Quenching and Grieving [46:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Kingdom Singers - "Tune my Heart" [2:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 [+/-]1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 [16]Rejoice always, [17]pray without ceasing, [18]give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. [19]Do not quench the Spirit. [20]Do not despise prophecies, [21]but test everything; hold fast what is good. [22]Abstain from every form of evil. [23]Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. [24]He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it. (ESV)
and Ephesians 4:25-31 [+/-]Ephesians 4:25-31 [25]Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. [26]Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, [27]and give no opportunity to the devil. [28]Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. [29]Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. [30]And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. [31]Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. (ESV)

The Christian life from start to finish is all about grace.  And it is all about grace, it is all about God.  Paul puts it this way in Romans 11:36 [+/-]Romans 11:36 [36]For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (ESV)
, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.  To Him be glory forever.  Amen.”  “Him” is God as He makes Himself known to us through His Spirit on the basis of the work of His Son for our justification, sanctification and ultimately for our glorification.  All of it is grace.  All of it is God.  The Christian life begins through the awakening that comes to us as a gift of the grace of God.  The Holy Spirit comes to us through the proclamation of the Word of God and awakens us to how holy and righteous God is and how sinful and ugly we are as He calls us to trust the only one who can save us from God’s wrath and our sin.  The Holy Spirit convicts us and gives us all that is needed to trust Jesus.  And we do.  That is grace.  That is God.  And as we trust in Jesus alone for salvation God declares us to be fully and absolutely right with Him not on the basis of anything in us or about us but on the basis of the sacrifice of His Son through the shedding of His blood on Calvary.  We are declared forever right with God.  This is Grace.  All grace.  This is God.  All God.  “It was grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.”  And the Holy Spirit who changes us also seals us up as a person and a people who belong to God and He begins to work in us to shape us toward the image of Jesus to make us as we live our lives among the people of God all that He wants us to be.  He is making us holy.  He is sanctifying us.  He is changing us as He grows us.  This is grace.  This is God.  And at last either by way of the coming of Jesus or the coming of death we are transported home on the wings of grace.  The Christian life begins and ends in grace.  AND THE SUPREME GOAL OF THE ENEMY IS TO WORK TO FRUSTRATE THE WORK OF THE GRACE OF GOD IN US AND AMONG US.  The Bible has two apparently different images for what this looks like and we are going to look at them today.

The Christian life from start to finish is all about grace.  And it is all about grace, it is all about God.  Paul puts it this way in Romans 11:36 [+/-]Romans 11:36 [36]For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (ESV)
, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.  To Him be glory forever.  Amen.”  “Him” is God as He makes Himself known to us through His Spirit on the basis of the work of His Son for our justification, sanctification and ultimately for our glorification.  All of it is grace.  All of it is God.  The Christian life begins through the awakening that comes to us as a gift of the grace of God.  The Holy Spirit comes to us through the proclamation of the Word of God and awakens us to how holy and righteous God is and how sinful and ugly we are as He calls us to trust the only one who can save us from God’s wrath and our sin.  The Holy Spirit convicts us and gives us all that is needed to trust Jesus.  And we do.  That is grace.  That is God.  And as we trust in Jesus alone for salvation God declares us to be fully and absolutely right with Him not on the basis of anything in us or about us but on the basis of the sacrifice of His Son through the shedding of His blood on Calvary.  We are declared forever right with God.  This is Grace.  All grace.  This is God.  All God.  “It was grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.”  And the Holy Spirit who changes us also seals us up as a person and a people who belong to God and He begins to work in us to shape us toward the image of Jesus to make us as we live our lives among the people of God all that He wants us to be.  He is making us holy.  He is sanctifying us.  He is changing us as He grows us.  This is grace.  This is God.  And at last either by way of the coming of Jesus or the coming of death we are transported home on the wings of grace.  The Christian life begins and ends in grace.  AND THE SUPREME GOAL OF THE ENEMY IS TO WORK TO FRUSTRATE THE WORK OF THE GRACE OF GOD IN US AND AMONG US.  The Bible has two apparently different images for what this looks like and we are going to look at them today.

Learn more about this message by downloading the sermon notes here!

