Guard The Gates – Part 3

Continuing this series on Guarding the Gates, which in concept really speaks of guarding the mind, we come to the third thing that can help you. In review, the first thing to do to guard the gates is to be given to study and the second thing is a minister has to be given to prayer. The third guard that you can put at the gate is a quest for personal holiness and godliness.

In the first message on this study, I mentioned the fact that when a man gives himself to disciplined and sanctified study, the stretching of the mind will directly affect the growth of the soul. Simply by nature of the study, the exposure to things in the Scriptures and the accompanying books the minister has available to him, we begin to understand how holy God is and how important it is for us to have acclimate it into our lives.

Holiness is important because of the nature of the work that a preacher must do. Never will I forget the story that was told in the very first class when I begin RN school in March 1985 that was told of Lewis Semmelweis. He was the guy who was laughed at because he outrageously claimed that dirty physicians’ hands were responsible for the death of the mothers who were dying from childbed fever. He was certain that the germs that were unseen were the culprits that were literally killing these young mothers.

I would be so bold as to assert that if my hands, heart, soul, and mind are not clean it will have some measure of impact on the congregation that I serve. In my mind, this ought to place a greater sense of responsibility on all men who bear the vessels of the Lord and they must be clean (Isaiah 52:11)! I also believe that for those who are quibbling about standards of holiness and are attempting to accuse those who are ardent adherents of a separated life of living in a condition of holiness that perhaps your vision has been clouded by the mists of worldliness that are so prevalent in our generation. We wouldn’t dare want a surgeon to operate on us if he had just come in from working in his garden and therefore a minister who has no real cleanliness of holiness about him shouldn’t be operating in the pulpit.

Jude uses strong words when he tells us that we will have to contend for the faith, which was once delivered to the saints. The faith is that dogma of doctrine that defines how to get into the church, who the church is and where it is to go. All of these components of the faith, while intricate, are very simply carried out by a man whose gates (mind) have been guarded by holiness. Jude when he spoke of the nature of this faith he also clearly stated that we have no right to modify it but the risk of it being altered escalated when there was a unholy alliance with “certain men” who managed to creep in “unawares.” Doctrinal purity and commitment to holiness will require vigilance on the part of clean men who have allowed personal holiness to be a guard at the gate.

What Type Of People Will God Bring Your Way?

Making Dry Church Services Come To Life

Why is it that in some churches, meeting with the creator of the universe is often a boring showcase for bad music, inept preaching and poor taste? Listed are 9 perspectives that can enhance the effectiveness of your services.

• Put yourself in the congregation’s shoes. Pastor, how long has it been since you just sat in the congregation? How often do you really try to identify with the needs, hopes and dreams of those in your congregation?
• Tell stories. Storytelling was Jesus’ primary method of teaching. He put the most profound concepts into simple and compelling stores that captivated people and changed their lives. Never telling a story is a prescription for putting people to sleep. 
• Question everything. Why do you take up the offering the same way each week? Why do you always sing the same hymn of invitation?
• Find some fresh jokes-or don’t use any. How many of you would rather be here in church than in the finest hospital in town? Please discard your moth-eaten jokes. Otherwise your congregation will start laughing out of pity, not humor.
• Go beyond your trusty old sermons of the past. Yes it’s nice to have some standby messages you can rely on. But the danger is that the more you preach the same sermon, the more difficult it is to present it with conviction, originality and excitement.

Live Personal Mentoring

If you are like most Christian church and business leaders you have already discovered that "quick-fix" leadership solutions simply do not work.

At best they are Band-Aids that only temporarily mask the real problems. Perhaps you also have experienced the frustration experienced after spending precious dollars to attend conference after conference and realizing that the motivation received wore off shortly after returning to the real world at home. Or maybe you are one of the countless leaders who visit the bookstore for the latest catchy title, only to buy another book that never gets finished and simply winds up looking good on the bookshelf behind your desk. Impressive but ineffective.There is a solution to the leadership dilemma. For many pastors the real solution is less costly than hosting an evangelist, or for a business leader to hire a consultant. The real solution is one-on-one live mentoring with a gifted and seasoned professional who is focused on you and your needs.

Dr. Fred Childs is highly solicited by Christian church and business leaders for personal mentoring. He offers invaluable understanding, insights, and solutions to leaders on a wide range of topics.ChurchMentor.net has an inexpensive monthly membership fee that introduces its members to an abundance of relevant leadership materials in written, audio, and video formats. However, now the services being offered are expanding to include live mentoring as well.

Are You Trained To Fail?

“Have you been trained to fail?”  You have been trained in ministry to fail if you have been taught to do the ministry rather than to train others for ministry.  I am grateful to the teachers who taught me to perform the functions of ministry:  visiting, counseling, marrying, burying, teaching, witnessing, and a host of other duties.  All are needed.  By themselves, however, they help us only to maintain, not to maximize ministry.  We can never be effective ministers until we learn what it means to be a leader and how to function as a leader.  The following are five common ingredients in growing churches:

• (1)  The pastor and the congregation understand their God-given gifts and use them in ministry.
  
• (2) The pastor’s hands-on ministry decreases and the congregation’s increases.
  
