, anything worth praising.

    It gets read as a keep-your-mind-out-of-the-gutter verse. And it is that. But it’s also an example of activation, because the more you look for good, the more of it you’re going to see.

    It was there the whole time. You just weren’t counting it.

    At the start of the day I try to remember to think of three things from yesterday I’m grateful for. Doesn’t have to be anything big. Maybe a good meal, or time with one of my kids, or just getting a chance to relax.

    I didn’t notice a difference at first. But after a while I started seeing that there’s a lot more good going on than I realized.

    A few lines later in that same letter, Paul says he’s learned the secret of being content in any situation. Fed or hungry, plenty or nothing.

    Learning to notice the good probably helps with that.

    But that’s not really the secret.

    Paul wrote that letter in chains, knowing he might not get out alive. But you can see him noticing the good. He points out that the entire palace guard has heard about Jesus because he’s locked up, and that other believers got bolder watching him.

    Then he says the real point.

    To live is Christ and to die is gain.

    He had no idea how his trial was going to go. Or if he lived past that what might happen to him later. But he knew exactly how the story ended, and that was enough to be content with either outcome.

    Noticing the good helped him. Knowing the ending saved him.

    If we believe what we say we believe, we already know the end. What we don’t know is the middle. And the middle can be tough.

    But knowing how the story ends changes how you live through the parts you don’t understand yet.

    In the meantime, keep looking for the red cars.

    P.S.- If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here:

    His Word Together

  • Accustomed to His Grace

    Accustomed to His Grace

    We get used to it a lot faster than we should.

    During the week I often write things on here about how getting off your phone can be a positive in your life. So while I was scrolling YouTube videos recently I landed on an old R.C. Sproul clip. Story from early in his teaching career.

    First day of the semester, 250 freshmen, three term papers due over the course of the year. He laid it out. Papers are due on these dates. Miss one and you get an F, no exceptions except a hospital stay or a death in the family. Everybody nodded along.

    First deadline came and most of the class had their papers. About 25 didn’t. They came in trembling, explaining they hadn’t made the adjustment from high school yet, could they just have a few more days.

    He gave them three days. They thanked him like he’d saved their lives.

    Second deadline. This time 50 didn’t have it. Midterms, homecoming, the usual excuses. He reminded them what he’d said the last time. They knew. They asked anyway. He gave them three more days, a little more reluctantly, and the class actually sang to him. He was the most popular professor on campus.

    Third deadline. 150 out of 250 walked in with nothing, cool as you like, figuring here we go again. One of them, a Marine veteran, strolled up and said something like happy days, don’t worry about it prof, I’ll have it in a couple days.

    Sproul pulled out his gradebook and started going down the list. No paper. F. No paper. F. No paper. F.

    Somebody in the back yelled that it wasn’t fair.

    He asked who said that. A kid named Fitzgerald owned up to it. Sproul asked if he remembered being late the first time around, the one Sproul had let slide. Fitzgerald said yeah. Sproul said, if it’s justice you want, it’s justice you’ll get, and changed that grade to an F too.

    The room went dead quiet.

    Nobody else wanted justice after that.

    The first time around, they were amazed by the grace. The second time, they expected it. By the third, they’d talked themselves into believing they were owed it.

    That’s not a college freshman problem. That’s just what happens to a person given room to keep failing without a bill coming due.

    I know exactly how the gradebook would read if it were kept on me. Not because I’m out here doing anything dramatic or terrible by our standards. Just the regular stuff: things I already know I shouldn’t do and do anyway, or having a little too short a fuse at times. I’ve been forgiven for the same handful of things enough times that part of me doesn’t treat it like a big deal anymore.

    Because if it’s already covered, it’s already covered. Why does it matter then?

    None of this means we’re going to stop sinning. We won’t. That’s the whole reason we need grace in the first place.

    But there’s a difference between failing at something you’re trying to resist and deciding it doesn’t matter much because the debt’s already handled.

    One is a reason to be grateful for grace. The other is Fitzgerald, standing up in the back of the room, forgetting there was ever a first paper.

    Grace is a miracle that we don’t deserve. We shouldn’t stop noticing.

    P.S.

    If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

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  • The Command We Break the Most

    The Command We Break the Most

    We say we believe. But we sure don’t act like it.

