Winning Ways: Still Life

"Still" describes someone who is calm, not anxiously moving or nervously talking.


"Still" describes someone who is constant: They are still the same.

"Still" describes a person who is controlled: They won't retreat but stand still.

But is "still" a good word to describe you?

I've been thinking a lot about this word. God commanded us to "be still" in our crisis and trust him (Psalm 46:10). God spoke to the burned-out prophet Elijah in a "still, small voice" (1 Kings 19). The Apostle Paul told us to be ambitious to lead a quiet life (1 Thessalonians 4:11).

We love the big and the flashy these days:

We read books that tell us we ought to expect the astonishing when we pray. Just ask God to give us this day our daily bread? How dull.

We go to conferences that tell us we're second-class disciples unless we've quit our jobs to start a third-world orphanage. If you're a working stiff who faithfully raises your kids and loves your spouse and serves in your church, well, that's not enough.

Really, I don't want to belittle the longing for a spectacular life. I sometimes need the reminders to pray boldly and to live boldly.

But still.


In the calls to expect the extraordinary I'm afraid God's people are forgetting the ordinary. We're called to be faithful, stubbornly obedient, and to look for God to show up in the routines of daily living.


So, starting this Sunday, we're starting a new study series called "Still." Across the next several weeks we're going to examine God's commands to be still, to stand faithful, and to do well the too-often dull work of life. We'll start with burned-out Elijah in 1 Kings 19. He needed the reminder that God doesn't always work in the big flashy ways Elijah expected. Join us @ 10.

Have you turned in an "Explore God" testimony yet? We want to know how the "Explore God" campaign has impacted you. Did it settle a question you were wrestling with? Did you get into some interesting conversations in the community? Did you make a decision for Christ? Give us your impressions and stories at jami@hbcaustin.org. Your story will be a real encouragement to the leaders of this campaign. We'll publish as many as we can on November 10.

__________________________________________

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Links to Your World, Tuesday October 29

At "Links to Your World," things are gettin all Halloweeny up in here.




Join us at the Hillcrest Trunk-or-Treat and Pumpkin Party




Here's a website claiming to help you find out if a previous occupant died in your house and is still hanging around to haunt it. Sadly, they missed the better title for their web page. They should have called it Ghoulgle.


 

10 Cyborg Jack-O-Lanterns

 

Creative Halloween costumes:

 

Not everything at "Links" is about Halloween:

 

Did you ever expect to see the day when the Vatican suspended bishops for rich living and Bible-belt Protestant pastors stepped in to fill the gap? (HT: Paul Pastor) Furtick's house is a big, big house, with lots and lots of room. Sadly, some of that square footage is mine, since I bought 4 copies of his book, Sun Stand Still, for Ministry Staff discussion. Sigh. 1986 Peter Gabriel, tell us what you think:

 

Are Smartphones Turning Us Into Bad Samaritans?

 

Links to Your World, Tuesday October 22

10 reasons why America's future is going to look a lot more like Texas

 

A word cloud of the words women most use on Facebook:



 

 

 

 




...and men:




 

 

 

 

 

 

Sermon Illustration Alert: In some parts of the world, people change their names in hopes of changing their lives.

 

What will we do with Earth's remaining 19 years?

 

"'Silence is like scouring sand,' he says. 'When you are quiet, the silence blows against your mind and etches away everything that is soft and unimportant.' What is left is what is real—pure awareness, and the very hardest questions." Here's a fascinating story about one man's quest to preserve a little spot of wilderness where there is no human-generated noise.


 

"There are times to speak up, particularly when issues of justice are involved, but an endless stream of calling people fools or liars -- people whom your neighbor voted for -- just does not make sense for the Christian. Unless, of course, you just want to preach to the choir and not reach the unchurched. The end result is another stumbling block for those we are trying to reach." You should read this post by Ed Stetzer.


 

The Atlantic: "Stable marriage and community are the secret sauce of economic well-being that nobody on the left wants to admit to using"


 

Churchgoing youth are 70 percent more likely to enroll in college than unaffiliated peers, research finds.


