Toe stepping

John 2:13-22 (NIV)

¹³When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ¹⁴In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. ¹⁵So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. ¹⁶To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!”¹⁷His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”^[b]

¹⁸Then the Jews demanded of him, “What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”

¹⁹Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

²⁰The Jews replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” ²¹But the temple he had spoken of was his body. ²²After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.

This post will have some relevance to a post I wrote earlier about being Nice, and comes from my post yesterday about the 3 Things the Church could do different.

The question for me is, why are we as Christians always afraid to step on other Christians’ and non believers’ toes?

If we look at the passage in the beginning, it is clear that Jesus had no qualms about be very blunt about the fact that He did not like what was going on.

There is also numerous other incidents in the gospels where Jesus would go face-to-face with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and pretty much crush their toes.

The church has become so focussed on keeping numbers in the church building that they have stopped to preach about the unexplainable, like where the angel of the Lord came and freed Paul from prison, or when Phillip was walking and the next moment he was standing in another town. When last have you heard a sermon on these topics?

I really feel that the church should start preaching more on the supernatural happening, spiritual warfare etc.

How do you think?

Church Focus

As I mentioned in my previous list post 3 Things the Church could do different, IMO I am now going to focus on the first thing, as promised.

The bigger church, especially in South Africa, tends to focus on teaching the people that already come to church. With this I am not saying that all the people in the church building is a reborn Christian, but if not, they will be in the minority.

Churches focus on creating great content for the sermons, great worship for the sermon and getting everything just right for the people that will come to the service. They will create sermon series with catchy titles, create great video introductions for the series, etc.

Churches will spend thousands, or millions, if they have that much, to have the best gear in the building. HD projectors, the biggest and best sound equipment and great lighting.

But I can’t help but ask the question, should this money not be used for uplifting the poor, orphans and widows? For getting missions started that will reach out and preach the gospel to the unsaved on the street, or in the house next door? Use this money to equip your people to be able to really spread the gospel, and not have to feel like they know too little of the Word to actually go out and speak to a stranger.

This is something that has been nagging me for the last couple of weeks, and it really gets me hot under the collar when I really sit down and think about it.

Yes, I love my church, I serve at my church. Yes I serve the very saved that I feel should be replaced with the unsaved.

I do however know that I have a calling on my life to go up in Africa and to serve orphans. Money is just a big issue, since this needs to be done out of pocket, and the time has not yet arrived for me to get into a Cruiser and drive the distance to get to where I will eventually end up at.

Will I still feel like this about the church come the time that I leave the church, and move out in faith?

I sincerely hope not…

3 Things the Church could do different, IMO

So, part of the 31 Day to Build a Better Blog challenge, is to write a list post for my blog. Since I have not done this before, this is a bit of a stretch for me, because I like to write as and when the inspiration and content come up in my mind, but sitting here thinking about what I can write a list post, and carrying on from my Elevator Pitch from yesterday, I thought it might be a good idea why I have some issues with the church as an institution.

So here goes…

The church tends to focus on the saved in the building, and not the unsaved and needy outside the building.

This is the fact that even though most churches have some movements that reach out to the community, it is a select few that actually partake in this, and in general the church does not do enough to equip people to reach the unsaved.

The church is too scared to step on the toes of the congregation, so it is sometimes easier to preach the easy to comprehend stuff, and to look over the difficult to explain stuff.

Too many times have I sat in a church service to feel like I have heard this before, or read a text in church, and finding the pastor to preach over the difficult things in the text and preaching on the easily explained stuff.

Structure

The structure of the church, for me, limits the efficacy of the service. Because we have a structure to adhere to, we sometimes rather decide not to let a prophet stand up and speak, or let the worship carry on longer, because we have to get to the sermon.

As I sit here typing, I feel that each of these numbers must be a separate blog post, each on its own, so we will stick with just listing them here, for now.

Acts 2

Acts 2:42-47 (Amplified)

⁴²And they steadfastly persevered, devoting themselves constantly to the instruction and fellowship of the apostles, to the breaking of bread [including the Lord's Supper] and prayers.⁴³And a sense of awe (reverential fear) came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were performed through the apostles (the special messengers).

