Where’s Your Hope?

Getting tired or growing weary? Is life just tough?

Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.  He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. (Isaiah 40:28-31)

Fatigue and discouragement often run together as best friends. When we get tired we are more susceptible to discouragement, depression and many other emotional ills. Simple annoyances can become traumatic experiences. Then we lose our focus and become consumed with the circumstances of life. Before long, God is no longer a part of our daily thought process and all we can see are the annoyances that have become trials of epic proportions. Really, the annoyances have gotten no bigger we have just chosen to focus on them. I remember talking with an elderly gentleman a few years ago who grew up in the great depression years. He told me “The great depression was nothing to my family. We lived in the country. We were poor when it began and we were poor when it ended. We hunted for food during the depression just like we did when times were good. It was those city boys that were jumping out the windows.” His focused never changed throughout those terrible years even though things around him did.

What is your mental state today? Is your trial really that big or does it just look big because you are focused on it? Where do you place your hope? Place your hope in God through Jesus and find renewed strength, power and the ability to soar with eagles! Even though you may be going through a great depression, placing your perspective in the proper place will help you get through it. The proper perspective is the Lord’s perspective. Focus on God. Then the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth who neither tires nor wearies will give you the strength you need today. Place your hope in Him and watch how your traumatic trials turn once again into everyday annoyances.

Prayer for you today

For you today...I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the glorious riches of His inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power to us who believe, according to the working of His vast strength. (Ephesians 1:18-19)

Churched but Lost

In late August, a group from our church went to Mexico City to conduct VBS at Capital City Baptist Church. One of the most difficult parts of the trip is crossing the border. We must obtain visas for every member of the group, register the van and the trailer, and pay for all of these items. The first thing we do is acquire our visas. Everything was going smooth until I handed the immigration official the church credit card. When he ran it, the card was declined. We had paid the card as we do every month and had plenty of credit line on the card to pay for the visas, but it was rejected again when I asked the man to try it again. Upon investigation, I found that the bank had rejected the card because it was trying to be used in Mexico. I had not informed them that I would be leaving the country so they automatically declined the request. We got that cleared up, but only after we returned from Mexico.

Has something like that ever happened to you? Have you ever given a credit card to a waiter or sales clerk only to find that you couldn’t use the card? That has happened to many people. It can be very embarrassing! Who really knows why it is rejected? It could be over the limit. It could be a safety issue; it could be a computer issue with the bank. Nevertheless, it is rejected.

Something similar, but far worse, has happened time and time again. The consequences are much worse than a few minutes of embarrassment. It happens when some people stand before God and present themselves as Christians, only to hear Jesus says to them, “I never knew you! Depart from me.” They ask Him to check again, still, they are rejected. In Matthew 7:21-23 this scenario plays out like this: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord!’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but [only] the one who does the will of My Father in heaven. On that day many will say to Me, ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in Your name, drive out demons in Your name, and do many miracles in Your name?’ Then I will announce to them, ‘I never knew you! Depart from Me, you lawbreakers!’” These people will not only be shamed, but they will be condemned to hell.

Jesus speaks of these people being allowed to live out their lives in the church in Matthew 13. He told a parable about wheat and tares growing together in the same field. Of course, we know that this is happening in the world today. It happens in abundance in our area of the country. We live in a region of the country where going to church is still the socially acceptable thing to do. We call it the Bible belt. East Texas could be considered the buckle of the Bible belt. As you talk to people about Jesus, most of the time the conversation goes to church membership. The overwhelming majority of people in our area claim some affiliation with a church. I remember reading the obituaries recently and seeing someone listed as a member of Southside, yet they had not attended in over a decade. It is this kind of commitment to Christ that concerns me. Do these people really have a relationship with Jesus? My fear is that when these people present their credentials to enter the gates of heaven, they will be declined.

How sad. Can’t you just see the shock on the faces of those people? Some people claim Christianity based on a decision they made to join a church years ago. Some live a life of works and religious activity all their lives and then find out they never had a relationship with Jesus. With so many of these people in our area what are we to do about it? How do we “make every effort to confirm your calling and election?” Looking at the disciples, especially those who were the Apostles of the early New Testament church, we get some idea of what a relationship with the resurrected Christ looks like.

Remember what they did after the crucifixion of Jesus? They were in a room, afraid that the authorities would come after them. What would they do now?

They had spent three years with Jesus. They followed Him everywhere He went. Now He was dead. What to do? Then Jesus appears to them. These people who were scared of the authorities now become emboldened and empowered by the resurrected Christ! They were no longer walking in fear of authorities but seeking to win them to Jesus.

