Category: Newsletter

I have a small leather 3-ring binder that I use for my sermon notes. I got it some years ago from supply store. It isn’t really a notebook. It’s actually an old address book, meant to hold pages with five or six names and addresses per page. These days you can hardly find address books like this anymore. Everybody(including me) keeps all their names and addresses on their contact list in their smartphones.

But I’d seen Billy Graham preach with his Bible and a full-size 3 ring notebook, and I thought, “Now why can’t I do that?” I’d begun preaching from more extensive notes, and eventually adopted a full manuscript format- something I thought I’d never do. I write out my sermons on half sheets of paper, 8 ½ x 5 ½ inches, and the more pages I wrote, the more a notebook made sense.

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Easter time is for pastors and churches the most wonderful and exhausting time of the year (along with Christmas). But I love it. I love the Tenebrae “Service of Shadows” on Good Friday, the Sunrise Service early on Easter Sunday Morning. But most of all I love the astonishing Truth that Easter celebrates, with is the keystone of our faith.

I don’t love the idea that Easter is all about springtime, the yearly cycle of birth-death- and reborn. And some vague sentiment of “what Easter means to us all”. And I especially don’t love the claim that Jesus’ resurrection was a myth.

I agree with the Apostle Paul: if Jesus didn’t rise for the dead, “we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Cor. 15:19) If I didn’t really believe that Jesus rose from the dead, I’d quit the ministry and go het an honest job.

Here are what are called the “minimal facts” about the death of Jesus and what happened next. Even unbelieving, skeptical scholars admit the following things:

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When I was little my grandmother would often get out a small plastic box labelled “Precious Promises.” She would open the lid to reveal about a hundred small rectangular cards in different pastel colors. On each card was printed a verse of Scripture, a promise from God written in the Bible. She’d pick one, then let me pick one, and then she’d read them both aloud. Then she’d smile and say, “Now we’ve had our promises for today.” It was just one more way that she communicated to me the importance of the Bible, and how encouraging its words could be.

A few years later, after an aunt and uncle gave me my first Bible, my grandma showed me Proverbs 3:5-6, which says:

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.” (NKJV)

Many of us are familiar with those verses, and maybe we’re a little too familiar. We gloss over them without really contemplating what they mean. There are three admonitions for us, followed by one promise from God.

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It has always felt a little surreal growing older.

My memories of my childhood are a blur of endless summer days playing outside with the neighborhood kids, riding to grade school on my bike, going to Sunday School in my parents’ Chevrolet, staying all night at Grandma’s house, Christmases, birthdays, reading comic books, and listening to Monkees records.

Somewhere around 12 or 13 years of age I slowly became aware that, even though I still felt like a little kid inside, I was getting bigger on the outside. I was awkward and clumsy as I grew into my new size. To add to my embarrassment, pimples started breaking out on my face—especially on the tip of my nose—and my voice started to change, getting lower but unexpectedly squeaking up an octave at the worst moments—like whenever I tried to talk to a girl. At some point during that time, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t a little kid anymore.

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There’s a short poem about money I heard a long time ago that I’ve never forgotten. Here it is:

Money talks; that’s no lie.
I heard it once; it said “Goodbye!”

But let me reword it a bit, like this:

Time flies; that’s no lie.
I heard it once; it said “Goodbye!”

Actually, I don’t think time says “Goodbye” at all. It just rushes by without so much as a “See you later!” It really is astonishing how fast it goes.

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Let me point to what I believe should be the future for our church. And please note: when I say “our church,” I mean in the sense that we belong to it, not that the church belongs to us. Our church belongs to God. It’s His. He paid for it with the blood of His Son (Acts 20:28).

We have revised our church constitution twice in the last 28 years. Both times it was a lengthy, challenging process, even with the aid of computers. Both times we looked at our church constitution- which, like so many others, borrowed heavily from the business world of the mid-20^th century- streamlined it, and brought it more into line with how we actually do things.

But we have also had an ongoing problem of diminishing interest and participation in the running of our church.

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The nature of a thing impacts how you interact with it. When we remember what the Bible says about the church, it will change the way we interact with it- especially our main Sunday morning gathering. Let me tell you about three different scenarios.

Scenario A. You go to Walmart. You need to get some bread and milk. You walk in through the sliding doors, grab a cart, and make a beeline to the back of the store. You maneuver around a few people who stopped in the middle of the aisle. You grab the milk. Heading for the bread, you have to take the long way because someone spilled something. Finally, you get the bread and head to the checkout. With some frustration, because the machine didn’t like how you swiped your credit card the first time, you completed your trip. Despite some inconveniences, you got what you came to get.

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About 1982 my family and I moved to Coal City, Indiana and I reconnected with a friend of mine I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. His name was Richard, and he was a musician, too. I was playing strictly acoustic guitar in those days, and he loaned me one of his amplifiers and an electronic effects unit for guitar. (For you guitar geeks out there, it was an Ibanez rackmount unit with compressor, overdrive, chorus, flanger and phaser.) All of this opened up a whole new world of wonderful sounds to explore.

Even more significantly, he loaned me an album of contemporary Christian music. It was an LP (I know, I’m an old guy) recorded by Dion, of “Dion and the Belmonts” fame. Dion had some top-40 hits in the sixties and seventies with songs like “Runaround Sue” and “Abraham, Martin and John.” But later Dion became a Christian and began to record Christian music. His music was a revelation to me. He sang the Gospel, clear and true, but in his own style, with guitar, bass, drums, and a Hammond B-3 organ. It was fantastic.

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