Is God Directing My Path?

How do you know that the hand of God is directing the paths you choose in life? Some claim to “hear” what God is trying to tell them, others “feel” the Spirit moving them in one direction or another. But how can the validity of such claims ever be tested, by the person experiencing it, or by anyone else? The first step toward evaluating the source of a “gut feeling” is to check it against Scripture. You will never receive anything from God that tells you to violate his will as it is already expressed in the Bible. If you think that’s what God is trying to tell you, I’m sorry to say the source of such misguided advice must either be yourself, or something more sinister.
Does my desire/feeling square up with Scripture? If so, what do I do now? There are two other tests that you can evaluate a choice in life by; conscience and the wisdom of respected fellow Christians. If what you want to do (or in some cases don’t want to do but know you should) matches up with Scripture, your conscience, and the wisdom of experience Christians; it is most likely a good choice. On the other hand, if it violates all three, no matter how much you want it, you should run away.
I faced such a choice years ago; having met a young woman that I fancied and being unsure of how to proceed. The question was this; could a Baptist and a Catholic get married? The Scriptures tell us to seek Christian unity, my conscience was clear, and the advice I received was mostly in favor. What to choose? Well, it’s been seven years of marriage under God’s blessings, and I hope for many, many to come. May God bless you when life’s choices appear before you, may your choices bring a smile to God’s face.

I Don't Want to LEARN Patience

“Why is this happening to me? What am I supposed to learn, God; patience? More patience!! I don’t have any left, I’ve already used it all to hold on this long; what now?” Most of us have been here at some point, we’ve been at the end of our rope and unable to see how any of the current troubles we face can be part of God’s will, or how any of it can “work together for good” (Ro 8:28). We’ve prayed, we’ve studied the Word hoping for answers, we’ve spoken to those we trust, but we still don’t have any answers. Where is God when we really hurt?
We all know the story of Job, how he was sorely tested in life by horrendously tragic circumstances, by losses that few of us could bear and go on. Job’s “friends” insisted that Job was to blame, that his troubles were the fault of unknown sins against God. We know that God was a righteous man, his friends were mistaken. In the end, God himself replies to Job, but no in the way that Job was hoping. He doesn’t address the specifics of Job’s troubles, nor does he offer him any explanation. The Lord simply asks Job if he knows everything like God does, or if he understands the whole universe as God does. The variety of examples the Lord uses when speaking to Job helps to illustrate for us how vastly interconnected God’s creation is. The Lord sees our whole lives, from beginning to end, and sees them combined with the multitude of people we affect for good or ill in our lives. How can we possibly hope to understand God’s reasoning with a view that is so limited? We can’t.
This may not be the answer that you were hoping for, but it’s the one that Scripture offers us. When it comes down to it, we must trust in the goodness and mercy of God, trust in the love he demonstrated through his Son, and trust that he certainly does know what is good for us, all of us. It may not be the answer that we want, but it’s the one we need.

How I Pick a Sermon Text

The selection process for choosing a Sunday sermon is to me an interesting one. As an independent church, I have the luxury and responsibility of choosing the text each week and deciding which emphasis from the text to put the focus upon. In the Catholic Church this process is partly decided by the liturgical calendar in which three texts to be read are decided in advance (OT, NT, Gospel); the priests know which texts they will be working with and choose one of them (or parts of two or all three) to make the message from. After spending the last two years working out my technique, I’ve found it useful to have multiple simultaneous series to choose from. Right now we’re working through Ephesians (almost done), Luke, and the account of the life of David.
Having that framework allows me to have continuity in the themes we learn about and also keeps the messages from being too scattered. I know that many preachers choose to preach on a specific topic or themes in a series of sermons that draw upon a variety of scriptures for their basis, but that technique has never really appealed to me. If an occasion seems to warrant a message on a particular topic I would certainly find a text that works with that theme, but I prefer to let the text that we’ve come to tell me what to preach to the church rather than try to find a text that goes with what I already want to preach. From time to time I find myself looking at the choices in each book we’re working through and I don’t seem to see something that will speak to our hearts this week. In that case, I often leaf through the Psalms or Proverbs, or perhaps look for a O.T. story that has a message we can discover in one sermon (like the one on Ruth). In the end, I’m simply hoping to try to bring the text of our beloved Bible to life, to help explain what it meant both then and now and to help us find out what God’s Word has for our lives today.

Why I Like Performing Weddings

This past summer I have had the opportunity to perform two weddings. The first was for a family member, my sister-in-law, and the other was for a couple I met for the first time this spring. Being involved in my sister-in-law’s wedding was indeed special because of the family connection and the years I had known my wife’s little sister; but after having done the second wedding a couple of weeks ago I’ve come to realize that the act of performing a wedding is in itself a very gratifying emotional experience. Wedding may be a bit of a pain to organize and plan, and pre-marital counseling, while interesting, certainly isn’t “fun”, but standing in front of two people’s friends and families during one of the most important days of their lives is one of the real cool bonuses of being a pastor. Part of the reason why I enjoy wedding is because I’m such a believer in marriage. I know Paul cautioned us about the extra duty that a man of God would have if he was married, but I don’t know how any pastor can survive without having a wife there at his side. We men may be a pain, but our wives are indispensable. God knew what he was doing when he created Eve for Adam, a “suitable helper” indeed. If there is one thing the church in America today can do to reverse the negative course our culture has endured it is to shore up our support of marriage WITHIN the church. We need to support each and every marriage within our congregation, encourage young people to seek marriage (instead of the false and cruel hope of living together), care for widows and widowers, and in general do whatever we can to ensure that when people think of First Baptist Church of Palo, they think of happy marriages. Scripture commands us along this path, and the happy faces I witnessed exchanging vows confirms it.

Being a "good" Baptist

What does it mean to be a Baptist? That’s the name on the sign, but what does it really mean? The most obvious of the Baptist distinctives is that we believe in adult baptism for believers who have made a public profession of their faith. In the Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, and Orthodox Churches (among others), baptism is performed for infants as a sign that the parents and the local church intend to raise the child in the faith. As Baptists, we don’t believe that this is the best practice according to our understanding of the Scriptures, but it is the practice just the same, for the majority of the world’s Christians. What is our response? In the relatively recent past, being a “good” Baptist also meant feeling the need to condemn those who don’t practice adult baptism and even to question the validity of the salvation of those who attend such churches. That was the old definition of being a good Baptist; evidently, the church isn’t what it used to be, and that’s a good thing. Go ahead and be proud of being a Baptist, but keep in mind that it’s no longer an us vs. them Church; we’re in this together because the word Church on the sign if far more important than the word Baptist which precedes it.