Author: Allan (Page 450 of 493)

Our Story

June 30, 2008 / Allan / 0 Comments

I’ve got Moses on the brain. Everybody who’s doing anything with Legacy VBS this week has had Moses on the brain for a while now.

The stories of Moses are familiar to all of God’s people. We know about the basket in the river and the burning bush and the plagues and the passover and the crossing of the sea. We know all about that. But I wonder sometimes if we truly understand that the story of Moses and the Israelites—or, more accurately, the story of the Lord’s deliverance of Moses and the Israelites—is our story.

This is us.

This one foundational primary act of salvation in our Scriptures very powerfully shapes us and informs us and motivates us to this day. This story, forever linked with our God and his actions to deliver his people inspires and foreshadows all of our God’s acts of salvation. All of them.

Our God saves us and rescues us and redeems us and delivers us and provides for us over and over again in a million different ways. But this first grand watershed event is the pattern. This points to them all. This is the paradigm.

Our God is the God who brought us out of Egypt. Our Lord is the Lord who destroyed Pharaoh and his army. Our God brought us through the sea. Our Lord delivered us from slavery.

We find exodus and sea-crossing language on almost every other page in our Scriptures, from the crossing of the Jordan River through Revelation. Almost half the Psalms. Most of the Prophets. Deliverance from Babylonian exile, freedom from Assyrian captivity, and salvation from sins and the world are all described and predicted and imagined and manifested in terms of slavery and liberation and water and promised land.

This is our story.

We’re all on the other side of the sea. Egypt is behind us. The Promised Land is before us. Our enemies are dead, scattered on the shore, unable to do us any further harm. And our God is present with us, leading us out of one world and into another, from one existence to another. The crossing of the sea isn’t a pep talk. It’s an understanding that God is your God because he acted in your life to deliver you. And when you pass through the waters of salvation, your identity and your loyalties and your worldview radically changes as you live in service to and complete dependence on the Sovereign Monarch who lovingly provides that salvation.

That’s our story.

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One night down, three to go.

Moses: Bound for Holy Ground kicked off last night to a packed house here at Legacy. And the first evening went off almost without a hitch. From Taylor and Lance’s specatular open to our corny rendition of The Ballad of Jethro and Moses sung to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies; from a real live baby Moses to the artificially “pumped up” shepherds; from the moving prayers of Jochebed and Miriam to the dramatic killing of an Egyptian taskmaster; from costume and set changes to ad-libbed lines and unexpected audience reactions; it was a night to remember.

Carrie-Anne’s been totally typecast as Moses’ wife, Zipporah. Jethro really did ask Moses, “If it’s convenient for you, would you please stand for the closing song?” The preacher really did kill a youth minister, and not just in his dreams. Doug Deere did enjoy his makeup a little too much. John West is under-utilized. No, Jerry Karels, I didn’t read the fine print on my preaching agreement. Kipi really did tell the cast backstage, “More cheeks and lips!”

Over 700 saw the show and stayed for a wonderful church dinner, maybe the final ever Legacy church dinner eaten in the hallways and not in the Fellowship Hall. I’ll have much more to write about all of this in the next couple of days. I’m trying desperately not to hyper-ventilate as the clock ticks on tonight’s finale, “One Day More.” But I’m moved by the gifts and the talents of this church family. I’m inspired by the beautiful voices all around me, the creative writing and directing, the know-how and ingenuity of those building the sets and props, and the spirit of unity and teamwork that’s all around us. It’s a tremendous sacrifice for every single person involved in our VBS. And we dedicate every bit of it to our Lord in the name of our crucified and resurrected Savior, Jesus the Christ. May he bless our efforts and may he use the gifts he’s given us to bless and encourage everyone who walks through these doors over the next few days.

As always, click on the pics for the full size. Night Two at 7:00 this evening.

Peace,

Allan

Eat The Word

June 26, 2008 / Allan / 3 Comments

“When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight.” ~Jeremiah 15:16

You are what you eat. We know that. We experience that. If a nursing mother eats fajitas for dinner with jalapenos and pica de gallo and salsa she’s going to be up all night. Not because she’s sick, but because her baby is sick. The fajitas have become a part of the mother. You are what you eat. I look in the mirror and I can see the cheeseburgers and Whoppers and Kettle Cooked Lays potato chips. They’ve become a big part of me. The biggest part.

