October
On August 30 I celebrated my 61st birthday (if you forgot to send a card it’s okay.) On August 31 I got on a plane and flew to Boston, MA for the purpose of meeting some church planters and exploring the possibility of partnering with them in the work of the Gospel in the greater Boston area. It was my first trip to Boston and to the New England area in general and I found it to be much nicer than I expected. It’s quite a fascinating old city. There is so much history, being in many ways the birthplace of our nation. At the same time, it is a very modern, diverse and influential city with an abundance of stark reminders as to how easy it is to slip away from our foundation in the Gospel.
Boston is home to 39 different universities, Harvard being the premier university not only of New England but of our nation. Did you know Harvard was founded as a Christian university to primarily train men for Gospel ministry and missions? Have you heard that for this academic year they have appointed an avowed atheist to be their new chaplain? Granted, it took them a couple of hundred years to get there, but get there they did. Harvard is simply a reflection of the greater Boston area which, according to the most generous estimates is only 2% evangelical Christian. What was once the epicenter of Gospel ministry and mission in the United States now has fewer Bible believing Christians than many Muslim nations.
In the picture I’m standing in front of the building that at one time housed the First Baptist Church of Watertown. If you could enlarge the picture you would see 1899 inscribed on the memorial stone on the front of the building. That was the year the church built that beautiful building. Unfortunately, there is no longer a church meeting in that building. As far as I know there is no congregation known as First Baptist Church in Watertown. The building you see was converted several years ago into luxury condominiums. In fact, there is an entire industry in New England dedicated to finding old church properties and converting them into condos or assisted living facilities or office space.
The people who do surveys and track numbers, statistics and trends are telling us that in the South, the Bible Belt, we will be in the same place as New England or our western states in less than 30 years. Imagine a Colquitt County where only two out of every 100 people believed the Gospel and sought to live according to God’s word. We’re tempted to believe it couldn’t happen here but we need to keep in mind that New England was once the Bible Belt of our nation. Sad to say but there are plenty of indicators that the experts will be proven right. Think about your kids or your grandkids for a moment. How often do they participate in the life of the church? How many friends do they have who are actively involved in a church? How active is our own involvement in the life of the church? How often do we pray for our neighbors specifically? Invite them to church? Have a gospel conversation with them? How much time do we spend in personal devotion verses reinforcing our political viewpoint or tracking our favorite team? How generous are we with our time and our resources? Are we more concerned about the condition of the church building or the health of the body of Christ that meets there? Do our personal preferences take priority over Gospel proclamation? Here’s the main question to be asked. Does Jesus Christ and His kingdom get priority over everything else in my life? Our answers will determine whether or not the experts are right. May we hold fast the foundation we have in the Gospel of Christ!
IHMS,
August
On Saturday, July 10, I was standing on the edge of the Klutina River looking across at the place where it merges with the Copper River. Both rivers were running about 30 mph over rocky riverbeds on their way to the sea. During the course of the day I watched a bald eagle pull a scrap of fish out of the river and get chased into the woods by two golden eagles. Later, that same bald eagle flew about 20-30 feet over my head and landed on the bank about fifty yards away. My son had taken me to this remote spot in the backwoods of Alaska to go salmon fishing. We didn’t catch a thing. It wasn’t for lack of trying. The fish just weren’t there that day.
After we got back to the truck Stephen apologized for the fact that we didn’t catch a salmon. He had apologized several times during the day and I knew he was disappointed. I looked out the window and then at him. I said, “You know, I got to stand in a place and see things today that 99.9% of the world will never see. I got to see that eagle flying about and view this incredible creation. On the way here I’ve seen glaciers and mountains and rivers and wildlife that is just amazing and I got to do all of this with my son. I’m a blessed man.”
We have a tendency as human beings to focus on the thing that didn’t happen or the thing that we didn’t get and miss the blessing that’s starring us in the face. We might look around at Colquitt County and think that it’s a pretty mundane and ordinary place and that our lives are much the same. Yet, if you’ll take a moment to look just a little closer there are things here that we are blessed to enjoy that the majority of the world will never experience. Our mundane and ordinary lives are chock full of blessing if we’ll only pause for a moment to take stock. There are little snatches and glimpses of beauty and glory, majesty and wonder all around. We don’t have to travel half way around the world to see it.
