The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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Category: Salvation (Page 23 of 34)

New Creation Reality

February 7, 2013 / / 0 Comments

“From now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, new creation! The old has gone, the new has come!” ~2 Corinthians 5:16-17

We’ve absolutely got to change the way we look at things. It’s so much bigger than we think.

Christianity is not the statement that God exists and sent Jesus to the earth to save us and, because of that, now makes demands of us. The New Testament is not a systematic approach to ethics or a rational outline of morality. Scripture is not a book of rules that inform us of how we should act in this circumstance or in that situation. Jesus did not come to this earth to bring a new ethic or a new set of morals. Jesus came here to bring us a brand new reality!

If anyone is in Christ… new creation! (The two words “he is” don’t appear in the original Greek text.) In Christ, it’s just “new creation!” Period. Or exclamation point, I suppose. New creation! Everything’s new. All of creation is brand new. Everything looks new. Everything is reinterpreted. Jesus is not an add-on to the story; he IS the story! Jesus is not the missing piece to the puzzle; he is the puzzle! And the box it came in! And the card table and the chairs and the fire in the fireplace! That’s the reality. God through Christ is redeeming this planet, he’s restoring all of creation, and so he rightfully claims every part of us. Everything you do, everything you say, everything you think. From the moment you wake up until the minute you go to sleep, God claims all of it in Jesus. His perfect will is that every bit of it is holy. So we don’t belong to ourselves. Every second of our time and every square inch of our bodies belong to the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

It’s bigger than we think.

When you put on Christ in baptism, when you accept God’s will for your life to be holy and sanctified and exactly like him, everything’s new. It’s panoramic. It’s all inclusive. It’s rich and deep, it gets in to every crack and crevice of your existence. It all belongs to God and he’s claiming it. There’s no room for other gods, there’s no place for selfish behavior, there’s no time to waste in worldly pursuits. There’s no need for anything else.

Christianity is not a verse for this and a passage for that. It’s not. What am I supposed to do in this business situation? What should I say about this family crisis? When I’m confronted with this, how do I act? What are my obligations in this circumstance? Well, let’s go look in the Bible…

I’m sorry, there’s not a verse for everything. You can’t go book, chapter, verse on a whole lot of things. But I don’t want a verse to determine my conduct situation by situation. I want the reality of the new creation. I want the reality of God’s claim on my life in Jesus Christ to be pushed into the room and dominate everything I do and everything I say and everything I think about. It has to. It has to be at the very center of my being and the very reason for my life.

“It is God’s will that you should be sanctified.” ~1 Thessalonians 4:3

I want to be completely wrapped up in God’s claim on my life. I want to be totally dependent on Jesus for my salvation. I want to be thoroughly led by the Spirit inside me to sanctification and holiness. It’s bigger than we think. And I want it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, our children’s minister here at Central, Mary McNeill, finally had her baby, fifteen days past her due date and and fourteen days past the last date chosen in our office pool. (Congratulations, Connie!) Mary and Todd had decided not to find out beforehand if this fourth child was a boy or a girl, which only added to the considerable interest and anticipation surrounding the whole thing. When we learned that the baby was born yesterday afternoon at just before 4:00, the curiosity became almost unbearable. When 5:30 rolled around and I still didn’t know the gender of this latest little McNeill, I decided to text Mary. After all, I’d been receiving calls and texts all day asking me about the baby. Plus, I’d have to announce the news to our Sneed Hall Bible Class at 7:00. I needed to know. Here’s the whole conversation:

“I’m going to start sending tons of people straight to your hospital room if I don’t get some baby information. STAT!!!”

“Baby born at 3:49, 7lbs. 6oz., 19 inches long. Will tell you the name after my kids get here.”

“Congratulations. Boy or girl? You’re killing me.”

“I can’t tell you until my kids get here and see. They didn’t want us to tell them over the phone, they wanted to find out for themselves.”

“Again, congratulations. I’m not sure what your kids have to do with me. Or why you won’t tell the one person on this earth you know has no facebook, no facetime, no twitter, no skype, no instagram, and no possible other way to communicate with anybody other than a really slow text. Girl, right?”

“Because the man with the least amount of technology also has the biggest mouth.”

“Will I find out before church?”

“Yes, probably in the next 15-25 minutes.”

“Never mind. I’ve lost interest.”

The news we wanted came a few minutes later. Ava Grace (I knew it was a girl!) came into the world, into the McNeill family, and in to the hearts of her Central church family as a perfect little gift from our Father above. She’s beautiful. And she’s a tremendous blessing. Congratulations to Todd and Mary, Kathryn and Ethan and Lauryl. We join you in thanking God for the gift of this precious child. And we can’t wait to see what our faithful Lord does with her and in her to his eternal glory and praise.

