We used to love watching a comedy show called “Whose line is it anyway� with Drew Cary. This has nothing to do with that.
While sharing lunch with Sandra I had an epiphany (or Holy Spirit moment for you Charismatics). I wondered if I would ever feel like any church would ever feel like a home church again. That’s when it became apparent to me that the way I have been thinking of church has been from a possessive point of view. For years I called South Sound Foursquare “my church� and the church I went to before SS4 was “my last church.� When I was going to my last church, I called it “my church.� But now I find it hard to call the church I go to now “my church� even though it was my last church before my last church. Of course, we all know that our church doesn’t belong to us but we still call the church we have chosen to belong to “my church� or “our church.� It gets even more possessive if you go to the same church that your parents go to or even their parents went to. Then it becomes our family’s church. Sometimes the family church is like other family traditions or even the family pet. It’s not perfect but it’s ours.
Jesus said, “And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it� (Matthew 16:18). Jesus called the church His church. Of the 86 references to church in the New Testament, it is never called preceded by a personal pronoun like your church or their church or so-and-so’s church. It’s always “the church.� Some examples:
And the Lord added to the church daily. (Acts 2:47)
At that time a great persecution arose against the church . . . (Acts 8:1)
From Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called for the elders of the church. (Acts 20:17) Notice, it doesn’t say their church.
To the church of God which is at Corinth . . . (1 Corinthians 1:2) Notice, it doesn’t say Corinth’s church.
For first of all, when you come together as a church . . . (1 Corinthians 11:18)
The churches of Asia greet you… (1 Corinthians 16:19) – not the Asian churches.
You see, I realize that the church I went to or go to now wasn’t my church and never will be my church. As comfortable as I may have felt, as involved as I may have been, as proud, or energized, or excited as I may have felt about going to a certain church, I was wrong in calling any of them “my church.� Somewhere along the way I started thinking of church as belonging to man. Maybe because of Mark 2:27 which says, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath�. The Sabbath was created for man but that doesn’t mean that it belongs to man. God created everything for us. Does that mean that we own everything? Hardly!
The problem is ownership - we start to think that we made the church. That somehow, there wouldn’t be a church if man didn’t think to put it together. We become (I became) proud of my church. My church has contemporary music. My church is cool. My church has a big youth group. My church has an active men’s/woman’s/50’s+/jail/______ ministry. My church has a cool website. My church is relevant. My church does outreach. My church feeds the homeless (every fifth Sunday). My church is growing. Oh, and My church is better than your church.
Newsflash: Church belongs to God. Duh.
I don’t know if I will ever find or feel like I have a home church again. I’m not sure that I want to or even that I am supposed to. I once said, “I like to think that my church is the church not a church.� I think I am only now starting to understand what that means.

I was sitting in our campground this last weekend around about 30 people and was reading The Master Plan of Evangelism, by Robert E Coleman, when I realized the irony of what I was doing. I was reading a book that is about spending time with people when I could have been spending time with people. Duh.
You ever get the feeling that you just can’t figure it out. Not like that “I’ll get it eventually� feeling but more of a realization that you will never get it. The more you study, the more questions come up. The more you look back and read the classics like C.S. Lewis, Phillip Yancy, William Law, C.H. Spurgeon, or look to now with the modern “greats� like Max Lucado, John Ortberg, Rick Warren, etc., the more you find yourself covering the same ground. Then you realize that nothing is really new. It’s just men being – well – men. Men trying to figure it out and then share what they have “found� with other men. And after we have read hundreds of books and tens of thousands of pages of interpretations, feelings, explanations, and sometimes flat out guesses, we come back to where we started. God is God.

There is definitely a lot of good that comes from reading and study but at some point we need to put the books down and do the real work. “The Great Commission of Christ given to his church summed it up in the command to ‘make disciples of every creature’ (Matt. 28:19). This means that the Great Commission is not merely to go to the ends of the earth preaching the gospel (Mark 16:15), nor to baptize a lot of converts into the name of the triune God, nor to teach then the precepts of Christ, but to ‘make disciples’ – to build people like themselves who were so constrained by the commission of Christ that they not only followed, but also lead others to follow his way� (The Master Plan of Evangelism, p. 101).

I think I’ll head to Starbucks now and do some reading… let me know when you can join me. �

“Go, find balance.� Miyagi in Karate Kid (1984)

Friday, June, 20, 2008
by John Fischer

There is hardly any human need stronger than the need to belong. We were created this way. Every one of us came out of a womb screaming for warmth, companionship and someone else’s heartbeat. We were rudely ripped out of that idyllic existence and thrust into a cold, impersonal, lonely world. No wonder babies cry. And the rest of our lives are spent trying to find that intimacy again. Everyone knows what this was because everyone had the same experience once—being so close to another that a heartbeat was a constant companion—and everyone knows that reuniting with others is a part of our common purpose in life. No man is an island.

