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Category: Jesus (Page 46 of 61)

Obliterating the Roadblocks to Christian Growth

January 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

As you can imagine, I have a stack of articles and papers in my study here that I intend to write about in this space. As you also know, that stack tends to pile up and grow as other things press in on me and immediate concerns crowd into my blog posts. Near the bottom of this pile is something from the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of ACU Today. It’s a list of bullet points from a 1993 speech made by then university president Dr. Royse Money.

At the beginning of the speech, Money declares, “I come to you tonight with a heavy burden on my heart for the Church. As we seek to be the Church that belongs to Jesus Christ, I see hindrances along our way that impede our progress. I want to be honest with you tonight and discuss some issues and problems and challenges we face in our fellowship (Church of Christ) that are not easy or pleasant to discuss. But we must.”

This month at Legacy we’re talking about what’s NEXT. What’s NEXT in your walk with Jesus? What’s NEXT for our congregation? What is God calling you to NEXT? Where is Christ leading us NEXT? We’re looking at Peter’s “add to your faith…” We’re considering Paul’s call to “attain to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” and “straining toward what is ahead,” and “pressing on.”

Legacy’s elders and ministers are gearing up for our annual retreat together tonight and tomorrow at Camp Carter on the other side of Fort Worth. In the midst of our prayers and planning and reflections heading into this weekend, Money’s bullet points are worth considering. For Legacy. For your church. For your congregation’s leaders. For you as a child of God and a disciple of his Christ.

~We must realize that unity does not mean uniformity of belief.
~We must determine the essentials of faith apart from traditions, customs, comfort and personal preference.
~We must realize in dealing with those who differ with us, both within our fellowship and beyond, that tolerance and a certain level of fellowship is not the same as total endorsement of another’s views.
~We must learn to handle diversity in a charitable way.
~We must mark those who cause division among us.
~We must rediscover that in our allegiance to Christ, the bride wears the name of the Groom.
~We must realize that the enemy is Satan and not each other.
~We must determine what the real issues are regarding the role of women in the Church.
~We must decide on the way Scripture should be interpreted.
~We must realize the powerful dynamics of change.
~We must rededicate ourselves to search relentlessly for truth as it’s revealed in the Scriptures.

To Money’s excellent observations and clarion call for action, I would add a couple of my own:

~We must shift our focus from pastoring the saved inside our walls to saving the lost outside our walls.
~We must be motivated by Christ’s love instead of by a driving desire to be right.
~We must relax and stop taking ourselves so seriously as we realize we live under and in the grace of God.

We ignore these things at our own peril. Just talking about them and feeling like we’ve done something isn’t enough. Action must be taken. Hearts must soften. Lives must change. Leaders must lead. Pro-active instead of reactive. Just holding our own isn’t cutting it. Christ’s compelling love wasn’t given freely to us so we can huddle up and play church and avoid doing anything wrong. His sacrifice on the cross and the Holy Spirit’s powerful work at the garden tomb is a call to action. Holy action. Christian leadership. The Kingdom of God is “forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it!”

May our merciful Father bless us with wisdom and vision. May he graciously overcome our staggering incapabilities to lead his people forward in his eternal Kingdom.

Peace,

Allan

The Choice

January 14, 2011 / / 2 Comments

The Word of God confronts us with two ways. The Law and the Prophets, the Psalms and Proverbs, the Gospels and Letters all present us with the choice of two ways.

It’s not about where you’re going to live, what career you’re going to pursue, who you’re going to marry, or what you’ll have for lunch.

It’s the way of life or death. The way of blessings or curses. The way of God or the way of the world.

Yes, this one choice certainly impacts all those others. It encompasses and involves all those other decisions you make about where you work and where you live and who you marry. But there’s only one choice in Scripture: the way of life or the way of death.

God says, “Choose life!” ~Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Jesus says, “I am the Way.” ~John 14:5-7

When we choose Jesus, we choose the way of life and the way of blessing and the way of God. We sign up for a life of following Jesus along the way. We commit to walking behind him in his way. Doing things the way he does them. Speaking like he speaks. Thinking the way he thinks. Acting and loving and forgiving and submitting and obeying and serving and suffering and praying the way Jesus does.

It’s a choice we make every day. Every hour. A conscious and constant decision to allow the Holy Spirit of God to empower us and guide us in the Way of Jesus. It’s that first and continual step in asking God to show you what’s NEXT. In submitting to whatever NEXT he has in store for you. In jumping out of your comfort zone and whole heartedly embracing that NEXT that will further transform you into his holy image.

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” ~John 14:6

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Speaking of choices: My annual Tulsa angst has begun. I just received an advance copy of the schedule for this year’s Tulsa Workshop from my friend Terry Rush and I find myself in the same spot I get into every year. How in the world do I choose?