Peace,

Allan

New Class East & New Class West

January 21, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Our God is doing something really, really cool on the south side of our Bible class floor here at Central. He’s the only One who can be praised for what’s happening down there. He’s the only One who can receive any glory.

Frequent visitors to this blog know that we are moving slowly but certainly toward what we feel is a fuller expression of the Gospel of Jesus in our church settings and programs and gatherings here at Central. We’re trying to become more inter-generational. We’re attempting to break down the barriers beween the ages and genders, the walls between socio-economic classes and cultures, the hurdles between languages and race. Not everybody fits in to the nice and neat little categories we use to make up our Bible classes. If you’re not a certain age or enjoy a certain marital status or make a certain amount of money, you may not easily slide into one of our established groups. I’m not being critical; that’s just the way it is. And it’s not unlike the way it is at most Christian churches.

So nearly a year ago we began talking about a new kind of Bible class at Central, one that would chip away at the dividing walls and welcome all-comers to the one table of Christ we read about in the Prophets and the Gospels. We’ve prayed and planned, we’ve laughed and cried, we’ve been overjoyed and in distress — sometimes in the very same day! — as we prepared for the launch of this new endeavor a few weeks ago. It’s been slow go, painfully slow at times. It’s been challenging. Tough. Scary. Risky, even.

But it’s also been such a tremendous blessing.

We’ve got a little bit of everything in this class. Almost fifty saints, young and old, blue collar and white collar, educated and not, Christians who were baptized 60 years ago and Christians who were baptized last month, suits and ties and tattoos and orange hair. A few of our new class members know exactly how to act in church: they were born and raised CofC. And they’re coming to our class because they never felt like they fit in anywhere else. A few of our other class members don’t know how to “act in church.” One of them just spent a couple of weeks in jail for some offenses committed during her previous life. She’s in our class because she can’t believe she fits in anywhere!

Our class was way too big way too fast to accomplish what we believe our God is calling us to do. We believe discipleship is taught and experienced in close Christian community. We think Christian transformation happens in relationship. So even at Day One, we needed to become two classes. We were too large. And I worried about how we would do that. We talked about it. We prayed about it together. For a couple of weeks we challenged one another. Someone said, “I should choose to go into the class where I’ll be most uncomfortable. That’s probably where God wants me.” Another said, “We’re all brothers and sisters in Christ working toward the same goals; just put us in a class and let’s get on with reaching out to more people.” It was beautiful. Inspiring. But would it work?

Nearly fifty of us were in the room again yesterday morning. After we spent a few more minutes in prayer about our first “multiply” (coming in the very first month!) we lined everybody up against the wall according to the year they graduated from high school. Seriously. That’s what we did. It wasn’t quite like consulting the Urim and Thummim; it wasn’t at all like casting lots for Matthias. But it’s how we did it.

There they all were, stretched out along the wall from Ernie (class of 1949) to Blaine (class of 2006) and everybody in between. I wish somebody had taken a picture. And we numbered off. 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2 all the way down. All the 1s went to New Class West and all the 2s moved to New Class East. And both groups evenly represented the multi-generational, multi-cultural table of our Christ as described in Holy Scripture.

We studied each other’s name tags for a couple of minutes, made some connections within our new groups for a few more, and then spent some time talking about our goals for our classes. We talked about small groups, about people we know inside and outside Christ who would benefit from our Christian community, about next week and next year. And then we prayed again. Prayers of thanksgiving. Prayers of hope. Prayers of faith.

I don’t know what God’s going to do with these two new classes. I really don’t. In my wildest dreams, I’d like to think this kind of thing could change all of Central and ultimately the whole city of Amarillo. Busting out of the norms that society has established always raises eyebrows and stirs up trouble. A deep commitment to this kind of living and sharing, loving and serving together in ways that the world never, ever experiences would be a powerful testimony. This type of cultural abnormality would be an undeniable witness to our King and his power to change people and save the world. I see all the Bible classes and small groups here at Central, eventually, looking more and more like these two new classes. I see everybody in Amarillo who’s never known Christ being attracted to this radical vision of barrier-smashing and non-conformity in such a way that the whole city is turned upside down. I can see that.

What’s mind-blowingly awesome is that our Father promises to deliver more than we can ever ask or imagine.

