Excited about church again

Tomorrow is Sunday, and I am eagerly looking forward to worshipping and fellowshipping with my new church family at All Nations church.  I’m excited about introducing All Nations to Simeon and Heather who are visiting from Minnesota.  I get just as excited about the two life groups in which Marion and I currently participate.  I am loving the new friendships that are forming, and I am eager for the new assignments that I know the Lord is preparing for me.

Some of you may find it odd that I would find church this stimulating.  Isn’t church supposed to be dull?  Well, no.  It ought to be wonderfully satisfying – but believe me, that hasn’t always been my experience.  In fact, I haven’t been this excited about church in a long time.

As a young man, my hunger for the living God was kindled in the early 1970s, during the era of the Jesus people revival.  In this atmosphere of spiritual ferment, drawn by the possibility of a transformed life, I began to seek the Kingdom of God.  At first I had little understanding and some very questionable mentors, so mine was a long and convoluted journey with many detours, but God was faithful and eventually I became a committed disciple of Jesus Christ.

However, my next twenty-five years in the church were mostly disappointing.  At first, I was attempting to serve God without really knowing him.  My involvement in a liberal denomination with very fuzzy theology did little to clarify my understanding.  Despite these handicaps, eventually I was led to a true relationship with Christ.  My personal life began to change, but the church still mostly frustrated me.  If anything, my frustration increased as my understanding grew.  Marion and I did have wonderfully refreshing experiences at camps and prayer ministry schools, but I was hungry for a church that more faithfully reflected Biblical Christianity in its everyday life.

About fifteen years ago, after many years of struggle punctuated by just enough bright spots to keep us moving forward, Marion and I were introduced to a wonderful family of churches and ministries known as DOVE Christian Fellowship International (DCFI).  Over several years, we came to see the DOVE network as our spiritual home.  For almost the first time in our lives we weren’t just reading in books about the wonderful things happening in moves of God in other times and places.  We actually saw the values of the Kingdom of God being embodied with integrity, humility and grace by leaders who really cared about us and were committed to seeing us succeed.  Our whole understanding of church was taken to a new level, and we ourselves were changed in deep and lasting ways.  We were hooked, and knew this was what we wanted.

Thinking that understanding a vision meant being prepared to implement it, we attempted to plant a DOVE church in a village south-east of Ottawa, but we ourselves still had much to learn about walking in Kingdom Christianity, and we did not succeed in gathering a leadership team that understood or shared our vision.  We had fought to establish this vision but had found that we could not do so without committed partners who understood our hearts and shared our burden.

Eventually we laid down this attempt and moved back to Ottawa, where we had several good and fruitful years serving as small group overseers and intercessors in a denominational church.  The lessons that we had learned during our DOVE years served us in good stead during these years, but even though Marion and I sought to be faithful and made many good relationships, I knew I was in a foreign land in terms of church culture.  I gave my best and sought to flourish in the place where God had planted me, but it didn’t feel like home.  I had been exposed to a church culture that had given me a taste of Kingdom life, and I would never again be content with anything less.

Little did we know that the Lord had been preparing us for something new, and everything was about to change.  A few months ago, at a Paul Baloche worship concert, the message of one song in particular really caught my attention.  I found that this song was on my heart over the next few weeks.   Every time I picked up my guitar, I found that I wanted to play this song.  Looking back, I can see that God was using this song to speak a message of hope over my life at this pivotal time.

Praise is rising, eyes are turning to You, we turn to You
Hope is stirring, hearts are yearning for You, we long for You

Since then, Marion and I have been in another season of transition on several fronts.  We don’t know exactly what the future holds, but we know something is changing, and we feel a sense of anticipation for the things that lie ahead.  I love my new church family and hope is stirring again that we  will have an opportunity to play our part in seeing God’s Kingdom established in our city.  I don’t know what our particular assignment is going to be, but it doesn’t matter.   We are full of gratitude at this door that God has opened for us.  It’s so good to be excited about church again, and to know that God has a place for us as part of a Biblical community of brothers and sisters, working with a servant leadership team that understands our hearts and wants to empower each member to fulfill his or her God-given calling.  We are experiencing the refreshing that the Scriptures speak of, and are looking forward to the day when all things are restored.

