SaltBox Thoughts

A Crazy Mad Rentless Love Part 2

2011-08-11T23:46:00.001-05:00

Just think about what the words Crazy Love brings to mind. I’m sure everyone has a picture in their mind right now as to what this love would look like. This love is intensely enthusiastic, inordinately excited, preoccupied, foolish, impractical, fantastic, strange, and ridiculous. It makes those around it do a double take and ask “Just what are they thinking?”. It makes no sense to those that have never felt or experienced this kind of love.

This is the kind of love that sent God’s only Son, Jesus to the cross for. 1 John 3:16 says “This is how we’ve come to understand and experience love: Jesus sacrificed His life for us.” To me this sounds like Crazy Love because to give up your life for someone else is kinda crazy right… I’m not sure that Jesus was jumping for joy to hang on the cross, but I’m sure He was intense about what He was doing for you and me. This Crazy Love is what made it possible for you and me to embrace freedom of the spirit, heart, soul, and mind. To live our lives to the fullest!

Now a lot of you are thinkin "Mad why would you put a word like Mad with the word Love". A lot of you are thinking of the Angry type of Mad. I’m thinking of a Mad that is lacking restraint or reason, feels strong enthusiasm, hilarious, senseless, excited, and completely bonkers. When was that last time you saw Mad Love. A love that made no sense. There is a book in the Bible called Hosea. You may be thinking “Where in the Bible is that?” It’s in there. Hosea was a prophet of God. One day God spoke to him and said “Find a whore and marry her. Make her the mother of you Children.” Hosea 1:2 So he marries a woman by the name of Gomer. She has three kids for him and then runs away to party and sleep around again. The she ends up in jail. Then again, God tells Hosea to “Start all over; Love your wife again, your wife who is with her latest boyfriend, your cheating wife.” Hosea 3:1 Then God has the audacity to say “Love her the way I, God, love.” Wow, I’m not sure I could do that.

Yes, that story is right out of the Bible. In the book of Hosea, God is having Hosea show the Israelite people how He loves them. Even though they have left Him to party and sleep around with other god’s, nations, and each other. Israel is doing there own thing and they are a in a prison of there own making. God wanted Hosea to show by example the Mad Love, that to us humans makes no sense, to the Israelites. To me what God asked Hosea to do was a little crazy, but unless you understand the Mad Love of God it would be Crazy

This kind of love is amazing to me. It is never ceasing, unyielding, persistent, and unstoppable. Have you ever had anything in you life that was relentless? The only Relentless Love that I know of is the Love that comes from God. God’s love does not depend on us. If it did, this world would be a terrible place. God is the source for Love. Relentless Love has nothing to do with us and everything to do with God. God’s love is truest and purest.

Think about the sun again. What is the nature of the sun? Can it do anything other than shine? Just like the sun, it’s God nature to Love! You and I can’t keep the sun from shining. We cannot keep God from Loving us. That is why God’s Relentless Love is beyond what we can humanly comprehend. We can reject God’s love, but He just keeps right on loving us. No matter what you do, where you go, how far you fall… God will be there with His Relentless Love!

If you’re thinking to yourself “How can I get that Love? How can I be caught by God’s Relentless Love?” I’ve got to tell ya, it’s just a choice away. I know that seems so simple and easy. Sometimes we as humans think that we’ve got to pay for or earn the right to get God’s Relentless Love. Nothing is further from the truth. The truth is that God in His Crazy Mad Relentless Love sent His Son, Jesus to rescue us from our life of sin which leads to death. Romans 8:2,3 “The Spirit of Life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.” With that said all you have to do is choose to ask Jesus to save you. So this Crazy Mad Relentless Love is a simple choice. All you gotta do is walk in to the arms of Jesus that have been wide open waiting for you to reach for His love. Just remember God will never let go of you!

"Jesus, come take my heart. I give it to You. Envelope me in your Crazy Mad Relentless Love. Make me new. Clean my life of sin. Give me beauty for ashes because that's what my life is. Ashes. Be my everything." Amen

Athena

P.S. Watch this video and hear about this Relentless love. Open your heart... because God won't Relent until He's got all of you.

All the Bible quotes are out of The Message.

A Crazy Mad Rentless Love Part 1

2011-08-11T00:45:00.004-05:00

Looking at this combination of words maybe your thinkin "These words don’t go together at all." Maybe they seem like a contradiction to each other. Maybe your thinkin I’m crazy for how I put all those together. Well if you just look at the surface of these words and that’s all you see then you are right. If you look deeper into the different meanings and emotions of the words, then you will see what I see when looking at this combination of words. What I see takes my breath away.

