The Intrusive Word, Preaching to the Unbaptized

Greetings All,

I like stories. I do.  Not fiction, but stories that are true.  And I hope you like them as well, since this week's"thought"  is a story.  A true story.  One that is a little humorous, a little sad, and a little challenging as well. It comes to you from William Willimon and is taken from the preface of his book, "The Intrusive Word, Preaching to the Unbaptized."  Enjoy.


     

     "In my last congregation, we decided that we needed to grow. We voted to launch a program of evangelism... You know what that means. It's the, "We had better go out and get new members of we'll die" syndrome..  Our church had begun a two-decade decline in membership, so we figured that a little church-growth strategy was in order.  We studied a program from our denomination telling us how to get new members. Among other things, the church-growth program advocated a system of door-to-door visitation. So we organized ourselves into groups of two and, on an appointed Sunday afternoon, we set out to visit, and invite people to our church.

     The teams went out, armed with packets of pamphlets describing our congregation, our denomination, and fliers portraying me, the smiling, accessible pastor, inviting people to our church. Each team was given a map with their assigned street. Helen and Gladys were given a map. They were clearly told to go down Summit Drive and to TURN RIGHT. That's what they were told. I heard the team leader tell them, "You go down Summit Drive and turn right. Do you hear me, Helen? That's down Summit Drive and turn right."  But Helen and Gladys, both approaching eighty, after lifetimes of teaching elementary school, were better at giving directions than receiving them. Thy turned left, venturing down into the housing projects to the west of Summit Drive...  [They] proceeded to evangelize the wrong neighborhood, and thereby ran the risk of evangelizing the wrong people.

     Late that afternoon, each team returned to the church to make their reports. Helen and Gladys had only one interested person to report -- a woman named Verleen. Nobody on their spurious route was interested in visiting our church, nobody but Verleen. She lived with her two children in a three-room-apartment in the projects, we were told. Although she had never been to a church in her life, Verleen wanted to visit ours. This is what you get, I said to myself, when you don't follow directions. This is what you get when you won't do what the pastor tells you to do. You get a woman from the projects named Verleen.

The next Sunday, Helen and Gladys proudly presented Verleen at the 11:00 service, along with her two feral-looking children.  Verleen liked the service so much she said that she wanted to attend the Women's Thursday Morning Bible Study.  On Thursday, Verleen appeared, proudly clutching her new Bible, a gift from Helen, the first Bible Verleen had ever seen, much less owned. I was leading the study on the prescribed reading for the coming Sunday, Luke 4, the story of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. "Have any of you ever been faced with temptation and, with Jesus' help, resisted?" I asked the group after presenting my material. "Have any of you refused some temptation because of your Christian commitment?"  One of the women told about how, just the week before, there  was some confusion in the supermarket checkout line, and before she knew it, she was standing in the parking lot with a loaf of bread she hadn't paid for.  "At first I thought, 'why should I pay for it? They have enough money here as it is.' But then I thought, 'No, you are a Christian.' So I went back in the store and paid them for that loaf of bread."  I made some approving comment.

     It was then that Verleen spoke up. "A couple years ago, I was into cocaine really big. You know what that's like!  You know how that stuff makes you crazy.  Well, anyway, my boyfriend, not the one I got now, the one who was the daddy of my first child, that one, well, we knocked over a gas station one night.  Got two hundred dollars out of it.  It was as simple as taking candy from a baby.  Well, my boyfriend, he says to me, "Let's knock off that Seven-eleven store down on the corner.'  And something in me, it says, 'No, I held up that gas station with you, but I ain't going to hold up no convenience store.'  He beat the hell out of me, but I still said, 'No.'  It felt great to say 'No,' cause that's the only time in my life I ever said 'No' to anything. Made me feel like I was somebody."  Through the stunned silence I managed to mutter, "Well, er, uh, that's resisting temptation. That's sort of what this text is about. And now it's time for our closing prayer."  After I stumbled out of the church parlor and was standing out in the parking lot helping Helen into her Plymouth, she said to me, "You know, I can't wait to get home and get on the phone and invite people to come next Thursday!  Your Bible studies used to be dull. I think I can get a good crowd for this!"...

