Where did God put it?

There are so many things that people are looking for when they come to church but are not finding. Hope, freedom, peace, friends, encourage and the list goes on. Does God hide these things from people, are do we, as leaders, never really show people where they can find the promises of God? This blog entry will look at a few of these missing incredients.

Looking for the Church…where did it go?

There are millions of Christians that are staying home these days. The reasons are many.  There is, however, a greater number that is present but not fulfilled. They are the faithful to attend every week, tithe or at least give some, sing the songs, pray and hope for better things. Their hopes are to find the things that brought them to church to begin with. The things you should expect from church the sermons and fellowship. But are they finding them? Here is a list of things that came up in interviews with some Christians that are faithful attendees.

This is what people are looking for in the local church but are not finding:

1.    Spirituality – relationship with God-”God just doesn’t seem to attend.”

2.    Connection with people. “No one greeted or welcomed us…we are new to town.”

3.    Recreational involvement – “We wanted to get involved in things outside of church with other Christians but it just didn’t happen.”

4.    Children’s development. “The kids learned a few songs but were mostly unchanged by their attendance.”

5.    Special interest like choir, youth, to serve. “No one seemed to be interested in what we had to offer.”

6.    For the teaching – in life issues. “I don’t know anymore now, after being in church for years, on how to do life than I did before I started attending.”

7.    For leadership. “We wanted someone to guide us in biblical principles for life…we were looking for strong leadership…we found that the leaders only served the corporation and not the people.”

8.    Counseling – life and marriage and teens. “We needed help with our marriage and teenagers. They had no answers….much less compassion.”

9.    Worship and music. “I heard this music 15 years ago. No one seemed to worship the Lord…just sing familiar, worn out choruses.”

10.  Business and political connections. “I wanted to connect with the business community in the church….it was difficult to find business people that were willing to connect with us.”

11. Significance. “I wanted more than just a building and a sermon, I was looking for a place to do something significant for God and for others.”

12.  Alleviate guilt – obligation and duty. “I feel more guilt…more hopeless than before I stated going to church…I thought God wanted to forgive me…not just give me more rules to live by.”

13.  Perpetuate tradition – My family used to go to this church. But it is so outdated that my children, as well as my husband and I have lost interest.”

14.  Goes for the sake of spouse. “I brought my husband, hoping he would get engaged…he didn’t. He says he doesn’t need that and will not be back.”

15.  Status and reputation. “Being part of a church helped my parents have a strong reputation in our town. Now it means little or nothing.”

16. Looking for people who actually live out their faith as examples to follow. “I work with some of the people in the church I visited. I would not want to live like them. There seems to be no one who lives  a godly life away from church that I would want to follow.”

People come to church for different reasons and really want to connect. But they are not finding what they need. Make a checklist of the items above and every week ask yourself if these items can be found in your local church. If not, then week by week work on one of them until you have rediscovered every one and have implemented a plan to make them more visible to people who attend. It will amaze you how quickly things will turn around and how your church will begin to grow.

Next time:7 Reasons why We are yet Unfulfilled.

Relationships that Work

Someone asked one day, “How do you become so successful in all you do?” Well, I’m not sure how successful I am, but the secret to any success that I have ever had is… “I get along with people…for long periods of time.” I look at every person that I meet as a potential life-long friend. This usually ends up being a positive experience and adds to the potential of having success.

That means I had to overlook their faults, forgive their wrongs toward me, and never let hate enter into my heart. Actor Will Smith made this comment; “Throughout life people will make you mad, disrespect you and treat you bad. Let God deal with the things they do, cause hate in your heart will consume you too.” Love lasts when the relationship comes first! Work on it.

The key to having successful relationships in any area is to have complete obedience to the Word of God. The word “relationship” means to be connected by blood or by marriage. Both of these denote covenants. We are in covenant relationship with the Lord through His blood and we are His bride. We are in covenant relationship with our spouses by marriage. We are in covenant relationship with our families by blood. We are in covenant relationship with the body of Christ through Jesus’ blood.

If we look at friendships as “covenants” we sense the importance of holding up our end of the relationship. That is extremely important in marriage. Having been married for 42 years now I notice how faithfully my wife, Charlene, keeps her covenant with me and how I strive to keep my covenant with her. The same goes with my children and grandchildren, we all have a sense that we are bound to love and serve one another.

Matthew 26:28 – “This is the blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sin.” (NIV)

God honored His part of the covenant with mankind by sending Christ into the world to “pour out His blood” for us. Wow! So what is my part? To faithfully serve Him, honor Him in all I do, and fulfill the mission He gave me in life to accomplish. I have to work at keeping my part of the covenant with God…it is not always easy.

Note: Relationships take years to cultivate, and if we are not “maintaining” and growing in relationship, they can be destroyed in a few moments. This means we work on them during the good and bad times. You learn to like someone when you can laugh together, but you can never really know deeper love until you have cried together. When you share common joy it’s great, but when you endure common sorrow together it is wonderful…in the end.

There are lots of ways to maintain strong relationships but the two most important things I think are; Faithfulness and consistent honesty.

