WithoutWax.tv by Pete Wilson | Tag Archive | Mike Foster
Tag Archive - Mike Foster

Poisonous Root

January 23, 2012 in Spiritual Growth with 28 Comments

Hebrews 12:15 Look after each other so that none of you fails to receive the grace of God. Watch out that no poisonous root of bitterness grows up to trouble you, corrupting many.

You may be justified in your bitterness, but it still contaminates everything.

You may have every right to not forgive certain people in your life. But you need to know bitterness contaminates everything. It spreads far and wide and deep.

And maybe the most dangerous and destructive thing about bitterness is that it doesn’t remain isolated to the source of bitterness, but spreads to all of your relationships. Left unchecked it will ruin everything that is important to you.

I love what my friends, Mike Foster and Jud Wilhite wrote in Deadly Viper.

You see, when you don’t forgive someone, you let them park in your life forever. These people are like parasites that can suck the life right out of you and allow bitterness to rot you out. If you let these people and their actions haunt your thoughts, emotions, and spirit, you allow them to continually damage not only you, but those around you, too.

Almost everyday I come in contact with people who are allowing unforgiven anger and bitterness from their past to destroy them today. Unknowingly their unwillingness to forgive is impacting their marriage, the way they treat their kids and their attitude toward most everything in life.

I’m not going to pretend like forgiveness is always easy because we all know it isn’t. Some of you have been hurt in ways I can’t imagine.  Someone wounded you, or betrayed you or lied to you or maybe cheated you.  You’re afraid if you let go of the hurt, they get away with something.  And you’re right, to forgive you will pay a high cost.  In fact the only thing that will cost you more than forgiveness  is not forgiving someone.

I know you want to see them hurt back, but that desire is a weight or burden that actually becomes a part of you. You’ll carry that weight from relationship to relationship, from season to season and if you carry that bitterness and anger around long enough it will choke the joy out of your life.

It costs a lot to forgive. But to not forgive will eventually cost you your heart.

Scandalous Grace

November 16, 2010 in Spiritual Growth with 36 Comments

I’m so excited about my friend Mike Foster’s new book Gracenomics. I spent some time this weekend reading through it and over and over it reminded me of the man I desperately want to be. A man with a ministry that is described as exhibiting unexpected, excessive, and scandalous amounts of grace.

I love what Mike wrote in the book describing the People of the Second Chance movement:

Together we’re setting out to be the first in line to forgive.

We’re racing to release grudges.

We’re making room for those on life’s margins.

We’re raising our voices for the vulnerable.

We’re accepting the unacceptable.

We’re becoming the Red Cross relief team for the disasters in people’s personal lives.

We’re setting out to be the living, breathing PEZ dispenser of grace for our world.

Click our heads back and out pops forgiveness for our enemies. Pop us again you get healing words for the wounded. Click us once more to score friendship through devastating pain. Pop it back again and again and the response will always be a sweet delectable second chance. We are grace dispensers who practice second chance living.

Reading through this book I was reminded of just how much I love the idea of grace until it inconveniences me or gets in the way of my agenda. I have a lot more work to do in this area than I thought.

Do yourself a favor and pick up this book.

Get a hard copy HERE. Get an electronic copy HERE.

What do you think holds you back from exhibiting grace like you should?

10 Billion Tweets

March 20, 2010 in Random Fun with 69 Comments

Twitter just celebrated its 10 billionth tweet. That is a lot of tweets.

Thanks to Mike Foster I saw this amazing graphic which provides us a glance at the breakdown of Twitter’s first 10 billion tweets courtesy of social media consultant and Mashable contributor Muhammad Saleem.

Despite the fact this graph shows that close to half of all tweets are pointless babble I’m still in love with this current form of social media. I’m meeting people I would never have met and having conversations I would never get the chance to have any other way.

Do you tweet? If so give us your twitter name so we can all follow you.

1bntweets-small

My Problem Isn’t With Tiger, the Media, or His Sponsors

December 18, 2009 in God with 62 Comments

tiger-woods

Like many of you I’ve been unable to escape the constant media attention given to the Tiger Woods scandal. Does it seem ironic to anyone else that the media is giving Tiger such a hard time for living out the lifestyle they portray on almost every single television show they air?

But to be honest, my problem isn’t with the media outlets. They’re just doing what they do. Feeding ratings.

My problem isn’t with the sponsors who are either ditching Tiger or standing beside him. They’re just doing what they do. Making money.

My problem is with the millions of Christians (including myself) who have jumped right in and used this as an opportunity to throw stones.

I thought my friend, Mike Foster, wrote an absolutely amazing blog post on this topic a couple days ago. I couldn’t agree more with his suggestions (#3 alone I will never forget).

As People of the Second Chance, here are a few of my suggestions:

1. You have so many words that you can share in a day. Decide whether they will be about blessing or cursing someone.

2. When someone is caught in a scandal, I visualize two buckets that I can fill. I can add to the “Shame Bucket” or the “Second Chance Bucket.” Sometimes my first/easy/fun/human nature response is to fill the “Shame Bucket” so I have to work harder not to do that.

3. For all you online peeps…write your articles, blogs, tweets, and comments as if the person in crisis (and their family) were reading it. Why? Because they do! And the jokes, snarky comments, sloppy facts and flippant remarks hurt people. Instead, devote your computer keyboard to the restoration of people.

4. Refuse to participate in the gossip session around the water cooler. Or better yet, jump in and turn the conversation towards grace and second chances. BTW, just plan on being called a “buzz kill” and not invited back to any more social functions.

5. Realize we are either part of the judgment problem or the grace solution. But we can’t be both. So choose wisely.

What are your thoughts?