New Hope

Sugar Babies and Soul Food

2012-01-18T05:52:00.002-05:00

Do you remember Sugar Babies? They still make those sugary caramel beans. I used to love them when I went to the “Picture Show” at the Colony Theater in Easley, South Carolina. The Sugar Babies tasted great but didn’t nourish me. For nourishment, I ate my grandmother’s Pinto beans, turnip greens, cornbread, and stewed beef. That was “soul food.”

Today, I am beginning to understand that possessions, pleasure, people’s praise, power to impress people, and safety from failure don’t feed my soul. They are Sugar Babies. The love of God is soul food.

Real Love is the love of God, unconditional love that cares about the well being of others without expecting anything in return. Real Love is grace. Imitation love is the praise, power, pleasure, and safety you try to get from other people, and it brings only temporary satisfaction and starves your soul. Real Love flows to you from God through people who have enough of it to give. They give it to you because God is Love and because you need to feel loved. If you try to earn it, you are going after imitation love. If you will give up trying to appear to deserve it and accept it just as you are, Real Love is yours.

More than any other writer in the Bible, John talks about God’s love as Real Love. He says God gave us an image of Real Love when he sent His Son into the world to lay down his life for us. He says Jesus’ example of Real Love is our inspiration for how we will live in the church. Most Christians know John 3:16 by heart. Let’s learn 1John 3:16 – “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”

Plans for 2012

2012-01-05T11:04:00.000-05:00

As I think about New Hope goals for 2012, developing a plan for having more room to grow is at the top of the list. It looks like God is bringing us new hope for healthy growth. We have children and their parents in our programs on both Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. That reality and three other factors enable us to plan for growth.

· Our church is off to a good financial start for 2012. We finished the year with money to put into savings. We have $13,000 in our Building Fund. (Thank you for your faithful giving.)

· Our Church Council has made plans for getting us a site plan that will provide a vision of where we can go in the future with expanded buildings.

· Thanks to the foresight of founding pastor Tom Kelsey and other New Hope leaders, we have a wonderful piece of property on which to build.

Six years ago, God gave me two life-changing things at the same time: becoming pastor of New Hope Baptist Church and knowledge of the principles of Real Love. In God’s providence, I was given a church to love and the knowledge that “our souls require feeling loved in just as real a way as our bodies require air and food.” Greg Baer’s Real Love Bible Study Workbook and his “Essentials of Real Love Seminar” on DVDs have changed the way I see human sinfulness and the Bible’s assertion that “God is love.” I plan to present what I have learned to the church I love as clearly as I can in a series of sermons. Here is the plan.

January 8 What Is Real Love and Why Do We Need It? 1John4:10; Isaiah 55:1-3

January 15 Imitation Love: Sugar Babies vs. Soul Food

January 22 Getting and Protecting Behaviors, also Known as Sin

January 29 Changing Your Judgment of People

February 5 Getting Love So That You Can Give It: A River of Life Flowing Out of Me John 4:7-26

February 12 The Law of Choice and the Law of Consequences

February 17 What Can Real Love Do for a Church?

February 24 Real Love and Eternal Life

Waiting on the Lord

2012-01-05T11:00:00.001-05:00

When Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem he was eight days old. There they met a man named Simeon. “He loved God,” the Gospel of Luke says, “and was waiting for God to save the people of Israel. God's Spirit came to him and told him that he would not die until he had seen Christ the Lord” (4:25-26). Simeon had been waiting patiently for God to fulfill his promise. We don’t know how old Simeon was, but it is likely that he had been waiting a long time when he finally saw eight-day-old Jesus. Think about it: this man did not give up. If he had failed to wait on the Lord, he would have missed his reason for being alive.

We need the faith and patience of Simeon, because we too are called on to wait for what we want from God. What matters is not how long we have to wait for what we want, but the kind of persons we become in the waiting.

Here are the questions to ask yourself as you think of what you are “waiting on the Lord” to see. Am I becoming more loving? Am I becoming more patient? Am I honestly praying, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven?” Am I trusting God to use me to get his will done?

You may be aware that Billy Graham turned 93 recently. In his wonderful book, Nearing Home, he says, “I was taught how to die, but nobody ever taught me how to grow old.” He writes that his wife Ruth wanted a specific saying on her tombstone. She was driving through an area of road construction once. When she finally came to the end of all the markers and equipment along the road, she saw this sign: “END OF CONSTRUCTION. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE.” Those words are over her grave. They are about waiting patiently for the Lord. Each of us is a construction project. We need patience to wait on the Lord.

For Christmas, Give Yourself Some Slack

2011-12-22T17:39:00.002-05:00

Across the years of being a pastor, I have sometimes struggled with the fear that my love for the people of the church would not be enough. That is why I am helped by a conversation that I read recently. A man told his friend that his efforts to do loving things for his brother would probably not be enough, because his brother was so demanding and complained all the time. His friend said, “Give your brother as much care as you can and then do a little more in order to stretch your ability to love. “

The man worried, "What if that's not enough for him? I can tell you it won't be."

"Listen carefully,” his wise friend said. “If it's not enough, it's not enough. You can't give more than you have, anymore than you can be taller than you are. If what you have to give isn't enough for your brother, then you have to be satisfied with your efforts, even if he is not. We're obligated only to do our best to love, never to fill the needs of another person."

We may have people tell us that our efforts to love them--to care for them, be with them, and more--are insufficient. Sometimes they even imply that we as people are not enough. What I am learning is that our inability to be as loving as people sometimes need or want us to be does not mean that we are failures as Christians. We need to grow in our ability to love and accept each other, and be gentle with ourselves in the process.

Colossians 3:12 says, “God loves you and has chosen you as his own special people. So be gentle, kind, humble, meek, and patient.” Giving yourself some slack means being gentle, kind, and patient with yourself as well as with others.

This Christmas, gently push the limits of your ability to love others, but as you grow, be pleased with your efforts. Give yourself and God credit for the progress you see in your life. The Spirit of Jesus is there to guide you and to celebrate your growth with you.

An Amazing Church

2011-12-22T17:35:00.000-05:00

What an amazing church! What an amazing year! Look at a few of the many people stepping forward to make this church go. (The list is far from complete. I don’t have time or space to include all who deserve recognition.)

Judy Hutchinson organized a gift of cookie boxes for the homeless. Our children decorated 140 small boxes. Our ladies filled them with the cookies they baked. Fred Griffith organized a workday. The hedges got trimmed, limbs got cut, debris and leaves go raked. Dalton Kirk organized a Men’s Breakfast. He is already planning the 3^rd one. Our nursery is full of babies. Our youth are performing tonight just before the Choir sings. Scotty Ford-Jones sets up tables and chairs every week. Trae Ford-Jones takes our food gifts to Halifax Urban Ministries every month. Lou Herouart takes pictures. Lois Cox writes notes to guests. Ruth Bradley gives information about us to guests. Erma and Garfield Dreas serve us meals on Wednesdays. Look at today’s list of Children’s Church workers that runs through February, thanks to Joan Wood. Kathy Stryker has set up a Facebook page for New Hope and is working on our web site. Elaine Hardy does Children’s Sermons and edits Connections.

Look at our financial situation: We are $12,419 ahead of our 2011 budget goal. We have commitments of $135,000 toward our 2012 budget goal of $140,000 (rounded off figures). We already have $12,500 in our Building Fund, which we just started.

These things have happened in 2011. Some of them were already in place before then. And before then, all the way back to the foundation of the world, God loves us. Today we love God and we love each other. 2012 is going to be a good year for New Hope.

New Hope in 2012

2011-12-05T20:46:00.001-05:00

For 2012, we have committed to give $89,352 on 31 commitment cards. If you have not turned in your commitment, it is not too late. Just place it in an offering plate.

Wednesday night we adopted a budget for 2012. The total is $140,985. We hope to expand our space for Bible Study classrooms and have placed $10,000 in the budget toward a modular building that we are studying. We also expect to need more help in the nursery and have increased our budget for nursery workers. Based on our giving so far this year, we estimate that we will give approximately $160,000 next year. That means we will make good progress toward adding better facilities. We also will develop a “Master Plan” of the future of our facilities as we look toward the future.

We also voted to begin a Building Fund. I encourage all of us to give our budget tithes and offerings first and then give to the building fund over and above that amount.

I am grateful every day for you, my church, and my loving community in Christ. Thank you for the gifts you gave the church staff on the night of our Thanksgiving meal. We are grateful to be working with you to build a healthy church.

Fleda and I are glad that God brought us to New Hope. God has blessed us through you. Here is the best part of being your pastor: I get to study the Bible and try to tell you on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings what I think I hear God saying. You encourage me by your desire to learn. You encourage me by your listening, learning, and growing in Christ. It is obvious that you want God’s message to shape your lives and our church.

Expecting the Daylight on Its Way to Meet Us

2011-12-05T20:43:00.000-05:00

Fleda and I experienced the joy of expectation while we were at her mother’s house in Easley, South Carolina on Thanksgiving Day. Christa and Matthew are expecting a baby in January. Matthew is our nephew, Fleda’s sister Mary’s son. I had the happy privilege of officiating at their wedding summer before last. Christa showed us the ultrasound picture of the girl she is carrying. We wait to see her face to face when she comes to greet us in the New Year.

Waiting in expectation is a powerful experience.

Christmas is coming and we wait together, expecting God to give us light and love. Paul writes about our expectations of God, "Brothers and sisters ... the moment is here for you to stop sleeping and wake up, because by now our salvation is nearer than when we first began to believe. The night is nearly over, daylight is on the way; so let us throw off everything that belongs to the darkness and equip ourselves for the light" (Romans 13:11-12). Expecting the daylight that is on the way to us means “throwing off what belongs to the darkness and equipping ourselves for the light?” How are we going to do that?

Throwing off what belongs to the darkness includes giving up these four things: trying to get people to like us, trying to control people with anger, withdrawing from relationships instead of working to make them more loving, and covering up pain with shallow pleasures.

Equipping ourselves for the light involves receiving God’s love so that we have it to give. If we are to live in the light of God’s love, we must find ways to receive God’s love and feel it. Then we become able to love as Jesus has loved us. John said, “Those who love their fellow believers live in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble” (1John2:10). There can be nothing more important for us to do here at New Hope than to learn how to love each other. That is how we will be equipped for the light.

As you plan how to use your time this Christmas season, please include time to be with your fellow believers at New Hope. Plan how you will receive and give love to them by listening, by showing that you care, by refusing to criticize, and by showing your joy in being together in Christ.

Give Yourself to God First

2011-11-04T09:45:00.000-04:00

What does it take to be a generous person? Do you have to be rich, have more money than you need, and have lots of resources and time? Do you ever think to yourself, “Someday if I get some extra money, I’ll be generous, but right now, I have to concentrate on taking care of myself?”

The people in the churches of Macedonia (the northern part of Greece and southeastern Europe) were made up of people who believed what the Apostle Paul taught them about Jesus of Nazareth: He is the Messiah that God has sent, our best look at who God is. Jesus died and came back from death to show God’s power over sin: all the destructive ways human beings live, and over death itself. These believers were asked by Paul to give an offering to help people in Jerusalem, because food was scarce for them in those days.

Here is how the Macedonian churches responded according to Paul’s second letter to the Church at Corinth. “While they were being tested by many problems, their extra amount of happiness and their extreme poverty resulted in a surplus of rich generosity. I assure you that they gave what they could afford and even more than they could afford, and they did it voluntarily. They urgently begged us for the privilege of sharing in this service for the saints. They even exceeded our expectations, because they gave themselves to the Lord first and to us, consistent with God’s will.” (8:2-5)

Clearly, what made those believers generous was not having lots of money. What made them generous was that they “gave themselves to the Lord first.” When we give ourselves to God first, we begin to understand that all we have comes from God and belongs to God. We are just the managers of what God entrusts to us. God intends for us to live our lives with “an extra amount of happiness” and share with others what we have, whether it is little or much.

In order to do what God is giving us to do here at New Hope, we need to give generously to our church. What will make us generous is our joy in seeing what God is doing and then giving ourselves to God.

Real Love Drives Out Fear

2011-11-04T09:43:00.000-04:00

A commercial airline pilot called Greg Baer to say that he'd broken up with his wife, his children were a mess, and he was miserable beyond words. The stress was killing him, and he was making mistakes on the job that were endangering his employment. "I don't think I can fly anymore," he said. "I just don't have it."

Greg told him the story of Jumbo the Elephant.

A baby elephant is born in the circus, but the other elephants laugh at him because of his unusually large ears and give him the nickname "Dumbo." Feeling like an outcast, his spirits are lifted by the friendship of a small mouse, Timothy.

Dumbo proves too clumsy to contribute to the elephant acts in the circus, so the boss assigns him to be clown, falling from a platform into a vat of pie filling. After getting drunk one night--that's a story for another day--Dumbo and Timothy wake up the next morning high in a tree. Timothy concludes that Dumbo must have used his big ears to fly there, but Dumbo doesn't believe it and refuses to jump from his leafy perch.

Timothy finds a feather and convinces Dumbo that it's magic and will give him the ability to fly. With the magic feather, Dumbo flies to the ground and returns to the circus, where he discovers that he has been assigned to jump from a much higher platform. Terrified, he jumps but loses his feather on the way down. As he falls, however, Timothy tells him that the feather was never magical, and that Dumbo had his own ability to fly. Dumbo pulls out of his dive, flies around the audience, and is hailed as a hero and star.

"Dumbo could fly,” Greg said to the pilot, “He proved that by flying up into the tree. But once he was there, he couldn't fly anymore, and only one thing prevented that: his fear. Fear distorts our thinking, alters our perceptions, and twists our behavior. You've already proven you can fly. There's no doubt about it, but you've recently been severely handicapped by fear--not primarily of flying, but of being a less worthwhile person as a result of all the unloving experiences you have endured from early childhood to the present."

The pilot learned to tell the truth and allow some loving people to see him, flaws, fears, and all. He found God’s love flowing to him through a number of people. His fears began to evaporate, and he's now flying--literally and figuratively.

Fear is crippling. As long as we're afraid--until we address the root cause of all fears--we cannot make full use of our abilities.

No human emotion is spoken of more often in the Bible than fear. The Bible wants to help us get over our fear. One instance of the Bible telling us that God wants us to get past our fear is 1John 4:18 which says, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”

Attend the Real Love Seminar to learn how love drives out fear.

Love Filling Lives

2011-11-04T09:42:00.000-04:00

Can anybody doubt the need for the increase of love in our world? Just today, October 20, 2011, the front page of the Daytona Beach News-Journal reports a city official arrested for beating a man and shattering bones in his face, parents allowing their teenager to keep marijuana and poisonous snakes in his room, and a man in authority using his power to secure sex from young girls. What is the cure for the destructive actions we read about in the paper every day? It is the love of God filling our lives so that we don’t keep trying to fill up our emptiness with power or pleasure or praise.

People who are in healthy small groups tend to increase their ability to love others. I see it in “Grief Support Groups.” As members of the groups share their experiences, discover what they have in common, and encourage each other, love naturally grows in their hearts. I believe this is what God wants for each of us and what God wants for our church: that we learn how to grow in our love for God and for others.

In our Real Love Groups, I see it, too. When people in the groups are able to tell the truth about their own sins and selfishness and talk together about how they are learning to gather the love they need and give it to others – even those who are angry and unloving toward them – they grow in love for one another.

Here is the Bible on the growth of love among members of the church in 1 Thessalonians 3:11 and 4:9 (Message). “May God our Father himself and our Master Jesus clear the road to you! And may the Master pour on the love so it fills your lives and splashes over on everyone around you, just as it does from us to you. . . . Regarding life together and getting along with each other, you don't need me to tell you what to do. You're God-taught in these matters. Just love one another! You're already good at it. . . . Keep it up; get better and better at it. “

This is what our church is about: learning how to let the Master pour on the love so that it fills us and overflows from us.

As We Grow: God's Tender Mercies

2011-11-04T09:41:00.000-04:00

I don’t often change my sermon plans in the middle of the week, but this week I have done it. The reason is twofold.

1. Two young adults are ready to be baptized and talked to me about it Wednesday night.

2. We are observing communion today.

So I have changed my plans for my sermon today. It seems very important to talk to the whole congregation about the importance of baptism and of the Lord’s Supper and why we obey Jesus and do these two things Jesus told us to do.

The other day, I asked several people to pray for New Hope as we grow. We now have Sunday morning Bible Study Classes that need larger rooms. We have the potential to have three or four babies with us on Sunday and/or Wednesday, and we have only one baby bed in our small nursery. When you pray, ask God to give us guidance in answering the questions: How are we going to expand our buildings to match the growth we are experiencing? How are we going to raise the money we need to pay for that expansion?

