Trials and Blessings part 2

So we made it to Phoenix. I have been sick for the last 2 days, fever over 103. I was so sick I thought I was going to die. It's Christmas eve, and I am starting to recover. I am excited about the gift of the Chevy Malibu, we have awesome friends. I need to figure out what to do with our van, which is stuck in North Platte Nebraska. We are so thankful for God's protection.

I was thinking about it last night how lucky we really were. We started to break down about 10 to 15 miles outside of Paxton Nebraska. It was dark and cold, and we limped into a Days Inn and parked. We stayed the night, got up to try to get to North Platte and didn't even get off the on ramp when the tranny went out. I can't imagine what we would have done if it went out that night in the dark and the cold somewhere between towns in Nebraska. God was looking out for us and taking care of us the entire time. His grace and mercy is so amazing.

Thank you all for your prayers. I am feeling better today, and the weather is awesome. I am excited to see all my Sioux City friends again soon, but I am enjoying Arizona for the time being.

Trials and blessings

So Elaine and I left Sioux City Friday morning to head to Arizona for Christmas. Everything was going fine until mid Nebraska. Long story short, we lost the tranny around Paxton Nebraska. We got towed to North Platte Nebraska, and our friend Dan came to pick us up. He drove us back to his house in Cheyenne Wyoming. It's been an adventure so far, but it seems like God is going to take care of us. Our friends are letting us use a van, and another friend is giving us a car. Wild, eh. God takes care of us, and we are so blessed and so thankful that God is taking care of us. Thanks for your prayers.

Merry X-Mas

Yes, I said it, X-Mas. Before you write me a dirty comment, I want to unpack this a little. As Christians, we have to stop yelling at the rooftops about stuff like this. Here is why. Pagans and Atheist didn't come up with X-Mas. It wasn't a result of the Anti-Christ, in fact it's a Christian invention. X is the Greek letter for Christ. X = Christ. So X-Mas is Christ Mas. We as Christians came up with it, then it became widely used, and we forgot the origins and then got mad and yelled at anyone who used it.

On top of that, stop yelling about Happy Holidays. If you are a Christian, that’s great, I am so happy you are in the family. Don’t assume everyone else is a Christian. Some people are Jewish, and they celebrate Hanukah. You don’t hear the Jews getting mad because of the Happy Holidays, they don’t demand we all say Happy Hanukah. I don’t know what Kwanzaa is all about, but I know it’s during the same time. And we all celebrate New Years, unless you are using the Chinese calendar.

Here is the point. We have become so culturally Christian that we forgot what is means to be a Christian. We tell people about Christ, not demand they use his name as part of a holiday celebration. If you say Merry Christmas, but don’t know Jesus, you’ll still go to hell. Sorry, but it’s the truth. If you make someone say Merry Christmas, and they don’t know Jesus, you haven’t helped. If you boycott Hallmark because they don’t have cards with Nativity Scenes on them, you have doomed a secular company by removing the witness they so desperately need. Protest people to hurt children, abuse students and kill babies. Leave poor Hallmark alone.

Salt and Light. Now you can say Merry Christmas, but don’t get mad at everyone else who doesn’t. I saw Petco has a sign on the door that had every holiday that is around the month of December. These poor people, they probably pray every night that God will keep us at home and not in their faces about their choice of holiday greetings! Think about it.

Talking to yourself is not praying

So there is this book called Conversations with God. In the conversations, the guy writes that God is in humans. So he is having a conversation with himself? How is this on the New York Times Best Seller list? What happened to our culture where people read this dribble? I can wax elequent for 200 pages about the way I think the world it, but I don't have the gall to title it "conversations with God". We have that book already, it's over 3,000 years old. It's actually a bunch of books, making up two volumes, Old and New Testament. Anyway, I was shocked and I wanted to share my annoyance. I never realized that you could make the best sellers list by writing a book about talking to yourself.

Thanksgiving

I am thankful for a lot. First and foremost I am thankful for my salvation. I am thankful that God loves and cares for me. I am thankful because He has blessed me far beyond what I deserve, with a beautiful wife, 3 kids and my dream job. I haven't had a perfect life, I have experienced some loss, but I have gained far more than I have ever lost. Each one of you who is reading my blog has blessed me. My friends from Golden Gate, my friends from ministry in Arizona, my friends from Heartland, my friends from Wyoming, my friends scattered. Each person that God has brought into my life has touched me, blessed me and helped me to grow. I am thankful for the chance to know you all, and to learn from you. What a great and mighty thing God does when He blesses us.

