KOPP DISCLOSURE: Inventory

Friday, November 17, 2017

Inventory

Kopp Disclosure

(John 3:19-21)

@#$%

"When you think you've arrived, it's time to start over."

(#11 from a non-best-selling book)

@#$%

Since a week with Jan, Eugene, Chuck, Jeff, and Ken along Flathead Lake in Montana back in October 2011, I've confessed I'm just scratching the surface of my relationship with Jesus and inching closer to the kinda undershepherd that He had in mind when The Rev. Harold F. Mante (RIP) took me to ___ seminary as an 8th grader because he discerned...

I've written a lot about that born anothen and kairos moment that's archived and available by going to the right column of www.koppdisclosure.com.

As I look forward to the next two decades of life and ministry on the corner of Lincoln and Main in Belvidere, Illinois with a family of faith that I love more than they will ever acknowledge or appreciate, I think it's time to take a quick inventory of some recent conclusions, convictions, and...

@#$%

1. I'll never eat stewed tomatoes because they look like blood clots;

2. Concomitant to #1, there's a lot of freedom when you've got over four decades of pension credits piled up;

3. Isaiah 40:28-31 is real for anyone who has real intimacy with Jesus;

4. As a homiletics professor, there were some technical problems with one of the best sermons that I've ever heard. Surprisingly, it was at a recent presbytery meeting where the Spirit is often squeezed out by rules of order and ideology masquerading as Biblically Christocentric theology because of forgotten, ignored, defied, or pretended ordination promises. Anyway, proving Samuel right again that the heart and gut are more important to God than the head, the message was about loving Jesus by loving like Jesus and nobody really likes to hang out with people and churches that say they love Jesus but don't love like Jesus;

5. More than ever, I really want to be shown my errors by Jesus, Holy Scripture, and common sense so I can confess, repent, ask forgiveness, and have relationships restored with people who forgive because it's the only Christian thing to do and is one of the indicators of being homeward bound;

6. While cellular prayer, romance, Cubans, iron pony, 9 with Billy, and the truck that I gave up but will get back again before the parousia provide the kinda refueling necessary for an INTJ like moi, among my greatest pleasures are leading authentic-not-by-the-scripted-liturgies-of-1563 worship moins mindless and barking litanies and other contradictions of Matthew 15 and 23, helping someone develop the intimacy with Jesus that produces good stuff like Paul wrote about in Galatians 5, helping folks who grieve broken relationships in time to praise God for the overcoming of the wouldas and couldas and shouldas by grace through faith in Jesus that will be healed forever in heaven, shattering the sound of silence, salting, shining, and leavenating; and

7. I covet more time with my family that has sacrificed so much for so long because they have respected sometimes grudgingly what Pastor Mante discerned so many years ago.

@#$%

While I could be assassinated at any time by an Islamofascistnutball savage or somebody in town who's still mad at me for taking the church away from them and giving it back to Jesus or be done in by Grandpa Kopp's cancer genes, I am more psyched - I'll never forget the mean and nasty hater who left our church because she didn't like me saying I'm psyched for life because she's not which is too bad because I'd cherish the opportunity to help her find Jesus and get psyched for life instead being such a bummer to herself and anyone around her! - than ever to get closer to Jesus and then closer to...

Uh, BTW, this hasn't been about me.

This is about you.

I'm just like you; needing to take an inventory every once in a while to...

If you don't understand what I mean by that, hang out with Jesus and part of His family in any church that still worships and follows Him by the book.

@#$%