When you have trouble keeping your mind on your Bible reading, praying, or on a sermon (never happens at Shandon – right?), here are a few tips:

1) Don’t expect too much of yourself.  When you do, in any field of endeavor -including time with God – it leads to short-term trying harder and a long-term sense of failure frequently followed by quitting.  There are parts of Scripture that are fascinating.  There are prayer needs that are riveting.  There are others that are common and everyday but still important.  Set a level of focus that is fairly normal, and if you fall below that normal level of focus, make yourself go back and start again as a discipline. 

 2) Tell yourself you’re going to have to pass a pop quiz on this passage and make yourself pay attention to the details.  While you pay attention to the details, you may be surprised at the inspiration that pops out of the page at you. 

3)  When your mind wanders during prayer, just stop.  Say, “Lord, excuse me for just a moment.”  Pick up a paper and pen or pencil and write out the distraction you have.  Then you won’t forget it and you’ll be able to go back to it and deal with it when you’re through with prayer.  As soon as you’re finished jotting down a note, just start talking with God again when you were interrupted.

4) Ask yourself, “Why am I bored with this passage of Scripture or this prayer need?”  Maybe you need to eliminate that prayer for a time.  That’s ok to do.  With Scripture, maybe you don’t have any idea why it was written in the first place.  (For example: law, genealogies.)  You can also find out from a Bible dictionary why that Scripture was written such as Nelson’s New Bible Dictionary (the best one-volume, Bible dictionary I know of at this point).  That has helped me, at times, to make difficult passages more interesting.  Also, I’ve been really rewarded by puzzling over something that is in Scripture for years (like genealogies) and finally getting it.  As one man said to me, “I wouldn’t spoil your search to understand the genealogies by telling you why they were written for anything.”  Twenty-five years later, I’m glad Dr. Nelson didn’t give me a quick and easy answer, and I’m glad the Lord made me puzzle about it.  I’m not going to tell you why either.

I had not been a Christian for long when I heard a pastor preach a sermon in which he put people down who came to church on Easter and Christmas and made it very plain that God’s true people were the people who came all the time.  I was very bothered by it at the time.  I felt somewhat good about the fact that I was an all-the-timer.  However, I was bothered about it because I thought about the number of times I went to church on Easter and at Christmas and felt very special about it and actually felt a touch of God.  I wondered how I would have felt if I had been at that stage and had heard him basically congratulate himself and all the regular attendees.  Now that I have had time to grow in my faith, I realize all that was wrong with that outlook. 

             Christianity is very different from Judaism in that Christianity is a faith composed of insiders who are committed to outsiders.  When we become a community of insiders committed to insider-ism, we become something Christianity has never been nor will ever be designed to do.  I certainly would never want to talk about Easter/Christmas attendees as being an ideal.  But to have unkind feelings or have the feeling that we are somehow special rather than people who are most fortunately graced by our great God is a denial of the truth.  We were all sinners when we were called.  We remain redeemed sinners in our calling, and when we go to heaven to finally be glorified and perfected, it will all be by the great grace of God. 

             Let us respond this Easter and every week to those who have not yet embraced our faith with a profound understanding that we are saved by the grace of God and by that alone, not by our inherent goodness. Let us grant to them a joyful welcome, letting them know we love and appreciate them.  Yes, they will probably get the idea that we really need them and will be lucky to have them and they’ll never really understand that that is not true until they come to Christ themselves and recognize what they’ve missed all their lives.  God bless you.  Happy Easter.  Let’s do all we can.

A friend of mine sent an e-mail to me with the most amazing account.  Did you know that the very first meal eaten on the surface of the moon was communion taken by Buzz Aldrin as he read a passage of Scripture from John 15?  He was an elder in a Presbyterian Church in Texas, and this was something his pastor worked out for him to do. 

             I found this to be most inspiring and a great and glorious testimony to the wonder of the Lord Jesus Christ.  You can read below the account Buzz Aldrin gives of that first meal on the moon.  God bless you as you read.  We serve a great and mighty God.

 
 (This is an article by Eric Metaxas) 
 
 Forty years ago today two human beings changed history
 by walking on the surface of the moon. But what happened before Buzz
 Aldrin and Neil Armstrong exited the Lunar Module is perhaps even more
 amazing, if only because so few people know about it. “I’m talking
 about the fact that Buzz Aldrin took communion on the surface of the moon. 

