Church: The power of working together

Posted on by
3

“Don’t try this alone.”  –advice on a thousand exercise devices.

Years ago, the Readers Digest ran an article titled “What good is a tree?” Here’s a quote–

When the roots of a tree touch, a substance present reduces the competition.  An unknown fungus links together roots of different trees, even of dissimilar species.  A whole forest may be linked together.  If one tree has access to water, another to nutrients, a third to sunlight, the trees find a way to share.

Wow.  Who knew that?  I certainly didn’t.

We could all take a lesson from the forest.

When I was a teen, someone set out a small longleaf pine in my grandmother’s yard.  Year after year, it remained a dwarf, refusing to grow. After her death, an uncle who owned the property set out hundreds of trees across the front yard. Suddenly, that lone, dwarfed pine had company and began to prosper.

The Lord knew you and I would be needing help in living for Him in this fallen world. So, when He saved us, He “added us to the body” (see Acts 2:41).

God never intended any of us to live this life in isolation.

Continue reading →

Biblical truths many of the Lord’s people do not believe

Posted on by
Reply

From the beginning, the Lord’s people have always talked a better game than we live.

So many biblical truths look good on paper and sound great when we’re spouting them.  And yet, judging by the way we live, here are some biblical truths which it would appear many of the Lord’s people do not believe….

One.  God sends the pastor to the church. 

Churches survey their congregation to find the kind of pastor everyone wants in the next guy.  People lobby for a candidate they like and rally against one they don’t.  And they vote on the recommendation of their committee.  And after he arrives, when some turn against him, they send him on his way.

Do we really believe God sends pastors to churches?  They are God’s undershepherds (see I Peter 5:1-4) and appointed by the Holy Spirit as overseers of the church (Acts 20:28).

Some years back, as I was moving my family to a church in North Carolina, I found out later that some were already holding meetings to agree on ways to get me to leave.  Why? Even though we had never met, they had decided I was too conservative for them.  In the next church, some began meeting to oust me because they decided I was too liberal.  Neither group believed God sends pastors.

Two.  God hears our prayers, cares for our needs, and answers our prayers.

In the typical congregation, what percentage of the people are serious about their prayer life?  Nothing tells the story on our faith like our prayer life.

Continue reading →

18 ways to shorten your sermon preparation time

Posted on by
1

I’ve given this a lot of thought, and have also enlisted a few friends to assist.  Here are the results, ways in which the minister can abbreviate the time he spends preparing sermons for God’s people.

1) Borrow.

In the secular world, this is called plagiarism. But we pastors know “God richly gives us all good things to share” or something like that. Fortunately, your people don’t read other preachers’ sermon books anyway, so they’ll never know. (Disadvantage: if the written sermon bombed, chances are yours will, too.)

2) Repeat.

Everyone knows repetition is a proven learning technique. Warning: do not call these sermons ‘repeats’ or ‘re-runs.’ “Previously preached’ is also verboten. If you have to put a label on them, try ‘Back by popular demand.’ It sounds better.(Disadvantage: some little sister in the church writes in the margins of her Bible every time you have preached a particular text, so you’ll need to vary your Scripture even if it’s the same sermon.)

3) Confess.

Tell a story out of your childhood and turn it into a microcosm of the universe, or at least of the gospel. Didn’t Phillips Brooks call preaching ‘truth through personality’? The advantages are that you are the authority on yourself, no one can contradict you, and very little study time is required. (Disadvantage: if nothing dramatic has happened to you, this can get boring quickly.)

4) Obvious.

Continue reading →

The Lord’s Prayer shows us how to have balance in our prayer life

Posted on by
Reply

In my early morning walk once I saw a man jogging on the levee beside the Mississippi River. As he approached, he seemed to be tilted slightly, running just a tad off balance. Then I realized one sleeve was hanging limply at his side. The absence of his left arm threw his body off balance.

Veteran Bible teacher Warren Wiersbe used to say there ought to be one more beatitude: “Blessed are the balanced.”

When Rick Warren of Saddleback Church said the key issue of the 21st century church would be not church growth but church health, someone asked his secret of church health. “In a word, balance,” he said.

Rick Warren explained, “Your body has nine different systems (circulatory, respiratory, digestive, skeletal, etc). When these systems are all in balance, it produces health. But when your body gets out of balance, we call that ‘disease.’”

