The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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Category: Romans (Page 1 of 26)

Reality Mission

May 5, 2025 / / 0 Comments

“The Word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart; that is, the Word of faith we are proclaiming. That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved… How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?… Faith comes from hearing the message.” ~Romans 10:8-17

Over the past few decades, we have gotten away from speaking the Good News. Of course, we still believe that God grants us salvation by his grace through faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We haven’t stopped believing. But we’ve stopped talking. We don’t proclaim with our mouths the way we used to, the way we need to.

What do I say? I don’t know what to say!

It might help if we saw our calling to proclaim not so much as engaging a rescue mission, but participating in a reality mission. Ours is a reality mission. The undeniable reality is that someday every knee will bow. Someday every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Jesus is Lord! And the day is certainly coming when all of creation will bow before him and recognize it. So we declare to our neighbors and friends, “You need to change jerseys! There is only one Lord and he is Jesus! You need to be on his side!”

It’s like declaring that dinner’s going to be ready at 6:00. You tell your teenaged kids or you tell your husband, “Hey, we’re eating at 6:00!” They may not show up. They may choose to ignore your declaration or reject your announcement. But you’re still throwing it out there: The food will be on the table at 6:00. You are a messenger with a message.

Have you spoken the Good News lately to somebody who really needs to hear it? Can you picture yourself saying to someone, “Christ Jesus has become for you your righteousness, holiness, and redemption.” Can’t you tell somebody, “Salvation comes by no other name than that of Jesus.” Can’t you say those kinds of things to the people God is placing right in front of you every day?

The Word is near you. It is in your mouth. It is in your heart.

Peace,

Allan

Good News > Bad News

April 21, 2025 / / 0 Comments

“By his power, God raised the Lord from the dead! And he will raise us also!” ~ 1 Corinthians 6:14

The world demonstrates power by taking life. Our God demonstrates his eternal power by giving life. It takes divine power to raise the dead–the kind of power that produces deep faith and hope and joy.

The power that raised Jesus from the grave and gave him final authority over all things belongs to us. This power that defeats sin and death and Satan forever–we experience that power when we hear the Good News. Because it means there is nothing — NOTHING! — nothing bad, nothing wrong, nothing evil, nothing dark in your life that hasn’t already been overcome by God in Christ!

The Bible says our God “gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were” (Romans 4:17).

So, maybe the odds are stacked against you. Maybe you feel like an outsider. Maybe all the bad news in our world is driving you to despair. Maybe the bad news at work or at the doctor’s office is overwhelming. Maybe the bad news in our marriage or with your kids or your parents really is too much. Maybe the bad news of your past sins or the bad news of your current sins has you paralyzed. The odds might be against you.

Okay, let’s talk about bad news.

The bad news is that Pharaoh’s army is going to win at the Red Sea. The Egyptians were huge favorites that day; the over/under was three-million dead Hebrews. The bad news is that the little shepherd boy and his sling is no match for a trained warrior giant. The bad news is Peter cannot walk on water. The bad news is nobody’s ever escaped from a Philippian jail. The bad news is the world’s authorities crucified our Savior. The bad news is all dead people stay dead.

Thank God for the Good News of the resurrection of Jesus!

The declaration of the angels and the testimony of the witnesses is true: Jesus is alive! Jesus lives! That stone was rolled away, not so Jesus could get out, but so we could look in and see for ourselves, so the truth could be seen and proclaimed.

Our God gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were! He calls things that are wrong in your life right. He calls things that are broken in your family fixed. He calls things that are missing in your soul, the things that are lacking and lost, he calls them found and saved and overflowing with goodness and life!

“The one who belongs to God has no fear of bad news; his heart is steadfast, trusting in the Lord.” ~Psalm 112:7

Peace,

Allan

Re-Thinking: Part 2

April 16, 2025 / / 0 Comments

My good friend Blu Malone sent me this picture yesterday. A good friend knows you well enough to understand what really irritates you and how to use it to make you laugh. Well done. I love this. I would like it on a sticker. Like six of them. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

Here at GCR, we’re trying to tackle the reluctance we have to speak to our friends and neighbors about Jesus. We haven’t stopped believing in Jesus Christ as our risen and coming Lord and the source off all truth and light and the only way to salvation. But we have mostly stopped talking. We’re not sharing the good news of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the way we used to. It seems to me that as we address the problem, we should acknowledge a few things we need to stop believing. There are some things we accept as real, that just simply aren’t. And those things can keep us from sharing the Gospel with the people God puts right in front of us every day.

