Bible Study, Life, Ministry, Motivation

Leadership Now

I am bald. For some, you could say I am follically challenged. Hence, I have had literally hundreds of hats all purchased or give to me with one purpose: to protect my bare head. Some were plain, others with a message attached. One of these hats broadcast a leadership style. That red and white hat had two bills. One bill pointing in one direction and another pointing another. And on the cap was boldly written, “I’m their leader which way did they go?” I would think this cap was given as a joke because I have never one to stand back and let others lead. I am the John Wayne type of person who is quiet, and unassuming until there is a crisis. When things go wrong, I block everything out, even who is to blame and come to a quick decision. And come what may, I stick to my decision without wavering.
The problem is that haunts this type of leader is the lack of company. This character is tragically and painfully alone. Their silence and their inability to let others own part of the solution is isolating. In today’s socially acceptable world we of the John Wayne set, living in our isolation want so much to be accepted volitionally try to restrain ourselves. So not only are we isolated, we now become withdrawn and reactionary only to the big things. It becomes an exhibition of “Silent Strength.” This attitude becomes so silent that decisions are reserved for when the house is burning down and everything else is left to others. And we live in a quiet desperation.
Men have allowed themselves to be trapped in their own inner lives. Silent strength often becomes quiet desperation. We endure an inner shame when we don’t have an answer. We are frustrated by simple choices. “Honey do you want beef or chicken tonight?” “It doesn’t matter.” The society around us has made its business to push men into this quiet desperation for generations. We must be politically correct. We must allow our spouses their say without constraint. We must be the strong silent type, enduring all, accepting all and with a small upturned smile as we cope. “When Momma is happy, everyone is happy.”
So, what is the solution? As I read the Bible to find guidance and direction, I discover we are to be leaders to our families, love our wives, disciple our kids, serve the church, and spread the gospel along with a thousand other things. It is simply overwhelming. As each new wave of frustration, anxiety, and compliance folds over, it becomes easier and easier to just give up the reigns that God desires of us to hold tightly to. It is all about individual decisions.
Christian men need to set their decision making not based upon people’s expectations but upon God’s expectations.
I am working on a Bible study based on the path set before men. It is how to make the right decisions in love and caring. It is how to renew the place of men in God’s plans. It is based on four maxims and each must have its proper place: Christian decision making is first compassionate to people. Decision making always is one of relationship over things. Your family is more important than anything you may own, want or crave.

Christian decisions are always about head knowledge and logic. It is not something you just do because your emotion or your heart says it is good. A person’s heart is the most fickle part of our lives and should not be trusted. This decision maxim is intellect over emotion.

Christian decisions are always about joy and not about happiness. Happiness is a temporary thing. Happiness comes and goes with the latest thing, place or substance. Joy is something that comes from within the inner soul. Happiness is usually associated with something outside trying to fill a gap in the soul.

Christian choice is always based on the future. It is not based upon the past. Sure you may have well failed at something, never-the-less it is not a determining reason for not trying again. There is always redemption. We must always strive to better than our past.

How do we become the person God wants us to be? How can we be the confident decision-makers in our homes? First, we must pray. Prayer is not an easy thing for most men because it is not natural to acknowledge something that is smarter, stronger and more intelligent than ourselves. Men must just start a conversation with God. To yield up to as much of God we understand and start a dialog.
Second, we need to start a regular Bible reading plan. Make it a habit to set aside at least 5 minutes for only reading your Bible. God will start to reveal His will for you and your family.
Next, go and find someone to meet with. Find another guy with whom you can have an honest conversation. This can be hard, but are we too scared to reach out to another guy and acknowledge that we are all struggling with something?
Finally, it is never too late to start leading. The world wants you to feel like you’ve already blown your chance to lead, or that no one will take you seriously, but this isn’t the case. Take a few minutes to write down the areas in your life where you would like to start leading. 
The bottom line is this: It is NOT too late to start leading. Ask the Lord to show you the way and just start leading.

What do you think?

Bible, Bible Study, Life, Preaching, Theology

Cash Register Eternal Life

I just finished teaching a cadre of men an eighteen-week study on the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus. The best time to assess that study is a couple of weeks afterward.  Lesson after lesson we explored the depths of this passage.  There were times where we found true understanding of scripture and lives were changed with slight veers in individual paths.  Now I am looking back and seeing what these passages really mean to me.

It is the third verse which was the greatest point of my study.  This is eternal life; that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. This is the only scripture where Jesus gives a precise, unwavering, perfect, straightforward definition of eternal life. 

