The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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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

Life Together: How?

January 9, 2013 / / 2 Comments

“Now, about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other.” ~1 Thessalonians 4:9

Paul claims that God has taught us how to love one another. We don’t need to talk about living together in Christian community, we don’t need to write about loving and serving one another within our church family, because every single thing we need to know, God’s already taught us. Everything we need to know about service and love we’ve been taught by God through his self-sacrificing Son. Everything. We just follow his lead. We bear one another’s burdens. Like Jesus who took up our infirmities and carried our diseases, we too support the sick, lift up the weak, and encourage the fainthearted. We defend the helpless and protect the hurting. We feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, and give that cup of cold water in Jesus’ name.

If anything, God has taught us through Jesus that living together in Christian family is all about people. Genuine Christian love and service is shown to people, it’s not lavished on some high principle. We love people, not ideas. We serve each other, not our doctrines and traditions.

You know, we talk a lot about our Christian community, our church. It’s a continuous topic of serious conversation. Is the church growing or not? Is the church strong or not? Are we becoming too liberal or too conservative? Is that church doctrinally sound (whatever that means)? How’s their attendance? What’s our contribution? Do they have a praise team? Are we going to do small groups?

Listen to me: Lost people don’t care! People with burdens and illnesses don’t care! People dying in sin, people without hope, people in our communities who are looking for the ultimate and eternal answers don’t care!

We talk a lot about change in our churches. Some of us are really for it; some of us are really against it. We’ll get more people if we change. We’ll get more people if we never change. We’ll get more people if we go back to the way things used to be. We’ll get more people if we move ahead to where everybody else is going. We talk about change, and it usually means we’re talking about what we do 75-minutes in the worship center on Sunday mornings. And it means nothing to the lost!

We can rip down our screens and burn all the computers and hum Gregorian chants that were written a thousand years ago. Or we can bring in a 50-piece orchestra and pass out a hundred microphones and sing only contemporary praise songs that were written last month. Either way, the lost are not saved. The burdened are not relieved. The downtrodden are not lifted.

Oh, yeah, we need to change. We definitely need to change. We need to change the way we look at things. We need to raise our vision. People need love and comfort and healing and acceptance and peace. They need fellowship. They need life together with the Body of Christ.

How do we do it? Again, we follow the lead of Christ. We love each other the way he loves us. We serve one another the way he serves us. We sacrifice for each other and bear each other’s burdens. Just like our Christ. It’s not about programs and numbers, it’s not about money and image. Life together in Christ is always about people.

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It took Jerry Wayne two years to discover what most NFL observers have known for a long, long time: Rob Ryan is not a good defensive coordinator. The brash brother of Rex and son of Buddy was fired by the Cowboys last night, ending an experiment that was doomed from the start.

Never mind Ryan’s outrageous demeanor on the sidelines, in the press, and out on the town that so completely opposed the head coach’s button-down, strait-laced personality. Never mind the outsized ego that made him the focus of intense attention and coverage that undermined what the team was trying to do at every turn. Never mind the continuous stream of profanity that Ryan unleashed on reporters, opponents, fans, Cowboys personnel, game officials, and office staff. Some of it was muttered under his breath, some of it was shouted from a full throat and a red face, but it was constant and enough to make even Norv Turner blush. Never mind the Jerry Garcia hairdo and the weight, which only added to Ryan’s entirely unprofessional bag of nothing. All of those things and more contributed to Ryan’s image which was an embarrassment to the whole organization.

If you just looked at his career on the field, that would be enough. The Cowboys were 19th in total defense in the NFL this year, the best ranking for a Rob Ryan defense in his nine-year career as a defensive coordinator. During those nine years, Ryan has never coached a defense to a winning record, much less a playoff berth. This season, Ryan’s defense forced a franchise-record-low sixteen total turnover, including a league-low seven interceptions. Cowboys’ opponents converted 40.1% of their third downs this year, good for the bottom third of the league. Again.

It’s significant that Garrett is the one who fired Ryan over the phone last night, not Jerry Wayne. Apparently, Jerry is letting Jason make this call and will bring in the defensive coordinator the head coach wants. That’s a switch. It might signal that this next year is a do-or-die for season for Garrett and Jerry wanted to judge him when Garrett had his own hand-picked coaches and system. Garrett mentioned a “change in defensive philosophy” last night. Might that mean a return to the 4-3  and an occasional blitz? Maybe. Hopefully.