 

Reasons for caution against "assisted suicide" measures: "My problem, ultimately, is this: I’ve lived so close to death for so long that I know how thin and porous the border between coercion and free choice is, how easy it is for someone to inadvertently influence you to feel devalued and hopeless — to pressure you ever so slightly but decidedly into being “reasonable,” to unburdening others, to “letting go.” Perhaps, as advocates contend, you can’t understand why anyone would push for assisted-suicide legislation until you’ve seen a loved one suffer. But you also can’t truly conceive of the many subtle forces — invariably well meaning, kindhearted, even gentle, yet as persuasive as a tsunami — that emerge when your physical autonomy is hopelessly compromised....Advocates of Death With Dignity laws who say that patients themselves should decide whether to live or die are fantasizing. Who chooses suicide in a vacuum? We are inexorably affected by our immediate environment. The deck is stacked." Ben Mattlin for the NY Times

 

Winning Ways: Telling People About God

After attending many conferences and reading many books on the work of ministry, I still haven't found a better definition of a pastor's job than the one given by my firstborn when he was a preschooler.


When Michael turned four, it was time for him to start sitting with his mother in church services instead of attending the preschool care. After a few weeks of observing the hour-long services of songs, prayers, and my teaching, he had an observation.

"I know what your job is, Daddy," he told me over Sunday lunch.

"Oh?"

"Your job is to tell people about God."

"Well, that's right, Michael. I'm a pastor, and my job is to tell people about God."

"Daddy?" he continued.

"Yes, son."

"It takes a lo-o-o-ong time to tell people about God, doesn't it, Daddy?"

Well, I guess the boy was right! When your job is to tell people about God, there's a lot to say.

But the opening line of the Apostles Creed gathers up all the Bible says about God in a single sentence: "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." In that statement I confess that God is my Maker, my Ruler, and my Father.

That's worth a closer look this Sunday. We'll close our seven week citywide "Explore God" campaign with the question, "Can I Know God Personally?"

By the way, we want to know how the "Explore God" campaign has impacted you. Did it settle a question you were wrestling with? Did you get into some interesting conversations in the community? Did you make a decision for Christ? Send your impressions and stories to my assistant, Jami (jami@hbcaustin.org). I'll prepare a newsletter column from the reports.

I've enjoyed studying the "Seven Big Questions" with you. And this last Sunday of the study series may be the most important. Many people are willing to say, "I believe in God"--and what they are saying is, "I believe God exists." But our goal should be to know God. To have a relationship with him. To "improve our conscious contact with God" as those in recovery groups put it. A.W. Tozer once said, "I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us he waits so long, so very long, in vain."

Bring a friend this Sunday @ 10!

 

Links to Your World, Tuesday October 15

The average cell phone user accesses his or her phone screen 10 times an hour

 

Welcome to BridesThrowingCats. It's brides throwing cats--what else were you expecting?

 

Another reason Alamo's the only place to watch a film: Madonna banned for refusing to stop texting during a flick.

 

How to cut toast.

 

"I do not think that the evolutionary ‘explanations’ for consciousness that are currently doing the rounds are going to get us anywhere. These explanations do not address the hard problem itself, but merely the ‘easy’ problems that orbit it like a swarm of planets around a star. The hard problem’s fascination is that it has, to date, completely and utterly defeated science. Nothing else is like it. We know how genes work, we have (probably) found the Higgs Boson; but we understand the weather on Jupiter better than we understand what is going on in our own heads. This is remarkable." Michael Hanlon for Aeon.

 

More people who live together are introducing their partners as their fiancé, despite no actual plans to get married.

 

Malcolm Gladwell, on his return to faith while writing his latest book: "I realized what I had missed. It wasn't an 'I woke up one morning' kind of thing. It was a slow realization something incredibly powerful and beautiful in the faith that I grew up with that I was missing. Here I was writing about people of extraordinary circumstances and it slowly dawned on me that I can have that too."

 

This family who survived the terror of the Nairobi mall serve with our International Mission Board. Katherine Walton has been I nterviewed by “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” TIME and People magazines and even Glamour magazine.

 

Winning Ways: Is the Bible Reliable?

In the film Castaway, Tom Hanks played the lone survivor of a FedEx jet crash marooned on a deserted island in the south Pacific. A few packages from the jet washed up on the shore with the castaway, and he opened them in hopes of finding something that would help him survive. When he came to the last package, though, he chose to keep it intact. His determination to eventually deliver that package to its owner was his thin connection to the hope of rescue. In fact, the film ended with the delivered castaway delivering that package to its recipient five years later.


