Pastor Chuck's Blog
One ordinary guy's thoughts on an extraordinary God

I spend my Wednesday mornings volunteering at my local YMCA, greeting people and checking them in. It is a simple task, really, but quite rewarding, as I get to serve others and encourage them. As I greet, I get told from time to time what a nice smile I have. It is usually very encouraging…but as I left the Y this morning, I was reminded of one thing that bothers me about my smile: a crooked tooth.

Even though I had years of having braces on my teeth, I have this one ‘out of place’ tooth. The poor little guy looks like the last to be picked for the kickball team…all the others in a straight line and he’s just crowded out behind them…all alone. Why am I telling you all this? Because it didn’t have to be this way.

After my braces, I was given a retainer to wear at night to help keep my teeth in place. It would require discipline (and at times be inconvenient), but the result would be worth it, I was told. I tried it for a while, but then starting “slipping”…a night here or a night there I wouldn’t wear it. Soon, wearing my retainer was the exception…and at first, there seemed to be no price. “Silly dentists”, I thought. “Always going off the deep end with all these things you’ve ‘got’ to do!”

I don’t know when it happened, but one day much later I looked in the mirror and there it was…a crooked line! That tooth serves as a walk-around reminder for me that discipline matters. When you stop being faithful to do the things you must do, it may seem like it has no effect, but it will catch up with us. So, what has God called you to do?

Read your Bible daily? Spend more time with your kids or spouse? Have regular exercise? Watch what you eat? Live on a budget? Whatever the needed routines in your life, take words of advice from a slightly unaligned mouth…discipline may be inconvenient, but it is a gift from God to keep our life on a straight path. Stay faithful! You can do it!

PC

What you and I believe matters, because what we really believe will determine how we live. I learned this watching my six year old son. For the last few months, he has struggled through various levels of anxiety at bedtime. If he couldn’t fall asleep in 2 minutes, he would start to panic. I struggled to understand why…so I asked: “Was he afraid of anything in his room?” No. “Did he believe our house was safe?” Yes.

Then, it hit me: he recently heard that growing kids need a certain number of hours of sleep a night to function…and he was afraid he might stay up too late and not be able to function! I’m not sure if he thought he’d just not feel good or if he thought limbs would start falling off his body, but one thing is sure: his belief about sleep deeply affected his actions. The same thing is true with what we believe!

So, I have worked to state my own “I believe…” In the weeks to come, I will flesh each of these out more, but for now, here’s my list! I challenge you to examine what you really believe about God, life, yourself and others. It could just change your life!

Pastor Chuck

I believe…

1. I believe we didn’t just come from nowhere! (Intentional Creation)
2. I believe there is a purpose for our lives! (Dignity of Humanity)
3. I believe there is a such thing as right and wrong! (Morality)
4. I believe there is a right-and-wrong giver! (God)
5. I believe God can be trusted! (Goodness & Sovereignty of God)
6. I believe we’re not okay on our own! (Sin)
7. I believe God did what we couldn’t! (Rescue)
8. I believe full life comes with full death! (Surrender)
9. I believe God didn’t leave us in the dark on how to live! (Bible)
10. I believe God wins in the end…and we can be with Him! (Victory & Eternity)

A few weeks ago, I saw a strange sight: a mail truck being towed. After thinking, “I hope I’m not on their route”, I thought how odd it was to see a truck known for serving having to “get a lift”.

I thought how strange it would be to see a tow truck being towed and it hit me: life in the Kingdom of God can be like that. When you “cross the line” to live in pursuit of Jesus’ call to make disciples and to be a light to the ends of the earth, in some way, you become like a tow truck. Largely, you live to see Jesus rescue others through you!

But here’s the problem: at the end of the day, we’re still just people…very fallen people, who have been redeemed by a great God. So, yes, we are used by God to help others get back up…and that’s a good thing. But even tow trucks need a lift sometimes.

Like the rest of the world, we have weaknesses and vulnerabilities…places we can fall down or even burn out. We need to receive Jesus’ amazing love and grace in order to share with others! Here’s 4 quick tips to keep from breaking down:

1) Learn to say “No”.

There will always be needs around us, but we can’t do it all. Consider this: God’s grace and anointing is only effective to the places HE has called you to go. Sometimes you will see a need you aren’t called to…which means someone else is. Trust God to be God and before going to the rescue, ask: “Are you calling me to do this?” If not, say “no”.

2) Rest!

You cannot always go! You need time to rest physically, emotionally and spiritually. You need regular time for God to pour into you. You need time to enjoy life and be with your family. Make rest a priority!

3) Have someone YOU go to!

Yes, you bring hope and help to others, but you need it, too! You need someone who pours into you…someone who ministers to your soul…someone you go to when you need help, prayer or direction! Find that person and let them pour into you!

