A Healthy Church - Devotions for 8-30-23

Acts 2:42 “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

            There are consultant groups and surveys that churches can use to help them identify if a church is a healthy one, or more specifically, to identify the areas of a church that are or are not healthy. Many churches have used them, and I have used them with various churches as well. It is helpful to understand your church and its strengths and weaknesses.

            In the verse above God’s word identifies what makes for a healthy church; faithful bible teaching, fellowship, “the breaking of bread” or standing on the death and resurrection of Jesus, and prayer. Any church that focuses on keeping these things important in their ministry will do well. Any church that neglects any of these will have holes in their ministry.

            How does your church stand on these four pillars? Does the preaching and teaching come from a solid biblical foundation? Do you have good fellowship among the people of the congregation? Does the church point people to “Jesus Christ and Him crucified”? And does the church take prayer seriously?

            Most churches have boards that meet to oversee the church and its ministries. Those boards need to use this verse as a template to guide them in leading the church. Church health is important, and it takes work to keep a church strong and healthy. It takes focusing on the four pillars of Acts 2:42.

            The Covid 19 pandemic showed how important these things are, or maybe I should say, coming out of the restrictions imposed by good-meaning governments showed that.

            During the pandemic, fellowship was stopped, almost completely for some time. Prayer was changed because people could not gather to pray. Breaking bread together, or more specifically, taking communion together to celebrate and remember the death and resurrection of Jesus stopped. The only thing that remained was teaching and preaching from the bible which was able to go on mainly through on-line formats.

            In short, churches took a huge hit from the pandemic, and some are still feeling the effects of that.

            So, how shall we go forward and make our churches healthy again, or continue to keep them healthy? By focusing on the four pillars of Acts 2:42. By making sure that the preaching and teaching does come directly from the bible. By joining together, face-to-face for various fellowship gatherings. By coming together to celebrate Jesus’ death and resurrection. And by coming together to pray. Doing these things separately, each in our own place, has greatly hurt the church. The church needs to come together to be healthy and do these four things as a gathering of believers. That is why the bible tells us to “not neglect the gathering of yourselves together” in Hebrews 10:25. We need to come together to really be a church and especially to be a healthy church.

            We had a church picnic last Sunday after our worship service. It was so good to be sitting across a table with other believers and hearing their stories. It was good to look around at many people smiling, talking, listening and just being together after worshiping the Lord together. Make sure your church is coming together, focusing on the four pillars of a healthy church. And make sure you are joining with them; we need one another, and the congregation needs us.

Pastor Gary.

Discipleship - Devotions for 8-23-23

John 1:43 “The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow Me.’”

            Follow me or come and follow me is what you read that Jesus said when He called His disciples. You hear that with almost every person Jesus called to become a disciple of His. Jesus also calls us with those words, “Come, follow Me.”

            What does it mean to be a disciple? The Church of the Lutheran Brethren uses the phrase, “A Disciple Making Movement” to describe itself. So, what is a disciple? What does it mean to become a disciple of Jesus?

            In today’s, mostly western influenced world, a world greatly influenced by the Greek and Roman civilization and ways of doing things, most of our training for almost anything is done in a classroom. We call people to a training session, or an educational class. Then someone stands up front, we call them the teacher, and they teach us some important information.

            This is good. Jesus used that sort of teaching model sometimes, and He was called, “Teacher” by those who followed Him. So, there is a teaching aspect to learning as a disciple. We need classes, we need teachers.

            I had some great teachers in seminary, they helped me become a pastor. Without them I would never have been able to serve in churches as a pastor for the past 40 years. Who is your teacher?

            But, Jesus did not say to those He was calling, “Come to my school and I will teach you how to be a disciple, or how to be a Christian.” Jesus said, “Follow me.” There is a big difference between sitting in a classroom with a teacher and following someone.

            Peter, John, James, and the other disciples of Jesus, including Philip who Jesus called in the verse above, lived with Jesus. They ate with Him. They slept near Him, often in tents. They sat under His teaching. They talked with Him as they walked all over Galilee and Judea. And sometimes Jesus would send them on an errand or give them something to do on their own.

            That is the way Jesus taught. He called those who would be His successors in spreading God’s love and message to the world, to become like Him. And to become like Him, they had to know more than just the information He would pass on to them in a classroom, they needed to know Him personally.

            Jesus calls us to follow Him today. That means studying His word, sitting in some classrooms to gain all the teachings about Him we can, and it means walking with Him.

            We do not walk with Jesus like His disciples did, but we can still walk with Him. That often means finding a mature Christian mentor we can spend time with and learning from them. It also means allowing the Holy Spirit to lead us, teach us, and guide us in our life.

            When Jesus ascended to heaven He sent His Holy Spirit into His followers, including us. God’s Holy Spirit is a part of every believer. To follow Jesus today means to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit according to God’s word.

            So, yes, find a teacher who can teach you about living as a believer. Find a mentor who can lead you in the ways of life. And draw close to God through the Holy Spirit in you and walk with Him as His disciple.

Pastor Gary.

Know-it-All  - Devotions for 8-16-23

Job 42:3 “Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore, I uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know?

