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One who is taught the word must share all good things with the one who teaches. –Galatians 6:6

Why do we act like this is a suggestion? Why do we treat our pastors like hirelings? Why do we continually strive against the authority of the Word of God?

Yeah deacons, gossips, busybodies, I’m talking to you. Next time you feel like griping about the pastor’s sermon, take time to talk to him about it. When you find out what all he did that week besides prepare the sermon, offer to help out. When you see that he doesn’t have access to that many pastoral resources, ask him what he needs and find a way to get it for him.

I suppose its easier to just play ‘blame the pastor’. I mean, its the Southern Baptist way right? And I admit, I’ve met some folks who were sloppy in the pulpit BUT, and here the thing we need to hear, I’ve also looked at their congregations and said, “No wonder.”

“But the Word of God is not bound!” Are you?

Oh please.

I’m not a member of the Mark Driscoll Fan Club any preacher talking like that in the pulpit around here would probably get tossed over hand out the back door. But thats here in the Bible belt.

But here’s a whole world away from Seattle Washington. If my home county was paved over and you stacked folks three deep over the surface the population might get as high as Seattle. And the inhabitants aren’t nearly as nice there as they are down here. They’re a rough crowd. But they need Jesus. How about this, rather than griping and fussing about how they do it up there, lets go on up there and start a ‘proper’ church with elders–if you can find any who are qualified–and the whole shebang and see how long it lasts.

I can see the other side of this to, so don’t get me wrong. The same issues apply. Is there any real disciple making going on? Have they, as the Hindus did, just imported Jesus into their ‘groove’? I’m not actually in a position to respond to these questions because I have never been to Seattle or preached there–which can only be a whole different experience than it is here in Oklahoma.

I like Tim Challies ‘trajectory’ comment. I think it fits and I think it reminds us to remove the logs before we pluck at the splinters.

I have to think of the demon possessed man that Jesus healed, then left behind. Do I know why he did that? Nope. But I’ll bet it was because he was the one who could minister to those folks best. You know, the pig raising Jews who were so upset over their lost profits that they asked him to leave. Face to face with Jesus…I can’t get a grip on that one. But the man who was healed could. Think about that one for a while then, rather than griping publicly, lets look around and see why we’re not reaching out to the folks where we live and why we’re not all about discipleship and planting churches and things.

I just read this and thought it applied.

Searching

Every now and again I like to answer interesting search terms that come up in the wordpress dashboard. This week I got a good one, “answering for your sins on earth.”

I asked one of my pastors once about this and he said something that really changed my idea about what sin was. He told me, “I think sin is its own punishment, don’t you?” I had to agree.

I like this definition:

“Sin may be comprehensively defined as lack of conformity to the law of God in act, habit, attitude, outlook, disposition, motivation, and mode of existence.”– Concise Theology: A Guide To Historic Christian Beliefs

Sin separates us from God. It was Adams sin of disobedience and rebellion that started this whole mess to begin with. We are sinners by nature, it’s what we do. It’s what we have to do before we are converted. After? We do it by choice. For the saved and the unsaved Sin is its own punishment. The lost sin because they can’t help it. The Christian does it because they are willfully disobedient. Christians sin because they choose to do so. They are the free ones in the world, they don’t have to do sinful things. Romans 6:7 For one who has died has been set free from sin.

So why do they? Well I don’t know. Sin is also a symptom. It should serve as a sign to the one doing it that something isn’t right between them and God. If a person continues in sin and still calls themselves a Christian, some self-examination is in order. What is causing this? Why do I continue to do sinful things when I call myself saved? Am I really a Christian?

It’s helpful to ask yourself these kinds of questions.

Overall ‘answering for your sins on earth’ is merely a function of the effects of our actions. Godly actions serve God’s purpose. Sinful actions don’t and therefore they have bad consequences. Here’s the tricky part though. Here’s the thing that gets a lot of folks. Sin is fun and sometimes the consequences of sin are nice and easy and good. A lot of folks are fooled by that one.

