Take Words With You

My friend Tim Kerr has put together the best kind of book. It's called Take Words With You, and it's the best because it's full of Scripture and designed to be used in prayer. Here's the blurb:

Take Words With You" is a comprehensive compilation of approximately 1500 promises and Scripture prayers (ESV) to provide tangible traction to our prayers. It is intended to fortify our prayers with God’s Word and to build a strong faith in God in the one praying. It is also intended to better align the believers praying with the will of God, which God has promised to answer:

This is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. (1 John 5:14)

And here is my endorsement of the book:

Tim Kerr models the type of prayer life I'd like to have. He's done us all a favor by showing us how we can use the Scriptures to fuel our prayers. I already have some good books on prayer; I don't have any that get me praying more than this one. Some books sit on the shelf. This one's going to sit on my desk for daily use. I plan on using it for years.

Take Words With You is now available on Kindle, and this week it's only 99 cents. This one is a no brainer. Pick up your copy at Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

Living Into Focus

Arthur Boers is author of Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distraction. And he knows what it’s like to struggle with busyness. He’s written a book about living well, believing that we’re not without choices as we confront the frantic pace of our lives. “I trust that sleepwalking is behind me and that more balanced and invigorating patterns of living are available to all of us,” he writes. “It remains possible to live well.”

Boers once pastored a church in which the congregation identified busyness as a key spiritual issue they were facing. The elders of the church agreed, but he jokes they were too busy to respond for a couple of years.

According to Boers, busyness is a discipleship issue. Busyness is a major challenge in most people’s lives. He points to experiments that show that busyness and haste leads us to be swept up in an agenda that isn’t God’s, or ours.

Not only is it a discipleship issue, but It’s also a missional issue. “If we are not living in substantially different ways from people in our culture,” he asks, “what do we have to offer? If we are not living in abundant ways, why would people want to join us?”

Boers encourages us to pay attention to our use of technology. “As devices and commodities move into the center, focal things become peripheral.” Boers is not against technology, but believes that we need to have discerning conversations about technology, and what our real priorities are.

He challenges pastors to face the issue of busyness in their lives and their churches. “Pastors, model what it means to live the life God has called us to, even at a cost.”

Boers spoke to Toronto pastors yesterday about living with focus. The video is a bit rough, but you can check it out here. You can also find out more about Living Into Focus at Amazon.com or Amazon.ca.

28 Seconds

Michael Bryant had everything: an impressive new job, two great kids, a marriage to a high achiever, a house in the nice part of town, an impressive resume, and all the right connections. It all unravelled one night in the space of 28 seconds.

On the way home after celebrating his twelfth wedding anniversary with his wife, he was involved in an altercation with a cyclist that resulted in the cyclist's death. Later, he was charged with killing him. Those charges were eventually dropped, but his marriage  ended. He lost his brother to a rare heart condition. He also carried the debt from funding his legal defense.

I've been reading Bryant's book 28 Seconds, which chronicles his life and the aftermath of that tragic night. One of the most interesting sections for me is when he describes the ministry of a downtown church called Sanctuary. A stranger, Jay, began phoning and emailing Bryant, inviting him to have breakfast at the Royal York Hotel with some homeless people. Bryant eventually gave in. Bryant was impressed by Jay and his work "mediating, breaking up fights, escorting junkies to and from a downtown church [Sanctuary]; talking, listening, feeding, cleaning." He met Greg Paul, the pastor, and learned about the ministry of the church, "a community of the homeless, of Rosedale scions alongside squeegee kids, of university students, and of hardened street soldiers."

As Bryant left, he overheard a conversation Jay had with someone. They were unaware that Bryant could hear them. "Yeah, he's really hurting...you know how it is...Slowly...Came yesterday...but he's getting better."

Bryant comments:

I'd fallen for the oldest charity trick in the book: thinking that I was offering charity to others, in helping Jay Barton, while the opposite was true. He and all the people at the Sanctuary were helping me, bringing me back to life, to connection with other human beings, to my own humanity.

Wow.

I've been thinking a lot about Bryant and his story. I've been thinking about how our lives can change so quickly, and how the mighty can fall. I've been thinking about how even at our lowest, we have a tendency to look down at others as if surely we haven't sunk to their level. I've been thinking about what it means to be a church of the broken, not just the poor and marginalized, but the rich and powerful who are broken. I've been thinking about how to minister to people without turning them into a project. Mostly I've been thinking about what they say about the ground being level at the foot of the cross, where the Harvard-educated rich are no different from the junkie who never made it out of high school.

28 seconds is all it takes to level any one of us and to remind us that we're not that different from anyone else. It's the reminder I need to remind myself that I dare not see myself on a different level from anyone else, junkie or millionaire. In the end, there's no difference. The junkies need Jesus. So does Bryant. So do I.

