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Faith Grows with Use

August 27, 2011 in Devotionals, Discipleship, Reading Notes with 0 Comments

The following is a devotional by A W Tozer on how to make our faith grow. I want to exercise my faith. I want to believe more and more every day and see God accomplish great things in my life. Read and see how God might use this in your life!

James 4:2

It was a saying of George Mueller that faith grows with use. If we would have great faith we must begin to use the little faith we already have. Put it to work by reverent and faithful praying, and it will grow and become stronger day by day. Dare today to trust God for something small and ordinary and next week or next year you may be able to trust Him for answers bordering on the miraculous. Everyone has some faith, said Mueller; the difference among us is one of degree only, and the man of small faith may be simply the one who has not dared to exercise the little faith he has.

According to the Bible, we have because we ask, or we have not because we ask not. It does not take much wisdom to discover our next move. Is it not to pray, and pray again and again till the answer comes? God waits to be invited to display His power on behalf of His people. The world situation is such that nothing less than God can straighten it out. Let us not fail the world and disappoint God by failing to pray.

Lord, I know my faith needs to grow, so please help me to exercise what faith I have and anticipate that growth and stretching. Amen.

Tozer, A. W. (2001). Tozer on Christian leadership : A 366-day devotional. Camp Hill, PA.: WingSpread.

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Santa Claus is watching you!

August 24, 2011 in Discipleship, Ministry Philosophy, Reading Notes with 0 Comments

The following quote helps us realize how we must be careful to teach the Bible and not morals. We must help children to realize that we will never be good enough in and of ourselves. It is always God that does the work. It is a work of grace.

In an effort to promote moral behavior and deter sin, the stereotypical Sunday school teacher implores children to be good little boys and girls so that Jesus will love them and take care of them. The stereotype is unkind and unfair, but it comes painfully close to characterizing much contemporary preaching that portrays God as a perpetual Santa Claus who is making a list and checking it twice to punish the naughty and reward the nice. I recognize that even as I write these words there are readers who wonder what is wrong with that characterization. The problem lies in the fact that such teaching becomes a menace to faith because it makes the ministry of Christ irrelevant by seeming to make God’s love dependent on our works.

Proper concerns to gain holiness and/or compel purity engender much improper teaching by making human activity the basis of our standing with God. Almost every generation has to rediscover grace because humanity has no natural capacity to receive (or perceive of) the notion that we can do nothing to gain God’s acceptance. “We cannot by our best works merit pardon for sin … nor satisfy for the debt of our former sins.”

After we have done everything we have been told to do, we are still unworthy servants (Luke 17:10). Because our works are mixed with so much weakness and imperfection of motive, they remain defiled before a holy God.

Our best works are as “filthy rags” to him (Isa. 64:6). They become acceptable to him only to the degree that their defilement is covered by Christ and to the extent that they proceed from his Spirit.

While there are blessed consequences to moral behavior and God honors the homage we offer him in the name of his Son, our actions in themselves offer us no opportunity for boasting and no leverage against heaven. Since our ability to do good works is from God, our goodness alone neither merits his blessing nor secures his acceptance (Ezek. 36:26–27; John 15:4–6; Phil. 2:13).4 Apart from the provision of God’s pardoning and sanctifying grace, our best works are actually deserving of God’s reproof rather than meriting his reward.

Chapell, B. (2005). Christ-centered preaching: Redeeming the expository sermon (Second Edition). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.

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Dorothy Carey

August 21, 2011 in Biographies, Reading Notes with 0 Comments

Carey accepted appointment as a missionary to India, and the date for sailing was set before Dorothy was even told about it. Carey urged her to go with him, but she at first refused. So Carey took their oldest child, Felix, and set out for the ship. However, the sailing was delayed, and Carey took the opportunity to rush back home and plead once more with Dorothy to join him. With many tears, she yielded and had only a few hours to pack all her possessions for herself and four children, bid farewell to family and friends, and leave England forever. She was scarcely aboard ship when she came to regret her decision, and she adapted poorly in India. The heat and humidity took their toll, and she was subject to severe fevers. Their grinding poverty, the uncertainty of their existence, and the death of one child proved more than she could cope with, and she lapsed into deep and debilitating depression. For the last thirteen years of her life, she lived in a single room, with padded walls, behind a locked door. Somewhere in missionary history a word of compassion should be written for Dorothy Carey, who paid a high price for Baptist missions and never knew why.

The first few years in India were a nightmare to the Careys. Dr. Thomas squandered their entire annual allowance within a few weeks, and they had to find secular employment or face starvation. In his naive hopes, Carey had expected multitudes in India to turn to the gospel, and he was shocked at the utter indifference and occasional hostility his preaching met. To earn a living, Carey became a planter, managed an indigo factory, and later became a teacher at a university. He preached frequently but with little response. Carey found the social and religious culture of India so intertwined with the caste system that persons of status feared to become Christians.

For the first few years in India, Carey was essentially in missionary orientation. He had no precedents to guide him, no sizable body of missionary literature to offer insights, and few missionary colleagues with whom to compare notes. Carey’s work was trial and error until after a few years he hammered out a missionary strategy to go with the missionary theology he had developed in England. The methods Carey developed, emphasizing not only preaching but also Scripture translation and the printed word, along with efforts to move the mission churches toward indigenous status, are worthy of note in missionary history. On the mission field, Carey also developed a more open attitude toward other denominations, helping to lay some foundations for Baptist participation in the later ecumenical movement.
On the first day of the new century, 1800, Carey and his family moved to Serampore. There he was joined by two other Baptist missionaries, John Marshman and William Ward, with their families. Thus began a famous missionary partnership and the Serampore Mission. Marshman was the preacher; Ward the printer; Carey the translator.

