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Commitment to mission and vision |
It is great to be back with you! It was good to be on holiday—I needed one—but it is also great to be back.
During my holidays, my family and I visited Pentecostal, Alliance, Baptist, Wesleyan, and Associated Gospel churches. It was good to worship with my brothers and sisters in Christ in different Christian churches and there is some great stuff going on in other churches. It was also great to hear how pastors and lay people pray for our church and admire our stand for the gospel—even if it means we lose our building. True Christians pray for each other and desire to see the biblical gospel preached, Christ crucified exalted and God glorified.
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What are you talking about? What things?
They’re not the typical opening lines we might expect from Jesus, not quite as earnestly evangelistic as Repent and Believe. But as two disaffected followers walk the long Emmaus road away from Jerusalem and their leader’s death, these questions are how the stranger that joins them begins. He wants to know about their experience of, as it turns out, disappointment in the life of faith. It’s only later, after their ambling conversation and over dinner, that they finally recognize the Christ they’d once followed, incredibly returned to them.
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Dear Friends,
One of the virtues of a good mission and vision statement is that we can pray the statements. Actually, for a church, if you cannot pray a mission or vision statement, then you should scrap them. The Church as a whole and local churches in particular, are God’s idea and should never be a mere human construct or project. Churches are to exist as part of God’s plan, fulfilling His purposes and seeking to promote His glory. In light of this, to have a mission/vision statement guide and direct our prayer for the church is to show that the mission/vision can only be realized if God acts and we are humbly dependent upon His leading and His power,
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How to become a Christian |
Dear Friends,
Now I would remind you brothers and sisters, of the gospel I preached which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved […] For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures […] (1Corinthinans 15:1-4, ESV)
To become a Christian, we need to personally receive the Gospel. This is what the Bible teaches consistently and deeply. Jesus is the Messiah sent by God to deliver men and women from an eternity alienated from God. Jesus is the Messiah sent by God to die on the cross, bearing our wrongdoing and rebellion and punishment. Jesus did this out of love for us because we cannot save or redeem ourselves. God in Christ did for us what we can never do for ourselves. He opened the door to Heaven. We need to receive the gospel to enter into this new standing with God and a new inheritance. How do we do this? Remember A, B, C, D.
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Dear friends,
“Why bother praying? If something is going to happen, it is going to happen anyway. If God’s all-powerful, He is going to accomplish His will without my puny interruptions. Prayer about spiritual things might comfort us, but it accomplishes nothing. I’ve prayed about real things in the past and nothing happens, so why pray?”
These are real and powerful questions. Two good books on these questions are C.S. Lewis’ “Letters to Malcolm” and Paul E. Miller’s “A Praying Life”. For now, here are four simple reasons why those of us who have become cynical about praying should confess our cynicism and recommit to prayer.
First: God asks us to pray. He would not ask us to pray if prayer had no purpose or effect. God is not cruel. He is not performing an unethical social experiment on us to see how long we will keep at a task (prayer) which is ineffective and purposeless. He is merciful and loving. If He chooses to wield His power in accord with the requests of finite human creatures- well, there is nothing in being all-powerful which prevents this. The most basic reason to be skeptical of philosophical and theological arguments against prayer in the child-like knowledge that is the Bible, time-and-time again, God says “Ask” (Mt. 7:7)
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