A Christ-follower with a limp: September 2023

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Spiritual Community is Essential

“Community is much more than belonging to something.
It’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter.”

Post-Covid, it’s been widely reported that the social isolation during the pandemic has led to increased mental health problems like insomnia, anger, fear, anxiety, stress, depression and even suicidal thoughts and attempts worldwide. All of this isn’t surprising. God designed us to be social creatures. The isolation of the pandemic disturbed the worldwide state of mind. Our world experienced firsthand the dark side of being devoid of human interaction and touch at a new and disastrous level. It affected sleep cycles and sleep is one of the body's natural healers. With good sleep, a person loses attention towards unpleasant events, thereby being renewed with energy and zeal. When it’s hampered, it leads to suicidal tendencies.

The bottom line is that God has designed us for community. This morning we’re completing our study of the “one another” statements in the New Testament. We only worked through a few of them, yet there are 59 of these “one another” commands in the New Testament. It’s just under 60 exhortations to actually do something for another brother or sister in Christ. These are behaviors we do out of an overflow of our relationship with Jesus, but they’re not things that we do solely unto the Lord Jesus. Other believers must be involved in order to fulfill them. They’re lived out in our ongoing relationship with other Christians. The primary place that we interact with other believers is in the local church family. While you can intellectually learn these commands by watching a worship service remotely or by listening or reading the material, they can’t be obeyed and applied without physical contact and interaction. In other words, it’s just not the same if YOU aren’t with us at church.
Going to church is not about getting your attendance gold star. It’s not about gaining God’s favor because you got together with His people. Church is not a place to go, it’s a family, a living body that God wants you to be a part of for your good and His glory. Faithfully attending worship services helps combat two of the greatest enemies that we have to Christlikeness in American culture: busyness & individualism.
In American culture, we’re so busy and there are so many options. Anyone who chooses to attend church for worship has potentially said “no” to another half a dozen options. The problem is that the vast majority of them aren’t bad things. They’re just not usually the best things. For example, many work six days a week. Sunday is often the only day to catch up on rest and rest is a good thing. Yet, the better thing is that, if at all possible, we need spiritual rest for our souls that we find as we worship.
Then, we’re bombarded with the message of “I’ve got to take care of ME.” If we break out of “me,” it often only devolves into the small circle of the “we” of my family. Is “me time” a good thing? Yes. Is “we time” of family a good thing? Yes. Yet, the better is the “we” of our church family. With the almost cultlike emphasis of “me” time, one would think that we are going to be in heaven alone – just me and Jesus – but we’re not.
God designed us for community. While each person is born again individually, one can’t be a solo healthy Christian. God designed us for each other. The local church is the best place for spiritual growth. While you can be self-taught when it comes to education, or work alone and be successful. You can even exercise alone to increase your physical health. Yet, the Bible is clear, you can’t increase your spiritual health and maturity alone. Why should we make worshipping together a priority?
You are needed. Although it is counter-intuitive, helping others is the most effective way to help yourself. We’ve been programmed today to be consumers. Buy more, earn more, spend more. It’s self-focused has us constantly thinking about ourselves, what we need and want. God built you to be in service to others. There are needs in the body of Christ (the church family) that only you can fill. There are people who need your voice, your face, and your life experience. The more you try to fill your life with your wants, the emptier it becomes. “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you,” (Matthew 6:33).
It’s a place to give and receive grace. Most of the time when someone says why they quit going to church, it’s because of something hurtful someone said or did. We have all been there. The Bible says that when this happens, we are to confront the offender, “speaking the truth in love,” (Ephesians 4:15). The local church must be a place of kindness and gentleness. Rude or unthoughtful brothers and sisters need grace and instruction as much as anyone. We can model and teach kindness in how we talk to them about their words and actions. Without your loving intervention, those same people might push others away from Christ.
It’s noteworthy too that someone will quit attending a church if they feel they’re mistreated, yet most of us are mistreated periodically at our jobs but we rarely walk off in a huff without trying first to resolve matters. It says a lot about what we value more, money or spiritual family.
It is vital for your spiritual health. The Body of Christ is not just Jesus dying on the cross. The New Testament often speaks of being “in the body” of Christ. The Body of Christ is the local assembly of those who gather to honor and worship Him. That’s simply not possible if you’re not physically gathering with other believers. Skipping physical worship hurts us. Much as a biological family needs physical interaction, we need personal interaction with our brothers and sisters in Christ. While God does not judge us based on our attendance, Hebrews 10:24 does urge us, “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”
It’s no coincidence that the world has gone mad while church attendance has dropped to record lows. Ultimately, there’s nothing more important that you can do for yourself, your family, our community, and even our country than gathering with spiritual brothers and sisters to weekly worship King Jesus. He designed us to need Him and each other!

