Stewardship --- The Austin Group

Five Minutes a Day for God

I stumbled across an interesting sight the other day on a very popular Christian website. One of the things that first caught my eye was an advertisement for a Bible study resource. The ad read, "Men – know God better in just 5 minutes a day." I don’t care how busy you are, you can find five minutes every day, especially if it will result in greater knowledge of God.

This slogan must be a winner in our hurried, hassled, accelerated, rushed world. We are all busy, especially us men. We must get to work early, get home in time to spend the evening with the kids, take a weekend job so we can keep the family outfitted with stuff, and do all the other things required of a good husband and father. One of the things that always seems to get lost in the shuffle is our relationship with God.

Now, someone comes along and offers to help me "know God better in just 5 minutes a day" and I know I can squeeze another five minutes into my busy life for something that important. Perhaps it’s true that I can have everything plus a good relationship with God.

As I am reaching into my wallet to get a credit card so I can click the button to order the 5 minute per day resource, my eyes notice the title of an article. It is just a few inches down and little to the left of the advertisement. The article is entitled, "Are You Too Busy For God?" That question triggered a conundrum for me. I just admitted that it would be a challenge to find an extra five minutes for God. I am probably too busy for God!

Grateful For No Term Limits

The first Tuesday in November of an even numbered year – what does that mean?  Election Day of course.  Like many of you, I am ready for this one to be history.  Perhaps it is just me, but the whole process seems to get uglier and uglier each year.  I don’t remember seeing more than one or two television ads that actually identified a candidate I should vote for and provided at least one good reason.  The huge majority were negative, condemning, accusative diatribes aimed at destroying the other person. 

I am convinced that many folks, especially Christians, believe that we are on the verge of extinction if we elect the wrong people.  Many of these people are also of the opinion that if we elect enough of the right candidates, happy days will be here once again.  To be honest, I do not subscribe to either position. 

Don’t misunderstand; I think it is a good thing to have honest, hard-working, self-sacrificing political leaders who possess the proper set of values.  We have not elected enough of them the past few decades (some might say longer than that) and we are suffering the consequences.  I also know that people that I consider serious followers of Jesus have conflicting opinions on the identity of those candidates.

However, the reality is that none of it really matters.  I know that some of you who read that sentence have just had your feelings that I am idiot confirmed, but allow me to explain.  The highest calling for any follower of Christ is to serve Him.  That is our primary task.  Everything else is secondary.  It does not matter what political or economic system we live in, we can still fulfill that task. 

My friend Charlie has been reading a new biography about Dietrich Bonheoffer and his excitement about the book has caused me to start reading it as well.  You may or may not know, but Bonheoffer was a pastor and theologian in Hitler’s Germany.  He was ultimately placed in a concentration camp and executed.  The books and letters he wrote during a very hostile time and in an extremely dismal environment are among some of the finest that every Christian should read.  It is probably correct to say that Bonheoffer’s words gained credibility because of his struggles and difficulties. 

Many of the finest disciples have been found in some of the most hostile environments.  Our provisions, the march of the Gospel, the strength of the church, and the cause of Christ are not dependent upon favorable politicians.  We will wake up on Wednesday morning happy about some elections results and sad about others.  However, we will wake up with the assurance that God is on the throne.  Because of that one truth, nothing else matters much.  Thankfully, God has no term limit. 

Falling In Love

A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value. She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life. (Proverbs 31:10-12)

Sharon and I just celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary. For that reason, I thought you might enjoy the story of how this all began:

Finding the right person to marry can be one of the most foreboding tasks in all of life. In fact, it is such a difficult decision that many young people give up and settle for less than the best. The acceptable approach to marriage today is to try it for a short time and if the relationship fails, bail out and try someone else.

Fortunately, I was spared the difficult process of striving to locate the perfect mate. I sometimes wonder if God knew I did not have enough sense to make a good choice so He made it easy for me.

Sharon and I met at church. Although I was already a freshman in college, I still participated in the youth group. The youth program was led by Sharon’s parents and was built around a musical group called the "Proclaimers." We traveled to churches around the state of Colorado and even a couple of trips to churches in Texas.

When Sharon graduated from High School she moved across the state to attend college. Although we were friends, we did not date nor did we consider any type of long-term relationship.

In the providence of God, Sharon and I both transferred to Wayland Baptist College in Plainview, Texas, at the beginning of the spring semester in 1973. We arrived at the Texas campus and neither of us knew anyone else.

