B.Y.O.F. – week two

in case you’re new to this site…or if you’ve been sleeping through the sermons the past couple of weeks, “B.Y.O.F.” stands for “Bring Your Own Fork”.  it was an idea that began this past summer as i was thinking about how to respond to the reality that people leave churches because they are not getting fed.  they are critical of the shallow teaching and gravitate to some other church family that teaches better and gives them more of what they are looking for.

i will never be found guilty of minimizing the need for solid bible teaching and the need for gifted and godly teachers of the word.  i have been blessed throughout my life with a few men who have opened the sacred book and showed me things that i could never have found on my own.  i will always be grateful for that.  but they did something more.

they inspired me to feed myself.  the best teachers of the word i have ever had in my life did not create a dependence.  they did not make me worship them.  they did not cause me to extol their virtue as teachers, in spite of the enormous respect and gratitude i had for them.  they simply took me deeper into god’s treasure chest and helped create a hunger in me that could only be satisfied by studying the bible for myself.

good bible teachers teach people why they need to study the bible for themselves. 

good bible teachers teach people how to study the bible for themselves.

good bible teachers inspire people to study the bible, in order to teach it to others…so those people will study it to teach others…and so on…

that’s god’s plan.  it always has been.

B.Y.O.F. week one

i have been looking forward to starting this series for quite a while.  my preparation started way back at the beginning of the summer.  it was good to finally arrive.

last week while i was away on my yearly youth pastor’s wilderness trip, we focused our attention on reading the entire book of john.  it is something that most people don’t get the encouragement do…let alone have the time to do.  seven chapters each day for three days.  we read.  we contemplated.  we chewed.  we thought.  we prayed.  we journaled.  we questioned.  we discussed.  

bottom line.  we fed ourselves.

nobody told us what to believe.  nobody directed our thoughts.  nobody spoon-fed us doctrine, practice, opinion, commentary, or their corner of the truth.  we just prayed and asked god to teach us from his word.

it was bold.  it was refreshing.  it was exactly what each one of us needed.  we all came up with different insights and personal applications of scripture.  we saw things we had never seen.  we grew deeper.  i couldn’t help but think that that’s what should be happening all the time.  for all of us.

i am more convicted than i have ever been that the person who complains that their church or their pastor is not “feeding” them is either a genuine spiritual baby…or a misguided whiner that needs to learn to pick up a fork and start feasting!

i know there are churches and teachers that are shallow.  i know there are churches and teachers that only give a token acknowledgment to the word of god.  i know there are churches and teachers that warp the truth or fill up sermons and lessons with opinion, conjecture, or out-and-out falsehood.  those churches and teachers should be called out.  if not, they will eventually receive from god exactly what they deserve.  that is not what i’m talking about.

this is all about healthy (or reasonably healthy) followers of christ who are growing up in age, but are still wearing a bib when it comes to the meat of god’s word.

let me hear from you on this one.

1 John 5:13-21

well…we made it.  a study all the way through 1 john.  i don’t know about you, but i feel like i know a little more than i did before we started this journey.  

this past sunday, was interesting, though.  there were two places in the text that i couldn’t fully wrap my head around.  the first was the reality of measuring my personal life experience with the words of the letter.  john writes…or at least appears to write that if we are praying the right way, whatever we ask of god, he will not only hear our prayer, he will do whatever we ask.

This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.  And if we know that he hears us–whatever we ask–we know that we have what we asked of him.  1 John 5:14-15

i know that god does not give me whatever i ask from him.  is it my fault for not asking the right question?  am i not asking according to his will?  am i not praying with enough faith?  is god merely protecting me from my own shallow or destructive requests?  do i just need to keep asking until i get the question right?  is it really all about the fish sandwich?

why shouldn’t prayer be as simple as saying, “god, i am good with whatever you deal.  whatever you deal!  thank you.  amen.”

i’m still laughing about the minor epiphany i had while trying to decode the meaning of the sins that lead to death and sins that don’t lead to death.

If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life. I refer to those whose sin does not lead to death. There is a sin that leads to death. I am not saying that he should pray about that.  1 John 5:16

in my relentless pursuit to figure out what it meant, i almost missed the point.  when we see a brother commit a sin, we need to pray for them.  don’t gossip…don’t judge…don’t condemn…don’t confront…don’t jump to conclusion…don’t ignore…don’t follow their example…pray.  pray that god will give them life.

hope the study was good for you.  i’ll be preaching a couple of sermons the next couple of weeks to help lay a foundation for where we are heading this fall.  you need to be there.