So I’m reading a book which wants to tell me why people don’t come back to church after the first visit, and how churches can make it more likely that people return.  And I come across this little snippet,

Seven minutes is all you get to make a positive first impression.  In the first seven minutes of contact with your church, your first-time guests will know whether or not they are coming back.  That’s before a single worship song is sung and before a single word of the message is uttered.

Obviously your guests aren’t making a logical decision based on the integrity of the preaching, the character of the church staff or the clarity of your doctrine.  They are not weighing pros and cons of worship styles and theological viewpoints…. Instead, they are taking clues about your church’s atmosphere and the peopl’es friendliness on a much more rudimentary level.  Their subconscious minds are working overtime to evaluate their compatibility with this new environment.

Fusion by Nelson Searcy (2007), p49-50

As the quote says, this isn’t a biblical observation, it’s a lesson drawn from studies of human behaviour and decision making.  So what’s your experience?

• When you visit a church how long does it take you to form an opinion?
  
• How does the experience of getting from the street to your seat colour your expectations of the worship experience and teaching?
  
• Have you ever decided within 7 minutes not to return to a church?
• Have you experienced a church make a strong first impression on you within 7 minutes?
  

I certainly relate to this “7 Minute Principle”.  I enjoy visiting other churches, but when I do I’m on pins and needles constantly scanning my environment trying to make intelligent judgments.  What publications do they have in their foyer?  Do they have a powerpoint projector?  What songbook do they use?  What Bible version do they have in their pews?  Do they have pews or chairs?  How are the worship leaders dressed?  How many members carry Bibles?  Does anyone talk to me or notice I’m a visitor?  What are the demographics of the congregation?  Does it look like it’s involved in the community, or is it still living in the 50’s?

 

• Read Genesis 18:1-15 here.
• If you missed Sunday’s sermon (November 15) you can listen to it here soon.

In Genesis 18:14 God has just informed a 90 year old woman, Sarah, that in a year’s time she’ll give birth to a son.  Naturally, she thinks He’s crazy, so He poses the question, “Is anything impossible for the Lord?” (HCSB)  This is a question that we’ll periodically consider over the coming year.

I find it fascinating that God answers this question, thousands of years later, when talking to another woman He’s just made pregnant.  In Luke 1:37 the angel Gabriel has just told the incredulous Mary that she will bear God’s Messiah, and that her elderly relative, Elizabeth, is miraculously pregnant also.  Then Gabriel concludes, “For nothing is impossible with God.” (NIV)

Q. “Sarah, is anything impossible for the Lord?”  ……………………………………. A. “Mary, nothing is impossible with God.”

Whenever I teach on passages like these I experience an urge to provide fine print for God.  I feel that I need to explain that the examples of Sarah, Mary, & Elizabeth do not mean that God will provide a child to every Christian who seeks to be a parent.  They don’t mean that every Christian will find a spouse, or that we’ll never suffer from significant illness or disease.  So why have they been preserved for us?

I am convinced that these passages exist to demonstrate what God CAN do, not to promise what He WILL do.  We could spend a whole lot of words trying to explain the WHY’s of infertility, singleness, illness, pain and suffering.  But the chances are that when we got to the end of those words the struggle would still be there.

We will discuss these struggles at some point, but God doesn’t intend these passages to rub salt in our wounds, rather, He wants to inspire faith.  In my experience it’s easy to lose sight of God’s possibilities while caught up in experiences and questions we don’t have answers for.  As we seek answers to our WHY’s, God wants us to keep believing that He CAN.  Nothing is impossible with God.

• What thoughts come to your mind when you hear God ask, “Is anything to hard for the Lord?”
• Have you ever found yourself in a situation where passages of Scripture that are intended to inspire simply made you feel worse?  Have you been able to resolve that conflict?
• Do the examples of these women make you think of something else?  Please share it.
  

• Read Exodus 14 here.
• If you missed Sunday’s sermon (November 8 ) you can listen to it here.

This post finally catches me up and gets the blog back in sync with my sermons.

Over the years I’ve often heard people observe that there’s a correlation between a Christian’s prayer life and the trouble they’re in.  The more trouble, the more prayer.  Perversely, many Christians struggle to have  an active relationship with God while experience peace and blessing in their lives.  This criticism is valid, but it’s more understandable than when Christians experience turmoil in their lives and try to get through it on their own, rather than laying their situation before God.

