Do you see my office?

Do you like it?

What if I reversed time to show you what it looked like 47 minutes before hand?

Have you ever realized that allowing a room to become messy usually starts with putting one thing out of place? Perhaps you’re just about to go to bed so you throw your dirty clothes on the floor. It doesn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but as you continue to leave those articles of clothing there, your room begins to loose it’s spotlessness. And for some reason, instead of just picking those clothes off the ground and chucking them into a laundry basket, you feel hopeless and believe that your room will never see the light of day again.

So instead of putting the book you were reading back on the bookshelf, you also chuck that on the ground. And there’s no reason to put that DVD back in it’s case, so how about we just slide that on top of the DVD player. And perhaps you’ll play that guitar later so you might as well leave that out of its case. And since you already left your dirty clothes on the ground, you might as well never put any of your clothes in a laundry basket. And then when you’re looking through your dresser for new clothes, you might as well empty the clean clothes you don’t want to wear onto the ground until you find that shirt at the bottom of the drawer that you do want to wear. And since the room is already a mess, you might as well just leave everything you just emptied ground.

Then, when it comes time to find new clothes for the next day, you just might have a hard time figuring out which clothes on the ground were the clean ones and which ones were the dirty ones. But now they’re all kind of mixed together and so they have all kind of became dirty despite whatever previous state they were in. Things continue to grow sloppy in your room as your life slowly spirals into a deep pit of despair.

So now your room is a mess. It is no longer handsome and has lost that shine it once had in its younger days. There is stuff everywhere and there is just no hope that it will ever be the same again. And what if you were to take a deeper look into that stuff? After all, there’s a lot you can tell about a person by their stuff. You can see a lot about their morals and their struggles along with everything else.

What about those DVDs you left out? What are the majority of them rated? Why do they have that rating?

Or perhaps you’re a video gamer. What are the majority of those games rated? Why do they have that rating?

What kind of pictures and posters do you have on the wall? What kind of books are you reading? What kind of files are stored on your hard drive? What kind of music do you listen to?

The list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on. There are so many things we need to check on to make sure if they should really be in our lives. But often times, we never think about it despite what Philippians 4:8 says:

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.

It only makes sense that Paul would say this seeing as how God is perfect, pure, and loving. Yet, keeping these everyday things in check just isn’t a big deal to us, and because of that, so much perversion enters our lives. Kris Vallotton gave a message at Bethel Church in Redding, California and shared this little cookie of truth with his audience:

Perversion is the wrong version of the same act.

A simple yet brilliant statement. For example, perhaps like most Americans you have a phone of some sort. It’s a wonderful invention isn’t it? You can reach anyone you want to at any time you want to and communicate with them. But how often do you use your phone for gossip? How often do you tear down others by what you say on that phone? How has TV become perverted? Or how about the internet?

Many of us have also bought into this lie that all of the stuff we watch and listen to doesn’t affect who we are. But everything you watch and listen to are all chucked onto the floor of your room too, and helps to make up who you are. And it only gets worse. The more that we allow into our lives that is not true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, excellent, and worthy of praise, the more we begin to look like something that is not God’s intention for us to look like. Certain problems become gateways to other problems and we continue to grow in ways that even we ourselves wish we didn’t.

When we allow satan the chance to screw with us, he’ll take the opportunity to do so and he will set us on a path towards destruction. He’ll help you make your room as messy as you possibly can. And so if you want to break his permission to do so, it’s incredibly important that you clean house, which only Jesus can help you do.

And I’m not talking about just packing everything away, but you might even have to go as far to throw some of your things away. And Jesus will help you do that despite how cheesy that may come across. Together, He will help you break down the permissions you gave satan to intrude in your life and together you can make your house blameless once again.

And if you’re like me, it’s incredibly difficult to focus on what I need to do in a messy room. Just like how it becomes impossible to focus on God when you have all this trash lying around.

Don’t wait for your room to become a mess.
Don’t wait to see how far you can pursue evil.
Don’t wait until you feel the pain of your actions.

Start cleaning house now.

Psalm 101

¹I will ^(A)sing of lovingkindness and justice,
To You, O LORD, I will sing praises.
²I will ^(B)give heed to the ^[a]blameless way
When will You come to me?
I will walk within my house in the ^(C)integrity of my heart.
³I will set no ^(D)worthless thing before my eyes;
I hate the work of those who ^(E)fall away;
It shall not fasten its grip on me.
⁴A ^(F)perverse heart shall depart from me;
I will know no evil.
⁵Whoever secretly ^(G)slanders his neighbor, him I will destroy;
No one who has a ^(H)haughty look and an arrogant heart will I endure.
⁶My eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me;
He who walks in a ^[b](I)blameless way is the one who will minister to me.
⁷He who ^(J)practices deceit shall not dwell within my house;
He who speaks falsehood ^(K)shall not maintain his position before me.
^8(L)Every morning I will ^[c](M)destroy all the wicked of the land,
So as to ^(N)cut off from the ^(O)city of the LORD all those who do iniquity.

