Common Grounds Online

Linc Ashby, If You Listen to One Sermon Online This Week Make It This One

2009-10-28T05:12:40-05:00

Please check out my good friend, Walter Henegar's, sermon here from this past Sunday. It's on hell of all things. Grab a box of tissues for the last 5-8 minutes. I rarely cry but I was teared up big time at the end of this one.

"Dying Well" - A Tribute to Broadcasting Great, Ernie Harwell

2009-10-15T13:04:36-05:00

Baseball fans know that there is something magical about the great broadcasting voices throughout the history of the sport. Legendary broadcasters like Harry Kalas (Phillies), Vin Scully (Dodgers), and Ernie Harwell (Tigers) are about as important a part of the sport’s rich lore as the players themselves. Therefore, as a big baseball fan, I was intrigued by an article discussing the faith of Tigers Hall-of-Fame broadcaster Ernie Harwell as he is dying of cancer. The article is entitled “Dying Well – Lessons from a Baseball Legend,” and it reminds me of John Piper’s article “Don’t Waste Your Cancer.” Here are a couple excerpts:

His confidence in God came during a frustrating time in his brilliant career. It was the early 90s and Harwell was being forced out by new leaders in the Tigers front office and an overzealous marketing director at the radio station for which he had labored for decades. But, due largely to the overwhelming outrage by the sports-viewing public in Detroit and across the country, Harwell was retained and many of those behind the attempted ouster were themselves shown the door. I'll never forget the godly Harwell's response when asked if his Christian faith had been tested by the events. "No, God is in charge of every sparrow that falls from the sky. If He wants me to continue on as announcer for the Tigers, I will. If He doesn't, I can't force my way back in. My life is completely in His hands and he always does what is right." Amen.

One of the founders of Baseball Chapel - a formal Lord's Day chapel service for baseball players - Harwell is known and respected across baseball as a humble, unashamed disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. And now he is dying like a humble, unashamed follower of Christ. Doctors expect Harwell to live about six months, but he is clearly dying well. When asked whether he was worried about dying, his answer was reminiscent of Paul's attitude in Philippians 1. "If you worry, that's like telling God that you don't think he can handle things. It's a slap in the face of God," said Harwell. "My confidence is in God. Long ago, I gave my life to him. My life is in his hands."

It All Just Looks a Little Different

2009-10-12T18:16:00-05:00

"For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received." - 1 Corinthians 15:3

"The gospel is still the gospel. Sin is still sin. It all just looks a little different." I have repeated this line a dozen times a day for the past nine months.

I have recently made a move that has been a bit of a culture shock. For the past five years, I have been doing college ministry on a campus of 39,000 students that has been ranked as one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse campuses in the nation. Out of those 39,000 students, we only had 500 involved in evangelical ministries. Do the math - there are more professing christians in Muslim Turkey than we had on our campus.

And now, I am the Senior Pastor of a 202 year old church in a small town in middle Tennessee. A town whose population is smaller than the campus I left. A town that has four churches just in its downtown. A town that has a benefactor who has given ten acres of land just for new churches to build buildings on (there are already three there now, with space for three more). We have more churches than fast food restaurants...a lot more.

And yet, with just a little digging into the souls of the people here, I find the same problem of idolatry. With just a few questions, I find the same expressions of unbelief. The stories here are littered with just as much brokenness as the stories I would hear on the college campus. It all just looks a little different.

But, the gospel is still the gospel too. The assumption that I run into on a daily basis is that I need some other ministry tool besides what I have been using for the past ten years now that I am no longer on a college campus. The gospel is still the gospel. It just looks a little different.

"Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved." - 1 Corinthians 15:1-2

I have been reminding myself frequently that the apostle Paul didn't need a new gospel as he traveled from such culturally and religiously diverse places as Jerusalem and Corinth. Sure, the outworking and application of his ministry looked a little different in each of those places. But at the core of his ministry, he was careful (very, very careful) to bring them back to the content of the gospel (see 1 Corinthians 15:1-3 for one of the few places he summarizes the gospel).

