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The Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke tell of two different events in two different places. Luke speaks of the angel’s appearance to the shepherds and their visiting the newborn Jesus in the manger. Matthew tells of the wise men visiting the “young child” in a house some time later.

I just read that the early church has always loved the wise men, but it largely ignored Luke’s shepherds. Drawings of the wise men appeared in the catacombs 200 years before drawings of the shepherds for example. (E.A. Carmean Jr, art historian). The shepherds were low status men, poor, and did not seek out the Messiah until the angels called them. The wise men, on the other hand, were high status, wealthy, and had to work really hard and travel a long way. 

God used them both. The shepherds’ appearance was a confirming sign to Mary and Joseph, and the shepherds started telling about him right away (Luke 2.17). The wise men came later and didn’t tell anyone. However, their gifts would have funded the family for a long time. 

Here are a few simple lessons:

• The Messiah is for all people, rich and poor. 
• God works through ordinary people.
• God often calls people through their work. The shepherds were working when the angel appeared to them. The wise men would have discovered the star as part of their work. For that matter, Jesus called the first disciples while they were at work fishing!

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I wrote on January 6 that some folks try to excuse themselves from doing anything significant for or with God because “my spiritual life isn’t what it should be,” but that’s no excuse since what we do today is what matters: just do the next right thing. 

Here’s another reason why the alleged quality (or lack) of our spiritual life is irrelevant. Peter captures it in the aftermath of the healing of the lame man in Acts 3.

Acts 3.12 (ESV), “Why do you wonder at this, and why do you stare at us as though by our own power and piety we have made him walk?”

When we say, “I can’t do great things for God because my spiritual life isn’t what it should be,” we are saying that we do great things by our own power and piety! If only I spent an hour every day with the Lord! If only I spent 2 hours in prayer like Martin Luther did! If only…

Peter recognized and explained that the healing of the lame man was by the name of Jesus, not by Peter’s power and piety:

Acts 3:16 (ESV) And his name—by faith in his name—has made this man strong whom you see and know, and the faith that is through Jesus has given the man this perfect health in the presence of you all.

So go and do the next right thing…in the name and power of Jesus!

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“My spiritual life isn’t what it should be.” My friend had just written to ask if he might have a special gift for prayer, but then he quickly undermined it with the old standard, “I can’t be called to great things…my spiritual life isn’t what it should be.” And the answer to that is:

So what? Do the next right thing.

Paul said in Philippians 3, “Forgetting those things which are behind…”

I was just reading about Simeon in Luke 2, and his spiritual life was what it should be! The text says he was:

– A good man
– A lover of God
– Pure
– In touch with the Holy Spirit
– A believer in the imminent appearing of “The Refreshing of Israel”

A wonderful list. HOWEVER, if he doesn’t respond to the Spirit THAT DAY and go to the temple, he misses Jesus. What if he had been in the middle of doing something important? Or unimportant for that matter. What if he thought, “I’ve been a good guy for a really long time, isn’t it OK if I take a day off?”

Simeon’s responsibility, my friend’s responsibility, your and my responsibility is to do the next right thing: pray, spend time in the Word, meet a neighbor’s need, encourage someone, write the blog(!), serve your spouse,…. My friend Fisher DeBerry, former coach of the Air Force Academy Football team, had a sign in his office: “You’re only as good as your last play.”

Do the next right thing. The alleged quality of your past spiritual life, good or bad, is irrelevant.

Have a blessed 2019!

Now go up into the hills, bring down timber, and rebuild my house. I will take pleasure in it and will be honored, says the Lord. Haggai 1.8

This verse is in the middle of the chapter on priorities where Haggai challenged the Jews returning from captivity that they had built their own houses while neglecting to rebuild the temple. I’ve been using it as a challenge to folks not to make excuses for not having their daily quiet time, for example. And the verse implies effort: “Now go up into the hills and bring down timber” sounds hard! But it’s commanded nonetheless.

But I’m learning a new application for this text as I find myself, at age 71, with my warranty running out! I’ve just had shoulder surgery on May 10, three weeks before I’m writing this. The shoulder surgery was scheduled quickly so that I’ll be able to have knee replacement surgery in August. And this “simple, out-patient” shoulder surgery wasn’t, AND I came home on oxygen, a complication caused by anesthesia and living at altitude.

