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The mind is a funny thing. It can be creative in the small hours of the morning and solve your problems. As a high school algebra student, I had that happen more than once. I'd go to bed puzzled about a problem, then wake up with the answer.
Great when your mind solves a problem without actually involving you in the process!
The mind can also be anxious in those hours. Half the people I know who wake up between midnight and dawn tell me they are worried about unidentified problems. Anxiety is a sleep-stealer.
Once in a while, I have awakened with a great article that just cried to be written. On one occasion, I got up and wrote it down. Next morning, far from being disappointed, I was impressed. Good stuff, I thought. I worked with it over the next few days and then sent it off to several magazines to see if the editors had a use for it.
InterVarsity Press' "His" magazine bought the article and ran it in a choice place--the inside back cover. Over the next 15 years, from time to time I would receive small checks in the mail from other magazines that found it and ran it. Several notes from editors in foreign countries like Korea and New Zealand advised me they were running the article.
So, I learned to get up and write it down.
Here's what I wrote down one morning this week. Strange? A little, maybe. An article for magazines? I seriously doubt it. Nevertheless, here it is.
We are not ignorant of his devices. (II Corinthians 2:11)
We actually know a good bit about Satan. More than we think, I expect. His history, his driving force, and his game plan are spelled out all through Scripture. We are left with tons of unanswered questions, but we know enough to understand how he works and what to do about him.
His devices. We know his maneuvers, his designs, his schemings, his wiles, and how resourceful he is. (Those are all different ways the Greek for "devices" is translated in various versions.)
Look at it this way. Satan is no fool. He has been studying human nature from the early days of the human race. He knows human psychology to a degree that any university in the land can only imagine. If they gave doctorates to serpents, he would have degrees out the kazoo. He is one smart dude.
He knows you.
The question before us, today, though, class, is this: do you know him? Do you pay attention to how he works?
There are two extremes to avoid: going to seed on Satan and seeing him in every thing, everywhere, is one extreme; and completely ignoring him is the other. There's a balance somewhere in the middle where God's people should take our stand.
If you are trying to do right, to live for God, to resist the encroaching infiltration of the world, then you are in his crosshairs. He has targeted you.
You'd better learn how he works and how to resist him.
I sit there listening while my pastor friend tells what he's going through in his church. And sometimes all the alarms go off. I realize he is in a dangerous place in his ministry.
Not always, but sometimes, I can tell him this. If I sense a leading from the Holy Spirit or if he and I already have a close enough relationship, I'll interrupt him.
"Brother Bob, can we pause the narrative here a moment? I need to point something out to you."
"My friend, you are exposed. You are a sitting duck. Life has drawn a target on your back. Satan has his gun-sights on you."
"You'd better do something big in a hurry or you're going to get in bad trouble."
He sits there stunned, without a clue.
"What do you mean? I'm doing everything I know to work my way through this."
I say, "I'm not talking about what you are going through. I'm talking about where you are personally at this moment. You are in a vulnerable spot and you need to move before something bad happens."
Older, veteran pastors have learned the hard way to tread softly through this dark valley they have entered. They have seen the carcasses of their peers strewn about, brought down by ego or depression or temptation.
It's the young minister who is more likely to try to brave it out alone. It's the young pastor who is more prone to end up a victim instead of a victor.
Here are 10 danger zones for the pastor to watch out for.
As a pastor, I sometimes trip over the words coming out my mouth when I try to say that "God uses 'little people.'" There ought to be a better way of saying that.
Some of us remember how Leona Helmsley offended the world by saying that "only little people pay taxes." She is now comfortably serving a long sentence for tax evasion in some federal institution. The judge probably added another six months just for the "little people" put-down.
How about "ordinary." God uses ordinary people. Folks like you and me. He uses ordinary things. Ordinary days.
Look up the definition and you'll quickly see the word means different things to different people. To some, it implies inferiority and the commonplace. In this article, it simply means: the normal, the usual.
A day like today. A person like you and me. A thing like this on my desk.
God delights in using the non-special.
Here's a couple of songs on that theme.
