daily java

Daily Java:

We have heard about proud Moab—
  about its pride and arrogance and rage.
  But all that boasting has disappeared.
The entire land of Moab weeps.
  Yes, everyone in Moab mourns
for the cakes of raisins from Kir-hareseth.
  They are all gone now.
The farms of Heshbon are abandoned;
  the vineyards at Sibmah are deserted.
The rulers of the nations have broken down Moab—
  that beautiful grapevine. (Isaiah 16:6-8)

In my daily Bible reading I am reading in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah is delivering God’s condemnation to several countries round about Israel.

It can get rather depressing and I am always glad when I get through with this section. I don’t really care for it. For one thing, I have no emotional investment in all these countries and, quite frankly, do not care about them.

However, one thing struck me today. The passage above where the people missed their raisin cakes. What a strange thing to miss. Your whole country lies in ruins and people miss the raisin cakes.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how caught up in food memories we are.

When I think of my grandmother, I think of her chocolate gravy. She made chocolate gravy like I have never had before or since. It was a special Saturday morning breakfast served over biscuits and was great.

My wife said that when she thinks of me and things I make, she thinks of either steak or lasagna. With her I think of stroganoff. Our daughter will probably think of green enchiladas, what we call sour cream enchiladas. Ella’s mother, she said, was roast, rice and gravy., her favorite aunt soup, my mother roast and french fries.

We all have memory keys of things that are gone. The Moabites were of raisin cakes. In the good old days, they say around eating raisin cakes. Now that the vineyards are gone, they cannot and they miss them.

I don’t really know what a raisin cake is exactly – a bunch of raisins mashed together, or a cake made with a lot of raisins – but when they thought of home that was it. And it was gone irretrievably.

When things are gone, not only the bad, but also the good is gone. The good old days were really only a few memories you have stored up that exclude the bad memories. Life in Moab was not all sitting around snacking on raisin cakes. Every meal of my mother’s was not roast and the chocolate gravy was a sometime thing.

But it is funny that you associate those not-to-be-repeated foods with different people and places.

John Donne said, “you cannot go home.” You can’t go back and have those foods in those situations. It is impossible. But how large they loom in your mind and how much you miss the people who gave them to you.

i left the Cooper County jail for the last time today

Some sat in darkness and deepest gloom, imprisoned in iron chains of misery. (Psalm 107:10)

I left the Cooper County jail for the last time today. The misery was strong tonight. One man was worried because his trial was tomorrow and he didn’t know what would happen. Another had been put in solitary because he had complained of physical problems. His friend in another cell block missed him and was alone for the first time in several months. The men he had been friends with had been sent to prison. Another was the brother of the man in solitary and he had been told nothing about his brother and was worried.

Then I went into the guard room. They were laughing about all of the things happening to the inmates. To them it was funny and the inmates’ own faults.

Whether it was or not I do not know. What I do know was that I knew these men better than the guards did. And they were in pain. And the guards didn't care.

Now these guys may have been lying to me every one. The inmates lie as a matter of course many times and you never really know if what they are saying is true. But some of these men I have known now for nine months and have heard their problems and their hearts. They are in there for drugs, rape, assault, DUI – but on the other hand, they are people. And they are just, for the most part, charged. They are not convicted. They deserve better.

I do not think I am strong enough for jail ministry. I know why the guards make such fun. they are distancing themselves from the inmates and making them less so that they can handle what they do. But it is such a small distance from that to brutality. And I hate brutality.

I will probably not go into the jail again. It hurt them that I was leaving. I am their only real link to the outside world. I wear brightly colored clothes and smell of freedom. I talk to them and call them by name. I shake their hands and ask about where they are from. I ask about their family and I talk to them. I ask what they think and I am the only person who does so. I am the only person in years for some who has expressed any personal interest.

And now I am gone. They will probably not see me again. One more disappointment,

Tonight I am depressed. I don’t think I will go in a jail again.

letting things go

The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief.
To increase knowledge only increases sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1:18)

Ecclesiastes is in my daily Bible reading right now, so I am seeing several things in it that strike me. And this is one.

The more you know, the harder it is on you. I believe that to a large point, the old adage “Ignorance is bliss” is true. The less you know, the less you have to worry about. Simple people tend to be happier.

My wife and I are two examples of this. Ella is by no means unlearned, but she and I have a totally different outlook on life.

I am an accumulator of information. I find it everywhere and it sticks in my mind. What is more, for the most part, I remember a lot of it.

Ella, on the other hand, enjoys receiving new information, but will not go out of her way to get it. She enjoys it (to a point) when I bring up new things, but does not go out to seek it on her own.

It makes for a marked difference in our personalities. Quite frankly, I know too much. And the more I know, the more it weighs on me. The accumulated information does not necessarily help me. She knows what she wants to know and is happy. I have to know more and am not, as a general rule, a happy guy.

And I learn a lot of stuff I don’t need to know because that is the way I am made. Some things I learn, I do not tell her because it would make her unhappy or bothered. But it is a personality quirk of mine that I have to learn them.

Once I do, they sit in there inside the maelstrom that is many times my mind. They may come out at some odd time and people are surprised that I know whatever it is I know, but in general, most of the knowledge I accumulate is useless. It is a shame I do not go to cocktail parties, because the kind of stuff I know would be great there.

Occasionally I will ask her, maybe while we are driving around, what are you thinking about?

Her response will be something like, I was thinking about how pretty those flowers are. Or I was thinking about the song we just heard on the radio.

I am usually thinking about 17 things, all unrelated, all of them twirling around inside my brain competing for attention. And there are times when I would love just to shut them all up, to think about flowers without thinking about conversations from 30 years ago, and something I had read, and the Hebrew word for something and what might happen to the van next, and something I had read and the political situation in America right now and missing my kids and our financial situation and my knee hurting and – on.

I envy her in her ability just to let things go.

Providence of God

You know when I sit down or stand up.
    You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.
You see me when I travel and when I rest at home.
    You know everything I do.
You know what I am going to say
    even before I say it, Lord. (Psalm 139:2-4)

I have been going back and forth to Longton, Kansas, for the past few weeks to speak at a church. It is 300 miles almost exactly.

