Wednesday Night Report

2. And Bob Arthur. That = 24.Praise the Lord He Is Good<br />11 Things God Does for Church Leaders Mark Driscoll <br />1. Jesus is the Senior Pastor of the church.<br />1 Peter 5:4 – quot;
And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory.quot;
<br />2. The Holy Spirit chooses leaders for the church.<br />Acts 20:28 – quot;
Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.quot;
<br />3. God gifts leaders of the church.<br />Ephesians 4:11–12 – quot;
And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.quot;
<br />4. God empowers leaders for the church.<br />1 Corinthians 15:10 – quot;
But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.quot;
<br />5. God encourages leaders in the church.<br />2 Corinthians 4:1 – quot;
Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart.quot;
<br />6. The Holy Spirit speaks to leaders about the church.<br />Acts 13:2–3 – quot;
While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, 'Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.' Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.quot;
<br />7. God gives wisdom to leaders over the church.<br />2 Timothy 2:7 – quot;
Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.quot;
<br />8. Jesus joins leaders as they discipline in the church.<br />Matthew 18:20 – quot;
For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.quot;
<br />9. God answers leaders' prayers for the church.<br />James 5:14–15 – quot;
Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.quot;
<br />10. The Holy Spirit falls on Bible preaching in the church.<br />Acts 10:44 – quot;
While Peter was still saying these things, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word.quot;
<br />11. The Holy Spirit says no to leaders of the church.<br />Acts 16:6 – quot;
And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.quot;
<br /> As Christians we (rightly!) have high expectations of our pastors as they preach the Word of God. We expect that that they will dedicate themselves to studying and understanding the Bible, that they will live lives marked by their commitment to holiness, that they will expend the effort necessary to craft Gospel-centered, Spirit-empowered sermons. In short, we expect that they will come to the pulpit prepared, having dedicated themselves to the task they've been called to. How odd it is, then, that we are content to have such low standards for our own preparation and our own diligence in listening. We expect to turn up at church and be blessed by the preaching of the Word, even while we have expended no effort in seeking to prepare ourselves to hear it and even while we sit passively throughout.<br />Having read many books dealing with the preaching of sermons, it was a blessing to me to read a book on listening to sermons. After all, I spend just a handful of Sundays each year preaching and all the rest listening. And I know I need to be a much better listener. Ken Ramey addresses just this in his new book Expository Listening: A Handbook for Hearing and Doing God's Word.<br />Ramey, pastor at Lakeside Bible Church in Mongomery, Texas, says that preaching is a joint venture in which the listener partners with the pastor so that quot;
the Word of God accomplishes its intended purpose of transforming your life. Nothing creates a more explosive, electrifying, life-changing atmosphere than when the lightning bolts from a Spirit-empowered preacher hit the lightning rods of a Spirit-illuminated listener. There is no telling the dynamic impact the Spirit of God will make through the Word of God any time someone who faithfully explains and applies God's Word comes into contact with someone who faithfully listens to and obeys God's Word.quot;
This powerful synergy is at the heart of so much lasting spiritual change.<br />And so, in this book, geared specifically to the average person (like me) in the average church (like mine) Ramey calls for a new appreciation of the hard work of listening to God's Word delivered through his servants. He begins with a theology of listening, showing the emphasis God places on listening to what he says. He then moves to the importance of hearing with the heart rather than simply hearing with the head or intellect. He offers teaching on harrowing the heart to hear, those week-long and life-long tasks of preparation that will allow us to listen and listen well. He also warns of the quot;
itching ear epidemicquot;
the Bible warns about (and the contemporary church gives such evidence of), calls for discernment among listeners, and offers biblical wisdom on practicing what you hear. He concludes with an exhortation to listen like your life depends on it.<br />In his Foreword to the book Lance Quinn writes quot;