God desires that we live a full life in the fullness of His Spirit.  What follows from this point in most presentations of this reality is filled with so much falsehood that it has led people like me to be shy of speaking about the Holy Spirit.  Fullness of life in the Holy Spirit is framed either materially, physically or psychically so that walking in the Spirit or being filled with the Holy Spirit is made to look like your best life now as defined by you.  It is seen as either not getting sick or always getting healed when you do get sick.  As was announced in a full page advertisement in our local paper:  healing belongs to you.  There it was.  Right in front of me.  Heresy of the grossest sort portrayed in the language of the Spirit.  And those who would buy into that heresy would not be bothered by the picture of the woman pastor or elder neither of which is known in Scripture standing beside the slogan I guess to guarantee its truth.  All that the picture guaranteed was a double dose of the devilish displayed on the same page of the newspaper.  Not only is life in the fullness of the Spirit seen as physical but also portrayed as material.  We can use the Spirit like the advanced cash use of our credit card.  Ask and you will receive.  Pray with passion and the prosperity will follow.  Now any who believe this travesty of truth would at this point trash this entry and me because it is obvious to those of this ilk that I either do not have enough faith or that I have none at all.  In fact, some may be bothered that I am on the border of blasphemy here but the truth is biblically that I am on the border of nothing here.  I am standing in the center of what it means to live life to the full in the Holy Spirit and it has nothing to do with physical well being or material abundance, nor does it have to do with psychical wholeness.

Jesus was accused of being possessed of demons and dominated by the prince of demons (Mark 3 [+/-]Mark 3 [3:1]Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. [2]And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. [3]And he said to the man with the withered hand, "Come here." [4]And he said to them, "Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?" But they were silent. [5]And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. [6]The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. [7]Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea, and a great crowd followed, from Galilee and Judea [8]and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan and from around Tyre and Sidon. When the great crowd heard all that he was doing, they came to him. [9]And he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they crush him, [10]for he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him. [11]And whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, "You are the Son of God." [12]And he strictly ordered them not to make him known. [13]And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him. [14]And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach [15]and have authority to cast out demons. [16]He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); [17]James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); [18]Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Cananaean, [19]and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him. [20]Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. [21]And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, "He is out of his mind." [22]And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, "He is possessed by Beelzebul," and "by the prince of demons he casts out the demons." [23]And he called them to him and said to them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? [24]If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. [25]And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. [26]And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. [27]But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house. [28]"Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, [29]but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin"-- [30]for they were saying, "He has an unclean spirit." [31]And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. [32]And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you." [33]And he answered them, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" [34]And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! [35]For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother." (ESV)
).  Why?  Because he challenged a religious system that was the resource for life for so many while at that time robbing them of what life really is.  The major issue for those who accused Jesus of being demonic was that His casting out demons was for the glory of God that led to people who lived for the praise of God and the pursuit of His purpose even when doing so was hard.  Remember the man in the cemetery from whom Jesus expelled demons and when this man wanted to go with Jesus which was the easy road to travel, Jesus sent him to his home where they had once mocked him to make known among his family and friends what Jesus had done.  This is what life in the Spirit is.  It is not our having what we want and desire to help us and to make us happy.  It is our being so saturated by God in His power that we proclaim in every place the Good News of Salvation.  We don’t quench the Spirit by channeling the fire of God in the way that is best for us but we let the fire of God burn and if it consumes us and others are converted then so be it.  We do not grieve the Spirit by using the Spirit for our own goodies but we bring delight to God by desiring that the Spirit so consume us that we be used of God to deliver the goodies to others.  This is real life in the Spirit.   And it is really hard and I guess that is why the only way to live this life is by the power of the Spirit.

 

 The Body [48:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

1 Corinthians 12:1-31 [+/-]1 Corinthians 12 [12:1]Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed. [2]You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. [3]Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says "Jesus is accursed!" and no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except in the Holy Spirit. [4]Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; [5]and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; [6]and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. [7]To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. [8]For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, [9]to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, [10]to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. [11]All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills. [12]For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. [13]For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and all were made to drink of one Spirit. [14]For the body does not consist of one member but of many. [15]If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. [16]And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. [17]If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? [18]But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. [19]If all were a single member, where would the body be? [20]As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. [21]The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." [22]On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, [23]and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, [24]which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, [25]that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. [26]If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. [27]Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. [28]And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. [29]Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? [30]Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? [31]But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way. (ESV)