In Exodus 14:11-12 the Israelites have seen the Egyptian army approaching and start complaining about their situation.  At first glance it’s easy to criticise them since their complaints are pretty strong.  But context provides an important insight to this passage.  Verse 10 tells us that “They were terrified and cried out to the LORD.“  Thus the complaints of v11-12 occur in a context of crying out to God.

Moses affirms this action.  Even with their doubts and questions they turned to God.  This demonstrates enormous faith development on their part, since earlier in Exodus they knew so little about God they didn’t even know His name.  Now they know Him well enough to take their concerns to Him.  In vs13-14 Moses challenges the nation to turn their complaints into trust.  “Don’t be afraid.  Stand firm … The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

I find this advice pretty difficult to put into practice.  I want to be busy.  I want to solve problems.  I want to use my gifts.  I want to distract myself from problems or personal shortcomings.  Standing still and trusting God to do something can be difficult.  “Can God really use someone other than me to solve this problem?”

Almost everyone reading this blog knows what happens next.  God parted the waters, creating a way of escape where none previously existed.  The enormity of God’s intervention here demonstrates the ridiculousness of human efforts to solve our crises without God.  No matter how ingenious Moses and the Israelites may have been, they were completely incapable of engineering a parting of the waters to escape the Egyptians.  Much more effecting to “stand still“.

But God’s words in v15 remind us that we don’t completely escape responsibility.  “Then the LORD said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on.“  The parting of the sea would have accomplished nothing if no one had walked through it.  God works with His people, not always for them.

This pattern of “Stand still. Move on.” recurs throughout Scripture.  God initiates, we respond.  Think about it, you’ll find numerous examples!

JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

• How do you practice “Standing Still” in your life?
• Can you share a moment when God has created a way of escape for you when none existed?
• Let’s start a list of biblical examples where God acted and waited for people to respond.
  

• Read Genesis 15:12-21 here.
• If you missed Sunday’s sermon (November 1) you can listen to it here.

I’m running a week behind with my posts, which is why I’m talking about Halloween toward the middle of November.

This sermon was not actually about Halloween.  We used our Trunk-or Treat the night before to advertise Sunday’s sermon.  I titled the sermon “What if God Scares Me?”.  Christians, understandably, have a way of only seeing God’s endearing character traits, eg. Jn 3:16 “God loves the world.”  But for many people in our society, the God that Christians present is scary, vindictive, and unattractive.

The Exodus presents a couple of events that cause many people to question God’s goodness.  First, we should not quickly pass over the deaths of Egypt’s firstborn.  Tens of thousands of families lost sons, fathers and brothers.  These families had apparently done nothing wrong beyond having the misfortune to live in Egypt at the time.

Second, It’s all well and good to get excited about the Hebrews leaving for a Promised Land, but that land already belonged to someone else.  In order for God to honour this promise thousands of men, women and children would die as God’s people destroyed cities and plundered the countryside.

That sure sounds like a scary God! I’m sympathetic with those who read Scripture this way, but would encourage them to continue their study to see the bigger picture.

In defense of God, I’d like to make a couple of points.  Obviously, this could be a lengthy, complicated discussion, but I hope the simple suggestions I make here provide a context that at least prompts readers to think further and not run with their first impression.

First, there is no denying the tragedy of the Egyptian deaths that motivated Pharaoh to allow the Exodus.  However, I believe that God gave Pharaoh fair opportunity to hear his demands and release the Hebrews.  The visit from the angel of death came after 9 other plagues: 9 other opportunities to obey God.  (Read more on Pharaoh’s hard heart here.) I understand that even this demand for obedience can make God seem self-centred, authoritarian, and heavy-handed, but we also need to remember that He’s God, so it’s not unreasonable to expect humans to obey Him.

Also, God’s demand for obedience had a context.  The book of Genesis records how God had used a Hebrew, Joseph, to save the lives of the Egyptians during a 7 year famine.  Then, even though hundreds of years later, the Egyptians repay that kindness by enslaving the Hebrews.  Was God’s demand really that unreasonable?

