Church Values: Reaching the Lost

When I was young my family traveled to Mount Rushmore on a family vacation.  In a large crowd of people, I had been having the terrible habit of wandering from my parents.  Having been warned by them to stop wandering and to stay close to them I made every effort in my mind and body to not stray from their side.  Unfortunately, that didn’t last long.  As we came upon the sight of the four faces I was transfixed.  And where my parents turned into a store to browse I continued to walk forward.  It was a large number of steps of my little feet before I finally looked up to my parents, pointing at the mountain.  But the person next to me was not my mother.  I eventually found them in the gift shop and to make a long story short, didn’t leave their side for the rest of the trip.

The interesting thing about this moment in my life is that I didn’t even realize I was lost until I looked up.  So it is with the lost in this world we call home.  How does God’s Word define the lost?  What is our role in reaching the lost?  What is the point of reaching the lost?

As disciples of Christ, there are many around us who are lost and may not even know of their own condition.  Our prayer for us as a church is to glorify God by making disciples through reaching the lost.  Join us this week as we study God’s call for us as his people and may we be convicted, encouraged, and led to join the harvest of the lost around us.

Church Values: Honoring God

I don’t know of a believer in Jesus Christ who does not desire to honor God.  But the difficulty of honoring God is that we struggle to full grasp and understand what that means.  If we would speak to ten different people we could receive ten different definitions of honoring God.  So, it is important for us to go back to God’s Word and see what He tells us is honoring to Him and how he asks us to honor Him.  That being said, it is also helpful for us to study the words of others who have wrestled with how to honor God in their own lives and how God’s Word has given them that understanding.  Hear the words of J.I. Packer.  His first two words give us an good start as to what honoring God looks like from scripture’s point of view.

“To worship God is to recognize his worth or worthiness; to look God-ward, and to acknowledge in all appropriate ways the value of what we see. The Bible calls this activity "glorifying God" or "giving glory to God," and views it as the ultimate end, and from one point of view, the whole duty of man (Ps. 29:2; 96:6; 1 Cor. 10:31).

“Scripture views the glorifying of God as a six-fold activity: praising God for all that he is and all his achievements; thanking him for his gifts and his goodness to us; asking him to meet our own and others' needs; offering him our gifts, our service, and ourselves; learning of him from his word, read and preached, and obeying his voice; telling others of his worth, both by public confession and testimony to what he has done for us. Thus we might say that the basic formulas of worship are these: "Lord, you are wonderful"; "Thank you, Lord"; "Please Lord"; "Take this, Lord"; "Yes, Lord"; "Listen everybody!"

“This then is worship in its largest sense: petition as well as praise, preaching as well as prayer, hearing as well as speaking, actions as well as words, obeying as well as offering, loving people as well as loving God. However, the primary acts of worship are those which focus on God directly -- and we must not imagine that work for God in the world is a substitute for direct fellowship with him in praise and prayer and devotion.”  (James Packer, Your Father Loves You, Harold Shaw Publishers, July 1986,  P. 15.)

That is our desire for us as a church.  We desire to know, understand, and live out the honor of Him.  Join us this week as we study, struggle, and grow into what God’s Word has to say about honoring Him.

J.C. Ryle: The Disciple of Christ, Duty, and Love of Christ

"Love to Christ is the mainspring of work for Christ.  There is little done for His cause on earth from sense of duty, or from knowledge of what is right and proper.  The heart must be interested before the hands will move and continue moving.  Excitement may galvanize the Christian's hands into a fitful and spasmodic activity.  But there will be no patient continuance in well-doing, no unwearied labor in missionary work at home or abroad, without love.  The nurse in a hospital may do her duty properly and well, may give the sick man his medicine at the right time, may feed him, minister to him and attend to all his wants.  But there is a vast difference between that nurse and a wife tending the sick-bed of a beloved husband, or a mother watching over a dying child.  The one acts from a sense of duty; the other from affection and love.  The one does her duty because she is paid for it; the other is what she is because of her heart.  It is just he same in the matter of the service of Christ.  The great workers of the church, the men who have led forlorn hopes in the mission-field, and turned the world upside down, have all been eminently lovers of Christ.

"Examine the characters of Owen and Baxter, of Rutherford and George Herbert, of Leighton and Hervey, of Whitefield and Wesley, of Henry Martyn and Judson, of Bickersteth and Simeon, of Hewitson and McCheyne, of Stowell and M'Neile.  These men have left a mark on the world.  And what was the common feature of their characters?  They all loved Christ.  They not only  held a creed.  They loved a Person, even the Lord Jesus Christ."

Why Disciples Forgive

"The man I ate dinner with tonight killed my brother." The words, spoken by a stylish woman at a Prison Fellowship banquet in Seattle, amazed me. She told how John H. had murdered her brother during a robbery, served 18 years at Walla Walla, then settled into life on a dairy farm, where she had met him in 1983, 20 years after his crime. Compelled by Christ's command to forgive, Ruth Youngsman had gone to her enemy and pronounced forgiveness. Then she had taken him to her father's deathbed, prompting reconciliation.

