Outreach - Time Well Spent!

There are many prospects that come through the doors of Trinity Baptist Church. They range from families who visit our church, to children who are involved with All Star Basketball, even ladies who attend some of our ladies events. The problem, sadly enough, is that all too often we don’t have enough people consistently involved in outreach to see all of them! Some of this has to do with a lack of concern for the lost, but much of it has to do with the lack of time. I came across these statistics and to be honest was shocked with how much time we waste! According to research done by Priority Management, did you know that in the life time of the average American he/she will:

• Six months sitting at stoplights
• Two years unsuccessfully returning phone calls
• Seven years waiting in line (ever been to Disney World)
• Nine years in front of the TV

Wow, what a waste! In January, we will be beginning a brand new way to do outreach. We are asking that you give about 8 hours - per YEAR! When you add in holidays and add in June-August (where all teams will go together one time a month) you come up with 8 hours a year. Our desire is that every member of our church can participate in this program. We will divide each Sunday School class into either a G-Team, R-Team, O-Team, or W-Team and we will ask that they try their best to be at outreach on their assigned week. Now certainly, if you can’t make it you can come on another team’s night. In fact, if you like you can come every team’s night if you want. We will have several opportunities for you during this time: (1) We will have new in town packets that you can simply drop by and welcome new families into the area (2) We will have letter writers (3) We will have prospects: those who have visited our church and need a visit (4) We will have those who have not been in some time and we need to check on them. (5) We will need some to volunteers to keep the nursery. I can assure you that you can be involved in one of these 5 areas! When you receive your list to sign up for this new ministry, please be willing to give 8 hours a YEAR for an organized plan to share the Gospel!

Success...Part 4

As I conclude this reminder (in my life and for our church) about what success really looks like, I thank God for men like Kent Hughes. I may never meet him personally, but in this book (and many of his others), God has used him to stamp my life for all eternity. The final two areas he calls success are probably the most attacked areas in our churches today: misinformation has caused many men, women and churches to be spiritual failures while succeeding in the eyes of the world. So rather than reviewing (you can certainly go back and read the previous blogs) I want us to delve right in.

Success is Holiness: God calls us to be holy; this is foundational to all other success. Hughes says: “…there are untold numbers of successful pastors and Christian workers who are abysmal failures. For those of us who would serve God, the truth is inescapable. The pursuit of holiness is essential if we are ever to know anything of real success.” He goes on through the life of Samson and David and tracks their moral failures, and they serve as a great warning to all believers. There is no doubt that holiness is not easy, it involves dying to self not just daily but many times, moment by moment. However, the great truth is that God will help us accomplish this because He demands it. This is where the Word of God and the Spirit of God function in our lives - we can not afford to grow dependant upon our self discipline or high morals because we can all sing along with the great hymn “Come Thou Fount” when the writer says: “prone to wander Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” Everyone of us are but one decision away from total chaos…this is why we must live by the cross, this is why we so desperately need a church to hold us accountable and get involved in our lives!

Success is Attitude: How often I have failed in this area. He tells us the importance of keeping our attitude in check when difficulty arises - how important it is to not get caught up in our situation but to encourage others through theirs. He speaks of jealousy among God’s people and a desire to compare ourselves with others! When Bro. David Miller was here, he and I were speaking of a church where the Pastor has been there for over 20 years, he has taught his people the Word of God, they understand the biblical purpose of the church, they are unified, they are passionate in their evangelism, and while evangelizing they get the Gospel right! I was sharing with Bro. David how I have read some of this Pastor’s writings and how I would love to meet him. This church’s congregation probably has less people than our student ministry… because of this it is safe to say they can’t give the amount we give to missions and they don’t have the resources. But as I have gotten to know about this Pastor and his church, I can say with certainty that this particular church is much more healthy than Trinity at this time. This is not a knock on us, but a clarification of success. This Pastor has had over 20 years to teach the same people from Word of God and has had a generation of people raise their children under his preaching. They are a healthy church, and regardless of what the convention says about them or what the community says about them, they are a successful church because they are persevering in truth.

Success....Part 3

I stated as I began this series of blogs, that I can’t describe what an incredible blessing the book “Liberating Ministry From The Success Syndrome” has been to me. When I look back over the years in the ministry the Lord has blessed me with, I am reminded what the world or even our denomination calls success may not be accurate. In my first church, we were going through a time of incredible growth, we saw many people come to Christ - this little church in Byron, Ga. was among the top 50 in the Southern Baptist Convention in Baptisms. Then, not long ago in our previous church, we had to deal with an individual caught in immorality and, when we dealt with this man there was an overwhelming desire to ignore the sin, to let it go. Nevertheless, the church stood for truth in the midst of great difficulty - many were angered, others accused us of being uncaring or arrogant, and many left the church. Which church was more successful? It depends on your definition of success. Seeing people come to Christ is always exciting, and it is evidence of a work of God; however, when the Church expects one another to live holy and holds one another accountable, is it any less successful? We have already looked at the fact that success is faithfulness, serving, and loving. But in his book, Kent Hughes goes a few more steps.

