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July 28, 2008
Good Monday!
This past week several of the
churches in our community, including the one that I pastor, joined together to
put on our Daily Vacation Bible
School. The location of our VBS is rotated each year
and each church sends a representative to serve on a planning committee. It was a wildly successful week. Our biggest evening was on Tuesday when we
greeted 140 children to the small church where we were meeting. It was wonderful to watch the way everyone
worked together to make it all work. The
pastor of the host church is a young man who is on fire for the Lord and the
two of us had an opportunity to get to know each other a little better. While I have been serving in Leipsic for 14
years now, he just completed his second year.
At one point Nestor asked me how I came to know Jesus Christ.
I told him that it was my wife’s
fault. Actually, Denise and I were just
dating and she knew that I was not a believer.
She knew that she had a very small window of opportunity to tell me about
Jesus and that if I was unwilling to give my life to Him she knew that there
was no future for the two of us. First
she had “tricked” me into going to church with her. We both worked at a grocery store and we both
were scheduled a Sunday off. We were
going to go to brunch and she asked me to meet her at an address in Toledo. I went to the address and it was a
church. I had never gone to church, and
I was a little worried about what I was to do next. The truth of the matter was this: I did not
have a personal relationship with Christ when we first started dating. She knew that. I thought I was a Christian
(only because I knew I wasn’t of the Jewish or Muslim faith). I didn’t really know what a Christian
was. I never grew up attending church of
any kind. My parents were not involved
in a church and so Sunday mornings were just great “sleeping-in” days.
After that first visit to church I started to attend
regularly with her and found myself in a very uncomfortable setting. I wasn’t uncomfortable because of the people
in the church—I just didn’t understand what was going on. But I was “smitten” by this young woman and I
wanted to find out more about her, so I went to church with her to see what
made her “tick.” As she began to share
her faith with me I decided that I could “pretend” being a Christian so that I
could spend more time with her. And so,
in her presence I portrayed myself as a very “religious” person. When I was with my “buddies,” I allowed my
true nature to shine. And so my “religion”
was a game. I was pious when I was with
her but I was genuinely a heathen (which was my real nature) with my
friends. It was a game that I played in
which I had to constantly be aware of who the players were.
One weekend, she had invited me to her church camp
for a youth retreat that she had helped organize. I had traveled there with her father, the two
sons of the pastor of the church, and an elder of the same church, whose
daughter was going to be baptized in a lake during an evening service that night.
That evening I witnessed the young lady profess her faith in Jesus and she was
then be baptized in this lake in front
of a very large gathering of people. It
was a pretty emotional time for many of the people who were there. It seemed like they were celebrating
something that I was not a part of. I
had no idea what the big deal was. That
evening in a cabin of several young men I found myself “trapped” with a bunch
of Christians—and they were genuine in their “religion.” They were having devotions and the baptism
subject was a part of the conversation.
I made a few choice comments about what I had witnessed and it became
clear to some there that I was not a part of their group. They were very kind to me in spite of
myself. Something was going on that made
me very uncomfortable and I was reacting to it very negatively. I ended up burying my head in my sleeping bag
hoping that this silly youth retreat would be soon over. This group of guys was way too open in
talking about their faith for me. I was
counting the hours before I was able to go home. Little did I know that God had something in
store for me the next morning.
As the sun awakened us the next
morning, following a breakfast in the mess hall, we all gathered to walk up a
steep hill for morning worship. The hill
was the traditional place for worship and at the top of this hill was cement
cross from which a wooden cross had been erected with the name Jesus hanging
from a sign at the top of it. Making a
long story short, the minister who brought the message shared a message about
the love of God and His desire to bring reconciliation to his created
beings. At one point he said that Jesus
Christ came to die for the sins of the whole world and even if any one of us
had been the only one on earth, he still would have died in our place. I looked up onto that wooden cross and in my
minds eye, pictured Him hanging there--for me.
I knew then that I could no long pretend to be a Christian—I needed to
completely yield my life to Jesus and live for Him. I quietly prayed to receive Jesus and my life
was almost immediately transformed. This
was real stuff and I didn’t know what to do next.
God took care of that. My transformation was so dramatic that things
I used to want to do, I no longer wanted to do.
My friends and my family were the first to notice. And it made them a bit uncomfortable as
well. To make matters worse (for those
people) was that God called me to be a minister three months later and so it
became really awkward for people to process that. I don’t think I was obnoxious in my faith—I
was just a very different person that people noticed. My “buddies” didn’t really want to hang out
with me any more and even a special cousin called me from Florida to ask if I was selling flowers at
the local airport wearing a robe with a shaved head. She hadn’t seen me for quite a while but was
getting family reports that caused her to be alarmed.
Jesus said that that would
happen. It’s actually what happens when
any of us decide to carry His cross. In
Matthew 10, Jesus is talking about several relationship challenges that happens
with a believer when he or she chooses to follow Him. Eventually He says in verse 38: “If you refuse to take up your cross and
follow me, you are not worthy of being mine.” In other words, to take up that cross to
follow Jesus means that we must be willing to publicly identify with Him, to
experience any opposition (or misunderstanding) and to be willing to even face
suffering (loss of friends?) or death.
That’s pretty radical.
I want to encourage you who are
carrying crosses right now. You may be
going through some rough times because you are choosing to live your life for
Christ. Some don’t understand your
decision, some might even reject you. I
know that is hard. But let me encourage
you that even in some instances, your commitment to Christ will eventually win
those who misunderstand you to respect and love you for your commitment. I know that is absolutely true in my
life. My family and my friends are some
of my biggest supporters and encouragers in my life right now. They thought I jumped off into the deep end
back then, but now, they embrace me and encourage me all the time. Go ahead and pick up that cross. Like in my case, Jesus will help you through
it. He will give you the strength you
need.
Have a wonderful week and remember that I am praying for
you. God bless!
Pastor Tim
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