Second, we need to understand the context of time.  If we just read the Bible straight through it’s very difficult to get a clear picture of the time frame.  God first promised the land of Canaan to Abram in Genesis 12:7.  Later in Gen. 15:12-21 God provides more details.  Abraham would not personally take possession of the land himself.  Rather, 500 or so years would pass before his descendants would claim ownership.

If God wanted to bless His people, why would he wait 500 years?  We find the answer in 15:16 “for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.“  As much as God loved Abraham and his descendants, he also loved the Amorites.  Although they worshiped other gods, their sins were not grievous enough to warrant the destruction that would occur when the Israelites conquered the land.  So God gave the Amorites 500 years to repent, to worship Him, to make things right, and they didn’t.  Only after 500 years was God prepared to punish them.

In both these examples I believe that we can see God’s patience, and in that His love, toward ungodly people and nations.  I admit that I do not understand the extremity of the punishment meted out, but through this and other examples I trust that God is just and fair.  These punishments were not snap decisions or immediate angry reactions to an insult, they only came after many lifetimes of insult and disregard.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

• Do you generally think of God’s commitment to justice as an endearing, or frightening, attribute?
• Do you struggle to reconcile some of God’s actions with the God of love, grace, and mercy most churches routinely present?
• Would it make a difference if  Christians emphasised the patience of God more?
  

Having said all that about Alexa, let me say a BIG THANK-YOU to everyone who’s visited Peter’s Patter over the past 18 months. By some quirk in the statistics this blog is ranked at #7. It’s my prayer that, in addition to quirky statistics, people are genuinely finding these thoughts, comments, and sermon followup to be encouraging and helpful in their spiritual walk and understanding of God.

On his blog, Kingdom Living, Matt Dabbs provides a list of the most popular Church of Christ blogs. So if your looking for some Christian money advice, homemaking tips, Biblical commentary, sermon suggestions, news from missionaries, or old fashioned controversy, there’s a great chance you’ll find it on this list.

Even if you’re not looking for anything in particular it can be fun to click your way through the list and see what’s out there.

It is notoriously difficult to develop a definitive measure of the popularity of blogs.  Matt uses Alexa rankings.  Alexa is a small utility that people can download onto their internet browser.  The program then anonymously keeps track of the sites people visits and ranks them.  So a person might have a very popular blog, but if no one with the Alexa utility visits it, then it won’t get recognized at all.  However, despite the obvious weaknesses of this methodology it does provide an objective way of ranking websites and distinguishing popular websites from those that might be out of date or rarely updated.  (To contribute to these rankings you can download the toolbar at this site.)

….now if I could only get some more comments and conversation flowing…

For those who are interested, the most popular posts at Peter’s Patter over the past year have been:

1. Jesus’ I AM Statements in John
2. Cleansing the Temple – John 2
3. Three Core Values for the church (plus 1)
4. John 21: Do You Love Me?
5. The President & “Childish Things”
6. 1 Cor. 3:9 – You are God’s Building!
7. Interview with the Christian Church
8. You Must be Born Again – John 3

• Read Exodus 13:17-18 here.
• If you missed Sunday’s sermon (October 25) you can listen to it here.

Exodus 13:17-18 tells us that God perceived that taking the shortest route from Egypt to Canaan would result in the Israelites arriving in Canaan unprepared for the battles that they would encounter there.  So God lead them on the longer route through the desert.

I compared the long route through the desert with the commencement of Jesus’ ministry.  The Gospel of John gives the impression that Jesus took the short route.  John 1:29-34 describe the baptism of Jesus and then the rest of the chapter tells of Jesus calling his disciples.  He hits the ground running.  But the synoptics all detail a gap between Jesus’ baptism and commencement of ministry.  No sooner does a voice from heaven confirm his anointing, than the Spirit leads him into the desert for 40 days, where he’s tempted by Satan.  Yes, God lead Jesus by the longer route through the desert.

I receive the impression from many Christians that once a person commits their life to Christ they should expect to start receiving blessings from God.  To be very honest with you, I’m torn about how to respond to this.  On the one hand, a person who submits to God’s rule over their life, receives forgiveness, freedom from guilt, the presence of the Holy Spirit in their life, and membership into the family of God.  There’s no greater blessing than these.  But on the other hand, I am also convinced that Satan likes nothing better than to attack newborn Christians.  He makes life as difficult as he can, trying to destroy faith before it’s taken root.  I believe this is the message of the 4 soils in Matt 13.