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Jesus’ investment advice

It was the spring of 1998, and I was 45 years old.  After having spent almost 20 years of my life either pastoring or planting churches, my life had recently taken a radical shift.  I was fresh out of school again, a rookie in my new line of work as an Oracle application developer (see Life in the Hallway).  I was also a new homeowner, after having spent most of my adult life in either church-owned or rented properties.  Marion and I had recently moved with our four children from the city to the country, at the invitation of a couple from our church, to partner with them in planting a cell-based church in the village where they lived.  So I had a new job and new house, was living in a new community, adjusting to a new lifestyle, developing new relationships, attempting to walk in a new model of ministry, and learning to think in new ways.

I hadn’t been finding the transition an easy one.  I was on a steep learning curve at work.  Marion and I were missing our friends from our church in the city.  The adjustment to country living had its challenging moments.  To top it all off, we were stretched financially.  Although having a real job had meant a significant increase in income, buying a house in the country and commuting to work in the city meant our expenses had also increased significantly.  We were home-schooling, so there wasn’t a second income.  We weren’t in debt apart from our mortgage, and we were pretty good about staying within our budget, but our car was ageing and there were many things that needed doing around our house.   We always had money for groceries and the bills always got paid, but things were tight.

As a young pastor, I had been somewhat conflicted about money.  I knew that money had its uses, and enjoyed the generosity of the more prosperous among our church members.  At the same time, I saw the prosperity gospel as a front for American materialism, and believed that to be a rich Christian had to be some kind of contradiction.  After all, hadn’t Jesus said that we should avoid storing up treasures on earth?  From 1991-1997 our family had lived on a very low income, first as church planters and then during my year at business college, and we had been content.  Why couldn’t others be like us?  To be honest, I think I felt very virtuous in my insistence that money really wasn’t all that important to me.  This, of course, was pride – but I wasn’t ready to admit this to myself just yet.  Other people might be self-righteous, proud and hypocritical, but not me.  I was much too spiritual for that.

But some cracks were starting to form in the fortress of my beliefs about money.  I had been getting some teaching on finances from my new friend Brian Sauder, who was giving apostolic oversight to our church-planting efforts.  He was teaching that God wanted his people to prosper, both because He is good and also so that we could have the necessary tools to do the work of the Kingdom.  I was starting to see a bigger picture and was beginning to think that maybe I hadn’t been right about everything after all.

Brian didn’t fit my stereotype of a prosperity preacher.  He didn’t wear a gold Rolex, an expensive Italian suit or crocodile shoes.  He didn’t have his own TV show, and he didn’t send out letters promising answers to prayer if we purchased his special anointing oil or prayer cloths.  He didn’t promote his own ministry, and he wasn’t out to sell me anything.  Instead he spent time in our home, got to know my wife and kids, gave us practical encouragement, shared Biblical wisdom honed in the school of experience, and genuinely cared about how we were doing.  He was a very down-to-earth, believable guy – a man of integrity.

More than that, his teaching on the topic of finances was having an impact.  I liked what I was hearing!  Still, I had some concerns to work through.  One beautiful spring day, I was on a break at work and I went for a walk to clear my head.  My office was on a military base that had recently been shut down, so there was lots of open space and it was easy to be alone.  While I was walking, I was crying out to God for his help with the various pressures I was experiencing, and I heard the voice of the Lord speaking to my spirit.  I say “heard” because I really did hear very distinct words, although not with my physical ears.  I was pretty sure this message had to be from God.  Not only was it consistent with Biblical truth, I also recognized that it could not have arisen from my own mind because it was totally contrary to my feelings, my expectations and my natural mindset and ways of thinking.

The words that I heard in my spirit were these :
        I intend to prosper you, first in the natural and then in the spiritual.

This message had the unmistakeable ring of truth.  I knew Jesus’ promise that His sheep could recognize the difference between His voice and the voice of a stranger.  From years of listening to the Lord I did not think I had been hearing the voice of a stranger.  Still, I needed to test this.  Was I deceiving myself?  Was this wishful thinking?  I asked Father if this was really His voice that I was hearing.  Didn’t Jesus say that it was hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God?  What about that?  Well, He assured me, it is hard but not impossible.  It’s hard, not because wealth is evil, but because our hearts are prone to fall into the deception that we don’t need God, and wealth makes this illusion easier to maintain – at least for a time.

As I continued to dialogue with the Lord, I sensed Him telling me that because Marion and I had made his Kingdom the goal of our lives, He could trust us with financial prosperity.  This, I recognized, was consistent with Jesus’ words of assurance to his disciples, as recorded in the gospel of Matthew and beautifully paraphrased by Eugene Peterson:

If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.  (Matthew 6:30-33 MSG)

That day, a big chink came out of the wall of the fortress of poverty thinking.  I knew that I was being changed.  My whole outlook on finances – indeed, on life – was in the process of being transformed.

