Pressing toward the goal

By Derek Miller - My Dad’s family is quite large.  His mother was one of twelve children who grew up in Southeast Alabama and each of them had many children and grandchildren.  One of my Dad’s cousins, Sidney Brown, had a child named Ashley who was one of the meanest troublemakers out there.  On one of our family trips to Dothan, my parents told me that I “should not taken anything off of Ashley and if he caused any trouble, I had permission to knock the tar out of him.”  To me, being about 11 years old, that was like saying that I had a “Get out of Jail” free card.  So, as we arrived, I looked for my opportunity to knock Ashley out.  My grandmother lived near a grave yard and my cousins, Ashley and I went off to “go play” in the cemetery.  Ashley started acting up and even though it was not major issue, I took my opportunity to bloody Ashley up.  He went home screaming that I had beaten him up.  When my parents asked me why I had done this in the middle of everyone, I simply replied, “Because you told me that if he gave me any trouble, I had your permission to beat the tar out of him.”  You could have heard a pin drop in the middle of that room.

I have to admit that I took a lot of pleasure in beating Ashley up.  But, I also have to admit that this is sin.  That is the way that sin works.  It is something that can feel good and is easy to do.  Man is sinful by nature and it is why we are separated from God.  That separation from God is exactly why I need Jesus to be my Savior.  In Romans 5:8, it says, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this:  While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  I accepted Christ as my Savior at a backyard Bible club at our neighbor Nancy Puffer’s house at the age of 12.  That was an acknowledgment that I was a sinner and needed salvation through Jesus Christ.  We cannot save ourselves and God cannot look on our sin without Christ’s intervening on our behalf.  Therefore, God provided a path for us to gain salvation.  Have you ever really stopped to think about that?  God sent His Son to die for our sins.  Why would He do that?  Why would Jesus have to come to earth in the form of a human?  The following story sums it up very well. 

The Man and the Birds by Paul Harvey

The man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge; he was a kind decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas Time. It just didn’t make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man.

“I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a hypocrite. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound…Then another, and then another. Sort of a thump or a thud…At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it.

Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them…He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms…Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.

And then, he realized that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me…That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him.

“If only I could be a bird,” he thought to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to safe, warm…to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand.”

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells – Adeste Fidelis – listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas.

And he sank to his knees in the snow.

While accepting Christ is the most important step in our Christian walk, it is by no means the only step.  We are then called upon to love and serve both God and other people.  This is more than a cliché for our class.  God gives the command in Deuteronomy and several other locations in the Old Testament to love God with all your heart, soul and mind.  Leviticus tells us that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Jesus answers questions from the Pharisees in the New Testament when they ask Him what the greatest commandments are.  In Matthew 22:37-40, Jesus answers that we are to love God and others.  When we love and serve God and love and serve others, we are demonstrating Jesus living in us.  Deeds alone will not provide our salvation, but they are a testimony to Jesus living in us.  Throughout the Gospels, Jesus provides many examples of loving and serving God and others.  We should do likewise.

Next on our Faith journey and very intertwined with loving and serving God and others is being on Mission for God.  We have to look for opportunities to be on Mission for God and then take those opportunities.  In his book, “When the Game is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box”, author John Ortberg talks about “shadow missions.”  He defines a “shadow mission” this way.  “My shadow mission is what I will do with my life if I drift on autopilot.  It consists of the activities toward which I will gravitate if I allow my natural temptations and selfishness to take over.  Everybody has a shadow mission.”  We have to figure out what our “true mission” is and go toward it.

In the Old Testament book of Esther, we are told of the many twists and turns that allow a young Jewish girl to become queen of the nation.  She has been raised by her cousin Mordecai who continues to provide her with advice.  As the king’s chief of staff, Haman, has been offended by Mordecai and has the king issue an edict that will essentially kill all the Jews in the land.  Esther must take the chance of going before the king when she has not been summoned, an offense which can result in death.  In chapter 4, verse 14, Mordecai says that “who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?” 