So, while it all looks a little different. The gospel is still the gospel. And sin is still sin. And Jesus is reigning over all things.

"Secularization or Exodus?" in First Things

2009-10-04T10:45:22-05:00

I read an intriguing article in First Things entitled "Secularization or Exodus" by Peter Leithart, and I wanted to see if CGO readers have any thoughts on the article. I think this is the money quote:

Christianity does not promote “secularity” in the modern sense. Where Christianity has become dominant, Christians have always sought to reshape public life, law, social order, custom, and economic life, in accord with the demands of the gospel. They have not considered public life a safe-zone, free from the influence of the gospel. But the gospel does challenge and overthrow the institutions and patterns of the old world. Wherever the gospel arrives, sacred sites lose their sacredness, the gods go silent, the religious ceremonies that encrust daily life go by the wayside, blood and sacrifice cease. When the good news gets to the scattered tribes of the Amazon, or unevangelized peoples of Africa or Asia, it comes as an announcement of a new exodus, a baptism that leads out of Egypt into a new world, guided by the pillar of the Spirit.

Thoughts?

Cody Chambers, Prayer-Hours

2009-10-02T08:07:09-05:00

I've always like the term man-hours. It sounds so solid, so real. It's not just time spent, it is time invested by a real, live person (man or woman). It only seems logical to mention the person who spent those hours turning out that product. Someone logged the time to do the work to produce the end results. He or she ought to be mentioned.

I've been flipping through a novel that describes human interactions against a backdrop of spiritual warfare. And I mean warfare, complete with angels and demons brandishing swords and such. While it's questionable whether some of the story's depictions reflect good theology, the story paints a vivid picture of a world with a spiritual realm that is activated and propelled by prayer. Events are not so much determined by human planning and action as by God's sovereign hand at work amongst the pleas of believers and the schemes of His evil opponents. The reader can see characters sink or swim based on whether they are undergirded by prayer or are forgotten.

Though the novel can lead one to think that human beings have the power to pull the strings of the future simply through praying a lot, it did remind me of the work done not through meetings and organizations and such but by prayer. The story touched on the fact that what really matters is the behind-the-scenes kind of stuff. For instance, I knew my parents covered me in prayer when I was a child, but only now do I recognize the prayer-labor involved, more man-hours than all their moral instruction combined. I knew the older woman who always engaged me in conversation at church cared for me, but could she have spent hours on her knees praying for me? It is humbling to think about such a thing; as I went through the humdrum of my daily routine, people were sweating it out before God.

Big ideas are running through my head all the time. If only this committee could be formed or that strategy be employed, such-and-such problems could be addressed, and progress in this area could be made. But what if that is not where the real labor lies? What if the lives we lead were meant to be laid at God's feet so that then they might come alive and be useful in real action. My 40, 50, 60+ hours a week may be spinning my wheels when I forget to fuel the engine with prayer.

Graham Buck - Hearing God's Providential Symphony

2009-10-01T02:21:00-05:00

I find that my life is a pasticcio of one ‘coincidence’ after another.

What do I mean by this? For some, it seems as if they have everything planned out and have the ability to follow through with those plans. For others, it seems as if they are free-spirits, floating on the wind of what ever may come their way. For me, I so want to be the first, yet experience some strange confluence of the two. For all my best efforts to the contrary I am dragged along, sometimes kicking and screaming, by the inexorable draw of providence. It is a feeling hard to describe, but one that I am sure everyone with eyes to see inherently knows.

There is a lie I believe, ‘I can control my life’. I’m not entirely sure as to why I continually return to this idea. It’s never proved itself right. Even in those times when things go exactly as I planned there is always some wrinkle whispering the truth of the matter. Sometimes I can hear this whisper. Sometimes I’m sitting and listening like Elijah. Most times I’m running like Peter, all good intentions poorly placed. “Peter said to Jesus… He did not know what to say…”

Thank God I’m not in control.

