Finding Inspiration

 

 

Where can a person go to find inspiration; where do we go to be filled with grace?

Maybe a better question would be, “What kind of inspiration do we search for?”

An artist or a musician may look for inspiration in a wholly different place than a bank robber, and a politician would possibly look in a different place than an industrialist.  So here, we deal with where regular every day Christians go for inspiration…

Some people find inspiration in beautiful scenes from nature, others might find it in reading about great and faithful leaders of the past, or people who are making a difference for Christ right now.  Some read blogs for inspiration, and there are many wonderful and inspiring blog posts to be found out there.

Of course, the best place for a Christian to find inspiration to continue the “good fight” is in the pages of the Word of God, for there is nowhere else that we can find the actual mind of God…

If we have a firm foundation in the Bible, we can find inspiration where ever we look.  It’s a funny thing, but we usually find the thing we are looking for.  Have you ever noticed that when you get a new car you all of a sudden see the same model of car everywhere?  Have you ever noticed that people who are looking to be offended can find offense in everything you say, or that people who have dirty minds see dirty things where ever they look?

God is active everywhere; in nature, in city streets, in Scripture, in the arts…

If our mindset is upon “the things that are above” inspiration is all around us.  The only thing in the universe that we actually have control over is our own mind.  Thus, we can set our minds on heavenly things and find inspiration where ever we set our eyes, and I don’t know about you, but I am truly thankful for that.

On bended knee

Abraham Lincoln one said that there are times when he found himself falling to his knees before God, for there was no other place for him to go during the darkest days of Civil War.  I think there are times like that for all of us.

We don’t even need to be enduring bad times to respond in this way, in fact there are times to jump for joy to the Lord, and there are times to fall on our knees in thanksgiving as well.

The most important thing, whether we are living in good times or bad, is to remember that we need to be near to God…

Come, let us bow down in worship, 
   let us kneel before the LORD our Maker; 
 for he is our God 
   and we are the people of his pasture, 
   the flock under his care.

(Psalm 95:6-7)

God is my joy and my sustenance; my happiness and my comfort.

God is my life and my strength; my creator and my redeemed.

Those Who Have Gone Before

It sure is easy to think that nobody has ever lived through the trials and tribulations that we go through, and yet many have done so.  Some times we might think that our modern age is so vastly different that we are breaking new ground every minute… but we aren’t really.

The modern life that we lead in the early 21st century is different in some ways though…  Well, we are using computers aren’t we?

The challenges of every day aren’t really much different from what they were in the 19th century, except maybe for the speed of things.  We worry about our families, making ends meet, keeping our jobs, educating our kids and keeping them out of trouble…  so did they.

We deal with a culture that sometimes acts as if Christians came down from Mars… so did they.

We sometimes wonder about where our lives are headed… so did they.

That’s an important thing to bear in mind; we really aren’t that much different from people of the past.  People in earlier times faced the challenges of their lives and times and came through it all.  They succeeded in one great, awesome and magnificent accomplishment: They passed the Gospel of Jesus Christ on to the next generation so that you and I could have its blessings in our lives today, and in this we own those who have gone before us a great debt of gratitude.

In this light, we must always remember that it is up to us, the Body of Christ in the second decade of the 21st century to ensure that we hand down to the next generation the love and sustenance of our relationships with Jesus Christ.

May we honor those who have gone on before as we lift up the Name that is above all names!

Should I or shouldn’t I?

This past weekend I conducted a Workshop on how to live like Christ Monday through Saturday.  The whole idea behind the program was to help Christians to understand what the Bible teaches on this topic in a practical and applicable way.  It was a nice success, and I have gotten very good feedback from the attendees.

It occurred to me in setting up the curriculum that this is a subject that is best understood in light of two things: spiritual warfare, and the terms and promises of the New Covenant.  Putting things in a covenant context is something I do all of the time in teaching, for without an understanding of covenant, most people have grave difficulty understanding Scripture.  In fact, when you come right down to cases, most great doctrinal disagreements come back to understanding or misunderstanding Biblical covenant and their application.  (See Mom, I really did pay attention in school!)

On the other hand, the spiritual warfare background of day-to-day Christian life is more difficult to present in a simple, clear way that doesn’t result in people getting carried away with shadows in the dark…

To make things simple and clear, I opened the Workshop by telling a story from the point of view of an angel in heaven; I assumed the character myself.  The story began with Creation and ran through until the present time.  Obviously I tried to give some idea of what goes on in spiritual warfare, but I had to explain things in earthly language and references, since none of us has been to heaven, and English most likely lacks words for all of the wonders none of us has seen, and arguably this is the sort of thing that the Bible authors themselves had to do, after all, how many times do they say something like “it was like a… ?”  It was “like” something because who can describe it any other way?

