Sunday’s message (April 11) raised thoughtful questions from a couple of church members. They indicated that the three circles diagram, as it relates to the family, was helpful but wondered how they could go about moving from one circle to the other or how they could encourage a spouse to move from one circle to the other.

             First make sure you are interested in your own level of involvement before you become interested in your spouse’s.  The parable of the mote and the beam (Matt. 7:3) is instructive here.  All of us need to be committed spouses and none of us are as committed as we need to be.  So pay attention to the person you see in the mirror before you pay attention to the person sitting across the table from you.  The beam in our own eyes always needs some work.

             As to how you go about moving yourself in the direction you should go, let’s look at I Corinthians 2:14 – 3:3.  These verses describe three spiritual positions.  The first is the position of the natural man. He is lost, separated from Christ, and does not have the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:14).  The second position is the man of flesh or the carnal Christian (1 Corinthians 3:1-3).  This man is born again and will go to heaven when he dies but is centered in himself rather than in the Lord.  The third position is the spiritual man (I Corinthians 2:15-16) who is centered in the Spirit of God and has the mind of Christ.  In order to move from being the natural man to being a Christian, you must believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.  In order to move from being a carnal Christian to being a spiritual Christian, you must surrender to the Lordship of Christ.  The natural man does not have Christ.  The carnal man does not have Lordship.  The spiritual man has Jesus Christ as Lord because he is willing to do anything the Lord wants.

             The same principles apply to the family and your level of involvement. The person who is an interested spouse and has been one for a while may be a person who has gotten comfortable in being a carnal Christian (focused primarily on flesh/self) or he may be a person who is lost and separated from Christ.  Only you can know which condition you are in.  If you are lost, in order to move beyond being a merely interested spouse to involved, make sure you are born again.  Can you be specific about the time you repented of your sins and received Christ through faith?  Are you trusting good religious feelings (which EVERYBODY has) or are you trusting the Lord?  If you are born again, sincerely ask the Lord to help you focus on your wife and children more than on yourself.

             The involved spouse is frequently a high level carnal Christian.  He is interested in what he can do for the family in his own power.  His motives are excellent, but his methods and means are lacking.  His methods are not generated by the Holy Spirit.  It isn’t that he doesn’t have a good heart, it is that he doesn’t have the power of God in order to carry out the desires of his heart.  That’s why oftentimes he finds his efforts to be less than joyful.  So the person who is the involved spouse, who I am assuming has been born again, needs to surrender to the Lordship of Christ by telling God you surrender to Him and are willing to do whatever He wants you to do.  Ask God to give you the power of His Spirit and to show you how to live the Christian life in your family in the power of Christ.  The surrendered spouse is the “committed” spouse.  He (she) is the person who has received Jesus Christ as both Savior and Lord and is walking in the Lordship and in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. 

             Whatever change needs to occur in your life begins with prayer and proceeds by continuous prayer.  To ask the Lord to do this work in your life is very important, and this goes both for which stage of church life you are in or which stage of family life you are in.  I hope this helps. 

             I’m going to speak to that this coming Sunday and perhaps that will make it even clearer.  I’m grateful for the interest shown by the two people who asked me this question.  I love hearing from you.  I pray God’s blessings on you getting to the committed core in both the church and family, the two most important teams in your life.

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.

                                                                                                      Ever been to Ridgeway, S.C.?  On Main Street there’s an old general store a friend of mine told me about.  I went up there because I wanted to see such a store.  While I was there, I bought a pair of overalls because I thought they would make a perfect souvenir from an old country store.  The store turned out to be as neat as I had hoped – unpainted, unvarnished floors, an old skylight, shelves full of every imaginable item of clothing, farm implement, and kitchenware. It was a lot like a museum where everything was for sale.  I’ve never forgotten it.

            Years later a man named John Ruff joined our church and mentioned he was from Ridgeway.  I started talking about this store and he said, “That’s my store.  It’s been in my family forever.  Come back and I’ll show you around.”  I took him up on it.  Back in the warehouse of the store I ran across a seed rack that he said was from the 1800’s.  Think of that.  Tomato seeds, turnip seeds, watermelon seeds all sitting around with perfect potential but never producing anything.  As the Lord Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies it will bear much fruit” (John 12:24).  We have the seeds of the Gospel in our Bibles and, if we are converted, in our hearts, souls, and minds.  At the end of your life will the seed God has placed in your life look like Mr. Ruff’s seed rack – interesting, old, and unused – or will it look like well used, sown, and multiplied sources of joy in eternal life in the lives of the people with whom you shared them?

            I’m listening to a piece of music written in 1721 titled Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 by Johann Sebastian Bach.  While this kind of music is not everyone’s cup of tea, my mother taught me to love it.  I’m glad she did.  I do still love it.

            Question:  Do you know the names of any of your relatives or what they were doing in or around 1721?  I don’t and have almost no interest in finding out.  Very few people do know unless they become interested in family trees.  Bach wrote this 288 years ago and it is still bringing joy to me and to others.  If you could do something today that would last at least 288 years, would you do it? 

GOOD NEWS!  We can all do something that will last that long and longer.  While at a worldly level I probably cannot do anything that will last that long (although you never know), spiritually I can and so can you.  My college roommate is coming to see me today.  What he did with and for me from 1966 – 1970 will live on in my son and daughter and in the lives of those converted to Christ under my ministry. (“My” is in the sense of identification rather than possession).  All of us who are in Christ have been given something that will last forever but only if we get it into the lives of others.  Unfortunately, most of us treat the Gospel like some garden seeds I’ll tell you about in my next blog.  The Gospel must be shared, and when you do you are doing the only thing I’m confident will bring joy to the lives of others 288 – indeed millions – of years from now.  The seed of the Gospel produces crops that last forever.