A funny thought (about the cold and flu season) came to my mind as I was driving into work:
“When you have a runny nose, does it jog your memory? Does it remind you that the living God wants to freely flow from within your innermost being with His healing Presence and power?”
Is the church
Asleep on a mattress
Over crumbling earth
That’s about to collapse
Into a huge sinkhole?
This blog is not about finger snapping, hand clapping, knee slapping, toe tapping, and/or armpit playing. It’s about the church, the body of Christ, functioning as God’s symphony.
The New Testament teaches that the church is like a human body and that each person is a member of the body and needs the other body parts to function. However, in spite of the Bible’s analogy, church meetings have been traditionally set up where only one body part, called the pastor, priest, preacher, or minister, does all of the functioning.
Back to the human body analogy, this is like a person who is completely paralyzed except for his mouth. Obviously, that person is severely restricted compared to how he/she is meant to be. The same with the church.
Church is meant to be God’s symphony, conducted by the Holy Spirit, where many parts play many instruments, not randomly or independently, but as led by the Conductor. What a tragedy that instead of a glorious symphony, church has been traditionally set up to be the same instrument solo, week after week, year after decade after century.
Perhaps it’s time we break out of the mold and let the church be what the Scriptures teach that it is — the freely functioning body of Christ. One person starts a song, one gives a testimony, one prays a prayer — we’re all God’s symphony!
If you live in Nashville, you can experience this first hand at The Salvation Army Berry Street, 225 Berry Street, 37207, on Sunday mornings at 10:45.
The church is the body of the broken; the face of the forgotten; and the house of the humble.
Yesterday I watched a movie about William Wilberforce, the man who in the early 1800 spent many years trying to get a bill to end the slave trade through the British Parliament. The force of Wilberforce’s example and lifestyle moved me so deeply that I wept through much of the movie. (It’s called Amazing Grace.)
Wilberforce was driven by an inner, deeply passionate, yearning force to make a major difference with his life. Here’s how he described it:
“No one has the right to do nothing. We all have a great eternal work that we are called to accomplish; eternity demands that we use this short and precarious life as well as we can. But aside from that, in a world as needy as ours, surely health and leisure and financial wealth should be able to find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate. Won’t ambition and greed ever go to sleep in our hearts? Will we never run out of things to want? We are so quick to discover new things to desire, so eager to pursue them; why can’t we be as hungry to find use in our lives for a Christlike spirit of love?”
The force that consumed Wilberforce with a Christlike spirit of love was his intimate relationship with the living, resurrected Jesus Christ — his Christimacy. Wilberforce wrote an amazing book called Real Christianity comparing genuine, all-consuming, lifestyle-transforming Christianity (Christimacy) with the passive acknowledgement of the shallow religion of Christendom. (Everybody should read his book and/or see the movie Amazing Grace and get a taste of the Wilberforce force.)
So what is your great eternal work? The specifics may vary from person to person, but the foundation of the work that we are all on earth to perform consists of 3 things:
1) Get to know, follow and obey the living, resurrected Jesus Christ as closely as possible — 24/7/365.
2) Win within. Surrender every wrongful thought, desire, habit, and deed to God and fight desperately for the rest of your life to overcome them all.
3) Spread passionate love for Christ and the desire and freedom to follow and obey him to every person possible using every means possible. Live it loudly and courageously and shout it from the housetops, Facebook, social media, and every other platform possible.
Time is short. We must get on with it or our life will be gone and it will be too late!
A thought on Dr. Seuss’ birthday: Perhaps Christ-followers should be as creative in presenting the living, resurrected Jesus Christ as Dr. Seuss was in his books. (Or as William Booth and the first members of The Salvation Army were.)
I deduce that Dr. Seuss had a mind that was loose as a goose and he put it to good use to produce and unloose profuse encouragement to spruce up (and juice up) kids minds and introduce them to creativity. He needed no excuse to cut loose and produce rhymes — putting together such random words as duce, truce, zeus, moose & mousse, recluse, Bruce and caboose, and even overproduce and reintroduce.