In addition, I also filled in some areas that we don’t have texts for, as many theorists have done oer the centuries, so you could say that I took a few liberties with the narrative, something I disclosed to the Workshop.    The bottom line is that the story achieved its purpose of communicating what spiritual warfare is all about and what it ‘looks like’ in real life while avoiding some of the more “far out” speculations that have been found in Christian literature over the years… The “reviews” from the session attendees were positive.

Now here’s my dilemma: I have been thinking of writing down this little narrative in a short series of posts here.  I fully realize that people of various doctrinal backgrounds may read it, and their backgrounds may well differ from mine.  I would not consider this a topic to argue about, not because it isn’t important, but because the argument accomplishes nothing.  I also recognize that the way I did the story, spread out over multiple posts could be confusing, particularly if a person picked up only one “episode.”  Yet, there’s no way it could be shortened to fit in one huge post.

It could be fun; it could help many to have a better understanding… Or it could confuse and frustrate…

Should I or shouldn’t I?

I  wonder…

A quiet moment

 

 

Life can be hectic and loud, but all of us need some peace and quiet some times.  It helps us to recharge, to relax and to calm our thoughts.  Yes, we all need a little peace and quiet, a little break you might say…

We need a little peace and quiet to talk things over with our Lord; to pray, to give thanks.

Today, if you hear his voice, 
  do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, 
   as you did that day at Massah  in the desert, 
 where your fathers tested and tried me, 
   though they had seen what I did. 

(Psalm 95: 7b-9)

We’ll never hear His voice in our hectic and loud world, we all need a little peace and quiet…

And so what do we see?

When we gaze up into the clear night sky, what do we see?  When we are far away from the city lights and we look upward, what can we learn?

Can we learn as much looking around the natural beauty of the earth? What about looking into a microscope and seeing the amazing complexity of a single living cell?

Yes, we can, for these all proclaim the glory of God!

We can hardly gaze upon Creation without coming to see the very handiwork of the Creator Himself… and yet millions see nothing. How very pathetic.

The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
 Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
 They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.

Psalm 19:1-4

How hard it must be to see the handiwork of God and still deny it; how miserable the life that seeks to be without purpose.  How great the burden must be to carry the obligation of denial.

 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

How can we take any pleasure in observing the folly of men who seek to deny the obvious?  How can we simply see such people as debating opponents?

The poor souls who would deny God’s glory need to hear the truth; and if we will not be inspired by God’s glory that is all around us to share His Truth… then who will be?

Music, Traditions and Change

Yesterday I opened a discussion of traditions and music and told you about the changes we made in this area and why.  I told you how we approached the difficulty of resistance when we did so, and today I’d like to wrap up the discussion…

Please understand that we didn’t make our changes over night or in a vacuum.  It all began with a concerted effort to grow our church spiritually not numerically.  I would imagine that if we just tried flipping a switch and went from totally traditional one week, and then totally contemporary the next, there wouldn’t have been anything but chaos as a result.  In addition, our music evolved slowly for a number of reasons such as a lack of people willing to participate; a general lack of talent available in a small congregation, but as time passed, these things changed  With each new success, more people wanted to be part of a winning team, you might say.

Music was not the only tradition that was either done away with or modified, but of course it was the most obvious.  I must mention here once again that when I speak of our traditions, I am referring only to the way we did things, not to the message of Scripture or to any Scriptural imperative. As time went on, something else started to change…

It used to be that baptisms were so infrequent that when there was one, nobody had any idea of what to do, and each time the wheel had to be reinvented… or so it seemed.  People might actually complain that church got out late that day! Baptisms became much more frequent, and pretty soon, everyone involved in the worship service knew exactly what to do:  Oh, there’s a baptism today, great!  Things go almost like clockwork because the results of the things that had been done, beginning with spiritual growth began to pay off in souls won for Jesus Christ.  To be sure, I’m not suggesting that improvements can’t still be made, that process never should stop, but a dramatic shift had taken place.

The time came when we had, instead of an empty auditorium, a need to go to two services, and the day may well come soon when we need either a third service or a new place to meet: God’s will be done!

The funny thing that comes to me in looking back is that I really don’t hear complaints much any more.  I can understand somebody being skeptical about changes at first, but when the harvest starts to come in, the skeptics are gone.  Oh, I’m sure that some day something else will change and it will take a time for a buy-in from certain quarters, but when you are in a place where God is working in your midst, TWWADI doesn’t seem to count for very much.

Looking at Your Traditions

I must begin by saying that it has been some time since my last post on Church growth.  I had not intended to be so long away (sorry about that) but I’m back at home and it’s time to move forward… so here goes.