Haggai 1.8 came to me as I’m getting back to the stationary bike for aerobic exercise and using the little breathing exerciser they sent me home with. I don’t want to do the work! But the word is clear: my body is God’s temple, too (I Corinthians 3.16), and God wants it rebuilt! And the rebuilding will be difficult.

But there’s a promise, also. The older Jews thought the new temple was puny compared with the previous one (Haggai 2.3). But God responds: “‘The glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house,’ says the LORD Almighty.” (Haggai 2.9) My orthopedist says I will be better than I was before! And God seems to be saying that, too!

So I need to do the work! If you find that your warranty is running out at whatever age, let’s encourage each other to keep both our spiritual AND our physical houses in order.

A friend of ours, in her 80s, was talking with June about a new experience she was having. Our friend is politically liberal, and, as nearly as we could tell, theologically nowhere. She and her husband hadn’t participated in church much until they retired and moved to a Colorado mountain town. There, they were going to a church in which they could discuss, as nearly as I could tell, their political causes.

So June was shocked when she said something like this: “We’re not going to church anymore, but we are participating in a discussion group that meets at 7am. We’re reading the Bible and sharing what we’re hearing from God. Have you ever heard of ‘Lectio Divina?’” (Lectio Divina, Latin for “Divine Light” is, at its simplest, a way of reading the Bible to listen for God to speak.)

Then our friend said, “The church has failed us.”

By which she meant, I’m over 80 years old, and I’m just learning how to read the Bible in a meaningful way.

Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Church, said much the same thing in an oft-misunderstood quote back in 2008:

We made a mistake… What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and became Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become self feeders. We should have gotten people (and) taught people how to read their Bible between services (and) how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.”

Bill discovered that Willow Creek Church, for all the good it was doing, hadn’t been teaching folks to read the Bible for themselves, and in that omission the church was failing its members. It was failing to make disciples. I’m afraid most churches and pastors fall into that trap. Churches have replaced training the people to be in the Word for themselves with never-ending spoon-feeding.

Ed Stetzer, a well-known church researcher, reflecting on what Bill Hybels said, wrote:

Willow is … repenting for what 95% of churches in America should also repent– not creating Christ-honoring, spiritually formed disciples. For thinking that sitting people down and having them read studies will make them disciples.

Folks, if you’re not yet reading the Bible for yourself, please click The Adventure Series tab at the top of the screen and scroll down for some resources. I recommend Brief Instructions and Journal for Daily Time with God that I wrote. There is more detail in my book Join the Adventure or Growing Strong in God’s Family or Every Man a Warrior, both described on the Adventure tab.

If you’re a pastor, please tap into these resources to help your members. Feel free to contact me at bob@ewell.com, and I or one of my Navigator colleagues can help. Let it not be said of us that we failed to train people to read the Word and hear from God for themselves.

I like to work! I’m 71 years old and NOT retired! Today, with The Navigators, I get to spend time helping pastors be more effective making disciples in their churches. I also mentor younger men and analyze corporate data for The Navigators. Before that, I was in the Air Force for 20 years and had my own statistical consulting business for 10.

Work itself is an honorable and necessary thing.

The first picture we have of God is that he is a worker (Genesis 1 and 2)

Many of God’s key people worked at “secular” jobs:

Joseph and Daniel were Prime Ministers.

Moses was a liberator and led the people through the wilderness.

Joshua was a general.

David, who wrote about half the Psalms, was also a military man and a king.

Continue reading A Biblical Perspective on Work →

I was at a dinner party recently, celebrating the birthday of a friend. There must have been about 30 of us there, and as we were mingling before dinner, the hostess came to me and asked, “Would you mind saying grace for us?” I told her I would, and I turned to my wife and said, “I must be the highest ranking clergy here!” Sure enough, when the hostess wanted me to pray, she said, “Bob is the closest thing we have to a minister so I have asked him to return thanks for the meal.” I didn’t know everyone, but I knew that well over half of us were believers so I said, “I’m glad to pray, but we’re all ministers here!”

Please see a few of my posts: “Imagine if Churches were Equipping and Sending,” March 2017; “Women in Ministry,” February 2017; “What part of ‘all’ do we not understand?” January 2015. A pervasive problem that I decry in these posts is that we tend to see only a few as “ministers” and everyone else as…what? Consumers? As long as this is the case, we won’t be nearly as effective as reaching our neighborhoods, communities, and the world.

