Category Archives: Worship

Bible, Church, Culture, Worship

Do we still need a Bible?

As I was preparing to attend church last week, I dutifully selected one of the many Bibles that fill a goodly part of one of my shelves.  There are big ones with plastic tabs along the edge, so scriptures can be more easily found.  There are old broken-down ones that have lost their binding and used only gingerly on my desk and examined with care. There are numerous Bibles that are differentiated by the translation; NASB, MOFFAT, KJ, NKJ, NIV, Message, RSV and on and on.  This week I chose a TNIV.  It is a study Bible with lots of helps and references.

As I sit in the sanctuary just a few moments later and the scripture for the sermon is blaringly displayed across three screens, I wonder, “what is the necessity of lugging a big black book to church”.  What is it that makes me feel that I have my act together in worship when I carry my Bible?  Has the church passed by the need to have pew Bibles for those don’t have one, or do we don’t need one at all?  The Word is passed down to the congregant in little spoons full by the upfronts and that seems to be good enough.

I have one Bible that I started my ministry way back there and since then the cover fell off, the pages are so well worn that I must be careful not to tear them.  It has been marked, highlighted, annotated and referenced thousands of times.  There is a sense of history about it.  If I have the latest version with updated references and scriptural research, why don’t I just throw it away?

Books have lives, and for me and my fellow attendees, consideration must be made for what we have lost personally and collectively by neglecting the Bible as a tangible object.  As one writer said of both the Bible and the hymnal that they, “straddle the worlds of literary and religious reading, of song and private reflection.”   They are a part of the method that should not be done away, just because there is no pocket in the back of the folding chairs. Bibles at church are part of the foundational formation of the family of God? Another scholar points out that what we hold dear affects us and called it, “hand piety.” That which we hold, that which we carry, that which we place on our laps at church has a significance.  These things are permanent parts of our experience of knowing God.

With the Bible on our phones and words on the screen in most evangelical churches, are we being molded into the church by the objects we touch, hold, and memorize? I really don’t think a Bible app on a smartphone holds the same importance as a Bible you have prayed with, cried with, laugh with and come through terrible trials with. A smartphone is just too easy to become a group of loosely networked individuals, where devotional practices and worship are experienced in an individualized manner.

Take your Bibles to church.

By the way, I was snooping a couple of weeks ago and those who had their screens on during service were not looking at a Bible application.

Bible Study, Culture, Motivation, Worship

Bubbles

“If I do this.”

If I drive an electric car, I will be making a difference to the polar bears.

If I live a good life, I will have good karma.

If I drive defensively, I will not get run over.

If I go to church once and while I will be accepted.

There was an invalid who every day would be found by a special place.  It had five great colonnades or walkways with alcoves on both sides.  They surrounded a great pool of water.  He had come there every day for thirty-eight years.  The common understanding was when the pool was disturbed by a visiting angel, the waters would start to bubble.  “If I am the first in the pool, I will be saved.

Year after year trying to be as close as possible so when the bubbles began he would roll into the healing water. Like himself, hundreds of sick, lame, blind, disadvantaged all depended upon the bubbles.  They put their trust in the bubbles.  They had faith in the bubbles.  The bubbles made all the difference.  The water no matter how cooling or inviting was not good enough; it had to have bubbles to be effective.

Every day was spent staring intently at the surface of the pool.  It was a danger just to blink and miss the first bubble as it disturbed the surface.  In our lives, we too wait anxiously for the next bubble in lives.  That next stirring will make the difference.

The malady of the day is the dependence upon the bubbles and not on the source of healing.  There have been great revivals, great outpourings of God’s Spirit on men.  These great stirrings have made a great difference. The great Reformation drew millions to a new faith-based belief.  The concept of evangelism crusades as espoused by Rev. Billy Graham gave place to millions of lives changed.  But these great stirrings were not little bubbles upon the pool.  They were great upheavals.  They were not choices of what is contemporary one moment and outdated the next.

Faith in bubbles is the problem.  If sing the right song in an easy key and repeat the verse repeatedly, I will be moved.  If we make the church more relevant, you will hear, “Here it is.  Here is the agitation that will turn people to God.  A well-orchestrated worship experience will save the church.”  “The bubble will be our cure.”

We tend to be polarized in our experiences.  When things are going well we have great things to praise God for.  When things are going poorly we have things to pray to God for.  They are both just disturbances in our lives.  And like the poor man at the pool, we are not saved by it.