    If you went out and asked 100 random people what Jesus commanded people to do most often, you’d likely get several answers quite a bit. Be kind. Love your neighbor. That sort of thing.

    They’d be wrong. It may be hard to pin down exactly, the best answer would probably be something along the lines of “Don’t Worry” or “Don’t be afraid.” Jesus says some version of it constantly.

    Stop being afraid. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Don’t let your heart be troubled.

    We nod along and act like we believe it. If you ask people if they trust God, we say yes without blinking. Ask if we believe He’s in control, that He said He’d work things out to His own purposes, and you’ll get another yes. All of it with a straight face.

    Then we lie awake at night worrying about bills. Or fretting about something that happened in a place we couldn’t locate on a map, and might not have even known about if we’d put our phones down more often.

    We build an entire mental prison out of things that haven’t happened yet and might never happen, while the stuff sitting right in front of us, the stuff we could actually do something about, gets ignored.

    Mostly because we’re too worn out from worrying to touch it.

    We are reasonably good at saying the right things, but our actions don’t back up that we actually believe what we say. Sometimes we will even admit to this and say maybe if we just had a sign it would be easier to believe.

    Don’t bet on it.

    The Israelites watched God divide the sea and wipe out the enemy pursuing them. Then God started raining bread on their camp for food. Moses told them not to keep it until morning.

    Some of them did anyway.

    You’d think after witnessing miracles in the recent past they’d have listened. But apparently they still weren’t quite convinced that the God who had just saved them was going to provide again tomorrow.

    We do the same thing, although maybe not as dramatically.

    Our lives tend to be a cycle of (usually) minor problems, followed by despair, then it all works out somehow. Then repeat. Ask yourself how often you feel like you’re not going to make it. Probably a lot. Then ask yourself how many times you actually didn’t make it. If you’re reading this, the answer to that is zero.

    Jesus tells us we will have problems. He doesn’t tell us everything will work out the way we’d prefer.

    He tells us not to be afraid anyway.

    It’s safe to believe Him.

    P.S.

    If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

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  • The Going Rate

    The Going Rate

    Turns out there’s no volume discount.

    I laughed when I first heard about it. An NFL owner, a team I’ve got no love for anyway, got caught up in a prostitution sting in Ohio earlier this week. According to court records, he allegedly responded to an ad online, agreed on a price, and showed up. Except the person waiting for him had a badge instead of whatever he expected.

    I’ll admit that one felt good for about ten seconds. Wrong team, wrong owner, easy to enjoy. If for no other reason than it wasn’t the owner of my team in the crosshairs for once.

    Then, as usual, the conversation drifted somewhere else entirely. A lot of people got hung up on the price. A man with that kind of money, doing something like that, for that little.

    Like the number was the scandal. Like he’d have come off better if he’d paid ten times as much.

    He wouldn’t have. And if you caught yourself thinking he would, that means some part of you has already sorted this into “tacky” instead of “wrong,” which may be its own kind of trouble.

    It doesn’t matter if the number is a hundred and forty dollars or a hundred and forty thousand. Doesn’t change what it is. There’s no bulk pricing on sin, no discount for going big, no premium package that makes it more respectable.

    Wrong is wrong at every price point, and most of us already know this, we just don’t like applying it evenly.

    Because it’s a lot more comfortable to grade sin on a curve when the ones at the bottom of it happen to be ours.

    The gossip. The grudge you won’t let go. The thing you said about your neighbor that felt more like observation than judgment while you were saying it. None of that makes the news. None of it gets a mugshot. So it’s easy to let it slide under a lower bar than the one you’d hold somebody else to, especially somebody whose mistakes ended up in the news.

    I do this too. Everybody does. It’s always easier to point out what the other guy does wrong while giving yourself a pass.

    The good news is that he can be forgiven. Whatever he did, whatever it cost him, there’s a way out of it that doesn’t run through explaining himself well enough. And the better news is that the same door’s open for the rest of us. Turns out forgiveness doesn’t have a price list either.

    You (probably) don’t need forgiving for what he did specifically.

    But take away what Christ did for you, and you’re standing on the same side of that line he is. Not a nicer version of it. The same line.