     Verleen taught me that evangelism is not about getting new members for the church...  Evangelism is not about helping more nice, buttoned-down, middle-class folk like me to find deeper meaning in our lives. Evangelism is a gracious, unmanageable, messy by-product of the intrusions of God into the lives of people.  Verleen was not the only one who intruded into our nice, bourgeois club called Northside United Methodist Church.  She had been brought there, I believe, by Another. Time and again in our life together as a church, just when we get everything all figured out, the pews bolted down, and everyone blissfully adjusted to the status quo, God has intruded, inserting some topsy-turvy-turned life like Verleen, just to remind the baptized that God is large, unimaginable, and full of surprises...  I contend that, through evangelism - through repeated confrontations with the intrusive grace of God - the church can be born again. By letting God use us in God's never-ending pursuit of the unbaptized, the baptized can rediscover what it means for us to be the church. That unlikely gathering of those who are called to sign, signal, and witness to the graciousness of God in a world dying for lack of salvation."

     Willimon dedicated his book to Verleen.  His experience struck me because I have also experienced the blessing of God bringing along very real, transparent, 'don't-yet-know-church-words-or-culture' people like Verleen.  A non-churched addict who had contracted aids through sharing needles, and was initially dating a prostitute. A man I had the privilege of baptizing him before he passed.

     Another was a young lady, who after much prodding by a friend, finally came to our church in Honduras in an expensive car she had borrowed from a friend.  She parked on the steep hill in front of the church, and during the service the emergency brake let loose. One of the greeters interrupted the service to ask if anyone owned a grey Mercedes, because it had just rolled down the hill into a brick wall. At that, the lady jumped up from her seat, and in front of everyone (in a very loud voice) blurted out: "Oh ___!"  And, despite the initially stunned faces, the church elders were so happy she had joined with us, they paid for the repairs.

     Another time, a gentleman who struggled with alcohol (and had previously gotten into a fight with his wife in our front yard!) called us to come down to his house because he'd "found Jesus."  When we arrived at his house, he was watching a VHS (some of you remember what those are) of a Bill Gaither Concert.  And at one point in the concert, he was so moved by joy (I can't remember the song), that he leaped up where he was standing, and jumped so high, that his head hit the glass globe of a hanging light and shattered it all over him and the floor!  And that doesn't even include the young new-to-church ex-nightclub dancer, who offered a prayer request during the service with such descriptive language that some of the older folk almost turned pale from shock!

     You see, sometimes Christians can forget that Jesus' band of disciples were not all moral, straight-laced, upstanding, well-educated, middle-class, "grew-up-in-church-every-week" type people.  Some came from the other side of the tracks.  Some shocked those who were the self-appointed guardians of the religious status-quo.  It's supposed to be that way. In fact, if the Verleen's of the world are not attracted to our churches, or feeling welcomed there, we are doing something wrong. For as we see in the gospels, sinners (the really bad ones like Zealots, prostitutes and tax collectors) were attracted to Jesus, felt loved by Jesus, did not feel judged by Jesus, and wanted to be around Jesus. It's something that should be true of us as well if we are Christians (or as the word means, "little Christ's"). Dare we pray for more gracious intrusions from people like Verleen?

Living in the Grace of Jesus, Pastor Jeff

The Blessings of Marriage

Greetings All!

     Today I want to share a selection having to do with marriage -- though I must stress it's a helpful thought to consider whether one is married or not!  I do not know the title or publisher of the book I originally took it from years ago, though I did write down the author's name - Theodore Parker.
     I have used this quote numerous times at weddings and people have expressed their appreciation for it, and most all their complete agreement with it -- especially those who have been married for any length of time!  It is, in my humble opinion, worthy of your focused, thoughtful, and discerning consideration, since it contains much truth and wisdom. Enjoy.

“It takes years to marry two hearts completely, even of the most loving and tender type.  Every happy marriage is a long falling in love. Young people think love belongs only to the silken-haired and crimson-cheeked.  And it does in its beginnings.

But the golden marriage is a part of love about which the Bridal day knows nothing.  A mature and complete marriage, where wedlock is everything one could desire, where the ideal becomes actual, is not a common thing.  It is perhaps as rare as perfect personal beauty.

