Safely Home

t snows in Minnesota like it does all across the upper Midwest. We northerners like to think we handle it so much better than those in southern states who run for cover at the forecast of a dusting, and to some extent we do. But we are not exempt for fender benders in a parking lot or multicar pileups on our interstates. Sadly, some of these events are more than nuisances or cause for insurance premium spikes. Some result in severe bodily injury, others in death.

In 2015 across the United States 35,092 otherwise healthy human beings died as a result of a moving vehicle. Single vehicle events accounted for a whopping 55% of all deaths, the kind of event that happens on a snowy road when simply driving from one destination to another.

Shortly after we moved from Michigan to Minnesota, all six of us were headed home in our full-size conversion van in the early morning hours along snowy Interstate 94 in southern Wisconsin. I hit an icy patch at 45 mph, slid off the road down into a wooded ravine where the van hit a massive oak as it rolled on its roof leaving us suspended by our seatbelts. Scary doesn’t describe the moments. By God’s grace we all walked away without a scratch. The van was totaled, but so what.

Yesterday, others around Minneapolis / St. Paul were not so fortunate. A light snow event during rush hour snarled traffic all across the metro. Nearly all made it home, but not everyone. Some suffered severe injuries requiring hospitalization, and others died. Of course, a snowstorm is not necessary to cause a vehicular death. There were 94 such deaths in Hawaii in 2015. I suspect nor more than a few were snow related.

John Newton of Amazing Grace fame wrote many texts set to tune. In a hymn that rejoices at the church gathering on the Lord’s Day, Newton pens, Safely through another week God has brought us on way and celebrates with the church God’s providence to gather the church together once again. Other writers have used the phrase “safely home” anticipating the arrival of God’s people to hearth and home. Some in mariner villages sang of God's grace in bringing the ships to “the harbor safe at home.” Safe arrival under God’s care must never be taken for granted and should always be a cause for thanksgiving.

Our family experienced this again last night as one of us slid off a glazed highway at highway speeds. When the tow truck dropped the vehicle in our driveway and we huddled in the kitchen, we held hands and thanked God that the damage was to sheet metal and not bones, muscles, and organs.

Our family’s usual practice is to pray when we arrive almost anywhere after a drive. At the end of the day, one of us often thanks God for his care of us during the day. 99.9% of those days we know nothing of the “what ifs” and “might have beens.”

We simply thank God for his protection not really realizing how often we were under God’s guard throughout the day. During the summer and around the holidays, I will welcome back to our worship those who have been away on road trips to the cabin, the Mountain West, or a distant wedding celebration. During pastoral prayer, we pray for those away from us, asking God for their safe return. When we see them again, we thank the Lord for his care along the way. In a world dominated by sin and cursed by death, that God directs our steps, covers our mistakes, and prevents calamities prompts in us praise each time we embrace after the briefest of absences.

When God brings you together again after a day away at work or school, when God brings you home again after a short trip to the grocery store, when God gathers us together again on the Lord’s Day, make that gathering a time to look upward in praise for God’s goodness to bring you safely home.

As always, I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.

A Pastoral Prayer for 2017

There is so much I’d like to change for people.

I’d like to return to the widow her husband of so many years.

I’d like to give the infertile couple a child to hold.

I’d like to relieve the diseased of the invasive force ravaging her body.

I’d like to instill purpose in the mind of the boy about to become a man.

I’d like to arrange for the lonely a life companion.

I’d like to give the impoverished security in the form of abundant resources.

I’d like to protect the victims of silent abuse.

I’d like to free the chained from a sin that so easily defeats him.

I’d like to remove debt that forces career decisions in opposition to deeply held longings.

I’d like to assure the simple that seeking first the Kingdom of God is superior to the wasted efforts of making this life more comfortable.

I’d like to promote peace in families and homes where conflict passes as normal daily activity.

I’d like to develop a hunger to read God’s Word for lifelong Christians who rarely open its pages.

I’d like to spread joy to the joyless souls plodding along in this life without this part of their salvation made available to them by the Holy Spirit.

O, Father, these are my friends, my family, my sisters and brothers-in-Christ. They enter a new year with the remnants of last year in its many forms hanging on to them. Their circumstances reveal the reality of living under the curse. Their pain and sorrow limits some and debilitates others.

I am unable to do little more than provide a pause to their daily distresses. You, however, can do all things. You alone possess the wisdom to know what is best for these you love. You alone express the power to overcome their most formidable enemies. You alone utter words capable of convincing the skeptic of a better way.

