Category Archives: Faith

When we backslide, a dozen things happen. All of them bad.

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“The way of the transgressor is hard” (Proverbs 13:15)  

What started this was a note from a fellow who took issue with something I said about the church.  He had no use for the church, he said. Every church he’d ever attended preached a shallow message, the sermons were mind-numbingly boring, and the people were dull and listless.  After venting, he wondered if I’d be interested in some essays he’d written about the church.  (Would it surprise you to know I declined?)

In our exchange, I said, “Could I tell you something that happened to me?  Even though I’ve been preaching for over half a century, at least twice during that time, I have gotten out of fellowship with the Lord.  What we call “backsliding.”

And when that happened, I noticed something surprising.  I became negative about my fellow church members and critical of the other ministers.  Then, when I humbled myself and repented, I saw them in a new light and found myself loving them. That was a fascinating thing to learn.

This was as gentle a way as I could find to tell the man that my money is on his being in rebellion against God. In his backslidden state, he is understandably down on the Lord’s people.

Backsliding.  Interesting term, isn’t it?  It says what it is, and needs little explanation.

You’re saved, you love the Lord, you’re doing well, and then you fall into sin one way or the other. Perhaps you slipped or you plunged headfirst, knowing full well what you were doing.

Now, look at you.  God seems so far away, and the closeness you once had with Him is only a distant memory.

You remember with longing when you felt so close to the Lord, so clean and pure, and so happy in Him.  You delighted in reading His word and perhaps in teaching it.  You loved gathering with the Lord’s people and singing the hymns and praying together.

But not now.

You are miserable.  You put up a false front and act like all is well. But something in your heart has died. The light has gone out.

What’s wrong?  You have fallen into sin.  The joy has disappeared, replaced by guilt and anger.

A backslidden state is a miserable place to visit but a terrible place to live.

When this happens, a hundred things take place in your life.  None of them good.  Here’s my short list of the bad things that occur when we are backslidden….

1) The rebel is holding Jesus in contempt. 

The Lord takes your rejecting Him personally. Your turning to sin is an insult.

When Israel fell away in Old Testament days, the Lord sounding like a spurned lover, said, “What fault did you find in me? What did the idols offer which I cannot give?” (cf.Jeremiah 2:5)

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Thankfully, Peter did not walk a mile on water. Here’s why.

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“But seeing the wind, Peter became afraid and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Save me, Lord!’ And immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and took hold of him….” (Matthew 14:30-31).

You’ve seen the video of the Boston Red Sox first baseman letting that World Series game-winning single run through his legs. It’s iconic.

It was the 1986 World Series and the player was Bill Buckner.

Had Buckner caught that ball and stepped on first base, the game would have been over and the Red Sox would have ended that so-called curse a full fifteen or twenty years earlier than they did.  Ask the Buckner family.  The video has run a zillion times on Youtube and in the minds of the fans.  They have enshrined his failure.  Most Red Sox fans forget all the thousands of put-outs Buckner made at first base, the hits he got, the runs he produced.

That is how the Apostle Peter must have felt.

Think of Simon Peter walking on the water to Jesus that night when the winds howled and the sea raged and far from being impressed–as one would think we should be!–we see only that he took his eyes off Jesus and put them on the wave, and began to sink.  As though we would have done better!

Actually, we should be glad Peter did that.  Yes, we should rejoice that he walked those few steps on the Galilee and yes, we should be impressed.  But everything inside me gives thanks that after that, Peter had a problem with what he was doing and messed it up.

Just imagine…

Suppose Peter had spent 30 minutes or an hour outside the boat, walking and then dancing and then pirouetting across the sea!

Get that picture in your mind’s eye.  At first, he walks hesitantly toward Jesus.  Then, more confidently.  And then he gets the hang of it and strides more confidently.  And finally, he’s jumping and running and bouncing.

“Peter, that’s enough.  You can come in now.”  The Lord had to call him inside, to get back in the boat with the rest of the disciples and to settle down.

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Silken Christians: What a novel idea

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“The silk we love for its softness and beauty is also one of the strongest and toughest fibers in the world. It has a strength of around five grams per denier compared with three grams per denier for a drawn wire of soft steel.” (From “The History of Silk,” by Harold Verner, quoted by Liz Trenow in her novel “The Last Telegram.”)

Soft and beautiful. Strong and tough.

You gotta love it.

What some in our day have called “a velvet-brick” and others “a steel magnolia.” Soft and beautiful, strong and tough.

A pretty apt description of our Lord Jesus Christ, isn’t it?  We see His softness and beauty in a hundred things He did: took time to receive the little children and bless them, responded to the cries of the leper and touched him, restored a dead son to his grieving mother, forgave an adulterous woman who had been publicly humiliated by religious bullies, and saved a five-times married woman of Samaria.  He invited the dying thief on the cross next to Him to spend eternity with Him in Paradise, and prayed for His executioners.

Our Lord said, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).

No wonder people are so enamored by this Lord Jesus Christ.

He was a beautiful man.

But the Lord’s strength and toughness are also visible–on full display, even–throughout the Gospels. 

