Category Archives: Friday is for Heart Songs

Soft Pretzel Dreams and Much More

Friday is for Heart Songs

At the Center of Every True Philadelphia Native's Soul is a Soft Pretzel

At the Center of Every True Philadelphia Native’s Soul is a Soft Pretzel

I’m in Philadelphia this weekend for my youngest cousin’s wedding. I have been dreaming of cheese steaks and soft pretzels for three weeks! (Had my first soft pretzel this morning complements of my brother who went out early and brought a bag of them home.)  Even more, I am looking forward to spending some time with my two brothers and a sister who still live in the area, three high-school friends on a golf course, and a college friend over a nice meal.

It  will be a packed but relationally rich weekend.

Last night my brother Will and his son (William) came and picked me up at the airport. It’s Will’s golf clubs, shoes and truck that I will be using to humiliate myself on the golf course this afternoon. I will provide the punch line for all of Ron, Waz, and Kurt’s future retelling of what it was like for the four of us to get together on the golf course for the first time ever and the first time that all four of us have been together in 40 years. I can’t wait and the humiliation means nothing.

I love these guys and have prayed for them and their families for years. Kurt stood up with me when my bride became my wife. It will be great to catch up on their lives and to laugh together again. After golf and later in the evening I will be meeting with a college friend who is going to drive an hour just to spend two hours together catching up on our lives.

Saturday is the wedding and there I will catch up with many extended family members at the celebration of Michele’s wedding. Sunday, Mother’s Day, will be more family connection time with my brothers and then back to Chicago and Watseka on Monday.

I am a blessed man. Despite all my sin God has given me family and friends that I have never, will never and don’t presently deserve. I have an incredible wife who everyone knows I don’t deserve, four wonderful children who frankly, awe me with their lives, and friends who are far better friends to me than I am to them.

Not really sure were this post is going except to say, count your blessings in family and friends and cultivate both all your life.

Holiness: It doesn’t work the way most people think it does.

Friday is for Heart Songs

Grains after harvest“A farmer plows his field, sows the seed, and fertilizes and cultivates—all the while knowing that in the final analysis he is utterly dependent on forces outside of himself. He knows he cannot cause the seed to germinate, nor can he produce the rain and sunshine for growing and harvesting the crop. For a successful harvest, he is dependent on these things from God.

Yet the farmer knows that unless he diligently pursues his responsibilities to plow, plant, fertilize, and cultivate, he cannot expect a harvest at the end of the season. In a sense he is in a partnership with God, and he will reap its benefits only when he has fulfilled his own responsibilities.

Farming is a joint venture between God and the farmer. The farmer cannot do what God must do, and God will not do what the farmer should do.”

Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness, p. 13.

Good opening words to a classic work (now 35 years old) on the pursuit of holiness. If you have never read Jerry Bridges book, you are in for a treat. If you have read it, it is worth dusting off and reading again or purchasing from Amazon.com.

Don’t stop praying for holiness, but if you and I are going to be holy, it is going to take more than praying about it.

Are You a Parent of Small Children? Don’t Miss This

Friday is for Heart Songs

Cranky children 2Cranky Children 1Cranky Children - Mothers

Just for fun on a Friday. Enjoy the day.

Some days are like this in the world of parenting.

But they are worth it. Bring them up in the instruction of the Lord.

“So, whether you eat or drink [or parent], or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31, ESV)

“And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” (Colossians 3:17, ESV)   cf. also 1 Peter 4:11.

“The Church is a Whore; But She’s My Mother” (often attributed to Augustine)

Friday is for Heart Songs

Marty iiiMy son is more than an aspiring poet; he is a published, top 100 on Amazon.com list of books on poetry (four times) poet.

He’s good. I am biased, but that doesn’t mean I’m not right. I love this particular poem so much that I recorded it at the end of the video taping of the message for our second campus (Ashkum, IL)  this week. 

The poem is called “I and My Muther, Wunn” and was inspired by a quote attributed to Augustine*: “The Church may be a whore, but she’s my mother.”  

Marty III (he is named after my Dad) imagines a very different but completely accurate wedding of Christ and his bride (the Church) under the image of …. well, I’ll let you watch the video yourself. I’m looking forward to my son’s own performance of the poem. His will be a hundred times better than mine.

*One of my professors used to say that “anyone who says that they have read everything that Augustine ever wrote is lying, because the mass is so great that no one can do it.” That is probably an overstatement but it is probably the reason why Augustine gets a lot of things attributed to him that are not completely vetted. This quote is one of them. I have heard it quoted for years. But I have never actually seen it documented. Maybe someone who has the complete works of Augustine on Logos could research this. But while the source may not be known, the truth of the statement persists. The Church is a flawed and unfaithful bride, but she is still the rescued bride of the Living and Holy Christ who holds the deposit of the gospel in her midst. 

Domesticated Puppy Dog Faith

Friday is for Heart Songs

wildness_exhibit2Acts 8:4-8 (ESV)
4 Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. 5 Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ. 6 And the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip when they heard him and saw the signs that he did. 7 For unclean spirits, crying out with a loud voice, came out of many who had them, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. 8 So there was much joy in that city.

One of the clearest pictures we have of the early church is that of believers going everywhere and preaching the gospel. In fact, beyond the Great Commission passages in the Gospel and Acts, there is no command to go and witness for Christ. Not one. Early Christians didn’t seem to need that exhortation.  Being a believer, being a follower of Christ, and being a gospel-teller was simply an assumed part of being a follower of the Way.