It is all showman’s tricks.  It is all smoke and mirrors.  It is all bubbles.  It is trading a true faith in God to a faith in bubbles.  The man at the pool was saved not by the bubbling disturbance of the waters beneath the colonnade.  It was no external disturbance that would heal the wretched man.  What healed that invalid by the pool was a person. It is the advent of Jesus into the middle of our lives that provides the healing of spirit and of mind. By faith, we are saved.  Faith in the commander who said, “Pick up your mat and walk.”

The Kingdom of heaven does not come with the observation of the bubbles.

What do you think?

Church History, Motivation, Worship

Lent

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This Sunday, Pastor reminded us that both Valentine’s day and the beginning of Lent was on Wednesday.

“What did you give up for Lent?” was asked of me several years ago and it really did not register what that meant.  I figured it was like a second chance at a New Year’s Resolution for those who had already abandoned theirs.

In Jesus’ day, the people gamely tried to obey the written law to win God’s favor. The scribes and Pharisees scrupulously taught the law to people looking for freedom from the Romans, adding many human safeguards so there would be no chance that someone might transgress a commandment by accident.

So why do we observe Lent in the Christian life today?  What are the reasons behind the tradition?  I really don’t find anywhere in the Scripture that admonishes us to observe a specific time and or season of fasting and personal supplication outside of admonishment to a continued and constant part of the Christians life.

Around the church, Lent and the Easter tradition has become an opportunity to bring us closer to God.  The Pastor is preaching on the great “I ams” of Jesus.  But in reality, it will be one more lost opportunity to be called of God to a higher place with Him. That’s surprising, especially since Lent is one of the oldest observations on the Christian calendar. Like all Christian holy days and holidays, it has changed over the years, but its purpose has always been the same: self-examination and penitence, demonstrated by self-denial, in preparation for Easter. Early church father Irenaeus of Lyons (c.130-c.200) wrote of such a season in the earliest days of the church, but back then it lasted only two or three days, not the 40 observed today.

In 325, the Council of Nicea discussed a 40-day Lenten season of fasting, but it’s unclear whether its original intent was just for new Christians preparing for Baptism, but it soon encompassed the whole Church. How exactly the churches counted those 40 days varied depending on location. In the East, one only fasted on weekdays. The western church’s Lent was one week shorter but included Saturdays. But in both places, the observance was both strict and serious. Only one meal was taken a day, near the evening. There was to be no meat, fish, or animal products eaten.

There has been many changes and interpretations to the length and scope of this season.  Never-the-less, Lent is still devoutly observed in some mainline Protestant denominations (most notably for Anglicans and Episcopalians), others hardly mention it at all. However, there seems to be potential for evangelicals to embrace the season again as a promoting fasting as a forerunner to revival. For many evangelicals who see the early church as a model for how the church should be today, a revival of Lent may be the next logical step.

Life, Personal, Uncategorized, Worship

Expectation and Miracles

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There is a joke that goes something like this: Two people fell off a high skyscraper.  One was an optimist the other a pessimist.  You could hear them as they fell down to an adjacent river. The pessimist was screaming and cursing as he fell.  The optimist could be heard as he passed each floor, “So far so good.”

So many people do not like to raise their expectations because they do not want to be disappointed.  “Don’t pray for healing, just pray that the doctors will know what to do.”  I believe that God will only intercede where there is faith. Faith is an expectation, an understanding of who God is and what He is capable of.  And it is this expectation that, in turn, increased our faith. Our faith level rises to the level of our expectation.

If you expect nothing, you will get nothing!  Praying for others is important to both me and God.  Never-the-less, the expectation of the person needing the miracle is even more important. I learned many years ago not to pray for a miracle if a person doesn’t have the faith or desire one. It is not that my prayer of faith can’t promote a miracle, but when the miracle does happen, the receiver reduces it by their doubt.

If you need a miracle, you need to pray in expectation.  Remove the doubt, remove the lack of expectation and pray in faith believing. Come into his presence with faith believing with no lack of expectation.  Get pumped up for God’s outflowing.

WHAT ARE YOU BELIEVING FOR THIS WEEK?

John 14:13-14, And whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If you ask anything in My name, I will do it.

Comments?

Church, Preaching, Worship

Preaching or Worship?

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And how will they hear without a preacher?
Romans 10:14

There seems to be an open debate now being waged over the character and centrality of preaching in the church. There is a perception of two competing events: preaching and worship.  The church today seems to be moving the line between the two towards the experiential worship side. Sermons are no longer something to be excited about and yearned for by the congregant but seen as taking second place to worship.