That is what an encounter with the resurrected Christ does. It is not a decision to become part of some institution, but it is a meeting with the Savior that changes your life, your focus, your activity, forever. Those of us who are believers in Jesus must be examples of what it looks like to be a Christian. We must let our encounter with the resurrected Christ guide everything we do. The more that we do this, the more the “tares” will realize there is something missing in their lives. If we are to reach the lost of Lufkin, the first thing we must do is “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” Will you covenant with me to begin praying for those who have some false sense of security concerning their relationship with Jesus Christ? As we continue to reach the world for Jesus, let’s not forget Lufkin. As we try to reach Lufkin, let’s not forget those who claim church membership but have no relationship with Jesus.

Wednesday, August 19

What a week of adjustments this has been! Returning from Mexico early Saturday evening was bad enough. Going from a high of high 70’s to a high of around 100 is pretty drastic. Sunday was Chase’s last day as he heads back to school and we are excited to have Chris Taylor coming as our prospective Youth Minister this week. Christa, our middle child, had 25+ soccer teammates from Lufkin High School come to the house for a sleep over Tuesday night. I was trying to find a movie worth watching until Missy threatened me for thinking about leaving. 25 girls, two dogs, one cat (who hid until late the next morning), two laptops, one desktop and tow TV’s make for much noise. I was sure God was calling me to go minister in a hotel, but my resident Holy Spirit, AKA Missy, said that was just the Chinese food I had for lunch speaking, not God. Today, I spent most of the day working on generators just in case Hurricane Bill takes an unexpected turn. If he doesn’t, they needed to tweaked for the hurricane season anyway. As you know, we house evacuees from the Gulf Coast if necessary and no electricity with 300+ people staying at the church is not a good thing! That’s not a big adjustment, just took a day from an already out of the ordinary week. Finally, Corrinn, our oldest, is leaving for Mississippi College on Friday. What an adjustment!

I am sure there will be tears in our eyes when we leave her in Clinton, MS. Missy has already teared up a few times missing her daughter before she is gone. Corrinn asked me if I was going to cry when we dropped her off. I told her, “Absolutely! I will have tears in my eyes as I say ‘Thank you, God. Thank you!’” Of course I am kidding! I am very thankful to God that she has turned out to be such a Godly young lady. She is ready to go out and change the world. Her mother have been praying for her, as we do all of our children, that they would take the small impact that we have made to the next level and do great things for the Lord. I believe she will do so.

As for the two remaining at home, Christa, along with Lauren Levens who is her lifelong friend, decided to take a more active leadership role on the soccer team. More than being the captian on the field, they decided to take it too the next level. One of the primary purposes of the sleep over was to start the year off on the right track. The two of them worked on a Bible Study for the team! I am so excited and proud of Lis (Lauren’s mom) and I stood in the front yard last night talking about how God is moving in their lives. Praise Him!! Of course they are still teenagers. Later they caught by the police wrapping a friends house. Their punishment was that they had to clean it up.

Davis and I are looking forward to spending a little more time together now that Corrinn will be gone. I am excited about that. We caught a couple of Astro games together, went to Mexico together to minister, and he helped me work on things like the generators.

Looking forward to another great week next week!

Mexico City Day 5

Another good day of VBS. Things are progressing well. We had over fifty children here once again. Everything seems to running smooth. We are looking forward to Thursday which is the evangelistic emphasis day. Lynn Sasser, pastor of Capital City Baptist Church, will be presenting the Gospel to the children. Please go before the Lord concern-ing this time. The group from Southside is doing a great job of being intentional in their teaching. They are pointing the children toward Jesus, which is what VBS is all about. I am so thankful for this team that gave up a week of their time to come and teach these children about Jesus. Yes, we are blessed by God for being here and yes we are having a good time, but it is still a sacrifice to be here. Most of them gave up a week of vacation to be here. All of them traveled for more than twenty-four hours in the van to get here. The really amazing thing is they do not see it as such a sacrifice. They just came to be obedient and to teach children about Jesus! But the Lord says of them in Isaiah 52:7, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the herald, who proclaims peace, who brings news of good things, who proclaims salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” I pray that God will use them while we are here, but also that He will reveal Himself to them in a way that is new and fresh to them.