During Super Bowl XXXVII, FedEx ran a commercial that spoofed the movie. In the send-up, after the FedEx employee delivered the package he had protected for so long, curiosity got the best of him. "Excuse me," he asked the recipient, "what was in that package after all?"

She opened it and showed him the contents, saying, "Oh, nothing really. Just a satellite telephone, a global positioning device, a compass, a water purifier, and some seeds."

No doubt those things would have come in handy for a man stranded on a deserted island!

The Bible is also something filled with good things that we miss if we neglect to open it. Many will neglect to open it because they have suspicions about its dependability. They've read or heard enough skeptical reports to doubt that the New Testament takes us right back to the actual words and actions of Jesus.

That's why we need to spend a Sunday in our "Seven Big Questions" series to deal with the reliability of the Bible. This Sunday I'll give you five reasons you can trust the Bible to give you accurate information about Jesus.

The Apostle John said, “What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life . . . we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us” (1 John 1:1-3 NASB). That’s the reason the Bible was written. The earliest followers of Jesus wanted you and me to share in their remarkable experience with Jesus. By reading their words, we can enter into a fellowship with these people who actually walked and talked with him.

Come this Sunday and I'll give you good reasons to open this wonderful package from God called the Bible.

Additional Note: Keep up with all staff newsletter columns at our website. This week, Gene writes about two Hillcrest ladies in leadership with Faith in Action, Steve reminds you of how you can help with the upcoming Craft Show, and Karen reflects on five years as our Kids Minister.

__________________________________________

Subscribe to "Winning Ways" and

it will arrive in your inbox each Wednesday

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Links to Your World, Tuesday October 8

In a post about toxic online commenting, John Blake for CNN defines several types of religious and atheist commentors. Horrible stuff here. It's one reason I pretty much ignore the comments feature at online sites.

 

Read a Lawyer’s Amazingly Detailed Analysis of Bilbo’s Contract in The Hobbit

 

You Talk Too Much. If you're wondering if I had certain people in mind when I added this to the list, yeah, I was probably thinking of you. :-) As the wise man once said, "It's OK to hold a conversation--just let go of it once in a while.

 

Facebook Version of Marriage Going Great

 

Online atheists love their memes, especially the ones that are “devastating” to religon as well as being humorous. Here are few such Devastating Arguments Against Christianity (Courtesy of the Internet). As it turns out, the arguments are indeed devastating…just not to religion. (HT: Evangelical Outpost)

 

Sermon Illustration Alert: Family Hosts 200 Homeless People for Dinner After Daughter's Wedding Gets Called Off

 

James Taranto says Stan Greenberg is a racist when speaking of white evangelical Republicans. Taranto has a point.

 

I did not know this: "Surprising new research from the University of Texas suggests that people who often say "I" are less powerful and less sure of themselves than those who limit their use of the word."

 

WSJ: Churches Take a Stand on Pews, Replacing Them With Chairs. At Hillcrest I like our decision to go with pews in the big renovation, but this is a trend we'll need to pay attention to.

 

Time: "Once a taboo topic, mental illness is an increasingly prominent plot line on television....Aside from helping those unfamiliar with mental illnesses to have a more realistic and unbiased view of psychiatric disorders, the depictions may help patients struggling with mental illness as well. “Someone with bipolar disorder may identify with a character and say to themselves, ‘if they can get through it, I can get through it.’"

 

Winning Ways: What If God Was One of Us?

In her hit song, "One of Us," Joan Osbourne sang:

What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home

Some just consider the song irreverent, but Osbourne was asking an important question: Does God know what we’re dealing with down here?

The answer is found in the life of Jesus. The Apostle John beautifully described the life of Jesus as God who "became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14).

This Sunday we'll continue our "Explore God" series with the question of Jesus' identity. Many regard Jesus as one of history's great moral teachers--another like Gandhi or Buddha, for example. But, as C.S. Lewis famously put it,

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher....Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse....Let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Why is this important? Two reasons.