Merely hearing a sermon is easy; it requires a properly functioning auditory system, but it's essentially a passive exercise. Actively listening to the preaching of God's Word requires mental alertness, focused attention, and a spiritually receptive heart.quot;
Ramey provides assistance and biblical exhortation on each of those disciplines.<br />In this book Ken Ramey shows that we ought to have equally high expectations of ourselves. For while the pastor preaches, we are to be attending to the Word, actively seeking to listen, to understand, to discern, to apply. Expository preaching demands expository listening. If you struggle to listen, if you struggle to know why you should listen, prayerfully read this book and heed its lessons.<br />Rivers of Joy Baptist Church<br />Pastor/Teacher: Charles E. Whisnant<br />Assoc. Pastor: Bill Bower<br />Church Clerk/ Pastor’s Secretary Peggy Hall<br />Financial Secretary: Kindra Tumbleson<br />Deacons: Jimmy Grant, Richard Lemaster<br />Elders: Charles Whisnant, Bill Bower, Bob Temple, <br />Church Staff: Johnny Edwards, Music<br />Bob and Saundra Temple, Missions<br />Ladies Ministry: Charity Whisnant<br />Building and Grounds: The Grants<br />Coming in April 2010<br />The study of spiritual gifts <br />Offer God no worship that is clearly contrary to His nature and perfections, but such as is suited to Him as he is revealed to you in His Word.<br />“God frees us from our bankruptcy only by paying our debts on Christ’s cross. More than that. He has not only cancelled the debt, but also destroyed the document on which it was recorded.”John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, 1986), page 234.<br />* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *<br />here's what God says about His relationship to the future:<br />Remember the former things of old:for I am God, and there is none else;I am God, and there is none like me,declaring the end from the beginning,and from ancient times the thingsthat are not yet done,saying, My counsel shall stand,and I will do all my pleasure:Calling a ravenous bird from the east,the man that executeth my counselfrom a far country:yea, I have spoken it,I will also bring it to pass;I have purposed it, I will also do it. Hearken unto me, ye stouthearted,that are far from righteousness: I bring near my righteousness;it shall not be far off,and my salvation shall not tarry:and I will place salvation in Zionfor Israel my glory.[Is 46:9-13, KJV]<br />What I don’t understand if you believe it why don’t we say it, and abide by it. To believe God is sovereign and the Gospel is of God why don’t we just believe it and act according?<br />The gospel is the most compelling, the most fascinating, the most incomprehensibly wonderful news ever. So how come we don’t preach or teach or talk like it is?<br />Fog-and-lasers churches don’t trust that the good news is compelling. Sturm und drang churches don’t act like it is.<br />It is true that the cross is an offense, a stumbling block, “foolishness.” And it is true that attractional-ism is an imbalanced mode of ministry.<br />But gospel-driven churches ought to be attractive. They ought to radiate joy. Their preachers should be self-deprecating, winsome, and visibly moved by the power of the gospel. If we truly believe the good news is that good, why don’t we make it sound like it is? Why do we sound bored? Angry? Disinterested? Or why do we seem excited about and interested in all sorts things other than the gospel?<br />This is not about tickling ears. It’s about speaking and living as if we feel that the gospel is true.<br />“A heresy is a doctrine that ultimately destroys, destabilizes, or distorts a mystery rather than preserving it. Sometimes a doctrine that was once thought to defend a mystery actually turns out to subvert it. A heresy is a failed attempt at orthodoxy, whose fault lies not in its willingness to explore possibilities or press conceptual boundaries, but in its unwillingness to accept that it has in fact failed.”<br />The Trinity is God, and God does not change. The Trinity doesn’t develop, mature, improve, shift around, wax or wane, or alter with the latest trends and fashions. But the doctrine of the Trinity is something theologians talk about, and theologians do change, and the way they talk changes. So it’s possible to describe the way the doctrine of the Trinity has been handled differently during the modern period, or roughly the last two hundred years. The doctrine has even made something of a comeback in these two centuries, though the story we usually hear about “the return of the Trinity” tends to emphasize only the last few decades, especially the avalanche of books since about the 1970s and 1980s.