Wednesday I took Ella to the ladies meeting at the Purvises and thought, I’ll check my tires. When I did, I found both of the front tires were not only just about bald, there was cord showing. That meant I was riding in a death trap at 70 mph. It scared me. I was almost afraid to drive home and then to Fame Tire Co the next day.

My van takes stupid little tires. 14 inchers. Nobody uses 14 inch tires these days. The trend is to big tires. Some of the cars today almost look like one of the old Conestoga wagons with those huge wheels.

Thursday morning, I went into Fame and asked for that size in a good used tire. They didn’t have what I had on the van, but they had the next size down for a good price. I bought them, had them put on and now I am ready to go again this week to Kansas.

The point is that my tires were bad and I didn’t know it. But nothing happened. When I went to replace them, they were there for me to buy. It all worked out like I needed. In fact, the lady there (Mrs. Fame?) told me that someone had called for them yesterday but didn’t reserve them, so they were there for me to take.

I was going somewhere to do the will of the Lord and he protected me. As the Psalm above says: You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. God protected Ella and me from a wreck. He saw I needed the tires and he made them available and he made sure I had the money.

I do not believe God goes ahead of us and gives us everything we want or even necessarily need. There were too many godly people in the Bible that had severe needs that God left unaddressed. But then again, sometimes he does. In the gospel accounts, there were lots of sick people, but Jesus only healed some of them.

But the way it went Thursday. God saw that I needed those tires and that he had sent me to that church in Longton and he blessed me with both the tires and the available money to buy them.

He also protected us from a wreck. At 70 mph, if one tire had gone, the other probably would have too and I may well have flipped the van. Ella would have been hurt. So he put in me the need to check the tires and he gave me the tires and money to buy them.

That isn’t a miracle. Those are different. But it is divine intervention in my life. It was God taking care of me so that I could do what I needed to do.

And I praise him for it. Thank you, Lord.

daily java

Daily Java:

Caiaphas, who was high priest at that time, said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about! You don’t realize that it’s better for you that one man should die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed.” He did not say this on his own; as high priest at that time he was led to prophesy that Jesus would die for the entire nation. And not only for that nation, but to bring together and unite all the children of God scattered around the world. (John 11:49-52)

Sometimes stupid people say good things. Here Caiaphas said something that was true and didn’t really realize it.

Caiaphas was the high priest of the Jews during the time when Jesus was walking around preaching. He hated Jesus because he knew that if Jesus was allowed to continue to preach and teach, people would like him and accept him as Messiah, the chosen of God. And if they did, he would lose his job as leader.

He decided that Jesus had to die so that they could shut him up. The funny thing about what he said was that even though he meant to shut Jesus up, he was really speaking the truth. It was better than one man die than all of the rest of humanity.

Jesus came to die. God sent him to die. And the reason was simple. We are sinners and since we have done things that are wrong, we deserve to be punished. And the ultimate punishment for doing wrong is death. But God did not want us to die. He made us to hang around with him, to walk with him, talk with him.

But there sits the death problem. How is he going to reconcile the problem that we have done too much wrong to be good any more. Somewhere down the line, we quit being an innocent child and became a sinful adult and deserve punishment.

So Jesus came to be a stand in for us. He never did anything wrong but died anyway. And he broke the bond of death by coming back to life. What all that means is that he gave us the ability to not have to die. He died for us. He took the punishment for us.

We are sorry people, that is the truth. All of us. Everybody has sinned, even those great looking people in ties and suits and dresses at church that look down on everybody else. But Jesus took the punishment so we don’t have to. And he did it because he loves us and does not want us to suffer.

So what do we do? We accept him as our Savior and let him pay the price for us. We do not have to die, because he died.

It really is that simple. We can stand before God without anything wrong in our lives because we let him take it from us. There is no way we can be good enough, but he can make us good enough no matter how bad we have been.

No matter what your life has been like, no matter what you are in here for, he can make you free and clean.

And you too can stand before God as his child. It is that simple.

daily java

Daily Java:

Then Jeremiah the prophet said to Hananiah, “Listen, Hananiah! The Lord has not sent you, but the people believe your lies. Therefore, this is what the Lord says: ‘You must die. Your life will end this very year because you have rebelled against the Lord.’” Two months later the prophet Hananiah died. (Jeremiah 28:15-17)

Hananiah, official court prophet to King Zedekiah, King of Judah, had a great job. He stood around all day giving pronouncements, handing out advice. He was a respected member of the king’s court. When he spoke, people listened. When he gave advice, it was generally heeded. He was important.

And the last thing he wanted was for his job to end. When Jeremiah the prophet came in telling the Israelites that they needed to give up to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and go into captivity, it was too much for him. He rebelled in the only way he knew how to do it: he counter-prophesied.

He knew he wasn’t really a prophet. He had always known this. But, on the other hand, his track record of guesses was good enough that before long, people thought he was one.

When Jeremiah came along, it made Hananiah mad. Here was a real prophet. And the main problem was that Jeremiah was a threat. Hananiah had it good, being so important, but Jeremiah could take it all away from him.

When Jeremiah gave the prophecy God gave him – Give up and let the Babylonians take you into captivity – it made him scared. If they went into captivity, he lost his job, his people lost their land, everything would be ruined.

On the other hand, if he could say otherwise, and by this time he was probably convinced he had some powers of prophecy, he could keep his job and his important place.

Jeremiah’s response: you are going to die. And he did. And the children of Israel went into captivity just like God said.

Saying things are true doesn’t make them true. Pretending nothing is wrong doesn’t make it right. Hananiah found this out but didn’t live long enough to learn from the lesson.

The Bible tells us that we are to pray for our leaders

I urge you, first of all, to pray for all people. Ask God to help them; intercede on their behalf, and give thanks for them. Pray this way for kings and all who are in authority so that we can live peaceful and quiet lives marked by godliness and dignity. This is good and pleases God our Savior, who wants everyone to be saved and to understand the truth. (1 Timothy 2:1-4)

The political season is going hard and heavy. Everybody has somebody they like that is running for office, and everybody has somebody they do not like. It is easy to grow offensive in our likes and dislikes.

But the Bible tells us that we are to pray for our leaders. The Bible never tells us we are to pray against them. Now you may want change or you may want things to stay the way they are. But no matter how you feel about an elected representative, as an elected representative they are your physical leaders. And you pray for them.

