I read this today in the “statement of belief ” on the web page of Americans largest church, lead by Americas most prominent evangelical Christian leader. It says concerning fallen mans relationship to God…

About Man…

Man is made in the spiritual image of God, to be like him in character. He is the supreme object of God’s creation. Although man has tremendous potential for good, he is marred by an attitude of disobedience toward what God called “sin.” This attitude separates man from God.

Just to help you out…..

Attitude (def): a mental position, a feeling or emotion, a hostile state of mind

I dont understand how this guy hopes to help people.

How can someone come to a place of repentance if all they think they suffer from is a bad attitude?

My kids have a bad attitude towards homework.

The state of  fallenf mankind is so much more than that…God help us all

Is not this the most serious thing about us as modern Christians? When did you last see someone weeping because of sinfulness? Is there evidence of brokenness of spirit amongst us, and humility?

We are all so healthy, we are so glib. Why this essential difference between the type of piety that you see so clearly in the ‘7th and 18th centuries and what we have today? Can what we have today be truly called piety? Can it be called ‘godliness’? It appears rather to be an intellectual acceptance of certain propositions, accompanied by hardness, an absence of feeling, a distrust of feeling, a dislike of feeling. As if the whole man were not involved, not only in faith, but in salvation!

The result is that you get a mechanical performance of duties; and people are taught to evangelize and to do ‘personal work’ almost by numbers, and are drilled to pray. Everything is organized and arranged, you pass examinations in them, and so all these duties are done in an external mechanical manner instead of rising out of the heart.

What a contrast this is with what we are told in Acts 8 about the people who were ’scattered abroad from Jerusalem because of the persecution’- the ordinary Christians, remember, the apostles being left in Jerusalem. What are we told about these ordinary Christians?

‘They went everywhere preaching the Word’ (verse 4).

That does not mean proclaiming it from pulpits; it just means ’speaking’ it. And then we are told in the next verse that Philip ‘heralded’ it. He was an evangelist and a preacher. But they all spread the gospel. Not because they were trained to do so, or because they were told, This is what you have to do now that you have been saved. There is no sign of the mechanical stages we are supposed to go through. You take your decision, then you are given some work to do. You are taken from step to step; and it is all organized and arranged. And it is all done in this mechanical manner.

We expect that kind of thing from the cults, and that is always their great characteristic, but it is not the New Testament way. But if you start with a definition of faith which makes it something notional, and naked, and intellectual, and deliberately exclude the feelings and the emotions, that is the inevitable result. So you get a hardness, a coldness, a mechanical type of Christianity. What makes this so serious is that t is so discouraging to a true visitation of the Spirit of God. You cannot read the accounts of the revivals of the past without observing that the emotional element was always prominent.

But, today, so many are terrified of emotion and have almost a phobia concerning excesses. Indeed I fear that it can be said of many that they seem to be so afraid of what they call excesses that they are ‘quenching the Spirit’. When have you known a congregation  to be really moved? When have you heard a congregation crying out?

Are you explaining away the great phenomena accompanying the revivals of the past in terms of the 20th century, and saying that the people at Llangeltho listening to Daniel Rowland were a sort of primitive people lacking education, and just emotionalists?

The Apostle Paul reminds the elders of the church at Ephesus of how he preached ‘with tears’. And Whitefield used to preach with tears. When have you and I last preached with tears? What do we know, to use the phrase of Whitefield, about preaching a ‘felt Christ’? Is not this the cause of the trouble today?

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Martyn Lloyd Jones pg 188 The Puritans

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My reflection on this is that unfourtunately today we also have the other extreme.

We have the Charismatic circus. Where it is all noise and emotion and no substance. No change. no repentance. No heart breaking for our sinful state and our lost world.

All people seem to get excited about is extra-biblical manefestations.

Balance is the key to life

John Owen:

To preach the word . . . and not to follow it with constant and fervent prayer for its success, is to disbelieve its use, neglect its end, and to cast away the seed of the gospel at random.

Charles Spurgeon:

I have known preachers who have been very weak, and yet they have been used of the Lord. For many, many years, my own preaching was exceedingly painful to me because of the fears which beset me before entering the pulpit. Often, my dread of facing the people has been overwhelming. Even the physical feeling, which came of the mental emotion, has been painful; but this weakness has been an education for me. I wrote, many years ago, to my venerable grandfather, and told him of many things that happened to me before preaching, - sickness of body, and terrible fears, which often made me really ill. The old gentleman wrote back, and said,” I have been preaching for sixty years, and I still feel many tremblings. Be content to have it so; for when your emotion goes away, your strength will be gone.” When we preach and think nothing of it, the people think nothing of it, and God does nothing by it. An overwhelming sense of weakness should not be regarded as an evil, but should be accepted as helpful to the true minister of Christ.

James posted this on CLCPeople - brilliant…

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Are you paying attention! I hope you are because many people are not in our culture. Take a look at 2 Timothy 3.

vs 2-5 “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God - having a form of godliness but denying its power.”
Does this sound familiar??

The Amplified Bible for vs 5 says “they deny and reject and are strangers to the power”

I would ask you to think what this might mean. Whether Paul is writing about his own time or the “last days” as we see it is hardly the point. The words are much deeper than that. What does it really mean to have a form of godliness? Wouldn’t that be a form of righteousness? Wouldn’t that mean we (or whomever) are doing some things right? Clearly, with Paul’s list there is nothing righteous or godly about these behaviors.

