A Trip Down Memory Lane

Well, they haven't moved Arkansas any closer to Virginia! After a very long car ride, singing praise songs until I was hoarse (of course, I had just preached so I was already on the way to hoarse) and a pretty good mystery novel on Recorded Books, I made it to Arkansas. After spending the night with my folks in Little Rock last night, I'll be with the girls the next two days giving Angelynn her car, Tressa her TV and Jasmine a city sticker from her Dad. (Is it just me, or does it seem Jasmine gets the short end of that stick?) I'll fly home Wednesday just in time to teach my class.

Last night, Mom and Dad mentioned the name of someone who had supposedly been at Denbigh sometime in the 1980's. The problem was that we could not remember them (I won't mention their name because I sure they read this blog and I don't want to hurt their feelings). Dad disappeared into his office and reappeared with three very full folders of old church directories dating back to the beginnings of Denbigh. We went through them looking for this family, but we never did find them.

What a trip down memory lane. I was reminded of people that I have not thought about for years! I thought again of how many people have come through Denbigh over the years. We have had so many from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard (along with a few Marines and maybe even some CIA spooks from Camp Perry, but then how would we know) come in and out of our church family over the last 25 years. They left a little of themselves with us and took a little of us with them. Hopefully the good parts.

Influence. Denbigh has touched a lot of lives over the years... and has been touched by a lot of lives. I hope that in some small way we have been able to enrich the Christian life of all of these people... I know they have enriched us. Maybe we can have a Denbigh reunion one day as we gather around the throne of glory. I look forward to it.

Seeing the Unseen

It seems that I might be in the market for a new TV. It's really not my fault; I have to buy one. Over the Christmas holidays, someone broke in to my daughter's apartment and stole her TV... as well as doing some other pretty strange stuff. Being a loving parent, I want to help her get back on her feet and get over her trauma. Of course that means giving her my 27" TV and replacing it with... ahh, something somewhat bigger than 27"! after all, HDTV will eventually be REQUIRED, and so who am I to buck something legistated by the government?

Stuff! It is so easy to think that stuff we want is really stuff we need. It is so easy to buy into Madison Avenue's hype. If we aren't careful, we can thing the hype is real. The film The Gods Must Be Crazy is the story of a tribe of people in Africa so remote that they had never contacted anyone from outside their world. An airplane flew over their village and someone threw a Coke bottle from the plane. They decided that this artifact was a gift from the gods and thus of great value; they didn't know that it was only garbage. They had seen the airplane and had a glimpse of the sky, but they decided that the garbage, the junk, was what was real.

Everyone in the village wanted this gift of the gods for himself or herself. They fought over the artifact; their entire existence became centered on possessing it. They did not realize that their lives had come to be centered on junk. But they were wise enough to understand the damage, and they decided the gods must have been crazy to have ever given them the object. So they began a journey to throw the object off the edge of the world. They didn’t know that the gift of the gods was no deposit and no return!

Faith is the ability to see what is really real and what is really junk. God calls us to focus on that which is of real value surrounded by the world of junk. The thread than runs through Hebrews 11 is that the great heros of faith were men and women who could see what was unseen. We see the junk, and the junk can glitter. But all that glitters is not gold. The toys and trinkets around us are fun, but they are not real. May God help us to be people who more clearly see that which is unseen. Can we see it any better in 42" Hi Def?

A Sure Thing

Sometime ago, we decided that it would be helpful if I had a cell phone. I don't know what we were thinking, but it made sense at the time. We are adding a phone to Lynn's existing service, and Alltel at the time had a pretty good deal on a PDA smartphone with email and web capabilities. I like gadgets, and I do use a PDA, and carrying one device rather than two was appealing. And the messaging on this smartphone was provided by on the the best known names in the business-- Blackberry. How could I go wrong?

Fortunately, my natural inclination to put off financial decisions as long as possible allowed the "deal" to expire before I made the purchase. Blackberry's maker Research in Motion was sued for copyright infringement, and the Blackberry service as of this morning is in real danger of being shut down. It seems they "borrowed" some technology owned by another company, and that technology is at the center of their service. So once trendy Blackberry users may later this week be the owners of message devices that can't sent or receive messages!

