Ministry - in the church and outside the church

For many years the only serving I did for Christ was in the church itself. I've done most everything from sweeping and vacuuming and yard work to preschool childcare for many years. It's hard to believe now I was pretty good at that. Everything I did was inside the church and that's all good.

For the last ten or so years I have been singing in a small choir on Sunday nights. I do that for me. I am very selfish about this. I am never quite sure how much I contribute. But I do try to be a good morale guy. I really do not understand because in most other areas of my life to try to do that brings confusion and failure. But in the church choir I do contribute in that way. It's a specific gift from the Holy Spirit. If there has to be a reason it may be because I am so happy to be a part. But that does not explain it. It is supernatural.

About four years ago I got plugged in with a group starting up Alpha for prisons in Houston. I really recommend this to anyone and everyone. This one is not so selfish on my part. Well yes it is in a different way. There is a very selfish way in which my brain tells me I am fulfilling a specific recommendation given by James in the Bible. True spirituality is visiting those in the jails and in the hospitals. So I am sure this is something God wants us to do. I do not think I am strong enough emotionally to do this on my own. But I can join a group and do it. I hope I never have to try to do this on my own.

If you are at all in need of a ministry that pays you back in many ways you should think about prison ministry. You could get involved with what we do. Or you could contact Prison Fellowship and see how you can plug in with them. They had a whole prison out in Sugar Land so I know they must need people. There is something called Kairos that goes into prisons. I know a couple of people who do that but I know little of how it works except that they go maybe monthly and it involves a lot of cookies.

If you are like me and you have really never been too close to the poor of this world prison ministry can be eyeopening. I tend to judge what is different from me. But these men (and women if you go that way) are people loved by God. Their mindsets are just so different. And yet once you get to know them you can love them as God does. God gives you the ability. This does not mean you do not hate the sin. And you have to understand these people are going to have a hard time staying out once they are released. Habits are hard to break. Often it is very hard to find "good" friends and a living wage job.

But you get to join God in praying and hoping for them. You can help as much as you can. I think you have to understand to keep boundaries though.

I get as much as I get in doing the small bit I do in prisons. It is really better if a lot of people do a little bit rather than a few people trying to shoulder a whole lot. There is lots of frustration. There is temptation to get jaded and negative. So it helps to have others along side.

I suspect it helps the guards to see us come in, fresh faced, optimistic. A bit of our ministry is to the guards, to be friendly to share with them anything we get to share with the prisoners. After a while even I recognize the different guards though I do not know names I know faces. We smile in recognition. At least at the facility I am going to, which is a jail, not a prison, the guards seem very friendly, not surly or belligerent like they are often portrayed. A jail is for short-termers, a prison holds long term prisoners. I understand the atmosphere is quite different. But I haven't been in prisons enough to truly experience it.

There are other ways to help the poor. One can work at Open Door Mission or in a food pantry. A man I know works with a meals-on-wheels group. That is certainly another direct Biblical command, to help the poor. That may be more where your heart lies. If it is go for it. Stick your little toe in and see where it leads. I repeat it would be much better if a lot of people did a little bit than for a few people to do it all, acting more like professionals than amateurs. "Amateur" has as it's root the Greek word for love. Do it for love of the people, for love of God, giving back for what we have been freely given. Make it a part of your ministry.

Luke 15, mostly the last one

Luke 15:11 - 32

The younger son "came to his senses". We would say say he lost his mind. He is going to give up his pride. He is going to grovel before his father. How many of us would continue to resist? We would seek another job before we groveled before our fathers. Or we take the anonymous way and apply for a government handout.

We are quick to think of this as God the Father, the all knowing God. But in this story Jesus never refers to him as God the father. All three of these parables are about the excitement of finding precious things. In this last one it is a precious person. The father knows him as precious. All of us know our children as precious. But many fathers may not be as willing to show it quite as openly or as extravagantly as this father does. I don't think I would. It would be there in my heart I think mixed with other emotions.

But in this story Jesus is using the example of an earthy father. So in this story how much does the father know? How much does he know of his mental state? He does not let him finish his speech. Is he simply very glad to see his son and no more? At least on the surface this is not about salvation. We quickly jump to that. Let us get back to the original story. It is about getting back a son that is lost.