<br />But the doctrine of the Trinity made its modern comeback closer to 1785 than 1985. The late eighteenth century was when the Romantic reaction against Enlightenment rationalism kicked in. The brightest minds of the Enlightenment found the doctrine of the Trinity to be hopelessly pre-modern and irrational, a dead piece of tradition that could not survive into modernity. Thomas Jefferson spoke for the educated classes when he sneered at “the incomprehensible jargon of the trinitarian arithmetic” which encumbered his simple view of God. But Romanticism, which according to Jacques Barzun “began as a cluster of movements and became the spirit of an age,” brought the doctrine back by seeing it as a stimulating source of reflection on a set of themes that were dear to the heart of Romanticism: History, Experience, and Retrieval of the Past. Briefly, here is how those three forces helped create a situation in which the doctrine of the Trinity could reclaim the attention it deserves from theologians.<br />First, the category of history. For the Enlightenment, the quintessence of truth was not just propositions, but the kind of propositions that could be distilled from all possible historical flux or cultural diversity. Thinkers like Gotthold Lessing took it as axiomatic that anything that happened in the course of history, at one particular time and place, could never have ultimate or universal meaning.<br />Along came G.W.F. Hegel, though, who told the story of world history as a kind of coming-of-age novel with Truth itself as the central character. For anybody captivated by Hegel’s view of reality, history was not an obstacle to Truth with a capital T: History with a capital H was the only place you could ever hope to find capital-T Truth hanging out. This view of world history as ultimate reality was so big for Hegel that the Trinity fit neatly inside of it: The Father is the idea of the Absolute, the Son is what happens when the Universal goes out of itself and enters into the particular, and the Spirit is how the Universal and the Particular reunite. In the process, the world is engendered, falls, and is redeemed. No wonder philosopher Charles Taylor said “the dogma of the Trinity is ideal for Hegel’s purposes.” Whether Hegel was ideal for the Trinity’s purposes is another question.<br />Nobody can or should follow Hegel in everything, but plenty of modern theologians have been moved by his impulse to find the course of world history as the arena where all the trinitarian action is happening. Especially if you develop that Hegelian impulse in terms of the centrality of the cross of Christ and the final consummation of the Kingdom, you get a thick theological brew. That’s exactly what Jürgen Moltmann brewed up with statements like this: ”If the cross of Jesus is understood as a divine event… the doctrine of the Trinity is no longer an exorbitant and impractical speculation about God, but is nothing other than a shorter version of the passion narrative of Christ in its significance for the eschatological freedom of faith and the life of oppressed nature.” Moltmann even argued that “the history of God” had a retroactive effect on the being of God, so that God turned out to be essentially shaped, affected in his divine essence and identity, by the event of the cross. Other theologians who can be found rooting God’s identity in the outcome or the conduct of world history include Wolfhart Pannenberg (God self-actualizes in history) and Robert W. Jenson (God identifies himself as his story). Process theologians, when they consider the Trinity, make a similar move, as do open theists and panentheist thinkers.<br />The second major Romantic category is experience. If Enlightenment rationalism prized truths that were true whether you experienced them or not, Romanticism viewed experience, deep experience, as the key to truth. F.D.E. Schleiermacher made experience central to his reconstruction of Christian theology, defining Christianity as the religion which is “essentially distinguished from other faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth,” and declaring that the proper business of theology is to “consider the facts of the religious self-consciousness,” to see what the born-again mind contained within its Christian consciousness. Did it contain the Trinity? Not quite. No matter how saved you may feel, you can’t exactly feel the Trinity. And if God were Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whether we existed or not, we would have “no formula for” expressing that God-in-himself anyway, since any formula we would have would be ours, derived from experience. If God were Triune in the woods and nobody experienced it, would he make a sound? Schleiermacher wasn’t sure, so he put the doctrine of the Trinity at the very end of his 700-page systematics. Was it the capstone of the whole structure, or an optional appendix? The latter.