4) Remove the hero mask!

It can be easy to start believing we need to be superheroes…not showing signs of weakness or vulnerability, because after all, there’s a world depending on us. But when we do this, we hold up a mask that doesn’t make us look genuine.

We aren’t the superheroes…He is! Our job is not to be perfect – that’s why Jesus came! What the world needs to see is real people with real flaws who are being changed daily by a real God. Be real. Don’t be afraid to share places you’re still a “work in progress”!

I pray this helps you pour yourself out for Jesus and devote your life to making disciples…but when you need it, Christian tow-truck, get a lift J!

How can we live in such a way that our lives really count? How do we get to the end and know we haven’t missed it? In the first part of this blog, I gave the most important two ingredients to a life that counts:

1) If I don’t do what it takes to stay close to God, I miss it!
2) If I don’t love my family (which equals TIME), I miss it!

As I have been reflecting, I see at least three more key priorities we’ve got to have in place for our lives to count for God and His Kingdom!

3) If I don’t genuinely love and serve my world, I miss it!

Before you get nervous, let me clarify: I do NOT own my own planet! By “my world”, I am referring to the relationships of influence God has given me: my friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors…people in my life who don’t know Jesus.

Jesus refers to Christians as the “salt of the earth”…the only thing preserving a world that is rotting away. He also calls us the “light of the world”…a light to bring hope to a very dark world. How do we shine and impact our world for Him? We have to develop a heart to really love the people in our lives. We have to make time in our schedules for them. We have to pray for them! We have to serve them! No one else can impact your world the way you can! Shine your light!

4) If I don’t discover what I was made for and give it my all, I miss it!

Jesus calls all Christians to shine for Him, but it will look different for each of us. Do you realize the God of the universe gave you specific dreams, gifts and talents that He wants you to discover, develop and use for His glory? That’s why we’re all so different! Your calling will look different than mine…and this world needs what you were made to bring it! Find what you are good at and passionate about. Develop your gifts & then use them with all you’ve got for God’s glory…that’s what a life not missed looks like!

5) If I don’t make time for rest, I will burn out and miss it!

I will end this blog where I started part one: our lives are busy…often too busy! The race of life is not a sprint, but a marathon – a great life is one run well over the long haul. Please hear me: you cannot always run, always go, always push. There will always be deadlines. There will always be things that need to be done, but if you do not make the intentional decision to incorporate regular spiritual, emotional and physical rest in your life, you won’t be able to do what God has called you to!

That’s why God set up the Sabbath: a regular time to cease from working to rest, reflect, be with our families, have fun…a time to just be a person! God didn’t put it in His “Top Ten” by accident! You NEED rest! I challenge you to answer the following questions…and no, you cannot say you’re too busy to rest! God would never make you too busy to do something He asked you to do!

• Do you get enough sleep?
• Do you have a regular time your family lays aside work, chores and tasks to just be together? If not, when could you have this? If so, are you protecting it?
• Is there a time you pursue hobbies you love? (God gave them to you for a reason!)

I pray we will run the race of life well. May we arrive at the end with confidence we didn’t miss it!

- PC

We all know it: life…especially life in 2011 in America…is busy! From appointments to deadlines, to social events, to work, to housework, to hobbies, most people seem to have too much on their plates. The unfortunate result is that we end up doing a lot of okay things decently instead of doing a few very important things well!

How do we keep from over-crowding our lives? More importantly, how do we arrive at the end with assurance we lived our lives as fully as we were meant to? How do we not miss it?

Recently, I’ve needed to be reminded of a few key convictions that (I pray) will help me run the race of life well – Today, I will share the first two: I hope they encourage you, too!

1) If I don’t do what it takes to stay close to God, I miss what I was made for!

As a Christian, that one’s easy to say…but it is another thing entirely to live out. It can be too easy to get under the “tyranny of the urgent” and find ourselves running to do all the things we feel we need to do. I’ve sometimes allowed myself to be so busy I felt I had no time to slow down and be with God!

Jesus said that He is the life-giving vine…we are the branches. That means I’m only of any use to a world in need if I am filled with Him!

Think of your life for a moment: are you making the deliberate daily decision to make quiet spaces in your life to be alone with God? Real quality time? What would that look like for you? Is there a change you can make today? More than anything else, we were made to know God! Don’t miss it!

2) If I don’t love my family, I miss it!

God has given me a pretty incredible family. I am married to my closest friend: a beautiful woman full of compassion, grace and a tremendous sense of humor. I have the world’s coolest boys who want to play with me and they love their daddy.

And yet, I can get so busy, I miss it. Sitting in the same room replying to emails or working on projects, I am only feet away from them, but I’m not there at all. I miss it.

Listen to me, spouses and parents: no one else on the planet can love your family the way you can, and when you miss it because of just being busy, everybody loses.

