Sowing and Reaping

In this worship gathering, we hear a message from Hosea 8 about the importance of remembering that we reap what we have sown – that the level of priority we give to our spiritual life will be reflected in the depth of our relationship with God. You can watch the message below, or the entire worship gathering below that.

Thankful to whom?

I know it’s not Thanksgiving weekend, but we celebrated “Christmas in July” at Bible Fun Camp this week, so I figure anything goes!

I often see memes that encourage people to be thankful.  Thankfulness is a good attribute, for it demonstrates that we are not taking everything for granted.

But these injunctions to thanksgiving leave me with one nagging question:  thankful to whom?

Gratitude is a character trait that everyone should have.  Even schools are including this as an important aspect of character building.  But the nagging question remains:  thankful to whom?

Some people will refer to “the universe” as the object of our thanks.  News flash:  the universe doesn’t do anything for you.  It just is.  True, significant changes in the structure or makeup of our known universe might cause something jarring to happen, but even those things have to have some sort of cause.

Some people say we should be thankful to others, which is a very good attitude to have, but others didn’t make the tomatoes grow in your back garden.  Others didn’t make the sun shine when you wanted to be outside.  Others may have cultivated your food or built your gazebo, but the growth of your food and the growth of the trees used for your gazebo had to have some sort of cause.

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?  Yes, we should be thankful.  And we should be thankful to the Lord, who created the world and everything in it, who has redeemed us by his Son Jesus Christ, and who sustains us every day in the power of the Holy Spirit.  

Gratitude without an object is hollow.  It’s one thing to be thankful; it’s another thing to be thankful to your parents for putting a roof over your head, or to a farmer for growing food, or to God for all he is and all he has done.

Let me encourage you not only to be grateful to God specifically, but to be grateful to God with specificity.

That is, when you express thanks, do so to God directly, and list off that for which you are thankful.

If you find that difficult to do, here are two suggestions.

First, at the end of the day, pause to examine your day and look for areas where you saw God at work.  In light of what you learn from that pause, give specific thanks to God.

Second, read your Bible, which has numerous examples of gratitude that will inspire your own prayers of thanksgiving.

“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good!  His faithful love endures forever” (Psalm 136.1, NLT).

Creeping Compromise

In this worship gathering, we hear a message from Hosea 7 about how compromise can creep into our walk with God, and how we can (and why we should) avoid it. You can watch the message alone below, or the entire worship gathering below that.

True Influencers

There are many church ministries that take a break in the summer, but one ministry gets its moment in spotlight at this time of year, and that’s Vacation Bible Camp.

Many churches that put the effort into this intensive ministry to children find that it is one of their greatest outreach tools.  That’s certainly been true for us.

At St. Paul’s Church, Nobleton, ours is this coming week.  We call it “Bible Fun Camp”, and it is shaping up to be a fun and engaging week for boys and girls aged 4-12.  (If you’re not too far away, and have kids in that age range, registration is still open!  Click the link to go to a fillable registration form.)

Someone once called Vacation Bible Camp a year’s worth of Sunday School in a week, and that isn’t far off:  we run our camp for three hours each morning for five mornings, which is 15 hours of concentrated time with the kids.  It’s not all learning time, of course, but it is all influencing time.  A church’s VBC is an opportunity to provide a loving, safe, decidedly Christian environment for children to experience the love of God not only through learning, but through relationship.

We find, as you might at your church, that many of the children who come to camp for a few years end up volunteering to be helpers when they age out of camp.  We love that!  It speaks to the relationships that have developed.  It also provides us with opportunities to minister to our helpers, who may still be forming their understanding of faith.

I encourage you to volunteer at a Vacation Bible Camp if your church hosts one.  If it doesn’t, perhaps you can play a role in getting one started!  It’s quite a bit of work, as those who lead them will tell you.  And while you won’t know exactly what influence you will have had until you get to heaven, you can be confident that you will have sown seeds of faith that perhaps another person will be called to water.

I still have memories of Vacation Bible Camps of my childhood.  Though I was an unchurched kid, I was sent to camp, and can still remember having a lot of fun, and learning about God.  One of those experiences was where I first learned the story of Noah; we did a musical entitled, “A 100% Chance of Rain”.  Mrs. Flynn and Mrs. Williams, both now with the Lord, gave their all (along with many other volunteers) to make that camp memorable, and some 50 years on, I remember it well and fondly.  That experience played a role in my eventual coming to faith in Christ.

Your role in a Vacation Bible Camp could make an eternal difference in a child’s life.

And even if you’re not able to help with the daily mechanics of a camp, let me encourage you to pray:  pray for the volunteers who lead and help, that they will be the hands and feet of Jesus; and pray for the kids who come, that their hearts will be open to the love and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.  To that end, I ask you to pray for our camp this coming week.

Instagram can have its “influencers”.  I think the real influencers are those who help at and pray for events like Vacation Bible Camps.  That’s an eternal influence!

“Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children.  I tell you the truth, anyone who doesn’t receive the Kingdom of God like a child will never enter it” (Mark 13.14b-15, NLT).

God’s Plan For Revival

I didn’t use this quotation in the message, but Tim Keller said, “Revival occurs when those who think they already know the gospel discover they do not really or fully know it. This leads to repentance and change.” In this worship gathering, we hear a message from Hosea 6 about how important it is for us not merely to go to church, but to be the church. We learn what this entails as God’s plan for revival in the church. You can watch the message below, or the entire worship gathering below that.

Change, change…

My wife and I are manse-dwellers.  That is, we live in a house that is owned by the church we serve.  There are always pros and cons for pastors to live in church-owned accommodations.  The obvious con is the lack of equity, but in many ways, the pros outweigh the cons.