Firing Ryan last night was something. It’ll help some; it couldn’t make things worse. Of course, if Jerry really wanted to do something that would appease the angry fans, drive ticket sales up, and please his coach and his team, he would fire the General Manager.

Peace,

Allan

Life Together: Why?

January 8, 2013 / / 0 Comments

We’re going to keep at it for a couple of days here on Christian commmunity. You know, we say the word “fellowship” today and we immediately think about a big bucket of fried chicken and a green bean casserole. And hopefully somebody brought banana pudding. But in the Bible “fellowship” is much more than just a meal. “Fellowship” is everything! Koininea means sharing. It’s not something you do every fifth Sunday with a crockpot. It’s something you do every single day. Sharing each other’s blessings and each other’s burdens as we grow together and glorify the Lord. This fellowship of the saints is not some ideal that we’re trying to realize; it’s a reality created by God in Christ in which we’re called to participate.

Why? Why love each other? Why serve one another? What’s our motivation? Why would we be so concerned about this?

Well, it’s nothing we have to guess at. It’s spelled out very clearly in all the Christian letters. Our life together reflects God’s work through Christ. It imitates God in Christ. It lives into and embodies what our God is all about.

Paul begins his community directives portion of Romans 12 with “in view of God’s mercy.” Or, in other words, because God has been so merciful to us, we should love and honor and serve one another. In Ephesians 4, Paul tells us to be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave us. In Ephesians 5, he directs us to submit to one another out of reverance for Christ. Colossians 3 tells us to bear with each other and forgive one another just as the Lord forgave us. On and on it goes. 1 Thessalonians 5. Hebrews 10. 1 Peter 1. What God in Christ has done for us and with us, we in turn do for and with others in Christian community.

God’s perfect love and sacrifice is fulfilled, it’s made complete, Scripture says, when we love each other with that same love. I forgive you because God forgives me. I serve you because God serves me. I give you what I have because God gives everything he has to me. I’m patient with you, I’m generous to you, I’m kind and gentle and compassionate with you because my heavenly Father is all those things to me. I submit to you because Jesus submitted to the whole world on a cross. I love and forgive my enemies because while I was God’s enemy, he put his only Son on a tree to save me.

That’s why we die to each other. We put to death our own selfish ambitions and vain conceits, we bury our own interests because of all the ways our God in Christ does that for us.

We know what it’s like to be stuck in sin. We know the misery. As C. S. Lewis describes in Screwtape, we know what it’s like to be trapped by the devil, to be drowning in sin, to have “an ever increasing desire for an ever diminishing pleasure.” We know what it’s like. I know what it’s like. And God through Christ saved me. He loves me and rescues me. I know what it’s like.

Why love and serve one another in Christian community?

Because I once was lost, but now I’m found; I was blind, but now I see.

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Vickie dominated our second annual Central Staff Bowl Challenge, leading it almost from start to finish with an uncanny knack for picking all the right games and avoiding all the upsets. Down the stretch Vickie correctly picked eleven of the last fourteen college bowl games, maintaining the impressive lead she built before Christmas by picking the first six games in a row. On the far extreme other end of things, Connie finished dead last. And it wasn’t even close. For those of you who are really interested (sickos!), Hannah finished in second place (blame it on Baylor), Mary and Matthew and I competed for the top spot right into the final week, but our point values were a bit misplaced. Greg and Elaine and George all suffered very disappointing finishes in the middle of the pack. Gail was frustrated to be really bad, but not bad enough to compete for the last place prize. Adam made all his picks while driving his family from Houston to Amarillo at 3:00 in the morning; and it showed. Mark thought picking all the games A-B, A-B, A-B right down the column would be interesting; it wasn’t. Tanner and Kevin were the closest to Connie at the bottom of the pile but, in reality, she was never seriously challenged. Vickie has bragging rights for the next year and she and Connie both get a free lunch when our church staff celebrates the end of the football season and the beginning of the NHL season (what?) at the end of the month.

No sooner had the BCS Championship Game been decided last night (that was like about four minutes into the first quarter; what happened, I was watching the championship and an OU game broke out?!?) when the church staff moved on to the next big contest. With our own sister Mary about to drop anchor with the fourth little McNeil, we’ve all placed our bets on the day Mary dominos, the exact time she gives birth, and the gender of the little tot. This is such a competitive group; I love it! Guesses range from this Saturday (does Hannah have some inside, sister-in-law scoop?) all the way to January 23. I’m pulling for a girl at 10:15 Sunday morning January 20.