Esther is able to turn the tables on Haman and save her people.  Her shadow mission was to live in the lap of luxury as queen, but her true mission was to be in the right place at the right time to be used by God to save her people.  How often are we brought into circumstances simply because of other events, but our true mission is to do the work of our Lord?  Have you ever thought that where you are today is no accident?  Who knows but that you have come to your position for such a time as this?  I was brought to South Carolina by my job.    That is not my true mission.  My true mission is to be an instrument for the Lord.  I purchased a house in a neighborhood.  Was I simply there to live in the house and not do anything for God?  My children attended school here.  Were their interactions only to learn and not do anything else?  My wife’s job was here.  Was she simply to sit on the sidelines and not teach her 4 year old classes while she was here?

A good illustration of this principle is captured in the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life”.  In that movie, George Bailey wants to travel the world and become rich and famous.  As the story plays out, however, he learns that his true mission is to help other people.   This is evidenced by what he learns when Clarence the angel shows him what would have happened if he had never been born.  How are you positively influencing those around you and being on Mission for God?  In other words, what are you doing in the place and position that you find yourself in to further God’s kingdom?

Lastly, we have to recognize that our Christian journey is just that—a journey.  We will reach our destination when we go to heaven, but on this side of heaven, we are called to keep on working.  Jesus never talks about retirement from Christian work.  Even the apostle Paul talks about the need to press on in Philippians 3:12-14.  We must keep pressing on.  We are to accept Christ as Savior, we are to love and serve god and others, we are to remain on Mission for God’s purposes and we are to keep doing these last two and continuing to help others know and accept Christ as Savior all of the days we are on this earth. 

I have learned many things on a pilgrim on this journey during our nearly six years in Lexington and I know that God’s work continues as we go forward.  Although we will be laboring in different areas, we are to continue pressing on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called us heavenward in Christ Jesus.  Thanks to all of you for what you mean to me and my family and the work that we will continue to do in Christ Jesus.  Blessings to each of you and I leave with the verses in Philippians 1:2-6.  May we continue to press on and God bless each of you!

Forward in faith

From Derek Miller ~ Back in the early ‘70’s, I fashioned myself to be a pretty good baseball player.  I could hit the ball fairly well and was a pretty good fielder.  I enjoyed going to practice and playing in the games.  Most of my practices were fairly close to home and my parents were reliable to pick me up after practice.  One day, however, our practice was held at a local elementary school that was positioned by one of the malls in the city.  Relatively speaking, it was pretty far away from my house.  My mom dropped me off at 4:00 for practice and the last thing she said as I got out of the car was, “your Dad will be here to pick you up” and she drove away.  At about 5:15, our practice ended and other players started leaving the field.  Many asked if I needed a ride and I would just reply cheerfully, “oh no, my Dad is going to be here to pick me up.”  Finally, the school yard cleared and I was the only kid left there.  The time went by, 5:30, 5:45, 6:00 and my Dad had not arrived.  Remember this was before cell phones or texts, so I had no way of knowing what the hold up was.  As it started moving toward darkness at about 7:25, I hatched the idea that I would walk to the mall and call home—how I was going to do that, I have no idea as I had no money to use in the pay phone.  As I started walking away from the field, an approaching car caught my attention—it was my Dad and brother coming.  So, I ran back to the school to meet them as they passed me by.  It seems that my Dad had forgotten that he needed to pick me up and I was there alone for over 2 hours waiting on him.

I was never so fearful in my life when I was waiting for him and had no idea why he was not there.  Our heavenly Father, on the other hand, is there for us.  The hardest part for us is that we have to completely trust Him and have faith that He is going to be there for us and direct our paths.  Just like the fear that I experienced wondering where my earthly Father was when I was sitting at that practice field, I am sometimes paralyzed by fear—fear of the unknown in my future.  In Proverbs 3:5-6, it says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him and he will make your path straight.”  In the King James Version, the last part of that verse says that, “He shall direct your paths.”  Notice that we are not called upon to trust in the Lord with some of our heart, or most of our heart, but every single bit of our hearts.  In the same way, we are called upon in all of our ways to acknowledge Him.  That can be easy to say and very difficult to put into practice every single time we are faced with a challenge.

