Pastor’s Corner

Pastors Corner 5-13-2012

It seems like only a few days ago that we were celebrating Mother’s Day and I wish I had the words to tell each of the women in the church how important you are to your family and to the church. Like your immediate family the church does not always tell you how much we appreciate your service and dedication to the church. No matter how the church honors you today, I do not think that it will express the true gratitude we feel for you in our hearts. It will just plainly not be enough recognition for your service to your family and the church. God has honored you with one of the greatest gifts given to mankind, the ability to bear children in the image of God. This gift is closely behind the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ or even the gift of life itself. God himself tells us the price on your service to your husband, family, and fellow man is far greater than precious jewels. With all this said, I would like to make a feeble attempt to thank you on behalf of the church for your love and service to everyone. THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS.

Pastor Danny

40 Day Challenge

As most of you know, our church has been challenged by Pastor Danny to set aside 30 minutes a day, every day, for 40 days to read the Word aloud with our families, beginning and ending in prayer. Today I received the following in an email newsletter from author Ray Comfort at Living Waters. I must say that I know too well the “excuses” he mentions, as we have been fighting many of them in this challenge. I hope that his thoughts might encourage you and strengthen your resolve to have a “family altar” time, too.

If you want “godly offspring,” it is essential that you make the time to establish a family altar. Build it out of the unmovable rocks of resolution. You will need to be resolute about this because it will be a battle. Your flesh will fight it, and you can be sure there will be a continual spiritual battle within your mind. “Circumstances” will constantly crop up. Your kids will occasionally groan when you announce that it is time for devotions. Loved ones may subtly, subconsciously discourage you. However, your time of family devotions should be a priority for your whole family. Don’t be legalistic about it, but as much as possible, put all other things aside before you postpone or cancel family devotions.

It will be an altar of sacrifice, as you sacrifice your time, your energy, and sometimes your dignity. For years, our kids heard, “Six o’clock—reading time.” My wife and I dropped whatever we were doing, and the children learned to do the same, and we gathered as a family. Making it a priority for your family’s growth will speak volumes about its importance in their lives.

Again, you will find that there are many excuses for not having devotions. You may be pressed for time, feel tired, or think you are unable to teach the Bible. However, there is one very powerful reasonwhy you should have daily devotions: the eternal salvation of your children. (Adapted from How to Bring Your Children to Christ…& Keep Them There.)

Malachi 2:15 But did He not make them one, Having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one? He seeks godly offspring. Therefore take heed to your spirit, And let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth.

Rivets

Most all of you know that I wear braces on both of my legs. They are necessary for me to walk since I have so much nerve damage from a neurological condition I have called CES. In the 13 or so years that I’ve needed them I have often had on and off repairs to be made on them; I’m on my fourth or fifth set (I think) now since they like any thing suffer from wear and tear. The most common, at least in the past year or two, repair is to the rivets that hold the straps in place: I keep having “blow outs” since I had to go to a new prosthetics maker. Since this problem has been more frequent the last 12-18 months I have found that if I replace the rivets myself with Chicago screws I have almost now repeat failures. And I don’t have to go into the office for the repair, which can take days for an appointment.

These “system malfunctions” used to really bother me: no, they would upset and aggravate the daylights out of me. Sunday evening shortly before church time I had my latest rivet pop. It took longer than usual to replace because I had my three year old “assistant” keeping a close eye on my work. After it was done I realized that I hadn’t gotten one bit irritated, aggravated or upset over the ordeal, although I wasn’t happy I missed church.

Last night I was thinking about this, wondering why my change in attitude towards this usually irritating situation. And it dawned on me why: my perspective over the years and months about it has changed. If I have to use and repair these old braces for another 10 minutes or 50 years it’s just a temporary thing. I know that I’m headed Home some day and when I get there I’ll not need these things any more. Braces, canes, and all that goes with them will be done with. And I’ll be able to perfectly praise and worship my God then. Until that day I’ll just have to be patient, fixing and making do with an imperfect body, in a fallen world, looking forward with my eyes on Christ Jesus to that Heavenly Home.

Birthday Gift

For our grandson’s first birthday I made him a leather covered Bible; that was two years ago. This past weekend was Connor’s third birthday and on Sunday he took, for the first time, his Bible to church with him. He thought it was the best thing of the weekend and kept repeating “my Bible; Pap made Bible for me.”. I was really touched by how Connor loved that Bible. It was very cute to see him carrying it all over the place, looking at the tooling I’d done on it, and leafing through the pages. And add in the sense of pride I got because he understand that I had made it specially for him and, well, it was some thing I’ll never forget.

This made me think about how our Heavenly Father must feel when we spend time in and appreciate His Word. He gave us the precious gift of His inspired Word to guide us and to teach us all we need to know to be reconciled to Him and live this life in the center of His will. We should have the same childlike enthusiasm for that precious gift as Connor showed for his first Bible. And we should hope and pray for ourselves and our families that we never loose it.

Pastor’s Corner

Pastors Corner 4-15-2012

This week I want to follow-up on a Pastor’s Corner that I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It was about Making God’s Word a Priority in your life for forty days. If you have not started I encourage you to start and if you have started I want to encourage you to continue. There have been a few days that it has been late and we were tired and it was a challenge to continue. The easy thing would have been to say we will skip tonight because it is late and pick it up tomorrow, but commitment does not work that way. If you are committed to doing something you do it when ever possible or reasonable. The benefits of spending time with God’s word and the family will be far greater that a little extra rest. I will leave you with a funny picture that has happen several times when we are reading God’s word. It seems that Rusty (Sherlene’s cat) thinks that it is the best time in the world to cuddle. He gets up in my lap, purrs loudly and watches and listens to everything. To someone looking in the window, knowing about Making God’s Word a Priority might think, “WOW” they must be serious because they even read to the cat. Continue reading and God bless.