You can't count on anything in this world to last. The only thing certain in life is its uncertainty. (Hey, this was the year that my Colts were certain to make the Super Bowl! Right!) There are no sure things in this world. We may think that we can count on our job, on other people, on our investments or on our health-- but they all let us down eventually. But God never does. The Hebrew writer contrasts trusting in money and trusting in God (Hebrews 13:5-6)

Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you. So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?”

Maybe the only thing more useless by the end of the week than owning a Blackberry will be owning stock in Blackberry! We can't count on anything... except God.

One-Eye-and-Half-Sense

I heard an old, retired preacher say years ago, “We don’t study the Bible any more; we just read it and remember what someone once said that it means.” I think he may be right. It is so easy to assume that all basic doctrines of the Bible (and most of the minor ones) are really pretty simple. In fact, anyone who has one eye and half sense and an honest heart can understand God’s will perfectly. The only reason that there are so many different denominations (and differences within our own) is that so few people really have honest hearts. Except for us, of course

Here’s a newsflash. God is far too wrapped in majesty and mystery for us to ever get our tiny little minds around Him. God Himself reminds us of that in Isaiah 55:8,9 (NLT)--

“My thoughts are completely different from yours,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

Yes, God revealed Himself to us in scripture, but He did so only in the “baby talk” that we can understand. We would be foolish to limit the eternal God to words simple enough for us to grasp! What Paul says about our final reward can be applied to all the things of God, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Cor 2:9, NLT).

So anytime we talk about the things of God, we need to do so on our knees, driven there by holy fear. It is arrogance that leads one to act as if the things of God are so easy that anyone with one eye and half sense can see it and that anyone else who disagrees with them must be dishonest or disinterested. That attitude is certainly not driven by holy fear.

Character Inside Out

In Alexander Dumas' classic The Three Musketeers, d'Artanian meets his future friends when he alternately offends and then challenges each of them to a dual on the same day. His encounter with Porthos is a point of warning for us, I think. As d'Artanian rushed to catch up to another gentleman with which he had a dual (he sure fought a lot of duels), he literally ran into Porthos. Porthos was showing off his new suit of eye-popping, finely embroidered, rhinestone-studded clothes to his friends when the rushing d'Artanian became entangled in his cape. The cape tore loose, revealing the fact that Porthos' distinctive suit was only distinctive in the front. He only had enough money for half a suit; the part that was covered by the cape was not very fine at all. Porthos had wanted to impress his friends with his fine clothes, but d'Artanian's clumsiness revealed him to be a fraud.

I wonder how many of us play the part of a spiritual Porthos. We give a great deal of attention to the part of our religious lives that shows to other people-- we attend services, become involved in church programs, and defend what the Bible teaches. And yet, on the inside our hearts don't really belong to God. It's all a facade; it is a suit of clothes only decorated on one side. Which sounds a lot like the metaphor Jesus uses to descrine the Pharisees in Matthew 23:25-28

25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. 27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

God wants us to be an inside-out people. He wants us to give attention to the way we are, not how we seem to other people. It is from the heart that we speak and act (Matt. 12:34). We cannot impress God with religious rite, right doctrine nor good behavior unless it is a reflection of our heart. God will take a humble tax collector over a full-of-himself Pharisee every time. Why? Because God knows our hearts!

On the Mountaintop and Beyond

Yesterday was the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. (Yes, it would have been better if I'd written this yesterday, but it was a holiday!). On this day, our nation pays tribute to one of the most unique and significant people of our generation. It is good and right that we remember and honor men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who helped to found this country "of the people and by the people." It is good and right that we honor Dr. King who led the movement that forced our country to be off all the people and by all the people.