I love Coldplay. However, I was a little behind in my fandom as “Clocks” was the first song I had ever heard by them. I was mesmerized by the piano part, especially since no man-band really ever used a piano as a main instrument at the time. Since then, I have come to own all of their main albums (even though I never got the thousands of b-sides and singles) and in the past year I got a chance to see their Viva La Vida tour. Truly amazing.

(Click on the pic to download their free live album if you have not yet done so.)

Never before has there been such a wonderful and creative combination of lights, music, video, confetti, and other random visuals at a concert. And never before had I felt such a strong sense of celebrity addiction moving throughout the audience. It put a very strange feeling in my body as literally thousands of people were pouring out their praise for their music. So much cheering for four guys. Not sure why it took so long to feel that way. I’ve watched tons of live DVDs, been to dozens of concerts, and played plenty with my own band.

Then there was this one moment where the addiction became real. The band moved off the stage over to a mini acoustic set in the back of the stadium. Now the audience was literally inches away from the band. And there was this one dude in particular right behind him trying so hard to touch Chris Martin. Jokingly Chris Martin said into his microphone, “I think I’m being molested.” We all laughed, but the dude didn’t stop. While they played the next song the guy kept yelling to Chris to get his attention, somehow unaware that they were in the middle of a song. Cameras were going off all around the band and the dude continued to reach and yell for Chris. I continued to feel strange in my spirit as this nailed my feelings home.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in now way whatsoever dissing my favorite band. I’ve been following Coldplay for a long time now and love their music. But I hope that we as Christians can see some things in this quick little story. We need to be careful to not turn our worship to our celebrity addictions among other things.

On top of that we can also apply the overused football analogy that I have heard so many times in the past decade. Why is it so easy for us to cheer our butts off for our favorite celebrities and sports teams, but when we get to church we stare awkwardly at the stage. Or to say it differently, why is it so easy for us to worship our butts off for our favorite celebrities and sports teams, but when we get to church we stare awkwardly at the stage. It’s like we don’t even know God’s there. And then we leave church saying, “I didn’t get anything out of that today.” Well it seems to me that if we’re not willing to provoke the Holy Spirit to do something, He may as well figure that we didn’t want to get anything out of church in the first place.

We all need to grow up—myself included. I have come to realize that it’s easier for me to worship when on stage for some reason but not as easy when I’m not playing an instrument. I need to cut that out. After all, where two or more are gathered in His name, there God is and until we acknowledge that I’m afraid we’ll stay content with apathetic worship.

So, in conclusion I would like to encourage ourselves this week to “worship our butts off.”

More thoughts on this whole deal yo:

After hours of dreaming, writing, recording, drawing, and editing, Jammin with Jamin is happy to bring you “Behind Closed Doors: Issue #1 & 2.” Starring the voice acting of Taylor Keating and myself, Behind Closed Doors is a story of wonder, questions, and excitement. It is also a story based off of a dream of mine that I believe God inspired and then helped me fix up the missing pieces. You can also note that the whole series is 2 issues long, so you don’t have to be impatient waiting for the ending

Hope you enjoy it!

Watch the blog video here or read below

So I happen to have my own Mr. Feeny in life…

Except his name is Brian Kono. And just like Mr. Feeny, he’s kind of following me around. He was my youth pastor in Westland and now one of my professor’s at Spring Arbor. And no doubt will he follow me to Asbury seminary next.

Now a long time ago Kono said something to my friend JJ (or Jason as many know him) and I about how he was amazed at how human beings could aim. We were in the church gym at the time and he pointed at a brick in the back wall. He found it quite astonishing that as a human being, he could take a basketball, aim for that brick in the wall and hit it. It was such a simple statement, but his astonishment must have been important enough to me that such a small conversation sparked into my brain now several years later. This has been a quick tidbit of what will now be known as “Konowledge: Episode 1.”

