Greetings,
"Repent! For the kingdom of God is at hand."
What is it about those words uttered by John the Baptist that cause the people to shutter? Believers and unbelievers seem to dislike the phrase equally. If I were to animate repentance it would be the loud, hard nosed, blunt, Brooklyn, side mouth talking, uncle who always says something like, “What!? It’s the truth ain’t it?!” Whereas, forgiveness would be characterized as a loving grandmotherly figure that embraces you in her arms declaring, “everything will be alright, my love."
Forgiveness is obligatory for us as believers, even if the person needing to be forgiven isn’t repentant. A repentant person is far easier to forgive than an unrepentant one, but it is necessary to forgive even if the person is unrepentant time and time again. That doesn’t mean that we are obligated to be a perpetual punching bag for the unrepentant jerk-face (in love).
What I am getting at is that while forgiveness is beautiful and popular to talk about, repentance is not. I wonder what kind of ministry can be accomplished if the people inside the “walls” of the church were to repent and humble themselves and turn from their wicked ways. I wonder what kind of community we could experience if we were to repent and confess our sins to one another in powerful transparency. If we were not disgusted by the deep sin that so easily entangles folks but patiently and lovingly sifted through the filth to help them to unravel the entanglement and find healing. I believe there is beauty and power in repentance. I think it requires great humility and courage to be truly repentant. The animated character of repentance should look like an excited, passionate, zealous, but wise and contemplative old man just set free from a long prison sentence that he deserved to serve in full. Humility comes naturally to a man that experienced a great level of forgiveness.
Repentance should be something that we embrace and welcome. We as the bride of Christ should be willing and even desiring to be completely open with our bridegroom the Lord Jesus Christ as well as our brothers and sisters in Christ. There should be no shame in the confession of our sins, no matter how dark and damning they may seem to us from a worldly perspective. The purity and love shared by the repentant soul is one of great humility and peace. The practice of repentance is something that we each need to continue to practice as believers. The kingdom of heaven is near. There is no time like the present to present yourself to the Lord as a sacrifice of praise and repent. May God richly bless our fellowship as we come to Him with deep and sincere repentance.
2 Peter 3:9 ~ "The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance."
Love ya,
Chris
Greetings,
Mission opportunities are all around us. You may be gifted in helping people through construction, counseling, playing, feeding, praying or evangelizing. The gospel is the great news of Jesus removing the condemnation of our sins and instead gifting us freedom and grace that He deserved because of His perfection. Because you and I were created by a creative God, we can demonstrate the greatness of the gospel and minister to people in countless ways.
One opportunity where we have a need in our church is for people who are gifted at planning events (these could be church family events or outreach events). If this is an area where you feel God might be calling you to serve, please let us know!
Another of our desires as a fellowship is to be active and engaged in ministry efforts around the world. Four years ago, I was introduced to a man named José Navarro. He and his wife Irma were housing several children that needed a safe and Christ loving environment to grow up. They desired to have an orphanage where many children could come to experience the unconditional love of Christ. When we met them they were doing this out of a travel trailer. The Lord laid it on our hearts at Way of Life to help them build a permanent facility on the property and adopt this project, José, Irma, and the children as our own.
Since then, we have partnered with them through our annual special offering and other fundraisers to construct a facility that is capable of ministering to dozens of children. We have also taken about 30 different people down there on about ten different trips to visit them and to assist with the building project. They are like family to us now! At the beginning of February, Sergio, Bill and I will be going to visit again, taking along a paint sprayer donated by someone in our church. I am especially excited for this trip because the building is nearly complete and soon we will be focusing on ministry to the children and the community.
Our special offering for foreign missions is coming up on March 3rd and we have a goal to raise $10,000 which will complete the facility and begin a new phase of ministry of helping to fund more of the day-to-day operations. We would love to partner with other churches and organizations to help this ministry to gain momentum in reaching the lost in the community by loving and supporting the kids in the area. It is a great mission field and the Lord has brought us right into the heart of this area for a reason.
Please be praying for the Lord to provide the funds for this wonderful project. In addition to giving financially, we will have the opportunity to join a summer mission trip in July, when we plan to spend several days ministering to the community through a VBS type of a program. We'll have all the details and firm dates available in a couple weeks.
Ephesians 2:10 (ESV) ~ "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them."
There are so many people that need Jesus. Let's do whatever we can think of to show the love of God to people!
Love ya,
Chris
Greetings,
There are a great number of people that do not know the Lord and openly admit that they have no real interest in following the teaching of the Bible. There are also a number of people that claim that they follow the teachings of the Bible but obviously do not. This world is overwhelmingly biblically illiterate and becoming increasingly hostile toward those who believe in Christ.
This last week some people raised a fuss about the Vice President’s wife teaching art at a Christian school. People came out against her and Christians in general for not adopting principles of an unbiblical and ungodly worldview. The world is trending downward morally speaking while seeing a rise in worldly “sophistication.” This divide between biblical morality and worldly sophistication is a recipe for the makings of persecution.
The first signs of persecution will be labeling and misrepresenting the biblical position. There will be a gross generalization of what we believe and a broad acceptance that all Christians are bigots and latest-group-a-phobic.
Misrepresentation will lead to broad stroke vilification of Christ followers. There will be little that a believer will be able to say to sway public opinion because the collective mentality and hyper sensitivity to being on the “right side of history” (from the world's viewpoint) will overpower reason, logic and intellectual dialogue. This is where a person who claims to be a follower of Christ but is entangled with the world's precepts will vilify the church themselves and either leave the church, split the church or start their own church.
Look around at churches today and you will see the effects of the third phase of this progression of persecution. I believe this is where we are today in the northwest USA. Once the church is misrepresented and vilified they are marginalized or seen as not important. We made it past the Christmas and Easter Christian to the unchurched generation that has no reference point for why the church is any more valuable than fraternal organizations. People in the unchurched generation don’t find value in church. This generation is largely missing from most congregations, and even those that do attend church in this generation often are asking "what can the church do for me?", not "what can I do in the name of Christ?"
Once the unchurched generation comes of age to lead in this country in overwhelming numbers, the logical next stage would be to criminalize the work of the church. Any deep discussion on this stage would be largely filled with conjecture as we do not know how exactly that will look. We need to be alert and not be caught off guard when this becomes a reality, and we must teach our children to be ready for this as well.
The obvious final stage will be outright persecution and punishment. It is really hard to imagine these final two stages because of our constitution here in the USA. As believers, our faith is not in our constitution, but in Christ and the constitution is not the word of God and so can therefore be circumvented. All of this is to say that we should be wise in our observance of the world around us. At some point our love for people may be taken as a hate crime.
No matter the situation, we should never keep from operating as the bride of Christ and fully obedient followers of Christ. It is clearer than ever that we should be loving each other all the more as the days are approaching.
Matthew 10:16, "Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves."
Love ya,
Chris