After dinner, my wife and I had a delightful conversation with someone who does get it. She and her husband just bought a car wash, and they see their interactions with their employees as front-line ministry. A chance to make a real difference in people’s lives.

“We’re all ministers here” is the best message I could give, I think. I’ve written a book on it. Please click the Join the Adventure tab at the top of the screen, and start thinking of yourself as on the adventure…because you are. We’re all ministers here…and wherever you are.

Why did 80-plus men and women—including 14 senior pastors, four associate pastors, and more than 60 other church leaders—brave snow and ice to converge on Navigator headquarters on Friday, February 24? Some driving more than four hours to be there?

Dr. Neil Hudson challenges a room full of pastors and church leaders to equip their members for their scattered life outside the church.

They came because they wanted to learn how to empower Christ-followers in their churches to see their lives as meaningful and live as fruitful whole-life disciples on their daily frontlines in the world, wherever they find themselves.

Neil Hudson, author of Imagine Church: Releasing Dynamic Everyday Disciples, presented a six-hour workshop teaching and motivating these church leaders for a different perspective on church. Neil emphasized that church is not primarily a gathering place but a training and sending place. One of Neil’s key concepts was phrased in the form of a question: “How are you using the (at most) 10 weekly hours that your members spend in organized church activities to prepare them for the 110 waking hours weekly that they are living their lives in the world?” (Neil’s book, Imagine Church, is available on Amazon.)

At least one participant is already thinking about changing the language used in his church: “We need to talk with people not about, ‘How can we use you in our church?’ but, ‘How can we help in your life, your 110?’ ” Another participant said the main takeaway was that the appeal of the church ought to be that “we’re inspiring people about living missional lives right where they are.”

We weren’t just “preaching to the choir.” We were sowing new seed among people who want to be engaged in more meaningful ways and just don’t know how. One lay church leader came to me during the day and said, “I’m so glad you invited me . . . . This is all new to me.” Another participant said, “This wasn’t about motivating people to take on more church activities. Therefore, this is a more sustainable approach to ministry.”

Several participants were moved by the diagram Neil showed them about being scattered into the world. The first grouping reflects a more traditional way of defining church: We are “red dots” who pull away to be together once a week. A better way, the missional way, is to see ourselves as the church scattered out in the world—what we in NCM often define as “where we live, work, and play.” One participant commented, “I need to make sure I ‘stay red’ when I’m out in the world.”

Diagram courtesy LICC (www.LICC.org.uk)

One of the senior pastors who has already begun to implement some of the Imagine Church concepts said to Neil, “I think you should change the name of your book. It should be called ‘Reality Church.’ My church is the ‘imaginary church.’ ”

“Imaginary” is not where “Imagine Church” comes from, but I like this pastor’s heart and desire to change his church culture. We in NCM in the Rocky Mountain Region will follow up with these pastors, most of whom we invited directly, to help them implement the concepts of whole-life discipleship as Neil, as well as The Navigators, defines a disciple: “learning to live like Jesus in your context at this moment.”

One of our guests wrote: “It was a really, really great day! Time very well spent and very inspiring!”

Don Pape, publisher at NavPress met with Neil on Thursday and attended part of the workshop, said it well: “Neil is onto something and Navigator Church Ministries could instigate a revolution.” May it be so.

I just listened to a recording of a well-presented sermon from a denominational leader making the case that women should be ordained. His argument was based on the many examples of women actively teaching, preaching, or prophesying. For example:
– Philip’s four daughters (Acts 21)
– Priscilla and Aquilla (Acts 18)
– The woman at the well (John 4)
– Mary Magdalene after the resurrection (Matthew 28, Luke 24, John 20)

I won’t comment on this approach because I think it’s the wrong issue. If the question is, “Should women be in ministry?” the answer is a resounding yes, of course. So should men, and old people, and young people, and people of all nationalities, races, and ethnicities. Note that in Acts 2.3, 4, the Holy Spirit came upon “each one of them.” In Acts 4.31, “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the Word of God with boldness.” (See my blog from January 2015.)

Churches give far too much attention to ordaining people as pastors and missionaries (church-paid workers) and far too little attention (almost always no attention) to ordaining people for their ministry in everyday life.

As one person said, “I spend an hour a week teaching Sunday school and they haul me up to the front of the church to pray for me. The rest of the week I’m a full-time teacher and the church has never prayed for me. That says it all.”