Jeremiah says when your words came, I ate them. I digested them. I assimilated them. I made them a part of me.

“‘…eat this scroll that I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.’ So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.” ~Ezekiel 3:3

Ezekiel’s being called into God’s service. Speak for me to Israel. Speak my words. Teach my people. Be an example for them. And God doesn’t say hear my word, listen to my word, read my word, study my word. He says eat it. Eat this scroll. Eat the word. Make it a part of you. Be one with it. Fill your belly with it. Take it all in.

“I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth…” ~Revelation 10:9

John’s taking notes on the words of the angel. He’s writing it all down. He wants to record it. He wants to remember it. And the angel says don’t write it down. Eat it.

The words of Scripture are written in a way—and intended—to get inside us. The words deal specifically with the life and death of our souls. And they’re written to transform each of us into a person who fits, and into a life that fits, with our God and his perfect creation and his gracious salvation and his gathered community. The words of Scripture have the power of the Holy Spirit behind them, the power of God in them. And they’re passed on to us to create in us truth and beauty and goodness. And as we wrestle with them and meditate on them, as we turn them over and think about them and obsess over them, the words enter our souls like food enters the stomach. They spread through our entire system of blood and air and organs and nerves and functions and they become holiness and love and wisdom inside us.

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” ~2 Timothy 3:16-17

Make no mistake, eating the Word does not result in doctrinal maturity or knowledgeable Christianity. We don’t study the Bible to know more. We study the Bible to do more. Living by the Bible, living by the Word of God, means we’re not interested in knowing more, we’re interested in doing more.

We don’t learn Scripture. We don’t study the Bible or use the Bible.

We eat it. We ingest it. We assimilate it.

We take it into our lives in such a way that it metabolizes into acts of love, cups of cold water, and prison and hospital visits. The words manifest themselves in casseroles and cakes, groceries delivered, comfort and encouragement, evangelism and justice and sacrifice, all done in the name of the Christ.

The Word of God is the standard. It’s the authority. And we don’t use it. We submit to it. It’s not for information. It’s for transformation.

May we be a people of the Word. And may our God bless his Word to be at work in us, transforming us and empowering us to become more and more like him.

Peace,

Allan

Tell Them How Much The Lord Has Done For You

June 25, 2008 / Allan / 0 Comments

“Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” ~Mark 5:19

I’ve been convinced for a while now that the reason we are not particularly evangelistic is that we’ve tried to convert people to the Church instead of to Jesus. We think people should be taught how to be members of the Church instead of being taught how to be followers of the Christ. And we’re so bogged down with all the rules and regulations and details of the faith that our story has become so complicated—DISTORTED—that we’re too afraid to tell it.

I can’t talk to my neighbor about Jesus or about my faith. What if he asks me a question I can’t answer? What is our church’s stand on this issue or that? What are we saying now about that topic that’s a little different from we were saying about it ten years ago? What are the reasons again we do or don’t do these certain things differently from everyone else? How do those Scriptures work that get me from Point A to Point B in those arguments we’re always having? I can’t remember all that. I might get something wrong.

So we don’t evangelize. We’ve made it so complicated—you can be a Christian, but I have to teach you how to be the right kind of Christian—that we’d rather not bother. Better to keep my mouth shut than to risk not knowing all the right arguments.

Terry Rush has articulated these thoughts so much better in his blog post from yesterday:

Loaded down with multiple and conflicting proof-texts while being well-warned of all those many false prophets, our people have become convinced we will not remember how it goes and most likely will get it wrong if we dare try. Therefore, the general population of the church lives frozen and mute; unable to move with confidence to extend their faith to another. We have concluded that refusing to share the life in Christ with others is a better option than taking a stab at sharing and getting it fouled up.

Please click here to read Terry’s wonderful little article on this problem. (His portrait of Barney Fife as the church cop who nervously paces with his whistle and badge, looking to bust somebody for getting part of the arguments wrong is classic.) And be encouraged to forget all the anxieties of the arguments and the details and just share with people what our God through Jesus is doing with you.

