The Night Before Sunday And All Through the House

My oldest son Adam and his bride Shonda are here with us, having driven down from Warner Robins, GA for a couple of days. It's great to have a chance to spend some time with family.

This is a pretty quiet house most of the time, except when Sean is playing guitar, but tonight we're having an abnormal amount of noise, which is okay.

I've just finished the powerpoint slides for tomorrow's sermon "Connect the Dots" where I hope to bring the congregation a deeper understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit and present them with the opportunity to surrender to His indwelling presence and direction.

We'll trace the work of the Spirit throughout the Scriptures, and then zero in on the incredible happenings in Acts chapter 2. I'm praying that the Spirit will connect the dots for people as He leads them to faith in Jesus.

Stay tuned.

Trying To Connect the Dots

It was one of those far ranging conversations you can only have with someone who knows your heart and soul. Bunny and I were talking as we headed out about how God is at work in our individual lives, and then as so often happens, I started talking about what I think God is leading me to do as a teacher/preacher.

I'll condense the conversation for you. :)

For many of the people in our congregation, the most important thing I can do now is to connect the dots of what they know about the Bible together so that they can see God's overarching plan - and their place in it.

I am fully convinced that a lot of people know a little bit about the Bible. A great deal more of the people I see week in and week out know a pretty good bit about it. But most have never really changed the way they live day to day as a result. When they trusted Christ for salvation, it was a moving event. But then another day came and went, and another, and they still weren't in heaven.

So they went back to living.

Maybe they were more considerate as they remembered Jesus' love. And perhaps they TRIED harder to "live a good life and treat people like they would want to be treated."

They had plenty of facts, but no story to place them into. They knew they ought to love because they were loved, but they never connected it to NOW and to the people they found themselves living with. They just could not see where anything they did could really make any difference.

And yet the Bible is brimming with examples of ordinary people doing extraordinary things because God was with them. And when you move into the New testament from the Old, you find that those who knew the most "Bible" seemed to have the poorest handle on what it really called them to do.

So what if we could transmit the Big Story - the HUGE narrative of how God worked, and how He is working, and how He can work through us and create opportunities for each of us to live it out?

What if we could connect the dots?

Stay tuned for Sunday. As we look at Acts, we'll try to tie the work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament to His coming on Jesus and to His living in us today to God's plan to change the world.

New Hope @ Worship 040608

This morning we tackled the topic of eternal punishment and specifically hell head on, so trying to choose music to reinforce the topic was out. What we could do is to try to balance a message that weighed in on the law side with abundant grace. What we could do is focus on Jesus. So that's where we went.

Come, Now Is the Time To Worship
Open the Eyes of My Heart Lord
Holy Is the Lord
Heart of Worship

and Softly and Tenderly

Beginning in Matthew 25, the "sheep and the goats" passage, I tried to lay out what our culture has impressed upon us about hell. Then what the culture understood of hell in Jesus' day. And then how the Bible translators colored both and where we need to come down.



New Hope sermon page with audio

Checking with some of the people who won't just give me a "good sermon" pat on the back seemed to reveal I had opened a conversation about the afterlife and exploded some myths. That's great, but what I really hope is that we need to make our way to those headed to hell and pray for the Holy Spirit to persuade them to turn aside and follow Jesus with us.

I used a clip from Seinfeld to set the tone. In it Elaine's boyfriend David Puddy is asked if he believes in God. He responds in the affirmative. Elaine presses to ask if it bothers him that she doesn't believe. He says "It's not my problem, you're the one who is going to hell."

In a later clip, after Elaine is tempted to take her neighbor's newspaper when her's is missing, Puddy says "why not, you're going to hell anyway."

She says this, "Well, if I'm going to hell, you ought to care."

Yes. Yes we should.

Oh! Hell

I'm beginning a short series of sermons Sunday on "Big Questions." The reason is that I believe some of the biggest questions about our faith that people carry within them are unasked. As a result, people are vulnerable to being led astray, or prone to misunderstand what God's purpose and character are. I'll begin this week with this question: "If God is so good, so loving, how could he possibly send anyone to hell?"