McBeth, H. L. (1987). The Baptist heritage (186–187). Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

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perfectly and impeccably manage themselves into failure

August 16, 2011 in Outreach and Evangelism, Reading Notes, Statistics with 0 Comments

There is an article here that discusses how the congregations of the Church of England are aging and dying. It is a bleak reality that is staring them in the face. It is something that we should consider in many of our churches.

As I traveled preaching across the USA I could say that this is true of many of our own churches. We must reach people with the gospel. Everyone must share the gospel with their friends, their families, their neighbors, the people where they work and everyone else.

Consider some of the quotes from this article. I welcome your comments. Do you think you see this happening or not?

He likened the Church of England to large companies that “perfectly and impeccably manage themselves into failure”.

“The perfect storm we can see arriving fast on the horizon is the ageing congregations,” he said.

“The average age is 61 now, with many congregations above that.

“His words are, of course, one of the fashionable sneers we have heard about recently, and to my mind, unhelpful at best, harmful at worst.”

Can this serve as a wake up call to all of us? Let’s work at getting the gospel around the world. Invite someone to church this very week. Share the gospel with someone! Get involved in the Great Commission!

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The preacher as the pope!

August 14, 2011 in Ministry Philosophy, Ministry Tools, Preaching, Reading Notes with 1 Comment

The following comes from great book that you should each purchase and read. I want to be a Bible preacher. This is a great explanation of a great mistake that happens often in the Bible belt.

I grew up with these thoughts. I still deal with them and I think that people in the South East of the USA have a great deal of problems with them. Read the excerpt and then order the book you will see mentioned at the end of the article.

I love the book and it will help all of us!

Several years ago a well-known preacher in Oklahoma climbed up in a tower on a vigil after announcing that God had told him that if people did not send him eight million dollars, He was going to kill him! To most of us that seems absurd, but only because we measure the claim by the nature and oracles of God as revealed in the Bible. But what is the difference between that preacher’s claim and the conservative evangelical shepherd who weights his sermons with declarations like “God told me” and “God is leading me” as authoritative underpinnings of extrabiblical information? Or what is the difference between his claim and the shepherd who draws the heart of his sermons from extrabiblical information as if to suggest that there are some things God did not think about regarding the needs of His people? At best we are putting words in God’s mouth and insinuating to listeners that they are His! Such a horrific thought demands that we give some attention to where and how the shepherd gets his message, what he is supposed to do with it when he gets it, and why it is so important that he does it.

My Sunday School teacher went on to tell me that many of his previous pastors did not ever get their messages until they were on the way from their office to the pulpit on Sunday mornings! This “preacher as pope” mentality assumes that God has extrabiblical revelation for His people on a weekly basis and that He communicates it to the shepherd through some mystical means that is often articulated as “getting a Word” from Him. In fact, many preachers and parishioners see this occurrence of omnipotent osmosis as displacing the need for Bible study and sermon preparation.
This notion is furthered by the looseness with which many preachers throw around those phrases like “God told me” and “The Lord said to me.” This scenario is frighteningly similar to God’s analysis of the prophets of Jeremiah’s day:

In addition to deceptively turning people’s attention from the legitimate Words of God, such preaching frustrates individuals who do not hear God as “audibly.” These false shepherds imply that God has a steady diet of extrabiblical revelation that is necessary for His people’s well-being, and that only they as the “Lord’s anointed” can provide it. And this erroneous preaching results in reckless living that leads to no profit.
The nature of shepherding today involves the issue of credibility. If preacher’s today can say “Thus saith the Lord,” and by it place extrabiblical information on the same plane as scriptural truth, then our listeners have no standard by which to determine the validity of truth. If pastors today are still responsible for “getting a word from God” that no one has ever heard, then we have no basis by which to distinguish the one heralding heresy from the one transmitting truth. The example of the Bereans should be noted because they searched their Scriptures to see whether or not Paul’s words could be substantiated by them (see Acts 17:11).

If we believe revelation is progressive and that God is still in the process of revealing information necessary for His people’s spiritual well-being, then the Bible is no more than one among many sources from which the preacher draws an authoritative word from on high. But if the shepherd sees the Bible as God’s total and final revelation of truth that is necessary for accomplishing His agenda, then his responsibility is simply to report it to the people. He is relieved from the mythical notion that he is responsible for revealing God’s truth to people. Furthermore, he can spend his time learning to be a better reporter of biblical truth rather than a suave revelator of new information.

There will never be any growth in the Christian life apart from knowledge (see Rom. 12:2; Eph. 4:22). Holy living flows from mature knowledge, and mature knowledge comes only by explanation. This suggests that the contemporary shepherd’s responsibility is not to “wow” his flock each week with something new that no one has ever heard before. Instead, he is to wrestle with the text of Scripture until he determines God’s intended meaning, help his people grasp it by way of clear and intentional explanation, and persuade them to act upon it through passionate persuasion.

Today people seem to be much more interested in personal experience, emotional feeling, and pragmatic application than explanation of the biblical text. The de-emphasis on explanation in preaching highlights the willingness of listeners to accept uninformed application which they readily put to use in their lives. Many shepherds are more than ready to accommodate. As long as listeners identify with the message experientially, walk away with a better feeling about themselves and their lives, or glean some principle or instruction for dealing with their current circumstance, then no one is really concerned about whether or not it makes sense or is based upon truth. The only thing that will turn the tide will be for shepherds to be faithful stewards of God’s call to be explainers of His Word and for those who listen to them to demand help in gaining such understanding.

Shepherds are no longer responsible for revelatory preaching but solely responsible for persuasive explanatory preaching. The default approach to preaching is simply to explain and apply what God has already revealed in His Word.

Shaddix, J. (2003). The Passion Driven Sermon : Changing the Way Pastors Preach and Congregations Listen (69–73). Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman.

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