Teach Your Children Well

And Another Thing . . . The Next Generation

My daughter is getting married in April, so this blog entry may be a bit maudlin.  She is sitting in front of me right now addressing her wedding invitations. And somehow I keep hearing the voice of Tevye from “The Fiddler on the Roof” singing in my head, “Sunrise, Sunset, swiftly flow the days.”  The cliché of life passing quickly is a cliché because it is something all of us experience if we live long enough. The days of children at our feet seem eternal while we’re in the midst of them, but when they are gone it seems they lasted only a moment. I believe this is why the Bible is constantly telling us to teach our children. God knows the moments that feel like they will last forever are gone before we know it. God’s message for parents is (Deut 11),

¹⁸ Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. ¹⁹ Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. ²⁰ Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, ²¹ so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land the LORD swore to give your ancestors, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth.

The lessons our children learn while they are with us, will be carried with them long after we have finished our days on earth. Proverbs 22:⁶ Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it. The things we are told when we are little stick with us, shaping our decisions and choices. Perspectives absorbed with ease when we are young, are hard to shake when we are old. If we learn bad things, it takes time and therapy and whole lot of grace to exorcise those demons. If we learn the truths of God, they will be a magnet forever calling us home.

This is why we teach the stories of God to the children of The Gathering. Bible stories have been shaping people’s lives forever. And in every culture in which they have been translated and told, people change. When we tell them to our children, they change as well. The sad thing is that a lot of us don’t know the stories ourselves. So I want The Gathering to be a place where we tell these stories to our children and to one another. The stories of God are the software the Holy Spirit uses to speak to us in the day-to-day moments of our lives. This is why God instructs Moses to have people tie them on their foreheads.

After my daughter walks down the aisle and starts her marriage journey, at some point along the way, she and her husband may be blessed with children. If so, she will begin to pour into her kids the things Kim and I have poured into her. God is the Father: the parent of us all.  He loves each of his children in each generation. My dad told me that he believed the key verse of the Bible was Psalm 100:5 which says, “For the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.” I think he was exactly right.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Going Viral: an Interaction between Strategy and Prayer

And Another Thing . . . Going Viral

This past Sunday, after our service in the awesome Carmel Middle School auditorium, we traveled to Soho Café to learn how to go viral.  Before I became a pastor and community builder at The Gathering, I spent 25 years as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company.  At various times in my career I sold antiviral medicines to treat things as diverse as herpes and flu. The fear with all of these viral conditions though, was that a new strain would emerge that the medicines could not contain. If that were to happen, the whole population would become infected and perhaps die.  In my former life, virality was something to be avoided--so it feels strange that now it has become a goal.

Churches throughout history have periodically hit the viral wave. On the day of Pentecost the church began as a prayer group of about 120 and ended the day with more than 3,000 members. This early church exploded when God’s spirit came on the scene. Christ-followers inside a house were so overcome by the presence of the Holy Spirit that they spilled out into the streets where people passing by began to observe and encounter this move of God. These spectators were soon infected with God’s spirit and the whole thing went viral. God and men were joined together until this holy amalgamation snowballed into a revival. As a church word, revival means that a whole lot of people at almost the same time, choose to change their lives and live for God. When revivals happen, society changes.

Every new church is a prayer for revival. The Gathering is such a prayer.  We want our city to change into a place where people love each other and God.  We want to see hope and light flow into our shuttered neighborhoods and “access-controlled” apartments. We want the children growing up on our streets to fear less and play more.  We pray that resources will flow from our community into the whole world to improve the plight of our neighbors everywhere. We want marriages to be renewed and restored. We want there to be a turning of the hearts of the children to their parents, and the hearts of the parents to their young. We want the people in our community to turn from anger and move towards laughter and joy.  We want Carmel to look less like a city of man and more like a city of God. Most of all, we want the people of our city to find their life in the life of Jesus. The Gathering is a prayer for this kind of change.

We have been asking each of you to pray for the imminent launch of The Gathering into our community.  Each day we have suggested topics to be prayed for, and I know that many are faithfully praying for our emergence into Carmel.  Keep it up.  The secret of virality in the church is not so much strategy as it is prayer.  When God shows up, everything changes.  If God does not show up, what we build is ultimately a vanity. 

We want God to inhabit and multiply our various strategies, just as he did for Gideon and Joshua and all the other people of faith in the Bible. So pray for all of those you will be inviting to come to The Gathering on March 4^th.  Pray before you hit the “send” button.  Pray for your neighborhoods as you drive down the streets.  Pray for the homes and businesses all around you as you move in and out of your daily routines.  Prayer makes strategy look brilliant. 

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Gideon's March Or How Faith Moves to Victory

And Another Thing . . . Gideon

The question is almost never “Will God show up?”, but, rather, “Will we remain faithful?” The real tale of faith is usually found in the small moments before the big event.  The story of God this week was about the victory Gideon’s army of 300 men won over the 135,000 Midianites occupying the land.  God’s people were in a hard place, reduced to hiding in caves and scrounging for food.  Starvation was an imminent danger for every family.  To remedy this situation God chose an unlikely hero: Gideon, the least member (the runt) of the least tribe in the country. In God’s economy, he was the perfect choice.  