The church today seems to want to define “eternal life” as a simple phrase pointing to where you go when you die.  It is a good place. It is the place you want to go.  It is the place where there are fluffy clouds and angel wings.  The church today seems to have made a part of an either-or situation.  And with this option, a market or economic value system has been attached. What does it cost?  What effort is required to attain it?  We want to know if God takes plastic.

Eternal life can not be bought.  Not by a sinner’s prayer.  Not by a perfectly recited and overly used system of chants.  Not by a set of behavioral attitudes.  Not by demonstrating in view of all and everyone in earshot that you have faith.

Eternal life is not the reward for effort. Eternal life is knowing God.  It is in that relationship of knowing one another that makes life eternal.  Simply by saying, “I am up to accepting your sacrifice,” or “I am willing to be your treasure,” is going to make the heavenly cash register open up and a little round token with the words, “Eternal Life” be given to you.  These are just the starting point.  The initial intersection between you and God. That first step is like the wedding ceremony; it is just the start.  Marriage is more than one simple saying of your vows.  Marriage and eternal life are about the relationship that goes on and on.  It is a daily seeking of relationship.  It is knowing.  It is devotion.  It is saying your sorry more than once.  Eternal life is not doing but knowing.

Comments?

Church, Culture, Personal, Politics, Preaching

Rise and Shine

1 Comment

I don’t understand.  I wake up and the first thing I hear is the news on in the living room and I am blasted by the latest scandal, the latest opinion that is contrary to the ones I have. I wonder how our “Christian nation” arrived at a place where our college students don’t think and just react to the latest rhetoric pumped from a tiny screen. I am aghast that our government seems unwilling or unable to just sit down and talk with each other.  Rather they are so polarized they would rather the country fail than not get their ideological viewpoint undermined.  I sit here questioning seeming fluid self-declared gender identity sweeping our culture, thrown in the face of God-created differences.

It is not just secular tidal waves that loom on our horizon. The church is being changed by these forces.  The church is called to change the world, not the other way around. I read of what we would call mainline churches just giving up on basic Christian beliefs.  “Mary wasn’t a virgin, she was just a maiden.”  “Jesus did not raise from the dead, it is just an allegory.” It has become more of what you do than what you believe, “Live the good life.”  The church no longer talks about the blood of Jesus providing a life-changing salvation.  It is all about an entertainment of the senses in a joint expression of euphoria as a substitute for worship.

As a result, there is a cultural relativism.  There are no absolutes. “We don’t need theology, we need a social application of cultural norms,” is touted at the latest seminar or church conference. The sheep have been set free to roam where ever they think is best.”  And they have taken this relative culture and ran with it.  Running toward destruction.

We must get back to basics.  Where we hold standards high. Where the truth is the truth.  Where the Bible is the basis of life.  There must be an evangelism in our church.  We must show unity, we must love one another. There are mainline churches across this great nation that are dying because they are not connected to the True Vine.

I pray for the church to be filled.  I pray for the church to be called to prayer.  I call for the church to change our culture.  I pray that the great churches of America have a genuine revival of the Spirit of God.

And with this revival will come a change in our country.

Bible Study, Personal, Psycolog, Ramblings

Leadership Dilemma

There is a myriad of stories of Bible studies, small groups, even churches that have less than stellar endpoints.  We look to many causes. “It was the building was not welcoming.”  The heat and cooling were not to my liking.” “There was not enough commitment from the church board.”  “There was an economic downturn in our area.” “The ministries were not meeting the needs of our socioeconomic mix.” And the list goes on and on.

I teach a regular Bible study specifically designed and presented to a subset of the congregation.  It is Men ministering to men.  The attendance has not always been equal from week to week and I am amazed at the progress each of these Christian disciples has come.  Never-the-less, I have to do personal inventory on a constant and continual schedule.  I want to make sure I am not the person that causes the change in attendance.

I am a very boisterous, loud, opinionated, strong personality. And this personal character must be kept in check within reason or there may well be an exodus from attendance. I don’t want to be an emotionally unhealthy Christian leader.

This emotional deficit is caused by a lack of inward understanding of my own feelings, my own weaknesses and limits.  It is this emotional detachment that also prevents an understanding of other’s feelings and perspectives.

Leadership that does not look inwardly will ultimately alienate all that is around them. As a remedy for this inward continual desire to be heard understood and agreed with comes a tendency to work a little harder, to volunteer for one more thing, to give of my time talent and treasure until they have little left.