Can we help you spiritually? Please check out more resources on our church's web page, Gracechurchwi.org. Or call us at 262.763.3021. If you'd like to know more about how Jesus can change your life, I'd love to mail you a copy of how Jesus changed my life in "My Story." E-mail me at Carson@gracechurchwi.org to request a free copy. Please include your mailing address.

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Hello is Healthier

“A smile is the universal welcome.” Max Eastman

Okay, think about it. Where’s a place that you find that you’re consistently warmly welcomed? And not just a, “I’m doing my job welcome.” About the only business where I find that I am warmly welcomed is at a car dealership. I’m rarely there more than a minute before someone is asking, “Sir, have you been helped?” Of course, a car buyer/customer is potentially worth thousands of dollars in commission, so there are other motivations which is why we have a high index of suspicion at a car dealership.
Did you know that habitually saying “Hello” to others can make you healthier? It also opens doors for friendships. I know that it did for us.
Some of our lifelong friends in Burlington are Tim and Rozanne Bird. We’d moved in for just a few days and the only people that we knew in Burlington were those from our church. Shortly after we moved in while I was away at work, Tim came over with a fresh loaf of zucchini bread for our family that Rozanne had made…and we’ve been friends ever since. Their children played and grew up with our children. We’d spend the holidays together. We were there for each other if there was a need or an emergency. There was hardly anything more enjoyable for us than to stop and talk to Tim and Rozanne. And though we moved from that neighborhood years ago, we’re still friends and periodically get together (though not as often as either of us would like).
Being friendly can help you live longer. Gallup just released a poll that learned that adults in the U.S. who regularly say hello to multiple people in their neighborhood have higher wellbeing than those who greet fewer or no neighbors. Your wellbeing score increases steadily by the number of neighbors greeted, from 51.5 among those saying hello to zero neighbors to 64.1 for those greeting six neighbors.
Americans report saying hello on a regular basis to five neighbors, on average, with 27% reporting greeting six or more. This varies substantially by age, however. Young adults (those under 30) say hello to an average of 2.9 neighbors, compared with 6.5 among those aged 65 or older. About one in seven among those under 30 (14%) greet six or more neighbors, compared with 41% of those aged 65 and older. Having children under 18 in the household marginally improves the chances of greeting neighbors.
We are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness in the United States and Western civilization. Lacking connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to an advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General released earlier this year. The physical consequences of poor connection can be devastating, including a 29% increased risk of heart disease; a 32% increased risk of stroke; and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults. The continued rise in suicide rates is connected to this crisis that as a culture we are so disconnected.
