I love being the Pastor of Bethel Baptist Church. This past Sunday marked three years that my family and I have been serving here and as I said from the pulpit last night, God has blessed us so far beyond what we deserve! We’ve come to love and know the people here and we’ve built a trust-relationship with them. They appreciate the Word of God and they show appreciation for their leadership. I am so humbled by them!
Yesterday was an awesome day. We closed out our Sunday School class called Marriage Matters and I think all the couples were challenged to deepen our love for each other. We had a great attendance as both morning services felt fairly full and Sunday evening was a great crowd as well. The music in all three services was probably the best I’ve experienced since coming here.
Before church a boy named Wesley came with his Mom to tell me about how he’d asked Jesus to be his Savior on Thursday night and that he was ready to be baptized. When I asked when, his Mom said, “aren’t you baptizing today?” So yes, we baptized two in water much warmer than the week before when a valve issue caused our baptistery to be 53 degrees.
As an added bonus, I ate “chicken over the coals” at the historic AQ Chicken House in Springdale. By day’s end, everyone kept talking about how they had really felt the presence of the Spirit of God in our services. I pondered the fact that we use that term sometimes without explaining it. We believe that the Holy Spirit takes up residence and lives personally in the heart of every believer, so when we gather together in corporate worship and we are all mutually submissive to God and to each other, His presence may be felt in a very real way by believers. It is this powerful presence of God that makes the difference in a winning Sunday and a normal one.
I thank God for all the winning Sundays we’ve had at Bethel, and I look forward to experiencing more of them for the years to come!
Thursday I visited the Native American Museum here in Bentonville with our Keenagers group and enjoyed lunch with them. Friday we dropped in on the Refuge Lockdown and were blessed not only by seeing 30 teens show up to stay up all night, but were also privileged to exit and sleep in a nice comfy bed! Saturday we watch the University of Arkansas Razorbacks get decimated by Alabama. And today, we had a great day together in worship as a church family.
Today was filled with the second installment of our Marriage Matters class, where couples laugh at each other’s inability to get basic communication quite right. The time of worship was rather powerful and we threw a shower for Kenneth and Christa, who will be wed at Bethel this weekend, which reminds me how happy I am for my cousin John in Louisville who has found a bride and will be wed this weekend as well.
We closed the book of Exodus in our Journey throught the Word and will be jumping into Leviticus in another couple of weeks. I must say, closing the second book of the Bible in this series is a bit like saying goodbye to a friend - I’ve learned much. In fact, I’ve learned far more than my congregation. We closed this evening with a look at the fact that God didn’t allow the nation to move until He was ready, and He wanted them to move as a community. What a lesson for every church. We need to stay in step with God and move as a community directed by the presence of God.
I can’t wait until next Sunday!
I love Resurrection Sunday! I especially loved this one. It really is funny to me how seriously people take this one Sunday. Many who do not attend church at all the other fifty-one weeks of the year will join in on the special family occasion of dressing up and heading to church together. For my part, that’s okay, I welcome our rare guests! WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
I’ve thought this before, but I really think this past Sunday was one of the greatest Sundays of my life! We had a near record crowd and three new additions to our church family. I got to baptize one and receive another for baptism, in addition to watching someone re-commit her life to Jesus. I also preached a message consisting of only one point and it worked! God blessed it. Even more than that, we enjoyed having people in our service who are not accustomed to going to church. That, more than anything else, made my day! WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Our annual Friend Day was this past Sunday and we ended up hosting a ton of friends and first-time guests. We had 224 for AM worship. More importantly I received some feedback telling me that a few of our guests who had not been to church in many years were delightedly surprised by the service. I always enjoy having guests but I’m really thrilled when we connect spiritually with people who don’t go to church yet.
God blessed in the preaching too. The story of Abraham’s (almost) sacrifice of His Son Isaac, and how that event was the climactic moment in his becoming the “friend of God” came alive. I could tell people were responsive and God moved in their hearts throughout the service. I’m looking forward to our Pastor’s Oasis this week, but I can’t wait until next Sunday!
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In our midweek Bible study last night, we went through a supplementary study on creation and evolution. There were many things I wished I’d had time to cover in the Sunday messages but simply couldn’t. In preparing, I studied areas of science that fascinate me. I wanted to have some basic knowledge on everything from the fossil record to quantum physics (like I said, fascinating!). I was so blessed by the exchange. People asked questions, gave their thoughts, and generally expressed their faith in Scripture as God’s perfect Word.