I pray for them like my Lord, your son, prayed for those whom he loved (John 17). Come to the aid of your creation. Make all things new. Do for your creation what neither I nor any other in your creation can do for them. Bring, I pray, to your people change that will cause them to glorify God for the great things you have done.

I pray this in Jesus’s name.

Amen.

As always, I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.

Two links to help with your 2017 Bible reading.

Bible Reading Plans for 2017 from Ligonier

Bible Reading Plans for Your Phone from Youversion App

Your Christmas Can Be More

They steal the show every year. Sure, we are happy to see the fourth grade girl who plays Mary in the year’s Sunday School Christmas Program, and we giggle a little when the boy playing Joseph has a voice higher than that of his “betrothed wife,” but we all know the best part of the show are the two, three, and four-year-olds. When they take the stage dressed as little lambs crawling around the manger scene or making the motions to “Christmas bells, Christmas bells, ring them all the day; God the Father sent His son on that first Christmas Day,” this is the moment for cameras to flash and film. The stars for the evening have arrived.

Beyond the stage, the Christmas season provides us with a most wonderful time of the year to model and to teach truths we Christians hold dear. Your Christmas can be more than a seasonal event if you will take advantage of the time before you.

Develop the practice to give rather than receive. As Christians we know the great joy of receiving God’s indescribable gift. The salvation we enjoy was not earned by our merits, but was handed to us by God’s grace. While the gift of our Lord was a great sacrifice for the Father, it was his joy to extend the gift to us.

My mom went to be with the Lord shortly following last Christmas. When we were with her Christmas morning, she seemed tired, but I assumed (wrongly) this was simply missing my dad, her first Christmas without him. What we didn’t know was the deterioration of her heart had once again reached critical mass. She would die less than a month later.

For her last Christmas my mom chose to model to her children and grandchildren the Bible truth that it is better to give than receive. In the tree was a small envelope. Inside, a brief note described a generous gift my mom made to a single parent, a woman with very little who spent was she earned on the care of her daughter. It brought my mom great joy to know of this woman’s receipt of her gift.

In a county dominated by an “All I want for Christmas is…” mentality, we Christians can be different. How will you teach this truth to your children? How will you live this truth in your own life?

Start a search to know the great plan of God. Have you ever tried to explain to a child how the baby in the manger is God? I wonder how our kindergarten Sunday School teachers do what they do. Adults ask me simple questions like “How do I help my teenage son?” But those early childhood teachers, they get the really tough questions.

The incarnation, God becoming a man, is a great mystery we accept by faith. That means because God told us it is so we believe it though we may not fully understand it. That we cannot understand fully should not prevent us from understanding partially. How hungry are you to know the mind of God? Do you want to know him, his works, his plans, his wisdom? What questions about God deserve your efforts to find an answer that reveals his greatness to you? As the psalmist wrote, “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; and His greatness is unsearchable.”

Christmas affords great opportunities for parents to trigger curiosity in their children about who God is. Fan the flame of the wonder of God in the minds of the young ones telling them what God did in Bethlehem so many years ago.

Make Christmas about Jesus, not family, not tradition, not vacation but about Jesus. Most have their traditions about the Christmas, and they serve as wonderful occasions to promote happiness, love, appreciation, and good memories. I cherish every memory I maintain of Christmases long ago shared with those now with the Lord. As meaningful as the moments in the present and the remembrances of the past, can we Christians celebrate more than those without Christ celebrate?

To make Christmas more about Jesus will require purpose. You will have to think, “How can I emphasize Jesus so that he increases and we decrease?” This question may produce blessings you never imagined. Presenting that question to those in your house may produce opportunties you never considered.

May this Christmas season be most joyful for you, Christian, as you soak in the wonder of God becoming man.

As always, I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.

A Pastor's Hope for the Church in 2017

To the best of my knowledge, my dad never read a book from beginning to end. My memories of my dad’s consumption of the printed word begin and end at the kitchen table where he would thumb through all the ads in the Sunday paper, nursing a cup of strong, black Hills Bros. as he glanced at the pictures. After the headlines atop each section of the paper, the black letters on the white pages garnered no attention from him. I doubt my dad ever read a complete magazine article. I know he never read a blog post, including mine, and his Facebook practices were limited to liking my kids’ pictures and playing Candy Crush. My dad was not unintelligent, but he was simple, and his reading habits reflected as much. That’s what an eighth grade education delivers.

Most of you are not like my dad as evidenced by the fact that you are reading now. To some extent you appreciate the information gained by consuming the word on the page. Some of us appreciate a little, and a few of us appreciate more.