The music playing, mixed from here and there, weaves a story of one who’s path is laid down already. Some might call this fate, I call it providence. Is there a difference? The one is an impersonal, immovable set of events into which one falls without fail. The other is a dynamic, vibrant relational interaction between persons. Even at the etymological level providence implies personality, which is to say, having foresight or precaution requires the ability to interact with varied and varying situations. Though providence does not prove the Christian god, it does provide a context within which to discuss his interaction with ourselves, others, and the world. Providence could be considered the score with which our God is directing the symphony of creation.

I sometimes wish I could know what instrument I play…

I’d like to think of myself as a timpani or first-chair violin, either laying the tempo or leading the melody. But I get the feeling like my part to play is the fourth bassoon, a vital part but never noticed. I should be ok with that. During the interview process for a job I was once asked “Do you think you could be content in a small town place like…?” It was a question which I had thought about, but when asked point-blank by a member of the search committee it took me aback. I answered yes, which was true enough then as is now, but it made me stand up and stare providence square in the eyes. Who’s design for life will I accept? Will some self-wrote, 3 chord lullaby win out over the possible magnum opus? Will the amateur have contempt for the virtuoso? Is there really an option? The theological concept of ‘irresistible grace’ speaks just as well to every choice one makes as it does to the doctrine of salvation with which it’s usually associated. When given a choice between providential grace and our own mud-slung construction we are, thankfully, often gently prodded along by the Spirit. And by gently prodded I mean, grabbed by the collar and lovingly dragged in the right way.

I wonder what the next movement might sound like… something with a bassoon solo perhaps?

"Conduits for the Spirit" by Todd Bragg

2009-09-29T11:59:01-05:00

These times is crazy!!! I don't know if anyone can relate to this, but I feel like so many things in my life are up in the air. As a musician, I am familiar with this feeling more than most perhaps, but I have talked to many recently that seem to be sharing the same sensation in their lives. What do I spend my time and energy working towards as my career continually evolves? How can I be the husband/father that I need to be when it seems spending more time together is the only way? Only, there's no more time! How do I cultivate and nurture the friendships that I have when it seems more and more difficult to spend quality time together. Should I go ahead and just pull my hair out since its thinning anyway? Its 10:30 pm and I haven't gotten anything done that I needed to get done, yet I haven't stopped!

Where does the Gospel fit into the mix? I love the idea of being able to study and meditate for hours on the scripture everyday, gaining incredible insight to share with my family and friends, but that doesn't happen often. And if that doesn't happen, then how am I really going to grow in my understanding of the Gospel? Right? Well, I don't know that I can sort all of this out or answer all of these questions, nor do know if I am supposed to. I can tell you that in middle of all of this chaos that is life, I have a peace that somehow passes understanding. I have a sense that every detail and every new twist and turn of events is happening exactly when its supposed to. I am surprised by the impact I have on my friends that I didn't orchestrate. The relationships that are so important to maintain in my life, usually need my ear more than my mouth. When brothers and sisters in Christ face unbelievably difficult times, I don't know the answers, I know my presence is what means the most to them.

Jesus left us with his Spirit. We carry it with us always. We share it with each other. We are usually not aware of the Spirits activity until after the fact. The Spirit is what carries us through the day and connects us to the community of Christ. I don't know about you, but I need to remind myself of this daily. Because of this I'm not going through life alone and there is a story of redemption being told through all of us.

David Brooks Compares V-J Day Footage to Our Contemporary Narcissism

2009-09-28T13:51:17-05:00

Excellent article by David Brooks of the New York Times. High Five Nation.

Excerpt:

And there was something else. When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.

But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.” Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within.

Everything that starts out as a cultural revolution ends up as capitalist routine. Before long, self-exposure and self-love became ways to win shares in the competition for attention. Muhammad Ali would tell all cameras that he was the greatest of all time. Norman Mailer wrote a book called “Advertisements for Myself.”