I mentioned two of these things in this space yesterday. We need to stop believing that the Church is in decline and that the Church is irrelevant. Here are three more things we need to stop believing so that we’ll feel more able to talk about Jesus with others.

Don’t believe that people in our culture are not seeking God. It’s not true. Yes, we live in a pluralistic, post-modern, post-Christian society now and there’s no going back. Yes, Christianity is no longer viewed as the only way to God and truth is no longer a fixed, eternal reality. Truth is now something each person decides for himself or herself. And, yes, there are more agnostics, skeptics, and atheists in this country than there’s ever been. But that doesn’t mean they’re not searching. They’re all searching! They’re all seeking! And there’s tremendous potential here for God’s Church.

The research is showing that we’re on the front edge of a backlash against all the pluralism and individualism in the U.S. We’re discovering that living in a world without universal truth is a lousy way to live. We’re learning that addiction to our screens and earbuds isn’t healthy, that it’s doing real damage to our relationships and what it means to be human. And people are looking for something else. They’re searching for a meaning outside of themselves. They’re seeking a purpose higher than their own tweets and posts, something more important than their careers and entertainment. People today are starting to recognize all the noise and clutter for what it is and they’re looking for something genuine and authentic. Something they can trust. People are open to it. People are seeking. And that gives the Church an exciting opportunity.

And what about the idea that everybody’s a Christian? No, we’ve got to stop believing that everybody in Midland or everybody in your town already goes to church. Because they don’t. And we also need to stop believing that people who don’t follow Christ have all heard the Good News about Jesus and thought it through and made the choice to reject it. That’s not true. Census data in Midland County and a couple of more recent surveys show that almost 50% of the people in our city don’t have a church home. Almost half! Barna research that was released last week shows that only 38% of the people in Texas go to church at least once a month. The chances are higher right now than they’ve ever been in your lifetime that your next-door-neighbor doesn’t go to church.

And there’s an increasing number of people who just don’t know much at all about Jesus. Over the last couple of decades, kids in this country are being raised differently than the ways you and I were probably raised. And there are lots of men and women in their 20s and 30s who’ve never heard the Good News. They’ve never heard it. We need to stop believing everybody has.

And we must stop believing that the Gospel is too complicated to share. The Good News of salvation from God in Christ is not hard. It’s simple. But for several generations now–for sure in Churches of Christ, I think–we’ve put too much emphasis on knowing all the details of our rules and regulations and being able to explain and proof-text our inconsistencies and loopholes, that we’ve made sharing the Gospel kind of scary. We’ve turned into a people who’d rather not say anything to our friends about Jesus than risk saying something “wrong” or not being able to answer a tricky question. For a variety of reasons, we’ve come to believe it’s a sin to admit to somebody, “I don’t know.”

The Good News is not complicated. It’s the very simple and beautiful truth that God’s eternal salvation through his crucified and risen Son Jesus is a gift. It’s a loving gift. And his limitless grace continually washes us and covers the stuff we don’t know.

If God is for us, who can be against us? Who’s going to oppose us? What’s going to stop us? What are we afraid of? Trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or sword? The culture, the media, the government, or the atheists? No! In all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us!

It looked bad when the world carried out the crucifixion of Jesus. But God used it to save all humanity. It felt bad when the world executed Stephen and scattered the Church. But God used it to expand the borders of his eternal Kingdom. Today, we can be certain that our God is using the circumstances and conditions in Midland right now, and in your community, to do more through his Church than we can possibly dare to ask or imagine.

The question is: What do you believe?

Peace,

Allan

Best. News. Ever.

December 13, 2024 / / 0 Comments

If God really was born in a manger in Bethlehem, then we have something no other religion in the world has ever claimed. God became a human being. God himself, the Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth, has become one with us by becoming one of us. The best news in the whole world is that God and us are brought together in Jesus. In fact, God taking on our everyday human condition is the means of our salvation. God reclaims us as his own by becoming one of us. That’s the best news ever!

But a lot of us are missing it.

I saw a survey early last week from 2022 that showed 43% of U.S. Christians agree with this statement: “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.”

How can that be? That’s impossible! Unless Jesus is both 100% fully God and 100% fully human at the same time, the Gospel is powerless to save. The Good News is just an empty announcement.

Think about, in the Bible, how people responded to Jesus. It’s mostly over-the-top extreme reactions. Nobody was ever just “meh” about Jesus. Some are so furious with him they try to throw him off a cliff. Others are so terrified they cry out, “Go away from me!” Others fall down before him and worship. Why all the extremes?

