This week at our small group we studied a lesson called, 'Why pray when you can worry?'. Its true isn't it? How often do we spend our time and energy worrying (or some other fruitless activity) when we can connect to the Creator of the Universe and have a personal conversation with Him. The Lord has been teaching Terry and I over the past few months some great things about prayer, and how effective it really is. I would love to have you throw up on the blog some of the things God has taught, or been teaching you about prayer. Or perhaps, you have had some incredible answer to prayer recently. Jump on and let's inspire the faith of others by what God is doing in you!
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WOW I can hardly believe that it's December already! I guess the Christmas decorations all over my house are giving it away. Terry really gets into decorating for Christmas. I remember the first Christmas after we moved to New Hampshire (1983). I went out and cut a scraggly little Christmas tree from out in the woods near our house. When I brought it home I leaned it on the couch and there it stayed for a couple of weeks until we finally threw it out. Boy have we come a long way since then! Terry really makes the house look beautiful now. Maturity can be a wonderful thing. I hope as you get ready for Christmas this year that Jesus remains the REASON FOR THE SEASON in your life.
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We had a great Thanksgiving. The whole family was here for the weekend. Seems like the older I get the more important family is to me. I'm so blessed to have a family who loves the Lord. Today (Sunday) all the boys played in the worship team at church with me and it was a great time in the Lord's presence. I hope everyone reading this blog had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
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Yesterday at our church was a really cool day. We had one of the former pastors return and speak, he's 89 years old! When I first corresponded with him about coming we scheduled it for October, but then that didn't work out, so we scheduled for November 19th. I didn't know that it was that very week 30 years ago that this pastor held the first service in their "new sanctuary". Now we have completely remodeled the sanctuary and he was here on this 30th anniversary. It was all engineered by the Holy Spirit! I was totally unaware of the "coincidence" until a couple of weeks before he came to speak. My point: the Holy Spirit can engineer circumstances to make something special and significant EVEN WHEN WE DON'T HAVE A CLUE! Next time you're wondering if God can make the tangled mess we call life work...HE CAN! Be encouraged!
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I hope as we approach this Thanksgiving season your 're-focusing' your thoughts onto how good God has been to you. I confess I sometimes lose sight of the incredible blessings He places in my life, its too bad we have to have a 'season' to get us back in focus. This coming week I will have all three of my sons, my two daughters-in-law, and my grandson with us. God has been so good to Terry and I! All three of our sons are serving the Lord, and we have a good relationship with each of them. Take the time this week to thank God for His blessings in your life, and take time to tell someone what a blessing they are to you from the Lord. Let's together bump our attitude of gratitude up the scale a couple of notches. For those of you who read this and have been, or are a part of my life I say, "I thank God for each one of you and the blessing God has made you to me!"
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I was driving home this week from a class I was taking and was thinking about Christian maturity. It seems many times that people substitute things they "do" for what they "are". To be a disciple of Christ we need to have a balance of three things: being, knowing, and doing. If we overemphasize any one of these components we end up being a lopsided, out of balance believer. It seems to me that many people think that service=maturity. Now don't get me wrong service is very important, but it does not equal maturity, it is merely one component in spiritual maturity. I know this because you can be a great servant and not even be a believer in Christ, in fact some of the greatest servants are often not believers. So what I'm saying I guess is that you can't be mature without serving, but you can serve without being mature. Next time someone implies you are not mature, don't pull out your list of things you are "doing" as you proof of maturity, spiritual maturity in bigger than that. Just a thought!
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I know I've been riding this discipleship horse pretty hard in my blog lately, but I've been doing a lot of reading in this area recently. I just finished a great book called 'The Connecting Church' by Randy Frazee. He has some rich thoughts in this work. He has some provocative thoughts on the role of the local church in the shaping of the life of a disciple, I quote from him:
"The Bible clearly teaches that God intends to accomplish His primary purposes through the church. The first Christians understood that a decision to follow Christ also included a decision to make the church the hub of their world, even when it required the abandonment of existing social structures. Yale University professor Wayne Meeks makes this point, 'To be baptized into Jesus Christ signaled for Pauline converts an extroardinary thorough going resocialization, in which the sect was to become virtually the primary group for its members, supplanting all other loyalties.' Frazee goes on to say: Yet the writings of scripture lead one to conclude that God intends the church, not to be one more bolt on the wheel of activity in our lives, but the very hub at the center of one's life and community."
He elaborates on these concepts in his work, but one thing shines through as he discusses this aspect of the place of the church in the life of a believer, we can't do without it, in fact we desperately need the local church. We do not grow on our own, we grow in community. Not in a community that is established or functioning as a 'spiritual Walmart' where we go to get what we need for convenient living, but a place to be challenged to grow in both general and very specific ways in Christ.
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Its been a busy few days, Ezra bought a new car (Ford Focus) and my involvement with that took some of my free time. I've been reading 'The Great Omission' this week by Dallas Willard, what a provocative read. His overall premise is that "There is an obvious Great Disparity between, on the one hand, the hope for life in Jesus--found real in the Bible and in many shining examples from among His followers--and, on the other hand, the actual day-to-day behavior, inner life, and social presence of most of those who now profess adherence to Him." In essence he's asking where is real Christianity? The kind that transforms lives to be like Jesus. He builds a case that people in America believe that you can be a Christian, but not be a disciple. In defense of this observation he defines a disciple as, '...one who, intent on becoming Christ-like and so dewlling in His faith and practice, systematically and progressively rearranges his affairs to that end."