Some wouldn't call this a success story: John didn't dedicate his life to Christ. But at that PF banquet last fall, his voice cracked as he said, "Christians are the only people I know that you can kill their son, and they'll make you a part of their family. I don't know the Man Upstairs, but He sure is hounding me."

John's story is unfinished; he hasn't yet accepted Christ. But just as Christ died for us regardless of our actions or acceptance, so Ruth forgave him without qualification. Even more so, she became his friend. (Albert H. Quie, President of Prison Fellowship Ministries, Jubilee, p. 5.)

Why do disciples of Jesus Christ forgive?  What does Jesus tell us about forgiveness?  How can I forgive someone who has deeply hurt me?  How are disciples of Christ able to forgive?

Join us this week as we study what God’s Word says about forgiveness.  We will primarily focus on Ephesians 4:32-5:2, but I would encourage us to read all of Ephesians before our time together on Sunday morning.  May the Spirit speak to each of us and may He prepare us to hear God’s Word and be transformed by the work of God in our lives.

Being Open

We have a special guest bringing the word of God to us this week.  Dave Decker is the founder and director of LightsOut Ministry and has been supported by us as a church for the past year.  If you would like to know more about Dave and LightsOut Ministry please feel free to visit their website at livelightsout.org.

This week Dave will focus on being open: open heart, open eyes, open mind, open hands.  What does this look like?  How does this help us grow as disciples of Jesus Christ?  What does Jesus desire from us as we strive to live out his commands?

Pray for Dave as he brings the truth of the gospel message and that God would use his time with us to encourage, convict, and drive us into a deeper, more intimate relationship with Jesus.

Spiritual Wholeness

Recently, I found a puzzle piece in the cushion of our chair at home.  The piece came from one of my children’s puzzles, which had been thrown out months before.  Why did we throw out the puzzle?  It wasn’t complete.  It wasn’t whole.  The purpose of a puzzle is to put it completely together in order to enjoy the whole picture.  But a puzzle that is incomplete is not fulfilling its purpose as a puzzle and so isn’t worth putting together.

Over the past number of months we have been wading through the book of James and have addressed issues from listening to and doing the Word of God, showing favoritism, taming the tongue, submission to God, and prayer.  Like a puzzle without all its pieces, so a disciple of Christ is not whole or complete without addressing each of these issues in their life.  Unlike a puzzle without all its pieces, God does not throw us away.  Instead, He works through trials and circumstances to create the pieces needed to become whole.  This week we will attempt to bring the words of God through his servant James together to help us as disciples of Christ to understand what it means to be spiritually whole and spiritually mature.

But we must all be warned, for growing into spiritual maturity is humbling, difficult, time consuming, and painful.  But in the end the disciple of Christ will be made whole.  Not by our own effort or merit, but by the work of the Spirit within our hearts and lives.

Join us this week as we discover God’s command to grow into spiritual maturity and wholeness.  May God use this time together to bring us to Him in a deep and mighty way, for His glory and greatness alone.

J.C. Ryle: The Christian's Love for Christ

"Do you love me?" (John 21:16)

"Let me show you the peculiar feeling of a true Christian towards Christ - he loves Him.  A true Christian is not a mere baptized man or woman.  He is something more.  He is not a person who only goes, as a matter of form, to a church or chapel on Sundays, and lives all the rest of the week as if there was no God.  Formality is not Christianity.  Ignorant lip worship is not true religion.  The Scripture speaks expressly: 'They are not all Israel which are of Israel' (Rom. 9:6).  The practical lesson of those words is clear and plain.  All are not true Christians who are members of the visible church of Christ.

"The true Christian is one whose religion is in his heart and life.  It is felt by himself in his heart.  It is seen by others in his conduct and life.  He feels his sinfulness, guilt and badness, and repents.  He sees Jesus Christ to be that divine Savior whom his soul needs, and commits himself to Him.  He puts off the old man with his corrupt and carnal habits, and puts on the new man.  He lives a new and holy life, fighting habitually against the world, the flesh and the devil.  Christ Himself is the cornerstone of his Christianity.  Ask him in what he trusts for the forgiveness of his many sins, and he will tell you, in the death of Christ.  Ask him in what righteousness he hopes to stand innocent at the judgment day, and he will tell you it is the righteousness of Christ.  Ask him by what pattern he tries to frame his life, and he will tell you that it is the example of Christ.

"But, beside all this, there is one thing in a true Christian which is eminently peculiar to him.  That thing is love to Christ.  Knowledge, faith, hope, reverence, obedience are all marked features in a true Christian's character.  But his picture would be very imperfect if you omitted his 'love' to his divine Master.  He not only knows, trusts and obeys
.  He goes further than this - he loves."