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Our Lord’s Patience Means Salvation

June 21, 2012 / / 2 Comments

For some reason — from the very beginning, in fact; check Genesis 3 — we have always decided that we know better than God.

We decided that God’s limits on us were oppressive. We rebel against our Creator and we sin. We blame Satan. We blame each other. We rationalize our actions and justify our sins. We argue with God about it. And in our sin, he clothes us. He covers us. He protects us and provides for us.

We kill our brother. And God puts a mark on us so we won’t be destroyed.

Every other chapter in Judges paints a dark picture of the rebellion of God’s people. They only do what’s right in their own eyes. They’re worshiping Ba’al; this is no little thing; this is full-blown apostacy. They forsake the Lord. They turn their backs on him. And God delivers them again and again and again. Even the deliverers are lousy. Barak refuses to obey God so Deborah gets the credit. Jepthah was a fugitive outlaw who sacrificed his daughter. I can’t find one redeeming thing about Samson. Even Gideon made a golden idol out of the people’s earrings. And God keeps rescuing his people. Again and again.

We see it all through the kings and the prophets: idolatry and rebellion and sin, pride and arrogance and defiance, doubt and disbelief. And, again, it’s been this way from the start.

After God makes a covenant with Noah, Noah gets drunk and naked. After the covenant with Abraham, Abraham panics and takes Hagar so he can have a son. God makes vows to Israel and they respond by building a golden calf before the words on the tablets can even set. After the covenant with David, the great king attempts to break all Ten Commandments in one weekend — and nearly does!

After 1,500 years of these adulteries, surely the Lord our God is going to sue for divorce. Certainly he’s going to destroy these ungrateful, unfaithful, stubborn people and start over. Or just quit.

No. The Lord our God sends Jesus. In an act of astonishing grace and incredible patience he sends his Son.

He. Sends. Jesus.

“He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” ~2 Peter 3:9

Our God is eternal. He always was and always will be. God is more than willing to let entire centuries go by, to let whole milennia pass, as he carefully works out his eternal purposes.

God is still patient. God is still waiting. He is patiently waiting for people to repent. He doesn’t want anyone to perish. He wants everybody to be saved. In Romans 2, Paul says it’s this patience of God, the richness of his kindness and tolerance and patience that leads to repentance. God’s patience is a big part of what saves us! In 1 Timothy 2, we’re told that God wants everybody to be saved. That’s why he waits. Praise God for his patience!

“Our Lord’s patience means salvation.” ~2 Peter 3:15

Peace,

Allan

God Prepares the Course

June 20, 2012 / / 1 Comment

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” ~Genesis 50:20

We can’t always see where our course is leading. As we’re running the race, we’re not always certain of what’s around the corner. We don’t always know. Only one sees the course perfectly: the loving ONE who marks it out for us.

Joseph is told at the very beginning of his race in Genesis 37 that he would provide for his brothers and family. He had no way at all to anticipate how that would come about in such a massive way. Yet God knew all along that he was going to use Joseph to feed his family and provide for the welfare of the world. It just took a while. It took a long while. It took thirteen years of slavery and prison before God eventually placed Joseph where he knew he’d be all along. God intended it for good. We just don’t always see it.

What I want you to know is that it doesn’t matter where you are in your race right now. If you’re at the top of the highest peak or at the bottom of the lowest valley; if all your dreams have come true or if your life feels like a never-ending nightmare, there will always be ups and downs. Some lives are more up than down, true, and vice-versa. But there will definitely be highs and lows in your race. The truth is that regardless of your present circumstance, God’s sovereignty — his love, his mercy, his justice, his faithfulness, his loyalty, his goodness — always wins!

Evil will not triumph. Blessing will always prevail. Obstacles will all eventually melt away. Joseph’s story shows us God’s complete control of our races.

In Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat the narrarator encourages Joseph while he’s in prison. He tells Joseph not to despair. Don’t give up. “I’ve read the book,” he says, “and you come out on top!”

Now, we don’t have that benefit. Our books aren’t finished yet. The chapters of our lives are written as we live them out every day. And we don’t know exactly what our endings are going to look like. But the call from our God is to run the race with endurance and faithfulness. Wherever we are. Whatever our circumstances. Keep in mind, our race is much more than just the end result. The journey, the process, is just as important.

Joseph’s complete faithfulness while he was a slave, while he was in prison, was every bit as valuable to God as the ultimate deliverance he brought to his family. Faithfulness is faithfulness. It’s huge!

Our response to the God who marks the course and runs the race with us is not a raised hand in a moment of prayer in the worship center. It’s not an emotional walk down the aisle during the singing of Trust and Obey. It’s not the amount on your Sunday morning check or the Bible passage you read Tuesday. The only appropriate response to God’s total sovereignty and loving faithfulness is complete submission. Total commitment.