What we so cherish, our radical individualism, is at the same time destroying us. Individualism has engendered unprecedented social isolation and yielded a depth of loneliness unique to 21^st-century American culture.
God designed us as relational beings. It’s a reality long affirmed by the Bible but now also supported by neuroscience. We must understand that we are social beings before we can regain social connectedness, friendship, and community in our church and in the world. While we can’t change the world, we can make a difference in our world. What can we do?
Limit your smart phone use. Personal, local conversations have been replaced by furious tapping on glowing screens separated by hundreds of miles. A smart phone is nearly always within reach. It’s there to wake us up in the morning, play our favorite music, capture our lives in pics and video, an ever-present portal to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, but it carries a price. Our digital interactions with one another, which are often necessarily brief and superficial, begin to pattern all our relationships. As we become shallow in our interactions with people, it becomes our habit.
The barista at the coffee counter gets a DM-like response. When we hang out with friends, we offer a series of Tweet-like responses in a superficial conversation with little spiritual meaning. The way we interact online becomes the norm for how we interact offline and it’s not the way to have a good conversation with someone. A good conversation involves listening and timing. That’s lost with Internet communications because you’re not there with that person. We must not treat another person the way we would if we interact with social media, but we will if we’re not careful.
The Lord Jesus models perfect being-in-relationship for us. Jesus was never not in relationship. He didn’t enter this world by splitting the heavens but by gently growing in his mother’s womb. He entered a normal family, spent His childhood and early adulthood in obscurity, and then launched His ministry by inviting others to follow Him. Even on the night of his crucifixion, Jesus gathered for a meal with His disciples, then He led them to pray with Him at Gethsemane. With His final breaths, Jesus instructed his disciples to care for his mother. If relationships were essential to Jesus, shouldn’t they be essential for us, too?
Like Jesus, we exist for relationships. If Jesus was history’s most “fully alive” human, it shouldn’t surprise us that a person can’t become fully human without a community. Simply put, we were created for community.
Ours is a social gospel. American Christians tend to read Scripture from an exclusively individualistic framework. We’re surprised to find that the Lord’s Prayer contains only plural pronouns (“Our Father…Give us… Forgive us”) and that the Apostle Paul writes “our Lord” 53 times but “my Lord” just once. So, our salvation isn’t less than personal; it’s more than personal. Responding to the loneliness epidemic creates an ideal opportunity for churches to prioritize fostering authentic community.
Western individualism has sparked unprecedented social isolation. We must work to recover the biblical need of community. It can begin next door by simply saying “hello” to a neighbor. It starts at work as you take time to interact with co-workers. It’s cultivated at church, as we share and care with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Back to School...for Christians