How did this happen? Given the central place of preaching in the New Testament church, you would think there would be no debate. No other religion has made the regular and frequent assembling of groups of people, to hear religious instruction and exhortation.  The very act of proclamation or preaching is an integral part of Christian worship.

Yet, numerous influential voices within evangelicalism suggest that the age of the expository sermon is over. In its place, some contemporary preachers now substitute messages intentionally designed to reach secular or superficial congregations–messages which avoid preaching a biblical text and thus avoid a potentially embarrassing confrontation with biblical truth.

The shift from expository preaching to more topical and human-centered approaches has grown into a debate over the place of Scripture in preaching, and the nature of preaching itself.

Two statements about preaching illustrate this growing divide. Richard Baxter once remarked, “I preach as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.” With vivid expression and a sense of gospel gravity, Baxter understood that preaching is literally a life or death affair. Eternity hangs in the balance as the preacher proclaims the Word.  The other is by Harry Emerson Fosdick pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, “Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.”

The current debate over preaching is most commonly explained as an argument about the focus and shape of the sermon. Should the preacher seek to preach a biblical text through an expository sermon? Or, should the preacher direct the sermon to the “felt needs” and perceived concerns of the hearers?

Clearly, many evangelicals now favor the second approach. Urged on by devotees of “needs-based preaching,” many evangelicals have abandoned the text without recognizing that they have done so. These preachers may eventually get to the text somewhere in the course of the sermon, but the text does not set the agenda or establish the shape of the message. It becomes a conclusion in search of a text.

Shockingly, this is now the approach evident in many evangelical pulpits. The sacred desk has become an advice center and the pew has become the therapist’s couch. Psychological and practical concerns have displaced theological exegesis and the preacher directs his sermon to the congregation’s perceived needs.

This mode of preaching denigrates its place to less than the Word of God and, consequently the need of something else for the church to find God.  And this other something easily becomes more and more emphasis on experiential worship.

The current debate over preaching may well shake congregations, denominations, and the evangelical movement. But know this: The recovery and renewal of the church in this generation will come only when from pulpit to pulpit the herald preaches as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.

Comments?

Life, Worship

God with us

There are many types of communication available to us today.  Our attention is has been driven to the screen.  Big screens in theaters with surround sound have become the norm.  There seem to be a cold war on the size of our home TV with the largest and highest resolution monsters are the price of the war.  Even our computers have large screens.  Laptops have almost replaced the desktop but still, the screen is the important part. Phones have all but become ubiquitous in everyone’s pocket or purse.  My generation was a generation of the page. But now the younger generation doesn’t seem to have time for a real page-turner of wood pulp; generation of the screen.  All these screens have become the communication medium of choice.

Even in church, the pew bible has been replaced by overhead screens.  Even more and more the church shows up with their bible on their phone or tablet.  They look up the scripture for the day at that is the total of the reading for that day or maybe for the week.

I was reading the advent story this afternoon in a real in the hand bible with split leather cover and I discovered the greatest communication tool ever conceived.  Three words struck me: God with us.

God the eternal, everlasting, all powerful, all knowing, unchanging has a desire to communicate to me.  And His preferred method is not a screen, a video, or even a book.  GOD wants to communicate on a one to one basis.  Face to face.  Life to life.  God WITH, God in the same place as, God the companion, God the helper, God the united in hope and love, God the company we desire.  God with us. Not as an overbearing and authoritative being waiting to stab his creation with a lightning bolt upon any deviation of conduct.  He is so close, so united with us that any punishment would also hurt HIM.

Our sins, our transgressions, our willful steps of defiance always hurt HIM.  That is true empathy.  He feels our pain, our lives of quiet desperation.

We celebrate Advent, that gentile waiting, let us wait with our hearts and ears open and we will hear the heart of God because he is already here.  GOD WITH US, the greatest communication of all time.

What do you think?

Church, Psycolog, Worship

Flash Mob Church

You may have not noticed but there is something happening in the Church.  There has been successive waves of growth and wane.  Waves of people coming in the door staying just long enough to figure it all out and then move on to the next congregation.  I don’t know what they are looking for, I do not know what would keep them long term, or for that matter do I even desire them to stay longer.  You see they are what I call locusts.  They fly in, sometimes in great clouds, to land and partake of the feast.  There is great excitement about these new numbers.  Energy is spent to make them comfortable, liked and accepted.  Some of them proudly proclaimed how much they loved our church and they attended only sporadically at times, they saw themselves as a part.  Some saw attendance as a once a month thing, others a little more.  However, when the time comes for them to fly away there is no warning, they are just not there anymore.  As suddenly they appeared out of the dark, they simply disappeared.  No amount of email and visitor cards stopped their vanishing.

