So, what do you think about in the middle of the night?

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Here is my answer. It’s from this website fifteen years ago.  (I’ve tweaked it a tad.)

The mind is a funny thing. It can be creative in the small hours of the morning and solve your problems. As a high school algebra student, I had that happen more than once. I’d go to bed puzzled about a problem, then wake up with the answer.

Great when your mind solves a problem without actually involving you in the process!

The mind can also be anxious in those hours. Half the people I know who wake up between midnight and dawn tell me they are worried about unidentified problems. Anxiety is a sleep-stealer.

Once in a while, I have awakened with a great article that just cried to be written. On one occasion, I got up and wrote it down. Next morning, far from being disappointed, I was impressed. Good stuff, I thought. I worked with it over the next few days and then sent it off to several magazines to see if the editors had a use for it.

InterVarsity Press’ His magazine bought the article and ran it in a choice place–the inside back cover. Over the next 15 years, from time to time I would receive small checks in the mail from other magazines that ran it. Several notes from editors in foreign countries like Korea and New Zealand advised me they were running the article.

So, I learned that when something is hammering on my brain in the middle of the night, to get up and write it down.

So, one morning this week, I was lying in bed thinking about this world we’re privileged to live in. About this planet we are privileged to live on. This is the result…

NO VIBRATIONS.

Here we are on this globe we named Earth, hurling through space at so many thousands of miles per minute. The most amazing thing to me is the absence of vibrations.

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The awesomeness of handling the Word of God

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“…rightly dividing the Word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).

The other day I posted this on Facebook…

Ever wonder how pastors deal with Sunday morning anxiety?  They’re about to enter the pulpit and lead a congregation to worship the living God, then open His book and declare its life-changing message.  What a responsibility!  How do they cope with so great a burden? I’ll tell you how. They breathe deeply, commit it all to the Lord, and keep telling themselves, ‘Relax, hotshot. This is not about you.‘  —  Most have to say it about 150 times before the message gets through.  For some, 600 repeititons are required. And alas, some never get the message and approach this most solemn of responsibilities thinking it’s all about them.

That generated some response.  And one in particular that resonated with me.

A friend expressed concern for those who cope with “the burden and fear of handling the word of God.”

Right.  Handling the Word of God is both a burden and a fear.

Standing before groups large and small or even individuals and opening God’s Word is a privilege, an opportunity, a responsibility, and a lot of other things. But it’s also a burden and a fear.

We must never take this lightly.  Lives hang in the balance.

The burden of the Lord.

Old Testament prophets would sometimes begin their assignment by announcing “The burden of the Lord” (e.g., Nahum 1:1).  Any pastor who claims not to feel the burden from time to time has been playing at the business of preaching. Well, either that, or delivering someone else’s sermons.

Lives hang in the balance.  People who hear the Word and believe may live forever. Those who reject Christ will have eternity to regret their decision.  And the determining factor sometimes can be the way one declared the “whole counsel of God.”

No wonder some preachers think this is about them, since so much is at risk here. If I do it well, God uses it to change lives forever. And if I do it poorly or get in the way, those who reject my ineffective message will more than likely reject my Savior too.

The burden is enormous.

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Why we celebrate thanksgiving

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In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.  –First Thessalonians 5:18

The leaders of this country knew something, something vital about people.  If they are not led to do otherwise, people will gripe and complain and insist on their rights.

It’s human nature. Ask any pastor.  Ask any school principal.  Ask any parent.

Ask our political leaders.

And when people gripe and complain, the infection spreads like wildfire and does just as much damage.

Firefighters know the way to head off a big fire is to light a backfire.

My uncle was a forest ranger in Bankhead National Forest in north Alabama.  When I was 15, he hired me to help him for part of the summer.  Two dollars a day it was!  Not much, but it was two dollars more than this farm boy was making!

I still recall him saying, “Joe, do you know how to set a backfire?”  I had no clue.  He showed me.  The fire was up ahead and coming this way.  But Uncle Cecil and I walked around setting small fires that we let burn a few minutes, then extinguished.  Then, when the fire arrived, its fuel was all gone, all burned out.  And the fire died.

That’s how it is with griping and complaining, with grumbling and insisting on our rights. The way to douse that conflagration is by getting ahead of it and setting a backfire of thanksgiving.

