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.

When I came to faith in Christ and my life began to change, the Lord gave me a real heart for lost friends.  All of mine but one were lost.  One in particular was my hunting, fishing, and dating friend from high school named Bill.  I couldn’t wait to get home so I could talk with him about Jesus.  The week before I went home I prayed daily and had some church friends do the same.

             When I got to Tallahassee I went to his house and asked him if we could go to his room.  He sat on his bed and I sat on the floor.  I began saying something like, “Something has happened to me, and although it is new it is also really wonderful.  I have accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior, and He is truly changing my life.”

             The look on his face changed from pleasant to not so pleasant.  He looked at me and said, “Why are you telling me this?”  I said, “I don’t know.  I know your family is Baptist, but we have never discussed Christ in any way, so I figured you were Baptist like I was Episcopalian – in name only.”  “Well, I’m not.  I’m ok.”  It was pretty much the end of the conversation, and it put a real chill on our relationship for quite a while.

             Surprisingly enough I didn’t feel like a failure at the time, although the strain hurt me because Bill had been a friend of mine since cub scouts (and we still are friends.)  I did feel like I had done what the Lord would have me do and that I needed to leave the results to God.  With occasional twinges of regret, that’s what I did.

             Can you imagine the joy several years later when I heard from him that as a law student in Birmingham, Alabama, he had prayed to receive Christ? Now we were brothers in Christ.  It was also a real relief because all signs of the strain between us were gone.

             I remember at the time thinking it could be difficult to win a friend to Christ who had done so many non-Christian things with me and who would remember me much more in that light than he would in the new light of Christ and that if it put a strain on our relationship or indeed if I lost a friend but he eventually came to faith in Christ, it would be worth the strain.  I think that was the right calculation. Sometimes I think that I and the rest of us take the other side of the calculation – that I would rather maintain a friendship than alienate someone even for a time by seeking to share my faith with them.

             I hope you are thinking about who you can share your faith with, that you will share prayerfully, and that you will leave the results of your sharing to God.  God bless you as you develop the harvest mind and as you apply it to the people God has put 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.

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!!!!