Category: Pastor Tim’s Blog

As you gather for worship Sunday Pam and I will be worshiping with two Filipino congregations in New York City. We are privileged to get to be a part of a transitional moment in their history as Baptists in New York. In partnership with NAMB they are broadening their mission to embrace all ethnic groups that are part of the New York Baptist convention.

While it is always difficult to be gone from “our” family on Sunday, your generosity in allowing us freedom to minister in other contexts around the globe is so encouraging. And, as always you will be lead and served well by our ministry team in our absence.

Please pray for us as we will for you. “We always give thanks for you…..”

PS. We are very grateful for your prayers and kind remarks in response to Pam’s aunts passing. You are truly a loving congregation.

Questions.  Everybody has them.  Life is full of them.  Just about the time we figure out one stage, another kicks in and it seems we’re back to square one.  Whether you are caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s or raising an adopted child or just walking through a tough spot in a marriage…questions visit us.  But our questions are not always about not having enough information.  Sometimes they have to do with larger issues… why do the innocent suffer?  Why does it seem that people on the wrong side of morality get ahead in life?  Why am I suffering?  Is God mad at me?  Is He punishing me?  Has He forgotten me?

Our questions are part of human experience.  Even people of faith have questions… and, ironically, doubts.  The Psalms are filled with questions, many unanswered, many spoken seemingly into an empty, uncaring void. These questions echo their way into our lives too.  And yet, we know there is One Who holds the answers.  And sometimes, as much as we feel we need information to fill in the glaring blanks in our lives, the truth is we really need our hearts to be healed…not our minds filled.  Data and information, as helpful as that can be, will not take the place of simply knowing God is There!

When Jesus went to the cross, the experience of our Savior being crucified was punctuated with an agonizing question coming out of the darkness:  “My God, my God, why..?  Even Jesus had questions.  Though He never ceased to be Deity, never stopped being God, He also wore our humanity and with that, our lack of always knowing the answer to every question.

God was humble enough to become a questioner with us.  He asked from the cross… and it seemed the heavens were locked in silence.

So when our questions come He understands when the answers aren’t apparent.

Or even when they don’t come at all.

This past week I attended the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville.  It is an honor for me to get to serve in that capacity, though this meeting was anything but pleasurable.  We had to deal with the sorrowful news that, due to the lack of gifts to our International Mission Board (IMB) an unprecedented 600-800 field personnel and IMB staff members can no longer be supported.  It was difficult news at best… tragic at worst.

But it was the moment when Dr. Chuck Kelly, president of New Orleans Baptist seminary spoke that gripped me deeply.  He was talking about the reality that one of our professors, who had been caught up in the Ashley Madison scandal, had apparently taken his own life.  He had dealt for years with an addiction to pornography that had just come to the surface.  He apparently took his own life in his family’s garage.  When Dr. Kelly learned of this professor’s death, he went immediately with his wife to the home to visit with the bereaved family.  He was met by a grieving widow who put her hands on Dr. Kelly’s shoulders, moved her face close to his, and with tears said “Please, please don’t let anyone else on this campus die because of pornography!  We could have forgiven him… he didn’t have to die.”

I wonder if we even consider the reality that pornography, or any sin, leads ultimately to death.  This occasion was one of more immediate consequence, as a grieving campus community filed past the body of a beloved teacher.  The reality came home.  “The wages of sin is death…” Romans warns us.  People die because of sin.  They die immediately spiritually, and eventually physically.  But sin always kills those it takes captive.  Only a Redeemer can come to set us free from an endless cycle of death- producing acts and bring freedom from sin’s chains.

And Jesus Christ is that Redeemer.  But we must trust Him, not just once and move back to what we used to be.  We must trust Him constantly if we are to truly and meaningfully be set free from our sin and from the resulting death it brings.

Might we plead the widow’s prayer to Dr. Kelly with our Savior:  “Please, please don’t let anyone else on this campus…in this church…die because of sin!!”

