Secret Church

---

Ann Voskamp & Sophie Hudson on The Cross and Everyday Life: Part 1 of 2 Posted: 09 Apr 2014 10:05 PM PDT Ann Voskamp and Sophie Hudson recently sat down with Pastor David and his wife, Heather, to talk about a number of topics surrounding this year’s Secret Church topic, “The Cross and Everyday Life.”  Ann is the author of One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are and she blogs at “A Holy Experience.” Sophie is the author of A Little Salty to Cut the Sweet: Southern Stories of Faith, Family, and Fifteen Pounds of Bacon and she blogs over at “BooMama.” Ann and Sophie each bring a unique perspective to this discussion in their respective roles as wife, mother, author, and blogger. We decided to post their answers in two parts – Ann’s post is below and Sophie’s will appear tomorrow. In this first post, we asked Ann several questions about how the gospel impacts her everyday life. So Ann… What are you working on these days? (family, church, writing, etc.) Ann: There’s the raising and teaching of our 6 exuberant kids, including 4 teenagers, and then there’s the attempt to go deeper with the families in the small group that we host and lead. I’m also studying Scripture and writing the next book out of that time of studying. But you know, as our family has been reading and memorizing the book of John this year, I keep returning to John 6:29 (Amplified Bible): “Jesus replied, ‘This is the work (service) that God asks of you: that you believe in the One Whom He has sent [that you cleave to, trust, rely on, and have faith in His Messenger].’” Jesus is saying that our realest work always is, no matter what we’re doing with our hands, to trust Him. Unless I choose again and again today to trust Jesus, what I am practicing is atheism, not faith. So no matter what the work is, the real work is to trust God and His unwavering, ultimate goodness and the complete and saving work of Christ on the cross. That’s the work everyday: I. Trust. You. Jesus. You've previously been involved with Secret Church through live-tweeting. What makes the topic "The Cross and Everyday Life" so important? Ann: I will never forget the words David Platt preached the Sunday I was at Brook Hills, only a few weeks before Christmas. He said, "Your only hope for joy, your only hope for peace, your only hope for comfort, your only hope for strength and your only hope for love in this life … is found in the cross of Jesus Christ. Your only hope in this life is found in the brutal, bloody, humiliation of a naked man on a wooden post. My hope is that you go out of this building clinging to the cross of Christ." And THAT is the crux of everything. Sometimes I wonder if we see the cross simply as our door into God’s presence instead of regarding it as our only air in God’s presence. We don’t get over the cross, but rather we spend a lifetime allowing God to get the cross into us. Christ said it on the cross: It is finished, and Christ finished it, but I am never finished with the cross. I need a cross-centered life if I am going to live the Christ-filled life. The cross is the sign of God's lavish, unfathomable affection for us, and we need the cross daily because of these two realities: 1) How else can I remember that He loves me? 2) How else can I remember how to die daily? We need a place of execution in our lives if we're ever to rightly execute a life of faith. Bottom line: If my life isn't cross-centered, my life is off-centered, and the warping spin leaves me sick. My life needs centri-faith force and the centrality of the cross is the force that holds together my universe. Grace is my gravity and the Cross is my cosmos. If everything in my world is spinning out of control, is it because I've lost the centrality of the cross? The Cross isn’t just the kindling that ignites our Christian life … the cross is the very fuel of all of our life. If the the cross of Christ isn’t your everyday fuel, the fire you warm your heart around, then you grow cold. Your faith goes nowhere. So God never moves us beyond the cross; He moves more deeply into the cross, and then we are so moved by this grace that we move out into the world. In One Thousand Gifts you've written about being grateful for God's everyday gifts. How do you see this idea overlapping with this year's Secret Church theme? How does gratitude fit in with the gospel? Ann: I read in Scripture that the gospel shapes us in two fundamental ways, much like what we see happening at the gathering of the Last Supper: 1) The shape of the Christ-life is eucharistic — Jesus takes the bread and does what? He gives thanks, eucharisteo in Greek (the original biblical language). So the shape of the Christ-life is firstly eucharistic, full of gratitude for the incomprehensible grace of the constant goodness of God, thankfulness for the saving grace of Christ, endless gratefulness for the relentless love and companionship of Jesus and His tender sanctification of our souls. Because of Christ, the call on our life is nothing short of wholesale gratitude. 2) We see how, at the Last Supper, the shape of the Christ-life is secondly cruciform. The shape of our lives should be cross-like, full of cross-like sacrifice. Jesus took that bread, gave thanks for it, and then broke it and gave it. How does our everyday life look like Christ did in that moment of breaking the bread, symbolic of His body, and of giving Himself away? How do we, on a daily basis, embody the cross, the sacrificial love that we’ve experienced, and then pass it on to a hurting world? If our lives don’t look eucharistic, full of gratitude, or cruciform, sacrificially shaped like the cross, then how will we bring the good news to the world? What do everyday routines and responsibilities look like for you as the wife of a farmer, a mom to six, a homeschooler, and a writer? Gritty. Loud. A bit of a crucible. A gift. We have 6 kids, 8 to 18. All the kids work for 2-3 hours each morning in the barn doing barn chores, taking care of hundreds of sows and piglets. Then they come in for breakfast, then morning routines, which fold into math, Latin, grammar, and spelling. After lunch, we have read-alouds covering literature, history, science, Shakespeare, poetry, and then piano practices. I write in the margins, the fringe hours, early morning, late at night. By far, the routine that most anchors our days and shapes us is that we eat around the table together three meals a day, and we never, ever leave the table without chewing The Real Bread. If you sit down to eat, you never leave the table without eating Words — you have time for Real Food. Because we just came to realize that the food served on plates … is actually dead food. The food we eat has to be kept in the fridge like a corpse, or it would rot. The food we serve on plates is dead food. But when we eat Scripture, we eat the only real food, for Christ is Living Bread. We are eating He who sustains all things, body and soul. When we eat His Words, we eat of the eternal Word. Deuteronomy 8:3 says, ” … man does not live by bread only, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Amplified Bible). The Word of God is what is living and active; it’s a Word that can revive the hungry, and when we eat the Book, the cells in the body, they rejuvenate, enlivened with the true strength. Eating Scripture three times a day as a family around the table … that’s the everyday routine, the one spiritual habit that has most changed us. A body, famished, needs to eat and there's only one way to eat life. This was actually so paramount to us that we had a table built for our family (by the same carpenter who built the house I grew up in). The table was built out of barn beams and it has eight drawers around all around it, so each person has a drawer at the table with their Bible in it. So when we are done eating, each child opens his/her drawer and takes out real food and we read Scripture together around the table. Because really, to live Christ-centric is to live Word-Centric. –Stay tuned for tomorrow’s interview with Sophie Hudson. For more information or to register for Secret Church 14, “The Cross and Everyday Life,” go here.

Erwin Brothers Interview, Part 2 Posted: 09 Apr 2014 07:12 AM PDT Yesterday, we posted part 1 of an interview with the Erwin brothers about how the gospel affects their work as filmmakers. Today is part 2… Be sure you check out their upcoming movie, Mom’s Night Out. Also, we invite you to join us 9 days from now for a the Secret Church simulcast with David Platt as we dive into “The Cross and Everyday Life,” a topic that will cover the affect of the cross on both work and entertainment.

You are subscribed to email updates from Secret Church Blog To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610