These past couple of weeks it has been pretty to see the leaves change. To see the leaves change colors and later fall from the tree is a sign of change. Change to colder weather and that Mr. Winter is on the way. Everything has its time and place, but not forever because everything changes. The only thing that doesn’t change is everything changes.

With this in mind we are the same way in our lives. We have a time and place in God’s history, but not forever on our timeline. There have been millions before us and could, if the Lord doesn’t return, be millions more after us. We are here for a season, and then the season will pass. We often make plans as if what we have will be forever, but it simply will not. The property you own has been owned before by someone not in your family, and most likely will not always be owned by your family in the future. Also, our influence fades that we may have gained over time. To think about who was the most influential in the 13^th century A.D. we may have to stop and look it up as will be the case for those regarding our century in the year 2600 A.D.

The point I would make is that we are often invested in the things that are temporary and not eternal. Eternity is a lot bigger thought for us because our minds cannot grasp its entirety. God is inviting us on to His timeline that never fades or runs out, and the leaves there never fall because nothing ever dies there. May we consider our investments into things that will last forever through Him.

I want to begin with one of my favorite passages of Scripture:

Philippians 4:4-7 Holman

Rejoice! Let your graciousness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses every thought, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

This verse to me summarizes the Thanksgiving spirit, and even mentions the attitude of Thanksgiving within its instruction. As believers we should come to God rejoicing because His presence is near us, even when we don’t “feel” Him. We can present our requests to Him with gratitude. Our thankfulness to Him should swallow up our worry because we have so much to be thankful for in this life. Yes, there are hardships and mountains to climb, but thank God we are not alone, and we are promised that God’s peace will guard our hearts and minds in Jesus.

I also want to leave a quote by our first president, George Washington, so that we consider how far we have drifted from the first Thanksgiving in our country.

(Opening quote from the Thanksgiving Proclamation signed by George Washington, President of the United States of America, October 3, 1789)

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor– and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness. 

Sometimes it is hard to find ourselves in such a busy schedule. Busy in part because we often neglect what we should hold as priority which is our fault, and partly because that is the world we live within today. Busy! Busy! Busy! Go! Go! Go! It is hard to come up for air and set boundaries that are necessary for sanity because we are trying so hard to keep up with the pace of life. Especially with the holidays before us we can see the insanity of our culture beginning to grow already only a few days past Halloween as it always does this time of year (and earlier and earlier it seems), and all for the cause of having ‘special family time.’ But is this the way life is supposed to be lived?

What happens to ‘family special time’ the rest of the year? How many families end up with hard feelings after the holidays because somebody’s traditions got stepped on or flat out forgotten? Or somebody didn’t make the usual dish that was considered a favorite to someone or one part of the family got invited that other parts of the family wished were left out. On the surface the holidays seem a happy time of year, and for many they are, but for many it is a pure headache desperately wishing the holiday season passes quickly.

I want to encourage us this year to focus not so much on the silly traditions of the holidays, but the reason we even have these holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas to begin with. Let our gratitude show in the way we treat others, not just family members, but those in check-out lines, customer service, convenient stores, etc. Also, remember that the greatest thing we have to be thankful for is a Savior born to us. So this Thanksgiving and Christmas, even though we are still a few weeks away, let our hearts be filled with love and kindness first towards our Creator and then to those created in His-Image.

Matthew 7:12

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

This past Sunday at church we began discussing putting on the Armor of God. Nobody in their right mind would say it is very smart to go into battle unprepared or without essentials needed to go to war. Yet, everyday Christians are going into the battlefield (school, work, home, and church, yes, even church!) unprepared and without putting on their armor. The first piece of armor the Apostle Paul tells us to put on is the Belt of Truth. The Belt held everything together for the Roman Soldier, and truth likewise holds everything together for the believer. Notice the more a society drifts from the idea of Truth being absolute the more that culture or society begins to fall apart at every level.  We are seeing this before our very eyes today. The second is the breastplate of righteousness, and this word righteousness is related to justice. We are to cover or guard our vital organs with justice. If we hold to truth then there can be justice, but if truth is done away with then justice is no more because justice would simply be an opinion of perspective. The third piece of armor is having your feet shod with the Gospel of Peace. I saw a meme on Facebook that said, “I’ve often wondered what I would do if I found out I only had one day to live. Would I eat junk or go crazy, etc.? Jesus knew, and on his last day to live He washed feet.” Why did Jesus wash His disciple’s feet? He knew that it was these feet that He would be sending out into the world to carry His good news of repentance and redemption. We must as believers be willing to go into the dark places of the world because we are carrying the message of light. Don’t forget to put on your armor of God for protection and peace in a world where the enemy is waiting to attack. We will discuss the rest of the Armor of God next week. Until then be the light of the world!

Ephesians 6:14-15

Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.^[1]

^[1] The Holy Bible: New International Version. (1984). (Ephesians 6:14–15). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

In light of the events over this past weekend at the Party Venue outside of Greenville where a senseless act of violence took place, a mass shooting, we ask ourselves ‘What is wrong with this world?’ Truthfully the world often acts the way the world would be expected to act without Christ as the center point of life. The more we move into a post-Christian society in America the more we see Christian values, whether we are Christian or not, that we have enjoyed and taken for granted for so long go to the wayside. We are moving into a society that has lost its consciousness and moral anchor point.