Oh there are those who are there all the time; never wavering, steady, resolute.  I used to say, “saved, justified, sanctified and petrified.”  Never-the-less why has this phenomenon happening?  Why has the Church become more of a Flash-mob experience?  If an individual church has two-hundred members, but only one-hundred is ever there at one time, what does that say about our new church culture?  The church becomes like a roller coaster. Has it always been that way, or has something changed?

I think it is not the preaching or even the preacher.  It is not the musicians or ever the type of music.  It is not the thousand hours of video work put into the presentation of the week splattered up on the white boarded front of the church.  It is that our culture has changed.  Changed from a Church oriented, family empowered, God designed culture to one of emphasis on the individual.  The individual who can determine what they like.  The individual that sets the boundaries.  There are no moral absolutes.  We have to be tolerant to everyone’s feelings and “specialness”. We want the new younger crowd to be welcome and comfortable.  To draw them out of the world to a God that fills them with awe and wonder.  But the church seems at times more like a “Me generation” rally than worship of God.

The church attendance roller coaster is simply a response to change from THEE to me.

What do you think.  Leave a comment.

 

 

 

 

Music, Preaching, Worship

Let the Church sing

Everything that God does is to music.  I was blessed to have an amazing encounter with a professor in my college days.  T. C. Mitchel was much more than a dry lecturer that my fellow students would try to understand.  He made thing more than just an intellectual understanding of scripture.  He was a cut from the cloth of many great English preachers.  Rev Mitchel made clear that which was quite muddy at times.  To that end I found a recording of one of his best sermons.  It speaks about how the church has always been full of song and amazement. It is well worth the 17 minutes to listen and have your heart strings vibrate with the song of God.

It is called “The People of the Spring Sing“

Church, Preaching, Theology, Worship

An echo and an AMEN to A.W. Tozer

The more I read of A.W Tozer, a mid-western born preacher, pastor, author, magazine editor and spiritual mentor to hundreds, the more he both puzzles and astounds me.  In very simple terms he internalizes the words of Jesus and through his writing Christianity is furthered.  He wrote, and preached thousands of words on a myriad of subjects.  He seemed to come back again and again to three themes.  What they are is a genuine heartache for the state of the church.

You could l characterize the first of these concerns as seeing the Bible as an end to itself.  It is seen as a recipe.  Take a verse here and another one from over there and use them to prove your point.  The Bible becomes nothing more than a collection of facts that can be dissected, positioned, extrapolated and preached.  Preachers today seem to have all the right illustrations and answers to any given problem.  They pour two parts from one test tube in the beaker and a couple of drops from another and the expected chemical reaction is the result.  There is little room for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Tozer saw this as the shortest path to dead pulpits and dead churches.  You can be,” Tozer delighted in saying, “straight as a gun barrel theologically and as empty as one spiritually.”  The goal of reading the Bible is not to know more about the Bible, or to be able to quote the correct scripture at the correct time, but to be a pointer.  A pointer to God Himself.  The Word of God, while extremely important, can become more than the source of those words.

Tozer’s second concern was a growing practicality of  programs in the church; to insert methods and techniques to make the Church more palatable with the world.  He called it pragmatism.  It was an attempt to make the church more popular.  It was to add things that were more fun, more exciting, more attractive to the world.   He wrote,The temptation to introduce “new” things into the work of God has always been too strong for some people to resist. The Church has suffered untold injury at the hands of well-intentioned but misguided persons who have felt that they know more about running God’s work than Christ and His apostles did. Let me interject here.  There is nothing inherently wrong with any method unless it dilutes the message or pushes out God. Methodology has become rampant in the church today.  No longer do we sing hymns about the blood of Jesus.  No longer is the bread and cup venerated as a means of grace; instead we have prepackaged cups with bread in the tear off.  It is neater but is it better?  Is convention better than the graceful God.  I wonder what Peter would think of our church service if he silently crept in the back of these new relevant churches.

Third in his triad of concerns for the church was the lack of true worship.  He remarked over and over again about the loss of the sense of majesty, reverence and awe.  The Church as he saw it, was trivializing the very thing it was trying to accomplish. He saw it becoming a form of entertainment.  Hymns were being replaced by gospel songs, (and now by choruses sung over and over again).  The pulpit was becoming a place of humor and endless illustrations. He heard too many laughs and not enough sobs.  According to Tozer, “Worship is to feel in your heart and express in some appropriate manner a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder and overpowering love in the presence Our Father Which Art in Heaven.”