I agree with Willard, that far too many professing Christians exhibit little or no life-change, Christians look so much like the world they 'blend in'. What would our lives look like if we took discipleship seriously, and as Willard says, 'systematically and progressively rearranged our lives to look like Jesus?'
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In his book Dissident Discipleship, David Augsburger has a great chapter on humility. He approaches humility from a perspective I have never heard elaborated...he ties humor directly to humility (of course healthy humor). Listen to a couple of quotes along this line:
"A humble sense of humor shows us our own absurdities, reveals our own contradictions, as well as revealing the absurdities and contradictions of those around us. Humor will not keep us from all sin, but it is a significant deterrent. When we laugh at ourselves, the laughter is a kind of reverence, a kind of self-deprecation and truth appreciation that expresses acceptance and wonder. In practice it is a type of confession, a means of contrition; indeed an act of repentance."
Wow, have you ever heard humor described with spiritual meaning as this? This is not flippant theology, but really a deeply thought through concept of how God uses humor in our lives as a relief/release valve where we might otherwise blow up under the pressure. Here's another quote:
"What makes humor and humorous people humble? Humble humor takes life, death, faith, and human fallibility seriously--so seriously that it can laugh at our flawed and feeble efforts to transcend them. We laugh best--indeed, most deeply--in our struggles with those things we hold in utter reverence. We take ourselves, our work, our best efforts at justice and mercy so seriously that we can see their lighter side and feel the deep mirth of humble paradox and contradiction, and then explode in laughter."
When we are unable to laugh at our own flawed humanity we really don't understand the situation. Humor deflates our over-inflated sense of self-importance, and brings pride to its knees as we through laughter at our foibles and failures get a divine 'reality check'! Let me just end this blog with one more quote from the book where Augsburger quotes Haring:
"Humorless people are almost always hopelessly condemned to immaturity. Or should we say that immature people are condemned to a humorless existence."
Give yourself the chance to have a good laugh today...think about something stupid you did yesterday! I've already made my list!
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Its been a few days since I've been on the blog. I have been reading a very interesting book lately, Dissident Discipleship by David Augsburger. I'll probably post a few thoughts over the next few days from what I'm reading there. He has a chapter on Christian community, let me give you a quote from it, "Christian community is a web of stubbornly loyal relationships knotted together into a living network of persons. We recognize authentic community by the visible strands of commitment and concern that enable people to live jointly, corporately, and cooperatively together." I was riveted by two phrases out of this quote, "stubbornly loyal", and, " visible strands of commitment". Todays culture says run, don't work through the issues. Commitment is seen as a dinasour from some distant past, a relic from a bygone era, like a fine antique that still finds a place on the shelf, but no place in everday life. I'm longing for the kind of community which Augsburger describes, which is stubbornly loyal. Throw me up some comments and tell me what you think that kind of community would look like in "real life".
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My son Ezra and I spent all afternoon looking at cars yesterday (my day off). His car has seen better days. The whole process of car shopping can really bum you out. You're car never seems to be worth what you think it is, and there car seems to be way over priced...what's a body to do? Anyway it was just some great time to spend with my son...you know a little male bonding! He really want a 5 speed, so it was really fun to watch his excitement trying out the sticks. It really brought back memories of my first vehicles and my fascination with power and speed. Seems kind of like us as Christians, we are so excited at first in our walk with the Lord but after a while we just want the convenience and comfort of a car (or Christian life) that drives itself! Makes ya think doesn't it?
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It never ceases to amaze me at the grace of God, and how He lavishes it on us as we need it. I tweeked my back this week which forced me to spend more time in reading, study and reflection. In church this morning He strengthed my back just as I needed it to minister today. If you are wondering how you are going to be able to do a specific thing when the time comes let me encourage you to prepare you for the miracle of His grace for the moment. Its a great feeling to know He never lets us down!
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Tonight is the night to turn your clocks back. I heard a radio announcer last night talking about turning the clocks back, and it got my mind thinking. How many time do we consciously or unconsciously want to live in the past, sort of 'turn our clocks back' living. Most of us have times in our lives where the memories are the fondest. Then we are awakened by the reality that nothing stays the same, and sometimes we grieve that fact. The truth is that if we are a Christian, the future is always brighter than the past, no matter how good the past looks. The apostle Paul said, 'forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead I press on towards the prize'! The writer of Proverbs said, 'the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn that grows brighter till the full day.'! It can be tempting to fantasize about our 'golden days' whatever they may be, but God's got something far better in mind for us.
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Ezra got very generous tonight and took Terry and I out to dinner at Cracker Barrel! It was great to have a free steak dinner, and we saw Ric and Candice Pavase and had a nice chat with them. Just whenyou think teenagers are a financial blackhole they step up and surprise you with something special...thankyou Jesus!
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Hi church! I sent out an email to everyone recently just to find out what we could do to increase participation level in spiritual activities. I was looking for some creative input about how we can develop things that will help people grow spiritually. Most of the replies centered around why people had not attended specific events, that wasn't really what I was looking for, I was not trying to surface guilt, just looking for input. I am going to start using this blog as much as I can to increase the communication since we live so far apart, scattered around the county. Feel free to click on comments and do a little cyber-dialogue with me I think it will be fun and will help us to grow.
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Wow, to get one of these blogs going they want three quarts of blood and your first male child! I'm going to continue to experiment with this blog so please be patient with me!

Hi. I'm just trying out my blog for the first time. Just curious as to how they work, and how useful this could be for communication with the church. Post something if you like so I can begin to practice blogging.

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