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Palm Sunday, already!

Can you believe that this coming Lord’s Day is Palm Sunday and one week from this coming Lord’s Day is Easter? WOW! This has been an amazing and very unusual winter; and, it is already gone…

For this year, I have chosen to read and preach from the traditional text of the events of Palm Sunday which are found in Matthew 21:1-11.  I have, as you can imagine, preached over thirty “Palm Sunday” Sermons over the years, and while I have sometimes skipped the “Holiday” aspect and simply continued whatever series I was in, this year I am passionately focused on a single key detail from this event: The King is Coming!

Jesus of Nazareth, Jehovah God in human flesh, the Messiah of Israel, is coming as the King of the Jews into His Capital City! He is the Kingdom of God and He is coming to offer them their long-awaited Kingdom. We know, of course, that the Jews of that day rejected Jesus and His offer of the Kingdom. Instead, they gave Him over to the Roman authorities to be put to death.

Great biblical history… but, that is not the point of the sermon! The point is, the King and His Kingdom are still coming as promised, and the most important decision we will ever face – the same one they faced in 32 AD – is whether or not we accept or reject Jesus as our King!

Read over these verses prayerfully and carefully and think about these questions:

How did Jesus know that those who owned the animal would just hand it over to His disciples?

How did Jesus know that the people of Israel would reject His offer and put Him to death?

Why did the same people who worshipped Him on Palm Sunday demand His execution a mere five days later?

Why do Christians believe that Jesus is coming back to earth and set up His Kingdom?

Why do I, like so many Christians, believe that His return may be soon?

Why do so many unsaved “religious” people praise Jesus for what He did, but utterly reject Who He is?

REMEMBER: On Thursday, April 5^th at 7pm, we will meet in the Old Sanctuary for a Maundy Thursday Service! Maundy Thursday celebrates the first Lord’s Supper that Jesus kept on the night before His betrayal. We will pray, sing hymns, read John 13, and then celebrate the Lord’s Supper together.

Dig in to God’s Word! I hope you will read over this exciting portion of God’s Word and ask HIM to prepare your heart for the message this week! I hope you will get studied up, prayed up, and fired up over the opportunity to worship God together with your Church Family!

I hope to see you Sunday and Thursday and Easter Morning with a Bible in your hand, a smile on your face, and your family and friends by your side… Remember, more people will respond positively to an invitation to worship with you on Easter than on any other day of the year!

Every Christian is called to be a minister of the things of God! It has well and often been said of Christians, “You are either a minister or a ministry!” I could not agree more.

As we come to the 20^th Chapter of the Book of Acts, we get a biblical glimpse of Paul as he ministers to the peoples of the Roman World. We see him as his third and final missionary journey begins to wind down. He is determined to get to Jerusalem and then to Rome.

These verses reveal five specific types of ministry in which Paul participated. One of them was given to, (and restricted to) the Twelve Apostles; but, the other four are ministries that every believer is called – or more correctly, commanded – to carry out.

In 1^st Corinthians 11:1, Paul commanded the Corinthian believers to, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.” Strong words… but, they are biblical words and therefore they are the words of God! I hope that as you read over, meditate over, and pray over these sixteen verses you will grasp the importance of Christian ministry to both believers and unbelievers alike.

Here are some questions that I will attempt to answer from these verses this coming Lord’s Day morning:

1. What is the first ministry we see in this passage, and why is it so prevalent in all of Paul’s ministry? Why do we not see more of it in churches today?

2. Why did Paul always surround himself with younger men with whom he ministered? How can we apply that practice to our church today?

BTW: This particular ministry is one of the most important in the life of the church… sadly, it is almost never used!

3. In verse 7, we see the most common biblical ministry being exercised. Think about the many ways in which this ministry can be delivered to and through our church.

4. Spiritual Gifts are one of the most divisive issues among believers! Here is another case of Paul performing a great miracle. Why do we not see miracles like this today – or do we?

5. Obedience, simple obedience, is in itself a ministry! It requires real sacrifice and it produces real fruit in the life of the obedient believer and in the lives of those unbelievers who watch how we live.

REMEMBER: This coming Lord’s Day is the last Sunday in March so we will be taking the Lord’s Supper together and receiving our monthly Deacon Benevolence Fund Offering!

