On Monday evening, my friends, Randy & Audrey Lundy, came up from Portland, Oregon in order to spend the better part of one day with my family and I. We had a great time together as I showed them a little bit of my life up here by meeting my family and some friends and by seeing the church and school that I grew up at.

On Tuesday, we drove up past Granite Falls and went hiking on the Robe Canyon Historic Trail. It wouldn’t a hike in Washington unless there was rain and we had a fair amount of it. But that rain made the whole landscape green and lush. The trail was very beautiful as it went along the Stillaguamish River and followed an old railroad that went into some tunnels.

Here are some pictures from the hike:

Yesterday, I listened to C.J. Mahaney preach a message at the recent New Attitude conference entitled Discern Your Heart. He spoke on idolatry, using several different approaches to get at the one point that Calvin makes in his Institutes when he says,

Scarcely a single person has ever been found who did not fashion for himself an idol or specter in place of God. Surely, just as waters boil up from a fast, full spring, so does an immense crowd of gods flow forth from the human mind, while each one, in wandering about with too much license, wrongly invents this or that about God himself. (Institutes, 1.V.12, pg.65)

From that he spoke on how the heart is an idol factory; it creates them by default and thus we must be on the look out for when and where they show up. He then gave suggestions for how we can identify the idols that may be in our heart and one of those ways that God designed to reveal our idols is testing. The test that is most difficult is the test of adversity because we are then in that moment at the loss of something and how we respond determines whether we are worshiping God or something else.

But the issue that really struck my heart was when he mentioned the test of prosperity. He says,

Most of us don’t think of prosperity as a test, but as pure gift. And it is a gift, but it is also a test. And certainly if we had to choose, we’d say, “I’ll have that test.” But do you know that it appears in Scripture the heroes of faith more often failed the test of prosperity than they did the test of adversity.

My life is somewhat comfortable right now. I have a great family, great church, great friends, and great job. There is nothing that I am even tempted to complain about and see all of it as a blessing from the hand of the Lord, and rightly so. But I must recognize that in the midst of this time of relative comfort and peace, that I am being tested to see if my heart truly clings to the Creator and not to His creation. It was a very fitting reminder for me; I pray it would be for you too.

You can download the messages from that conference here