Sugar Babies and Soul Food

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.