A friend who publishes an internet magazine for preachers and frequently picks up something from this blog to share with his subscription list wrote with suggestions on future articles we might want to write. See what you think about these subjects….

–the most difficult passage I ever preached. (Do I dare admit to him — and to myself — that if a text is really difficult, I don’t preach it? I usually stay with it until I get a handle on it and thus it’s not the most difficult any more. The most difficult ones are the least-studied ones.)

–the 17 best lessons I’ve learned in the pastorate. (So far, I’ve only come up with the first two: keep growing and keep praying.)

–the 12 funniest jokes I’ve ever told in the pulpit. (Well, the three funniest I told my first Sunday at one church and almost got voted out before I ever moved in. I’m still giving this one a lot of thought. Like most pastors, I tell them and forget them.)

–the 10 biggest mistakes I’ve made in the pastorate. (Is it possible to do this? The pastors who read this will understand that there are some mistakes we make that are so embarrassing or shameful or secret that one does not dare admit them, regardless how long ago they happened. In fact, one pastor I know when asked to compile such a list of career mistakes in his ministry answered, “My biggest was five years ago when I honestly answered a question like this. The deacons read it and soon I was out of a job.”)

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I am not, nor have I ever been, a deacon. I’m a veteran pastor (42 years) and retired director of missions (5 years), and a lot of other things (father, grandfather, cartoonist, blogster, banquet-speaker, etc.), but never a deacon. I am the father of a deacon, but that doesn’t count.

So what do I know about deacons and how did I come to know it?

Every church I ever pastored — and there are 7 of them — had deacons. The first, Unity Baptist Church of Kimberly, Alabama, had only one, Mr. Guthrie, but he was elderly and left everything to me. The last three pastorates — the First Baptist churches of Columbus, MS, Charlotte, NC, and Kenner, LA — had large deacon boards (fellowships, groups, however you want to refer to them), with all of them were very involved in the day-to-day affairs of the church.

In a couple of churches, I received scars from deacons meetings. In only one church, I’m happy to say, I came to dread the monthly deacons meeting more than surgery or an IRS audit.

With one church’s deacons, I became the topic du jour in a session that lasted until midnight, when a group tried to have me fired. The other deacons stood up and kept that from happening, I’m glad to report.

Some of the dearest friends I have on earth are deacons. Some of the wisest counsel I ever received as a pastor came from deacons. Some of the finest contributions in these seven churches, leadership that made a lasting difference, came from deacons.

I believe in deacons.

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The news clips and Monday morning newspapers report on President Obama’s Sunday visit to the Notre Dame campus to speak and receive an honorary doctorate. They all have him appealing to both sides of the abortion issue for calmness and reason. Okay, I’m for that.

Obama told how in his presidential campaign his website mentioned the right-wing extremists (ideologues?) who oppose “a woman’s right to choose.” A medical doctor called him to task for the language, saying he’s not a right-winger, but believes that abortion is wrong. He wanted the president to use more temperate language and to recognize there are good, reasonable people on that side of the fence. Obama told how he had his staff clean up the tone of the website. In his Sunday speech, he called for good will from pro-lifers as well as pro-choice people. “We ought to be able to respect one another’s position and have a thoughtful conversation about it,” he said (not the precise words, but that was the thrust).

No problem here. I’m all for that. But it seems to me the president is missing one big thing, the “elephant in the living room,” as the saying goes.

When a pro-lifer has his way, a child lives. When a pro-choice person has his, a child dies.

It’s very difficult to keep cool about that.

There’s too much at stake here.

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You and I are forever reading of the antics of dumb crooks and caught-in-the-act celebrities or politicians and scratching our heads while wondering, “What were they thinking?”

Would it interest you to know the Lord felt the same way, not about dumb crooks and self-seeking bureaucrats, but about His own disciples.

It’s in Luke 9, and it’s enough to disgust you with them…and by inference, with yourself. Myself.