This afternoon we made our first trip to Casa Hogar Adulam. This is a place that takes in homeless children and children living in adverse circumstances. Currently there are around fifty children living in this place, but there are many more who come to eat and shower and then head back to life on the street. Homeless children are numerous in Mexico City. It has been determined that this city has the biggest population of homeless children in the world. We met one young man who was living with his mother on the street. She decided to move one day and did so leaving her four children behind in Mex-ico City. Only one of the children lives in the orphanage. This is not a rare occurrence. As children would walk while we were talking to the pastor who oversees the home, he would tell us the story of that child. All of them were heartbreaking. The ladies spent the afternoon cleaning rooms and organizing a library. The cleaning was not cleaning up a lived in room—well at least it was not inhabited by humans. They said there were nu-merous inhabitants but they had six legs and scurried away from the light. Those working in the library spoke of the difficult in arranging the books by topic. Understandable when you remember the books are all in Spanish!

Then men were told their work would be “very difficult” by the overseer. We walked up the stairs to the third floor then the overseer climb out of the stair well and began to make his way to the roof by walking on pallets that had been strapped to metal beams. He told us to be careful just about the time he took his second step. That was the step where his foot went through the rotten wood. He caught himself and continued to the roof. There were six of us standing there looking at each other in disbelief. Jose, Steven, Davis, two teenagers from Capital City Church and I are thinking about the climb. The teenagers, including Davis, are ready to jump on the pallets and head to the roof. The Capital City guys make their way up there. Davis starts to climb and I grab him and tell him to “forget it.” I am now trying to determine the best way to save face and still let the boss man no in a polite way, “There is absolutely no way I am getting on that roof.” To be quite honest, I wasn’t worried to much about saving face. I am old. I am terrified of heights. I wanted to what needed to be done to help the orphanage, but surely there was some other way to get to the roof. I could handle being on a roof with no guard rails more than forty feet about the concrete and tile floor. I could not however bring myself to climb out of a stair well on to rotten pallets to make my way to that roof. What about a ladder? I am a US citizen. Doesn’t OSHA still cover my work practices in Mexico? Surely they would fine me if they heard about what I was doing. After all, the Bible does tell me to “obey the law of the land.” That must include the law of the land where I live, even though I am not in my home country. I could never be so disobedient and break the law of the land in which I live, at least not when it suits my fears.

It was about this time that the overseer says we need only one more guy up there to help. We were not in the basement (see yesterdays’ blog) so God COULD hear my heartfelt pleas. Now all I had to do to save face was simply find a reason why one of the other guys had to go instead of me. At the time the boss made the statement I was working my outside the stair well. I immediately got down and allowed one of the others the “privi-lege” of working on the roof. Jose and Steven were left and neither one of them really wanted to go, but Steven did. He made the climb—slowly and carefully, but he made the climb. The rest of us were escorted to the place where we would be working. Somehow it seemed so appropriate. We were led down stairs and then back up to a room in an adja-cent building where we were to remove the roof consisting of plastic table and other odd pieces covering the room. There we would be handed the rebar from the guys on the roof of the other building. At least we were surrounded by walls. What was so appropriate about this room? When we opened the door at to make our way into this room, it was filled with…chickens. Was this a word from the Lord? Was He pointing out my character so plainly? It was obvious. There was not just one or two chickens, but more like twenty or thirty. There was also a turkey! What was God telling me? Am I a turkey with a chick-en heart? Don’t answer that. That is between me and Lord. I simply chose to interpret that as coincidence. There was absolutely no meaning to that room being full of chickens. And besides, the real reason for them being there was to give Davis something to do in between rebar passing’s. I think he caught every chicken in there and held the turkey too. He also was able to hold a couple of the rabbits that were in there, but we won’t even be-gin to think about the spiritual implications of the rabbits being in the room.

Please keep praying for us and forgive the typos. I don’t prook reed these befor postin them. 

Mexico City Mission Trip Day 4

Monday, August 10, 2009

VBS started today. Everyone was excited about that. Normally we start with very few children and it builds throughout the week. This year we started with a bang. 53 children showed up on the first day. How exciting that that many children will be hearing about the love Jesus has for them this week. We pray that the number will increase day by day.

Everything went smooth today. All the teachers were ready to teach the Bible to the children; the m missions tract was good; and even recreation and refreshments were smooth. We have such a good team! Thank you God for the servant mentality you have given this team.

Since today was our only evening off we planned to go shopping and to Restaurante Ar-royo, the world’s largest single Mexican restaurant, with seating for 2,200 patrons. It has musical stages, wandering mariachi and jarocho bands, and a mechanical bull. It also contains its own bullring. We were pretty excited about this until we realized we were not able to drive. In Mexico City the government introduced a program, Hoy No Circula, which bans most drivers from using their vehicles one weekday per week, based on the last digit of the vehicle’s license plate. For example, vehicles with a license plate ending in 5 or 6 may not be used on Monday. The last digit of the van is 5 so we were unable to drive anywhere. Our options were to just stay at the church all evening or to use Lynn’s car along with two taxis and choose one of the two activities. We decided to get the taxis and go shopping.