Because if Jesus is God, then you have to change and center your entire life around him. If he is not God, then he is someone to hate or fear. No other response makes any sense; it can only be one of the two extremes. Either Jesus is God or he’s not. So he’s either absolutely crazy and dangerous or he’s infinitely wonderful and good.

But our world is filled with people who say they believe in Jesus, they say they understand who he is, but it hasn’t revolutionized their lives. There’s no change. They still look and think and act like everybody else. The only way to explain this is that, contrary to what they claim, they haven’t really understood the meaning of Immanuel, that Jesus Christ is God with us.

The Advent of Christ, the arrival of Jesus changes everything. If anyone is in Christ, there is new creation! The old has gone, the new has come! Ezekiel says we’re given a new heart and a new spirit. Romans 12 says we’re given a new mind. Jesus tells us we’re given a new identity and a new family in him. And at the end of Matthew 19, Jesus gives us the hope of living in a brand new world, what he calls the renewal of all things!

Something has happened. Something has been done. And it totally changes everything. It’s the best news you’ve ever heard. And it gives you and it gives all of us a whole new world.

Peace,

Allan

Nuts and Bolts

November 21, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Alright, let’s get down to it. Christian unity. Accepting all Christians, all baptized followers of Jesus, for the sake of the world. Being one with all disciples of all denominations. Worshiping and serving together with all Christians and churches.

Well, what about the Christian who disagrees with me on divorce and remarriage? Or weekly communion? Or church leadership structures or church names?

Yes, let’s go there.

In Romans 14-15, the divisive issues of the day are eating meat versus vegetables and the observance of holy days. The apostle Paul certainly has his opinions on what’s right and what’s wrong. He has his convictions on these divisive topics. But in Christ Jesus, he says, those things don’t matter.

“Accept the one whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters… Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand… We all belong to the Lord.” ~Romans 14:1-8

Do you believe you are perfect? Do you think you’ve got everything figured out perfectly? Do you believe everything in the Bible exactly right, do you worship God perfectly, do you live God’s will righteously and without fault, do you practice your faith perfectly? Do you have all of God’s will perfectly interpreted and figured out? No?

Then how are you saved? What covers you in your honest shortcomings?

The grace of God. His matchless grace.

Do you believe the Churches of Christ have every single thing perfectly interpreted and figured out? Are the Churches of Christ doing everything exactly right? No?

Well, what covers us in our innocent misunderstandings? How can we be saved? God’s grace. His wonderful grace.

You think there’s any chance at all the Methodists might be doing something right according to to the will of God that we’re not? You think the Presbyterians might possibly have something figured out that we don’t? What if First Baptist’s understanding of something is fuller and richer and more in line with God’s will than ours is?

What covers us in our sincere misunderstandings? What saves us when we don’t have everything perfectly right?

God’s grace. His limitless grace.

Okay, let’s flip it around. Let’s assume that we have it right on the Lord’s Supper and the Methodists have it wrong. Let’s pretend that we’re right about baptism and the plurality of elders, and the Presbyterians and Baptists are wrong. Does God’s grace not cover them completely? Are they any less saved?

Yeah, but they’re wrong! We’re right!

So, you get God’s grace where we’re messing it up, but they don’t? We get God’s grace to cover us, but nobody else does? Why?

Because we’re trying harder. We’re more honest with the Bible. We’re more sincere.

That might be the most arrogant thing a disciple of Jesus could ever say.

The grace of God applies to both conduct and doctrine. We are all saved by grace through faith in Jesus. We’re all in the same fellowship, the same boat. So, why do we have such divisions among us Christians? Because we confuse doctrinal issues we feel strongly about with “faith.” Because we refuse to consider our own positions or opinions as disputable. Because our distorted theology of grace sometimes depends on the hot church topic of the moment or which preacher is writing what book or what church is doing something differently. We define ourselves by our differences from others instead of by the relationship we all have with God in Christ.

1 Corinthians 3 says you’re still worldly. You’re acting like mere people. You’re being worldly.

Yeah, that’s right. That is how the world acts, maybe more so now than ever. If I disagree with one politician or one celebrity on any one point, I’ll vilify that whole person. I’ll write him off. Everything that person says now is wrong. Everything he does, everything about him is wrong. So, I don’t see anything redeemable about his party or his movie or his team. A politician could say the sky is blue, 2+2=4, and Blue Bell ice cream tastes great and some of us would disagree with him because he’s not in our party.

