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Gratitude

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Here’s an article I wrote for our church’s newsletter, the Edifier:

As we near the end of the book of Hebrews on Sunday mornings, it’s been interesting to note how the theme of gratitude has popped up a few times.  And, as we end another year at Crestview, it’s good to be reminded that gratitude is the attitude we must employ, as well. 
In Hebrews 12:28, we were urged to “be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”  Gratitude in Christ’s work for us propels us to be a worshipper rightly relating to God in fear and adoration.  In Hebrews 13:15, we were called to “continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge His name.”  These words “sacrifice of praise,” also occur in an ancient OT translation of Leviticus 7:12, speaking of the highest form of a peace offering that was offered under the Old Covenant.  The purpose of this offering was to express gratitude to God for removing the sin of the worshipper.  Offering up gratitude to God, then, is seen as we acknowledge who God is (Hebrews 13:15) and give ourselves in service to others (Hebrews 13:16).  In light of all that God’s done for believers through Christ, we should respond with gratitude, with grateful hearts that God’s given us what we don’t deserve. 
All of this is very timely for us as a people.  First, there’s the political arena.  We have a huge election coming up in our country.  On November 6, we have the privilege (and responsibility!) in our democratic republic to make decisions and select leaders.  And, if our heart is not oriented to God properly, we can easily become anxious, worried and wonder what will happen if something we didn’t vote for is passed.  I’ve also found that when I’m grumbling, complaining, finding fault with other people or the various processes inside and outside the church, my heart hasn’t been well-nurtured in the streams of gratitude.  God, in His grace, then, allows our hearts to be exposed in things like a national election.  Guard your heart.  Nurture it in gratitude to God and make decisions at the ballot box accordingly. 
Secondly, this also relates to end of year decisions in the church.  While we are led by elders, the congregation gets to participate in affirming leaders and a budget each year.  On December 9, after the AM service, our members will gather to affirm recommendations from the leaders.  Hebrews 13:17 urges us to “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.”  How is this possible?  Again, we can only live rightly in the church with a spirit of gratitude to God.  Recognizing the blessings He’s given will help us to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”  Without gratitude, we’ll complain and voice our opinions in ways that might not be the most helpful for the good of the whole.  With gratitude, our words will be seasoned with grace and, hopefully, bless the ones who serve us so joyfully.
Finally, we have Christmas.  I know it seems like it’s a long time from now, but it will be here soon.  Gratitude to God for Christ will keep our hearts and minds directed to glorify God through a busy holiday season.  When we are consumed with the presents and activities and not mindful of all that God launched into motion in sending His Son, we will be grumbling, complaining Scrooges.  But, hearts nurtured by gratefulness to God will truly be able to celebrate the good news of great joy for all people: a Savior is born. 

Therefore, I hope you are full of gratitude as this year comes to an end so that we might be a people who glorify and enjoy God, forever.  

VBS Isn’t Just For Kids…

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Here’s an article I wrote for our church’s newsletter…

There was a day when Saturday morning cartoons were a reality for some of us.  One of the staple commercials you could count on was that silly rabbit trying to get a bowl of Trix, which always ended with the children chiding the rabbit and saying, “Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids.”  I fear that when it comes to thinking about Vacation Bible School, many in the church have that same feeling.  We hear about ministry opportunities and say to ourselves, “VBS is for kids.”  And, while it may be true that much of the energy is directed to serving children, I’m hoping to show today that VBS isn’t just for kids.  There’s much benefit to be had by the church at large through VBS.  Here’s some reasons:
1) VBS helps bring people together in service.  Most of us know that the law can be summed up as loving our neighbor as ourselves.  We know that we are to, through love, serve one another.  And, VBS is a great opportunity to come together with other like-minded believers and serve.  This, in turn, helps build the unity of our congregation.  When you are “in the trenches” with another believer seeking to serve, you will begin to be drawn close to that individual.  This is what makes the church strong.
2) VBS builds consistency in your relationships with others.  VBS is a week-long event.  So, rather than just bumping into others in our church on a Sunday, you get the opportunity to fellowship with others day after day.  Each night will present its own opportunities to glorify God and your consistent involvement in this will encourage you spiritually.
3) VBS looks outward.  Much of our difficulty in the church comes when we are inward focused.  We can become so intent on what we want and we would like to see happen, that our joy becomes tied to whether or not our desires are happening.  Each year, however, VBS is a call to remind you that church life doesn’t revolve around you.  There are others who need served.  Specifically, we get the opportunity to serve children. 
4) VBS communicates love for our neighbors who are younger than us.  When you think about church life, you probably devote most of your energy to things that don’t involve children (unless you’re a parent of a child and/or involved in an ongoing ministry to them).  What I love about VBS is that it gives adults and teenagers the opportunity to show children how dearly loved they are.  We rightly feel this in our hearts.  But, VBS puts feet to those feelings, showing children that we are excited to make known eternal truths to them.  VBS allows us to tangibly love not just in words but in actions and truth.
Finally, 5) VBS allows you to practice a spiritual gift.  Most of us know the importance of exercise or at least moving around so that atrophy doesn’t occur.  God has uniquely gifted every believer in the church to serve.  How often do you use those gifts?  Are you looking for an opportunity to use a gift you don’t use as often as another?  VBS is a great way to jump in and serve, employing your spiritual gift for the good of others.
So, those are a few reasons why I would encourage you to be involved in our VBS, June 10-14.  There is more info on it in other parts of the Edifier.  VBS isn’t just for kids, it’s for people like you and me who want to be a part of something that glorifies and enjoys God, forever.  

