Kim 365
One of my current open books is Jesus + Nothing = Everything by Tullian Tchividjian. I’m reading it on my phone, which has proved to be very handy since I can highlight with the touch of a finger. In all honesty, I should just highlight the entire book. It is awesome. Some reviews fault it for being repetitive. I believe that is the point.
The basic idea of this book is that you need nothing but Jesus. The life of a Christian is forever defined by the gospel of Jesus Christ. So what is the gospel? Good news. What is the good news? The good news is that while we were still sinners, Jesus died to save us from our sins. Not because we’re great, but because we’re not. Not because we’re worthy, but because we’re not. Not because we are mostly good people who just need a little help, but because we’re horrible people who can do nothing good apart from Christ! Jesus, fully God and fully man, lived the perfect life we could not live. He died the death we should have died. He takes our sin, and gives us his righteousness. He transforms guilty, vile, and helpless sinners into children of God. That is Good News!! We are saved by grace. We did nothing to earn Jesus’ love. He loves us not because we’re lovely, but because he is lovely! And his love makes us lovely. The gospel is not just for our salvation, the gospel is for our sanctification as well. The gospel is not something we can ever move past. We don’t get saved and then work our way toward being better people. It is all of grace, all of Jesus. Plus nothing.
I’m about half done the book, and thought I would share a sampling of my favourite quotes thus far.
“When it comes to the Christian life and experience, many of us have understood the gospel as the thing that gets us in, while the thing that then keeps us in (we assume) is our own effort and performance. We recognize that the gospel ignites the Christian life, but we often fail to see that it’s also the fuel to keep us going and growing as Christians.
Unless we come to see and embrace the fact that the gospel never loses its importance in the practical outworking of the Christian life, we’ll continue to undercut and cheapen the gospel’s impact.”
“In our bones, we know that God hates unrighteous ‘bad’ works; we’re not nearly so convinced that he hates self-righteous ‘good’ works just as much, if not more.”
“The biggest lie about grace that Satan wants the church to buy is the idea that it’s dangerous and therefore needs to be kept in check. By believing the lie, we not only prove we don’t understand grace, but we violate the gospel advancement in our lives as the church by perpetuating our own slavery. The truth is, disobedience happens not when we think too much of grace, but when we think too little of it.”
“You and I will never know Christ to be a great Savior unless we first understand ourselves to be great sinners. We’ll never really feel deliverance if we don’t first feel desperation. We’ll never experience the glory of real freedom if we don’t first experience the grief of our own slavery.”
“In his law-fulfilling life, curse-bearing death, and death-defeating resurrection, Jesus has entirely accomplished for sinners what sinners could never in the least do for themselves. The banner under which the Christian lives reads, ‘It is finished.'”
“Because we’re so naturally prone to look to ourselves and our performance more than we look to Christ and his performance, we need constant reminders of the gospel.”
“The irony of real growth in godliness is that those who end up obeying more are those who increasingly realize that their standing with God isn’t based on their own obedience for Jesus but on Jesus’s obedience for them.”
“The only thing you contribute to your salvation and to your sanctification is the sin that makes them necessary.”
“The gospel is not just for non-Christians. It’s bigger than that; it’s for Christians, too. The gospel represents both the nature of Christian growth and the basis for it. Whatever progress we make in our Christian lives – whatever going onward, whatever pressing forward – the direction will always be deeper into the gospel, not apart from it, or aside from it. Growth in the Christian life is the process of receiving Christ’s ‘It is finished’ into new and deeper parts of our being every day, and it happens as the Holy Spirit daily carries God’s good word of justification into our regions of unbelief – what one writer calls our ‘unevangelized territories.'”
I enlisted the help of my big boys today, to make some posters for another garage sale this weekend. At the sale a few weeks ago, we sold two tons of stuff. We also had a ton of stuff left over. So we hauled it to our friends’ house, more people brought more stuff, and this weekend we’ll do one more garage sale to (hopefully) liquidate what’s left, and make a few more dollars for our friends’ adoption.
In an attempt to earn Favourite Granddaughter status, my niece declared her Grandpa must be 32 today. She was almost rewarded with the whole birthday cake. In reality, my dad is a tad older than that, but still has more energy than a lot of his kids. The grandkids took him to the playground for his birthday while the rest of us lazy bones sat around the house.