It’s just a start. We don’t have any cool names for our classes yet or even any coffee makers or posters on the bare walls. We don’t have a leadership structure yet or even a finalized curriculum. What we do have is a common heart for the biblical picture of God’s one people around God’s one table. We have a united passion for leaning in to and working toward what our God has promised is the ultimate goal of salvation.

And now we have hard evidence of our faith in God that he is doing something really cool.

Peace,

Allan

Life Together: Last Thing

January 10, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Why devote our lives to one another in brotherly love? Why sacrifice for and serve one another in genuine Christian community? What’s the result of living our lives together the way Scripture calls us to? Does it matter whether we go through life as an individual follower of Jesus or as a fully involved member of a Jesus-following church?

Yeah, it matters a lot.

One, it brings glory and praise to God. Paul says we should accept one another just as Christ accepted us in order to bring praise to God (Romans 15;7). Loving and serving one another in Jesus’ name makes God’s love complete. The Christ himself says the selfless deeds done for others in his name causes the world to praise our heavenly Father. He tells his disciples in John 13 that if you love one another as I have loved you, everybody will know you’re mine. Everyone will know this is real. Our Christian fellowship marked by genuine love and service fulfills the very reason God created us and sent his Son here to save us.

It also reveals God’s power. Our God is strong when we’re weak; his power is made perfect in our weakness. And the more we open up with one another, the more of our lives we share with one another, the stronger and more powerful our God becomes. The sharing of our struggles and our weaknesses, the mutual bearing of one another’s burdens, opens our eyes to see more clearly what God is doing. I’d like us to demonstrate more of that even in our Sunday morning worship assemblies. The open and honest sharing of our lives and our struggles together should be a regular thing, not a rare thing. When somebody walks to the front to confess a sin or to repent from a wrong or to ask for prayers, there should be 20 or 30 brothers and sisters rushing to the front to be with him. Dozens of brothers and sisters should meet him or her right there on the spot, ready and eager to hug him and pray with him and confess with him, to encourage him and support him and lift him up. Our Christian community, our church, should be the safe place, not the last place, to share our struggles.

And we might say, but what will the visitors think? If we start doing this every Sunday, what will the visitors think?

Are you kidding me?!? Our God is at his strongest and most obvious in the humble recognition of our weakness. God works amazing wonders when we declare our dependence on him instead of ourselves. What will the visitor think? The visitor thinks, “Hey, I can really fit in with this church. These people have lots of problems, but they have God. And they have each other. They’re not pretending. They’re not playing. They’re not just doing church, they are being church.”

And that’s powerful.

Lastly, our Christian lives together, loving and serving each other in Christian community, is part of the salvation process. It’s part of what Paul calls “being saved.” We selflessly love and serve, we bear one another’s burdens the way Jesus does, and our thoughts become words. Our words become actions. Our actions turn into habits. Our habits become our character. And our character becomes our destiny. Life together is a significant part of being transformed into the image of our Savior. The more we serve, the more like Jesus we become. The more we love, the more burdens we bear, the more we consider the needs of others more important than our own, the more like our Lord we become. That’s sanctification. That’s preparation for living forever in the face-to-face presence of God. And that’s our salvation.

Again, our Christian friendships should be treasured, never assumed. Our time together should be cherished, never avoided. Opportunities to be together should be seized, never scorned.

Peace,

Allan

For These Brothers of Mine

December 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

You’ve read Matthew 25, right? It’s the separation of the sheep and goats, the familiar vision Jesus gives all of us of that last day of judgment and glory. We wonder about that last day, don’t we? I was certain that last Friday, December 21, was not going to be the last day. (Of course, when I got my copy of Aerosmith’s new album last week and discovered that Steven Tyler had done a duet with Carrie Underwood — on an Aerosmith album!! — I began to worry. I can’t think of a more disturbing sign of the end times tribulation than that.) But we do know that last day is coming. And we do know Christ Jesus, our King, is going to judge us. He’s going to separate those who denied him as Lord from those who faithfully submitted to his Lordship. That’s what he says in Matthew 25:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the Kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I needed songs, and you sang them to me acappella; I needed a communion meal, and you ate it every Sunday; I needed a church, and you built a huge building with the right name on the sign; I needed correct doctrine, and you preached harshly worded sermons and wrote scathing articles; I needed distinctions, and you drew rigid lines of fellowship; I needed strict obedience to laws which never came out of my mouth, and you vigorously kept them and enforced them on others.'”

No! God forbid!

As Joe Malone used to exclaim, “Shades of reason, neighbor!” That’s not what it says. Praise God, that’s not what it says!

“For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited me in; I needed clothes, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you looked after me; I was in prison, and you came to visit me.”

