And my sin...

OH the bliss of this glorious thought...

My sin - not in part but the whole - 

Was nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more.

I heard this hymn this morning during my quiet time.  I cannot even begin to tell you the emotion that rises up into my heart when I sing those words - "not in part but the whole" and "I bear it no more."

The Master's Voice

Frustrated.  Weary.  Upset.  Tired.
Describe the way you feel about your job, relationship, or current place in life?
Oh, there is no shame in that!  Shame comes from one place, and that is certainly not from our Heavenly Father.
For whatever reason, I feel like the Lord is going to lead some people to this post that would say, "Yes, one of those words perfectly describes my emotion at the moment."


I have something very wonderful to tell you.  There is a Voice that removes that emotion from this place in your life.


Don't think for one second that Jesus doesn't long desperately to speak directly to you this morning.  He promises us that His sheep hear and know His voice.


Here is what to do.
-Go to a place that suits you for having a quiet conversation with a friend.  Your room, a coffee shop, a porch.
-Take a notebook and a pen or your laptop.  You will need to write.
-Praise the Lord.  We enter into His presence with thanksgiving and praise.
-When you feel Him surround you, begin to write or type out your questions, emotions, and thoughts down with Him there.  Ask him to speak to you.
-At some point, you'll notice that it's not just you that is writing.  Your questions will start to have answers surface in your thoughts.  You will write something out that speaks directly into your situation that you never would've thought of on your own.


This very morning, I needed encouragement.  I was feeling weary this morning of the place that I am in.


I began the process.  I began to type on my computer, "Lord, I long for your Presence to come and bring peace and encouragement into my heart and sole."  It was funny.  I typed "sole" when I had intended to type "soul".  I wasn't sure why, but I felt like I should just leave it.


I typed for a while longer, and the Lord reminded me of a word that I had received at church.  I felt like I was supposed to go back and listen to it.  I did.  I had forgotten a lot of what the Lord had said in that Word.


I listened to the cd of the word, and there was a section of the word that was totally devoted to my feet.  "The sole of your foot."  That particular section of the word happened to be exactly what I needed to hear this morning.  It was perfect.  It was my Jesus, right when I needed Him, reminding me that He was with me and knows exactly where I am in His plan and purpose for my life.


See, you are not alone.  Struggle is a part of our Christian life (just ask any pastor or read the lives of the Disciples), but we have a Master of our walk who longs to speak life and encouragement to us.


Will you listen for His voice this morning?  Will you hear his words over you?  (His song over you?  He is your Heavenly Father, who sings over you too.)


[If you get blessed by this, bless us back with your story.  Jess and I love stories, and your story might encourage someone else.  Shoot us an email]
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The Excited List

The top ten things that make Mr. Hill exuberant at the behest of our friend, Travis Bearden...

This is so much harder than making "The Angry List".  A couple of differences are obvious to me as I begin to try and think through this list - These are in order of importance, there are many more things in life that make me excited in life than make me upset, and trying to describe the emotion that rises up at the thought of these things is beyond me.

1) My Jesus.  This is not here as cliche.  I am who I am because of Him.  He is my love.

2) My Wife.  Again, not cliche, simply true.  She is my partner in everything that I do.  My life would be completely awful without her.  Watching her be who she is enthralling.

3) The thought of being a father.  No, we have no kids on the way, nor any plans for them currently, but I have wanted to be a dad since I was little.  The honor and privilege it will be to be a daddy is beyond my words. 

4) Having the opportunity to be a blessing by the direction of the Holy Spirit.  Be it giving, encouraging someone, or teaching.  I am alive for these moments.

5) People.  I love people.  I love being around them, talking to them, watching them.  People.

6)My G Puppy.  Cutest and smartest ever.  No debate.

7)The Diamond H Ranch.  I proposed to my wife, learned how to bass fish, shot my first big deer, bled and sweat, grew in Jesus, learned to build fence, and generally became a man on that piece of land.  It is very dear to me.  

8)Sports.  I love playing sports.  I love watching sports.  I love sports - especially Aggie Sports and playing basketball.  My wife probably questions my sanity with how excited I get at the thought of playing basketball.

9)Nike and Ralph Lauren clothes.  They fit right.  They make me really excited.  Undoubtedly, Nike makes the coolest sport apparel.  Period.  It is the best, and it makes me happy.

10)Music.  I don't even want to be honest about how much memory on this Macbook is taken up by music.  I also do not want to be honest about how much money I have spent in  my life on music.  It is likely disgusting.

