Greater is He who is in you. Therefore….

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“You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.”  I John 4:4

I was a 20-year-old college sophomore and still 15 months shy of receiving a call into the ministry when our church selected me as “pastor” for the annual Youth Week. Basically, that meant I was to preach a sermon that Sunday night. Yikes.  That was excitingly scary.

The text was this verse. I’ve never forgotten it, primarily because I never quite got the significance of its meaning.  It sounded wonderful and encouraging, even motivating. But what little I was able to glean from its riches is thankfully gone and erased from the minds and memories of those present that night in the Spring of 1960.

I love the promise.  “Greater is He who is in you than the one in the world.”

The Lord is with you, He is in you, and He is for you.  Scripture declares each one in no uncertain terms..  Need some verses for those?

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Two of my best ideas for ministry

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I’m tempted to say, “Some of my best ideas for ministry came from other people.”  Which is true, of course. Ask any pastor or staffer.   And, just as equally true, some of my best ideas bombed and I wouldn’t want to tell you about them.  Smiley-face here.

But here are a couple of things the Lord gave me (I know, I know. We should say that cautiously, lest we join the Name Above All Other Names to something unworthy) that not only worked out, but turned out to be some of the best things we did in my last pastorate…

First idea.  An idea for stewardship.   Purpose: To motivate people to tithe their incomes to the church over the difficult summer months

Summer is hard on churches which live from month to month financially.  And yes, sometimes from week to week. People go on vacations or find distractions to take them away on weekends. A large segment of the Lord’s flock give only when they are in church.  Sundays when they are out, the church goes lacking.

Once when our church was hurting financially–which seemed to be a constant for that congregation–the Lord gave me the idea which we were to name “SUMMER BLESSED.”  (I have no memory of the moment the idea arrived or whether it was sparked by something another church was doing.)

In naming it “Summer Blessed,” the idea was to “make this a summer blessed of the Lord.”  With the full support of the church leadership, I threw out this challenge to our congregation:  “Tithe your income for the three months of the summer and do so faithfully.  Then, at the end of August if you do not feel your life has been immeasurably blessed as a result, if you will request a refund, we will return all the money you gave to the church.”

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Ten words to the victims (and veterans!) of the hurricanes

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Sunday, preaching in Biloxi, Mississippi, I asked the congregation, “How many of you were living here in 1969 when Hurricane Camille changed this coastline forever?”  A lot of hands went up.

Then, “How many of you lived here in 2005 when Katrina destroyed so much of the area?”  Many more hands.

I said, “So when you think of neighbors dealing with hurricanes, such as Harvey and Irma, you know.  You’ve been there.  You can pray for them with a genuine compassion and a deeper understanding.”

Before they left the building, those people made generous contributions to their neighbors impacted by the hurricanes.

Each hurricane is different. Each takes its own path and blows at its own speed. And each one is similar.  They destroy and uproot and flood.  Those who experience even one such storm forever identifies with the victims and veterans of all those which follow.

With that in mind, it might be in order for those of us with scars from past hurricanes (for my family, it was Betsy in 1965 and Katrina 40 years later) to offer a word or two of encouragement to friends caught in the path of the latest of these monster storms.

Ten words, actually…

(We will try not to insult you with platitudes such as “work hard” or “try not to cry.”  You will work hard and you will cry, and God bless you as you do.)

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Why a lot of professing Christians never attend church

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“Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together”–unless, of course, the Lord reveals to you that you are the church, as one lady said to me.  Or, that you are smarter than the preacher, the deacons are trying to run the church, or no one in the congregation will speak to you.  Hebrews 10:25, sort of.

When you don’t want to do something, you shouldn’t have to have an excuse.

If you do not want to go to church, for instance, if you can skip church for a whole year and never miss it, you should “man up” and admit, “I’m not a Christian and don’t believe all that Bible stuff.  Church is for people who take the Lord seriously. Not me. So, I don’t go.”

Hmm. That felt ‘mean,’ didn’t it?  But it’s dead on accurate.

Please read on.

By “go to church,” we don’t necessarily mean a building with a steeple on it.  It could be a group of God’s people gathered in a living room to sing and pray and study the Word.  Or,  fifty people in a storefront.  The point is not the location or the structure but God’s people meeting on a regular basis for the work and worship of the Lord.

The redeemed of the Lord will be drawn to one another.  They love each other.  Jesus said so.

I heard of a pastor somewhere who collected excuses on “why people who call themselves Christians don’t go to church.”   He did not make these up…

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Letter to pastors in the hurricane zones

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At this moment, Texas is in full recovery mode from Hurricane Harvey while Florida awaits Irma.  These are scary times.

For those of us who came through Katrina in 2005, nothing about this is fun.  We recall all too well the hundreds of deaths, flooded neighborhoods, destroyed churches, and uprooted lives.  God bless our friends who are in the wake of Harvey and the path of Irma.

I was the director of missions for the SBC churches of the New Orleans Association, which gave me a front row seat to all that had happened and what the Lord was doing.  With that in mind, I would like to offer a few thoughts for the pastors and other church leaders in these war zones…

You are about to see what God can do with thousands of His faithful people.

You already know His power; that has been amply demonstrated.  But the power of His people flocking into your area to help neighbors rebuild their lives may be more inspiring than anything you have ever imagined.  They will feed the hungry and knock themselves out ministering and giving, and your neighbors will be amazed that they ask nothing in return.  As a result, most will be more open to the gospel of Jesus Christ than at any time in their lives.

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Helpful preacher friends. Lord, save us!

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My journal tells of a revival in our church in 1992.  After the final service, my wife and I took the guest evangelist and singer to lunch.  And there they proceeded to unload.