Recently, the church’s Board of Managers hired a contractor to do some bathroom renovations in the manse.  We got to say good-bye to the 1960s tile on the walls (I spent a lot of time imagining names in all the squiggles in those tiles), a medicine cabinet that bit back (the doors on it had unchamfered mirrors), and old linoleum flooring (that never quite seemed clean).  We got to say hello to freshly painted walls, a medicine cabinet with lots of storage and a bright light in it, and clean tile flooring.

All in all, there are a lot of really great changes, and we are very grateful.

But change, even good change, can be challenging.

Muscle memory is getting the best of my right big toe, for example.  When I go to stand at the sink to wash my hands or brush my teeth, I’m finding that the big toe on my right foot is having a collision with the new vanity…every time.

I’m sure that will change as my body gets used to standing in front of a new piece of furniture that is shaped differently from the old one.  But it’s a change, and change – even good change – takes time for adjustment.

When I was younger, I seemed to adapt to change far more easily than I do now, as I move north of middle age.

Change, when done for the right reasons, is always good for us.  But that doesn’t necessarily make it easier.

I read an article this week that was about change, and how the pandemic underscored how challenging change can be.  One of the things that it noted was that change is often difficult because it involves grief.  

Now, I am not grieving the loss of our old bathroom aesthetic!  But I am, perhaps, grieving a loss of a particular routine to which I had become accustomed over nearly 15 years of using the bathroom as it was. The new routine is not that much different, but it is new nevertheless.

As change goes, my example is minimal and rather silly in some ways.  But it illustrates how change can be difficult for us in general, and in our faith life in particular.  I remember reading, several years ago, a book entitled Who Stole My Church? by Gordon MacDonald.  Written long before the pandemic, it was sort of prescient to our time, when change in the church, as in the world, comes at a lightning pace.  It was an instructive book for leaders, a reminder that change brings grief.

Last week, I wrote about how churches that change their mission will not survive, but churches that keep with the mission outlined in Scripture, but change their method, will thrive.  Change must happen, but there is always a cost, and some sort of collateral damage that must be measured.  But we can help our church leaders, even as we pray for them, by our own openness to change, and enduring the grief that inevitably comes with that change.

After all, you’ve survived change before!  Remember that when you became a follower of Jesus, everything changed – your lifestyle, your priorities, your eternal destiny – and for the sake of another generation, we can undertake more change.

“Since God chose you to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.  Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others.  Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony.  And let the peace that comes from Christ rule in your hearts. For as members of one body you are called to live in peace. And always be thankful” (Colossians 3.12-15, NLT).

Truth and Consequences

In this worship gathering – which is truncated following the message – we hear from Hosea 5 about the importance of trusting God over political structures, and how Israel and the church are covenant communities – so we shouldn’t try to equate the covenant community of Israel with a “Christian nation” for the church of today. You can watch message below, or the worship gathering below that. Our apologies for the audio challenges (and synchronization issues!).

Mission and Method

Earlier this week, I was writing a letter to my congregation in which I cited the late renowned business consultant, Peter Drucker.  His work has inspired many business people, large and small, in their efforts over many years.  In many respects, his work inspires the church as well.

Drucker was known to ask people, “What business are you in?” and he’d follow it up with a more pointed question:  “How’s business?”

For a lot of churches today, the “How’s business?” question is pretty humbling to answer.  Particularly in western culture, the “business” of the church isn’t going very well.  Congregations are shuttering their buildings at an alarming rate.

I think that reality is connected to the earlier question:  “What business are you in?”

Unfortunately, there are many churches in western society today that have lost touch with their “business”, their calling, their mission.  Congregations that remain stuck in a “Christendom” mode of operation are especially susceptible to this problem.

There is no doubt that the world has changed – a lot.  And the reality of the pandemic only accelerated the rate of that change.

Some churches have seen the changes in the world and just kept their heads down, doing what they had been doing for generations.  Others saw the changes in the world and decided to change their mission to ‘keep up’ with the changes in the world.  And some have seen the changes in the world and decided to change their method in order to reach a changing world.

Can you guess which one of those three kinds of churches is thriving today?

It’s the last one.

Churches that simply ignored the world have simply fallen off the radar as irrelevant.  Churches that changed their mission have become so much like the world that the world sees no point in engaging.  But churches that changed their method have had some success at engaging the world.

The point is that the mission never changes:  Jesus has called us to make disciples, to build the Kingdom of God.  But the method must change, and often!  I’ve seen it illustrated this way:  if you have a pitcher of water that has a leak in the bottom, you know that the pitcher isn’t doing its job and needs to be replaced.  The water doesn’t change, but the vessel does.

As God’s people gathered, we are in the world but not of the world.  How we present the unchanging good news of Jesus in an ever-changing world means being aware of where the world is, and offering the hope that we have in a manner that reaches people who, today, may not even be aware of the hope Jesus brings.

Whether you’re in leadership or not, work to ensure your church stays true to the mission, but is flexible with the method.  And pray for your church leaders:  their job is a difficult one.  Pray that they will lean hard into their calling from God, and into his sufficiency to preserve his faithful church, no matter what comes our way.

“Remember your leaders who taught you the word of God. Think of all the good that has come from their lives, and follow the example of their faith” (Hebrews 13.7, NLT).

INDICTED!

If you’re a pastor, elder, deacon, minister, priest, bishop, district superintendent, or any other kind of church leader, you probably won’t like this message. But as a pastor, I preached it to myself first and foremost, and I hope you will take it to heart. Hosea 4 indicates that the people of the northern kingdom of Israel were in the mess they were in largely because of the priests. In this message, I suggest that things are not much different today. Much of western society’s current pickle is blamed on, at least in part, the clergy, and church leaders. You can watch the message below, or the entire worship gathering below that.