    Funny story either way. Just don’t spend so long laughing at his price tag that you forget to check your own.

    P.S.

    If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • Probably Even Worse Than You Think

    Probably Even Worse Than You Think

    But remember who’s in charge.

    It’s not uncommon today to hear young adults talk about not wanting to have kids. Laying aside the ones that are just being selfish (without always realizing it), there’s usually a couple of main reasons for it.

    One is that they feel they should wait until they are more financially stable. Which at least shows some forward thinking, though I think most people who waited to have kids will tell you they wish they started sooner. It turns out there’s never a “good time” financially, and you tend to figure out how to make it work.

    Not to mention when you’re younger you have more energy to chase the little bundle of joy around.

    The other big reason is that the world is in such a terrible state now, they want to be able to act noble for not “bringing another life into a fallen world.”

    They aren’t wrong that things are in a sorry state. You can’t turn on a TV or look at your phone without seeing that, and it only seems to be going in one direction.

    If anything, what we see probably doesn’t even really show us how bad things really are. There’s almost certainly depravity going on that’s even worse than what we are told about. It’s enough to make anyone want to curl up in a ball and not do much of anything.

    But it’s always been this way.

    Terrible wars as far back as we want to look. People mistreating each other. The holocaust. The brutality and decadence of the Roman world.

    All the way back to Sodom and Gomorrah, it’s never been particularly good.

    But here’s the other thing, God was in charge then and he’s in charge now. If we only know two things for sure, it would be these: that we are closer to the end now than we ever have been, but we don’t know how close. And that everything will be reckoned and brought back to order. We don’t have to know how or when to trust it will happen.

    If you were sick, and a doctor told you he had a 100% cure but it would require a period of extreme discomfort, you could withstand it because you know what’s on the other side.

    So when God has told you that things will be worked out but there will be tribulation in the meantime, know you can withstand that too.

    And get to listening for what God wants you to do, and do it. Because you can.

    P.S.- If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • Not a Warning

    Not a Warning

    At least not the way I always heard it explained.

    Last week I wrote about resentment toward latecomers. How we might get a little jealous of people who lived however they wanted for years longer than we did, and still walked away with the exact same deal we got.

    But think about it. Why would we actually feel jealousy?

    If the life we were living beforehand was so great, why did it ever occur to us that something needed to change? And why, once we figured that out, could we not manage the change ourselves? Lucky for us, somebody else could.

    There’s a passage where Jesus talks about counting the cost before you follow Him. Every explanation I ever got made it sound like a warning label. You’re going to give up a lot, so you’d better be sure before you sign on.

    But like usual, the surface reading and the real one aren’t pointed the same direction.

    Living a worldly life means chasing what the world values. Money, status, whatever version of “made it” you’ve picked out for yourself. Sometimes you actually get some of it. And the second you do, you want more. What you did manage to grab tends to slip through your fingers anyway, one way or another, eventually.

    Once you’ve accepted Jesus, some people respect you for it. Plenty more will look down on you, or at least think you’re a little weird. You’ll probably lose some of your appetite for piling up wealth too, because you know good and well there’s something coming after this where none of it will matter.

    Trade a life that doesn’t satisfy you, and that you can’t hold onto anyway, for one that does and that you can’t lose.

    Sounds like a pretty good deal. Not much of a warning at all.

    So maybe we shouldn’t be jealous of the people who show up later. If anything, we should be kicking ourselves for not showing up sooner.

    P.S.-If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • Same (Unfair) Deal

    Same (Unfair) Deal

    It was unfair when we were on the receiving end too.

    Last week I wrote about how we tend to read ourselves into Bible stories as the good guy. Job, not the friends. The son who stayed, not the one who left. It’s a habit, and mostly it’s a wrong one. We’re usually standing closer to the other side than we’d like to admit.

    There’s a parable that puts this on full display, and it’s an uncomfortable one if you think about it.

    A landowner goes out at dawn and hires workers for his vineyard, agreeing on a day’s wage. He goes back out at nine, noon, three, even five, an hour before quitting time, and hires more, telling them he’ll pay what’s right. End of the day, he pays the five o’clock crew a full day’s wage. Then the nine o’clock crew. Then the ones who’d been out there since sunrise, sweating through the whole thing. Same amount. Every one of them.

