Assurance

 

Each Sunday as a part of our worship we have a place where we confess our sin and receive God’s words of assurance of the forgiveness of our sins. It works like this: I give an invitation for silent, personal confession. After a brief time to allow people, including myself, to confess I lead all of us in reciting a prayer of confession that is printed in the worship bulletin. And then I pick up my Bible and read a passage that speaks to the assurance of forgiveness that we can rest in, usually adding some comments about how that passage assures us.

I have a collection of prayers of confession that I rotate through in planning worship. I also have a collection of Bible passages that assure forgiveness that I rotate through. These two collections are unequal in number and so there is almost always a different pair each Sunday morning. Every once in a while my Bible reading brings something to my attention that would serve as words of assurance and I add that passage to my collection. And that is happening this Sunday with Deuteronomy 4:31, which reads:

“For the Lord your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them.”

What, you may ask, does that have to do with the assurance of forgiveness?  The ‘sin’ word is not even mentioned, and neither, for that matter is Jesus. Pastor Brad, what gives? 

In writing these words Moses has a few things to say about God, most noticeably being that he is merciful and faithful. He has made a covenant, a solemn promise, to hold the Hebrews as his own people, and he intends to keep it. That covenant is not dependent on their behavior, but solely relies on God’s word to them.

Their behavior, frankly, is often very ungodly and fully deserving of God’s wrath. But instead of wrath God gives mercy. Instead of giving them what they deserve he does the exact opposite, being merciful in forgiving their sin. Without mercy on God’s part he could not be their God and they could not be his people.

That mercy for God’s people is fully seen in the death-and-resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Moses points God’s people far ahead to the wrath of God against sin poured out on the one person who can bear it, something Jesus does freely, out of love, for all the people of God living at all moments of human history. He takes our sin and its punishment and gives us his sinless nature. The one sacrifice of Jesus to take away our sin, forever. This is the greatest expression of mercy in all of human history, and in it, alone, all who believe in Jesus can be assured that their sin is forgiven. Every last bit. Amen. 

 

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Bull riding or barrel racing?

 

For most of this year I’ve been having trouble with my laptop. There were a variety of things happening, such as the fan speeding up and getting very loud, and recording video of my sermons that was choppy and made it sound like Alvin, of the Chipmunks, was in the pulpit, and programs running very slowly, and, perhaps most annoying of all, my laptop just shutting down, seemingly at random.

I searched online for help. I asked friends who are more computer-savvy than I for help. I took my laptop to the shop. In the process of understanding what was going on and what I could do about it I tried a number of things, such as deleting files to clear up memory, having fewer files and folders open at the same time, and taking the back off to clean the fan ports. But in the end the day-to-day problems were unchanged and using my laptop, which is essential to many pastoral tasks, was becoming chronically frustrating. And so last week I took the advice Robin had been suggesting for months and ordered a new laptop.

It arrived yesterday and I spent part of the afternoon getting things set-up. I turned it on and did whatever it said to get the basic systems running. I copied all the files from my old laptop that I wanted to transfer to my new laptop onto an external hard drive and then moved them over. I set-up some bookmarks and shortcuts for apps and programs that I use frequently.

There is a learning curve to getting this laptop, and its operator, to work well together. Part of that work has gone easily and part of it has not. My new laptop is from a different manufacturer than the last several I’ve owned, and it runs on an upgraded operating system. For reasons I can’t possibly imagine there are things within programs that work differently than before. I’ve been able to figure a number of things out, but not without a bit of trial-and-error. I know where I want to go, and I know where to start, but I’m not sure by what route I’ll be able to get there. But, regarding changing laptops, this is not my first rodeo.

There is a spiritual idea coming in this post and I attached a rodeo picture, but it occurs to me I’ve got the wrong image. A bull-rider might be perfect to characterize a rodeo itself, but a barrel-racer would be a more suitable photo for my point. The average bull rider gets thrown off much more often than they succeed but a barrel racer has to learn to work as one with her horse.

In Psalm 32:2-3 David is in a miserable place, lamenting the present difficulty in his life, but then he points to the solution in verse 5, saying: 

“I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity;

I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”,

and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.”

David begins like the bull rider, thrown to the ground and perhaps dazed and trying to figure out what went awry. And the solution is to be more like the barrel racer, to go back to the beginning and learn to work with the Lord, rather than to live at odds with Him.

When your life with God stumbles may you be encouraged to get back to basics, such as prayer and confession, and get going again, working with Him.

Time for me to figure out another new thing as I upload this blog post. There may be a hiccup or two, but it’s not my first rodeo. 

 

 

Photo credit: RodeoHouston.com, via the author’s cellphone

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Prayer Meeting

“And when they had entered, they went up to the upper room, where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James. All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.”