“We have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to our Father and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our own good that we may share in his holiness.” ~Hebrews 12:9-10

Peace,

Allan

Vacation Pics

June 19, 2012 / / 2 Comments

If you’re looking for the brilliant theological insight and outstanding religious reflection normally found in this space, you’ll have to check back tomorrow. Today it’s pictures from our recently concluded and barely-recovered-from Orlando vacation. That’s all. Just pictures. Mostly of the girls, of course.

Come on, it’s not nearly as bad as subjecting you to an hour-and-a-half slide show on the wall of our living room after dinner.

Thursday was spent all day driving from Amarillo to Gulf Shores, Alabama. There’s a really nice beach in Gulf Shores and a couple of really nice shops. But the main reason anybody would visit Gulf Shores is to eat dinner at Lambert’s Cafe where the very loud and funny wait staff throw huge homemade rolls across the restaurant to guests at their tables. So, following a relaxing Friday at the beach, we ate at Lambert’s. And ate and ate and ate. It still cracks me up to watch waiters tossing rolls across the dining room. It’s so funny watching them ricochet off the hands of 80-year-old women and off the heads of six-year-old kids. I’m proud to report our table went fourteen for fourteen; no drops.

We drove all day Saturday in a hurricane to reach Orlando just as it was getting dark. Sunday was our last calm day as we worshiped with the First Christian Church in Kissimmee (at the beginning of the service they promoted the upcoming Christian Church Convention which is being held in Orlando this year and put Jerry Taylor’s picture on the screens as one of the featured speakers; at that very moment, Jerry Taylor was preaching in my place at Central!) and took in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium. After that, it was four non-stop dawn to dusk days at the three Universal theme parks:

Two days at Adventure Island which features all the Harry Potter rides and exhibits. FYI: you cannot get drunk on Butterbeer. Trust me, we tried. Two of the best rides — and two of the longest lines! — are in the Harry Potter part of the park. The kids flipped out on all the movie set recreations.

One day at Universal where The Simpsons ride is making a killing poking sarcastic fun at amusement parks and commercialization and long lines and high prices and everything that is Orlando, Florida. The best roller coaster we rode all week is at Universal. It’s called the RockIt Roller Coaster and it lets you choose from about 60 different songs in six different categories to listen to as you plunge 150 feet at an 80-degree angle and then loop and corkscrew your way around the track at 50-miles per hour. ZZ Top’s “Gimme All Your Lovin'” was my song of choice. Carley preferred some cover of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” I’d never heard before.

And one day at Universal’s Wet N Wild water park which turned out to be mostly just wet and wet after a massive thunderstorm rained out our afternoon.

We drove all the way to Little Rock on Saturday, worshipped with the West-Ark Church of Christ in Fort Smith on Sunday, dropped Valerie off at Oklahoma Christian for Camp Zenith, and then limped home Sunday night where Carley met her Missions in Amarillo buddies for the start of her week.

When I met all the Junior High girls at Matt and Sara’s house this morning, they had all dyed the ends of their hair red. I don’t have pictures of it yet. I’ve got time. There’s no way Carley will get all that washed out this week.

Peace,

Allan

Running the Races

June 18, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We’re finally home now from a ten day family vacation to Orlando, Florida  and back. We put 3,384 miles on the Town & Country and I feel like we did most of it yesterday. I’m very, very glad to be home. We all are. Orlando is great, but there’s not a Dr Pepper to be found there. I knew the Magic Kingdom had a contract with Coke. But so does Universal Studios and, apparently, the entire Central Florida region. It is not the happiest place on earth.

We managed to survive four straight days of Universal theme parks and theme rides and theme restaurants and theme shops. On the way home yesterday we dropped Valerie off at OC for Camp Zenith with all her Legacy friends and made it back just in time to deliver Carley to her “Missions In Amarillo” event here at Central. Now, it’s time to get caught up on this blog. Bear with me, I’ll try to do this in a couple of days.

I want to post a few pictures from our Running the Race kickoff at Central two Wednesday nights ago. I know, these pictures are already old. But, really, this is the first chance I’ve had to even think about posting them since that evening.

We crammed Sneed Hall for the enchilada dinner; we even had to bring in extra tables and chairs. The “Running the Race” headbands were a big hit as surprise door prizes. As always, just click on the pictures for the full size. Copy and use them at your own discretion.

  

I don’t have any pictures of the actual worship time in the chapel. There are lots of those pictures out there. I can report that the chapel was packed. It was buzzing with energy and excitement. It was loud with kids. And the singing was magnificent. Whoa, the singing was good.

Following our worship time, we all headed out to the field behind the Upreach Center for some intergenerational races. Greg and his crew did a great job of organizing four different events in which we all competed in pairs for gold, silver, and bronze medals. In order to foster some of that intergenerational interaction, the rule was that there had to be at least a 20-year age difference between teammates. And it worked!

Josh Dowell and I took the bronze medal in the game’s opening event, a race in which Josh ran the width of the field, did seven circles with his forehead pressed against an upright baseball bat, staggered back to where he blew up and tied a balloon. My job was to sit on the balloon and pop it. Which I did. Nobody blacked out or hyperventilated. Which is a surprise.