The Resurrection of Jesus

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Here’s my Edifier article from the March/April 2012 Church Newsletter of Crestview:

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:4)


I know it may be difficult to wrap your mind around this, but Easter is just around the corner. And, if you’re like me, I often find myself needing help to be able to praise God for what He’s accomplished in raising Christ from the dead. It was with great joy, then, that I read these words from Octavius Winslow:


“The resurrection of Christ is a vital doctrine of Christianity. It sustains an essential relation to the spiritual life of the believer. Viewing it in connection with the union of Christ and His people, the two facts become identical— standing in the relation of cause and effect. Our Lord, in His great atoning work, acted in a public or representative character. He represented in His person the whole elect of God, who virtually were in Him, each step that he took in working out their redemption. In His resurrection from the grave this was preeminently so. The Head could not be resuscitated apart from the body. Christ could not rise without the Church. Thus, then, the new or the resurrection life of Christ, and the inner or spiritual life of the believer, are one and indivisible. Now, when the resurrection of the Head is spiritually realized, when it is fully received into the heart by faith, it becomes a quickening, energizing, sanctifying truth to each member of His body. It transmits a power to the inmost soul, felt in all the actings and manifestations of the spiritual life. Blessed are they who feel, and who feel daily, that they are indeed “risen with Christ,” and who find every new perception of this great truth to act like a mighty lever to their souls—lifting them above this “present evil world”—a world passing away.

“Perhaps no circumstance connected with the resurrection of Christ conveys to the mind a clearer idea of its bearings upon the happiness of the Church than the part which the Divine Father is represented as having taken in the illustrious event. His having committed Himself to the fact at once stamps it with all its saving interest. “Whom God has raised.” “Like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father.” “If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead.” By this act of raising up His Son from the grave, the Father manifested His delight in, and His full acceptance of, the sacrifice of Christ, as a finished and satisfactory expiation for the sins of His people. So long as Jesus remained in the grave, there was wanting the evidence of the acceptance of His death; the great seal of heaven, the signature of God, was needed to authenticate the fact. But when the Father released the Surety from the dominion of death, he annihilated, by that act, all legal claim against His Church, declaring the ransom accepted, and the debt cancelled. “He was taken from prison,”—as the prisoner of justice—the prisoner of death—and the prisoner of the grave; the Father, in the exercise of His glorious power, opens the prison door, and delivers the illustrious Captive—and by the door through which He emerges again to life, enters the full justification of His whole Church; for it is written—“He was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.”

“A more important truth— where all are of infinite moment to the happiness of man—is not found in the Word of God. As it forms the keystone to the mighty arch of Christianity, so it constitutes the groundwork of spiritual life, upon the basis of which the Holy Spirit of God quickens the souls of all, who are “the called according to His purpose.” It was a knowledge of this truth which awoke the ardent desire of the apostle’s soul, “That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection.” (Evening Thoughts, Feb 8)


I hope you find the truths found in this brief excerpt helpful. The resurrection is not some insignificant, meaningless event. No. In the resurrection, believers are united with Christ and now truly live, not for ourselves but for Him who died and rose again for us. Blessed to celebrate this with you once again…

Is Christ All?