Pastor Danny

In Tune

The other day my wife was mowing the lawn; she always does the mowing since I’m unable to do so. Our grandson, Connor, was in the yard playing while she was working. Every so often he would holler at her or say some thing to her. Every time he spoke to her she paused and replied. I found this a little odd since normally when she is mowing and I need to get her attention it takes a lot more than speaking to her: yelling, waving my arms, maybe even throwing some thing at her is required. Obviously she was much more attuned to Connor than she normally is anyone else while she was working.

The Bible teaches us that if we will draw closer to God, He will draw closer to us. The more open our spiritual eyes and ears are the more apt we are to clearly hear the Lord when He speaks to us. Spending quality time in the Word and prayer is the best way to become attuned to hear His every call and feel His sweet presence.

Pastor’s Corner

Pastors Corner 4-1-2012

Last Sunday I presented the church with a proposal to think about for a week. I’ve had another week to think about it and still think that it is a good idea. The suggestion, I am going to call Making God’s Word a Priority, is intended as a way for the church to get closer to their immediate family while they get closer to God. The proposal asks for a thirty minute daily commitment to reading God’s word for forty days. During this time the family will come together and turn off all distractions (television, phones, computers, back ground music, basically anything that would distract). The family should start out by holding hands and praying before they start reading. Each member of the family should take turns reading out loud. Once you have read for thirty minutes then hold hands again and end in prayer. Depending on your family circumstances your version of Making God’s Word a Priority may be somewhat different. You can start out anywhere in the Bible and do not have to do the books in order. This should give us a way to make God’s Word a priority in our lives and by the end of the forty day I hope that we all look forward to spending these thirty minutes with God and our families.

Pastor Danny

Where is Petey?

Late last summer we found a lost dog: he was a Shih Tzu pup, maybe four months or less old. To make a long story short, we ended up rescuing him and he’s now a part of the family.

Today Petey, the name we gave him partly because our grandson says is so cutely, escaped (again) from our fenced in yard. Overall he’s a great dog, other than this need to escape and roam. But I digress … Petey belongs to Connor; just ask him and he will tell you “Petey my dog”. Today’s escape came at a bad time: I was watching Connor alone and couldn’t go after the spunky, quick, and agile pup. And Connor worried his little self (he’s almost three) half to death over Petey being gone. He looked out the door, the window and yelled “Pete! Come here!” more times than I can count. His distress pushed his nap time back by about two hours, and I thought he was going to cry himself off to sleep over worrying over that dog! Thankfully Connor finally drifted off to sleep with minimal shedding of tears.

About five minutes after he fell asleep I hear Pete-dini at the front door; the UPS man across the street had inadvertently scared the little critter home. Connor and Petey are both still napping now but I look for a happy reunion in an hour or so.

This all got me thinking about the lost folks in our lives. What if we were so concerned over their relationship, or lack thereof, with Jesus that we could do nothing but fret and worry, shed tears and and cry out for them? I am made to believe we would see many would made restless by the Spirit and convicted of their sins. And that we would see lost sheep seeking desperately after the Savior.

God’s Word teaches we need to have child like faith. Maybe we need to seek after some child like zeal and angst for those we love and know are lost, too.

One Man Band

I found this story online today and thought it was a great illustration of how important the gathering of ourselves together really is. That being said, I hope you get as much from it as I did.

Praise ye the Lord. Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise in the congregation of saints. (Psalm 149:1 KJV)

One-Man Band
The late Bill Bright told the story of a lone musician-a man who believed himself to be the finest musician in the world and needing no one else to produce the finest music.

Accordingly, when the curtain went up for a symphonic concert, the audience was astounded to see 70 empty chairs, with the appropriate instruments, and only one person to play them all. When the conductor’s baton signaled the start, this man ran frantically from one instrument to another, trying to keep up with the conductor.

“Of course, this is just an allegory,” Bright wrote. “But isn’t that what many Christians are like? They are content to live their Christian lives by themselves without seeking the fellowship of others. There is no possible way that we can exist as healthy Christians without fellowship.

“In the fictional one-man orchestra above, you can imagine what the music sounded like-disconnected, uncoordinated and offbeat. That is what a Christian’s spiritual life is like in isolation from other members of the body of Christ.”

Billy … who?

Over the course of the past week I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and spending several hours with a young couple. Wednesday night, during what was probably our last conversation, the subject turned toward the Lord and His Church. I can’t recall how exactly but Billy Graham came up in our conversation. The lack of response from them prompted me to ask if they knew or had heard of him; to my surprise, neither of these young folks had. I took a few minutes to pause there and tell them about him and his ministry, even sharing a YouTube clip with them.

All day today, and most of last night, this has been weighing on my mind: How could two bright young people have never heard of this iconic man? I suppose that “we” take it for granted that the next generation knows about great people of the Faith, such as Dr. Graham. We also figure they know basic tenants and truths of God’s Word. In many instances “we” are dead wrong: they don’t have a clue.

The Bible says we are to teach the things of God to our children and our grandchildren. Just because most of the 40+ demographic grew up with at least basic Biblical knowledge doesn’t mean that the ones behind did. In fact, we dropped the ball and are seeing the results of that fumble nationwide, if not worldwide.

And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. (Romans 13:11 KJV)

It’s not too late. But we don’t have any more time to waste either. An untold number of souls are on the wrong side of the balance today.