Why Jesus Came

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Baptists in the Bahamas

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

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

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.