--- ---

A question: who among us doesn't see prominent segments of the Church involved in this? Not rallying the Church to resist self-promotion, but engaging in it, indeed at times leading the self-promotion. Always rationalized..."just trying to reach more people for Jesus."

I confess there's a part of me that wants to press the point. However, what are the implications of the three sentences in the previous paragraph? Does this mean no blogs with a connection to a book, like this one? Or if such a blog like CGO can legitimately exist, does it mean no endorsements for the book, as I have placed on the left sidebar? Do descriptions of Contributors constitute self-promotion?

I leap to David Brooks' point, and find it easy to tar and feather 'the other,' but the mere existence of this blog and its features suggest how accommodated I and we (the Contributors) are to self-promotion. What price humility?

Tom Nelson Speaking at DTS Chapel on Christians and Depression

2009-09-28T08:57:30-05:00

What interested me when I first heard about Tom Nelson's depression was what I knew of him via his famous "Tommy Nelson boys". (There may be an official title for the 12 or so young men he disciples each year, but I don't know it. Among Texas evangelicals they are known as Tommy Nelson boys.)

Anyway, from encountering a couple of these guys and also a couple of girls who dated other Tommy Nelson boys, I knew a bit about the man himself. Among other things, I knew he was impatient and hard regarding the subject of depression. So when I first heard he had stepped down from the Denton Bible pulpit because of depression, I noted the irony. I wondered how hard it must have been for him to accept or even recognize. I thought of this as God laying him low that He might raise Nelson up for a new aspect of ministry.

And so He has. Watch and hear Nelson repudiate his old stance towards depression. The compassion and love he has for any and all sufferers of depression is beautiful to see. The Lord has been using this broken man to encourage and heal countless people. The man who once greeted depression with a verse and interrogation about the sin in one's life has now become depressed people's advocate and guide.

Corey Widmer Co-Pastors East End Fellowship in East Richmond

2009-09-25T04:00:00-05:00

Corey Widmer, one of the original Contributors to CGO and still an occasional Contributor, is co-pastoring the new East End Fellowship in Richmond, VA.

I'm not sure why the Houston Examiner would write a story about the East End Fellowship of Richmond, but regardless, the story is a good one. See what Corey and friends are doing as they dig in more deeply into the Church Hill area of Richmond. The story focuses on the other co-pastor, Donald Coleman.

Catherine Larson Interviews Donald Miller re: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

2009-09-24T10:01:14-05:00

Catherine Larson, who published the splendid As We Forgive earlier this year, works at BreakPoint (Chuck Colson), and is a Contributor for us here at Common Grounds Online. For Breakpoint this week she interviewed Donald Miller regarding his new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life.

Donald Miller is fairly well known for his Blue Like Jazz book that has sold a million copies and is being made into a movie.

This is what interviews could be and should be. Read Larson's interview with Miller (here).

Excerpts:

CL: One of the parts of your book I liked best was when you talk about character development. Can you explain what character transformation has to do with living a good story?

DM: Well most stories—maybe I should say many stories—are about the arc of the character. You know Dickens’ A Christmas Carol would be the best example. You see Scrooge at the beginning and he’s a bitter old man, and by the end he’s a generous person who’s been changed by conflict, by encountering what’s at the heart of who he is. And that’s by design. That’s something that God has designed. It’s the way that He changes us. We are people who are constantly changing, and that’s by design. We’re becoming something different all the time and hopefully we’re becoming something better.

Even before the Fall of man, you see the elements of story. You see Adam being lonely, not being complete....Adam walks with God, knows God intimately, has not sinned and yet is lacking. God knows what he’s lacking because he created Adam to lack and he needed a woman, so instead of giving Adam a woman, God tells Adam to name the animals, which probably took many, many years.....