The son went away and has not been heard from. The father has to be afraid he is dead. He has been worrying, perhaps praying. I think about parents who saw their children go off to the New World 200 to 300 years ago. They would be saying goodbye never expecting to see them again. There was no regular mail, communication would be at best slow, taking months. The parents would never know how they got on. How hard that would be!

We think of sibling rivalry to explain the younger son's urge to leave. Did he not really understand how much his father loved him? Did he think he father favored the eldest?

Yes we do see this as Jesus showing us the attitude of God the Father through this small family tragedy. This is about a loving heavenly Father. Perhaps we can never imagine our earthly father doing such things, being so overjoyed to see us, hugging us, giving us a welcome home party. But our heavenly Father is like that. Jesus is telling us so.

Let us keep that in mind and remind one another of it.

Blue Bible version of Luke 15 (NIV)

Try it

Try it

I learned an exercise in seminary that I submit to you. You can do it. And it will produce dividends in your understanding.

Pick an epistle and read it through in one sitting. Pick a small one to start with. While you are reading ask God to show you why Paul wrote it. I submit to you that every epistle was written for one reason. Not one reason for most of it, one reason.

It's like unlocking a treasure chest. Once you see what it is you will then see that everything Paul wrote in the epistle contributes to that main idea. If you think that something does not fit then you have not quite gotten it yet. Look further.

You may have to read it more than once. It often helps to read it in different versions. My professor said to read it in three different versions at minimum before you settle on an answer. If you do this you will be richly rewarded.

What you discover will be something you rarely hear from the pulpit. Usually a preacher will "proof text" these epistles. A sermon will be based on one short passage. Or short passages from various places will be patched together to make a point. Doing it this way distorts the message of the letters as a whole. The Bible bears up well to this sort of thing but it is not the same as figuring out why an epistle was written in the first place.

Secondly what you find will be still a great truth for today as well. You will be increasing your depth of knowledge about how God relates to his church.

I just did it with a short epistle, Second Thessalonians. There are several short epistles that make this an easier exercise. Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians are also good. In class we also did Romans, perhaps the most complex Epistle. But it still works with Romans. Romans is a great one to do. But do a shorter one first. I will not give you the answers (as if I could truly say I have it all together). Doing these and discovering for yourself will be better. I got a good answer for 2 Thessalonians. I sort of remember the answer for Romans.

If anyone tries this, please respond to this message and let us know what you find. I'd love to see how your thoughts compare with what I got. My professor does this class often. He repeatedly goes back and does this work over and over. Each time he reworks his thought God gives him a slightly different perspective. He changes, hopefully improves, his answer. I wonder if any other professor takes this view.

I did 2 Thessalonians before but of course I have forgotten what I concluded last time. So it was like doing it all over again.

Simply Chrstian - N. T. Wright

Simply Christian - N. T. Wright
I told MP I would not read this book. That was premature. What I really meant was I would not buy it and it is inconvenient trying to park downtown to go to the downtown public library. That would have been oversharing to explain, not to say I have not overshared before. I'm trying to be good.

But where I stayed this weekend was very close to the downtown library so DW and I walked over there Saturday. We saw Louise Alexander which was nice. I was able to pick it up without a problem. I figured by now my card would be expired but it wasn't. It seems like a long time since I have checked out an HPL book. I am so spoiled by the Rice Library. They have a great collection, I like older books, and they let me keep them for 30 days. HPL only allows 14 days, often too short for me.

Plus the workers at HPL have many times not checked my book in when I return it causing me to have to prove to them I do not owe late fees, that it is on their shelves, or already checked out again. This is maddening as you can imagine. So I never put them in the book slot and always insist on watching them swipe the books as returned. This is often inconvenient and they do not appreciate my attitude. So I have tried to stop checking out HPL books.

So I broke my rule this weekend. I got Simply Christian and one of the newer Cat Who books. Rice has none of the Cat Who books. They also do not have much N. T. Wright and certainly not Simply Christian.

