Casual Worship

On a Thanksgiving weekend visit with family, I noticed a church sign advertising their 'casual worship' service.   I assumed that they meant more laid back kind of environment, no suits, no ties, etc...  While I kinda laughed out loud when I first saw the sign, the term 'casual worship' conjured up other things in my mind after I thought about it for a moment or two.

Isn't that what ails us?  We have a  'worship deficit disorder'.  We are too casual in our approach.  I am not referring to wearing jeans or singing contemporary music.   The heart of the issue is the issue of the heart.   I have been in many 'church services' where we have entered into worship in a casual manner, forgetting who we've supposedly come to worship.  We (me included) think at times that we are coming to hang out with 'our buddy Jesus'.  We come to sing a couple of catchy tunes, we feel good with our plastic smile and we are unaware of our great sin of thinking more of ourselves than we ought to think.   Instead of falling flat on our faces in reverential adoration to the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, we stumble into the pew unprepared to offer acceptable worship to the King of kings.   I was convicted by seeing this 'casual worship' sign.  How much of my future worship will be casual?  How much of it will be unacceptable?  How much heart preparation will there be?   How much prayer will I have invested beforehand and how much confession of sin will there be?   Will there be any thought of the glory, majesty, loftiness and beauty of the Lord as I enter the room for corporate worship?   Or should I just go ahead with my all-too-often 'casual worship'.....

Black Friday

Black Friday is a phenomenon that I am still trying to figure out.  Wake up before dawn, stand in line for hours for the store doors to open up, risk being stampeded by a bunch of self-absorbed people... all to get half price on a $20 toaster or to get an electronic gadget that will be obsolete in a year.  The Friday following Thanksgiving is quite appropriately named though.   Black Friday.   Maybe it's named that because it is an outward manifestation of the blackness of our worldly and materialistic hearts...  Maybe Empty Friday would be a good name.  Or Rude Friday.  Or Impatient Friday.   Or.... Black Friday. 

Answered Prayer

God is still answering prayer.  Sometimes abrupt and immediate.  Yesterday, when my wife and I were clearly going down one road of life, thinking we were following a perceived answer to prayer, we were suddenly re-directed.  The doors were shut, the road was blocked, the path was changed... we were taking a detour.  It was an obvious intervention by God, the controller of all events.  He is not a God who has stepped away from His creation to let it run by itself.  Not at all.  He is actively involved with His people, clear down to the smallest detail.

And what did we learn from this experience?  When we are in prayer - seeking out what God wants for us - and then we somehow discern His will wrongly and head down a road that we really had believed was His will, He will intervene and throw down the roadblock and turn you right around.  That is His protective nature.    The converse of that is also true, at least it has been for me experientially:  that if we are NOT in prayer and NOT seeking what He really wants, then we may end up on the path that we never really wanted to be on... and He may not step in until we've learned the lesson He wanted us to learn.    Well, I think I know which side I want to be on.   Answered prayer like this should and does increase my faith... and makes me all the more eager to continue in prayer.  What other kind of exciting answers await us?!

It is Good to Give Thanks...

It is good to give thanks to the LORD And to sing praises to Your name, O Most High - Psalm 92:1.


Thanksgiving Day is just a couple days away.  A simple search on any Bible software or a glance in a Bible concordance for the word 'thanks' instantly reveals how many passages deal with giving thanks.   And yet we live in a culture of ungrateful people.  Even amid the recession, our country is still blessed beyond what we ever deserved.  But the woe-is-me crybaby mentality abounds.   The giving of thanks is a tough thing for us poor Americans.  Complaining is the path of least resistance - and so that is the path we often take.  It is quite revealing about ourselves.  This year at Thanksgiving, I want to get over my sin of ingratitude and begin to be conscious about being thankful.  It is, after all, God's will for our lives... "in everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus" - 1 Thessalonians 5:18.


Happy Thanksgiving!
Mark 

The Worst Trade... EVER!

In 1987, my favorite baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, traded popular catcher Tony Pena to the St. Louis Cardinals for Andy Van Slyke.  Van Slyke turned out to be a pretty good player for the Buccos, but at the time I thought it was the worst trade in history.  I am sure there have been other ‘worst trades’ in professional sports. 

The real worst trade in history is found in Romans 1:25 - “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie...”   According to commentators R.C.H. Lenski and William Hendriksen, the literal rendering of that phrase could be, “They traded THE true God for THE lie”.   What could be a worse trade than that? THE lie in view here is the idols, or image-likenesses that people often make to replace THE true God.  Oh, they recognize who God is.  The Apostle Paul says they know that much, “For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God, or give thanks” (Romans 1:21).  Not only do they know God but they are familiar with his law.   Verse 32 of the same chapter says, “...although they knew the ordinance of God”.    But even so, these people refuse truth.   They exchange it for THE lie.   The imagery of the lie comes from Isaiah 44.  Hendriksen says this “describes a sculptor, who has made for himself a god.  He reaches out to take ahold of it, but fails to ask himself, ‘Is there not a LIE in my right hand?’  The idol is a LIE because (in the imagination of the worshiper) it promises much; however it provides nothing!”