Last Sunday as we dedicated Drew and Dusti Heil’s sons, Andrew and Ashton, we also dedicated T. J. and Stephanie Pullin’s daughter, Finley. Then we welcomed Drew and Dusti as new members of New Hope. Dusti came to us on promise of a letter of recommendation from another church. Drew came asking us to baptize him. We have scheduled his baptism for Sunday, October 23 at 2pm. Further details will be forthcoming. We give our thanks to God for all His goodness and tender mercies.

Armand: Man of Compassion and of Music

2011-10-05T12:25:00.000-04:00

When I came to be the pastor of New Hope I was surprised by the amazing talent of our accompanist, Armand Melnbardis. I had never heard anyone play the keyboard with such a flare for making it sound joyful and relaxing. Before long, I also saw something even more important about Armand. He is a man of compassion who enjoys learning about how to have healthy and loving relationships.

Armand attracted friends to his concerts. Occasionally they would come to hear him play the keyboard and the violin in New Hope worship services. And then I saw him begin to attract friends to our Real Love Groups. He gave his time and attention to people who wanted to learn how God ‘s grace flows thought people when they are able to receive and give unconditional love.

Sindy Young was also from Latvia, died of cancer almost 5 years ago. Her’s was the first funeral I conducted at New Hope. Erma Dreas tells me that she remembers a time when Armand called and asked, “Will you take care of Sindy’s baby while we try to encourage her and bring her out of serious depression. He recruited help, offered his friendship and did what he could in a desperate situation.

The longer I have known Armand, the more I have developed respect for his compassion. When I started the first Real Love group at New Hope, Armand was there from the first meeting. Over the years I have seen him grow spiritually and emotionally.

Go with God, Armand. We will keep you in our hearts and pray for you to find a great church, people through whom God’s love will flow to you, and many opportunities to serve God by loving others unconditionally.

Parents and Church Promising to Bring up Children in the Faith

2011-10-05T12:13:00.004-04:00

Because bringing up children to know that God is love and to be loving is so important to us at New Hope, I decided to post the responsive reading of promises that our parents and congregation made on Sunday, October 2, 2011. It was a beautiful Parent/Child Dedication.

Parent-Child Dedication: Stepanie and TJ Pullin Dedicate Finley. Dusti and Drew Heil Dedicate Andrew and Ashton.

Children learn from their parents to place a high value on the Church, the Bible, and living in the unconditional love of God. TJ and Stephanie, Drew and Dusti, as you dedicate your children to Christ, will you covenant with God and New Hope Baptist Church to teach your children the Christian faith, how to love without condition, and how to live as responsible children of God?

We will.

In Deuteronomy 6 the Bible instructs parents: “Talk about the commandments of God wherever you are, sitting at home or walking along your way; talk about them from the time you get up in the morning until you fall into bed at night.” This is the challenge and the glory of parenting. Will you teach the commandments of God by your unconditional love, your words, and the way you live your lives? Will you love and teach, love and teach, love and teach, then, love and teach again?

We will.

The Bible counsels us to fill our “minds with and meditate on things true, noble, reputable, compelling, gracious – the best not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.” Will you teach your children to fill their minds with such things and find joy in the life God is giving them?

We will.

Church family, will you give your love, encouragement and prayers to these parents? Will you, by gifts of your love that will include time, energy, and money keep on providing a church family, a place of worship, and Bible teaching for Finley, Ashton, and Andrew so that they may know the love of God, grow up in the church, and bear the fruit of the Spirit?

We will. Drew and Dusti, TJ and Stephanie, you have our support and our prayers as you teach your children to love God, love people, and be responsible.

Here are God’s words about being good parents: “A refusal to correct is a refusal to love; love your children by disciplining them. Do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

Do you dedicate yourselves today to the task of learning to fill yourselves with God’s unconditional, real love so that you will be able to discipline your children without anger and love them unconditionally?

With God as the source and this church as a channel of love and forgiveness, we will.

Armand's Farewell Concert, October 16

2011-09-23T10:28:00.000-04:00

We are facing a change at New Hope. Armand, our Instrumentalist for 15 years, has announced that his last Sunday will be October 16. We pray that God will give him success in his new life as a musical artist, performer, and teacher. We have been fortunate for all these years to be blessed by his music. Now we are preparing ourselves to say farewell and give him our encouragement as he makes this huge transition in his life.

Change brings some feelings of anxiety, because we are stepping into the unknown, Armand much more than the rest of us. However, we here at New Hope will need to trust God for the future of our worship services and our life together.

Plan now to attend Armand’s farewell concert on the afternoon of Sunday, October 16 at 5 o’clock in our sanctuary.

Today we are giving our special offering to help World Vision provide food and supplies in the Horn of Africa where 13 million people are in need of emergency assistance. Every $100 we give could potentially provide 1,700 meals. World Vision not only provides emergency food, they also provide seeds, supplies and training to establish sustainable food sources. We want to open our hearts of compassion as Jesus teaches and do what we can to respond to this great crisis. If you want to give by check, make it out to New Hope Baptist Church and put on the notation line “Horn of Africa.”

Why We Have an Offering in Worship

2011-09-05T22:08:00.000-04:00

I have never in my life attended a Sunday morning worship service that did not have and offering in it. Somewhere along the way the plates always got passed. We never have a Sunday morning service at New Hope without an offering. Why is that?

Worship is about feeling awe and wonder. I love the hymn “How Great Thou Art” because it stirs up my awe and wonder. I love walking on the beach at night for the same reason. A famous Jewish mystical writer named Abraham Heschel said that a basic issue in religion is what to do with our feelings of awe and wonder. He wrote, “Endless wonder unlocks an innate sense of indebtedness. Within our awe we only know that all we own we owe.” When I see how great God is and how small I am, I know that I don’t have anything that was not given to me. That is why it is good and even necessary to have a time in every worship service to give money as a way of acknowledging that we owe God for everything we own.

A writer named Alan Storey reflects on Jesus’ words, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21) when he says we have an offering in worship in order to relocate our hearts. “Do you see why we have an offering in worship? We do not have an offering to keep the lights on. We do not have an offering to pay the pastor. We have an offering because God knows that it is the one thing that can relocate our hearts. When we have an offering we give people an opportunity to relocate their hearts. Where our treasure is, there is our heart!”

When the plate is passed to you and you pass it on to the person beside you, remember:

We have an offering to respond to our awe and wonder.

We have an offering to relocate our hearts.

New Hope's Past and Future

2011-08-12T09:24:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday evening after dinner at the church I sat across from Sarah, a guest, who said, “Tell me about this church’s history and it’s plans for the future.” Here is how I responded.

New Hope came out of South Daytona Baptist Church 15 years ago: August 4, 1996. They met at Spruce Creek Elementary School, then bought the A-frame and worshipped in it until they built the current sanctuary. Armand became the accompanist early on and has been with New Hope for most of its 15 years. Dennis (who was sitting beside me) has been minister of music for 10 years. Fleda and I came 5 years ago this month.

Part of the strength of New Hope is the people who have been members since the beginning. They form a loving core. They know each other well and care about each other deeply but remain concerned to reach out. When I talked to the Pastor Search Committee of New Hope five years ago, I asked them, “What are your hopes for the church?” They responded, “We want to reach younger families.”

I said, “If we are going to reach younger families, we have to prepare for and care for their children.” That is what we are working on for the future.

New Hope has always been a different kind of Baptist church, I said to Sarah. We are not a Southern Baptist church. We have always given our mission money to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which began in 1991 as an alternative to the SBC. We take the Bible seriously and want it to shape our lives and our church, but we try to understand the Bible in historical and cultural context. We differ with the SBC on how to interpret Paul’s words, “Wives are to graciously submit to their husbands,” (Ephesians 5:22). Nor do we say, as is now in the Baptist Faith and Message Statement of 2000, “The office of pastor is limited to men as taught by the Bible.” We believe God’s will for today is reflected in the fact that women are educated and taking leadership roles in every area of life.

Our young guest seemed to respond very positively to what I told her about us. She stayed for Bible study and talked to me afterward about how a church might reach young adults. Her daughter, Madison, a first-grader, was participating in our children’s program, and I believe they will be back.

Extravagant Hope

2011-08-08T12:15:00.000-04:00

The prophet Jeremiah says God has extravagant possibilities for you and me. Every once in a while we feel the Spirit pulling us to do something new, something rare, something good. There’s a relentless spontaneity about it. Every once in a while we should act on impulse with just the faintest impression that we heard God say, “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11).

Brett Younger writes, “No day is without the possibility of a unique opportunity. If we keep asking, ‘What peculiar thing might God want from me?’ we’ll find ways to adore God.

“Try telling God,” Younger says, “that you want to live an out of the ordinary day. Pray more than an ordinary prayer. Pray that God will empty you of everything that isn’t love. Speak an extravagant word of grace to someone. Look for words so lavish that their face and yours will turn red. Read the Bible. Do something for your church that you’ve never done. Pick something that frightens you. Stir things up. Be the one who mentions Jesus during deacons’ meetings.

“Speak to someone to whom you’ve gotten used to not speaking. Sell something and give the money to feed hungry children. Give more than a reasonable amount. Be open to all kinds of extravagant possibilities. God may invite you to go beyond what’s reasonable. God will lead us to become better thinkers, better ministers, better Christians, to love the church, love Christ.”

These words about living on extravagant hope are for you, my New Hope family. Our church came into being 15 years ago this month. The God who called us into being wants to give us “a future with hope.”

Learning American History in Boston

2011-07-29T07:33:00.001-04:00

When we toured Boston last week I learned some things about the history of our nation that I should have learned in school, had I been paying attention. Fortunately, Fleda and I had our granddaughter Madison with us as we walked the “Freedom Trail”. Madison has been paying attention to her history lessons. In addition, we had our daughter-in-law Tamara leading the way to some good restaurants when she was finished with the training she was taking at Lesley University. The lobster roll at the Union Oyster House was good but even better was the pasta we ate at Mother Anna’s in “The North End,” Boston’s neighborhood of more than 90 Italian restaurants.

On the Freedom Trail we saw Paul Revere’s House, the Old North Church, Park Street Church, and the USS Constitution. The enduring fame of the Old North Church “began on the evening of April 18, 1775, when the church sexton climbed the steeple and held high two lanterns as a signal from Paul Revere that the British were marching to Lexington and Concord by sea and not by land. This fateful event ignited the American Revolution.”

Park Street Church, right across the street from the Boston Common, is known as the Evangelical Church of "firsts.” It is the location of the first Sunday school in 1818 and the first prison ministry in 1824. On July 4, 1829, William Lloyd Garrison gave his first public anti-slavery speech there. "My Country 'Tis of Thee,” was sung for the first time by the church children's choir on July 4, 1831, thanks to the leadership of Lowell Mason, Park Street’s Minister of Music. Among Mason’s more popular hymns were “Joy to the World”, “Nearer my God to Thee”, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”, and “My Faith Looks Up to Thee”.

What Do You Want People to Say about Your Church?

2011-07-29T07:29:00.000-04:00

I’ve been thinking about our church’s reputation: what do you want people to say about your church: It is a friendly church? It is a church where they have exciting worship services? You can hear good music there? You can hear good Bible preaching and teaching there? They have good food there on Wednesday nights? They have nice buildings and property? All of those are important. But I haven’t gotten to what I want people to say about us yet. Here is what I want people to say about New Hope Baptist Church: “People are being changed for the better in that church.”

Now, I know that in order for people to say that about us, they are going to have to spend time with us. We don’t change and become like Jesus overnight, so it is not something that people can see if they only visit us a time or two. But the Bible says in Galatians 5:19-23, “When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God. But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

What if someone stayed around New Hope and really got to know us for say three months? Would they see some members or regular attenders giving up such things as lustful pleasures, hatred, selfishness, and outbursts of anger and finding and sharing love, joy, and peace? I think that if they had eyes to see, they would see such change in some people’s lives here. I see it in some New Hope people. I pray to see more of it among us and believe that I will.

That is what I want people to say about New Hope. We see people becoming more like Jesus in that church, more filled with his Spirit of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship's 20th Anniversary

2011-06-28T10:08:00.001-04:00

Fleda and I enjoyed the Annual Assembly in Tampa. It was a great time of reconnecting with old friends, attending meetings, and thinking about the history of the Fellowship. It felt right to celebrate how we came together 20 years ago.

I am glad I was there in Atlanta in 1990 for the first meeting of what we named the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991. There were three thousand of us. Our views on how the Bible ought to be interpreted, women in ministry, and theological education had been shut out of the Southern Baptist Convention. We were pastors, laymen and women, seminary presidents, missionaries, and seminary professors. We were determined to do something new.

One of the highlights of the meeting for Fleda and me was seeing and hearing the Moderator of The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship speak at a special CBF birthday party on Wednesday night. She is Christy McMillin-Goodwin, the Minister of Education at Oakland Baptist Church in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Fleda taught her in preschool Sunday School in Columbia, SC when I was the pastor of Greenlawn Baptist Church. Christy spoke of how her parents drove past other churches to be part of one where there was thoughtfulness and openness to God’s leadership in new directions. I baptized Christy when she accepted Christ as a young girl. Now she is an amazingly gifted and faithful leader in her church and in the national organization of CBF. Talk about a blessing. We saw the results of respecting the Spiritual gifts and abilities of women and of not putting limits on their role in church.

Our Language in the Immigration Debate

2011-06-06T18:11:00.000-04:00

Have you ever thought about how the term “illegal aliens” indicates a prejudice against people who are in this country without documentation. To speak of people as “illegal” is to imply that they are out to do something to us. To call them “alien” sounds like they are totally different from us. Sometimes we talk about “aliens from outer space.”

Miguel De La Torre, in his book Trails of Hope and Terror, uses the terms "undocumented," "undocumented immigrants" and "migrants." He says, “Language discloses one's moral perspective and frames the political debate. Using the word "illegals" or the phrase "illegal immigrant" paints unauthorized or undocumented people as criminals. It's uncertain when our society started affixing the concept of criminality to Hispanic immigrants.

“What is certain is that our society does not affix illegality or criminality to other people who break the law. For example, we do not refer to those who break the speed limit as ‘illegals.’ When alumni break the ban on drinking alcohol on campus before and during college football games, we don't call them ‘illegals’ or ‘illegal alumni.’ Are jaywalkers, golf betters and underage drinkers called ‘illegals’?”

I heard a man who is half Guatemalan talk about the fact that there are many undocumented workers in America who are our fellow Christians. We need to think of them as our fellow human beings instead of thinking of them as an alien hoard that is pouring across the border. They love their families. They love their children. They want to find hope for their lives.

I know that we have an important debate going on in our nation as to what to do about people who are here without proper legal documents. I am asking us to think of them as human beings and know that many, many of them are Christians.

And I am asking us to let our thinking be shaped by the Bible and not exclusively by television and political debate. Here is what the Bible has to say in Leviticus 19: 33-34. “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.”

Thankfulness for Small Gifts

2011-05-31T08:42:00.003-04:00

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonheoffer wrote, “Thankfulness works in the Christian community as it usually does in the Christian life. Only those who give thanks for little things receive the great things as well. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts prepared for us because we do not give thanks for the daily gifts. We think we should not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must be constantly seeking the great gifts . . .. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the small (and yet really not so small!) gifts we receive daily. How can God entrust great things to those who will not gratefully receive the little things from his hand?”

What “little things” should we be thankful to God for? I think of three gifts that are “really not so small!” Scotty Ford-Jones gave a powerful, honest testimony on Sunday, May 29 telling us how God has used New Hope and changed him from angry to loving. Two couples have joined us in the last three weeks. B.J. and Fred Zercher live in Summer Trees. They come to us with great appreciation for our ministry and a desire to continue to grow spiritually. John and Bonnie Roberts drive from Holly Hill to be with us. They were members of New Hope in our earliest days and remember with thankfulness the care they received from our church during their grief over losing one of their sons.

It feels like summer because wildfires are breaking out, hurricane season is being discussed, snowbirds have gone north, and our offerings are down.

This is a plea from your pastor. Remember your church when you pay your bills. Remember your church when you look into your wallet. God has given you this church. Lives are being changed by God’s grace through your church. Love your church. Help your church do its work by supporting it with ten percent of your income. Give what you can and give it consistently. Give with thankfulness for the small things you receive every day. God will entrust great things to us as we gratefully receive little things from his hand.

Choose Joy

2011-05-31T08:39:00.000-04:00

I was using a weed eater in our back yard. At one point--as I attempted to turn my body while backing away from the area I was cutting I tripped over a root and fell flat. Humiliated, I actually yelled at the roots for tripping me. Imagine, yelling at roots for simply being what they are. In that moment, I forgot roots don't reach out to ensnare me or trip me. They just grow in the ground to bring nutrition to the trunk and leaves of the trees.