First, the background situation. The Lord and three of His disciples — James, John, and Peter — are atop the Mount of Transfiguration and overwhelmed by what they are seeing. The Lord suddenly becomes transformed in front of their eyes as though a light deep within Him began emitting rays. Then, a cloud enveloped them all and the Lord was seen to have a conversation with two ghostly figures whom they either recognize or later learn to be Moses and Elijah. Of the first three gospels, only Luke tells what they were discussing: Jesus’ coming death in Jerusalem. How we wish we knew what they were saying about it!

Okay, we have here a tense, strange, wonderful, scary situation, one unlike anything that has gone before or would follow. Now, you’re one of the three disciples. What do you do? Not a thing. You take it all in and feel privileged to have been a spectator of this vision.

But, then, Simon Peter is not like you. Always looking for a way to improve on any situation, Peter felt he had to say something.

“Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here. Now, let us make three tabernacles — one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ Because he did not know what to say.” (Luke 9:33)

As one known to break a holy silence with the intrusion of fleshly speech, I know how it feels to be Simon Peter, I’m afraid. But that’s not good. This is a terrible affliction and handicap, one that must be tamed and brought under the control of the Holy Spirit if God is to use such a person.

What were you thinking, Peter?

The answer of course is, “Uh, nothing.”

And that’s the problem.

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One.

I could go back and look it up. But, too lazy to do the responsible thing, I’ll tell you the story from Rick Lance and take the chance of repeating myself.

Rick was quoting Robert Smith, a writer with the Minneapolis Tribune, whose daughter was approaching her third birthday. The parents were planning a birthday party for her, but she began to rebel. “I’m not through being two yet!” she insisted.

Dad went through the calendar with her, explaining how life works. “When we get to that day,” he said, “you will be three.”

She stood there with arms crossed looking like a midget Patton and said, “I don’t care what that calendar says. I’m not through being two yet.”

So, the Smith family canceled the party and went on treating their daughter as a two-year-old.

Dr. Lance commented, “Some people refuse to go into the future.” The Israelites under Moses (Numbers 14) recoiled from the future because they were fearful, forgetful, and unfaithful. (You may thank Alabama Baptists’ Rick Lance for that good outline.)

Two.

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I once heard John Bisagno, veteran pastor of Houston’s First Baptist Church at the time, say he did not understand why many pastors require so long to prepare a message. “Give me some privacy, my Bible and a note pad and in two hours without interruptions, I have the sermon.”

That, I might say, is just one of the five hundred reasons most of us who know Dr. Bisagno have envied this gifted servant of the Lord. To put it bluntly, few of us can produce the kind of sermon we ought to be preaching in that brief a time.

In my case, the preparation time is not measured in hours, but in days or even weeks.

Here’s what I mean.

Perhaps it has something to do with limited intellect, but a sermon has to grow in my mind. Marinate as opposed to microwave, I sometimes put it. It just takes time for me to grasp the thrust of what the Lord is saying, how it pertains to the various scriptures on that subject, how it all relates to the Lord Jesus Christ and the cross, what it means to the average guy in the pew, and what we want to accomplish in the sermon.

Case in point.

Next Sunday, as I write, I’m bringing a message to a congregation about an hour from home. A group I’m a member of will be having its annual retreat in that area and a local pastor asked me to bring the morning message in his church. As I prayed for direction, eventually I decided the Lord would have me to bring a sermon from Romans 12 on the subject of “what the healthy church looks like.”

Now, I’m strongly convicted on the subject of healthy churches. In my last pastorate, we did a church health study over a couple of months and ended my nearly 14-year tenure with a reasonably healthy congregation. I taught a semester-long seminary course on the subject of healthy churches, and have taught the Epistle to the Romans a number of times.

So, it’s not like the subject was new to me. That, however, made the task more difficult for coming up with one message of 25 or so minutes in length. I have far too much information on the subject to put into one sermon.

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Oh great. All we needed was a plague.

We have worldwide economic meltdown, wars and famines and pestilence, crime and corruption. Now, we have an epidemic: swine flu. Look for the panic to occur any moment now.

One thing about it, we are better set up for plagues than we were in the 14th century when the Black Plague ravaged Europe. Back then, that thing silently moved in on ships and was carried from town to town by fleas, riding on humans and animals. These days, we put people on planes, they sneeze into the air, and by nightfall, the flu is being enjoyed by people all over North America. Next day, Europe.