Dr. Sinclair Ferguson pastor of the marvelous First Presbyterian Church of Columbia, South Carolina said in a sermon two weeks ago, “the greatest privilege and highest honor given to any human being in any part of the world is the privilege and honor of being a part of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Do we believe that? Paul portrays the church as the body of Christ with Christ as the head of the church and it makes it plain in all of his proclamations that to belong to Christ who is the head of the church is to belong to His body. The first belonging to Christ is the result of a radical act of the grace of God on the basis of the shed blood of Jesus and the latter belonging to the church is the Spirit led response of all who have truly received and responded to the grace of God. How do I know that someone is a believer, that they belong to Jesus? Well at least one way I know is that they belong to the body of Christ and are involved both purposefully and passionately. But how does this body of Christ work? What does it look like in its effective operation? That is the question for this morning as we turn our attention to 1 Corinthians 12 [+/-]1 Corinthians 12 [12:1]Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed. [2]You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. [3]Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says "Jesus is accursed!" and no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except in the Holy Spirit. [4]Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; [5]and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; [6]and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. [7]To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. [8]For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, [9]to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, [10]to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. [11]All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills. [12]For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. [13]For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and all were made to drink of one Spirit. [14]For the body does not consist of one member but of many. [15]If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. [16]And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. [17]If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? [18]But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. [19]If all were a single member, where would the body be? [20]As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. [21]The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." [22]On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, [23]and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, [24]which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, [25]that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. [26]If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. [27]Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. [28]And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. [29]Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? [30]Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? [31]But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way. (ESV)
. What we want to see this morning is how the Spirit of God works in the church of God to bring glory to God, to bear witness to Jesus and to build up the body of Christ.

Learn more about this message by downloading the sermon notes here!

 

 Walking the Spirit: Family: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(the audio was a little low for this service…. hope to have it corrected by next week!)

Galatians 6:1-10 [+/-]Galatians 6:1-10 [6:1]Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. [2]Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. [3]For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. [4]But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. [5]For each will have to bear his own load. [6]One who is taught the word must share all good things with the one who teaches. [7]Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. [8]For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. [9]And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. [10]So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith. (ESV)

The Fruit of the Spirit is . . . and we examined last week the fruit that is the inevitable outcome of life lived under the control of the Holy Spirit.  The fruit grows internally as a well-spring of joy that is fed by the experience of the love of God that gives us contentment in all circumstances.  The fruit shows externally in compassionate care for others that is the result of our trust of the purpose of the Sovereign God in our own lives to do that which is good.  And the fruit is eternal as we live our lives in trust of God and obedience to His Word because we are controlled by the Holy Spirit.  The fruit of the Spirit is real and it is revealed.  And it continues to grow and to show as we live out our lives putting to death the desires of the flesh and submitting our lives to the obedience of the Word of God which is what it means to walk in the Spirit so as to live in the Spirit.  But Paul wants us to know that there are two contexts in which we live out our Spirit-filled lives and that there is a core connection between the two.  I believe that he wants us to know also that the first context is the foundation for the second context so that it is impossible to live under the control of the Holy Spirit in the second context if we are not doing that actively in the first context.  Let me be very specific as I ask you to look at these verses to see first how they are laid out and then we will look into them to listen to what the Spirit of God is saying.

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I. The Context for the Communication of the Word of God, 9:20-23

A. One of the very real passions for the people of God in every period is the passion to hear the voice of God. We want God to speak to us. We desire desperately to hear His voice. One of the very visceral evidences of being a true child of God is this deep hunger and thirst to hear from heaven. One of the great devices of the devil, however; is to get us to detour from the main road that must be travelled if we are to hear God’s voice.

B. We have already seen in the previous verses of this chapter that God spoke to Daniel through His Word while Daniel was seeking God in serious study and in earnest prayer. In our context, we would say that Daniel was seeking God on His knees as he read the Bible. This is how God spoke to Daniel. This is how God speaks to us. This is how God speaks to His people in every age. The study of the Bible is hard work. It takes devotion and discipline. This is why the deliberate investment of our lives in Bible Study is so very important. It compels us into the discipline of the dedicated and daily study of the Word of God. And this is how we hear the Word of God.
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This is now the third and what I hope will be the last installment of my reflections on how I believe the most religious but unrighteous generations among modern Americans is found among the builders (born prior to 1946) and the boomers, my generation (born between 1946-1964).  My focus for these reflections is remarkably narrow and thus could be way off base.  But this is very personal with me as what I am addressing has been brewing inside me since around 1974.  That is when I began to notice that my age group (I was 22 then) and my parent’s age group who would be the age group now from 65+ were remarkably religious but not really righteous as I was seeing that defined biblically.  And this conviction has not diminished at all in me over the years; there was a time when I hoped that it would, but it in fact has grown much stronger with the years.  I think that somehow in the providence of God it is exactly why on the one hand we see many in my age group and their children having left the church not to return.  I have a family member who for a long time has fought against God and so much of the fight generally has to do with what he saw in the church growing up and what he saw in me during my liberal years when I was so intensely religious but so far from being really right with God.  And I believe even more strongly that in God’s providence it is why so many twenty and thirty somethings among whom God is moving mightily reject the traditional church and her traditions because they have seen what that produced in their parents and grandparents and they want no part of it.  It is my prayer that their number and passion will grow greatly in the years ahead.  They are the only real sign of hope that I see for the church in America.

