Daily Thought: Surrendered to God's Will

"The strongest human will is always the one that is surrendered to God's will and acts with it." ~ Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart, p. 152

A New Job

Jenny and I have been married a month!  I am very thankful that it didn't take very long to find a job in Austin.  It is hard not preaching, but right now I am exactly where God wants me to be. My job is working with four guys who have mental disabilities.  They all live together in a house and I am one of the staff that help them live as independently as possible.

It might be quiet for the next couple of days as I adjust my time with my new work schedule.  As always thanks for reading.

Daily Thought: Kingdom-of-God Activity

"To promote law, order, and justice is good, and we certainly should do all we can to support this.  But to love enemies, forgive transgressors, bless persecutors, server sinners, accept social rejects, abolish racist walls, share resources with the poor, bear the burden of neighbors, suffer with the oppressed—all the while making no claims to promote oneself—this is beautiful; this is Christlike.  Only this, therefore, is distinct kingdom-of-God activity." ~ Gregory Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation, p. 103

Daily Thought: Pointless and Vague Prayers

"And yet how much of our prayer is vague and pointless. Some cry for mercy, but take not the trouble to know what mercy must do for them. Others ask, perhaps, to be delivered from sin, but do not begin by bringing any sin by name from which the deliverance may be claimed. Still others pray for God's blessing on those around them, for the outpouring of God's Spirit on their land or the world, and yet have no special field where they wait and expect to see the answer. To all the Lord says: And what is it now you really want and expect Me to do?" ~ Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer, Kindle Version

Daily Thought: Becoming Fluent In Christian Behavior

"Of course, the Christian ideal is that we should get to the point, as with a language, where we don't need to think about it at all.  If you are a native speaker of, say, Swahili, and want to learn Chinese, your aim is to be able to listen and speak in Chinese without ever thinking of grammar.  To the extent that you are still racking your brains about which words to use and how to form sentences, you are not yet fluent.  But, as you practise, the rules will steadily become, as we say, 'second nature.' That is the aim with learning the new language of Christian behavior." ~ N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians, p. 131

When Churches Close

When Churches Close

The church family I served in Storm Lake is a church family that has a big old building, but without the financial resources to keep up with the upkeep of the building. When a church family gets in that situation the building begins to become a hindrance, rather than a tool, to growth. So what do you do? This is a question more and more church families will have to face as attendance continues to dwindle.

This article addresses a couple of options church families have when it comes to getting out from underneath the crushing load of a building they can no longer afford. It is sad to see church buildings close their doors, but it doesn't serve the Church's or the community's interest to have empty church buildings polluting the landscape.

Daily Thought: Jesus is not a Product

"That is how I felt about some of the preachers I heard speak.  They were always pointing out the benefits of Christian faith.  That rubbed me wrong.  It's not that there aren't benefits, there are, but did they have to talk about spirituality like it's a vacuum cleaner.  I never felt like Jesus was a product.  I wanted Him to be a person." ~ Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, p.131

Being What Jesus Desires

Water is one of life’s essentials. As scientists look for life on other planets one of the things they look for is the presence of water, because without water life cannot exist. We need water to survive.

I know that when it is hot out, like it is right now in mid-July, there is nothing better than something cold to drink. Sometimes you will hear someone respond when asked what they would like to drink, “I don’t care as long as it is cold.” When it is hot outside being able to drink a glass of cold water is a very good thing.

When the weather is cooler there is little better to help keep you warm than hot water. I love taking hot showers in the winter time along with drinking a large mug of hot chocolate. Many people turn to hot water for therapeutic reasons, to relax stiff muscles and release tension. Having hot water is a very good thing.

I remember going out to fix fence with my brother on a hot summer day while growing up on the farm. We were driving the loader tractor with bucket full of what we would need. On the tractor was a jug of water left over from when we baled hay a couple of weeks before, and being thirsty I took a big gulp of that water and immediately spit it out. It was terrible! The water in that jug was good for nothing.