Peace,

Allan

Pray For Hank & Janet

June 24, 2008 / Allan / 12 Comments

“O Lord, the God who saves me,
day and night I cry out before you.
May my prayer come before you;
turn your ear to my cry.
~Psalm 88:1-2

Please take a moment right now to lift up a prayer to our Father for some dear friends of mine, Hank & Janet Lewis. I just learned last night that their 18-year-old daughter, Jade, was killed in a car wreck Thursday evening.

Hank & Janet and their sweet family live in Smithwick, just a few miles east of Marble Falls, where Hank owns a construction company. The little church in Smithwick doesn’t have much of a youth group, so Jade and a couple of her buddies came to our congregation in Marble Falls most every Sunday night and Wednesday. As the default youth minister there for a little over six-months in ’05, I got to know Jade by teaching her in Bible classes and worshiping with her at devotionals. We took her to WinterFest. She was in our home. A beautiful and talented young lady with big dreams.

I didn’t meet Hank and Janet until January ’07 when we all spent two weeks together in Israel. Through friends they had at Austin Grad and the Brentwood Church in Austin, they had arranged to take Jade with them on our trip. Jade was the youngest in our group of 25. Janet was the sweetest. Hank was the funniest.

I fell in love with this couple, this family. Huge hearts. Giant faith. Generous spirit. Hank and I wound up working in the same corner of the 10th century B.C. fortress in Tamar during the archaeological portion of our tour. And we began calling him Hammerin’ Hank because of the relentless way he attacked the nine layers of 4,000-year-old dirt with his pick. There was no quit in Hank. He worked harder than all of us.

And he played just as hard. If I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget Hank picking up boulders the size of small cars and tossing them over the 600-foot cliffs at Mizpe Ramon and hollering with delight as we watched them tumble almost out of sight. You could hear him laughing and screaming a mile away. He was acting like a ten-year-old boy. And we fed off that.

Janet’s penchant for beautiful scarves almost caused an international incident at the Israeli-Jordan border. We had to negotiate with machine-gun-toting soldiers to secure her passage.

And Jade was the adventurous one. We lost her on a couple of ocassions, once for a little over an hour, when she hiked ahead of our group and took a wrong trail.

In May of ’07, just two days before we moved from Marble Falls to Legacy, Hank and I shared a two-hour breakfast at the Bluebonnet Cafe. And we talked about preaching and construction and faith and hope and raising daughters. We talked about God’s Church and the eternal scope of his Kingdom. And we prayed for each other.

And I just found out last night that Jade is gone.

My heart is broken today. But nothing like theirs.

I just got off the phone with Hank. He’s hurting. But his faith is strong. He encouraged me more than I encouraged him. He’s prayed for years that our God would keep his daughter safe. And he and Janet realize that Jade is now in the safest place she could possibly be. There’s nowhere safer than in our Father’s arms.

Please pray for Hank and Janet today. Pray for their other children, Caitlin and Keenan, and the two kids they just adopted a few months ago from Ethiopia. (I told you they have big hearts.) Ask our God to comfort them with his peace and love. They are wonderful Christian brothers and sisters who are, right now, going through a deep, deep valley. The visitation is this evening. The funeral is tomorrow. Please pray for them.

And hug your kids a couple of extra times today.

Peace,

Allan

It Is Good

June 23, 2008 / Allan / 1 Comment

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” ~Romans 8:28

Our God ordains not only the ends, but the means. He uses all of it, everything that happens to us, for his purposes.

Nothing touches our lives that is not under the control and direction of our loving heavenly Father. Everything we do and say, everything people do to us or say about us, every experience we will ever have—all of it is providentially used by our God for our good.

Our problem is that we generally see what’s good for us differently from the way God sees what’s good for us.

As he works in our lives, and in the circumstances of our lives, God’s intent is to build Christian character, to conform us into the image of his Son, and to prepare us for final glory. So what he promises in Romans 8:28, then, is not that every difficult experience will lead to something good in this life. The “good” God has in mind may involve the next life entirely.

Regardless, we enter every day, we welcome every situation, we endure every circumstance with great anticipation, knowing that our God is intimately involved and working in our best interests.