We live in a country that can change its leadership and its corporate vision by voting new people in and old people out. We have that power.

However we do not have the power to speak ill of our leaders. They are from God and God, through his word and the words of the apostle Paul, tells us that we are to pray for them

It is easy to say, well I like this or I do not like that. But remember, this was written in a time when one of the most ruthless emperors Rome ever had was in power. Nero was in charge and he was mean. Yet the Bible never says, pray for him to go. Instead it says Ask God to help him.

This was from an apostle who was eventually killed by a Roman emperor if church tradition is right. But he still says pray for him, intercede on their behalf, and give thanks for them.

That is a long ways from the vitriol and anger poured out on our president and other elected officials. Whatever you may think of them, however you may feel, whether or not you agree with them does not matter. You are to respect them. if you do not, you are sinning and disobeying God.

Romans 13:1-4 says:  

Everyone must submit to governing authorities. For all authority comes from God, and those in positions of authority have been placed there by God. So anyone who rebels against authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and they will be punished. For the authorities do not strike fear in people who are doing right, but in those who are doing wrong. Would you like to live without fear of the authorities? Do what is right, and they will honor you. The authorities are God’s servants, sent for your good.

They are from God and they are sent for your good.

You don’t like them? Vote them out. But while they are in office you respect them and pray for them. Talking ugly about them is a sin.

Hard to do, but absolute Bible truth.

We are gone to Kansas again this weekend. We will see you soon. God bless you.

daily java

Daily Java:

Your teeth are as white as sheep that are freshly washed. Your smile is flawless, each tooth matched with its twin. (Song of Solomon 6:6)

A girl smiled at me in WalMart the other day. And when she did, I was 16 again.

I am almost fifty years her senior, but her smile was so pretty and so without guile that it popped me back a long ways. I do not know who she is or was, I did not approach her, but I have thought about her for a few days now.

It is funny that a 63 year old man who is happily married can be so reduced by a young girl’s smile, but it is true. And, of course, she meant nothing by it. She was probably one of these happy girls who likes to smile at people. Here was this old guy and she smiled. She probably smiled at children, young married people, dogs and cats – she was just a happy girl.

But what amazed me was my reaction to the smile. It was so pretty and unexpected and took me so by surprise. I was not ready for it.

When I go to church, I expect people to smile at me. And I smile at them, whether young or old. It is just a part of social interaction. The same goes for the grocery store and other places. I smile and say hi a lot.

But to have a pretty girl smile at me unexpectedly was something else. And I liked it. It made me feel young and remember what it was like for a girl to smile at me just out of the blue.

Girls used to smile at me a lot. I even remember when I would catch the eye of a girl out of the blue. We would look at each other and maybe smile, but nothing would come of it. I remember one girl who was walking with her boyfriend. I caught her eye, she caught mine, we turned and looked at each other. She smiled kind of sad and turned around to live her life.

I never was a handsome guy, but I was big and strong and vital looking. I looked like a dominant guy and women noticed me. Not that they fell all over me or anything, but they did notice. And they would smile.

I liked having girls smile at me and smiling at them. I liked it even after we were married. My wife knew I was not cheating on her, so she left it alone. Smiling at a girl is an absolutely normal reaction to a man. It is the most natural thing that happens. It is also, I believe, just part of the male/female thing that goes on even after you are committed to someone. It is a realization that you are still male and can appreciate a girl in a natural way.

It is the acting on it that becomes wrong. If I chased the girl down and tried to ask her out for a date because I figured she was coming on to me, that would be stupid on my part and would hurt her. she would probably recoil in horror at this old geezer trying to flirt with her.

I realized soon in life that the smiles and flirtatious looks young girls in the youth group would give me at times were nothing more than practice for life. I was a guy, even if a little older, so they would smile at me and act coy, knowing that they were safe from my advances. Just practicing. And any man who is in any kind of leadership has to know that.

That girl was smiling at the world. she was happy and pretty and slender and probably had a Justin Bieber song (barf) in her head and was just smiling.

I loved her for it. I just hope and pray her life goes well and she finds that special person who will smile back and they will connect.

Jesus had friends like everybody else and one of them died

When Jesus saw her weeping and saw the other people wailing with her, a deep anger welled up within him, and he was deeply troubled. “Where have you put him?” he asked them. They told him, “Lord, come and see.” Then Jesus wept. The people who were standing nearby said, “See how much he loved him!” But some said, “This man healed a blind man. Couldn’t he have kept Lazarus from dying?” Jesus was still angry as he arrived at the tomb, a cave with a stone rolled across its entrance. “Roll the stone aside,” Jesus told them. (John 11:33-40)

Jesus had friends like everybody else. And Lazarus was probably his best friend, along with Lazarus’ sisters, Mary and Martha. And it hurt him for his friends to be hurt just like it would anyone.

But he also had a problem. His problem was that he was not hire. People didn’t just tell him what to do, even if they were good friends. He was his own man and was doing what he felt God wanted him to do, no matter what other people may have thought.

When they came and told Jesus that Lazarus had died, Jesus was busy with something else. So he didn’t just drop everything and go. Besides, unless he flew, he couldn’t get there in time. So he went on with what he was doing, which was preaching and teaching and healing. Then he left.

But then when he got there, everybody blamed him for Lazarus’ death. If he had been here, they said. He can heal blind people and all. He could have healed Lazarus.

And he could have. But he didn’t. Instead he came to the funeral and brought Lazarus back from the dead. He used Lazarus as a teaching tool just like he used the man born blind in John 9. Everybody there saw the tremendous power of God and there were a lot of people there that day who believed in him as the Son of God, the Messiah.

I have often thought what it must have been like for Lazarus. He was dead and in heaven (if he was Jesus’ friend, he had to have been a devout person) and Jesus yanks him back to earth and inside a smelly tomb. Did the grave clothes still smell like a four day old corpse in the heat? Did the tomb still smell? Was he happy? Was he mad?

Whatever he was, he was back in the world and the center of attention. His sisters were all over him, happy to see him alive. All the crowd was looking at him. And there was his friend, Jesus. So things worked out okay.

But I do wonder how he felt.

One thing for sure, a lot of people were scared of Jesus now and they started looking for a plan to get him out of their way. He was ruining their plans.

