Your Own Jesus: A God Insistent on Making It Personal
5/5
()
About this ebook
Mark Hall
Mark Hall is a true storyteller and a teacher with a heart for ministry. He is lead singer and songwriter for the Grammy Award-winning band Casting Crowns, whose first three albums have sold nearly four million copies. He has been in ministry nearly twenty years and has served at Eagle's Landing First Baptist Church in McDonough, Georgia, for the last eight years. Mark admits he’d be overwhelmed by life’s demands were it not for his wife of nineteen years, Melanie, who also serves as Casting Crowns’ road manager. Even on tour, Mark and Melanie homeschool their four children: John Michael, Reagan, Zoe, and Hope.
Read more from Mark Hall
Thrive: Digging Deep, Reaching Out Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Well: Why Are So Many Still Thirsty? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThrive Student Edition: Digging Deep, Reaching Out Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFight for Their Hearts: Hope and Help for Every Dad Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPartnering With the CIO: The Future of IT Sales Seen Through the Eyes of Key Decision Makers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Your Own Jesus
Related ebooks
Fresh Power: What Happens When God Leads and You Follow Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Destiny Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Chosen: Come and See: a novel based on Season 2 of the critically acclaimed TV series Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5You're Either Walking The Walk Or Just Running Your Mouth! Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFaith: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWe Spanked God: Biblical Thoughts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLoved by God Devotional: 52 Encouraging Reminders That You Are Seen, Known, and Free Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSecret Freedom: How to Fly Again and Gain Freedom from Keeping Secrets Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Chosen: And I Will Give You Rest: a novel based on Season 3 of the critically acclaimed TV series Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGod of the Towel: Knowing the tender heart of God Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mirror Mirror...Am I Beautiful? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLet Me Have My Son Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKennedy Stern Christian Suspense Complete Box Set (Books 1-9) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hope for a Woman’s Heart: 52 Encouraging Devotions Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFeathers from My Nest Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiving Somewhere Between Estrogen and Death Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTime to Rejoice: Devotions Celebrating God's Love Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAge of Crowns: Pursuing Lives Marked by the Kingdom of God Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIrresistible Invitation 40 Day Reading Book: Responding to the Extravagant Heart of God Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Beckoning Candle Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Pilgrim's Progress for the 21st Century: A Modern Adaptation of the John Bunyan Classic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnderstanding Purpose: Women of Faith Study Guide Series Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReformission: Reaching Out without Selling Out Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When It Hurts to Hope: Honest Conversations about Living with Unmet Longing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOvertaken Unawares: What You Need to Know About the Rapture, the Antichrist, and the Book of Revelation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDivided We Stand: How to Love When We Disagree Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFaith Unraveled Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRaw Faith: What Happens When God Picks a Fight Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5You Were Made for More Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fresh Faith: What Happens When Real Faith Ignites God's People Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
YA Religious For You
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Soul as Cold as Frost: The Winter Souls Series, #1 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5They Both Die at the End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Crown as Sharp as Pines: The Winter Souls Series, #3 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Very Large Expanse of Sea Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Miseducation of Cameron Post Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Circle Maker Student Edition: Dream Big. Pray Hard. Think Long. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Healer's Apprentice Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Case for Christ Student Edition: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Story of Jesus: Teen Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Upside of Falling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Philippians: A Double-Edged Bible Study Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Blackout: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cross and the Switchblade: The True Story of One Man's Fearless Faith Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Chaos Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seedfolks Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Real Name is Hanna Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rumble Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Road to Nowhere Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5We Can't Keep Meeting Like This Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Awakening of Malcolm X: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Watcher in the Woods Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vivid: Color Theory, #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Recommended for You Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Power of a Praying Teen Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Radiant: His Light, Your Life for Teen Girls and Young Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Welcome to Adulting Survival Guide: 42 Days to Navigate Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Your Own Jesus
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Are you a believer? Do you have a passion for a closer walk? Have you noticed in other believers something you just don’t enjoy, yet?You might need “Your Own Jesus“.In Youth Pastor, Contemporary Christian Singer and Songwriter Mark Hall’s new book, “Your Own Jesus: A God Insistent on Making It Personal“, you will find yourself laughing, sometimes wincing, but delighting in this read.Revelation 12:11 states “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.“This is an invitation book, an overcoming book, that speaks to the fact that so many of us know Jesus but only from afar but not up close and personal.The introduction and chapter titles bring the reader to remembrance many of the Casting Crown songs and lyrics providing more detail into the thoughts that produced these songs.Mark Hall speaks to this point with passion and with urgency. The stories and episodes in this book are poignant and sincere. * Walking us through Psalm 1 (his personal life verse(s)) is astonishingly accurate and describes the ’slow fade’ is a process. * His story of preparing youth leaders prior to a youth camp should cause all leaders to think about their own sin before presenting themselves to minister in any capacity to another. * The oak tree illustration identifies the depth and richness of a close walk with our Savior is necessary to combat gusty lies of the enemy.It is not a work of theology as some would characterize theology. It is work of testimony and in so takes the reader into biblical doctrine in a much more personal way.I enjoyed many of the thought provoking quotes such as… * “I have a saved spirit but I still think with a lost brain.” * “He was listening to the still wrong voice.” * “If you are the only christian you know without sin, you are already in the sitting in the seat of the scoffer.”A delightful, deep, very illustrative book that causes the reader to consider we cannot live off the FAITH of another no more than we can live the LIFE of another.An added bonus is the discussion guide at the end of the book. Youth workers, Sunday School Teachers, and any other church leader could benefit greatly from this book.