During the first two weeks of school, we encountered each other occasionally but we did not spend a significant amount of time together. I was not seeking a girlfriend. My interest was focused on school and pursing God’s call on my life to become a preacher.

After we had been in school for several weeks, Sharon called the dorm one evening and said that she had something to talk about. She was hesitant to say anything on the phone so I invited her to come by the dorm that evening and we would talk.

When she arrived, we sat together in the lobby of my dorm, spending several minutes with small talk. After a short time, true to my nature, I asked her why she had called. I always like to get to the point.

She stammered around for a long time, unable to explain. I tried several ways to encourage her to talk openly but she was still unable to express herself. She was able to say that she felt God was telling her something but she could not muster the courage to share it with me.

Finally, almost to the point of exasperation, I said, "Perhaps God is telling you the same thing that He is telling me."

Her eyes lit up as she quickly said, "What is that?"

With some hesitation in my voice I replied, "I think God is telling me that you and I will spend the rest of our lives together."

Sharon did not hesitate to express her agreement; God was indeed telling her the same thing.

Now what?

What do you do when you find the person you are to marry but there is no emotional attachment. In many other societies this would not be a problem, but in the American culture, emotions normally precede commitment to marriage.

We set out on the only course of action that we could devise - we began the process of falling in love. It is not difficult to begin to love someone when you are committed to spending your life together.

Gradually over the next few months our emotions began to fall into place. We spent many hours together, discussing the past and the future. It did not take long for us to get excited about the prospect of marriage. Because of our commitment to one another, we were able to openly discuss issues that must be faced by married couples.

Because of our commitment to one another, Sharon and I have not had to deal with some of the problems that destroy marriages. Neither of us has ever had a doubt about the faithfulness of the other. Whenever a problem arises, we always know we will find a solution because leaving the marriage is never an option.

I recognize that our situation is very unique. In fact, I have not met anyone who has told a similar story of courtship and marriage. There have been some who tried it but it was more their doing than God’s so it backfired.

Perhaps the most important lesson learned from this experience is the importance of commitment before emotional investment. It is very tempting to give our emotions to another person before we give ourselves. The consequence is that most of these relationships fail, leaving broken hearts and bad experiences.

I do not expect this same process to happen anyone else. However, I do hope that all of us can better understand the necessity of commitment in marriage. Love does not make a marriage successful. Commitment makes a marriage and love is the result of this type of commitment.

Wide But Not Very Deep

I went to the arcade recently to spend the afternoon with my son and grandson. It would have been more fun if the temperature had stayed out of triple digits, but I had a good time anyway. Any time with my grandson is good time. The first part of the afternoon was spent inside watching Noah play videogames. He offered me some tokens so I could play as well, but video games passed me by a long time ago. I haven’t been very good at them since the early days of pong.

Once the tokens were exhausted, we went outside for the main event – go carts. Every kid loves go carts. When our boys were young we lived in a very small town with little traffic on the streets. Since it was safe, we purchased a go cart and let them drive it around town. It was one of the advantages of living in a town that was too small to have a pizza delivered.

Watching people drive go carts is always interesting. They usually are allowed to make five or six laps around a curvy track. Not all the go carts run equally so there are always a few that are much faster than the others. Also, the drivers possess different skills. There are some who are just enjoying the drive and others who are fulfilling some NASCAR dream. It is easy to read the facial expressions as the drivers whiz by on the asphalt track.

However, I saw something unusual, but it should not have been surprising. Most teenage boys are either striving to impress a girl or instigating havoc with their friends as they travel around the track. Yet, there was a young man driving around the track, oblivious to everything except for the telephone next to his ear. That’s right; he was at the go cart track talking on the phone. This was a rather unusual example of multi-tasking. Obviously it is quite common to see a driver on the Interstate talking on the phone (or texting), but it just seemed odd to me that in the midst of an experience that he had paid for, he could so easily be distracted by a phone conversation.

This is a phenomenon that I have seen frequently in the past few years. People get so busy and preoccupied with sharing an experience with others that they actually miss the experience themselves. Think about it. What could this young man have been talking about? If he is discussing the ride it seems to me that it would be better to enjoy it first and then share it with someone else. If he is talking about something totally different, get off the cart and give the conversation the attention it deserves. I have noticed the same kind of thing at a fireworks show. Folks are so busy with the video recorder that they miss the experience. It does not matter how good you are with the camera, the video will never be as good as the real thing.