One more thing before I set before you the final five descriptors of what I have seen that have caused me to conclude that the boomers and buildres are very religious but not righteous:  I just finished listening during my workout this morning to a sermon by John Piper where he cited the thousands of traditional churches all over America that are closing and the large number of church plants that are taking place.  If we understand what God is up to, then we should not grieve over these church closings.  It is my conviction that many more thousands need to close and give their resources which in some cases are enormous to the causes of the Gospel in reaching the world.  And we must rejoice at the changing shape of the church where biblical fidelity is being married to doctrinal integrity and it is producing churches with a truly missional mindset.  But that is not happening in most of our traditional churches.  And the reason is the power base that is held in many of them by intensely religious builders and boomers.  In fact, I am convinced that the only traditional churches that are making a real Gospel impact any more are those where the power bases by whatever means have been broken and splintered so that those who once ruled according to their desires have all but lost their voice.  Now with all of that, let me turn to the final five:

Number five:  the privatization of the relationship with God.  Builders more than boomers but certainly among boomers as well see their relationship with God as a purely private matter.  That is not only detrimental; it is demonic.  A relationship with God is the result of the miracle of the grace of God being so manifest to us that our world is turned upside down and inside out.  The outcome is a passion to know God and to make Him known.  We could no more hold in the news of the new birth than we could the news of the birth of our first grandchild.  Nothing has hampered evangelism in so many communities and churches where I have served quite like this very perverted and entirely unbiblical notion about what a real relationship with God looks like.  It has led to people among both boomers and builders who have lived their entire adult lives thinking that they really are believers while never ever having told a single soul about what it means to be saved.  That reality speaks volumes about why the traditional church in America is and has been in trouble for a long, long time.

Number six:  the above view is often welded to a thorough misunderstanding of the precious doctrine of the priesthood of every and all believers.  This truth is a precious teaching of Scripture which simply means that we are responsible before God to communicate His truth to the world and to care for one another in the church.  We do not need a preacher to proclaim the Gospel to the world for us nor do we need a pastor to care for us.  We communicate the Gospel to the world and we care for one another in the church.  The pastor is called of God to oversee the flock of God with the help of other elders so that his priority purpose can be prayer and study so as to teach the depths of the declared Truth of God in the Bible.  But the priesthood of the believer as often understood and practiced by many builders and boomers has come to mean that we can interpret the Bible for ourselves so that it means whatever we want it to mean.  The outcome is that we go to church on Sunday to hear another take on a text that may or may not be different from our own.  I see and have seen this one for some time as one of the most atrocious developments in our SBC life.  It has produced so much perversion.  For example, and I can only site one; it has led us to believe and individual can be saved by saying a prayer and walking down an aisle regardless of whether there is evidence of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in that person becoming an active part of the life of a local church.  That is why we have SBC churches that will boast of 1,000 members while having under 200 in attendance on any given Sunday.  That is the tragedy of the triumph of heresy over truth.

Number seven:  This perversion of the priesthood of the believer led to the democritization of the church.  We in SBC life turned the church into a democratically governed body.  We would have monthly or quarterly business meetings or conferences in which members would come to discuss all matters of business and to vote.  Now this produced two major issues:  first, there is no biblical model for this way of being and doing church, but when you have privatized religion and a perversion of the doctrine of the priesthood, it is easy to make any model of managing a church fit.  Secondly, in many churches that I served we would have people come to and speak out in business meetings that never came to Sunday night worship and in some cases only came to church to participate in business meetings.  And in some cases they were powerful enough to sway the people toward their way of seeing in doing church which in now almost forty years of experience was never, ever what would have been the biblically right path.  And what is most horrific to me is that we still have churches that hold the Bible high as the inerrant word of God and still do Kingdom business this way!

Number eight:  Add to this democratic way of doing church a leadership body called deacons that saw themselves as a board of directors.  Seriously.  Men got to be deacons by being men of influence and power in the community.  Spiritual intergrity and bibilcal fidelity did not mean much if anything.  One of these men who served as a deacon in the fifties in sixties in one of the churches that I served told me after God had turned his life around that when he served as a deacon he never went to Sunday School or Sunday night church and only attended worship occasionally.  He drank at parties with the other deacons and the pastor of the church and saw his role on the “board” of the church in the same way that he saw it when he served on the “board” of the bank.  In his words, “the church was a business to me with its product being the production of good, decent, morally responsible people.”  How horrible is that?  And yet there are still builders and boomers that see the church this way.

