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.

Thanks for your favorable responses to this past Sunday’s sermon.  The antichrist is an interesting subject, and I want to share a few more thoughts on what I think it means to acknowledge the presence of the antichrist in our world. There are three basic beliefs about God in the world:  antitheism, deism, and theism.

1.  ANTITHEISM – This belief holds there is no God and that the material universe just happens to exist.  There is no explanation for it.  There is no purpose for it.  It started nowhere.  It’s going nowhere.  It has no creator and does not need to be understood except as something that is material and exists.  This outlook finds the idea of the Christ and antichrist equally unnecessary.  Evil is a behavioral problem.  There are no spiritual problems.
2.  DEISM – There is a God (or gods).  He or they probably made the universe.  He has no personal involvement in its management or preservation, and he does not enjoy it because he is uninvolved with it.  The enemies of the Gospel whom John is confronting in his letters (called Gnostics) were a lot like these deists.  They believed God existed but was uninvolved, distant, and knowable only as we speculated, argued, and disagreed.  Even then we could not be certain.  This outlook also finds no place for antichrist.  Everything here plays out at a behavioral level.  Prayer and the Spirit of God are an illusion.
3.  THEISM – There is a God.  He created, manages, and loves the universe, the world, and all that is in it.  He is personal in nature.  He reveals Himself to people in many ways and is interested in us and how we’re doing.  He not only pays attention to us, but He helps us and intervenes.

             The doctrine of the antichrist reminds me that the material world is governed spiritually and is headed for a spiritual destination.  The problems that come my way are not just a result of the need to reengineer the material world.  There is also a need for me to deal with the spirit of the antichrist in this world of ours.  Other than this being interesting, why should this idea be important to you?

Over the past week, I’ve posted 5 practical helps to anchor your life in Christ.  As a reminder, only a personal, born-again relationship with Christ will ultimately anchor us, but there are some practical steps we can take to compliment our relationship with the Lord.

Here are the first four followed by the final and 5th help.

Anchor 1: A well broken-in Bible

Anchor 2: Calloused Knees

Anchor 3: Worn out Shoes

Anchor 4: Worn out church clothes

Anchor 5:

A CHRIST-CENTERED DATEBOOK OR CHECKBOOK (or on-line account) – I was told early on that what you love you will spend time and money for.  What do your datebook and checkbook say about your love for the Lord?  Pay attention to this when you balance your checkbook.  Could either or both of these books be used as evidence to convict you of being a Christian? 

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            The Lord be with you as you enhance your sense of connection to God.  It is His greatest gift to us, and He means for us to experience it and enjoy it.