Baseball Church

While driving to church this week, I noted how the church has become specialized. We drove past a cowboy church, a family church, a church that promotes gospel singing, a traditional church, and probably a few others that I did not notice. I know that we also have contemporary churches, ethnic churches, postmodern churches, homeless churches, house churches, and a church for just about every group imaginable.

The thought struck me out of the clear blue, the sky was clear and blue this morning, that I need to create another specialized church – the Baseball Church. It seems like The Natural (my favorite baseball movie) thing to do. There are numerous baseball fans out there, many of them who need to hear the Gospel. It might not ever become a mega church, but I think it might be worth the effort.

Here is my idea. Instead of pews, we arrange the seating so the back rows are bleacher seats. As you get closer to the front we can use fold down box seats and for those who choose to sit on the front couple of rows, they get the luxury padded chairs. Instead of a pulpit the preacher will stand on a mound because preachers today don’t need a pulpit to hold their notes. The worship slides will be shown on a JumboTron hanging over the choir which is actually seated in the bullpen.

Of course, we must have an organ. It just does not feel like a ballpark if there is no organ to pump up the crowd. There will no shortage of songs to sing. Obviously, the standard, the "Amazing Grace" of our Baseball Church will be "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." However, we could also sing, "Catfish" by Bob Dylan, the always popular, "Talkin Baseball" about "Willie, Mickey and the Duke," and others by John Fogerty, Alabama, and Bruce Springsteen.

Now you might be thinking that there is nothing spiritual about baseball. Well, I beg to differ. Have you never seen "Field of Dreams" (my second favorite baseball movie). We know for certain that they are playing baseball in heaven all the time. It wouldn’t surprise me if Bob Gibson is pitching to Babe Ruth in today’s game.

At this Baseball Church, the ushers will be more like vendors. Instead of passing a plate through the crowd, they will walk the isles during the service and when folks want to give, they simply raise their hand to get the usher’s attention and pass their money down the row. If we want to get real adventurous, we can have the usher toss a small bag of peanuts to the giver. Rather than donuts and coffee in the foyer, we can provide nachos and soft drinks, or for our more liberal friends, maybe even a light beer.

Sermon ideas for this church are limitless. How about a series of messages on "How to Get Home" or "How to Handle a Bad Call." We could have a sermon on sacrifice, hitting a home run (a sermon on achieving success), the necessity of team work (a sermon on the church), overcoming errors (a sermon on forgiveness), or switch hitting (a sermon on homosexuality).

The seventh inning stretch is the time when we will stop down and greet one another while the organist plays "Cotton-Eyed Joe" or perhaps "YMCA." We could even have a preacher who specializes at giving an invitation. He would be our "Closer" and take the mound to call everyone to commitment.

I’m getting excited about this – I think it might work. I can see folks wearing jerseys with the names of the Apostles on the back. If the sermon gets boring, the crowd might want to break out the wave or in the midst of a series on sex we might show the kiss cam on the JumboTron. The ideas for our Baseball Church are limitless.

You might be wondering what all of this has to do with the church. Does it really matter? Isn’t the goal to draw a crowd, to get people to come? If we get them there, they will wade through all the stuff and figure out the Gospel.

Our Preaching Is Working, But That Might Not Be a Good Thing

A few weeks ago I wrote an article titled, "Things Christians Emphasize That Jesus Didn't." The whole point of that little excursion was that we spend a great deal of time talking about things that received very little attention by our Lord. The danger of doing that is that it gives us less time to focus on the things Jesus thought were important. One of the subjects I mentioned was family.

We preach a lot about family. I am just taking a stab in the dark here, but I would not be surprised if a vast majority of preachers devote an entire series to the family each year. I know some guys who do it more than once a year. I just did a Google search looking for sermon series on the family and came up with more than 120,000. That is a bunch of preaching. By the way, I did a similar search looking for sermons on evangelism and discovered 52,000, only thirty-five percent as many.

It looks like all that preaching is paying off – people are getting it! Folks who attend church are finally realizing the importance of family. A recent survey revealed that eighty-nine percent of those surveyed said the purpose of the church was "to take care of my family’s and my spiritual needs." Not only have they become aware of the importance of family, but they have also reached the conclusion that taking care of the family is the reason for the church’s existence.