Everyone, except me, seemed to have a good time shopping. I was praying diligently for the group to choose to go to the restaurant, but we were in the garage which is located in the basement of the church so God couldn’t hear my prayer. We left for the Ciudadela in Lynn’s car and the two taxis. During the trip there, these crazy Southside people were sticking cameras out the window taking pictures of each other and anything else that looked interesting. Upon arriving, the group decided to stay in that shopping area for two and half hours. At that point, I realized that God was punishing me. I looked for an op-portunity to leave the group, get by myself, and seek the face of God in order to repent of this grievous sin for which I was being punished. I had no idea what it was, but I knew it must be terrible in order to receive this kind of punishment. Since two of the people wanting to go shopping were my offspring, I felt a parental responsibility to stay with them, therefore repentance would have to come later. As we were walking and looking and walking and looking and walking and paying I realized that this really was not pu-nishment, this was just life on a mission trip. I recalled God’s love for me and that re-minded me that He would never do something like this to me. He loves me too much. He sent Jesus so I would not have to be punished like this, no matter what the sin. Why was I here then? The LADIES! They had assumed control of this trip. What was I thinking? I could have sitting in the middle of a nice restaurant sipping strained pineapples (the Spanish words are pina coloda—virgin of course) while listening to a mariachi band. So I quickly realized this was not punishment, but stupidity on my part. I’m the pastor. I can make executive decisions. I could have told them what we were going to do. Whatever! I live with three ladies, my wife, a 18 year old and a 17 year old. I am supposed to be in charge there too, but I know how that goes. Better to just sit back and endure a few hours of misery than have seven women mad at me for the rest of the trip. Then I thought about Lynn who has to do this ten to twelve times each summer. I am sure all the groups that visit here to help in the work want to shop. How does he do this? He, being much more experienced with this kind of thing, brought study materials and remained in his vehicle the entire time. He had several hours of study time. If I were him, I would rename my care “The Word.” That way he could brag to me and the rest of his friends, “I spent over three and half hours in the Word today.” We would be very impressed.

Anyway, we made it back safe and sound. For some reason the taxi ride home was only one half the rate as the ride there; exact route in reverse, but yet half the cost. Odd, but welcome to Mexico City.

We had sandwiches for supper upon our return. Yes, you heard right. We travel 1150 miles one way to Mexico and eat sandwiches. I could still be sipping strained pineapples and eating authentic Mexican food but I am eating a jamon and queso sandwich. Pray for me. Ask the Lord to help me keep my theology straight and not slip back into the thought that He is punishing me.

Mexico City Mission Trip Day 3

We had a great day today. We worshipped with the English speaking congregation this morning. It was a packed house this morning. The guy who led worship was a rookie. It was his first time to lead worship anywhere. He did a great job! You could not tell he had never done it before. He is truly blessed by God. We were especially blessed because two families we had worked with before came from out of town to be with us in worship. From Ocoyoacoc the Trejo family came to be with us. Gloria woke up early and brought dozens of tamales with her. Add to that the understanding they had to ride a bus to get here, and you realize what kind of people they are. We really love them and formed a bond with them while we were working in their city. We used their house as the teaching point for VBS.

Sacrovir, Claudia and the two boys, Sacro Jr. and Benjamin came from Lerma. We started a church with their help in that city several years back. How blessed we were to spend some time with these two families.

After church, we had lunch with the team of workers from Capital City Church. The assignments were given out and everyone got busy preparing the rooms and the worship center. Looks like it going to be a great VBS.

This evening I had the privilege of preaching to a group of West Africans. They are a group from Nigeria that in Mexico City. They had been meeting all of the city and asked Lynn if they could use Capital City facilities for their worship gatherings. They also asked Lynn to preach for them. He has been doing so for the last year or so. I love worshipping with them. They are the epitome of worship that is expressive but not excessive. By the time you get to the preaching time, they are so in tune with what is going on that they help preach. I would start a verse and they would complete it with me. It was a true blessing. If nothing else good happens (although I expect it will), my week here will be a success.

We met as a group a few minutes ago and talked about being intentional in our expectations this week. We have been doing this so long that we are in danger of having limited expectations. We have such a good group here this week that I know they will look for the Lord to do great things. Only a few have been before, so that helps. The expectations of the new missionaries are always an energizing factor on any trip.

Pray that the Lord will have His way this week; with the VBS, the work at the orphanage, and in our hearts.