Sourced from the Desiring God Blog site.  Written by David Mathis

Do you lean in on Sunday mornings? Or does a critical spirit or unchecked cynicism have you leaning out, ready to size up and dress down the slips and inadequacies of the leaders up front?

Does a spirit of apathy and laziness have you leaning back, just going through the motions, anticipating little more than the benediction and your afternoon nap to follow?

God Works in Miscues

Leaning in on Sunday morning has less to do with the posture of your body, and more to do with the stance of your soul — whether your heart is constricted and closed in corporate worship, or swelling in hope and expanding with expectation. Whether you have an attitude of anticipation, or whether society’s increasing cynicism about everything under the sun has come home to roost in your own chest. Whether you’re ready to give the benefit of the doubt to miscues up front and distractions around you in the pews, or are waiting for another excuse to disengage.

As you sit judging, negligent to the conflagration of grace at work around you, have you considered the time and energy that have been invested to prepare for this gathering? Do you receive it as a gift of love, or with a sense of entitlement? And have you considered how God loves to work in and through his people in corporate worship, not just despite, but often because of, our blunders and imperfections?

Pastors, Not Performers

It may help to know that very few pastors feel adequate in all the facets of our up front leadership in corporate worship. In fact, many feel adequate in none of the facets.

The rehearsals of live theater, and the retakes and extensive edits of movies and television, may have conditioned our society to expect flawlessness on stage, but this is not the calling of corporate worship. Your pastors are not professional actors, and your leaders in music and song are not rock stars.

Our pastors have been entrusted not with producing a good show or memorable concert, but the care of our souls — which is not “professional” work to begin with. They may appear up front for an hour each week, but the other 167 hours they are not on stage. They are not performers. They are very easy to critique. You deserve no badge of honor for being sharp enough to spot problems and identify places for improvement. It is very naïve to expect eloquence up front from your pastors.

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Frank Retief was pastor at St James Church Cape Town for 31 years, having planted the church in 1968 with his wife Beulah.  He became the Presiding Bishop of the Church of England in South Africa until he retired in 2010.  Frank remains active in ministry through preaching, teaching, pastoral work & writing, and has authored a number of books.

Unexpected Consequences

Mark 4:30,31,33: Again He said: “What shall we say the Kingdom of God is like or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed which is the smallest plant in the ground. Yet when it is planted it becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches, that the birds of the air can perch in its shade”.

Sometimes small words and actions can have very large consequences. We are all familiar with this rule of life. And it is exactly this principle of unexpected consequences that Jesus uses in this parable.  The parable Jesus told would probably have sounded ridiculous to the ears of his listeners. In fact I suspect we often miss the shocking impact of the things Jesus said because we are unfamiliar with the background and customs of His day.

Everybody knew that a mustard seed grew only to a medium sized garden shrub and the idea of the birds of the air perching in its shade would have been laughable. But then Jesus deliberately intended to exaggerate the power of the shrub to make an important point. God can take the tiniest beginning and no matter how unsuited it may be God can use everything and everyone to do more work for His Kingdom that its size warrants.

That’s the way it is with the Kingdom of God. A little seed dropped here or there and the next thing you know there is a Sunday School where there was none before; or somebody is helped who had no hope, or some lost soul finds the Saviour and a life is changed.

The idea of the birds of the air all crowding to sit on the shrub’s branches may have occasioned laughter by those who heard Jesus because it seemed so unlikely. But think of how many people you know who have been helped by someone you least expected. Possibly even in your own life, what you thought was your very weak faith in Jesus and great ignorance of the bible was nevertheless overruled so that many people have been helped and encouraged by you.

We should never despise the day of small things. Always be ready to speak a word for the Lord or to do somebody a kindness. You never know what kind of consequence that may lead to, or what blessings may flow into someone else’s life.

Prayer: “Heavenly Father, thank you for your great grace that overrules all our sins and mistakes. Take me today, even though I am just a “mustard seed” and use me for your glory in the lives of others. Amen”

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And Article from the Desiring God Blogsite & Written by Alistair Roberts

Are your smartphone habits healthy?

If we are to assess whether our smartphone habits are healthy or not — and this is hardly a question that should be exclusive to young Christian adults! — perhaps a helpful place to start is by challenging the underlying cultural script that typically drives our adoption of new technologies. This script is one that rests heavily on choice and potential as such and the notion of freedom from (upon the removal of constraints, limitations, and restrictions) and is much less attentive to the reality of freedom for — to our being liberated to become more fully and faithfully human in communion with God and each other.