The ones who are blessed by the Father, the ones who will receive the inheritance, the ones for whom the Kingdom is prepared are those of us who reflect the glory of God. Those of us who show grace and compassion, love and faithfulness, patience and mercy and forgiveness.

Our Lord pulls no punches when he declares with divine authority that justice and mercy and faithfulness are more at the heart of what it means to belong to God than tithing. He does not apologize one bit when he condemns the religious elite for saying all their prayers correctly, but then foreclosing on the widow’s house. Our King desires mercy, not sacrifice. It’s always been that way.

Your practices don’t matter if you don’t show grace and compassion. It doesn’t matter how often or how seldom you take communion if you’re not demonstrating love and faithfulness and forgiveness in your dealings with people. You can sing the songs and say the prayers perfectly right, but if your attitude is not Christ-like, if you’re heart is not being transformed more into the shape of Jesus’ heart, if you’re not reflecting God’s eternal qualities in the ways you interact with people, it’s meaningless.

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'”

Our God has revealed himself to us. He’s told us who he is in beautiful words and in mighty deeds. Our God is compassionate beyond measure. His grace is given freely and abundantly. His patience means he will never give up. His love is limitless, no boundaries; his faithfulness is uncompromising, it’s forever. His forgiveness is complete. Total. It’s done.

We are blessed. So very blessed. Praise him. And may our lives increasingly reflect his glory.

Peace,

Allan

Creation and Salvation in Connecticut

December 14, 2012 / / 7 Comments

I was preparing to write today’s post about Josh Hamilton and the Rangers. It wasn’t going to be a very long post. My main concerns with the team are not with losing Hamilton. Or Michael Young. Or Mike Napoli. My main question is: Why don’t big-name, free-agents want to play in Arlington? I’ll write more about it later. Maybe.

While I was heading to the Dallas Morning News website a few moments ago to get some stats I wanted for the post, I learned about the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. And everything has changed for me now. I can’t write about baseball. Baseball is insignificant. It’s meaningless. ~~~~~~~~~~~~

We Americans live in a decidely violent culture in an increasingly violent country. We’re eaten up with violence. We watch it in the movie theaters and on our TVs. We sing about it along with the radio. We joke about it with our friends.We cheer war. Our kids (and adults) use violence in their video games. And it shows up more and more and more in our local and national newscasts. A movie theater in Colorado. A shopping mall in Oregon. A football stadium in Kansas City. A downtown bar in Amarillo. An elementary school in Connecticut. It’ll be something else tomorrow or the next day. Just another bloody shooting on another screen?

God help us.

We’re surrounded by violence at this church. Talk to Patty who was baptized into Christ last week. Or Amanda or Melinda who put on Jesus as Lord last month. Talk to any of the people at Prayer Breakfast or Loaves and Fishes around here. There is a severe shortage of respect for human life. We are confronted every day — usually through news outlets but, sometimes, face to face — with senseless violence by and against children of our God who are created in his holy image. And it sickens me.

This is the kind of thing that makes us cry out to our God, “How much longer, Lord?”

It’s also the kind of thing that turns a lot of Christians against God’s creation. A lot of Jesus followers believe that our salvation is a divine rescue from the evils of the world. Salvation from God, a lot of Christians believe, is salvation from the flesh, from being human, from living in a world of skin and bone, free will and choice, people and things. There are a lot of disciples who don’t seem to care much about the world. “It’s all going to be burned up anyway!” they say. “Heaven holds all to me,” they sing. So much so, I’m afraid, that they separate salvation from creation. To many Christians, the world and whatever is of the world or in the world is evil and worthless and sad. We don’t care about the world. We’re being delivered from the world.

But the Incarnation of God drastically counters that viewpoint.

The birth of our Lord Jesus, instead of separating creation and salvation, actually connects creation and salvation. It joins the realities of heaven with the ordinary and sometimes terrible affairs of life on earth. By becoming one of us, God reaffirms the original goodness and purpose of his great creation. Our human condition — even with all our flaws and weaknesses, shortcomings and sins, violence and greed — is not so evil and worthless and sad that God himself is above becoming flesh! In fact, it is Jesus taking on our everyday human condition that is the means for our salvation. God reclaims us and our world as his own by becoming one of us.

You know, not everything that happens is God’s will. In the Gospels, God intervenes to rescue Jesus from Herod. But at the same time, the little boys of an entire village are still slaughtered. That part was not God’s will. It wasn’t providential. And we struggle with the concept of God’s sovereignty and man’s free will all the time. God as all-knowing and all-powerful together with man’s ability to do whatever he pleases is troublesome. It’s complex. God’s people have been debating it since the beginning of time and, I suppose, we always will.

