jeff warren Posts

The Role of the Pastor

Dr. Robert Creech, Professor of Christian Ministries and Director of Pastoral Ministries at Truett Seminary, has faithfully served as the interim of the First Baptist Church of McKinney, Texas.  As an outstanding interim, his messages have been intended to prepare the FBC family for the arrival of the new pastor, Dr. Richard Lee.  (I am very excited about his arrival and coming tenure as the pastor there).  I received a few excerpts from a recent sermon that I thought were outstanding.

  • The perfect pastor preaches exactly 10 minutes.
  • He condemns sin roundly but never hurts anyone’s feelings.
  • He works from 8am until midnight and sets a good example as a husband and father.
  • The perfect pastor makes $200 a week, wears nice clothes, drives a good car, makes good buys, and gives $100 a week to the church.
  • He is 29 years old and has 40 years of experience.
  • The perfect pastor has a burning desire to work with teenagers, and he spends most of his time with the senior adults.
  • He smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his church.
  • He makes 15 home visits a day and is always in his office to be handy when needed.
  • He always has time for the church council and all of the various committees.
  • He never misses the meeting of any church organization and is always busy evangelizing the unchurched.

This portion below (from Eugene Peterson) is especially powerful and I am sharing it with my friends who are pastors. It’s also a great word for all church leaders and members.

“Century after century, Christians continue to take certain persons in their communities, set them apart, and say, “You are our shepherd.  Lead us to Christ likeness.”  Yes, their actions will often speak different expectations, but in the deeper regions of the soul, the unspoken desire is for more than someone doing a religious job.  If the unspoken were uttered, it would sound like this:

“We want you to be responsible for saying and acting among us what we believe about God and Kingdom and Gospel.  We believe that the Holy Spirit is among us and within us.  We believe that God’s Spirit continues to hover over the chaos of the world’s evil and our sin, shaping a new creation and new creatures.  We believe that God is not a spectator, in turn amused and alarmed at the wreckage of world history, but a participant.”

“We believe that the invisible is more important than the visible at any one single moment and in any single event that we choose to examine.  We believe that everything, especially everything that looks like wreckage, is material God is using to make a praising life.”

“We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact.  We don’t trust ourselves; our emotions seduce us into infidelities.  We know we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it.  We want you to give us help.  Be our pastor, a minister of Word and sacrament in the middle of this world’s life.  Minister with Word and sacrament in all the different parts and stages of our lives – in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle.  This isn’t the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task.  We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks.  This is yours:  Word and sacrament.”

“One more thing:  We are going to ordain you to this ministry, and we want your vow that you will stick to it.  This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community.  We know you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are.  We know your emotions are as fickle as ours, and your mind is as tricky as ours.  That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you.  We know there will be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you.  And we know there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it.  It doesn’t matter.  Do it.  You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it.

There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now.  Promise right now that you won’t give in to what we demand of you.  You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better.  With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of Word and sacrament so you will be unable to respond to the siren voices.”

“There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world, and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the foundational realities with which we are dealing – God, Kingdom, Gospel – we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives.  Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.”

What Every Mother Needs

“Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.”       2 Timothy 1:2

Paul’s blessing to young Timothy is my blessing for all moms this Mothers Day.

Every mother needs:

1. Grace

Mothers, may God’s unmerited, pardoning and transforming favor and power be upon you.  May His grace cover you, define you, and guide you as guide others.  May your marriage be grace-centered.  May you parent with grace.  We are all in need of grace.  So let’s go ahead and destroy the myth of the “super mom”.  There are no perfect moms.  The super mom is simply the mom who sticks with it day in and day out and does not give up.  Real moms need the grace of God.  God’s grace picks up where we are done.  Paul said,

“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace to me was not without effect.  No, I worked harder than all of them- yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”  1 Corinthians 15:10 

Mom, God’s grace finishes the task when you can’t go on.  Aren’t you glad, when you feel you can’t go on, God’s grace gives you strength?  When you fail, His grace covers you.  When you lose your temper, His grace covers you.  When you find yourself feeling all alone, unappreciated, or unworthy His grace covers you.  You can turn to Him.  To be a mom is to rely daily on God’s grace.

2. Mercy

God’s warm and tender affection for those who are in need and who are afflicted comes in unlimited ways to moms.  It is His compassion and understanding love that can keep you going.  Moms, God knows your deepest hurts.  He understands those private moments when you grow weary and become discouraged.  To be a mom is to rely daily on God’s mercy.

Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”  Hebrews 4:16

3. Peace

Peace is the fullness of God’s blessings upon His people- because we have been reconciled to Him through the death of Jesus Christ.  Because we have peace with God, we can experience peace in our hearts daily.  Mom, what do you need more than peace today?  You find it as you run to God.  To be a mom is to rely on His peace in your life daily.

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” John 14:27

Mom, you are a valued treasure to God to everyone around you.  But your ultimate worth in life is not found in being the perfect mom, it’s not found in your husband or your children.  Your worth is found in Christ.  In Him you find peace.  In Him you find mercy.  In Him you find grace.

Happy Mothers Day Mom!

The Silence of God

What Really Happened on the Cross?

“God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” 2 Corinthians 5:21

People ask: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” R.C. Sproul noted, “That only happened once, and He volunteered.” Jesus was sinless and yet He “became sin” for us. What does this mean?  If you want to live forgiven you must fully grasp what took place on the cross.  And the key to unlocking the mystery of the cross is to consider the most perplexing, uncomfortable, and difficult words that ever came from the lips of Jesus.  In His final moments on the cross, He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew 27:46 He’s actually quoting Psalm 22:1, but clearly this is a cry of anguish.  Here “forsaken” means, “abandon”, “left in trouble”- someone in trouble and turning your back on them.  I’ve had many people ask me, “Did He really believe the Father had abandoned Him?”  Could it be that God the Father really did forsake Him?  To understand the difficulty of these words we must first understand the nature of the Triune God.  The Trinity (the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit) is at the core of biblical Christianity.  It’s important to note that the Trinity is a relationship of submission.  The Son says He does nothing apart from “the Father’s initiative” and that He does only what He sees the Father doing.  Jesus says that ultimately the Spirit would come and “will guide you in all truth”.  At Jesus’ baptism, the Father says, “This is my beloved Son”.  In John 17:11, Jesus prays for the Father to make His followers “one even as we are one”.  Could it be that for the first time in all of history there was violence done, not only to Jesus, but to the Trinitarian relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  Understood correctly, this cry of anguish found in Matthew 27, is one of the most powerful, perplexing, and comforting words that Jesus ever spoke to us.  In fact, I pray that as we unpack them you will be overwhelmed, besieged, and undone by God’s love for you.

See Matthew 26:36-46 In an attempt to understand more fully what Jesus meant, we need to go back to the Garden of Gethsemane the night before the cross.  As I read the event of Jesus’ last week, I’m struck with the reality that He is in complete control of all that is happening.  If you look carefully and listen to His words it seems as though He Himself is writing the script.  As the story unfolds you realize that’s precisely what’s happening.  He has a secret ambition.  It’s interesting to note that just prior to His arrest, John 18:4 says that Jesus knew “all things that were to happen to Him.”

Matthew’s account of the events leading up to the moment of Judas’ betrayal is the most descriptive account of all that Jesus was going through.  After Judas agrees to betray Him, Jesus shares the Passover meal with His disciples.  During the meal Jesus tells Peter that he will deny Him three times that night.  Then they go to a spacious olive grove of the garden called Gethsemane.  Emotionally drained (in fact Luke tells us that they were “exhausted from sorrow” in chapter 22:45), the disciples reclined under the moon and stars of a now peaceful night and quickly drift off to sleep.  Jesus, however, would find no peace, no rest at all.  Matthew says He “began to be sorrowful and troubled” (26:38).  Mark adds that He was “deeply distressed”.  Often Jesus would go off alone, most of the time to be alone, but on this night He would need His best friends there with Him.  Jesus, the Man, needed human companionship.  Solitary confinement is the worst form of punishment our species has ever devised and, in this moment, Jesus didn’t want it.

When His disciples failed Him, Jesus did not try to conceal His hurt: “Could you not keep watch for one hour?” (vs. 40)  His words suggest something more threatening than loneliness.  Is it possible that for the first time ever He did not want to be alone with the Father?  A great struggle is underway in the heart of Jesus.  No formal, well recited prayers would come on this night.  No poetic, nicely phrased petitions in these prayers.  Dr. Luke tells us, “being in anguish, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was like drops of blood falling on the ground” (22:44).  He describes a rare medical condition that had taken effect, known as “hematidrosis”, in which the blood vessels, under such stress, expand and burst into the sweat glands.  Imagine what happens next: He falls face down on the ground crying out to God the Father.

