Things I Never Want To Forget

The mind is an amazing thing.  God has created us with the amazing ability to think, learn, remember and imagine, all in vivid detail and in full technecolor.  I was reminded how precious this gift is the other day when I visited one of our long-time members in the nursing home.  Gary is suffering from an inoperable brain tumor and the combination of the tumor placing pressure on his brain and the effects of radiation therapy have had a profound impact on his ability to think, speak, and remember.  My short visit with him has stuck with me for the last week; seeing the frustration on his face when he couldn't gather his thoughts enough to express what was on his heart, hearing the confusion in his voice as he tried to remember how long he had been going through treatments, and seeing the tears in his eyes as he apologized for being weak and emotional.  I began to think about all that I would lose if I could no longer remember the things that God has done in my life.  There are so many memories that I treasure, a joyous childhood marked by love, acceptance, and the godly example of my parents, a unique adolescent and high school experience that set me apart from my peers.  I had the opportunity to go to BBC at the zenith of its fruitfulness and experience the excitement and challenge of college life.  I would hate to lose the memory of the first night that I laid eyes on Shelley, and the near-stalkeresque pursuit of her that followed.  I treasure my memories of my days on the back side of the desert in Spokane, WA and the magical moments and hard lessons that I experienced there.  I can't imagine losing my grip on every little detail of the night I asked Shelley to marry me or the vision that she was as she walked down the aisle to become my bride.  I couldn't bear to lose my sense of wonder at the birth of my children and at each stage of their development.  I would hate to forget what my heart felt like the first time I stepped into the pulpit as the pastor, the rush of excitement and the utter terror at the awesome responsibility that God had laid on my shoulders.  How could I ever lose sight of the hundreds of couples that I have counseled with and then presided over their weddings?  How could I forget the blessed peace that God has given, even in the darkest hours, when I held beloved church members in my arms and sought to bring them comfort in the hour of tragedy and loss.  It would be a tragedy to lose sight of the hundreds of people over the years that I have been given the privilege of leading to Christ, and the look of relief and gratitude to God that radiated from their faces.  Victories and defeats, championships and near-misses, joys and trials, every one of these memories is precious to me.  As I have struggled this week to process the emotions that I felt after my visit with Gary, I have come to this conclusion.  First, I need to be thankful every day for the blessings that God has given me. Second, I need to tell the people that I love that I love them at every opportunity and the ones that are not so lovely, I need to make things right with before it's too late.  And finally, I need to write these things down so that when my memory begins to fade, I can look back with thanksgiving on what God has done.  I do not doubt that the day will come when I find myself in a similar situation to Gary's, whether it be because of illness or longevity.  So while I still can, I plan to hold fast to the memories that I treasure and be thankful to God every day.

Hope for a Nation

This morning I was able to participate in an event that I find very encourgaing.  I stood in front of Grove Middle School with a group of sixth through eighth graders and prayed for our community, our nation, our leaders and the lost.  The entire event was led by the students themselves and it offered hope for what the future holds for our country.  There are, among the upcoming generation, a few young people who are passionately in love with the Lord and His Word.  They understand their responsibility to be a witness and they are not ashamed to make a public stand for Christ out in front of their school.  Another group met at Grove High School and still another at the Community Center, all with the common purpose of standing up for Christ and acknowledging that the first and best remedy for our schools, our community, and our nation is prayer.  I look forward to seeing what God is going to do with some of these young prayer warriors.  I believe that He can use them to shake their world!

Radical

I have been reading a lot of things over the past few months that have challenged the status quo in my own Christian life.  I have begun to realize that I have settled into a comfortable pattern of worship, service to God, and witness that doesn't really demand too much of me.  Don't get me wrong, I work hard.  Many Saturday nights, I am in my office until 10:30 or 11:00 PM putting the finishing touches on the plans for Sunday's services. I have a steady routine wherein, I spend Monday seeking the Lord about what the sermon should be the following week, deal with any bookkeeping that needs to be done as a result of visitors or decisions the day before, and settle in to study for the next Sunday's sermon.  Despite what it looks like in my office, I have a fairly organized routine that allows me to prepare my sermon, create the study guide for the bulletin, create the PowerPoint, do the bulletin, prepare the order of service, set up the computer for projecting the song lyrics and sermon notes, and get all of the soundtracks and videos in place and ready to go.  I love to write, so the daily blog and email updates that sometimes take up my morning, are a fun and exciting part of my day.  They also serve as a natural outflow from my personal devotional time.  The pastoral tasks of visitation and counseling fall where they may during the week, giving every day a little variety and adding a personal touch to ministry that I love. Salt in the daily times of personal and long-term planning and putting out the little fires that arise from time to time and you have a basic picture of what my life and ministry have become.  I like it.  It's comfortable.  It's a challenge, but I generally know what to expect.  When I compare that to the example that I see in the New Testament and some of the basic statements of Christ about following Him, I am beginning to see that maybe He is calling me to something more. 
We have developed a brand of Christianity that we can easily align with the American way of life.  Blessing equals affluence.  Obedience is simply the avoidance of the big sins.  Charity has its limits and its boundaries.  But what if Jesus really did mean for us to give it all away and follow Him?  Or what if He simply meant for us to live within our means, simply and frugally, and give everything else to reach the lost, to feed the hungry, and to change the world?  What if He really intends for us to genuinely redeem the time? What if the waste of our resources, time, energy, and emotions on things of this world like sports, reality TV, and leisure activities really do grieve the heart of God and quench His Spirit in us?  What if "Sunday Morning Christianity" only makes us accountable to Him for "Monday Morning Witness?"  I'm not sure of all of the answers yet, but one thing I do know, God wants to speak and have us to listen.  He is tired of us assuming that we know what He wants us to do.  So I guess the first step, for me and possibly for you, is to be still....just pull over for a few minutes.  Just turn off the TV, pull out of traffic, give your mind a minute or an hour to stop racing about what is next on the agenda.  Find a quiet place and pray with Samuel, "Speak, Lord, thy servant heareth."  Wait....wait....don't get in a hurry.  Just stay there until He speaks to your heart.  Listen for one thing that you can do to turn things around and begin to follow His plan for your walk with Him rather than your own.  Be prepared.  It may shake you up a bit.  He may ask you to do something that upsets your orderly, cleanly manicured, fine-tuned ritual.  But whatever it is, it will draw you closer to Him.  And one by one, maybe we can set aside the "golden calves" that keep getting in our way and begin to see His Spirit move in us in a powerful way. 