Men and women are married fractionally — a small fraction here, followed by a larger fraction there.  Very few are ever married totally, and those that are, only achieve it after some forty or fifty years of gradual growth, adjustment, perseverance and experimentation.

When a man and woman are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and victorious.  They walk better, their metabolism improves, they think more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and interesting, and they can do more than they ever dreamed of doing.

In love of this kind, sexual intimacy in not the dead end of desire, as it is in purely romantic or promiscuous love. It is the periodic affirmation of inward delight in each other, and the crown of an active, intentional and well-lived life.  Knit together by the bonds of friendship and mutual affection, their love is as interesting as it is enduring — able to withstand the winds of adversity and change, bear hardships, build upon the mistakes of the past, and use them as opportunities for forgiveness and growth.”

     In a society which sees less and less reason for marriage (4 out of 10 thirty-and-under-people now see no need for it at all), this "thought" gives us a better insight into the blessings of marriage, how one should view it, and what it might take to improve it.

     The health of the family unit is key to the preservation of any civil society, and the health of marriages is key to the health of that family unit.  We must, therefore -- especially in a society like ours which is decidedly not "marriage-friendly" -- always be praying for those who have entered into this, "bond and covenant of marriage (which) was established by God in creation."  This relationship of committed love received Jesus' stamp of approval by, "His presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee."   After all, it's a way of life which, "signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and His Church, and Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people"  (from The Celebration of Marriage, Book of Common Prayer).

May you be encouraged to persevere in this God-ordained relationship, and partake of the blessings God intended through it, Pastor Jeff

"Being poured out like wine," and "The need for confession."

Greetings All,









This week's thoughts' come to you from two different devotional books: Devotions for the God Guy - A 365 Day Journey," by Michael DiMarco,










and "Simply Sacred" by Gary Thomas.

The first has to do with "Being poured out like wine," and the second with "The need for confession."  I trust both will speak truth into your heart. Enjoy.

"But even if I am being poured out like a drink offering on the sacrifice and service coming from your faith, I am glad to rejoice with all of you."  Philippians 2:17 

     "When God uses you, he pours you out like wine and he breaks you like bread.  But what does all that mean? How can you become wine? How are you broken? Well, it's really an amazing analogy.  Wine is made from grapes. But before grapes can be drunk, they have to be crushed, smushed, turned to nothing but juice. Their former shape is destroyed and their very being translated from one essence to another.

        Have you ever felt crushed, squeezed, out of all your energy -- even to the core of your being? Don't be so quick to complain. It's very normal for the God guy to be crushed. But it's for a very good purpose: so that you can be poured out as part of the sacrifice of service.

     Okay, you can almost handle the idea of being broken by God. But what about when you are crushed by someone else? What then? Can you look at the crushing and still say, "Thank you for pouring me out, dear God."  Or do you buck against the torment and turn away from the strain?  When you are being crushed by someone other than God, don't start to wonder what you're doing wrong but think about how wine gets made.  You can't be poured out as a drink offering until you've been squeezed.

     So if you want to be turned from bitter grapes into beautiful wine, then you've got to accept the fingers that are squeezing you even when they aren't God's.  If God chooses to break you by letting you be squeezed and smushed by life, then don't start to worry that you've been forgotten or abandoned by God -- quite the opposite is true. When the pressure comes, don't sin because of it, but stand in the face of it -- and then you will be ready to be poured out as a part of the sacrifice."

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The Need For Confession

     "Dietrich Bonhoeffer shocked the [Protestant] theological world when, as a Lutheran theologian in the early part of the twentieth century, he began advocating that Protestants reinstate the practice of confession.  He did so not because he felt confession to a fellow human being was necessary in order to gain forgiveness from God [the point the first Protestants initially rebelled against], but because human confession has a practical purpose -- it makes our sin seem more real to us. 

        If you question this, ask yourself: "Why is it much easier to confess sins to God than to your pastor? Why is there more shame when another sinful human being observes my weakness than when I pronounce them before an all-holy God?"  Could it be because God's presence is so weak in our lives?  If we truly understood and cherished the beauty and holiness of God, we would shake a bit more when we approaching him.  But his invisibility often creates a buffer, thereby softening the impact of his presence.

