Sexy satan

Any Anberlin fans out there?

If not become one.

Go here and download this or this or this…now!

Their music has challenged my outlook on people and forced me to wrestle with some of the harsh realities our world deals with like addiction, identity, the existence of God, and the necessity of hope. Their music has caused my mind to do mental calisthenics. The song, The Feel Good Drag, from their album, New Surrender (which you should have purchased by now) has caused me to brew on satan and sex in a new way.

The bridge is a little hard to decipher, but it goes like this:

Failure is your disease
You want my outline drawn
You are my greatest failure
Discourse your saving song

Most of the song is sung to a girl who he was entrapped with sexually. The devil is mentioned in the chorus, and the bridge gives the listener the clue as to why he is to blame for their captivity.

You want my outline drawn.

The devil’s primary concern is captivity, destruction, and death. Though it sounds like the song is bashing this girl, the singer knows there’s a greater force in the mix. He knows, in all actuality, satan is to blame. And they are to blame for buying in.

We all are to blame, aren’t we?

We all have bought the lie?

In the first book of the Bible God creates man and woman as husband and wife, gives them His, “Very good!” stamp of approval and then tells them to, “be fruitful and multiply,” or, “turn on some Marvin Gay, get busy and populate.” This all happens before Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden tree. If anything is unclear here let me simplify, one of the reasons God created men and women was to have sex, and He promoted it!

But everything got messed up, including original intention, design, and guidelines.

Adam and Eve, our original dad and mom (gross?), in an attempt to make themselves like God (calling the shots, taking control, taking fruit and their lives in their own hands), disrupted their relationship with Him. This screwed everything up, including our sexuality.

Here’s an insight into sin, one of our favorite words to ignore. Sin happens when we worship anything other than God. Another way to phrase it would be to put anything in the place of God. Or one more, we sin when we obsess over something or someone instead of God.

What satan does is he takes the good things God created for us and causes us to become obsessed with them in place of God. So we end up worshiping the creation instead of the Creator. The surface looks like pleasure. The ulterior motive is captivity, destruction, and death.

You want my outline drawn.

satan is sexy. he knows how to take the good and beautiful things God created, like marriage, intimacy, our bodies, family, sex and pleasure, and lure us away from God’s original intent. To seduce us away into captivity, destruction, and death. Your lips, your lies, your lust, were just the method.

Temptation, sexual  or not, is a shallow promise of something that satisfies. The tricky thing about temptation is that it lures us into believing we’re incomplete or weird if we abstain. If it presses in hard enough for long enough it can become the basis of our identity. It guarantees us control and then gags, binds, and tosses us in the trunk. Temptation is the doorway into sin through which many enter, some linger, and few reject.

Temptation offers us freedom and fulfillment at the cost and captivity of our souls.

An obsession with God will redefine our perspective of everything satan tempts us to be obsessed with. An obsession with anything other than God will define our view of Him. If we’re not obsessed with God we’re obsessed with something else, it may be sex, or it may be people, money, power, or ourselves.

We’re all obsessed with something!

The reason a lot of us have a problem with God is because our obsessions have told us that God’s out to take away everything we “love” (a popular and accepted coverup for obsession). God doesn’t want us to have any fun (or sex), right?

But, it’s satan who wants us dead.

Jesus isn’t sexy. But when God becomes a man and enters our obsession obsessed world to die on a cross so we could become obsessed with Him it should make us wonder what our hollow obsessions ever did for us other than offer us cheap thrills at a high price.

satan offers us sex to kill us.

Jesus was killed so we could live and have sex as He designed it.

A One Night Stand With God

God wants gives us what we desire.

People are consumed with two longings. One of those longings, love, is most obvious. Doesn’t it suck that the very word “love” has become cliche? Anyways, the second longing, in my opinion, is a desire for a committed, lasting, dependable love. To simplify, people long for love and faithfulness.

We send this demonstrated all around us. It takes place in our relationships, marriages, dating, friendships and families. It is mused over in the movies and TV shows we watch, the music we listen to, and the books we read. We are all looking for the definitive relationship marked by love, but a love that is there, not just when all is breezy, but more importantly when everything hits the fan.

We are all pilgrims on a journey in search of love and faithfulness.

Many of us have claimed to set our eyes, hands, hearts, and feelings on it. But when we pick up the most recent copy of People or hear those words, “It’s over,” or subject to

Breakups

Betrayal

Abandonment

One night stands

Divorce

we’re hit with the hard reality that love and faithfulness remains unreached.

In an attempt to attain love and faithfulness we brave a lot of hurt and heartache. Our efforts to achieve perfect love are disappointed over and over by imperfect people. Psalm 117 nudges us towards God to discover what we all desire, “great is his love toward us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.” God defines love and faithfulness. But before we get there, many of us need to allow God to redefine love and faithfulness for us.

Rick Warren, in the Purpose Driven Life, tells us that pain is megaphone God uses to get our attention. Many of us have given God our attention in these moments and cry out for His love and faithfulness only to be disappointed with what surely sounds like silence and feels like absence. How often do we have a one night stand with God? We give Him a try but leave in the “morning” because He’s not what we intended Him to be – He didn’t provide what we demanded. One night stands never live up to their publicity.

Psalm 139 says something that has always intrigued me, “How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you.” God is always thinking about us? Sounds like something that motivated a song by the Police. Truth is we like when people think about us. We want to be the only one on our boyfriend or girlfriend’s mind. In other words, this is not abnormal. The end of the verse is what catches my attention. When we wake we are still with God? I’m not gonna lie, or claim that this is a spot on interpretation, but that sure does sound like an intimate sleep over that ended positively.

I’m not implying that God’s thoughts toward us are sexual or we can have sexual encounters with God. What I’m getting at is that in our searching for love and faithfulness maybe we’re the one’s who left the morning after. Are we the one’s who left perfect and fulfilling love and faithfulness with the hopes of finding perfect love and faithfulness elsewhere?

God gives us what we desire, but you won’t find it in a bedroom but on a cross.

:: The French Pressed Four ::

: 410Bridge :: If you’re interested in a clean water movement let me know and I’ll give you some more details.

:: BigStuf Camp :: Sounds crazy but 5 days in Daytona with 60+ middle school kids was awesome!

::: The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis :: The most simplistic beat down I’ve ever received

:::: Harry Potter 6 The Movie :: And I haven’t even seen it yet!