AMEN and AMEN

Your comments are appreciated.

Life, Ramblings, Worship

Dry Worship, now what?

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I arrived early for my small group lesson last Sunday.  We had a substitute leader and the portion of scripture is well known and everything that can be said had been said a thousand times before.  I read the scripture when asked, bring in historical references when appropriate.  But something seems to be missing.  10:30 and we pray move to the sanctuary for worship.

It is well done: the song service is meant to set an environment of worship. But I am not feeling it.  Where is the awe of God? Where is the beauty of worship?  I am just not getting it today.  I look around and there are some that are raising their hands and praising God.  But for me, nothing.

So what should I do from here? Should you go through the motions anyway?  Do I just bear the lack of personal oneness with God and wait for next week?

What is true worship? Jesus said true worship must involve both spirit and truth (John 4:24).  OK, let’s look at truth.  The Bible is truth.  The lesson was truthful, the Pastors message was truthful, the songs were truthful. Worship in truth is a revelation of Jesus.  I have the truth part covered, it must be the other requirement.  Worship in Spirit.

What’s worship in spirit?  What does that mean?  Back to study.  I have to find the truth about the spirit.  What does the Bible say about spirit?  Normally when book refers to the Holy Spirit, it is predicated by the word “THE”.  Digging a little deeper, John was using the word spirit to refer to feelings and emotions.  So worship in spirit is to do so with feelings and emotions.  Now don’t get me wrong, I am not proposing rolling in the isles and handling snakes, but it is more than a stoic resignation to boredom.

So how to get to the feeling part.  Especially for a person not known for his outgoing enthusiasm.  I would think that worship in spirit includes joyful praise, awestruck wonder, sorrow for sin, longing for God, and maybe a chill or two.  But what if I am just not feeling it.  What can I do? Is there a pious position which I can put my head?  Where are the holy feelings? I guess I could just go through the motions.  Stand when everyone else stands.  Sit when I am asked.  Try and sing songs that I really don’t think have much good theology.  But that just sets me up for what Jesus calls hypocrisy in Matthew 15:7-8

You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me…”

So what can I do?

In my studies today I found an interesting passage in Psalms 40 and was the theme of a great old hymn He Brought Me Out

My heart was distressed ’neath Jehovah’s dread frown,
And low in the pit where my sins dragged me down;
I cried to the Lord from the deep miry clay,
Who tenderly brought me out to golden day.

He brought me out of the miry clay,
He set my feet on the Rock to stay;
He puts a song in my soul today,
A song of praise, hallelujah!

At the beginning of Psalm 40 David was not feeling the worship. He felt as I did, in a pit of destruction and stuck in miry clay.  But it changed, God put a song of praise in his mouth. What is the difference?  What is the change that brought the song of praise?

David states plainly. “I waited patiently for the Lord.”  He did not go through the motions.  He did not stand when everyone else were standing.  He did not mouth the words.  He did not hold his head at a pious angle.  He simply waited for the Lord. He did not give up on worship; it was still the goal, but he simply waited for God to help him worship.  And here is how to do it.  I borrowed this quite a few years ago and I don’t know where but here it is:

  1. With expectation point yourself to the divine.  No use looking inwardly if it is just more emptiness.  Don’t focus on your lifeless heart — trust Christ to meet you, help you, change you.
  2. Pray and ask Him to help you worship.  Admit you want to worship and you are not doing so well. Cast your burdens upon Him — and ask Him to strengthen your faith.  Ask for more of the Spirit’s work in your heart to enable you to feel joyful praise, awestruck wonder, and heartfelt longing for Him.
  3. Open the Bible again and find the truth of God that points to praise. If worship is fire, then truth is the fuel that causes the fire to burn.  The more fuel — the hotter the fire.  Focus on the truth in the songs, the prayers, the Scriptures.
  4. Do point one through three again and again patiently.  It’s called waiting for a reason.  God might change your heart instantly — or not.  But His timing is perfect love for you.  So humbly continue waiting for Him.

It may take a long time or just an instant but it will come.  My God is not one to disappoint.

But — if we will wait on the Lord — it’s just a matter of time before we feel the wind of the Spirit start to blow — that fog starts to break up — we see the beauty of God revealed in Jesus Christ —

And we will worship.