This type of leader ends up engaging in more and more activities that what can not be sustained.  They seem to continually give out FOR God more than they receive FROM Him. They serve others to share the joy of Jesus because there is little joy in their efforts alone.

In their more honest moments, they admit that their cup with God is empty or, at best, half full, hardly overflowing with the divine joy and love they proclaim to others.

As a result, with all the balls in the air, a leader must continually grab at the next one lest one should fall.  And in the heavenly juggling act, the time and effort due to the current ball in hand go into “good enough” category.

In the process, they obscure the beauty and perfection of Christ they say they want the whole world to see. No well-intentioned leader would set out to lead this way, but it happens all the time.

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, Bible Study, Life, Personal, Preaching

Without Love

I may well speak fluently of Calvinism, Reformed, Wesleyan and even Seven Day Adventist within an assemblage of brethren. I can even lead them to a point of excitement and feelings of being accepted as one great body of believers.  Never-the-less, when I walk away, and I see them only as theological misfits, I am nothing more than sound and fury signifying nothing.

I even can preach and teach the great mysteries of theology and apologetics. I can make thoughtful and logical expositional and theological stands.  I can and have used illustrations of media and popular culture in making my three points of homiletics clear.  I have presented the Words of God to such a way that people broke out in song or raised hands in expressions of joy.  If I have opened Gods truth that some were moved to simply sit in awe.  Never-the-less, if I do not care enough to know God myself and those who are loved by that same God, I am nothing but a white noise.

If I create a new vision for the church for new things and buildings are built as one more big edifice to Christianity, but I lose sight of the God I serve and the people that God loves, I am nothing.

If I am well known in the congregation as being one the biggest givers, and I am always there to sponsor the next big thing at the church and always willing to go the conference or barbeque, and I do not show love for those sitting in the corner wanting the most just to be included, they don’t mean a thing.

You see, no matter what I say, or believe or even what I do, if I leave out love, I am a man without hope or worth.

Love is the thing.  Love is never exhausted, it never gets too old, it never runs out of energy.  Love and compassion are more concerned with the other guy than my own selfish desires. Love is giving a couple of dollars to the man standing at a street corner; the very dollars you were going to spend for coffee on the way to church.

Love isn’t about the next big thing that everyone else has.  It is acknowledging all that I have are gifts from Him.

The opposite of love is walking around with the nicest clothes, with head held high, with the expectation that all around you will notice and give you preferential treatment.  It is giving everyone a voice.
It is the realization that you are not that important.  It is the acceptance of equality of idea, belief, stature, hope, dreams, and life.

Love is about sitting in the back at church not wanting to be seen or giving the best piece of pie at the potluck to the person who really needs it. It is giving up your place in line when it is inconvenient. In traffic, it is giving the other guy a way to get in even though he has just cut off three other cars. And when someone does not let you in, you say to yourself, “we all have places to go.”

Love is not caring about a heavenly scorecard keeping the size and quantity of sins for everyone else but me.
Love does not reveal the secrets of other travelers going the same way, instead, love takes delight and joy in new understandings and knowledge.

Love puts up with more than anyone would expect. When things get you down, love is there to bring you back up because God is trust.  Love in you will always be looking for the best in people, best in events, best in circumstances and best in the worst.

For Love, the past is the past and we need not look back with feelings of regret and longing; Love simply keeps going to the ultimate rewards of God.

You see my friends, Love just keeps on going, it never stops, it does not grow weary, it does not slow down because of resistance or age.

All that I have written will be nothing someday.  All the lessons I have diligently prepared and presented in God’s name will be gone and forgotten.

Even the essence of my intellect and understanding will reach a limit.

I can not know it all; I try with all my strength to push one more idea or catchphrase into my limited mind.  But I still know just a little piece of the truth. Everything I have ever learned, explored, understood, known, taught, preached, prayed is and will always be incomplete.  The good news is that when the total, the complete, the absolute, the perfect arrives, my incompleteness will all be eliminated.

When I was a kid, running wild in the streets and hills, I had few responsibilities or wonder.  I spoke of little things and fretted about even smaller things.  But I have grown up and have eliminated all the little things only to be confronted by the things I cannot know.

Today we can’t see the things that are right before our eyes.  There seems to be a wispy cloud between God and me.  I want to see better, I want to find some tool to dispel the mist, but there is none to be found.

