Collies
Yesterday we talked about the role of the lama, in the field and in the church, today we will talk about the role of the dog.
What is the dog’s job in the sheep pasture? They keep the sheep in line. Without a dog to herd them the sheep will scatter and wander off when moving from field to field. When it’s time to go from summer pasture to winter it can be a fairly long walk, depending on where you plan for your animals to graze. Without the dog strays will get lost and lambs can go astray. The dog knows the sound of the shepherd’s whistle. He knows what to do when someone falls away from the group, and he will fight any animal that comes against his flock. The dog isn’t always our favorite person in the church. He or she is the one who gently points out the places we are falling short from the commands of the shepherd. But he is also the person who will show up to the house of the recovering addict because she didn’t come lunch like she usually does. He’s the one who will go into the bar to find the sheep who has turned to something harmful to escape his problems. He’s the one who will sit up all night with the person struggling with depression who just can’t take another day. She’s the one who bakes a casserole for a friend who needs help to get by. She’s the person who cries in her prayer closet for the sheep who wouldn’t come home. And she’s the one the world doesn’t want to mess with in regards to her flock, because she’s the one who will go down fighting.
The dog isn’t always loved in the church because he or she can look like someone who is critical or judgemental at times. But the dog is the one who will fight for you against yourself when you become your own worst enemy.
For those of us who are the dog of the church, let’s not be hard on ourselves when we get scolded by the sheep for only listening to the shepherd, it’s His voice we should follow anyway. And next time one of the dog’s points something out to you, pray about it and see if it is something God wants you to fix instead of getting angry.
God bless the dogs of the church.
Tomorrow we will cover the sheep and then lastly, we will move to the shepherd.
Category: searching
Lamas
I just want to be a sheep, bah bah bah bah. Remember that song? Maybe most don’t. But when I was a child we used to sing a song about wanting to be a sheep in God’s pasture. But perhaps not all of us are sheep. God said that He would send shepherds to lead the sheep -pastors. But what about those who aren’t simply part of the congregation but have a specific calling inside the church, not as pastor, but as one of the other ministering bodies in the building?
For this let us take a moment to look at a sheep farm. On the farm you have your shepherds, then you have your lamas or donkeys, then you have your collies or terriers, then you have your sheep.
We all know what the shepherds do, but what does a lama or donkey do? We have several shepherds in our area and they will tell you that the lama or donkey is there to protect the sheep. They will fight off wolves and wild cats and keep the sheep safe. They aren’t social and don’t always spend time with the sheep, but they are always there to silently protect and defend. They are our prayer warriors. Our prayer warriors aren’t always social people, they are often missing from group prayer meeting, because they are in their own corner fighting on their knees in a place where they can’t be distracted. They are battling for you against the enemy and keeping you safe. They are the lamas.
Tomorrow we will talk about the collies and terriers. The next day we will talk about the sheep. But for today, be grateful for the lamas in your church. Praise God that He gives us all a purpose.
Hey there little red. Who have you been listening to?
Hey there little Red. Who have you been listening to?
Imagine how that story would have gone if Riding Hood had listened to the wolf. She would have been a lovely dinner for a hungry wolf family and the story would have been shorter and without space for all the sad remakes.
We too are walking through the woods, we don’t really know where we are going or if it’s going to stop being dark. What we do know is that there is an enemy waiting for us. Prowling. If we listen to what he says we will be dinner. The wolf says stuff like, “everyone is doing it.” “It’s legal now.” “It won’t hurt anyone.” “God loves me despite my flaws.”
The wolf isn’t stupid. He takes things that sound good and use them to twist the truth. Lots of things that are legal are that way because they are fine, but some are legal because the law makers gave into pressure, or chose to lower the law’s standards to make extra money. Sometimes when everyone is doing something it’s a good idea, like brushing your teeth or eating less salt. But lots of stuff everyone does is simply people living according to the flesh and not God’s word. It won’t hurt anyone is a good policy, unless it will hurt you and you haven’t considered that a worthy concern.