About the Gospel

I’ve been a Southern Baptist my whole life.

What that may mean to you is ‘whoa, disney boycott’ or ‘prohibitionist’.

What it means to me is hard to explain. When I was a kid my prayer in church was ‘Dear God, why is this taking so long?’ The pews were as hard as the preaching. And guess what? Some of it started to sink in. This Jesus (or Je-Sus! as the ol’ country preachers used to say. Syllables may vary by county.) Back then it wasn’t about the Convention or the ACP or whether or not the church was going to split over the color of the carpet in the sanctuary. It was a matter of going and hearing the Word of God. You can fill in the blank on my conversion and Baptism probably. I’m OK with that. It happened. I know it happened and it happened in a Southern Baptist Church where something 20% of the total membership showed up for Sunday School and they all stayed for Church plus a few guests. Sound familiar?

Of course it does. There’s a lot of that going on still in this country. People get together and hear the Word of God preached on Sunday and just about any day in between. I read about missions in strip mall, coffee shops, and abandoned bars. I read about preaching points and evangelistic crusades…you get the point. But most of us have got a humongous freakin’ Sequoia of a splinter in our eye because we’re not happy with their language. Or maybe that pastor has a tattoo that shows when he stands in the pulpit. Maybe the music’s loud as the preaching can get but its the Gospel. You can’t deny the content.

Take some fiber. Man up. Or mind your own business, that’d probably be better.

People need the Gospel, they need Christ. Who are you to deny them that?

“But the word of God is not bound!” Are you?

Encouragement

Every now and again I get frustrated with some things. The SBC is one of them. But I want you to know, whoever you are, that I dearly love my church. I love Southern Baptist Churches because their members are so hard headed and yet can be so soft hearted. I’m the same way, at least from the hard-head part.

So when I get down on them enough that it trickles over into my writing I know its time for an attitude adjustment. Rather, my attitude gets adjusted and then I realize that it was the Lord working to soften up my hard heart all along. No I’m not getting all charismatic on you and saying I had a revelation so just put your hands down and quit it already. What I am saying is that God still works in and through and on his people and his church even if I am too short sighted to see it.

And if I can’t get an amen on that one then we’ve got a problem. Or as one of my pastors once said, “If that don’t light your fire, your wood’s wet.”

It’s disappointing isn’t it?

I don’t generally write posts about blogging but I feel like I must do this one. I’ve been getting a lot–for me–of traffic from Founders from the non-post I wrote about the name change at Liberty. I feel sorry for those people because clicking a link at Founders and ending up here at Unbound is like taking a walk in a beautiful park and then stepping into the mens room. It’s almost always a disappointment.

The truth of the matter is that it bothers me greatly that there is what is, apparently, a seminary devoted to a great number of the things I disagree with in our SBC churches. I suppose I can sympathize with some of my atheist readers when they see Huckabee doing so well in the campaigning. It just bothers me.

I didn’t think it was a very good move when the SBC cozied up next to Falwell anyway but thats just me.

The Sacred Cow Grill

OK. So the issue I was discussing yesterday has already bobbed to the surface in my comments. The dreaded phrase sufficiency of scripture. And don’t get me wrong, because scripture is sufficient. But I think we—and that’s the SBC we—are not really getting the point.

You see, I didn’t even know there was a conservative resurgence taking place in the SBC until it was, technically, over. From what I read in blogola that means that they have officially shot all the wounded, buried them in unmarked graves and stampeded a herd of scapegoats over the burial site to cover their tracks. I read about it for the first time on Tom Ascol’s blog over at Founders—which of course immediately marks me by association for some folks—and I was shocked. Well, I mean I laughed out loud because my first thought was “Wow, if this is what the church looked like after the resurgence it must have been a disaster before.” And my second was “I just can’t really say that with a straight face.”