     In and through another person God becomes real to us in human form. There is a flesh-and-blood person sitting next to me who flinches when they hear or see what should make me flinch, but doesn't -- and I see my hard heart exposed by their soft one."

        We might say that when it came to the Catholic sacrament of confession the Protestant Reformers, "threw the baby out with the bath-water."  It is one thing to reject confession to a priest as a sacrament that earns us salvific merit; it is another thing altogether to see confession as a helpful and healing practice for our spiritual growth and well-being.

     After all, if we take James 5:16 to heart, and realize it is spoken in the imperative or command form, we will see that it's really not optional for our growth in godliness. The thought that I can keep all my struggles secret, or worse yet should, simply stunts my spiritual growth, impoverishes me spiritually, keeps me in bondage to the sins I hide, and leads to self-deception regarding my true desire to move beyond that sin as well as my need for others in the body to hear me, love me, encourage me, offer me godly counsel, be firm with me, help me see past my blind spots, and hold me accountable.

       As Bonhoeffer also said (and I'll paraphrase): "Sin is like mold in a dark, damp basement.  Keep it hidden in the dark and away from the light and it grows and festers. But open the windows, and expose it to the direct sunlight, and it will soon shrivel up and die."  Too many believers feed their sin by keeping it hidden from the brothers and sisters they should be confessing it to as part of the sin-killing process of sanctification.

Just a little food for thought!  In His Service, Pastor Jeff

Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God

Greetings All,

     This "thought" comes from a man to whom I owe a deep debt of gratitude. He is one of my former professors at Gordon-Conwell and his "Life of Jesus" class still ranks as one of the best and most inspiring courses I've ever taken.
     To this day I still remember when he shared the anti-intellectual paradigm used in the Pentecostal church he was raised in: "I'd rather be a heart on fire (for God) than a mind on ice."  Yet as one who desired to pursue a PHd in biblical studies he had come to believe there was third alternative. That it was indeed possible to be, "A mind on fire for God," since we are called to love God "with all our mind."
     His booklet "The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospel," (a mere 20-25 page booklet which critiques the obvious flaws of that movement) is well worth the read, and also had a formative effect on my theology.  Thus, this thought is in honor of him, Dr. Gordon Fee, and comes from his book, "Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God."  Enjoy!

     "Despite the affirmations in our creeds and hymns and the lip service paid to the Spirit in our occasional conversations, the Spirit has been marginalized both in the halls of learning and in the life of the church as a community of faith.

     I do not mean that the Holy Spirit is not present; he is indeed, or we are not of Christ at all. But the primary emphasis regarding the Spirit's activity has been on his quiescence [stillness, quietness], based largely on imagery drawn from Elijah's encounter with God on Sinai, where the Lord was not in the wind, earthquake, and fire, but came to Elijah "in a still small voice" (I Kings 19:11-13).  Support for this view is then found in the New Testament by emphasizing Paul's "fruit of the Spirit" (Gal. 5:22-23), while suggesting that the "gifts of the Spirit" in I Corinthians 12-14 were for the apostolic period only.

     Quiescence, however, has sometimes fostered anemia, not only in the church corporately, but also at the individual level, evidenced in part by the myriad of ways individual believers have longed for a greater sense of God's presence in their lives.

     This common "missing out" on the Spirit as an experienced, empowering reality has frequently been "corrected" historically through a variety of Spirit movements -- most recently in this century in the form of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements.  Emphasis there has been on the "wind, earthquake and fire," and the primary texts are from Acts and I Corinthians 12-14.

       These Spirit movements have also tended to emphasize individualistic spirituality, so that the reality of the Spirit is sometimes merely experienced in the experience. Such piety frequently lacked sound biblical and exegetical basis or betrayed inadequate theological reflection.

   The net result has tended toward a truncated view of the Spirit on both sides, accompanied by an inadequate view of the role of the Spirit in Paul's understanding of things Christian. For Paul life in the Spirit meant embracing both fruit and gifts simultaneously -- what I have come to call life in the radical middle. The Spirit as an experienced and empowering reality was for Paul and his churches the key player in all of Christian life, from beginning to end. The Spirit covered the whole waterfront: power for life, growth, fruit, gifts, prayer, witness, and everything else.