“Parenting – not politics, not the classroom, not the laboratory, not even the pulpit – is the place of greatest influence. To suppose otherwise is to be captive to the shriveled secular delusion. We must understand that it is through the godly family that God’s grace, a vision of God, a burden for the world, and a Christian character are most powerfully communicated. …Parents, don’t abandon your place of influence. It is still true that ‘the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.’ Believe it.” Kent & Barbara Hughes

One of the great failures of the contemporary American family is that even Christian families have surrendered spiritual education to the public school. Education is not the solution to a successful life. Much of what is purported to be education today is indoctrination.
That’s evidenced on college campuses when someone is invited in to speak who doesn’t buy into the cultural values being taught. There will be violent riots with law enforcement called in to protect the guest speaker with a disparate viewpoint. Rather than an intellectual discussion of ideologies, there is bullying to shut down a contrarian yet thought-out worldview. It’s a page right of out of China’s Cultural Revolution.
Education apart from moral absolutes is dangerous. For example, Germany of the early 1930s was a world leader in most fields of art, science, and intellect. Berlin was a center for the arts. German poets and writers included renowned ones like Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann. In science Germans were preeminent. In 1933, when the National Socialist Party came to power, its biomedical field included some of the greatest physicians and scientists in the world. To fully grasp the horror of the Holocaust, imagine that the commandant of Auschwitz when he'd finished his day’s work retired to his home to a fine meal and to listen to music by composers like Franz Schubert.
Knowledge is one thing; moral absolutes are another. Good sense is not conscience. Education is not a guarantee for morality or even for conscientiousness. Even the most educated can be heartless profligates.
Children do not belong to the State nor are they its responsibility to raise. God gave them parents. Those parents are responsible before God for the training of their children. It is not the schools or even the church’s responsibility to teach your children a biblical worldview. A child’s spiritual upbringing is the responsibility of his or her parents.
Speaking of God’s truth Deuteronomy 11:19 commands parents, “You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”
Parents of faith should not expect public-school teachers to provide religious instruction. Teachers are to focus on academics, the arts, and physical education. Public schools are designed to serve children of all faiths or even of no faith. Classrooms are to remain free of bias concerning matters of religion. Yet the worldview of the public school is often antibiblical and sometimes hostile to the morals, beliefs, and doctrines expressed in Scripture. So, what are parents to do?
First, act like a Christ-follower. The only Christ-follower many public school teachers “know” is the one caricatured by the media. Christians are to be the model of kindness, love and graciousness. We can disagree without being angry. Personally, I’m embarrassed by supposedly Christian parents being nearly riotous at school board meetings because of the moral literature in school libraries. That’s not the way Christ-followers are to conduct themselves. For as long as I can remember public schools have taught evolution. Where were these parents then? Teaching formative minds that they are the “human animal” or homo sapiens not Imago Dei has as dangerous of outcomes as today’s sexuality without morality.
Most teachers chose the teaching profession because they want to make a difference. Yes, they often have entrenched beliefs but you won’t convince them that they’re misled by getting in their face. You’ll only feed their preconceptions that Christians are kooks.
We win the world by being Jesus. Our Lord was the “friend of sinners.” So be one of the most supportive parents your child’s teacher has. Feel free to kindly share where you disagree with what is being taught and ask for your child to miss an area that you’re concerned about yet have a creative alternative. Daniel 1 is an example of having convictions with grace.
Have a continual dialogue with your child. Know not only what is being taught but the influence their peers are having on them. If you have more than one child have conversations individually with them so that they feel safe to share what’s going on in their lives. Ask questions and have a dialogue instead of a pontificating monologue. Respect their opinions yet when their worldview veers from God’s truth, seek to direct them to Scripture, which means that you must first know Scripture. Don’t cave to fear by isolating your child from friends you consider a bad influence. Our best tool in cultivating godly children is prayer not fearful conspiring.
Remember God is sovereign. The heroes of the faith that we most revere grew up in godless environments with secular, idolatrous education. Joseph, Esther and Daniel all learned to stand alone. Ultimately, you want your child to have their own convictions not yours. They will one day give an account for their choices to a holy God. The same God who gave you those children can protect them.
Every Christian parent should rightly desire to train up their children in the way they should go, but there’s no foolproof method. To overestimate our best efforts is to underestimate the power of sin in our own hearts, and in our children’s. Their only hope is not us but God’s radical grace.

Sunday, September 3, 2023

The First 35 Years!