My wife needs my heart, my attention, my creative pursuing of her…my time. My boys need someone to wrestle with and build LEGO houses with. They need someone to read the Bible to them and pray with them. They need someone to listen to them and patiently train them…but all of that equals TIME!

Do you have protected time to be with your family? Time that nothing will interrupt or steal away? They will feel as important to us as the TIME we give them!

There’s a lot of things we can do in life, but if we’re going to live…really live and not miss it, it will be because we took intentional regular time to be with God and because we showed our families with our lives that they mattered to us! Let’s not miss it!

-PC

Looking back at the first sin in the Garden of Eden, I saw 6 UGLY costs of sin. In part one of this 2-part post, I shared the first 3:

1) Sin always promises something you think you need.
2) Sin always downplays the consequences: “You surely won’t die!”
3) Sin always involves experiencing something you weren’t meant to know.

Now, the final three:

4) Sin always messes up relationships with others & God.

What is first thing Adam and Eve did after they sinned? They covered up. Have you ever thought about this…they were husband and wife (& the only two people on the planet)…who exactly were they hiding from? Not God…they hide from Him later. They are hiding from each other. In their sin, something happened. Are they now ashamed of how they look? Is there a sense of distrust? I’m not sure, but one thing is abundantly clear: a relationship that was meant to be deeply intimate has now been plagued by awkward distance.

What is the second thing Adam and Eve do? They hide from God, because they are now afraid of Him. The one they were meant to trust more than anything is now the one they want to run from, because the relationship has been broken. To make matters worse, instead of being honest, they start passing blame: Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent.

Sin always messes up relationships with others – there is no such thing as a “private sin” that only affects you. Sin always messes up our relationship with God. It causes us to want to run and hide and to make excuses…and that’s exactly what our enemy wants, because as long as a sin is private and we are distant from God, it has power over us.

5) Sin always hinders God’s plan for your life.

God made Adam to rule the land. He made Eve to be his companion and completer in his work. But after they sinned, those plans were hindered deeply. Now Eve will long for Adam, but he will rule over her. The great dignity God gave women in being the bearers of children remains, but now with deep pain. Adam’s working of the land will bring thorns and thistles. What they were made to do was hindered by their sin.

God has an amazing plan for our lives, but when we choose to sin, we leave the path God set for us. We don’t lose our salvation, but many Christians live in defeat, frustration, and miss what they were made to do because they choose to live by their own rules.

Many blame God: “Where are you? Why aren’t you rescuing me? Why is my life so hard?” Yet we are the ones who made bad choices: dropping out of school, putting ourselves in a lifestyle we can’t afford, getting in relationships that go physically or emotionally outside God’s boundaries…and when everything falls apart, we are quick to accuse: “Where is God?” We can’t blame God for our bad choices! Sin takes us off God’s path and it takes repentance to get back on it!

6) Sin always brings death.

God told us from the beginning that the ultimate price of sin was death. When Adam and Eve sinned, that’s exactly what happened: now human bodies will wear down and die. We will face sickness and disease. The purity of our relationship with God died. And unless something changes, sin will separate us from God forever…not because God is cruel, but because the consequence of sin is death: just like a person who drinks a full bottle of bleach will face terrible consequences…not because the people at Clorox are cruel, but because they are facing the consequence of something poisonous running through them.

Yet, even here, God makes the most amazing promise! Right in Genesis 3, God promises that one day a seed of the woman will come to crush the enemy once and for all: A Savior will come to take the consequences of our sins on His own back and offer to take them all…if we’d just trust Him!

We don’t deserve it, but He will come. To show Adam and Eve the seriousness of His promise, He covers them with clothing: an innocent animal gave its’ life to cover the guilty! Our sin always equals death, but the innocent Son of God came, died and rose again to cover us!

I pray you will live to trust Jesus and His gift. I pray you will deal quickly with sin…and ultimately I pray you will live free of sin and its’ ugly costs!

PC

I made a commitment years back that has really impacted my walk with God: reading through the Bible each year. It really IS a living book where God speaks to us to help us know and love Him! As I recently started reading again from “the beginning”, something leapt out to me from the tragic story of how sin came in the world through Adam and Eve: I saw 6 UGLY costs of toying with sin. I have known them firsthand from my own life as well as ministering to others as a Pastor. I pray these would be an encouragement and useful in staying away from sin and its’ UGLY cost! Today’s blog will list the first 3:

1) Sin always promises something you think you need.

You know the story. God makes man and woman and places them in the midst of a beautiful earth. He gives them a purpose and responsibility (remember, Adam’s job was to rule over the animals. He even got to name them…what the heck was he thinking with “Aardvark”? Sorry, getting off track). Man had love, the promise of building a family and in the Garden, we knew God…He even walked with us! In short, we had all we needed.