But looking at the birth stories of Christ helps clear it up a little for me. You have this perfectly seamless union of the human and the divine. It’s a story of collaboration. Both elements working together so perfectly — and so mysteriously — we’ll never figure it out. But the Incarnation gives us a sense of the big picture. God is indeed sovereign. He does have plans for his world. And he has the authority and the power to intervene and control things any time he pleases. But there’s no reason to create us and seek a relationship with us if our lives are already programmed  and scripted.

What we see in the birth of Jesus is not God controlling or manipuating the situation. We see God joining us in a partnership. Some people, like Mary and Joseph, cooperate beautifully. Others, like Herod, don’t. God allows and he honors both sets of choices. And he works through both sets of circumstances. He is God with us, not God instead of us.

Yes, all of creation is groaning. We read about this latest school shooting in Connecticut and we realize we live in a sinful place in a fallen world. Today, especially, again, we are groaning as in the pains of childbirth to become what we were truly created to be.  And it seems impossible for this horrible stuff to be redeemed. How can it be salvaged? Where is the good? Just come quickly, Lord, and take us all away from here.

No.

He created our “here.” And he’s working to fix it.

Our merciful Father is at work today in Newtown, Connecticut. He’s joining creation and salvation today in mighty acts of grace and love, service and sacrifice. He’s redeeming that entire situation and the hundreds of people there who are mourning intense and personal loss.

We’ll become more like our Christ when our hearts ache at the loss of human life like our God’s heart does. We hurt when his creation hurts, we groan with all of creation today. And we look for his gracious acts of forgiveness and reconciliation. We look for signs of the salvation he is most assuredly bringing.

Peace,

Allan

Through Water to Salvation

December 11, 2012 / / 1 Comment

“…this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you.” ~1 Peter 3:21

In recalling to his readers how Noah and his family were “saved through water,” the apostle Peter points us to Christian baptism that, in the same way, saves us. Peter’s clear, succint statement is astounding. For a lot of people, it’s scandalous. Peter tells us that baptism has a salvation function.

Paul draws the same conclusion as he looks back on the one foundational and identifying event for Israel: the exodus and the crossing of the Red Sea (1 Corinthians 10:1-4). He sees what happened in Exodus 14 as a baptism “into Moses” and compares it to our baptisms “into Christ” (Romans 6:3, Galatians 3:27). Paul wants us to understand our baptisms as a comparable moment of deliverance and redemption.

Baptism, just like the flood and the Red Sea crossing, is a saving event. Just as God saved Noah through cleansing the old world with water, so God saves us from our old lives through baptism. Just as God delivered Israel by using water to destroy their enemies, Pharaoh and his army, he delivers us by using water to eradicate our enemies of sin and death. Noah and Israel both pass through the waters into a new world, a new creation. Christians pass through the waters of baptism into a new world, eternal life with the Father through the death and resurrection of the Son.

It’s a divine gift. It’s a sacrament of God’s grace. It’s a salvation experience. In baptism our God redeems us, gives us a new identity, and frees us from slavery to sin and death. And it shapes who we are and how think and act as a people of God.

“We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” ~Romans 6:4

~~~~~~~~~~

What a marvelous joy to welcome into our home overnight Friday our great friends David and Olivia Nelson and their sons, Caleb and Seth. The Nelsons timed their furlough in the States from their missionary lives in Ukraine to coincide with the birth of Seth last month in Lubbock. David and Olivia figured one boy born in Kharkov in Hospital 17 was enough. So we were very blessed that they took a long, winding route from Lubbock to Fort Worth, through Amarillo, to spend almost 24 hours with us last weekend.

After answering several questions Friday night from servers and other customers at Blue Sky about David’s accent, we stayed up way too late passing Seth around, drinking egg nog and Dr Pepper (no kafir, David)  and playing our favorite, Phase 10. Caleb entertained us the next morning by splashing through his pancake breakfast. And then we spent a good long while with our Father in prayer, thanking him for the awesome privilege of serving him in his Kingdom together on opposite ends of his world.

The Nelsons are in Fort Worth now for another month, reconnecting with the church family at Legacy, stocking up on picante sauce and Jello-O and other stuff they can’t get in Ukraine, and being reminded of how much they are truly love and appreciated and admired by everyone who knows them.

I praise our God for the ways he works through and with David and Olivia. I thank him for our rich friendship and partnership in the Gospel. And I acknowledge gratefully that I’m a much better Christian, a more faithful follower of our King, because I know them.

Peace,

Allan

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