What is your favorite love song?

I’m excited because tomorrow we start a new teaching series on the Fruit of the Spirit.  Last week at Vacation Bible School we studied the Fruit of the Spirit, so we thought it would be cool to keep the study going.

First up is love!  Love is all over our culture.

This afternoon, if you were in our house, you could hear one of the newest hit love songs, “Ooh, La, La” by Brittney Spears blaring from a room upstairs.  I’ll admit it, I really enjoy a good love song.  I’m not sure if “Ooh, La, La” fits the bill, at least in my mind!  Lovers over the decades have come up with so many wonderful love songs, both lyrically and musically.

Often they’re catchy, because love is so exciting.  Some love songs are very emotional, because love is deep.  Some love songs make us sad, because love can be difficult.

So what’s your favorite love song?  And why?

Prayer and the Spirit World

Tomorrow we finish our study of Daniel.  What a life that guy lived!  For the past couple months, one of the postures we have seen Daniel take, time and time again, is that of kneeling in prayer.

Daniel is a Jedi master of prayer.  We’ll look at chapters 9 and 10, which play this out in very colorful fashion for us.

What kind of prayer did Daniel pray?  How did he do it?

How did God answer?

Do different intensities of prayer receive different responses from God?

Does prayer really make a difference?

And what might be of most interest of all is that connection of prayer to spiritual warfare.  Angels vs. Demons.  Are they for real?

What do you think?

Dreams and Visions

I admittedly gave Phil Bartelt a tough assignment this weekend.  Phil is preaching at Faith Church because I was at Dads-n-Lads camp with my son Jared at Twin Pines for the better part of the week.

Phil is preaching on four chapters in Daniel.  7, 8, 11, 12.  Check them out, and you’ll see why I called it a tough assignment.  Not only is it four chapters, the material is very, well, strange.  It is filled with dreams and visions, prophecies about the future.  That should come as no surprise to you if you have been following along with our study of the book of Daniel.  From the first chapter we learn that God blessed Daniel with the gift of interpreting dreams.  Then God gave the Babylonian kings some powerful dreams and visions which no one could understand except Daniel.

In these chapters, God and Daniel are at it again.

So it is four chapters, it is about dreams, but it is also about prophecy, the meaning of which scholars have debated for centuries.

And Phil is going to figure it all out for us!  😉

But I need you to prep for this sermon.  Read those chapters ahead of time.  Also read what Jesus had to say about prophecy and future times.  He talked about it in places like Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21 and Acts 1:6-7.

People have at times requested that I preach about the book of Revelation.  This will come very close!

Civil Disobedience

Maybe you had to read Thoreau’s paper on Civil Disobedience in high school or college.  It is a transcendentalist classic work of American literature.  Here is a brief summary.

Have you ever practiced civil disobedience?  I’ve heard of people who rationalize not paying taxes. I’ve heard of people who try to pay their electric bill with private currency.  Imagine you’re a small business owner, and a customer tries to pay you with a bunch of gold coins. Liberty Dollars But they are not imprinted with the markings of the US Federal Reserve.  What would you do?  Many people believe that money in the USA should be based on the gold standard, so they buy gold and try to pay for things with gold.  It is an act of civil disobedience.  Some have been put in prison for this.

That’s what happened with Thoreau.  He disagreed with some government policies and decided not to pay taxes, so he was thrown in jail.  In our study of the book of Daniel, this coming Sunday we come to one of the most famous cases of civil disobedience in the history of humankind.  It involves bloodthirsty lions too!

Take a look at Daniel chapter 6.  Ask yourself, are there ways you need to be practicing civil disobedience?  How did Daniel do this?  Why?

How do you feel about job evaluations?

It is summertime, and among many other things we do every summer at Faith Church (like the 4th of July picnic at Long’s Park, VBS and summer camp at Twin Pines), we also do staff evaluations. 

Usually I bring along a ministry volunteer that serves with the particular staff member, and we talk with them about the previous year.  The Pastoral Relations Committee handles my evaluation.  Each member of the committee receives an eval form, they fill them out, return them to the committee Chair, who compiles them, and we all meet in August to talk it over. 