For a while now God seems to have been quiet in my life. It’s not the He’s not there or not alive to me, but just not really speaking anything new or maybe it’s that I haven’t been listening. I think we’ve all been in this place. Then one day these exact words dropped into my spirit and here’s the story behind them.

Relating these word to myself I have this to say. There was a time in my life when I didn’t understand love in the least little bit. In fact this crazy love that loves with abandon, started in oblivion to itself in my life. As weird as that sounds, it is none the less true. One day I sat down beside this love and never even noticed it was there. I even thought it was kinda stuck up and looking down it’s nose at me. I called it “the preacher man”. It would tell me I was wrong in my sin and to come to Jesus, but I felt no love, only the “better than you” attitude coming from it. Enter a sunrise…

Like when you watch a sunrise, it’s all just pretty colors one minute and the next there sits the sun in all it’s glory. You never really saw it fully appear, it was just there. Love snuck in past my own “I’m better than you, when I’m really dying inside to be noticed and loved” attitude. One minute I had no idea about this love and the next it was just there. Without my knowing it parked in my heart and began to grow with abandon.

In case your wondering this story so far is about James and I. We were together 9 months before we got married. I can’t tell you the exact moment when I realized I loved him. It was like I always did and that was the right and natural thing. Neither of us were looking, we were just doing our own thing. His was being a preacher man telling people they needed Jesus. Mine was living my life on the fence between right and wrong. I didn’t do anything really “bad”, just followed my own way. Then like the sun, our loved happened! We always say love is a choice and it is, but it’s so much more. The emotion of love is another thing all together when in an upstanding follow God's design relationship. It’s the stuff of a crazy mad relentless love, an ardent fervor for each other. Put the "choice of love" together with the "emotion of love" and you have this thing that leaves you feeling and knowing that your gonna explode. It makes you want to scream, laugh, cry, shout, dance, smile, throw your arms to the heaven's…You get the picture. To this day our love has grown each day. I look forward to where it’s taking us for as many days as we have together.

Next I'm gonna turn this toward the Spirit inside us and God! Stay tuned...

Athena

Negative Voices

2011-07-04T22:29:00.001-05:00

There is a significant amount of negativity these days. You can't turn on the tv, radio or internet without people telling you everything that is wrong with the world. It seems to me that we should be different than this. We should be bringing hope to a world without hope rather than adding our two cents worth. Often we simply tell people what is wrong from our "Christian" perspective. All this does is makes us another useless voice in the sea of negativity. We get tuned out just like the rest of the noise. The bible says we should not speak unwholesome words but just words that give grace to the people who need to hear them at that moment. The challenge for us is to separate from the hopelessness around us so that when we speak it doesn't remind people where they are but shows them where they want to be.

James

The church is dying?

2011-05-02T17:11:00.000-05:00

I would like to state for the record that the church is still very much alive and well! If you cannot kill God what makes you think the church is dying? I have heard it said many times that the church is in decline. This may be true of many churches but it is not true of all churches. I have noticed that churches that are not culturally relevant are very much in decline. I have also noticed that we often accuse thriving churches of preaching some type of watered down gospel. I agree that there are churches that do this but it is not true of the majority. It is foolish of us to try and discredit what is happening in other churches when there is nothing of true value happening in ours. If the church we are in is in decline the greatest thing we can do is ask why and realize that we might be the problem. It also would do us well to ask why others are successful rather than assuming it's due to some form of compromise. I often feel as though we have lost the heart of God for reaching the lost. We have failed to realize that there is a world full of hurting and broken people looking for answers. If you have legit answers for the real problems they have you won't be able to build a building big enough to hold them. We can no longer blame our impotence in the church on "the great falling away". The truth is that we have fallen away and are holding a form of Godliness that has no power to set people free. If we are to reach the generations that are missing from the church we must engage the culture that they are living in and bring the truth of God's redemption into their messed up lives. We can no longer make excuses, that time is past...we must square our shoulders like men and be the change that needs to happen.

James

Easter Bunny?

2011-04-24T19:53:00.000-05:00

So I have held a theory for a few years on the Easter Bunny. So hear goes my thought...I have only shared this with one person before today. I can't prove any of this but hear me out and then give me your feedback.

The rabbit represents fertility in different religions and mythologies. The Easter Bunny lays eggs. Eggs to me carry a very close symbolism to the empty tomb of Christ. So my thought of the Easter Bunny is that it carries an implication that some twisted form of fertility caused the resurrection rather than the power of God. So there you go I just attacked the Easter Bunny. Not really...but seriously what do you think about this thought.

James

Crutches

2011-03-25T21:41:00.000-05:00

I have heard a lot of people say that Christianity is a crutch. This thought makes me laugh. I had so many crutches before I gave my life to Christ. In fact, it was Christ that made me strong enough to stand up like a man and throw away the crutches. I am not trying to shove religion down anyones throat. I'm just saying that I used to have some serious issues and now I have Christ...it was a pretty sweet trade!!!