I still recognize that our hearts can be deceived by wealth, as they can by any addictive substance.  I take Jesus’ warnings seriously, but I now realize that the real issue is not wealth or poverty, but Lordship.  If my allegiance is to Jesus, and I have learned to value and walk in the freedom that He promises to the children of God, then I can handle prosperity without being corrupted by it, and I can use it to bless many and to do the works of the Kingdom of God.  One of the ways of testing ourselves on this point is to ask ourselves whether there is anything that we couldn’t let go if Jesus asked us to.  He always gives back more than He asks of us!

So what about the title of this post?  Does Jesus give investment advice?

Yes he does.  It’s very simple.  Sow your seed boldly and courageously! Everything that is in your hands has been entrusted to you by the King.  It’s his, not yours – you are a steward, not an owner.  The owner, however, is generous and will reward those who are faithful.  Don’t let fear drive you to dig a hole and bury your wealth – natural or spiritual – in case something goes wrong.  Because you know His character, don’t hesitate to invest everything you have in His enterprises, and expect Him to bring an increase.  Be willing to take risks for the sake of the King, trusting that He wants to bless you.  (See the Parable of the Talents, Matthew 25:14-30)

That doesn’t mean I ought to take stupid, uncalculated risks.  Jesus also told his disciples not to build on sand, and to count the cost before embarking on any enterprise.  Although he applied these lessons to the Kingdom of God, he knew their natural meaning.  Stupidity doesn’t make us better disciples; planning wisely can be an expression of God-honouring faith.  Having said all that, I have come to see that my Father wants confident, bold sons and daughters who are not paralyzed by fear, but are willing to take risks – even if some of those risks don’t work out exactly as we expect.  This mindset is a key to Kingdom living, and is as true in the financial area as in other areas of life.

On that spring morning in 1998, I desperately needed to hear the voice of the Lord telling me to prosper, because up til then, even though I had stepped out in faith many times, I had also often been dogged by a nagging fear of failure, and deep down I found it hard to believe that God really wanted to bless me.  Since then, many things have changed in my life.  God has indeed prospered me financially and spiritually. More than anything else, it is my view of God that has changed.  I now realize that since I am a child of God, forgiven and cleansed because of the shed blood of Jesus, my Father delights to bless me and wants to see me succeed.  He delights to fill me with His Spirit so that I can do the works of God.  Why would he not also give me all good things – including financial prosperity?  At the same time, prosperity, like healing or any other form of blessing, is a secondary goal, not a primary one.  So, my focus is not to be on these secondary blessings but on the Giver of all good gifts.  This is the battle that I need to fight daily : to keep my gaze fixed on God, His goodness and His priorities, and to boldly invest and cheerfully give out what He has freely supplied.  If I do that, He promises to richly supply me over and above what I need for every good work.

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Beyond Reason

Beyond Reason.

Margaret Trudeau wrote a memoir by this title in 1979, and in 2009 Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro wrote about the art of negotiation in a work by the same title.

Both books were best-sellers, but when I hear the expression beyond reason, I don’t think of either of them, nor the talk show by the same title.  To me, the phrase beyond reason suggests one of two things – either behaviour that is unreasonable and therefore hard to accept (“it’s beyond reason the way he carries on”), or a belief that is unsupported by reason and therefore unconvincing (“I can’t imagine that Jim still believes in Santa Claus at age 29 – it’s beyond reason“).

In this post, I am not going to get cranky about anyone’s unreasonable behaviour.  Rather, I want to focus on one very popular belief that I consider to be beyond reason, even though it is held by many seemingly rational people.  I am referring to the increasingly common belief that life on earth was not created by some supernatural intelligence, but “just happened”.  I was exposed to this belief in university and accepted it for a time, thinking it was undeniable because it had been proven by science.   I have since given the matter a lot of consideration and have concluded that this common conviction is in reality totally unfounded, and that far from being based on reason it is in fact quite unreasonable.

I realize, of course, that by definition beliefs about the origins of life are unprovable.  By its own standards, operational science can have nothing conclusive to say about such matters.  From a scientific perspective, the best we can do is talk about possibilities and probabilities, because no-one was there to observe what actually happened.

So let’s stick to possibilities and probabilities.