First, because Jesus is everything it means to be God, knowing Jesus is the best way to know God. Jesus wasn’t simply a man who was filled with the presence of God: Jesus was the presence of God. And so if you want to know what makes God smile, look at what made Jesus smile. If you want to know what enrages God, look at what made Jesus angry. Any claim about who God is and what God likes must be measured by the words and life of the man who was God-in-the-flesh: Jesus Christ.

Second, because Jesus is everything it means to be God, the sacrifice of Jesus was God paying our penalty himself. In 2 Corinthians 5:19 Paul wrote, "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself." The astonishing claim of the gospel is that the man hanging upon the cross was the creator himself giving himself up to save his prized creation.

Believers need this reminder as much as those investigating faith. Join us this Sunday at 10 to celebrate the fact that God really was one of us.

__________________________________________

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Links to Your World, Tuesday October 1

Man Experiencing First Real Moment Of Peace In Years Resuscitated (The Onion)

 

For the love of Myst

 

Great a capella arrangement:

A four-year-old British boy survived the bloody Kenyan shopping mall attack after standing up to a terrorist gunman and telling him: “You’re a very bad man.” Time. The gunman released them saying, "Forgive us. We're not monsters." What's this guy's definition of "monsters"?

"Pastor Saeed is not the only Christian in chains for the Gospel," David French of ACLJ wrote Sept. 16. "He's not the only Christian who faces mortal peril simply because of his faith.... Go to Be Heard, write a letter for Pastor Saeed, then stay and learn about the plight of Christians in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and beyond."

 

Wait...Buddhist persecution of Christians? That doesn't fit the Western fable of Buddhism

 

CT: "According to a study of more than 100 nations, changes in the percentage of Christians—especially evangelicals—in a given country have a direct correlation to economic well-being."

Sure, you can wish Michael Goodman a happy birthday today.

 

Amy Simpson, in her post, "Evangelicals, You're Wrong About Mental Illness"--

Stop telling people they can cure their mental illness with only prayer....One sure way to drive people closer to despair is to tell them their mental illness is simply a spiritual problem, tell them to pray it away, then when it doesn’t work, just tell them to pray harder. Laying a heavy spiritual burden on people suffering from serious mental illness is a way to encourage suicide, not to prevent it....Mental illness, like other diseases, is a reality of life in a world where parts of our body–including our brains–get sick and malfunction. We don’t consider it acceptable to prescribe prayer alone for diseased livers, hearts, and pancreases; why prescribe it for disordered brains?

 

For those of you who followed five seasons of Breaking Bad right through the finale Sunday, here's James Poniewozik:

No, we’re not all Walter White. Most of us would never do what he did even in his circumstances. But have none of us ever done the wrong thing in the name of pride, expedience, or “the children”? Isn’t the world full of people who make selfish choices because they tell themselves they need to look out for their own families first (never mind what other families are indirectly affected)? To disassociate yourself from Walt is to tell yourself that your ordinary impulses–It’s not fair! I deserve this! My kids deserve this!–could never lead you to a bad place. You don’t have to kill to compromise, and Breaking Bad is all about how one moral compromise makes the next one easier.

And don't miss this Breaking Bad observation by Chris McNerney and Daniel Lee:

Walt didn't become broken—Walt was already broken. Broken on the inside by pride, lust for power and greed, all of which was neatly hidden away until circumstances brought the inner being to light. So Walt wasn't a bad person because he manufactured narcotics; he manufactured narcotics because he was a bad person, and the long-term effects of unrepentant sin gradually harden him into a ruthless psychopath....What starts off as an instinct to provide for his family mutates into a monstrous obsession to preserve the empire that Walt has established with his own two hands. Walt has been so engulfed by the darkness that he is no longer fully human. And that's because sin is a force that refuses to let up; like gravity, it relentlessly pulls us inward into itself. As Walt himself says, "If you believe that there's a hell...we're already pretty much going there. But I'm not gonna lie down until I get there" (from episode 5.07, "Say My Name").

But I didn't watch the much-ballyhooed program and I'm not sure I'll binge-watch the five seasons to catch up. A couple of years ago Diane and I thought we'd keep up through Netflix, but the first three episodes of the first season were so dark and brutal. Besides, I know something about the family heartbreak of drug abuse (another story for another day), and we didn't need further sorrow from our entertainment. In the end, Lily Rothman's reasons she doesn't watch the show are good enough for me, too.

 

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