When Your Conscience Catches Up

Dear Friends,

This Lord’s day we will wrap up our sermon series entitled “Core Values for a Life that Really Matters”.  Our last Core Value is Integrity.

During the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Selena Roberts wrote in the New York Times of a heated controversy that threatened the integrity of the games:

About 10 yards past a security checkpoint along the path of a cinder-block hall inside the Salt Lake Ice Center, a panel of nine judges filtered into a room for a standard post-competition meeting last Tuesday morning. Twelve hours removed from the controversial moment when gold medallions were draped over Russia’s Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze instead of Canada’s Jamie Salé and David Pelletier, the judges assembled for a review of the decision under Ron Pfenning, the head referee.

At first, it was business as usual as the judges sat around a table, pouring over marks for several skaters, according to two high-ranking figure skating officials who spoke Friday on condition of anonymity.  Then the meeting took a bizarre turn. Pfenning, known as a gentle and meticulous caretaker of skating, handed each judge a piece of paper with a passage about honesty and integrity, officials said.  As each person passed back the pieces of paper, the judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne began to sob, officials said.

“It was a rambling avalanche of words,” Pfenning said when reached by telephone. “I hadn’t asked her a question. She had been teary-eyed through a lot of the meeting. It was an outburst: ‘You don’t understand. You don’t understand. We’re under an awful lot of pressure. My federations, my president Didier, I had to put the Russians first.’  Didier Gailhaguet is the president of the French Figure Skating Federation. Pfenning said that when Le Gougne called out Gailhaguet’s name, he knew he had to report the incident to the International Skating Union. “I never gave it a second thought,” Pfenning said.

For several minutes, the wail from Le Gougne grew so loud, one official said, that a person in the room stripped tape over the crack in the door in an apparent soundproofing effort.  The two high-ranking skating officials said no one embraced Le Gougne, the stylish 40-year-old Frenchwoman, as she cried out. Many of the judges, officials said, saw her as a pathetic figure. They already knew why Le Gougne was distraught, they said: her conscience had caught up to her.

What do we do when our conscience catches up with us?  How does a commitment to Integrity of heart and life save us from disastrous relationship crises?  This is our focus for this Sunday!

On another note altogether, many of you have taken a keen interest in the earthquake tragedy in Haiti.  We have raised (and sent) over $3,400 to help with the relief efforts.  Thank you for caring.  Here is a letter to the Grace Covenant Mission Agency sent by one of their pastors, who lives in Haiti and head up the work there.  The Hernandez family serves with Grace Covenant in Paraguay, so they are our connection in Haiti.  I am printing the letter as is, with grammatical errors and all:

Greetings today in the precious name of our Lord and Savior Jesus-Christ!
There is no way to explain what is happening right now in Haiti. We can
resume all in one word: If the Lord is not the author of what we have seen,
God has a reason for it to happen. Since January 12, the number of
Christians is increasing. Here in Mont-Rouis, during the fasting days (3
days) 590 people have come to the Lord. 95% are young people. The church of
God where I used to attend is too little to receive the Christians. Pastor
Meres, in Lanzac was asking me for help to buy more chairs or banches
because there is not enough room for the people. We had this event in every
village in Haiti.
Our churches are doing good. The ministers are doing good, too. Pastor Oseme
was the only victim during these days. He was in PAP, a block fell on his
knee, it was not too bad. But, he was later kidnapped and had to pay a
ransom of 1,500.00US. I lent him some money, other people lent him to
re-emburse the money he lent.
I will try to send some pictures of people we were and are helping now. We
were helping people to go to the hospital, medicines. Milk for the little
children etc. We want to thank everyone who has contribute to send an
offering to help our Haitian brothers in their circumstances.
You could not hear from me since there was no signal on Haitel to use the internet.  Try to write more next time, God bless.   Raquens Turenne.

The takeaway is that God can use even disasters and tragedies to bring more people into his forever family.  Every pain has a purpose, and every ruin is redeemable.  

I hope to see you Sunday!  