Today I did a Google search on “What do cells do”.  My first hit was a very informative site from the British Science Museum.  In it, I found this revealing description of just one of the functions of living cells
( How do cells make proteins )

Proteins are large, complex molecules, which all your cells are making continuously. Each protein is made up of many amino acids which must join together in the correct order for the protein to work properly. Imagine a car assembly line: to end up with a working car, the workers must know when and where to add each part. Likewise, the cell needs a set of commands for making proteins. This instruction manual is in your genes – found in the cell nucleus. 

This is just one of the many intricate processes that are going on constantly inside each living cell. I studied introductory biology in university almost 40 years ago.  Since then, what is known about cellular biology has increased greatly, but even what was known at that time was enough to amaze me. I was in awe of the complexity and level of organization involved in the structure and function of even the simplest living cells.  Yet, the lecturer was clearly hostile to Christianity and all forms of theism, and openly mocked any suggestion that such wonders might have originated from the hand of a Creator.  No, he insisted, any reasonable person would agree that they arose purely by natural processes.   Such confidence seems more like an article of faith than a scientifically-based conclusion.  It makes me wonder who is being unreasonable.

It’s a well-known fact of cellular biology that cells can only come from other living cells.  No scientist has ever observed, or been able to reproduce, the spontaneous generation of a living cell from inert chemicals.  So how did the first living cell arise?  The popular site How Stuff Works addresses this issue in an article entitled Where did the first living cell come from.  Despite being written with a clear evolutionary bias, the article still contains the surprising admission that no-one really knows how the first living cell could have arisen “spontaneously out of the inert chemicals of Planet Earth perhaps 4 billion years ago“.  Yet, the author assures us, one day science will find the answer.   Really?

I work in the field of information technology, writing PL/SQL code to implement business logic in Oracle database systems.  Someone had to create the PL/SQL engine that I use to write and compile my code.  Someone else had to design the core Oracle database engine and the SQL language on which the PL/SQL language is built.  Someone else had to design the C programming language in which most of Oracle’s core components are written.  Someone else had to come up with the basic binary logic that makes all computer languages possible.  And that’s only a small part of what is required for me to do my work.  There are layers upon layers of complex systems and sub-systems underlying every line of code that I write.  But even given the best tools to work with, if I blindly hit keys on my computer keyboard, my code would not be very good – in fact it wouldn’t work at all.  I have to apply structured reasoning and creative intelligence to the process of coding, otherwise I come up with nothing but a useless mess.

There is far greater complexity programmed into even the simplest living cell than what is contained in any computer program that I could ever hope to write.  Faced with this undeniable reality, an unbiased, unprejudiced observer could draw only one conclusion.  There must have been some creative intelligence involved in the process.   This is not provable, of course, but it is the only reasonable conclusion in light of the available evidence.  In fact, we can go farther and assert that it is beyond reason to suppose it all just happened by chance, spontaneously.

Francis Crick, the man who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, and a self-proclaimed atheist, made this startlingly frank admission :

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going  ( Crick, F., Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1981, p. 88 )

Evolutionists typically scoff at Bible stories that include miraculous elements, such as the account of the virgin birth of Christ.  David White (Single Cell Irony, Creation 32(3):20, June 2010), has cogently pointed out that it really takes no more faith to believe in the virgin birth of Jesus than to believe that the first living cell could have arisen spontaneously.  After all, when considering the feasibility of the virgin birth, it is really only the origin of the first embryonic cell of Jesus that is at issue.  The first fertilized cell in a human embryo contains the entire human genome – all the information required to give rise to a fully-functioning human being.  Once this first cell was formed, Jesus’ embryo would have grown through natural processes, with no further miraculous intervention.  The Bible agrees with this statement, clearly indicating that it was only Jesus’ conception that was miraculous, initiated by the Holy Spirit.

While the thought of a miraculous conception of a fertilized human embryo may seem far-fetched to someone predisposed to believe that supernatural events cannot occur, consider for a moment.  Is it really any harder to believe that God could miraculously fertilize an already-existing egg inside Mary’s womb (an environment perfectly designed and suited for such a feat), thus creating the first embryonic cell that gave rise to Jesus, than to believe that the first living cell on earth arose spontaneously out of chemical soup in circumstances that “just happened” to be perfectly suited for its survival, growth and reproduction?

Yet, oddly, it is creationists who are mocked by evolutionists and criticized for believing in miracles.   It’s beyond reason … seems they must have a hidden agenda, no?

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.  For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  (Romans 1:20-21, NIV)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.  (John 1:1-5, NIV)

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