“Our privilege is twofold. We have an amazing task,

and we get it to do it among people we get to love.” Daryl Dash

It’s been a year of anniversaries for me. In May I was honored for twenty years of service as the chaplain of the Burlington Police Department. Then, on July 2^nd our church family joined Jane and me as we celebrated 40 years of marriage and this weekend marks 35 years as your pastor.
Little did Jane and I realize that as we moved our family from Detroit that we would some day be celebrating 35 years as your pastor in Burlington. We were in the midst of assisting a new church plant on the northwest side of the Detroit suburbs when God called us here. They celebrated their launch of their first Sunday on our first Sunday in Burlington.
No doubt you have heard the old saying, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.” Wisconsin was not our first choice of places to minister. Jane and I had both gone to school in Watertown and the college we attended sadly had an adversarial relationship with the community. Then, most of our family and friends lived in Michigan. We thought that we might serve the Lord in Wisconsin for five or so years and then head back to Michigan…and an opportunity did arise, but I turned it down. It just didn’t seem like it was God’s will.
Today this is our home. You are our family. This is our community (please, just don’t demand that we be Packer fans).
Looking back. Burlington was the smallest town either of us have lived in. In 1988, the city didn’t have a traffic light. I quickly realized how small the city was when I opened a bank account the next morning after we moved in at what was then “the Bank of Burlington.” The woman at the front desk greeted me with, “You’re the minister who moved in last night.”
Yet I look back with gratitude at the faith and hope of those 30 some people who called us to come. The church had recently gone through some deep waters. That small group had discussed closing, but they persevered. They didn’t just talk about making changes, as so many churches do, they truly wanted change. They were cognizant that it was change or die…and so we did.
They weren’t astronomical changes. Most were incremental. Many times, we fail to realize that as each of us needs to grow spiritually, churches too must grow spiritually…and pastors must grow spiritually. My approach and philosophy of ministry today is very different from my approach to ministry in 1988. God was going to work on my heart.
Funerals are the dark valley of being a pastor. God was so gracious to me in my first one at our church. It was for a dear old saint, Bess Norum, who was 95-years young. Bess was a firecracker and had sung in the choir for Evangelist Billy Sunday’s crusades and Bess was ready to go Home. It helped prepare me for my next funeral of a young mother who was a cancer victim and left behind a husband and two young children.
In thirty-five years, there are thousands of memories. Yet, as I look back, I continually marvel at the faith of our church family. They trusted the Lord. They trusted Him to work through our leadership. There were some big challenges and some deep waters, but they remained faithful. We changed our philosophy of ministry from internally focused to externally focused, our music, our version of Scripture, even our location to our present building. Those are radical changes for a church. Many a church has died because they refused to grow and change. We are here today because of their faith in God and perseverance.
Looking at the present. The most dangerous place for a believer is to become satisfied and think that they’ve arrived. It’s even more dangerous for a church. Too many churches rest on the victories of yesterday.
I’m so thankful that our church has a holy sense of discontent. There is a passion to continue to grow in grace and to reach our community with the gospel. Most churches talk about reaching their community but have internal barriers that hinder it like cliquishness, pettiness, legalism, liberalism or politicalization.
Currently, most churches grow either through children in the church coming to Christ or believers from another area church transferring in, not through outreach. At Grace, we’re thankful for children who come to faith, yet hold that we’re co-laborers with other churches not competitors. Our mission field is our community and those who have not yet met our Savior.
I feel so blessed to systematically work our way through Scripture with you so that we grow in our understanding and application of His truth to our lives. This is our family! It’s a privilege to pray for each of you and to share your needs and burdens with the Father. I am so thankful that our church is growing in its understanding that our church is not a “business,” it’s a family of redeemed brothers and sisters. That means that we’re not clones. Our differences become building blocks of unity and spiritual growth. Today our church is made up of those from varied walks of life, marital situations, and economic levels. Committed discipleship is one of our goals as we continue to move forward together.
What’s ahead? Personally, I’m thankful that I don’t know. Retirement is not in our plans. We still have a fiery passion to take new ground and reach more folk for His glory! We don’t want to coast or be satisfied with the status quo. We want to invest and be part of raising up the next generation to love Jesus and reach our community for the glory of God.
Yet, there comes a time to step away. Most pastors leave too soon, some though stay too long. Jane and I want to be sensitive that we are helping you move forward into becoming more like Jesus. All of us need to be cognizant of the fragility of life and good health. Experience has taught us that one’s health situation can change quickly. We never want to get in the way of God’s plans or what He’s doing. Afterall, it’s His church.
One of our next steps is to continue with our master plan and build a children’s wing. We want to plan for the future and next generation. This church is not about us, it’s Him and them.
Jane and I look forward to one day going Home. Yet we know that we are so blessed to have had a taste of heaven for the past 35 years of serving Him by serving you, our Grace Church family! All I can say is: Thank you for being so good to us! We love you so much!!