   But if the empowering, experienced dimension of life in the Spirit is often missed on the one side, too often missing on both sides are two further matters that, for Paul, lie at the very heart of faith.  First, the Spirit as person, the promised return of God's own personal presence with his people; and second, the Spirit as eschatological fulfillment, who both reconstitutes God's people anew and empowers us to live the life of the future in our between-the-times existence -- between the time of Christ's first and second coming.

     If the church is going to be effective in our postmodern world, we need to stop paying mere lip service to the Spirit and to recapture Paul's perspective: The Spirit as the experienced, empowering return of God's own personal presence in and among us, who enables us to live as a radically eschatological people in the present world while we await the consummation (of the Kingdom). All the rest, including the fruit and gifts (that is, ethical life and charismatic utterances in worship) serve to that end." 

     For those who do not know what the word "eschatological" means, it essentially means "having to do with time." As believers in Jesus we are experiencing in the PRESENT, a degree of the blessings we will experience in full in FUTURE, when Jesus returns to consummate the kingdom He inaugurated at His first coming.
     Through Jesus and the Gospel, God is giving us a "foretaste" of the some of the blessings of the eternal state. In Christ, and through the influences of the Holy Spirit, God has already brought some of those FUTURE blessings (justification, healing, pardon, joy, eternal life...) into the PRESENT.

        Picture God sending the Spirit into the future age, where he takes an "armful" of the blessings promised to the saved in eternity, and brings some of those blessings (not all) back into the now, and lets us experience a taste of them in the present.

     That (though inadequate to fully explain it!) gives you an idea of what the concept "eschatological" (having to do with time) means in relation to the kingdom, the Spirit, and the Christian faith.

     And obviously, if we are to walk in step with the Spirit and emphasize His part in God's glorious work of redemption, just as the apostles did, we need to do as Fee suggests and,  "recapture Paul's perspective: The Spirit as the experienced, empowering return of God's own personal presence in and among us, who enables us to live as a radically eschatological people in the present world while we await the consummation (of the Kingdom)."

Hoping this will simply perk your interest to look at the two books mentioned above!  Pastor Jeff

Joy of Gaining Victory over Sin

Greetings All,

     This week's 'thought' comes to you from Tim Challies.
     It has to do with the joy of gaining victory over sin. It resonated with what I've found to be true both in Scripture and in my life, and thus I thought you might benefit from it as well. After all, a significant part of our Christian walk deals with the pursuit of godliness and the growth of the fruit of holiness.
     Salvation (at least as defined in the Bible) has to do with being "saved," or delivered, from the power and penalty of sin -- its penalty when we trust in Christ and are justified (or declared not guilty) through the application of the atonement to our actual guilt and the crediting of Christ's righteousness to our account, and its power as we continue to trust in Christ, come to know His will more fully through His revealed Word, and learn to stake our lives upon His promises to us in the Gospel. In regard to this Challies offers some helpful insights. Enjoy.

The Joy of Not Sinning

     "I think it is a question every Christian would like to ask God, given the opportunity. It is an honest question. A humble one, I hope  --  "If you have the ability to immediately destroy and remove all of a Christian’s sin the very moment he puts his faith in Jesus Christ, why don’t you?  Why didn't you?"

     There is always a good bit of debate in the Christian world about exactly how God sanctifies us and how human effort relates to divine work. Whatever we believe about sanctification, we know it is a lifelong battle and we know it is a difficult one. The difficulty is related to the extent of our depravity, the fact that the effects of sin extend to our every part, to our minds, our hearts, our wills, even our bodies. We could give every moment of every day to the battle against sin and still die as deeply sinful people. Every Christian will die much more holy than he was when he first put his faith in Jesus Christ, but a lot less holy than he would like and probably a lot less holy than he would have imagined.

     The Bible is indispensable in sanctification.  Literally.  You cannot and will not grow in holiness without reading God’s Word without submitting yourself to God’s Word without applying its truths to your life.