If my dad were still with us, I’d go back and try to help him, not to read the whole of a newspaper article, but in the reading of his Bible. How do you fare at Bible reading? Do you know what your Bible can do for you?

You will help yourself by reading your Bible. Your victory over temptation will become more frequent. Your capacity to act wisely in given situations will increase dramatically. Your decision making will no longer be regrettable as you look backward. You will be a lot less moody when the Bible settles your thoughts and emotions throughout the day. Coffee can't do this for you, but a diet rich in the Bible will. Your estimation of God’s greatness and grace will grow exponentially.

You will help your family by reading your Bible. Your love for siblings, parents, children and extended family will grow as you read of God’s love for them. Your positioning of their interests above your own will become more natural and less intrusive. You will become a more patient and just parent. The Holy Spirit will carry the advice you offer to your children to their hearts. You will position your family for generational faithfulness to our Lord. Years from now one of your descendants will offer, “Remember how grandpa would say, ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart?’”

You will help your church by reading your Bible. Your Sundaycorporate worship will flow from your daily Bible reading encouraging the worship of those gathered with you. Your participation in conversations will bless those in your small group or circle of close church friends as you offer, “Well, I was reading in Jeremiah the other day and God says…” Your spiritual maturity brought abought by the long term reading of God’s Word will contribute to the protection of the church when it is tempted to deviate from the Word of God in its doctrine or its methods. Your love for the church will grow as you read and witness our Lord’s love for the very same church of which you are a part.

You will grow in your desire to see people saved by reading your Bible. You will read of hell and weep for those condemned to a Christless eternity. You will see the self-consumed in the community and wonder not about their status but about their eternal destiny. You will read in the gospels the stories of the demonically oppressed and cry out to God for the release from the bondage of sin on display anywhere teens and college students gather. When you read your Bible for months on end, one day you will find yourself giving the gospel of Jesus Christ to someone in the most natural of conversations and afterward wonder, “What just happened?”

You will mature both in the content of your prayer and the frequency of your prayer by reading your Bible. Prayer is hard for those who do not read their Bibles. That makes sense. Without reading the Bible, knowledge of God is minimal. What knowledge does exist is second hand, what your pastor told you about God or what you parents said sometime long ago. As your intimacy with God grows from your reading what God says to you in his word, the natural result will be a prayer capacity you never knew possible. Bible readers become serious prayers who experience God’s power in answered prayers.

A while ago someone asked me about goals for our church in 2017. After some consideration and at the top of my list is this: our church needs to read the Bible. We have not conducted any surveys of our membership on the subject. The only information I have is anecdotal. The stories that make their way back to me suggest we don’t read our Bibles. We just don’t. But we can, we should, and we must for all the reasons listed above.

Often when I gather with our men to pray, one of them will offer, “Help our pastor as he leads us…” Sometimes I wonder what that means, as I lead us where? I’ll let you in on a little secret; there are times when leaders lead less than certain that the direction they are championing for the group is the way to go. On this one, though, I am quite certain. We need to read our Bibles.

But you don’t need to wait until January 1, 2017. You can start reading your Bible today. Read Proverbs 13, the proverb of the day. Or read Psalm 1, occupying the first position in the collection of the psalms for a reason. Or read Luke 1 in anticipation of the birth of Jesus. Or read Romans 8, one of the most important chapters in all of the New Testament. Or read Revelation 21 and marvel at what God has in store for us when this world ends.

Friends, you need, we need more of the Bible. Will you read it…a lot…often…more than you think you need?

As always, I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.

The Lie

Nothing I’ve written has been shared more across social media than a 2013 Lunchtime Musing on the subject of suicide. Recently on our church Facebook page, a reader wrote in response to that LM, Thank you for sharing this. My son also committed suicide in November, 2015. He was a Christian, a Bible college student, a passionate soul-winner for Jesus, and a shining light in the darkness. He saw 3 of his friends commit suicide on that same weekend, and eventually he too believed The Lie. This really ministered to my heart, reminding me that Paul is with Jesus, and I will see him again because I've trusted in Jesus as well.

After accidental injuries mostly related to car crashes, the leading cause of death for 10-34 year-olds in the United States is suicide. I suspect nearly all reading today know someone or a family where suicide has been a nightmare not merely a statistic. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), After a period of nearly consistent decline in suicide rates in the United States from 1986 through 1999, suicide rates have increased almost steadily from 1999 through 2014. While suicide among adolescents and young adults is increasing and among the leading causes of death for those demographic groups, suicide among middle-aged adults is also rising.

With that in mind, I share with you again pastoral thoughts I wrote in 2013 on the painful and very real problem of suicide among professing Christians.