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What I would not do for a great story!

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“And without parables (great stories!) Jesus did not teach” (Mark 4:34).

I once sat through a long convention session just to hear a motivational speaker.  The story with which he opened was so good it became a mainstay in my arsenal of great illustrations and sermon-helpers.

Time well spent.

I’ve read entire books and come away with one paragraph that became a staple in my preaching thereafter.  It was time well used and money well spent.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling Eat, Pray, Love”--which a zillion people loved but of which I am not one; sorry!–attended a party 20 years ago and heard something from a fellow whose name she has long forgotten.  She says, Sometimes I think this man came into my life for the sole purpose of telling me this story, which has delighted and inspired me ever since.

That’s how it works.  One story, a lifetime of benefit.

Gilbert says the man told of his younger brother who was an aspiring artist.  Living in Paris and struggling to get by, he seized every opportunity to get his name before people.  One day, in a cafe’ he met some people who invited him to a party that weekend at a castle in the Loire Valley.  This was big stuff and he eagerly accepted the opportunity to hobnob with people of wealth and influence.

This would be the party of the year, they said.  The rich and famous would be in attendance, as well as members of European royalty.  And, they informed him, it was to be a masquerade ball where everyone went all out on their costumes.  “Dress up, they said, and join us!”

All that week, the little brother worked on a costume he was sure would knock them dead.  His outfit would be the centerpiece of the ball, the one sure to generate the most interest and conversation.  When the day came, he rented a car and drove three hours to the castle.  He changed into his costume in the car and walked up to the castle, head held high, confidence and excitement exuding from the pores of his skin.

Entering the castle, he quickly realized his mistake.

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A book I just finished: “Pumpkin Spice & Everything Nice”

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Pumpkin Spice & Everything Nice by Katie Cicatelli-Kuc.  Published by Scholastic, Inc in 2024. It’s a young  adult novel.

Hey, don’t knock young adult novels if you haven’t tried them.  From time to time I grow tired of reading heavy things, murderous things, complex and torturous things, and just drop back to read something light.  The heading about the title of this book says “Get ready to fall in love.”  The word fall is just like that, in italics.  So, the emphasis is on this time of year when leaves are turning brown and people are carving jack-o-lanterns and drinking pumpkin spice.

I love pumpkin spice lattes.  Not that I drink them often.  Maybe one a season.

Right now, the other books I am reading, some each day, include–

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How to give thanks. And how not to.

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It is said that when Maureen Stapleton won the Academy Award, she gushed into the microphone, “I want to thank everyone I’ve ever known!”

That got a laugh, I’m sure, and everyone understood the sense of gratitude that threatened to overload her nervous system. It’s a grand feeling, no doubt, although few among us have ever been in the position she was at that moment.

But does anyone think that Ms. Stapleton’s friends and family members, her co-stars and colleagues, her producers and directors, immediately felt appreciated and properly thanked by that statement? Surely not. No one took it as a personal word of appreciation.

Impersonal, general, generic one-size-fits-all thanks does not do the job. A message on the sign-board in front of a place of business saying “Thanks for your patronage” does not communicate thanksgiving.

There are ways to say “thanks” effectively and also ways to say “thanks” when you’re wasting your breath.

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In everything give thanks. Go ahead, it’s not that hard.

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In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.  –First Thessalonians 5:18

Were not ten lepers healed?  And yet only one turned back to give thanks.  –Luke 17:11-19

“Thank you” may not be the most profound thing you will hear or speak today. The person you direct those words to–let’s be honest–will not find them the most rewarding of utterances they receive throughout the day. In our society, they’re rather routine.

However, and this is what keeps us coming back to reminding ourselves to give thanks, the absence of those two words creates a deafening silence that may wound good people who have served well.

Thanksgiving can be trite or it can be a treasure. How we give it, the way we speak it, the smile on our countenance, and the sincerity in our voice, these infuse it with authenticity or diminish its worth.

Though I have the gift of eloquence and can move great audiences with the force of my words and have not thanks, I am become a self-righteous prig and an insufferable elitist.

