Preaching, Teaching, and Ministry in Portsmouth

Things continue to go well for our family in Portsmouth. Ministry is both strange and wonderful. For those of you praying for Krista and I as we serve here we would invite you to pray for the upcoming ministry to the college campus that has begun. Last week we had our first Training session for the core group that is participating in this endeavor, and this coming Sunday we have our second, detailing what the gospel is. There will be four sessions in total, two in may covering methodology of evangelism. Pray for me as I lead those seminars.

I have just finished preaching through a three part overview series from the book of 1 Kings at a nearby church. This church was without a pastor and I was filling in for several Wed. services. It was a wonderful series for me to teach as I have been studying to go through the book verse by verse this coming fall. For this series, however, I took the book and divided it into three sections: Chatper 1-11, 12-16, and 17-22. The theme of the book is God's Presence in the Midst of Israel's Spiritual Wasteland...so I have called the series overall "God in the Wasteland" (borrowing the title from David Wells superb book by the same name, though his work is on a different and unrelated subject). I was delighted to teach it and have learned a great deal about the book as a whole over that course.

I am currently preparing to finish up my first semester as adjunct professor of English Composition at Shawnee State University, please pray that I find a summer job to keep up our income.

Krista has been very busy with Mia at home, and she also helped to host a ladies retereat last month for the women of our church, she did an excellent job. We are now slowly working out times to get to know individual members of our church family better and spend time with them. Your prayers are a great help to us friends, and we continue to covet them.

God bless

Sermons for Sale

Here's a quick advertisement:

Are you a pastor? Are you tired of spending hours in the Word of God? Studying to make sure that what you present your people is Biblical and Christ-Centere? Do you find that preaching is just too much of a hassle? Well there is good news for you friend. One pastor has declared his sermons fit for everyone to preach and he is even offering them at a fair price to you.

In case you miss it, I am being sardonic here. I find this sort of promotion of laziness in the pastorate an afront to gospel ministry. Pastor, your job is to study the Word of God in depth for your people. It is not your job to build a mega-church, design and orchestrate new church programs, or expand your church campuses. Your people coming in on Sunday morning with heart-ache and bitterness, struggling with sin and guilt don't need the words of another man who has never met them and doesn't know how the present text needs to be applied to your and their contexts. They need their pastor to love them enough to dig into the text and help them understand how the gospel matters when they've been up all night with a screaming baby, or how the cross of Christ relates to their failing marriage.

Pastors, don't be lazy! Do your duty as a preacher of the Word of God, and spend time in the text yourself for the sake of your people and the glory of our Savior!Don't buy a sermon!

You Must Have Sin to Have Salvation

Our culture is so anti-sin that since the dawn of psychotherapy we have resorted to calling sin merely sickness. We remove the moral responsibility from sin and assure ourselves that it is not our fault. We shift the blame from ourselves to our biological makeup, to other people, or even to God himself. It's a habit as old as the existence of sin itself. Adam, in the Garden of Eden, placed blame on Eve, and God. This is not how God looks at it, however. He has not be seduced by psychology. Sin is still sin in His book.

But it was in a conversation with some co-workers over breakfast this last week that I saw first hand the other way we think about sin in our culture. While attempting to share the gospel with these two young men I was "informed" that we are not all born sinners. We're all actually born good. We learn sin and therefore sin, but this is merely a result of our society's stupidity.

The problems here are manifold. Of course we must concede that sin did not exist until Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden. But post-fall all men are born sinners. One of these young men argued that its clearly evident to see man's internal goodness when we look at a child. But I argue that looking at a sweet, beautiful child and watching them disobey, without years of observed sinfulness, is clear evidence that man is inherently sinful. Why do children learn to lie before they can even speak? Why do they squirm and resist getting their diapers changed? How did they learn to manipulate their mothers and fathers and grandparents with that innocent little looks and hugs after having disobeyed? They know because it is in them from birth to do so.

This does not mean that all people are as bad as they can be. But if all men are good why are they not able to resist the temptation to sin in even the smallest way (cheating on their taxes, speeding, selfishness, etc.)? We are all bad, and even the smallest sins count against us before God.

But there is hope. For when we are willing to admit we are sinful, and not just sick, then we are steps away from securing freedom from that sin. Christ came into the world as God's only Son and bore the wrath that we deserved for our sins, when He died upon the cross. And now all who confess they are sinners and beleive upon Jesus' death and resurrection on their behalf will be saved. Acceptance of your sin is necessary for salvation, friends. So own up to it, and step into freedom from bondage!