Churches seem to do a pretty good job preparing new converts for blessings, but not so well preparing them for obstacles and spiritual attacks.  Perhaps we worry that talking of long desert roads will deter people from committing their lives to Christ’s rule.  I wonder if Christ was thinking this when he spoke to the crowds in Luke 14:25-33 about their need to “count the cost” before deciding to follow him.

Have you experienced a church/person that does a good job of encouraging people to make an informed decision about their salvation?  Do you agree that Christians often get too excited describing the blessings or a relationship with God and overlook the struggles that come with it?  Is this justifiable or a serious shortcoming?

If we accept that young Christians often encounter particular challenges from Satan, we must ask ourselves “How do our churches provide extra support for new converts?”  I try to set up a regular Bible study/discussion with those I baptize, but it often doesn’t seem a priority to them right then.  (Just as newlyweds seldom schedule a counseling session for the week after the wedding.)

Have you seen effective ways that new Christians have been encouraged/supported?  Did you experience difficulties in the first year of your New Life?  What helped you stick with your commitment?

Read Isaiah 42:1-13 here.

Last night I was privileged to speak at Rochester’s Church of Christ Area Wide Worship Service (RCoCAWW).  The theme for the night was “Sing a New Song” which we took to heart with song leaders from half a dozen congregations leading our singing.  I always find these events encouraging as churches with different worship styles, theological emphases, and racial mix, come together to praise God.

Given the diverse audience, many of whom had never heard of me before, I worked to keep my presentation upbeat and entertaining.  This meant I didn’t get bogged down in a lot of exegesis and included plenty of “fluff” to keep people engaged.  But I believe my topic still had an important message that I hope people will relate to.

The phrase “sing a new song” occurs several times in the Psalms (33, 40, 96, 98, 144, & 149), Isaiah 42, and Revelation (5:9 & 14:3).  The Isaiah passage seems to give the most context to this phrase, so that’s where my talk was concentrated.

The first 9 verses of the chapter describe the changes God is going to bring upon the world through His servant.  He’s going to restore justice (v1, 3-4), open blind eyes, free captives, release those who sit in darkness (v7).  Verse 9 provides a succinct summary of the preceding verses, “See, the former things have taken place, and new things I declare.“  God continues to redeem His people and His creation.

In the context of God’s creative and redemptive activity the appropriate response of His people is to “Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise from the ends of the earth.“  It seems to me that the new actions of God require new songs of praise from His people.  Our worship should respond and react to the presence and activity of God in our lives.  This may seem like a fairly simple conclusion but I think it has some practical application.

Just as I’m a fan of Bible translations that use contemporary English, I believe that if our songs are to be meaningful to us they should reflect God’s working among us today.  While we might comprehend the imagery of lighthouses, anchors, and lifelines, are they natural ways for us to express our relationship with God?  For me to worship genuinely from the heart, I need to use words and experiences that reflect my thoughts, not just the range of my vocabulary.

This is not just a rant against traditionalism.  I have observed that songs from different generations have different emphases.  While hymns from the the late 1800’s and early 1900’s often praise God for his actions, very few of them actually thank Him.  Many hymns written during WWI and the Great Depression look forward to eternity and heavenly reunion with loved ones.

Contemporary praise and worship songs also have gaps in their repertoire.  While many songs express our love to God, there is shortage of recent songs appropriate for communion.  I also have a hard time recalling many songs that encourage the church to reach out to a lost world in the way that the old “Throw Out the Lifeline” does.

So the application of this exhortation to “sing a new song” involves a thoughtful selection of songs that prompt the worshiper to consider God’s involvement in his or her life.  Sometimes this older songs will best accomplish this purpose, but sometimes God’s new activity requires new songs.  The church needs to embrace our modern songwriters who speak of and for God…even if the styles or repetition of lyrics don’t always seem natural to us at first.

Of course, there’s a whole lot more to be written on this topic, eg. How does the above discussion apply to music styles?  Can music styles prevent us from singing from the heart?  It is also distinctly possible to apply this “new song” instruction to simply transitioning from a lament to praise as we witness God at work.  It does not necessarily mean each of us should compose a new song each week.