<br />But Schleiermacher reoriented modern theology toward experience just as definitely as Hegel had toward history, and so it was only a matter of time before modern theologians succeeded in re-thinking the Trinity as an object of experience. In recent decades, the most thorough case for this was made by Catherine Mowry LaCugna, who argued in her controversial book God For Us that “the doctrine of the Trinity is ultimately a practical doctrine with radical consequences for the Christian life.” The doctrine is a kind of shortened description of how God gives himself in salvation history, and how we receive grace. Modern theologians working in the liberationist mode have been especially motivated to connect the Trinity to experience, from Elizabeth Johnson’s argument that God is She Who Is, a Trinity that women can name toward from their own female experience, to Leonardo Boff’s presentation of Holy Trinity–Perfect Society as a model for egalitarian social and economic structures. In the latest literature, we are hearing more and more about “church practices” as the key to having true knowledge of God the Trinity.<br />Both of these trends brought mixed blessings to trinitarian theology, reinvigorating interest in the doctrine but also introducing considerable confusion and error. All the good and bad of both trends came together perfectly in the work of Karl Rahner. Rahner was equally interested in the course of salvation history and in the personal experience of grace. He believed that God communicated himself to humans in these two ways, with actual history corresponding to the Son’s incarnation, and the transcendental conditions of spiritual experience corresponding to the Spirit’s indwelling. It was Rahner who summed up “the new trinitarianism” with the watchword, “The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice versa.” That is, when we experience Father, Son, and Spirit in the course of history and our spiritual lives, we experience who God is inside himself (immanent to his own being), and –here the big step– what God is in himself is nothing but what he is for us.<br />The third major category of Romanticism that reinvigorated the doctrine of the Trinity was the retrieval of the past. If the modern world of Enlightenment thinkers rejected the doctrine, then so much the worse for the poor, modern world, according to the theologians who made a major mental investment in the pre-modern past. ”That’s so medieval” doesn’t have to be an insult, when it means close engagement with great minds like Augustine and Aquinas, to name just a few.<br />And here it is high time to admit that a large number of Christian theologians never recovered the doctrine of the Trinity after the Romantic reaction, because they never neglected or abandoned the doctrine of the Trinity in the first place. Jaroslav Pelikan, the great historian of doctrine, said that “the modern period in the history of Christian doctrine may be defined as the time when doctrines that had been assumed more than debated for most of Christian history were themselves called into question: the idea of revelation, the uniqueness of Christ, the authority of scripture, the expectation of life after death, even the very transcendence of God.” So it is understandable that in histories of modern theology, attention would be given to those who were making changes. But as Colin Gunton has pointed out, “In all periods there have been competent theologians, Catholic and Protestant alike, who have continued to work with traditional trinitarian categories while being aware of the reasons that have led others to question, modify or reject traditional orthodoxy.” For anybody who reads old books instead of recent dismissive summaries of them, it is easy to point to a constant line of writers, conservatives of various denominations down through the modern period, who recognized the doctrine of the Trinity as biblically clear, doctrinally certain, and experientially vital: Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, Hermann Bavinck, William Burt Pope, Francis Hall, and many more.