“Lord, who can dwell in your tent? Who can live on your holy mountain?” (CSB – Read the chapter)
What matters more in the end: What we believe or what we do? What is it that ultimately determines who gets to be with God and who doesn’t? The content of our thinking, or the outflow of our behaving? That’s a little like the chicken or egg question. How do you decide one from the other? You can’t really. But can I go out on a limb a bit and suggest that the Scriptures seem to give maybe a fraction more weight to one over the other?
So, we know that being useful in our relationship with Jesus requires faith, virtue, and knowledge. But how do we consistently do anything positive with those? We need something else. In this fifth part of our series, Being Useful, we talked about what this next thing is. Thanks for reading.
Staying on Track
When I was growing up, I had the great fortune of going to a church with a whole bunch of godly men to watch as examples of how to do the Christian life well. It was a gift that has kept on paying dividends in the years since. There’s a call to our great men in there, but that’s for another sermon. One of these men was named Martin Coleman. Martin was an engineer and was one of those guys who could do or build pretty much anything. My parents and his kids are about the same age and his grandkids are just a little bit younger than me. We all grew up together as pieces and parts of one big church family. That’s part of the reason I so love what we have here at First Baptist—which, incidentally, was the name of that church too.
This past Sunday, we continued our new series, Being Useful, by looking at the first character trait on Peter’s list that will make us more useful to Jesus. Item number one: Faith. What is faith? What does it look like to have faith? And how does growing in faith make us more useful to Jesus? Read on to find out.
Making God Happy
We were sitting in
a restaurant the other day and over my shoulder a family had been seated at a
pretty large table. They needed the
space. The waitress came over like she
would for any customer and took drink orders.
Not long after, they called her back.
They wanted to make some special requests. Then they called her back again. Then she came to take their food orders…and
they made some special requests. Then
the drinks came out. And those weren’t
right. The appetizers were wrong
too. So was their dinner. The manager came to the table at least once,
maybe twice. It took a couple of trips
by the waitress to get dessert ordered and right too. Now, this was a busy restaurant and certainly
mistakes are occasionally made in the industry.
But as we looked around the room, we didn’t notice anybody else getting
the amount of specialized attention they were getting. Now, they were never ugly that we could tell,
but the fact that just about all of their stuff wasn’t quite right began to
suggest a pattern. The pattern wasn’t a
restaurant that couldn’t get its stuff together. The problem was a family that was hard to
please.
“You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
I’ve said many times before that context is king when it comes to understanding the Scriptures. I’ll continue to beat that drum until I have you dancing to it in your sleep. But there aren’t many verses for which such a reminder is so important as this one. Taken out of context, this verse threatens to unravel our whole understanding of salvation and seems to justify the stifling legalism that has given Christianity such a bad name in so many places. How do we get this right?
This past Sunday we kicked off a brand-new teaching series called, Bible Stories to Make You Squirm. If you are the kind of person who believes the Scriptures should have some kind of a place of authority in your life, you are left with a thorny problem: There are some stories in there that are just downright uncomfortable. If they are there on purpose and for our benefit, what are we supposed to do with them? In this series, we’ll explore several of these hard stories and begin to see that all Scripture really is for our benefit. Even the hard stuff.
You Want Me to Do What?
Have you ever
watched or read something that just wasn’t good? It’s not necessarily that it was bad, it just
wasn’t good. You just didn’t enjoy it. I remember watching Adam Sandler’s Punch
Drunk Love when I was in college. If
you’ve never heard of it, you’re better off for that. It’s a dark comedy about a socially awkward
guy falling in love. It was awful. The credits rolled and all of us gathered in
my friend’s living room watching it looked around at each other and as almost
the same time said, “We can’t have that two hours of life back.” I remember reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
when I was growing up. A book combining
science fiction and medieval adventure should have been an easy winner. It was all I could do to not put it down and
find something better to read. If I
wasn’t such a perfectionist about finishing books I probably would have. The thing about reading a book or watching a movie
that isn’t good is that you can always just walk out. There are some stories, though, that are
harder to ignore.
The Nexus 