11) Ten just wasn't enough for this list...Cowboy Boots.  The way they smell when they come out of the box.  How dependable they are.  How good they look.  How versatile they are.  The world should wear boots.

I love my little wife, her pretty red shoes, and how well she fits in my arms.

SHFP: William Wilberforce - Author and Statesman

This man has become one of my heroes.  Both a professed follower of Christ and leading politician of his day, William Wilberforce was a driving force behind the abolition of Britain's slave trade.

He wrote and published this book in the late 1700's, and I have found it's words to be equally as potent and applicable today as they must've been more than 200 years ago.  The book that I have quoted below, Wilberforce's A Practical View of Christianity,  has challenged my intellect (as Barbara Tuchman's book did), improved my writing (reading his writing is like playing basketball with Lebron...it's rough, but you get better), encouraged my dreams, and shown me that there truly is nothing new under the Sun when it comes to our fallen nature and struggle towards Jesus.

So, I challenge you to muddle your way through this passage as I have his book.  Keep a tab in your browser set to www.m-w.com and admit that your vocabulary is a little deficient (as I have found myself forced to).  Recognize how material and relevant Wilberforce's words are in 2010 as they were in 1797 - one of my favorite discoveries as I have read the book.

Most of all, I hope that you realize that in the same manner that Wilberforce had a professional calling as a politician but made a tremendous impact on the religious and moral standing of his country through his writing and life - so we can today.

No matter what profession you find yourself called to - engineer, accountant, sales, politics, stay at home mom - I guarantee that you can also have an impact for Christ on the culture around you.  Change for our great nation will not emanate from her government, but from normal men and women like us who are willing to follow Christ in a passionate and surrendered manner.

"There are many shades of difference between those who flatly renounce, and those who cordially embrace the doctrine of Redemption by Christ.  This class has a sort of general, indeterminate, and ill understood dependence on our blessed Savior.  But their hopes so far as they can be distinctly made out (for their views also are very obscure) appear ultimately to bottom on the persuasion that they are now, through Christ, become members of a new dispensation, wherein they will be tried by a more lenient rule than that to which they must have been otherwise subject.  'God will not now be extreme to mark what is done amiss: but will dispense with the rigorous exactions of his law, too strict indeed for such frail creatures as we are to hope that we can fulfill it.  Christianity has moderated the requisitions of Divine Justice; and all which is now required of us, is thankfully to trust o the merits of Christ for the pardon of our sins, and the acceptance of our sincere though imperfect obedience.  The frailties and infirmities to which our nature is liable, or to which our situation in life exposes us, will not be severely judged: as it is the practice that really determines the character, we may rest satisfied, that if on this whole our lives be tolerably good, we shall escape with little or no punishment, and through Jesus Christ our Lord, shall be finally partakers of heavenly felicity.'

"We cannot dive into the human heart, and therefore should always speak with caution and diffidence, when from external appearances or declarations we are affirming the existence of any internal principles and feelings; especially as we are liable to be misled by the ambiguities of language, or by the inaccuracy with which others may express themselves.  But is sometimes not difficult to anyone who is accustomed, if the phase may be allowed, to the anatomy of the human mind, to discern, that generally speaking, the persons who use the above language, rely not so much on the merits of Christ, and on the agency of Divine Grace, as on their own power of fulfilling the moderated requisitions of Divine Justice.  He will hence therefore discover in them a disposition rather to extenuate the malignity of their disease, than to magnify the excellence of the proffered remedy.  He will find them apt to palliate in themselves what they cannot fully justify, to enhance the merit of what they believe to be their good qualities and commendable actions, to set as it were in an account the good against the bad; and if the result be not very unfavorable, they conceive that they shall be entitled to claim the benefits of our Savior's sufferings as a thing of course.

"They have little ideas, so little, that it might almost be affirmed that they have no idea at all, of the importance or difficulty of the duty of what the Scripture calls "submitting ourselves to the righteousness of God" [Romans 10:3]; or of our proneness rather to justify ourselves in his sight, than in the language of imploring penitents to acknowledge ourselves guilty and helpless sinners They have never summoned themselves to this entire and unqualified renunciation of their own merits and their own strength; and therefore they remain strangers to the natural lostness of the human heart, which such a call would have awakened into action, and roused to resistance.  All these, their several errors, naturally result from the mistaken conception entertained of the fundamental principles of Christianity. They consider not that Christianity is a scheme "for justifying the ungodly" [Romans 4:5], by Christ's dying for them "when yet sinners" [Romans 5:6-8], a scheme "for reconciling us to God-when enemies" [Romans 5:10]; and for making the fruits of holiness the effects, not the cause, of our being justified and reconciled; that, in short, it opens freely the door of mercy, to the greatest and vilest of penitent sinners; that obeying the blessed impulse of the grace of God, whereby they had been awakened from the sleep of death, and moved to seek for pardon, they might enter in, and through the regenerating influence of the Holy Spirit might be enabled to bring forth the fruits of Righteousness." (Emphasis the authors)

Desires fulfilled and Trees of Life.