Why was Jesus in such agony?  I would suggest that you and I have never known this kind of anguish.  I’ve talked to many people who knew they had only days, even hours to live.  Some are terrified but most are accepting, even calm.  Jesus seems anything but calm.  Knowing what was to come, was He afraid of the beatings, the scourging, the spikes driven through His wrists and feet?  Was it the fear of death that tortured Him so?  Here we realize that sometimes it’s a blessing not to know the future.  Was it the betrayal of His closest friends?  Was it the denial of Peter?  Was it a combination of all of these things together?  No.  I believe that the pain Jesus knew in the garden and would experience on the cross was greater than any one of those things and even greater than all of those things combined.

To know what was at the heart of His agony, we must understand what He meant when He referred to the “cup” the night before in the Garden.

What was this “cup”? What was Jesus hoping to avoid?  It was not merely death.  It was not physical pain on the cross.  It was not the scourging or humiliation. It was not the torture of nails being driven through His body, not the horrible thirst, nor was it the disgrace of being spat upon or beaten.  Again, it was not even all these things combined.  I say this because those were all the things Jesus said not to fear.  In Luke 12:4, He said, “And I say to you my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more they can do.”  “But,” He went on to add, “I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after he has killed, has power to cast you into hell; yes, I say to you, fear him!” (vs. 5)  Clearly, what Christ dreaded most about the cross was not physical death.  It was the outpouring of the wrath He would endure from His Holy Father.  The key is a clear understanding of “the “cup”.   The “cup” was a well-known Old Testament symbol of the divine wrath of God against sin. Consider just a few references:

“Awake, awake! Stand up, O Jerusalem, You have drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of His fury; you have drunk the dregs of the cup of trembling, and drained it out.”  Isaiah 51:17

“Take this cup of fury from my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send you, to drink it.  When they drink it, they will stagger and go mad because of the sword I will send among them.” Jeremiah 25: 15-16

“Drink, be drunk, and vomit!  Fall down and rise no more, because of the sword which I will send among you.” Jeremiah 25:27

Pretty graphic stuff.  What Jesus was experiencing on the cross was nothing less than the cup of the terrible wrath of God!  It’s worth noting here that “wrath” is not an out-of-control reaction of someone going “postal” on an angry rampage.  God is beyond that.  Wrath is God’s holy reaction to sin and in this case, it is unleashed on the Son.  The “cup” that Jesus was to drink was the vile, repulsive cup of sin bringing upon Him the full fury of the wrath of God.

Now, consider this: The One who had never tasted the tiniest drop of sin, the One who had never been separated from the Trinitarian relationship, will now bear the full brunt of the divine fury of God upon the most terrible, grotesque sins ever committed by every person who would ever live.  This, of course, includes your sins.

2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “He made who knew no sin to become sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”  That holy transaction of our sins being poured into Him, the full wrath of God unleashed upon the Son, is what Jesus feared most.  He had never been separated from the Father, until the cross.  God the Father has never abandoned anyone except His own Son.

This is the only way to explain the perplexing prayer of Jesus on the cross: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46)  Friend, as you read this, do you realize what you’ve been saved from?  God imputed (transferred, exchanged, ascribed) your sin to Christ and then punished Him for it.  Peter puts it this way:

“He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by His wounds you have been healed.”  1 Peter 2:24 Don’t you feel a need to stop right now and thank Him?  Go ahead and do it.

In the garden we find the only place where Jesus addresses God as “My Father” (Matthew 26:39,42).  In fact, Mark records He prayed, “Abba, Father”.  “Abba” is the Aramaic equivalent of “Daddy” or “Dada”.  I believe that Jesus was experiencing a kind of “holy separation anxiety”.  What parent has not seen the terror in the eyes of a child while being left behind- as if their eyes and their cry was saying, “I can’t believe that you are leaving me!”, as if to say, “Why have you abandoned me?!”  I believe that is precisely what Jesus went through on the cross, and the garden was a prelude to the pain He knew was coming.  With this cry, He yelled, “My God…” not “My Father” (the only place He does this).  Did the Father really abandon the Son?  Was there really violence done to the Trinity while Jesus was on the cross!?  I can’t explain it theologically or understand it rationally, but how else can you justify this cry of Jesus?

As He cried out in anguish, God’s inflexible holiness and boundless love collided, and our redemption was made possible.

That’s what happened on the cross. For you to be fully forgiven, Jesus had to be fully abandoned.  In that moment, the Man Jesus was not in charge, the Father was.  What does this transaction over 2,000 years ago have to do with you today?  Everything.  It is more relevant than today’s newspaper and more powerful than any truth you’ll ever know.  “You are forgiven”, He says.  Jesus, the Lamb of God, took on the full fury of God’s wrath.  He died so that you wouldn’t have to and now, you can live forgiven.