I asked a pastor friend for this story. He was unable to tell me his source. I don't think that means he made it up; only that he clipped it out of something without noting where he got it.
Two hundred years or more ago, the British Navy arrived in the Canadian waters near what is now Quebec. They were instructed to wait for reinforcements before attacking the city, then held by the French.
When the commanding officer saw his men growing bored with the waiting, he decided it would be worthwhile for them to get in a little target practice. In the distance, he could see numerous statues of saints atop the cathedral. "Let's see you hit those," he ordered.
By the time reinforcements arrived, the British had used up most of their ammunition, and they were found to have insufficient military resources to defeat the French.
Two hundred years later, Quebec is still a French city, because the British decided to fire on the saints instead of the enemy.
In military parlance, "friendly fire" is when soldiers fire on their own buddies by mistake.
It happens in churches far too often.
It is true that the Bible identifies a number of sexual practices as wrong and to be shunned by the Lord's faithful. It is true that homosexuality is among these. It is likewise true that the New Testament sees homosexuality as no worse than adultery and other kinds of transgressions.
However.
Those other areas do not pose as great a problem for the pastor who wants to address them. He can preach against adultery and lust and pornography all he wishes and he will not enrage anyone.
However.
The subject of homosexuality (gay, lesbian, bi-sexuality, however we wish to phrase it) is a minefield for the man of God. Almost anywhere he steps, he takes a chance of stirring up something from one direction or the other.
As the new pastor of a church, I was pleased to get a phone call from a local television station inviting me to speak. New preachers are always glad to get before the community; it helps get their ministries off to a roaring start. But this one I turned down.
"We are putting together a panel to address homosexuality," the news director said. "We'll have two gay/lesbian speakers and two ministers. Would you be willing to be one of the ministers?"
No thank you. Not in a hundred years.
There are indeed a few Christian leaders around who can pull that off, but I'm not one of them. This had all the makings of a shouting match or worse, an opportunity to hold the Christian message up to ridicule. Both are to be avoided.
This week, a friend of mine emailed to get my input on a discussion her denomination is conducting on this subject. Here is her note to me and my response.
One day last week, I found myself across the table at a fast food place from a friend who ministers to college students. Before taking this position, he was a student minister in various Southern Baptist churches, and from all reports, was a roaring success in each one. So, for no other reason than curiosity, I posed a situation to him.
"Alvin," I said, "let's say I'm the new student minister at a church. And let's say I have only a handful of young people, maybe ten. Tell me how to build a great program."
He was ready for me. You'd have thought we'd planned this. I imagine he's done it so much the response is second nature to him. Like asking me how to drink a glass of iced tea!
Focus on middle-schoolers. If they buy into your vision, they will grow your ministry.
He does not mean to neglect the older high-schoolers. But two realities affect the new student minister coming to a church: the youth often have a hard time changing their allegiance from the former minister to the new one, and soon, these will graduate and move on to college and no longer participate in the work. So, common sense dictates that focusing on the younger teens is right.
Put people around you who are better than you.
My friend's story last Monday could be told by every preacher in the land.
"When I stepped off the platform Sunday morning, I knew I had laid an egg. The sermon seemed to have been still-born. It just didn't work. I felt awful."
"But the most amazing thing. People were down at the altar praying, and ever since a number of people have come up to me saying how it ministered to them."
Just goes to show, I said.
Goes to show what?
I raised that question on Facebook this week. I asked pastors who have felt that they bombed and then heard from church members that the sermon had special meaning to them, what they learned from the experience. The answers were all of one theme: "That God can use anything." "God can speak through a donkey." "How unimportant the messenger is." "Christ is everything."
Recently a friend and I visited another church. She was visiting in our home and there is a pastor she loves to hear, so I drove her there. That day, the sermon was not up to his usual standards, I felt. He is normally one of the finest expositors anywhere.
In the car, on the way to lunch, my friend said, "That was a wonderful sermon. Just what I needed to hear today."
Goes to show.
From time to time, as I'm sketching at a church or school, the question arises: "So, have you had training for this?" Or, maybe, "Are you self-taught?"