Well, that’s God’s design and it’s His design before the Fall of man and not after the Fall of man. So story exists before the Fall. Now conflict really got hijacked after the Fall. It’s very different than it was because there are all sorts of other painful realities that we deal with because of the Fall of man, but God intended to change our character from the beginning. And so that’s one of the reasons in Scripture it talks about, “Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials, knowing the testing of your faith is producing perseverance.” That conflict is by design, it’s something that God wants and we’re supposed to engage it with a positive attitude because it changes our character. It changes who we are.

-----

Again, read the whole interview between Catherine Larson and Donald Miller.

MATT KLEBERG- HEAVY METAL'S NOT SO BAD

2009-09-18T11:38:53-05:00

I can’t really say that heavy metal is my favorite genre of music, although I did enjoy a brief Metallica kick in high school and I do rely on DragonForce to keep me awake during late night painting sessions. That said, I want to describe a recent, and unexpectedly AWESOME heavy metal experience.

The other night my musician friend Mitch, from Philadelphia, drove down to Charlottesville for a last minute gig at a local bar/music venue. Mitch plays bass in the heavy metal trio Haley, named after the lead singer/growler. Their album cover shows the leather-clad, eye-linered, tattooed band members posed together wearing purposefully blank expressions. The track list on the back reads as follows: 1)Burning Witches 2)Blacked Out 3)Hallowed 4)Devour 5)Stop This Ride 6)Pain is Love 7)Leeches 8)Apathy 9)Broken Guitars 10)Drown Me. My favorite is the CD design, which boasts an x-ray hand giving the middle finger.

The band didn’t show up in a big tour bus- no, they showed up two hours late in a 1984 Chevy conversion van that had broken down just outside of Philly. The band didn’t arrive with hundreds of adoring metal fans awaiting the show, either. In fact, when I got there, a few songs into the show, five people were in attendance, total, including myself…and the bartender. As it turns out, CLAW (Charlottesville Ladies Arm Wrestling) was going on the same night, stealing the vast majority of would-be concert attendees and leaving the bar virtually empty. (I confess, CLAW was the reason I was late to the show myself)

Between the long drive, the van trouble, the late start, and the lack of fans, the band had plenty of reason to be sour. They could have easily pulled an entitled rock-star move and refused to play. They could have been condescending to the few of us in attendance, as if it were our fault that no one else had showed up.

Instead, they chose something redemptive and life-giving. Those guys went nuts. The lead singer screamed his bloody guts out and shredded guitar solos on his back, jumping off speakers, playing with his mouth. I swear his head nearly exploded more than once. Mitch, on bass, never stopped head banging throughout the entire two hour set, which they played without break. They played old stuff, they played new stuff, they played stuff they had never tried live. The three of us facing the stage got totally sucked in, playing air guitars and punishing air drums. The fourth attendee, a middle-aged guy in khakis who had clearly told his wife he was off for a late-night milk run, stood off to the side with both fists in the air and his eyes closed. It was pure bliss. In a moment of humor the lead singer pointed to khaki guy and me, “Alright, you guys are gonna count us off…right side of the stadium give me a ONE, TWO,” and to the couple on the other side of the bar, “left side of the stadium, give me a THREE, FOUR!” Of course the four of us obliged, shouting an enthused “ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR!” and the band jumped into the next song, “Apathy”. At the end of the show, the lead singer declared it was “free pin night” and passed out pins with the x-ray middle finger. While he was at it, he gave all of us free CDs. After the second encore, the four fans chatted it up with the band and helped them pack up the reluctant van.

The whole night was a thing of beauty- three guys using their musical gifts with crazy wild abandon, totally content with the most humble of opportunities to perform. Is there some explicit message of redemption in Haley’s music? No. Are you going to find any hope in songs like “Apathy” or “Drown Me”? No. Did the four of us in attendance leave that show touched by the power of art and human passion? You bet. I am convinced God delighted in this modest show. This common grace business is interesting- we’re all made in the image of the Creator, and so often our own creative work reflects that glory in moments of unintended beauty. So here’s what I’m left pondering: which is more important, the act of creating, or the thing created?