Similarly, life does not intend to make problems for us. Life just IS, and we choose how to respond to--or proactively interact with--any element of it. This is more obvious with roots, but it's still true with people, who often appear to be doing things to us. But they're not. They're just being themselves, and on occasion we happen to get close enough to feel the effects of their choices, much as I discovered the effects of roots only as I chose to clear the ground with them all around me.

The people and things around us just ARE. It's not personal. We then have the power--the privilege, really--to choose who we shall be. Will we be irritated and miserable? Will we try to change the people and things around us, which never works in the long run? Or will we choose to be loving and happy? It really is our choice.

Our Calling Is to Bless

2011-05-31T08:32:00.003-04:00

God provides blessings through many human channels of His love. Find ways each day to be aware of how much you need your brothers and sisters. Receive and give nurture, support, and love.

The Bible challenges us to bless even those who insult us. "All of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing"(1 Peter 3:8-9 NIV).

As I read those words I think about how hard it can be even within the church to not repay insult with insult. But that is our calling. As the Message puts it, "No retaliation. No sharp-tongued sarcasm. Instead, bless—that's your job, to bless. You'll be a blessing and also get a blessing."

Easter Sunday

2011-04-29T19:38:00.000-04:00

Easter Sunday was a very good day for us. We had a number of guests. There was an enthusiastic spirit of worship. I am thankful for the work that many of you did to get us ready for the day. Our thanks to Lou Herouart for taking on the lilies project and helping us to have that beautiful display around the communion table. And our thanks to Jim Suprenant for the work he did to clean out the plant beds in front of our sanctuary and in front of our parking lot. They look great. Bill Batchelor worked to make our sign communicate clearly the date and time of our Maundy Thursday service. By the way, I think hand sanitizing was a good image of serving each other. It may not have been as dramatic and time consuming as actually washing feet, but it was a way of serving each other that is well-known today.

The Choir gave of their time unselfishly. It was great to have that boost to our singing at the 9 o’clock service. I also thank you for your attention to our guests. It was clear to me that they were being given many warm greetings before and after the worship services.

As you can see in our numbers, our attendance at the 9 o’clock service was larger. Thank you regular 11 o’clock attenders who gave up your time and came at 9.

We will miss our snowbirds who are flying back up north these days. God bless you, keep you in His strong loving hands, and bring you back to us. We will miss you.

Some of you have recently read the Time Magazine article about Rob Bell, the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church and his book Love Wins. I have just finished reading that book, and I think it is a good one. Here is part of what Bell says about heaven.

"Eternal life doesn't start when we die; it starts now. It's not about a life that begins at death; it's about experiencing the kind of life now that can endure and survive even death." Bell writes that life as we know it, with births, aging and funerals, is part of eternity. We are not merely being good to get into Heaven one day, but to bring Heaven to Earth today through how we live our lives. When we think of Heaven, we think of peace, love, health and the wiping away of every tear, but it doesn't have to start in the afterlife. It can begin right now. We can love more and let go of grudges. We can let peace rule our hearts and minds. We can bring Heaven to Earth everyday.

Halifax Urban Ministries acquired the STAR Center and Family Shelter in January 2010. STAR Center and Family Shelter provides direct services to local homeless folks and homeless families with children. Judy Hutchinson called and got us a list of the kind of things the Center needs for its people. In addition to the items we brought in today, we will receive an offering to help buy bus tickets for those who qualify. If a client has a verifiable job interview or doctor appt. they are given a bus pass for Votran. STAR/HUM gets a 10% discount from Votran when spending $100. All day passes are $3.00 and one way are $1.00.

Thank you, Judy, for the investgating and the publicity on this. Thank you, Trae Ford-Jones for delivering our food gifts to H.U.M

Forgiveness

2011-04-08T12:39:00.002-04:00

When Jesus tells us that we are to forgive those who sin against us, he is not telling us to forget, to tolerate, or to excuse people. Forgiveness is not simply letting people off the hook. Forgiveness means these things.
1. I am not going to hurt the person who has hurt me. There are times when we want to make the other person suffer in the way they have made us suffer. Forgiveness means refusing to act on your desire to hurt the other person back. Here is what Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome (12:17-19), “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” Forgiveness means leaving it up to God to exact a price from the person who has hurt you.
2. I set my intention to heal from the hurt that I don’t deserve. As long as I am angry and resentful toward the one who has hurt me, I am letting someone else be in control of my happiness. Forgiveness means I am not going to nurse and rehearse the injury. I am going to work to recognize that the past cannot be changed and I can make choices that will help me to recover and be happy no matter what the other person has done or is doing.
3. I recognize that Jesus wants us to forgive in order to keep relationships healthy in our church, in our families, and in all of our communities. Hebrews 12: 14-15 says, “Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.” Just two church members refusing to forgive each other can destroy the fellowship. A weed of bitterness gone to seed can destroy a garden that was once beautiful.
4. I accept what Jesus has done for me, and I let it flow through me to others. Thinking about how many times God has forgiven you can motivate you to forgive. This is the way Paul said it to the Colossian Christians: “Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others” (3:13).
• Have you found it difficult in the past or in the present to forgive someone? What has helped you to forgive?
• What makes it easier to see other people’s guilt than to see your own?
• Is there a relationship in which you are in danger of turning a hurt into resentment or hatred? What will you do to stop that process?

Our Daily Bread: The Bread of LIfe

2011-04-03T21:22:00.000-04:00

John 6:41-58

Preached at New Hope Baptist Church on April 3, 2011

It is good to repeat the words of Jesus when we gather for the Lord’s Supper. He gathered the disciples around the table and served them bread and wine that night before he died on the cross. “This is my body,” he said. “This is the new covenant in my blood.” We need to hear those words often.

But today let’s think together about Jesus’ words in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus responds to the people who had wanted to make him king after they saw him feed the crowd with just five loaves of bread and a couple of fish from a little boy’s lunch sack. Jesus tells them, “You are interested in food that you can eat today, the kind that gives you some physical strength. But I know what you need. You need food that gives you life and lasts for eternal life.”

They talk to him about God having sent manna from heaven to feed their ancestors who wandered in the desert after escaping slavery in Egypt. They are saying, “You’re the new Moses. You give us a sign like that.” Jesus tells them, “That food was the kind that doesn’t last. You ancestors ate it and died. I am the bread of life. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.” Then he says words that are hard to hear even though we know he doesn’t mean them literally. “My flesh is real food. My blood is real drink. Whoever continues to eat my flesh and drink my blood… will live because of me. . . will live forever.”

In Jewish law, there is direct prohibition against taking blood in with your food. Leviticus 3:17 says, “This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, wherever you live: You must not eat any fat or any blood.”

Of course Jesus is not talking about literally drinking his blood and eating his flesh. Then what is he saying? It is about the Lord’s Supper. Right?

No. What we will do with the bread and the grape juice in a few minutes is a way of making visible what Jesus is talking about. His teaching and his Spirit are the food we need to nourish us. In that sense, we take Him into our systems and receive him as food.

As we read Jesus saying, “I am the bread of life,” we need to look at the whole Gospel of John to understand the context of those words. When you read it, you see that Jesus is constantly saying, “I am.” He is using images to help us understand how he can help us to find our way and build a life on eternal principles.

Just listen to the list:

1. I am the Light of the World. John 8:12 and 9:5

2. I am the gate for the sheep. John 10:7

3. I am the Good Shepherd. John 10:14

4. I am the Resurrection and the Life. John 11:25

5. I am Teacher and Lord. That is what you call me, and you are right. John 13:13

6. I am the way, the truth, and the life. John 14:6

7. I am in the Father and the Father is in me and I am in you and you are in me. John 14:11 and 20

8. I am the vine and you are the branches. John 15:5

All of his “I ams” are about what he will do for us if we believe in him, trust him, have confidence in him, His teachings are what we are to do in our daily lives.

Let’s think about what Jesus has told us really is life giving for us? What gives us life that will last forever? What is it that will not perish?

Jesus talked about it in his sermon on the mount when he said, Don't worry and say, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear?' The people who don't know God keep trying to get these things, and your Father in heaven knows you need them. Seek first God's kingdom and what God wants. Then all your other needs will be met as well.

If we will receive it, Jesus gives us his guidance and his direct spiritual help to build our lives. He dwells in us to help us and show us the way to eternal life.

Here is a way of looking at it that I found helpful. This is from Eugene Peterson. Suppose you decide you are going to build a house, but you don’t know how. You take a course in house building. You buy books and go to Internet sites that give you lots of training on the subject. You get the blueprints and buy the materials that you need for your house.

One day you begin. The lumber is delivered, and you lay the foundation. You struggle by yourself day after day. The walls begin to go up, and you start on the rafters. But as the house grows and as you start cutting openings for windows and setting partitions you find that there are some things you have forgotten or still don’t know. You go back more and more to your books. Things don’t seem to come out right. When you saw wood the cut is often not straight or comes up measured wrong. The wood splinters. You seem to be all thumbs.

Like all do-it-yourselfers, you have some neighbors who come by each day and stand around and make small talk. They have suggestions. “That wall seems to be out of plumb. Are you sure that is the way to set a window casing?” They make you nervous. Every time they shows up you are reminded of the badly cut boards, the bent nails, and the times you failed to follow the blueprint. One day you finally say what is on your mind, “I don’t need your advice. I need your help!”

Suddenly, they have busy schedules and things on their calendars that they just can’t miss.

But then one day, by chance, a skilled helper comes along. He rolls up his sleeves and gets to work actually helping you and sometimes saying, “If you do it this way, it will work better.” You find yourself enjoying his company and learning more than you ever thought possible. He is not there to give you condescending advice. He comes alongside you to help and teach.

His presence doesn’t mean you don’t make any more mistakes. You still feel the tension of what the house could be and the imperfect outcome of your efforts at building it. But it goes way better and you are happy and at ease, because someone who can help you has come not to say, “That doesn’t look right to me. You better go back to the blueprint. You’ve got that out of line there.”

No. He has come to help and to teach.

That is what Jesus does as the giver of food that lasts. He will come into the mess and scramble of lumber in our lives and work with us. He doesn’t stand to one side saying, “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

If you trust him and align with him, he will work beside you and help you to build your life.

Here is another image Jesus uses: Water. He said to a woman standing at Jacob’s well in Samaria, “"Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give will never be thirsty. The water I give will become a spring of water gushing up inside that person, giving eternal life." (John 4:14)

I was shopping for a few groceries the other day, when one of our younger members called me back. I had just called a couple of hours before that to check on him. We had a brief conversation in which he really accepted the fact that I care about him. I put my phone back in its holster and I thought, I feel really happy about the way that went. I feel energized. I went up to the check out and saw those little bottles of stuff called “5 Hour Energy.” I thought, I’ll bet I have gotten more energy from the conversation I just had and a few others in the last 24 hours than is in that little bottle.

While Jesus was talking to the woman at the well in Samaria, his disciples had been off buying something to eat. He offered her the living water that would quench her thirst forever. He talked with her about her life and the mistakes she had made. He talked with her about God. Another way to say it is he loved her. She went back to her town to tell her people about this man.

When the disciples got back with the Publix subs they urged Jesus, “Rabbi, eat something.”

But Jesus replied, “I have a kind of food you know nothing about.”

“Did someone bring him food while we were gone?” the disciples asked each other.

Then Jesus explained: “My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from finishing his work. (John 4:31-34)

That is the nourishment Jesus was talking about when He said, “I am the bread of life.” He will give it to you.

It is up to you to take him at his word, put our confidence in his love for you, get involved doing God’s will, putting God’s kingdom first, paying attention to what God is doing right now in your life.

A man went to an African country to be a teacher in a missionary school. He had been a track and field athlete in high school and college, so he was made the track coach. He has a young man on the track team who was his best runner. His speed won a number of races. But one day when they were competing against another school, this one who normally won, looked like he had his feet in cement. He was running a 400 meter race and was falling far behind. But just as the runners were coming around the last lap, he put on an amazing kick. It looked as if he found energy that had just not been in him that day.

After the runner got his breath, the coach asked him, “What happened? You looked like you were about to lose and then you got this amazing spurt of energy. Where did that come from?”

Looking at his coach and teacher, he said, “You know how you always tell us that Jesus is available to help us if we just call on him? Well, I thought of that as I was falling behind in the race. So I just started saying to Jesus, “You pick ‘em up and I’ll lay ‘em down. You pick ‘em up and I’ll lay ‘em down.”

Here is the deal: You can’t buy the pure love of God that gives you energy. Jesus is offering it to you in all of these images and figures of speech. God loves you today and wants to give you

guidance where you don’t see the path,

security when you feel threatened,

truth about what can hurt your relationships and what can make your relationships more loving,

truth about how to treat people,

love that you can give to others,

spiritual energy, an amazing supply of it that comes from being loved and loving others,

and

life that lasts forever.

You can have all of that, but not if you are trying to deserve it trying to get other people and God to think you’re wonderful. Either you receive it as a gift because you put your confidence in what Jesus says and does or you can’t have it at all.

Once you put your confidence in Jesus, you will have times when you are amazed at how much energy the Bread of Life gives you. Obeying his teachings and receiving his love won’t make you perfect or make you feel energetic all the time, but you will know that it nourishes you every day like daily bread and gives you life forever.

So now we take the bread, bless it, break it, and give it to each other. This is Jesus body and blood. It is the nourishment of life. Whoever eats this food will have eternal life beginning now and forever.

The Bread of Life

2011-04-02T15:03:00.001-04:00

When Jesus fed a large crowd of people, a story that appears six times in the four gospels, four words are used to describe his actions. He took the bread and when he had blessed it (or given thanks) he broke it and gave it to his disciples to give to the people. Then on the night when he was betrayed to the religious leaders of Jerusalem and to the Roman authorities to be killed, the same words are used to describe the sharing of the bread in what we have come to call “The Lord’s Supper.” He took the bread and when he had blessed it, he broke it and gave it to his disciples saying, “This is my body broken for you. As often as you eat it remember me.”

Then one day, as he talked to people who knew the story of Moses and the manna God provided to feed the people of Israel so they would not starve to death in the desert, He said, “That food that God gave our ancestors kept them alive day by day, but they eventually died. I am the Bread of Life. I am the nourishment that, if you trust me, will give you life day by day and you will never die.”

I want us to feel the power of sharing in an experience that began all those years ago when Jesus and his apprentices fed the crowds. Breaking the bread and sharing the meal, tells us two important truths: 1. We belong to the one who gave his life to give us life. 2. We belong to each other. This is how Paul put it when he wrote to the church at Corinth. “With the cup we are sharing in the blood of Christ. With the bread we are sharing in the body of Christ. Because there is one loaf of bread, all of us, thought many, are one body, for we all share the same loaf” (1 Corinthians 10:16-17).

It is life giving to belong to you folks at New Hope Baptist Church and to belong to Jesus with you. He teaches us how to live the good life. The Bread of Life nourishes us with love, joy, and peace. I am thankful that I have learned how to let Jesus be that Bread for me. He gives me the nourishment I need for my spirit, day by day. He nourishes us as his Body. We have it made. No matter what happens, we belong to Him and to each other – forever!

What Do You Want People to Say about Your Church?

2011-03-29T08:51:00.000-04:00

Judging Others

2011-03-29T08:48:00.001-04:00

From teachings on Real Love by Greg Baer come these thoughts, which I relate to Jesus's teachings on judging others.

How easy it is for us to focus on what other people are doing that we don't like or approve of, instead of looking at what we can do to create the happiness we say we want to find in our lives. Every time we put our attention to something we have no control over (like other people's choices) we set ourselves up to go straight into our own Getting and Protecting Behaviors and pursuit of Imitation love: we feel like a victim because of what they are doing, or we attack and feel powerful as we criticize and judge others (as we gossip or become offended or just make loud judgments as we listen to the news), we find praise as we decide we're so much better than those offending others, and we can feel safe as we surround ourselves with other people and ideas that don't challenge us.

We make other people's mistakes our business whenever we criticize, judge, ridicule, condemn or blame them. We make their mistakes our business when we feel hurt or victimized by them. We even do this when we feel sorry for them. We do these things consciously and unconsciously, and probably more often than we even realize.

The trouble with all of this is, of course, that we can never be happy when we go down this road. Remember, the three pieces of the happiness puzzle are to 1.) feel loved, 2.) be loving and 3.) be responsible. When we focus on other people's mistakes, we make it impossible to do any of these - we can't feel loved when we're worrying about what other people are doing that we don't like, we certainly aren't being loving while we're judging and criticizing or fearing them, and we're not taking responsibility for what we do have control over, like taking the steps to do #1 and #2: feel loved and be loving.