James "Pops" Rees

The Choice...Capitivity or Freedom?

2011-03-23T11:42:00.001-05:00

How many have heard of Babylon in the Bible? It was like the ultimate place when every carnal desire could be attained easily. Sound familiar? Kinda sounds like the day we live in. So take the word "Babylon" and let it become the mentality or mind set of carnal desire where every worldly thing is just a step away or who the world says you must be to be cool and accepted. I am not attacking America, just trying to help with a mental picture.

So, let's begin there and realize that surrounding us is everything our flesh could possible desire. How are we to live in an excessive culture and not be poisoned by it, let alone influence it? In a place where youth and beauty are the greatest things desired, how are we to avoid being sucked in? The term "friendly captivity" comes to mind. Think about that for a while. To be in captivity is to be enslaved. This world offers a lot of friendly captivity. The way it leads to captivity is by saying one look won't hurt, one taste can't hook, one time won't change, you deserve it... The thing is captivity never remains friendly. The more you have, the more you need and the less happy you become. Just ask anyone you has been addicted to anything. The more we "play" with sin, the more we will be sucked in. Satan will bide his time and wait for the opportune moment to take us captive. It may seem like your getting away with what your doing, but make no mistake the devil will ensnare you when you play with sin and you will be the one with the regrets.

Here's a question. Are you so used to the decaying morals that surround you that you don't even know how to blush anymore? What I mean by that is there is stuff that we see daily weather it be on TV, the internet, or real life that should shock and embarrass us. When we are no longer embarrassed or shocked by what we see, than we are beginning on the road to that friendly captivity. Daily we are being indoctrinated or trained by the culture around us. What are you doing to counteract that?

Now we come to the choice part. Any decision that we make, that is not easy requires this small thing called resolve. Resolve means to make a decision or have firmness of purpose. Resolve requires integrity on our part as well. Integrity is the state of being undivided or complete. Integrity depends on consistency. Consistency is sticking with something and doing it over and over that same way. I'm not talking about being perfect. Perfection on earth is impossible. What I mean is that resolve is not a one time choice. It is a daily thing. It means making the right choices over and over and over again. It means that no matter who you are with, where you are, or if you are by yourself, that you are the same person. Life is much easier and simpler when we don't have to remember what we are supposed to be with different people.

Here's the low down. The devil never wastes his attacks. He knows where in our lives that we are inconsistent. He's know when we stop making the resolute decision to choose what is right. He knows exactly what to send in your path to make you trip because he's been studing your habits. The bull's-eye for him is our inconsistency. That's where he'll be waiting to help us make the bad choice.

We will live making the right choices on purpose or we will not do it at all.
"Sin is crouching at you door; it desires to have you" Gen. 4:7
Right living takes tenacious obedience!

The choice is yours...

-Athena

Just a day...

2011-03-10T13:58:00.000-06:00

I'm sitting here at the studio thinking that I should use my time wisely while I'm doing basically nothing listening to the recording process. So I decided to write a blog about my day in the studio and what all we do. Basically we take one day and lay drum track for three different songs. Today we are working on, The Anthem. It's kind of a rock ballad. Not a typical SaltBox song, but very cool nonetheless. We started the morning by laying the guitar tracks. Which is cool because we can add the parts that we have been hearing in our heads. Then we add the bass track. My part was easy because basically I play the same thing throughout the song. Then we ate lunch. Currently we are working on the vocals. Vocals are fun to record because I don't sing. lol After we get the vocals down, we'll listen to the whole thing and check to see if there are things that we can add to set the song off and make it really special. That's basically it. I get to spend a whole lot of time listening to really great music and not doing much.

-Athena

Big Shoes

2011-02-25T23:34:00.000-06:00

I snapped a picture today of my youngest son wearing my shoes. The thought started running through my mind that our children follow in our footsteps. I began to think about the things (both good and not so good) that I see in my boys. It is obvious that they get a significant amount of those things from me. Your kids are like little mirrors running around screaming at you. It is so important that you walk a right path because no matter who you are there are people following you. Children are a gift from God...what we do with that gift we will answer for. Children are like arrows in the hand of a warrior...what are you aiming yours at? Whatever you entertain in your life your children will do in excess. Dads we have some big shoes!

James "Pops" Rees

Faith-Hope-Love

2011-02-19T13:35:00.000-06:00

Love is a choice to give when there is no reason. If you look hard enough there will always be a reason to hold back your love. Faith sees what is possible when everything fails. There will always be an abundance of failure available to pick from. Hope is a silent violence inside...it rages against the pressure of life. Hope just stands there and won't let go.