            When I was young, I really bothered my dad. He called me a know-it-all. I likely deserved that description as I let my mouth go off when I should have kept it closed. You know how that goes, open your mouth and you will expose what little you really know. But that was me, at least to some degree, enough to get under my dad’s skin.

            In the book of Job, Job does some of that. He thought he knew about God. His friends thought they knew even more and then are shown that they knew nothing when it came to the Lord. Toward the end of a long discussion where they all showed what know-it-alls they were, another person enters the discussion, Elihu. He first condemns Job’s friends and says they were all wrong in what they thought they knew and then he turns on Job and condemns Job for speaking about things he knew very little about. Then in chapter 38 God speaks to Job and says, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?”

            Ouch! Job was taken to task on who and what God was, by God Himself. And God reveals to Job that he really didn’t understand God, or the things of God at all. After being taken to task Job replies in chapter 42 that he spoke of things he did not understand. He repented of his quickly spoken words and chose to listen instead of speaking.

            Now that I am a pastor, I often wonder when I am being a Job or one of his friends. When I am speaking about things too wonderful for me, things I only think I know something about? When should I keep my mouth shut so I do not reveal the emptiness of my mind on the subject, especially the subject of God and the things of God?

            When Job is taken to task by God, God simply asks him a series of questions. Those questions were about all sorts of things that mankind cannot understand, and Job certainly couldn’t. He asked Job about how God created all things. A question today’s scientists still have no idea about. God asked Job about the deep places of the sea, places still mostly unknown today. He asks Job about outer space and the deep secrets of all that is contained there. Again, things “too wonderful for me” and really, too wonderful for any and all people. We just simply do not know much outside of our very limited understanding of the immediate world in which we live. And truly, we don’t know much about that either, even though we think we do.

            So, what do we do? We admit that we don’t know very much and come to God with a closed mouth and an open heart. We sit at the feet of Jesus and take in as much as we can. And then when we are called upon to share our limited wisdom with others, we do so with fear and gentleness for we are stepping into an area we have only limited understanding of.

             There is one more thing we can do as well. We can become like George Washington Carver. He was a scientist back in the early 1900’s who would go to his laboratory and set some object in front of him that he wanted to understand and then he would pray. He prayer was that God would show him why God made whatever it was that he was trying to understand. He asked God why he made the sweet potato. He asked God why he made peanuts. He always started out his studies turning to God and asking God to teach him. What a great example for us too. We should do that before we open our mouth and reveal what little we actually know.

Pastor Gary.

 Anxiety - Devotions for 8-9-23

Luke 12:22 “And he said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you put on.”

We all have worries, don’t we. If we are honest, we all have things in our lives that we worry about. Some of those things are huge, a job loss, a medical condition, a family member who is lost. We all have things we worry about, things we are anxious about.

But Jesus tells us not to be anxious, not to worry about them.

The bible is full of statements, that while very true, are hard to fulfill. We are told to be holy as God is holy. We are told to go and sin no more. We are told to pray without ceasing. There are a lot of calls, commands, and general statements in the bible that we are unable to fulfill fully and completely. They are impossible to fulfill for any human being. This call to have no anxiety about life is one of them. We are unable to have no anxiety about the problems and negative situations in our life.

But God is still able to take care of them. God is greater than our problems. God is more than capable of handling anything and everything that comes to us in this life. He is able to handle our financial problems, our health issues, our relationship messes, our troubles of any and every kind. He can handle them, because He knows all about them and has all power, the power of creation.

Therefore, we can have no anxiety. We can let go of our worry. We can do as Jesus calls us to and give all things into His very capable hands. We can, but often we don’t because anxiety and worry come so quickly and easily to us in this life that is often so hard.

Whenever a problem arises, we need to turn to God and look at how He is greater than our problem. Most likely we will know of others who have gone through hard times, and we can see how they prayed, and God answered their prayers. We can read the faith stories of those who have gone before us and for whom God has handled their biggest struggles and took away their greatest fears. When we do that, when we hear the testimonies of others who had great fears and problems and who God has led out of them, we can rest a little more in His care. We can learn to trust God when we hear how He has helped others. And from that, we can let go a little more of our anxiety and worry.

We can also read the bible and hear Jesus’ call us to not worry, not be anxious. We can read how Jesus calmed the water, how He fed the 5,000, how He healed the sick and raised the dead. We can read the accounts of the miracles in the bible and know that God has not changed. He is still a miracle working God.

Maybe what is causing your anxiety will take a miracle from God to resolve. Maybe it will be that He calls you to walk through it, with Him at your side. Which is a greater miracle? For God to wave His hand and fix it immediately, or for God to walk with you as you walk through the trouble, though the fire? Both are miracles. And those miracles are why we can let go of our worries and anxiety. We can let go of them because God will either do a “fix-it-immediately” miracle, or He will do the miracle of holding your hand and walking you through whatever hardship you are facing. God is a miracle working God, so turn to Him and let Him choose which type of miracle He will do as you face a new hardship, or an old one, in your life. Then let go of the worry, let go of the anxiety and allow God to do His miracles in your life.

Pastor Gary.