Success is Believing: The Bible says “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” Most of my difficulty arises from the failure of this area. I will tell you and preach to you so often that we serve a sovereign God, but when something happens, when difficulty comes - too often I respond in a way that doesn’t display what I say I believe. Often I get anxious over things, frustrated over issues, and aggravated with people. Too often I act as if some accident has taken place in my life rather than believing that God is at work for His glory and my good. If my belief is deepening, it will change my behavior in the present, and it will change my response in adversity. He closes this chapter out by asking three questions that serve as a heart check: (1) Am I believing that God can take care of me? Truthfully? (2) Am I believing He loves me? (3) Am I believing that He rewards - that he is morally active on the part of those who seek him? I must confess there have been times while my head has known the correct answer, my heart doubted these things.

Success is Prayer: If I am not praying I am not a success in the eyes of God. He points out that prayer is fundamental to be a success in the ministry. We need to look no further than Christ; when pressures grew, He did no more than to withdraw and pray. Hughes gives a few reasons why prayer is so important: (1) We pray because of what prayer does to us. Prayer is not to change God’s mind - He is unchanging. God knows that what we need more than anything else is to fix our focus upon Him and He will conform our heart. Prayer is not when I get God to do something for me, but when He moves in my life in such a way that I am aligned with His will. (2) We pray because of what prayer does in the church. Prayer sets the spiritual atmosphere of the church. How blessed I am that so many in our church have sent e-mails, cards and spoken to me and shared that they pray for me daily. I covet those prayers and can’t imagine where I would be without so many saints of God interceding for me. (3) We pray because Jesus prayed: Several years ago there was a popular fad among believers and others to wear a W.W.J.D bracelet, shirt or some other type of article. We know the answer to “What Would Jesus Do?” - He would pray - He demonstrated this for us.

In short, if we were to define our lives by this…if we were considered a success in our lives, our families, our ministries by how much we prayed and how much we really believed what we say we believe, the question is: Would we be successful? If our churches and leadership were as consumed with this as we are with buildings and numbers I wonder how much more successful we would really be?

Success....part 2

In my last post, I began a series of entries that I commented on from a book called, “Liberating Ministry From The Success Syndrome.” I received this book early on in my ministry and it has profoundly impacted my view of what real success is in the life of a ministry, and in fact, the life of every church and believer. Without rehashing all of that I want to jump right into the next couple of subjects that define real success for us as believers.

Success Is Serving: The point that is made by Hughes is that real service doesn’t require that someone recognize you. He illustrates this point by stating: “The conductor of a great symphony orchestra was once asked which was the most difficult instrument to play. ‘The second violin’ he answered. ‘I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play second violin with enthusiasm----that is a problem. And if we have no second violin, we have no harmony’” Too many times in church no one wants to play second violin. There is no picture of service like Christ displayed at the Last Supper except that which He displayed at the cross. He died for us and it added nothing to Him, it didn’t complete Him, He was already perfect. So often we come to church looking for our needs to get met, upset if someone hasn’t ministered effectively to us, or has not appreciated us properly. If I were to combine the first two points from this book I would find that biblical success is when I am faithful in everything - including my service! Not only is success serving, we must understand that…

Success Is Loving: This is something that should be ever growing. The tragedy about our love for God is that is can be so veiled. It IS possible to preach, to sing, to be a pastor, teacher, writer – and yet, still NOT love God. But Hughes points out if we really love, we are successful. He mentions four things love does in us, I will highlight only three because of space: (a) It places our ministries beyond the judgments of man. We don’t operate according to man’s standards, nor for man’s approvals…one can not put a statistic on our love for God. If I love Christ, I will love His bride! (b) It liberates us from the destructive tendency to compare ourselves with others. As I realize that I am called to live for Christ, and He has equipped me to accomplish the purpose of bringing glory to Him. I will not try to be someone I am not, I will not compare myself and find someone I believe I am “better than” to build my ego up - nor will I find someone better than me to strive to become. My desire will be to love Christ above all else and serve Him using the gifts He has given me, for His glory. (c) It frees the whole church up, because loving God is something all of us can do. This success is not just for a select group, every believer has equal opportunity to do this. The reason I don’t love Jesus more than I do is because I don’t want to. That hurts, huh? You have heard me say this in sermons before – but what do I mean by it? Just what it says! I choose how I spend my time, what I read, what I study, who I talk about and what activities I partake in….if I truly want to love God more, I will spend more time deepening that relationship. If we really took this relationship seriously, wouldn’t we make more of an effort to grow in it continuously rather than becoming complacent and comfortable? My love can grow deeper, or it can grow cold, it depends on His grace but it depends on my desire! I can enhance this by a devotion to His Word and His people.