As I look at friends and loved ones that I have deep relationships with for many years I have learned that their faithfulness and honesty with me means the most. This is the way we walk in relationship with each other. If we lie or are unfaithful to each other, we don’t deserve the relationship. I have noticed that even great men and women carry with them the burden of bad relationships. How much greater could their lives be if those relationships were healed. Most of the broken relationships are a result of unfaithfulness or dishonesty.

RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LORD: We are to “walk” in relationship with Him.

Our relationship with the Lord was intended to be like that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before they fell. They walked and talked with God face to face. They had a personal and physical relationship with the Lord, but when they sinned mankind was separated from God, removed from the presence of the Lord and from direct access to the blessings of God. They broke covenant by being unfaithful and then lying about it and it affected us all. But, the Lord didn’t give up on us! Through His Son Jesus, God put into motion His plan to redeem us back to Him!

This is how we can express true and faithful relationship with Jesus.

Love the Lord: Christian love has God for its primary object and expresses itself first of all in implicit obedience to his commandments. All of the law is fulfilled in one word: LOVE! Matthew 22:37 – “…Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” I Peter 1:8 – “Whom having not seen, ye love…“

Just to give the Lord our hearts is not enough–we need to unite our whole being, heart, mind, and soul, in order to love the Lord the way he wants us to. We should express our love to the Lord by loving His word and His people. Knowing his commandments in our heads is not enough, we must keep them in our hearts also. David, in Psalms said: “your law is within my heart,” “I delight in your Law.” And we should serve one another as we walk in the Love of God.

John 14:23 – “If a man love me, he will keep my words My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” We live our lives in covenant with God according to His word and our relationship with Him will grow and flourish. If we continually violate what we know to be the word and will of God, our relationship with Him will wane and grow increasingly cold. On the other hand, when we walk according to His word, we have joy and closeness with the Almighty.

Bottom line – Be faithful to God, the Church and to your love ones and you will have success everywhere you go in life. At least that’s what I believe.

Dealing With Our Emotions – The Root of it All.

WHAT LIES BENEATH OUR FEELINGS?

My uncle, Moore Plauche, (that’s right he was a Cajun) let me go with him to work one day…I spent the whole day with him and had a blast. He owned a “Service Station.” For you younger folks, that is a place where you went to get gasoline for your car but someone else pumped the gas for you. Not only that, but they would clean your windshield, check the air pressure in your tires and check everything under the hood (that’s where the engine is) to make sure that your car was road worthy. It was fun just hanging all day meeting new people and working around the station….especially for a 10 year old.

At the station there was a huge glass cookie jar in the little office/store and Uncle Moore reached in and gave me a pack of chocolate cookies with cream filling…talk about good. Then, a couple of hours later, I reached in and helped myself to a pack of chocolate cookies with cream filling…only Uncle Moore wasn’t around to see it. But as fate would have it, he figured it out…maybe because of the color of my teeth….that I had stolen the cookies. When he got through scolding me for stealing his cookies I felt like the lowest form of life on the planet. What an emotional bummer…But I learned a great lesson and an emotional chord was struck that I can still remember today…guilt and shame mixed with embarrassment all wrapped up in a cellophane cookie wrapper hurts!

You see, the emotion of guilt and shame was created by a deeper problem, dishonesty. Our emotions are not the root problem. They are a result of deeper issues in our soul…issues that lie beneath the surface in our lives.

Negative emotions are the manifestation, or the “fruit”, of a much deeper problems. When we do wrong we create the basis for emotions that will affect us negatively later. When we lie, cheat, steal, and do anything else that we were told was wrong, or that our conscience convicts of us is wrong, we set ourselves up for the negative impact these “sins” will have on our emotions.

So how do we deal with these strong negative emotions? We must deal with the “root“, not just the “fruit“

How the “root” develops: As children we start collecting data about life – good and bad (“Train up a child in the way he should go…” – Proverbs 22:6) We learn from experience and from observation what is right and what is wrong. Even before becoming Christians we know right from wrong. People who never read the Bible, hear the Gospel, or experience church know right from wrong. Romans 2 tells us that even the Gentiles that did not have the law, “knew by nature” what was right and wrong and became a law unto themselves because of what they observed and what their conscience dealt with them about.

Everything we do, see and experience in life creates the parameters for what our conscience will store as right and wrong. When we violate our conscience we set ourselves up for emotional trauma. When we allow our minds to “take it all in” we give our enemy more ammo to attack our emotions with. The Bible tells us to take “every thought captive” in 2 Corinthians 10:5…thoughts that are contrary to the knowledge of God. When we willingly do wrong we put our hands in the cookie jar of life knowing that if we get caught there will be judgement…it’s unsettling to our emotional makeup.

It is the “something to hide” syndrome that puts our emotions on edge…we are kinda sorry we did it but would be more sorry if someone else finds out. It’s like going to the principal’s office when I was in Jr. High School…I always wondered, “Exactly which one of my mischievous deeds was I being called in for.” I was guilty before I got there and the queasiness in my stomach would remind of that quilt.

