What Are You Chasing?

A Cry for
Intimacy With God

I’m part of a
generation that hungers to know God. We want a real relationship with Him—the kind
that’s filled with the laughter, tears and honesty even when it hurts. We want
a relationship with God that isn’t tampered with by artificial additives that
promise to make it sweeter, sourer or tastier than it really is. We want an
organic relationship with God.Why organic?

Though it’s a word usually
associated with food grown without chemical-based fertilizers or pesticides,
“organic” also
describes a lifestyle: simple, healthful, close to nature. Those are things
many of us desire in our relationship with God.

We hunger for simplicity. We want
to approach God in childlike faith, wonder and awe. We long for more than just
spiritual life but spiritual health-whereby our souls are not just renewed and
restored but become a source of refreshment for others. And we want to be close
to nature, not mountain ridges and shorelines, as much as God’s nature worked
in and through us.

Such a God-infused lifestyle
requires us to step away from any insta-grow short cuts or formula-based
beliefs and dig deep into the soils of spiritual formation only found in God.
In this place, our intimacy with God springs to life.

Many of us have come to place in
our spiritual journeys where we want to know a God who in all His fullness
allows us to know Him just as He is, stripped as much as possible of any false
perceptions. We want to know God.

Margaret
Feinberg is a speaker and author of The Organic God and Scouting
the
Divine (margaretfeinberg.com).

A Cry for Purity

Let’s get the bad news out of the way. Practical, balanced
teaching on sexual purity and living it out with integrity has an anemic
history in the contemporary church. By contrast, a nonstop, toxic mix of
eroticism coupled with the flesh’s rebellious nature has commandeered our
attention with little to no intervention.

Thus, our only hope now is to cry
out and pursue purity. The yearning is deep and passionate; however, deep and
passionate yearning simply doesn’t rise to the level of resolution.

Over the last 14 years that I’ve
ministered sexual wholeness to mostly young adults, I’ve become familiar with
that cry. It’s anxious, urgent and deeply personal.

And it isn’t just confined to
young, single Christians. Sexual purity isn’t synonymous with celibacy. If the
goal is indeed sexual purity that pleases Christ, then the progressive
path out of sexual impurity should be marked by:

1. Rediscovering the foundations
and fundamentals of our faith and what they are intended to accomplish in your
life.

2. Rebuilding the breaches in your
life using spiritual and relational processes.

3. Recreating your desires through
strategy. You must have more than just a desire to live sexually pure. Desire
must conjugate into holy pragmatism.

The most important lesson I’ve
learned and continue to teach is an old one: Prevention is much better than a
cure. Sometimes progressive thinking should never evolve beyond proven truths.

D.L. Foster is founder of Atlanta-based Witness
Freedom Ministries, which declares that freedom from the gay lifestyle
is a
reality in Christ (witnessfortheworld.org).

A Cry for Racial Diversity

The greatest mosaic of all is the kingdom of God. Diversity
and multiethnicity exist not as an attempt to incorporate politically correct
ideas into the church but as a manifestation of God’s love toward all His
children. Pentecost was a multiethnic, multilingual experience. American
Christianity is not. That’s about to change.

For too long the church in America
has embraced defacto segregation whereby we define the church not only by its
denominational affiliation but even more so by its racial and ethnic composition.
This emerging generation is privy to a powerful truth: Only a multiethnic
kingdom culture can repudiate the spirits of Herod, Absalom, Jezebel, and Sodom
and Gomorrah.Racial diversity may very well save
American Christianity. Historically, white evangelical believers focused on
righteousness or vertical issues such as abortion and marriage while ethnic
believers channeled resources into the horizontal issues of justice, poverty
and equality. Next Generation believers will converge at the nexus of the
gospel message-where John 3:16 meets Matthew 25; where righteousness marries
justice while moral relativism, cultural decay and spiritual apathy
simultaneously acquiesce before a robe of many colors.

In other words, American evangelicalism will be less
segregated, more integrated and more committed to authentic community outreach.
Be advised, our young people have no interest in sitting in the pews of a
church that is entirely white, black or Hispanic. They desire diversity, not in
the context of political correctness, but in the Spirit of Pentecost.

Samuel Rodriguez is president of the National Hispanic Christian
Leadership Conference and the Hispanic National Association of Evangelicals (nhclc.org).