Fighting for Identity (Ephesians 6:10-18)

I'm a big fan of the warfare metaphor when thinking/talking about our spiritual life. I have been for as long as I remember. I know some people that think things like, "A relationship with Jesus shouldn't be a violent fight, it should be a peaceful walk in the park." I like that thought process too, except for the whole problem of sin and Satan. Can't really walk in the park peacefully when Satan might be behind that tree up there waiting to lure you into a trap. That's why I like the term "spiritual warfare."

I have a hunch that my fascination with this term probably comes from my high school youth pastors' admitted obsession with Ephesians 6:10-18. I'm not joking when I say we talked about those verses at youth group at least twice a semester.

Ephesians 6:10-18 says:

10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. 

11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 

12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 

13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. 

14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place,

15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 

16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 

17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.

I absolutely love how this talks about our walk with the Lord. It's a warning to be cautious, an exhortation to preach the Word, and an encouragement to stand for God.

This has all been extremely relevant to me recently. I feel like I'm in a fight to continually find my identity in what Christ has done for me, and not in what others think about me (or how I think of myself for that matter). Reading these verses, I remember that God has given me the tools to fight this evil. I remember that only in Christ and in the Gospel can I find the protection necessary to prevent myself from self-destructive thoughts or actions. I remember that the same power that resurrected Christ from the dead is working in me to resurrect my life.

And in that I can truly find my identity.

- Joe

One More Week. Then It's All Over.

Hey all,

Band #3 at the Rock Fall Retreat.

I want to start this off by apologizing to anyone that follows me on Twitter or is my friend on Facebook. This next week is going to be rough for you. I am going to blow up your feeds with posts about 5 of the coolest dudes in the world and how much I'm going to miss each one of them. Band #3 has been one of the best things that's happened to me during college, and since most of the band is moving on after this semester (i.e. graduating on time), we will be playing for the final time as a band this Sunday at the Rock church service.

These five dudes (Travis, Seth, Sean, Mike, and even Daniel Boone) are all amazing men of God. They sacrifice so much of their time to lead the church in worship. They don't do it to look cool (although most of them do anyways). They don't do it to show off (but have you seen how good Mike is at guitar?). They do it because they genuinely love Jesus and desire to worship Him with the talents they've been given.

Please, please, please join us for a campus-wide worship night. You can find more information about it on the Facebook event page, found here.

One more week. Then it's all over. Band #3 will no longer be the 6 of us. But with a little luck and a lot of Facebook messages, I know these 5 dudes will always be a part of my life.

Sorry for being super lame.

- Joe

My Story Part 2

This post is a continuation of one of my earlier posts, which you can read here.

When I left off in my last post, I was detailing how I gave my life to Christ at Turkey Hill Ranch Bible Camp, and how I finally felt like I fit in somewhere.

After this experience, I decided that the church my parents were attending wasn't really for me, so I went looking elsewhere for a church home. My buddy Josh, the same guy that originally invited me to Turkey Hill, invited me to come along with him to his church's youth group. I was hesitant, but ultimately decided to go with him.

Youth group quickly became the center of my world. I loved every minute of it. I quickly became infatuated (sorry for the old person word) with a girl there, started playing music on the worship team, and hanging out with youth group kids as much as possible. I had become the stereotypical youth group Christian teen.

As I grew older and progressed into high school, music began to gain more and more of my focus. I started a band with Josh, either played bass or electric guitar or lead worship every Wednesday night at youth group, and played bass most Sunday mornings at the main adult church service. It was also around this time (probably senior year of high school), that I began to get frustrated with what I saw as a lack of motivation on the part of so many people at church. But I didn't really express that to anyone, at least not yet.

I started at Mizzou in the fall of 2009, and my life honestly started to quickly go downhill at that point. I got a really sweet job at a local bank, but this really just took my focus more off of God than it already was. My frustrations boiled over into full blown contempt during the summer after my freshman year, and I left the church without looking back.

I wasn't exactly done with God at that point, and I still considered myself a Christian, but I pretty much decided that if I was going to keep doing the whole "faith" thing, it was going to be on my own terms, without anyone else's input or help. Fall semester of my sophomore year became all about having fun and doing what I wanted to do. I was making ridiculously good money at the bank (especially for a 19 year old kid), and I started blowing it all on video games and other worthless pursuits. Around this time, I also started drinking on a fairly regular basis, something I had sworn I would never do just years before.