Last time, I was talking about TWWADI (The Way We’ve Always Done It) and proposed to continue with a look at some traditions that we adjusted so as to move forward both spiritually within our congregation and as a result to bring more people to Christ.  The biggest and most visible tradition that we took a look at was our music.

Now I fully realize that this is a controversial subject in many places and it has had fallout in churches for quite some time.  For whatever reason the style of music in a church is often a polarizing subject that breaks a group into two parts:  The first part is often the older group that likes their music the way it’s always been and doesn’t want to hear about doing it differently, and the other group is often the younger ones who want more modern music. We had the same dynamic.

It is tempting to want to try “blended” music as many churches do.  Blended music is a little of each so that nobody is overly irritated… and so that nobody is overly satisfied. I must admit that we did some of the blended music for a time, but not because it was our desire to compromise, but because we lacked the people who could sing the more contemporary tunes.  This is not a good thing!

The thing that I hope you will understand here is not the “what” but instead the “why.”    There are two very important things to consider when music in the worship service is being discussed.  First we need to remember what the purpose of the church is from a Biblical point of view.  Is it to please its members and give them their favorite music… or is it to seek and save the lost?

If the purpose of the church is to please its membership, then take a vote and follow the majority.  If it is to seek and save the lost, then we must take into consideration what will make a visitor, a seeking person who is willing to consider becoming a Christian and give his or her life to the Lord, comfortable enough to let down their guard and take in the message of Salvation.

Before I go any further, I must confess that I prefer the old music, the songs that come from the old Hymnal, you know the ones, they are all a hundred years old or more… some are closer to 500 years old.  When I come home, I also listen to classical music; I am really fond of Baroque music (1600-1750).  Am I representative of those we are supposed to be taking the gospel to?  No, not really.

Most people who are not already church members aren’t familiar with old hymns, but they usually do listen to music, and mostly they listen to music that is more contemporary than not.  If they are visiting a church, it stands to reason that the more that they come into contact with that is familiar and comfortable, the more at home and relaxed they are likely to be, and the more relaxed, the more likely they are to receive the message of the gospel than if they feel utterly out-of-place.  Thus, since there is plenty of very fine Christian music in a contemporary style, why shouldn’t we use it instead of insisting upon our own preferences and losing the opportunity to win a soul for Christ? I have heard it said that if the music isn’t traditional then it also isn’t worship… but consider this:  What is traditional music?  It is nothing more than contemporary music from a different time!  What is style?  It isn’t something from the Bible, it’s something from the culture of man.  If the music faithfully conveys a Christian message than the style is meaningless!

The other thing we should consider is why some of us insist on making no change in music.  A spiritually mature believer will have his or her top priority on the lost, not on their own preferences or habits, thus when people strongly object to any change, they are not telling us that we shouldn’t adjust our music, they are telling us that we need to do a better job of discipleship, that we haven’t taught them enough for them to grow spiritually.  To put it another way, their objection is a teachable moment.  When we patiently and lovingly teach them where our priorities need to be as Christians, we are able to bring them along into greater spiritual maturity and enable our churches to reach people that we haven’t reached before.

I’ll continue this discussion in the next post…

One Week Later

I would imagine that most of us have various impressions of the last week’s news relating to the events in Boston.  Violence, terror, confusion, outrage, sadness, mourning all fit the bill, but of course there are other things as well.

Praise for the first responders, the bravery of so many of those who put their lives on the line to protect the good citizens of the Boston area, and of course heavy concern for those who were killed or injured and their families.  There were many saddening tales of injuries, loss and grief…

There have been a great number of tributes paid, tales told, news reported and images of all kinds that I wouldn’t even attempt to add to those.  For me, there are certainly many questions that still need an answer: How could this happen?  How did these guys expect to get away with their crimes?  Are there more involved?  All of these are on my mind after a week that shocked us all.

I was struck late last week by the many comments from friends and acquaintances of the perpetrators saying that, particularly the younger of the two was such a nice guy, how nobody could have imagined him capable of such acts.   I heard an “expert” who pointed out that whenever there is a horrible crime of violence, the people who knew the murderer or attacker always say these things, and the expert said that they are simply speaking from emotion and didn’t understand the signs involved in such things.  Maybe the gentleman is correct, but this thought stuck with me:

Suppose those people are right; suppose that this guy was the last one that any reasonable person would have suspected to carry out such an outrageous act of violence upon innocent people… what happened?