     And yet the Bible does not zap away sin any more than my salvation does. I have discovered in my own life that there are not a lot of texts in the Bible that instantly obliterate a particular sin. Rarely do I hear a text preached and see an instant, substantial advance against a sin. Never do I read a text and see my sin immediately and irreversibly melt away. Rather, the Bible provides the categories for my sin, it displays my sin in all its ugliness, it displays holiness in all its beauty, it exposes me as a sinner, it convicts me of my need to do battle against this sin, it gives me the desire to destroy it, it arms me to do so, and gives me hope through the gospel that this sin—even this sin with such a grip on me—is powerless before the indwelling Holy Spirit. And then begins the long and difficult task, the moment-by-moment battle, of killing it, of going back to the Bible again and again and preaching its truths to myself, of relying on the Spirit, of calling out for his help, of waging war against my own flesh, my own desires, my deep-rooted habits, my mind, eyes, ears, heart, hands, feet, and everything else I am.

Romans 7:14-25

     Putting sin to death is never easy—life does not bring much that is the rare combination of easy and worth doing. Sanctification is no exception. Yet few things are more rewarding, more encouraging, than seeing victory over sin, seeing a pet sin begin to look ugly, seeing its power erode, seeing its prevalence diminish. Few things bring so great a sense of God’s pleasure and so great an opportunity for worship than not sinning in the face of what was once a near-irresistible temptation.

     I don’t know why God did not sovereignly remove all my indwelling sin the moment I became a Christian. I don’t know why he does not zap it away through a simple encounter with Scripture. What I do know is that sanctification is a battle, but a battle always worth fighting."

     The fight with our adversary, sin, is an ongoing mystery.  It is always a struggle. Sometimes we make progress.  Other times we think we have only to discover it was not us who changed but our circumstances. And as much as we might wish it were not so, we can easily deceive and numb our conscience with excuses when there happens to be a sin we want to participate in. Not only that, when something becomes universally acceptable in society, it invariably seems to become acceptable in the church -- even if God's word condemns it.

     That's why we need to be ever in the Word. That's why we need the Bible to inform our consciences and not the latest public opinion polls or the media. God calls us to resist sin, not compromise with it. And that battle never ends so long as we are in this flesh. Yet as Challies notes, it is "a battle always worth fighting."

     We may succumb.  We may slip and fall. We may willingly fall. But when we do God's habitual call to His people is to rise to our feet again as forgiven children, readjust or put our armor back on, and get back into the fray of the battle once again -- continuing to do so as long as we have breath.

     And, yes, it is a battle worth fighting.  Because the honor of our worthy and gracious God, and the validity of our testimony to the life-transforming power of the Gospel, and our joy in Jesus hangs in the wings. We will not always win. That much we know. There may even be times we lose more than we win. But with so much at stake -- we must never lose the will to fight.

In His Service, Pastor Jeff

Church Growth

Greetings All, 

    This week's 'thought' is for those of you who love the Church, and because you love it, desire its health and vitality.  It's a selection which someone else came across, and when he handed it too me, said: "I think you'll like this."  He was right, I did.  It resonated with something in me because it expresses so well something I've always felt but have struggled to express as well as the author of this selection does. 

 

     It comes to you from Dr. Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois and is taken from the book: "Wayfaring:  Essay's Pleasant and Unpleasant." Enjoy, and be challanged, and never stop loving the Church Christ loves and for which Christ gave His life (Eph. 5:25) -- Dr. Jacobs tells us one of the ways we can.

 

     "We Christians cannot set as our goal the becoming of a counterculture for the common good.  Nor can we directly seek the elimination of the vices and illusions that constrain our attempts to love our neighbors as we should.  We will strip away our self-deceit and become a true light unto the nations only by seeking and becoming faithful to the call of the Gospel.  If we eventually become a true counterculture for the common good, that counterculture will simply be the product of our faithfulness. 

 

     All too often Christians think even of faithfulness as a means to an end, that end being (usually) something called 'church growth.'  We think so because in our culture goals are always products; quantifiable goods that, because they are quantifiable, can be produced by techniques.  Thus our true ancestor is Charles Finney, the 19th century evangelist who believed that his evangelistic techniques were fully scientific:  'The right use of means for a revival is as philosophically sure as the right use of means to raise grain and a crop of wheat.' It is truly wonderful that Finney and his many modern heirs fail altogether to notice that whenever the Bible compares soul-winning to agriculture, it invariably does so in order to emphasize the inscrutable sovereignty of God: Paul planted. Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.  And we never get an explanation of why the ground on which the sower sows is so variable in quality, in receptiveness to the seed of the gospel. Obedience, not results, must be our watchword. 

