Flipping out, Losing it, Going off, and other generally mean things

Sometimes people are hard to deal with.

Six or seven years ago we had an outdoor concert in the grass field behind our church.  Featuring our praise band playing on a flatbed trailer, it was something we had not done in recent years, and we were excited about it.

A few days before the concert, I was out one afternoon distributing door hangers in neighborhoods near the church.  One of those neighborhoods is sandwiched between rental communities.  Interestingly, the homes in the neighborhood look very similar to the homes in the rental community, and it can be hard to tell where one starts and the other stops.  This is a key distinction because while it is legal to put up door hangers in the neighborhood, the rental community has a no solicitation rule.

From the direction I was walking, I did not see the rental community sign that mentioned this rule.  I got about 20-30 door hangers out illegally before a man came rushing out of his house yelling at me from across the parking lot: “You’re not allowed to do that!  Didn’t you see the sign?  No solicitation here!”

You know how your body can heat up very fast when someone confronts you harshly?  Yeah…

Why did he have to be so mean?  He wasn’t wrong about holding me to the law.  He correctly interpreted and applied the law.  He was also right about bringing it to my attention.  But did that give him the right to be unkind and mean?

I wonder what was going on in his life, in his history, that led him to react that way?

Have you ever been mean like that?  I have.  Way too often.  My guess is that many of you know what I’m talking about.  You’ve lost it.  Or people have been very unkind to you.  The stories abound.

We can unload on Facebook.  We can go off on persistent telemarketers or customer service reps from another country who have accents that are difficult to understand.  We scream at the TV.  We yell at family members, friends, neighbors and co-workers.

As we prepare to study the next few characteristics of the Fruit of the Spirit, gentleness, kindness, and goodness, I wonder if you might think through why we can be so unkind, so mean, so hurtful?  And if you’d like, let’s discuss it a bit here before the sermon tomorrow.  I’ll also share how my story with the angry man ended!

Follow up to Joy & Peace (aka “resting in the liver”)

What an amazing Sunday!  We got to celebrate with seven people as they were baptized, proclaiming their faith in Christ and their desire to be his disciples for life.  That visual image of moving from death (under the water) to life (rising above the water) is so clear.

Through those baptisms on Sunday we saw a bit of what Jesus meant when he said he came to give us abundant life.  We also learn about that life through the Fruit of the Spirit.  On Sunday we took a brief look at Joy and Peace.  Very similar to the difference between “Like and Love”, which is the difference between opinion and conviction, we talked about how we can experience joy and peace despite the circumstances.  James reminds of this when he says “Consider it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds”. 

Wow.  Read that a couple times reflectively.  James knew what it meant to rest in the liver, which is, by the way, one way some cultures talk about peace.  In our culture, the heart or stomach or mind is the seat of our emotions.  But liver?  Yep, the liver.  We might say “give your liver a rest,” but when we say that, we’re not talking about emotions!  In some cultures they feel emotion is centered in the liver like we say we feel it in our heart.  Just different body parts, that’s all.  Same phenomenon.

The question is how do we properly deal with our emotions.  James is essentially saying “Use your mind (consider) when you are dealing with life’s crap (it) to control your emotions (joy).”  Consider it joy.  Yeah, it’s that simple.

Yeah, right.  Simple?  Try impossible.  Or at least it can seem that way.

So I came across this very helpful article.  Check it out.  Maybe it will help you grow joy and peace in your life.  Another excellent resource about emotions is the book The Cry of the Soul by Dan Allendar and Tremper Longman.  I urge you to begin a study of it.  Have you contacted a friend to help you?  Why not meet with them week by week until you finish studying the book?  We’re growing fruit this month!  Maybe discussing it more here will help too?

Resting in your liver

Joy and Peace.

Two things we followers of Jesus are to be known for.  And yet, how many of us don’t feel joy and peace?  How about you?  Are you feeling a lack of peace in your life?  Not feeling joy?

What we need to learn to do is to rest in our liver.  Yeah, that’s right!  Rest in your liver.  Know how to do that?

The second sermon in our Fruit of the Spirit series is tomorrow, and we’ll be taking a look at Joy and Peace, including what it means to rest in your liver.  Join us to learn more!

Also, we are excited that we’ll be baptizing seven people tomorrow!  Pray for the Lord to help you grow joy and peace as we study his word together and praise him for the work he has done in each of the people’s lives who are being baptized.

Follow up to Favorite Love Song

In preparation for the sermon on Sunday, I asked the question on this blog, “What is your favorite love song?”  There were so many great responses!  We heard of another church that put together a whole bunch of love songs, made a fun medley out of it, and we played the video during the sermon.

Our culture has so many different views on love, doesn’t it?

“I can’t fight this feeling anymore…”  Often love is portrayed that way.  A feeling, an opinion, and something that can change.  But we learned from 1 Corinthians 13, that the love God wants us to have is deep.  More like the song “I will always love you.”  Take a look at this encouraging video that describes the amazing love God wants us to have.

Sometimes it is very difficult to love certain people.  Do you have one of those people in your life?  In your family?  Neighborhood or workplace?  Guess what, they’re in the church too. Jesus said, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.”  One litmus test for discipleship to Jesus is that we must love other disciples of Jesus.  We are to be known for this!

But again, it can be so hard!  It is okay to admit that we are having a hard time with someone in the church.  In fact, it is good to admit it, but in a very sensitive, caring way.  Maybe not in the middle of the worship service!  Instead, it is vital that we bring a trusted friend to help us.   Do you have an accountability partner?  Who can you reach out to that will help you love?

For the next month as we study the Fruit of the Spirit, we should be able to look back and see that fruit growing in our lives!  That means we should be more loving at the end of the month than we are now.  Having someone to walk alongside us to help us can be the deciding factor as to whether or not we are growing.  God uses people in our lives to encourage us.  So will you invite someone into your fruit-growing process?  And will you pray “Spirit, fill me that I might grow your fruit in my life.”?

Also feel free to discuss here!

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!