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Here’s my article for the upcoming newsletter our church produces…

As a church, we continue to walk through the book of Colossians on Sunday mornings this year. It has been a joy to walk through the amazing language of Colossians 3 in recent weeks. We’ve seen a compelling call to seek the things that are above—where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God (3:1). Clearly, we’ve been called in a compelling way to seek Him above all. Even our verse from the sermon on 8/29 says, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him” (3:17). Chapter 3, then, has sought to draw our attention off of our finite, little lives in this world to the all-encompassing, Christ-exalting future we have with Him.

In Colossians 3:11, we were given an amazing truth about our lives together as the visible church in the current age when we were told, “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.” Many times, sad to say, our corporate life together is based more on differences that the unity found in Christ. We pit the young married against the older married. Singles vs. married. Children and students vs. adults. Our lives are wrapped up in difference. We divide up based on who likes K-State and who likes KU (we especially don’t hang out with others that differ from us on game day). But, the reality that is to define us as the people of God is Christ. He is all and He is in all. He is everything.

In the verses that follow v.11, we see how Christ is everything. In Christ, we have characteristics that embody the Gospel (compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness and patience). In Christ, we can put up with one another and forgive one another. In Christ, we have a clear idea of what love is. In Christ, His peace governs our lives. In Christ, the message of the Bible (which magnifies Him from Genesis to maps) indwells us richly and emerges out of our lives. And, really, this vision includes all the we do and say, doing it all in the name of our Lord Jesus, even giving thanks to God the Father because of Him.

Is Christ all for you? Or is your involvement and life in the local church about other things? What keeps you united others? Christ? Or the way they treat you? Christ is all, but Christ is also in the ones who trust Him.

The text gives clear remedies for discerning our hearts…

Are you grateful? Over and over again in this text, we are called to be thankful. Are you grateful for what God has done for you in the Gospel? If you are, then this grateful spirit will translate into healthy body life.

Are you united with others? If Christ is all and in all, then really, you have great reason to stand united with others who hold those same truths. Don’t major on minors. Major on the only thing that matters: Christ.

Are you relating well with others? In the coming weeks in Colossians, Paul will take this central Gospel message and expand its influence to include husbands, wives, children, parents, slaves, masters and outsiders. Is Christ seen as your all in this relationships?

Let’s glorify and enjoy God forever by being a people formed by Jesus so that it may be said of us, “Christ is all and in all.”

Covetousness, which is idolatry…

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From our church’s current newsletter, an article I wrote:

As a church we place God’s Word at the center of all that we are. We exist to glorify God and enjoy Him forever and we know how to do this by what God has revealed to us in His Word. During our Sunday morning worship gatherings, we have been looking at the book of Colossians which is rich in telling us much about Jesus Christ and our relationship to Him. We are looking at that section in chapter 3 about putting off certain things and putting on others. In Colossians 3:5, we read: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” For the past few weeks, we have been memorizing the Ten Commandments and the last one is “you shall not covet” (Exodus 20:17). But Paul ups the ante a bit and tells us that covetousness is really idolatry.

Many of us don’t think we struggle with idolatry. We picture some Old Testament buffoon bowing down at some golden calf or other image. But, Paul says that the problem of idolatry isn’t so much about the outward stuff as much as the inward desires and cravings or, to put it like he did, what we covet. In his recent book, Gospel in Life, Tim Keller writes: “Why do we lie, or fail to love, or break our promises, or live selfishly? Of course, the general answer is “Because we are weak and sinful,” but the specific answer is that there is something besides Jesus Christ that we feel we must have to be happy, something that is more important to our heart that God, something that is enslaving our heart through inordinate desires. The key to change (and even to self-understanding) is therefore to identify the idols of the heart.”

