Evaluating 40 Days of Community

About Me

Hi! Thanks for stopping by! Please allow me introduce myself and give you a brief testimony. If you want to contact me, you can do so here.

My name is Ryan Schatz and I live in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada. I grew up in a good Christian home and have been attending church all my life. However, looking back I can see now that my Christian walk was sickly at best. Not only did I completely lack boldness in proclaiming the gospel and standing for truth, but I was shackled by various secret sins. My Christian walk could be characterized as a roller-coaster of emotional highs and lows; high on Sunday, ebbing lower during the week. At times I would feel like I was doing something good and God should be proud of me, but other times I frequently slipped right back into my old habits and not only felt horrible, but powerless to avert it. Truth be told, I believe that I named Jesus as the Lord of my life, but when the rubber met the road, there was really no difference between me and the average Joe except that I went to church on Sunday and he went to soccer practice.

As I moved into the corporate world, my heart became enamored with my newfound success which literally got the best of me. I began to focus my life on building my career, making money, setting myself up for a nice retirement, getting stuff and experiencing everything that I wanted to experience. The gospel was not my focus, and Jesus was not my Lord in my daily walk though I professed Him to be. Its hard to say this, but the end of it was that my profession of love was empty and ineffectual.

My life took a sharp turn in August of 2004 when, after reading some very frightening passages in the New Testament which challenged me to the core of my very salvation, a faithful itinerant pastor used the mirror of God’s law on me. It was through this exercise that it finally dawned on me through the working of the Holy Spirit what had been keeping me from giving my heart 100% over to God. I didn’t really understand to this point that I hadn’t done so, but the experience made it very clear to me that I was holding back and why. I thought I was 80% good and God simply back-filled the 20% that was bad. Truth be told, I had a pretty high view of myself… not uncommon since it was the world’s system that taught me to have a high self-esteem and turn a blind eye to my failures.

Perhaps another way to put it is that I always thought that my sin, my ‘missing the mark’ was simply cosmetic and that I was a pretty good person in comparison to some others. I hadn’t committed any of those nasty sins like killing someone or committing adultery. I was like the man who prayed to God and said, “Lord, thank you that I am not a horrible person like that murderer I saw on TV, or that adulterer over there. Thank you for bridging the gap for me and keeping me from being really bad.” But when I realized that God would judge me not just by external action or inaction, but by my inner life, this made me seriously reconsider my self evaluation. When I saw that hating someone was to God the same as murder and lust made me a fornicator and adulterer, I began to realize that I had always had a faulty view of myself. My heart was shallow soil, and unkept with weeds beginning to choke me. I began to then understand that in God’s eyes there was nothing good in me — I didn’t score any brownie points with God whatsoever, and my sins were piling up day after day before Him. In a sense, finally looking into the mirror of God’s moral law magnified the grace of the cross of Christ to my heart. Wow… what a debt I was forgiven! What a love I began to feel for my saviour! Why hadn’t I seen this before?

I began to realize why I was unable to obey Jesus’ commandments and why I lacked boldness and persisted in sin. I was still the lord of my life; I had not made Him 100% Lord of my life, so He was unable to use me. I was an unholy tool, useless to my professed master and miserable as long as I tried to live like I knew I should. Until this point, I knew that I was still ultimately living for myself despite my profession of faith but I honestly thought that this was normal. Perhaps my misunderstanding of Romans 7 contributed to my passivity. Luke 14 told me differently. Without giving everything up and considering all that I had or could accomplish as refuse compared to apprehending Jesus Christ, I was not His disciple. That hit hard! But now by the grace of God I understand and believe. Phillippians 3:8 has become my confession of faith: “…I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord… and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ.” My eyes have been opened to see the truth of salvation behind Luke 7:47, and I have fallen in love with Jesus Christ and now give Him everything that I am and that I have. It’s finally over with living for self happiness and self fulfillment — Jesus being the means to feeding the lusts of the flesh.

Since this monumental point of turning in my life, I have discovered God’s heart in seeking and saving the lost, His call to discipleship, and the necessity of standing for truth and against error. My desire is to earnestly press in, seeking to understand the Father’s ways and how He works so that I might walk in them by the power of His Spirit.

Hopefully this helps you understand me a little bit. Perhaps you now have an appreciation why I would bother writing a blog like this. Please, if you have any comments or questions, post a reply.

May God richly bless you as you seek to know His character more fully. I very much look forward to seeing you around. Again, feel free to email me here if you wish.

Ryan

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