Today I celebrate my third wedding anniversary.  (Happy Anniversary Julia!)  There's a lot of things I've learned during this time and not just that I like to eat twelve times as much bacon as my wife.  

I've learned the answer to the ultimate question in a marriage - How do we make a marriage work?

Ya see, the whole point is - everything in this universe exists for God.  So now we have to ask ourselves - how do you make your marriage exist for God? 

Well, how do we glorify God? 

We make God happy when we strive for the fruit of the spirit: love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23).  Not only would God be happy, but if you had love, joy, peace, etc., you too would obviously be a very happy person.

When your focus is God, then one's goal isn't trying to make yourself happy, but God.  When we are trying to make God happy, we ultimately make ourselves happy.

If you and your spouse are trying to be more Christ-like (love, joy, etc.) then your marriage can only get better. 

It's like that lame analogy, but it's totally true.  It's like a triangle.  You and your spouse are the points at the bottom, and God is the point at the top.  The closer you slide your points to the top (God) the closer the points get to each other. 

So, to grow closer to each other - you must grow closer to God.  And having a ton of bacon at the ready never hurt either.

There is this new teacher at my kid's school.  He's a young guy, right out of college, and he's from Venezuela and he just is so positive and joyful that you can't help but smile around him.  I wish I had that.  Instead, when I'm around people get angry and get gas.  I always wondered what the second fruit of the spirit (joy) should look like in real life and now I know.  He's always praising God for whatever.  And you can see sincerity and joy in his face.  It's not cheesy or annoying, just real and infectious.  It's weird how you can be inspired from someone you don't even know.  I guess that's the power of the fruit of the spirit.  So today, let's try to thank God for stuff we normally don't, find the joy in that, and share that joy with people around us.

On to the news!

• Copeland has a new song up.  I'm guessing it's called, "The Grey Man".  It's probably about aliens.
• Jonezetta has a bunch of tour dates up.  They probably wouldn't mind if you showed up to a show.
• Trenches has a new song up called, "Ocean Currents".  There's a lot of yelling in it.
• The Oakland Raiders won their one game for the season.  Season goal accomplished!

Just a quick encouragement for you to be great.  But what is 'great'?  Great isn't power, reputation, wealth or embarrassing Tom Brady in the Superbowl (no matter how awesome that was).  It's serving.  God wants us to serve others. So in his book, you get more 'points' for serving, and none for being awesome and cool.  Greatness IS Serving.  So who are the people God placed in your life to serve?  Family members, friends, coworkers, church people, even Tom Brady.  Figure out what you can do for them and start doing serving things today - and be great.

MT 20: [25] Jesus called them together and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. [26] Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, [27] and whoever wants to be first must be your slave-- [28] just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

MT 23: [11] The greatest among you will be your servant. [12] For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

We've all been in situations where a fellow Christian attacks us or is a big fat jerk to us in some way.  It happens all the time.  At school, work, church, with our family members, in ministry, on the internets, on a rocketship or in an underwater lair.  I'm sure we've all let our emotions get the better of us.  And I doubt that God wants us to respond by calling them 'poopie-pants' and then punching them in the face, then sending out a mass email written in all-caps to your all your friends saying exactly how much of a poopie-pants that person is.

So how do we deal with it without sinning?

I've seen it so many times where Christians are not only hesitant to label themselves as a Baptist, Methodist, Reformed, Calvinist, Arminianist, Conradist, etc., but also think it's a bad thing.  We've seen so many divisions in the Church and a lot of people attribute that to labels. 

The common thinking goes, "What can't I just call myself a Christian?  Why do I have to label myself? Why can't I just say I believe the Bible because labels are bad."

Christ died for us and rose again so that we could live a new life, a life not bound to sin.  Looking back on this past Easter let's all try to honor Christ's work by weeding out more of the sin that we harbor, that keeps us from being happy and glorifying God.  Maybe the sin is something that you need to stop doing.  Maybe the sin is something that you're not doing - like loving the people you interact with, or being devoted to God's Word. Either way, we are not longer slaves to those sins, so let's commit our lives to Christ.

Salt makes most everything better. McDonald's fries is one of the greatest foods that God has blessed us with, but it's better with salt. All meat needs salt to actually taste good. And I think bacon somehow naturally has salt, that's why it's a perfect food. It's already naturally satly. It's like they made the bacon from pigs who bathed daily in a rainbow from heaven. A rainbow made of salt.

I don't even want to know what bacon would taste like if it wasn't salty. It'd be bland grease and fat. Not offering anything good. It's like if you took away Pixar from Disney, you'd have nothing.

We all know people suck. The people you love the most will always wrong you in some way. Random people will bug you. Weird internet people will be mean to you. People are sinful. We can live our lives annoyed and mad at everyone, living a miserable life.

Think about the people who really annoy you. I'm not talking about Aerosmith or the NY Yankees. I'm talking about the people you've interacted with that have done something to you that you didn't like and wish they would die a terrible death or fall into a tiger trap or be forced to watch Matrix 2 AND 3.

Search your heart. You'll find people. And if Christ can forgive us of a lifetime's worth of sin, we should be able to forgive someone of a few instances of sin. If we can't then, we aren't quite grateful for Christ's forgiveness are we?

Hopefully you've heard me say this before. But if you don't know God's specific will in a situation, then you at least know how you should act during the situation with this one passage - Galatians 5:22-23 "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control." It's like the master key for life.