But then another player entered…a deceiver who told us there was something more. Something we needed in order to really be fulfilled. Something God was “holding out” and refusing to give. Something we couldn’t get unless we broke the boundaries God set up: “Eat of the tree…and you will be like God, knowing everything from good to evil.” And we believed him…

Sin still promises to give us something we think we need. Hello, that’s why it’s called temptation…it promises something that looks appealing, something that makes us subconsciously think, “I need this in order to be fulfilled…or in order to make my pain go away…or in order to feel like I am enough.” And yet it is something we know God said to stay away from…and so a silent war begins where we question God’s plan: is He really right on this one or is He “holding out” on me? Sin always promises something you think you need…but it never delivers what you thought you’d get!

2) Sin always downplays its’ consequences.

“You surely won’t die”, the enemy mocked. The enemy would have us believe that God is just like the parent whose kid keeps acting out in the grocery store. They constantly threaten to lower the boom if they disobey “one more time”, but never actually do anything about it.

The truth is that God warns us about the grave cost of sin, because He made us and He knows what really will destroy us. To use the parent analogy, God is like the parent who warns his child not to touch the hot stove…not because He’s mean or moody, but because the stove is actually hot and will burn you if you touch it. But every time we choose to sin, we turn a deaf ear toward God’s warning and downplay the consequences…and we always get burned.

3) Sin always involves experiencing something you weren’t meant to know.

Did you know there are things God doesn’t want you to know? He never wanted us to know the effects of drugs on our bodies. He never wanted us to know the pain of abuse, teasing or insecurity. And He didn’t want Adam and Eve to know sin. God wanted us to be innocent of evil, but when we sinned, we immediately experienced something we should never have known.

In Adam and Eve’s story, they immediately saw themselves, each other and God differently and they wanted to run and hide! They weren’t supposed to experience that feeling – it was a perversion of the gift God gave them.

Sin is still usually a perversion of good gift God gave. For example, sex is great within a committed relationship of lifelong marriage. But at the same time, this gift is so precious and so vulnerable, it was only meant to share with one person for life. God’s boundary for sex is within marriage. Period.

But when someone chooses to go outside that boundary, they always experience something they shouldn’t have known. It is a perversion of an otherwise great gift, but a great gift in the wrong place always brings destruction. Fire in the fireplace…good. Fire on the living room rug…not so good!

As a pastor, I have personally know the painful experiences of taking an otherwise good gift and using it in a way God told me not to…and I have ministered to countless people who have done the same…people who thought, “Maybe I know better than God’s standard on this.” The result is always knowledge (and often deep pain) we shouldn’t have ever known.

Okay…that got a little long – sorry ! I will share the final 3 UGLY costs of sin in my next blog!

So, it is a new year…a time we all seem to evaluate our lives and adjust accordingly. At the dawn of 2011, I have come to realize a pretty bad habit I’ve picked up, especially with my sons. It is the habit of trying to be the Holy Spirit’s Junior Executive! As a Christian, I love Jesus with all my heart and long with all I am for my boys to love Him, too. So far so good! But too often what happens is this: my boys (like all of us) act out in a way they should have realized was wrong…and I stand at a crossroads. Do I (calmly) address the wrong behavior and try to use it as a teaching moment in the hope of building character in their young lives? Do I pray for God to move powerfully in my boy’s lives and to grow compassion and integrity in them? Or do I use my words, tone and facial expressions to display displeasure in an attempt to “make” them feel bad and want to change?

Unfortunately, too often it has been the latter. Pretty bad, huh? But this is what I am coming to see: other than the fact that my actions look little like the God I want them to be like, I am finding grace to realize something simple, yet profound: God doesn’t need me to play Junior Holy Spirit! He’s quite capable all by Himself! God Himself said HE was the one responsible for drawing people to Himself (John 6:44). MY job is to love, to pray, to model…yes, to provide correction and most certainly to teach with authority the way they should go (Proverbs 22:6), but to leave the changing of the heart to Him. I couldn’t even change myself, so I am of little good changing anyone else!

So, here it is, world. I am officially resigning as Junior Holy Spirit and taking the role of a daddy that loves, prays, models and leads. Only one problem: it is a DAILY decision to take up our cross and die to ourselves…so, this probably won’t be the last time I’ll have to turn in this “pink slip!” God, please grant me the grace to trust you to be you and to know how to be the dad you want me to be! Thanks for 3 amazing boys – may YOU draw them to love you with all…you know how much it means to me!

PC

Okay…so I have finally decided to come fully into the technological age. Well, mostly. I still have no clue about texting and use an ancient cell phone (I think it is a rotary)!

In the coming days, I will be using my blog as a place to “think out loud” about the greatness of my God and how He moves in everyday life. Hoping it will be a blessing.

See you soon (I hope !

Pastor Chuck