Matthew 7: 1-5 Judging Others

‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, “Let me take the speck out of your eye”, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

Praying for God's Will to Be Done

2011-03-18T11:56:00.000-04:00

Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before he went to the cross, “Not my will, but your will be done.” I want to pray that. I want to deny myself and follow Jesus. How do I know that I am actually doing that? The words of a prayer have helped me and comforted me. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Bardstown, Kentucky. I saw him there when my Church History class from Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville visited his monastery in 1966. Merton’s writings have helped many people. This is his prayer.

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

I am comforted by these words in the prayer: “Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.” The spirit of those words is humility and trust. Even though I cannot know for sure that I am doing God’s will, I can trust God to accept my intentions to do what God wants. The desire to please God counts, because God is merciful. God knows that we are limited, frail and fragile humans. God will take my desire to please him and bless and use it for the sake of the kingdom.

"God Meant It for Good"

2011-03-10T16:21:00.001-05:00

Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish Christian thinker said, “Life has to be lived forward and understood backward.” Only as we look back over the events of our lives can we begin to see what God has been doing. Often we see how God seems to have orchestrated events to do us good. A classic case of looking back and seeing God’s providential care is in the story of Joseph in the Book of Genesis.

Spoiled by his father, Joseph got a “coat of many colors” which made him look like a dandy in the eyes of his brothers. He bragged to them about his dream in which all the brothers were gathering sheaves of grain and all the sheaves bowed down in front of Joseph’s. Then he told them of a second dream in which he was the center of the universe and the sun, moon, and stars all bowed down to him.

Joseph’s brothers conspired together: “Let’s kill the Dreamer.” As it turned out they sold him into slavery in Egypt. There God was with him and led him through a series of setbacks including imprisonment all the way to the top of Egyptian society. Because of his gift for dreams and their interpretation, he rose to be second in command in the government and led a campaign to store up seven years worth of grain, saving the county from starvation when a drought hit the whole region.

When Joseph’s brothers came to Egypt to buy grain, he recognized them, and they had no idea who he was. When he finally revealed to them that he was their bother, he was overcome with emotion. Near the conclusion of the story came Joseph’s famous line: “What you did to me, you meant for evil, but God meant it for good.”

We love and serve Joseph’s God today. The God who revealed himself to us in Jesus is God at work in all things for good for those who love him and respond to God’s purposes at work in our world.

Just the other day, I heard some widows in a Grief Support Group talking about how they have seen God at work in their lives even in the midst of their pain over the deaths of their husbands. That is the God we know. God is always asking us to trust that whatever happens to us, He intends to do us good. In the Kingdom of God, we can count on God to take the worst that can happen and turn it into something good.

Reaching Young Adults

2011-03-01T09:15:00.000-05:00

I hope we are beginning to reach younger adults. They live busy lives. Some have had bad experiences with church. Some have had very little experience of church. Our challenge is to help them know the good news of Jesus Christ and how to live out their faith in everyday life.

I have started a new Young Adult Class using the teachings that have changed my life the most in the last 6 years: Real Love Essentials and The Real Love Bible Workbook by Greg Baer. (To learn about Real Love go to reallove.com.) We are looking for the ways these teachings help us to know the good news of Jesus, not as information, but as inner peace in our relationship with God and with people. Once we have finished Real Love Essentials, which I expect will take us at least 8 months, we will spend three months on the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. Then we will be ready for basics of the Bible: what the Bible is, how to read it, and how to study it.

When you pray, ask God to bring together in our church, a group of young adults who are committed to love each other and to grow in their ability to serve God. Please ask God to give me and my assistant teacher, Donna Walker, the inner supply of God’s love and the wisdom we need to love and teach the young adults who will commit themselves to our class.

Talking about New Hope

2011-02-16T21:20:00.000-05:00

“God is good.” “Maybe the word is getting out.” “We are not a typical Baptist Church.” I heard these three statements from three different members of New Hope this past week.

Lois Cox, our Church Clerk and head money counter, emailed the news to me about our $4480 offering last Sunday. She wrote, “God is good.” Last Sunday was a special day in the life of New Hope Church. One hundred thirty four people attended our two worship services and gave that great offering.

I told our John Burlingame about the high attendance and the offering when I visited him at Sandlewood rehab facility on Wednesday, and John said, “Maybe the word is getting out!” That stayed with me. I thought, John is proud of his church, and he wants people to know about New Hope and join us as we try to do good work for God.

I overheard Judy Hutchinson say to another member of our Tuesday Grief Support Group, “We are not a typical Baptist church.” She is so right.

Let’s get the word out. If you are a member of New Hope, how about telling anyone who needs God and a good church that we are alive and serving. What could you tell people about us? How about these things for starters?

· We are learning to live by what Jesus said is the most important thing in the world. "'Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.' This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: 'Love others as well as you love yourself.' These two commands are pegs; everything in God's Law and the Prophets hangs from them" (Matthew 22:37-40 The Message).

· In our small groups we walk beside each other and care for each other.

· We are a thinking church as opposed to one in which members are supposed to hew to a strict list of “official” doctrines.

· We are aware of the wideness of God’s mercy and try to show that mercy in the ways we relate to each other and to people who are not like us.

· God’s Spirit is working in our lives as we learn how to love each other as Christ loves us.

Healing the World

2011-02-04T08:22:00.000-05:00

Our Minister of Music Dennis has inspired me to think about my favorite hymn on love: “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” number 7 in The Baptist Hymnal. It begins, “Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee, God of glory Lord of love,” and ends, “God our Father, Christ our brother, all who live in love are thine. Teach us how to love each other. Lift us to the joy divine.” The words are by Henry van Dyke, a popular Presbyterian preacher, poet, and writer in the last half of the nineteenth century. His meditation on First Corinthians 13 is a powerful little book titled, The Greatest Thing in the World. Learning to love each other is the greatest thing in the world.

One of van Dyke’s most popular stories, The Story of the Other Wise Man (1896), is a parable about loving people. He adds Artaban, to the story of the three Wise Men in the Bible. Artaban sells all he owns to bring three precious jewels to the newly born Christ child. All along his way to meet the baby Jesus, however, people who need his aid delay him, and as a result, he finally uses up all his precious jewels to help people and never gets to see the baby Jesus. In the end, Arbatan has a vision of Jesus Christ telling him that in helping others, he has seen and helped Christ himself.

The scenes of violence in Cairo, Egypt are hard to watch. Our hearts go out to the people who are caught up in the chaos. We pray for the people of Egypt and hope that the violence will stop before more people are killed and injured. How can we make a difference?

As people who follow Christ, we want to be part of healing the world. Jesus’ words apply to us: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God,” and “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” As we learn to respond in compassion to people in their needs and fears, we become peacemakers, salt and light in the world. Since we can’t change the whole world, we concentrate on learning to love. Henri Nouwen wrote, “All people, whatever their color, religion, or sex, belong to humankind and are called to be kind to one another, treating one another as brothers and sisters. There is hardly a day in our lives in which we are not called to this.”

The Joy of Preaching

2011-02-04T08:19:00.000-05:00

As we begin the New Year, what are you most thankful for and most excited about? As you might expect, my heart gets beats faster and my gratitude flows for the opportunities I have to preach. Each week, I get to study and listen to a passage of the Bible and then tell you what I think I have heard. It is my privilege and responsibility to try to bring a word from God to a congregation of people who listen and try to be shaped by truth from the Bible.

Preparing to preach is a daily, continuing job. Most days, if anybody asks me, “What are you doing today?” I can honestly answer, “Getting ready for Sunday.” But, to be open with you about how I get ready, I have helpers. I remember, when I first started learning what preaching was all about, I realized that I need lots of help. My help comes in the form of commentaries, books, and other preachers’ sermons. My challenge is to keep you, the people of New Hope in mind as I prepare. The message is not a general message for everybody. It is for a specific audience: you, the people of New Hope.

What I hope will happen when I preach is that someone will hear and learn something about how to live knowing God’s love and wanting to do God’s will. So when you pray, ask God to use the sermons that are preached here at New Hope to change lives. Ask God to speak through me. When you come into our sanctuary on a Sunday morning, take a moment to ask God to use the whole worship service as well as the sermon to get truth and assurance of God’s care into all of our hearts and especially into those who have been far away from God.

Following "In His Steps"

2011-02-04T08:17:00.000-05:00

When Jesus said, “Bless those who curse you and pray for this who mistreat you” (Luke 6:29), he gave us a challenge we will not be able to meet if we think that other people are in control of our emotions. What do I mean? Have you ever said, “He makes me mad?” When you said that, without intending to, you gave control of your emotions over to another person. You can’t bless anybody if you believe they are making you angry or sad.

The good news is that anger is a choice. Joy is a choice. Corrie Ten Boom and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, spent years in Nazi concentration camps. She survived Ravensbruck. He was hanged at Flossenburg just before World War II came to an end. They both chose not to give in to hate and curse their captors. They showed us that we are free to choose love in the midst of an atmosphere of hatred.

Henri Nouwen described our freedom to choose our perspective and our emotions. “Strange as it may sound,” he wrote, “we can choose joy. Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently than the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.”

Jesus is our clearest image of what God is like. Jesus is also our clearest image of what a human is meant to be. Because he knew that we have freedom of choice, he could teach us to bless those who curse us. Peter, who saw firsthand how Jesus responded to cursing said, “He is your example, and you must follow in his steps. . . . He did not retaliate when he was insulted, nor threaten revenge when he suffered” (1 Peter 2:21-23).

We can choose love over hate, joy over despair, and blessing over cursing.

Henri Nouwen on Gratitude and Being God's Beloved

2011-01-13T15:43:00.001-05:00

A couple of you asked me for copies of the devotional thought I read last Wednesday night to begin our time for giving thanks. I want more of you to have it. So here it is. It is by my favorite devotional writer, Henri Nouwen. He titled it, “The Spiritual Work of Gratitude.”

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives-the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections-that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.

Let's not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.

Here is another of his reflections titled, “The Still Small Voice of Love.”

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, "Prove that you are a good person." Another voice says, "You'd better be ashamed of yourself." There also is a voice that says, "Nobody really cares about you," and one that says, "Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful." But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, "You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you." That's the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen.

That's what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us "my Beloved."

If you would like to receive Nouwen’s Reflections as a daily email, visit HenriNouwen.org.

Our Giving in 2010 and 2011

2011-01-13T15:41:00.001-05:00

Let’s make 2010 the last year we finish in the red. In 2010 we gave $144,757 toward our expenses, which amounted to $171,868. We fell $27,111 short, but we are going to make a healthy turn in 2011.

New Hope made two decisions last year that will help us a great deal this year. First, by conducting a “Pay Down the Debt Campaign” and adding some money from savings to reduce our mortgage principle, we reduced our monthly mortgage payment from $3100 per month to $326 per month. Second, we adopted a realistic budget. Last year’s budget was $180,108. This year it is $149,186.

With our monthly mortgage payments reduced by more than $2000, we are going to give enough to support our 2011 budget

In our Long Range Plan we said “our first objective is to pay off the existing debt of $70,000 before the expiration date of October 30, 2018.” We will do that by making monthly payments of $926.81 and by making an additional quarterly payment on the outstanding principal as cash flow permits. We also plan to become able to pay off our existing debt by increasing the number of church members who are giving 10% of their income to the church.

If you can give 10% of your income to support our ministries, I am asking you to do it this year. If you cannot give ten per cent, decide on a percentage of your income you can afford to give and give it regularly. We will have a good year of giving and stop our long-running practice of spending money out of our savings in order to pay our bills.

God has worked through our Church Council, our Budget Committee, and our Long Range Planning Committee to lead us to the place where we can begin to pay for our ministries, support missions, and put some money into savings. “Great is the Lord! He is most worthy of praise!”

"Thanks and Yes"

2011-01-13T15:38:00.001-05:00

This is a prayer that I heard long ago attributed to Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary General of the United Nations. “For all the has been thanks. To all that will be yes.” That prayer expresses the way I feel about the past and the future of our church.

As I look back over 2010, I am grateful to be pastor of New Hope. There is nothing like the local church when it is working the way it is supposed to work. When I hear members say that our church feels like their extended family, I believe we are doing what the church is supposed to do. When I saw the church members who came to Ben Baiiley’s Memorial Service, I was glad for the support his family is receiving as we “bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). When Sharon Bailey told me that she looks forward to being in our Grief Support Group, I was glad that we are a church learning some new ways to expand its care.

As I look forward to 2011, I am enthusiastic and aware that there is a lot to be done to keep our church working the way it is supposed to. Here are a few things we will do this year.

_ A new Real Love group will teach participants the nature of God’s love and how to make loving choices.

_ Our Long Range Plan calls for the beginning of a Sunday School Class for young adults. I am working on it and hope to begin the class in February. It also calls on us to recruit and train enough new leaders of children and youth to achieve a ratio of one leader for every four students.

_ We want to increase the number of church members pledging to give a tithe (10%) or more of their income to support our ministries.

_ We want to do training that helps members discover how they can best serve Christ in or through our church by using S.H.A.P.E. materials to show members their Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experiences.

When you pray, thank God for all that has helped us see God’s love for us and say yes to the truth God will teach us in 2011.

Why Jesus Came

2010-12-24T14:30:00.001-05:00

Richard Rohr, a Roman Catholic priest, says that Jesus identified his message with what he called the coming of the “reign of God” or the “kingdom of God,” whereas we have often settled for the sweet coming of a baby who asked little of us in terms of surrender, encounter, mutuality or any studying of the Scriptures or the actual teaching of Jesus.

I invite you, as we move from Christmas into a new year, to consider that the suffering, injustice and devastation on this planet are too great to settle for any infantile gospel or to let your faith stop with a baby Jesus. What we call the Incarnation, God becoming a human being, becoming one of us, strikes directly at the heart of evil and corruption in the world. The Creator of the universe came to us as a helpless baby. He lived a perfect life of perfect love. When he died, he died taking on our sin and exposing the evil of our world. Then, the end of the story was not defeat. It was the defeat of death when he rose up from the grave and gave his power to the coming of the kingdom of God into our world and into our lives.

Jesus lives in us and invites us to live in the kingdom growing in our ability to love others and to work with him to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

Thank you for doing justice and loving kindness by giving to our Global Missions Offering. We gave more than our goal of $700. Now, as we enter into the New Year, let’s give more than our 2011 goal of $150,000 for our ministries here at New Hope.

Walk in the Light

2010-12-17T20:57:00.000-05:00

A passage from the Bible has stayed on my mind lately. “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin” (1John 1:6-7). These words came into my mind recently when someone trusted me enough to tell me some truth. That truth telling allowed me more deeply into this person’s life. I felt honored that I had been trusted. I felt as if I was being invited into a personal journey

How did I feel toward that person after that revealing conversation? I felt more like a friend and a fellow struggler in life. What the Bible says in the First Letter of John became a reality: “We have fellowship with one another.” God has shown us in Jesus how to walk in the light. We don’t have to be afraid of bearing each other’s burdens. We can tell the truth about ourselves and increase the love that flows between us.

This truth from John’s letter is also challenging us to see that this is how we get our sins forgiven. We have to tell the truth about them. That is what it means to walk in the light as God is in the light. When we tell the truth to God and to a trusted person who can love us, we invite God to make us clean and get the sin out of our lives.

That is what I love about living life with other followers of Christ. We can tell each other the truth, come out of the darkness and walk in the light and we get to live a shared life in which love for God and love for each other grows and grows.

I’m glad that we members of New Hope are experiencing a shared life with each other. May our light and love increase as we celebrate the birth of the One whose life is light. This is the way the Gospel of John says it: “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4-5).

Let’s learn some new truth about walking in the light this Christmas season. Tell your truth to God and to a trusted person. Then you will walk in the light of Christ and know fellowship and forgiveness.

The Whole Christmas Thing

2010-11-29T21:30:00.001-05:00

A woman was Christmas shopping with her two children. After hours of looking at toys and much else and hearing both her children ask for everything they saw, the three of them got on an elevator. She was feeling what so many of us feel during the holiday season: pressure to go to every party, taste all the holiday food, get that perfect gift for every person, make sure not to forget anyone on our card list, and respond to everyone who sent us a card.

The elevator doors opened. A crowd was in it. She pushed her way in and dragged in her kids and bags of stuff. When the doors closed, she blurted out, “Whoever started this whole Christmas thing should be found, strung up and shot.”

From the back of the car everyone heard a calm voice respond, “We already crucified him.” For the rest of the trip down there was a tense silence in the elevator.

Have you ever heard anybody say, “I HAVE to do my Christmas shopping.” It sounds like a duty, and something is wrong with that picture. So what will happen if you simply don’t give gifts to people who have traditionally expected them? Many people will be relieved, because your gifts always made them feel obligated to give you something in return. Some people will be disappointed, because they have just been trading with you. So what have you really lost?