For forty days Jesus fasted in the desert and did battle with Satan. He stood up against the religious big-shots who would use a blind man for their self-centered purposes. He grabbed a whip of ropes and drove the money-changers and animal-sellers from the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple.

He went to the cross and stayed there until His work was done.

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Your behavior matters. That’s I Peter 2:12 and it’s the truth.

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Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may on account of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation (I Peter 2:12).

Be a fly on the wall. Sit in on religious discussions and you will come away burdened by one huge conclusion: for a large number of people who call themselves followers of Jesus, doctrine counts far more than behavior.

They didn’t get it from Jesus, I’ll tell you that. And they sure didn’t get it from Scripture.

Start at page one of the New Testament. You’re not out of the opening chapter before you see that the sexual activities of the Lord’s people is a matter of major concern. It shows up in the genealogy of Jesus, with a number of people listed having been guilty or accused of inappropriate activities of a sexual nature. Still in that chapter, Joseph hears that his beloved Mary is with child and decides to call off the engagement. It took heavenly intervention for him to change his mind.

And that’s just in the first chapter of Matthew.

Skip over to chapters 5-7, what we call “The Sermon on the Mount.” There’s doctrine there–Scripture never slights the subject–but behavior before the Gentile world by God’s people is a major consideration. Oath-taking, brotherly treatment, sexual purity, relations with one’s enemies–and we’re still in chapter 5.

Sprinkled throughout that fifth chapter of Matthew are reminders that God’s people are to live by a higher standard than the Gentiles in order to bear a faithful witness to them.

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Anyone can love the lovely and well-behaved. But we have a bigger job than that.

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Fred Harvey was a name almost every American knew in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This son of Britain had come to America and made his mark in the food industry. Working with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, he built a chain of restaurants across the great Southwest which became legendary for their insistance on quality and their devotion to the customer.

In his book, Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West, Stephen Fried says Harvey originated the first national chain of restaurants, of hotels, of newsstands, and of bookstores–“in fact, the first national chain of anything–in America.”

You may be familiar with the Judy Garland movie on the Harvey Girls, another innovation of Fred Harvey’s. He recruited single young women in the East, then sent them to work in his restaurants from Kansas City to California. In doing so, he inadvertently provided wives for countless westerners and helped to populate a great segment of the USA.

All of this is just so we can relate one story from the book.

Once, in the short period before women took over the serving duties for his restaurants, Harvey was fielding a complaint from one of his “eating house stewards” about a particularly demanding customer.

“There’s no pleasing that man,” said the steward. “He’s nothing but an out and out crank!”

Harvey responded, “Well, of course he’s a crank! It’s our business to please cranks. Anyone can please a gentleman.”

Pleasing cranks.

Anyone can please a gentleman.

It’s our business.

Why did that line sound familiar to me, I wondered as I read past that little story. I know. It sounds so much like the Lord Jesus.

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If you enter the ministry, bring a healthy curiosity!

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I came by it honestly. My dad, a coal miner with a 7th grade education, was interested in everything. He read and learned and talked to us of all kinds of subjects.

In college, I changed my major from physics to history because the professors in the science building were focusing more and more on tinier and tinier segments of the universe. But history deals with it all, every person who ever lived, every civilization, every lesson learned. Nothing is off limits to history.

That did it for me.

I’m reflecting on a life-changing week I enjoyed. On a Monday afternoon, I was among a busload of preachers and spouses from across Europe who spent several hours touring the ruins of Pompeii, the Italian city devastated by the eruption of Vesuvius in August of A.D. 79. It was truly unforgettable. So much so, that….

After my arrival home in New Orleans 36 hours later, I was in our public library reading up on Pompeii. I checked out a Robert Harris novel Pompeii, and finished it the next night. (Note: I recommend anything Mr. Harris writes. The best historical novelist ever.)

I felt like I had been living in Pompeii that week.

I returned to the library and checked out everything I could find on Pompeii.

Okay.  The question is…

Why? Of what possible use is this in my ministry?

Answer: I have no idea. Maybe no use at all, maybe a lot.

A strong curiosity is a wonderful thing for any Christian to have, but particularly preachers. Why?

Well, several reasons….

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Faith: The most ubiquitous force in the universe

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Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and even though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls (I Peter 1:8-9).

A few years ago, a group of scientists were given the most prestigious award in the world, the Nobel Prize for science, for discovering that all around us, all around them, and throughout every cubic foot of the universe is reverberating tiny echoes of the original Big Bang, Creation itself. They called it something like a “humming,” which everyone heard to the point that they had quit questioning it.

You see the same wallpaper every day and eventually you quit noticing it. When the scientists decided to analyze the mysterious hum, they found echoes of the Beginning.

Faith is like that. It’s everywhere, everyone uses it, lives by it, orders their lives by it and around it, but rarely give it a thought.

The funny thing is how some dispute that they believe in faith or use it in any way. As they do so, they draw their breath by faith, stand on their spot of terrain by faith, and plan their next act by faith.

Defining faith is a little tricky. Everyone tries his hand at it.