Peace,

Allan

Life Together

January 7, 2013 / / 1 Comment

For most of us, if not every single one of us, we live in a “Christian-friendly” place. In most of our towns and cities, there is some kind of a Christian gathering or activity happening somewhere every day and night of the week. There is some kind of Christian work or service being done in the name of Jesus somewhere in our cities every day. There are Christian churches on every corner. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a dozen Christians. The people you work with, your neighbors, your waiter, the lady in front of you at the post office — they’re all Christians. Or, at least, most of them would claim to be Christian. Now, without getting into the specifics of their connections to Christ or their discipleship to Jesus, the truth is that most of us can go for days at a time and never see anybody or talk to anybody who wouldn’t say they’re a Christian.

And I wonder if we take that for granted.

Because, I promise you, the apostle Paul and John and Peter and Luke and the other early disciples of Jesus could never have imagined in their wildest dreams a world in which most people claim to be Christian. That concept of open and public worship and devotion to Jesus and open fellowship with a huge community of believers would have been unthinkable. Our group of 750 that meets together at Central on Sunday mornings and all the things we do together and all the ways we come together would have blown those first century Christians out of the water! Our meetings together and our fellowship with one another is so… matter-of-fact. So ordinary. So expected.

The very first Christians could never relate to what we enjoy on a regular basis. To those great men and women of the faith, the physical presence of other Christians — being in the same room with a bunch of other disciples! — was not normal. It was, instead, an uncommon source of great joy and strength.

Paul’s in prison and he calls Timothy to come to him in the last days of his life. He remembers Timothy’s tears when they departed and he longs to see his beloved son in the faith “that I may be filled with joy” (2 Timothy 1:4). He writes to his brothers and sisters in Thessalonica: “Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again” (1 Thessalonians 3:10). The great apostle John, in his second letter writes to his brothers and sisters in Asia: “I have much to write to you, but I do not want to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to visit you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12).

There were times in their lives when these great men of God did not have the physical, visible fellowship with other believers that we enjoy on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. And they longed for it. They treasured it. They cherished it. They looked forward to it and savored it with great delight.

Good or bad, I don’t think we can relate.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about Christian fellowship in his wonderful little book, Life Together. When he wrote this in 1938, he was running an illegal underground seminary in Nazi Germany. This was five years before he was arrested by Hitler’s Gestapo police, seven years before he was executed by special order of Heinrich Himmler:

“What is an unspeakable gift of God for the lonely individual is easily disregarded and trodden under foot by those who have the gift every day. It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brethren is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us. Therefore, let him who has the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.”

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.

May we rededicate ourselves from this day forward to living more closely together in Christian community. May we place the proper perspective and value on the time we get to spend together in the holy presence of our loving and saving Father. And may we better understand how our life together not only serves to transform all of us more into the image of Christ, but serves to redeem this broken world in the name and manner of Jesus.

Peace,

Allan

So Much Glory

January 3, 2013 / / 0 Comments

We’ve just completed a year-long study here at Central of the foundational words of our God in Exodus 34:5-7. This is the passage in which our God describes himself in his own words to Moses and his people at Mount Sinai. It’s the longest such passage in all of Scripture and paramount to the understanding of our heavenly Father and his ways. These words describe God’s eternal nature, his character, his mode of operation, his glory.

“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.”

As a church family, we dove into these holy words in January of this past year and worked through them together a little bit each month. By God’s grace, we are trying to assimilate these words into our own lives. We want to live into these words. We want to become, as a people of God, everything these words tell us about our God. And we want to get better at seeing and recognizing the glory of God all around us.

A few weeks ago, as we were getting close to wrapping up the series, I asked our congregation to submit photos that, to them, reflected this eternal glory of God. Send me the pictures, I begged, that communicate God’s faithful love, that demonstrate his patience, that speak to his great forgiveness, that represent his holiness, that show his compassion and grace. Send me pictures that, to you, show God’s glory. And the pictures came in by the dozens.

Nearly a hundred different pictures accompanied by nearly a hundred different stories, representing God’s glory in nearly a hundred different and beautiful ways. Our enormously talented worship minister, Kevin Schaffer, arranged all the pictures and set them to music in three separate slide shows our church family enjoyed together during the sharing of communion on Sunday January 30. (You can see all three videos by clicking here.)

