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)

             A few months ago when I felt led to preach the four sermons for Christmas, I was bothered because I wasn’t going to read the Christmas story and the sermons were coming from the Gospel of John, which doesn’t recount any of the birth narratives.  Yet I felt strongly led to do it.  The sermon I felt the most strongly led to preach was the one from this past week titled, “The Gift of Eternal Life.”  However, I felt it was a little out of place at Christmas.  Every time I thought about changing it, the Spirit of God said, “Don’t do it.”

             At the 10:00 service, I felt good about the message and how it went, but at the 11:30 service when the invitation was given and a lot of young people who were here for the Chick-Fil-A Classic Basketball Tournament came forward, I thought, “That was God’s purpose in putting this on my heart.”

             The experience this past Sunday was very different from many of the other times we’ve hosted these young people from around the country.  We had about 20 or 25 people come forward at the end of the worship service making different kinds of decisions but all moved by the Spirit of God.

             I’m grateful to the Lord that He led me to do that and gave our church the opportunity to see that kind of response to His message and the work of the Holy Spirit.  Keep praying that the Lord would work in my heart, in the hearts of each staff member, and in the hearts of the lay leadership in our church.  God is good.  He is at work in this world of ours to will and to do for His good pleasure and for His glory.  It is a joy to be a part of that.  I hope it is for you too.

We’ve invited our church to get in the game with pledging this year.  It has been such an odd year financially for the nation and for the Columbia area that I wasn’t sure what to expect.  At the end of Sunday, we had pledged $150,000 more than we had pledged at the same time last year, and last year we had a great pledge campaign.

             This can only happen when God’s people dig down deep and get into the faith dimension before they ever start thinking about what they’re going to pledge in the financial dimension.  I’m grateful for the dollars you will give.  Make no mistake, we can’t run this church on air.  However, if it only becomes a matter of affordability or financial wisdom, then we lose touch with the great lessons stewardship has to offer us – that primary lesson being faith. 

             I see a lot of faith in what all of you did.  It demonstrates you love the Lord.  It demonstrates you have a commitment to reaching out to the world in season and out.  I look forward to us finishing the year strong, our giving being great, and our bringing honor to God in demonstrating to the world that we love God more than we love ourselves.  Thank you for being a great church and thank you for sharing the rewards of faith with each other and with the world.

  I once had the opportunity to interview a staff member in Jacksonville, FL (actually Jacksonville Beach).  I arranged the interview so I could be at First Baptist in downtown Jacksonville to attend their weekly worker’s meeting followed by their Wednesday evening midweek service.  The teacher’s meeting was amazing.  Imagine me still remembering a Sunday school worker’s meeting this many years later.  Guynelle Freeman gave a five-minute talk about reaching the lost that still makes me want to go out and reach out. 

             As soon as this worker’s meeting was over, I walked to the sanctuary so I could get a good seat.  I hadn’t been there two minutes when a gentleman came, sat down beside me, introduced himself, and said, “You know, I love my church.”  I said, “I can see why.  It’s a tremendous church.”  He said, “But I never knew what it meant to love my church until I repented of my sins and received Jesus as my Savior.  Has that ever happened to you?” 

             “Oh, yes,” I said.  “Could I tell you about it?”  I did, and he asked, “What do you do?”  When I told him he got embarrassed.  I said, “Thank you for giving me the chance to be sure.  Your love for the Lord inspires me.”  Ten minutes later another gentleman did the same thing with the same results.  That (not the sermon, the music, the budget, or the buildings) is what does make a church great.  By that standard, how great are you making our church?  It’s a good question for all of us to ask week by week as we are called to go into the highways, hedges, pews, and hallways to bring people to faith in Jesus Christ.

             Years ago as I was leaving Singapore I stopped a Singapore Airlines flight attendant to ask if my seat was a bulkhead aisle seat so I could change it if it was not.  She said, “Yes, exactly.”  Two hours later I boarded the plane.  Standing by my seat was this attendant who said, “53-B Mr. Lincoln.  Have a nice flight.”  Again, I was deeply impressed.  I don’t expect anyone to know my name in this big, impersonal world, and I’m not the least bit bothered by being just a face in the crowd when I travel.  But when somebody does know my name it really impresses me. 

 True or not our church feels big and is assumed to be impersonal by a lot of people who visit us.  If it turns out to be so because no one reaches out to them when they come, they may be a little disappointed but they are not surprised.  What an opportunity that gives us.  What if, for the next year, nobody could get into our out of our church building without being welcomed warmly, introduced to at least one other church member, and thanked for coming.  Let’s be the most surprisingly friendly church in Columbia starting today.

            The Jesus Challenge has been a lot of fun this year.  It has particularly been fun as we have emphasized doing small things for people. 

            Going the second mile is a concept that makes an enormous difference in other people’s lives and strangely makes a real difference in ours when we go the second mile.  Taking the opportunity to help people when they don’t expect it and when you have no obligation to give it is a character and heart-life improving exercise. 

            This past Sunday morning I mentioned taking the shopping baskets (the kind that you carry around in the store) back to the pile for the cashier and mentioning it to the cashier.  I found myself caught between two points as I was thinking about telling her why I wanted to do that.  The first point was the desire to be modest and not call attention to myself.  The second was the desire to bear witness to the fact that Jesus Christ does put things like this in our hearts to do.  I’m glad I mentioned to her that I was doing it because of Christ and The Jesus Challenge, but I think it is always something we need to keep examining in ourselves.  Am I calling attention to myself or do I truly want to glorify Jesus? 

We can tie ourselves in knots worrying about such things, and I don’t want you to do that.  The truth is, if you are seeking self-recognition, it is not a condemnable offense.  Even Paul said of those who were preaching the Gospel out of envy and strife that it didn’t matter to him why people did it as long as the Gospel was preached.  So let’s give glory to Christ.  Let’s engage in The Jesus Challenge by helping people, and I hope you enjoy a fuller heart because you gave of yourself to others.

First of all, thank you for the feedback you gave on the last post.  I would ask that you do the same for this one.

At the beginning of September I’ll be planning all the sermons for our church for 2010.  What would you like to hear me preach about during 2010?  I prefer three to four sermon series on subjects that require Biblical truth to be helpful and pretty readily lean toward the how to (instead of merely an idea or a concept).  In other words, I like to try to answer the question:  How will this sermon help someone live life better?  You don’t have to sign your suggestion, but it is a huge help to me to be able to contact you, if need be, on stuff like this.  For me, conversation beats e-mail where I need to try to understand your idea more clearly.  So if you could give me the easiest phone number at which I can reach you, it might help me help the church.  Thanx.