Day 4 - Lindisfarne

We left the hotel for Lindisfarne at 9am.  Lindisfarne is an island off the Northeastern coast of England.  It's known by the locals as Holy Island.

There's one way on and off the island via a causeway and its only accessible by car during low tide.  Otherwise it's surrounded by water.

The island has a recorded history since the 6th century.  It became the center of Celtic Christianity under Saint Aidan, Cuthbert and others.  It was a hub for Monks and Priests to be trained and then  travel south throughout England bringing the gospel to the villages.    

It's known as the birthplace of Christianity for England.  From 715-720 monks and artists worked on what is now known as the Lindisfarne gospels.  They are known for the beauty of the artwork in its pages.

We had a few hours (before the tide came back in) to explore the island and have some intentional time of quiet spiritual retreat.  I found a gate with a quote on it that I sat by a few minutes to pray and meditate.  I walked around the island, toured the castle and just had time to pray and enjoy God's creation.

On the gate was this quote: "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant." (RLS)  I didn't know who RLS was until I got home, it's a quote by the author Robert Louis Stevenson.

I sat by the gate and confessed that for most of my ministry I've wanted to see the harvest.  It's easy to judge myself as a pastor when there isn't much of a harvest and often failed in my work.  The quote reminded me to be obedient to God and leave the results up to him.  If I am faithful to Him, the desired results aren't the win, and the undesired results aren't necessarily a failure, obedience to Him is the win and that should be all that matters.    

As James writes: "Whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues in it - not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it - they will be blessed in what they do."  We aren't promised success and God doesn't expect success from us 100% of the time.  When we obey the Lord we are blessed in what we do, not necessarily the results of what we do.  The blessing is in the obedience.

It was a powerful moment for me to be reminded that God is in charge.

We left the island at like 1pm and a few of us toured Bamburgh castle.  

We arrived at Durham University where we ate dinner and got settled in to the dorms of St. James College for the next five nights.  

We met David Wilkinson, the principal of the College and our contact and host.  David is an ordained British Methodist pastor and has a Ph.D. in Astrophysics.  He was humble, approachable and easy to talk to.

Oh and by the way, the walls of the cafeteria and several other areas of St. John's college are lined with original Salvador Dali paintings:

I went out that night walking around Durham with a few other guys and had a great time of fellowship.  What a phenomenal day!

Leaving Edinburgh - Day 3

We boarded the bus early on Friday, August 30th to head South towards England.  On the way our first stop was a small church built in 1450 called Rosslyn Chapel.  It has been restored over the years and continues to be a place of worship.  It's a beautiful chapel inside and out and was a nice departure from the huge Cathedral's we saw on the trip.  

 As pretty as the church was, the best part of the stop was what was happening outside.  

There was a man just outside the chapel dressed up with old weapons and armor for people to try.  He also loved history and had no problem sharing his thoughts on William Wallace.  He said Wallace wasn't as tall as people think he was.  According to him, the sword they claim was his was lengthened for Wallace's statue and he was probably barely 6 ft. tall not 6'7".

He also told us about a man just as significant in the Scottish war of independence: Andrew De Moray.  While Wallace wreaked havoc in the South of Scotland, Moray did the same in the North.  They combined forces at the famous battle of Stirling Bridge where Moray suffered a wound that would later cause his death.  I wonder if Moray had survived he would be alongside Wallace in Braveheart?

Our next stop was a cool town on river Tweed called Berwick Upon Tweed.  We ate Fish 'n Chips at a local diner and had fantastic tea.  It is the Northernmost town of England and was a neat place to spend a couple of hours.  

Before heading to our hotel near Lindisfarne, we stopped at another neat town on the ocean called Seahouses.  I mostly spent time hanging out by the water, walking on rocks and just enjoying the beauty of God's creation. 

I'll tell you about Lindisfarne in the next post!

Scotland - Day 1 and 2

For the last two weeks I’ve been in Scotland, England and Amsterdam.  The trip happened through the Reynolds Lead academy with 19 other pastors from the Western North Carolina Conference.

I thought I would blog the hi-lights of the trip over the next week or so.

We flew out on Tuesday, August 27th and arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland the next morning. We hopped right on the bus for a full day of touring.

Day One

The first stop was Hollyrood Palace which is a palace the queen still uses for events and hosting other dignitaries.

Next we toured St. Giles Cathedral and Edinburgh castle.