I hope you will read over this exciting portion of God’s Word and ask HIM to prepare your heart for the message this week! I hope you will get studied up, prayed up, and fired up over the opportunity to worship God together with your Church Family!

John MacArthur points out in his commentary on Acts that it is an undeniable truth that the Church prospers under persecution. I believe he is right about that.

Our passage for this coming Sunday is Acts 19:21-41. In these verses we will consider the two – and only two – gods that the unsaved world worships! Here we find Paul and his fellows in the City of Ephesus. As Paul is about to leave the City, great persecution and a near riot break out because these worldly worshippers rightly see that the gospel is an out and out attack on their false gods. Today, 2,000 years later, that has not changed! When the gospel collides with all false gods and their world views, trouble is on the way.

I must admit that I often dread what is ahead for Bible-believing Christians in America! As I think on these things, I do understand that the present and coming judgment of God on America is necessary to correct the murderous sins into which this Nation has fallen. The good news is that such pain, persecution, and judgment often brings God’s people back to their senses and then God can use us to bring our Nation to repentance.

Read over these verses a few times and ask the Lord to speak to you through them. Think about these questions which I will address on Sunday:

“What are the only two gods the world worshipped 2,000 years ago; and, are these really the ONLY two gods that the unsaved world worships today?”

“What kind of impact was the gospel having on the world of Paul’s day and what kind of impact is it having on America – and the world – today?”

‘What does this godless world love most and what do they hate most?”

“Why do some people love to “play church?”

“What does a godless culture fear and what do they respect?”

“What does all of this mean to me and my loved ones?”

Dig in! I hope you will read over this exciting portion of God’s Word and ask HIM to prepare your heart for the message this week! I hope you will get studied up, prayed up, and fired up over the opportunity to worship God together with your Church Family!

I hope to see you Sunday with a Bible in your hand, a smile on your face, and your family and friends by your side…

This coming Lord’s Day, as the Lord allows, we will be reading and studying Acts 19:1-20 where Paul arrives at Ephesus during his third Missionary Journey. This is yet another one of those passages that must be understood in the light of the transitional nature of The Book of Acts! Since the key issue is ignorance of the Holy Spirit, I have entitled this week’s sermon, “The Holy Who?”

Apollos had not heard anything about Jesus beyond John the Baptists’ testimony that Jesus of Nazareth is the Lamb of God – the Messiah of Israel. Paul meets twelve men who have also not heard of the ministry of Jesus and of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Paul lays his hands on them and the basic pattern of Pentecost is repeated. As you read through these verses and pray to prepare your spirit for worship on Sunday, consider these principles we find in these verses:

A great problem is created when God’s people are ignorant about the Holy Spirit!

There were things that only the Twelve Apostles could do!

People rejected the gospel message even in the presence of these Apostolic miracles!

Some divinely-given abilities were strictly reserved to the Apostles, and those who tried to appropriate them for themselves paid an awful price!

God is also glorified in the humiliation of His enemies!

And, God is still in the business of radically changing people!

I hope you will read over this exciting portion of God’s Word and ask HIM to prepare your heart for the message this week! I hope you will get studied up, prayed up, and fired up over the opportunity to worship God together with your Church Family!

Feel free to email, FB, message, or tweet me any questions or comments you have about this upcoming sermon…

I hope to see you Sunday with a Bible in your hand, a smile on your face, and your family and friends by your side…

As the Lord allows, this coming Sunday, (3/4/12) we will continue through the eighteenth Chapter of Acts with a sermon on the subject… “How to ‘Patch Up’ a Preacher!” This is the story of Paul’s 3^rd Missionary Journey and the events at Ephesus.

We will meet Apollos, a mighty preacher of the Word, who still had some lessons to learn and how God used a humble tentmaker and his wife to correct his theology and increase his effectiveness! In other words, they patched him up!

There are three key lessons in these verses:

1. There is no time and no place where it is OK to quit serving God!

2. There is no time and no place where it is OK to tolerate error!

3. There is no time and no place where it is NOT OK to share the gospel!

I hope you will read over this exciting Chapter of God’s Word and prayerfully ask HIM to prepare your mind and heart for the message this week! I hope to see you Sunday with a Bible in your hand, a smile on your face, and your family and friends by your side…

I am thinking about starting a “Christian Classics Reading and Discussion Group”. I am trying to see if there are some interested persons who would want to be part of such a group!