<br />In the 1930s, Karl Barth pulled off a heroic retrieval, apparently single-handed, of the doctrine of the Trinity as the starting-point of Christian thought. The story is often reported as if the doctrine had been utterly dead and that it sprang back to life under the hands of Dr. Barth. Indeed, in 1931 an exasperated German-American theologian named Wilhem Pauck was reviewing Karl Barth’s use of the doctrine, and exclaimed, “As if it were really a matter of life and death, that as members of the church of the Twentieth Century– we should accept the dogma of the Trinity!” This is a telling remark in many ways. But one thing it should remind us is that Barth’s daring one-man swim against the tide of modern theology was a swim against the tide of modern liberal theology: the kind of person who was shocked by the assertion of trinitarianism was the kind of person who was capable of huffing and puffing about how “members of the church of the Twentieth Century” could hardly be expected to accept this fuddy duddy of an old doctrine. Barth gave those people a good thorough shaking. But there are other traditions, like conservative evangelicalism among others, who never allowed themselves to mock the old doctrine, and never stopped teaching it as they found it in the Bible. At their best, they never accepted the Enlightenment altogether uncritically anyway, so they didn’t have to participate in the same way in the Romantic over-reaction against the Enlightenment.<br />Was the modern trinitarian trip all a huge detour? Could we have arrived at the same place if we had just stayed conservative and waited for the prevailing winds to blow over? No, the categories of history, experience, and retrieval truly have served to enrich trinitarian doctrine and have made possible real progress in understanding, so long as they stay close to Biblical revelation. Because we have learned from the modern Trinity, the Romantic Trinity, that this is a doctrine which ought to be transparent to history, that ought to be transparent to experience, that ought to be transparent to the great theology that has gone before. But above all, the doctrine of the Trinity must be stated in such a way that it is transparent to Holy Scripture.<br /> HYPERLINK quot;
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/rayortlund/2010/04/20/acceptable-worship-2/quot;
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Acceptable worship<br />from Christ is deeper still by Ray Ortlund<br />“When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.” Isaiah 1:15<br />The worship God rejects here is not idolatrous worship. It is his own biblical worship, performed by the people with elaborate, even sacrificial, abundance. But God says he hates it. Why? Their hands are full of blood. Human blood.<br />The acceptability of our vertical worship is inseparable from the humaneness of our horizontal relationships.<br />Let us love one another. It can make all the difference in our worship of God.<br /> HYPERLINK quot;
http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/perrynoble/ZvVU/%7E3/x6fqGqlzEdE/quot;
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It’s Hard To Lead When…<br />from Perry Noble dot com by perry<br />3 people liked this<br />#1 – You think you are better than the people you are leading. (No one loves an environment where they are constantly looked down upon and spoken down to!)<br />#2 – You think you are smarter than the people you are leading. (Reality is…you’re probably not. AND…if you are then your insecurity limited you to only bringing stupid people to serve around you…not wise!)<br />#3 – You think the people you are leading should take care of you…but you refuse to take care of them.<br />#4 – You don’t respect the people you are leading. (If there is someone in the room who causes you to roll your eyes everytime they speak…either they should not be there OR you need to do a serious gut check and make sure you aren’t intimidated.)<br />#5 – When you are threatened by the people you are leading. (There is NOTHING more dangerous than an insecure leader. Saul freaked out when they gave him credit for slaying thousands and David credit for slaying tens of thousands…and, well, it didn’t end well for Saul.)<br />#6 – When you run over those you are supposed to be lifting up.<br />#7 – When you believe the people around you should do what you say because of the POSITION you hold rather than the PERSON you are!<br />#8 – When you allow unresolved conflict to dominate everyone’s thoughts but you refuse to bring it out in the open for fear of the discomfort it may cause. (If you team can’t enter into uncomfortable conversations then your team will NEVER accomplish anything significant!)<br />#9 – You don’t love the people you are leading. (Jesus was an effective leader because He genuinely LOVED the men He led! AND…also because HE WAS JESUS! :-) )<br />#10 – You don’t listen to the people you are leading. (If you view your leadership team meeting as an opportunity for you to only teach rather than share your heart and learn from others…it’s probably a really boring meeting!)