⁴⁴And all who believed (who adhered to and trusted in and relied on Jesus Christ) were united and [together] they had everything in common;

⁴⁵And they sold their possessions (both their landed property and their movable goods) and distributed the price among all, according as any had need.

⁴⁶And day after day they regularly assembled in the temple with united purpose, and in their homes they broke bread [including the Lord's Supper]. They partook of their food with gladness and simplicity and generous hearts,

⁴⁷Constantly praising God and being in favor and goodwill with all the people; and the Lord kept adding [to their number] daily those who were being saved [from spiritual death].

After having to write my Elevator Pitch for the 31 day to Build a Better Blog, this theme got stuck in my head once again, and this has been my main passion the last year or so.

Why is it, that we as a church deviated from the way church was in Acts 2? Why are the Christian faith declining in number lately, and not growing like in Acts 2, when new believers were added to their number daily, and they grew by the thousands?

What went wrong?

I am planning to explore this a bit myself over the next couple of posts, and be sure that this will probably become a recurring theme from here on in.

I dream of a church, where we are so fired up to spread the Word, that we will add thousands to our numbers, DAILY!

Showing love to those that need love.

I am struggling a bit with putting this into practice.

A friend told me last week that I am to her love, in the way that I interact with other people and such, but for me it is not so. I tend to struggle sometimes to rather not make a sarcastic comment, because it might hurt someone, and yes, I fail quite a bit at this.

I also know part of my calling in this world, and by the way, it is part of yours as well, is to show God’s love to the people around you.

Now, I have this other friend that finds it impossible to find God in his life lately, and every time I have some kind of conversation with him around this, it simply breaks my heart that I am not able to show him God’s love.

So how does one do it?

It seems to me that every time I try to show love deliberately, I fail big, but if I don’t think about it, somebody comes and tell me stuff like I told you before.

This is just one incident like this, and I sometimes loose heart myself because I am unable to help this friend of mine, which I struggle to handle.

So, how does one show love deliberately?

Nothing is impossible for God

Last night, me and my wife finally got time to watch Facing the Giants, yes I know we are behind the times, but bear with me.

While watching the movie, I continually caught myself thinking that they are pushing the workings of the Lord just a tad too far for me. Come on, how can all these things happen. The underdogs win the state football championship, and on the same night, the coach, after earlier finding out he is sterile, heard he is about to become a father.

This morning, as I got up, and got ready for the day, I felt like the Holy Spirit telling me that I must stop having such little faith. I mean, if I have the faith of a mustard seed, I will be able to tell a mountain to go jump in the ocean and it will happen, so why can’t God decide to bless a team and a family so much that the human mind can’t comprehend it?

Well, in the end, I could do little else but to ask forgiveness for my lack of faith.

Later in the day, I remember I have a CD in my car about a testimony of a person, that I don’t know the name of, that was literally resurrected on the morgue table, as the doctor was getting ready to do an autopsy. This CD has been in my car for more than 2 weeks already, but I have not listened to it yet, but I soon realised why, because I had to learn this mornings lesson, before I could really appreciate the testimony of this person.

Praise be to God, and may we all have the faith to believe for great miracles in this world.

Nice

nice

–adjective,nic·er, nic·est.

1. pleasing; agreeable; delightful

I read a blog post on The High Calling Blogs site last night which got me thinking in such a way that it has been occupying my thought the whole morning up till now.

This blog post commented on that we as Christians sometimes feel we always need to be nice, but in a leadership position it is sometimes a problem. It immediately came to me that we as Christians was not called to be nice, but to love our neighbour, after we love God with all our hearts. Nothing in there about being nice.

I truly believe the commercial image we have of Jesus is completely wrong. Movies and books have painted Jesus as this complacent nice guy with blue eyes. Always talking softly with the people around Him etc. But if you actually read your Bible, you will find Him chasing people out of the temple with a whip, and talking pretty much straight up to the Pharisees.

Do you think Jesus was ‘nice’ with the people when He chased them out of the temple?