What is the “righteousness of God”?

“But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation.” Colossians 1:22 What is “the righteousness of God” poured into us?

The “righteousness of God” is to be as righteous as Jesus is righteous.

How can I receive it?

“Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.”  John 1:12

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works, so that no one can boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9

How can I live in it?

“He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by His wounds you have been healed.” 1 Peter 2:24

So, grace is unmerited favor- Does God forgive me regardless of how I live? And once I receive His grace, can I go live any way I want to live?  I believe this question gets to the heart of what it means to be a Christian. If I truly comprehend the gift of God’s grace and the price that was required to pay so that I might be forgiven, then I will respond with a gratitude that would involve my whole life- all that I am. Otherwise I experience what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”- grace that cost Jesus everything but cost me nothing.  To receive His grace is to experience “costly grace”- I understand that the possibility of grace cost Him everything and therefore, cost me everything. It is costly because Christ’s life, death and resurrection becomes a model, the example for MY life.  Thus Bonhoeffer’s most famous quote, “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”  There is no greater cost.  Of course this is in line with the call of Jesus Himself:

Then He said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Luke 9:23

Out of gratitude for this great exchange we die to ourselves in order to live for Jesus.  As we die to ourselves it is HIS life now alive in us.  Let your life now be one big, constant, ever-growing act of gratitude back to God for all He’s done for you.

 

 

General Revelation (from “Live Forgiven”)

God may be indescribable, but He is not unknowable.  As we’ve already considered, God has revealed Himself to us through creation. Theologians call this “general revelation”.  He is seen “in general” throughout all of creation.  Through it all we catch a glimpse of who He is.  Creation reveals who He is- His character, His beauty, His “bigness”, and I think how “small” He can be as well.  God reveals Himself in “general” terms through His creation so that humans will simply humble themselves before Him and then partner with Him in to accomplish His purposes.  God doesn’t reveal Himself for kicks.  He reveals Himself “on purpose”, or even “for His purpose”.  Simply put, God’s job is to do the revealing, ours is to do the responding.  We respond to His revelation by humbling ourselves before Him and surrendering our lives to Him.

So, the logical question is this: What does creation say about who God is? And regardless of where you are in your faith journey, doesn’t it seem logical that God created all that is?  Remember, it is scientifically impossible to get something out of nothing.  In regard to the Aristotlean logic of “cause and effect”, there must be a cause for every effect.  Ultimately you are led to an “Uncaused Cause”.  What does creation reveal to us about who God is?  What can we know about Him?

Throughout all He has made God shows us how wonderfully creative He is and how thoroughly involved He is with His creation.  He cares for His creation and in ways and in places that we have never seen or think about.  When the Discovery Channel presented its series, “Planet Earth”, it quickly became a favorite in our family.  Taking years to make, a group of British scientists and photographers put together, what was for me at least, one worship sequence after another.  As they show us places and practices in creation never before seen, we’re reminded that much of God’s creation and caring seems, at times, gratuitous, unnecessary, even extravagant.

For instance, why didn’t He stop at 100 billion stars?  Why did He create billions of galaxies with trillions of stars in each one?  Why didn’t He stop at 2,000 mammals?  (There are 4,260 different types of mammals).  There are 6,787 species of reptiles, nearly 10,000 different types of birds and 28,000 species of fishes.  And of course, invertebrates outnumber all the vertebrates put together.  There are 80,000 species of mollusks and a million different kinds of insects.  Why didn’t He stop at 1,000 types of insects?  I read recently that there are 300,000 species of beetles and weevils alone!  What’s up with that?  And again, what does this say about God?  As a piece of art expresses the heart of the artist, God’s artwork, His creation, is an expression of who He is.

Why the extravagance, the lavish and seemingly excessive creativity?  Some scientists have now added to their reasons for the existence of such a vast universe this interesting thought: The Universe exists so that we might explore it and in so doing find the One who is the Creator of it all.  Again, He’s not just “out there”.  He wants to be found by us.

It’s as if He is trying to say to us throughout His creation that He is the One in control of all of life, not us.  It’s as if He wants us to know who’s in control, as if to say, “You’re going to need a God like me.  You’re going to need a God who creates and cares for His creation in ways that you don’t even see.  You’re going to need a God who gives and blesses and sustains and loves for seemingly no reason whatsoever.”  That’s the kind of God He is.  He loves because that’s who He is and we see His heart in creation.