My goal is to further expand the understanding of God's character within those who walk with me through the Scriptures, and to put hell in its place. The mature Christian needs to have a firm grip on what the Bible says about hell. We need to love and trust God to be Who He says He is throughout Scripture. We need to place eternal judgment in context with truth and grace - both being indispensable.

Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of instruction about washings, and laying on of hands, and the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment (Hebrews 6:1-2).

After reading and studying on God's justice and His use of eternal punishment this week, I'm convinced that our view on this reflects our attitude toward the effects of sin. If we don't think sin is all that bad, if we see sin as just a mistake, a momentary lapse in judgment, and not the rebellion it is, then we cannot understand why God would take the extreme steps He will in judging sin.

Understanding how severe that punishment will be ought to motivate all of us to be more earnest in evangelism and more serious about living a Spirit-filled life.

I'm casting about today to try and find a way to help the congregation find the answer. On a subject like this it would be easy to turn on the "mute the preacher" button and just sit in a daydream for 30 minutes. How can I get people "into" the subject to the point where they answer the question as the Holy Spirit leads them into the Scriptures?

And how do you make sure that they (and you) do not go too far? Our cultural imprint is always with us. Movies, books, and folklore have all done their work in the years before the congregation shows up to hear the Word of the Lord. The last thing I'd want to do as a preacher is to expand on what Scripture says.

“‘Hell’ is one New Testament picture portraying the fate of the unsaved. But, as we have seen, it is not the only one; it is not even the primary one. Nor is it the definitive one. God’s Word is rich in illustrations and terminology describing the divine punishment of the Age to Come. All serve a useful purpose. The very variety of expression adds to our limited conception. Let us be warned—and stop where God has stopped. To do otherwise, is, according to Revelation 22:18, to risk the very punishment we seek to understand.” Edward Fudge, “Putting Hell In Its Place,” p. 17

.

So as easy as it would be to let Gary Larsen's Farside cartoons do all the heavy lifting, I'll keep praying for God to give me the insight and wisdom needed for the task.

If I Had Only One Sermon

Today was one of those days that had me wondering just what God was up to. Bunny was away doing her amazing artist stuff, and I was left along at home to read, study and pray (oh and freeze! It's cold here today). As I wrote earlier, I've been reading the "red letters" - everything Jesus said in the Scriptures - this week, getting ready to preach a series based on them.

The way my mind works though, I go into "immersion mode", where I soak up everything I can on the text I have before me. It's not uncommon for that work to generate 50-90 pages of notes for a 40 minute Sunday morning sermon. I'll do all the background stuff, word studies, scan other versions, and read the text over and over and over. Then I have to walk away for a while and do something else.

Today when I did that, I was reading an excellent book by Kenneth Bailey on Luke Chapter 15. Bailey writes from the background of someone who knows the lifestyle of the Middle Eastern peasant intimately. I have been blown away by his insight. He's like Rob Bell on steroids.

If I had only one sermon to preach, it would be on the three "lost" parables in the fifteenth chapter of Luke. I haven't done much "candidating" in my career, and have only done two "revivals". I'm a pastor. I need to know the people I'm helping connect to God in order to be truly effective.

But let me preach Luke 15, and I would stand in front of anyone or any crowd. It speaks so deeply to me. I've been that prodigal. I have prodigals I love dearly. I've been that older brother, and known quite a few in the churches I've been a part of and led.

And that Father... oh, that Father. How I long to love like that. How thankful I am to be loved like that. How I want to see our church full of people willing to love like that!

There are other texts that move me, but if I had only one sermon - Luke 15.

New Year, New Series

Christmas is behind us now, and we've crossed the threshold of the New Year. I haven't yet had to write 2008 but I know how to make a seven into something eight-ish, so I'm good. Time to move on from the "Nights Before Christmas" series of sermons.