The familiar cultural script is that more is typically better — more interactive, faster, more efficient, more connected, more fluid, more integrated, more social, more intimate, more inclusive, more “user-friendly” — and that the further our limitations are rolled back, the freer we become. Yet many of us are rediscovering the truth of Edmund Burke’s dictum that many of the restraints upon us, and not merely our liberties, should be reckoned among our rights and the grounds of our freedom. Pursuing unguarded liberty with things puts us in very real danger of having those things “take liberties” with us (1 Corinthians 6:12). The loss of natural limitations often doesn’t leave us better off, and many struggle to re-establish these broken barriers in the far less certain form of sanity-restoring disciplines.

The diagnostic tests that we should run — and should continually be running — ought to be informed by a clearer concept of what our freedom is for and the sorts of shapes that it takes. The bigger questions that we need to address are as follows:

• Do our particular uses of our smartphones, and our use of a smartphone more generally, have the actual effect — not just hold the theoretical possibility — of making us better servants of God and of our neighbors?
• Are our smartphones tools that facilitate our commitment to the central purposes and values of our lives, or are they — and our habitual modes of using them — constantly distracting, diverting, or obstructing us from them?

Read more…

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Written by Author & Blogger Tim Challies

“Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these,” Jesus said as He recalled the beauty of a common lily (Luke 12:27). And I suspect that even Solomon in all his splendor could not have imagined the sheer affluence that you and I enjoy today. The lily is here today and gone tomorrow, so fleeting and commonplace that we overlook its intricate beauty and fail to acknowledge the glory of the God who made and sustains it. Is it possible that we have grown so accustomed to our affluence that we have lost the wonder of it, too? Is it possible that our affluence harms us even as it blesses us?

Those of us who live in the developed world today enjoy a measure of wealth that is almost beyond understanding. This is the kind of wealth that billions of the world’s population can only dream of. This is wealth that previous generations could not have imagined. And it is not merely money that we enjoy in such abundance, but also comfort, influence, and so much else. We are incredibly, unbelievably, divinely blessed. And yet, many of us can identify that this wealth brings with it a kind of illness, a spiritual malaise that some have labeled “affluenza.” Are we sick with affluenza? And if so, is there a way that we can use and enjoy our affluence without succumbing to this ugly disease?

The Symptoms of Affluenza

In the waning days of the First World War, the war to end all wars, an unexpected illness began to break out in small pockets around the world. What at first showed only the symptoms of a cold soon progressed into a particularly virulent form of the influenza virus. Incredibly contagious and dangerous, this virus quickly overwhelmed a sick patient’s immune system. Often, within hours of exposure to the disease, a patient would show the first symptoms, and within a day would be desperately ill, unable to breathe, drowning in ravaged lungs. Passed from soldier to soldier as they were jammed together in the front-line trenches and transported by marching armies, the Spanish flu spread to almost every nation in the world and claimed the lives of somewhere between twenty million and forty million people. It is known today as the deadliest epidemic in human history, and in its time it ravaged the world.

Affluenza is a spiritual disease that is ravaging the modern world. It is similar to every other disease in that we can accurately diagnose it by its telltale symptoms.

Ironically, the most common symptom of affluenza is discontentment. Many of us have discovered that as our wealth and our possessions multiply, so too does our discontentment. There is an inverse relationship between how much we have and how much we are convinced we need to be content. Just think about Adam and Eve. They had the whole world before them. The whole world, that is, but for one little tree that God had decreed would be off limits. And somehow they determined that they could not possibly be content unless they had the fruit from that tree. And like Adam and Eve, we can have great abundance and still feel empty. We can have great abundance while still feeling the gnawing discontent that we do not have more. Just one more dollar, just one more gadget, just one more vacation, just one more upgrade—joy is always that close, but that far away. If you suffer from affluenza, you will know it when you look at all you have and still believe that just a little bit more will really bring the joy you crave.

Another common symptom of affluenza is self-dependence. Our abilities multiply alongside our wealth, and when we are most able, we tend to be least dependent. Why would I pray to God for my daily bread when I have millions in my savings account? Why would I pray for God to give me wisdom when I can already see the fruit of my hard work and good decisions? The man with little prays much; the man with much prays little. If you spot self-dependence in your life—self-dependence manifested especially in prayerlessness—you may well be suffering from affuenza.

Allow me to point you to one more symptom of affluenza: ingratitude. The Bible makes it clear that all the good we enjoy is a gift from God (James 1:17). The Bible makes it equally clear that we are to return thanks to God, gratefully and specifically, for each one of those good gifts. But ingratitude is a grave challenge to the person suffering from affluenza. Why should I give thanks to God when I am the one who has worked so hard for what I have? Why should I give thanks to God if what I have is only the smallest portion of what I actually want or deserve? Your lack of gratitude may prove that you have a bad case of affluenza.  Read more…

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