Monday Matters

Well, I decided to listen to music as I walked this morning and it shuffled "Can't Get No Satisfaction" and "19th Nervous Breakdown" first. I had to laugh out loud. For "preacher-creatures" like me, Mondays can be toxic. We have a tendency to analyze everything that happens on Sunday with a hyper-critical eye. So any humor helps.

The last day of Spring Break 2011 has come and gone, and I'll be glad to get everyone back next weekend. In our post-multiple PCS state, we can really tell when some of our regular families aren't with us in worship. And with vacations, sickness, and whatever keeping people away, we're less than we could be. Still, I thought we had a pretty good day, all things considered. Our worship team stepped up and delivered on songs that we had trouble with in practice. "God of This City" is usually a New Hope favorite, but we just could not get it done Wednesday night. In fact I was 90% sure I would leave it out on Sunday. But after praying about it, even up to the last minute, I thought that we needed to sing it - that God would speak to us through it. So I asked everyone in the congregation to both pray and sing us through it. Thank God, it worked.

The songs were: Our God Is Greater (first time we've done it); Forever, God of This City, and Grace Flows Down. I thought the singers did well again and the band was really good at following them. Sean just blew me away on lead guitar on the first song. Just wow. If worship is bringing your best to present before God, then he did it!

We've been looking at John's gospel - specifically the portrait of the Messiah he tries to paint with the 7 "signs", and yesterday we looked at the man of Bethesda who Jesus asked "Do you want to be well?" All week long as I thought about the passage of Scripture, I kept seeing other people - people today - that over time found that their misery was more comfortable to them than the idea of change and healing. I also kept thinking that I had to make sure that the answer people walked away with wasn't a Tony Robbins like human potential message, but that the secret to change was reliance on Jesus. Hope that happened and some people were helped.



Be praying for New Hope as we go forward toward Easter.

Pray that we will have the opportunity to see people come to know Jesus as Savior and Lord.

Pray that God will provide the resources we need to continue to minister to our community.

Pray that I will be able to balance family, school, substitute teaching, and my calling as pastor.

New Hope needs me to relieve some of the financial pressure by cutting the amount of compensation the church provides for my family to live here. We're operating on a shoestring and really need a change until God sends us more to work with. Without that change, we are going to face some tough choices that I don't want to have to make. So pray that I'll continue to do well in my teacher certification program, and that I'll get enough substitute work to contribute to New Hope's needs.

This is such a special place, and I serve alongside some amazing people. I truly do thank God every time I remember that. Even on Monday.

Reflecting on Today's Message

The Bible is summed up in two sentences: First, cheer up; you are a lot worse than you think you are. And second, cheer up; God’s grace is a lot bigger than you think it is. - Jack Miller

The balance has to be there for it to be the gospel.

Yes, we are sinners. There is nothing in us that should attract a Holy God.

And yet, while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

There are times when I hear people speak of their unworthiness that I wince if they take it what seems to me to be too far. But I don't know them and what they have gone through as well as they do.

Yet I know God's pursuing love intimately. Personally. So I know His love is large. Expansive. Lavish. Amazing.

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

What I Heard - What I'll Do

Since our DSL has been down almost all morning and into the afternoon, I've been watching DVD's and reading. Monday is that kind of day for me anyway. Today I spent an hour or so watching Donald Miller, author of "Blue Like Jazz" and others, talk about the power of "Story."

Miller, speaking to a group in Nashville, explains how finding your place in God's Story, and inhabiting the "story" God has created you for, can make all the difference. I think his seminar needs to be viewed by a great many Christians I know, and that the application of what he's identified as critical might just be a strong weapon in our battle for the redemption of the culture.

There is probably no communicator in the world more intent on getting their message across to their listeners than an evangelical Christian preacher on Easter morning.

Certainly others are intensely devoted to their craft. Most assuredly there are some who believe in the content of their presentation. But within the insider's groups I have belonged to - of other pastors and preachers, Easter is described as "The Super Bowl", "The World Series", "The Big Day", and other terminally superlative terms.

One of my gifted communicator friends said this about the intensity a preacher must exhibit on Easter this way, "If a preacher can't get 'up' for Easter, then he ought to quit." "Up" means passionate about the day and what God did - I'd agree 100%. But if "up" meant "performing at your best", I didn't. So I moped around yesterday evening, tried to put it behind me using a variety of analogies "Babe Ruth struck out XXXX times", "Michael Jordan missed XXX buzzer beating shots", and some spiritual consolation from a pastor friend. When I went to bed last night, I asked forgiveness and requested more of His wisdom for future messages.

I figured that when I got up this morning, God would have moved on to more pressing matters with far more important servants, but I was wrong. He still wanted to weigh in on the subject with me. While I was praying through what happened yesterday at New Hope with my part in the celebration of Easter, I did not get the message to quit.

But I did get a very clear message to quit frittering away my time and the attention span of the congregation unless I have a clear, cogent, and compelling story to draw them into. (Hey, three alliterated points. I must be having a stroke!) Every single time I lose sight of how God has wired me to communicate His Story, the result is so much less than it should be.

Mea culpa

So I am determined to seek and find more and better ways to communicate the truths contained in God's "Big Story", and want to grow my own "story line" so that when I come before the "King of Kings" and the "Lord of Lords" I will be breathless - having been snatched from another great adventure with Him.