We wait eagerly, Paul says, for “our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” That’s the “good” God’s working in you and me.

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We went to a rock and roll wedding Saturday night. I don’t know what else to call it. When the bridesmaids walk down the aisle to Grand Funk Railroad’s “Some Kind of Wonderful” and the bride enters to the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” that’s a rock and roll wedding.

Ashley, you were beautiful. Warren, love that girl just like Christ loves his Church. And may our Father bless you both richly with long lives of faithful service to him and his people.

Chris and Liz, the wedding was fantastic. We had a blast. We miss so much praying with y’all in parking lots, watching Cowboys and Stars games at your house, worshipping our God with you in Mesquite and Tulsa, and laughing together about everything. Jeremy, your song blew us away. It was a perfect evening. We love y’all.

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We have a little baby cottontail living in our yard. At least one. Maybe there’s a mom and dad and a bunch of little bunnies, I don’t know. But Thursday afternoon one of them decided to cool off by jumping in our pool and hanging out in the shade of the skimmer. He sat there in the skimmer from before noon until I dragged him out with a net at almost 6:00. Carley wants to cage him and keep him. She’s already named him Chestnut or something.

Peace,

Allan

The Delightful Word

June 19, 2008 / Allan / 3 Comments

“The Bible tells us not how we should talk with God but what he says to us; not how we find the way to him, but how he has sought and found the way to us; not the right relation in which we must place ourselves in him, but the covenant which he has made with all who are Abraham’s spiritual children and which he has sealed once for all in Jesus Christ. It is this which is within the Bible. The Word of God is within the Bible.” ~Karl Barth

“How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” ~Psalm 119:103

After Oasis last night I visited for about an hour here in my study with some folks who wanted some more information about Legacy. We talked about spiritual formation and children’s education and Small Groups and new buildings and worship styles and evangelism. And we did our very best to stay off that A-B Line of thinking and talking. And right in the middle of our conversation, one man looked right at me and said, “You know what I really like about Legacy? I love how much Scripture is read here.”

Me, too.

Sadly, the holy Word of God isn’t read publicly anymore in too many churches. I cringe as I write those words. And I hate to believe that it’s true. But it is.

While I was in school at Austin Grad I served as a roaming visiting preacher, trying to get my feet wet, trying to gain some experience, trying very hard not to embarrass myself or the poor person who had invited me to speak. Inevitably, someone from the church would call me a few days in advance of my visit and ask for a Scripture reading. And on more than a few occasions, the kind person on the other line would balk at my suggestion.

“That seems too long,” the person would say. “Can we shorten that a little?”

“It’s six verses!” I’d reply. “Ideally, I’d like to have the whole chapter read.”

In too many churches the only time Scripture is read is right before the sermon, generally just one or two verses, usually by a pre-teen or teenager who’s not looked at the passage until the moment he’s standing before the holy assembly of God’s people.

I’m delighted that, here at Legacy, we uphold the Word of God and give it the prominence it deserves in our Christian assemblies. The Word is read publicly in big, meaty chunks. The Word opens our assemblies. It closes our assemblies. It’s read at the Table. It’s read by our elders and ministers. It’s read by the entire congregation in unison. It’s read by our young children and our older men.

And there’s a reason for that. Actually, there are many reasons for that.

The Bible is an instrument of God’s holy communication. God acts through his Word. He speaks through his Word. God is his Word. The Bible is not a book of man’s thoughts about God and the actions of God; the Bible is God’s intimate actions and thoughts about and regarding man. The Word of God creates and sustains life. The Word transforms us into his image. It gets inside us and shapes us. It molds us and moves us. It’s the vehicle by which God reveals himself to man. It saves. It’s the standard by which we’ll be judged. But the Word of God is not a threat or a burden. It’s a delight. It’s our hope and our joy. It’s our protection against temptation and sin. We live by the Word of God. Without the Word of God, we live in famine.

And so we read it here at Legacy. All the time.

And I was very glad last night when my new friend noticed.

Peace,

Allan

Author: Allan (Page 450 of 493)

Our Story

Eat The Word

Tell Them How Much The Lord Has Done For You

Pray For Hank & Janet

It Is Good

The Delightful Word

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