Number nine:  Do not underestimate the radically wicked influence of racism among the builders and boomers.  Many who were baptized members into the church among both generations were also those fighting hard against integration.  Members of churches in the south were the leaders in the establishment of institutions both educationally and otherwise whose express purpose was to create environments where their kids would not be in the same classroom or on the same athletic fields as black people.  Now how odd is this mentality?  God is redeeming a people for himself from every tribe and tongue and people and nation and we come to the church house to sing to this great God and to say that we want to be involved with Him in His work and then Monday comes and we say, “not really; we want to be involved with God in His work of reaching anglos.”  The church I am in now is the only church I have ever served where I was not given in the early weeks a private audience with a few power boys who tole me what I was to do if a “black person” came forward on Sunday morning.  I have responded to them all the same way and I can assure you that it stuck in the craw of these men who from that moment forward looked for some other reason to come against me, terrified that I was going to seek to bring black people into “their church.”

Number ten:  Boomers and builders are very vocal in every church I have served.  They want what they want and they believe that they are entitled to it.  This entitlement mentality is tied to the reality that most of the grumbling and complaining I hear always comes from these age groups, far more now from builders than from boomers and some of  it in my current situation I understand fully. I do not agree with it and listen politely (most often) but I understand it.  They see the church they knew changing and in some ways radically.  And that is deliberate because the church they knew was rigorously religious which is exactly what I used to be.  And those churches for reasons ordained of God are dying and ought to.  So, I understand why those who are tied too much to what used to be and too little to Him alone who is would grumble and complain.  But underneath is this sense of the church belonging to them.

God revive Your church in our land.  And teach me I pray that is not my church or our church.  It is Your church.  Build Your church, Lord Jesus; that is your promise.  And I stand upon that promise.  Amen.

Here is my argument:  I believe that the generation born in America prior to 1946 is by far the most religious generation in modern American history but at the same time by far the most unrighteous as true righteousness is defined by the Word of God.  And I believe that my own generation known as the boomers born from 1946-1964 are not far behind them.  I see few signs of hope of a real revival of what the Puritans would have described as true religion among either of these age groups; I see encouraging signs of hope among twenty and thirty somethings all over this country.  This group that is radically redefining church wherever they are in abundance will either be given liberty by the traditional church or they will do as they should and leave the traditional church on her trash heap of traditional religion in order to form new forums for the focus of their very passionate faith.  But yet again I go astray from the purpose of this entry.  What I want to do in this entry and the next is give ten reasons for my belief that the builders generation and the boomer generation are by far the most religious while being at the same time by far the least truly righteous.

Before I list and comment on the ten reasons I need first to say that both these generations have made stellar contributions to society.  They taught us about the value of hard work and  the discipline of staying with a task during tough times.  They fought wars on foreign shores and defended the cause of liberty.  They built the infrastructure of so much of small town America from the east to the west coast and from north to south.  The builders made money and saved it to give their children (the boomers) a better life than they had known thus teaching us the value of one generation providing a foundation for the next generation.  And yet in far too many cases the operative pronoun in all of the above is “I” or “we.”  The focus is far too frequently on what we did and what we gave and what we produced that has yielded over time an entitlement mentality in every area of life, even in the church.  So that many builders and boomers look at the local church as their church so that what is to be done there is to be done their way and if they do not get their way they grumble and complain and if that doesn’t work they keep themselves and their money at home.  That may be an entrepreneurial way of expresing power but he shows the virtual absence of true piety.

Let me do one other thing here.  Let me frame my argument because my focus is frankly quite narrow.  Others will have to see is this applies to their contexts and thus enlarge the focus, but I am writing this assessment from the perspective of a Southern Baptist Pastor having served in county seat town First Baptist Churches for almost thirty years and the other nine years of pastoral ministry have been in rural churches in the South.  So, my purview for proclamation is very small.  This is simply what I have seen in these kinds of SBC churches for now almost forty years of ministry.  With that said, I will now give you five of the ten reasons for saying that the builder and boomer generations have not helped us in understanding what true religion really is.

Number One:  Most builders and boomers grew up in a time when a relationship with God was defined as a public profession of faith usually made some time before adolescence that was signified in walking down a church aisle to join the church and then having that decision sealed later by baptism.  Joining the church on the basis of a profession of faith quickly became in the early fifties the equivalent of being saved or of giving your life to Jesus.  It was during the late fifties and through the decade of the sixties that many in fact made this “decision.”  They were immediately counted as both children of God and church members.  And when they dropped out of church after tenth grade or dropped out altogether during the college years, nobody thought to conclude that by biblical standards these people who were by any standard the vast majority most likely had never been saved.  What this produced during this period by the adults who practiced this perversion and the young people who participated in it was a fully false view of both conversion and the Christian life.  It resulted in communities all over the south filled with pagan people who really, sincerely consider themselves to be saved because they joined the church and were baptized.