DW got two mystery books on spec. The first one was too gross and she did not get far. The second one she liked better and she finished it Saturday night. Friday she finished her Sue Grafton book "I is for Innocent". Because I have not read it yet she gave me some slight teasers but did not spoil it. She did mention a surprise. I'm OK, by the time I start it I will have forgotten what she said, hehe.

I have issues with N. T. Wright that are at best petty. I would love to think I will hate this book. But I probably will not. I will try not to be too annoyed about this. There has to be a reason why Wright is liked by many people that I respect. These people are from all sorts of Christian perspectives. I would like to find glaring problems with his style or theology. But I probably will not. Less certain to me is whether I will find this book helpful to my faith.

I just finished the short introduction. The title of the book reminds one of Lewis', Mere Christianity. It seems he is attempting to do the same thing Lewis was. I am also reminded of Alpha, the series of talks given by Nicky Gumbel. The introduction says he is trying to do what Gumbel is, explain Christianity both to those outside and inside the faith. The subtitle "Why Christianity Makes Sense" implies he as trying to write an apology here. But the introduction never says anything directly about this. Is this British understatement? We shall see I guess.

Sir Gibbie original version by George McDonald

Sir Gibbie original version by George McDonald
Sir Gibble is almost done. I cheated and snuck to the end with about forty pages to go. So sue me. I guess I suspected how it would end. Sort of. The girl who is the most liked by the author wins our hero despite his best efforts to push her into the arms of his best friend. Nevermind that they are cousins. Maybe not first cousins, the book never says about that. Did the author forget about that? No I suspect not. He may have thought it was an added plus, keep the marriage (and the money) in the clan so speak. Remember this is Scotland.

Sir Gibbie is the original volume. These books have been "translated". And the translated books have been renamed. I cannot remember the modern name. In the original book dialogue that is carried on in "broad Scotch" is spelled out some of phonetically. It is often pretty hard to get the exact meaning but you can get the gist. In a translation there is a little missed as when the man speaks in his this native tongue when being informal and speaks in good English to put down his hearer. I guess this is explained in the authors comments. So there may be no reason not to go for the translation except that I am reading out of a library full of older books. This library does not have the newer versions.

Gibble has qualities of Pollyanna. Anyone remember Pollyanna? She too was a happy child in the face of circumstances. She too took it upon herself to see to it that people's lives turned out well, happily we might say. Except McDonald is also very interested in people's souls, their salvation as well as their earthly well being. So Gibble works to set people along the right path to God as well as to make them successful and comfortable.

I wonder if it works like that. Not as much as McDonald's romance makes it out. Of course this is a romance, one must never forget that. A romance is as much about what they author would like to see reality be as anything else. McDonald would like an almost Christlike figure like Gibbie be able to influence people to faith.

Do we think God is like that, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit? Do they influence people towards faith? Is it as active as Gibbie is or is it more passive? Now Gibbie works behind the scenes so to speak. Often people do not know he is setting up situations. For myself I think it retrospect I can see I helped to set up situations a few times. But I was certainly not smart enough to do it myself. God arranged things not me. I only had it revealed to me later. There may be other times that God used me that I certainly will never be aware of, this side of the grave anyway.

There is another character in this book a Donald (Donal) Grant. He is the young man who did not get the girl. McDonald was very interested in him too. We are told inside this book that the author might write about Donald in another book. It seems he did, three volumes full. I will tackle that one soon, if God allows me to.

A lot can be said about Sir Gibbie. According to something I looked at while working on this entry, Gibbie was a favorite character of C. S. Lewis and that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was influenced or inspired by Gibbie.

Evolution versus Creation revisited

Evolution versus Creation revisited
We were discussing evolution, the beginning of the universe, how long the universe has been in existence. Phillip Collins in his talk a week or so ago mentioned 15.7 billions years as the age of the universe. He stated it categorically as if that date is set in stone. It's as if we had always known this.

In fact as few as ten years ago I know for a fact a different number was being used. Back then that number was the fact according to some.

I recall that God demanded of Job that Job tell him how he made the universe (Job 38+). He asked Job if he was there. Of course the answer is no. We were not there. We cannot ever understand how God made matter out of nothing. We have no idea how God did it. Even if we accept the idea that the universe began 15.7 billion years ago in a big bang, we don't know why. We cannot really know how. It is a unique, unrepeatable event.

