daily java

Daily Java:

Commit yourself to instruction; listen carefully to words of knowledge. (Proverbs 23:12)

I was listening to someone talk about the Bible the other day and they didn’t know what they were talking about. The worst part of it was that with a little study, they would have.

I guess that was the worst part. Maybe the worst part was that they were willing to go out in public and say things that were not true and didn’t know the difference.

A man I worked with thirty years ago had this problem. He would hear something and it sounded relatively logical to him so he would use it in his sermons. The problem was that it was blatantly wrong.

For instance, he said that the word Gentile means literally dog. It doesn’t take more than thirty seconds to read in a book that Gentile means nation and it is the word we get our word ethnic from. He was wrong and if you knew anything you knew he was. So he looked foolish.

The writer of Proverbs says to commit yourself to instruction. In other words, be a learning person. Keep on learning, keep on studying, keep on being fresh. Don’t say foolish things under the guise of scholarship. If you are going to pretend to knowledge, then be knowledgeable.

Listen to people. You can learn from anyone no matter how old you are. The real student does this. He always questions, always checks. He will ask anyone no matter who they are or their age if he doesn’t know what they are talking about. He has a thirst for knowledge.

To this kind of person, knowledge is not something they accumulated back in school and now just automatically have. It is something that is life-long, continual. And it is something that is a joy, to learn new things.

Do it. Make yourself a learning person and listen.

daily java

Daily Java:
My close friends detest me. Those I loved have turned against me. (Job 19:19)
It was 1997, a rough year for me. of course, it seems several of them have been rough. But I suppose this was more strange than rough, an odd year.

I had gone through a thirty day fast in the month of April toward National Day of Prayer on May 1. Then I had been normal (or as normal as you can be after coming off a thirty day fast). Then my gall bladder blew up. I had surgery and it went badly. I don’t know if the gall bladder attack was worse than they thought or if the doctor was a butcher. Probably a combination of both.

The doctor gave me a laproscopy and I wasn’t a candidate for it and it hurt me badly. It took almost a month before I was back to normal.

Between the fast and the recovery from the gall bladder attack and surgery, I lost 80 pounds. I was smaller than I have been in decades.

We were friends with some people who lived outside of town in a commune. They and the circle of people around them were some of our closest friends. This circle included an old cop and his wife and a musician for the Catholic Church and a minister for the Disciples of Christ, along with some other ministers and such. We got together with all or some of them a lot.

We met a lot for prayer during this time and talked about a lot of things. I shared words of the Lord with them and they with me. We were friends.

We had a church plant in a storefront in Odessa, MO, that also had a coffeehouse on Saturday nights. A lot of these people were coffeehouse friends and we even had the Coffeehouse Band for a while. It was great fun.

Then it turned.

I introduced many of my coffeehouse friends to the commune friends and they began to get together. For some reason this caused the coffeehouse friends to drift away from us.

One day I was at the commune’s restaurant. This was quite a large undertaking as they viewed much of their ministry with feeding people. We had the commune pastor’s father with us along with a missionary from Africa. The father and I had talked and seemed to get along well.

The pastor’s father was talking about ministry and suddenly he told me that everybody in town was laughing at me, and that my ministry was worthless. I sat stunned by this sudden and unexpected turn. Then the missionary began to address me about something, I forget exactly what, but it went along the same line. I stood there listening and realized that I had to leave. I took my jacket and started to leave. It surprised everyone that I was leaving and the missionary said, “Wait.” I said no, that I had to go and I left.

I was stunned by this turn by my friends. The commune was used to this. Somebody would do something they didn’t like or thought was wrong and they would castigate them publicly and they would take it, it was part of their community. But why me?

Over the next week, several of my friends came to me in tears over this, wondering themselves both why it had happened and why they allowed it to happen.

But over the course of several weeks they had moved away from me into the circle of this commune and it hurt. It was almost as if this commune had told them that they could their friend or mine and they decided to go with them. I never knew and I never found out.

But these former friends were in tears over their own participation. But it seemed too late.

We went from a circle of friends to virtually no friends in a month. And I never figured out why.

It has been 15 years and tonight I remembered it like it was yesterday. The betrayal and public humiliation was too much to bear and it still hurts.

It was not long before I found out that another friend had been lying to me and the church died.

Fifteen years ago. Tonight it seemed like last month.

What is the Bible?

In class tonight, the questions was asked: How would you describe the Bible to someone who had never heard of it before? What would you say?