You can’t control what people think of you, but you could explain that all the shopping has begun to interfere with your celebrating the birth of Jesus. You could tell them that you don’t expect anything from them, either, but that you’re not telling them what to do.

God freely gave us his Son from a heart of love. What we all really want is to feel loved by people who care about us and enjoy being around us no matter what we do. Have you known love like that? God gives that kind of unconditional love. This year, receive the love of the One who started this whole Christmas thing.

Hope and Giving to the Church

2010-11-19T11:47:00.001-05:00

Hope can be inspiration for giving money to the church. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” I’ll be honest with you. I hope that members of New Hope will give money to what they hope to see God do in our church.

Fleda and I are giving 10% of our income to New Hope because

• We hope to see parents bring children to church so that they grow up in church and love it. • We hope to see people who are distant from God come to know and love God as we know God in Jesus.

• We hope to see people become students of Jesus and grow spiritually and emotionally as they read and understand the Bible.

• We hope to see New Hope Baptist Church become stronger and continue to be a growing, loving church family long after we are gone.

We hope for some more visible things like new buildings, too, but what happens in people’s relationship to God is most important.

Work of Faith, Labor of Love, Patience of Hope

2010-11-19T11:44:00.000-05:00

We are in the middle of our Stewardship campaign. It is an attempt to get us all focused on giving to the church as a way of expressing our faith in God, our love for God, and our hope in Jesus Christ. We are looking carefully at the words Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica, “I’m praying for you as I think about your work of faith, your labor of love, and your patience of hope in following Jesus.”

What is our work of faith? As I tried to say last Sunday, faith means all of us giving because we trust in God to use our efforts here at New Hope. Sometimes we may feel that our work in is vain. It is all too easy to get our minds focused on what is not going right: a person who seems never to respond to the call of love, a lack of funds to get done what we see needs to be done, evidence that while some are working hard to move our church forward, other members seem to prefer staying uninvolved. Don’t put you thoughts there. Put your mind on what God is doing. Faith sees the truth that our work is in God’s hands.

What is our labor of love? Our Long Range Planning Committee has been hard at work proposing that we begin a building program when we begin to make ends meet on a regular basis. We are working toward the day when we are giving enough every week to be able to put some money in savings for future ministries. But our plans are not about buildings. They are about the lives of people whom God loves. We want more people to know God as we know God in Christ. We want more people to come into the family of God’s love.

What shows our patience of hope? We don’t give up. We don’t grow weary in doing good work for God. Our hope comes from the fact that we believe God is at work to do us good. We can handle our present momentary troubles because God is renewing us from the inside out every day.

Do you see how God has been at work in your life? Do you see how God is working to lead our church into a bright future? What will you then give out of faith, love, and hope? Will you commit to worship regularly, study the Bible regularly, serve your church, and give out of your income as God has blessed you?

Henri Nouwen on Real Love

2010-11-04T12:03:00.001-04:00

Nouwen starts with the love of God as a Spirit-given reality. He is thinking of Romans 8:15-16, which says, “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God . . ..” Nouwen says, “The Spirit reveals to us not only that God is ‘Abba, Father’ but also that we belong to God as his beloved children. The Spirit thus restores in us the relationship from which all other relationships derive their meaning.”

All other relationships derive their meaning from our relationship with God who is our Abba. And Abba is a name for God that indicates closeness. The translation “Daddy” gets at our way of expressing closeness to our human fathers. I also like “Papa,” since I called my grandfather Papa, and he was my closest father figure when I was a child and a teenager. Thinking of God as Daddy or Papa helps us to think of God as embracing and nurturing care, without the “connotation of authority, power, and control that the word Father often evokes.” God’s love includes and goes way beyond “all the love that comes to us from our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and spouses.” Paul in Romans says our ability to call out to God as our Abba comes from the Spirit as a gift.

None of us would be here today if someone had not cared for us when we were infants. We cannot live without the love of our parents, sisters, brothers, spouses, and friends. Without love we die. This was clearly seen, Greg Baer points out when after WWI many infants orphaned in Europe we given good nutrition and medical care, but warehoused in big institutions. Infants were in crib after crib with no one to hold them except for feeding when some busy nurse found time. Three fourths of those babies died. Why? Because without love we die.

“For many people this love comes in a very broken and limited way. It can be tainted by power plays, jealousy, resentment, vindictiveness, and even abuse. No human love is the perfect love our hearts desire, and sometimes human love is so imperfect that we can hardly recognize it as love.”

How do we ever learn to open ourselves to Real Love, God’s Love when we have been wounded by those who love us with imperfect human love? We have to act on faith and trust that the Source of Real Love is God’s unlimited, unconditional, perfect love. We must trust that this love is not far away from us and is the gift of God’s Spirit both dwelling in us and available to us through many human channels.

Stewardship: Faith, Love, Hope

2010-11-04T12:02:00.001-04:00

This November at New Hope we are thinking about stewardship under the themes of faith, love, and hope, using Paul’s words to the church at Thessalonica: “We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 1:3).

What does it mean to be a steward of the gifts God has given you? A steward is simply a manager of someone else’s property. We are taking care of what belongs to God. A man looked around at all the suffering and injustice in the world and cried out, “Dear God, look at all the pain and the distress in your world. Why don’t you send help?”

God responded, “I did send help. I sent you!” Our faith is that we are God’s stewards sent here to help.

The church is our reminder that everything we have is a gift of the God who loves us. We did nothing to deserve being alive today. Life is God’s gift to us, not because we deserve it, but because God gave it to us out of his heart of love. We can’t know the meaning of life if we believe that we are entitled to everything we have. God gave us this life.

Our hope is that God is going to use us to do good. We enjoy caring for each other in New Hope Baptist Church, but we are not angels. We are human beings, and we sin. Even the good we do can be marred by our failings. That is why we find hope in God’s forgiving love and in God’s power to use our flawed efforts.

Thanksgiving is not “Turkey Day.” We Christ followers use this holiday as a time to be thankful stewards. We aren’t fooled by the world’s values. We know that Thanksgiving is much more than eating lots of food and shopping for Christmas presents. It is thankfulness for faith to do the work God gives us to do, for the gifts of his love, and for our hope that we are serving God’s coming kingdom.

A Meditation at the Memorial Service of Phyllis Keddy on Oct. 16, 2010

2010-10-16T16:28:00.003-04:00

Phyllis: Ready for Glory

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18; 5:1

Here is the passage of the Bible that I look at more often than any other, because I turn to it ever time a church member dies. It speaks so clearly of our hope of eternal life. It says that eternal life starts here. It started for Phyllis Keddy a long time ago on this earth. It started for her when she began to have her inner nature renewed day by day.

What is that all about? How do you get renewed every day?

There was a song in the musical Godspell that was called “Day By Day.”

“O dear Lord, three things I pray:

To see thee more clearly,

To love thee more dearly,

To follow thee more nearly

Day by day.”

That prayer is a pretty good description of living a life that gets renewed on the inside day by day. Because Phyllis was so faithful to New Hope Baptist Church – we saw her every Sunday in worship and in Bible study – we start there, assuming that she really wanted to see God more clearly as God has shown himself in Jesus.

We saw her growing in her love for God in her love for people.

We saw her wanting to follow Jesus more closely (“more nearly”) as she brought her sons and her daughters-in-law and other friends and relatives into her circle of influence and got them to church or to talk about spiritual matters.

The great promise of this passage from Paul’s second letter to the Church in Corinth, Greece is this: “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure. . . .” Another way of saying that is this: “These little troubles are getting us ready for an eternal glory that will make all our troubles seem like nothing.”

The troubles we go through in our lives may seem very large at times, but compared with the glory for which we are being made ready, they are small.

That is why we are saying that Phyllis was getting ready for glory. She was preparing herself, by the way she loved God and by the way she followed Jesus, to enter into life and health and joy beyond our ability to imagine.

Let’s look at some ways we can see Phyllis getting ready for glory.

1. She cared for the people around her.

How many people in this room and up north and not able to be here today can testify to her caring about the happiness of other people without expecting anything in return for herself?

Here is what I saw in the relatively short time I knew Phyllis:

She cared for us here at New Hope. She came here because she wanted to be around us. Worshipping God with this little flock meant a great deal to her. She told me so, and she showed how much it meant to her by being here so faithfully. But that is not all. I saw how she brought some of you here.

And Phyllis told me the next to the last time she was able to talk to me how much church had meant to her life. She said that her parents didn’t go to church. It was church folks picking her up when she was a little girl and taking her with them to a Lutheran Church that gave her a sense of what church is meant to be. For her it became foundational to her life. The church was her spiritual family, extending out beyond her large biological family. In the tough times, when there were struggles, when there was illness, when there was a challenge to be faced – what the Bible calls “a slight momentary affliction” – she would reach out for support to all of her family, including her church family.

There is a law of Christ. It is this: “Love one another as I have loved you.” In fact Jesus said this is how people are going to be able to know that you are a follower of his, a disciple. They will see that we in the church genuinely care about each other. Phyllis was a leader in this kind of love.

I had an aunt who liked to cook. I would eat dinner at her house about every Friday night during my childhood. She would cook something she really liked and say to you, “Taste this. This is really good.” That is the way I see Phyllis. She found what made a real difference in her life and she would say to her family and friends, “Try this. This has brought me some joy and peace and I want you to have the same.”

She cared for people and loved the church. That was getting her ready for glory.

2. She loved life as it came to her.

I noticed that when I talked with Phyllis. There was no super spirituality. She didn’t try to impress me or anyone else with her knowledge of the Bible or her prayer life or her regular church attendance. She lived her life in this world and loved it. That was evidence of her getting ready for glory.

I heard someone ask this question recently: “If you don’t enjoy living this life, what makes you think you will enjoy the next one?” I would expand that a little: If you aren’t experiencing what the Bible calls the fruit of the Spirit in this life, what makes you think you will get it in the next life?

The fruit of the Spirit is what God is making us now in this life. Here it is in Galatians 5:22-23, “God's Spirit makes us loving, happy, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.” Does that describe Phyllis?

Henri Nouwen said,

“For a long time I have thought about eternal life as a life after all my birthdays have run out. . . . But the older I become, the less interest my “afterlife” holds for me. . . . Wondering how things will be for me after I die seems, for the most part, a distraction. When my clear goal is the eternal life, that life must be reachable right now, where I am, because eternal life is life in and with God, and God is where I am here and now.

The great mystery of the spiritual life – the life in God – is that we don’t have to wait for it as something that will happen later. Jesus says: ‘Dwell in me as I dwell in you.’ It is this divine in-dwelling that is eternal life. It is the active presence of God at the center of my living – the movement of God’s Spirit within us – that gives us the eternal life.” (-Henri J.M. Nouwen, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit, 1994)

3. She endured hardships with faith.

This is at the heart of the promise in 2 Corinthians about getting ready for glory. “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”

An affliction is anything that causes pain or suffering. We saw Phyllis go through a relatively short battle with cancer. I am sure that there were some other things in her life that caused her some pain and suffering. Many of you would know those pretty intimately. My guess is that she had learned along the way in her life to go through pain and suffering with trust in God.

Trust means that you let God be in control. Trust means that you accept what happens to you as somehow not outside God’s care. You submit to the pain and go through the suffering with an awareness that God didn’t cause you to suffer in order to punish you. You know that you are not different from the rest of humanity. You are just as likely as the next person to be in an accident, to be struck by lightning, to get cancer. But in all these things, we are more than conquerors, more than champions. We know that they are not evidence that God doesn’t care. In all the events of life, we trust God.

Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”

Joseph, after his brothers had sold him into slavery in Egypt and he had gone through false accusations that resulted in a long time in prison, he came to see that God used his suffering to bring about good for a lot of people. And Joseph, when he got the chance to get back at his brothers for what they had done to him, hugged them and cried and said, “You intended to do me evil, but God used it for good.”

Paul said, “God is at work in all things for those who love God and are called to find out God’s purpose in their lives.” And he said, “I am sure that neither death nor life, nor suffering nor hardship, nor war, not even angels or demons – nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from God’s love that we have in Jesus.”

So Phyllis let herself be renewed on the inside. That is why we know that she has entered into a new life that we can only call, with the Bible, Glory. Did you know. as you saw her live her live and deal with her hardships, that she was bound for glory?

We can’t really picture in our minds what it is like for her now, but the Book of Revelation helps us.

John wrote that he “saw a vast crowd, . . . from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb. (The Lamb of course is Jesus after he has been the sacrificial lamb for our freedom from sin and death.) They were clothed in white robes and held palm branches in their hands. And they were shouting with a mighty shout, “Salvation comes from our God who sits on the throne and from the Lamb!” And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living beings. And they fell before the throne with their faces to the ground and worshiped God. They sang, . . .Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and strength belong to our God. . . .”Then one of the . . . elders asked me, “Who are these who are clothed in white? Where did they come from?”

And I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.”

Then he said to me, “These are the ones who died. They went through the great affliction . They have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb and made them white.

“That is why they stand in front of God’s throne. . . .

And he who sits on the throne

will give them shelter.

They will never again be hungry or thirsty;

. . . . For the Lamb on the throne

will be their Shepherd.

He will lead them to springs of life-giving water.

And God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”

Can you see Phyllis in Glory? Can you see her in that vast crowd, in her clean, white robe, standing in front of God’s throne with Jesus, the Lamb, by her side? She is filled with all the fullness of God’s love for her. She has life that flows forever from the Springs of the Water of Life.

Stewardship: Faith, Love, Hope

2010-10-16T16:26:00.000-04:00

The theme for our stewardship program beginning on November 7 is titled “Grow as Stewards through Faith, Love and Hope!” In his letter to the church in Thessalonica, Paul wrote, “We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 1:3).

God gives us faith, love, and hope – virtues essential for our lives as Christian stewards. Each week during this three-week program, we will look carefully at what the Bible teaches about faith, love, and hope.

In week one (November 7), we will look at how it is through faith that we have access to God’s grace and a new relationship with God. Faith gives us peace with God (Romans 5:1), and Paul says in our theme verse that faith produces work. Faith leads to action. Through faith, we are given power to work for God’s purposes. With the eyes of faith, we can see that God is gathering people into Gods family through our work at New Hope. We are seeing some lives changed in the direction of real growth in the Spirit of Christ.

During the second week (November 14) we will focus on love. Love is working to help others become what God created them to be. The source of love is God. “Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us” (1 John 4:11-12). God’s love has brought together a strong fellowship here in New Hope. In response to God’s love for us, we give freely of our time, talents, and money to help others, to bring them into a relationship with Jesus that puts their feet on the right path and brings them into God’s family.

The third and final week (November 21) we will focus on hope. Because Jesus was raised from the dead we celebrate our hope that life can be filled with joy and peace now and on into eternity with Jesus. We give ourselves to joining God and working with hope for what he is doing in Port Orange and beyond.

I want all of you to be in worship and in Bible study as we focus on the theme “Grow as Stewards through Faith, Love and Hope!”

To Change the World

2010-10-06T06:00:00.001-04:00

There is a story of an old man who said, "When I was young, I wanted to change the world. I found I could not do that, so I tried to change my community. I found I could not do that, so I tried to change my family. I found I could not do that, so I decided to let God change me."

The strange thing is God changed that man, and as a result, the world was changed. It became a better place.

Jesus is changing hearts today, at the price of his cross. He wants you and me to look at our own lives and tell the truth about our need to have him change us.

Like the old man in the story, our greatest temptation is to think so much about changing other people that we never think about our own need to change. I want to encourage you to look not at what you can criticize in others but at what you need to give over to God in your own life. Jesus used the image of trying to take a speck of dust out of someone’s eye while you have a huge chunk of wood over your eye. First remove the obstruction from your own eye, he said, and then you may be able to help a brother or sister who needs to change.

Tell God the truth about what needs to change in you. Jesus is changing lives today. Tell him that you are ready to let him change you. Watch Jesus make the world a better place.

Is Your Life a Channel of Blessing?

2010-09-24T10:20:00.003-04:00

I like the first two lines of the hymn Make Me a Channel of Blessing: “Is your life a channel of blessing? Is the love of God flowing through you?” I am convinced that this is the best way to see the way the Christian life works. You don’t’ work really hard to earn God’s love for you. You accept God’s love, it fills you, and then the love of God flows through you to other people. This image of love accepted and love flowing helps me to understand the story we call “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.”

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is also the Parable of the Unloving Older Brother. Jesus told this story mainly to help unloving people to see themselves in the older brother. Luke tells us that Jesus responded to Pharisees and scribes with this story when they saw that tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. Seeing the people they despised gathering around Jesus evoked a response from them that went like this: “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” If we sang the hymn’s question to them – “Is the love of God flowing through you?” – the obvious answer would be, “No.”