But even though this is a quick tidbit of my life that is now added to yours, I hope it will help you see the amazing smartness of God. (I’m sure there’s a better way to say that, but I struggle with big words.) I mean, if you think about it, there really is a lot of programming involved into such a simple action of chucking a ball at the wall. If we were to zoom in all the way to see the molecules making up that one brick in the wall, then we would probably see millions upon millions of tiny little dots of energy. Then as we zoom out of this molecule stage, we could see the one brick these molecules are creating. Then the amazing brainpower God has given us can help us to somehow focus on that one brick out of the dozens on that wall. Not only can we see it, but a good sportsman could have enough hand-eye-coordination to toss a ball directly at it and hit that brick that makes up the wall and the molecules that make up that brick.

Again, a simple, yet amazing thought. God’s smartness at work. And then, imagine if you will, how many of those amazing actions take place in a regular basketball game. You take a ball, know how and where to bounce it and throw it to win the game. In my mind it really takes God’s creation and maximizes it. It’s all these simple things we can find joy in and understand that God has made us so complex. And then out of that we can come to realize that if God was capable of programming a world as complex as ours, how amazing His smartness must be beyond our own.

In all honesty though, I suck at sports. I can’t score a goal to save my life. And that’s not really an understatement either. In fact, yesterday I played my friend’s mom in basketball.

She won.

…

Twice.

I am both a failure and a P-I-G.

I hate basketball.

But I am still amazed by God’s complexity and I encourage you to amplify the small things so that you can see Him in everything.

For those of you who would rather watch than read

My whole life I’ve been taught that if you’re going to make noodles, you first must boil the water. Then, once the right temperature is reached, you may place those lovely little shapes of dough into the water. Tonight that lovely little shape is radiatore:

In all honesty, I’m not really hungry.

In all honesty, I’m addicted to plain noodles.

With salt…

LOTS of salt.

And tonight, I decided to break the rules of noodle physics and not wait for the water to boil, but rather place them in right at the beginning. And go figure, my lovely radiatore tastes quite fantastic and no different than usual. I even got them several minutes faster than usual

So many times we never challenge what we’re taught. In plenty of instances this can be a good thing. For instance, if we’re taught the dangers of driving we will hopefully refrain from getting hurt. But on the other hand there are plenty of times where we are taught what is considered to be truth, but is, in fact, not.

I bring this up because tonight I started what I can already tell is going to be an amazingly awesome read called, “When Pigs Move In” by Don Dickerman.

It’s awesome to see someone so anointed by God take his time to write a book to tell us about what many don’t understand. Within the opening chapters he brings up the fact that there is much he has been taught by the church and his seminaries that he just accepted as truth until God invaded his life in ways he didn’t expect. Hence my sad attempt with the noodle analogy.

Now this guy has genuinely seen people changed by God, delivered from demons, and physically healed in full instantly. God has made the scriptures real to him. He was taught that all the crazy physical healing and demonic oppression that happened in the Bible died out with the apostles, which go figure, was what I was taught. I didn’t question it for the longest time until God grew my curiosity for what the Holy Spirit was really capable of a couple years ago or so.

One of the many things Christians have come to believe about demon possession is that demons cannot possess Christians. However, this is a common misconception, which any deliverer would happily tell you. In fact, Dickerman hits on this as early as chapter two as he tells the story of how God helps him through his first deliverance. He is delivering a female inmate from years of demonic oppression since she was born into a demonic family who dedicated her to satan. In fact, they were so deep into demonic oppression that they were actually setting their daughter up to be the bride of satan. Can you imagine how many demons are haunting this girl since her birth?

On top of that, she is fully Christian. She has dedicated her life to Christ and yet these demons continue to oppress her until the moment she is delivered several times in one sitting. The way Don portrays his dialogue with the demon is exactly like an audio session I heard of a deliverance. The demons actually tried to trick Dickerman several times into thinking she had been delivered when there were still a few left in her.

Surprised?

It’s time for the people of God to relearn this stuff. Far too many of us have fallen into this misconception that this stuff doesn’t happen anymore. That’s exactly what satan would have us think. And it’s done him well, too. I seriously encourage you to go to Borders, Amazon, or somewhere and get this book. Let’s learn together and become stronger in Christ.

I leave you with something that gave me the “Holy Spirit chills” all over my body tonight. At the end of delivering the woman above, Dickerman wrote this in his dialogue with her.

Angrily the demon persisted, “She’s mine!” I began to command with more boldness, “NO! She’s not yours, she belongs to Jesus Christ, and she has been bought with a price, purchased, redeemed, born again! She is an heir of God and a joint-heir with Jesus Christ. You have no right to her life, and you will leave her now in Jesus Christ’s mighty name.” The woman began to cough. She jerked and trembled and cleared her throat as the vile demon left.

May God give you dreams tonight to push you into learning together and becoming stronger in Christ.