Job 38 is interesting. In a parable like way God asks him if he knows why he set gravity the way he did. Why is Avogadro's number such as it is? And so on ... These are questions that scientists cannot begin to answer so mostly they pretend that these questions do not exist.

Science does best when it observes physical events that can be controlled and repeated. Science is at a loss when it dabbles in origin theories. Origins by their very nature are unrepeatable events. We can only hypothesize, guess as it were.

So what we have in the Bible in Genesis is an origin account. Several unrepeatable events are revealed. Most Christians think these things were revealed by God. He explained them to man in a way that he could understand. And don't think we, in our sophistication, are much different than the original readers of these stories. We can take God's word for it or not. If we do not then we have lost some faith.

Someone else, it may have been Colson again, mentioned something else that is interesting. Blind evolutionary forces is such a large universe over such long time periods should have created other worlds with other life forms. Life forms with self-consciousness such as we have. There have been many millions of dollars spent trying to find and contact such life forms. SETI and such endeavors have been absolutely unsuccessful at finding anything remotely likely. In fact I am not aware of anything like our solar system anywhere on any of the stars they have examined. I think they closest thing to planets found to date are some seemingly dead stars rotating around another star. These dead stars are usually pretty big. Now it could be that at such long distances it is hard to see something as small as a planet the size of earth. But it not for lack of trying that they have not found direct or indirect evidence of planetary systems. Most theories of solar system development would as a corollary theorize that lots of stars would have planets around them. But this does not seem to be the case.

It would seem that if blind evolution could product complex life forms like ourselves in one little corner of the universe it could do so in many places. Perhaps they are just too far away to be contacted but so far nothing at all hopeful has come to light. Science fiction likes to ponder many worlds with advanced civilizations and ways to communicate and travel to a fro. But so far reality has proved very different.

New Christmas hymn - Mary Did You Know?

Mary Did You Know? - Christian song by Buddy Greene and Mark Lowry

This is a relatively new song in the Christmas season repertory. Lyrics by Mark Lowry, score by Buddy Greene. Our Celebration groups has been performing it in our big Christmas special service for many years. I was listening to out 1999 service the other day, getting into the advent season. We do it as a duet with the choir singing some backup. In 1999 we had Omari Tau and Kim Cade as soloists. We have never had better. Others have done a wonderful job too. Perhaps it is just that Omari and Kim were the first. They created the roles so to speak. I have it on cassette. The recording is not too good. So it's better I cannot share it. You could not experience it as I experienced it.

This song creates a wonderful word picture: Mary did you know how amazing your son would be? Mary did you know he would be God in the flesh. I think the implied answer is that Mary could not possibly know. She could not possible imagine. And neither can we. We cannot imagine what he did for us. We cannot imagine how God could be a human too. The God that created the vast universe grew as a fetus in a young woman's womb.

Google shows the song has been covered by Reba McIntyre, Kenny Rogers and Wynona Judd, and Clay Aiken.
Youtube search finds quite a few hits. I am biased but I do not think the Rogers-Judd duet is as good as the one we do. There needs to be more passion. The is Donny Osmond, Kathy Mattea, Daniella Dalli, and more. Perhaps the best solo is by original writer Mark Lowery.

Perhaps the power of the song is shown by the varying interpretations of the artists doing this song and how many "big names" are singing this wonderful song. I think this song may outlast our generation and become a permanent hit around Christmas time.

Mary did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water?
Mary did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters?
Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?
This child that you've delivered, will soon deliver you.

Mary did you know that your baby boy will give sight to a blind man?
Mary did you know that your baby boy will calm a storm with his hand?
Did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels tried?
And when you kiss your little baby, you have kissed the face of God.

The blind will see, the deaf will hear and the dead will live again.
The lame will leap, the dumb will speak, the praises of the lamb.

Mary did you know that your baby boy is Lord of all creation?
Mary did you know that your baby boy will one day rule the nations?
Did you know that your baby boy is heaven's perfect Lamb?
This sleeping child you're holding is the great I am.