King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death sparked riots that rocked Memphis, Chicago and many other parts the country. For many, King symbolized the civil rights movement, and it was a shock that he was dead. Well, it was a shock to everyone except Dr. King. The last paragraph of his last public speech given the day before his death was eerily prophetic--

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life-longevity has
its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.
And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've
seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know
tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy
tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have
seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

A generation later, Dr. King would not recognize his country. Sure, only the incredibly naive would say that the problem of race has been fixed. But only the incredibly dishonest would argue that ours is not a totally different world.

I was only 12 years old when Dr. King was killed, but my memory of the event is very clear. The Sunday night following his death, we had a youth group meeting at church. During that gathering, one of the older teens blurted "I'm glad they finally shot that n*****" Several openly agreed with him. Though there were several adults present, they said nothing to challenge that statement. Where do teens learn such hate?

The sad historical fact is that most white churches defended the status quo and opposed civil rights. Segregation was not just tolerated by churches; it was enforced. Several of our colleges had to be forced by the government to open their doors to blacks. I know of ministers who were fired because they baptized and discipled too many of "them." The theme of racial and ethnic equality in Jesus Christ is a major theme that runs through the New Testament. Oneness of Jews and Gentiles in Jesus was not just a sidelight issue for Paul, it was his ministry. Books like Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians and others stress this equality. And yet the church missed it for so many years. What else we are missing?

Make Yourself Indispensable

Several years ago, The Daily Press carried a story about a man named Adolph Stec. His neighbors thought Mr. Stec had abandoned his little house and moved out of town. Some continued to cut his grass occasionally while others gathered his mail until the mailman began to skip the house because it looked so abandoned. Eventually work crews came out and cut off his utilities.

But it wasn’t until May 8, 2001 that he mystery of Adolph Stec was solved. Developers bought the house at tax auction, and they entered to inspoect the property. They discovered Mr. Stec’s almost completely decomposed body sitting in his living room chair. A newspaper was in his lap and a calendar was on the wall were both dated February of 1997. Mr. Stec had been dead in his house for more than four years, and no one had missed him! One of his neighbors said,
"He really wasn’t a very friendly man, not nice at all. So everyone just went on with their lives. He must have abandoned the place, we thought." How sad that someone could be so completely expendable, so totally dispensable!

I wonder how many Christians make thesmelves that dispensible at church. Sadly, church for many has become a place where you go to fulfill religious duties. It much more like a religious theater where holy things are observed than a spiritual family where holy relationships are made and mantained. May we come more and more to see Denbigh as our little logo suggests-- "God's Family Under the Cross."

Spring Came Early

Spring came early at the Tucker house yesterday! No, I’m not talking about the unusually warm weather (I’m actually going to cut my grass this afternoon if things dry off). No, our most important harbinger of spring arrived in the mailbox yesterday—the Pepperdine Bible Lectures program book! I actually stood outside for 10 minutes skimming the program before I went inside, and then I spent another 30 minutes reading it in more detail! I really have to do that because once Lynn gets it, I won’t get it back for weeks. By March, she’ll have all her lectures underlined and most of her clothes laid out!

Actually, getting the program this early is a rather rare treat for us. There have been several years where the program book didn’t come in the mail until after we get back from the trip. Of course, the entire program is online, and we sent off our reservations the same week we found the PDF application on the web site. But there is something about having the program book in hand that is a sure sign that spring is coming. You can keep your robins chirping in the backyard and the first game of baseball season. For us, spring is about making airline reservations to LAX. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to log onto CheapTickets.com.

The Heart of Worship

There is a certain unsettledness that goes with any major church change-- like changing our worship times and format. And with unsettledness comes discomfort-- what was wrong the old way of doing church anyway? It is easy for us to become sidetracked by the forms and formats of worship that forget its focus. After all, when we come together as a church, we have to do something. And we all have our own ideas about what we should do-- old songs vs new songs, planned worship vs spontaneous worship, short sermons vs shorter sermons. And there is something to be said about using the very best forms. But sometimes we can focus so much on the externals of worship that we miss the heart of worship.