The idea is simple. We would take about four to six books per year and read through them and have special times of discussion about them. The books will be true Christian Classics… “Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis; “Christianity and Liberalism” by J Gresham Machen; “Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan, for example.

We would read a portion of the book each month and then meet and talk about the book giving our insights and the lessons we take from it. Obviously, I think this could be a real joy for booklovers and for anyone wanting to grow in their understanding of the Christian faith.

We will have a Facebook group for easy communication about the book… questions as they come up, etc. (You do not have to be on Facebook to be part of the group, it is just one more way to communicate!) Let me know what you think and if you would be willing to participate.

I can get the books at a reduced price for those who do not have them already. For example, “Mere Christianity” in paperback is about $10 each.

I am eager to hear from you!

Philippians 4:8 (ESV) “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

Psalm 101:3-4 (NKJV) “I will set nothing wicked before my eyes; I hate the work of those who fall away; It shall not cling to me. A perverse heart shall depart from me; I will not know wickedness.”

To say the very least, I have never been a computer, “Geek!” After twenty-two years of owning and using a computer nearly every day; and even though I am now using a “state-of-the-art” laptop, I am still pretty much of a, “point and click” kind of guy. But, I have remembered a very important lesson that I was taught early on about working with computers: “Garbage In, Garbage Out!”

In the computing world, GIGO simply means that if I put the wrong information into my work, I am going to get wrong information out of my work. Simple. In computing, that is!

GIGO is not quite so simple in living the Christian life! The principle is clearly true: if we take “Garbage” into our minds, we are going quickly become garbage thinking and garbage living people!

We live today in a world that is saturated in its own filth! I could write pages and pages about the intellectual and moral garbage that the present American culture considers to be art and entertainment, but, that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that if a person – including a Christian person – fills their mind with this rubbish, they should not expect to have a head full of beautiful and God-honoring thoughts.

This is a challenge for many Christians, including me, as we work our way through this sewer of depraved culture we call, “the real world.” Yes, we are called to be “in” the world, but we are not called to imbibe the world! Christians have to be in the world, (we are, in fact, commanded to go into the world) but we do not have to allow, “the world” to be in us!

So, the question is: how do we go out every day into this godless and immoral culture and yet keep it from saturating our thinking and living? Simple!

We need a strong offense! It is found in God’s Word! Philippians 4:8 (ESV) “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

Proactively fill your mind with the Word of God, the things of God, and with thanksgivings to God! Read the Bible, meditate on the Bible, and memorize parts of the Bible!

We need a strong defense! It is found in God’s Word! “Psalm 101:3-4 (NKJV) “I will set nothing wicked before my eyes; I hate the work of those who fall away; It shall not cling to me. A perverse heart shall depart from me; I will not know wickedness.”

Stop watching and listening to godless junk! Stop focusing on and thinking about those things that dishonor God and damage your life!

Who knows… maybe Christians can redefine GIGO to mean, “God In, Glory Out!”

(Juliet) “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, And for that name which is no part of thee Take all myself.”

–  William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet ca.1600

The First Baptist Church of Atwood is affiliated with, and works in friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention! Every Southern Baptist Church is an autonomous (self-governing) body that voluntarily partners with the 42,000 other autonomous churches that make up the SBC.

The Southern Baptist Convention was born in 1845 amid the national controversy over slavery which led sixteen years later to the civil war. Unfortunately, the Baptist churches located in the South took the side of their states and their culture in this controversy. They have long ago publicly confessed this as sin and apologized to the Nation for this shameful past and for the many years of supporting those in the South who espoused segregation and opposed equal rights for African-Americans.

Over the past century, the Southern Baptist Convention has come to have churches and missionaries in every State of the Union and in over one hundred and eighty Countries around the world! In a very real way, the name “Southern” does not accurately describe these believers, who have now come to be the largest non-Catholic denomination in the world.