It’s not that I’m not grateful for those who have gone before because I truly am. I recall my own conversion and it’s almost laughable. I’ll have to write about it sometime. But the main fellow involved was most definitely a revivalist and what that means to me is that he preached an evangelistic message with an emotional invitation and mood music to get people to respond. I can’t really complain too very much about that because I heard the gospel and believed it and was changed. Can’t explain it other than God can and does use anything for his glory.

You see, the problem with that sort of mindset, that sort of revivalist mentality is really evasive. It compartmentalizes our Christian lives into “Sunday, Wednesday, and Special Events”. The idea of scheduling a revival falls into that last category. The deadly part is that when the Falls Creek church camp effect wears off, you have people who just don’t feel saved anymore. This is our wide open back door folks. This is our problem as a church and as a convention. Our salvation is based on our decision.

What scares me the most is my own mind. I know when I make a decision, it’s a fairly dynamic event. What that means is I can leave the house wanting a chili dog but by the time I get to Sonic I’m dying for a cheeseburger. See what I mean?
We’ll talk about why this is a problem tomorrow.

Same thing only different

I wrote this post The Anti-Founder’s University about this Founders Ministries Blog: New name, same historical revisionism when I read about it back in January.

I encourage you to read Dr. Ascol’s post, not my own. You can actually LEARN something over there.

The Product of Conception

If you’re reading this, you’re the product of conception. At some point, someone did something that caused you to come into being. You were conceived. You were carried in your mother’s womb for around nine months and you were born. At some point in your life you were a baby. All of us at least have that much in common. We are all the product of conception.
I just don’t think we’re thinking about the same thing.

It’s easy to reduce our existence down to biology and tissue, flesh and bone. We are that, at least. But we are also spiritual beings. There are religions in every culture of the earth. The athiests want us to believe that it’s an inherent weakness in the human race, the need for a crutch. I think they’re right, to a certain extent. We all feel our own mortality bearing down upon us. ‘Death and taxes’ are the only sure things some folks say. I know it’s a cliché but it’s one that reflects the way some people feel. We all hear that external call. We all see the marvels of nature, the stars in the sky, the sound of a musical note, the taste of fresh strawberries or the sweet smell of hay in the fall. Some of us just reach different conclusions about it than others. Some call it happenstance or random chance that led to the evolution of life on this planet. Some point to scientific evidence and have well convinced their self that no one could have created this. It’s too complex, too bizarre for any mind to conceive. And I agree with that too.

But here’s the thing I continue to come back to in my thoughts. If God is who the Bible says he is, then do we really expect to understand him or his creation? Could we really worship God if he was anything but so far outside our ability to understand that most of what he has done is beyond our comprehension? Of course not, I wouldn’t want it that way either. That would reduce him to an idol. We could truly capture his essence in a statue or painting if that were the case. We could contain that image–and control it.

Babies are wondrous. From conception to two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two cells. How can we even debate the idea that one cell that changes into billions is any less a child that the billion or more? The billion or however many countless cells wouldn’t exist without that one cell, nor would any of us. It’s about the possibility. It’s life, even if it’s less of a mess to ‘clean up’ which is what an abortion is an attempt to do: post-event damage control. Whatever the circumstances that led to IT, IT is still a child.

More to follow…

More reading

Clone Wars Life is not a board game (see this also) POC POC2POC3

OK, the debate last night.

Fine. I watched the debate. I’m not apolitical. Just a few comments here about it though.

First, I thought McCain and Romney were going to throw down. That was obvious. Paul was ticked because it didn’t seem like anyone was there to hear him, even though he did get some applause. In California thats scary enough. I do recall, though, that Huckabee was the only one who came out of the thing un-tarred. There was plenty of mud slinging going on but he didn’t do it as far as I could tell other than lobbing a governors-make-better-presidents bomb out in the middle of the mess that was already there. But out of all the candidates, he was the only one who wasn’t tagged at least once.

I also liked Huckabee’s thing about life and abortion, etc.

My favorite part was when Anderson Cooper interrupted Romney’s ‘I was a great governor’ speech with “So are you running for Governor or President?” Good question to ask considering.