Number Two:  This false understanding of faith was tied to a false understanding of faithfulness.  Godliness as defined by the Bible was replaced by goodness as defined by the mores of the culture.  There was a certain list of “don’ts” and a certain list of “do’s.”  As one man put it to me recently, “we just wanted out kids to grow up to be good, moral people who would enter the world and make good, right decisions.”  It was for me one of the most clearly communicated cultural definitions of Christianity I had ever heard.  It came from a boomer brother.  He was serious.  But so are so many who see being good and doing good as the essence of what it means to be a Christian.  So, if you joined the church as a child and lived right as an adolescent and are not a good contributing member of the community with good moral values, it must mean that you are a Christian.  It does not mean that at all and some who read this may be shocked at this conclusion.  You are one who really needs to keep reading.

Number Three:  It was during this period that there emerged a programmatic way of measuring piety.  Now it is here that you would have to be a Nashville notched Southern Baptist in order to understand what I am about to say.  Nashville is headquarters for Southern Baptists.  It is to us what Rome is to the RCC.  That may push it over the line but not too far in the fifties and sixties!  All of our literature for both Sunday School and Baptist Training Union came out of Nashville and a Southern Baptist Church that did not use this literature was suspect of being charismatic! Southern Baptists were shaped by the programs produced out of Nashville so that a real Christian was one who went to Sunday School and Church on Sunday morning and if you wanted to be a really good Christian or you had been really bad and needed some extra points, you went to BTU (if you think that stands for British Thermal Units, you are probably a Methodist and need to repent any way!).  But the point is that participation mattered.  It was the way we stayed saved and the annual or bi-annual revival meeting is the way we got saved.  It was all carefully constructed and particularly programmed.

Number Four:  The liberalism that was ruining our seminaries was alive and well in the 1950′s so that most SBC churches that were of the FBC variety were getting these men as pastors who were liberals.  They told stories on Sunday morning.  They turned the inerrant truth of God into instructive material for a morally meaningful life.  They did not preach the depravity of man and the sovereignty of God; they preached rather that humans are basically good and God is all loving so that we just need our kids to join the church and do the right things, and they will be ok.  The parents liked it because it got their kids into heaven.  The kids liked it because they could be assured of going to heaven even though they were partying on Saturday night. It was the preaching of human goodness as the meaning of salvation and it gutted the Gospel and truncated the Truth of God.

Number Five:  Worship was reduced to a traditional routine of rather formal liturgy.  First Baptist Churches began to mimic the Methodists except for saying the creed and emulate the Episcopalians except for kissing the Bible.  The service began with a very formal prelude and ended with an equally formal postlude.  The choir no longer sang special music, but anthems.  And the prayer to begin the service was called the Invocation.  The sermon because it was preached for the most part by men who were not inerrantists was reduced to twenty minutes and no longer than thirty and the Bible was barely present.  This was the time when many people came to church on Sunday without a Bible.  It is no accident that when I make observations about this I find that the builders and the boomers are still the least likely to have Bibles with them on Sunday morning but the twenty and thirty somethings have them and they are open with highlighter lines and markings all over the place.  I can still tell today when I am dealing with the religious types when they get all exercised about the elements of worship and what we call them and particularly when their main focus is either how long I preach and when we “get out.”  I do not ever this kind of thing from the twenty and thirty somethings; either they are sinister gossips behind my back or they have a different perspective on what worship really is.

Well, that is one-half of the reasons that I see.  I could see it all wrongly.  I hope I do.  I’ll give you the other five next time.

 

 Walking in the Spirit: Fruitfulness: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Galatians 5:22 – 6:10

We are all born with some very basic desires.  God has made us in His image which means in part that those desires cannot be satisfied except by Him.  As Augustine put it, “God has made us for Himself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him.”  Our problem is that those desires are directed through our flesh so that Paul calls them the desires of the flesh and our flesh is by nature sinful or self-centered from the very moment of birth.  We want these desires gratified in a way that satisfies us and we seek that from birth.  That is why Paul calls these desires not only desires of the flesh but also works of the flesh.  The word for “works” suggests the investment of time and energy for the purpose of satisfying those desires in a way that brings pleasure to us.  Now we looked last week at the four basic desires that are found as the foundation for the works of the flesh:  we desire relational intimacy, we desire religious stability, we desire to feel good about ourselves and we desire freedom.  And we work for these on the basis of what we see we need so that we invest time and energy in seeking satisfaction for these desires.  And it always leads us deeper and deeper into domination by the sinful expression of these desires.