Oh how times have changed.

There was a wildness to early Christian faith, a boldness that simply could not be contained. Today, that wildness and the boldness that accompanied it seem to have been bred out of the DNA of what it means to be a Christian. Ours is a domesticated faith, a puppy dog faith,  a faith lacking backbone and confidence.

Let’s get back to kind of faith that makes a city rejoice (Acts 8:8).
Let’s proclaim the gospel with boldness.
Let’s ask God to make us bold.

Let’s get into the word of the Living God in such a way that the word of God gets into us and transforms us into mighty warriors, wielding the word of God with compassion and confidence so that more of the lost get found, the least get served, and the forgotten have the gospel of peace preached to them.

 

“My Pastor is Picking on Me”

Friday is for Heart Songs

Whining 5There are those all over the country who get upset with their pastor for one reason or another and “pick up their marbles” and move on to another Church. Usually, not all the time, but usually this not a good idea and might, at times, be a grave sin. It might be well to take counsel from a saint from another generation on how to think when we feel that a pastor’s message strikes too close to home. 

The faithful hearer accuses not his minister for particularizing him. It does not follow that he aimed, because the arrow hit. Rather, our parishioner reasons thus: “If my sin be notorious, how could the minister miss it? If secret, how could he hit without God’s direction?”

THOMAS FULLER
(Puritan pastor)

And Pastors and Church Planters:
This goes double for you. When you are studying the text of the living and active Word of God and God puts his finger on your unrighteousness, confess and repent before God before you go and talk to the people of God about what they need to do. Christians and especially pastors should not be whiners but workers for the Lord’s harvest.  

God is a Lover and He is Looking for Lovers

Friday is for Heart Songs

Love God Love othersGod is a lover and he desires lovers. 

And to love the lost the way they need to be loved we need to love the Lord more than we love the lost. That kind of love only grows out of an intimacy with God. And that intimacy is only grown out of time spent brooding over the word of the Living God and praying for a heart that breaks over the things that breaks the heart of God.

What is that thing that breaks the heart of God?

Luke 15:1-32 tells us what that is and key to understanding what Jesus wanted to communicate is in how Luke introduces what Jesus said. The context is that the Pharisees and scribes are complaining about Jesus spending time with “tax collectors and sinners”. On that occasion, when Jesus knew what and why they were complaining about the company he was keeping, Luke tells us, “Jesus told them this parable:” (Luke 15:3) Notice: Luke doesn’t say “these parables” but “this parable”:

Most editors of our Bibles supply section headings that sound something like this from the ESV:

Parable of the Lost Sheep (15:1-7)
Parable of the Lost Coin (15:8-10)
Parable of the Prodigal Son (15:11-32)

Generally, these editor-supplied headings are helpful, but not here. The headings lead us to believe that these are three different parables and not one. But they are one parable. Luke told us that back in verse 3. It is one parable in three movements. And they all have the same point.

There is an extravagance to the love of God.
God is on a search and rescue mission for lost people.
That is his heart.
And that is the heart that his followers need to cultivate. 

Get to know your God. If you do, your passion for the lost will grow. 

That may be the only evidence you have that you are truly one of his followers.

A Prophet at Harvard: From Liberal Hero to Goat

The following, except for a closing comment, is from Kairos Journal. May God raise up a dozen Solzhenitsyn-like voices for our perilous, irresponsible and wicked times.

A Prophet Visits Harvard (1978)

SolzenitzenBefore his 1978 Harvard commencement address, Russian exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the darling of the American liberal intelligentsia; when he finished, he was a pariah. (The New York Times called him “dangerous” and a “zealot.”1) They were expecting a grateful message, worshipful of their “Great Society.” Instead, he rebuked them for their cowardice, legalism, superficiality, herd instinct, materialism, humanism, and flirtation with socialism.

Solzhenitsyn’s message might have seemed a good fit for a school whose early seals bore the words, In Christi Gloriam (1650) and Christo et Ecclesiae (1692)2. But the school has long since sold its Christian birthright for a “mess of [secular] pottage.”

The founders were long dead when Solzhenitsyn came to the microphone for the 327th commencement. His hearers had little use for talk about “for the glory of Christ” or “for Christ and the Church.” Instead, they were primed to receive a word on “free expression in the face of tyranny” or “the splendor of the unconquerable soul” from this longtime prisoner of the Soviet gulag. They were not at all prepared for the Russian’s prophetic words, such as these that follow:3

This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man—the master of this world—does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected.

The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.

Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

It [humanism] started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.

I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.

Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition.

We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.

Alas, neither Harvard nor its adoring constituency fell to its knees in repentance, but prophets are not called to be successful. They are merely called to be faithful, whatever the resistance and reaction. And though their contemporaries may reject their message, their names will enjoy honor where and when honor counts.

Perhaps God will grant Harvard repentance. Perhaps revival will begin with another shocking commencement address, a guest column in the student newspaper, or the conversion of a popular professor. In God’s providence and in God’s time, it doesn’t take much. The founders knew this when they chose Zechariah 4:10 for the title page of the first “catalogue” of their fledgling school—“Who hath despised the Day of small things?”4

My prayer, our prayer ought to be that small beginnings or new beginnings, God might start a new revival, that our nation might yet return to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to the Lord Jesus Christ who alone is worthy of all honor, praise and glory.

Footnotes:

1 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses, and Six Later Reflections (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980). 3-20.
2 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 330.
3 Solzhenitsyn, 23-24.
4 Morison, 420.