Don Evans and I qualified for the medal round in the three-legged-sack race. But, due to some awkward moments at the turn, which, thankfully, all occurred inside the sack and out of sight, we finished fifth. Carley and Shannon actually took the gold in that event. Alas, it would be the last medal of the night for the Stanglins.

Jonah and I didn’t even come close in the golf ball toss. And Leon dropped and broke our water balloon on just the fourth throw into the evening’s final event. He blamed a hangnail or something on his “catching hand.” We’re putting him on the 15-day DL.

It was just the beginning of what promises to be a wonderful summer of exploring and enriching the tremendous blessing God has given us in having a church family made up of five full generations. You know, some churches are made up of only two or three generations. We’ve been blessed with five! And from here on out we resolve together to never take that blessing for granted; we promise to use it to our Father’s glory and to impact all of Amarillo for the sake of his great name; and we intend to enjoy it more and more.

Peace,

Allan

Running the Race Together

June 6, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Our 83-year-old chapel here at Central has been transformed into a miniature stadium complete with colorful banners and cheering crowds, athletes and trophies, lockers and shoes and ice chests full of Gatorade. We’re kicking off our summer “Running the Race” series tonight and, as I’ve come to expect at this place, we’re going all out.

The hope is to use these nine summer Wednesdays to foster some strong intergenerational relationships. We’re not having Bible classes. No kids programs or youth groups. We’re not doing anything according to age group. We’re all eating together at 6:00, worshiping together at 7:00, and then playing together at 7:30.

Together. That’s the key word and the critical idea. Together.

We’re using as our theme passage Hebrews 12:1-3 where Scripture directly ties us disciples of Jesus today who are currently running the race to all the faith heroes in Hebrews 11 who ran the race before us. “Therefore,” it says, “since WE are surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses, let US throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let US run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

By running the race together, Hebrews is not saying all of us in the Central Church of Christ. It’s not “we” or “us”  together in the United States. This huge host of faithful runners to which we belong is not limited by the boundaries of time and space, much less the man-made borders of nations and denominations. Hebrews 12:1 ties us together with Hebrews 11.

So, we run the race together with all the saints of all time. We run the race with Abraham and Ernie, with Moses and Lachelle. We run with Mollie and Johnny and Callie and with Noah and Jacob and Joseph. And these great witnesses who went before us are like spectators; they’re watching us as we run the race and they’re cheering us on. That’s part of the picture. But it’s more than that. They are witnesses in that they bear a testimony. Their lives are a witness to God’s faithfulness, to God’s great provision and his eternal promises. Their lives prove what we preach.

It’s not so much they’re looking at us to cheer us on as we’re looking to them for encouragment and inspiration.

We’re part of a heritage, a legacy; we’re living and running in a story that’s a whole lot bigger than most of us realize.

So, while we’re eating and singing together tonight, while we’re competing in three-legged sack races and tossing water balloons with people much younger and much older than us, we’ll be reminded that we’re always running this race together.

Peace,

Allan

Once a Sandie…

June 4, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Our oldest daughter, Whitney Leigh-Anne, graduated Saturday at the Amarillo Civic Center with 491 of her classmates at Amarillo High School. Whitney’s Senior year is finally over. This year that began with not a little anxiety and uncertainty got better and better as it went along and ended Saturday night in grand fashion: stirring speeches, inspirational (and really loud) music, lots of giggles and smiles, and a raucous celebration amid flying mortar boards and flashbulbs and yells.

What a wonderful weekend!

We had a house full of family from Thursday evening through this morning. (No, on second thought, it was just my mom and dad who came Thursday and stayed through this morning.) They came from as far away as Oklahoma City and Fort Worth. And Arlington. And Mesquite. And Kilgore. (Wait, never mind; Amarillo is far away from every place.) Carrie-Anne made black and gold Oreo balls while fielding job offers and negotiating with principals and human resources guys (she took the job at Tascosa High School!), Brent fixed some sprinkler system issues I was having in the backyard, we all took turns blowing up and taking down what seemed like lots of air mattresses, we scrambled to find the extra tickets we needed for the actual ceremony (thank you, Christy!), the Kingsleys grew increasingly smug as the Thunder tied up the Western Conference Finals, Dad must have checked my rain gage and the hallway thermostat seventeen times, and I preached Sunday morning in sweat pants, tennis shoes, and a pair of wrist bands that looked like they were manufactured in 1986.

What a wonderful weekend!

Congratulations, Whitney! We’re so proud of you. Straight A’s. Extracurricular clubs and events. Great friends. Amazing attitude. Superior work ethic. And a Christian kindness that is evident to all you meet.

Whitney will stay here at home and attend Amarillo College in the fall. And we’re expecting nothing less than continued growth and stellar achievements.

Praise God! What a wonderful weekend!

Peace,

Allan

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