May we at Trinity grow in our Faithfulness, Service and Love! Then we will be a successful church! More to come….

Success - part 1

Over the next several posts I want to discuss “success” with you. Now, the subject matter of these posts are not original from me - but God did use them to help form me. I mentioned in my last post what a joy it is watching our students learn great biblical truths early on in their life and how that bodes well for the future of Trinity. Early on in my ministry one of my dearest friends in the world, Dr. Herb Reavis gave me a book written by Kent Hughes entitled “Liberating Ministry From The Success Syndrome.” If I could point to a single book - authored by man that is - that forever changed my view of ministry and life, it would be this book. I go back to it often - it has helped my outlook and perspective more times than you can imagine! I encourage every young man I know going into the ministry to read this book. But as I have flipped through it through the years, I realized that while this book is written primarily to those who are pastors, it is a book that should help define success for every believer. I believe if we, as God’s people will look at these subjects and define our church’s success, family’s success, and life in general’s success by these standards, we would truly impact the world for the cause of Christ! I will only deal with the first one in this post:

Success Is Faithfulness: Now, this is obviously true for the Pastor - to be successful in the eyes of The One who matters, I must be faithful to Him. I must faithfully preach the Word of God, stand by it, live by it! But, does God require anything less than faithfulness from every believer? Over and over Scripture links success to obedience. Now, let’s be clear - just because the WORLD calls you successful, doesn’t mean you’re obedient to God’s Word. In fact, if you recall Moses struck the rock in the wilderness when God told him to speak to it! Water still came out… it seemed successful from the results, but it failed miserably in eyes of God because Moses was not faithful to keep God’s Word. If we are going to be faithful to the Word of God, we must KNOW the Word of God and continually be growing in our knowledge of it. Are we doing this? Hughes ends up saying: “Success then, comes when we faithfully study God’s Word and faithfully obey it, applying what we understand to all areas of our lives under the direction of the Holy Spirit.” Wow! What if all of us would judge ourselves and our church by this standard? There is a tendency to measure ourselves against another believer, but God will not compare us in that way. He doesn’t look at Trinity and compare us to other churches in our city. One of the chief ways He judges our success is faithfulness to His Word. By nature we don’t like to be judged this way - we like something concrete… we like the numbers, we like the measurable statistics, that way we can keep the score. However, that is not how our God works. I want to encourage you this week to pray that Trinity Baptist Church is successful in regard to our faithfulness! Pray that your Pastor and leadership will be faithful, and pray that you will be found faithful in your calling as a believer!

Growing Men and Ladies in Godliness

As I have outlined the biblical vision for Trinity in previous posts, I wanted to share a point of rejoicing this past week during our staff meeting…but, let me first explain…

When God chose to allow me the joy of being Pastor of Trinity, I knew there were some things that we needed to immediately establish: first, I wanted to make it crystal clear, from a biblical perspective, what God required out of our men and women with regard to their biblical roles specifically in marriage (this began during our marriage series). Secondly, I wanted to make sure we, as a church, understood not only the authority and inerrancy of the Word of God, but the sufficiency of the Word of God in every area of our lives (I pray this is being done as we walk through Psalm 119). Third, I knew we had to understand the biblical concept of what being a Peace Maker looked like. In our churches around America we have “Peace Fakers”, we have gossips, we have strife, but we fail to understand what Peace Making is all about (obviously this is what I pray is being accomplished during our Sunday morning services). I pray we will continue to grow in our knowledge about these subjects, as well as others that we will be dealing with in the coming months and years. I say all of this because as we have studied these different series, so many of you have shared with me how you wish you would have known these things years ago…to which I echoed those sentiments. How much further in my walk would I be, and how many mistakes and sinful strongholds I would have avoided, if I had known and applied these truths!

Now, back to our staff meeting….I explained all of this because Bro. Brad Walker has headed up a great event for our students! To be honest, I forget the catchy name he has for the event for the young ladies (something about pampering), but for the young men he is hosting a “Man VS Wild” weekend. While this will be a fun and exciting weekend, it is weekend that will be teaching our young men and young ladies what it means to be a godly man and a godly woman! I can’t think of a more appropriate topic in our society – a society that is so confused about what real biblical manhood and womanhood looks like! As I think about events like this and what Bro. Jeff Summers is teaching our children, I feel very confident that the next generation of Trinity Baptist Church will be well grounded. They are being taught things that were not a priority when many of us were growing up in church. My boys know more doctrine at their age (9, 11) than I did when I went into High School. As we teach our students these life changing truths, we must also remind them “to whom much is given, much is required.” As they learn these truths, make sure you help teach them and apply them to their lives on a daily basis. Then rejoice as you watch the Spirit of God and the Word of God take root in their life!

