The Pilgrim Pastor

“Danger Will Robinson.” Perhaps you’ll recall the words of the robot in 1960’s television series “Lost in Space.”  When danger approached, the robot, acting as Will’s surrogate, would alert him to the danger.  We don’t have a robot warning system, at least I don't, but God has provided us with something far greater.  The Holy Spirit lives inside of us, alerting us to danger and challenging us to greater depths of trust and heights of commitment to God as we follow Jesus Christ.

There are a lot of dangers facing the Body of Christ.  Some are external, but like cancers, the internal infections are often the toughest to diagnose and to treat.  In an article that appeared on churchleaders.com, Perry Noble addresses “15 Signs Your Church Is in Trouble.”  He says that you know your church is in trouble when “There is a loss of a sense of urgency!  (Hell is no longer hot, sin is no longer wrong and the cross is no longer important!).”

“Danger Will Robinson,” complacency kills. It has been well stated that he who steps in a river never steps in the same water twice.  A river’s internal life is maintained by its constant flow.  The water is oxygenated, pollutant spassed along, and its vitality sustained because of its flow.  Friend, our spiritual lives personally and as the Body of Christ are little different. 

The Holy Spirit is alive and active, drawing people to repentance and empowering the Church for every good work.  “He has made us competent as ministers of anew covenant - not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (II Corinthians 3:6 NIV)

Today is day.  Now isthe time.  Shake off the bands of idleness and live for Christ!  A small stagnant pond may be pleasant from afar but to drink from it could be toxic.  A clear mountain stream, on the other hand, near the source, clear, refreshing, cold, crisp, gives life.  Drink deeply of the Holy Spirit and live for Christ!

The U.S. Military has finally been able to accomplish its mission of ending the influence of the terrorist and ideologue, Osama Bin Laden.  As an American and former Marine, a part of me wants to celebrate this “victory.” The skeptic in me wonders who will come along to fill his shoes.  There are plenty of people in this world with a bent toward destruction to take his place. Removing this man’s influence is surely a good thing.  However…

We are awfully concerned about our outward image aren’t we?  I still remember how unsure of myself I was in the 8^th grade because of my $9.00 shoes from Payless.  I had just moved to a new city and felt awkward enough; minus the florescent “swish” that was an obvious fake of the Nike “Swoosh!”

We want to fit in.  We want to look like people deserving of respect or admiration.  My three year old son Ephram has taken to giving me a bit of a military style “inspection” every morning.  Before I can leave the house for work or to go to Church on Sunday morning, he has to make sure that I am wearing something that he can emulate.  This morning Ephram said, “Daddy, is that a yellow or white pastor shirt you are wearing?”  You see, he doesn’t have a yellow pastor shirt– that’s what he calls my dress clothes – but he does have a white one… and we absolutely MUST match.

He wants to be like his dad. At least he chooses good role models! Today is Sunday, the day when followers of Jesus have for centuries celebrated His resurrection and gathered to worship Him, teach the Scripture, encourage one another, and seek to grow in our ability to look more like our Heaenly Father, our Abba.

Jesus doesn’t wear pastor clothes though.  I sure wish it was that easy to look like Christ!  He wears the clothes of gentleness, love, and meekness – truth, mercy, and grace.  Friend, what are you wearing today?  Are you dressed like your Heavenly Father,who showed us what He looks like through Jesus Christ? 

“Jesus answered: "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen theFather. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?” (John 14:9 NIV)

“Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” (Romans13:14 NIV)

Sincerely,

The Pilgrim Pastor… ripping at my tattered sinful natural clothing…trying to remember that they are covered with Christ… 

So, I stumbled onto this blog recently.  (The Naked Pastor) He is a former pastor, so of course I was interested in what he has to say.  He is also an artist and cartoonist.  His cartoons are thoughtful, provocative, insightful, challenging, and worth a look. Blessings!

I love his cartoon post today.  It’s a tough job being a pastor and one of the rewards… Rhino thick skin!

Tonight the family and I ended up at a certain store which carries everything from baby chicks, toys, to riding lawn mowers, and clothes.  The specific store doesn’t really matter, but I suspect that if the general management knew how difficult it was for us to make a purchase, they would think it does matter! When we checked out at the register the clerk was able to scan every item with no problems except for one item.

Now, this one item is probably the most important item; at least to my three year old superhero.  He found the shirt on the rack, picked it out, and asked for it, and said “all-wight!”when I said that he could get it.  Apparently the bar code wouldn’t scan properly due to a recent update of the system of some sort.  The clerk tried two or three times and different ways to enter this code and that other code, but she just couldn’t scan it in.  She called a front line supervisor who said, “I’m sure the system will be updated in a couple of days.  Try coming back after the weekend and but it then.” Really?!

