Tag: truth

Categories
Worship

Are you trying to “get the feeling again” during worship?

man standing with uplifted hands during a sunset - symbolizing our search for a feeling during worship

Sometimes (maybe even too often) when we come to worship, we have come looking for an emotional experience… some aspect of having a specific feeling. Is that what worship is supposed to do – to give us an emotional high? Are you coming to worship in an attempt to have your heart-strings pulled?

Alistair Begg discusses his thoughts about those who say to him something along the lines of: “I’m just trying to get the feeling again.”

…I meet with people every week who think this is the answer to their spiritual impoverishment – if only they could get the feeling again.

…If you come to church on a Sunday for the feeling, I guarantee you that 9 Sundays out of 10, you’re going to go away disappointed. We have to acknowledge that we come to worship on the Lord’s Day in all kinds of conditions of heart & life.

…If you came hoping for your favorite instruments to get the feeling back again, then you might be disappointed; If you came hoping to sing your five favorite songs, you might be disappointed; If you came for anything other than truth to transform, then you may wait for a long time. And only the truth transforms and stays, because the feeling goes as the music dies.

When you attend worship with your church family, is it to experience some elusive emotion or feeling again, or is it to meet with God’s people as a family and hear the truth that has the power to transform your life? As we grow in our maturity, we should realize that our primary concern in worship should not be to have our emotions stirred, but for us to better know the truth of God’s Word. And what we will find is that if we better know God’s Word and embrace the truths there, then worship will automatically affect our emotions because we will be in awe at the grace of Jesus to rescue sinners like us. God’s truth is sufficient to impact us powerfully and to transform our lives.  

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Categories
Relationships

Defining Love

How do you define love?
“Always giving the other person everything they want”?
Sounds good to me! Start sending me gifts!

As a parent who loves your children, do you always give them everything they want?
Of course not.
When the tantrum breaks out on the floor at Walmart, do you say – “Well, I didn’t know you wanted that toy/candy/live animal so badly. I love you, and you want it, so yes, I’ll buy it for you.”?
I highly doubt it!
We can easily see how that is not love.

Love is always doing what is best for the other person, and that might mean telling them “no” to something they want.

If a pastor, minister, or church leader loves the people in his church, will he always give them everything they want?
No. Sometimes, the loving thing requires that he share with them the truth – and that can hurt.

God condemns the priests long ago telling them:
“Those who are sickly you have not strengthened, the diseased you have not healed, the broken you have not bound up, the scattered you have not brought back, nor have you sought for the lost.”

Many ministers in America today have “left the weak and crippled to limp hopelessly on in their sin, unaware that they aren’t walking normally.” By not wanting to offend anyone, we are not being loving neighbors, because it isn’t loving to only give someone what they want. “We must also give them what they need—the truth.”

…We have all these happy, friendly churches with happy-looking people happily doing work for God, and yet, beneath the surface, nothing is making sense. Husbands aren’t sacrificing for holiness and right living, wives are giving up, and behind every whitewashed wall are dead-men’s bones.

…somewhere along the way, we decided to stop defining holiness too clearly because we didn’t want to seem too different from other people, scared of what people might think and scared that we might hurt our relationships at home. Now we have our wish—we don’t look much different at all, and we’re too often limping along in the same fog as the lost.

Why are we scared to share? Many people wonder: “what if I seem irrelevant to them?” “Why not consider a far more frightening question – What if we are irrelevant? In our rush to seem relevant, what if we lose our saltiness as Christians and lose our purifying effect on our culture? That is true irrelevance.”
(Arterburn & Stoeker – Every Man’s Challenge)

So let’s all stop worrying about being irrelevant. Let’s stop worrying about whether everyone likes us. Let’s worry about how to tell people the truth in love (though with gentleness & reverence). Sometimes that might sting a bit, but it is the only right thing to do if we love someone else.

Categories
Ethics

One Way Follow Up

A quick follow-up to my post from earlier tonight… absolute truth exists!

“Wrong will always be wrong even if everyone is doing it; and Right will always be right even if no one is doing it.”

