Why I Write This Blog: From Understanding to Worship

As a rule, whenever one of my friends has a blog, I'll follow it. I feel better telling everyone to read my blog if I return the favor. But the thing about most of my friends' blogs is...they're inactive. The last post was several months or even years ago. Somehow my blog has bucked this trend and has managed to be more prolific than many of the big-shot bloggers I follow, even with a full-time job on the side, if not in post frequency then in raw word count. (Quantity, not quality) What is the reason for this? What, besides the fact that my thoughts have to end up somewhere, keeps me posting on this blog as if I were getting paid per word? Two things:

1. Helping God, the Bible, and the gospel make more sense to me so I can appreciate them more.
2. Helping God, the Bible, and the gospel make more sense to others so I can appreciate them more.

So often teaching and preaching draw a distinction between genuine spirituality and dry "intellectual exercise", a distinction I think is wholly unwarranted. Coming of age in a genuinely Biblical, God-and-gospel-centered church like Hope Community, I quickly internalized its message of the centrality of the gospel. But "the gospel" was, in my mind, still something of an abstraction. It seemed to me, at least partly, based on the teaching I got in college, that the point of the gospel was to share and spread the gospel--which is circular and ridiculous! Because my understanding of Christianity was shallow, I was living it weakly.

Maybe it's just part of my nature as a deep thinker, but I need to know very clearly and deeply what I believe and why for it to have an effect on my life. I believe it's not wrong to question God, at least with the right motives, because the more we understand of Him, the more we'll want to worship Him in our lives. This blog is my attempt to build that greater understanding, one post at a time, for myself and for others. I hope it helps you.