“Innovators focus on the verbs. They’re proactive. They’re energetic. Innovators set out to create, to experiment, to inspire, to build on new ideas. Their techniques may at times seem unusual, but the results can be truly extraordinary.” Tom Kelley, The Ten Faces of Innovation.
Experience 21st Century, Christian innovation @ The Salvation Army Berry Street, 225 Berry St., Nashville, Tennessee, 37207 on Sundays @10:45.
Sequester — a wake up call that one nation under debt, with entitlements or tax breaks for all, cannot long endure.
Forgive us, Lord, for being so focused on self and what we want; so little focused on others; and not focused on You at all.
When you just can’t seem to figure life out — math might help. Let’s meaningfully meditate on multiple (7) mathematics matters:
1) Math wasn’t blown into being by the Big Bang. It just doesn’t add up that an accidental explosion could produce precise principles, postulates, theorems, and formulas.
2) Math isn’t a myth, manufactured by the mind of man. Numerous people have discovered mathematical principles — however, they didn’t invent them. In fact, in human history, math has frequently divided myth from reality.
3) Math is not matter (and it’s not an addition to or an appendage to matter). It is intangible. You can’t hold math in your hand, or see it with your eyes. Yet we readily rely on its reality. Mathematics exists independently of matter.
4) Math matches reality. It works. Mathematics is truth, not fiction.
5) Math moves us beyond the material to more meaningful matters like mystery and mysticism? It reveals that life and existence are more than a closed set of numbers, stuck within the confines of the physical universe.
Run the numbers for yourself. The solution to life is not in stuff. All your stuff, including your physical existence, can be (and someday will be) taken away. So what’s left after the great subtraction? After the hardware of your body is destroyed?
6) Math demonstrates that there is logic, reason, and intelligence (software) behind the physical universe. And some of it was downloaded into you. That download, the non-material aspects of who you are, will carry on when your hardware breaks down and decays.
7) Math can’t solve life’s biggest problem. So what happens after the break down of your hardware? Where will your software go? Mathematics can’t answer that question. But you know — deep in your soul. You know if you are in harmony with or in rebellion against the inventor of math — the one who made your body and soul.
A suggestion on how to be a soul man (or woman): Take the square route — not the cool one.
Venture capital is money invested in upstart, high-potential, high-risk businesses.
Venture faith is an investment of trust and obedience in Spirit-led ventures, even when they appear to be very high-risk.
Venture faith always produces great spiritual adventure — never religious boredom! And it can flood you with great spiritual riches! So be a Christ-preneur.
–Venture down to The Salvation Army Berry Street for a faithtastic return on investment!
— 225 Berry Street, Nashville, Tennessee, 37207 — Sundays @ 10:45 am.
“Things get unpredictable when the Spirit is around.” Loren B. Mead
“When you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then the ministry of Jesus just flows out of you.” –Corrie Ten Boom
“If Christ has not been made a well within us, there will be no outflow from us.” –Charles Spurgeon
“What is needed is for God to fill our hearts with His thoughts, and then His desires will become our desires flowing back to Him.” –A. W. Pink
“Ask to become a channel for the power of the Holy Spirit. Believe God, and do not obstruct the way of the Holy Spirit, so that He may work through you.” –Samuel Logan Brengle
“Let man choose life; let him daily nourish his soul; let him forever starve his old life; let him abide continuously as a living branch in the vine; and the True-Vine Life will flow into his soul, assimilating, renewing, till Christ be formed in him.” –Henry Drummond
“The habit of celebrating the greatness and graciousness of God yields an endless flow of thankfulness, joy, and zeal.” –J.I. Packer
“The moment a man falls into sin, divine life ceases to flow, and his life becomes one of helplessness.” –Smith Wigglesworth
“Soulish Christians do not contain the living flow of the power of the Holy Spirit.” –Watchman Nee
“We need to be broken before the rivers of blessing can flow out through us to others.” –Zac Poonen
“If the life of Christ is flowing through us, as it flows into the heart, it will fill us with joy, and if so, we cannot contain it, it must flow out.” –G.V. Wigram
“Spiritual work flows with the current of the Holy Spirit, without the need of fleshly strength. ” –Watchman Nee
“If we really want the Holy Spirit in our midst, we must allow Him to be the leader.” –Rick Joyner