Is it any wonder Jesus prayed, “My prayer for all of them [His disciples and us] is that they will be one, just as you and I are one, Father—that just as you are in me and I am in you, so they will be in us, and the world will believe you sent me” (John 17:21).

We were made to be together. We often think only in terms of our own spiritual lives and forget the fact that God is saving a people to come together for His glory. Salvation is not just an individual matter; it’s a group hug. It is when the church functions as a whole that we give evidence to who we really are—the Body of Christ. That’s the Body of Christ, not the “Individual of Christ.” No one of us can reflect, alone, who God made us to be. His will is expressed in all of us together. Together we are the Bride of Christ. (My grammar checker doesn’t like that last sentence because this concept challenges even our language.) I am not the Bride; you are not the Bride. We are only the Bride in completion with all other believers in history and in the world. This is all part of God’s plan to bring us back together where we can hear each other’s heartbeat and experience the oneness that Jesus has with the Father. Jesus prayed that we would be all wrapped together in our oneness—us in Christ, and Christ in the Father.

So what does this mean for you and I today? It means we are not alone. We know where we belong. We need to give priority to our relationships with others because who we are depends on it. There is no such thing as individual spiritual growth. Check your calendar; arrange some lunches. Time put into other people is time committed to God and His purposes.

I was reading a book in a coffee shop yesterday. There was a woman in her fifties talking to a couple in their twenties at a table directly across from me and about ten feet away. I observed quickly that the older woman was very into the conversation. She was quite animated and kept leaning in close to talk to her young friends. It looked like one of those happy conversations punctuated by brief spurts of laughter. They were enjoying their meeting. She was definitely enjoying it more than the couple though. Maybe she had downed a little too much coffee.

After about ten minutes the older lady got up to leave but continued the conversation with a little more volume. This got my attention briefly, briefly enough to see her sit back down. A few minutes later she was up again. Now I was distracted. She stood there for about five more minutes still engaged in the conversation bending over from time to time to talk to her young friends. I guess she got tired of standing and sat down again but it wasn’t long before she was back up saying her goodbyes; once to both of them, then once more to each one of them, then a final “Bye you guys.� As she reached the door I half expected her to turn around and return to the table. I imagined myself in screaming in slow motion, “Nooooooooooooo.�

Then it occurred to me that my current church situation is sort of like the lady that wouldn’t leave – but sort of in reverse. We left the church almost two months ago but I’m still talking with a friend who is the church administrator and still attend one of the church’s weekly small groups. So the conversation and relationship keeps going. I feel like I’m hovering there, like the older lady in the coffee shop, as if I’m in the grip of some unseen tractor beam. I’m enjoying the exchange but now I wonder if I’m being a distraction or worse, a pain in the butt. I haven’t sensed that anyone is shooting daggers from their eyes at me from across the room but then again, neither did she.

by: John Collings
If we live as children in a world lacking real maturity, then we are led by those who are physically stronger or intellectually more articulate. We perceive ourselves as grown because there are no examples of adult obvious to us. We operate as adult even as orphaned children must in order to survive. Yet something within us proclaims a restlessness that there must be more. It is because children should be children. Desiring to be a father and caring for children does not make one a father. Becoming a father is a process of time, an accumulation of experience, and involves the transference of a seed of life into a suitable container to contain that life.
This is the predicament of the organized church. Children who know no real maturity striving to proclaim reality which is past their experience and comprehension. Because they cannot ‘’know'’ by virtue of their ‘’age'’, they must operate not by spontaneous living, but by structure and rules which only gives the appearance of what they wish to be.
There must be fathers within the church. Those who operate by an inner knowing of who they are and are able to comfort the children. Encouraging them to be children. To give understanding to the young men, knowing their rebellion and search for gifts and God’s power is a natural part of their becoming. Fathers who have no goal and no vision, except to love those whom they have been given that they also might know the Life. Fathers who produce fathers.

I remember that passage back in the book of Psalms that says, “Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and here feathers with yellow gold� (68:13). Now what does that mean? It shows the picture of a poor dove that fell down among the old cans and broken pots, the place where old junk is thrown out. Perhaps someone shot an arrow, hit this little dove and she went tumbling down and landed there. She wasn’t dead, but she was in bad shape. So she got some sunshine and pecked a few seeds here and there, waiting for nature to heal her wing. And one day the sun was bright and the other birds were up in the air, so she tried out her engines, revved up her motor and off she went.
As she circled around, someone said, “Oh, look at the beautiful dove, shining in silver!�
“Yes,� another said, “look at the gold along the edges of her wing.�
She had just been down there in the junk pile a little while before, but now she arose by the grace of God into the sunshine. That was David’s way of saying that God can take nothing, can take the poor wrecks of you and me, and change us and make us into doves with wings of silver and gold.