1 person found this helpful
Book preview
Your Own Jesus - Mark Hall
INTRODUCTION
WHY WE NEED
OUR OWN JESUS
THIS MORNING, I AWOKE EXHAUSTED FROM THE weirdest dream. I was slogging through a battlefield, fighting some unidentified enemy in a war without explanation.
So I was already drained when I realized I couldn’t eat breakfast because some buddies and I were starting a fast today. It seemed like such a good idea a few days ago. All of this was bouncing around in my head as I got into my new car only to remember it doesn’t have AM radio. I’m trying to wean myself off talk radio because it tells me a thousand times over that the world is going to pot. Great. Another fast on an already difficult morning.
Then I reached my office at Eagle’s Landing First Baptist Church and encountered a secretary who wasn’t wearing her customary smile. She pointed at her watch and told me I was late in placing my first phone call for a series of scheduled media interviews. That only reminded me I needed some time to work on new songs for the next album. Then there’s the upcoming tour…
If a barometer could measure the degree of being flustered, my needle would have been nearing the red side.
Yet at some point during the first interview I started thinking, Man, God is good. Shut up and deal with this. This is awesome. I started talking about everything God is doing with Casting Crowns and with our ministry at church, and I got pumped. Later, I ran into someone who asked, Hey, what do you think about your record being number two in the Billboard 200?
All I could say was, That’s pretty awesome,
but inside I was doing cartwheels and praising the Lord. My tense morning was a distant memory. Life was good.
Then came the email.
I learned of a problem with one of the kids in our student ministry, and my heart sank. Right about then, someone showed up for another big appointment I had forgotten about, and a crammed day lost another hour. I found myself feeling gravity again.
So I’ve been up and down from the moment I awoke. All of this happened today. And it’s only 11:00 a.m.
I sure am glad I have my own Jesus. If I didn’t have my own personal walk with him, my life would be one giant vat of emotion, a tempest tossing me from one whim to the next. Which is why I have learned I need my own Jesus—my own relationship with the Lord of all creation. I can’t live by what I feel but by the truth God’s Word reveals.
This last line may sound familiar because it’s part of the bridge in East to West
—a song I wrote about learning to accept and live in the reality of God’s forgiveness. The lyrics describe where I’ve been in my walk with Jesus over the past few years. No matter how many times my old life comes haunting, God calls me to rest on his truth and not on what I feel or think.
As Christians, we can’t live by what we feel or go off our gut, because it is rotten (Philippians 3:19). We have to live by truth. God has been constantly reminding me lately that his Word is truth. And truth is truth. It doesn’t only become truth when we start believing it. Truth just is—for everybody everywhere and at all times.
I try to rest in that fact and not in how I feel about it or what it means to me. Who cares what the Bible means to me? We need to know what it means. That’s where I have to allow God to redefine my thinking. He tells us in Romans 12:2 not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. What always gets me about this verse is he’s telling believers we still need to be transformed. It means I have a saved spirit but I still think with a lost brain, and slowly but surely my mind has to be transformed. Such transformation comes but one way—by truth. By his Word.
Knowing What You Believe
Back in 1998, one of my former students called me a few months into his freshman year in college. He attended an institution of higher learning, yet he wanted answers to a kind of test he didn’t expect.
Man, I need help,
he said, his voice almost a quiver. These professors are pounding me. The entire culture here is mocking everything I ever heard you say.
He spent the next several minutes asking questions, though one unsettled me more than any of the others. He told the story of an assertion someone made in class that left him too befuddled to reply, which is why he had called me for help.
Now, what do I believe about that again?
he asked.
Less than a year after leaving the cozy spiritual nest of our church group, where everyone shared the same beliefs and lingo, he was facing the white-hot furnace of a hostile universe and its ungodly worldviews. And he folded like paper in fire.
He didn’t have his own Jesus.
I’m not saying he hadn’t experienced salvation; he simply didn’t have a meaningful connection to a living Lord through his own intimate fellowship. The walk, what little existed, wasn’t personal. Reading between his worry lines, I could hear his confession: Mark, I don’t really have my own beliefs. I just have yours, and you’re not here. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. Your Jesus didn’t come to college with me.