Learn more about this message by downloading the sermon notes here!

I went to the first church I would serve as pastor in the Fall of 1970.  The church called be to be their interim pastor.  I had no idea what that meant.  What I knew was that God had called me to preach and the Word of God was like a raging fire in me.  It was coming out either on the streets or in the sanctuary, or both.  So I was delighted to go to this church that I still admire for putting up with me in those early years and sitting under some horrible preaching.  I am not being self-effacing and falsely humble; I read some of those sermons some years ago as I was tossing them in the dumpster.  That is just the truth.  Now I have told you that not to begin a blog chronicling what has now become almost forty years of ministry but to give you the long term perspective out of which this blog emerges.  If you were to ask me today or had you asked me after two years at that first church, “which generation of people does the most grumbling and complaining?” I would give you the same answer then and now.  In fact, the extent of the grumbling and complaining and the nature of it (it is never about Kingdom issues) caused me as a young preacher to go to an older preacher and complain to him, seeking his wisdom about how to respond to it.  I will never forget his words, “when you get to be their age, you will understand and you may be worse than they are.”  Well, the age of the group when I went to the older pastor were the forty plus people, what is known generationally as the builders or those people in our generation born prior to 1946.  I am now well into the age range of that age group and see and hear the same thing in 2010 that I heard in 1972 and I still do not understand.

Now let me say several things here that are important to hear.  First, the second group generationally that has most distressed me is my age group.  We are called boomers.  We were born according to the demographers between 1946 and 1964.  We were raised by the builders born prior to 1946.  We were raised with the mentality that our lives were going to be better than theirs and that we deserved it.  We were raised to think that the measure of measures for meaning in life was monetary and material prosperity fueled by a high quality education.  And we were raised to see these things both as what we deserved and as the declaration of blessing from on high so that we look at our “stuff” and say, “God has blessed us,” which is true and conclude, “we must belong to God,”  which is a horrible conclusion to make.  Boomers are so much into building our kingdoms that we have little time for His Kingdom except at the level of giving.  We give.  But it is hard to get boomers to do much beyond that because we have rested our salvation in our profession of faith and baptism and have failed to see that though we are saved by faith alone we are not saved by faith which is alone.  We do not really like James:  faith without works is dead, being alone.  Now I know that everything above is a generalization but it is a close characterization of many in my generation.  We passed this legacy of living on to our chidren born between 1965 and 1980 and you will have found many of them actively engaged in churches during their childhood and through about the tenth grade, pulling away when they got drivers license and not involved at all during and after college except when they “come home.”  Many boomers are not bothered too much by this reality since they have the same understaning of salvation for their children that we have for outselves.   I see this a lot.  I hear parents who are boomers speaking of their children who are living like pagans and saying, “well, I know that he or she is a Christian . . .”  I am never shocked because what the parent is saying about the child is what the parent believes about himself or herself.  Both have reduced a relationship to God to a religious ritual.

My hope in these days really does rest in the generations emerging after 1980.  I see and sense a lot of hope in these young men and young women.  They do not want anything as it used to be.  They see the good looking shell of outward appearance but the emptiness inside of that shell that they see in so many lives is disgusting and distressing.  For example, they see traditional church and its forms and routines and then watch the lives of those who grew up in the time in which church was done by ritual and routine, and they do not see real and radical life change.  They see people who are concerned about things that do not matter:  what a person wears to church, what kind of music is sung in church, where something comes or does not come in the order of worship. whether there is mistake in the bulletin or the newsletter, whether the room is too cold or too hot, and I could on and on ad infinitum ad nauseum.  They see this kind of thing and they are not only repulsed by it, as they should be and as I am as well, they want so much more.  I see a hunger and thirst for Jesus among them that I have not seen in my entire ministry.  It is what stirs me and thrills me in our day.  For example, for every builder that wants to tell me how far past twelve I preached are two or more from this younger generation who have no concern about those kinds of meaningless matters.  They want more meat from the Word of God.  They want to drink from the fountain that quenches and never runs dry.