<br />This one picture is how I sort of envision God descending onto Mt. Sinai in Exodus.<br />Eyjafjallajokull<br />vis calls penalty on himself, gives up shot at first PGA win<br />By Jay Busbee<br />Follow Yahoo! Sports' Devil Ball Golf on Facebook and Twitter.<br />Imagine standing on the edge of achieving your life's dream. You make a small mistake that will cost you your dream -- but if you don't say anything, you might just get away with it. Would you own up to the mistake, or would you keep quiet and hope for the best? <br />Brian Davis isn't the best-known name in golf -- or even the hundredth-best-known -- but after Sunday, he ought to move up the list a few notches. Davis was facing Jim Furyk in a playoff at the Verizon Heritage, and was trying to notch his first-ever PGA Tour win.<br />Davis's approach shot on the first hole of the playoff bounced off the green and nestled in among some weeds. (You can see the gunk he was hitting out of in that shot above.) When Davis tried to punch the ball up onto the green, his club may have grazed a stray weed on his backswing.<br />So what's the big deal? This: hitting any material around your ball during your backswing constitutes a violation of the rule against moving loose impediments, and is an immediate two-stroke penalty. And in a playoff, that means, in effect, game over.<br />Okay, you can think that's a silly penalty or whatever, but that's not the point of this story. The point is that Davis actually called the violation on himself.<br />quot;
It was one of those things I thought I saw movement out of the corner of my eye,quot;
Davis said. quot;
And I thought we’d check on TV, and indeed there was movement.quot;
Immediately after the shot, Davis called over a rules official, who conferred with television replays and confirmed the movement -- but movement which was only visible on slow-motion. Unbelievable.<br />As soon as the replays confirmed the violation, Davis conceded the victory to Furyk, who was somewhat stunned -- but, make no mistake, grateful for the win. <br />quot;
To have the tournament come down that way is definitely not the way I wanted to win,quot;
Furyk said. quot;
It’s obviously a tough loss for him and I respect and admire what he did.quot;
<br />Furyk took home $1.03 million for the win. Davis won't exactly have to beg for change to get a ride home; he won $615,000 for second place. And he may have won much more than that by taking the honorable route.<br />To be sure, this isn't quite in the same category as J.P. Hayes, the golfer who disqualified himself from qualifying school after learning -- in his hotel room, all alone -- that he had played a nonqualifying ball; or Adam Van Houten, who cost his team an Ohio state title when he admitted signing an incorrect scorecard. For starters, Davis's shot was on television, and while he could have quot;
not noticedquot;
the movement, the TV cameras still did, and someone might have called him on it later on.<br />But the bigger deal is this -- the guy gave away a chance at winning his first-ever PGA Tour event because he knew that in golf, honesty is more important than victory. It's a tough lesson to learn, but here's hoping he gets accolades -- and, perhaps, some sponsorship deals -- that more than make up for the victory he surrendered. <br />Now that you have read it what do you think? What would you have done?<br />Let me tell you this: I love stories of integrity and this is one for sure. Did you catch that he called the foul himself and knew that it would cost him over $4oo,000 and the title. He only thought the weeds moved but it could only be seen in slow motion. To me I see him seeing his integrity worth more than money.<br />I find myself asking do I have that kind of integrity? When I think I see the weeds move in my life even if it could only be seen in slow motion, what do I do? Would I call a foul on myself?<br />Proverbs speaks of integrity:<br />Pr 2:7 - He stores up sound wisdom for the upright; He is a shield to those who walk in integrity, <br />Pr 10:9 - He who walks in integrity walks securely, But he who perverts his ways will be found out. <br />Pr 11:3 - The integrity of the upright will guide them, But the crookedness of the treacherous will destroy them. <br />Pr 19:1 - Better is a poor man who walks in his integrity Than he who is perverse in speech and is a fool. <br />Pr 20:7 - A righteous man who walks in his integrity– How blessed are his sons after him. <br />Pr 28:6 - Better is the poor who walks in his integrity Than he who is crooked though he be rich.<br />Integrity is important – How are you doing with it?<br />Signification<br />significance<br />