“The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.”
-Genesis 11:5

This verse comes out of the story of the Tower of Babel and it used to always throw me off. Why exactly did God “come down” to see the tower? God knows everything, doesn’t He? So why didn’t He already know about it? I had no sudden epiphanies and could not for the life of me come to a conclusion as to why exactly this was said. So, while the verse lingered in my head I decided to give a message to a youth group on this particular passage.

I explained how the Bible says that the people building the tower were partially doing so to make themselves famous (verse 4) and somewhere towards the end of the message, God grabbed my thoughts and twisted them all around. Finally this verse made some sense to me, at least through the new perspective God had given me. These people had started working on their own plans for their own selves and had forgotten about God and His plans. Or to say it differently, God was not a part of the builder’s plans. It was as if they had never even invited God to be a part of what they were doing and so it seems to me that the Bible is asking the question:

How could He know? It’s not like anyone told Him about it.

Do not hear me wrong. God is omniscient and knew about the tower, but the way the Bible words it brings about a very good point. So much of the Bible is worded in ways to make you think, or uses other different literary forms to catch your attention.

I’m not so sure we’ve changed that much really. All to often it seems that we go about building our towers—our dreams—and forgetting to invite God along. Of course the right thing to do would be to let God give us the blueprint to what He wants us to build and I definitely understand the struggle. But it’s time we learn to let go and not only invite God into our lives, but invite Him into our journey whatever it may be.

I wrote a song about Babel awhile back called Tower in the Ether. Feel free to listen in the video below, read the lyrics that are in it, or download it for free here.

A little while back I got a chance to do what was by far my most advanced video editing. I made a natureriffic video meant to portray God’s greatness and glory and then play it to a song my band (The Newfangled Sequence) wrote called “The Watery Abyss.” We then compiled a bigger band to perform the song live to the video at Spring Arbor University’s chapel, which you can also watch below. There is so much complexity into the first couple chapters of Genesis and I am always amazed by what I read in it. While this video does not go to in depth theologically, it is simply meant to show you some images of nature I’ve seen and taken to inspire you in your wonder of God’s greatness. Hope you’ll watch and hope you’ll enjoy!

The blueprint:

A little while back my band was fortunate enough to be given a chance to get an interview in the Jackson Citizen Patriot. Now there’s always been debate in many bands about how open to be about their faith in how they present themselves and I know that there were many times where we had played around with the different ideas. Obviously, we’re a band of Christians who write Christian music which should be quite evident in our lyrics, but many bands have a hard time trying to figure out how much to say outside of the lyrics.

I must sadly admit that I was afraid for awhile that people would not care for our music if they knew it was Christian. It wasn’t that I was hiding the fact that we were, it’s just that I didn’t always come right out and say it. However, it has occurred to me throughout time that I no longer care what people think about our music. We are both a band of Christians and a Christian band. Sure, some people may no longer care to listen anymore, but what’s the point behind our band and the talents God has given us if we’re not willing to be straight up about it?

It becomes even more evident to me when I know that two internationally famous bands in particular are both bands of Christians and yet there’s not always a huge vibe coming off of them to get anyone’s attention in that way. It seems that when they sing about faith, their lyrics tend to be very metaphorical. I have also struggled with this and have plenty of metaphorical songs. And I’m not saying metaphorical songs are bad, they’re also very artsy and can help a person look at a subject in a different light. But sometimes it seems like more an effort to cover the real truth than to be artsy. It’s not that they bands and their lyrics need to pound people over the head about their faith, but it seems like it needs to be said or more widely portrayed.

I think back to the olden days of POD. Man, talk about being straight up about something. They did not sugarcoat anything and as awkward as it might have been for them at times, they made a difference for the Kingdom. Their music found its depth in their faith, in their lives, and in their actions. Or you can look at the currently popular band Underoath. Most people would not expect this heavy screamo band to get on a stage—especially in front of half the audience’s they play for—and say something about Jesus. They obviously care:

Now in reference to my first sentence, I finally decided to forget about sugarcoating the truth when we did an interview with an awesome reporter named Bill Chapin of the Jackson Citizen Patriot. We were honest about the truth in the article. It was a chance to say, “Yeah, we’re Christians, our faith means a lot to us, and our band would lost and pointless without it.” Below is the article if you’d care to read. Also, if you click on the picture below, it will take you to the webpage where the article is if that is easier for your to read. You can also stream or download the podcast interview with us.

I turned one of my more recent posts into a video and have also launched a new youtube site for my blog so I can continue to put things like this up. If you’d like to watch it and the other videos you find here on my wordpress, just head to:

www.youtube.com/jamminwithjamin

Or you could always just watch it here: