daily java

Daily Java:  

And because Joseph was a descendant of King David, he had to go to Bethlehem in Judea, David’s ancient home. He traveled there from the village of Nazareth in Galilee. He took with him Mary, his fiancée, who was now obviously pregnant. And while they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. She gave birth to her first child, a son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them. (Luke 2:4-7)

On the floor of my living room is a manger scene. It is a fairly nice one. Someone gave it to me a few years ago and I keep it safe every year. This year the horn on the camel's saddle broke off, but I just super-glued it back on.

This year I placed a small set of lights inside it on the ceiling of the manger. I really like it because you can see it easily. And I enjoy looking at it.

I was raised in a Christmas-phobic church. The Church of Christ celebrated the pagan side of Christmas – Santa Claus, presents, stuff – along with the pagan side of Easter, too. They were totally against any religious celebration. I never have been able to figure out why, but I went along with it for over forty years, twenty of them as a minister.

When we came out of the Church of Christ, we decided that we would go whole hog on the holidays. The first church I pastored (a Disciples of Christ church) went all the way with a humongous tree and all kinds of decorations. And I liked it.

So we do everything: Advent, Christmas, manger scenes, along with all of the Easter stuff – Lent, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter sunrise service. I love them all.

And sitting here looking at this manger scene reminds me of how much I love it all.

The tree is all lit up, the windows are decorated, I even have the living room bookcase (which itself has two small manger scenes in it) decorated to the hilt. I just like it all.

Little by little, though, I am moving away from gifts. We spend entirely too much for no real reason except that our marketing culture tells us to. And if we don't, there is a national mourning period for not enough revenue.

Going in WalMart or other stores near Christmas can be almost depressing. They are decorated and the Christmas music is playing. But there is no real Christmas spirit. It is only a marketing ploy. The same with the malls.

In fact, WalMart starts not long after Halloween, which starts not long after Labor Day. They move from marketing season to marketing season and it is too bad if you don't want to. It is all a desperate desire to get you to buy things. The meaning is nothing, the purpose is nothing.

Yet I still observe Christmas. And I still like it. And will continue until I die.

I am glad my Savior came so I celebrate Christmas. I celebrate Easter because that is why he came.

And I praise him all year long.

daily java

Daily Java:

King David was now very old, and no matter how many blankets covered him, he could not keep warm. (1 Kings 1:1)

I just watched Rocky Balboa again. It was a good movie, but it made me sad. There are things in life as you get older that you have to say are over. This was the last Rocky film. He is around my age so there is no way he can credibly do this again. So he has to quit.

But still, Rocky has been around all my adult life since the first one in the 1970's. And now it is through. So many actors have gotten old (which is of course the natural order of things). The Star Trek people are either dead or so old they look weird, the idea of Harrison Ford doing another action flick is ludicrous, all of them are old now so it has to stop.

I see them getting older and it reminds me that when people look at me, they do not see the healthy, handsome, strong, virile man they used to. Well, maybe they were on something when they did, but still, I am not what I used to be.

In fact, no one is. Anybody who thinks he is the same as he used to be is foolish and full of beans. That is why it is funny to see people like rock stars and movie stars trying to act and dress as they did twenty or thirty years ago. They look foolish. Madonna and Cher are perfect examples.

We have to admit the fact that we are getting older. It is hard and not very much fun, but it is true. We have to acknowledge that we have been here for a while.

You figure. I remember when the Beatles came out. I remember, in fact, when Elvis came out. I even remember when this country was a good one with men acting like men and women acting like women and children – you know. I remember paying (and this is true) 9 cents for a gallon of gas. Houston, TX, had some phenomenal gas wars. I remember touch tone phones coming in. I remember giant cars and 15 cent large fountain Dr Peppers.

In fact, I remember so much that sometimes I get tired of remembering it all. And I start wondering if I need a bed warmer like King David had in 1 Kings 1. Of course, Ella gets mad when I bring it up, so probably not.

But the body begins to betray you. Thursday night, I began my nightly ritual of 100 pushups (I do them every 40 years like clockwork) and threw my shoulder out. And there are other things.

But I have to acknowledge that age is real and that I, like every other human being who lives very long, has to go through it. I suppose that the age factor is the only thing our Lord never had to go through. He died early.

But it is something that is common to all older people. Sooner or later, they get older and tired and sooner or later they get cold, no matter how many blankets get piled on them.

But, even though we get tired, the grace of God never does. The mercy of God never does. The love of God never does. As Lamentations 3:22-23 says The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.

His blanket never quits working and his love never ends. He is God.

the biblical narrative

This has been in my files for a while and I thought I would put it on my blog.

From the now seeming defunct blog http://desertpastor.typepad.com/paradoxology/ on December 02, 2007, Scot McNight wrote, "The biblical narrative as a "Wiki-Story" is, in fact, an approach that is both historical and historic. It's the way the Church has always read the bible" (including Irenaeus). The ancient-future approach to read the bible is to read the bible as a story.

McNight quoted Abraham J. Heschel : "to believe the bible is to remember, not merely to accept the truth as a set of dogmas."

Here is how the church listened to the story of the Bible (McNight's 5-part Thesis):

1. There is a gospel, a message of deep magic – the story of God's relational saving truth.
2. There are expressions of the gospel's message, or deep magic. These expressions are stories of the story.
3. The stories unfold in time so that these stories form a plot – a meta-story.
4. This plot that we discern in scripture contains divine energy – the communicative action on God's part to engage you and me as communicants in covenantal relation with God and others.
5. The proper relationship of you and me to the story and its plot is one of listening and discerning well.

McKnight went on to present a comprehensive, scholarly treatise on these ideas. Of particular interest were his thoughts on "epistemic promiscuity", or... "why a 'wiki-story'?"

As we broke, Scot has encouraged us to discuss the following questions at our tables:

1. Which of the five models best describes how you read the Bible?

2. What can we do to restore "story" to the Church?

3. What are the positives and negatives of reading the Bible as a "Wiki-story"?

Again, jump on in and share your thoughts or reactions to any or all of these.

My own comments: this is interesting and and I believe a good picture of the message of God. What do you think?

daily java

Daily Java: 

 There is a path before each person that seems right,but it ends in death. (Proverbs 14:12)

What do you do when past sins were fun and you had a good time doing them?

My drug experiences in the late 60's and early 70's when I was in the army were fun. I had a good time and remember them as a good time. Yet they were wrong. So what do I do when past sins are remembered as fun?

The thing is, whether they were fun or not, they were wrong. As the scripture above says, sometimes things just seem right but they aren't. They are wrong whether I liked them or not..

So my acid trips and my other excursions into drug use were wrong, even though they seemed like fun.
Yes. They were wrong no matter how good they felt.

Debbie Boone sang a song in the 70's that said “How can it be wrong when it seems so right.” The problem is, it can be wrong as hell and still seem right because when it comes down to it, you are not rational when you are doing wrong. You are in a different mindset that does not consider the things of God.

When you are stoned, you think you are king of the world. You think everything revolves around you and around your desire to do whatever it is you are doing. It really doesn't matter to you at the time that you are sinning against the grace of God. You are having a good time.

And quite frankly, you are not in the best frame of mind. When you are stoned, you are altered and you are in no condition to make any kind of judgments.

So what you are doing, no matter how great it feels, if it is wrong it is a sin and you need to repent.
The problem is, it is hard to repent of a sin that felt great.

But as the scripture says, what feels right to you is not necessarily right. It may end in death. Even though it felt great at the time, it was wrong. Recreational drug use is wrong, drunkenness is wrong, immorality is wrong – all these things are and were wrong even though you did them when you were young and stupid.

So you have to look at the word of God to see what is wrong and train your heart to do the right things.

Does God make allowances? Yes, I believe he does. But, on the other hand, do you really want to depend on whether or not he makes allowances for youthful stupidity? Do you really want to take that chance?

The drug use I did when I was in the army was wrong, no matter how much fun I had doing it. So what I need to do is repent, even though it is hard to do. I didn't feel that I was doing wrong even though I was.

Father, save me from my own stupidity, past and present. Save me, Lord. I praise you and depend on your grace to save me from my own inadequacy. I praise your name.

getting a salary again

Don’t hesitate to accept hospitality, because those who work deserve their pay. (Luke 10:7)

For several years, I have labored at works underpaid and in virtual poverty. The Assemblies of God, along with the Foursquare Church have impoverished us. And at times what money we got was begrudged.

We lived for a year and a half on $650 a month. Occasionally we got a little more, but that is all we could count on. Even so, we fed people and were hospitable. We gave all we could and continued to work in ministry, although it was unpaid. We really and truly hurt financially.

Yet we kept on. We continued to minister and to work with the church. I did more there for no pay than I was allowed to do at other churches for what pay I got.

Yet we kept on.

This church opened up and invited us to come. Since we have been here, we have been warmly received and people seem to be happy we are here. But we went through the last month with little pay. We received Ella’s check and the small retirement check I am sent, and one check a couple of weeks ago.

It had to be wrapped up for the business meeting, so last night I went over and talked to the other elder about what my salary was to be. All of a sudden, they realized that they had not paid me. So they gave me a check. Now today, they gave me another. It seems that no matter which way I turn now, sometimes gives me another check.

I feel rich. In my pocket is several hundred dollars. Since we cannot get a debit card for a while, I have been carrying around cash. Now tomorrow I will go and cash yet another check. I plan to keep some cash at the house for emergencies.

The point is that I feel wealthy. I am merely getting what I have gotten in the past, but in comparison to my poverty, it is wealth.


The apostle Paul said that he knew how to live in both plenty and little. I have lived with the little for entirely too long.

Now I have to figure out how to live with the plenty. I can be a fool and spend it or I can save it for what we need in the future. Maybe investments, maybe CD’s or something. We have been getting by on nothing for so long that we do not need much. But it seems I have much

I have already spent too much, but as Ella pointed out, all we have done is get what we have needed for a while. We just have not been able to buy the things, the necessities we needed. We have done without.

I think we are about caught up. We have Christmas coming and we plan to get a few things we want to get for our children, but in general, we are not going to overspend.

It feels good to be normal again after so long. I am employed and I am getting a paycheck and I am where people love me.

I want to be effective and be worthy of my pay. I praise the Lord.

doing what you don't understand

The Lord gave this message to Hosea son of Beeri during the years when Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah were kings of Judah, and Jeroboam son of Jehoash was king of Israel. When the Lord first began speaking to Israel through Hosea, he said to him, “Go and marry a prostitute, so that some of her children will be conceived in prostitution. This will illustrate how Israel has acted like a prostitute by turning against the Lord and worshiping other gods.” So Hosea married Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, and she became pregnant and gave Hosea a son. (Hosea 1-3:5)

Some of the stuff God told his people was plain strange. And not only that, some of it bordered on the cruel.

Noah had to ignore the pleas of his neighbors while the floodwaters rose. Abraham had to willingly take his son off to be slaughtered as a human sacrifice for a God that had always detested that. Joshua led his people on slaughtering rampages through Canaan as they conquered the land that left men, women and children dead behind them. Elijah had to kill a lot of false prophets, people he might have known.

These were not things that were necessarily optional. They were mandated by God. He didn’t ask them if they wanted to do it, he just said do it.

The same with Hosea. Go find this tired prostitute and marry her and have children, some of which will be illegitimate. It didn’t matter that Hosea might have had a girl friend he had been dating. It didn’t matter what this match would do to his social standing. It didn’t matter how he felt. God never asked.

Then, after she had left him and gone back to business, he had to go buy her back and marry her again. She was old and worn out, no one even wanted her anymore. But too bad. he had to take her back and let her back into his life and his bed.

And the only reason was to show Israel, who for the most part didn’t care anyway, an illustration of their relationship to God. He took a used nation, finally had to let it go and then took back the worn out nation again as his own.

Hosea’s life became a little observed illustration.

But he did it anyway. His parents probably objected. If he had a girl friend, she was not happy. He was probably not happy himself. But he did it anyway. He was faithful to what God wanted him to do. He obeyed even when it was inconvenient.

We all do that to one extent or another. I had a friend who cried all night when he found out God wanted him to become a pastor and leave his life as a professional musician. But he got up the next morning and did it anyway. I have known people who have left their homes and relatives to go to foreign mission fields only to find themselves or their families sick or injured in conflicts they never intended to be close to. I have known people to give up good jobs to go into ministry only to find themselves impoverished as older people.

They did what they heard God tell them to do regardless of whether or not they wanted to.

Moses did this. He got God mad at him trying to get out of the ministry God told him to do, but he ended up doing it anyway. Jeremiah was the same way. He didn’t want to. Jonah went into his ministry half-heartedly, found himself a raging success and got mad at the success. King Saul tried to hide from his job, Peter tried to deny it, others were other ways. Jesus gave up a life of normalcy with a wife and children for a ministry of only three years that ended up with him being killed.

But in the end, they did what God wanted, even though they may have never really understood it. God never required that they understand, just that they obey.

Pretty unfair, I will have to admit. But that was one faithful guy, Hosea. And I admire him.

daily java

Daily Java:

Even princes sit and speak against me, but I will meditate on your decrees. (Psalm 119:22-24)

I was just having a conversation with a man I haven’t seen in several years. Now, at the time of this conversation, I was in the shower. And I haven’t seen the man for four or five years. But I was still having the conversation.

In the conversation, I was defending myself. He did me wrong and hurt the church in the doing, but it didn’t matter. He felt totally in the right and felt he could do pretty much whatever he needed to do to accomplish what he felt he wanted.

He was a superintendent of the area in which I was and had an agenda for the church that I didn’t. But because he was superintendent, he felt his agenda trumped any other.

What was sad was that he did not have the slightest idea of how to deal with a church like the one I pastored. He was great with large churches, affluent churches, city churches. But he knew nothing of country churches and small churches. He knew nothing of their dynamic, of their mindset. He thought he did, but he didn’t.

He went behind my back and hurt my ministry. I finally left and as a result, he destroyed the church. And all the time, he probably figured that he was doing good, even after he closed the church.

I came into another soon like it. The leaders of the area church felt they knew better than I what to do with the local church. They went behind my back and again destroyed my church.

And all this time later, I still defend myself from them, even though they are long gone from my life. I do it in the shower, late at night, when driving by myself, other times when I am alone. They hurt me, they hurt my family and they killed my church. And the bad part was they didn’t even realize it. But I do. And I cannot figure out how to quit telling them about it and defending myself, all these years later.

They figured they were doing “God’s work” and ran roughshod over the church. They knew all about (I suppose) large urban churches, but knew nothing about the churches they were supposed to be overseeing.

It was a while before I recovered. When I decided to come back to pastoral work, I came into my old denomination. It had its faults, but the good thing is that there is no one except God above the local work to tell me what to do. I am responsible to my church and not to some organization.

Organizations kill if they are not careful. They over-organize, micro-manage. I came into the organizations thinking that they would care for me and for what I was doing. They ordained me and within months turned their backs on me because I did not share their particular vision for the churches they set me over. My anointing and mandate from God did not matter. What mattered was what they thought.

I suppose there may have been more to it than just that, but that was the gist of it. What seemed like freedom quickly became corporate bondage. And I will do it no more. I am independent and I was foolish to forget that.

That is one thing that has always been my problem. I am independent. I do not like organizations, no matter how well-meaning they may be.

No one controls me except God. I answer to no one but my church. Yet preaching the Good News is not something I can boast about. I am compelled by God to do it. How terrible for me if I didn’t preach the Good News!  (1 Corinthians 9:16).

I do what I do because God tells me, not because some earthly organization, no matter how well meaning, tells me I can. God alone empowers me to preach and God alone ordains me. And I am glad.

daily java

Daily Java:

Our actions will show that we belong to the truth, so we will be confident when we stand before God. Even if we feel guilty, God is greater than our feelings, and he knows everything. (1 John 3:19-20)

We try our hardest. But as hard as we try, we still do not do what we need to do. After a while, we begin to feel guilty. Am I really a Christian, we ask? If I was really a Christian, if the Spirit of God was really in me, if I was really good, I wouldn’t do those things.

And they may not be good things. In fact, some of them might even be despicable.

But consider this: you are human and as such make mistakes. If you didn’t make mistakes, you would not be human. You would be weird. The only person who ever lived, who ever drew breath and sweated sweat and ate food and so on, the only one who never made mistakes was Jesus himself. Only him. Everybody else, without exception, made mistakes.

Moses was just about the greatest man who ever lived. Deuteronomy said that There has never been another prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face (Deuteronomy 34:10). Yet, he sinned by losing his temper in Exodus 17 and disobeyed God by not doing what he said. True, he was fed up with God’s people and felt God’s own anger towards them, but he still made mistakes. God respected him just about above all others but he still sinned.

Elijah was another. A great prophet of Israel who was so good that God sent a Chariot of Fire in 2 Kings 2 to get him and take him away so he wouldn’t have to die. Yet he had a problem all his life with depression and constantly was in a funk. He was great enough God didn’t want him to die, but he still had problems.

All the rest of the great men of God. All of them were great but all had problems. Noah drank too much, as did Lot. Both were saved by the hand of God from their places, but both had problems. Abraham lied a lot. David couldn’t keep his hands off other women, the apostle Peter had a bad temper, the apostle Paul didn’t seem to like women very much. It goes on.

But the one thing all these people had in common was the knowledge that God loved them and that he was with them in spite of their failures. He was with them and they knew it.

The same goes with us. We try and we try but we still fail. As the apostle Paul said in Romans 7, sometimes it seems that all the things we do not want to do are the things we keep on doing and the things we want to do we cannot seem to accomplish. But as he says in Romans 8, we are still saved by God through his Spirit and through his grace.

Yes, we screw up daily, hourly, minutely – but even so, we are his children and he loves us.

And not only does he love us, as long as we are trying our best, we are saved.

As John says above, Even if we feel guilty, God is greater than our feelings and he knows everything.

We are not serving a God who demands perfection or even expects us to feel perfect. We are serving a God who recognizes our failings and our weaknesses and loves us anyway. And even when we feel that failure in his sight and our hearts figure we have lost it all, he is greater than our hearts.

He loves us anyway, even when we do not think so.

That is the beauty of grace, knowing that we are fine in God even when we do not feel like we are.

daily java

Daily Java:

Rejoice in our confident hope (Romans 12:12)

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the four Sundays that come before Christmas. Advent was designed by some on the early church as a watching time, waiting for the advent – or coming – of the Messiah.

The world then, like the one we live in now, was a world of no hope. And hope is a strange thing, something hard to define. You either have it or you don’t.

Those who have hope are happy, even when things are going badly. They have some point to life, some reason to get up in the morning. They live.

Those who do not have it are miserable, they are despairing. There is no point, no purpose to their lives. They just exist.

You see people like that around. They are just waiting for something to happen, dreading the day it does, not knowing how to get the strength to make it through another day. Their dreams are gone, their joy is gone, their lives are futile.

They may even be people in good jobs or with good families. It may seem that they have everything to live for. But in their eyes, you see it. There is no hope. They are null and void in life, just waiting to die.

The apostle Paul calls it our confident hope. It is a hope that shows. We may even be going through a rough time in our lives, but the hope is there, maybe even partially buried. But it is there. And it will come back. It is a certain confidence in the fact that we know we are loved and that there is some purpose or reason beyond what we have been able to cobble together ourselves.

It is like the confidence of a man who knows his physical limitations and is walking through a rough neighborhood. It is like the confidence of a pretty girl who can break her nose and know it will be fine and she will still be pretty. It is like the salesman who is good at sales but hasn’t had any customers come in. He knows sooner or later they will and he will sell.

It is like sister Ella in her new sparkly cap. It looks good and people stop to tell her. She is confident in it.

It is knowing that things will turnout fine even if they look bad.

That is the hope we celebrate today, the hope of the resurrection, the hope of eternal life, the hope of purpose and meaning beyond this world. We celebrate hope. Jesus brought us hope. God gives us hope through him. As a Christ-follower, we have hope.

And that is what today is all about: hope. Confident hope. Eternal hope. Extreme hope. A hope that is everlasting and will never die.

That is our gift from God. And when we hope in him, we give it back to him.

daily java

Daily Java:

You will never again return to the land you yearn for. (Jeremiah 22:27)

In the book of Jeremiah, the writer tells his people that they are being punished by God for past national sins and that they are going to have to go into exile from their homeland for 70 years. He tells them that he knows they do not want to and that they want to come back home, but then he tells them that they will never again see the land they love.

I want to be young again. I am not sure why I have been feeling this way, but I am not happy with the way my life has gone and want to change it, to do things differently, to make more of a difference than I have.

I read a quote today by somebody, I forgot who, that said, one idea of hell is on the last day of your life, just before you die, you meet a person who is what you could have been. To the writer, that was hell, too see what you could have accomplished, what you could have achieved if you had let yourself do it. I personally do not think I could bear it to see what I could have done.

When I was younger, people told me a lot that I was going to accomplish great things one day, that I was talented enough to do so. But I didn’t.

I made a lot of mistakes and bad choices throughout my life. And I would almost give anything to go back and change them. but instead, I am 63 and starting all over again in a new denomination. I don’t have but maybe 15 years left, 20 at the max, and here I am starting again.

I had the talent to become a great musician but grew up in an acappella church. I could have been a writer but never gave myself to it. If I had been more judicious, I could have been a big name preacher. I had the speaking ability and the personality, and when I was younger, the ability to get people to follow me.

But I was none of those things. Instead, I went from church to church, seeking something. Wanderlust afflicted me and I dragged my family around all over the place. I am broke, with little or no credit rating. I could not buy a car or house if my life depended on it.

I am an older man living in a tiny town, pastoring a tiny church and was grateful to get the job.

I also feel I have left out things I wanted to do in life for one reason or other. At many points in my life, I can point to a decision that was bad and resulted in our leaving where we were, or failing in where we were. I can also see where I could have gone in a drastically different direction if I had just known what I know now.

And I want to change it. But I cannot. I will never be any younger, no matter what I want or what good I think I might have done in the kingdom or fun I might have had in life.

Hebrews says that we live once and then face the judgment. Everybody does and so will I, even if I do not want to.

It is a foolish wish, I know. And it is one I wish I could get out of my mind. I think about it at night and consider the changes, how people would respond to me, like me better, etc.

Rampant nostalgia for that which is irretrievable is tiresome.