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.