We love you, Dad! You are an immense blessing to all of us. We love your love for Jesus, your love for your family, your zest for life, and your servant heart. We hope your next spin around the sun is a great one!
School has been pretty lax around here for the last few months. So when we finally sit down and get some actual bookwork done, you can bet I’m going to snap a picture of it. I’m not here to spin it and make it look like we are deep in the school trenches and are ready to wind up our school year before the public schoolers. On the contrary, we will probably be doing school through the summer because we pretty much took off the last few months.
Today was awesome though. The boys hammered through three days worth of math because they are so thrilled to move on to ADDING! They are already working on addition all the time in real life, but the fact that it’s coming up in their workbooks is incredibly exciting to them. Wyatt, who is typically quite distracted with this sit-down stuff, was a machine today. The secret? Stickers. Why didn’t I clue into this sooner? Thank you, Dollarama!
Our kids came home this afternoon, windblown and sun-kissed, taller and more adorable than ever! We gave them an assignment before they left: they were given a point & shoot camera and had to document their time at the lake with photos. So here we go, a peek into camping life through the eyes of four and five year old boys.
Markus catches Wyatt running for the playground.
Cool clouds.
The floor of the camper. Important detail. Right along with…
…the curtains!
Gramma, contemplating something. Perhaps admiring that floor?
Markus tells me that Grampa snapped this “terrible picture” of him eating a roasted marshmallow, which he did not at all like the taste of.
Uncle Henry pulls up with his truck, boat, and camper.
The fateful creek that swallowed up little Wyatt’s flip flop.
Bailey, on her way to the beach. Didn’t Wyatt do an amazing job with this shot?
Bailey, mid-stride. Grampa, talking on his cell phone.
Self portrait. Hi, Wyatt!
A view of the beach and lake. The water is really high this year! See how the bridge is actually surrounded by water?
Cool vehicle playground on the beach.
A stop at Gramma and Grampa’s before they came home.
Thanks for taking them, Mom and Dad, they had a blast! Next time we will try to come up for a day as well so we can join in on the fun!
I had a lovely breakfast with this little cutie this morning. He was thrilled with his strawberries and blueberries!
The rest of the day involved running around getting errands done with only one child along, since the rest of the kids are camping for the weekend with my mom and dad. It is amazing how much I can get done, quickly, when I have only one kid with me! And it’s amazing how I thought life was so complicated when Markus was our only child!
Clay and I also had a lunch date at Souleio. Yum! The food was good too.
I bought Bailey’s birthday present, dropped stuff off at Value Village, and ran around to a bunch of garden centres, trying to find the necessary components for my square foot gardening soil. Peavey Mart came through! Add that to yesterday’s trips to Ten Thousand Villages, Dollarama, and Costco, and this has been a busy shopping weekend!
I enjoy my time off when the kids are busy with Gramma and Grampa, and I sure do look forward to them coming home. When they’re away and their constant 6 year-old-and-under neediness is not glaringly obvious, I find myself remembering how cool they are and I can’t wait to spend time with them again. It’s recharge time for all of us. The kids get fresh love from their amazing grandparents, and we get some time to refresh to give them fresh love when they come home.
Marmalade. For the first 27 years of my life, the idea of spreading orange peel jam on my toast disgusted me.
Then I grew up.
I had marmalade when Clay and I had our anniversary staycation last year and realized I’ve been missing out! So marmalade joins the list of things I was once convinced would never pass my lips. Already moved into my good books are onions and olives. There may be others, but that’s all I can remember at the moment. I wonder what’s next?
(As for the photo, Clay was having fun with long exposures and playing with light. We played with the external flash while moving around, and this is what we got.)
Having been playing Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Wii since his birthday in March, Markus was thrilled to be told he could finally watch the movies. We borrowed Episodes 4-6 from friends, and tonight we watched Episode 4. Both the boys were absolutely thrilled. Markus made sure to wear his Lego Star Wars shirt, Clay wore his as well (it’s a PJ shirt, and the kids think it is “supah cool”), and Wyatt was happy to wear his robot shirt – I guess it’s close enough to being a droid.
Big thanks to Bailey and Deacon, who went to bed early.
This might go down in history as my most boring 365 photo ever. On second thought, I think I have a similar one that is equally boring. No matter.
I trekked out in the rain this evening with Deacon. I had a meeting to be at, and I don’t go far from my little man for any extended period of time yet.