With our upcoming transfer to Georgia, we had lots of questions.  While we are familiar with the area and it would seem that it would be easy to re-acclimate back there, we were faced with lots of decisions that had big impacts.  Most all of those were encapsulated in one big decision—where would we live.  While we had our own ideas of where that should be, we turned it over to God to help us make the decisions.   We thought we should look at areas closer to our offices.  We would continue to rule out areas further away.  While we watched, many houses that we looked at, started dropping out as options pretty early on.  One house that we really liked and was the first house on our list, went under contract in early March.  It was located further away from our offices so we dismissed that as being expected when we looked at it and kept moving forward because it was not in our desired location.  That house came back on the market and we continued to pray for God’s guidance as we looked.  I even remarked to our realtor that it might get to the point, where we would need a neon sign outside of a home saying, “This is the One”.  As we continued the process, many homes came on the market and we would pray for discernment as to which house we should choose.  One by one, those houses went under contract.  It became so concerning that we contacted our realtor and asked her if we needed to go ahead and come earlier than planned to find a house.  She indicated that we should.  So, in late March, we went over and started looking at houses again.  We saw one house that we really liked in the same neighborhood as the other one we liked.  Joyce and I discussed which one we would prefer and we prayed for God’s discernment.  During that week, the 2^nd house sold and we were left with the original house in that neighborhood.  As we walked up to the house on our realty tour, we could see a sign in the foyer.  There was a neon green poster board that said, “This is the One!”  While we know the realtors had talked, it became evident that the sign was right.  As we negotiated the price, the counter-offer came back right where we had hoped to be if we were buying the house.  The very next day, another offer came in but we had an agreed price by then.  It was not where we originally thought we would be, but it was evident that it is where God wanted us to be.

A few weeks ago, Pastor Mike told the story in Joshua where the Israelites were crossing over the Jordan River heading into the Promised Land.  In Joshua 3:14-17, it indicated that the Jordan River was at flood stage.  Joshua directed the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant to go forward.  As soon as they stepped their feet into the Jordan, the river water started backing up and the people crossed over on dry land.  Notice something here.  God did not tell the Israelites to stand on the sidelines until He was ready for them and then the miracle would happen.  He did not say, wait until I part the water in front of you before you cross.  They actually had to take steps forward in faith to step into the water before the miracle occurred.  Before they did that, they had no idea what was being planned.  They had to “trust in the Lord with all their hearts and lean not on their own understanding.”

In the book we just recently started in MOVERS called “Crazy Love” by author and Pastor Francis Chan, he talks about our minds are the size of a soda can and our God is as vast as the ocean.  Do I really want to have faith in and serve a God that I can compact into a space that I can comprehend and understand everything that He is doing?  Having read the entire Bible, I am yet to find where it says that we will always have complete understanding of everything that God is up to.  What it does say in several places is that we are to trust in the Lord.  In Proverbs, I am called upon to trust with my entire heart and acknowledge Him in everything that I do and He will direct my paths.  Just like the people of Israel, we have to move forward and let God direct us where we need to go even if we don’t fully understand what is going on.  Also, in Deuteronomy 31:6, God tells Moses to “be strong and courageous.  Do not be afraid or terrified. . ., for the Lord your God goes with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you.”  With promises like that, are you willing to take the first steps of faith and let Him direct your paths?

Build on eternal; squeeze in the temporary

~ From Derek Miller

We make many, many decisions in our lives.  These decisions range from the routine easy decisions to complex and difficult decisions with long-term impacts.  In the typical day, we have to make thousands of decisions.  We make decisions on whether to shower or eat first, what to eat for breakfast, what clothes to wear, what time to wake our children and/or spouses for their day, what route to use to get to work, and on and on.  Many of these go without much forethought and are made in a fraction of a second.  Many of these decisions, however, even when they are perceived to be small, can have many life altering impacts.