He added, “Likewise when the body of Christ becomes unbalanced, disease occurs. Health and growth can only occur when everything is brought into balance.”

Continue reading →

What is your idea of Heaven?

Posted on by
1

My friend Bob was dealing with a difficult family situation. Now, in my opinion, he did not need the grief, because Bob was getting up in years and his health was poor.

He said to me, “I can’t wait for heaven.”

I said, “They don’t call it ‘rest’ without reason.”

That’s a reference to Revelation 14:13. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on….that they may rest from their labors.

When I was a kid, a song we’d hear occasionally was called The Big Rock Candy Mountain. We heard it, smiled at its silliness, hummed along with the catchy tune and thought nothing more of it.

One day I discovered this song was the hobo’s national anthem during the Depression. And it gives us his idealized picture of paradise.

Harry McClintock (aka “Haywire Mac”) wrote the song, we’re told, in 1928. Here’s a little of it….

“In the Big Rock Candy Mountain

You never change your socks

And the little streams of alcohol

Come trickling down the rocks.

The brakemen have to tip their hats

And the railway bulls are blind.

There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too

You can paddle all around in a big canoe

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Continue reading →

Ten things Christians do not ask the world

Posted on by
Reply

“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the world, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful”  (Psalm 1:1). 

“The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him…” I Corinthians 2:14

Around Easter or Christmastime polls, surveys, and magazine articles all indicate the world has given up on Jesus, on God, on Christians, on the church, or on preachers.  But let not your heart be troubled, Christ-follower.

We may as well ask a blind man what he thinks of the sunrise I enjoyed this morning, a deaf person how they appreciated the symphony, or my unbelieving neighbor what he thought of my sermon last Sunday.

The world is lost.  Never lose sight of that, follower of Jesus Christ. So, we should not be asking it for direction or seeking its counsel. When the disciples told Jesus the Pharisees were offended by Him, he said, “Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind.”  (Matthew 15:12,14)

And yet, how often do we hear of people polling the neighborhood of a designated area to find out what people see as their greatest need, what they would like most from a church, or why they no longer go to church. Then, they build a church program around the results of their poll.  What’s wrong with this picture?

They are called ‘lost’ for a reason. (See Luke 15.)

Here are ten questions the Church should not be asking of the world…

One.  We don’t ask the world how to get to Heaven.

The world has plenty of answers, true. But any answer that does not involve the Lord Jesus Christ and His death-burial-resurrection is manmade and thus wrong, no matter how beautiful or philosophical. The world’s answers are based on feelings and convictions, something read or dreamed or heard, or what someone wished were true.

Jesus alone has the answer to this. Why? Among other things, “No one has been to Heaven except the One who came from Heaven, even the Son of Man” (John 3:13).  He is the One and Only. And then, He is The Way to Heaven (John 14:6).  The only way.

Two.  We do not ask the world what it thinks of Jesus.

Continue reading →

Please write in your Bible

Posted on by
2

“This shall be written for the generation to come; and the people who shall be created shall praise the Lord” (Psalm 102:18).

Please go to the front of your Bible and write in it.

Start by putting your own name.

Often, when I pick up the Bibles of friends to see what they have written in them, I’m chagrined to see they don’t even have their names.

Write in your Bible, friend. Please.

At Christmas 1973, my aunt Eren gave a new Bible to her mother, my wonderful grandmother Bessie Lowery McKeever.  Grandma died in 1982, but not before marking up that Bible.

I now own it.  It is a treasure beyond price.

One morning, I read something I had never seen before, that made the tears flow.  (I was looking up the text above, and Grandma’s Bible was handy.)

In the margin beside Psalm 103:17, Grandma had written “One of Papa’s favorite verses.”

But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon those that fear him, and his righteousness unto children’s children.

I never knew Grandpa Lowery, her father.  Many years ago, she told me he was a preacher of the Word, and a Baptist at that. As a little girl, Grandma would accompany him as he went out to preach. Other than that, I know nothing of him.  Thanks to Grandma’s notes in the front of this Bible, I have his name:  George Marion Lowery. And his wife, my great-grandmother, was Sarah Jane Blocker, whose birthdate is listed as January 1, 1852.  (Grandma Bessie was born in 1895, was married in 1910, and became a mother the first time in 1912 when my dad Carl arrived, and for the twelfth time with the birth of Georgelle in 1936, six months after being widowed.)