• (3) Both the quality and the quantity of ministry increase.
• (4) The pastor’s ministry influence increases as he shares ministry responsibilities with the congregation.
  
• (5) A biblical philosophy of ministry is established.  That is, leadership plus lay ministry equals growth.

How can you build a leadership team and maximize ministry in your church?  The following six steps are proven and effective.

1. Identify the leaders in the church.  Who are the influencers?  These persons may hold formal or informal positions of leadership.  They are the ones to whom others look for decisions.  Write down their names and rank them on a scale of 1 to 10 as to their leadership and influence within the church.
2. Intentionally take time to build relationships with your current and future leaders.  Do not ignore or exclude the others, but focus on developing leaders.

Bible Study Procedures

The main purpose of interpreting a text is not UNIQUENESS but CLARITY!   The first task of the preacher is EXEGESIS – careful, systematic study of the Scripture to discover the original, intended meaning; to find out the original intent of the words of the Bible; to hear the Word as the original recipients heard it.  But we don’t just do exegesis when there is an obvious difference between THEN and NOW – it is the first step in studying EVERY text

• Go back to the original and the best sources for yourself first – don’t just begin by consulting somebody’s book! (i.e. Mark 10:23 – one “expert” said there was a gate in Jerusalem called the “Needle’s Eye” which camels could only go through on their knees, but that gate never existed!)
• We must always guard against EISEGESIS – reading our desired interpretation into the text instead of letting the text speak to us!

To provoke your thinking, one of the best things to do is use several Bible translations that you know in advance will differ in their interpretation.
There are three basic theories of translation:

1. Literal: advantage – as close as possible to the original; disadvantage – doesn’t account for cultural differences in customs and expressions (i.e. King James Version)
2. Free: advantage – eliminates historical and cultural “barriers” by expressing Scripture in modern terms; disadvantage – since it is more concerned with translating “ideas” it is not always accurate in exact wording (i.e. Phillips, Living Bible, The Message)

The Value of Biographical Preaching

The proper definition of biographical preaching is;

The method of preaching that expounds a Bible character, based on careful exegesis, to deduce the principles that regulated his or her life and to apply the principles to the modern listener. A simpler definition is; Biographical preaching is preaching that provides a biography of the life of a person from scripture and draws a moral lesson or message from that story.

It is essential to understand that all preaching in its most basic of forms is (or at least ought to be) expository in nature. By that I mean that every scripture you share in a sermon should be exposed and expounded upon. Even when only one verse is used in a topical sermon, there is a degree of exposition that takes place.  In the same sense, biographical preaching is a type of expository preaching. You are telling the story of an individual rather than the story of a chapter or a book. Instead of exposing a passage of scripture, you are exposing the life of a person in scripture. Your text may include several passages of scripture about the character.

What Did Jesus Say About Tithing?

It began with the outpouring of the Holy Ghost in Acts chapter two, but was continued and maintained, in part at least, by the giving and sacrifice of the first century church!

The bible says that they gave their all and laid it at the Apostles feet. They sold houses and land, possessions and goods, and parted them to those who had need of them.

Were these new, born again, Christians giving of their all, simply out of faith, or was there some precedent that had been set by the words and actions of the Jesus and His disciples?

Obviously, these Christians did not yet have the New Testament writings to refer to...but they were there in person when Jesus taught, instructed, and acted as their example in all things.

The Dark Side of Spiritual Abuse - Part 5

What I increasingly discovered was in these dark spiritually abusive environments, it serves as excellent and fertile conditions for hypocrisy to prevail. As you dig deeper into these environments you soon discover dark, deviant sins and moral corruption simmering beneath the surface. I believe that the huge level of repression that takes place in these “churches” does nothing except bring out the worst sins of the flesh. Although when someone finally does decide to speak up concerning the matter of these dark sins, the leader usually resorts to efforts of damage control so that the leadership and the church do not have a soiling of “reputation.” Man hasn’t really learned any new tricks about covering sin; he still resorts to insufficient fig leaves just as Adam and Eve did at the beginning of the state of man.

What I also found to be very surprising is that most of the time the wife of the leader will also work toward damage control. She will do everything within her power to live up to the social pressures of maintaining some semblance of normalcy in the various relationships she has within the church. She apparently has come to understand that the dark side of her mate can shift on her as much as it does with those people he is taking advantage of. So instead of dealing with the moral and spiritual failure that is present things are left to follow the course of gravity. Gravity leads the person to maintain an environment of manipulation and absolute mind control on those people he is supposed to serve.

While I have written about the traits and characteristics of those who are involved in a spiritually abusive environment, I have not been specific with practices of spiritual abuse. I will list some of the practices while leaving some of the most extreme situations out as some would probably be absolutely shocked to know this kind of thing takes place under the guise of religion. So here are some actual practices of spiritual abuse:

• A member having to submit financial records to the church leader and the leader determines how and when they are to spend their money.

• A member having to sell various things on a constant basis to feed the coffers of the church so that it entirely benefits the leader.

• A wide disparity between the lifestyle of the leader and the members. He lives like a king while the members appear to live at a level of poverty or barely just able to get by.

• The leader using a “word of knowledge” or “word of wisdom” to pick a spouse for those who are in the congregation.

• Members being absolutely forbidden to question the direction the leader takes or question the decisions he is making.