Some might say that the ability to appreciate the little things comes with age and maybe growing older does help the process, but I don’t think that’s the main factor. I think this ability is the by-product of the ability to appreciate the One who created it all in the first place. More than once the psalmist said that the creation displays the glory of God. It shouts and sings His praise to anyone who will listen. When we come to the place of not simply acknowledging but really believing in the core of our being that God is both great and good, that changes our perspective about our lives and the world around us. When we stop approaching Him with the mindset of “what can God do for me today?” and begin to consider all that He has already done for us it will melt our hearts and open our eyes to wonder, beauty and grace that’s been there all along.
I’m a blessed man. If you know Jesus Christ as Lord then you are blessed as well. The favor, love and mercy of the God of all creation rests upon you. It doesn’t mean that the day will be a cake walk. You could be going through something very difficult. You may face some incredible disappointments but there will be glimpses of glory even in the midst of them. You may only see them in hindsight, but they are there and they are reminders of the love and compassion that the Father has for you in Christ. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow….”
IHMS,
An Object of Grace
As many of you know, my Mom passed away on the 11th of May. As I’m writing this, over a week has already gone by and once again I’m amazed at how time keeps persistently moving forward. But that’s not why I’m telling you about my Mom’s passing. There’s something more that I want to share with you, but I’m going to ask a favor of you before we continue. I want to ask you to withhold judgment until you’ve read the whole story.
So here we go. My Mom and I were not emotionally close. We were never ugly toward one another; we just didn’t talk much or share much with one another. I loved my Mom in a dutiful sort of way and I’m confident that she loved me though she was not demonstrative about it. You’re liable to think I’m a terrible son when I say that I have not cried over her death, but I can honestly say it was a blessing because she was physically and emotionally miserable.
But I’ve come to know my Mom a bit better since May 11th. She left me and my sister and brother a gift that we were largely unaware of. Mom liked journals, at least she liked the idea of them because she would buy them and start writing. None of them are complete but her story is there in bits and pieces. The gift to me was the journal where she wrote about her life growing up and about her first marriage to my birth father. Peyton Place has nothing on this story.
Mom was born in Wheatland, WY, the youngest of six children, one of whom died in infancy. Her father was an alcoholic and when she was around 12 her father caught her mother in bed with another man. Her parents divorced and the court determined that neither one of them were fit to be parents so Mom was shipped off to live with her siblings, each of them keeping her for a few years until she was 19 or 20. Then she decided to move to California with one of her cousins. It was the late 1950’s. After a time, she and her cousin parted ways. That’s when she met my birth father. She writes that he was charming, a smooth talker and she wrote multiple times that she was naïve. She was young, longing for someone to love her and not very wise. She had told me bits and pieces about him through the years but her journal revealed that the man was an absolute scoundrel (I’m being polite).
They went to Reno, NV to get married because his divorce was not final. He had four children by his first wife and likely I have other siblings because he was a womanizer. He would leave my mom for days at a time, crossing the border into Tijuana to go to the strip clubs. Not too long after they were married he stole $3000 (equal to $28,000 today) from a Go-Cart club that they belonged to. After stealing the money, he took my mom to San Francisco. The club members tracked him down and when he didn’t pay back the money they had him thrown in jail. A short time after his parents bailed him out I was born. While she was in the hospital my Mom gave him $200 to pay toward the hospital bill and he took the money and went to the bar. That was the final straw for Mom and she divorced him. She goes on to talk about being a young single mom and the trauma of irresponsible baby sitters before she met Jack Brown, the guy who would give me his name and become my Dad.