In his lifetime, my dad presented me with two Bibles. The first came in 1948 when he asked me to “come go with me,” and we walked off the West Virginia mountain, and up  the railroad tracks to the town of Sophia. Inside a variety store he asked the clerk to “Show us your Bibles.” He told me, “Pick you out a Bible.”  I was stunned.  This was the last thing I expected.  I chose a black zippered beauty which I read every night for years.  Then, many years later Dad gave me Grandma’s Bible. I’m still finding notes she left in the margins.

This is about people writing in their Bibles.

Continue reading →

Turning putdowns into motivation

Posted on by
Reply

Jesus said, ‘No doubt you will quote this proverb to me, “Physician, heal yourself! Whatever we heard was done at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.” No prophet is welcome in his own hometown (Luke 4:24).

John Fogerty’s group Creedence Clearwater Revival is unforgettable to anyone who has owned a radio in the last 50 years.  A few years back, in an interview with newsman Dan Rather, Fogerty was remembering a key moment in the 1960s.

The group was one of many bands to perform at a particular event.  As the final group to warm up, and thus the first band to appear on stage, suddenly CCR found they had been unplugged.  John Fogerty yelled to the sound man to plug them back up, that they weren’t through.  The technician did so reluctantly, then added, “You not going anywhere anyway, man.”  Fogerty said, “Okay.  Give me one year.  I’ll show you.”

One year later, the group was so hot with hit record after hit record (“Proud Mary,” “Born on the Bayou,” “Bad Moon Rising”) that “we were too big to play in that place any more!”

Turning a sarcastic putdown into a healthy sic ’em!

I’m remembering the first day I began pastoring a church on Alligator Bayou some 25 miles west of New Orleans.  In April of 1965 I was in my first year of seminary.  The church was running 40 in attendance, and had done so for the two decades of its existence.

After the service, I’m shaking hands with worshipers as they exit the building.  Behind me, coming through the doors, two men were talking.  They had no idea I could hear them.  One said, “Well, this little church is doing about all it’s ever going to do.”

The other fellow agreed.  But it was like a spark to my powder keg.  Everything inside me went on full alert and I said, “We’ll show you!”

Continue reading →

Boring Sermons: We all have them from time to time

Posted on by
Reply

We all preach boring sermons from time to time.  The trick is not to make a habit of it.

I’m almost tempted to say a pastor should give his people a boring sermon once in a while in order to help them appreciate the good ones.

Bill Baker was pastor of Clinton, Mississippi’s First Baptist Church.  He told me this one himself.  At the Friday night high school football game, during halftime the other team’s band marched onto the field and did their show.  Right in the middle of their presentation, a group of students on the other side of the stadium called out, “B-O-R-I-N-G!!”  Real loud and very slow.

A four-year-old girl was puzzled by that.  ‘What are they doing, Mama?” she asked.  Her mother explained that sometimes students will do that when they feel the other band is doing poor work.  “It tells them they stink,” she laughed.

That’s why the very next Sunday, right in the middle of Pastor Baker’s sermon, this four-year-old stood in church and did the same thing.

It brought the house down.  And furnished the child’s mother with a lifelong cause for embarrassment.

I’ve preached boring sermons.  And I’ll bet you have too.

Continue reading →

Five things the newlywed couple must not do

Posted on by
Reply

Newlyweds can easily be overwhelmed with their new circumstances.  They are adjusting to each other–the delightful as well as the mysterious, the obvious as well as the surprising.  They are finding out how to plan their days and nights now that dating and courting have suddenly been deleted from their agenda. And, they are finding out about mortgages and rents, taxes, and neighbors in ways they only imagined earlier.

It’s called life. It happens to all of us.

It would be natural for the newly married couple to postpone some things. And true enough, some things can be put on the back burner.  Let them delay going into debt for “big ticket items.”  Debt can be a killer for young families. Let them delay having children until they have solidified some matters in their own new relationship and established their home.

However, some mighty important matters should be dealt with head-on and faced immediately.

1) The newlywed couple should not wait for a good time to start reading their Bible and praying together. 

Let them start at day one, and never miss a day.  If they need a plan, they would do well to ask several mature couples at church for suggestions.

Continue reading →