Christina & I were really surprised by this.  I have never been to a store where I had to work this hard to make a purchase!  I had money in hand and they wouldn’t take it for the shirt!  There was even a price tag on it.  Christina said “well can’t you just put in the price and override the system or something.” (Silly her, thinking that a store would want to sell its goods for a profit…) The answer was no.  Come back in a couple of days!

After getting the store manager involved, the clerk was finally able to make the sale through some kind of system trickery or tomfoolery or mystical retail sales enchantment or something – very much to my superhero’s liking.  This experience got me thinking though; the local church can be just the same way.  We don’t have anything to sell but we do offer “spiritual goods” and the sign is not always blinking “open” on our spiritual store front is it?

A stranger asks for help and we say, “come back tomorrow, I’m busy.”  An obviously downtrodden fellow believer walks past us on the way out of the door and we say to ourselves, “ah… maybe next Sunday I’ll ask how they are doing.” We over hear a man in the convenient store telling the clerk, whom he apparently speaks to frequently, about his personal struggles, we feel the Holy Spirit leading us to offer to pray for him, to share the Gospel with him, but we say “well,the line is long and it would be embarrassing and besides, I’m late for work;maybe next time.”

Friends, there may not be a next time.  I performed a funeral for a woman today who I had no reason to suspect would pass from this life into eternity only a few days ago.  She was elderly and had health concerns but it came quickly, as it almost always seems to do.  We are not promised tomorrow.  The sale – in this case the free gift of Christ love – must be made now. 

“And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27 KJV) Speaking of a certain greedy man who thought he would store up treasure for himself, Jesus says, “But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'” (Luke 12:20 NIV)

We only get one time through this life and we are not promised tomorrow.  “This is the day theLORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalms 118:24 NIV)  This moment is all that we have.  Let us live it for Christ completely! 

Not so blessed are the loose-tongued, for they shall trample the hearts of many…

It occurs to me that a lot of what I do as a follower of Jesus is to clean up the broken pieces of which are left behind in the lives of people by other followers of Jesus. Christina and I met a woman on a plane last year whose face turned from a gleeful smile to a noticeable frown after she asked me what I did for aliving.  “I’m a Pastor” I said.  “Ohhh…” was the sound she made...

After we talked for a while she told me that the kind of Christianity I was talking about – you know, Bible-stuff, striving to look like Jesus, sound like Jesus, love likeJesus – was not what she had experienced in her religious upbringing or in her experience with professed Christians.  She said that most Christians she knew were overly opinionated, holy-only-on-Sunday, and not very Christ-like.  Sadly, it wasn’t that difficult to believe her.

It strikes me that many of us, dare I say, most of us, are entirely too freewheeling with our opinions and far too reserved with the love and truth of Christ.  Jesus did not say “Blessed are the belligerent for they shall get their point across.”  He said blessed are the poor in spirit (humble), blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (sincere), blessed are the merciful (like Jesus), and so on.

It seems that the more outrageous, egregious, hurtful, unhelpful, or outrageous an opinion it is – the more compelled we feel to share it! Of late, Christina and I have been taking slow steps of late to make healthier and as we see it, more responsible choices with things like what we eat or don’t eat and how we spend our time as a family.  In particular, for health reasons and humane treatment of animals, we have begun eating only cage free eggs.  This is one step on our present journey to be and become more centered as a family.

Now, just in case that phrase leaves you in utter bewilderment, as it has to most people I have mentioned this too, a cage free egg is the “slightly” more expensive product of a chicken that was raised outside of the incredibly small cages that most production farm chickens live in. 

In telling my “cage free” story here I know I run the serious risk of incurring more of the bewildered looks and comments such as “What the heck is a cage free egg?  What difference does it make?  It’s just a chicken?! Why on earth would you spend twice as much on those eggs? What’s the point?”

Here’s the point: Why have I quickly learned not to share about my eating of cage free eggs with other followers of Jesus?  In telling this story to other Christians, I have incurred everything from sarcastic comments to obvious disgust!  And I am a Pastor! 

When I choose to eat cage free eggs I am not calling into question your choice not to.  In fact, in all fairness, my choice to eat cage free eggs doesn’t have anything to do with you.  Likewise, your choice not to do so doesn’t have anything to do with me.  For all I care, you are welcome to guzzle a dozen of them raw, straight from a blender, every morning like Rocky Balboa training to fight Apollo Creed! 

My point here has very little to do with our eating of Cage free eggs.  I don’t even care very much about eggs.  As a follower of Jesus, in fact, I am much more concerned with our routine inability (unwillingness) to speak in a way that honors Christ more than our own opinions.