The question we need to be asking ourselves in light of the many mass shootings is, “What happened to human dignity and the value of human life?” The question I often ponder to myself is where or when did we get to a point when killing each other was not the last choice but the first. The problem is we no longer see the value in each other all we see are our differences. The art of debate has become as much ancient history as the Roman Empire. We no longer have conversations, but simply actions without prior thought. We see skin color, political perspectives, cultural differences, but we have lost the ability to see each other as human beings created in God’s Image. The fact that each one of us are created in His Image should give each human value even among our differences.

Genesis 1:26

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.”

C. S Lewis once said, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”

 When you read this it makes so much sense. As a pastor I have been asked many times that if Jesus never sinned, how could he be truly human. My response is that because Jesus never sinned, He is the only One who has truly been human. The rest of us fall short of our created intentions because our sins rob us of our created purpose.

We as believers must learn to push back against the temptations that befall us. We must truly learn the discipline of being or becoming a disciple of Christ. We must let love for Jesus be the motivation to not yield to temptation and not simply a religious moralistic framework of what we’re supposed to do so we can look like the “Good Christian.” If religion alone is our motivation to do right then we will live as failures of the cross of grace.

I remember taking Geometry in high school, and our teacher was describing how important math was to life (I guess some of us students were questioning it at the time) and gave the example that if you were to build a Skyscraper in which the math was off just a hair at the bottom that it would result in being way off at the top. This is a clear example in how Satan works in his temptations. He isn’t going to come at you full bore because we would readily recognize the strategy and reject it. Instead he gets us to buy in to just 2% of the lie, and lets the rest work itself out until we find our lives way off from the life God would have us live. He begins in the small things to later attack the big. Charles Spurgeon once said, “When Satan cannot get a great sin in he will let a little one in, like the thief who goes and finds shutters all coated with iron and bolted inside. At last he sees a little window in a chamber. He cannot get in, so he puts a little boy in, that he may go round and open the back door. So the devil has always his little sins to carry about with him to go and open back doors for him, and we let one in and say, ‘O, it is only a little one.’ Yes, but how that little one becomes the ruin of the entire man!” Beware that our greatest deviations from God begin in the little choices that we make.

When you listen to either the world news or the local news we see so much pain and heartache. We see so much devastation, division, and destruction that overwhelms us and makes us not like the world we live within. We see people struggling with a sense of meaning and purpose finding themselves often discouraged and alone. Well, no new news here, but this is the world in which we live. We live in a Fallen World where not everyone recognizes the Prince of Peace as Jesus and desires to follow Him. Many choose the Prince of Darkness and follows him because he seems to offer selfishness and pleasure as the end goal whereas Christ offers a new life.

The trouble is we often don’t know or realize when we are being deceived. The Prince of Darkness seeks to destroy, divide, discourage, assists us in our doubts and to ultimately deceive. This is evident every time we turn on the news. This world’s Prince of Darkness loves to hurt and devastate where the world’s rightful Lord and King wants to heal and bring peace in unity. With each choice we make in our life we either are supporting the Prince of Peace who is the Light of the World, the Lord Jesus Himself, or the Prince of Darkness which comes to destroy without bias. C.S. Lewis once said,“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” Who are you turning to in your choices today? Whose agenda do you support in your choices? Ultimately to have world peace, peace must begin within our own heart, and this begins when we choose to follow the Prince of Peace, King Jesus!

Recently in our church we have been studying through the book of Philippians. There are so many great truths to realize in that short little book. There is one that sticks out to all of us and many of us can even quote the verse, but many of us may never realize the depth of its meaning because we jump off the train too quick. It is the verse that says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” We often say this verse to pump us up before facing some challenge, but the reality is Paul is writing this in the context of being a prisoner when he can’t provide for himself. He was telling the Philippian church who had just sent him provisions that he knows what it is like to have much and to have little but the secret of contentment is in the knowing that in Jesus he is and without Jesus he is not.  This was not a statement to pump or psych out the Apostle Paul during a rough patch in his journey but rather the reality that he lived within. On the outside Paul was a prisoner with much need, but on the inside Paul states he is full and filled with abundance because it is Christ who strengthens him.

We see in this short letter that Paul had a different perspective than the rest of us. He did not let his attitude be dictated by his circumstances, but rather his attitude or mood was dictated in his love for Jesus and the love he knew Jesus had for him. Circumstances change in our lives but the love of God never does, and He is always our provision.

I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Philippians 4:13

September 26

Psalm 46:10 – Be still, and know that I am God;

When I was young my mother used to tell me I had “Ants in my Pants” because I wouldn’t sit still much as I was always into something. Sadly, we have become an “Ants in your Pants” society because most of us hate being still. How many people constantly stay on their phone nowadays? We are a culture of little busy-bodies! Over time this kind of approach to life is exhausting to our body and draining to our spirit.

In this little verse, God is calling us to be still, but why? The answer is to know that He is God and not ourselves, or some circumstance or interruption in life. The reason many of us struggle with hearing from God is because our lives are too loud, too busy with our own self-will that we cannot hear as Elijah did ‘the still, small voice of God’ (1 Kings 19:11-13). Sitting in silence, allowing our minds to declutter and detox from the junk of the world is a necessary practice for spiritual sanity. Biblical meditation is refocusing the mind on God unlike the Eastern practice where one attempts to empty their mind which is actually logically impossible. We must learn to recapture the silence and the stillness of life and let the beauty of God rekindle the fire within our hearts. There is a time to be busy, but the joy you get out of the busyness of life will be determined in how connected you are with God in those still moments we create everyday.