Love in Jesus,

Pastor John

The Eyes of Your Heart

Dear Friends,

Here’s one of the many fascinating things Jesus said:  

“Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is good, your whole body is      filled with light.  But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!” – Matthew 6:22-23

In these verses the Lord isn’t just talking about physical eyes and physical light.  He’s talking metaphorically about spiritual insight.  He’s talking about seeing in a new way spiritually.  People who have a “bad eye”, which here really means a bad heart, are said to be lost in moral and spiritual darkness.  But if your eye is good; that is, if you possess a generous heart, undivided in its loyalties, then you will see the world rightly.  The Apostle Paul calls it seeing with the eyes of your heart.  In Ephesians 1:18 he says, “I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you…” The song we sometimes sing, “Open the Eyes of My Heart” is from this verse.  The point is that God wants us to see the world with new eyes, with spiritual insight.

Christian Smith is a sociologist who has studied American Christianity in depth. In his book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Life of American Teenagers, Smith describes what he calls the “de facto dominant religion” among American teenagers.  Unfortunately, his description of the religion of American teens can also be applied to many adults.  It is this: “moral therapeutic deism.”

According to this “religion,” God created the world and watches over it, but has little involvement unless called upon to solve problems.  Smith further describes this “religion” in these terms: “the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”  What then does God require of people?  Simply that they be nice to each other and practice fairness, “as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.”        The technical term for this is reductionism, where our deep and rich biblical heritage is reduced to a very self-centered, inner focused faith which is really just faith in faith itself.  In this view, God exists to sanction our desires because human happiness is the highest good.  Long gone is the sense of mission and personal holiness to which all Christ followers are called.  Rather than being challenged to see the world in a new way, and to live accordingly, we are launched on a quest for happiness and it doesn’t matter how immoral we have to be in order to attain it.  This Jesus does not challenge the way we see the world, much less how we live in it because He wants us to be happy; so He sanctions our desires. Others have called this “cheap grace” or “easy believism.”

This Sunday we’ll look at Core Value #7!  The key to this Core Value is to see the world in a new light, from God’s perspective!  When we do this, we will be energized by the fact that we were made for a mission!  Have a great rest of the week and Lord willing, I will see you Sunday!

Affectionately in Christ,

Pastor John

P.S.  Men, I hope to see you at our breakfast this Saturday morning!

Olympics and Core Value #6

Olympics and Core Value #6

Dear Crosswalkers,

The 2010 Winter Olympics are taking place in Vancouver, Canada, and they start on Friday!  As a sports lover, I’m always intrigued by stories that feature followers of Jesus as they pursue their dreams with the values of the Bible and the desire to honor the Lord in everything.  One great story comes from a book entitled Finding God At Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians.  American figure skater and Harvard graduate Paul Wylie writes of his experience during a very trying moment in the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics:

I set up for the first jump in my program, but as soon as I’m in the air, I know something is terribly wrong. A flash later my hand touches the ice; the blade will not hold. I start slipping and now I realize it: I am falling. All I hear as I collapse to the ice is the empathetic groan of what seems like a million voices. I struggle to get up, hustling to get to the next move, thoughts racing through my mind as I try to cover the disappointments. There is no way of erasing a fall from the judge’s minds, nor can I jam the television transmissions to the living rooms of family and friends watching back home. This is live, and I have just blown it.

I have four minutes left and one important choice to make. Either skate through the rest of the program believing that something constructive will come of the mishap, concentrating and performing through to the end, or continue to dwell on the fall and its consequences, inviting more mistakes caused by a negative frame of mind. A Scripture flashes through my mind that helps me with my decision: “The righteous shall fall, but they shall not be utterly cast down.” I suddenly grasp God’s perspective: he will use our successes and our failures to teach us about ourselves and to show the world his glory. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28) I move on, accepting a new role. I admit imperfection and decide to skate “heartily as unto the Lord” for God’s glory rather than my own results.

Paul Wyle would go on to finish tenth.  But his lack of success there did not cause him to lose heart.  He persevered, and learned from his fall.  He eventually won the silver medal at the 1992 Winter Olympics in France.

I share this story because it is so easy to stay down when we fall.  God wants us to get up again.  Failure never has to be final.  We are on a journey, and God is able to use our stumbles and falls to make us better people, fully equipped to do his will and help others when they fall.  The NT says, “We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation” (Romans 5:3-4).

This Sunday we look at Core Value #6 – FAMILY PRIORITY!  For some of us, there have been some nasty, hurtful falls in this arena.  God doesn’t want us to give up on our families.  With the Lord’s help, let’s get on our feet again and go for the gold with our family relationships.  This will be a practical message for us all!