And so here we have the worst trade, the worst exchange in human history:  one who would exchange the true God for the lie.   Why?  Because men love darkness rather than light.   Does this not show how stupid, depraved, sin-sick, twisted and needful mankind really is?   Thank God he reveals his truth to those who have ears to hear and are willing to listen. 

Amazing Grace

A Prayer from the Valley of Vision - Puritan Prayers and Devotions

My heart is drawn out in thankfulness to Thee,
For Thy amazing grace and condescension to me
In influences and assistances of Thy Spirit
For special help in prayer.

No poor creature stands in need of divine grace more than I do,
And yet none abuses it more than I have done, and still do.
How heartless and dull I am!
Humble me in the dust for not loving Thee more.
Every time I exercise any grace renewedly,
I am renewedly indebted to Thee, the God of all grace.

I cannot boast when I think how dependent I am upon Thee
For the being and every act of grace.

What If...

What if I don't want government health care?
What if I go to jail someday for professing my faith openly?
What if we lose the will to win the war in Afghanistan?
What if abortion is really murder, what will happen to us?
What if God really controls the climate?
What if congress actually did something of value?
What if people wouldn't drink and drive?
What if parents spent time with their children?
What if the United States is attacked by terrorists again?
What if we end up plunging into another Great Depression?
What if people really understood what the Bible says?
What if the Bible is right?
What if life is really a vapor?
What if hell is an eternal conscious punishment for rejecting Jesus Christ?

Why Parables?

I am just 'thinking out loud' today.  This morning I read the parable of the sower - you know, the hard soil by the road, the rocky ground, the thorny soil and of course the good soil.  I started wondering the same thing I always wonder when I read a parable:  why did Jesus choose to use parables?   Maybe that's an easy answer to someone else, but I've always had trouble with it.   Why didn't Jesus just directly say the lesson he wanted to convey to the hearers?   While he is direct in many portions of scripture, sometimes the parables are hard sayings.    Then it struck me... the answer isn't as hard as I was making it.   Every time I read a parable, I have to 'think'.  I have to really ponder what it is that he is saying.  I have to actually engage my mind!   Was this his reason for speaking in parables?  To get the hearers to 'think'?  For those who heard the parables and thought through them, Jesus had some profound lesson for them to learn... and for those who didn't have 'ears to hear', the message was concealed from them.

The Christian faith is a 'thoughtful' faith.  We have our Bibles and our minds, and so the Lord expects us to 'hear' and to think.   The Christian faith is a 'reasoning' faith.  "Come let us reason together", the Lord says in Isaiah.  Reasoning, thinking, pondering engaging.   We don't have a baseless faith; there is no blind faith in Christianity.  No, it is reasonable.  It is thoughtful.  And so as we read the scriptures, we sink deep into them and think through the words and phrases.   If we immerse ourselves in the Word, rely on the Holy Spirit as our teacher and helper, then the passages will become more clear to us than if we simply gloss over them in an effort to get our 15-minute or 3-chapter-a-day quota.

Just Enough

How much money do we want?  How much do we need?  Finances seem to be the endless topic of discussion in these days of economic uncertainty.  As I study through Proverbs, there are many passages that deal with money.  Most of them are common sense instructions, like being generous (11:24-24), avoiding dishonest gain (13:11), not being greedy (15:27)... and others like them.

The Christian life is often characterized by balance.  Too much of something in one direction can have a bad effect.  Too little of something also can have a bad effect.  Extremes in either direction can be devastating!  And so it is with money or possessions.  Check out what the writer of Proverbs says in chapter 30:8-9:  "Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is my portion, lest I be full and deny Thee and say 'Who is the Lord?'  Or lest I be in want and steal and profane the name of my God".   That's balance!

How much money do we want?  How much do we need?  Just enough.

A Great Sound

This morning in church we were studying various passages in the book of Nehemiah.   One did not have to listen very long before hearing a great sound.  "Turn to Nehemiah 2:1... now turn to chapter 4... look in chapter 6... now back to chapter 2... go to verse such and such... now keep your hand there and turn to the New Testament and look in 1 Timothy chapter 6".    We were turning pages at breakneck speed, keeping pace with the pastor as we got our exercise in our morning Bible drills.   The great sound?   A couple hundred people turning their Bible pages simultaneously.  All those crisp, thin Bible pages turning at the same time sounded like an orchestra to me.  It meant that people were engaging in a hearty study of God's Word, and not just being lazy spectators.  We were all participating in the same kind of activity that the noble Berean's had been noted for in the book of Acts - not taking someone's word for something, but rather checking out God's Word to see if these things were really so.   What a great sound!