I wrote (and this was on the spur of the moment):
"The Creator of the Universe wants you to know who he is. He sent his mind, his Spirit into the minds of several men to write so that you could know him, know how he feels, what he thinks, and so that you will recognize him when he calls. The Bible is his Manufacturer's Operational Manual."

What do you think?

daily java

Daily Java: 

But Jesus replied, “Stop complaining about what I said. (John 6:43)

Everybody wants Jesus to be like they want  him to be. When he is shown to be different, a lot of times they get mad. They want him to be a vegetarian or drive an electric car, or agree with them on their politics, to like the candidates they like, to be like them.

One reason is that the real Jesus makes them nervous. The real Jesus wanted them to change from what they are to what they should be. He wanted them to quit acting stupid and start being godly.

Jesus didn’t care a fig about politics. In Matthew 22, some people come up and ask him what about paying taxes. Israel was an occupied country with an army nobody like telling them what to do and taking all their money.

When they asked him, he asked them to show him a coin. They did.  

His reply: he asked, “Whose picture and title are stamped on it?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. “Well, then,” he said, “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God  that belongs to God.” His reply amazed them, and they went away.

He gave them an answer that they did not expect and that surprised them. They were ready for a debate and to argue with him. They were also sure that he would give them ammunition to try him for sedition and heresy so they could get rid of him.

But instead, Jesus said that he didn’t care. God and Caesar (or the government) were different and didn’t need to necessarily mixed.

That is not to say we don’t vote or make our voices heard about morality and other issues, but it is to say that Jesus didn’t care about politics. He was busy with more important things: mainly the Kingdom of God.

But it did say that Jesus had his own agenda. He had his own plans and he didn’t really care what yours were. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t care about you, but it did mean that he was busy doing what God wanted him to do and had no time for other things.

It also meant that he said what he needed to say even when people got mad at him and tried to get him to change his mind.

He also didn’t mind saying things that sent people away. He didn’t want a bunch of people that hung around because they thought he was a great guy who did good things for them. He wanted people who cared about what God wanted.

When he told them to eat and drink him, he was just telling them that they had to make him part of them like food is part of a person. He was not part-time in their lives. But the way he said it was also to show them that it was God in charge, not them. What they wanted may have been important to them, but not to God.

And what we need to do is quit complaining about what he has to say and quit trying to mash him into our image. We are his followers, he is not ours.

A long way down

I remember the days of old. I ponder all your great works and think about what you have done. (Psalm 143:5)
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)

Since I left the Church of Christ, my life seems to have stopped. There was a time when I pastored large churches. I was somebody. Now, in the past few years, I have not. And I am not somebody, just a failed unemployed, destitute ex-preacher.

And I am beginning to wonder if I did what God wanted me to do.

It seemed like the right thing to do, to leave the Church of Christ. I no longer believed their core doctrines: baptismal regeneration, mandatory weekly communion and of course, the ultimate one, acappella music as the sole method of praise.

I also believed in my role as a pastor being stronger than it was allowed to be. In the Church of Christ, I was a hired hand at the beck and call of the elders, who were the real “leaders of the church.” I was staff.

But I begin to wonder how much of that was pride and how much was real conviction. Since I have come into those denominations that view their pastors as called of God and, at least on paper, lift them up, I have been at the beck and call of boards and councils to the point that I could not do what I needed to do.

So what was the difference?

I have even began to revisit some of my changes. I think I am no longer pre-millennial in my eschatology. I think I have come back to my original thought on the whole end-times thing and become, once again, Inaugurated Millennialist. I even wonder if I ever was a pre-mil or just went along with it to be with friends.

I also am moving to a different view of the Holy Spirit indwelling than I have held for the past few years. While I still believe in the baptism, I no longer believe that it has to have tongues. I think that tongues is one of the most overrated and underused and misused things in the church.

Most Pentecostal churches preach tongues as their doctrine, many times leaving Jesus and all of the other stuff behind.

Tongues to these people (pre-millennialism , too) have become what is preached. The grace of God and a life lived worthy of him are sidelined so that people can be taught to speak in tongues and be afraid that the world will end soon.

My teachers taught me differently, but I have noticed that, in many things, my teachers were wrong. They were certainly wrong on the role of grace in our lives. They were also wrong on the role of works. They overemphasized the wrong things and almost refused to consider the right ones. They de-emphasized the Spirit in our lives and overemphasized the Bible.