God does love you despite your flaws. But it doesn’t stop there. God want you to leave your sins behind and follow Him.
See? Twisting. The wolf is always twisting the truth. He speaks softly in your ear and tells you half truths that pull you off the path and lead you to his den. Sometimes he even infiltrates grandma’s house, (the church, your small group, your friends, your family) and gets to you that way.
You have to not listen to the wolf to get back home safely. Going into the woods is mandatory. Going off the path is optional. Listen to the word of God. As one of my favorite preachers once said, “get to know God so well that when the devil comes to tell you lies, God’s voice blocks him out.”
Take God’s hand and stay on the path. Beware the false words of the preditor and trust the Truth of God.
( disclaimer: I do not believe actual wolves are evil. They are wild animals and need respect but should not be killed or trapped due to fear. Use sense and caution when dealing with all wild animals.)
Don’t take sides?
Don’t take sides?
We see it so often. “Christians don’t take sides, we love everyone.” After that it feels like taking a side means you don’t love both sets of people and that is not true. You have to take a side on many things. Being pro-life does not mean you hate the women who have had abortions, it means that you acknowledge unborn babies as lives that should not be taken, you also know that many of these women did not see the other options as possible and you know that they are broken. Being opposed to the killing of babies does not mean you hate the mothers who choose this, though you hate the action. Being against living in sexual sin (of any kind) does not mean you hate those who are, it means that you are against the sin. The fact is, we all must choose a side in all things. Either we choose the side of Jesus or we choose the side of the world. We can not live as though we are part of the world, or worse, as though we are indifferent to the wrongs that are happening in it. We must take a stand. We need also to pray for people on all sides. We need to pray for our own people and for those who oppose us, and sometimes that feels like it sucks, but once you start doing that it helps you to see past your own thoughts and feelings to God’s. He wants people to live the way He planned it, He also knows that we will go astray, that’s why He is said to patient, because instead of slaying us for our sinful ways He gives is time to see that we are wrong so we can come to Him. He isn’t wishy-washy about sin. What He says is wrong is wrong period, no discussion, but He also says that He will welcome you back as a prodigal, He also says that He will graft you into the vine, He also calls Himself your Father so you know how much He loves you and that He will always forgive you when you come to Him and repent. We must side with Jesus or else we aren’t Christians, but doing that in love can be so hard, we need to pray and trust Him and ask Him to help us take His side with His motives and not ours.
He is the breath
He is the breath
He is the breath inside my lungs, I am just the breather.
I am simply using what He has given me to get through each day. We make everything about us. We make music meant to worship Jesus about our carnal relationships, we make our bodies meant to honor Him a temple of worldly pleasures, we make our minds that were meant to serve Him a battleground against Him. We don’t even acknowledge that God gave us all these things. That they are gifts from Him.
He is the breath inside our lungs, we simply use what He has given us.
Like CS Lewis said when speaking of God. He said, ‘we are like children, who ask their Father for money to go and buy Him a gift. And like the good Father He is, He always rejoices when we give our lives back to Him.’ -Mere Christianity (rough quote from my memory. I recommend reading the book for he says it so much better than I have here)
When we give our lives to Jesus, we are simply giving back to Him what always was His. We think we belong to ourselves, but we belonged to Him first.
He is everything that is important about us. Do we make Him our desire? Do remember to prioritize Him? He prioritizes us. We are His desire. We are nothing but hollow human shells without Him filling us with life. He is our redeemer. Let Him redeem you.
Jesus can see past the door to your true motives
“Jesus only looked at the blood on the door, not at who was inside.”….. really?
