Looking for the Living among the Dead
Intentional Faith
Thank You
“Thank you for staying in a church whose
- Music
- Clothes
- Liturgy
- Building
- Service order
- Preaching style
- Sanctuary
- or something else
has changed into something you don’t recognize any more.
Thank you for the heritage you passed on to us that gives us the courage to try new, even stupid things to see if they work.
Thank you for how much you pray for us.
Thank you for reminding us that the methods can change as long as the message doesn’t.
Thank you for keeping the ship steady when people like me want to rock the boat.
Thank you for the times you want to speak up, but decide it might be best to pray about it for now.
Thank you for the times you need to speak up and do.
Thank you for the times you express your concerns in private, so you can stand with us in public.
Thank you for forgiving us when we blow it.
Thank you for letting us reach higher, because we’re standing on your shoulders.
Thank you for catching us when we fall.
Thank you for doing all of this without getting anything close to the credit you deserve.
For these, and so many other blessings that no blog post will ever be long enough for, we thank you.
Easter 2015
Church-Killing Gossip
Gossip is one of the most destructive forces in the local church. The article below, entitled “How to Stop Church-Killing Gossip,” has many helpful suggestions for how we ought to address gossip when we hear it. (This article was originally published on the blog of the Gospel Coalition).
Gossip involves saying behind a person’s back what you would never say to his or her face.
Flattery means saying to a person’s face what you would never say behind his or her back.
Here are some wise words from Dan Phillips for when you hear gossip from someone:
- Ask, “Why are you telling me this?” Often, that in itself is such a focusing question that it can bring an end to the whole unpleasant chapter. It has the added benefit that it can help a person whose intentions are as good as his/her judgment is bad.
- Ask, “What’s the difference between what you’re telling me and gossip?” See above; same effect, same potential benefits.
- Ask, “How is your telling me that thought, that complaint, that information going to help you and me love God and our brothers better, and knit us closer together as a church in Christ’s love?” Isn’t that the goal we should share, every one of us? Won’t it take the working of each individual member (Eph. 4:16)? Isn’t the watch-out for harmful influences an every-member ministry (Heb. 3:12-13; 10:24; 13:12-15)?
- Ask, “Now that you’ve told me about that, what are you going to do about it?” While the previous two are subjective, this is not. If neither of the previous two questions succeeded in identifying gossip/whispering/sowing-dissension for what they are, the answer to this question will do so. Tip: if the answer is “Pray,” a good response might be “Then why didn’t you do that and leave it there in the first place?”
- Say, “Now that you’ve told me about that, you’ve morally obligated me to make sure you talk to ____ about it. How long do you think you need, so I can know when this becomes a sin that I will need to confront in you?” The least that this will accomplish is that you’ll fall off the list of gossips’/whisperers’ favorite venting-spots. The most is that you may head off a church split, division, harmed souls, sidelined Gospel ministry, and waylaid discipleship. Isn’t that worth it?
You can read the whole thing here.
Ray Ortlund explains what gossip is and why it is sinfully enticing:
Gossip is our dark moral fervor eagerly seeking gratification.
Gossip makes us feel important and needed as we declare our judgments.
It makes us feel included to know the inside scoop.
It makes us feel powerful to cut someone else down to size, especially someone we are jealous of.
It makes us feel righteous, even responsible, to pronounce someone else guilty.
Gossip can feel good in multiple ways. But it is of the flesh, not of the Spirit.
. . . Gossip is a sin rarely disciplined but often more socially destructive than the sensational sins.
Gossip leaves a wide trail of devastation wherever and however it goes – word of mouth, email, blogging, YouTube.
It erodes trust and destroys morale.
It creates a social environment of suspicion where everyone must wonder what is being said behind their backs and whether appearances of friendship are sincere.
It ruins hard-won reputations with cowardly but effective weapons of misrepresentation.
It manipulates people into taking sides when no such action is necessary or beneficial.