In the Guideposts story written by Kevn Felts, he tells the story of how he was struck to give a $100 to a family that he did not even know.  As it turned out, he provided the seed money to print the initial 15 copies of a story that would become the bestseller, The Shack.  Do you see that?  A simple act of giving to others, allowed author Paul Young to print out 15 copies of his story to distribute to his family members.  God used that gift to help millions who have read The Shack which has sold over 14.5 million copies.  Kevin relays that he never knew who he gave the money to until he was called upon to be the camera man for a documentary about Paul Young and realized he was the beneficiary of the $100.  A gift that has been multiplied many times over when placed in God's hands.

In Matthew 6:19-21, we are called upon to store up treasures in heaven and not here on earth.  Jesus lays out the different economic lessons that God has for us.  Many times we get hung up on the marketing blitz of modern times and we lose out on seeing that many "treasures" we seek have a short life span and we find that we have to scratch that itch for the next latest and greatest thing.

In Luke 12:16-21, Jesus relays the parable of the foolish farmer who has a bumper crop.  Rather than being generous with his bounty, he decides that he is going to build bigger barns and take it easy for a while.  The story shows that while Jesus continues to show that we tend to focus on the temporary, God is more interested in the eternal.  One thing to notice here is that Jesus doesn't say that the man in the story is evil or wicked.  He simply calls him a fool.  Why does Jesus use this harsh word?  The man did not deliberately set out to neglect his wife or ignore his children.  He did not establish the goal of becoming greedy and self-preoccupied as possible.  He didn't purpose in his heart to defy God or close off all compassion for the poor.  He just had other things to do.  He was simply too busy.  His priority list of what mattered most would be:

1. Harvest large crops
2. Build bigger barns
3. Achieve financial security
4. Eat
5. Drink
6. Be merry

What he did not bank on was that all of these things were temporary.

When we do a little mental accounting, we realize that as we look around and think about our lives, there are many things that are temporary.  This list includes our possessions, our resumes, our bodies, money, pleasures, other people's opinions of us, security, titles and positions, youth, power, physical attractiveness, and health.  On the Forever side of the ledger, we find God, our investments in the lives of others, our soul and deeds of love are eternal and are those treasures in heaven that Jesus talked about in the earlier verses.

What these verses are saying is that we need to be rich toward God.  You may ask, what does that look like:

• Being rich toward God means growing a soul that is increasingly healthy and good.
• Being rich toward God means loving and enjoying the people around you.
• Being rich toward God means learning about your gifts and passions and doing good work to help improve the world.
• Being rich toward God means becoming generous with our stuff.
• Being rich toward God means making that which is temporary become the servant of that which is eternal.
• Being rich toward God means savoring every roll of the dice and every trip around the board in this game of life.

What stops you from being rich toward God?

A couple of things get in our way.  One is that we are in a long lasting desire to keep score.  The old "keeping up with the Joneses" routine.  It is easy to use stuff to keep score and it is very difficult to quantify the effect of loving and serving both God and others.  We love to compare and contrast ourselves to those around us and decide whether we are better than, equal to, or worse than someone else.  Second and very related to the first, is that we like to live in the here and now and we lose track of the coming accountability that we are going to have to give later on.  With all of this, it is important to recognize that wise people build their lives around what is eternal and squeeze in what is temporary rather than the other way around.

Kyle Orth has learned that very thing.  Growing up in Tallahassee, Florida, he was one of the best athletes that I ever saw.  Whether we played football, basketball, baseball, track or any other athletic endeavor, everyone always wanted to be on Kyle's team.  It seemed that his teams never lost.  In a relay race, he was the anchor leg to make sure that any deficit after the third lap could be made up with his speed.  I was on a recreation league team with Kyle and we won the league championship in come from behind fashion due in large measure to Kyle's play.  As the years went along, my family moved away and when we moved back to Tallahassee, his family had moved.  The last time that I saw Kyle was when he came to a bank I worked at in 1982.  We had lost touch with each other.