At the end of the night, I decided to close discussion on the issue. This Sunday, we’ll be moving on to the more personal nature of Genesis, chapter two. I couldn’t help but to add this one thought, however, after reading Job 38. The creation-evolution debate is much like the theological battle that took place between Job and his friends. They reason with one another about the nature of God and God’s world. Then God finally speaks.
What does He say? To summarize the chapter, it is “Were you there when I created the worlds? Then how do you think you know anything?” He goes on to illustrate His majestic and dynamic creative power. Can you make the sun rise? Have you ever seen the center of the earth? Can you make an intricate snowflake? Can you make rain or suspend clouds of water over the earth? Good questions! We can study, we can observe, and I believe we ought to explore the amazing world God created around us. Science is good, until it goes to our heads.
God ultimately settles the argument. We might say in modern vernacular, the buck stops with Him! God, the Creator and only eyewitness of creation, knows exactly what happened in the origin of all things. So at the end of our quantum theories, evolutionary theories, and Big Bang theories, all of which are questioned and debated regularly by men more skilled than I, God sits above the circle of the earth, stretching out the universe like a curtain and calling out, “Seek me and find me with your whole heart!” The debate ultimately ends with worship!
This past Sunday, I began preaching in Genesis with chapter one, verse one. The message started a lengthy commitment to preaching all of the word. I don’t think I’ve ever been as satisfied by a message in all of my ministry. I had studied and prepared for about six weeks for just the first chapter of Genesis. So how was it? Exhilarating!
The choir was tuned up and did an awesome job. Singing Shout to the Lord with them was great. They also sang a favorite of mine, There Are No Orphans of God. Angie (my wife) and Tamara (the Choir Director) sang Nothing But A Miracle Will Do. These special numbers highly exalted the King, but it was the congregational song How Great Thou Art that moved my heart most deeply. I’d been studying about the magnitude of creation, the vastness of the universe, and the miraculous nature of all that God brought into being. So when we sang “I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed” I did something rather unorthodox, especially for me. I stood. I stood in reverence and fear of the awesome God we serve. I was overwhelmed emotionally and spiritually. The Spirit of God moved in my heart in that moment, and I stood, raising my hands high toward the God of heaven, not caring what anyone in the auditorium thought! It was unabashed worship, and it ought to be that way all the time!
I can’t wait until Sunday, to move on to the next passage. The Word of God is so inexhaustible, it seems I’ll never preach the unsearchable wisdom of God in this one short lifetime, but I’ll live and die trying!
Last night, the local association officially voted to name Larry Hendren the new Editor of The Baptist Banner, which will free up that much more time each month for me to spend doing the things that matter. Please keep praying that I’ll have all of my priorities right, spending adequate time in prayer, in study, with people, and with my family. And may God get the glory as we learn to fear Him, love Him, and stand in awe and reverence of Him!
This week is very monumental for me. I am preparing to begin preaching through the entire Bible this Sunday morning. It has been a ministry-long dream. Since reading the autobiography of Dr. W. A. Criswell, who preached through the Scriptures over an almost eighteen year period at First Baptist Church in Dallas, it has seemed an unreachable and impossible task. I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought and prayed about this assignment.
In my mind, I’ve tried to place myself into the shoes of my church members, some of whom may not survive to hear the end of it all in the Revelation. Won’t we get bored? Won’t we get bogged down in the law, the plans of the tabernacle, the genealogical tables? Will people really be interested? Will the messages be relevant to my life? Nobody has asked any of these questions yet, except for me, but they have lingered in my thinking.
Then I think on the positive side. God’s Word is the source of all the divine wisdom we have at our disposal. He grows people through His Word. My calling to ministry is a call to shepherd God’s people by feeding them the truth of God. No book is more special, no other subject matter is appropriate. Why not preach “all the counsel of God?”
One dominating thought, however, is “what if I mess this up?” What if I don’t cover enough material? Life is too short to rely on “do-over’s” and I will probably get only one or two shots at a series like this in my lifetime. From that thought flows the bottom line issue - I have only this life to spend for God’s glory. This may very well be the last series of sermons I ever preach. Will it be worth it in the end? Absolutely! My life and the lives of the people God assigns to me to shepherd will be forever changed and enriched by hearing the whole counsel of God.
The question I’ve come to grips with is, if preaching through the entire Bible in a single series was the only feat I ever accomplished, it would be worth it - I would have to do nothing in addition to it to have fulfilled my calling as a Pastor.