It unleashes the dark powers of psychological transference, doing violence to the gossiper, to the one receiving the gossip and to the person being spoken against.
It makes the Body of Christ look like the Body of Antichrist – destroyers rather than healers.
It exhausts the energies we would otherwise devote to positive witness.
It robs our Lord of the Church he deserves.
It exposes the hostility in our hearts and discredits the gospel in the eyes of the world. Then we wonder why we don’t see more conversions, why “the ground is so hard.”
Read the whole thing, including his own counsel on what you should do when you start to hear gossip.
Preparations
Food for Thought
Below is a post from Charles Wood regarding daily Bible reading. I hope it will encourage you to send time in the Word each day.
WHY YOU’LL NEVER REGRET FEEDING ON GOD’S WORD EVERY DAY
…”let’s be brutally honest for a moment : do we really feel a need for the Bible? Between Twitter, Oprah, our accountant and Sunday morning sermons, there’s already a flood of counsel washing into our lives. What’s the Point? So why read the Bible? And why every day? Dozens of reasons could be mentioned. Here are a few of the most important: Daily Bible reading is how we calm down, tank up, get wisdom, go deep, get busy and commune with God.
1. Calm down. Each day we roll out of bed and, as C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, ‘all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals.’ One reason we read the Bible is so that we are not subject to living the day out of haste but rather out of calm. We remember the shortness of life, the eternality of heaven and the abundance of a gospel from which no sin or failure is excluded. The promises of Scripture are like an asthmatic’s inhaler, enabling us to slow down and take a deep breath.
2. Tank up. Reading Scripture is like eating food. We have to do it regularly, it tastes good to taste buds that are alive, and it nourishes us for the day. Bible reading is stored energy, stockpiled emotional and psychological capital. We stay afloat throughout the day by making moment-by-moment withdrawals from that vast reservoir.
3. Get wisdom. By nature, we are fools. Over time we can shed folly and become wise. We will not do it on our own. And we will not do it by downloading all the cleverness of the world’s best self-help gurus into our minds. We need a word from heaven, from beyond. The Bible is the world’s great self-corrective. Each day it tweaks our lives and prompts fresh mid-course corrections. Wisdom flourishes.
4. Go deep. Daily Bible reading deepens us theologically. On the one hand, the demons are excellent theologians (James 2:19). They would ace our seminaries’ doctrine exams. So it isn’t enough to have right doctrine. But it is certainly necessary. Defective doctrine means a defective view of God, and to the degree our view of God is defective, to that degree the ceiling lowers on our potential for joy, comfort and above all enjoying the gospel of grace. One reason we read the Bible is to deepen our minds. To sharpen the contours of our vision of God. To think more accurately about all that matters most.
5. Get busy. We also read the Bible to be told what to do. It’s not the main thing we read the Bible for. But we do find ourselves stirred to take action in concrete ways. Sometimes the text commands action directly. Other times it doesn’t, but at the least, indirectly, a text will mess with us, change us a little bit, alter our outlook and thus impel us forward in some new step of practical obedience externally because we have been changed a tiny bit internally.
6. Commune With God. This is the umbrella category that includes all the rest. This is the point. Reading the Bible is a personal experience—“person-al,” one person to another. What other book do we read, conscious of the author interacting with us as we do so? Daily Bible reading requires routine and structure, but it is not mechanical—just as a body requires a bony skeleton, but it is not the skeleton that gives it life. We do with the Bible what the Psalms guide us in doing—adore God, thank him, complain to him, wrestle with him, express perplexity to him and all the rest.