There is a passage in Revelation that we misinterpret so often. Christ Jesus has the apostle John write these words to the church in Laodicea:

“‘ know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:15-16; ESV).

The way we normally hear this passage interpreted is that Jesus wants us to either be on fire for Him or totally cold towards Him rather than trying to ride the fence between the two. Such an interpretation misses out on a very important point of what Jesus was saying: cold water is good to drink. Cold water isn’t bad, but it is a very good a useful thing, just as hot water is useful and good.

The point Jesus is making is that the Laodiceans thought they were so self-sufficient, that they had things so together, that they were not useful to Him. Because of their wealth, their medicine, and their education they thought they had everything they needed, but Jesus reminds them that they didn’t. Not only did their city lack a good source of fresh water, but they lacked the humility and the faith to experience God’s transforming power in their lives.

Craig Keener in Revelation: The NIV Application Commentary wrote:

“Laodicea boasted great resources, but while the Laodicean Christians likely shared their Laodicean neighbor’s pride over their self-sufficiency in many respects, they presumably also shared a common dislike for their water supply...In contrast to its claims of self-sufficiency (3:17), it had to pipe in its water; though much of the aqueduct from the south was underground nearer the city it came through stone barrel pipes, thus remaining vulnerable to any intended besiegers who wished to cut off the city’s water supply. More important, this water had grown lukewarm by the time of its arrival. 

“The point of the lukewarm water is simply that it is disgusting, in contrast to the more directly useful ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ water; all the churches would plainly understand this warning...Jesus thus finds the church in Laodicea to be other than what he desires (cf. Isa. 5:2-6). In today’s English, he is telling the self-satisfied church in Laodicea: ‘I want water that will refresh me, but you remind me instead of the water you always complain about. You make me want to puke” (pp. 158-159).

Jesus desires that His followers be a certain type of people. We are to be poor in spirit, meek, merciful, and peacemakers just to name a few characteristics. When we are proud and live our lives on our own terms rather than by God’s will we become something that is disgusting Jesus. We are unfit to be called His disciples, and He will get rid of us if we don’t comply to His desires. It is then that we can be used for His purposes.

Yes, it is good not to sit on the fence and to have our passion run hot for Jesus, but that was not the problem Jesus was addressing with the Church in Laodicea. Their problem was a refusal to rely on the grace of God for life as they insisted that they could find life on their own. Jesus wanted to remind them that they weren’t as self-reliant as they thought. We must heed this warning, not to try to muster up our passion for Jesus, but rather to humbly surrender our lives to Him. That is when we will be the most useful to Him.

Daily Thought: God Is First

"While we ordinarily first bring our own needs to God in prayer, and then think of what belongs to God and His interests, the Master reverses the order. First, Thy name, Thy kingdom, Thy will; then, give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us. The lesson is of more importance than we think. In true worship the Father must be first, must be all. The sooner I learn to forget myself in the desire that HE may be glorified, the richer will the blessing be that prayer will bring to myself. No one ever loses by what he sacrifices for the Father." ~ Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer, Kindle Version

Can't Rush the Process

Here is a pondering I discovered in an old notebook that I have never shared before.  It was written sometime between March 2006 and September 2006 when I was working at Bruegger's Bagels in Coralville, IA.

On Saturday as I worked at my job baking bagels we experienced a rush of people who wanted to buy a dozen bagels.  I went from having baskets full of bagels to empty baskets in a matter of minutes.

The problem was that I could not bake the bagels fast enough to meet the demand during that period of time.  You have to understand that the way we bake bagels requires a certain process which cannot be rushed.  There are certain steps that must be followed for the bagels to come out of the oven looking right.

Since our bakery uses frozen dough the first step in the process is  to take the frozen dough and set it on a fiberglass board so it has a chance to thaw and rise.  This little task is called slacking.  You can imagine the little jokes I have heard while slacking the dough.