New Hope @ Worship 09 November 2008

With our youth and leaders away on a retreat today, it was trending a bit older than normal on the platform. But at least I was there to help demographically. :)

Our God Saves -great song that we did again after two weeks - lots of energy
Arise - praises Jesus, and helps us see Him as He is
Your Name - focus on the attributes of God
Forever - God is faithful
Amazing Grace - God is merciful. We sang every stanza



This was the fourth of a series called "We Hold These Truths" on the power of God.There were so many great scriptures and so many ways to approach it that I read, thought about and walked around with during the week, I wound up hitting several and nailing none. Note to self - preach A text, not all the texts.

God is able
He is exceedingly able
We is exceedingly abundantly able
To do
To do more
To do more than we can ask
To do more than we can ask or imagine

Would have been one way to approach it.

Well, to God be the glory and may His Spirit take my offering and use it to further His Kingdom advance.

A Test

If you can figure out what the heck is going on in this picture, then perhaps you stood a better chance than most at grasping some of my train of thoughts in the sermon this morning.

Aaaarrrgghhh!

Never bothered me that much to go 0 for 4 in baseball. It's just a game.

But to waste the time that God had set aside for people to hear of His plan, His purposes, and His offer to them - aarrgghhh!!!

Mea culpa

Monday, Monday

I actually don't hate Mondays. Though I know a lot of preacher-creatures do. For me it's a time to rest up and reflect on how we did as a community over the past week, and look ahead without a pressing deadline.

But this Monday began with immediately trying to fix what ailed Bunny's PC. It showed up with a strange window on the screen showing a pctsgui.exe error, with an input field wanting you to send in an error message. PC Tools Spyware Doctor didn't want to run, so we had to trot out Spybot and have at it. Then we found a couple of weird additions including one possible key logger.

Key loggers make most PC techs blood run cold because they capture everything you input into your keyboard and send it away to someone else. In this day of online convenience where we buy online, you can quickly lose your identity and your money. Both of us are very fussy about sweeping our PC's and using safeguards, but I am absolutely paranoid about it and run far more protective software than she does.

But I think we were able to eliminate the threat before it captured any data. (If it really was that type threat.) We both run the much safer Firefox browser, but I add NoScript to mine to eliminate any unwanted program execution without my approval. Bunny tried to do it as well, but the "nagging" that NoScript does finally got to her. We have a hardware firewall too, and Bunny runs the Windows SP2 firewall, but I add another on my laptop and have security set high. I may have to revisit what we're doing on Bunny's PC and add another layer of protection.

And it all happened before 9AM.

Monday, Monday

"...can't trust that day."

Sometimes when you roll over into Monday, it's a real blessing. Maybe you had a tough time the day before and knowing you have a day to reorient helps a great deal. Just having the space to reflect can soften the previous day's experience if it's bad, or you can continue to bask in the glow if it was a great day.

As a pastor, you are so tied into the events and people of the church you serve that if you aren't careful, you tend to kick yourself around quite a bit. You know and give assent to the fact that God is sovereign, and His will is being done, but if you didn't feel as though you did your best the day before, then you spend Monday thinking, if only I had worked harder, prayed more, not used that illustration, used more Scripture, used less Scripture... well, you get the idea.

But most Mondays serve as waves on the shoreline, and whatever you scribbled the day before in the sand gets blurred and erased.

Not today.

That sermon stunk. Just plain stunk. It never cleared the "so what?" bar, much less the "now what?" one.

But I can deal.

So then I open an email from Ray Pritchard and find that he's done what I wasn't able to, in the way I was hoping to do it. Thanks a lot God. :)

A decree from Caesar Augustus.
An angel appearing to Mary.
A virgin becoming pregnant.
An angel coming to Joseph in a dream.
A baby who will be called Immanuel.
A mysterious star in the east.
A group of magi showing up in Jerusalem.
Angels appearing to shepherds.
A trip to Bethlehem.
An inn that was full.
A stable that was available.
A babe wrapped in rags and placed in a feeding trough.
A star that led the magi to the right house in Bethlehem.
Gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
A dying king who tried to kill the baby.
A desperate journey to Egypt.
Another journey to Nazareth.

And think of what the Bible says about this baby:

"He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end" (Luke 1:32).

"You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21).

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14).

" For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6).

Pretty amazing stuff, if you stop to think about it. What are the chances that all of those things that had to happen in exactly the right way would have happened? That a pagan emperor would issue a decree at just the right moment in history, when the Pax Romana was in full force, when the world was yearning restlessly for deliverance, that angels would show up to a young man and a young woman, that they would believe the angels, that the virgin would become pregnant, that Joseph would decide not to divorce her, that the star would shine in the east, that the magi would travel hundreds of miles seeking the baby, and all of it would finally focus on a stable outside an inn in the "little town of Bethlehem," where the most incredible event in history took place.

C. S. Lewis says it this way:

The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares the way for this, or results from this.

He is entirely right about that. Sometimes we focus on peripheral questions (how did Jesus turn water into wine?) that distract us from the central truth of our faith. We believe God became a man. That the Creator became part of the creation. That the infinite became finite. That Almighty God took on the form of a man and was born as a tiny baby. This is the central truth of our faith.

I think Shawn is on to something when he uses the phrase "an accident from God." That's what Christmas is. It's an "accident from God," which means of course that it's no accident at all but it sure seems that way from the outside looking in.

It's personal, it's Biblical, it's really good. Everything I was trying to do.