William Wallace and Robert the Bruce guard the entrance to the castle:

In a parking lot behind St. Giles cathedral lies the grave of the Scottish pastor, scholar, reformer and founder of the Presbyterian church in Scotland John Knox.  Someone literally parks on his grave today.  Knox believed everyone should be able to read the Bible in their own language which was radical at the time.  Seeing his grave in a parking lot was a great reminder of the truth that greatness in life isn’t about us, it’s about the Kingdom.

Day Two 

Our second day in Scotland was a free day.  Seven of us decided to rent a van and drive into the Northern highlands of Scotland.  We stopped a couple of places along the way for pics and eventually got to a need little town called Oban. We ate at local pub/restaurant and had fish and chips and tried haggis for the first time.  The fish n chips were good, I wasn’t a fan of haggis.

We spent about an hour just walking around and enjoying our time.  We headed back a different route so we could experience Glen Coe.  It was a beautiful area.  We stopped several times for pics and found an amazing Sunset over a lake with a castle in the background.  It was beautiful.  The pictures don’t do it justice.

Fasting

I preached on fasting this morning and invited the listeners to check out this blog for more content.

Lately I've found I have more content to share than time to do it in on Sunday mornings.

In this case the extra content is from a book.

In his book Celebration of Discipline (which I highly recommend) Richard Foster shares the portion of a journal from Elizabeth O'Connor regarding her experience of fasting. I found her progression helpful and fascinating:

1. I felt it a great accomplishment to go a whole day without food.  Congratulated myself on the fact that I found it so easy…

2. Began to see that the above was hardly the goal of fasting. Was helped in this by beginning to feel hunger…

3. Began to relate the food fast to other areas of my life where I was more compulsive…I did not have to have a seat on the bus to be contented, or to be cool in the summer and warm when it was cold.

4. Reflected more on Christ’s suffering and the suffering of those who are hungry and have hungry babies…

5. Six months after beginning the fast discipline, I began to see why a two-year period has been suggested.  The experience changes along the way.  Hunger on fast days became acute, and the temptation to eat stronger.  For the first time I was using the day to find God’s will for my life.  Began to think about what it meant to surrender one’s life.

6. I now know that prayer and fasting must be intricately bound together.  There is no other way, and yet that way is not yet combined in me.”

When fasting progresses from focusing on myself to focusing on God, we start to get it!

Sermon Rewind: All Grown Up Part 5

In-Justice for All

Theodicy is the study of how we reconcile evil and injustice and suffering in the world with a good and all-powerful God.

The argument is if He's good, He would do something about evil and if He could He would do something about evil.  Therefore, if God is all-good and all-powerful why doesn't He?

More people have stepped away from faith (maybe not all the way into atheism, but away from faith) because they are unable to reconcile a good and loving God with evil and pain and suffering in the world.  Fair enough, it makes sense.

Here's the deal though, pain and suffering and injustice is not an argument against God's existence.  There's no rational argument against the existence or involvement of the God of Jesus based on injustice in the world.  It's passionate and emotional and powerful, but it is not a rational argument.  

Injustice in the world calls into question the justice of God, not the existence of God.  Which means it makes more sense to be angry at God than it does to be an atheist.  The existence of God is a different question than your personal experience with God.

Jesus was the one who brought the idea of a God who is good and loving into the world.  Jesus is the one who showed us a God who claims that every single person on this earth is of sacred worth.  Every single person matters.  Every single person has dignity.  Every single person is worthy of love and compassion.

Jesus introduced the world to this God in a time when there was neither justice nor dignity for most people.  The rich ruled over the poor.  The powerful ruled over the non-powerful.  If you had the gold, you made the rules.  Might made right.  In a world where there was no dignity, women had not rights, children were not named until a certain age because the infant mortality rate was so high.  Jesus comes along into that world and claims that God is good and loving.  

Jesus' first century followers embraced a God who was good and just within a culture that was characterized by injustice.  

If the Christian God had been so fragile as to be argued out of existence based on injustice, the Christian God would have never made it out of the first three centuries.  Because the Christian God's followers were persecuted consistently for the first 300 years of the churches existence.  

If there is no objective standard for justice, injustice ceases to exist as well as justice.  And if there is no objective justice or injustice, do you know what we are left with?  

My Justice
You Justice
Nazi Justice
Majority Justice
Isis Justice
Klan Justice 
Nature's Justice 
Street Justice
Power Justice
Rich Justice

When we reject God because of injustice in the world, we don't solve injustice, we lose the definition of justice.

We love the idea of a God of love, but we are uncomfortable with a God of judgment.  Here's the catch though: You can't have justice without judgment.  If there is not judgment of what is evil, then there is not justice.   