The dough is then put into the walk in cooler where it stays until it is ready to be used.  When it is ready to be baked, about a day later, it is taken out of the cooler where it needs to stay for about 5 minutes to bring it up to room temperature.  Once the raw bagel is at room temperature it is put into a vat of boiling water. Why boil? Boiling gelatinizes the starch in the outer layer of dough, giving the bagels their characteristic chewy crust. (I couldn't remember why we boiled them and so I Googled it, so this information is from All Recipes.)

After being kettled for 90 seconds the dough is strained and put onto baking sticks, five per stick.  If the bagels require a topping you place them face up and cover them with the right topping, and then you flip them over so they are face down on the stick.  Non-topping bagels naturally are placed face down from the start.  This whole procedure can take another 3 to 4 minutes.

Once the bagels have been properly placed on the sticks they are finally placed in the revolving oven for  5 minutes.  After 5 minutes you reach in and flip and remove the baking sticks to allow the bagels to finish baking on the shelf face for another 13 minutes.  Then it was time to remove the bagels and put them in a basket so they could go out front.

When you are feeling rushed it is easy to begin to think that you can take a short cut, like not kettling the bagels for 90 seconds, but if you do that then the bagel doesn't get the nice chewy crust it is supposed to have.  Trying to shorten the baking times means the bagel won't have the nice brown color it should have.  In the end any short cuts that a baker takes results in an inferior bagel.

This is where I would like to make an application to our lives.  When Abraham was 75-years-old God promised him a son.  Abraham and his wife Sarah waited and waited and there was no son.  Somewhere around 10 years later Abraham and Sarah thought they would give God a hand, and Abraham had a son with Sarah's servant girl, a perfectly legitimate solution in that culture, but it wasn't what God had in mind.  It was another 15 years or so that God blessed Abraham and Sarah with the son of promise, Isaac.  In that time of waiting God was preparing the couple for the son who was to come, but because of their shortcut things didn't turn out like they should have.

You and I are impatient.  We want God to transform us now and give us the big assignment that will turn the world upside down, but God has a process that He wants to take us through.  There is no shortcut, you can't take a test and skip a step or start going to worship twice a week for extra credit.  God, like a good baker, is taking His time to make sure we turn out exactly like we are supposed to.

What do we need in this process?  We need wisdom.  Without wisdom we will miss out on how God is using the experiences of our lives, including our pain, to mold us into the people He created us to be.  Remember what James wrote:

Dear brothers and sisters,​ when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.

If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking (James 1:2-4; NLT).

In this process of transformation, instead of looking for a shortcut we need to ask God for wisdom, because only then can we do our part as we seek to become the people God desires us to be.

Daily Thought: God's Vision His Way

"It is possible that we may spend our lives laying the groundwork for a vision that is fulfilled after our death.  How many missionaries died with little fruit, only to influence thousands after their death? God's vision is fulfilled God's way.  This means we must be careful about our focus.  If the ancients had focused on the seen, they would have gotten discouraged and frustrated.  But instead they focused on the vision." ~ Jud Wilhite, Faith That Goes the Distance, pp. 90-91

Good News Not Good Advice

There are plenty of people out there willing to give you good advice. From Dear Abbey to Dr. Phil to Dr. Laura we have plenty of people out there who will give us advice on how to live. The problem is that it isn’t God’s advice. Sure we can find Biblical passage to support some of it, but that doesn’t mean that it is God’s advice.

In an attempt to be relevant and to meet the need of their congregations too many preachers build their messages around the good advice of people like Dr. Phil rather than building their sermons on the text of God’s Word. Haddon Robinson wrote a chapter entitled The Relevance of Expository Preaching for the book Preaching to a Shifting Culture. In it he writes:

“It is one thing to find insight and direction from a text and to demonstrate how it gives God’s perspective on the current approaches to a problem, but it is another thing to find one’s basic ideas in the humanistic disciplines and then baptize those insights into the faith unconverted. A sermon urging care for the environment, for example, may look to the natural sciences to make us aware of what is happening to the air, forest, seas, and animals, but also turns to the same sources for the diagnosis of the problem, and the motivations for acting to solve it. We’re sure that Christians should be concerned about polluted air and depleted natural resources so any verse or two about creation being God’s handiwork is all the scriptural support we need for what we want to say. The Bible is actually incidental to the sermon. 