On the other hand, those in my home denomination had strength of commitment. Nothing could keep them from church. Nothing could keep them from singing. Nothing could keep them from giving. They loved to be together and do things together.

I suppose they could be excused a few problems in that they lived their Christianity. Too many of those I associate with now do not. They holler a good holiness, but do not practice what they preach.

So what do I do? I don’t know.

I cannot see myself going back into the Church of Christ again. I have visited there lately and would not be able to.

But on the other hand, I am sick of Pentecostals and their phoniness. The church I attend is a good one, but it is hard to get anybody to do anything.

A weird place to be in your life when you are  62. I ought to be at a place where I can look back over my life with a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Instead I see a pattern of failure and loss. I used to be something. Now I am not.

daily java

Daily Java:
Someone wrote me the other day and asked me a question.

John you always see both sides...tell me what you see in this post.
I have heard so many pastors criticize the modern Christian family's desire to attend churches that have all the 'trimmings'... but I tend to look at it like this, not very many Americans if given the choice, would live without air conditioning in the summer, or hand pull their water from a well four times a day, take the public bus system, sleep on a straw mat on the floor, send their kids to work instead of school, do their laundry in the river or buy the leftovers at the meat market for the weekly meal. We live in a land where luxury has become a thing taken for granted, why do we expect any different from the Sunday morning worshipper? Besides, given the choice, who wouldn't want a coffee bar at church... or more songs than sermons!? Is the modern American Christian out of touch with reality? Chances are, if you own more than one car in your household, you are. But what's the answer for the struggling, small church? Complain about the empty seats, or fill them? What's the choice? Offer Sunday morning childcare and fill a seat, or don't and leave it empty? Hard choices in modern American Christianity. The scriptures say, faith comes by hearing, that is, hearing the Good News of Christ (Rom. 10:17). If the sales rep at AT&T has to do anything possible to get a potential customer in the door, unfortunately, in this commercialized society the modern pastor has to do the same. And comparing your American worshipper to the Chinese worshipper, just doesn't work. Guilt lasts only as long as it takes us to walk out the door and get into our new SUV and go home to our 2000 sq. ft. house and switch on our 72" TV. The only thing that can change the heart, is God. Concentrate on Him, and the Good News He has delivered.

My answer:
The apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1 that he wasn’t going to do anything but preach Christ and him crucified. Yet Jesus, when he preached, fed people, performed miracles and everything else to get their attention before he told them anything about God. Or at least while he was telling them.

People’s expectations are different today than before and there is nothing we can do about that. Whether we like it or not, daycare and coffee bars are becoming a norm rather than an extra. I attend a fairly conservative church, yet we have coffee and junk to eat before church (Breakfast for a Buck he calls it) and a fairly contemporary service, along with child-care. In my church I had some of the same things. Good music in a church is not an extra anymore, it is a given, as is multi-media.

Whether it is good or not is beside the point. It is true. Like my wife, it is where we are. How does a small church tap into this? I do not know and spent the past several years before finally kind of giving up trying to figure it out. Maybe going back to the simple church model would be the thing and training people from the bottom up.  I don’t know. But I do know that laboring along year after year with none of these resources is hard and is self-defeating. Or at least feels that way. Like trying to push start a dump truck by yourself.

Both sides have a point. To the one it is trying to buy Christians with gimmicks. To the other it is coming into an old fashioned church and worshipping with the Amish (at least to their way of thinking). I have been to both and I have pastored both. The more contemporary are more fun, but you have to keep ahead of the curve all the time or people get dissatisfied. The other makes for a bunch of defeated Christians laboring years in a small church.

All this to say I do not know. It is a sad question and one we ought not to even be having to ask ourselves. I do believe though that pursuing some of these things that you can without compromising your integrity is part of living in this culture – narcissistic and self-indulged as it is. You are preaching the truth to this generation, even if they are spoiled.

Whatever we think about it, it is the way it is done today. And we have to acknowledge that.

daily java

Daily Java:

Listen! The Lord’s arm is not too weak to save you,
    nor is his ear too deaf to hear you call.
It’s your sins that have cut you off from God.
    Because of your sins, he has turned away
    and will not listen anymore. (Isaiah 59:1-2)

Calvin Coolidge was known for his economy of words. He didn’t say much. When he went to church one Sunday, someone asked him what the preacher spoke about. He replied “Sin.” When they asked him what he said, President Coolidge said, “He was agin’ it.”

God is against sin, no matter the form or the reason behind it. And because we are sinful people, he has to be against us. He doesn’t want to be, but he has to be. Sin is directly contrary to his nature, that nature of holiness.