Wednesday’s kick-off evening is easy. No choice. Praise and worship with Kip Long and a keynote address from Randy Harris. Awesome. But the anxiety kicks in early Thursday morning. At 9:00, do I go with the no-brainer, Don McLaughlin, on “Possibility Thinking: Nothing Less Than Winning the World” or Bill Campbell’s “For Church Leaders Only: How to Build a Healthy Congregation?” I could also go hear my friend Josh Ross on “Baptism: Transformed to Join in Jesus’ Mission.” And those are just three of the six possibilities for that hour!

More choices, of course, at 10:00. I’ll probably go with Randy Harris on “Jesus and the Quest for Cool.” But that means saying ‘no’ to Victor Knowles and my friend Dan Bouchelle and three other really interesting speakers and topics.

The 11:00 keynote is easy. No choice. Dusty Rush. No problem. Lunch is easy. I know we’re going to eat at that Mexican restaurant where we always run into Garth Brooks.

But it starts all over again at 2:00. How am I supposed to choose between Al Maxey’s “Breaking the Chains of Rigidity: Frail Hermeneutics” and Terry Rush’s “Adjusting Our Minds to Build Winning Congregations?” Are you kidding?

Same thing at 3:00. Again at 4:00. How does one choose between Marvin Phillips, Edward Fudge, Bobby Valentine, and Randy Harris? How do you choose between “Let the Chains of Spiritual Blinders Fall Away” and “The Unchained Holy Spirit” and “How to Break Free from the Chains of Those Who Won’t Change?”

And that’s just Thursday!

The Tulsa Workshop is one of the spiritual highlights of my every year. Have you never been? You have no idea what you’re missing. I encourage you to make the trip this year. March 23-26. Here’s the website with tons of info. There are special tracks this year for preachers and elders and worship leaders. Programs for the teens. Special stuff for the kids. You’ll be blessed by the worship, the study, the speakers, the fellowship, and the Holy Spirit of God. I really, really, really hope to see you there.

Peace,

Allan

A Tidbit After Bread

January 10, 2011 / / 2 Comments

Regular readers of this blog will know of my deep respect and admiration for German theologian and Christian martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. No books have had more of an impact on my walk with Christ, my calling as a congregational preacher, and my faith in God than Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. Costly grace. True discipleship. Christian community. These are all concepts that Bonhoeffer not only wrote about brilliantly, but also lived out genuinely.

So you can imagine my delight at receiving over the Christmas holidays the first Bonhoeffer biography in almost 50 years. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by New York author Eric Metaxas. I took a big bite out of this massive 542-page volume last night. And I intend to have it completed by the end of the week. It is excellent.

In the several books on Bonhoeffer I’ve read, I’ve seen his “tidbit” quote about complete commitment to Christ.

“The religion of Christ is not a tidbit after one’s bread; on the contrary, it is the bread or nothing. People should at least understand and concede this if they call themselves Christian.”

I knew the quote was taken from a lecture on the essence of Christianity that Bonhoeffer delivered early on his career. But this new book tells me it was part of a three-lecture series to a group of teenage boys he was mentoring in Barcelona in the winter of 1928. Bonhoeffer was 22-years-old. But he already had a firm grip on what Jesus meant when he said, “Follow me.”

The title of the lecture is “Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity.” It was number two in his series, preached to the teens on December 11, 1928. And this new book has published a pretty big chunk of it.

Bonhoeffer begins by talking about the fact that most Christians have actually exiled Christ from their lives. He says, “Of course we build him a temple, but we live in our own houses.” Bonhoeffer points out that we only take Jesus seriously on Sunday mornings. Our religion only has meaning on the first day of the week where one “gladly withdraws for a couple of hours, but only to get back to one’s place of work immediately afterward.”

OK, now here’s the really good stuff about taking Christ and his call seriously:

“One admires Christ according to aesthetic categories as an aesthetic genius, calls him the greatest ethicist; one admires his going to his death as a heroic sacrifice for his ideas. Only one thing one doesn’t do: one doesn’t take him seriously. That is, one doesn’t bring the center of his or her own life into contact with the claim of Christ to speak the revelation of God and to be that revelation. One maintains a distance between himself or herself and the word of Christ, and allows no serious encounter to take place. I can doubtless live with or without Jesus as a religious genius, as an ethicist, as a gentleman — just as, after all, I can also live without Plato and Kant. Should, however, there be something in Christ that claims my life entirely with the full seriousness that here God himself speaks and if the word of God once become present only in Christ, then Christ has not only relative but absolute, urgent significance for me. Understanding Christ means taking Christ seriously. Understanding this claim means taking seriously his absolute claim on our commitment. And it is now of importance for us to clarify the seriousness of this matter and to extricate Christ from the secularization process in which he has been incorporated since the Enlightenment.”

Yes, Christ Jesus is an all-or-nothing proposition. Yes, we have a long way to go in our understanding and our practice.