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10 questions for those not accepting “once saved always”

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(I send this forth in all sincerity and with the kindness of Christ. If you disagree, please respond graciously also. God’s people should be able to have a serious and Christ-honoring discussion about this hotly debated subject.  Thank you.)

Let me set the table with something the Lord Jesus said.  When the disciples returned from preaching with glowing reports of amazing victories over the devil, our Lord called them back to earth, so to speak, with this:

“Do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you. But rejoice because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20).

Now, look at what He did there.  The Lord changed the basis of their joy and thanksgiving from something that fluctuates–like the outward results of missions, which can be good or bad, up and down–to something permanent and unchanging, our salvation.

The Lord Jesus clearly thought our salvation was secure. And He should know, right?

Otherwise, wouldn’t He have chosen some other basis for our joy?

No other conclusion is possible. Jesus clearly thought salvation was a once-and-done proposition. Something permanent, solid, irreversible.

As far as I am able to tell, you will not find one place in the utterances of the Lord Jesus that say otherwise.

For those who find they cannot accept the teaching of “once saved always saved” (aka, the security of the believer), we have a few questions….

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What to do when the pastor needs a time-out

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A friend was in a conference at her church in which various leaders were sitting around haggling over some issue. When one of the guys grew a little irritable, his wife said, “All right, Bobby. You’re in time out!”

The wife is a kindergarten teacher.

Pretty good idea, I think. Someone crosses the line and begins behaving badly, and we put them in time out. Maybe like hockey’s penalty box.

A pastor sent me a note, asking for my (ahem) famous instant assessment on his situation. He’s losing his passion for his ministry even though he knows he’s in the right place and there is nowhere he’d rather be. His sermon preparation is uninspired and much of the work of the ministry is drudgery to him.

I said, “This is a no-brainer. You are fatigued. You need rest.”

He did not argue, but started telling why his church was not going to allow him time away.

What would you think was the major reason the church will not grant him some quality time off? Answer: He’s bi-vocational.

What that means is that in addition to pastoring the church, he also holds down a full-time job in the secular world. So, to the congregation–this is him talking now–he’s part-time at the church. And what could possibly be stressful about a part-time job?

Faulty reasoning. Seriously faulty. His full-time employment carries a full quota of stress and pressure. As for the church job, there is no such thing as a part-time pastor. You are always the pastor and always on call. The work is never far from your mind. Your sermons are always incubating inside you, whether you’re having lunch at your desk or driving to the office. Church members rightfully feel if they need you, day or night, they can call.

Try telling them, “I’m not on duty right now. I’m part time.”

The fatigued pastor needs some time out.

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The most important person in your church office

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The receptionist–the one who greets the public–is in many ways your most important staffer.

She is the first person most people see when they walk in, the voice they talk with on the phone, and the only one a lot of outsiders will deal with from your church.

Pastor, she can make you or break you.

She can be a light to someone coming in from the dark, lift the spirits of a visitor who ran out of hope miles up the road, defrost the spirit of Jack Frost himself, and protect the beleaguered pastor who desperately needs an hour of study time without interruptions.

She can do all these things and more. But she can also run people off faster than Sunday’s tithing sermon or Wednesday night’s cold ham and peas.

Where does one find a receptionist sent from Heaven?

Answer: Heaven.

Ask God. He knows them all, has full resumes on each person on the planet, and runs the best placement service ever. Pray.

For some reason a long time ago, I began getting invited to speak to meetings of church administrative assistants, a catch-all phrase that encompasses secretaries, receptionists, bookkeepers, and practically anyone else on the office staff. I’ve been to Alabama’s Judson College more than once addressing that state’s church secretaries, done the same at Louisiana’s Tall Timbers Conference Center and Mississippi’s Garaywa Center. Best of all, for many years the National Association of Southern Baptist Secretaries (NASBS) invited me to attend (to address them, hold conferences, and sketch everyone) their bi-ennial gatherings, sometimes at one of our conference centers (Glorieta in New Mexico or Ridgecrest in North Carolina, at other times at Lifeway in Nashville and one year at the First Baptist Church of Dollywood. Oh, excuse me. Sevierville, Tennessee. (smiley face here!)

This is not to imply that I know a lot about their work, only that I spend a good deal of time with them and treasure the difference these ladies–they’re almost always women–make in the church’s ministry.

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