    The all-day workers are furious. Not because they got paid less than promised, they got exactly what they agreed to. They’re furious because somebody else got the same deal for less work. The landowner’s answer is basically, it’s my money, I can be generous with it if I want, and what’s that to you?

    If you’ve already accepted Christ’s offer of forgiveness, it’s easy to look at someone who hasn’t yet and feel a little something when they finally do. Some version of, must be nice, they get everything after they were out there living however they wanted until an hour ago.

    But not too long ago, that was you. Doesn’t feel that way now, but it was.

    It’s not wrong to notice they didn’t earn what they got. Because they didn’t.

    But neither did you. You still don’t deserve it.

    That was the whole point of the deal in the first place. Christ is free to hand out grace to whoever He wants, on whatever timeline He wants, and none of us are in a position to file a complaint about the terms.

    If you’ve already accepted, congratulations. Now maybe quit keeping score on who got a better deal than you, and spend the energy instead trying, and mostly failing, to live like someone who’s actually been given what you now have.

    And if you haven’t accepted yet? It’s free for the asking. You don’t have to clean anything up first. Nothing you’ve done disqualifies you. And once you have it, nobody can take it back.

    And if you get the side eye treatment from some of us, don’t worry about it. You’ll probably be doing the same soon.

    It’s never too late.

    Until it is.

    P.S.- If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • We’d Never Do Something That Bad (Part 2)

    We’d Never Do Something That Bad (Part 2)

    If God used Paul as his vessel, He probably has a job waiting for you too.

    A couple weeks ago I wrote about Peter’s denial, and how we read it like something we’d never stoop to. But the truth is it was a pretty garden variety move, the kind of go-along-to-get-along thing we all do more than we’d like to admit. God still used him anyway.

    Paul’s a different case. Most of us, hopefully, never go anywhere close to the lengths he did. And God still used him too. In a big way.

    I guess in Paul’s defense he thought he was doing good at the time. Which also sounds familiar to a lot of us if we are honest.

    When word got around that Saul of Tarsus had a change of heart, nobody believed it. Why would they?

    This wasn’t a guy who’d quietly disagreed with Christians. He’d built a reputation hunting them down. Stephen was stoned to death while Paul watched and held coats for the men doing the throwing. Another time he says “I cast my vote against them,” talking about believers being put to death. Not one incident. A pattern, with him positioned right in the middle of it.

    Later Saul obtains letters of authority to go after believers outside Jerusalem too. He was a man on a mission, and it wasn’t a mission for Jesus.

    Then the road to Damascus. Blinded, knocked down, told to go into the city and wait. A believer named Ananias gets sent to heal him and clearly does not want the job but he does it anyway. No word on whether he acted like Jonah later.

    Saul’s sight comes back. And he becomes Paul, who will be used by God to spread the Gospel.

    Obviously the disciples weren’t thrilled to see him at first. And it wasn’t easy. But Paul did what he was told and trusted God, and ended up writing most of what comes after Acts. Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, the letters to Timothy and Titus.

    Most of the New Testament, written by the man who used to hold the coats of those killing believers.

    Here’s something you’re probably starting to notice a pattern about: God didn’t wait for Paul to clean up before using him.

    He went from a terrible oppressor to the greatest evangelist ever known in the blink of an eye. All because that’s what God wanted him to do and Paul trusted God.

    When you think you’re too damaged or have done too much for God to be able to use you, remember Peter, Paul and others. And just trust God and listen. And when you hear, act.

    P.S.

    If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

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  • Not Even Close

    Not Even Close

    When we start trying to explain God’s plan, we are really explaining our wishes.

    Job was a good man. Loved God, kept his ways, and he was rich on top of it. Everyone around him looked at his life and saw a man who was clearly blessed.

    Then he lost it all in about four verses. Kids, livestock, servants, health. Gone, fast.

    His friends show up and spend most of the book explaining why. Different speeches, same theory underneath all of it. God is just, suffering is punishment, so the suffering must mean Job sinned somewhere and isn’t admitting it.

    Job won’t agree. He hasn’t done what they’re accusing him of, and he says so. They don’t believe him, because they need him guilty. Look at why for a second and it makes sense. If suffering is always earned, then being righteous keeps you safe, and they get to keep believing they’re in control of what happens to them. Easier to accuse Job than to give that up.