 

    Last Christmas Day my pastor, Martin Johnson, spoke of his youthful habit of walking in the forests of British Columbia at night, guided only by moonlight. It was remarkable how far he could see, how delicately beautiful the landscape. The only problem was that he couldn't see where to put his foot for his next step.  The light that is Christ, said Martin -- is just the opposite: it illuminates with perfect clarity your next step, but blots out the surrounding territory.  It's worth remembering that when people ask Jesus cartographic kind of questions -- 'Will many be saved or only a few?' -- Jesus tells them to mind their own spiritual business.  I think that if we try to formulate a plan for becoming a counterculture for the common good -- if we draw up a map and an itinerary -- we may well receive a similar rebuke.  'What's that to you? Follow me. One step at a time.' 

 

    Yet there is a sense in which a focus on today's obedience makes a long view possible: it does not yield a map, but it does yield a confidence that He who has called us is faithful, and will conduct the whole church to her journey's end. About a dozen years ago, Pope John Paul II answered a question concerning demographic predictions that Muslims would outnumber Catholics by the year 2000.  To this inquiry the Pope replied placidly. After all, Jesus Christ himself proposed a still more frightening question: 'When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?' (Luke 18:8)  The whole business of counting the adherents of religions in order to find out which of them 'has a future' is a process at best distracting from, at worst hostile to, true faith... 

 

     The church must insist on the integrity of its witness, because only such countercultural integrity will save the church -- and therefore serve the common good -- in the long term.  George Weigel points out that Pope Benedict is fond of quoting the old Benedictine maxim, Succisa virescrit -- 'pruned, it grows' -- but as every gardener knows, the immediate result of a vigorous pruning is an apparently lifeless remnant.  It is only in the next season that the luxurious growth appears... 

 

     How delightful it would be to drive past an empty megachurch and tell an unbelieving friend that the congregation couldn't pay their bills after they gave too much to rebuilding churches in New Orleans... We must remind ourselves that we can insulate ourselves from surprising uncertainties or setbacks only by the kind of false prudence that insulates us also from surprising blessings.  Indeed, we need to ask ourselves what, exactly, in our prudence, we are afraid of.  Sometimes I suspect that it is God himself, or at least life itself."   

 

 

          Duplicating the ways and methods of the world in the Church only produces worldly churches.  Whatever good Finney may have done in his own lifetime, his attempt to turn revival (or mass conversion) into a matter of duplicatable human means, methods and gimmicks, rather than a sovereign, miraculous and supernatural move of God where we are entirely dependent upon His grace, has left us with scores of people who have said a prayer under pressure from another, but never experienced true, saving, supernatural heart change through the implantation and germination of the seed of the Gospel in the soil of their soul.   Prof. Jacobs is right -- we are called by God to be obedient and faithful, not successful by the world's standard of measure (Rev. 3:7-13).  

   

           Loving the Church for the sake of the Lord of the Church, 

 

Pastor Jeff

Being Pruned

Greetings All,

This week's thought comes to you from the well-known devotional writer Andrew Murray (1828-1917). This particular selection is found in his book "The True Vine," which is a verse by verse expostion of John 15:1-16. A missionary to South Africa with the Dutch Reformed Church, Murray reacted against the deadening effects of raw rationalism and a Christianity that offered no vital experience with Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Murray has a special place in my own spiritual life, for he "discipled" me (in a way) in my first two years as a Christian. One week before I headed off to the Dominican Republic as a missionary (shortly after my conversion in 1980), I realized I needed some Christian literature to bring with me for that two year mission stint. And since I literally had no money at the time, and only a week before I left the U.S., I prayed earnestly for the Lord to supply some funds for the purpose of buying those books. Two days later a check for $55 came in the mail!

I then took the money, went to a local Christian bookstore in Marion, Indiana (totally ignorant of what Christian literature was good and what was not), and spent every dollar on books. I bought two by A.B. Simpson, one by F.B. Meyer, and SIX by Andrew Murray (Like Christ / The Spirit of Christ / Abide in Christ (his most popular) / Absolute Surrender / and With Andrew Murray in the School of Prayer).