At the end of the day I believe the principle of “singing a new song” means that our worship is to interact with and respond to God’s movement in our lives. I have previously written an article discussing how our regular monetary offering to God can be similarly interactive.  So I guess I’m 2 down with 3 to go.

Discuss how song selection impacts your worship experience.  Do some songs make your worship less heartfelt than others?  Do you find that the effort of learning new songs is worthwhile?  Can you recall an occasion that a new song has spoken to you?  I’d love to read your comments?

• Read Exodus 12 1-11 here.
• If you missed Sunday’s sermon (October 18) you can listen to it here.

New Testament Christians, that I know, tend to avoid spending too much time in the Old Testament.  I think this is a shame.  We can learn so much about God from the Old Testament.  We also gain understanding into how the New Testament relies upon and builds upon the Old Testament.  From understanding the Old Testament better, we better understand Jesus, who observed the Old Testament law.

Things we might learn from the Passover meal and the events it celebrated:

Lamb Roast

• The blood of the Passover lamb provided salvation for the Hebrews – 1 Cor. 5:7 refers to Christ as the church’s Passover Lamb.  (see also Jn 1:29, & Rev 21:27)
• Faith & Works: The Israelites needed faith, but they also needed to act.  They had to paint their doorframe with blood.  Just staying indoors and trusting God would have ended in death.
• Is Baptism a work? For Church of Christ members (and others) who believe that baptism plays a role in one’s salvation the Passover provides a good example.  The blood around the door didn’t save anyone.  The Hebrews actions in putting the blood there didn’t give them any merit.  They were saved by God’s grace when they followed God’s instructions.  Did God need to see blood to know who His people were?  No.  But would He save them without this action on their part? Again, No.
• The importance of putting God first: In Exodus 12:2 God gives His people a new calendar that begins in the month that He delivered them from Egypt.  This was radically different from the calendar they kept in Egypt.
• The importance of community: According to Exodus 12:4, small households were to share the Passover meal with other families.  This was not a time to be alone.
• Give God your Best: I believe Exodus 12:5 gives some of the earliest instructions concerning acceptable sacrifices, and immediately we see that the lamb is to be “without blemish”.  God demands more than our leftovers.
• God’s Grudge with Yeast: In Exodus 12:14-20 God institutes the Feast of Unleavened Bread.  During the seven days of the feast, if anyone has yeast in their house, they’re to be “cut off from Israel”.  That seems pretty extreme.  There’s not a lot of explanation given in Exodus as to why God doesn’t like yeast, except in 12:39, where their flight from Egypt was so urgent that they didn’t have time for dough to rise.  The New Testament sometimes equates yeast with sin & false teaching (Matt 16:6-12, 1 Cor. 5:6-9).  But it’s not always a bad thing.  In Lk 12:1 Jesus calls hypocrisy “yeast”, but in 13:18-21 the kingdom of God is compared to yeast.
• Deliverance from Slavery: The whole concept of God delivering His people from slavery to a Promised Land resonates with Christians who view themselves as having been rescued from the slavery of sin and delivered to an eternal Promised Land. (Rom 6:15-23)
• The Lord’s Supper: Since Jesus was celebrating the Passover with his disciples when he instituted the Lord’s Supper we should be able to apply something from that original setting to our celebration today.  Most evangelical churches seem to prefer “Lord’s Supper”, or “communion” rather than “Eucharist” (which comes from the Greek word for “thanksgiving”) to describe our commemoration today.  However, since the Passover was a celebration of thankfulness and all the Last Supper accounts have Jesus offering prayers of thanks, maybe we need to emphasise thankfulness more as we come around the Lord’s table.

That wasn’t actually what I intended to write about today, but I think it’s a good topic.  Can you add anything to this list?  Do you think some of my suggestions and connections are reaches?  Please join the conversation by leaving a comment.

• Read Exodus 11 & 12 here.
• If you missed Sunday’s sermon (October 11) you can listen to it here.

Hi everyone.  I’m back from a week’s vacation, so it’s taking me a while to get back in the saddle of blogging.  But here I am.  I’m continuing this series from Exodus, “Becoming People of God”.  This week we’re looking at the institution of the Passover.