A Washington Post article of a few days ago says, “(This is) the latest example of how diseases, from influenza to tuberculosis to cholera, are spreading ever more quickly in an increasingly globalized world.” The good news, reporters Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan write, is that “so, too, are the tools necessary to combat sudden outbreaks of disease: expertise, medicine, money, and information.”

By an odd coincidence, I’ve just been reading Geraldine Brooks’ novel on the black plague of the 17th century. “Year of Wonders” is the strange title for this fascinating book. Brooks is a veteran correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and the author of “March,” a Pulitzer Prize winner, which several in my family found fascinating.

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A reporter interviewing me for an article concerning my retirement said, “I’ve been to your website and read a lot of your stuff. You impress me as something of a provocateur.”

That was a first. No one had ever accused me of that, but the more I reflect on it, I like it. A “provocateur,” as the name implies, is someone who provokes you. “An agitator,” the dictionary says. Hmmm. Don’t want to be one of those. But I do love the idea of provoking people to do something good and right.

“Provoke one another to good works,” instructs Paul in Hebrews 10:24.

In his commentary on Hebrews, Kent Hughes picks up on that thought. The Greek word, “paroxysmos,” is the root of our word “paroxysm,” a sudden convulsion or a violent emotion. In most cases in the Bible, this is not a positive word. For instance, used in Acts 15:39, it indicates a sharp disagreement between Paul and Barnabas.

We are to be “positive irritants,” Hughes says. Ah, now that I like!

Hughes mentions several ways by which we can irritate people productively: by praying for them, serving as a good example to them, letting God’s Word work in and through us, and encouraging them.

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Sooner or later, one ought to be able to narrow down his major theological (i.e., true life) beliefs to just a few. The only way to do this, it appears to me, is to have lived long enough on this sod as to know oneself thoroughly, to have studied enough of the Word to know the Scriptures intimately, and to have interacted with others over decades as to know the alternatives sufficiently.

Here then are my big three, three non-negotiables I believe with everything in me. The discussion is closed on these, my conviction is rock solid.

1. WITHOUT GOD, THERE IS NO MEANING.

As a young adult, I struggled with the concept of deity and tried to satisfy my youthful-but-inquiring mind that God is no figment of my imagination, but a genuine Person in back of the universe and the One whom we read about in the Scriptures. The more I read and contemplated atheism, the clearer I saw how all it had to offer was despair and meaninglessness.

Back from that brink — and glad to be — I had to admit that everything inside me resonated with the message of God in Scripture, both Old and New Testaments. It was more than comforting, because much of it is disturbing. It was rock solid, like I was dealing with reality. The teachings of Scripture fit the real world I was living in.

Ravi Zacharias has written, “If life is random, then the inescapable consequence, first and foremost, is that there can be no ultimate meaning and purpose to existence.” That fact, he says in “The End of Reason,” is the “Achilles’ heel of atheistic belief.” In spite of the fact that modern writers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris like to promote moral values outside of a belief in God, it does not work. If there is no God, there is no ultimate meaning, and the child molester, the serial killer, Dr. Albert Schweitzer and Dr. Billy Graham or Mother Teresa, all come to a common end of nothingness.

Everyone seeks meaning and purpose. Movie script-writer Leonard Mlodinow (Newsweek, May 4, 2009) tells how he found himself at a Hollywood party chatting with a successful model when an attorney came up and usurped her attention. It turned out they were both Trekkies, devotees of the Star Trek saga, and knowledgeable about the most minute of details. He writes, “I stood there with a blank look, obviously over my head. Too much detail for my taste…. I was in awe that he remembered all that arcane stuff. Then, somewhere in the middle of his Vulcan dissertation, I realized something.”

What Mlodinow realized was that the stuff the Trekkies were quoting as Bible, the material they were memorizing and spouting as their gospel, he had written.

Mlodinow says, “The situation felt surreal. Not just because I’d forgotten my own dialogue — you’d be surprised how easy it is to blank on entire scenes — but that they had remembered it, and in such detail.”

It’s truly amazing what some people will grab hold of in order to give meaning to their lives.

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