And then may we join Christ in His redemptive mission on this planet in answer to that prayer.

“My chains are gone…I’ve been set free.  My God, my Savior has ransomed me…”

An anonymous writer offered the following statement.  It touched me as I read it, and hopefully will be meaningful to you as well:

Can we who have so much be untouched by those who have so little? Can full stomachs hear the hollow echo of stomachs that are empty?  Can a people drunk on personal freedom, personal rights and civil rights, truly understand those who are held captive by famine and hunger?  Can we who are held captive by our gadgets, entertained by TV, seduced by Hollywood, victimized by our own success, be touched by those who search frantically for individual grains of rice to fill their now empty bowls?  Can we, whose ears are attuned to Panasonic, Sony, and Pioneer, hear the plaintive cries of the child in Sao Paulo’s slums, the wailings of a young mother wailing hopelessly at the grave of her child in India, or the broken sobs of a father recently bereaved to now raise six children in San Salvador?  Who, really, are the deaf, the crippled, the hungry, the blind?

We are!

You and I are.  We have eyes that cannot see, hearts that cannot feel, feet that will not move, ears that cannot hear, and a hunger that cannot be satisfied.  We can change the course of a hurting world.   But will we?

“Though He (Jesus) was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor that we, through His poverty, might be made rich.”  (2 Corinthians 8:9)

One of the cruel experiments performed by Nazi doctors during World War 2 on prisoners was an experiment initially designed to study endurance.  The plan was simply to have a group of fairly healthy men dig a hole, then with wheelbarrows move the dirt to a pile about 50 yards away.  After the hole was finished they had the men refill the wheelbarrows, fill in the hole they had just dug, and begin the process over again.

The study did something inadvertently that surprised even the Nazis.  After days of monotonous, long, arduous days of digging and refilling, digging and refilling, with no end in sight the men did not collapse.  Instead they went mad. They would intentionally run from the guards knowing they would be shot. They deliberately ran into an electric fence and died in that way.  They literally began to lose their minds.

Some of us have jobs that make us feel the same way. The monotony, the meaninglessness, the unending assembly line can make us want to run screaming into the fence as well.  Unless we know a secret:

Our work has meaning.  God has a purpose in what we are doing even when we aren’t sure ourselves what it may be. God is not a God of randomness and chance.  If you are working a job you’d rather not, it may well be that there are people there who need to know the God who can give meaning to their existence as He gave to you!

Work is not a punishment.  It is not God harshly treating us to pay us back for sin or wrong in our lives.  Jesus has already paid for that!

God is a God of meaning and hope.  He knows that we cannot reach our full potential as human beings apart from some kind of work and effort.  Have you ever watched children play?  That’s their work!  It’s calling out things about them that sitting at home doing nothing could never do!

If you feel you have a meaningless, frustrating, dead-end job ask the God who created work to help you see the “why” in what you do.

It just may change your life!

As we concluded our study last week of Christ’s Message to the Church, we looked at the “lukewarm church” in Laodicea. It would be wonderful if such a study were just a history lesson. But in reality, it is far more than history. It is for many a present reality.

I have been asked to reproduce the following list I used last Sunday from the Francis Chan book Crazy Love for the purpose of self-examination. We are to “examine ourselves” to see if our faith is authentic. (2 Corinthians 13:5)