That’s where the journal ended. Pretty crazy, right? Those of you who know me would have never guessed my tragic, convoluted origins. You would likely never imagine that I was the offspring of such a despicable man or that any woman could be so gullible as my mom. It is truly an amazing thing that I am the person I am in the place where I am. That’s what grace is all about. I am only who I am by the sheer grace of the Lord. I can think of a thousand different ways that my life could have turned out. There are thousands of “what if’s” that pop up when I think about what my life could have been and most of the outcomes are not pretty. I can confidently confess with Paul that “I am what I am by the grace of God!” By His grace He orchestrated the course of my life, moving us from San Fran to Idaho to Ft. Lauderdale and finally to Boynton Beach and the Christian Academy at FBC Boynton where for the first time I heard and understood the Gospel, asking the Lord to forgive me and receive me as His own (Mom and I were baptized together at FBC Boynton and my Dad about a year later.) I’m twice adopted! Finding Mom’s journal has blown me away. Not because of how awful or tragic it was but because of the clarity of God’s grace to me in all of it. The story of my life is shot through with the grace of God!
However, there is another take away in all of this and I hope you’ll hear my heart in this. I didn’t just turn my life around. I was rescued! If you are a believer, your life is shot through with the same grace. You and your family may have a long history as Christ followers. You couldn’t even begin to imagine yourself or someone in your family getting caught up in the kind of chaos described in my Mom’s journal. But here’s the reality. If you go digging back in your family history far enough, you’re going to find someone whom the Lord rescued out of the chaos and brokenness of their family and changed the trajectory of their life and that of their family. You’re just as much a recipient of grace as I am. We’re all in need of rescue because we’re all lost and hopeless without the grace of Jesus.
One last thing. I hope my story is a reminder to all of us to be careful not to write people off. We never know how the grace of Christ can change a life. It certainly has mine!
IHMS,
May
In Proverbs 30 we’re introduced to a guy by the name of Agur son of Jakeh. We don’t know anything about him beyond his name because it is the only time he is mentioned in all of the Bible. Well, we do know one other thing: he liked to list things in sets of four. Five times he mentions a list of four things. Some of these things anger him, some of them grieve him and some of them impress him. In vv. 18-19 he says, “There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a young woman.”
He says in essence that these things are a mystery to him and yet at the same time they are fascinating to him. Even in our scientific, highly informed age where science has explained in detail how eagles soar, snakes crawl and ships sail (though they have yet to give a solid explanation for romance) we can still be quite enthralled by something like an eagle circling in the air.
There are things like that in the Christian life, one such thing being prayer. What a fascinating mystery prayer is! We are called into this incredible relationship with the Creator of all things and encouraged to come humbly yet boldly into His presence through prayer. Jesus said we are to hallow or hold in highest esteem the name of our God, yet tells us we can address Him as Dada (Abba). Jesus also tells us to come before our Heavenly Father without pretense, being honest and open with the One who intimately knows every detail of our lives and the things that are on our hearts at any given moment. Elsewhere in the New Testament it is implied that through prayer we actually enter into the throne room of Heaven itself. Genuine prayer is a personal encounter with God Himself! Though we know and confess that He is the Sovereign Ruler of all things, yet we also know that our petitions and requests are heard and considered and that He is at work through the very prayers that we have uttered. What a great mystery and yet what a fascinating privilege and blessing we have to be able to pray!
One of the things the New Testament especially encourages is that we should pray together. It’s a blessing and a calling that as redeemed people we can pray together. On Thursday, May 6 we will have the opportunity to exercise that blessing. That day is the National Day of Prayer and there will be an observance and time of prayer in downtown Moultrie at the Courthouse Square. There is more info in this newsletter concerning the event itself, but let me encourage you to join with the body of Christ from all over Colquitt County to pray for our community and for our nation. It will start at noon and should last between 45-50 minutes. Who knows what the Lord might do as His people submit themselves to Him and seek Him in united prayer? I hope you will make the effort to join us!
The Obligatory Resurrection Article
Here it is. The obligatory article on the resurrection. It is April after all and Easter is the first Sunday in April and all that. So it is only natural to talk about the resurrection because this is the time of year we’ve reserved to talk about it.