My journal…

“At lunch for one solid hour, they filled me with their suggestions for improving our work here.  Finally Margaret intervened and said, ‘You guys are overdoing it.’ I was about to overdose on their helpfulness!”

I don’t recall asking for their input.  And to be sure, they presumed upon the relationship.  I’m confident they felt they were serving the Lord well by suggesting ways we could get this big church off the ground and into the air.  And because they have been in full-time itinerant ministry for decades and have seen it all, they have definite opinions and convictions on what works and what doesn’t.  And they are friends, although not with a lengthy history. Anyway…

My well-meaning friends had no clue the forces I was contending with inside the membership of the church.  But, they wanted to help me, so I listened.  And praise the Lord for a good wife.  She spoke up and told them that was enough already. Smiley-face goes here.

She was right.  There is such a thing as overdoing a good thing.

These days, in retirement, I’m in a different church almost every Sunday.  I preach in big ones and little ones, taking them as the invitations arrive.  And frequently after ministering in a church, I do have thoughts on what the pastor can do to serve the Lord better there.

But unless I’m asked, I keep it to myself.

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Someone is praying for the preacher: Thank you!

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I could tell the day I was no longer president of our denomination.  People across the nation had been praying for me, and now they were praying for the new guy.  I could feel the slackening off of the prayers.  It’s a terrible feeling. –From one of our past denominational leaders 

Her name was Mary Ann Adlar.  (Not sure about the spelling of her name.)  An invalid, her life was devoted to praying from her small cottage in the southern part of England. Sometime in the 1860s Miss Adlar heard of a man in America whom God was using mightily.  She began praying for Dwight L. Moody, that God would send him to her church in England.  Her beloved country was desperately in need of a Heaven-sent revival, she felt.

In 1872, an exhausted Dwight L. Moody came to England on a vacation.  He met the pastor of Miss Adlar’s church, and was invited to preach there.  There was such power in the service, Moody was invited to stay for a series of meetings.  Four hundred people came to Christ that week.  Moody asked the pastor whether someone had been praying. Surely they had, he reasoned.

The pastor asked around and found Mary Ann Adlar, the woman whose prayers brought a preacher across an ocean and brought revival to her church.

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Those frustrating times with church members

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Any pastor can tell you about that.  Even when you do your best to serve God by ministering to His people, some church members are not going to forgive you.  You didn’t do it their way, weren’t there when they called, didn’t jump at their bark.

Those are the exceptions, I hasten to say to friends who wonder why we overlook the 98 percent of members to focus on the 2 percent who drive us batty.  It’s the 2 percent of drivers who are the crazies on the highways and ruin the experience for everyone else.  It’s the 2 percent of society who require us to maintain a standing army to enforce laws.  Rat poison, they say, is 98 percent corn meal.  But that two percent will kill you.

I say to my own embarrassment and confess it as unworthy of a child of God that I remember these difficult moments with God’s people more than the precious times.  Perhaps it’s because the strained connections and hard words feed into my own insecurities.  Or maybe it’s because there are so many more of the blessed times.  It’s human nature, I know. Help us, Lord.

Even so, here are two instances from my journal that stand out….

First, the church member who is mad at you needlessly

On returning from an out-of-town engagement, a staff member told me I needed to call Selma, that she was angry about something.  Selma was married to a deacon, a  good guy, and they were not high maintenance but generally supportive.  I could not imagine her being angry with anyone. I called her immediately.

“My sister is in the hospital and none of you have come by to visit.”  That was her complaint.

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Three kinds of peace

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“And when He approached, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, ‘If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace!  But now they have been hidden from your eyes.'” Luke 19:41-42

You’ve seen the bumper stickers and billboards. “KNOW JESUS; KNOW PEACE,” followed by “No Jesus; No Peace.”

That’s almost right, but not completely.

We hear Christians say, “If the world just knew Jesus, we would have world peace.”  It sounds right, but we might be missing something.

A lot of Christians do not have peace. They are constantly beset by worries and fears, angst and anxieties.  Christians are taking the prescriptions along with everyone else to settle their nerves.  Something is going on.  What?

Many churches–made up of born-again, Bible-believing, Christians (a redundancy if ever there was one)–are constantly at war among themselves. They argue over doctrine, where to situate the organ, whether to even have an organ, whether the pastor should wear a suit and tie or jeans and sneakers, and how much to pay the preacher.  They argue over who is to run the church and divide over how long the sermons should be.  And they love the Lord.

Something is wrong.

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Pastor, you’ve been asked to pray at a convention of some kind

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Every pastor gets invited to offer invocations at public gatherings.  It goes with the territory.

I once prayed at the grand opening of a big box home-and-hardware store.  As a thank-you, they gave me an electric Stihl saw.  Not being a woodworker, I passed it on to a neighbor.

Once in a pastor’s office I noticed the wall covered with plaques and degrees and framed certificates.  Not only was his high school diploma on display, but when the local supermarket thanked him for praying at their grand opening, he framed that letter too.

Okay.  Here’s what happens.  The secretary of the city council or school board or state legislature calls.  “Pastor, would you say the opening prayer at next Wednesday’s session?”  Before the call ends, you may expect them to say something like, “And pastor, please make the prayer inclusive.”  Or interdenominational.  Or non-sectarian.  What she means is a) don’t preach to us and try to convert people in your prayer and b) if you must include Jesus, try to be gentle about it.

In other words, be nice.

You would think no one would have to tell a preacher to be considerate of others when he prays.  But these public prayers have been abused by so many preachers, it’s necessary.

Now, if they tell me to leave Jesus out of it–in just so many words–I tell them I will not be able to help them, but “thank you so much for asking.”

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