This glaring omission is well-articulated by Mark Greene (whose pamphlet The Great Divide contains the above quote) and Neil Hudson of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. I strongly recommend Neil’s book Imagine Church, available on Kindle and in paperback from The Vere Institute. Mark Greene’s The Great Divide is also available from The Vere Institute. My book, Join the Adventure! has suggestions to get you started. Click on the Join the Adventure tab above.

I received the most marvelous testimony of the power of God’s word from a pastor friend of mine, Dr. Mark Johnson. On January 8, he wrote to his Baltimore congregation:

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the second newsletter of 2017. Some might question the point of emailing a newsletter on a weekly basis to the members and friends of Mt. Olive United Methodist Church. … The fact is, I want you to have the “Daily Bible Reading Plan” in your email each Sunday morning.

I am what some may call a cradle Christian. Maybe you are, too. I started attending worship as an infant and Sunday School as a small child. You probably did, too. When I was 14 or so, I was recruited onto a church committee and at 16 I was a delegate to Annual Conference. You can probably make a similar claim. I, just like you, was baptized, communed, and confirmed. But for me there was still a big void in my life.

One Sunday – I was probably in my early-30s at the time — I was sitting in choir loft on a Sunday morning. It came time in worship for the Gospel reading and we all reached for a Bible. For whatever reason, there was only one Bible in our row. The fellow next to me handed me the Bible and said, “Here, you probably need this more than I do.” I took his remark as a friendly jab, took the Bible and turned to the morning’s lesson. As I began to follow along, I was transfixed. The story spoke right to me and even though the Liturgist stopped reading, I continued. I finished that chapter and went on to the next. I continued reading through the sermon. When I got home, I found my Bible and picked up reading where I left off. I felt like God grabbed my heart and soul and wanted me to know – to be – something.

There are lots of reasons to read the Bible. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 teaches “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” There is a lot to consider in those two verses but let’s look at “all scripture is inspired by God” and why that is important.

We might define “inspired” as influenced, motivated or encouraged and might say that a favorite teacher inspired our love of reading. But such a definition of “inspired” does not do justice to what the author, Paul, was getting at when he wrote about the inspiration of scripture. Paul used, and perhaps coined, the term “theopnuestos” which we translate as “inspired.” It is a combination of “theo” (God) and “pnuestos” (breathed). “Pnuestos” is related to the word, “pnuema” which means both wind and Spirit. Paul is telling us that the Bible is “God-breathed”; that is, God’s Holy Spirit flows through the Biblical text to interact with the faithful reader.

That kind of makes the Bible sound like an enchanted object straight out of a Harry Potter book, doesn’t it? Really, the actual physical Bible is just ink, paper, and binding. But the stories, histories, songs, poems, letters and revelations within the Bible have been recognized for thousands of years as authentic and authoritative remembrances of the Holy at work in the lives of faithful, and some not so faithful folks, like you and me. As we read, hear, study, and tell scripture the Holy Spirit moves within us in ways that reveal God’s self to us. As God reveals God’s self to us, and we make our lives open to God, a deep and life-changing relationship is built.

I can point to that Sunday in the choir loft when God grabbed me — heart and soul — as I read the Bible as the day my life changed. My journey with Jesus began when God-breathed scripture connected my life to our living LORD.

This newsletter is first and foremost an invitation through daily Bible reading for your life to shaped, formed, and illuminated by God. Really, could anything else be more exciting? See you in worship.

Blessings,

Pastor Mark

Here’s the rest of the story from my perspective, and I share it with his permission. Fast forward 20 or 30 years, and I taught a simple method for time with God to Pastor Mark and his staff at a church in Colorado Springs. At our next meeting, Mark said, “I was really excited to practice what we had learned, so I got up the next morning and sat down to read Romans with my Bible, journal, commentary, and Greek New Testament. After a couple days of this I realized that’s not what Bob asked us to do. So I put away my Greek New Testament and my commentary and worked through the process: read, reflect, respond, record. And I said to myself, ‘This is insanely simple.’”

It appears that Mark’s seminary tools had temporarily distracted him from the simplicity of taking in the God-breathed Word that he had been so excited about.

Keep it simple, folks. God wants to speak to us. And thank you, Mark, for the stunning reminder of the power of the Word. Your congregation is blessed.

PS Clicking on the method link gets you the short version of a simple method. Or, click on the Join the Adventure tab at the top of this page and order my book! I discuss time with God in detail in the middle section.