There have always been people who feel like they know what God wants better than God does.

daily java

Daily Java:

Don’t answer the foolish arguments of fools,
    or you will become as foolish as they are.
Be sure to answer the foolish arguments of fools,
    or they will become wise in their own estimation. (Proverbs 26:4-5).

Someone once said that the Bible is full of contradictions and used this verse as one. And it is a contradiction. However, it is so because there is no real way to deal with a fool.

Whatever you say to a fool, whatever you try to counter his arguments with, he will find another place to go. His argument is liquid and one trying to argue with him cannot ever get a real hold on anything.

He will jump around to illogic, to outright falsehoods, to arguments ad hominem, to whatever he can use to argue with you. And the facts don’t really matter. All he wants to do is win.

On the other hand, you hate to leave his contradictions and his foolishness unaddressed. You want to try to answer what you hear and know to be plain lies and stupidity masqueraded as philosophy or wisdom or in some instances just plain information. You know it is not and that it is leading people astray and you want to challenge it.

But arguing with a fool is like trying to keep the ocean back with a squeegee. It just doesn’t work. The minute you get on one track, the direction changes and you end up looking foolish.

So what do you do? There really isn’t much you can do. You answer him and you look foolish because you have stooped to their level. You don’t answer him and you look like you are afraid and the misinformation remains out there for someone to believe.

It is a conundrum and there isn’t a lot you can do. You can try, but make sure you do not sink to their level.

When Jesus was faced with a fool, he said nothing. At his trial in Luke 23, we read this:

Herod was delighted at the opportunity to see Jesus, because he had heard about him and had been hoping for a long time to see him perform a miracle. He asked Jesus question after question, but Jesus refused to answer. Meanwhile, the leading priests and the teachers of religious law stood there shouting their accusations. Then Herod and his soldiers began mocking and ridiculing Jesus. Finally, they put a royal robe on him and sent him back to Pilate. (Luke 23:8-11)

Jesus knew that all Herod wanted was a show and declined to be the entertainment. He never said a word until finally it made Herod mad and he began to show his true colors. Jesus knew it would do no good to say anything.

So you address what you can when the fool speaks, but in general it is better just to shut up and let him blather. Talk to people afterwards after the fool has gone home to his hovel. Then you will have a certain measure of decorum and common sense.

It is a hard thing to know when to talk and when not to talk. The problem is that fools are often better at it than you.

daily java

Daily Java:

I am the good shepherd. (John 10:11)

My wife and I drove past some sheep the other day and she pointed them out. She also commented that you don’t see sheep a whole lot.

I was born and raised in Texas. That is cattle country, pardner. But even so sheep and other stuff, like emus and llamas are coming in. And the problem is most of us don’t really relate to sheep.

However, God did. In the culture Jesus came from sheep were dominant. They used their wool, their milk, their manure for fertilizer and occasionally ate the sheep for supper. But it is something we don’t know much about. Since I have never eaten sheep’s milk cheese (or at least not that I know) I don’t know if it is good or not. I have eaten lamb and kind of like it, although I would hate a steady diet of it.

I have read enough westerns and seen enough cowboys to get some idea of how cattle are handled. But I really don’t understand sheep. I know they are extreme herd animals. They will follow each other practically off a cliff and get scared easily. I have also found out in the past several years that they can be mean and bite.

The shepherd takes all this into consideration I have found. He knows they are unpleasant little creatures but works with them. I even understand they name the sheep. I know cowboys will usually name one or two dominant cows or bulls, but shepherds have a greater knowledge of their sheep.

They also have to protect them because, unlike cattle, they are helpless and cannot take care of themselves. They are also stupid.

It is a little irritating sometimes for me to be likened to a sheep. I don’t mind being a bull. I saw a male longhorn the other day with impressive forward sweeping horns. They were probably two feet long. I like being like that.

But a sheep. That is what he called us though. Why? Because we can be stupid and follow each other into problems. Get a bunch of guys in a bar together and you got problems waiting to happen. Get them liquored up and the problems mount. And in general people are like that. Problems waiting to happen.

Jesus said he was a shepherd that loved his sheep and wanted to help them. He said his care for them was out of love, not out of a career move.

His intervention in our lives is to help us find what is right, and to help us come back to God. He is not here to raise us then butcher us. He is here to love us and for us to love him. And unlike sheep, he wants us to love each other.

And we follow him like sheep. The sheep were comfortable with the shepherd and Jesus wants us comfortable with him too.

The Good Shepherd wants us to follow him to heaven. And he loves us.

daily java

Daily Java:

Then the Lord said to me, “Even if Moses and Samuel stood before me pleading for these people, I wouldn’t help them. Away with them! Get them out of my sight! (Jeremiah 15:1))

God loved his people Israel. He did everything he could do to help them, to bless them, to give them beauty in their lives of service to him. But they kept on turning from him.

It started almost immediately when they left the land of Egypt. They were hardly out of danger from the Egyptians when they started complaining. And no matter how great the miracles were that God performed in their behalf, they still complained the entire time. There wasn’t enough to drink, there wasn’t enough to eat, they were hot, they didn’t like the direction Moses was taking them. They even rebelled a couple of times and tried to take over. They began to try to do things their own way.

God put up with it and put up with it. He would punish them for their rebellion and then restore them to prominence among the nations around them. He did it again and again until he finally got tired of them.

The northern ten tribes, called Israel, were the first to go. They had degenerated until God was sick of them and he sent the Assyrians to conquer them and take them off to captivity.

The southern two tribes, called Judah, he put up with for a few more years, but sooner or later a king came along that engaged in infant and human sacrifice and God said enough. He sent the Babylonian Empire to conquer them. The nation as a nation was gone.

When they finally limped back into their former homeland, they were a shadow of their former self: an occupied nation, governed by a ruler a thousand miles away and they never got their former glory back. In fact, God finally got so tired of them that he sent the Romans to finally remove all vestiges of the temple from Jerusalem. The nation of Israel today is not a nation of God, but rather an ethnic gathering. They are a secular nation.

He loved Israel and probably still does. But like a man with a wife who sleeps with everybody in town but him, he finally got sick of them. And what he told Jeremiah above tore Jeremiah up. He said, it doesn’t matter if two of the greatest people I have ever known intercede, I am done with them. I am through.