The act of wrong doing doesn’t seem to affect us that much…we all deserve the cookies (in our own mind), but the thought of getting caught brings a kinda of sick feeling to our stomach.

It still happens to me…so what is the quick answer? Listen to God, to your conscience and do not let your mind play out acts of wrongdoing that could actually lead you to doing wrong things. Look for the way out that God gives you before you fall head long into temptation.

The rule I try to live by for healthy emotional well being is: “Don’t do anything that you don’t want reported, and don’t say anything that you don’t want repeated.” If I can do this, there will be less opportunities for my emotions to run awry and beat me up. In other words, “Get your hand out of that cookie jar!”

Dealing with Our Emotions

Dealing with Our Emotions

A few months back I got a call from my podiatrist that took me on a journey with my emotions that I had never experiences before. She said, “The biopsy on that ulcer on the bottom of your foot came back as a level 5 melanoma.!” Uh-oh…that sounds like trouble…a million thoughts filled my mind and every conceivable emotion hit me right between the eyes.

Then I made a huge mistake…I googled “foot melanoma.” Try that and see what it says…YOU ARE A GONER!

My mind raged with a million thoughts, and most of which were not positive. “Where did that come from?” I would read about how people suffered from the disease and even the treatment and my mind would reel with images of intense suffering. Then I would pray and God would give me peace…only to go through the up and down emotional torment again and again. I could not believe what was happening to me. Then as I processed the situation and really turned it over to God, peace came…and peace remains today. I had surgery and was given a good report and prognosis…but I had suffered for weeks at the mercy of my uncontrollable emotions. “I was fed up with my emotions.”

So, where does all of that come from? Answer; It is a well designed part of you that God put there to get your attention when things go wrong, when you are in danger, and even when good things happen. Let’s look at our emotions here.

EMOTIONS ARE GOD-GIVEN – He has made us body, soul and spirit…emotions are weaved through every part of our fiber.

It starts with God expressing emotions. He shows us His emotions in scripture… grief, compassion, jealousy, anger and even, in the case of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, a stress over the eminent suffering He faced on the cross…he sweat drops of blood!

Since we are created in God’s image, it is natural that we have those same emotions and more. Look at our list.

Here is a partial list of emotions – anger, fear, happiness, sadness, temper, excitement, gloom, hatred, depression, jealousy, and the list could go on for a while. So, how do we respond to these emotions in a healthy way? Consider the following.

EMOTIONS CAN SERVE AS “WARNING LIGHTS” – WHEN SOMETHING IS WRONG, THE LIGHT COMES ON. Similar to the warning lights in your car, your emotions can alert you that something is wrong within you (fear, anger, depression from disappointment or bad news, etc.) There are of course good emotions. (But that is not so interesting to write about, so let’s look at the negative ones)

 These “warning lights” may have a “short circuit” – you may not be working right. There may be a sickness that is affecting your emotions like the news of the newly discovered cancer in my body. Or maybe you’re overworked and losing sleep. It could be relationships that are falling apart or the loss of a family member or even the loss of your job. All this can bring on strong negative emotions that have debilitating results.

Maybe you just have “flat” emotions – i.e., not experiencing a full range of emotions (this commonly occurs when people are denying some of their feelings – such as anger) (i.e. the quiet man next door becomes the serial killer). (Lack of emotion for family) Romans 1:31.

Whatever your emotions are at present, know that there is an overcoming power available to you through Jesus Christ. In my next blog I will discuss how God helps us overcome the most devastating situations in our lives and how He helps us control our most extreme emotions. 

p.s. So you don’t have to wait to hear about my cancer…it was removed surgically and the doctors think that they got it all. No evidence that it has spread…Thanks be to God…

Next post we will look at how guilt, shame and sin affect our emotional health. 

Q: what emotional binges have you been on lately?

Do You Experience God on Sunday?

THE GOD EXPERIENCE

For decades, local church was a picture of what it meant to be behind the times in terms of music, video, technology and the overall worship experience. Not anymore. Many churches today are the most high tech venues in their city. Churches have moving lights, billowing fog, movie-theater quality video and precisely tuned audio systems. I love the new technology we have in our churches and I think in many ways, it only helps to enhance a genuine worship experience. But, without the presence of God and an opportunity to experience a genuine relationship with Him, there will only be diminishing returns on the benefits of an enhanced environment.

Nothing is more important than bringing people closer to God. As we do this, I think its important to stop and consider the picture of God that we are offering the people in our churches. I remember several phases in my own walk with God and how the lessons learned in each of those phases has taught me more about who God is and what it means to genuinely experience Him.

How we present Christ in our services will either serve to draw people closer to God or to repel them from Him. You have probably had both experiences and so have I. Is He an angry God with retribution in His heart toward us? Or, is He a loving God offering us a secure relationship with Him through His son Jesus? To a world without Christ we should offer a “God Experience” on Sunday that is undeniably an authentic encounter with the Great I Am. It all starts with presenting Him as a forgiving, welcoming and accessible God.

When people attend your church service and are drawn closer to God, they will be back. For there is nothing greater than a genuine Divine encounter.