    We like that idea too. Be good enough, do it right enough, and God will help you. Except look at it for ten seconds and you’ll notice you don’t actually want a universe that runs on that rule. It means everyone who’s ever suffered did something to deserve it. And we’ve all done something to deserve it.

    If you’re honest, you know that even when you do something that’s technically right a large part of the time you’re not doing it for the right reasons.

    Job’s friends go through chapter after chapter of explaining why things happened like they did. Kind of like how we act like we can discern God’s plan for us. Here’s what actually happened: God let Satan destroy a man’s life over a bet Job had no say in. A righteous man, no less. Read that straight and it’s offensive. But once you sit with it, the friends’ explanations are the part that’s almost funny, how far off they were chasing a reason that didn’t exist.

    When God finally answers Job, He doesn’t explain the wager. He asks where Job was when the earth was made, whether he can command the morning. Shows him the size of what he isn’t equipped to know, not the reason behind it.

    We’d do well to spend less time hunting down the reason for things. Job’s friends never could have worked out what was actually happening, no matter how hard they tried. Job probably never found out either, this side of being back with God.

    We like to make it sound like it’s easy to trust. But it’s not. At least not all the time. Not when it’s impossible for us to know the why. That’s why we fail repeatedly. And why God made provision for us.

    P.S. If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

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  • We’d Never Do Something That Bad

    We’d Never Do Something That Bad

    Except we do, all the time.

    The story of Peter’s denial is one of the catastrophic failures in the whole Bible. Foretold by Jesus Himself the night before, like the whole thing was written in advance. It sounds like a uniquely terrible collapse of faith.

    It was terrible. That part’s not in question. He shot his mouth off about how he’d die before disowning his Lord. A few hours later he denied knowing Christ, in public, three separate times, to people who weren’t even pressing him that hard.

    A servant girl in the high priest’s courtyard looked at Peter and asked him directly, something close to, weren’t you with him too. Not a vague vibe in the room he had to read. A direct question. And three times, Peter answered it. No. Don’t know the guy. Never met him. Swore for effect on the third.

    So yes it was terrible. But it wasn’t unique.

    We do the same thing, regularly, and don’t call it that.

    We don’t usually deny Christ outright, because most of us never get asked that bluntly. What we get instead are smaller, more specific versions of the same question. Someone asks straight out what we actually think about something, and we know what the honest answer costs, so we give the rounded-off version instead. Technically not a lie. Worded carefully enough to stay out of trouble either way. We call that being diplomatic, or not making it a thing, or just being easy to deal with.

    Going along to get along. That’s the polite name for it. It’s also the exact move Peter made by the fire. He just didn’t have a softer phrase available to hide behind. He was asked, and he answered the wrong thing on purpose.

    Our version doesn’t get preached about on a Sunday. Nobody wrote it down with a rooster crowing at the end for effect. So it doesn’t feel like denial. It feels like being reasonable. Being easy to get along with. Not making things awkward.

    Call it what it actually is, though, and it’s the same transaction Peter made at the fire. Get asked directly, and trade a small piece of honesty about whose side you’re on for a small amount of comfort. He did it under torchlight with witnesses. We do it at dinner, at work, online, and walk away feeling like nothing happened.

    That wasn’t the end for him, though, and what happened after matters more than the failure itself. Peter wept over it. Didn’t try to explain it away. And later, after the resurrection, Jesus finds him on a beach and asks him one question three times. Do you love me. Once for every denial. Doesn’t make him relive the scene at the fire. Just asks, lets Peter answer, and tells him to go feed the sheep.

    That’s the man who ends up preaching at Pentecost, the one the whole early church gets built around.

    We definitely don’t have anything to be proud of, but despair isn’t called for either. It’s the opposite. If God still handed Peter the church after that, mid-failure, no cleanup required first, He’s not waiting on a clean record from the rest of us either.

    Your denial is real. So is what He’s still willing to do with you in spite of it.

    P.S.

    If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

    Register to Receive Posts Via Email!

    By submitting, I understand I will receive marketing emails and blog posts from Mike Browning Realty and/or associated companies. Unsubscribe at any time.