Yes, he gave them one more chance after this so that he could bring the Messiah through them, Jesus, but they turned again on him and refused to follow him. Where before they worshipped idols, now they worshipped the law. They could never make it to worshiping God himself, loving God himself. They were like the wife who took the love letters her husband had written her while he was in the army to bed every night while he slept on the couch.

You finally get fed up with something and you are through it.

I hope and pray that God is not through with America.

daily java

Daily Java:

Lead me in the right path, O LORD, or my enemies will conquer me. Make your way plain for me to follow. (Psalm 5:8)

We just got back from Longton, Kansas. We were looking at the work there. And we saw it.

Longton is a small town of 350 people with an abbreviated downtown like so many small towns have. There are some businesses, chief among them, a small grocery store, a café and a bar that the church says serves a great steak. There is a post office and a pizza place, along with a couple of other things that may or not be open. It was hard to tell on a Saturday evening and Sunday morning.

The church had about 40 in attendance but has had a lot of problems in the past couple of years. Their pastor left after some unpleasantness kind of took his heart away. He had also gotten married and had a couple of children so he needed more money than they were able to pay him. They had two or three men that they considered seriously that came for three or four Sundays each but turned out not to be what they claimed to be.

So they are afraid.

They responded overwhelmingly positively to us. In fact, they loved us. it was almost unanimous among those I talked to that we come back.

The only problem is do we want to? It is a town of 350 that is dead as a hammer. It does have a small school that is a united school district of several small towns in the county. It also has a couple of businesses that seem to be doing alright. It has no industries, but does have a gas station (although 20 cents higher than thirty miles away) and a drive in. It has three churches but from what I hear, two of them are dead.

Is it a work that I truly want. On the one hand, I want to go somewhere to be their pastor. On the other, they are in a dead little town.

On the practical side, they have a parsonage that is provided, but it is an older house. But it and the church are paid for. They have some money in the bank and are not hurting at all. And they appear to want this so much.

They have begun to reach out to technology a bit in that they bought a projector and lap top computer and project songs on the wall. They used YouTube videos of praise songs complete with winging and music. That means they are open to new stuff. It would not be hard to begin a praise band using kids from the town. I would bet money that guitar players and drummers and such would come out of the woodwork when they found out there was a place to play. It has happened before.

But the town is dead and 30 miles from the nearest town of any kind of life (and WalMart). It is 30 and 100 miles from the nearest hospitals of any kind. But as I pointed out to Ella, do I really want to spend my life trying to close to a hospital or grocery store. There in Longton, I would have trouble getting cheap food. I would have to go to Independence thirty miles away. The nearest city of any real size is Topeka, 100 miles away, or Tulsa, about the same.

I have got to decide what I want to do. They will probably ask me to come back next week. If we go back, we will spend Thursday through Monday there.

I have got to decide how badly I want my own church. Do I want it enough to go to Longton, a town that is dead.

Ella is not excited about it but will go wherever I drag her since she is trapped in my world.

On the other hand., I loved them. On the other other hand, I am a church fool and love the church anyway.

I have to decide.

Lord, give me strength and power to decide what your will is. Make your will plain so that I do not have to worry. Hear me, O Lord. Amen.

daily java

Daily Java:

Commit everything you do to the LORD. Trust him, and he will help you. (Psalm 37:5)

Tomorrow morning we go to Longton, Kansas, to talk to a church there about being their pastor.

It has been over a year since I left Lincoln and was sick to death of pastoring. I wondered if I would ever do it again. But it seems either of three things: one – the Lord has something else in mind, two – I really want to do this, or three – any idiot can get a church to preach at if he looks hard enough.

Could be the third, I am not sure. When I was younger I could always find a place. But then I was large and dynamic and forceful. As I have gotten older, I have had more and more trouble. Part of that was the Assemblies of God. I never fit in there and people could see that I was a fish out of water when I came to talk to them. I just wasn’t Pentecostal and they could tell. Black suit and King James Bible notwithstanding, they could tell.

So I am going to go as I am, casual and loving. If it works, it will work. If it is what God wants of me, then it will hit. If not, it will not. I will no longer tailor myself to my church. I will do all I can to be the kind of person to reach them, but I will not compromise who I am or what I believe.

Longton is a tiny town, 350 or so with a small church. They need a man with partial support – which I have with our retirement and all. They will probably not be contemporary or anything in their music (especially since I found out they are getting a new organ – which I hate).

But if it is the Lord’s will, I will go. My options in ministry are extremely limited. But then again, they are not desperate.

We have carved out a niche here at Firm Foundation. I do more ministry here than I have in the last two churches I pastored. The people love us and receive us. I write here and do jail ministry, along with playing my guitar, preaching occasionally and teaching Sunday night class. Any writing that comes out of the church is edited by my hand or it would be horrible.

It was interesting the other day that Mel Eaton, the pastor here, upon my pronouncement that I didn’t think I was doing anything useful, made the comment that I check everything he does and make him look good. And I do. I have become aware of that.

But the problem, as much as I love him and the church here, is that this is not my church. It is his. It is my church in that I am an integral part of it, but it is ultimately the pastor’s church.

One thing the church at Longton said was that they were looking for a teaching elder in their pastor. That is what I am in spades. I am far more the experienced teacher than a preacher anyway. I have always wanted a church to recognize that aspect of my ministry anyway.

We have decided that if the church is good we will go. If not, we will not. We like where we are in the church and we like where we live. Our finances are not great but we are making it. We are happy here. We are close to our children and doing things in a church we love.

But if this church in Longton is what the Lord wants us to do, we will do it happily. Although I love this church, I am eager for my own church.

It is interesting that it is the Independent Christian Church, the group from which I came close to ten years ago. They are in general not a charismatic church. But one of the things that appealed to them was my charismatic background. Evidently there is a charismatic element there and they need a pastor that can deal with it.

That works for me. I am not Pentecostal at all, but I am charismatic. The difference is both stylistic and organizational. Pentecostals find other Pentecostal churches to be with and segregate themselves. Charismatics work within their existing denominations as leavening.

They are not always appreciated, but of course, many times that is the own fault. They forget they are not the whole dog, the whole body. They are a part of the body with different talents and gifts.