Gideon amassed an army of 32,000 but God reduced the number to 300. In fact, it took two waves of reductions to get down to a size God believed was appropriate! Not only that, but Gideon’s inspired plan was to approach the enemy without weapons; they were to carry a torch hidden in a jar, and a trumpet. Three hundred unarmed men walked for miles toward what appeared to be certain destruction.

This march toward the battle is the part of the story that intrigues me. This march of faith is the battle.  It is easy to say we trust God.  It is another thing to instruct our own legs to walk us into the presence of an overwhelming force and near certain destruction.  Everyone in Gideon’s army knew the stories of what God had done for their ancestors-- the parting of the Red Sea, Manna falling from heaven, Jericho’s walls falling down -- but He had not been in the miracle business for awhile. They had to wonder if things were really going to change. Would this be a God story, or just another failure? They mustered faith to believe that God was talking again and that Gideon had heard Him. So they walked through the dark night.  With each step came the question, “Do I keep going or run away?” I wonder if the faces of their friends who left in the early reductions haunted them as they walked. I suspect they could almost hear their voices encouraging them to move toward the safety of known subservience and abandon their foolhardy quest for freedom. 

As the small army approached the camp it all became very real. They could hear the noise of the soldiers. They knew they were committed.  They would see it through.

Fredrick Buechner once wrote that “doubts are the ants in the pants of faith; they keep it awake and moving.”

Paul Tillich similarly wrote, “Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.”

The King James Version of the Bible translates Hebrews 11:1 this way: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

There are times when our life with God requires us to go on a march towards something that only makes sense if God is on the other side of it. If God is not there it will be a disaster. Each time we receive this call we can choose to embrace our fear and run away, or to move with God until He releases us. Sometimes, we are called to go on the entire journey. With each step we must choose between continuing on with God or running back to the perceived comfort of what we know. Much of this march is a dance with doubt and faith. The trick is to continue the dance all the way to the end. Our faithfulness on the journey finally brings us into the position where God can do the amazing things He intends.

In Gideon’s case, God defeated a mighty force with just light, sound and a whole lot of faith.  Faith was the journey then as it remains the journey now. Move with God and you will find him faithful.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Samuel, Eli and Listening to God (The Seven Minutes a Day Exercise)

And Another Thing . . . Listening

My mother was told she would never survive childbirth.  I am now an old man with two younger sisters and Mom is still alive and living well.  My parents named me Samuel, which means “asked of God,” and one of the first Bible stories my mother taught me was the story of the man I was named after.  Hannah, Samuel’s mom, was barren but she promised God that if He would let her have a son, she would give the boy back to Him. He did and she did.

While he was still a young boy, Samuel was taken to live in the temple with Eli, the head priest. One night, even though he was barely old enough to be in Junior Church, God called to Samuel. The story goes that he thought it was Eli calling and went to ask the old man what he wanted. This happened two more times before Eli realized what was up and told Samuel that the voice he was hearing belonged to God. That night Samuel learned the sound of a voice he would listen to the rest of his life. He would listen to, and then speak God’s words to the nation of Israel. He was a transformational figure in Jewish history serving as the last judge and the first major prophet. He learned, while still very young, to listen to God. His ability to hear and then speak what he heard is why we still talk about his life after all of these years. Samuel’s story was the story of God at this week’s Gathering.

No one can teach anyone the sound of God’s voice. Each person must make this discovery his or her own. Learning to listen, to recognize God’s voice, is an important milestone on the road to becoming a disciple. I believe that this is a lesson God is asking His people to learn in this moment.

Mike Elmore, MD, who has been discipling me for the past year, spoke at The Gathering this past weekend on the importance of listening to God. I had lunch with my good friend David Mullins this week and he told me that E91 is doing a series on listening to God. David also told me that Southland Christian Church in Lexington was in the middle of a series called “Listening to God.” Every morning I read Oswald Chamber’s, My Utmost for His Highest, and this week it was all about listening to God. Perhaps God is trying to tell me something. Perhaps he is trying to tell all of us something.

Mike suggested at this week’s Gathering that a great way to hear God’s voice is to commit to setting aside seven minutes a day for the purpose of listening. He said to find a “sacred space”—free of cell phones and easy interruptions – and a “sacred time”—usually early in the day—to sit still and ask God to speak.  Mike suggested that we meditate on Revelation 3:20, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” Jesus is waiting to be invited in.  Take seven minutes every day to do just that.

I have been doing this exercise for many months and I am amazed at how God shows up during this time. He speaks when I stop, focus, and invite Him in. I am learning that God is not really silent as much as I am most of the time not really listening. So now, I am trying to listen more. I find that when I am able to do this I wind up being renewed.

We are all busy.  And even though seven minutes sounds brief and even though the reward is high, it is surprising how hard I have to fight, sometimes, to accomplish this. It is as though the brakes on my life won’t engage to let me stop and focus. Perhaps there is a conspiracy out there to keep me moving, to keep me from listening to God. I am not really into conspiracy theories, but it feels that way sometimes.

Like this morning, I felt this pressure to finish my blog before I did my seven minutes. I felt like I needed to accomplish that goal first. Now, I feel like I need to stop writing and go listen.

And that’s all I have to say about that . . . for now.