Are we missing the boat?

For just over a year now, I’ve been chewing on the thought that the North American church has missed the boat. Now, before you misread me, understand that I absolutely love the local church. I’ve been raised in it and I’m currently serving in it. In fact, I have a great heart for it. I think this is why I’m so concerned about it.

It all began last February when I was attending the Southeast Conclave Student Ministry Conference in Atlanta. During the weekend, I had the opportunity to hear from Francis Chan who has quickly become one of my favorite speakers/authors/Christian leaders. During his session, he asked this question:

If you were stranded on an island and the only influence you had for what a New Testament church should look like was the Bible, would you walk into your church and say, “yeah, this is it! This is what the bible says church should be!”?

His answer regarding his own church – at the time – (Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, CA), and what the majority of us in the room would say was “No!”  Now this isn’t a bashing of the local church in general or my own church specifically, but it is a reality that we must consider.  Although God is moving and there are tons of great things happening in our church, the question that has been weighing on me is are we missing out on the totality of what God wants our churches to be?  Because of how we’re structured, how we operate and how we program, are we limiting the movement on God’s Holy Spirit in the local church?

By the way, I don’t have an answer to this, so if you’re reading looking for some great nugget of wisdom on how to build or return a church to what it should be biblically, I don’t have it.  I do believe I know where we need to begin, though.

A few weekends ago I attended another conference, YouthLab, at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary with Jeff Tilden.  During this conference we heard speakers like Wes Hamilton, JR Vassar and Ergun Caner – all of whom brought great wisdom from their own experiences as church leaders.  Although I could blog at length about what any one of them said, it was Vassar’s message that has really stuck in my heart and mind.  Not only that, but I believe it’s where our journey to the return of a God-honoring, biblical church begins.

Vassar mentioned to us that as church leaders we must be much more concerned with inspiration than we are with imitation.  What he meant was that so often our desire is to imitate what other people and other churches are doing in ministry instead of just following the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  I believe that much of the Church’s ineffectiveness in today’s society is because we love imitation but neglect inspiration.  It’s so easy to just copy what someone else is doing instead of abandoning ourself to the nudging of the Holy Spirit.

I fully believe that God understands how to reach our communities and the various subcultures around us.  I believe that he understands the thought patterns of the Baby Boomers, Gen X’ers and Millennials.  I have complete confidence that when God planted my church where he did 175 years ago that he knew the people who would live in our community in 2010 as well as those who will live here in 2050.  This isn’t true just for where I serve, but for every evangelical church out there.  Why then would we as church leaders go anywhere else but the Holy Spirit to find direction and wisdom in how to reach those around us?

Again, I don’t have any great nuggets of wisdom to share.  In fact, what I do share I stole from Vassar: If we desire for our churches to be biblical, to return to their original intent and to effectively engage our culture with the message of Jesus Christ, we must first return to a complete dependence on the Holy Spirit.  Sure, we can glean insight from conferences, associational entities and other churches about what might work and about what might not but, ultimately, we must turn to the One who has all authority and who loves the church more than you and I ever will.

Who’s in your tomb?

Just a quick thought on an obscure verse as we think about Easter…

This morning in Staff Meeting our Worship Pastor, Pat Van Dyke, read from Matthew 27 and shared a few thoughts on the burial of Jesus.  As he was reading, a verse that I’ve heard many times popped out at me.

And Joseph (of Arimathea) took the body (of Jesus) and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock.  And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and went away.  Matthew 27:59-60.

Ok, here’s some thoughts on this verse:

1. There’s a guy with a tomb…his own tomb…which he carved out himself.
2. You had to invest some good money to have your own private tomb.
3. This guy willingly gave up his tomb so Jesus’ body could be placed in it.
4. Not knowing that Jesus would soon leave the tomb unoccupied, Joseph assumed that he would not be able to use the tomb himself.

Alright, here’s clincher!  Jesus took Joseph’s place in the tomb!  Do you see where I’m going here???  When Jesus died on the cross, his death paid the penalty of our sin.  What’s the penalty for sin?  Death (Rom 6:23)!  So, Jesus took our place of death!!!

Here’s my question for you:  Just like Joseph allowed Jesus to take his physical place of death, have you allowed Jesus to take your spiritual place of death?

We’ve all sinned.  Because of this, we all deserve death.  But Jesus died in our place so that if we place our trust in him, we don’t have to pay the penalty for our sin!

For more information on this, do the link.

Easter at First

If you live in the Clarksville area and don’t already have a place you normally worship, I would love to invite you to celebrate Easter with us here at First Baptist!  Our Pastor will preach at 7:15 and 9:30.  Since he is still recovering from heart surgery, another staff member will preach at 8:30 and I’ll be preaching in DOXA (10:55).