Anybody else dislike job evaluations?

Or are you strange enough to welcome them?!?!  Maybe you get excited for someone to tell you how you need to improve?  Or maybe you are so awesome at your job that your eval is perfect every year! 

Or maybe not…

Have you ever had one of those evals where you go into the meeting, and you get generally high marks for your job performance?  You’ve been a very good employee, and your boss wants to tell you that.  But they also feel they have to point out things that needed improvement, even if those areas are minor or far and few between.  Like they will somehow fail as a boss if they don’t at least give one or tow critiques.  Nobody is perfect, right?  There has to be something wrong.  Maybe you’ve been in one of those eval meetings that I’m talking about, and though you look at the official report they give you, and the report is glowing, you walk out of the meeting feeling like you just got kicked in the gut.  How do you feel about those job evals?

Then there are other kinds of eval meetings.  These are the ones you walk into confidently.  You are feeling good about the past year or past six months, and you feel like you’re about to hit a home run.  Instead, you strike out.  The job eval points out things in your performance that shock you.  You think “That’s not true!  That’s not me.  This must be a mistake, this must have been meant for someone else.”   But it was meant for you.  It was about you.  It is the truth.  

How does that feel?  How did you miss the truth about yourself?  How can you have a perspective about your job performance that was so misguided? 

Is it possible, as we look to Daniel 5, that the job performance scenario could be said about your discipleship to Jesus?

Are you changing?

Have you become a different person in the last year?  How about in the last five years?  For those of you who have lived a bit longer, are you different now from what you were 30, 40, or 50 years ago?

We were watching videotapes this past week of our family 13 years ago.  Some of them were from our year in Jamaica, and our two oldest boys were 3 and 2 years old.  We watched them with great joy because it was so cute seeing our boys that little.  I’ll be honest, though…it made me ache inside.  The passage of time is filled with joys and sadness.  How many of you have felt the sadness of your children or grandchildren growing up?  How many of you have said, “I just want them to stay little”?  Our little ones weren’t even born in those videos, and now they are 7 and 9.  Sometimes I say to them, “How about it guys, let’s stop growing!” 

But they just keep getting older…

We all go through change in our lives, we become different people as the years go by. Sometimes the change is for the good, sometimes for the worse. Are you changing? How can we change in the right direction?

This Sunday we study Daniel chapter 4 and learn about a pretty dramatic change that happens in King Nebuchadnezzar’s life.  Would you be willing to tell us here how you have been changing?  Then read Daniel 4!

Church is a business?

I ordered a book today.  One of my pastoral friends has highly recommended it, and it can’t come soon enough.

Why?

I get so freaking frustrated because I am running a business, the success of which is measured by numbers.  Those numbers are decreasing.  That gets me upset, even though I know that Jesus is not about numbers going up (think narrow way that few will find).  I still want to report numbers going up.  There is a part of me that doesn’t care that the church is using a business model, and that is not what Jesus ever wanted.  I still want success!  I’m addicted to it, I admit it.  And emotionally, it is very, very hard to let that go.  But I need to.  I need to focus on making disciples, so I’m really looking forward to the book!

The book?  Building A Discipling Culture by Mike Breen and Steve Cockram.  Want to join me in a study?

Nehemiah, Brother Lawrence & Conversing with God all day long

Yesterday we studied the OT Hero, Nehemiah.  We saw that he was a man of prayer.  In fact, it seems like most of the book of Nehemiah is a prayer journal.  As we read the story of his passion to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem, little prayers are sprinkled throughout, personal prayers from Nehemiah’s heart and mind.

When he gets the news that Jerusalem’s walls are in ruins, he prays immediately.

When he nervously walks into the presence of the king with a sad face on, and the king says “What’s wrong? What can I do for you?”, the first thing Nehemiah does is pray.

This pattern runs through the entire book, and in fact the final line of the book is another personal prayer.