And that became my identity. I was all about music and hanging out and doing whatever seemed fun at the moment. Now I don't want to lead anyone on and act like I was partying all the time and just getting plastered. I drank as an escape, and it was at most once a week, even at its height. But I looked to that to feel better. I was broken, spiritually and emotionally, and I looked for acceptance and identity in everything and anything besides God.

But it was at that point, like it is in so many of these stories, that God started reeling me back in. He used a fight with a roommate to get me to try church again, even though it was only because of spite that I went (incidentally, I also chose the Rock spitefully because of a conversation I had with the leadership of my old church that painted it in a negative light, whether that's what this person meant to do or not). I immediately met Chris Swift and Travis, and joined their Canvas Group. A month or so after attending my first Rock service, I got drunk for the last time, and didn't drink again after that day until I turned 21 about a year later. I don't even really know why I stopped. I've never really even thought about it before. I guess God just took that desire away from me.

One of my favorite parts about Colorado LT: my band.

Anyways, I could not have been more blessed through these experiences. God showed me where He wanted me, and I have found a home in this church. I play bass on the worship team with 5 of my best friends every third Sunday. I am an Equipper (student leader) in the best Canvas Group on campus (Plaza, aka the "hipster" CG). I attended Colorado Leadership Training last summer, which is lead by my pastor at the Rock, John Drage. And I just absolutely love every second of growing and learning in the context of my church family.

Thanks for reading guys. If you would like to hear an unabridged version of this story, hit me up. And I'm always up for hearing your story as well. If there's one thing I learned last summer, it's that there is absolutely nothing as beautiful as the story of God's redemptive power and grace demonstrated through the saving of one of His children.

My Story, Part 1

This past summer at Colorado LT, we spent quite a bit of time discussing our stories and how important they are to us as Christians, not only because they define who we are as one of God's people, but no matter what we did or didn't do in our lives, they show the redemptive work of Christ through us. In my down time during this break from school, I've been looking back at some of my notes and journal entries from LT, and while reviewing how much it meant to me personally to share my story with the people in Colorado, I decided to use this blog as an avenue to share with a slightly larger audience. So here it goes.

I was born into a Christian household with extremely loving parents that are to this day still my biggest supporters. But I still struggled with self-doubt and self-worth issues growing up. I had a physical condition called ptosis in my right eyelid that caused my eye to always appear shut. It's amazing how an innocent question "Can you see out of that eye?" from an unknowing child can completely and totally devastate someone's world, but I experienced that on a daily basis in elementary school. I thought all that people could see was my deformity, and I felt totally unlovable. It was an extremely lonely place to be in.

This is what I looked like back then. I was a stud.

But then I went with one of my buddies for a week at a place called Turkey Hill Ranch Bible Camp. It was there that I first heard about the real Jesus, the one who loves me and died for me. I couldn't get enough of this guy. I wanted to hear all about Him. In my somewhat undeveloped 12-year old mind, I thought the best thing was that Jesus loved me despite my physical "deformities," but I quickly learned that the true miracle of grace is that Christ loves me despite my distance from God because of sin and my spiritual "deformities." My counselor, a guy named AB, walked me through accepting Christ on the Thursday of that week, and my real life began that summer day.

But the next few years were obviously difficult, as they were and are for many young teenagers, but I finally had a place to fit in. I knew that Jesus loved me, and I loved him, so I didn't care that I was super awkward. I started going to my buddy's youth group at his church, and the two of us started playing music together. I joined the worship band shortly after joining the church, and I really felt like this was where I belonged.

I'll get into the rest of my story, including my journey at this church during my high school years and how I came to be at The Rock in subsequent posts. Like I said, we spent a lot of time on our stories this summer, and the full version I wrote out is about 8 pages single-spaced, and I add things every time I look at it, so I don't want to try to cram it all into one post.

Thanks for reading.

13 Goals for 2013

Ok. Once again, very similar to my 5 Favorite Memories of 2012 post, this one is pretty self explanatory. These are my 13 goals for 2013 (in order of importance... sort of). Some are serious. A couple are deadly serious.


1. Finish the year with more Twitter followers than Seth. We both have 143 as of this second. It's like the Alabama-Notre Dame of Twitter, except neither one of us is stupid and we're both pretty bad at football.