This passage contains so much depth I think I could dwell here for a month or more.  As I read Exodus 12 this time, I realized that the Hebrews celebrated the first Passover before the Passover actually occurred.  That first night they they celebrated their salvation before they’d been saved!

While I suspect that many Hebrews that night followed Moses’ instructions out of fear, they still expressed an element of faith.  At a minimum the believed that God could/would carry out His threat of killing the first born sons.  At a higher level, many of the people celebrated that night out of faith that God would bring about their release that night.  They ate that meal as if God had already delivered them.

Jesus demonstrated a similar example of faith at the Last Supper.  The account of the Last Supper in Luke 22 emphasises Jesus’ forward view.  Twice, in vs 16-17, he looks beyond the cross to a future meal with his disciples in the kingdom of God.  Even when he looks forward to the cross he speaks with faith that God will complete what He has begun.  When he says “this is my body given for you“, he speaks of a future event.

My pet peeve is that when we participate in the Lord’s Supper today most of the time we do so looking backward, not forward.  We look backward at the cross.  We look backward at our sins.  We remember the suffering Jesus went through on our behalf.  Yet this one dimensional approach to communion omits the promises Jesus gave his disciples.

It’s appropriate for us to remember our sins, but why not do so in a context of celebrating their forgiveness?  Why do we not do a better job of remembering Jesus promise of the future meal with him?  Why do we not spend our time around the Lord’s Table remembering that he’s coming back for his saints?

Even 1 Corinthians 11:26, (the classic backward perspective passage due to the instruction “examine yourself“” in v 28, but more on that another time), looks outward when it describes the Lord’s Supper as a proclamation, not a commemoration.  It also looks forward by say that we do this “until he comes“.

At the core of this discussion is the issue of how we live out our faith.  Do we live as though God’s promises are already completed? This was the challenge for the Isrealites at the first Passover, and for Jesus at the Last Supper.  As we participate in the Lord’s Supper this is the question we should be asking ourselves.  In earlier posts I posed the questions this way, “Most of us believe in God, but how many Christians actually believe God?“  Read those posts here.

Do you agree or disagree?  How do you approach the Lord’s Supper?  Please leave a comment!

Read 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 here, and James 2:1-5 here.

There’s no recording of the sermon this week as Lawson Rd had its annual Fall Fellowship in a park.  But I presented the same material in the park that I shared on Friday at the Camp Hunt Men’s Retreat.  (The recording is available HERE, along with the other speakers.)

The subject I was allocated for the Men’s Retreat revolved around the idea that Christians are called to be humble.  Both 1 Cor. 1:26 and James 2:5 remind us that the world doesn’t think we’re better, smarter, or stronger because of faith in Christ.  In fact, they regard us as foolish, lowly, and poor.  While these passages also reassure the church that at the end of the day our faith will be vindicated, they also dismiss any suggestion that the ultimate vindication is any excuse for pride or arrogance in the present.

Many people outside the church seem to regard Christians as having a “holier-than-thou” attitude to them.  Since this impression is so widespread, I expect it’s rooted in reality.  Churches, and therefore by definition individual Christians, can easily fall into the trap of looking down our noses at people who are not as “enlightened” as us.  We can even think less of other Christians who interpret Scripture differently or choose to express their faith in a different manner than we do.

Paul asked the Corinthian church to “remember what you were when you were called.“  I wonder if we forget that too quickly.   Or do we sometimes exaggerate our “goodness” before we accepted God’s grace?  Do we expect people to clean themselves up before they show up at church?

Ephesians 2:1-10 also discusses this phenomena of Christians forgetting their total dependence upon God’s grace.  Throughout this passage God acts to save people.  God initiates and we accept his gift of salvation.  Verses 8-9 provide a succinct summary, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.“  Even here Paul warns of the dangers of pride, and the need for humility.  It’s easy for us to take credit for our own salvation.

God does want us to boast, but not in our our abilities.  “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.” (1 Cor. 1:26; Jer 9:23-4)  How would our churches be different if we did more “boasting in the Lord”, and less in our knowledge and behaviour?  I’m also interested to hear how others think churches/Christians communicate pride? What would a humble church look like?