• LUKEWARM PEOPLE attend church fairly regularly. It is what is expected of good Christians.
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE give money to charity and to church…as long as it doesn’t change their standard of living. They give if its easy and safe.
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE choose what is popular over what is right when the two are in conflict. They want to fit in both at church and outside the church.
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE don’t want to be saved from their sin…only from the penalty for their sin. They don’t hate sin and aren’t truly sorry for it. They’re sorry God is going to punish them for it.
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE rarely share faith with friends or co-workers. They do not want to be rejected, nor do they wish to make people uncomfortable by talking about “private issues like religion or Jesus.”
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE measure their morality by comparison with the world. They may not be all-out for Jesus, but they aren’t as horrible as this guy they know.
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE say they love Jesus and He is, indeed, a part of their lives but He isn’t allowed to control their lives, their thoughts, or their time or money.
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE love God but they do NOT love Him with all their heart, soul mind and strength. They believe that kind of radical devotion is only for pastors or missionaries, not average people.
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE love others but they do not seek to love others as they love themselves. They love those who are capable of loving them in return (family, friends)   There is little love left over for those who don’t love them back or those who slight them. Their love is highly conditional and comes with strings attached.
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE seldom think about eternity and life in heaven. CS Lewis said, “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE do not live by faith, their lives are structured so they never have to. They don’t want to have to trust God if something unexpected happens…they have a savings account. The truth is, they have all they need and life wouldn’t look much different for them if they suddenly stopped believing in God.
• LUKEWARM PEOPLE are not really that different than an unbelieving person. They probably drink or swear less and equate a partially sanitized life with holiness.

Our answers reveal the truth about the temperature of our devotion to God and perhaps the truth about the genuineness of our salvation. Today, “examine yourselves” and evaluate the temperature of our love for God.

May we find we are on fire and not lukewarm. (Revelation 3:16)

With several of our families bidding farewell to their college students for the first time, I thought it might be interesting to view the “Mindset List” released each year by Beloit University.  It is educational to get a little insight into the minds of our current college community.  I will caution you however:  It will make you feel old!  This is a selection of the fifty items listed on the website (https://beloit.edu/mindset/2019).

From the website:
Students heading into their first year of college this year are mostly 18 and were born in 1997. Among those who have never been alive in their lifetimes are Princess Diana, Notorious B.I.G., Jacques Cousteau, and Mother Teresa. Joining them in the world the year they were born were Dolly the sheep, The McCaughey septuplets, and Michael “Prince” Jackson Jr.

Since they have been on the planet:

• Hybrid automobiles have always been mass produced.
• Google has always been there, in its founding words, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.”
• They have never licked a postage stamp.
• Email has become the new “formal” communication, while texts and tweets remain enclaves for the casual.
• Four foul-mouthed kids have always been playing in South Park.
• They have grown up treating Wi-Fi as an entitlement.
• The announcement of someone being the “first woman” to hold a position has only impressed their parents.
• Charlton Heston is recognized for waving a rifle over his head as much as for waving his staff over the Red Sea.
• Cell phones have become so ubiquitous in class that teachers don’t know which students are using them to take notes and which ones are planning a party.
• If you say “around the turn of the century,” they may well ask you, “which one?”
• They have avidly joined Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione as they built their reading skills through all seven volumes.
• Attempts at human cloning have never been federally funded but do require FDA approval.
• The therapeutic use of marijuana has always been legal in a growing number of American states.
• Teachers have always had to insist that term papers employ sources in addition to those found online.
• The Lion King has always been on Broadway.
• At least Mom and Dad had their new Nintendo 64 to help them get through long nights sitting up with the baby.
• First Responders have always been heroes.
• Splenda has always been a sweet option in the U.S.
• The Atlanta Braves have always played at Turner Field.
• The proud parents recorded their first steps on camcorders, mounted on their shoulders like bazookas.

Here is the most important “mindset” of all, however:  “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”  (Philippians 2:1)

I want to make a case with this blog for reclamation. I want to challenge you, us, we, the Christian, Christ-honoring, Christ-following community of believers, the Body and the Bride of Christ to stand up for a time-honored, commonly recognized symbol. While I know I am not the first to suggest this, I want to make my case for reclaiming the rainbow.

Quick, without thinking too much about it, when you think about the rainbow what is your immediate association?

1) A wonderfully sweet, multicolored candy called Skittles (You know, “Taste the rainbow!”)