The writer of Hebrews introduces the well-loved 11th chapter, the Faith Chapter in our New Testament, with a definition:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (Heb. 11:1 NIV).

Some kid said it’s believing what you know isn’t true.

Here’s my definition:

“Faith is a conviction that something is true, real and solid on the basis of genuine, verifiable evidence even though some of the evidence is still missing.”

In a sense we are all celestial Sherlock Holmeses––studying the evidence, coming to conclusions on the basis of that evidence and making decisions, but all the while wishing we had the missing parts of the puzzle. Divine sleuths.

The disciple of Jesus Christ goes forward by faith. The Jew, the Taoist, the Muslim all live by faith. The Hindu, the Buddhist, the animist, and the voodoo practitioner get up every morning and go forth by faith.

The atheist lives by faith. The skeptic and agnostic are faith practitioners, just as much as Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham or Mother Teresa ever were.

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FAITH: elusive, exclusive, conclusive!

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Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and even though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls (I Peter 1:8-9).

A few years ago, a group of scientists were given the most prestigious award in the world, the Nobel Prize for science, for discovering that all around us, all around them, and throughout every cubic foot of the universe is reverberating tiny echoes of the original Big Bang, Creation itself. They called it something like a “humming,” which everyone heard to the point that they had quit questioning it.

You see the same wallpaper every day and eventually you quit noticing it. When the scientists decided to analyze the mysterious hum, they found echoes of the Beginning.

Faith is like that. It’s everywhere, everyone uses it, lives by it, orders their lives by it and around it, but rarely give it a thought.

The funny thing is how some dispute that they believe in faith or use it in any way. As they do so, they draw their breath by faith, stand on their spot of terrain by faith, and plan their next act by faith.

Defining faith is a little tricky. Everyone tries his hand at it.

The writer of Hebrews introduces the well-beloved 11th chapter, the Faith Chapter in our New Testament, with a definition:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1 NIV)

Some kid said it’s believing what you know isn’t true.

Here’s my definition:

“Faith is a conviction that a certain thing is true and real and solid on the basis of solid evidence even though some important evidence is still missing.”

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What worries pastors the most

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“Be anxious for nothing…” (Philippians 4:6).

“Why did you fear? Where is your faith?”  (Mark 4:40)

Worry, they say, is spending energy and resources on needless situations.  Crossing bridges we may never face.  Paying bills that never come due.

Worry is a waste of the imagination, someone said.  And almost everyone agrees that, for a believer, worry is sin.

But just defining worry is no help to anyone.  Telling someone not to worry is like instructing passengers not to panic when the plane is in a nosedive.   A lot of good that would do.

Now, what one person calls “worry” another may call “being concerned” or “caring deeply.”  When a husband tells his wife he does not worry about some upcoming crisis, almost always she interprets that as his not caring.  When the church treasurer said he lies awake at night worrying about our finances, I replied, “Not me.  The Lord is going to be up all night anyway; I let him worry about it.  I sleep like a baby.”  He was convinced I didn’t love the church as much as he did.

Even so, there are issues that do indeed occupy space front and center in the minds and hearts of God’s ministers.

Here are several that come to mind….

One.  Pastors worry about finding the balance between their responsibility to God and their accountability to the congregation.

It’s true that pastors are accountable to the people to whom they minister.  The episcopal type of church government tries to ease the pressure on the minister by creating a layer of administration between him (her, sometimes) and the membership.  But even in the Catholic church, the epitome of hierarchical rule, an unhappy congregation will generally persuade the bishop to make a change in their ministers.

Even so, a faithful pastor knows that while his governing board may sit in judgment on his work each month, there is One who oversees it moment by moment.  And ultimately, His is the only judgment that counts.

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Courage in God’s children is in short supply these days. Be strong, Christian!

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What man is there who is fearful and fainthearted? Let him go and return to his house, lest the heart of his brethren faint like his heart. (Deuteronomy 20:8)

Cowards have no place in the Lord’s army.

Faintheartedness seems to spread from one person to another like a bad disease. Better to go forward with a small fighting force made up of champions than with a massive one infiltrated by cowards.

Fear and courage are brothers, we are told. They show up at the same time, often hand in hand. But, like many brothers, the competition between them is fierce. They struggle to see which will rule the day.

Fear and courage are both contagious.

Let someone start the conversation by pointing out how strong the enemy is and how weak our side is and how foolish we would be to go forward, and soon, his solo is drowned out by a chorus of like-minded fearmongers.

They had been waiting for an excuse to go home.

Let someone stand up and speak faith and courage, and often–not always, alas–others will step out of the crowd to stand with him. Ten warriors with courage–strong of heart and dead-set on victory–can do more than a thousand who are ruled by fear.

The twelve spies had returned from their forty days in Canaan. Israel’s multitude gathered around, eager for their report. There was good news a-plenty: the fields were fertile, the crops abundant, the orchards loaded, and the barns filled. But there was another side to the report: the land was well-populated, the cities were walled and protected by standing armies equipped with the latest technology. And if that wasn’t enough, there were giants in the land.

This could go either way.

It all came down to leadership.

Immediately after the report, faithful Caleb spoke up. “Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it.”

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