The pain must be unbearable. The aftermath sucks the very life out of the family. No reasonable answers exist to answer the ultimate question, “Why did he do it?” On Mother’s Day Jonathan Hamilton died after a fall from the upper level of a Greenville, South Carolina, parking garage. The Greenville County Coroner determined the death a suicide. Jonathan grew up in a ministry home. He is the son of Ron and Shelly Hamilton, hymn writers and originators of Patch the Pirate. For those familiar with the music, Jonathan’s voice was that of PeeWee Pirate. My heart breaks for the Hamilton family.

This news follows that of Matthew Warren, son of Pastor Rick Warren. Like Jonathan, the 27-year-old PK (preacher’s kid) took his own life. My heart also breaks for this family and this pastor.

Why do people commit suicide? No simple sentence or paragraph can answer that question. The Bible tells of some who ended or attempted to end their lives. Jonah tried, but God intervened. Judas Iscariot succeeded as did King Saul. I think it is accurate to say that in the mind of the one who attempts the act there is a thought that rages, “Better dead than alive.” The thinking is, of course, a lie; nevertheless, the thinking seems, at the time, so true.

Many have a connection to someone who took or attempted to take his own life. I share that experience. Though I have no memory of him, my birth father took his own life when I was a toddler. In my capacity as a pastor, two church members took their own lives – one, a father of teens in our student ministry and another, a teen in our student ministry. Like most suicides, the families asked questions that could not be answered. To this day, my heart aches for those families.

The most recent statistics report nearly 43,000 suicides annually in the United States. Men commit suicide at a rate nearly 4 to 1 compared to women. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people ages 10-34. Every day 16 senior citizens end their lives. Among those 43,000 were many born again Christians, brothers and sisters in Christ who believed The Lie, “Better dead than alive.”

When a believer attempts or commits suicide, he accepts as truth the same lie that a non-believer accepts. In many The Lie brewed for months or even years culminating in that one final act. To overcome the act, one must overcome The Lie. Our task is to help them overcome The Lie. It is not easy, but it is possible.

A few answers to suicide questions:

Yes, a born again Christian does go to heaven even if he dies at his own hands. There is nothing in the Scriptures that teaches that God’s wrath remains on a man if he commits suicide. In fact, Romans 8:38 affirms that no death of any kind can separate a believer from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.

Yes, the church can help people tempted to commit suicide.Sisters in Christ can and must aid other women who are distraught to the point of suicide. Brothers must connect closely enough to other men that they can aid when a man is on the verge of believing The Lie. God has given to the Church His Word, His Spirit and His Son to address every need a man has, including any needs that might cause one to consider suicide.

No, this final act does not and should not define a person’s life. It is easy for a survivor to consider the loud and abrupt end of one’s life as the moment that characterizes him. This is an unfair and inaccurate conclusion. I appreciate what my friend, Jeremy Frazor, wrote about Jonathan. Jeremy is a staff evangelist at Jonathan’s home church in Simpsonville, South Carolina.

Praying for and grieving with the Hamilton family tonight. Thinking back on his life brings a big smile to my face. I remember when God got a hold of his life as a teenager. The zeal and joy he had. He was on fire for God! Going soul winning downtown Greenville, playing soccer for the Mohicans, teaching him gymnastics and watching him flip. What a gifted person. Fun times!!! In the last couple of years, I remember a song that our team did that he wrote called, “Higher Ground.” It was awesome! I know he is enjoying Heaven! He is with Jesus Christ his Lord. I’m jealous in a good way for him. Looking forward to seeing him again soon!

No, pastoral and ministry families are not exempt from believing The Lie. We are made of the same flesh that you are. Sometimes we feel that we cannot live up to your expectations. Sometimes our children no longer want to live in the glass house. Sometimes, we believe The Lie that Jonah believed, “Better dead than live a ministry life.” Pray for us and for pastor/ministry families that you know. Be attentive to their loneliness, their moves to isolation, and to the heavy burdens they endure like the heavy burdens you endure.

No, we will not shame you or judge you if you tell us that you are tempted by The Lie. I suspect that many people, including me, have entertained the thought, “Better dead than alive.” By God’s grace we overcame through the power of the risen Jesus Christ. We know that apart from God’s grace, we too would be a statistic. We want to help you to overcome too and conclude, I have been crucified with Christ: it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life which I know live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me (Gal. 2:20).

Praying for the Warren family. Praying for the Hamilton family. Praying for the people of First Calvary Baptist Church that none would believe The Lie and that all would assist any who may now be believing The Lie.

As always, I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.