Hard Preaching

You hear very little today, even in our good churches, about real preaching. Even among regular church goers, the connotation of “preaching” is negative. How many times have you heard someone say: “Don’t Preach To Me!” Well, the truth is, if there is anything we need today, it is to be preached to! Paul warned in his letter to Timothy: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from truth and be turned aside to fables.” 1st Tim. 4:2-3. The most unpopular thing to do today in our culture is to warn people of danger and outright lies concerning the Gospel - it is considered unloving, condescending, arrogant, and so on. When our boys were little and they would walk over to the fire place to touch the fire, or try to open a cabinet with cleaning supplies, I would discipline them - and I wanted to do it in such a way that they would not want to go near the danger again. This was not unloving, condescending, or arrogant; in fact, it was the most loving thing I could ever do to them. I was called to keep them away from danger.

This blog topic results from my thinking of a new book that is out….one of my favorite authors (John MacArthur) has a new book called: The Jesus You Can’t Ignore. Read the quote below for one of the reviews about this book:

"[In his] first public act, he took a whip, went into the heart of Judiastic religion -- the Temple itself -- and started throwing people out of there, overturning tables of moneychangers, overturning the tables in the operations of the buyers and sellers of animals," the noted author shares. "He condemned the whole place because it was to be a house of prayer, and they had turned it into a cave of robbers."

MacArthur says there are many false teachers today who are not preaching the full gospel.

"We have the idea today that we need to preach this sort of soft, amiable kind of message, [that] we need to tell people what they want to hear," he laments. "But the truth of the matter is, soft preaching produces hard people. Because soft preaching affirms them, tells them they're fine, [that] you need to grab your dreams...."

And while MacArthur acknowledges that the gospel makes people uncomfortable, he says it prepares hearts for the only cure for sin -- which is Jesus Christ.

This is the reason I am so adamant when preaching that salvation is not a magic prayer - It is for this reason I come down so strong on men like Joel Osteen and Robert Schuller. For this I am not sorry, and for this I am grateful to so many of you who do not just casually or passively receive the Word and hard preaching - but you gladly do so. Thank you for making this calling a true joy!

Calling Intense PeaceMakers!

As I am writing this, I am thinking that we have seen people come to Christ every week since we began the Peacemakers study - the reason is that being a “Peace Maker” is impossible without the cross of Christ being a reality in our lives. It is such an interesting study because most people, upon looking at the subject matter will initially say: “I know Bro. So-and-So could really use this study.” But the Word of God works like a mirror, and those that truly desire holiness, as they are confronted with the Word, realize they are the ones who are in desperate need of becoming a Peace Maker. Understanding this, it was our desire as we entered into this study, that this would not be something that we just look at, study and walk away from. Our desire is that this will forever change Trinity!

In the coming weeks our staff and church leadership will be asking for some names of people who would like to be on our Peace Makers team. This will not be a team that a person will rotate off of after a designated time, this will be a team that is completely committed to moving outside of their comfort zone to keep Biblical peace in this local body of Christ. I want to briefly share with you some of what this ministry will entail for those who choose to be committed:
(1) A continual growth in your life spiritually, to the point where there is a deepening passion for biblical peace.
(2) A willingness to get involved in any conflicts within the body and help our brothers and sisters effectively serve Christ, and keep our testimony of love for one another.
(3) A willingness to live out Matthew 18 in your life, in your church, and help others understand how we are to be involved with one another and do all we can to help each other walk with Christ.
(4) To force us out of the contemporary “Lone Ranger” mentality, that what I do is my business and what you do is your business. This is an American concept but certainly not a biblical concept. The biblical understanding of church is that we are accountable to one another, we need each other to assure each of us display the glory of God to the best of our ability. The bottom line is I need you and you need me - we were never meant to go through his Christian walk alone. The explanation of this team will be given in our New Members Class, and each member will be presented to our church.

So in short, as you have gone through this study, if it has struck a cord with you – if you have a desire to be part of bringing peace to the lives the families at Trinity as we serve together, pray about being part of this team. This means you will get your hands dirty! You will have to be more committed to Scripture than comfort. But regardless of your age, if this is a ministry you would like to find out more about, please respond to me through this blog, send an e-mail, call our church office, or see a staff member…we will write your name down and plan an initial meeting that will explain this in greater detail. I will be sharing more about this as we continue to go through this great study and watch God work in amazing ways. See you on Sunday!