That is why Jesus came, to take away our sin by his sacrifice and to bring us back into the presence of God as we were before the fall in the Garden of Eden. Jesus takes away sin. When we are in Jesus, we are free from sin.

That doesn’t mean that we can do what we want, but it does mean that when we mess up, and we will, God looks at us through the prism of his Son, Jesus, and sees us as sinless.

Our response is to remain as good as we can be. To be, as Jesus said, perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:48). We know that we cannot be sinless, but we try to be. We do it because we love him.

The world has been taken over by sin. You see it everywhere in everything. Music is full of it, movies are chock full of it, our children reflect it in their language and the way they talk to each other, it is apparent in our music and even in our business dealings with each other. Sin has weighed us down and there is nothing we can do about it except to accept Jesus and his grace.

And above all, we have to recognize that sin for what it is. The apostle John said in 1 John 3:4-5: Everyone who sins is breaking God’s law, for all sin is contrary to the law of God. And you know that Jesus came to take away our sins, and there is no sin in him.

Sin is real and it tears up your life and your heart. Sex outside of marriage, drunkenness, greed, embezzlement, lying – all are tearing your life up. The only thing that can put your life and your heart back together is Jesus. He came to take that sin away.

The world sits in sin and wallows in sin because it will not recognize that power of Jesus. But God is able to take it away when you accept him into your heart, when you allow him in.

Everybody sins (Romans 3:23), even really good Christians that come to church each week (1 John 1:8). The only ones who are without sin are those who have given their hearts to Jesus and trust him.

God is agin’ sin but he is not agin’ you. He loves you and never intended you to be in sin in the first place. His arm will pull you back in, his grace will remove that sin, his love will accept you.

Let him do it.

daily java

Daily Java:

I long for the years gone by when God took care of me,
when he lit up the way before me and I walked safely through the darkness.
When I was in my prime, God’s friendship was felt in my home.
The Almighty was still with me, and my children were around me.
(Job 29:2-5)

And now my life seeps away. Depression haunts my days.
At night my bones are filled with pain, which gnaws at me relentlessly.
With a strong hand, God grabs my shirt. He grips me by the collar of my coat.
He has thrown me into the mud. I’m nothing more than dust and ashes.
(Job 29:26-29)

The past couple of days have been rough ones for me. every once in a while, my mind goes into a guilt and a blaming spiral that, when once began, cannot stop. I begin to revisit failures and shortcomings. I come back to places in which I hurt someone or in which I, or we, have been hurt.

A lot of times these days come in the first day of a fast. It is as if my mind is trying desperately to derail the fast, to ruin the good that comes from it. It usually goes away. But yesterday it came full force and I am not fasting. I don’t know why.

But it hurts, nonetheless.

When I look back over my life like that, it seems worthless. There seems to be little of any good coming out of it. I am a failed preacher living in HUD housing, living off a paltry retirement check. I cannot get a job and we are so poor that I can barely at times breathe.

Oddly enough, though, I am doing a lot of ministry right now. We are what amounts to the entire hospitality ministry of Firm Foundation Church, I am jail minister, teach a Sunday night class, do most if not all of the writing and editing for the church, prayer ministry on Sunday mornings, occasional preaching. I probably do more than any other member other than the pastor.

But of course, I get paid nothing and have in a couple of months, come to the point of being desperate for enough money to have gas to drive to church.

I believe that because of the hospitality ministry, we have plenty of food. the freezer is full of good things. We have trouble with mile and such but we have plenty to eat.

But that is where it stops. Our furniture is all, with the exception of the bookcases and two lamps, castoffs I have gotten hold of. It is not that they are bad or anything, but none of our furniture was new when we got it.

I had to borrow $20 Thursday for a week. We get paid next Wednesday and we will be better then, but it will not be long before we run out again.

It is so tiresome and I don’t know why. I would feel like God has deserted me – and I have given it thought at times – but Ella comments that I am still able to teach people and to write things that come from God’s heart, so I don’t know.

I do ask why he has decided to hang this old preacher out to dry. After forty years of service, why am I so destitute. And I have seen other preachers like this too. I trusted him to take care of me and he hasn’t. I finally took early retirement since I could find no job whatever, so at least I would have a little, but the $336 a month will not go very far.