Someday the mist will part.  Someday the fog will burn through by a great light. I won’t be long before the crystal-clear day dawns and the sun will cast its warmth upon my face and I will be warmed by it.  We’ll see it all then.  We will see as clearly and keenly as God sees.  Someday the view will be so clear so perfect that we all will see as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

Until that perfect completeness comes and reveals itself through the new day, we must keep on loving. Faith in the love of God has for us, hope in the inescapable and unchanging Love of God and to simply Love without extravagant limits.  But the best of these is simple and uncomplicated; LOVE!

Culture, Ramblings

Soap box time

I set here at my desk thinking about my two grandchildren and how their lives are saturated by screens.  If it is not a laptop, then a tablet, or even a smartphone.  They seem to be grabbing the very life of my perfect little ones.  I would suppose my mom and dad felt the same way about television, never-the-less, I think it is much worse.  I am not condemning all technology; if I was I would have to throw stones at myself.  I use technology to build Bible studies, sermons, blogs, Christian videos and I am constantly researching the latest insights from great preachers and theologians, all with the help of my computer and its associated screen.  There are concerns.

For those who can absorb information at the rate of hundreds of texts, tweets, emails, Facebook posts, all the while viewing the latest YouTube videos, I can’t imagine by the time they grow into adulthood that a thirty-minute sermon at the church will not be able to hold their attention. It seems there is a shortening of attention span and the lack of a comprehensive learning styles bode well for today’s preachers.  So, does the preacher just keep shortening his sermon and become just one of those legacy things that ultimately pass away?  Or does the preacher of tomorrow have to work harder to open the word and let the Holy Spirit lead to all understanding?  I think the latter.

This social media generation is also being fed by this all-encompassing media blast a very low view of authority.  I believe social media and the tyranny of the screen exclaims itself as the great equalizer.  Everyone has a voice. Facebook tells us we have the right to post the most trivial and the most mundane events, with the expectation that all your friends will read them will all due attention and comment and press the like button. My trip was so good you have to envy me. Opinions become egalitarian; everyone’s post or reaction to a post is presumably important to the whole world.  Everyone has an opinion and there is an assumed equality of importance.  There is no authority other than the mob.  With total equality, there is no authority.  The pastor’s views are no more valid than the teen.

This Facebook mentality is simply too easy.  It requires no commitment beyond a simple click.  We control the message, the duration, intensity, and level of contact. At any moment, we can simply stop reading.  Only to be pulled back because we feel left out.  The level of true understanding of people and committing to a relationship is simply not there.

Some would disagree and state, “I know a lot more than if I wasn’t online.”  I know when my cousin is in her garden, I know about my brother is safe, I know what was preached on in three prior church affiliations; all good stuff. But it is all on a surface level. In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011), MIT professor Sherry Turkle observes, “On social-networking sites such as Facebook, we think we will be presenting ourselves, but our profile ends up as somebody else—often the fantasy of who we want to be”. My friended friends might well feel as though they are connected, but, they are just a little further away from who they really are.

There is an art of writing.  To look at a sentence and know it is what is intended, just feels good. When I read most Facebook posts it looks like the education level of the writer is still in the fifth grade. Sure, it is easier to leave a voicemail or send an email than to talk to someone face to face. Turkle notes. “The new technologies allow us to ‘dial down’ human contact”.  Yet we seem to crave real contact and settle for much less.

The solution?  It is not going into a hole and throwing away all our screens.  They are just tools.  From my view from the pre-screen era is that technology is not sinful.  But like any other tool, it can well add an additional vehicle for it.  Where two or three are gathered together, I will be in their company. Turn off the screens and open your Bibles.  Contact someone today and tell them you love them and explain why.  A relationship has to be more than an icon to be clicked on to show your affection.

Bible, Culture, Life, Personal, Sermon Illustration

Knowing and knowing

In teaching ten men on a weekly basis, I have often reached conclusions in my own personal study as I prepare.  Sometimes they are nothing more than a black hole dragging me away from the subject I was trying to understand.  The word “know” throughout the Bible has been most often related to a relationship.  It is more than head knowledge.  It is coming to point of value to the thing or person you have come to know.  It is not just a compilation of facts.  It is coming to understanding and that understanding is worth something.  Only with a sense of importance and a value, does it become known.

An example may help here.  I was returning from Oakland airport after picking up a special visitor to my home.  I left the airport and my GPS device reported immediately there was going to be a 20-minute delay on my chosen route home.  Intellectually I understood what 20 minutes were.  It was a simple inconvenience.  So we pulled into the prime commute traffic heading North.  About three miles down the road I hit the traffic.  in which no one was going anywhere fast.