At first, I wondered whether this young man needed some instruction in apologetics to inform his answers in an ungodly environment. The more he talked, and the more I thought about it, I concluded he needed something else, something deeper than quick answers from a book or enrollment in a discipleship course. He needed his own Jesus, his own nurtured, daily fellowship with the one true God. He wasn’t cultivating his own faith, much less living off of it.
Learning a Few Lessons
Recently, I’ve been learning some hard lessons. First, I can’t forge spiritual transformation or growth. I’m not the Holy Spirit. I can teach biblical truths and try to reach people through song, but I can’t make someone listen or even care—let alone change. My responsibility is to tell the truth in love as God grants the opportunity.
Second, many of us believers, even longtime members of the body of Christ, have genuine faith but parasitic practices. Sometimes our only experiences with God have trickled down secondhand from the lives of more mature believers. What we know of an authentic walk with God actually belongs to someone else—it isn’t grounded in our own experience of God.
This book was generated as I asked myself—as I now ask you—some difficult questions. Is your walk with Jesus Christ characterized by personal faith, personal prayer, personal study, and personal disciplines? Or do you get by with the overflow from more mature Christians?
Do you have your own Jesus?
Perhaps reading these words makes you uncomfortable. The notion sounds almost heretical.
Your own Jesus.
Yet the longer I walk with and serve Jesus in the local church, the more crucial the question seems. Every believer must have his or her own Jesus, for Jesus is the only way to salvation, peace, and contentment, both in this world and the next.
It sounds weird. It sounds like I’m insisting you find your own way, as though there are as many versions of Jesus out there as there are people. In fact, there is only one—and he is the only true way (John 14:6), and he is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8). What has multiplied is the number of fragmented, faulty, human-generated Jesus versions.
This is precisely why you must have your own Jesus—your own personal walk with the one true Jesus.
Everything in life stems from our walk with God. We need our own, everyday, walking-around friendship with God. Just him. I’m using your own Jesus
to convey just how much God insists on the personal.
Your pastor can pour into you. Your small group leader can pour into you. Your favorite band can pour into you. All of these folks are terrific, and they’ll encourage you in your walk with Jesus—but you will have nothing more than empty religion until you develop your own friendship with the Lord. You can learn from others, but they can’t live your life for you.
You must pursue Christ for yourself. You must find your own Jesus.
The Jesus.
Finding the Rhythm of God’s Heartbeat
The apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all
(4:4-6).
If we stop reading there, however, we miss a key component. The next verse clues us into the truth that Jesus, the one God
to whom Paul refers, must be ours in a personal way: "But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift" (Ephesians 4:7, emphasis mine). The passage’s context speaks to the uniqueness of each believer as God apportions spiritual gifts for the benefit of the church. God made you unique because he wants a fellowship that is uniquely for the two of you—Jesus and you.
But how do we maintain a fellowship with God that makes us his voice, his arms and feet and hands?
The question contains the answer. Fellowship. Communion with God. The personal disciplines of Bible study, prayer, obedience, and practicing the presence of the Holy Spirit. There are no shortcuts.
Yet this book is about more than reinforcing essential spiritual disciplines. I want us to avoid something that will short-circuit our time with God. I want to help us learn to recognize and overcome the seemingly incessant opportunities for compromise, great and small, that neutralize so many believers.
Compromise is the assassin of fellowship with God. We’ll learn how to spot potential compromise and, through growth in the Lord, wade through the muck and emerge resembling Jesus rather than feeling so guilty and hopeless.
All of it is designed to inspire us to find the rhythm of God’s heartbeat, to obey God’s bidding even in the simplest of matters, and to submit to a Lord who died for us and asks us to live for him. I can think of no more important subject for the church today, because as go the individual walks of believers, so goes the body of Christ.
I’m so passionate about this subject that I urge you to visit www.castingcrowns.com, select Blogs,
and click on Mark Hall’s Blog.
Take some time in the coming days to supplement your reading of this book with a series of videos titled Crowns’ Camp.
They touch on many of this book’s themes.
And as we’re told in John 15:5, Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. He grafted us in, each branch a unique part of the growing vine. It has to be individual. It has to be real. It has to be personally cultivated. You have to be able to call Jesus your own.
CHAPTER 1
EXPLAINING
THE WIND
East to West
I can’t live by what I feel
But by the truth your Word reveals
I’m not holding on to you
But you’re holding on to me
THE GUN FELT AS COLD AS DECEMBER IN MY hand. I could see my friend ordering a cone in the yo-gurt store while I sat alone in his car with a lonely heart, my dark thoughts, and his gun.
She had dumped me. The holiday