Too late at night to be blogging.

Ever been grumpy for some seemingly unknow reason? Sort of grumpy tonight. Not sure why, had a good day. It was my day off, so I didn’t work much. I did a few e-mails and that was about it. Took the boys to a movie, hung out, made homemade pizza. So what’s my problem.

Maybe it’s the cold. Maybe it’s all the things I wanted to should have done today and didn’t. Maybe it’s that I’m a sinful man, trying to live redeemed but doing so poorly. After all, this blog is completely and totally self-absorbed, it’s all about how I feel and what I did and what I think.

I was going somewhere with all this. Stopped to talk to Elaine, and completely lost my train of thought. Anyway, I shouldn’t be grumpy, I should be content. Things are going well, life is good. Even when life is hard, those trials are the very thing that make me look more like Christ. Maybe I’m grumpy cause things are going well and I’ve gotten complacent. Maybe it’s cause I need to go to bed and I’m not. Who knows. I'll be happier tomorrow!

modality

Now if you started reading my blog thinking I was going to talk about the heresy of modalism, you will be disappointed. What I am talking about is the way we “do church”. I have been reading a book called Pagan Christianity. I have read Simple Church, Kingdom Focused Church, Purpose Driven Church, and a bunch of books that aren’t about the church, but they way we should behave in church. Small groups, Sunday School, Corporate worship, House Churches, who should lead, what they should lead and when and where they should lead it. Who started what and when and why.

Here is my conclusion. No one is happy with anything in the church. Big churches should be smaller, small churches should be larger. Some want praise songs, some want hymns. Most of the time, there is minimal scriptural evidence to support this stuff. Book after book after book of half-cocked arguments. Now with Pagan Christianity, the book says we shouldn’t even have a church service. We shouldn’t have paid clergy (unemployment here I come), or church buildings or music or any of that stuff.

Here is what else annoys me. 99% of the stuff that is being argued is details. We have done a church service the same way for 200 years. We have prayer, singing, sermon, passing the plate and invitation, not always in that order. It hasn’t changed, but we argue about what sort of plates to pass, how fast the music should be, and if we should pray in old, middle and modern English.

Here is my answer. DO WHAT GOD TELLS YOU. Just as equally important. DON’T ASSUME GOD TOLD EVERYONE ELSE WHAT HE TOLD YOU. God told Joshua to kill a whole lot of people. Doesn’t mean you should. God told Abraham to sacrifice his son. You shouldn’t, God may not intervene for you. God told Noah to build a big boat. He didn’t tell you to build a big boat. Listen and then obey. A pastor named Don Pierson told a prayer conference I was in that God expects the time from His command to your obedience to be very short. If you have to stop and tell everyone else how to do what God told you, it makes your obedience be longer. If God tells you to go to a house church, then go. If God tells you to go to a big church, a small church, a growing church, even a dying church, because He wants you to breath life.

Be obedient is first. Be scriptural is second. I can’t list all the things that we want to do in church because it’s cultural, not scriptural. Guess what, there are things that make sense that are wrong. Rule of thumb, if you have to create an elaborate theology, filled with logic and reason to justify your position, it’s probably off. If your position cannot be justified by scripture, then maybe it’s time to rethink. Even if your idea is not popular, God is not real concerned with you being popular.

Last thing. Quit complaining. Too many whiners out there. In football, they call those armchair quarterbacks. If you are unhappy, either do something about it, or be happy. Either trust God that He put that leader or leadership team in place, or reality is that you are at a church where you feel that God didn’t put the leadership in place. If that’s the case, why are you still there? Then we can have less books to tell us what’s right or what’s wrong or what’s good or what’s bad. I closed a blog with the statement about being a church and being The Church. Be part of the worldwide body of Christ. Minister to others, witness, evangelize, help, reach out. All the time we spend talking and fighting and backbiting, and causing divisions and factions takes away from the time we need to spend being The Church, the Catholic (which means universal, I’m not referring to the denomination) Church.