A.W. Tozer. The Attributes of God, Volume II. Camp Hill, PA, 2001.

Sometimes when I go here and there I take a plane. Once you get up in the air, you’ve got so much sunshine that if you want to read you’ve got to shut the little curtains to keep the sun off your book. But down below you see a solid carpet of thick clouds and find it very difficult to understand how anybody can be down there saying, “Oh, what a cloudy, overcast, gloomy day this is!� It isn’t cloudy and overcast and gloomy up where you are. You’re looking down on it.
So if you insist in being down here looking up, you’re always going to have an overcast sky – the devil will see to that! But if you remember that your life is hid with Christ in God then you’ll be looking down on it, and not looking up.

A.W. Tozer. The Attributes of God, Volume II. Camp Hill, PA, 2001.

Shake your head to get all the wheels going and try to stretch your mind all you can, then think, if you can, about the past. Think your hometown out of existence. Think back to when there wasn’t anything here but some Indians. Then go back and think all those Indians away, back before the Indians got here. Go back before that and think away the North American continent. And then think away all the earth of ours. And then let’s go back and think that there are no planets and no stars dotting the clear night sky; they have all vanished away and there is no Milky Way, no anything.
Go to the throne of God and think away the angels, the archangels, the seraphim and the cherubim that sing and worship before the throne of God. Think them all away until there is no creation: not an angel waves its wing, not a bird flies in the sky – there’s no sky to fly in. Not a tree grows on a mountain; there is no mountain for a tree to grow on. God lives and loves alone. The Ancient of Days, world without end, to the vanishing point back as far as the human mind can go – there you have God.
The Great Augustine said,

What, then, art Thou, O my God – what, I ask, but the Lord God? For who is Lord but the Lord? Or who is God save our God? Most high, most excellent, most potent, most omnipotent; most piteous and most just; most hidden and most near; most beauteous and most strong, stable, yet contained of none; unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new, never old; making all things new, yet bringing old age upon the proud and they know it not; always working, yet ever at rest; gathering, yet needing nothing; sustaining, pervading, and protecting; … Yet, O my God, my life, my holy joy, what is this that I have said? And what saith any man when He speaks of Thee? Yet woe to them that keep silence, seeing that even they who say most are as the dumb? . . .
But Thou, O Lord, who ever livest, and in whom nothing dies (since before the world was, and indeed before all that can be called “before,� Thou existest, and art the God and Lord of all Thy creatures; and with Thee fixedly abide the causes of all unstable things, the unchanging sources of all things changeable, and the eternal reasons of all things unreasoning and temporal) . . .

God is not dependent upon His world, upon kings and presidents, upon businessmen and preachers, upon boards and deacons. God is not dependent upon anything. We have thought our way back until there’s no history – back to God Hinself, God the Eternal One.

A.W. Tozer. The Attributes of God, Volume II. Camp Hill, PA, 2001.

Being made into a new creation is like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Originally an earthbound crawling creature, a caterpillar weaves a cocoon and is totally immersed in it. Then a marvelous process takes place, called metamorphosis. Finally a totally new creature - a butterfly - emerges. Once ground-bound, the butterfly can now soar above the earth. It now can view life from the sky downward. In the same way, as a new creature in Christ you must begin to see yourself as God sees you.
If you were to see a butterfly, it would never occur to you to say, ‘Hey, everybody! Come look at this good-looking converted worm!’ And it was ‘converted.’ No, now it is a new creature, and you don’t think of it in terms of what it was. You see it as it is now - a butterfly.
In exactly the same way, God sees you as His new creature in Christ. Although you might not always act like a good butterfly - you might land on things you shouldn’t, or forget you are a butterfly and crawl around with our old worm buddies - the truth of the matter is, you are never going to be a worm again!
This is why the usual New Testament word for a person in Christ is ’saint,’ meaning ‘holy one.’ Paul for example, in nearly all his letters addressed them to the ’saints.’ Yet all the time I hear Christians referring to themselves as ‘just an old sinner saved by grace.’ No! That’s like calling a butterfly a converted worm. We were sinners and we were saved by grace, but the Word of God calls us saints from the moment we become identified with Christ.
Some people ask, ‘But I still commit sins. Doesn’t that make me a sinner?
I answer, ‘It depends on whether your identity is determined by your behavior what you do ­ or by who you are in God’s eyes.’ Do you see how we have continued to do as Christians what the world does by determining a person’s identity based on his behavior? The only way to get free of this is to do what Paul wrote in Colossians 3:1-3:
‘Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.’
From: Classic Christianity. Eugene: Harvest House Publishers. ©1989.
By: Bob George

Welcome to Azevedoweb’s blog. Here you will find the raamblings of a twisted mind - mine. Hope I don’t offend you and if I do that you will let me know.

Dennis