We have gotten so tired of this and the Lord has not shown us any relief. Instead Ella continues to fall and hurt herself. And life gets harder. And I have maybe 20-25 years of this left.

daily java

Daily Java:

A huge crowd kept following him wherever he went, because they saw his miraculous signs as he healed the sick. (John 6:2)

Nothing makes for a popular guy like having stuff people want. You have enough money and everybody is your friend. If you are known as the guy who buys drinks for everybody whenever you go in the bar, it is not surprising that everybody likes you.

But when they start expecting it is when it gets kind of dangerous. If people begin to depend on you for what they want and you quit giving it to them, chances are they will get mad at you.

People were this same way around Jesus. He healed, he did really interesting things, and to some he was a never-ending source of entertainment.

In John 6, they are sitting around him after he had done a bunch of great things, miraculous signs, just waiting for something else to happen. In fact, they were so sure that he was going to do something good that they didn’t even bother to bring lunch.

Jesus saw that they were this way but he stayed with them anyway. He had come to tell them about the love and grace of God and meant to do so even though he knew they were going to get mad at him sooner or later.

But they were hungry so he fed them, making a lot of food appear from just a little. And the crowd loved him for it. Kind of like going to hear a politician and he gives everybody bar-be-cue. They eat it and think, this is great. All we have to do is follow this guy around and we have free food and free entertainment.

When he gets through, he has twelve baskets left over, just enough for his apostles. He is trying to show them that he can feed everybody and still have enough left over for them for a few days. He is saying that if they will give their lives to him, he will take care of them.

But he left his apostles and went out to pray. The apostles took a boat to the other side of the lake where they were supposed to go and a storm came up. They thought they were going to drown but Jesus came walking up on the water.

He asked them why they were afraid. Hadn't he just made a lot of food and fed 5000 men and their families? They were embarrassed and were scared of him.

Jesus can do great things both for others and in your life. He has promised that he will never leave you and that he loves you.

As long as we give ourselves to Jesus, he will be with us. he never promised a life of comfort or ease. Most of the apostles including himself died violent deaths.

But their lives meant something because they had given them to him. Without him, our lives are meaningless, just lived for nothing.

With him, we have the presence of the God and his Son who conquered the world and lives in our hearts.

daily java

Daily Java:

Give in proportion to what you have. Whatever you give is acceptable if you give it eagerly. And give according to what you have, not what you don’t have. (2 Corinthians 8:11-12)

I was in the jail the other day and a man who was attending a church in Kansas City, Kansas, told me his preacher told him that giving was never acceptable nor real unless you gave money. He didn’t have much money and felt guilty.

The preacher was wrong and foolishly so. The Bible never says that giving is money alone. His preacher had told him (or at least he had that feeling) that to give and tithe were synonymous, that both had to be money to be true giving.

What the Bible does say is that we are to be giving. But the New Testament never tells God’s people to tithe. In fact, the New Testament only talked about tithing in relation to Old Testament people or in telling Jesus’ listeners how hypocritical the religious leaders of the day were. They even tithed the weeds in their garden just in case God wanted that too (Matthew 23:23) but completely forgot the whole point.

There is nothing wrong with tithing. It is a good idea. You should tithe, yes, Jesus said, but do not neglect the more important things (Matthew 23:23). Jesus said that it is a place to start, that we need to be better than those who only tithed because God said to and that we should give even more. He didn’t mean to bust ourselves financially (2 Corinthians 8:12 above), but rather that our whole life should be giving. Giving is not a one time thing but a lifestyle, just like the rest of Christianity.

Now the apostle Paul did give instructions for how to give your money in 1 Corinthians 16:1, but that was only in dealing with filling a need when it arose. The church needs to have the money around to deal with bills and problems and not have to go scrabbling for it every time you need something.

But giving is greater than money. Giving is your life. Giving your life to God; giving your time, your food, your clothing, your effort, your prayer (real prayer, not just the little quickies you write on Facebook), your dedication to his word, your attendance in church, your involvement in that church. Your life, not just your money.

It is easy to throw a little change or a check into the contribution plate. Almost anybody, no matter what economic strata can do that. But it is not easy to put yourself in that same plate. To put your time and your heart there, your energy, your life in addition to your money.

That attitude in life is harder. It requires dedication and time spent in his service. And this is a hard culture to get time from people. People are so busy. But until you can put your life ahead of what you want, your money will not really count. Putting it before school and work, before TV and hobbies is what counts. Your school and your work will do everything they can to pull you away from service and real giving.

But just refuse. Give. And like he said, it will be given to you (Luke 6:38).