I don't answer what I'm thinking.
What I say is usually a variation of, "I've had some formal training. But mostly, I've just worked at it. And I'm still trying to figure out how to draw better."
But what I think is, "So, you think my stuff looks so amateurish I could not possibly have learned this from anyone?"
Can you imagine someone saying to Picasso, another artist of some renown (!), "Did you take training for this?" Or to Pavarotti or to Frank Lloyd Wright?
Today, my friend Mary Baronowski Smith told me how she made herself learn to sight-read a hymnal so she could play anything she wished on the piano. Even though she was taking lessons, this skill was self-taught.
Here's what happened.
Those old enough to remember the 1960s do not need a reminder on how divided this country was. The war in Vietnam was tearing us apart as surely as the Civil War had done a century earlier. This time, however, it tended to be a generational thing, with the oldsters defending the government's handling of the war and the young ones marching in the streets against it. Related to this was the entire generational rift in the culture, with the clothing, the music, the hair styles (beards!), drugs, sex, and the list goes on.
Everything not nailed down was coming loose.
On October 22, 1968, former Vice-President Richard Nixon brought his campaign for the White House to Deshler, Ohio. There, Nixon spotted a 13-year-old girl named Vicki Lynn Cole holding up a sign that read "Bring Us Together." He mentioned that message and later adopted it as the theme of his administration. The Cole family was even invited to the inauguration. After that, Vicki Lynn faded into obscurity.
Sadly, so did the concern for national unity.
The Nixon administration was one of the most divisive in American history, ending, you will recall, with the president resigning in disgrace, Vice-President Agnew resigning earlier because of kickbacks he had taken as governor, and a number of the highest advisors going to prison. It was a shameful period in our nation's history.
Unity was a clever idea, Nixon thought. But only that and nothing more.
We're back at a time when our nation is divided. Hopefully not as severely or as deeply as in the 1960s, but the rift between the "reds" and the "blues" is drastic.
Within religious denominations, division is a constant threat. Doctrinal differences are a constant, social trends inject themselves into church life, and the world exerts its pressures for churches to conform. Personalities complicate negotiations and division often results.
Within your own church membership, the enemy is always at work, looking for wedges to drive between members and the leadership. He walks to and fro, to paraphrase the Apostle Peter, looking for an opening in the wall he can enter to create havoc.
In our never-ending concern for unity within the body of Christ, let's make a few points here.
In a typical Southern Baptist church--if there is any such animal!--the pastor and other ministers handle most of the pulpit duties. The times when a deacon can be counted on to lead in public prayer is more likely to come before the offering and in the Lord's Supper.
When a layman approaches the pulpit to lead in prayer, there is no telling what will happen then. If it's true that most pastors have never had training in public praying, it's ten times as sure that the laypeople haven't.
What we get when the typical layman comes to the microphone to lead a prayer is some or all of the following:
--trite statements he has heard other people pray again and again
--vain repetitions
--awkward attempts to be genuine and fresh
--awkward attempts to admonish the congregation about some issue, usually their laxity in giving
--a total unawareness of the time element. He/she may be too brief or go on and on and on.
The typical layman feels out of place doing this. There are exceptions, thankfully, and some wonderful ones. But in most churches, the deacons and other lay leadership would rather take a beating than to pray in public.
A pastor friend announced to his deacons that they would no longer be leading offertory prayers. He expected resistance and was prepared to respond to it. Instead, without exception, they cheered the news. "They felt like a burden had been lifted off their shoulders," he said.
I understand that. But I regret it. In truth, this could be a wonderful time for a man or woman of the Lord to render service of an unusual nature to the congregation and indirectly to the Lord.
Here are ten suggestions on how any of us--preachers, staffers, deacons, laity--can improve our public prayers.
I pray that they all may be one...that the world may believe that You sent Me.(John 17:21)
I have a strong suspicion that the Lord is almost the only One among us who truly knows the value of unity within His Body.
To put it another way: Even those who love the Lord with all their heart, who treasure His word and work to obey Him, seem not to place a high enough value on unity within the Body.