I suppose that my gift, or curse – whichever you call it – is that I do not believe that the baptism of the Holy Spirit should be preached. Jesus is to be preached. The baptism is just part of the overall journey, not the destination.

I look forward to this, even if nothing comes out of it. I just look forward to going somewhere else than here.

May God grant us wisdom and discernment in what we do. May he show us his way and his will. If we are to go to Longton, let it be. If we stay here, let that be. His will be done. Amen.

daily java

Daily Java:

O Lord, you alone are my hope.
    I’ve trusted you, O Lord, from childhood.
Yes, you have been with me from birth;
    from my mother’s womb you have cared for me.
    No wonder I am always praising you! (Psalm 71:5-6)

We are in Longton, Kansas this morning speaking at a church so we will miss you.
I had my 63rd birthday this week. I never really envisioned myself being this age. It is not that I expected to die violently or anything, I just never had thought about being in my 60’s until one day – BAM! – I was. And someone once said that turning 60 is much easier than staying 60.

But here I am.

Except for a short time in the army, all my life I have been in a church setting. I have been a pastor of some kind or other since 1974. But I read an article about an 80 year old man who had Alzheimer’s and it dawned on me that it is only 17 years in the future before I am 80. I will never be as old as Pastor Mel, that is true, as he is several months older than I.

But here I am, 63 years old and I both see and feel the age. I am no longer the bull I was in my 30’s. Now I do snort like a bull on occasion trying to clear my sinuses but that is about it.

Looking at the world and the things that have transpired in my life, I am both pleased and displeased. I married sister Ella in 1971 and we are still married and like each other. That astonishes the guys in jail, most of whom have come from broken lives. But that is a good thing in my life. However, she has deteriorated physically from the cute little mini-skirted girl I married. And, of course, I am no longer the giant specimen of manly perfection that I was in my own mind then either.

The world has not prospered in the interim, either. Our society has grown from an open society in 1949 when I was born to a closed society of paranoid fear today. Society has gone from happy to angry, prosperous to deprived, open to closed.

Several years ago in the mid 90’s I worked for a newspaper and ran a picture of the graduating class of that year. I came across the graduating class of 1953 and ran it too. the difference was astonishing. The class of 1953 looked clear-eyed and hopeful, the class of ‘93 looked worn-out.

And you see it and hear it on the street. 15 year old girls curse worse than guys did in the army. Virtual nudity is acceptable anywhere. Really fat people walk around in skin-tight clothing. There is no innocence, no real hope, just a life lived to try to get as much as you can before someone else takes it.

All right. I got a little depressed on my birthday and do not like what the years have brought to our country and our civilization. That’s the problem, really. Only God is our hope, as the Psalmist says. And only in him is there any relief from what the devil has done to our society.

God bless you and keep you.

imagine

That is what the Scriptures mean when they say, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

Thinking about the church in the future and imagining.

IMAGINE:

Daily corporate prayer

Eating places – especially for those in need

Accommodation units – hostel, B&B, on site units for members in temporary need

Learning courses – resource center

Work and creative arts projects

Sacred space with gardens or another quiet place for meditation

Mentors and counselors

Facilities for all or most ages

Social entertainment

Unlocking doors;

church interiors as public spaces in the city;

worship installations staying up all the time;

the local church building as an open-doored hangout;

sofas,

visuals, newspapers, books, food, drink;

good coffee;

plenty of places to plug in your laptop;

opening hours 10am to midnight;

spiritual resources and personal space available at all times;

a place to work, rest and pray; the living room only bigger.

Rolling community – like the Cheers bar: as one set of characters leave another set arrive. All are connected by the bar staff [who themselves come and go] or one or two members who exchange groups. Everybody does some connecting in this way.

The community is a network, not just a spoked wheel dependent on a few at the center.

daily java

Daily Java:

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. “Rabbi,” his disciples asked him, “why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or his parents’ sins?” (John 9:1-2)

Have you ever had something bad happen to you and wonder if God was trying to tell you something? Or if he was punishing you for something. Or worse, have you ever seen a child that was born deformed and heard someone say that the parents had sinned and God was punishing them?

These things are not true. You suffer for what you have done because of the fact that you have done something bad. and, of course, your children suffer because of the fact that you have done something wrong. But that is because they are deprived of your presence or the support you can give them.

We are not punished by God because of things other people do. While those things might affect us, it is the fault of the person. You are not in jail because of something your parents have done, but because of your actions.

In John 9, Jesus’ apostles believed one or two things that were part of he common perception. One was that the man who had been born blind had parents that had done something bad before he was born. Therefore, he had been born blind to punish them. The other was that God had looked at the life this man might have lived if he had not been blind and turned out to be a jerk so God punished him in advance.

Both of these ideas were wrong. He was born blind because of some problem in the physical make-up of him and his parents. But Jesus also said that that being born blind was going to be used to show his power.

He was blind from birth, Jesus came along and healed him and everybody saw it. Whether they wanted to see it or not, they saw it.

And of course the religious leaders did what they always do when faced with something they disagree with: they ignored it and tied to turn it around.

They first tried to say that Jesus and the man both were sinners and such a thing couldn’t happen. But when they saw it had, they tried to call the man and his parents liars. He really hadn't been born blind, they said. It was all a hoax. The man’s parents were so afraid they were trembling and finally told the authorities they could ask the guy himself. They were afraid to commit themselves, even with their own son.

Then when everything else came out that the man was blind and had been healed by someone they didn’t like, they hollered at him and threw him out for having the gall to try to teach them.

It just went to show that you cannot convince some people, no matter how innocent or how sincere you are. Some people are going to believe what they want to believe no matter what you say or do, or what the facts are.

Even Jesus had this problem.

daily java

Daily Java:

David also ordered the Levite leaders to appoint a choir of Levites who were singers and musicians to sing joyful songs to the accompaniment of harps, lyres, and cymbals. (1 Chronicles 15:16)

I have led singing in church since I was ten years old. A man named Matt Arrington was the song leader at the Freeport, TX, Church of Christ and asked me to lead a song on Wednesday night. Or I badgered it from him, one or the other.

I led ever since. For a while I got to be the requested song leader, especially among the youth groups of the Churches of Christ around Houston, TX. I led at a lot of the Youth Devotionals and Youth Rallies.