I must be honest and confess that I am a real skeptic when someone starts throwing around numbers from a survey. There are so many variables and ways to frame numbers that you can make a survey reveal just about anything. However, the number eighty-nine percent, even if it is only half that much, is startling. Can it be that the huge majority of church attendees believe that the purpose of the church is to take care of their family?

We should not be surprised. Much of what the church does is designed to meet the needs of the family. Buildings are designed, schedules are set, meetings are planned, worship services are conducted, and sermons are preached, all with the intention of taking care of families. It is working. People have come to the conclusion that this is all about meeting the needs of our families. We even include it in the name of the church and have a multitude of "Family Churches" across the country. When I did a Google search for "family church" the return was close to one million pages.

The truly sad part of the aforementioned survey is that only eleven percent of the respondents said that the church exists in order to win the world for Christ. We have successfully (or treacherously) turned the corner and now most of us are convinced that Christ died so that we can have healthy families rather than for the salvation of the world.

Happy Fourth of July But Be Careful

I am concerned that many churches gathering this Sunday will be tempted to misdirect their worship. As Christians we worship One Lord, Jesus Christ. However, sometimes our worship gets sloppy and we include other objects of affection. This occurs occasionally in our celebration of American independence. This year, Independence Day happens to fall on Sunday.

Certainly I am not condemning patriotism. I love this country and thank God frequently that I am an American. My father fought in the "Big War," losing his right leg as a result of wounds he suffered on Iwo Jima. I am proud that he was a Marine. I support my country by striving to be the best citizen I can be – I vote, pay taxes, obey laws – all the stuff good citizens do. I try not to complain too much about the condition of our nation, I am trying not to speak disrespectfully about our leaders. I salute the flag when it goes by in a parade, put my hand over my heart for the national anthem, and I cheer for the USA in the Olympics.

But, I don’t think we should do any of that at church on Sunday morning. When the church gathers for worship on Sunday morning, even if it does happen to be on July fourth, it is for a much higher purpose. The temptation will be to give this coming Sunday over to a pledge of allegiance to something other than Christ.

Let’s be grateful that we live in a country where we can worship unhindered by government interference, but let’s not worship the freedom. The borders of the church span every country for all time. Christian writer Tony Camplo said, "America may be the best Babylon the world has, but it is still Babylon nonetheless."

Antipodes

If you were an ancient theologian, a defender of the faith, the church would have expected you to be an advocate of the belief in a flat earth. Not everyone back in those days believed the earth was flat, but it was certainly the official position of the church – and they were serious about it; just ask Galileo. One of the strongest arguments used by such thinkers was the impossibility of the existence of Antipodes.

"Antipode" is a Greek compound term from "anti" meaning opposite and "pous" meaning foot. The term was applied to those people who would have lived on the bottom side of the earth if it were indeed anything but flat. Essentially, the idea was that these Antipodes would have to live upside down. None other than the great theologian Augustine wrote the following words;

"As to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets on us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, there is no reason for believing it. Those who affirm it do not claim to possess any actual information; they merely conjecture that, since the earth is suspended within the concavity of the heavens, and there is as much room on the one side of it as on the other, therefore the part which is beneath cannot be void of human inhabitants. They fail to notice that, even should it be believed or demonstrated that the world is round or spherical in form, it does not follow that the part of the earth opposite to us is not completely covered with water, or that any conjectured dry land there should be inhabited by men. For Scripture, which confirms the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, teaches not falsehood; and it is too absurd to say that some men might have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man."

There is actually a "Flat Earth Society" still in existence today. I went to their website and read some of the material. It appears that it is made up of people who were rejected as members of their local Star Trek fan club. However, if you are an aspiring scientist who is never confused by real facts, you might want to sign up. Perhaps we could coin a new Greek term, "Stomapous," from a compound word meaning foot in mouth.

However, I like the term "Antipodes" in the sense that it describes those who live upside down or in the opposite direction. I think it might be a good stewardship term. Much of what the Bible says about stewardship sounds upside down to those with good financial sense.

• It is more blessed to give than to receive
• Do not store up treasures on earth
• Giving more than you can afford to give is often praised
• Do not expect interest when you lend
• It is difficult, nearly impossible, for the wealthy to be saved

It seems that to be a faithful biblical steward might put us on a different path than being a good money manager. We might find ourselves living upside down according to the Wall Street Journal.

As the church ultimately discovered, in spite of the reasoning of Augustine, those living on the underside of the earth were not really upside down. When it comes to stewardship, perhaps we should all be antipodes. We will likely discover that it is not really upside down after all.