For several years now, there has been some discussion among Southern Baptists about attempting to find a new name for the denomination that better describes who they are now rather than just who they have always been. Few things have caused more emotionally charged talk than the idea of changing the name of the denomination!

At the Southern Baptist annual Convention this past summer, SBC President Bryant Wright appointed a task force to discuss this matter and bring a recommendation to the 2012 annual convention for discussion and vote. The Task Force recently completed their work and will bring their proposed recommendation at a meeting of the Executive Committee in February.

There is not much drama here. Since almost everyone on the Task Force is from the Southeastern states, I would be stunned if they bring a recommendation to take their beloved, “Southern” out of the name! (And even if they did, it would never pass.) By the way, they have already publicly stated they will not recommend taking “Baptist” out of the name.

I pastored the First “Southern” Baptist Church in Waukegan, Illinois for seven years. The Lord blessed the church with exciting growth over those years, but almost all of the growth was from people with either Southern Baptist or at least Southern backgrounds. I have already publicly stated that it is my personal opinion from this experience that having “Southern” in the name of a church in the Midwest is a real hindrance.

I believe it is a moot point. As I said earlier, I would be stunned if the Task Force recommended taking “Southern” out of the name of the denomination; and, I would be even more stunned if it was passed at the Convention in 2012.

And, what if they did? Would changing the name change the character of the denomination in any meaningful way? Probably not; but, it would help to remove an unnecessary barrier to those living outside of the south when they are seeking a church.

Dispensation #2 – Conscience! Genesis 3:6 – 9:19

The Dispensation of Innocence ended with the temptation and sin of Adam and Eve. Man had seen, and ought to have learned, that even in a perfect environment human beings rebel against God! Once that lesson has been demonstrated, God allows humans to follow the dictates of their own conscience, or moral reasoning.

The word, “conscience” is simply a compound word meaning, “with knowledge.” And the knowledge with which the conscience is equipped is the moral nature of God which is part of His image in mankind – but, which was marred in the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. Bible.org points out on their website that there are several God-given functions of the human conscience:

1) It produces guilt. John 8:9-11; Romans 2:14-16

 2) It produces a need to repent. Genesis 4:1-4

 3) But, it cannot create righteousness in a person and it can be seared (made callous) by continually being ignored. Romans 3:10; 1^st Timothy 4:2

Human beings want to live by their own conscience, (let your conscience be your guide) because it can be calloused and overcome. It is impossible for the conscience to serve as a faithful guide for living because it was marred at the time of Adam’s and Eve’s fall into sin.

During this time (approximately 1,000 years) humans, who were living by the leading of their fallen consciences, became worse and worse to the point that God said in Genesis 6:5-7, “And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.”

So, the Dispensation of Conscience ends with God’s judgment upon mankind in sending the world-wide flood. Being a God of mercy, He spared Noah and his wife, his sons, and their wives to begin the human race again!

Dispensation (Lesson) One: In a perfect environment and with no history of sinful behavior, human beings rebel against the authority and commandment of God!

Dispensation (Lesson) Two: While being allowed to live according to the dictates of their conscience, human beings sear their conscience and devolve deeper and deeper into sin rebelling against the authority and commandments of God!

Next Time: (as the Lord allows) “The Third Dispensation” – Human Government.

Matthew 1:1-25

This is, of course, the Christmas Story – the Miracle of the Incarnation! Cf. Matthew 1:1-25; Luke 3:23-28; John 1:1-3, 14

Key Verses: John 1:14; Matthew 1:20-21; Luke 2:11

Jesus Christ is God come to earth in human flesh! And the reason He has come is to, “save His people from their sins.”

Jesus Ben Joseph of Nazareth is the only Jew alive today that has His genealogy intact to prove that He is a descendant, (and heir to the throne) of David!

This is the legal genealogy of Jesus to King David through Joseph. If this were the source of Jesus’ bloodline to David, Jesus could not sit on the Throne of David because of the curse on Jeconiah (Coniah) and his sons! Cf. Jeremiah 22:28-30

*Luke 3:23-28 is the genealogy (the bloodline) through Mary to David’s son Nathan. So, Jesus has both the legal right to David’s throne through His step- father Joseph and the birthright to David’s throne through His mother Mary!