After experiencing this congestion for seven minutes, my mind told me there would be a reprieve in a couple of minutes or so.  At that point my trusty GPS reported a change in the traffic pattern, “there will be a 54-minute delay on your route. My intellectual understanding of being inconvenienced changed to knowledge.  As we moved as a dreadnaught of hundreds of cars down the five lanes of traffic, I began to be a little irritated with little things.  Little things like motorcycles whizzing down between cars with only inches to spare started to irritate me a little.  I started keeping track of two or three cars that seemed to want to change lanes with every opportunity to gain on the rest of us willing to go with the flow.  It was nerve-wracking.

I was really getting to know traffic. When you know something beyond a simple understanding and then when you become a part of it you are changed.  To know of a future delay and becoming part of it is two separate things.  When you know something as the Bible uses know, then you have to live it. To know is experiencing and being changed by it.  It affects your feelings, your hopes, your dreams, and even your driving habits.

John 17:24 is John’s intent to tell us about knowing God.  His intent is to tell us that knowing God is more than an intellectual head knowledge.  Knowing God is seeing the value.  Knowing God is the relationship.  Knowing God is being changed.  Knowing God is an intimacy. Knowing is more than a warning of an impending delay in my plans, any more than our concept of hell slowing us down.

Life, Personal, Psycolog, Ramblings

Pondering is better than quibbling.

I have been making a concerted attempt at teaching my grandson a few things about numbers.  Once you get beyond the rote memorization and tedium of the times tables there is an elegance to numbers. We talked about prime numbers, you know those numbers that are only divisible itself and one.  1,2,3,5,7,11,13,19,23,29,31,37,41, and on and on.  As we sat together in my study we pondered this list of numbers.  We were wise owls staring into the night as I explained, “as numbers get bigger and bigger there are fewer and fewer prime numbers and like numbers themselves, they go on for infinity.”

It looked as if his head was going to explode.  Mind you he is getting ready to enter the fifth grade, and the relativity of numbers and infinity itself is some of those things that probably needs to held back to at least the seventh grade.  But it was an introduction.  A beginning of a thought pattern that could well carry through to the rest of his life.

For me, there is a thirst for learning that can’t quite be quenched. There is a little itch that cannot be scratched urging me on.  It is more than a want to just rearrange the ideas and facts of others.  I must find the new, the encouraging, the frightful, the consoling, the special in everything I see.  When I am disappointed in someone or experience a slightly hurtful comment, I go to my special place of wonder.  I look out at the world around me and try to discover something new.  You might well call this escapism, or even an unwillingness to face the reality that people sometimes hurt me without knowing.  But for me, it is better than lashing out or making my own snide comment.

Of all the comments, slurs, circumstances, and disappointments that Jesus went through, I see very few instances of Him lashing out.  Don’t get me wrong, I am no Jesus.  Nevertheless, I think it is just better this way.  I will not waste my pondering on quibbles.

Culture, Life, Motivation

All of a sudden

Driving across town to do a simple errand I was late.  Every stop light seemed to be just turning red as I approached.  Every light brought on a small incremental growth of frustration.  Call it happenstance, coincidence or luck, but I came upon three green lights in a row.  My countenance lightened as the journey came to an end.  Pulling into the parking lot of my destination I realized I was on time for my appointment.

I have personally experienced instantaneous healings.  I have also heard testimonies of God healing people in a single moment of faith.  But as often as not it was preceded by months or years of faithful praying for that breakthrough. The world I live in has become an instant soup kind of world.  Microwaves, 260 channels on widescreen televisions provide entertainment with a push of a button on a remote control. Today’s culture has embraced the instant, and sometimes we forget the importance of persistence and our Biblical mandate to not give up when the going gets tough.

Before the beginning of the world, there was a plan for Jesus to come into this world. But when the day came for Mary to give birth there was no room in the inn. You would think if God had this perfect plan of bringing the savior to the world he could have made reservations.  Even in promises, even in the promises of God, there will be challenges.  Even when God is in something, problems can and following the reservation less Jesus, often will present themselves.

We look at our local churches and fully expect that if God is in something, it’ll work out perfectly.  But sometimes it does not.  Some Churches do not thrive, some even shut their doors, years of prayers and hopes seemingly unheard.

But they are just stop lights in our paths. Sometimes it takes a long time for God to act suddenly.

The Study of God and Life