I Wonder...

I had a conversation yesterday that made me wonder what it would have been like to talk to a young William Carey.  How would a young Amy Carmichael have looked at the world, before she went off to change her world for Christ?  How did a young Bob Hughes wrestle with the calling of God on his life?  What did those missionary greats that we have come to know look like, act like, think like, before they hit the field for the first time?  I have a unique vantage point right now on the workings of the Holy Spirit on the heart and life of a young missionary, because there is one who counts me as her confidant and sounding board.  Who knows whether she will become one of those few whose exploits for God turn them into household names stirring the hearts of future generations to greater heights for God.  Odds are that she will become one of the nameless multitude who faithfully serve in some darkened corner of the world known only to God, until the day when we all stand before Him to receive our crowns.  However the future turns out, today I am standing in awe of the work that God is doing in the heart of His young servant, my daughter, Chelsea.  It seems that every time we speak now, it doesn't take long for the tears to start flowing.  Most of you know that she is preparing for an 11-month,11-country, missions trip that will take her into the heart of darkness in the most poverty-stricken and gospel-starved corners of the earth.  But few of you have the window into her heart that she and God have afforded me.  A year ago May, I moved Chelsea from Springfield, MO to Amarillo, TX.  I packed most of what she owned in the back of our Suburban and a 6'x8'x12' U-Haul trailer and stored the rest in our storage space here in Grove.  In only a matter of days, she would graduate from Baptist Bible College with a degree in business and she hoped to start her own business one day. But first, she planned to take a little missions trip to the Philippines and China.  While there, God began a slow but deliberate process of pruning, shaping, and refining her into someone that He could use. Since her return, He has continued to chip away at the things that would hold her back.  And she has willingly (sometimes) allowed Him to do so, until her life and heart are now refined to their most basic essence.  In a few weeks, she will move back home for a short time before leaving on her journey.  When she does, she will bring with her four plastic bins that contain what remains of her earthly possessions.  She will, for the most part, have sold everything that she has in order to be used up for God.  Which brings us to the conversation that we had yesterday afternoon.  She said, "Dad, I'm sending you a list of all of my books.  See if there are any that you want before I sell the rest.  God has made it clear that He wants it all.  At first, it wasn't too hard.  He wanted me to simplify my life, make a few sacrifices, get rid of some of my excess.  But now, He is carving away some flesh and bone.  He is asking me to give up a part of my identity.  I'm the girl who always has five books in her backpack, whose house is like a library to her friends, who almost any time you see her has a book in her hands.  This is getting hard.  My friends keep telling me, you are coming home someday and you will need some of this stuff, but God keeps saying, "If I can provide for you over the next year, why would you think I wouldn't provide for you later."" All I could think of while I listened to her speak of the running dialogue between her and God, was, "Who is this woman that she has become?  How did she emerge from that defiant little girl with a rapier wit and a fiery temper?  And with a heart of passion like this who knows what God will be able to do through her life?"   I have always been proud of my children.  I tend to brag about there athletic accomplishments a little to loudly and a little too often. But the feelings that I am having these days about both of my kids tend more toward awe and wonder than fatherly pride.  Because what I see in their lives today is not the imitation of the Godly example that I have tried to live before them, but the passionate pursuit of an intimate relationship with God that goes far beyond what they have ever seen in me.  I see in Chelsea a radically different level of commitment to the Gospel than has ever been true of me.  I see in her an example to follow as I press toward the mark in the waning years of my life.  I have no idea what the future holds, but I do know that she is ready to be used by God wherever He chooses and when someone is willing to lay themselves in the hands of God, He has a tendency to do great things through them.