The Heart

2011-02-14T15:54:00.002-06:00

Have you heard the saying "Follow Your Heart"? That's the stuff of fairy tails and nightmares. Your heart can lead you into places you never ment to go and into things you didn't want to do. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that your heart can't tell you good things. It can, but we can convince ourselves in our hearts that anything is OK and right. What does your heart want? To whom is it submitted?

Do you have "if onlys" in you life? Like if only I had this then my life would be complete. Just as we get what we thought we needed the rules change and there is something new that we need. It's a never ending cycle.

In the Garden on Eden, Adam and Eve enjoyed a standing invitation of open access to God. All their needs were met. They had no hunger, stress, sickness, bills, demands... What are some of the things that you deal with that they didn't have to? They didn't sin because of their demanding circumstances or need. Sin is not the product of what we have or don't have. It is a product of the heart. "The heart is deceitful above all things." Jeremiah 17:9 The heart can easily buy into satan's lies.

Nothing is more misleading than an unsanctified, rebellious, or lost heart. For this reason God continually warns us through the Bible for us to give Him our whole heart. Here are some examples:
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength" Deuteronomy 6:5
"Acknowledge the God of your Father and serve him with wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind, for the Lord searches every heart and understands every desire and thought." 1 Chronicles 28:9
"As water reflects the face, so one's life reflects the heart" Proverbs 27:19
"For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks" Matthew 12:34b
"Good people bring good things out of the good stored in their heart, and evil people bring evil things out of the evil stored up in their heart. For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks" Luke 6:45
These are just a few places in the Bible the heart is mentioned. Do a search and look up other verses and study them. Are you seeing a pattern?

So enter Noah...Adam and Eve lived in the most ideal circumstances, but still choose sin and disobedience. Noah lived where depravity ruled and people followed every evil thought without restraint. He made right choices and was righteous and blameless. "But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God" Genesis 6:8&9

What was the difference? The difference is Noah walked with God in his heart. Heart change doesn't come form a one time commitment or far away thoughts of God. It comes from the constant state of fellowship with God. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute...

The deliberate act of will is the inevitable choice between habitual fellowship or habitual failure. Our culture surrounds us with every conceivable practice of sin and the continual mockery of God. We can be victorious only if we walk with God and give Him our whole heart. There is no place more safe. The choice is your daily, hourly, momentarily... What will your choice be? Who will you serve?

-Athena

Focus

2011-02-12T21:37:00.001-06:00

Keep your eyes on where you are going because where you are can detour you. What you focus on will be the direction you go so stay focused on where you want to go and not on your failures. Your going to mess up get over it! Failing doesn't make you a failure...not trying does. Anytime you have a dream in your heart you will have opposition in your life. There are no free rides to your destiny. There will be naysayers along the path...what you listen to long enough you will believe. Be careful what you believe because that is what you become! What you invest time in will become valuable to you so invest yourself wisely. If you choose to spend your time on things that don't move you forward don't be surprised when you move backwards. There are two paths for your life, a right one and a wrong one. What you focus on is the difference between regret and a life well lived.

-James

Porn

2011-02-10T22:25:00.000-06:00

The bible says in Matthew 5:28 that if you look at a woman to lust after her you have commited adultery with her in your heart.

Looking at porn is a sin plain and simple. The bible also says in James 1:14,15 that we are tempted when we are carried away by our own lust. It says that when lust is conceived it gives birth to sin and when sin is accomplished it brings forth death. So ultimatley this stuff will kill you. You must realize that porn is your enemy not your friend. This is the first step toward your freedom. God will help you defeat your enemies but not your friends. You must fall out of love with it and see it for what it is.

Porn traps you in a cruel cycle of guilt and shame. It preys on your God given desire to love and be loved. It's beauty lures you in with the offer of acceptance, only to turn on you and consume your mind with lack of fulfillment. The reason porn is so powerful is because we desperatley want to be wanted and need to be needed. You have this beautiful image saying I want you, I need you, I accept you, and for a moment you believe. Shame is what it leaves you with, emptier than before, addicted to a temporary feeling. It's a moment where you feel like everything about you is ok.

Porn is an addiction. If you don't agree just try to stop looking at it. You have to admit that it has a hold of you before you can get free from it. Here's some motivation for you to get free. Did you know that porn is the major cause of male impotence? Men are stimulated by sight. The more you look at the stuff the more you have to look at the stuff to get excited. The end result...your no longer excitable...now how exciting is that? Porn changes a man from a protector of women into a predator of women. Porn will make you think thoughts you never wanted to think, do things you never thought you would do, and be someone you never thought you would be.

I am living proof that God can set you free from this stuff. If you want to talk just hit me up saltboxband@yahoo.com

James "Pops" Rees
SaltBox