Mr. Burger King pulled into town one day and decided to check out his franchises. Driving up Route 45, the business district of the city, he spotted one of his fast-food restaurants. It seemed to be doing okay, so that pleased him.
Then, he spotted something that puzzled him.
Right beside that Burger King was another one, identical to the first. What in the world was going on, he wondered.
Then it got worse.
Across the highway in the next block was another one. Three Burger-Kings that close together? What kind of marketing is this?
Before he left town that day, Mr. Burger King had found fourteen of his franchise restaurants in that community, most of them within half a block of one another.
Something was badly wrong. Some district manager was in bad trouble.
One day, the Lord Jesus came to our town. He spotted the First Baptist on one corner, First United Methodist on the other corner, the Presbyterians across the way, and the Assembly of God down the block. In the next block was the Catholics, the Latter Day Saints, and the synagogue.
And of course, each one claimed to be using the original recipe.
The July/August issue of "The Atlantic" has an article that blew me away. "Why We Should Mock Terrorists" has as its alternate title "The Case for Calling Them Nitwits."
I do like this. Finally (I felt when seeing it), someone has struck the right note about these terrorists. They are truly fools.
Underneath the graphics on the lead page of the article we read: They blow each other up by mistake. They bungle even simple schemes. They get intimate with cows and donkeys. Our terrorist enemies trade on the perception that they're well trained and religiously devout, but in fact, many are fools and perverts who are far less organized and sophisticated than we imagine. Can being more realistic about who our foes actually are help us stop the truly dangerous ones?
We want to think these jihadists are purists in their faith and disciplined in their devotion to their God. Hardly, it turns out. In fact, we learn that a great many of these terrorists can't even read and write. All they know is what their wrong-headed leaders tell them. And like dunces, they believe all they hear and never turn a critical eye to anything.
Such people are not only our foes; they are their own worst enemies.
Hence my question: When is it all right to call your enemy an idiot and a nitwit?
Wrong answer: when it's true.
Right answer: When your goal is not to win him over, but to destroy him.
If your goal is to win him, then gentler methods are called for. You will want to understand his position, sympathize with where he is coming from, answer his objections, and reason with him. You'll need to build a relationship with him.
But if the enemy needs to be sent into the nether-regions, all bets are off. Forget the nicer stuff and take the gloves off. Tell him the truth about himself.
Believe it or not, there is some Scriptural grounds for doing that.
Okay. Don't anyone tell the preacher we're all going to encourage him.
Let him think it was spontaneous on your part.
What I want you to do is something you've almost quit doing. No, I'm not talking about praying for him, although there is that.
Write him a letter.
Handwrite it. Make it two pages, no more. Make it positive and uplifting.
And when you do, I can tell you several things that are true of that letter once it arrives at the pastor's desk....
---It will be a rarity. He gets very little first class mail these days. Everything is done by computers.
---He will keep the letter for a long time.
---It will bless him (and possibly his family members) for years to come, particularly when he comes across it years from now.
Case in point. Last night, I ran across a letter from Christy dated July 15, 1997. Here is what this young lady--perhaps a high school senior--wrote to her preacher.
"Grandpa," little Leigh Anne asked, "How do I know when it's God talking to me and when it's just me talking to myself?"
Pastor James Richardson told his beloved little one, "Honey, that's one of the hardest questions you'll ever face in this life."
Someone asked me the same question the other day.
Here is my attempt to answer it.
First, let's identify the wrong answers. I know it's of God because of the warm feeling inside me. I've had several Mormons tell me that. Bad answer. A dangerous one, even.
Some of us remember the Debbie Boone hit from a generation ago. "This can't be wrong; it feels so right."
All over the world worshipers in a thousand religions read their holy books and come away with warm feelings. Doubtless, many interpret the inner emotional reaction as a verification of their faith's validity. They go forward into the day, assured that their faith is solid, their belief well-anchored, their lives well-lived.
I know it's of God because it fits my convictions. This hardly deserves comment.
I know it's of God because it's something I was wanting to do anyway. Ditto.
There has to be a better way.