 Some months after his return, he wrote about it in Guideposts magazine.
 
 
  And a few years ago I had the privilege of meeting him
 myself. I asked him about it and he confirmed the story to me, and
 I wrote about in my book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God
 (But Were Afraid to Ask). 
 
 The background to the story is that Aldrin was an elder at his
 Presbyterian Church in Texas during this period in his life, and knowing
 that he would soon be doing something unprecedented in
 human history, he felt he should mark the occasion somehow, and he asked his pastor to help him. And so the pastor consecrated a communion wafer and a small vial of communion wine. And Buzz Aldrin took them with him out of the Earth’s orbit and on to the surface of the moon. 
 
 He and Armstrong had only been on the lunar surface
 for a few minutes when Aldrin made the following public statement: 
 ”This is the LM pilot. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every
 person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a  moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.” He then ended radio communication and there,  on the silent surface of the moon, 250,000 miles from home, he read a verse from the Gospel of John, and he took communion. Here is his own account of what happened: 

 ”In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches.  Whosoever abidesin me will bring forth much fruit.  Apart from me you can do nothing. 
 
 I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute [they] had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray 
 O’Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly. 
 
 I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion
 elements. 
 
 And of course, it’s interesting to think that some of the first words spoken on the moon were the words of Jesus Christ, who made the Earth and the moon – and Who, in the immortal words of Dante, is Himself the “Love that moves the Sun and other stars.”
 
 WOW!!!! 

1 John 1:5-10  

          The first sermon from 1 John covered the reality of the Christian life as an experience with God.  The second half of this chapter deals with the Christian life as a different experience with sin.  It’s important that you read this part of the chapter also and understand how it applies to your life.  Let me help.

             I’m well aware that when the subject of sin is raised, gloom and doom is anticipated.  It is actually no gloomier than raising the subject of smallpox when a 100 percent effective cure is available.  Sin is a gloomy subject only for the prideful who don’t want to admit they have a problem they cannot solve on their own.  The doctrine of sin is really the most practical and helpful doctrine in Scripture.  Nothing sets you up for miserable heartbreak in life like denial of the reality of sin.  When we believe life is rosy or everybody is good and just occasionally messes up a little, we are sure to be not just disappointed but to be gut punched.  When we understand what 1 John 1:5-10 teaches about sin, we understand it is the most fixable problem any of us will ever face.  However, it is also a problem that we MUST deal with honestly and successfully.  This cannot be done apart from the grace of Jesus Christ.

             But we have the grace of Christ.  In it we are able to establish a new relationship that is not casual (I’m only human) but secure (in my sinful humanity I am confident enough in God’s love to be able to quickly and easily recognize and confess my sins).  What has God done to make this possible?

             Verses 5 – 6 teach that the new relationship is a RELATIONSHIP OF LIGHT.  We want God to shine the light of His truth and holiness into every corner of our lives and point out our dirt, failures, and sins.  Verse 1:7 tells us that as believers God’s truth is light for us that enables us to look honestly at our sins, and the inability to be honest about sin means we are still in the dark.  So the first difference is we grow in our preference for honesty and clarity and our rejection of denial, dishonesty, and rationalization regarding sin.

             In your personal devotional life try saying, “Dear God, You are welcome in my life.  Please point out anything to me that displeases You. I am ready to hear anything You may have to say to me about my sin.”  Receptivity to the light of God is the first difference, and verses 8 and 10 reemphasize this idea because of open honesty with God and His Word. 

             How do we say we have no sin apart from outright denial?  We do so when we say things like my sin doesn’t matter because it’s no worse than anybody else’s or it doesn’t matter because I don’t see it doing any direct harm to anyone else. Verse 8 says the unwillingness to acknowledge and deal with sin is self-deception.  It indicates a lack of truth in us. That is, the light described in verses 5 – 7 is absent from our lives.  In verse 10 when we say we have no sin, we make God and His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, a liar and indicate His Word – the Word of God – is not active and working in our lives because when it is, we will freely admit, “I am a sinner.  I have sinned.  I need God’s redeeming grace.” 

 (Continued in my next blog)