“Other sermons on more personal issues such as grief, guilt, anxiety, or loneliness often depend on the insights of counselors or psychologists to analyze the situation and to show how they should be handled. We too easily buy into the assumption that the members of the social sciences can give us all the help we need. Of course the Scriptures work well enough for religious matters, but when it comes to the business of living they aren’t much help. When it comes to those issues we want to believe we can fix things ourselves; there is no need or use to call in God” (pg. 81; emphasis added).

There is no doubt that we can find good advice from the wisdom of this world, but are we called to offer people good advice? To be honest with you if I am called to offer people advice on how the can have a better life or purpose in their life then I am in trouble. Dr. Phil does that far better than I can and people don’t have to get off their living room couch.


Preaching has to be more than offering clichés and advice about finding our best life now. The wisdom of this world is incapable of making sense of the trials and hardships of life. Consider what James wrote in his epistle:


Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. 

But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him (James 1:2-5; NASB).

Life is not a walk in the park. Everyone experiences hardships and struggles, they are an universal experience. James points out, as do other Biblical writers, that trials serve a purpose: they help us become the people God created us to be. James says for us to be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

In the very next verse James writes; But if any of you lacks wisdom. Why is wisdom important? Why not strength? hope? or relief? Isn’t because only through wisdom can we discover how to use these hardships in our lives? Simply enduring hard times isn’t the answer, it is how we choose to respond to those trials. In order to make the right choice we need God’s wisdom.

The pages of the Bible contain God’s wisdom. If we neglect the study of it and the preaching of it then we cut ourselves and others off from the wisdom God wants in our lives. So the purpose of preaching isn’t to impart good advice to people so they can have the life they always wanted, but to share God’s wisdom so people can make the right choices as they journey to become the people God created them to be.

Daily Thought: Becoming Spiritually Mature

"The truth is, the more spiritually mature you grow, the more you will find your heart being drawn to people.  You want to reach out to people, especially those neglected by society or far from God." ~ John Ortberg, Everybody's Normal Till You Get To Know Them, p. 59

Daily Thought: At The Back of Everything

"God loves you not because you are clever not because you are good, but because He is your Father. The Cross of Christ does not make God love us; it is the outcome and measure of His love to us. He loves all His children, the clumsiest, the dullest, the worst of His children. His love lies at the back of everything, and we must get upon that as the solid foundation of our religious life, not growing up into that, but growing up out if it. We must begin there or our beginning will come to nothing." ~ Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer, Kindle Edition

Daily Thought: New Orders

"The Kingdom of God is advancing into the kingdom of darkness, a campaign to ransom people and the earth God intended us to rule. For the Son of Man came to seek and save what was lost. All that was lost. If Christianity seems to you to be having rather less than a remarkable impact on the earth, it is because too many Christians have this idea that we are in a waiting game, that we are basically killing time until Jesus comes back and we all get to go to heaven. We are sitting around like people waiting to catch a flight. That is not what Jesus told us to do; he didn’t say, 'Now hold tight in those pews and twiddle your holy thumbs, I’ll be back soon as I can.' He said, 'As the Father has sent me, I send you' (John 20:21). Let that sink in for a moment. New orders have been given." ~ John and Stasi Eldredge, Love and War, Kindle Edition

Daily Thought: Connecting Us with God

"When the Spirit of God is dynamic in our lives, his central job is connecting us with God, convincing us of our need for a Savior, drawing us to Christ, whispering to us that God is our father, making clear to us the truth of God from Scripture, coming alongside of us to console us when we're wounded, to equip and strengthen us for the work we're called to do, and to empower us to relate to others with the energy of Christ." ~ Larry Crabb, Connecting, p. 44