I would say that in these verses a form of godliness equals godlessness. So why does Paul say a form of godliness.
I think it has to do with the duality of the internal versus external nature of humans. Christianity is not external, it is a Spirit-filled internal life. The behaviors (external) are the effects (not the cause) of the internal work. The group Paul is talking about are external “christians” Or maybe they are not Christians at all, just the result of cultural religion. That is why the behavior is so godless. They are denying the way in which God works in their lives.

For example, would you consider a man who requires strict set guidelines to act righteously (self-control) a godly person? You can inflict all the psychological and physical rules- punishments- on the man you want, he is only abiding by those rules because of the consequences (external). Once you remove those rules (and you must at some point), what you find is a man without self-control. What was controlling him was removed. So now he is without self-control (unless he is afraid the punishment will return).

Simply put, the whole idea of correct behavior was external to begin with. That is not how God works! He does an internal work in your soul, which results in external behaviors.
When we think our works are our Christianity, we deny the power of God. Having godless behavior is only one way to deny God’s power. Having a form of godliness (godlessness) in our thinking can deny the power as well. When we fool ourselves into thinking that all God’s works are external, we can deny His power in our lives. God’s divine principles must be worked out in our souls before they ever express themselves in our external lives.

I was sitting here tonight out by my shed, thinking, and praying for church.

I was watching the twigs burn and how brightly they burnt, but they gave off no heat and then quickly died.

Then I put some logs on.

They burnt slow, steady and for an extended period of time. The heat they gave off was tremendous.

So, it is in life and our walk with Christ.

It is not how fast you burn or how bright you burn, but how hot, how passionate and how much heat you give off to those around you.

May we never be a people whose flame is bright and then disappears.

May we be a people who burn bright for years and the generations to come are warmed by all we have done.

There is, after conversion, a time of preparation and testing for every Christian, to see whether he willingly and heartily sacrifices all for the full blessing.

If in this stage he perseveres in earnest effort and striving, he will be brought to learn the two lessons the Old Testament was meant to teach.  He will become more deeply conscious of his own impotence, and the strong desire will be wakened after a better life, to be found in the full revelation of Christ as able to save completely.

When these two lessons are learned-the lesson of despair of self and hope in God alone-the soul is prepared, if it will yield itself in faith to the leading of the Holy Spirit, to enter truly into the New Testament life within the veil, in the very Holiest of All, as it is set forth in the Epistle of Hebrews.

Where Christians, through defective instruction, or through neglect and sloth, do not understand God’s way for leading them on unto perfection, the Christian life will always remain full of feebleness and failure.

Having lived the life of misunderstanding, feebleness, and failure, I can say unequivocally that dying to self and becoming alive to Christ is way better.

Woodrow Wilson said:

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

Louis Pasteur said:

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.

Strength is not a physical attribute, I mean real strength. I am not talking about physical prowess.

Bullies have that and bullies are cowards.

I spent most of my high school days looking after disabled kids on the bus and protecting those that could not protect themselves. I learnt that if you can whip a bully once they run. I have also learnt that those bullies I could not whip (yes I did receive my share of beatings), somewhere down the track someone else reminds them of the order of the universe.

Some of the strongest people I know, are not those that others would deem or call strong.

Yet they are powerful beyond themselves.

They give people permission to be great, when they themselves stumble.

They have the strength of mind to change, to bend, to bounce back.

They have an inner courage, to persevere, to rise above.

To love when all around them are loveless, to strive when all around them give up, to pursue when all around them stop. To dream when everyone else lives in fear.

To believe when surrounded by skeptics.

To have faith when everyone else runs. To attack and conquer their inner demons.

It is not age specific, nor gender specific, it is character driven. 

This, I believe is the strength that God asked Joshua to have. A strength that didn’t run from conflict, but guaranteed it.

Friend, life will have its critics.

Small people with small minds and small hearts who are committed to a small life and a small god.

Don’t be that person.

I knew a man once who lied to get a promotion because he could not believe that God would provide - all his life his god will not provide.

I knew a woman once who all her life had to make it happen because her God was always slow…she will always have to make it happen.

I knew a man once who would not listen and shipwrecked his life. He will spend his days listening to the voices of “What if…”

You can not make a weak person strong, by weakening a strong person.

You only become strong by overcoming your weakness.

As Helen Keller said:

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

A legacy is something that we all leave for the next generation.

For some, it is possession, for others it is books and writings, for others it is principals by which they can live and steer their lives.

But in the end all of our lives will get summarized into one sentence…what will yours be?

What will your life sentence be ?

What will they put on your tombstone?

1) a legacy is an intentional thing

I believe that a leader should be intentional about the legacy that they leave on the lives of others and the mark they leave on the world.

2) we choose our legacy

We all have the power of choice. We can choose to be defined by our past or refined by it. We can choose to live from this moment forward.

We can choose to leave a legacy that will speak into the generations to come by the actions and impact we leave behind.

3) Leave a legacy of living

The greatest thing you can do to leave the legacy that you want to leave, is to live the life you have always wanted to live, be the person you have always wanted to be and pursue the passions you have always wanted to pursue.

4) Live as though you were dying

Value the family, friends and opportunities you have today.

There is a great joy in helping other people achieve the things they always wanted to, but never thought they could.

The greatest legacy that you will ever leave is the lives you have touched, the loves you have had, the passions that you have pursued, and the people that you have helped.

Mel sent this to me this morning….. brilliant

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