So Jesus told them what Luke calls “a story.” Actually, it is three stories that function as one. A lost sheep is found and there’s a celebration. A lost coin is found and there’s a celebration. A lost son that is found and there’s a celebration. The older son will not enter into the celebration for his brother who was lost and is found. Why? We limit our understanding of what is happening inside the older brother if we side with him when, acting like a victim, he tells his father, “You never gave me a party – after all I have done for you.” We also fail to understand what is happening if we make him the bad guy and just label him the mean and nasty older brother.

The reason the older brother cannot celebrate his brother’s return home is because he does not have love in him. He thinks he has earned his father’s love by working hard. Love that is earned is not real love. He can’t get love from his father that way. He has to accept his father’s love for no other reason than the father gives it, and he needs it. If he had love in him, it would be flowing through him, but he had never learned that the love of God is freely given and freely received. Then it flows out to others.

If you try to earn love you can’t have it, and it won’t flow. But if you will receive it, God the Father’s love will fill you and flow through you to other people. It won’t matter to you who they are. Your life will be “a channel of blessing.”

Love and Faithfulness No Matter What

2010-09-16T21:10:00.001-04:00

Two writers have had a huge impact on my life in the last five years: Greg Baer and Henri Nouwen. They have both helped me to see that the purpose of life is to learn to love others, not to have everything going my way all the time.

Greg Baer teaches that most people believe that the purpose of life is to consistently enjoy comfort, convenience, pleasure, and fairness. He says that with this belief, situations such as sickness, disability, and poverty become intolerable. But the goals of life are not comfort and ease. The ultimate goal of life is to have joy and peace. We can only have genuine joy and peace as we share love with those around us. “When we believe that learning to love others is the greatest joy of life, we begin to see events that are painful and difficult in a different light.”

Henri Nouwen gives us a similar perspective on the purpose of our lives when he writes, “Many people live with the unconscious or conscious expectation that eventually things will get better; wars, hunger, poverty, oppression, and exploitation will vanish; and all people will live in harmony. Their lives and work are motivated by that expectation. When this does not happen in their lifetimes, they are often disillusioned and experience themselves as failures."

“But Jesus doesn't support such an optimistic outlook. He foresees not only the destruction of his beloved city Jerusalem but also a world full of cruelty, violence, and conflict. For Jesus there is no happy ending in this world. The challenge of Jesus is not to solve all the world's problems before the end of time but to remain faithful at any cost.”

These two teachers help me to appreciate people I know who are facing some of the toughest things life can throw at them and are still loving and faithful. They have given me a clear vision of what I want to do with my life. I want to learn to love others. I want to remain faithful no matter what happens.

Religious Freedom for All

2010-09-10T14:41:00.000-04:00

As we commemorate the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on The World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11, we mourn the loss of the lives of innocent people. We pray for the end of religious fanaticism that generates the kind of hatred that was in the attackers. We thank God, as we know God in Jesus for our religious freedom in America. It is religious freedom for all.

We Baptists have a strong heritage of standing for religious freedom for all people. Our ancestors came out of the Church of England in the early 1600s when the English king, James I, thought he had the “divine right” to tell his subjects what their religion would be. John Smyth and Thomas Helwys stood firm for freedom as the first Baptists on English soil. They stood not just for their own freedom, but also for the freedom of all people to worship God as they choose.

Thomas Helwys, a Baptist pastor, wrote to King James, “For we do freely profess that our lord the king has no more power over their consciences [Roman Catholics] than over ours, and that is none at all. . . . For men’s religion to God is between God and themselves. The king shall not answer for it. Neither may the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure. This is made evident to our lord the king by the scriptures.” By “Turks” Thomas Helwys was referring to the religious group we call Muslims.

In response to Helwys’ stand for the freedom of “Roman Catholics, . . . heretics, Muslims, Jews or whatsoever” King James put him in prison in London where he died.

Our founder of our Baptist heritage took a stand and died not for religious tolerance, but for religious freedom. Tolerance says, “Our religion is the dominant religion in control, but we will tolerate other religions, allowing them to have their place.” Religious freedom says, “There will be no dominance of one religion over another. ‘For men’s religion is between God and themselves.’” Thank God for the religious freedom of all in America.

God and Creator and Stephen Hawking

2010-09-03T10:43:00.000-04:00

You may have heard that Stephen Hawking, the most respected theoretical physicist since Einstein, has written that he does not believe God created the universe. In his new book, The Grand Design, he says, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”

This has been high on my list of things to think about this week. It comes right under my thoughts about how I can keep crabgrass from taking over my lawn. I have to be honest: I don’t know what Hawking means when he says that the universe can create itself from nothing “because there is a law such as gravity.” As she reported this story, Robin Mead, CNN Headline News host, asked the best question: “Who made gravity?”

It seems to me that Dr. Hawking is making a faith statement of his own. He certainly cannot prove that nothing comes from nothing because of gravity. That is purely his statement of his belief. And we can be grateful that he is not saying, “Those who believe in God as the Creator should give up their faith.”

So we will go on trusting in God as revealed to us in Jesus as our Creator and Savior and friend. We will allow any theoretical physicist who wants to believe in the creative power of gravity to have his or her faith. It is sad though. Dr. Hawking is missing out on the hope we have in God the Creator who “has a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10). We will celebrate our faith in Christ who, as Paul says in Colossians 1:15-16 “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible”. . . , things like gravity.

Membership Covenant

2010-09-03T10:42:00.000-04:00

People who complete the new member class, “New Hope 101,” and decide they want to join our church are asked to sign the covenant that you see below. These are promises we are asking our members to make to God and to each other for the sake of our church’s spiritual health.

Having received Christ as my Savior and Lord and having been baptized and being in agreement with New Hope’s statements, strategy, and structure, I now feel led by the Holy Spirit to unite with the New Hope Baptist Church family. In doing so, I commit myself to God and to the other members to do the following.

1. I will protect the unity of my church.

· I will act in love toward other members.

· I will refuse to gossip.

· I will follow the leaders.

2. I will share the responsibility of my church.

· I will pray for its growth.

· I will build relationships with unbelievers and invite them to attend.

· I will warmly welcome those who visit.

3. I will serve the ministry of my church.

· I will discover my gifts.

· I will be equipped to serve by my pastors.

· I will develop a servant’s heart.

4. I will support the testimony of my church.

· I will attend faithfully.

· I will live a godly life.

· I will give regularly and proportionately from my income.

I believe that if we can all make and keep these promises to God and each other, we will grow. Healthy churches grow.

Our Financial Future

2010-09-03T10:41:00.000-04:00

At our Church Business Meeting on August 4, Church Council Chairman Bill Batchelor reported that the loan modification and line of credit that had been recommended by the Church Council and approved by the church was completed with the bank on July 15. We paid down our mortgage from $120,000 to $70,000 using the $21,000 we raised in our Pay Down the Mortgage Campaign and $29,000 from savings. As a result, our monthly mortgage payment has gone from $3,000 down to $926.26.

We secured a line of credit with the bank in the amount of $25,000. We will, of course, only draw on it in case of an emergency.

Here is our great hope: Now that our mortgage payments are greatly reduced we will be able to pay our bills each month without ever having to withdraw any money from our savings account. Please keep your tithes and offerings flowing. We depend on your faithful giving to be able to get our ministry done. As we all give to God regularly and proportionately of our income, we will be able to accelerate our payments on our loan and pay it off early.

Fleda and I give a tenth of our income to God through New Hope. That is our long-standing commitment. We want New Hope to be a strong church with a bright future.

God blesses the investments we make in his work. As that great church starter Paul wrote to the churches in Corinth, “Those who sow sparingly will reap sparingly. Those who sow generously will reap generously.” Trust those words of the Bible. Give as God has blessed you. Give a tenth of your income and trust God to make our church grow strong in getting the message of Christ into people’s hearts.

May God make us a healthy, growing church.

Bibles for Children

2010-08-20T09:58:00.002-04:00

We are trying to communicate the truth of the Bible to children. I believe it is important for young children to begin to get the whole story of the Bible:

from God’s creation of everything to God’s work to save us human beings through his people Israel to the sending of His Son to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead to his final victory in The Revelation.

Ruth Bradley talked to me about how surprised she was to learn that many, if not most of the children coming to our Wednesday evening Kid’s Klub, have no idea what the Bible is. Some of them have not seen one in their homes. At Ruth’s request, we have bought 20 copies of The Bible. We will give one to each child who does not have one. Lois Cox, a member of The Friendship Sunday School Class, suggested to Ruth that their “Sunshine Fund” would purchase the Bibles for the children.

I ordered paperback copies of the Good News Translation from The American Bible Society. That version of the Bible is the black hardback one under our chairs in the Sanctuary. The Good News Translation was the first translation of the Bible intended for people for whom English is a second language. The copies we are giving to children include “Helps for the Reader” with a “Chronology of the Bible,” maps, guidance on how to read the Bible, a way of learning all the books of the Bible and other helps.

The Bible is more than literature to be admired. It is good news for people everywhere. I am glad that we are giving the Bible to children with encouragement to understand its message of good news and apply it to their lives.

How “Souls Are Made Sweet”

2010-07-28T09:33:00.002-04:00

Greg Baer of reallove.com has made a profound impact on me with his teaching that anger destroys love, and love can melt anger. I was recently browsing through my books and ran across The Greatest Thing in the World, written by Henry Drummond in 1875. He made the same point about the destructiveness of anger. “A want of patience, a want of kindness, a want of generosity, a want of courtesy, a want of unselfishness, are all instantaneously symbolized in one flash of Temper.”

A person much given to anger or "Temper" needs an inner change of spirit. As Drummond puts it, “Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, but by putting something in – a great Love, a new Spirit, the Spirit if Christ.” This inner transformation cannot happen too soon. In fact, Drummond says, some of us have not much time to lose. We need to let the mind of Christ be in us to make us able to love, because Jesus said, “Whoever offends one of these little ones who believes in me, it would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Then Drummond gives this surprising and powerful interpretation of these words of Jesus: “That is to say, it is the deliberate verdict of our Lord Jesus that it is better not to live than not to love.”

Those words practically took my breath away when I first read them: "It is better not to live than not to love.” Not loving is destructive. Not loving takes away life.

I want to balance Jesus' blunt words and Drummond’s shocking interpretation of them with this prayer of Paul: “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:17-19). "Being rooted and established in love" and being "filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" is how people become loving. That is how “souls are made sweet.”

Baptists in the Bahamas

2010-07-23T09:13:00.002-04:00

Last week, I was teaching at New Hope Baptist Church in the village of Mt. Hope on the island of Abaco. The island is beautiful. The weather is hot. Electricity is not as plentiful as in the U.S. Electric power was off 4 to 6 hours on three of the five days I was there.

There were only two pastors in the group of 9 people who attended the sessions Monday through Friday nights. The others in the group were leading churchwomen. I taught some pastoral care principles, using some material that I have used here in our church: The Real Love Bible Workbook, Understanding Your Grief, and handouts on listening that I have shared with our deacons. I gave everybody in the group copies of Understanding Your Grief by Alan Wolfelt and of Being a Good and Faithful Servant by Cecil Sherman.

The group was very receptive to what I taught, especially Pastor Elon McIntosh of St. Thomas Baptist Church in the village of Wood Cay. He is typical of most Baptist Pastors in that area, which is called Little Abaco, in that his congregation is small and his major source of income is lobstering. Elon told me that last season did not bring him much profit, because the price of lobsters was low due to the bad economy.

I was on the lookout for the possibility of taking a group of members of our church to Abaco to help one or more of the churches. I think that a group of 5 or 6 of us could help with Vacation Bible School next summer. I learned of an 80 year-old woman who was trying to move from one house to another. She definitely needs some help.

On Wednesday evening, August 4, I will tell you more about my trip and my experiences with the people of Little Abaco.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Florida is building relationships with Baptist Churches in the Bahamas. I am grateful to be a part of this effort. Here is the link to the CBF of Florida web page. http://www.floridacbf.org/missions/caribbean/bahamas

Being a Comforting Church, Not a Comfortable Church

2010-07-08T11:09:00.001-04:00

We have a Long Range Planning Committee at work on behalf of our church. This committee is thinking and praying about the kind of church God wants us to be as we make plans for the next 10 years. John Pierce, the editor of Baptists Today, recently wrote an editorial that can help us to think about what God wants New Hope Baptist Church to be.

He wrote, “Perhaps we are putting so much energy into trying to create ‘comfortable’ churches that we have failed to recognize the importance of being ‘comforting’? One does not need to go to church on Sunday morning to be comfortable. A blanket at the lake, the soft music at the coffee shop and the cozy sofa at home can provide that pleasure. Finding comfort from the storms of life, however, is a more difficult pursuit.”

Then John gives three basic ideas that can help a church be more comforting than comfortable.

“One, a person who is hurting must feel that the church really cares. Compassion and sensitivity are not programmed – they are formed though spiritual discipline.

“Two, fear of condemnation is a roadblock to community. One will only risk his or her pain, struggles and other evidence of human frailty in an environment of understanding, acceptance and grace.

“Three, the church must be a place where the transcendent presence of God can be experienced more so than anywhere else. Worship – regardless of style – must allow for those who bring burdens, fears, hopes, uncertainty, joy and confusion into the full presence of the Divine.”

God wants New Hope to be a comforting church. How would you say we are doing at showing people that we care, at providing an atmosphere of acceptance, and at bringing people into the presence of God in our worship services? What do you think we need to do to get better at being a comforting church?

Religious Freedom

2010-06-29T08:07:00.000-04:00

The Fourth of July brings celebration of our American freedoms. It is a good time for us to think about the meaning of religious freedom. Many Sundays in church I have thanked God or heard other people thank God for “the freedom we have to be here today and worship without interference.” Religious freedom is a precious gift.

Religious freedom means freedom for all religions and for people of no religion. In America people are free to worship as Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, or Unitarian Universalists. They are also free not to worship God. There is no religious test for holding public office in America. There are countries in the world in which it is against the law to belong to any religion other than the official religion of the country. Thank God there is no such state control of religion in America.

Maybe the hardest part of religious freedom for us is the freedom it allows for those who are atheists. Once, I visited a woman in the hospital who said, “I don’t like it when people tell me they don’t believe in God. It just makes me angry.” Why would she respond to someone who says they don’t believe in God with anger? Why not with compassion and sadness that they are missing out on a source of strength and comfort?

Anger is a protecting behavior. We tend to use it when we are afraid. This normally sweet and reasonable lady had grown up surrounded by people who believed in God and talked about God in Baptist ways. Fear gripped her heart when someone talked about there being no God.

We live in a nation that long ago decided to leave it up to individuals to decide about religious faith. The result of religious freedom in America is that we have to live with people all around us who are of a different faith than ours or of no faith. What a gift! We can listen to them and learn from their perspectives. We can lead them to freely choose faith in God, as we know God in Jesus Christ.

"Work Hard and Serve the Lord"

2010-06-29T08:05:00.000-04:00

Wednesday night we discussed Romans 12:9-13, Paul’s words to the church on loving one another sincerely. He tells us to love each other generously, without hyprocisy, and “don’t’ fake it” (The Message). We discussed the eight ways Paul says we can make our love real at New Hope. One of those ways is to “work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically.”

This is where my job comes in . As the pastor, I want to help as many members of New Hope as possible to find a job in our church that enables them to work hard and serve enthusiastically. So I am using a class that I am calling “Discovering Your Ministry.” Any member who takes this class will learn his or her S.H.A.P.E. (Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experience) for ministry. Out of that knowledge of their SHAPE they will find an area of our church’s ministry that fits them. I along with other church leaders will help them to get involved in a job that seems right.

This has to be one of the most important ways to love with real love. We want to help each member to find a way or ways to serve the Lord at New Hope that brings them fulfillment and makes us a stronger church.

The next Discovering Your Ministry Class will be two Sundays afternoons in August from 5:00 to 7:30 pm. Mark your calendar for August 22 and 29. Our goal is to have all of our members working hard and serving the Lord enthusiastically.

Our Papa God and Our Fathers

2010-06-19T17:50:00.001-04:00

All across the country, children are celebrating fathers on Fathers Day. Fathers are receiving gifts, phone calls, text messages, emails, and being honored with meals out at restaurants. My children have remembered me with car washing liquids and materials. They have called and will call to strengthen the ties that bind us.

One of the best gifts I have received was from my ten-year-old granddaughter Madison a couple of weeks before Fathers Day. I sat down with her on the floor of Fleda’s mother’s house in Easley, SC to play a card game. She looked at me and said, “I love you, Papa.”

In his book of daily meditations, Bread for the Journey, Henri Nouwen wrote, “The Spirit reveals to us not only that God is "Abba, Father" but also that we belong to God as his beloved children. The Spirit thus restores in us the relationship from which all other relationships derive their meaning.