Where Are The People of God?

In this daily devotional, I often write of the beauty of the world that God has created and especially the splendor of the place that He has allowed me to live.  I love Grand Lake.  I love Grove, Oklahoma. I love my home and the people that God has called me to minister to.  But this morning, as I have been studying for an upcoming sermon series, I have come across some very disturbing statistics that remind me that this physically beautiful world is a spiritually dark and forboding place.  The numbers tell us that almost a third of teenagers have been drunk twenty times or more and 35% have experimented with illegal drugs.  Every year 3 million young people--about 1 in 4 sexually experienced teens--acquire a sexually transmitted disease.  Children as young as six are cutting themsleves. The average self-harmer is aged eleven, and 1 in 10 adolescents are thought to have cut themselves deliberately at least once.  AIDS has now killed more people than the Black Death.  In Africa alone, 400,000 children have been orphaned to this terrible epidemic.  And even in America one in five children is living in poverty while more than half of adults in the richest nation on earth did nothing in the past year to help the poor.  Such self-absorption in the midst of such crisis begs the question, "Where are the people of God?" 
It seems to me that we have fallen into a comfortable Christianity that demands padded pews, temperature-controlled sanctuaries and finely managed production values for our orderly and high-impact worship services and we've forgotten that Jesus said, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord."
It's time that we stepped outside our comfort zone and do something that we couldn't normally do.  It's time to make a sacrifice for someone else, to go to those who are in need, and to make a difference in our world.  The darkness around us is caused primarily by the fact that those who are called to be the light of the world are hiding their candles under a bushel.  So let's go!  Let it shine, people of God, before it's too late!

Present Reality

Once upon a time..... or Someday when I..... These are two statements that rob us of the blessings of God in our lives.  We spend so much time reminiscing about the past or longing for the future that we forget to live in the moment and rejoice in what God is doing right now.  The past is a trap because we can either get caught up in anger, bitterness, or regret or we can romanticize the "good ol' days" so much that we long to return to them rather than moving forward.  The future also has the potential of harm in that we often are so focused on some future blissful circumstance that we don't do what needs to be done today.  While we wait for things to be "just right" we sacrifice the opportunities that God is giving us right now.  Paul challenged us to "press toward the mark..." by forgetting those things that are behind.  Jesus challenged us to "take no thought for tomorrow..." but to live by faith today.  The answer is to look at the past with thanksgiving, to address the present with faithful determination, and to approach the future with hope.  God is in control of all three.  Nothing you do can change the past.  The future will be what it is when it gets here.  All you can affect is how you live today.  So let's live it for the glory of God!

The Value of Your Christianity

I've been reading a lot lately about "radical Christianity."  Francis Chan and David Platt, among other authors, are challenging Christians to move beyond the luke-warm, dead-dog ritualism that has become the modern Christian experience into an exciting and passionate pursuit of genuine Holy Spirit-filled, "take up your cross" commitment that Jesus demanded of those who would be called His disciples.  The ideas in these books stir my heart and move me forward toward attitudes and actions that I once may have thought were extreme, just because they were out of the ordinary, contrary to the status quo.  But as I read Church history, I find that the men and women who have had the most impact on our world for Christ in centuries past have been the ones who gave Him everything that they had.  People who burned their candles at both ends and in the middle so that they could be a shining light in a cold, dark world.  These were men and women who rose early and spent hours in prayer and in the Word so that they would be prepared to face giants in the power of His might.  They were people who looked beyond the circumstances that surrounded them and saw the need of people in dark, dangerous places and offered no excuses as to why they shouldn't be the ones to carry the light to them.  These were people who actually took seriously the admonition of Christ to sell all that they had and come and follow Him.   The common element in the testimonies of the great heroes of our faith is that they had entered into a deep personal relationship with their Savior that meant more than the world to them.  Following through with the implications of that relationship was more important to them than life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.  His pleasure meant more to them than their pleasure.  That relationship, that mission, that life of faith was something worth dying for.
What has come to my mind this morning is this question, Is the level of Christianity that so many of us live, what we believe and practice as our Christian faith, something that we value enough to die for?  Are we so convinced of the truth of the Gospel that we would lay down our lives to share it with others?  Are we so committed to our Savior that we would follow Him to the cross, or to the firing squad, or to the jail cell?  We have so easily interpreted away the call of Christ to abandon all and follow Him and we've changed Christianity into something intended to make us happy and comfortable.  This mutant, cheap imitation of Biblical Christianity has led to a consumer mentality in the church that results in a loss of vision, passion, and power.  The only hope for this world is a revival of the kind of Christianity that Jesus called His disciples to embrace.  "They that live godly WILL suffer persecution...." "Men will kill you and think they are doing God a service...." "Take up your cross..." It's time we committed ourselves to a walk with God that demands something of us, but offers us something worth dying for.  The world is in need of radical followers of Christ who will live what He taught regardless of the cost.  If not you, then who?  If not now, then when?