Inadequate Worship

As you’ve probably heard already, this Sunday is Easter.  That’s a pretty big deal for us Christians since the Resurrection is the crux of our belief.  If it wasn’t for Jesus walking out of that tomb, we would have no hope or joy.  In fact, we would have no salvation and our faith would be in vain (1 Corinthians 15:14-17).

Because of the immensity of the Truth that this day represents, Christian churches all around the world put a lot of time, energy and, hopefully, prayer into the planning of their Easter services.  I know this is true of the services at First Baptist.

I have been given the amazing privilege and responsibility to preach in our church’s contemporary service, DOXA, while our pastor has been recovering from heart surgery.  Since he’s still trying to take it slow, I’ll be preaching in DOXA on Easter.  I’m really excited about this, but I’m also a little overwhelmed by the nature of this Sunday.

During the past 2 months,  I’ve meet weekly with our DOXA Worship Pastor, Mike Williams, to plan each Sunday’s worship service.  This morning the schedule was no different.   We met at 9am at a local coffee joint to pray and seek God’s wisdom and creativity as we began to sculpt worship for this upcoming Sunday.  What was different, though, was how inadequate our plans for Easter Worship seemed!  Our heart is to clearly present the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the amazing, indescribable, unimaginable TRUTH of the resurrection!  In our desire to build a service that equips the believer and brings glory to God through the celebration of Easter it became abundantly clear that we couldn’t do it.  We could not plan a worship service that would adequately present the total amazingness (not a word) of the resurrection.

Here’s what’s so cool about this.  During our planning time, I started to get frustrated!  I wanted everything to be “just right” but everything we planned seemed to be lacking.  It was at this moment, though, that my frustration turned to worship when I remembered a phrase from Francis Chan’s book “Crazy Love.”  In the first chapter, Francis wrote,

Many spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves.  His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can’t contain Him.  Isn’t it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?

Our corporate worship times, no matter how much energy, effort and planning we put into them, will ALWAYS be inadequate!  This isn’t just true for Easter Sunday, but for every Sunday of the year!  Every worship planning session I’m apart of should be filled with awe and wonder as we are continually reminded that we can never do or say enough to completely glorify God the way he deserves.

Thankfully, his glory doesn’t depend on my vocabulary.  Nor is it based on the song list Mike develops.  It’s not even diminished or increased by the videos we use.  God’s glory just is.  It’s here.  It’s big. It’s truly indescribable.  And I think this understanding is what God desires from us; understanding that we can’t define him.  We can’t design a worship service that completely demonstrates his glory.

So, this fact that we are incapable of giving him the complete glory he deserves, should be exactly what draws us into true worship – the kind of worship God desires.

My prayer for DOXA and every other Christian worship gathering this Sunday (and every Sunday!) is that we will be overwhelmed by the greatness of  God, aware of our inability to describe him and, therefore, fully drawn into the worship of the One who defeated death.

Purpose and Grace

One of my absolute favorite passages in all of Scripture is 2 Timothy 1:8-9 which says,

Do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began…

God has allowed me to be a pastor.  Technically, my job titles says that I’m a “Minister to Students” but I view my ultimate calling as a pastor to the local church.  This is a great job.  I get paid to preach, study God’s Word, hang out with believers, share truth with the lost, encourage those who are struggling and work alongside other great people doing the same.  Through all of these things, I get to daily see God reveal his glory and majesty!

Now here’s the amazing thing in all of this: I’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve it!   There’s not one thing I have ever done on my own that I can point to and say, “that’s why I get to be a pastor!”  The beautiful truth of this, of my “holy calling,” is that it’s all because of God’s purpose and grace.

Now what does that mean?

First, God has a great purpose in all that he does.  There is a grand, divine intentionality to every detail of our lives – even our jobs.  For me personally, there is a greater reason for me being a pastor then to just have a cool way to make a living.  God, in his divine wisdom and for his glory, allows me to do what I do.  There is a heavenly purpose behind it.  I believe part of the purpose is the fact that God receives tons of glory when he accomplishes his will through fallen humans.  It shouts of his power and greatness when he takes weak and frail individuals and communicates the Truth of the Gospel through them.  The purpose behind me being a pastor is that God can use the life he created to point glory back to himself…and I’m completely cool with that!

What about Grace?  Basically, grace is when we receive what we don’t deserve or don’t receive what we do deserve.  For instance, because of the sin in my life, I deserve God’s eternal wrath.  Fortunately, we have a merciful God who sent his Son Jesus Christ to take the penalty that we deserve (death) on himself.  Therefore, what I deserve, because of my faith in Jesus, I do not receive.  On the flip side, I do not deserve his love, patience, provision, wisdom or presence but he freely gives all of these!  The same is true of my calling as a pastor.  I in no way deserve to stand as an ambassador for a holy God, but he has allowed me to do so because of his grace.

So, purpose and grace defines what I do.  God has a purpose for my life and because of his grace, not my own merit, he has chosen to use me.  I think that’s pretty awesome.