Started thinking before the holidays about this, praying what direction to go in next. Several factors involve themselves in the preparation process. Number One of course is what is God directing? There have been times when it was extremely clear what I should preach. That could be driven by the circumstances we found ourselves in as a church, or a pressing need that presented itself, or a realization over time that the church was in need of instruction in a certain area.

For a few years, I actually followed the Lectionary in order to try to cover as much as the whole counsel of God's Word as I could. In another couple of years I tried to follow the SBC lectionary - the Adult Sunday School quarterly. :) Yes, I would preach ahead of the next week's lesson in the Sunday School texts, hoping to go deeper and give more context than they would receive in their lessons. I was helped in that by some great resources put out by the EXTRA! staff at Lifeway.

The goal in both was to try to deliver one consistent message each Sunday instead of three different ones. When you think about it, the average Baptist who comes to every opportunity on Sunday will hear a SS lesson which applies to life in one area, a sermon which probably is in another, and then finally a Sunday night sermon or small group. Three messages, three applications - all of which will be mostly forgotten by Monday afternoon.

So my idea was to take each Sunday as a teaching unit, and pound one Big idea from three angles. General context and application in SS, Broader context and application in the morning sermon, and then that night to really focus on parts that might be nuances but were more than incidental in the text. For example I might do a word study that night to help flesh out a concept, or I might do a character study of someone involved in that morning's text.

I still really like that, and believe it has the most potential for transformation, however present structure and circumstances being what they are, it is a nonstarter. If I was in a plant, the small group lesson would come as further exposition and application of the Sunday morning sermon. But I'm not in a plant.

So here I am.

With a mix of people at various stages of spiritual growth, with a varied demographic of ages and education, with varied backgrounds as far as church and region. In general, we need to be better at applying what we already know of the Bible to our lives, we need to have a more consistent ability to see the world through a Christian world view, we need to be able to share our ideas in the marketplace of ideas effectively and clearly across all those demographic lines and tribal boundaries. And we need to grow as a church on mission.

Oh is that all?

I should just tool over to see what Fellowship, or Granger, or Northpoint is doing and buy their last series. The most effective church in the area, far and away the one that has grown the fastest, does that, and has done that for three years. But I can't do that. They don't know New Hope like I do, and I have precious little in common with any mega. At times I'm not sure we're seeing the same world.

So I pray, and I think about the people who are most likely to be out in front of me as I deliver the message. Will this series reach them? Is this what God would have me do?

One other factor - what can I do best?

The craziest thing has happened to me. Without wanting to or meaning to, I've gone from a topical preacher to an expository one who is far more comfortable with a passage than a series of verses spread out over the Bible. When I first began, I could preach topical sermons - really well at times. But now, I struggle with it.

Today I'll read every word Jesus ever spoke that's recorded in the Scriptures as I pray about a series on "The Red Letters" which will probably come mostly from the Sermon on the Mount and if it goes well, the parables. I'm also looking at the book of Romans and for Wednesday nights (we're through with Numbers) whether to continue into Deuteronomy or skip it.

By tomorrow, I hope to have clear direction and begin serious prep work for whatever God leads me to do. Pray with me that I'll be a willing vessel for His awesome Truth.

It's NOT About Us

Luke 1 is not ultimately about marriage stress. We need to be on guard against inserting ourselves and our needs into the center of every passage. Luke 1 is ultimately about one of the most significant events ever - the announcement of the arrival of the Messiah. It’s a pivotal moment in all of history. We risk trivializing the passage when we make it a how-to sermon on dealing with marriage stress.

HT Theocentric Preaching

I struggle with this all the time as a pastor.

You know that people need to listen to the Word and apply its precepts and principles to their lives. You are intimately connected with them, especially as a small church pastor. You know what they are going through more than most.

And at times the tendency is to take Biblical texts with transcendent meaning, and hang "practical application" on them. For example, I could turn John 1:1-14, which I'm taking up this week, as a sermon on relationships based on Jesus' relationship with the Father, and his move to earth to be in our neighborhood and how he didn't let that distance affect their relationship. So (the application goes) we must do everything we can to maintain our relationships.

Barf.

Don't do that.