Recently, through a series of God centered events, our lives have reconnected when I noticed pictures of work he was doing last summer in South Africa.  After getting to see his sister on Facebook and getting his contact information, I corresponded with Kyle and he related his story of how he has gotten so heavily involved in kingdom work.  He related to me that while influenced by events that happened to build his foundation in childhood, his recent involvement in these missional trips has been triggered by a calling to do things with an eternal effect rather than a temporary one.  It started about a decade ago with a daily quiet time and then built into his following the footprints of Jesus into the world.  He answered the call of who will go with, "Here am I, send me."

Kyle is epitomizing that wise people build their lives around what is eternal and squeeze in what is temporary rather than the other way around.  I always enjoyed being on Kyle's teams because I knew that we were going to win.  Jesus' words show that we need to recognize that it is being on His team that really makes all the difference.  When we do that and we change our focus from ourselves and our needs to those of others around us that is when we become eternal winners!

Touching A Life

~ From Derek Miller

Last week, we talked about how much God loves us and how we have to put our time and effort into a relationship with Him.  That is the foundation of being a Follower of Christ.  But that is not the ending point of our relationship with God.  He expects us to love and serve others, which in many ways can be more difficult to do.  The good thing is that God can use many actions on our part, big or small, to make a difference.

In God's hands, every action can have an impact.  In the Guidepost story from April Grube, she relayed that she was on the red eye flight from Los Angeles to Washington, DC when a large man became her seat mate.  As he sat down in his seat, April realized that her desires for sleep were not going to be met.  She was an experienced flyer with an understanding of all the normal annoyances that go with flying.  This list of annoyances included the fact that she had lost one of her favorite books on a flight to South America for a mission trip.  As she and the man exchanged names, he asked her for her name again.  He then asked her if she had ever been on a flight to South America.  When she acknowledged that she had, he relayed the story of how he had discovered her lost book on a flight to South America and the life changes that had taken place as a result of reading the book, including her handwritten notes in the margins.  After reading the book cover to cover, he noted the book's owner written on the cover, April Grube. 

As Followers of Christ, we are called upon to take action.  As we read the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20, we notice all the verbs in the verse (Go, Make, Baptizing and Teaching).  We have to take action.  The other thing to notice is that nowhere does it say that what we are called upon to do has as a prerequisite that it will be comfortable or easy to do. In fact, many times, what we are called upon to do can be life-changing. 

Catch and Release

~ From Derek MIller

 

God is so vast and amazing that we try our best to come up with ways that we can understand Him.  Many of these ways, are rooted in misconceptions.  As we develop more and more technology, it seems we get better at attempting to define and confine God in a box of these misconceptions. 

 

We have the OnStar God.  He is the one that we call on when we get into trouble along the road of life.  We think we can press a button, get help and once the crisis is averted, move on our way.  This is similar to treating God like a genie in the bottle who we can summon just when we perceive that we need Him.  Then like a disposable wipe, we just throw Him aside until we need Him again in another moment of crisis.

 

Another misconception is the iPod God in which we pick and choose the attributes of God similar to downloading individual songs instead of the entire album.  In other words, we pick what WE want to believe about God and how we should interact with Him.  The problem with this is that we miss out on the richness of all that God has to offer.

 

Third, there is the Video Game Score God.  This is one that many struggle with.  They recognize that they cannot fully achieve what they want or ought to do as they live their lives.  Just as with a lot of video games, the score you get on one level determines whether or not you can advance to the next level.  Is that really how God will decide whether or not you can go to heaven when you die?  Are you able to earn your way into heaven simply through doing more works alone?  Of course not.

 

Why do we do these things and why do we keep on repeating these same misconceptions, in varying forms, of God?  God is our Heavenly Father and wants to build a lasting relationship with you and me.  The Bible is full of stories of how God wants to interact and intersect with our lives on more than just a surface level.  It is important for us to read the Bible and recognize those stories and how they apply to our lives.