Side note: Follow me @joelangworthy. You probably will regret it. I don't say anything worthwhile.

2. Actually graduate from college. Right now I'm on track to graduate in December of this year, I just want to keep that going. I love Mizzou. But I don't love school.

3. Beat Matty Ice in NCAA Football 13 consistently. And I mean with both of us playing as SEC teams. This is a big deal in the Cotton House. A really big deal.

4. Finally eat a HBCB from Whataburger. Schwenker has been tempting me since I went to Whataburger for the first time with him before the A&M game. It's gotta happen soon.

5. Vegas Invitational. Mizzou's playing, so we're going. Matty Ice, Seth and myself. Enough said.

6. Do some sort of "country" activity with Salem. Hunting, fishing, drinking moonshine, picking some bluegrass tunes while sitting in a rocking chair on a porch, I don't even care. I haven't even thought about it that much.

7. Attend a true away football game. I've been to bowl games. I've been to tons of neutral site games. But I've never been to a true away game. Ole Miss anyone?

8. Watch all 6 Star Wars movies in one day. Or get a girlfriend. Cause we all know I can't do both.

9. Find out what edamame is. I'm just curious.

10. Give Seth a cool nickname. Matt is Matty Ice, Ben is Schwenker, Steven is Salem. Everybody has one. Except Seth.

11. Figure out why Bob Stoops is allowed to be on that stupid "Hello" AT&T commercial. That's gotta be some sort of NCAA violation right.

12. Something clever and funny. Coming up with 13 goals is really hard. You try it.

13. Survive until 2014. Between Vegas, Seth's bachelor party, and constantly saying things that piss people off, I have a good chance of dying in 2013. But I really don't want to. So it's a legitimate goal.

5 Favorite Memories from 2012

Thought I'd go ahead and do one of these. Pretty self explanatory.

5. All the Mizzou games I went to with my guys Seth and Matt. Watching Mizzou win their last Big 12 Championship at the Sprint Center (Dutch Oven West) in Kansas City, MISSOURI. The Braggin' Rights game in St. Louis. Every football game, even the losses. I hope we can keep doing this every year guys. For real.

Our seats at the Big 12 Championship.

4. Getting to be a part (albeit a small part) of Seth asking Melissa to marry him. Just being there that day was amazing. Going to the columns that afternoon with him and Matt and Casey to scout out the best place to hide people and to take pictures. Hiding by Middlebush to alert people when they were coming. The party afterwards. It was all awesome. Stoked to party with them this summer at the wedding!

3. Band #3 and everything we did together. Travis, Seth, Mike, Sean, Tashia, Cindy, Daniel, and anyone else that ever played with us are all awesome. I love those people more than anything and if I could somehow play with all of them for the rest of my life I would. The last service of spring semester (where we debuted a song Trav and I wrote) Fall Retreat, and Monday Night Worship all stand out in my mind. Band #3 is pure awesome.

Band #3 at the Rock Fall Retreat 2012.

2. Spring Break at Massanutten with some awesome people. I went to Virginia/Washington D.C. with 6 other people over Spring Break, and it was fairly epic. We went hiking a couple days in the Appalachians, saw a ton of really cool historical stuff in D.C., toured the Capitol, and had some great times just chilling at the resort. Travis, Ben, Megan, Tashia, Jack, and Drake. I love you guys.

The 3 best looking people on the trip hanging out with Abraham Lincoln.

1. Colorado LT 2012. I don't even know how to describe this experience. Jesus. The people. The mountains. Worship. Learning. This summer had all of that and all of it in droves. I grew more in my relationship with God in those 3 months than I had in the 9 years of being a Christian before that. I'll always remember going to McDonalds with Steven and Jason, playing music with Stephen and Reyn and Josh and Michelle, hanging out with Josie and Michelle and Merle and Ben and Eli and Andrew and all the rest of my project group, swimming with John Drage really stupid early in the morning, working at the Joe Langworthy Memorial Golf Course (and playing it with Rob and Jason and Josh), and hanging out with Swift and playing Mario Kart at his cabin. Nothing could have been better for me this summer. I thank God every day for what I experienced out there.

My buddy Eli got baptized at the end of the summer. Praise Jesus!