I think the reason we are uncomfortable with judgment is because we want God to do something about evil in the world, but it's usually someone else's evil and not our own.  We don't want our contribution to evil to be pointed out.  We don't want to be judged, we just want to be loved. 

So what does the God of Jesus and the God of justice have to say about all of this.  

When God saw the stay of humanity, when God saw that we all fall short and deserve judgment.  God didn't send a judge, he sent a savior.

Jesus says: I did not come to judge the world, I came to save the world.
-John 12:47

Before God ever judges anyone in the world, He offers salvation.  The God of justice saves us before He judges us and is perfect in His judgment. 

For the complete video messages from this series click here.
These messages are adapted from Andy Stanley's series Who Needs God

Sermon Rewind: All Grown Up Part 4

The God of Jesus

Does what you do define who you are, or does who you are determine what you do?  Wherever you land on that debate, we have to agree that what you do is a major indicator of who you are.

So if we want to know what God is like, maybe we should look at more than just who Jesus was, but also at what Jesus did.  Please remember, not many people followed Jesus before His resurrection, it wasn't until after His resurrection that the church formed.  Christianity didn't begin because people came up with something to believe, it began because people experienced the risen Jesus then wrote about it.  They saw him die, looked inside an empty tomb and decided He was who He said He was.

In John 14 Jesus tells his disciples, specifically responding to Phillip, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father."  In other words Jesus is saying, if you want to know what God is like, watch me.  If you want to know what God would do, pay attention to what I do.  In verse 11 Jesus says "Believe me when I say I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves."  In other words, don't believe just for the sake of belief.  I'm not asking to have faith for the sake of faith.  I'm asking you to test the evidence.  Do some digging.  Watch me and what I do and determine for yourself if I am who I say I am.  Don't have blind faith, believe on the evidence itself.  Believe in what I say and what I do.

So with that in mind, what did Jesus say about God?  Let's keep it simple, there's three main things.

First, He said God is Spirit (John 4:24).  Spirit is spaceless, timeless and immaterial.

Second, He said God is Father (Luke 11:2).  This is not the reflection of our earthly fathers, this is the perfection of father.  What Jesus is trying to convey is that God is personal.  God is not male, God does not have Gender.  Any personal image used to explain that God is relational will fall short.

Third, He said God is Love  (1 John 4:16).  Okay Jesus didn't say this, Jesus went one step further and acted this out by dying on the cross for us.  When we love each other we reflect the very nature of God.

If you have ever thought "I just believe God loves everybody" you have to concede that before Christianity that statement would've never existed.  The belief that "God loves everybody" was ushered into this world by Jesus.  It is a distinctly Christian idea.

May we love God and love one another the way Jesus showed us and taught us to.

For the full video message go here.

Sermon Rewind: All Grown Up part 3

A-Bible-Tells-Me-So-Jesus

So in the second week we covered this idea that Christianity doesn't exist because of the Bible anymore than you exist because of your birth certificate. The purpose of your birth certificate is to document something that happened. If your birth certificate ceased to exist, would you cease to exist? Of course not, in the same way if the Bible ceased to exist, Christianity would still continue on.

Why? It's simple, Christianity doesn't exist because of the Bible, the Bible (the New Testament specifically) exists because of Christianity. The Bible exists because people witnessed something that happened that was worth documenting. The Bible exists because within our human history this man named Jesus enters our world, says some crazy things, then backs up those crazy things by rising from the dead after he was crucified.

Jesus is crucified around 30AD, three days later he rose from the dead and the church was born.

On August 6th, 70AD the temple in Jerusalem is destroyed by the Roman legions. That historic event and others before it and surrounding it are not recorded in the documents of the New Testament because they had not happened yet. This fact tells us that the dating of all of the New Testament writings is before this time. This puts the dating of all the New Testament documents earlier than 70AD. And the earlier they are the more reliable they are.

The writers of the New Testament were not writing what they believed, they were recording what they saw. They were documenting historical events regarding the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Once Constantine rose to power as the undisputed emperor in 312 AD, he needed to find something that would unite the empire. He chose Christianity. Under severe persecution Christianity grew exponentially leading up to Constantine's rule.

This happened before anyone held a Bible in their hand. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd century Christians believed Jesus loved them before the Bible told them so. For the first 300 years of Christianity’s existence the debate was not centered on a library of books called the Bible, the debate centered on an event.

The question wasn’t “is the Bible true” the question was “did Jesus rise from the dead?” And all the evidence well documented by those first century witnesses and writers point to a resounding yes. For people like John, Peter, Luke and Paul the unequivocal answer was "yes" and they were willing to die to for their "yes."