Looking at this question from a Christian Biblical point of view, I’m struck by something that a “profession” in security might not take into consideration, and that is the fact that there is a difference between “evil” and “Evil.”  The former is a word that we might use to describe a very bad action: “That was an evil thing to do.”  The latter, however is an active, searching and driving force that is seeking to turn otherwise decent people into monsters.  It is in fact the spiritual enemy of the Christian.  It seeks to corrupt, destroy and foul anybody who lets it into their lives, and it is something that we must take very seriously.

I am normally one of the last people to over-spiritualize things, please understand that.  However, the Bible teaches us that we are on the front lines of a spiritual war, and we must take that seriously.

 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Ephesians 6:12

It is incumbent upon us to protect our young from opening themselves to Evil; to take up the sword that is God’s Word to oppose it, and to be fervent prayer warriors for Jesus Christ, to boldly pray not just for safety from evil, which is the approach that our civil authorities must take, but rather to pray boldly for the utter destruction of that Evil which has plagued this world for so many centuries, and to pray boldly that the cross of will triumph over sin and death in the hearts of the people.

Basic Communication

As we continue on with our look at church growth, I think it would be beneficial to review some basics of elementary communication to see if there is an application to growing a church, and of course I mean growing first in the sense of spiritual growth and then its natural result, growing in numbers. As an undergraduate, over 30 years ago, I studied communication, and the one thing that I can remember, perhaps more than any other thing that my professors taught was that the first rule of communication was to know your audience. Certainly you wouldn’t speak to your grandmother the way you might speak to your college-age friends.  You wouldn’t address the President the way you’d address the guys on your bowling team, and you wouldn’t make a presentation to an audience of college professors in the same way you would to a group of elderly women.

This is actually more of an issue in churches than you might think, particularly when a congregation is diverse, for not all Peoples and backgrounds have the same frames of reference.  When I started this blog, my idea was to comment of frames of reference that people have, and how they affect our view of the things around us.  For example, when I have been teaching in church to a group of people who are mostly in their 50′s and 60′s, I might use as an example a cultural reference to a TV show, commercial or song from the 1960′s.  If I used that same example to a group of people in their 20′s or 300′s, they would probably have no clue what I was talking about, and if I mentioned Lady Gaga to the older group, they would be clueless, as I am.  (Just a name I heard on the radio this morning)

I have been strongly criticized in some comments on this series of posts because I have used some modern terms that come out of the world of communication such as “vision statement” and “rollout.” It seems that when some Christians see these terms used, they assume that I must be running some of a scam, entirely disregarding the message of Scripture and putting together a phony kind of church that is built on tricks and entertainment, containing no spiritual truth… You might ask why I used these terms to describe what went on instead of more traditional Biblical terms meaning the same thing.  For example, I could have said that we ‘proclaimed our vision of the Body of Christ as exhortations to the flock to repent from their wicked ways and follow the Lord with faithfulness.’  I didn’t put it that way because who understand that other than preachers, seminary professors and old school Christians who only read King James?  They are not my (here’s another one from communication) “Target audience.”  Why are these fine folks not my target audience?  Simple: They already know it all, and wouldn’t even consider what I am saying here!

Here are a couple of examples from the Bible:  First, Jesus frequently used analogies relating to agriculture to communicate His message to the people.  He did that because he was speaking to people who lived in first century Judea and the areas surrounding it who lived in an agrarian economy where the major production was in grapes used for wine-making, wheat used for bread making, fishing and the raising of sheep for food and wool.  Do you suppose He would have used the same examples if the area was one that raised tomatoes and artichokes?  Of course not; who would have understood all that sheep stuff?  When we teach those passages today, we must explain it to modern-day Americans; Jesus didn’t have that problem because his audience knew exactly what He was talking about.

Consider the apostle Paul.  Did he present the message in the same terms to Greeks as he did to Jews in Judea?  Of course not; the Greeks didn’t know much of anything of the Jewish Scriptures.  When Paul spoke to the Athenians on Mars Hill did he present the gospel like he had presented it everywhere else?  No, he knew his audience! Consider the synoptic gospels: Matthew wrote for a Jewish audience, Mark to a Roman audience and Luke to a Greek audience.  They all present the same exact message, but they do it in different ways…

In a nutshell, church growth comes down to one problem that leads to other problems which are really a subset of the first one: That main problem is how do we get our current congregations mature enough spiritually so that we can shift out target audience away from them and on to the lost who so desperately need to hear about Jesus Christ? If you are perceptive, you might realize that I just restated my TWWADI post to reach a different audience!

I have already described what we did to accomplish this.  Our approach was in Vision rollout phases 1 and 2.  First, in phase 1 we pointed them to the Great Commission and got their attention.  In phase 2 we actively stepped up our educational efforts to teach them Scriptural application in daily life.  The next step in the process was to shift the target audience for everyone from selfish things to reaching out to the lost, and that discussion begins tomorrow.