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Cloverton

Although I know some of you couldn’t make it because it was on a school night, the Lord really blessed many (and will bless many more) thanks to the Cloverton concert this past Tuesday to benefit the CARES Food Bank of Strasburg.

Right Deb and Michelle? 🙂

There were three churches involved. We sponsored it with the Strasburg Community Church and Mountain View Fellowship co-sponsoring. I cannot thank their ministers, Steve and Donn respectively, enough for all the help they and their congregations provided. From a place for the band to sleep to food to being insta-roadies…it was an incredible coming together of brothers and sisters in Christ to help feed the hungry.

And some awesome music praising the Lord!

I’d also like to mention a neat thing that happened to Steve, Donn, the Strasburg Community Youth Pastor Steve, and me. Show time was 7:00 PM…and we went down to the green room at quarter of to confirm some logistics around introductions/etc. When we got to the bottom of the stairs and just outside the green room’s door we had to stop.

Do you know why?

So we wouldn’t interrupt the earnest, lengthy prayer of the band.

And that’s when we 100% knew we made the right decision bringing those godly young men to Strasburg!

WDJD

And that prayer convinced me to add another entry to the series I began with when I started preaching in the Church of Christ. Back in Antrim, NH I first spoke once a month…and the first three sermons were based on WDJD, “What did Jesus do?” The very first was February 22, 2009…”WDJD: Scripture.”

[Read more…]

Expository Preaching

I believe I have noted before that I am a topical preacher…meaning I choose a topic and create a biblically-based sermon around it. Many other preachers are expository…meaning they go through books of the Bible verse-by-verse. Which is better?

Depends who you ask. 🙂

I’ve seen expository ministers act like it is the only legitimate way to preach…which is a bit crazy since they (like me) are committed to Scripture…and the Bible does not clearly say one way or another.

James 5:13-18

Even though I am a topical preacher, today’s sermon is going to be an expository one about some verses in James. Let’s hop right in and read Jame’s 5:13-18:

13 Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. 14 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. 15 And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. 16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. 17 Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. 18 Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.

We are only really going to touch on verses 14 and 15…partially because I’ve been meaning to keep my summer sermons short and have failed miserably…and partially because two verses are especially germane to an anointing we are going to do right after I am done. This sermon is basically an introduction to that.

So, let’s reread verses 14 and 15:

14 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. 15 And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven (James 5:14-15).

Although those verses seem pretty straightforward, there is some disagreement about what “sick” means in them…so we will focus on three things:

• Is this ceremony for illness?
• How should the ceremony be performed?
• What does it mean if the person isn’t healed?

I know you could come up with many more items to touch on, but if we unpacked all that is in verses 14 and 15, we could be here a couple hours. 🙂

Is this Ceremony for Illness?

Generally, I recommend people start interpretation with a “natural reading” of a book, chapter, or verse. What I mean is that, normally, what a passage naturally means when you read it is probably what actually means. For instance, if you read the creation narrative in Genesis, its natural reading is that God created the world in seven literal days…so God probably… [Read more…]

Quick Review

Last week we spent a good amount of time looking at two principles and sub-principles when it comes to prayer:

• Do not pray like Jesus said not to
  • Do not pray selfishly
  • Do not pray for show
  • Do no pray thinking you can control God with your prayer
• Pray like Jesus said to
  • Pray constantly
  • Don’t lose heart
  • Remember who you are praying to
  • Pray that others will recognize who God is too
  • Pray for God’s will versus what you want
  • Look to God for your needs
  • Ask God for forgiveness
  • Ask God to protect you from temptation

We all still in agreement that those are good principles? No second thoughts after a week to reconsider? 🙂

Emulating Jesus

As promised, this week we are going to discuss the third principle…along with its sub principles.

Pray like Jesus did.

When I first started preaching in Churches of Christ, I began with a series based on “What did Jesus do?”: WDJD. We all probably have heard people say in situations we should ask ourselves, “What would Jesus do?”: WWJD…but Ray Comfort’s Living Water’s ministry rightly pointed out that it may be better to ask, “What did Jesus do?” Scripture tells us what that is, whereas people can argue until the cows come home about what Jesus would do. [Read more…]

Becoming Mormon

Some of you may already be aware of where my “formal” spiritual journeys began. Neither of my parents were religious while I grew up. My dad was, theoretically, Catholic…and my mom was just as theoretically Lutheran.

So they had me baptized as a Methodist as a toddler.

A few years later…maybe when I was six?…they gave my me a choice of whether I wanted to continue to attend Sunday school at Canaan United Methodist Church (although I don’t know if “United” was in its title back then).

How do think a six year-old kid with no true spiritual life at home decided?

Zoom forward to fifteen year-old Alan. Although I think I may have said a simple prayer every night and definitely believed there was a God, I was far from saved. Then my parents had Mormon missionaries over…and what they taught seemed to make a lot of sense.

However, fifteen year-old Alan did not “get religion.”

Now shift ahead to maybe 20 year-old Alan…for 52 year-old Alan the timing of the past gets foggier and foggier… 🙂

At that point I decided (a) that if there was truth in the physical world there is truth in the spiritual world and (b) that I wanted to know it. I was, and hopefully remain, a very logical person…and wanted the truth about God.

And based on my short spiritual history, guess who I went to to start that search? [Read more…]