When we trample others in the name of speaking the truth, we look a lot more like Judas than Jesus. We betray Christ when we trample unbelievers with our opinions, rather than showering them with the love of Jesus! I don’t care about what kind of eggs you do or do not eat.  I really don’t. I do care what we look like to the world.  I do care how we present Christ.  The truth of the Gospel is best served on a platter of love.

I do pray for all of us who proclaim Jesus to learn to cage our opinions and set free the love of Jesus.  How? Here’s a place to start:

When we are not sure what to say: don’t. 

“When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise. “ (Proverbs 10:19 NIV)

“A man who lacks judgment derides his neighbor, but a man of understanding holds his tongue.” (Proverbs 11:12 NIV)

“Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of thewise brings healing.” (Proverbs 12:18 NIV)

Friends, we are never going to be perfect.  That’s why God saves by grace.  But that is no excuse for allowing our tongues to rule us.  Only a fool does nothing because he cannot do everything. let us be mindful of what we say and how we say it. 

As followers of Jesus let’s make every attempt to have our words put Christ on display! “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” (Colossians 4:6 NIV)

Perhaps eggs and the Gospel should be cage free and our opinions should be caged.

Sincerely,

Pilgrim Pastor, holding my tongue on the journey...  

Do you feel worse when you go to church?  I know I do sometimes!  In fact, sometimes my day actually gets worse from going to church.  That’s sounds crazy for a Pastor to say doesn’t it? But it’s true!  There are times when I am in prayer before a church service and the weight of what I am about to preach hits me like a ton of bricks and I remember how completely unworthy I am to preach these words.

And were it not for the blood of Jesus Christ and the worth that He gives to me, I would just pack up my Bible and go home. 

Though probably in a different way, has going to church ever made you feel worse?  In a discussion that I was having recently, someone told me that sometimes they feel worse after going to church because they realize that what was read in the Bible and subsequently what I preached from the Bible, has everything to do with them.

That is called the conviction of the Holy Spirit.  That is the feeling we get when we know that God is calling us out of darkness and into the light.  That is the feeling which resonates in the deepest part of soul when God – who is absolutely holy – comes into direct contact,most often through the preaching of the Bible, with the darkness of our soul.  The light switch goes on and we are able to see all of the cobwebs, rotten things, selfish motives, dust, and all of the stuff that we would rather keep hidden in the darkness.

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” (John3:19-21 NIV)

That is a passage many of us have never heard or read.  It means that when we come to God the light of His Word (Bible) shines the truth on our lies.  It reveals our need to change.  But friend, it does a lot more than that.  This is a sometimes obscure section of Scripture only because the preceding passage is so much better known.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son.” (John 3:16-18 NIV)

The conviction that the Holy Spirit brings, in light of our sin, is not to tell us to shape up, become better people, or do a better job, it is to make us so disgusted with the ugliness that is now obvious that we run and not walk to the only place where we can be forgiven and where healing is available to our broken souls – the Cross! 

The Gospel is not the message of “shape-up or ship-out,” it is the message of fall-down and worship the one whose blood can cover your sin;whose light can burn away your darkness.  Ya, Church makes me feel worse sometimes too, but repentance and forgiveness are worth the pain. 

Recently my son Sebastian asked me, basically out of the blue as wewere getting dressed for bedtime, “Daddy, does God really have the whole world in His hands?”  Sebastian is only five and he also views the world in rather concrete terms.  Metaphor is sometimes difficult for childrento grasp and being a child with a form of Autism, one of Sebastian’s gifts is the ability to interpret language and the world in its most strictly literal sense.  Over the years of his young life,one of the things he has taught how incredibly silly our use of language oftenis.  We seldom say what we mean. Get a grip on yourself?  Do you really desireme to hug myself?   When I put him and his brother to sleep singing “He’s got the whole world in His hands,”apparently Sebastian must have been visualizing God literally holding the world in His hands!  This brought laughter to my voice and peace to my heart. 

How wonderful is the mind, the heart, and the simple faith of a child?!In Matthew 18:3 Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (NIV)  Does Jesus mean that in order to receive the kingdom of heaven we have to abandon reason, throw away our knowledge, orbecome unaware? 

Surely not!  In Mathew chapter 5 Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, and the pure in heart.”Our Lord is telling us not to become fools or to withdraw from learning.  The New Testament knows nothing of ignorant faith.  The message is that the only way to trust in God in a way that is complete, satisfying, and God-honoring, is to do so in humility, sincerity, and honesty.  While the song “He’s got the whole world in His hand” is not speaking of literal hands which actually turn the world on its axis, the message is nonetheless of immediate and literal importance.  

All that occurs in this world is well within the scope of the allowance or design of the God who created us in the beginning, recreates our hearts in Christ, and shall one day restore His creation to its intended perfection.  All that occurs, God either allows or designs. 

As a divine King, His sovereignty is absolute.  Friend, He really does have the whole world in His hands.