And I learned so much.

I learned about grace and forgiveness from Andrew and Stephanie and Evie. Mike showed me the connection between a newborn baby and a glorious sunrise. Mary Ellen spoke of God’s glory as reflected in her parents’ marriage of 73 years and John Todd saw it in his mother’s long and faithful friendship with Marilyn. I learned that Lyndsay was baptized by Paul Sneed, that Shirlene’s kids weren’t exactly chomping at the bit to move back to Amarillo, and that Joe and Margie once saved Becky’s life. My brothers and sisters at Central see the glory of God in hummingbirds and rainbows, in mountains and sunsets and in pink balloons at a sweet teenager’s funeral. Josh and Brittany see God’s faithfulness in their chocolate lab, Connie sees God’s patience in the spiritual journey of her grandmother, and many of us experience God’s grace in Judy and Linda as they so courageously battle cancer. Pictures taken in Africa and New Mexico, Brazil and Oklahoma, Canada and right here at home. There is so much of God’s glory. God’s glory is everywhere, testifying to his love, reminding us of his grace, showing us his forgiveness, witnessing to his faithfulness.

Through those pictures and the stories, I have learned so much about my church family at Central. I’ve seen inside your hearts a little more this past month. You’ve revealed to me a little more about where you’re coming from and how you think and how you experience God. That makes me a better preacher today than when this project began. And we’re all interested in that!

I pray that in thinking about these pictures and then sending them in, we all were forced to consider God’s nature in new and exciting ways. I hope we’ve all grown to begin seeing the presence and the power of our God in places we’ve never before thought to look. And my desire is that we will all seek to reflect that same heavenly glory so that our kids, our neighbors, our city, if facing a similar assignment, would feel compelled to send in pictures of us.

Peace,

Allan

Heart of a Disciple: Submission

January 1, 2013 / / 0 Comments

As we begin a brand new year with our brand new re-commitments to our Lord and to his eternal Kingdom, let’s consider a final trait of Christ’s twelve apostles that were lacking in most everybody else who ran into Jesus during his ministry. That last trait is submission. Or you might call it obedience.

Jesus’ disciples recognized that they needed his instruction. No matter how harsh they sometimes were, they knew they needed to apply Jesus’ teachings to their lives. Now, they were not perfect students. Not by any stretch. Sometimes Jesus was angry at them. Frustrated. I’m sure he was sick of them sometimes. When, at the drop of a hat, they’re wanting to call down fire from heaven and burn out a whole village. When they wanted to censor other followers who were teaching in Jesus’ name but not doing things exactly as they were doing them. In Matthew 17, these disciples can’t cast a demon out of a sick boy and Jesus says, “How much longer must I put up with you?” If you’re a school teacher or a parent, you can relate to our Lord’s exasperation. When Peter got sidetracked during a critical moment, Jesus called him Satan.

Yet these apostles continually repented and re-repented and re-submitted themselves to the lordship of Jesus and his teachings. One minute, yes, they’re arguing over who will be the greatest in the Kingdom, but the next minute they’re submitting to a foot-washing lesson on selfless service. Peter denies Jesus three times and then enjoys a breakfast on the beach with Jesus, repenting and accepting forgiveness and recommitting to submission and obedience.

Humility, trust, and submission. You can’t know a person has those traits by looking at his SAT scores. But if one doesn’t possess these qualities in increasing measure, one cannot understand Jesus the way his first disciples did. These are absolutely essential qualities for a follower of the Lord. They’re indispensable traits that give a person the ears to hear what Jesus is saying and the eyes to see what Jesus is revealing. Because Jesus is not the kind of teacher everybody gets.

He teaches in parables and questions and difficult language to make sure their level of understanding is never past their level of personal involvement. He made them dig. He made them get invested and involved. He made them sacrifice. Their personal relationship is a major part of Jesus’ teachings. With Jesus, you don’t just listen and then regurgitate facts and ideas. You have to have a change of heart. If you don’t have the right kind of heart, you can’t really comprehend everything Jesus is doing.

It’s never merely informational with our great rabbi. It’s transformational. His teaching always starts and finishes in the heart.

May we each approach our Lord and Master with humility, trust, and submission. May we see with his eyes and hear with his ears. And as we learn, may our hearts grow and be transformed and become one with his and with one another’s.

Amen.

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Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

Peace,

Allan

 

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