I am literally brimming with excitement this morning.

Yes, brimming.

You see, in the last 3 days I have experienced the fulfillment of no fewer than three of my childhood/teenage dreams.

Yes, I am really serious about that.  Three in three days.

Jesus is really fun and exciting like that.

We'll take them in order of occurrence.  Saturday, Sunday, and Monday timing:

-SATURDAY-
Desire fulfilled: Preaching in a church.
        You have to understand, as I type that, I am crying.  That is a desire that has been so deep in my heart, so full of passion to teach and encourage God's people - It's really hard for me to express how much life there was in me when I walked over to the little podium.

       No, I didn't preach to thousands, it was just about 15 or 20 at my parents little country church in Childress, TX where our family's ranch is....Do you know that, that didn't matter to me on Saturday night?  Christ Jesus, my Master, spoke a message to my heart for his people, and trusted me enough to steward those words right.  The Creator of the Universe, the Love of my heart, my Lord.


Proverbs 13:12 - Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire is fulfilled, it is a tree of life.


-SUNDAY-
Desire fulfilled: Shoot a really big buck on MY OWN ranch.
       Alright, I recognize that not all of you will understand this one.  You have to know, since I was a little kid, I loved cowboy and ranch things.  When I was in high school, my parents bought our ranch...I was one step closer.

       My whole family has always been bird hunters - dove, quail, pheasant.  That's cool and all, but I wanted to shoot a big deer.  I had shot little cull bucks and does before on other people's ranch to help them maintain the eco-system balance, but I had never seen a buck worth shooting on our ranch.  We were waiting for the right one and the right time.

Sunday, the time - and the buck - both came:

Here's how it happened, if you aren't the hunter (or wife of a hunter) type, feel free to skip past this paragraph.  :)  So, we drove in the "Mom Mobile" (Our diesel Mule) over to this wheat field where we had been seeing Fred the Deer.  (Yes, his name is Fred.)  It was me, Dad, and our Outfitter friend, Chad.  We pulled up and there were 10 does...no Fred.  I was slightly discouraged.  We thought he might've been shot already by our neighbors, because we hadn't seen him in a couple of days.

Dad says, "let's drive over to this one other place that I've seen him."  We drive over to the side of this little draw next to the wheat field.  I was thinking, "It's OK.  We'll come back tomorrow.  Maybe I can shoot another buck.  It's OK.  Jesus will fix it."  (Even if you don't care, you must understand, this was a momentous occasion for me.)

Fred is there across the draw(small canyon for you non-country folks) and back up towards the wheat field .  Fred and a 6-pointer friend actually.  I have Chad's .300 Winchester Short Mag.  This is basically a small cannon.  Fred appears to be 9 points (one of his antler "tines" doesn't for like it should).  Fred is also MASSIVE.  NO kidding.  He easily weighed 300 pounds, thus the need for the cannon.

Fred begins to walk down into the draw.  We lose the line of sight.  We walk quietly, excitedly, nervously toward a fence at the bottom of the draw.  We have him again.  He's turned a little toward us (not a good profile shot) so we wait.  I cannot even begin to explain to you the agony and horrible excitement that you experience at this point.  What if he runs?  What if we don't get the shot?  It's awful.

Chad says, "He's going to walk down the draw...wait for it."  I wait.  (Chad is awesome)  Fred begins to walk down the draw.  Chad again, "I'm going to stop him, you ready?"  I find Fred in my sight.  "Yea, yea," I say.  A whistle...another whistle.  Fred stops, Chad, "now, take the shot."

BOOM!

Fred is clearly hit.  He is stumbling a bit.  He is still moving.  Chad says it was a perfect shot.  (I feel 10 feet tall at that point.)  Fred is attempting to move toward the end of the draw and the big canyon (bad news), Chad tells me to, "put another in him." so we don't lose him in the canyon (all very guyish) I chamber another short mag quickly, line him up, and pull the trigger again.

