Protect Your Heart

 

Even in best of times it is possible to loose heart. 

Grief, tragedy, and hardships come into our lives and rob us of joy, peace, and hope. Things that make life worth living.

Stress, inconveniences, and busyness, like a drippy faucet, have a similar effect. Our lives don’t have to be crumbling down for us to lose heart.

In these days of uncertainty all of us are at risk of losing heart and living, to some degree, in despair. How can we prevent this from taking place?

Here are a few quick thoughts:

1. We need to monitor our thinking: Philippians 4:8 (NLT) “And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” What we think about has a huge impact on our feelings about life. What determines our thoughts are the things we put into our minds. Our TV watching, internet surfing, and social media lurking all influence what we think about and how we think about them. Limits on time and type of media are crucial for a proper thinking. This is also why Scripture meditation is important. By meditating on the Bible we are putting into our hearts and minds true, noble, and good things.
2. We need to act on what we know: Philippians 4:9 (NLT) “Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.” It is one thing to know that right thing to do, but it is another thing to do it. A word of caution here. We have to be intentional and realistic in what we do. Too often we try to compensate for our past failures and inaction by doing all these wonderful things, which adds to our load of stress, and when we fail to live up to expectations, our load of guilt. Small changes, when put together over time, have a big impact. So where do you start? Usually there are one or two things you know that you should be doing. That is where we start. Do the next right thing.
3. We need to confess our needs to God: 1 Peter 5:7 (NLT) “Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.” Giving God the things that are on our hearts is a way of letting them go. We need to be able to let them go so they don’t dominate our thoughts and emotions. It is important to remember that this takes time. Yes, it would be nice if all we had to do was to give our worries and cares to God once and that be the end of it. Often, because these thoughts and cares are imbedded in our hearts, it takes multiple times to truly handing them over to God for them to leave our hearts.
4. We need to worship: 1 Peter 3:15 (NLT) “Instead, you must worship Christ as Lord of your life. And if someone asks about your hope as a believer, always be ready to explain it.” Worship is the best way to orient our lives back towards God. Remember, we are created in God’s image and for us to live that image out in our lives, our focus must be on Him. Whether it is through singing songs, journalling our gratitude, or praying from our hearts, worship shifts our perspective from ourselves to God. That shifts allows us to live with hope.

In this world, with all of its hardships and tragedies, we need to protect our hearts. We by living with hope, and hope comes from the intentional action of following Jesus.

Don’t lose heart and don’t despair. Turn your heart and mind towards God and let Him fill you with hope.

Sunday Prayer: Proclamation of Freedom

Many of us take our words for granted and we don't think that what we say has very much authority. Simply reflecting on the reality of how the words of other people have wounded us or have blessed us shows us that what say has power attached to it. 

That is why we need to be very careful about making false promises and statements. What we say is one way we bring things into reality. 

A prayer like this, a proclamation of the reality that we want to live, has the potential to be powerful. There is nothing magically about these words, but the words carry power when we say them with the intention of living a life of faith. 

This proclamation of freedom is adapted from an exercise Pastor Greg Boyd did at Woodland Hills Church on September 4, 2011.  I hope that you find blessing and freedom through it.

For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

~ Galatians 5:1 (ESV)

Through the authority of Jesus Christ, who died for sin, I declare that I am free. He has rescued me from the kingdom of darkness and He has brought me into His Kingdom, the Kingdom of Light.

On the authority of Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead, I declare that I am no longer a slave, that all chains are broken, the power of sin has been defeated, and the bondage to Satan has ended.

By the authority of Jesus Christ, who now stands at the right hand of God, I declare that I will stand fast in freedom, that I will be a good steward of the life given to me, that I will hold on to the inheritance promised to me, and that I will not return to the slavery of sin.

On the authority of Jesus Christ, my Savior and Lord, I renounce all bondage to fear, to insecurities, to greed, to despair, and to depression. We renounce all sexual addictions, all drug addictions, and all people pleasing addictions. And I renounce all bondage to self-centeredness, to the cultural idols, and anything else that has the power to enslave me. For who the Son has set free is free indeed!

Sermon: A Few Good Men and Women

This is sermon 9 in The Story series that I am preaching at Bethlehem Church in Austin, MN. 

 As God's people we are to be separate from the world. 

What can we learn from Israel's example in the book of Judges to help us be set apart from the world?

 

We Can’t Go Back

 On Monday evening I posted a screen shot of a tweet from comedian and libertarian Dave Smith to Facebook.

I think we need to ponder this reality.

No matter how much we want to go back to “normal” we can’t, things have changed.

Now it is true that things are always changing, but usually they are gradual and you don’t notice the change taking place. In this way you  are slowly conditioned to accept the change. 

Because of social media, reporting around President Trump, and especially the pandemic, the pace of change has accelerated, which has caused us to take notice of it. 

Rather than having these things happen slowly over time, they hit us right in the face.

A good example of this is Sunday worship attendance. Attendance has been trending down for years as congregations grow older and younger people stopped coming. Because of lockdowns, masks, and other restrictions, many churches have experienced a sharp decline in attendance from where they were just last year. 

These people were leaving anyway, the pandemic just made it happen faster.

Since we know we can’t go back, all we can do is to plan to go forward. As we plan to go forward we have to realize that what worked in the past will not necessarily work in the future.

Here are some of my thoughts about moving forward:

1. We need to think smaller rather than bigger. This is true for the church, where we need to concentrate on smaller gatherings. Smaller gathering are not only helpful in discipleship, but they are also helpful when limitations are put on gatherings. When things are smaller our plans are not as easily disrupted. I also think going smaller is the key to moving forward politically. One of the overlooked checks to the federal government’s power, and I believe the most important check, are the states. Washington’s power is rendered useless when the states decide not to comply with the Feds wishes. We see this as individual states legalized marijuana. The federal government doesn’t have the resources to enforce its laws across the individual states. Washington depends on the states to enforce its laws. As one of my favorite podcasters, Brion McCallahan, says, “Think locally, act locally.”
2. We need to diversify our thinking. Too many people think in binary terms. Republicans and Democrats, progressives and conservatives, racist and inclusive, etc. As someone who tends to live outside the binary bubble, I can tell you things are not that simple. When it comes to following Jesus we need to move past the tendency to judge a person’s faith and commitment to Scripture based on a few pet doctrines like the age of the earth or a premillennial interpretation of the end time. We need these different perspectives to gain a greater understanding of the Bible and following Jesus (now, this doesn’t mean everything is open to interpretation, but it does mean that when there are different perspectives we should be able to listen to them). When it comes to politics we need to break away from the strangle hold of a two party system. Having only two major parties lead to corruption as people hungry for power manipulate the system. Also, there are thousands, if not millions of people who do not line up with either a Republican or Democrat view of the world. I am one of them, and consistently we go unrepresented. Let’s bring more voices to the table and spread the responsibilities of governing to many different parties, rather than just two.
3. We need come to an understanding of the role social media plays in our lives. This is a new technology, and we don’t understand all the different ways it is effecting us. It is certainly shaping our opinions of things and making it seem like there is a greater divide between people than really exists. That is one of the reasons for the hostility that we are seeing. Social media is being used to divide us and cause us to see the other side as evil. The responsible use of social media is key to moving forward.

No matter how this election turns out, we need to understand that we aren’t going back to the way “things used to be”. 

Things have changed, and rather than complaining about that reality, we need to find a way forward.