People think God didn’t know who was inside? Yes the blood on the door in Exodus is used as symbolic for the blood of Christ on us, but it’s not the same situation. Read the whole book, understand what was happening, then come up with your slogan. Yes the blood of Jesus covers our sins, but we can’t be purposely living a filthy and sinful life and expect that Jesus will let all that go because we accepted Him once. Jesus warns many times of living a life that will cause His Spirit to leave you and cause you to fall short of Heaven. He knows who you are. He isn’t blinded by the blood He gave so generously that He has missed the fact that you misuse it as an excuse to sin. If you keep your evil ways you never truly accepted Jesus and if you need a slogan that makes it easy for you to keep on with your lifestyle the way it is and still claim to be a Christian then you’ve missed the point. This post is not a rant. Just a warning. It’s too easy to over look the hard stuff in the Bible and simply take things people have twisted to fit our sin and fly it like a banner. We need to get to know Jesus personally and to want to please Him by living lives worthy of Him. If not then we’ve missed it. We are missing it. Following Jesus is more than saying words at church and then going on like nothing changed. We need to change and to serve Him.
Living a thankful life
When speaking to Timothy he said: But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
2 Tim. 3:1â€-‬5 NIV‬‬‬
Our Era is an Era of thanklessness. It was prophesied by Paul that the spirit of thanklessness would come, the question is why? Perhaps it is because the devil knew that if we had a thankful spirit, a mind set naturally to be grateful, we all would look upon the sacrifice of Jesus on and all the way up to the cross, and be so grateful that we would all turn to follow Him. Perhaps that is why the devil fights to keep us ungrateful. Being ungrateful damages your soul. A soul with the Holy Spirit in it will always lean toward gratitude even if things are bad, because the Spirit knows that even when the season we are in is hard God has still given us things to be thankful for. Those who give in to thankless attitudes permit their souls to be damaged and they become jaded.
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.
Colossians 3:15 NIV
We can find peace in situations that call for chaos due to the Holy Spirit within us. That is something to thank God for. Much of Paul’s writings seem to be a call to action. When Paul here says and be thankful I feel he is using it as a weapon against the enemy. Your peace that comes from Jesus is a weapon against the devil, your thankfulness that comes from Jesus is a weapon against the devil. So be thankful and use it as a defense against our enemy.
If you disagree that Paul is calling us as soldiers to use thankfulness as a weapon, then check out Chpt. 4 verse 2:
Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.
Colossians 4:2 NIV
Thankfulness is a weapon. So wield that weapon today as you look around at what you have and thank God even for the bread crumbs. Praise Him for He is holy and worthy to be praised.
Happy Thanksgiving
The Shepherds humility
This weekend was my last weekend for camping before winter comes. My dog and I took our first day at our camp spot to go hiking. The fall colors were beautiful and we went for a long hike down the trails. At the end of the trail we had chosen we ended up in a farmer’s field. He had just finished taking off all of his wheat and the sharp unbending stocks stood in our way. My dog is a Jack Russell, so he’s not very tall. The stocks were too high for him so I had to pick him up and carry him. We have been hiking for a really long time or else I would have turned us around and taken us back the way we had come. But the road lay ahead of us just beyond the field so I picked my dog up and carried him in my arms. He’s not a very light Jack Russell. He was too heavy to carry in my arms the whole way so I placed him up on my shoulders, like shepherds do with sheep. In doing this I realized a couple of things. We often see images of Jesus carrying lambs (representing us) on His shoulders as He traverses a rocky or dangerous area. He is always carrying the lamb on His shoulders, because that’s what shepherds do. When I placed my Jack Russell, who’s considerably lighter than a lamb, up on my shoulders it caused my body to bend forward in a position of bowing humility toward the terrain that I was navigating. Holding his little feet on either side of my neck and having him trust that I wouldn’t let him fall all seemed to he symbolic of the way Jesus carries us. And of the way He carried the cross. He humbled Himself. We hear people say that all the time but do we really acknowledge what it means. He humbled Himself. Bowing is often a sign of respect or humility. I see Jesus bowed under the weight of the cross on His back and shoulders, like He would have carried the lamb in the images we see. When Jesus placed the cross on His back, He was carrying us every one of us. Every person, every name that would ever exist was attached to that cross, when He sacrificed Himself for our sins. And like the images we see of Him carrying the little lamb on His shoulders, He had to bow forward. To put a sacrifice of humility on someone who didn’t ever need to be humbled, God didn’t need to humble Himself, if anyone had the right to not be humble, it’s the guy who created the whole world. But He still chose to humble Himself for us, in dying on the cross, in carrying the cross, in carrying us He had to bow forward to take the strain and the weight of our sins upon Himself as He carries us forward toward the end goal. We can’t do it on our own, we just don’t have it in us. We can try and we will fail, but He will never fail. Like I said earlier we have to trust Him, as He places us on His shoulders, to never drop us. But He won’t, He’s God, He loves us. And He buys Himself forward to take our weight on to Him, because that’s just who He is.