2) A covenant promise from God that He would never flood the earth with water again

3) The symbol of the LGBT movement

4) An upscale vacuum cleaner

Some of the answers above will be conditioned by the generation. Some by your affiliation with a church that actually teaches Bible stories. For a few, the thought of a vacuum cleaner came to mind.   And let’s be honest. Some of your answers were conditioned by your affection for candy.

But I will further press my point by asking this. If I flew a rainbow flag in our church sanctuary Sunday morning, how many of us would immediately think “the Pastor is going to preach on God’s covenant promises?” And how many would think, “Is our church supporting the homosexual agenda now?”

Many in our culture today look at the rainbow in a totally different light — as a representation of gay pride. First used in a parade in Northern California, artist Gilbert Baker created the first “rainbow flag” as a visible symbol for the LGBT community in 1978. Then when the Supreme Court issued its pivotal ruling this summer, the White House that night was bathed in multi-colored striped lighting to depict…a rainbow.

It struck me the other day as I was driving back from Orlando following a thunderstorm and there, streaking across the sky in all its glory was a double rainbow. Pam immediately got her phone and took a picture. Apparently the same thing had happened in Alabama, because our daughter Allison posted a rainbow picture she had just taken on her Facebook page.

Then it hit me. The LGBT community doesn’t own the rainbow. God does. Now if you know me, you know that, as an American, I believe in and will fight to protect the human rights of any person in America to be a practicing homosexual, and as a person I am obliged to be socially tolerant of and kind to any who may be so inclined….(and we in the Christian community need to work on our kindness toward those with whom we disagree). However, I do not have to acknowledge or believe that such a lifestyle is moral or right, no matter what our culture or any court says, nor will I be silent in what I believe.

And I want my rainbow back.

A member of our church asked me a question recently that, truth be told, may be a question many have.  The question was, “Does doing more for the Lord (eg, working more, volunteering, etc.) make us a better Christian?”  One of the verses we could turn to in dealing with that issue is in James where we are told, “Show me your faith without deeds and I will show you my faith by my deeds.”  (2:14-26 )  In this instance, “deeds” or doing good deeds or works is portrayed as evidence that one’s faith is genuine.  Can you be considered a true Christ follower and do nothing to show it?  Of course Jesus also said, “By your fruits you will know them.” (Matthew 7:20)  Does fruit imply good works or good deeds?  These are hard questions for us to wrap our thoughts around, and to convince ourselves that we can either amplify grace in our lives by doing more good “stuff” or have grace subtracted because we are not “doing enough” is to misunderstand the nature of salvation.

The Bible teaches “by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves… it is the gift of God. Not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)   So we see here clearly that it is grace through faith that produces salvation, not what we do however busy or well intentioned we may seem in our efforts.  There are many well-intentioned, workaholic Christians who have transferred a Puritan work ethic and overlayed it on how God saves us.  That negates a Gospel of pure grace.  We are not saved by what we can do FOR God, but from what we did TO God through our sin.  Jesus died on the cross to pay that penalty once and for all… completely.  Nothing we can do negates that.  Nothing we do can add to that.  It is by grace.

So then, where do our “good deeds” fit?  Ephesians 2:10 tells us “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which the Lord prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” The Lord has a prepared, measured amount of work that He expects of us.  It is always in line with our giftedness, it always brings joy to us when we do it, and it is always an assignment that we are uniquely gifted to accomplish.

In short, an authentic Christian who has been saved by grace will also show evidence of that salvation by tangible deeds and works.  However, to “try” harder and to “do” more to gain a higher standing as a Christian is a vain activity at best.  The rewards spoken of in the Bible are for acts of obedience to the Gospel, for standing fast in difficulty, and for walking faithfully with the Master, but our standing with God is ultimately based on His goodness and His work at the cross on our behalf, not on our works for him.

We can’t be a ‘better’ Christian.. …. only an obedient one!