I was a music major in college so it came easily to me. Since I was in an a cappella denomination, one which believed musical instruments were wrong when used in worship, it was simple for me with my musical knowledge.

Then in 1994, I left the Church of Christ.  I became the pastor of a  Disciples of Christ church in Northwest MO. They, of course, had musical instruments. Two big farm boys played – one the piano, the other the organ.

The first Sunday I was there, I found out that the pastor was the song leader. And I had never led singing with instruments. So I approached the service with a bit of trepidation.

I do not remember the song that we started with. But it took three tries before the instrumentalists and I could get together to start the song. I was embarrassed but, after all, I had never really done that before. I had led choruses and stuff, but had never led worship that had instruments. It was a totally different thing. People that grow up in it do not know how different it was.

I liked it. But I also like the a cappella music in worship. And people who grow up using instruments do not worship the same way a cappella people do. In the Church of Christ, everybody sang. There were no spectators. It didn’t really matter if you could carry a tune or not. Everybody sang. And everybody enjoyed it. The harmonies were astounding.

We enjoyed it so much, in fact, that we would get together at my house after evening services usually, sometimes up to half or more of the church, to have what we called “Singing and Sandwiches.” We would eat sandwiches and then sing hymns until we were hoarse. It was a time of fellowship you don’t get anywhere else.

In an instrumental church, people listen more than sing. And the harmonies are not nearly as good. You rarely hear four part harmony in an instrumental church. Usually it just people singing an octave low or something like that.

I like playing guitar and I love a full-bore worship services with loud guitars and drums and everything else. But there was something about a cappella singing, having a good time, finding other basses or tenors and singing together, the kids trying to sing lower than they could so they would be a bass, just reveling in the song itself, as well as the fellowship of music with others.

It was wrong to mandate that kind of worship, but it had a lot of heart in it. It had the kind of heart we all need to put into our worship to God, singing from the heart as well as with the mouth.

Church attendance is not magic

"Don’t be fooled into thinking that you will never suffer because the Temple is here. It’s a lie! Do you really think you can steal, murder, commit adultery, lie, and burn incense to Baal and all those other new gods of yours, and then come here and stand before me in my Temple and chant, ‘We are safe!’ — only to go right back to all those evils again? Don’t you yourselves admit that this Temple, which bears my name, has become a den of thieves? Surely I see all the evil going on there. I, the Lord, have spoken!" (Jeremiah 7:8-11)

We get the idea somehow of church being a safe zone, a cleansing zone. And it is to a point. But church is not magic.

We go do whatever we want during the week, living out lives as foolishly as we can and then on Sunday morning we go to church, sing some songs, listen to some guy holler, maybe take some communion and then we are good to go for the rest of the week. We can go out again and rack up the foolishness, then next week again, we will go and get spiritually hosed down ready for another week.

It doesn’t work that way. Going to church doesn’t make your weekly life fine.

Jeremiah told his people the same thing. They would go and do all kinds of things (I really hope their list of sins was worse than those of the church here) then they would run to the temple and use it as a kind of King’s X, a safe place. They would leave the temple with the happy exclamation, “What a great worship service this week!” and then go back to what they were doing.

Church became an interlude in their week, designed (at least in their minds) as a spiritual car wash to get rid of all the grime accumulated during the week.

But God never intended it to be such. God never intended worship services to be anything but that: worship services. There is no power in the attending that forgives wrong. What forgives wrong is the God of heaven who we worship. Church in and of itself does nothing. It is just church.

I saw a sign in a store when I was young that said: “We serve you six days, but we serve God on Sundays.” What the man meant was that he was closed on Sundays, but what it sounded like was that he had a partitioned life. He did what he wanted six days a week, and was holy for one. That wasn’t what he meant, but I remember that as being such a philosophy of Christians throughout my ministry life.

By doing this, though, the people Jeremiah was writing to cheapened the whole worship process. They made it into something it was never meant to be: a magic ceremony like confession: do what you want, then come be holy for a while and you will be fine.

How it must grieve the Lord to see his people be like this. Live your lives for him all the time, not just one day a week. Otherwise, worship time does no good either to you or the Lord.

daily java

Daily Java:

Now go and write down these words. Write them in a book. They will stand until the end of time as a witness. (Isaiah 30:8)

I have always believed that the writers of the Bible didn’t know they were writing the Bible when they did.

There is a song in Jesus Christ Superstar that has the apostles singing at the Last Supper. In it is the line: “Always hoped that I'd be an apostle. Knew that I would make it if I tried, Then when we retire we can write the gospels So they'll still talk about us when we've died.” It’s a funny line, but I don’t think anything like that happened.

I believe in verbal plenary inspiration. I believe every word in the Bible is where it should be. However I believe it differently than many others of my comrades in arms. I believe that God guided the men who wrote and that when they wrote they pretty much said what God wanted.

I do not believe, however, that God grabbed them, wrung out a book while they were in a trance and when they woke up, arm cramping in pain, they had written Romans. For one thing, each book bears a definite characteristic of its writer. John is different from Luke, Paul from Peter, and so on. Someone says that God used their style, but to what end. If God had just dictated the book, they would all sound the same.

I do believe that the God of the Universe is big enough and powerful enough to speak the world into existence. Therefore he is big enough to order the minds of men (which he after all created from nothing) to say what he wanted them to say without co-opting their minds and bodies. They could write what he wanted and still be conscious.

But I don’t think they necessarily knew that what they wrote would be preserved for thousands of years. After all, there were a lot of writers in the first century writing a lot of letters to a lot of churches. And each of these letters were essentially Bible classes on paper. In the absence of any central document, every teacher, every apostle, everybody (good and bad included – look at some of the books like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene) wrote them. God guided the hands of those who collected them and let just what he wanted float to the top of the pile. And the Bible was born.

Can you imagine the Lord appearing to you and saying, “I want you to write a book for me to put in my Bible. The book will last for thousands of years, be hotly debated, people will parse and dissect every single word and take much of what you say out of context. Now get busy. We’ll call it Colossians.”

You’d freeze right away. What will I say? How will I say it? You would go through draft after draft and still not be able to say just the right thing in just the right way. It would drive you crazy.

They knew what they were writing was important, that people would read it and get good out of it. They knew it was valuable to the church. But I don’t think they knew it would be THE HOLY BIBLE.