He continues: “We often don’t go deeply enough to analyze our idol-structures. For example, ‘money’ is of course an idol; yet, in another sense, money can be sought to satisfy other very different idols. That is, some people want money in order to control their world and life (such people usually don’t spend their money, but save it), while others want money for access to social circles and for making themselves beautiful and attractive (such people do spend their money on themselves).” Richard Keyes in his essay The Idol Factory notes, “All sorts of things are potential idols… if this is so, how do we determine when something is becoming or has become an idol?… As soon as our loyalty to anything leads us to disobey God, we are in danger of making it an idol… An idol can be a physical object, a property, a person, an activity, a role, an institution, a hope, an image, an idea, a pleasure, a hero…
• Work, a commandment of God, can become an idol if it is pursued so exclusively that responsibilities to one’s family are ignored.
• Family, an institution of God Himself, can become an idol if one is so preoccupied with the family that no one outside of one’s own family is cared for.
• Being well-liked, a perfectly legitimate hope, becomes an idol if the attachment to it means that one never risks disapproval.”

To help identify idols in our lives, on top of the above info, Keller gives the following questions: 1) What is my greatest nightmare? What do I worry about the most? 2) What do I rely on or comfort myself with when things go badly or become difficult? 3) What makes me feel the most self-worth? What am I the proudest of? 4) What do I really want and expect out of life? What would really make me happy?

There are various ways to deal with idols, but the Gospel solution is the only one that will produce lasting change. Simply repent and rejoice. Repent or turn from that idol and rejoice or delight in the all satisfying-ness of Jesus. In The Expulsive Power of a New Affection, Thomas Chalmers writes, “The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one… It is when admitted into the number of God’s children, through the faith that is in Jesus Christ, that the spirit of adoption is poured upon us—it is then that the heart, brought under the mastery of one great and predominant affection, is delivered from the tyranny of its former desires, and is the only way in which deliverance is possible.” Let’s escape covetousness, which is idolatry, then, by clinging to the greatest of all possible good – Jesus Christ our Lord. “And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:20-21).

On Brotherly Love

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Here’s the newsletter article I wrote for our church’s newsletter, the Edifier, coming out this weekend:

I love the book of Hebrews. Much like Colossians (which we are currently going through on Sunday mornings) the book of Hebrews is on a campaign to demonstrate how Jesus is better than anything. He’s better than angels, Moses, Melchizedek, the Old Covenant and anything else we could dream up. The truth that Jesus is better than everything is easy for us to mouth a confession to in the church. What becomes really difficult is living out the ramifications of what that means.

In Hebrews, for example, after a compelling picture of Jesus’ greatness for twelve chapters, chapter 13 begins by saying: “Let brotherly love continue.” In the bigger context, we read in Hebrews 12:24, of Jesus, who is the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. You remember that story don’t you? Abel and his brother Cain both were children of Adam and Eve. Abel kept sheep; Cain was a worker of the ground. Abel brought the firstborn of his flock as an offering to God. Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground. The Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but not Cain’s. Cain was angry and his face fell. And God said to him, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:6-7). It is on the heels of this that Cain and Abel go the fields and Cain kills his brother.

Back to Hebrews, when the writer says “Let brotherly love continue” there must be something that would provoke this urging. In the immediate context of Hebrews 13:1, at the end of chapter 12, we read that we should “offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:28-29). What is all of this getting at? Here are some things…

To continue in brotherly love, we must fight sin. Sin is in all of us. We all have sinful tendencies. Maybe some are more outrageous or easily seen than others, but we are all tempted with sin. It’s easy for us to hate our brother because they seem to be “blessed” with something more than we are. When we get in this trap, we are skidding down the slippery slope Cain experienced. Therefore, let’s fight sin. Sin is crouching at the door to pounce on us and master us. But we must rule over it. By God’s grace, let’s fight sin.

To continue in brotherly love, we must worship God properly. We forget that we are always before the face of God (we live coram deo). If we understood who God is and thought more about Him than our selfish desires, we wouldn’t drift into hateful attitudes and actions towards others. When the vertical relationship is proper, horizontal relationships will be right. Remember who God is and let that inspire your love for others.

Finally, to continue in brotherly love, believe in Jesus. We are so quick to forget who we are in Christ. We forget the sin that characterized our life before Him and how we have been rescued. Remember in Hebrews 12:24 & Genesis 4 that God was pleased with Abel’s sacrifice, but Jesus’ blood speaks a better word than Abel’s. If God was pleased with Abel, using the logic of the writer of Hebrews, He is ecstatic with the sacrifice of Jesus. To continue loving people as God intended we must center who we are in Jesus and the Gospel.

Therefore, let’s glorify and enjoy God, forever, by continuing in brotherly love.