Happy October 1
Signs of love
Signs of love
We all talk about signs of life. I even have a favorite album by that title. But do we discuss the signs of love? As I have been staying in our trailer during these fading months of warm weather, I have had the same picture to look at every morning. It’s a photo of the design a puffer fish makes when he is trying to attract a mate. The male fish will dig his body into the soft sand of the sea floor and score into it many intricate lines until he has made a picture he is proud of, then the female fish sees the picture done just for her and goes to him. It’s his sign of love.
God also leaves signs of love for us. Flowers. Butterflies. Seashells. Sunsets. Extras.
Sherlock Holmes once said: “Flowers show me that God is good. We need food and air and water to survive, but flowers are an extra.”
God shows His love for us in the extras that we take for granted each day. So many feel like God doesn’t love them, simply because they don’t know how to look for the signs of His love. In the big miracles yes, but also in the psithurism as the wind tickles the trees, also in the soft sand beneath your feet, also in the smile of a loved one, the twitch of a bunny’s nose, the wag of an old dog’s tail. Look for the extras. The signs that God loves you enough to do things to make you smile, things that you don’t even give Him credit for. Next time you smell a flower or gaze at a sunset remember, that’s an extra and it shows that God loves you.
Do not forsake
not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.
Hebrews 10:25 KJV
7am on a Sunday. Other people are still in bed and look to a day of doing nothing. But you are up and getting the coffee on. Walk the dog. Get dressed for the day and grab your stuff for the Sunday service. Are you a greeter? Part of the worship team? The person who sweeps snow off the sidewalk before Church? Maybe you are the pastor. Give it another couple of hours and the congregation will be there. They too got up on a day when PJs and hot chocolate would have been so much more pleasant. In come the body of Christ and you all sit down and chat. Then the worship starts and you praise God. Then the pastor comes and you hear God’s word. Then you go home.
It sounds so simple. This ‘Church’ thing. But it is one of the most important things you will do in your week. Too many have come into the habit of streaming Church from their living room and making the effort to become part of a Church family. Don’t get me wrong, the fact that we can stream Church is great! And there are days when you can’t get to Church physically and need to live stream. The fact that that is possible is a blessing. But it shouldn’t be all you do. Church is so much more than a sermon from the pulpit. It’s a place where you can serve God. You get to physically be part of a Church family and to have that happen it takes commitment and effort on your part. You have to keep attending and start volunteering, doing little things that connect you to the people and the pastor. God does not want us to stop gathering with other believers. That might not look like Church as we know it in up coming days. It may look like a home Church or a small group. It may be simply someone reading the Bible as you gather together and then discuss God’s words. For many people Church is a secret and dangerous affair. These people could spend time with God on their own each week and not risk getting caught by gathering with other Christians. Yet they gather anyway. Why? Because they understand the power and importance of being with other Christians. They get that we need to encourage and be encouraged. We need prayer circles and a safe place to go where Jesus is the center. Though the body is in peril or discomfort their souls know they are safe there with others like them.
If they can gather together, why can’t we? Why would we even consider stopping? Our greatest worry is whether or not we feel like crawling out our warm beds. And yet we consider staying home and simply streaming. We must gather in the upper rooms we have been gifted. Whether that’s a Church building or someone’s home, or perhaps a hidden chamber in the basement of some forgotten building where our enemies cannot find us. No matter what it looks like we must continue to gather.
Carried in the cross 