I think NOT!

He did it in love yes, by teaching them that the temple is a place of worship and not of trade. He had to speak harshly to the Pharisees to get them to see the issues with their views on religion.

Loving someone doesn’t always mean that we have to be nice. If I had to be nice all the time to my daughter, she would run amok in the house, and in the end she would learn nothing. I have to teach her in love, which sometimes means that she needs to get a spanking or a time-out.

We need to get away from always trying to be nice, and start to get back to what Jesus commissioned us to do, and that is to show love, even if it means we sometimes need to not be nice, and be straight forward and harsh.

Keeping the dream

Do you dream?

Do you have a God given dream? A dream that you know was placed in your heart by our Father, and that you must realise before you die?

Do you have something that drives you to do certain things to make that one thing happen eventually?

Well I have one, one I realised was a God given one only recently, and I also know that it is going to take me some time to actually get to a point where I can live out this dream, due to financial implications and time constraints, etc.

But the problem is, I know this dream will only get to be realised in about 5 years’ time, so what do I do to keep this dream alive, since satan’s best weapon is to steal our dreams, which in turn will break our hope, and he in turn hopes that it will make us doubt in our Father and His promises.

Since my dream is HUGE, in the sense of time and money, and I KNOW that I will not be able to do it for a while still, so I need to do small things in the meantime to keep this dream going and growing.

My dream is to travel Africa with a Land Cruiser, and to minister to the orphans and widows. God also told me that this ministry will not be funded by a church, and the funds will mainly come from myself and some sponsors along the way.

Now, the implications is that I can get caught up in making the money through me and my fathers’ business, and forget about this dream, which is exactly what satan wants, but I have some contingency plans in place for this.

One, is to go on small outreach trips, with different groups, when and where the chances appear to do this.

The other plan is to have a group of brothers and sisters, keep me aligned with this dream, and have them pray for me about this on a regular basis, and be accountable to them in order to put the things needed in place to make this dream happen.

So, what is your dream, and what are you doing to keep this dream alive?

On being good and being saved

It is easy being a good person in worldly terms.

It is easy to help the poor, because you feel like it is your obligation to do so, since you have more.

But is it always easy being a good Christian. Meaning, to be the good person, and to live out the ethics etched in your heart by the Word of God?

To always give to the less fortunate, and to take care of the widows and the orphans, without pass? When the street vendor walks past your car window, to greet him friendly and say no thanks, or to ignore the person, or to swear at them, which we see way too often.

God has challenged me to in time move my ministry to the African Orphans out there. To go and do upliftment trips to the orphanages up there in big and dark Africa, and to stop sitting on my hiney, at the comfy church building where I can take, take and take a little bit more. To move away from the institution called the Church, and to move into a Jesus like life. To go spend my time with the unsaved, and to love them. Not preach to them, but only to love them. show them that there is still someone that cares, and to stop judging them. To stop asking the question to the prostitute of why she is doing what she is doing, but to start to understand that she does not want to be there, and she has forgotten what it feels like to be loved, and then to show her that love. To hold her in my arms, without expecting ANYTHING, and I say again, ANYTHING, from her.

I find it that we as Christians find it way too easy to sit in church and our cell groups, saying to each other what we must do and asking what we can do, but how often do we really go out and do something? And why do we need to make it an event to show love to the “DIFFERENT” people out there? Why can’t we start to make it part of our lives, and really start to live that way, and move away from all there little rules we have created within our organised religion, which Jesus even despised of the Pharisees. We need to get back to reading the Bible, and not other books written by people. These books might be good, and they might teach us a lot, but really people, too often we take what a person wrote in a book, or on a blog, above what the Bible tells us.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

James 1:27 (NIV)

Confused

I read this passage yesterday, and it has been confusing me since then.

Maybe I am over analysing it, but please, if some of you learned people can explain this to me I would really appreciate it.

Mark 12:24-27

Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!”

What is confusing me, is what happens to the marriage as an institution in heaven? If we are like to be lifted up to be like angels, would we not care that we were married on earth, or had kids?