For example, if you find yourself in the line at the grocery store and for some reason the lady in takes out her check book, which or course adds thirty minutes to your line, how are you supposed to act?

No, you don't say, "Ever heard of a debit card?"

Dear Conrad -- I'm just wondering about the claims of many historians of how all religions are alike (though I know they don't all lead to the same direction) in that Christianity is a religion just like Islam, or Buddhism, which just happen to diffuse successfully throughout Europe. We are taught in World History how it's just a religion spread through converted powerful rulers, crusades, and conquistadoras. How could I prove to others how Christianity did not just originate from people seeking power nor is a legend that caused wars? I need some insights only if you have time.  --Anonymous

Dear Conrad.  How can a loving and benevolent God send someone to hell?  -- Jasmine

Dear Jasmine,

When thinking about God we always have to consider all his attributes.  Yes, God is a God of love.  But we also believe that God is fair and just. 

Would it be fair for a parent to reward both the child that obeyed a command to clean his room with the same reward to the other child who yelled back and went into his room and burned it down?

The parent can still love both kids, but he must be just too.  He will reward the one an punish the other.  In this example the parent has both attributes of love and justice. 

I like to evangelize, it just fills me up, however this doesn't mean I know how to do it... Sometimes I feel very insecure when I evangelize, maybe because I don't know how to, or maybe because I don't feel worthy.  How can I evangelize (what steps do you recommend me to follow?) in a different way then just going up to someone and telling them "If you receive Christ you go to heaven if not you go to Hell"? How can I approach them? What can I start saying?

Dear Giovanni,

I need to make two huge points here. The first point I'll go over very quickly, so I can move on to the next one.

Dear Conrad - This isn't much of a deep question but it made me wonder.  I've started
re-reading the Bible and have found that in Genesis 1:26-27 it says, "God spoke: "Let us make human beings in our image."  When God is speaking in Genesis 1:26 He says 'us' and 'our' as if there were more then one God or God had more then one personality.  Is there some hidden meaning in this I'm not discovering? Thank you, Jason

Jason,

This is a great question that speaks to the heart of the difference between Christianity and any other religion. 

"Religion comes from the stupid infancy of our species..." so says Christopher Hitchens. If you haven't heard of this British author you are sure to hear his name soon. His most recent book has garnered him numerous appearances on TV talk shows. The title of the book? "god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything."

What makes Hitchens worthy of discussion here is not that he is another atheist out to see Christianity run into the ground. Rather, it is the wit, and skill with which he argues his case. It is the publicity he is gaining and will gain as he spews pop-philosophy across the airwaves. His arguments aren't anything new, in fact most of them are old. He won't destroy the faith, that is not what makes him worth talking about. As Dr. Al Mohler has stated, "He accepts most of the most extreme criticisms of faith in God...the big issue here is not that...Christopher Hitchens [is] going to bring down the household of faith..." Rest assured friends that God's Word will stand as it always has.

I hope you all do some sort of daily devotion with prayer. It's obviously a good thing and you don't need me to tell you that you should be doing it. It's one thing to know you should be doing something and another to be motivated to do it.

Like, just cause I know I should eat healthy doesn't mean I can't stop eating chocolate covered bacon for breakfast.

But in case you are motivated in doing some sort of daily devotional and prayer and you need a little structure to your prayers and don't want to just randomly pray for stuff that happens to pop into your head, this is for you.

There are four main sections that you could have during your prayers. And it's all in this little acronym:

"A.C.T.S."

I'll explain what each part is.

A - "Adoration". This is the praise part of praying. Praise is adoration of who God is. You praise someone for their traits and attributes. A really simple way of defining praise is if you can fill in the blank here, "God is ________," that's most likely praise. God is love, God is just, God is sovereign, etc. Praise would be like, "God I praise you because you are a God of love."

C - "Confession". You also should be confessing your sins during prayer. We should always realize that we suck. We're not any better than anyone around us. The only righteousness we have in God's eyes is from Christ. So confession would be like, "God, I pray that you would forgive me for throwing bacon on my mom in anger."

T - "Thanks". Duh. You know what giving thanks is right? But sometimes it's easy to get thanks confused with praise. Praise is for a trait someone has, thanks is for what someone has done.

Like you can't thank me for being super good looking, cause I didn't do anything to be super good looking, God made me that way. But you can praise me for being super good looking. You can thank me for giving you a aardvark, but you can't praise me for the aardvark.

You can however praise my generosity for giving you an aardvark. Now you are praising my generosity, not the aardvark. Thanks for giving me the aardvark, praise for the generosity. Difference. But don't get too bent out of shape if you kinda get praise confused with thanks. I'm guessing God understands what you mean.

S - "Supplication". This is more commonly known has prayer requests. And if I used "PR" instead of "S", then the acronym would spell ACTPR and that doesn't make any sense. I could say PRACT, but that's not a word either. So anyways ‘supplication' is asking God for stuff. Supplication would be like, "God, please heal my headache, help me stop throwing cheese at my enemies, I pray for wisdom," and whatever.

So at night or morning, or whenever you do your devotions, this little acronym pretty much covers the bases to have a complete prayer.

Now we just need to be motivated to actually do devotions. Would it help if I gave you an aardvark?

(Verses Used: Psalm 100:4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.  I John 1:9-10 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.  Psalm 119:170 May my supplication come before you; deliver me according to your promise.)