Big Fred buckles.  It's over.  Turns out, both of my shots were less than two inches apart, right in the kill zone.

It was so perfect.  Then I walk up on him.  He has a front kicker.  He's a 10-point Buck, and I shot him on my ranch with my Dad.

I realize that, that doesn't strike a chord in the heart of all of you, but you must understand, that was a desire of my heart from the time I was a little kid.  God provided the ranch, the deer, the time, and the place.  It was amazing.

Proverbs 13:12 - Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire is fulfilled, it is a tree of life.

-MONDAY-

Desire Fulfilled:  Have friends like my Lone Star Marina Men.

       To say that I was short on friends through middle school and high school would be an understatement.  Describing me as unpopular would've been an understatement at times through those years.  Literally, at times all the way through high school, I was at times totally devoid of having a good guy friend.

       I literally begged God for friends, for men.  I begged God for men who I could share life with, share struggles with, share victories with, enjoy the Lord with, and enjoy everyday life with all the same.  I wanted real friends.  Not just friends that were for a certain part or piece of life, but friends that I could share all of the things that make me, me with.  Jesus, sports, food, good beer, dominoes, prayer, sin struggles, good stories, the lot.

       Monday morning at 5:30 I was praying with some of those friends.  Every Monday morning we meet in a conference call from all over the state of Texas (and one loner from Memphis, TN who needs to get his butt back here.) to pray for each other, for our marriages, for our relationships, to pray that we would endure as men who are called by the name of Jesus Christ.

       When I cried out before the Lord in my bed at 1503 S. Lamar in Amarillo, TX for all those years asking him for those type of friends, I never could've imagined a group like the Lone Star Marina.  Ben, Brad, Don, Geoff, Prothro, Daniel, Sloan, Wes, and Kyle Wood - not to mention all of the sweet women who put up with us and the many other folks who love to hang out with us.

Thank you, Jesus, for my friends.  They are truly a desire fulfilled in my life.

Proverbs 13:12 - Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire is fulfilled, it is a tree of life.




I want you to know why I wrote this blog.  It wasn't to sound like a braggart.  It wasn't to boast.  It's purpose was two fold:

One: To express my heart of thankfulness to my Sweet Love, Jesus for bringing my dreams to fruition.

Two: (And honestly the main reason.) To give YOU a three-fold testimony from my own life that Jesus gives you dreams and He will bring them to fruition.  If you will trust and follow Him, I promise you that He will always bring you a tree of life.


Whether you are waiting for your desired spouse, the desire of the right job, the desire of seeing your kids become successful, no matter what desire resides in your heart - I promise you, you have a God who loves you and longs to fulfill that desire.



John 10:10 - The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows).



Yep,

A Fulfilled, Mr. Hill

Proverbs 12:4

"A wife of noble character is her husband's crown."

I have truly obtained favor from the Lord.  I am a blessed man.



Mr. Hill

Blogging Love

I love blogs.

Blogs provide a space for creativity, growing, community, ranting, skill developing, skill bragging, and the list goes on and on.

I love blogs because they never cease to amaze me. I believe sometimes the devil can trick you into believing that if you surround yourself by other peoples thoughts then you will have no thoughts of your own. In some cases that might be true if you are extremely unsure of yourself and other people's atmospheres affect yours therefore preventing you from being stable. Recently I have been so inspired to be more me because other people are being more them. I love reading about other peoples passions - even if I am totally not passionate about them. I love seeing how people are growing and creating because it inspires me to want to pursue excellence.

I totally believe that is how God wants creativity to be. The more creativity is shared the more original people can become. God is the Creator of creation and I truly believe He loves it when His kids are creative. I truly believe God wants to release more and more creativity into His church and I think finally people are starting to earnestly desire it.

John Bevere and Joyce Meyer always say that Christians should be the most excellent in whatever it is that they do. Whether it is teaching or engineering or cooking or designing - it is God's plan that Christians have the most excellent and cutting edge ideas. I love that. Unfortunately that is not always the case because legalistic religion tends to stifle the creative because creativity cannot flourish where there is no love. God wants to brag on his kids by giving us the best ideas, we just have to let Him pour himself into us and let Him change us to look more like Jesus. The great thing about all of us looking like Jesus is that every single one of us will look totally different and be the most excellent at what He has anointed us to do!

I love blogging. I love people. I love Jesus. I love becoming more like Jesus so I look more like me :)