In other news, our missionary, Wilson Phang, has returned from Haiti.  Here is a portion of his report:

I spent 8 days in Port au Prince to provide care for the medical staff at one of the surviving hospitals there.  I arrived in Haiti to witness the tail end of the carnage – bodies piled high and amputations around the clock.  What a joy it was to see the city begin to have its critical medical needs met by the time I left. My last two days there, the hospitals were providing medical care to non-quake related needs.  The wards were half empty.We hear that there are many in the outlying areas that have not had any medical care or food aid.  However, we were also told that it was not safe to travel out there as mobs and gangs have formed in search of food and water.  I returned to Miami on the Feb 7th, to witness that city watch the New Orleans Saints overcome the Colts to win their first ever Super Bowl.  I could only think of the devastation Hurricane Katrina unleashed on New Orleans and was pleased to see the city rebuild.  I wish the same for Port au Prince.  But more so, that the people will turn back to God.Please join me in petitioning for the people of Haiti.

Love in Jesus,

Pastor John

Core Value #5 and The Rest of the Story

Dear Crosswalkers,

This Sunday we will look at Core Value #5 for a life that really matters – SHARING THE GOOD NEWS.  Author Kevin Harney tells the following story in his book Seismic Shifts:

It was a battle. A wrestling match. A test of wills. Every day, at exactly the same time, Margaret would go to the bathroom cabinet, open it, and take out a huge bottle of Castor oil. Then she would head to the kitchen to get a tablespoon. At the sound of the drawer opening and the silverware rattling, Patches, her Yorkshire terrier, would run and hide—sometimes under the bed, at other times in the bathtub or behind Margaret’s recliner. Patches knew what was coming.  Someone had convinced Margaret that her beloved dog would have strong teeth, a beautiful coat, and a long life if she gave him a spoonful of Castor oil every day. So, as an act of love every 24 hours, she cornered Patches, pinned him down, pried open his mouth, and—as he whimpered, squirmed, and fought her with all his strength—poured a tablespoon of Castor oil down his little doggie throat.  Then one day, in the middle of their battle royal, with one sideways kick, Patches sent the dreaded bottle of Castor oil flying across the kitchen floor. It was a momentary victory for the canine, as Margaret let him go so she could run to the pantry and grab a towel to clean up the mess.  When Margaret got back, she was utterly shocked. There was Patches licking up the spilled Castor oil with a look of satisfaction only a dog can make.  Margaret began to laugh uncontrollably.  In one moment, it all made sense.  Patches liked Castor oil.  He just hated being pinned down and having it poured down his throat.

Do you agree with me that this has an application to faith sharing?  The message is wonderful; the methods often leave something to be desired.  Good news was meant for sharing, but we all feel intimidated about the methods of sharing that good news.  This Lord’s Day we will see why faith sharing is such a central core value for living a life that honors the Lord!

Thank you so much for your prayers last week regarding Pastor Oseme of Haiti.  He was kidnapped and threatened with death if a ransom wasn’t paid.  When we learned of his release, I let you know, and we praise God for answering our prayers.  Here is the rest of the story:

It turns out Pastor Oseme was with another, more prominent pastor, and that more prominent pastor was the one targeted by the kidnappers.  Pastor Oseme was included in the kidnapping simply because these fellow pastors were travelling together.  Interestingly, the ransom for the prominent pastor was $7,500 and for Oseme it was only $1,500.  For having a smaller church and less prominence his ransom price was significantly discounted!  It makes me reflect on how we value life.  Of course the biblical world view says that all life is of infinite value because we are created by God and we have eternal souls!  Back to our story, the bottom line is that both families paid the ransom and secured the release of the pastors (I was told that the kidnappers settled for $6,000 for the prominent pastor because that was all that could be raised.  I guess he wasn’t as prominent as they thought!).  In a perfect world the kidnappers would have repented or at least been captured.  So while this wasn’t the perfectly ideal outcome, I believe that given the extremely unsettled situation in Haiti in the earthquake’s aftermath, this was a wonderful result.  If Pastor Oseme was my son, I would be rejoicing.   Dallas Elder, the Executive Pastor of Grace Covenant, extends his heartfelt thanks for our prayers!    See you Sunday!

Love in Jesus, Pastor John