We can do the same thing in Christ’s Church. If I disagree on one point with any Christian or congregation or denomination, I vilify that Christian or congregation or denomination. Everything about that Christian or their church is wrong. So, I can’t fellowship or worship with them.

And the unbelieving world looks at that and says, “No, thanks.”

A religion as visibly divided as ours can hardly reflect the truth. It reflects the fallen world, not the glory of our God. Our Christian unity will have an eternal impact on the world. But the world has to see it. It can’t just reside in our hearts and minds. Christian unity must be lived out loud and seen in public. It has to be visible. And when it is, the world will believe.

Peace,

Allan

The Will of Jesus to Practice

November 20, 2024 / / 0 Comments

More and more research is being released about the effects of cell phones and digital technology, telling us what we already know, what we’ve known for 20 years. But somehow it keeps being presented and received as groundbreaking. What? Cell phone bans result in academic improvement? No way!! Who could have ever guessed that? The latest is coming out of the Dallas School District where Robert T. Hill Middle School banned all phones on campus five years ago. According to school officials there, the campus culture has shifted. There has been a 75% decrease in bullying (I’m not sure how they measure that), and a 13-point gain in the number of students meeting the standards of the STAAR tests. According to the story from Channel 5 in Fort Worth, the biggest pushback generally comes from the parents. Not the students. Parents complain they need to be in constant contact with their children. Of course, because we want to raise our kids to need to live with us into their 30s.

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Our first “4 Midland” pulpit swap and Thanksgiving service is this Sunday. I’m preaching at First Baptist this Sunday morning and Steve Brooks, our brother from First Methodist, is preaching here at GCR. Darin Wood, the pastor at First Baptist is preaching at First Presbyterian while their pastor, Steve Schorr, is preaching at First Methodist. And then all four of our churches are coming together Sunday evening for a combined Thanksgiving service. In advance of these glorious events, I’m posting this week about Christian unity as a gift of God to receive, our Church of Christ heritage to embrace, and, today, the will of Jesus to practice.

My prayer, Jesus says, is that all of them may be one. May they be brought to complete unity. It’s this unity, this uncompromising love and acceptance we have for all baptized disciples of Christ, that will prove to the world Jesus really is who we say he is. Our unflinching commitment to love and accept and unite with all Christian brothers and sisters will astonish the world!

Well, Allan, not ALL people who’ve been baptized. A lot of people are not baptized like we are. A lot of churches don’t do the Lord’s Supper like we do. We can’t worship with and have fellowship with ALL Christians.

That’s why the Church is not astonishing the world.

Our Lord’s prayer is for unity. Christ’s will is for complete unity among all his followers. We need to get there. So, let’s lay it out.

If God accepts someone, I have to also. I can’t be a sterner judge than the perfect judge. I don’t know anybody who would say, “Well, God certainly accepts this woman as a full child of his, but she doesn’t meet all of MY standards. I’M not going to accept her.” Nobody would say that. The truth is, I must fellowship everybody who has fellowship with God. All the saved. Everybody who’s saved.

So, who is saved?

Well, all those who hear, believe, repent, confess, and are baptized (by the way, that’s another Church of Christ creed).

All those who hear what? The Gospel! And believe what? The Gospel! Who repent and confess what? The Gospel!

Okay, what’s the Gospel? That Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God, that he alone is Lord, and that we’re saved by faith in him.

The Bible sums it up in several places, but that’s pretty good. Believe in Jesus as the eternal Son of God, declare him Lord, and, by faith, submit to his lordship in baptism. We’ve never required anything else. The Church through the centuries has never demanded anything more. We’ve never asked anybody their position on atonement theory or women’s roles before they’re baptized. We don’t put a person in the water and then catalogue all their beliefs on the plurality of elders and the age of the earth before they’re saved. Now, some of us try to do that after they’re saved! We can act like a health club sometimes: “The first month is free but then, after that, you’re going to pay through the nose! For the rest of your life!” No, that stuff is not the Gospel. The apostle Paul says nothing but Christ and him crucified.

“Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.” ~Romans 15:7

We are called to accept others by the same standard as when Jesus Christ accepted us, to continually accept others based on the way they were accepted at their baptisms–the way you were accepted at your baptism. Your acceptance by God is a gift. The fact that Christ Jesus accepts you is nothing but pure grace. Now, show that same grace, share that same gift, to everyone who calls Jesus Lord.

Peace,

Allan

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