By and large, that’s the problem. We don’t talk about the Resurrection enough. We don’t think about it enough or incorporate it in our discussion of the Gospel enough. I agree with those who say we don’t believe it deeply enough and therefore we don’t apply it to our everyday lives enough. On April 4, 2021 we will look forward to having a packed house at church and we will sing and clap and preach like the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the greatest thing that ever happened in human history!
And that’s my point. It is THE GREATEST thing that has ever happened in all of human history and to a great extent we only truly celebrate it once a year! This goes back to my point that we don’t believe it deeply enough. Think about it for a moment. The vast majority of our Gospel presentations go something like this: You’ve sinned against God. Jesus died on a cross to pay the penalty for your sins. If you will put your faith in Jesus, you can have eternal life. I’m not wanting to disparage any of the typical Gospel presentations, but those that I’m familiar with, EE, CWT, ABC, The Roman Road, etc…, make no direct reference to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Yet Paul said in 1 Corinthians, “This is the Good News that I delivered to you; that Jesus died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that He was buried and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” Paul spends the rest of chapter 15 explaining how the death of Jesus has no value if Jesus is not raised from the dead, but is incredibly good news if He is! Again, I would in no way want to devalue the atoning sacrifice of our Lord. All I am saying is that we must hold the cross and the resurrection tightly together because one without the other is meaningless. Yet I want to affirm what Paul says, we are to be pitied more than anyone else if Jesus is not raised.
I would contend that there are two primary reasons that so many of us as Christians lead such ineffective lives in regard to the Gospel. The first would be a lack of deep gratitude for the substitutionary life and atoning death of Jesus. We fail to acknowledge just how desperately lost we truly were and thus we don’t like to think too deeply about all that Jesus had to suffer in order to save us. Unfortunately, many believe they just need a little help from Jesus. They fail to understand that without the righteous life and sacrificial death of Jesus they are morally destitute, bankrupt before God. The second reason we stumble along in our faith is a lack of understanding and true confidence in the literal, physical resurrection of our Lord and Savior. His resurrection is the means by which we have received the Holy Spirit, His presence with us. The resurrection is what frees us from sin’s power. We are no longer slaves to sin. It validates all that Jesus said and did, especially His atoning death. Because He is raised we have the greatest hope ever, that the day will come when we will be raised as well! Not to some ethereal, “spiritual” existence, but to a real, tangible, physical life that is infinitely better than anything we can imagine here; a new heaven and new earth! We will be in His presence forever! Let’s celebrate well on April 4 and may we live in light of His resurrection from that day on!
IHMS,
From Shades of Night to Plains of Light
“Gloom, despair and agony on me. Deep dark depression, excessive misery. If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all! Gloom, despair and agony on meeeee!” Adults of a certain age will remember that chorus sung by the gang from the weekly variety show, “Hee Haw.” I can’t remember any of the skits that went with the song, but I don’t know that I’ll ever forget that chorus.
That might feel like a theme song for the past 12 months. It was about a year ago that we were watching the first impeachment trial while just beginning to hear about a new virus that might cause some problems. Now here we are a year later and we’ve witnessed the virus’ devastation, a crashed economy, riots and widespread protests, fires, floods, freezes and hurricanes, incredible division and suspicion and perhaps the craziest election cycle we’ve ever had. There’s been plenty of gloom, despair and agony to go around and it doesn’t feel like we’re out of the woods yet. As someone implied to me the other day, “The hits just keep on comin’.”
I know that the Hee Haw gang was just having fun when they sang that song but gloom, despair and depression are real things and if we’re not careful we can get caught in their grip. So what are we to do in the midst of seemingly dark days? First, we’re going to put no stock in the idea of “luck.” We are heirs of the promise, children of the Sovereign God of all creation and everything is in His hand and under His control. None of this craziness caught Him by surprise and, in fact, He is working it all together toward the day of resurrection, the new Heaven and new Earth. We can rest in providence and grace and give no credit to luck, karma, fortune or any other explanation for our circumstances. We can know that God is in control because Jesus is raised from the dead!