“Getting Practical: So what might this actually look like? To be sure, it would be simplistic to conceive of every person’s time in Scripture as looking the same. Just as there are different but equally valid ways to exercise, so too there are different but equally valid ways to read the Bible. But what is nonnegotiable is that we must be doing so with faithful regularity in order to be healthy. I have found morning time, first thing, to be best for reading the Bible. The house is quiet. A day’s worth of activity and anxiety has not built up. My mind is as blank as it will be all day and my body is as lethargic as it will be all day, making me well suited for unhurried reflection on the text. At times in the past, I’ve tried spending time in the Word in the evening, but my mind is racing from the day’s events, and I find it extremely difficult to slow down and chew on the text in a meditative way. Coffee and Scripture first thing in the morning has become a daily ritual that I dearly love and need. Experiment with what works best for you. Reading through the Bible in a year may be a good idea, especially if you are newer to Christianity. For myself, I’ve found slower, unhurried reflection and meditation on very small portions of Scripture to be best at this stage, with four young kids in the house and a small window of time for quiet solitude each morning….” Charles Wood
Spiritual Evaluation
“Your wait time is….”
It is possible that when you call a business, you might hear a computerized message which informs you of how long you must wait for a customer representative. Often when we hear that message we have to face how impatient we are. Recently I read an article that contained words of wisdom regrading the virtue of patience. The author of the article is Charles Wood. I am grateful for such godly and wise counsel.
Pastor Chris
1. Waiting Reveals Our True Motives: Waiting has a way of bringing out the best and worst in people. People who don’t have good motives won’t wait long because they’re not interested in the commitment it takes to see something through. They’re too interested in short-term gains or success.
2. Waiting Builds Patience In Our Lives: Patience in waiting for small things leads to having patience in the bigger things. Our problem is our perspective is usually wrong. We tend to think the bigger things in life are finances and possessions, while God thinks influencing and changing people is more important.
3. Waiting Builds Anticipation: Why do children get so excited around Christmas? Because the wait has produced anticipation. We tend to appreciate things the longer we have to wait for them. Because of having to wait so long, we tend to cherish and take care of it more than others might. People tend to treasure the things they have to wait for.
4. Waiting Transforms Our Character: Waiting has a way of rubbing off the rough edges of our lives. Few sermons talk about Moses having to wait in the desert 40 years before God came to him. God used this time of waiting to transform his character.
5. Waiting Builds Intimacy With and Dependency Upon God: Think of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Jesus, Paul, etc. Waiting during the difficult times developed their relationship with God. Some of the most intimate relationships we have in our lives are because a friend stood in the trenches with us during the heat of the battle. I’ve always believed God is just as interested in the journey as he is the destination. If not, all the biblical accounts would only include the feel good parts and not the good, the bad and the ugly of the times of waiting. We may not always understand why we have to wait, but the good news is that God never asks to wait without Him.
We discussed this in our small group Sunday evening as some in the group are going through serious times of waiting. They added several more reasons:
6. God Knows That We Are Not Yet Ready for What We Want: we may need more maturity, a different setting, some step of action on our part, etc., before we are really ready for any action on His part.
7. He Just Shows Us Who Is In Control: we know that intellectually, but we sometimes tend to wander into His area. Waiting may well be His “push-back.”
8. There Is A Web of Humanity Involved: It is possible that other people and circumstances are involved in that for which we wait. We are waiting because there are those other things that must be cared for first before our request can be granted.
9. There Is the Possibility That We Are Not Ready For What We Are Waiting For: There is nothing more tragic that watching someone get an almost immediate answer to prayer and then squander what has been granted on trivialities or minutia.
10. God May Be Making Us Wait So We Can See Why What We Wanted Would Not Have Been Good For Us To Have At The Time We Were Asking: some of the things I have had to wait for have become matters of indifference during my time of waiting. Had He given them to me just when I asked for them, I would have squandered them in the sense that I really didn’t need them or even want them, something that I could only learn through the time of Waiting.”
Mother’s Day
We thank the Lord for godly women, who are called “mom”. A mother’s willingness to sacrifice her live is a true display of the love of God in Christ. The link below is a clever way to remind us of a mom’s sacrificial life. Enjoy the laugh, the tear and I hope you have a blessed mother’s day.
Pastor Chris