All of Murray's books are set up in devotional style, with short 2-3 page chapters, making them very easy to read, contemplate and digest. This thought has to do with God pruning us so as to bring forth greater fruit in His service. Enjoy.

"He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, He prunes, so it will be even more fruitful." (John 15:2)

"I look out my window on large vineyards. The chief care of the vinedresser is the pruning. You may have a trellis vine rooting so deep in good soil that it needs neither digging, nor manuring, nor watering, but pruning it cannot dispense with, if it is to bear good fruit. Some trees need only occasional pruning; others bear perfect fruit without any; but the vine must have it. And here at the very outset of this parable, our Lord tells us the one work the Father does to the branch that bears fruit -- He prunes it that it may bear even more fruit.

Consider a moment what this pruning is. It is not the removal of weeds or thorns or anything from outside that may hinder the growth. No, it is the cutting off of the long shoots of the previous year's growth. The removal of something that comes from within, that has been produced by the life of the vine itself. It is the removal of something that is a proof of the vigor of its life.

The more vigorous the previous years growth has been, the greater the need for the pruning. It is the honest, healthy wood of the vine that has to be cut away. And why? Because it would consume too much of the sap to fill all the long shoots of last year's growth. The sap must be saved up and used for the fruit alone...

What a solemn, precious lesson! It is not to sin only that the cleansing and pruning of the Husbandman here refers. It is also to our religious activity [to growth spawned by the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit in our lives] as it is developed in the very act of bearing fruit. It is this that must be cut down and cleansed away. We must, in working for God, use our natural gifts of wisdom, or eloquence, or influence, or zeal. And yet, they are ever in danger of being unduly developed, and then trusted in. And so, after each season of work, God has to bring us to the end of ourselves, to the consciousness of our helplessness and the danger of all that is man, to feel that He is all and we are nothing. All that is to be left of us is just enough to recieve the power of the life-giving sap of the Holy Spirit.

What is of man must be reduced to its very lowest measure. All that is inconsistent with entire devotion to Christ's service must be removed. The more perfect the cleansing and cutting away of all that is of the self, the less surface over which the Holy Spirit [like the sap] needs to spread. The less there is of us, the more intense can be the concentration of our whole being to be entirely at the disposal of the Spirit."

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Then he ends with this prayer: "O our holy Husbandman, cleanse and cut away all that there is in us that could make a fair show, or could become a source of self-confidence and self-glorying. Lord, keep us very low, that no flesh may glory in Your presence. We trust You to do Your work."

So often we think that we must always be building upon, or leaving intact, all the growth of the past. We can be led to think that the healthy shoots that grew during past year's of vigorous spiritual growth should never be snipped or pruned. It almost seems counter-intuitive (to someone who has never farmed) to cut back the branches that grew so strong and high during rich and precious seasons of growth! I myself have often suffered from the false belief that fruit of a more precious and useful nature will grow on branches that sprouted long in my previous years of growth.

But this passage tells us otherwise. Past growth (though good and necessary at the time it grew) can actually be a deterrent to the production of richer and sweeter fruit in the present. The sap of the Spirit, if we understand Jesus, is diluted and weakened and wasted when it flows through lengthy branches of past growth all over again. As with grape vines, you want the sap to go directly to the new year's fruit, to sweeten it and make it more lucious and nutritious.

Though we don't often pause to think of it, I fear that many Christians (myself included) have frequently placed their trust in their growth, instead of the Lord who produced it. Or, as I have also seen, people sometimes cling to past experiences with God, or become content to live in the memory of those past times of growth, when what the Chief Vinedresser desires to do is come and prune them away (painful as it may be), that we may have new and better growth. Old growth is not pruned because it is bad, but because we don't want the sap of the Holy Spirit to be diluted and diminished in its intensity by having to flow through that now unnecessary old growth.

Just as pruned vines produce the best fruit, so also there is a habitual need for less of us, and more of Him. Instead of glorying in our growth, every so often we need to ask God to prune away the past season's growth, that we may be better able to bear lucious fruit for God in this present season of our lives.

With prayers that that pruning may not be too painful! Pastor Jeff