Already, I’ve become familiar with the greatness of modern science. Many Christians today are at war with the scientific community over evolution, the Big Bang, and other modern ideas. I’m not threatened by these, but rather encouraged, albeit for a strange reason. Both of these theories, hard to swallow as they are, actually substantiate the greatness of the Bible. Let me explain…
The Big Bang proposes that the universe is not infinite, that it had a beginning in time. Until 1913, the world thought the universe was infinite, that it had no beginning and would have no end. But because of the discovery that the universe is expanding rapidly, we can postulate that if you work backwards, everything was once together, before the expansion began. In other words, the universe had a starting point. What baffles modern scientists is, what then? What did things look like before the universe began its explosive expansion? To this the Bible says, in the beginning… God!
And what of evolution? Why in the world would I appreciate this crazy and impossible to believe prognostication? Because evolution is really a fragment of a larger idea that there is a logical progression to the development of life on this planet, and that development concurs with the first chapter of Genesis in its order and structure. The only differences are that what science assigns to billions of years really happened in six literal, twenty-four hour days. First the rocks, then water, then marine and plant life, then the beasts of the earth, and finally man. I was taught in Astronomy 101 that all of this took place over about thirteen billion years. The Bible declares God did it in six days. I choose the Bible, but I stand amazed at science’s validation of the order of creation. I’m no more impressed with the Bible, I’m just more impressed with scientists.
Ultimately, what I’m discovering is that Genesis was never intended to be a science or history textbook. It was not intended to stir up debate over the literal nature of the word “day” or whether there was a gap included for the geological ages. Rather, Genesis’ creation account is a hymn of praise to the Creator! Don’t miss this. The story of creation wasn’t given so that we might use it as a source of scientific data (though I believe its perfect, literal accuracy). It was given that we might know our Creator, be impressed with His creative acts, and choose to serve and glorify Him for eternity!
What an awesome discovery for me! I can’t wait to share it all with the congregation of Bethel Baptist Church. Please pray that I will have the necessary time to invest in the study of God’s Word so that I might not fail to present the whole counsel of God with pastoral wisdom and compassion. Pray that I’ll always see the relevance of each passage to our daily living. Pray that lives will be changed for the glory of God as we “journey through the word” together!
Today begins a very hectic season in our lives - well, hectic if traveling is hectic. We’ll be leaving the middle of this afternoon for the great metropolis and returning tomorrow evening. Week after next, it’s on to St. Louis for a three-day jaunt where I get to see the Cardinals play at the new Busch Stadium! The following week is Vacation Bible School, interrupted by a one-night stay in Tulsa for our Tenth Anniversary (which you’ll hear more about later). The following week, I take Angie to St. Louis and I return to Northwest Arkansas the next day while she goes with her family to Griffin, Georgia for several days. Then, a week later, I meet her in Kentucky for a week to visit with my family. All of this in June… and I’m not even missing a Sunday service!
It’s really a good thing I love traveling. I especially love Branson. Why, you might ask? Well, it’s not the country music, the craft festivals, or all the super-expensive shows. It’s certainly not the outlet malls either. It’s really the fried green Tomatoes served up hot at MacFarlan’s and the cheap breakfast buffet at Starvin’ Marvin’s! You should have known it would all surround fried foods! I also love the drive through the Ozarks, a movie at the Imax Theater, and especially being with my wife and daughter! They make these moments wonderfully special.
See you in Branson! I’ll save you a fried green tomato… maybe.
This past Sunday, we had the great privilege of ordaining three young men (Jeff Chadd, Jason James, and David Stewart) as Deacons at Bethel. My heart was so moved by the experience. Aside from my own ordination, I’ve only been a part of a few other such ceremonies. Though there are some slight differences between the ordination of a Pastor and that of a Deacon, I still feel there is a special camaraderie that is shared between the “ordained brethren.”
I’m filled with a lot of hope as a result of their ordination. They represent a generation that is often hard to find involved in Christian leadership today, but they represent a growing population at Bethel. I’m most excited that they were not the only young men who would be qualified for the position. In the initial nominating process, I allowed the existing Deacons to offer names with no input myself, and I’ve been blessed to be around these godly men.
Lee Roberson (who recently went home to be with the Lord) said, “Everything rises and falls on leadership.” How thankful I am that God has given us nine great men of God to serve in this very special position. They are each very different in their personalities and giftedness, but they are all ultimately concerned with the glory of God and the reaching of people for Christ. I cannot describe the help they offer to me, in the way of assisting in the pastoral care of Bethel’s membership as well as in their prayers and personal encouragement.