The Most Practical Thing

I love this quote from Tim Keller's Center Church:

A pastor should be marked by humility, love, joy, and wisdom that is visible and that attracts people to trust and learn from them. As a pastor, you may not be the best preacher, but if you are filled with God's love, joy, and wisdom, you won't be boring! You may not be the most skillful organizer or charismatic leader, but if your holiness is evident, people will follow you. This means, at the very least, that a dynamic, disciplined, and rich prayer life is not only important in the abstract and personal sense; it may be the most practical thing you can do for your ministry.

Prone to Wander: A Guest Post by Daniel Darling

This is a guest post by Daniel Darling, author of the new book Real: Owning Your Christian Faith. Real is being released tomorrow.

In the last several decades there has been much angst over the exodus of young people from the evangelical church. Seems every year there is a survey letting us know how poor of a job we are doing at retaining our young. And as I speak, books are continuing to hit the bookstore shelves with all sorts of prescriptions for stemming the tide.

Interestingly, the solutions are all over the map. Critiques of the Church come from the left and the right, from rock-ribbed creationists and theistic evolutionists, from serious Reformed types to pragmatic church growth gurus, from right wing political provocateurs to left wing prophets of justice.

There are good elements of truth in most of the anti-Church screeds. But I wonder if, in all our self-criticism, we’ve missed a simple, yet profound truth at the heart of 2nd Generation rebellion.

It’s the old-school doctrine of original sin. Of course every self-respecting evangelical would easily stand up and defend this doctrine as essential orthodoxy. But in our practice, in our angst about the next generation, we subtly deny it. In our faith statements we’ve become John Calvin, but in our assessment of the Church, we’ve become Charles Finney.

Let me explain. There is an unwritten rule in evangelical parenting that goes like this: if you raise your children right, “God’s way,” then you are guaranteed success. Your children will not only be converted, they will grow in the grace and knowledge of God. And if they don’t, then something is wrong with your parenting or the methodology or the systems in your faith environment.

Nobody quite says it like this, of course. But we easily point to Proverbs 22:6 and misapply this verse as a proof text for the right parenting formula. We forget that a) proverbs are proverbs, not commands or promises. Furthermore, we forget that even children born into spiritually rich, grace-based, intentional environments possess a depraved heart set against God. We forget that the work of conversion and sanctification cannot be produced by tweaking the system or changing the paradigm.

This supernatural work can only be done by an invasion of the divine, by God’s Holy Spirit.

Now I’m not saying parents and churches and systems have no influence or are unimportant. The Scriptures a full of parenting and discipleship guidance. Parents bear an enormous responsibility and churches are tasked with discipling the children in their midst.

But, humans are not tasked with the results. God is.

This paradigm shift is huge. It frees us from the pressure-based, peer-reviewed, competitive parenting that pervades many evangelical churches. It invites a spirit of repentance, dependence and faith on the part of parents and key spiritual influencers. And it keeps us from usurping the role of the Holy Spirit in shaping our children’s hearts.

An Acute Problem

This misplaced emphasis is why I think growing up in the evangelical church has its unique struggles, struggles few understand. And it’s why I wrote my book, Real.

Now don’t get me wrong, I loved growing up in the faith. I loved being in Church and hearing my father read the Scriptures to us as children. I loved the spiritual discussions we had. And today I love the church so much I decided to pastor one.

So unlike most coming of age church memoirs, this one is not an anti-church screed. Instead, I speak to 2nd Generation Christians about our unique struggles and how we can make the faith of our parents our own.

Let me explain. My parents came to faith as adults, so the decision to follow Jesus was a big one, especially for my mother who was raised in Judiasm. They had seen the emptiness of life without Christ and had no desire to go back.

But for me, it was a different story. I became a Christian at the age of four. And while my conversion is no less miraculous as my parents and my heart was no less darkened, I did not experience the vivid contrast between life in Christ and life without Him.

So inside my heart, there was always this little whisper, Maybe this Jesus stuff is a bit overblown? Maybe the world is actually more fun and less miserable than Mom and Dad say it is. Maybe other religions really are equal to Christianity?

My heart, to quote the hymnwriter and preacher, Robert Robinson, was “prone to wander.” There was always within me a lurking desire to chuck everything I knew and explore life on my own.

This wasn’t a reaction to legalism or abuse or anything in my church or home environment. This was just purely a heart of rebellion.

Of course every child of God is tempted to run from the One who redeemed him, but for 2nd Generation kids, I think it’s particularly acute. Mainly because we have not know anything but Christianity.

I’m not discounting negative factors that drive kids from the church. But I wonder if these are merely factors, not causes. That perhaps the enemy targets the hearts of those closest to Jesus by whispering the lie he first uttered in the Garden, the lie that Christ is not sufficient to fulfill all of life’s deep desires. That there is a world out there the Master has forbidden you from exploring.

Find out more at DanielDarling.com | Amazon.com