It seems to me that Nehemiah had developed a continual conversation with God.  He knew how to have times of set, formal prayer, as he demonstrates in prayer and fasting at the beginning of the story.  But he also went to prayer so effortlessly, so quickly in a moment’s notice when trouble arose.  God was always there, having never left, and the relationship between the two was current, active, engaged.  I love how he remarks in 8:10 “the joy of the Lord is your strength.”  He could say this because he experienced it personally.

This closeness with God reminds me of a monk who would live about 2000 years after Nehemiah.  Brother Lawrence also learned to converse with God all day long.  You can read his story here.  It is a short, but powerful story that is perhaps the best illustration of Paul’s admonition that we should “pray without ceasing.”  Lawrence worked in the monastery kitchen, and would be so deeply engrossed in talking with God while washing dishes and preparing meals, that he gave up on daily formal prayer.  To return to his room for devotions was for him a distraction from his conversation with God.  Wouldn’t it be amazing to have such closeness all day with the Lord?

Let us be people who find the joy of the Lord as our strength as we learn to converse with him all day long.

Does prayer matter?

I received a piece of communication this week that told the story of a friend’s urgent prayer request to God. Interestingly the very thing that my friend asked God to stop from happening…ended up happening. As a result the last thing my friend said to me was, “What is the point?”

Good question. I appreciate the honesty. I have wondered this many times myself, and I have read numerous books on the subject, in addition to what God says in the Bible. There are many sub-questions to consider when attempting to answer this quandary of whether or not prayer matters.

To what degree do people have free will?
Does God plan out all the details of the future?
Is it possible that he would hear our prayer and change his mind?
We say God knows all things, so wouldn’t he already know what we’re going to pray and what the outcome will be?
In what sense are we in a relationship with God that involves the kind of give and take that prayer seems to assume?
Or is prayer just an exercise in dutiful obedience?
What other factors are involved?

There was a man in the Old Testament, Nehemiah, who seems to have a confident grasp of these matters. At Faith Church tomorrow we’re going to look at his story, trying to answer some of these questions. As you read those questions above, how do you answer them? Let’s discuss!

How to deal with bitterness in our families

This is a story that starts with tragedy.  Lots of tragedy. 

A lady named Naomi lost her husband.  Then her two sons also died, leaving three women as widows.  A lady and her two daughters-in-law.  You can read the story in the biblical book titled Ruth.

In our world we have seen many different reactions to tragedy.  We have felt them within ourselves.  Naomi’s one daughter-in-law, Orpah, returns to her family, but the other, Ruth, stays with Naomi.  Even when Naomi decides to return to her hometown, Ruth leaves her own people to join Naomi.  It seems the daughters-in-law are coping.  Naomi, not so much.

Returning to her home town of Bethlehem, Naomi, which means “pleasant”, says, “Don’t call me that.  Instead call me ‘Mara’”which means “bitterness.”  She is upset at God.  Where she left Israel with a husband and two sons, a full family, she has returned to Israel, she says, empty.  She blames God, something many of us have done.

Different ways to handle tragedy.  Some cling, some leave, some get bitter.

As I read this story, however, I could help but wonder how Ruth felt about Naomi’s statement?  Some people would hear their mother-in-law say “Call me ‘bitter’ because I have returned empty” and think to themselves “Why is Naomi saying that?  What about me?  Am I worth nothing to her?  She shouldn’t say ’empty’…she has me!”  It would be very easy to join right in the bitterness and allow the bitterness to be directed right back to Naomi.  How many times have you experienced something like that in your family relationships?  Thinking “I can’t believe they said that!”  Or  “They are taking me for granted.”  “I’m not being treated right.”  “Look at all I have done for them, and this is the thanks I get?”  Ruth could easily have thought to herself “Wow, lady, I just lost my husband too, and yet I decided to leave my homeland, my people, and travel all this way to start a whole new life, just to be with you…and you give me nothing.  You call yourself ’empty’?  I’ll show you ’empty’…I’m out of here.”  And Ruth could head back home.

Ever experienced bitterness in your family?  We don’t know what went through Ruth’s mind.  It wouldn’t surprise me if it was something like I described here, but thankfully, she certainly didn’t act on those thoughts if she had them.

What can we do about bitterness?  Have any thoughts?

I encourage you to read Ruth and discuss here!