But here is my question:  what happened among the builders and the boomers to produce the kinds of people that populate so many of our churches?  What was going on to create this condition?  Now I want it understood that some of the most godly men and women I know are from both these generations.  I am blessed by them.  But I am also deeply concerned that we pay attention to the blowing wind of the Holy Spirit across the landscape of the life of the church in our day and it is not coming from either my generation or the one beyond me.  That means that neither of these generations can define who the church is or what the church is to be.  Fresh wind and fresh fire from the Spirit of God is falling on the twenty somethings and thirty somethings all over the world and we had better listen.  Can that wind and fire fall on my generation and the builders?  Absolutely.  But we must know what created the conditions in which we have found ourselves for far too long and we must be willing to repent of our pride that for far too long has held the church captive to our cultural concerns.   And I will speak to that in the next blog.

One of the most fulfilling and yet frustrating realities about expository preaching is that no text is ever treated totally and thoroughly.  Such a treatment would require either the choice of smaller units of Scripture for each Sunday or much longer sermons.  The former would mean far too much time spent in any one book of Scripture; the latter would mean far too few people participating in the worship time during which we are doing a thorough examination of the text.  We live in a day and a culture when only a few churches are really serious about Scripture and thus would not tolerate longer than 45 minute sermons. This blog is not about how revealing it is that we can watch a television program for an hour and find it far too much to listen to a 45 minute sermon.  It is about the good food that is often left on the table at the end of every examination of a text.  For example, the goal of the sermon this Sunday was to set before us the reality that we are all born with basic desires.  These desires emerge out of our flesh so that means that these normal desires are naturally sinful since we seek to gratify them on our own terms and in our own way.  We are sinners by nature and by choice so that the way we seek satisfaction of these basic desires is sinful.  Paul calls them “the works of the flesh” since we invest time and energy (the basic meaning of “works”) in the satisfaction of these desires.

We listed four of these basic desires this past Sunday:  relational intimacy, religious stability, feeling good about ourselves or self-esteem and freedom.  These are four desires with which we are born.  We want these desires satisfied.  But since we are sinners, we seek the satisfaction of these desires in the ways of the flesh and are always left either unsatisfied or dissatisfied.  For example, we seek relational intimacy in members of the opposite sex and we seek that intimacy in ways that are sexual.  Paul calls it “porneia” or sexual relationships outside of marriage.  The word that he uses covers all sexual activity outside of marriage because all sexual outside of marriage is sinful.  It is an affront to God.  So the boy who sleeps with his girl is not lavishing her with love; he is lusting after her and motivated by the need for relational intimacy.  He goes on the date to go to bed with her thinking that it is what he needs.  He succeeds to get her into bed and is left fully unsatisfied.  This is how the flesh works and this is what is meant by the works of the flesh.  The works of the flesh are simply our pursuing natural desires in ways that are directed by our feelings.

Now it is right here that we come face to face with a fundamental issue in our culture:  we are taught that pursuing our desires as determined by what we feel that we need to be happy is a good thing.  I mean, we have developed a whole branch of “science” and an entire educational system based on this belief.  The social science of psychology both in its base form (psychology) and in its higher expressions (psychotherapy and psychiatry) are built on the baseline of our knowing what we want and need.  When these needs and wants are frustrated, we are left unfulfilled.  And our frustrated and unfulfilled states take us toward all kinds of bipolar disorders that when rightly diagnosed can provide for us the necessary medication to help us to feel better about ourselves so that we can get back at the pursuit of what we sense that we need and want.  In biblical terms it translates something like this:  we are born sinners whose basic desire to feel good about ourselves which we do in the pursuit of our sinful desires.  When we cannot have what we want or when we get what we want and still do not feel good about oursleves, that is God’s way of showing us that something is wrong with us or that we are sinners and the help we need is not found within us or around us but beyond us as it comes from God by His grace and through His Son.  Does anyone else see the dilemma here?  Follow the flow of our system and you will be assured that your problem is not sin and the solution is not God; follow the flow of Scripture and you will be assured that your problem is sin and the only solution is God.  Does anyone else see that what we have in our churches is people who are trying to swim in both rivers at the same time?  The end result is that we look to the therapeutic and medical community to give us what we really need and we look to God as the clean-up hitter whom we need only when the other does not work and whom we surely need when death is coming and we want to go to heaven.  My fear is that this kind of view creates for us the kind of God that is no help for us at the door of death because this kind of God is not God who through His Son has defeated the power of sin and death and gives to us daily in His Spirit what we need to live godly lives in Christ Jesus, lives which are not at all about us having what we need and want to feel good about ourselves but lives that are consumed by Him so that we crucify ourselves so as to live for others which really makes us feel good about ourselves.  Most of us don’t need shrinks; we need contact from a sovereign savior.