Peace,

Allan

To Us A Child Is Born

December 25, 2010 / / 0 Comments

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” ~Isaiah 9:6

Yeah, yeah, God is with us. I know he lives with us. But only metaphorically, right? God is with us in a spiritual kind of way, a mental or psychological way. There’s no way God can actually live with us on earth. I mean, God is perfectly perfect. Infinite. Transcendent. Holy. Divine. Eternal. Wholly other. The barriers of time and space and divinity are too great. God can’t actually live with us here. After all, we are human. And sinful. Finite. Physical beings with physical limitations and shortcomings. God with us isn’t really real.

Isaiah 9 says “Wrong!”

It says God came to us. It says the Incarnation of our great God is a real, physical, historical fact. God left the glory in heaven to come to us.

Now that would be a very horrible thing if God were a monster. If God were bent on destroying us or desired to torture us, his coming to us would be a terrifying thing.

But our God loves us. He is a loving God. He desires communion with us. He wants to be family with us. He calls us his children and wants us to call him our Father. He loves us so much that he determined a long time ago to do whatever it takes to get us out of the dark and into his eternal Kingdom of Light. Even leaving heaven. Even putting on our flesh and taking on our great burdens of suffering and sin and shame.

To save us.

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.” ~Isaiah 9:2

I pray that you have a great Christmas with your family and friends. I pray that you are blessed today with peace and good will. And I pray that you give thanks today for the incomprehensible gift of God’s coming to us in humility, in the form of a helpless newborn baby, to rescue us.

Merry Christmas,

Allan

Two Kinds of People

December 9, 2010 / / 1 Comment

From the rumor mill… I just got off the phone with a very reliable source in Benton, Arkansas, the home of free-agent ace and savior Cliff Lee and the center of the baseball universe. (The source is a gospel preacher and a great friend of mine. It doesn’t get any more reliable!) The informant tells me that Lee’s granddad was in the downtown Benton bank this morning and was overheard telling a buddy, “Cliff’s going to sign with the Yankees. And we’re going to disown him from the family!”

You heard it here first.

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You will be wowed — quite possibly overcome — by this rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus. Click here to check out this very different version performed to the glory of God by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. Set aside six minutes of your life and be blown away by this. If you’re an impatient Cretan, forward to the 2:25 mark and let it rip. I’ve never heard any arrangement like that. Ever. Not even close. Goosebumps, man. Big time. Wow.

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First Tulsa Workshop preview — You already know what a big fan I am of the annual Tulsa Workshop. Every March, it’s one of the most anticipated and rewarding spiritual highlights of my year. This year, Terry Rush and the Workshop organizers are planning several sessions that are dedicated specifically “For Elders Only” and “For Children’s Ministers Only” and “For Preachers Only.” The speakers for those special sessions include such heavyweights as Don McLaughlin, Rick Atchley, Al Maxey, and Terry himself. The elders sessions are going to be facilitated by the Memorial Drive shepherds. I can’t recommend that highly enough. I’ve been with those elders there. I’ve spent time with them. I’ve prayed with them. They’ve prayed for me. They’ve blessed me. They know what they’re doing. They’re elders in our Lord’s Church and they love it. If you can get your elders to Tulsa this year, do it! Terry provides a sneak peak at this part of the schedule on his blog here.

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“The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” ~1 Corinthians 1:18

There are two kinds of people: those who are dying and those who are being saved. Paul makes it pretty plain. All of Scripture confirms what the apostle knew. The message of Jesus — his life, his teachings, his death and resurrection — is difficult to accept. It doesn’t make sense with our contemporary eyes. It contradicts everything we’re taught by society. It flies in the face of contemporary culture. It’s offensive to the values of the country in which we live.

Honestly, it’s the exact opposite of some of our own strongly held beliefs and practices.

May our Father give us eyes to see Jesus as the Holy Son of God, not just a really good man; the belief to view the cross of Jesus as our eternal victory, not a scandalous or embarrassing defeat; the faith to embrace the Resurrection as our certain destiny, not just an amazing story; and the trust to submit fully to Christ’s eternal reign as something real for us, not just an abstract idea.

Peace,

Allan

Beauty, Eh?

December 1, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Set aside five minutes and watch this video. Seriously. It’s a flash mob scene from a couple of weeks ago at a shopping mall in Ontario, Canada. David McTee sent me this link late yesterday and I’ve watched it through tear-streaked eyeballs three times now. It’s beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful.

Click here.

I must admit, the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” gets me everytime. I love singing it. I love listening to it. It moves me. It transforms me. But this video took me by surprise. I’m not sure what it is. It has absolutely blown me away.

It’s very incarnational, I think.

Christ Jesus, through his people, invading a shopping mall and revealing his glory. The Son of God joining a large group of people, dwelling in their midst with all their worldly concerns and problems and thoughts, the good and the bad, and turning his face toward them to bless them. The promised Messiah breaking through the barriers of time and space to reclaim his Father’s creation. Jesus working through his people to redeem a shopping mall, if only for a moment. The Holy One of Israel, through his Church, blessing this group of unsuspecting men, women, and children.

The Incarnation. God with us. In the most unusual places. It takes my breath away.

Peace,

Allan

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