This evening we are re-starting a regular prayer meeting at our church. Re-starting is a bit loose, as we had a weekly prayer meeting briefly, for a year or maybe two, when our ministry began here late in 2013. I don’t recall how long we had it nearly as well as I recall how poorly attended it was. There were many times when during the hour that had been set aside I was the only one present. So, in a moment of practicality in considering my schedule, I cancelled the prayer meeting. I was already regularly spending time in prayer on my own and I didn’t need to schedule another period of that same thing into my week, did I?

Well, with prayer, as in so many things, it’s not about me! It has often occurred to me, particularly in the past 2-3 years, that there are a number of things that our congregation could be praying over. And not in the sense of putting those things in the prayer list I pull together for worship each Sunday morning, but that we should be gathering together outside of our Sunday worship to seek the Lord in prayer together.  

Things like the kinds of ministry we are engaged in within our community and that they would bear fruit pleasing to God. For our local schools and the tribal government. For our mission partners. For stronger families in our community. For sobriety and encouragement for those actively pursuing sobriety. For us to encourage each other as sisters and brothers in Christ. And as the old commercial said, “That’s not all!” for the Lord will certainly also lead us to pray for other things too.

Last Sunday afternoon we had a meeting of our church council and decided to resume some things that we haven’t done since the pandemic began. I put out the idea of beginning a prayer meeting. There wasn’t a whole lot of talking about the idea as we decided to do it on Wednesday’s a 6:30 PM.  And so tonight we begin. Join us if you are local and pray with and for us if you aren’t. Like the early church in the book of Acts, nay we be “joined together constantly in prayer.”

 

Photo credit: www.RaifordRoadChurch.org

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Real Life Adventures Of A Rez Pastor

 

“reallifeadventuresofarezpastor.”  Yesterday I used that tag on a Facebook post. Two weeks ago a cable had broken on the church’s riding lawnmower and a volunteer here last week took a look at it and told us what we needed to order to be able to repair the mower. The part was ordered and arrived on Monday. Monday evening I watched a 10 minute YouTube video and decided to repair the mower after I finished my run on Tuesday morning.

Tuesday morning I got to work, encountering two minor hiccups in my situation that differed from the video. They weren’t a big deal to manage, but then came the first significant problem, in that while the new cable was designed to connect like I had seen on the video, the original part on our mower connected in a different way. The second major issue was that the new cable was significantly longer than the original. I improvised solutions to both issues and when Robin went to mow the lawn everything seemed to work and our grass and weeds, which have been growing rapidly this year, were quickly trimmed.

Real life adventures of a rez pastor. The things I share on Facebook, such as the mower repair, or Saturday afternoon, where I had done pruned some shrubs, attempted to repair my laptop, and then improvised a tool to remove a plastic cap from a bathtub drain, are just a part of the story, and truthfully not nearly as connected to being a pastor as to taking care of a house and raising children, things that a great many people also do.

Real life adventures of a rez pastor.  Not so much the week-to-week activities of preaching, planning and leading worship, visiting people in the nursing homes and doing a variety of administrative tasks. Those things are being done by most pastors.

Real life adventures of a rez pastor. The truth is that much of what really falls within that hashtag aren’t the kinds of things where I can share any but the barest of details. The three men I gave a ride to on Monday evening. The two men I stopped to talk with while on my run Tuesday morning. The man calling me Tuesday morning to talk about some things he’s struggling with. The man I had a long conversation with at the post office on Tuesday afternoon. The man on Tuesday evening that we gave a meal to and a safe place to sleep for the night.

Real life adventures of a rez pastor. Some things that can be shared and a lot that can’t, but all joined together in one overarching goal: to point people to Jesus Christ as their Savior and to live with Him as their Lord. The reservation might be a unique setting but the goals I have in mind as I serve here apply anywhere. Wherever it is that you happen to live, may God be glorified as you serve the Lord Jesus in that place.

Boundaries

This past week we hosted a mission group here in Dulce. One thing they did this week was run a youth sports camp, where each morning about 20 or so children played and/or learned basketball and pickleball. Most of the kids knew something of basketball, while pickleball was a new experience. Each day also included a lot of miscellaneous playing, snacks, a Bible lesson and prayer, and lunch before going home. All-in-all the sports camp was an outstanding part of an outstanding week.

This week my Bible reading plan brought me back into the psalms. For the past nine or ten years I’ve followed a plan that has me read through the New Testament and Psalms twice a year and the remainder of the Old Testament once. Monday I returned to the Psalms.

Psalm 1 is short and to the point. It contrasts the difference between the person who aims to live close to God in their life and the person who lives farther and farther away from God. Verse three says:

“…but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night.”  

The psalmist understands that there is a known way in which a person should live, and that way is found in the law of God. Much like our children playing basketball and pickleball need a line on the court to know what is in bounds and out-of-bounds, the law of God acts as a boundary for the shape of our lives. Good, and even glorious, things can happen inside God’s boundaries. Outside of them? Not so much.

God’s law is a boundary that is truly given for our good. We can’t keep it perfectly, and praise God that He has given His Son Jesus to save us in those times when we disobey the law.  But we can learn the law and strive to keep it, as a thankful response for the gift of our Savior. Amen.

 

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.