“Abba is a very intimate word. The best translation for it is: ‘Daddy.’ (I want to add ‘Papa’ as a good translation of Abba.) The word Abba expresses trust, safety, confidence, belonging, and most of all intimacy. It does not have the connotation of authority, power, and control that the word Father often evokes. On the contrary, Abba implies an embracing and nurturing love. This love includes and infinitely transcends all the love that comes to us from our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, spouses, and lovers. It is the gift of the Spirit.”

We thank God today for fathers. We thank God for sending Jesus to give us our best look at God. Thanks to Jesus, we know who God is, and we know who we are: Father and children. (Read The Message translation of Romans 8:15-17.)

Religious Freedom, Personal Freedom

2010-06-10T11:48:00.002-04:00

It happens that July 4 falls on a Sunday this year. I am going to preach on the great gift and blessing religious freedom is to our nation. This will lead me to talk about the size of our church. I don’t mean the physical size. I mean the size of the Jesus we worship and serve, the size of the heart of New Hope Baptist Church.

The text for July 4 is Luke 4:16-30, which tells about the time Jesus went to his hometown and read from the scroll of Isaiah in the Synagogue. He applied the scripture by telling those gathered for Bible study the story of how God sent the Jewish prophet Elijah to provide food to a Gentile widow during a famine and how God used the Jewish prophet Elisha to heal a Gentile with leprosy. His people tried to kill him after that Bible lesson, because they did not want to hear that God actually brought healing to people who were not of their race or religion.

The title of the sermon is Big Church, Big Nation. My prayer for this sermon is that it will help us to see how America got its deep desire to give religious freedom to all people from the spirit that is behind Jesus’ teachings in this story. I also pray that it will lead us to see ourselves as Jesus’ church with a calling to live out God’s desire to bring healing and hope to people who are not of our race or our religion.

The following Sunday, July 11, the sermon will be based on an obscure Old Testament story of how the prophet Elisha threw salt into the water of the spring that supplied the city of Jericho. Elisha’s actions removed the curse that Joshua had placed on the city. This gives us an image of God’s readiness to quickly remove anything in our lives that has cursed us with doubts about our salvation and anxieties about our future.

The text for July 11 is 2 Kings 2:19-21. The title of this sermon is Salt in the Water. My prayer for this sermon and worship service is that it will bring healing for many. Come ready for God to remove any curse from your heart and mind that is holding you back from a free flowing supply of God’s love and from growing in Christ. You will have an opportunity to throw salt in water to symbolize your freedom, your healing.

Women as Church Leaders

2010-06-03T22:25:00.000-04:00

Baptists Today reports that the Georgia Baptist Convention plans to disfellowship Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta “for the crime of calling a female co-pastor,” Rev. Mimi Walker. You may remember that the Halifax Baptist Association disfellowshipped Central Baptist Church of Daytona Beach after it called Rev. Sonia Phillips as co-pastor.

John Pierce, editor of Baptists Today, writes that the argument of some fundamentalist Southern Baptists that 1 Timothy 2:11-12 is the clear statement of the Bible on the issue of women serving as pastors, ignores parts of scripture that affirm women in leadership roles. It also ignores the instructions in verse 9 calling for women to dress modestly without “braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes.” I agree with his point.

Defenders of slavery took the approach of choosing verses of the Bible that supported their way of looking at the world, such as Ephesians 6:5 (“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling”) while ignoring the broad biblical message of human worth and equality.

I am glad that New Hope Baptist Church decided long ago not to restrict the roles that women can play in our church. We have women serving in almost every area of the life of our church including teaching.

“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence,” says 1 Timothy 2:11-12. We recognize that just as slavery was accepted in Bible times, so was the subjection of women. At that time in history, to own slaves and to keep women from being educated and becoming leaders were accepted as a normal way of life. Have we not recognized the gospel truth on both of these issues?

We live in a society that respects women in leadership in any realm of life you can name: education, business, politics, science and the list runs on. If a woman came to me as the pastor of New Hope and said, “I believe I have teaching and shepherding gifts from the Holy Spirit, and I believe God is calling me to be a pastor,” I would listen and try help to her find her calling. There are some Baptist churches today that will call women to serve them as pastors and co-pastors. Georgia Baptists and the Halifax Baptist Association won’t have fellowship with them, but thank God for churches that respect women and know that the Holy Spirit gives gifts without regard to gender.

Memorial Day

2010-05-31T12:10:00.000-04:00

Memorial Day is a day to remember those who have died in our nation's service. In the spring of 1866, Henry C. Welles, a druggist in the village of Waterloo, NY, suggested that decorating their graves should honor the patriots who had died in the Civil War. Townspeople made wreaths, crosses and bouquets for each veteran's grave. They decorated the village with flags at half-mast. On May 5 of that year, veterans led a processional to the town's cemeteries.

Decoration Day was officially proclaimed on May 5, 1868 by General John Logan and was first observed officially on May 30, 1868. In 1882, the name was changed to Memorial Day, and soldiers who had died in other wars were also honored.

In 1971, Memorial Day was declared a national holiday to be held on the last Monday in May. Memorial Day Weekend is a three-day holiday that is typified by the first family picnics and barbecues of the year. The Indianapolis 500 Mile Race takes place on the Sunday before Memorial Day.

Memorial Day is still a time to remember those who have died, whether in war or otherwise. In his book, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral, Tom Long writes, “We [followers of Christ] know that death changes, but does not destroy, our relationship to the dead. We stand on a great continuum of worship with the saints who have gone before us. We pray, and so do they. We praise God, and so do they. Only the prayers and praises on our side are . . . all set to the music of ‘Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!’ (Revelation 22:20) . . . . The saints, however, stand day and night in the presence of God and the Lamb. . . . The victory has been won, not just their victory but God’s victory over all that destroys creation. For them . . . ‘the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah’ (Rev. 11:15). Our earthly intercessions blend into their acclamations of pure praise and joy.”

Real Love on TV; Bahamian Pastors

2010-05-31T12:07:00.001-04:00

Real Love by Greg Baer has helped me to understand why people do what they do. Greg Baer’s seminar on DVD and his Real Love Bible Workbook have been the most important materials I have found for changing my attitudes and becoming a more loving person. In the fall, I am going to start a Real Love Group at New Hope.

The television show "World's Strictest Parents" asked Dr. Baer to consult with the producers to integrate Real Love into the show. The episode follows the Cooper family as they take in two children and help integrate them into their family unit.

The show will air on CMT (Country Music Television) on the following dates: Saturday, June 5, 8:00 pm; Sunday, June 6, 2:00 pm; Wednesday, June 9, 4:00 pm; Thursday, June 10, 6:00 pm; Tuesday, June 15, 5:00 pm; Saturday, June 19, 4:00 pm. I look forward to watching this show to see how Real Love helps this family.

Fleda and I will fly to The Bahamas on July 12. I will spend five evenings teaching a group of Bahamian Baptist pastors some of the basics of Pastoral Care. I will give each of them a copy of Understanding Your Grief, the book we used here at New Hope as the guide for our Grief Support Group. I’ll sharing with them my experience with leading groups. I’ll also teach them the principles of Real Love to help them with pastoral counseling. I will lead them in a survey of Cecil Sherman’s book, The Life and Work of the Pastor.

When you pray, ask God to give me wisdom as I prepare to teach and to give Fleda and me some relaxation and renewal as we enjoy the island of Abaco.

How Can I Keep from Singing?

2010-05-21T11:26:00.000-04:00

In John 17, Jesus says to the Father, ”I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” The pessimistic part of me says we who believe in Jesus through the word of the disciples (The New Testament) are not one at all. We are divided into many denominations and splits within denominations and within churches. We seem to be far from the oneness of heart and mind that Jesus prayed we would have.

Not only that, when I look at the hostility between groups of people, the high rate of addictions and marriage failures, and the general lack of commitment on the part of so many church members, I find myself crying out, Why are we not having more of an impact on the world? Look how evil and suffering and hatred continue in the world. I need some hope.

Here is the best statement of hope I have seen lately. Our choir is going to be singing these words this morning.

My life flows on in endless song above earth’s lamentation.
I catch the sweet, though far off hymn that hales a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear that music ringing.
It finds an echo in my soul. How can I keep from singing?

What though my joys and comforts die, the Lord my savior liveth.
What though the darkness gather round, songs in the night he giveth.

The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart, a fountain ever springing!
All things are mine since I am his! How can I keep from singing?

No storm can sake my inmost calm while to that Rock I’m clinging.
Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?

These words express the hope that is in the book of Revelation: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever.” (11:15) “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth… And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God….” (21:1-2)

Realism and Hope in the Book of Revelation

2010-05-06T11:31:00.004-04:00

I’ve been studying the Book of Revelation. I see something I already knew about Revelation and something I had never seen before: The Gospel is clearly there in the Book of Revelation, and realism – even cynicism – about people is also there.

An image of the Gospel message is in Revelation 7. “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude . . . from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’" Then John is told, "These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” (7: 9-14) This picture of people from every tribe and nation touches me. They sing to praise God for salvation from destruction. The life-giving blood of Jesus Christ has brought them together before God’s throne.

An image of realism about people is in Revelation 8 and 9. A third of everything in nature is destroyed. A plague of stinging locusts tortures people. Many people suffer and die. Others suffer and wish they could die but cannot. God is trying to get through to people through their pain. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." Many will not be roused. This is the conclusion of all the pain of chapters 8 and 9: “The rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands; they did not stop worshiping demons, and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood—idols that cannot see or hear or walk. Nor did they repent of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality or their thefts.” (9:20)

I know some of those unrepentant people. They play out their lives on the field of death. They refuse to turn, refuse to learn. They continue down the path of destruction. Even pain cannot get through to them. Despite opportunities to turn from the path of death and receive the gift of life from Christ, they continue toward destruction.

After more than 39 years as a pastor, I believe the good news that we human beings can change. God will give anyone who comes to Him a new life. I see people change but not often. Jesus said, “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13).

“You Can’t Worship God and Money Both”

2010-04-27T14:15:00.000-04:00

Right after Jesus tells us to store up treasure in heaven and not on earth, he says these words. "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” I have had a tough time understanding what Jesus is talking about. Now I think I have found out exactly what he means. He is talking about what we should desire. Henri Nouwen makes it seem clear to me. We are to love God, desire God more than anything. Otherwise our desire is divided and in the same way that blind eyes cannot see, we cannot focus on what we want. Jesus is telling us the same thing when he says, “You can't worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you'll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can't worship God and Money both.”

Here are the words of Nouwen: “Desire is often talked about as something we ought to overcome. Still, being is desiring: our bodies, our minds, our hearts, and our souls are full of desires. Some are unruly, turbulent, and very distracting; some make us think deep thoughts and see great visions; some teach us how to love; and some keep us searching for God. Our desire for God is the desire that should guide all other desires. Otherwise our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls become one another's enemies and our inner lives become chaotic, leading us to despair and self-destruction.

Sometimes we behave like children in a toy shop. We want this, and that, and then something else. The many options confuse us and create an enormous restlessness in us. When someone says, "Well, what do you want? You can have one thing. Make up your mind," we do not know what to choose.

As long as our hearts keep vacillating among these many wants, we cannot move forward in life with inner peace and joy. That is why we need inner and outer disciplines, to go beyond these wants and discover our mission in life.”

I hope this helps you to understand what Jesus is telling us. Love God with everything that is in you. Then you discover the meaning of life, and it is not about accumulating things for yourself. It is about your mission in life, which is to love and serve God.

A Church Full of Ministers

2010-04-27T14:13:00.000-04:00

What we need is a church full of ministers. I don’t mean ordained clergy. I mean church members who are serving God. Minister means “servant.” To minister is “to serve.” This is the New Testament’s job description for pastors and teachers in the church: "God has given... pastors and teachers to prepare God's people for works of ministry, so the body of Christ may be built up" (Ephesians 4: 11-12).

My job is “to prepare God’s people for works of ministry.” That means it would be wrong of me to try to do all the ministering myself. It makes sense that I would do other “works of ministry,” but my main service to the church as a pastor-teacher is to prepare church members for works of service. I am using my spiritual gifts, abilities, and training to try to prepare a church full of ministers or, as Ephesians 4 says it, “so that the body of Christ may be built up.”

I’m not the only one preparing God’s people called New Hope Baptist Church. We have others gifted, able, and trained to teach including those who teach Bible study classes: Ruth Bradley, Mel Lyons, Shane Gaster, Boyd Frank, Jeanne Mathieson, Leesa Holloway, Cheryl Secunda, and Tim Fisher. Dennis Bucher is our Minister of Music. As his title says, he prepares God’s people for works of ministry through music. Elaine Hardy is our Sunday School Consultant, gifted and trained as a preparer of God’s people. My list is not exhaustive. There are others preparing God’s people in other ways. We work together to have a church full of ministers.

Flow of the Spirit: Beyond Resentment

2010-04-14T16:18:00.002-04:00

Colossians 3: 1-10

We are in a series called “The Flow of the Spirit.” We began the Sunday before Palm Sunday. Remember Jesus said, “If anyone is thirsty (empty, needy) come to me (trust me, follow me) and drink (live the life I lead you to live) and out of your belly will flow rivers of living water.” The John comments that by rivers of living water, Jesus meant the Spirit, which was to be given.

What God wants to do is have the Spirit flowing in us not just to bless us. God wants his Holy Spirit to flow through us and out

to others to bless them.

The question is how do we not quench the Spirit? How do we keep it flowing?

Paul in Colossians says that the two things, which are true of Jesus, are also true of us, his followers. Christ died. Christ is risen. We also have died with Christ. And with Christ, we are given the power to rise and live a new way of life. This is the way he says it. “So if you're serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don't shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that's where the action is. See things from his perspective.” (Colossians 3:1-2 Message)

So since we are living this new resurrection life, our job is to keep our eyes on the things that are important to our life with Christ. We are to look not at the things around us all the time. We are to look above to the things that Christ wants to do in our lives.

Paul goes on to tell us that we are going to be living in some new ways. We have died to the old ways, and we are living in some new ways. We have put some things to death in us. We are now alive to some new realities. Then he uses another image. Paul says it is like taking off old clothes.

Anybody here have any old clothes in your closet? Do you ever wear them to work around the house? Maybe to clean out the garage or to work in the yard or go up on the roof and blow out the gutters. Then you come back in and shower and put on clean new clothes. The old clothes are like rags compared to your good clothes. That is the image Paul uses.

So for today and the next three Sundays, borrowing an acrostic and some ideas from John Ortberg, I want us to look at taking off the RAGS.

Resentment.

Anxiety.

Greed.

Superiority.

Those are the RAGS we are exchanging for the new clothes of compassion, gentleness, humility, and trust.

Let’s look at the list of ways we can quench the Spirit that Paul talks about in Colossians 3. “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.”

Before we deal with Sexual immorality, I want to comment on “the wrath of God.” God’s wrath is not God losing his temper the way we tend to do. God’s wrath is not God flying off the handle in a fit of temper. We do that sometimes when other drivers cut us off on I-4. This morning someone cut me of on highway 44 in a white Nissan Versa. Anybody here driving a white Versa? There was a flash of anger in me about how I was being disrespected and endangered. God’s wrath is not like that. God doesn’t flare up in a fit of temper and then lash out and hurt somebody.

God’s wrath is the natural working out of the consequences of the way a person is living. A sexually immoral life will lead to destruction. That is God’s wrath. Greed will eventually lead you to an empty life of loving things instead of people. That will be destructive of your life. The destruction is God’s wrath working in the life of a person who makes money and possessions idols and ends up smothered in them.

Now, look at the list in Colossians: Sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed. Then Paul talks about another list of things that will quench the Spirit. He says, “ . . .you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (vv.8-10). What I want to focus on today is anger. I am calling it resentment in my title today.

I thought about the fact that Jesus deals with the same destructive attitudes and actions in “The Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew 5. Jesus first says that he has come not to destroy the Jewish Law, Old Testament Law, but to fulfill it. Then he gives illustrations of the way he fulfills the Law. He gives interpretations of laws beginning with the formula, “You have heard that it was said to the people of ancient times, but I say to you….” It is interesting that he deals with the same two broad concerns that Paul talks about in Colossians 3, but he brings them up in the opposite order.

Paul talks about sexual immorality first. But Jesus starts with “You have heard it was said to people of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder and whoever murders shall be liable to judgment, but I say to you, ‘Whoever is angry with a brother or sister is liable to judgment. Whoever says to his brother or sister Raca (a term of contempt like “Trash”) is liable to the council and anyone who says, ‘You fool’ is liable to the hell of fire.” The Greek word for hell there is the Greek word Gehenna that means to always burning garbage dump outside of Jerusalem. Jesus is saying that anger expressed with attacking disrespect will destroy the angry person. He says we had better get rid of our anger as quickly as possible.

"Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to that person; then come and offer your gift.” (Matthew 5:23-24) Getting reconciled instead of continuing to let your anger smolder is more important in the church than giving you offering. First, Jesus says, deal with the anger. Don’t let is smolder.

Then he says that again with another image. "Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.” (Matthew 5:24-25) It is a way of saying again, Deal with the anger quickly. Don’t let stay in you and quench the Spirit.

Paul says the same thing this way in Ephesians 4:26-27, "In your anger do not sin: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.” That is his way of saying about anger, “Don’t nurse it and rehearse it. Get it out of you heart as quickly as you can.” Anger, which builds up in you, can defile the church. It can spread its poison within the system. It is like snakebite. What kills is not the bite. It is the poison, which courses through the blood. If you can get the poison out, you can save life.

I think he is talking about getting control of resentment when the writer of Hebrews says, “Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.” The devil gets a foothold, not only in your life, but also in the lives of others when you allow resentment to stay in you and to grow.

So how do we get beyond anger and resentment? I want to give you three pieces of guidance that I have found helpful, as I have tried to learn how to handle my own anger.

First, you have to give up blaming your anger on other people. You have to stop saying, “She makes me angry. He makes me so made.” Other people do not make you angry. The angry thoughts and then the angry emotions are in you. One piece of evidence that the other person doesn’t cause your anger is that what stirs up your anger, doesn’t even bother someone else. Have you ever noticed that?

It is your emptiness and fear, your inner pain that is the source of your anger. Have you ever had a bad sunburn? You were burned to such an extent that your whole body was sensitive. Your were in a room full of people and somebody bumped you. It hurt really badly. You moved quickly to protect yourself. But did the person who accidentally bumped you cause your pain? No. The pain was already there. They just happened to touch you in a way that stirred up your pain.

If you tell yourself that other people make you mad, you are in effect saying, “I will stop being angry when other people stop being so stupid.” When is that likely to happen? Never. There will always be people treating you without courtesy, telling you the check is in the mail when it is not, cutting you off in traffic. You have to stop blaming other people for your anger and accept responsibility to for the fact that it is in you.

Second, You need to change your perspective on other people. Our tendency is to be understanding of our own inner motives and attribute to ourselves the best of intentions, while we see others as to blame and just downright evil.

Let me give you two images.

This one is a true story. Steven Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People writes about traveling one day on big city subway. Just across from him was a man who brought three small children onto the train with him. As they were headed out of the city, the three children began to pick at each other, the way children will. The father sat staring straight ahead not paying them any attention. It got worse. The kid’s were getting louder. Still the father was lost in a dream world of something. Then the children began to run about and were becoming a serious bother to other passengers.

Finally, Covey says, he was getting very judgmental toward this man who was allowing his kids to disturb everybody around them. He could take it no more and spoke to the man. “Sir, your children are creating a disturbance. I think you need to deal with them.”

He said the man looked up suddenly as if awakening from a dream. He said, “I am sorry. Please forgive us. We are on our way home from the hospital where their mother just died.”

Covey, of course, immediately had a change of feelings toward this man who had just lost his wife. That perspective made a huge difference in his understanding of what was going on. We need to keep in mind that there is much about others we don’t know. There is a saying, “To understand all is to forgive all.” I am not certain that is completely true, but in this context it helps us to realize that there is much we don’t yet understand about other people, and when we are tempted to judge them, we need to make an effort to look at them with the desire to understand them.

This image comes from Greg Baer the author of the book Real Love. Imagine you are sitting with a friend beside a swimming pool. You have a really good lunch spread out on the table, tall glasses of tea, the weather is perfect and you are enjoying your conversation. Suddenly someone in the pool begins to splash water in your direction. You can’t see who it is because there is a deck chair between you and the water. The splashing is getting worse until your pant legs are getting wet. You get up to go tell this idiot to stop it. But as you get close you realize that the person who is splashing you is drowning. Do you feel angry with him now? No. Instantly your feeling go from feeling irritation to feeling compassion and you want to help him.

The thing I believe is that when people are mistreating me, attacking me, lying to me, running from me, it is not about me. They are drowning emotionally. They are splashing me with their behaviors they use to protect themselves or to try to get something for themselves not because they are bad people. They are downing emotionally and just splashing about trying to keep their head above water. What you believe about other people, your perspective on their behavior will have a direct effect on your feelings about them.

I have said that in order to get rid of anger you need to stop blaming your anger on other people.

Second, you need to change your perspective on other people.

Third, and this is the most important thing you can do: You need to find ways to enable yourself to know in your head and feel in your heart God’s love for you.

John says, “Perfect love casts out fear.” I believe fear is behind a lot of anger. Therefore, I believer love can drive out fear and melt anger. We worship Jesus whose love overcame death and who rose from the grave on the third day. It is in knowing a love so strong and deep that we have hatred, fear, and anger driven out of us. May you, with all that is in you, know that you are surrounded by unconditional care. And God’s love flows to you and me through many human channels. The more deeply and fully we experience God’s love, the more we come to see that the love of our mates, our parents, our bothers and sisters and our friends are reflections of the “first” love of God.

Paul says take off the old clothes of anger and malice and resentment. Put on the new clothes of compassion, understanding, and love.

In the early days of the church, they used to ask those who were being baptized into faith in Christ to strip off their old clothes and go down into the water of baptism. When they came up from immersion they were given new clothes to wear. The new clothes were white to symbolize their changed lives, their new and pure way of learning from Jesus and letting his Spirit flow through their lives.

Life After Death and Inner Renewal Everyday

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Easter is about life after death. It gives us hope for the future for those who have died, because Jesus rose up from the dead. He was raised first. The dead will be raised with him. Our hope is in God’s power to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. The death of loved ones and friends makes us aware of how much we must depend on God for life beyond death. Here is what Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. “We know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence” (2 Corinthians 4:15).

Easter is also about renewed life while we live each day. In that same passage, Paul makes this amazing claim about the power of the resurrection in everyday life. “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”(2 Corinthians 4:16-17).

Outwardly our bodies are dying, but inwardly we are being renewed every day. The troubles we go through everyday are preparing us for something so wonderful it cannot be described. Paul must be talking about the same thing he had in mind when he said, “Don’t be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2). The renewal is in your thinking. Your emotions come from your thinking. Therefore your renewal is both mental and emotional. What a thought! When you are growing emotionally and getting better at your relationships, you are experiencing resurrection power at work in you.

On this Easter Sunday let us thank God for the promise of life beyond death and for the promise of inner renewal everyday. Not only will we be given the gift of eternal life when we die, we are being given that gift everyday as our thoughts, emotions, and relationships are transformed, making us more and more like our living Lord.

Grief and the Resurrection

2010-03-29T09:36:00.000-04:00

One of the most rewarding things I do as a pastor is to lead grief support groups. Our recent group here at New Hope has been especially meaningful. We found that spending time together trying to understand grief helped us all. We were able to love and encourage each other. We will start another grief support group soon.

At Easter we celebrate God’s resurrection power. It is about much more than our positive thinking. It opens us to a power and grace beyond us. Since God raised Jesus from the dead, we know that there is life beyond death for our loved ones.

God’s power breaks into our world to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Whenever we trust in God’s care for us and share it with each other, as in a grief support group, His resurrection power breaks into our lives. In the peace God brings to us in the midst of our grief, we receive resurrection power. God brings healing to our aching emotions.

Thank God for giving us this family of faith we call New Hope. In it we have the privilege of sharing each other’s sorrows and joys. As we care for each other, we experience God’s resurrection power at work among us.

Easter Season

2010-03-18T13:14:00.001-04:00

I’m glad we are getting close to Easter for spiritual reasons and for earthly reasons. First, the more personal, earthly reasons: I am glad Fleda is getting a Spring Break from school so that we will have some time together with family. I am glad the warmth of spring is arriving. My Florida blood craves it. I have already enjoyed seeing downy Sand Hill Crane chicks, Tom turkeys fanning out their tail feathers for their harem of females, and hearing owls hooting in the night, calling for a mate. My spiritual reasons for being glad to welcome the Easter season include that we are preparing ourselves to experience the power of the Resurrection of Jesus. Before we get to the day of resurrection, we focus on examining our own hearts. Some Christians observe Lent, the forty days before Easter as a time to fast or to “give up” something for Lent. I, like most Baptists, did not grow up in that tradition and just don’t “do Lent.” During this season of preparation for Easter, I have been studying the images of God that are in the Bible. I’ve been trying to teach some things about those images on Wednesday nights to help us have a clearer awareness of who God is and what God does for us.

I am thankful to new member Shane Gaster for introducing us to a service of darkness for Good Friday. Dennis Bucher and I had been talking about just such a service. It will help us experience something of the suffering, the fear, and the mystery of Jesus’ agony as Judas betrayed him, Peter denied him, the other disciples deserted him, and Roman soldiers nailed him to the cross.

Writer Ron Rolheiser points out, “Interestingly, the gospels do not focus on his physical sufferings (which must have been horrific). What they highlight instead is his emotional suffering and his humiliation. He is presented as lonely, betrayed, alone, helpless to explain himself, a victim of jealousy, morally isolated, mocked, misunderstood, stripped naked so as to have to feel embarrassment and shame, and yet, inside of all this, as clinging to warmth, goodness, and forgiveness. Good Friday, in Luke's words, is when darkness has its hour.”

On Good Friday night, April 2 at 7:30 we will gather in our sanctuary to worship God using scripture readings, music, poetry, light, and darkness.

May our Good Friday Service of Darkness bring us the consolation of having Jesus identify with our own emotional suffering. May his being with us and his sacrifice for us bind us to God, so that His warmth, goodness, and forgiveness flow out of us.

Living One Day at a Time

2010-03-16T20:21:00.000-04:00

As I talked the other day in the hospital with our member Ben Bailey about the diagnosis of cancer he had just received, we talked about how he accepts that, as he said, “It is what it is.” I admired Ben’s attitude and determination to accept and make the best of his days. Then I ran across this piece on seeking to live right each day. It is from a much-loved pope.

Do you remember when the Romans Catholic Church began to change after Vatican II back in the 60s and 70s? The Pope who led the change was Pope John XXIII. He put together what he called his Ten Commandments for Today. They are what he wanted for himself in his daily life:

1) Only for today, I will seek to live the livelong day positively without wishing to solve the problems of my life all at once.

2) Only for today, I will take the greatest care of my appearance: I will dress modestly; I will not raise my voice; I will be courteous in my behavior; I will not criticize anyone; I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.

3) Only for today, I will be happy in the certainty that I was created to be happy, not only in the other world buy also in this one.

4) Only for today, I will adapt to circumstances, without requiring all circumstances to be adapted to my own wishes.

5) Only for today, I will devote 10 minutes of my time to some good reading, remembering that just as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to the life of the soul.

6) Only for today, I will do one good deed and not tell anyone about it.

7) Only for today, I will do at least one thing I do not like doing; and if my feelings are hurt, I will make sure that no one notices.

8) Only for today, I will make a plan for myself: I may not follow it to the letter, but I will make it. And I will be on guard against two evils: hastiness and indecision.

9) Only for today, I will firmly believe, despite appearances, that the good Providence of God cares for me as no one else who exists in this world

10) Only for today, I will have no fears. In particular, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe in goodness. Indeed, for 12 hours, I can certainly do what might cause me consternation were I to believe I had to do it all my life.

I think this list will help anyone who wants to live life with love, joy, and peace one day at a time.

Sermon Plans for March and April, 2010

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March 7 Never Waste a Crisis: The Testing of Your Faith James 1:2-4 This message will use the Joseph story in Genesis 37 to lead us to think about God’s power to help us in times of crisis. God will use the trials we face to make us stronger.

March 14 Never Waste a Crisis: Plan B Romans 5:1-5 This will be a continuation of the Joseph Story to talk about God’s power to help us in our toughest times.

March 21 Flow of the Spirit: Rivers of Living Water John 7:37-39 The beginning of a series on how the Holy Spirit will flow in our minds and in our living if we don’t quench the Spirit.

March 28 (Palm Sunday) Shane Gaster, Guest Preacher

April 4 Christ Is Risen Indeed 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 An Easter message on the historical reality of the Resurrection and the impact Christ’s Resurrection makes on us.

April 11 Flow of the Spirit: Beyond Resentment Colossians 3:1-10The Spirit will enable us to change and grow away from our tendencies to become angry and resentful.

April 18 Flow of the Spirit: Beyond Anxiety Psalm 23 The Spirit will enable us to grow toward trusting God and living a life of love and power.

April 25 Flow of the Spirit: Humility Luke 18:9-14 The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector will be the basis of a sermon on recognizing the truth about ourselves and learning to tell the truth about ourselves: I am a sinner in need of God’s mercy.

Laying a Foundation for a Loving Community

2010-02-27T16:13:00.000-05:00

We are growing on Wednesday evenings, too. If you were here last Wednesday evening you may have noticed that there were more children and youth than ever. The decibel level was higher than usual because their young voices reflected excitement. I am grateful for the fact that so many children and youth are coming to New Hope. They are with us because of the preparations made by Cheryl Secunda and her leaders. Wasn’t it great to hear that group of older children recite from memory all the books of the New Testament a couple of weeks ago? Our thanks to Leesa Holloway and Erma Dreas for teaching them. And we thank Joanne Kirk, Beth Gibbons, Kelly Secunda, Debbie Shelver, and Fred Griffith.

What we are seeing is the fulfillment of this truth: Children (and people of all ages) will come when they know that they are cared for and have been prepared for.

When you see Jim McCroskey thank him for all he has done to get our building and grounds in shape. Our playground equipment was acquired by Jim as a gift from the City of Daytona Beach Shores where he is Assistant City Manager. The lights in the parking lot and along our sidewalk also came from Jim’s work on our behalf. We got a huge bargain on them. Jim led in the installing of our lights and of our playground equipment.

Two weeks from today, March 14, we begin our Laying a Foundation for Growth Campaign. The purpose is to give as much money as we can in March to pay down our mortgage debt. You will see the bricks building up as we give above our regular budget offering. We are building not buildings yet. We are building a loving community.

Love and Hell

2010-02-15T10:40:00.001-05:00

On January 24, I preached a sermon in the meaning of hell. I got more requests for that sermon than any I have preached at New Hope. The subject of real love has dominated my thinking for at least three years now. Dr. Walter Shurden, Chairman of the Department of Christianity at Mercer University until his retirement a couple of years ago, has helped me to understand how living without real love leads to hell. In a meditation on how the author of The Shack plays on the theme of “living an unloved life,” Dr. Shurden brought together the relationship between living unloved and hell. He wrote,

“At least part of what it means to be “lost” is to live as though you have never been loved. All are children of God, but some have resisted the embrace . . .. When we live unloved lives we end up overreaching like Adam, lying like Eve, manipulating like Jacob, being fearful like Saul, living unbuttoned like David, amassing like Solomon, denying like Peter, boasting like Paul, and killing ourselves like Judas. Living unloved, we end up puking in alleys, bed-hopping, living self-destructive lives, buying till it hurts, climbing ladders made of others’ heads, building barns too big to live in, confusing ambition with vocation, hoarding rather than sharing, hating folk who don’t look like us, driving by Lazarus, and using rather than serving people. To tell the truth, we end up on trash heaps on the southwest corner of Jerusalem. They called it Gehenna. We call it Hell! We end up as waste, and we waste the only life given to us. That is hell: waste.”

I know some people who are living unloved. They are lost. They are on the way to wasting the only life they will ever have. They are resisting God’s embrace and the embrace of the human channels through which God’s love flows. I pray for their salvation from the trash heap, from hell.

Young People Need Our Love

2010-02-06T19:27:00.001-05:00

Last Sunday morning, January 31, we had eight young people singing in our worship service. Wednesday night I talked with one of the girls who came down front at the invitation time to say she wanted to join our church. She is twelve years old. She comes to church without either of her parents. Our youth group gives her a feeling of acceptance.

As I walked into the youth room in the A-frame to find her, I noticed that there were at least four new young girls there whom I did not know.

Here are some of the thoughts that came into my mind: Why are these young people coming on Wednesday night in such numbers? And what are we being called to do to care for them? What is God doing? Are they learning here at New Hope that God loves them and has a purpose for their lives? Can they grow up to serve God when they have very little encouragement from their parents to continue in church? How can we help them to be growing disciples of Jesus Christ?

I am thankful for the work that Cheryl Secunda, our Director of Children and Youth Ministries does to bring in young people. God seems to be sending us young people between the ages of 11 and 14. How can we join God in what God is doing? How can we provide spiritual care and guidance for these young girls and boys?

When you pray, please ask God to send us the leaders and the healthy, caring people we need to show these young people that their future as Christ followers really matters to us. Ask God to help us to find ways to give them the care and the guidance they so much need. Do you see what I see?