Month: May 2015

For many of us, our search for a church that is “meeting my needs,” added with our mobile society, does not allow us to experience what a commitment to a local body of believers over a long period of time can really mean. “Freedom does not always mean going…. Freedom often means staying. That’s certainly true of the Christian understanding of marriage. Staying with one partner over a lifetime opens me up to the goodness of God in a way that serial monogamy doesn’t.” Church is the same. Developing deep, ongoing relationships is more beneficial to our spiritual health than just finding the immediate experience — the brief sensation of feeling like I have finally found a home, where I agree with the theology and music (at least for a time).
–David Goetz

Our American society has continued to push upon us the idea that the need of the individual is of highest priority. So we search for what will “meet” my individual needs. Unfortunately, we are often like children wanting a candy bar just before dinner. But many of our parents required that we have a long-term commitment to better meal choices, knowing it would be better for our health than the candy bar. Too many have carried this child-like mentality of not needing self-control with them from childhood into adulthood — and it bleeds into many other areas of life — Including how we might choose a church. We see so many people hopping from one experience to the next, instead of learning to stay and build lasting relationships.

God created us for intimate relationships – with Him and with others. And intimate relationships can only be built over long periods of time. May God help us to learn how to be people of commitment to Him and to one another. May He help us to have a stronger commitment to relationships with others than we have to our own experiences. God has not told us to find more ways to meet our own needs, but rather that we should consider the needs of others as more important than the needs and experiences of oneself. That idea certainly flies against the trend of society, but if we will embrace it we will find ourselves growing more healthy as we engage in self-control, commitment, and deepening relationships with one another.

I’ve posted a copy of this list where I will see it each day, because I need the reminder. Maybe you do to:
My purpose is not to praise myself;
My purpose is not to make my name great;
My purpose is not to get rich;
My purpose is not to gain authority over others for my ego’s sake;
My purpose is not to leave brothers and sisters in the dust of my ambition;
My purpose is not to make others feel small;
My purpose is not to become self-sufficient;
My purpose is not to earn a five-star rating from the masses.

If we could boil down the purpose of our time in the spotlight, we might narrow it down to three points. The purpose of my influential position is:
to make God’s name great,
to advance His kingdom on Earth, and
to serve others.
–Anonymous author of Embracing Obscurity

Have You Embraced Your Strategic Purpose in Your Influential Position?

It is obvious that the Church and State are heading in different directions, and doing so at a rapid pace. But is that something we should be terribly alarmed about?

Nowadays, as the U.S. grows increasingly secularized, it appears that church and state are heading in different directions. The more I understand Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God, the less alarm I feel over that trend. Our real challenge, the focus of our energy, should not be to Christianize the United States (always a losing battle) but rather to strive to be God’s kingdom in an increasingly hostile world.
–Philip Yancey

I think Yancey is right. It is not our role to force our Nation to become Christian. It cannot be done. It is a losing battle. Just as one cannot legislate morality, neither can you legislate faith. Neither morals nor faith can be forced upon people. An immoral person may behave due to the punishment that would come if he broke the law, but just because his behavior “looks” moral doesn’t change the fact that his heart desires to commit immoral acts. Therefore, he is still an immoral person who, for a time, seems moral. And it is the same with faith.

Therefore, instead of being alarmed at the “direction” our nation is heading, we should realize that the Bible indicates clearly that the road to destruction is wide and broad and most people will be traveling down that way. Only a few find the narrow path of salvation and life with Christ. This doesn’t mean we should stop working in the harvest. It just means that we shouldn’t be alarmed that we see sinful people doing sinful things. That is the natural course.

The unnatural course that should be a cause for alarm is when those who say they are followers of Christ start looking just like those who do not believe. When believers look just like the world… then we have gone off-course, and it is definitely time to sound the alarm.

Are you striving to imitate Christ in this increasingly hostile world? or do you look very similar to the world… so much so that others would have a hard time knowing you have faith in Jesus Christ. If so, then sound the alarm and change your direction.

I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection:
    (1) the world and
    (2) the Christian tradition.

The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world — it had evidently been meant to go there — and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress. And when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me.
–G. K. Chesterton

Have you had the experience of Chesterton where your understanding of God has helped you make better sense of the world and how to live in it yet not be of it?

Some see miracles as an implausible suspension of the laws of the physical universe. As signs, though, they serve just the opposite function. Death, decay, entropy, and destruction are the true suspensions of God’s laws; miracles are the early glimpses of restoration. In the words Jurgen Moltmann, “Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly ‘natural’ things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.”
–Philip Yancey

Amen.
May we all strive to be more like Jesus – the only normal One who ever walked the world!