It would surely scare me if I knew these blatherings on my blog would last forever.

daily java

Daily Java:

“My people are foolish
    and do not know me,” says the Lord.
“They are stupid children
    who have no understanding.
They are clever enough at doing wrong,
    but they have no idea how to do right!” (Jeremiah 4:22)

I always read the news every morning. I do my Facebook devo, I read the Daily bible reading on oneyearbibleonline.com, write in my blog if anything hits me. Then I go on the news pages on the internet and see what all happened while I was asleep.

It is usually depressing.

When I saw this verse this morning, it struck me. They are clever enough at doing wrong, but they have no idea how to do right. It seems the psalmist is saying that they have become so immersed in evil that they have lost the ability not only to do what that is right and good, but even how to do it.

When it comes to doing good things, they are helpless. Their minds automatically go in the wrong direction.

You don’t have to read very far in the news pages to see that. Horrible things are happening in our culture today and they are becoming commonplace. There doesn’t seem to be much shock value left in anything. There is nothing that can go on a movie or a TV program that we have not seen in the news.

And every new thing that comes along, horrible though it may be, becomes after a while commonplace. We look at these things and we analyze them and try to figure out why they happened. But many times they happen simply because people cannot think of anything else to do. They have lost the ability to do good things.

And when that happens, when that innate goodness is lost, there will be something that will take its place automatically. Evil will come in. after all, what is evil but the absence of good?

Its children, its adherents, when it comes down to it, are stupid. They have lost the ability, that God-given ability to discern what needs to be done and to do it.

Instead, they rob and steal and beat and kill and commit atrocities the like of which people only 50 years ago would not have been able to imagine.

It also seems that there is no end in sight. It seems that things will only get worse, that sooner or later there will come a breaking point and our society will degenerate into lawlessness.

Only by the Lord making a wholesale appearance and moving his Spirit over this world will it change. Oh, Lord, make that happen.

daily java

Daily Java:

But may all who search for you be filled with joy and gladness in you. May those who love your salvation repeatedly shout, “The LORD is great! (Psalm 40:16)

We have been in Boonville off and on for around four years. I spent an abortive year and a half in Lincoln but we came back to Boonville. We like it here. We like the church and I have carved out  a ministry and a place here. I do a lot in the church, enough to almost be a full-time associate minister. We enjoy the church. There is a good spirit here and the people in general like us, some even love us. They respect us and listen to what we say. When it comes down to it, we are the church’s fellowship ministry. And I provide a good balance to the pastor here and in general, I believe, do a good work.

The problem is, of course, that we have no money. There are no jobs to be had and we are living on our retirement which is less than $1000 a month. I like our apartment but it is HUD housing and I do not like being beholden to the government. We have refused food stamps and outside food help and the Lord has blessed us food-wise. We have a lot of people over for meals and the Lord sees it and blesses us with a full freezer of meat.

But we live close to the edge in several ways. One of those ways is that I am not doing what really makes me happy: that is, preaching. I am an adjunct to another man’s ministry. While my work is well-received and necessary, anything I do is in cooperation with his ministry. It is not really my own.

He knows that too and I think it bothers him. But since the church is not a rich one, there is nothing he can do about it.

Now a church has called me and wants me to come. The problem is that it is a small church in a little bitty town in Kansas, a place I have never had any desire to live before. It is a part-time position but it comes with a parsonage and it would be mine.

I am not a small town guy, but at the same time, as I have said before, what else am I doing?

But, on the other hand, as my mind is cursed with saying, we like it here. But we are financially strapped. Really we are poor, I suppose, but I never liked to use that word. Anything that happened that required money would hurt us.

The denomination is one I would like to go back into. I am sorry that I left the Christian Church and went to the Pentecostals. That move has been nothing but pain. While the Christian Church was not necessarily wonderful to us, at the same time, we did alright.

What am I going to do? I search God’s will. Move to this little town in the middle of the Kansas nowhere, 100 miles to the nearest large city, 30 miles from the nearest WalMart? Or stay here in what is a comfortable but unsustainable lifestyle?

Hear me, O Lord.

daily java

Daily Java:

We know, dear brothers and sisters, that God loves you and has chosen you to be his own people. (1 Thessalonians 1:4)

People in churches get to thinking that because they go to church and do all of the religious stuff that they are something special. They are not.

They are something special because they are in Christ and it is God who chose them to be that special person, that special group. It really has nothing to do with them.

Now it is fine to be proud of being in Jesus and in his grace. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, Jeremiah 9:24 says:

But those who wish to boast should boast in this alone: that they truly know me and understand that I am the Lord who demonstrates unfailing love and who brings justice and righteousness to the earth, and that I delight in these things. I, the Lord, have spoken!

It is good to be glad you are in Jesus. The problem comes when you get to thinking that Jesus ought to be happy you are in him, that you are somehow doing him a favor by being in his church.

In Luke 18:9-11, there were two men who went to pray. One was a Pharisee and one was a tax collector. These were two completely different kinds of people.

Pharisees were the conservative rulers of the Jewish group. They were usually very proud of their holiness and their heritage. When they prayed in public, they like to do it in a public place where people had to walk around them. Some even had a guy with a trumpet that would blow it when they started to pray so everybody would know. Kind of like the guy who yells out his prayer before his meal in a restaurant so everybody can hear how holy he is.

The tax collector (publican in the old King James Version) worked for the Roman government on a commission basis. The Romans were an occupying army that demanded strong taxes from the Jews. The tax collectors took as much money as they could and kept whatever was left over after giving the rest to the Romans. Most Jews hated tax collectors.

The Pharisee prayed about how great he was and what all he did. It was as if God should be proud of him. The tax collector recognized that he was no good and wouldn’t even lift his eyes to heaven.

When Jesus saw them, he said the tax collector was the one who really prayed to God. The other one, the Pharisee, just bragged out loud about what he had done. There was no prayer there.

When we come to God, we come as broken people who have screwed up our lives beyond any way to fix them. And we give them to God to fix. We can do nothing in and of ourselves. It is all God’s doing, whether you are a rich businessman or a broke guy in jail. We are all the same in God’s sight.

He chose us and gave us the ability to accept that choosing. When we do, we are his children and we are his people. And he loves us.