Another thing that I’m doing on a regular basis is counting nothing as belonging to me. What I mean is that I have to regularly remind myself that the stuff of this life is not mine. My house, my car, my bank account and even my very life is on loan to me from the One who has redeemed my life. So I count nothing as mine. As citizens of the United States we have enjoyed unprecedented freedom and prosperity, yet as hard as it is to imagine, even those can be taken away. So I’m trying to get to that place where daily I’m confessing, “my life is not my own. I’ve been bought with a price.” There is a sense of freedom in knowing that if you don’t own anything then they can’t take anything away.
Finally, we must choose to believe above all else, that God loves us! Many are asking where is God in the midst of all of this? Every hardship, trial, setback and difficulty will be used to call His love and His power into question. Paul had every reason on earth to give way to gloom and despair, but he was so sure of God’s love for him in Christ that he continually rose above his circumstances. We can be just as confident in the love of God because we know that Jesus came for us and gave up His life for us. Recall what Paul said in Romans 8: “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all-how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things? …Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? …For I am convinced that neither death nor life, …nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” May we live with great hope, convinced of His love for us!
IHMS,
A Certain Message for an Uncertain World…
“A certain message for an uncertain world.” Pretty catchy don’t you think? I said that in December’s article. But don’t be impressed. I’ve been around for a while now and I’m pretty sure someone has said the same thing before. That catchy slogan was probably hidden somewhere in the recesses of my memory. Catchy slogans make great bumper stickers and T-shirts, but too often we adopt the slogan and fail to live the truth. Bumper sticker theology is no way to live in the kingdom that Jesus purchased for us.
With all the confusion, chaos and uncertainty that surrounds us today we need some clarity and certainty. We need more than catchy phrases and worn out clichés. We need something solid and unshakable. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that the person who, ”…hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like the wise man who built his house on the rock.” Yet, too often we choose to build on the shifting sands of some social, economic or political system. We listen to a college professor or a talking head or a guy with a talk radio program and put more stock in what they say than in what our King has declared to be true. Then we pick out the words of Jesus that fit with our preferred system of thought or view of reality and declare it to be the model that Jesus prefers.
It’s very clear that Jesus expects His word to be the foundational premise upon which we build our lives. But we have a preference for building on sand. Let’s take the debate between capitalism and socialism. There are Christians on both sides and they can quote a raft of verses in support of their favored position. But both of these socio-economic strategies have the same basic flaw and therefore they will always fall short of being foundational to life in the Kingdom of Jesus. The problem with both systems is they start with the premise that people are basically good. They both assume that people will naturally choose to do what is good and right for themselves and their neighbors. Jesus says exactly the opposite. He says there is no one good but God. (Mt. 19:17) Earlier in His Sermon He said, “If you then who are evil, know how to give good gifts….” (Mt. 7:11) In saying that we are evil, He is simply saying that we are inherently selfish and if that selfishness continues unchecked it will produce things that are truly evil. We want to believe that our preferred system is morally superior to the other when in fact, either system would work perfectly well if we and our fellow adherents were as good as we want to believe we are. So the fruit of selfish human nature under capitalism is greed and the fruit of selfish human nature under socialism is lust for power. The capitalists say they want people to be free to choose, but the tech company algorithms are just one example of how easily those choices can be manipulated. The socialists say we just want to create an equitable society and then give preference to one group over another in order to increase their own power.
As believers we are called to build all of life on the word of our Lord. That means our preferred system must be submitted to Him and not the other way around. That was part of the reason that the early church had such an incredible impact in the Roman world. They weren’t tied to the systems of the day but instead put Jesus’ words into practice. They were generous, selfless, compassionate, diligent and responsible. They lifted people up, drew people in with grace and love and then held each other accountable to a higher standard than any of them had ever known. They freely proclaimed the good news of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection knowing all the while that it could land them in prison or worse. All of life was surrendered to the lordship of Jesus, their time, their money, the safety and security of them and their family, their nationalistic pride and the place of their group within that nation. Everything belonged to Jesus so that they were then set free from the fear of men. They knew true freedom. The freedom of being founded on the word of our Lord. May we yearn for the same.
IHMS,