Another way to say this is:
Error does not become Truth because it is widely accepted; and
Truth does not become error, even when it stands alone!

one way street sign to represent that absolute truth existsRavi Zacharias indicates that there is a fight taking place against the idea of absolute truth. And that the educational environment (especially universities) has worked to remove any idea of absolute truth. That there came to be the belief that “If young, fertile minds could be programmed into believing that truth as a category does not exist…then it would be only a matter of time before [everything] could be [used] in the fight against the absolute.

“However, over time the sword has cut the hand that wielded it, and learning itself has lost its authority. Today as we look upon our social landscape, the answers to the most basic questions of life—from birth to sexuality to death—remain completely confounded. …No one knows what to believe as true anymore.”

Oh that we would discover the Truth that Jesus defines what is True!

Categories
Ethics

One Way

Who’s to say what’s right or wrong? Each of us has our own convictions, and so what you consider to be wrong might be okay for me. This is the view where each of us gets to determine what is truth for us – that morality is relative depending on who you are and that there is no absolute truth. But if you read the Bible, you’ll find that God takes a different view.one way street sign representing there is only One who provides absolute truth

There is an absolute truth – truth that is right at all times, in all places, for all people. That truth is found in the character traits of Jesus Christ. This is the declaration that God makes to us.

Living on the coast after Katrina, thousands of volunteers came in from all over the world to help us. A volunteer who lived in a large city in Colorado told me that until he came to the MS coast, he had never seen such “moral relativism” – meaning that each person could justify any immorality by believing that what one person might call sin wasn’t sin to them. And that view is expanding all over our nation and world. I find that it is now a strong belief in middle MS – in what we used to call the “Bible Belt.”

There have been plenty of Christian scholars who have convincingly argued that there is absolute truth, but one of the simplest and most effective ways I ever saw it written was in a teacher’s room at Bay High School. It was a poster that hung above the chalkboard and it said:

Wrong will always be wrong even if everyone is doing it;
and Right will always be right even if no one is doing it.

This next week, my plan is to go out each day with the knowledge that Jesus Christ and His character is to be my guide –
I will be a person of love, b/c Jesus is the embodiment of love.
I will be a person of joy, b/c Jesus is my joy.
I will be a person of peace, b/c Jesus is the ultimate Peacemaker.
I will be a person of faith, b/c Jesus is faithful.

May we always base our behavior on Jesus – the authority of what is absolute truth.

“I am the way, the TRUTH, and the life.” – Jesus

Have you encountered people who justified their behavior even though it went against God’s Word? How do you help them find the Truth?

Categories
Christian Living

Fill ‘Er Up

What have I set my heart on in an attempt to fill it up?gas pump representing the idea of how we want to be filled up with success
Our society and culture tell us that if we set our hearts on success, fame, pleasure, and influence, then we will have enough and will find joy, happiness, & fulfillment. But what if someone who had acquired all these things told you that it was all a lie? That these things still won’t be enough to fill you up?

Famous British author Malcolm Muggeridge stated:
“I may, I suppose, regard myself as a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets. That’s fame; I can fairly easily earn enough money to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Internal Revenue Service. That’s success. Furnished with money and a little fame [I] may partake of friendly diversions. That’s pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time. That’s fulfillment. Yet, I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by millions, add them all up together, and they are nothing, less than nothing. Indeed, a positive impediment measured against one drop of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are.”

The truth is that all of the enthrallment and novelty that I can find in these things is not enough. Because “somewhere and sometime, human enthrallment finds its limit, as does human capacity. God alone is the perpetual novelty—providing wonder, truth, love, and security” (Ravi Zacharias).

So add up all the success that the world offers and it is of no comparison to knowing Christ. Paul found that same thing to be true and said all that he had gained he now counted as worthless garbage in comparison to knowing Christ.

So what should I do? Perhaps, I should try to follow the example of Ezra – “the good hand of his God was upon him. For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the LORD and to practice it, and to teach His statutes and ordinances in Israel.” If I set my heart on God and practice and teach His Word to others, then I will fulfillment in life.

Because, “when man lives apart from God, chaos is the norm. When man lives with God, as revealed in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the hungers of the mind and heart find their fulfillment” (Ravi Z).

Set your heart on God and you will find in Him the wonder of perpetual novelty.

“Christ is a substitute for everything, but nothing is a substitute for Christ.” (H.A. Ironside)