Matt Redman tells how his preacher led him to look at worship in a different way. Redman is a worship leader; that is both his gift and his ministry. But for a period of weeks, it was decided decided that the church would worship without any music at all—no instruments, no singing, no nothing! During that time, the church concentrated on worship withou songs. For Redman, this focus was painful. But it was out of that experience that Redman saw worship in a whole new way, and he wrong wrote his classic praise song “Heart of Worship”--

When the music fades, all is stripped away
And I simply come longing just to bring
Something that's of worth that will bless your heart
I bring you more than a song,
For a song in itself is not what you have required
You search much deeper within
Through the way things appear
You're looking into my heart
I'm coming back to the heart of worship
And it's all about You; it's all about You, Jesus
I'm sorry Lord for the thing I've made it
When it's all about you, it's all about you, Jesus

The first question we need to ask about worship is not about its form or format; the first question is always about its focus. Worship is about God. Sure, the form worship tales impacts people, and therefore we must think about the forms. But the focus must always be God.

A Great Day

Well, yesterday was a very interesting day! It was the first Sunday that we were all together in one service after four years of being “separate and apart.” This was a major change for us in how we do church. Whether you were used to coming at 8:30 or 11:00, everyone now comes at the very strange time of 9:45! Maybe the most unique part of our change is having worship first followed by Sunday School, an order that most of us haven’t seen before. (What would Paul say about having Sunday school second?)

I’m sure there are a dozen glitches that we’ll have to work out. For example, we pulled out extra chairs and blocked aisles at the back in violation of the fire marshal’s “suggested” seating restrictions. We'll need to get better at ushering people down front. We do want the fire marshal to worship with us at some point, so we might want to work on that! We may need to scrunch the rows closer together so we can have an extra row on each side... but that will mean going from business class to coach as far as leg room!

Things went very, very well. The singing was truly amazing! I can’t remember being in a service anywhere where there was more energy and spirit in the song service! I did feel a little extra pressure in preaching because I had only one “take” to get it right! (With two services, I had two chances to feel good about how well the sermon went!) I thought Bob’s "Elder’s Blessing" comments were particularly appropriate. We even ended the service exactly on time! And it was so very encouraging to see the auditorium so full!

Let's commit ourselves to making this new schedule work. It's going to seem a little awkward for awhile, and that's OK. Let's work together as God's family under the cross to allow Him to work in us..

You Can't Please Everyone

Here I sit bleary-eyed for the third straight morning because again I sat up too late to watch a college football game. Actually, this time it was THE college football game—Texas and USC in the Rose Bowl for the national championship. For once, the game actually lived up to all the hype as Texas won on the final play. Scanning the sports headlines this morning, the pigskin pundits' post-mortem on the game gives all the answers as to why Texas won and why Vince Young is the best player in football… and why he should go to the pros early and why coach Mack Brown is a great football coach. Of course, these are the same experts who where saying yesterday that USC would win and why Mack Brown always lost big games. As my Dad says, an "ex" is a has been and a "spurt" is a small stream under pressure; put them together and you have an expert.

I doubt that Vince Young is paying too much attention to the ideas, opinions and thoughts of the experts. In fact, the ideas, opinions and thoughts of other people are never a good basis for making decisions. Why? Because they are always changing; they are always a moving target impossible for us to ever hit. It doesn’t matter what car you drive, what neighborhood you live in, or what career field you pursue, you will never make “them” happy. A line from the old Ricky Nelson song suggests, “You can’t please everyone, so you got to pleas yourself.”

Paul would disagree with that as well. He says that our job is not to please others or ourselves’; we are to please God, “We urge you in the name of the Lord Jesus to live in a way that pleases God, as we have taught you” (1 Thess 4:1, NLT). Think about it. We know we can't always satisfy others... and neither can we seem to satisfy ourselves! Our ideas, opinions and thoughts seem to change too. What we thought would bring us happiness or meaning or stability or whatever end up failing us. We can’t live to please others or ourselves— so we must please God. In fact, it is when we live to please God that we really also please ourselves and others. That’s Paul’s statement in Romans 14:17-19 (NLT)--

17 For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. 18 If you serve Christ with this attitude, you will please God. And other people will approve of you, too. 19 So then, let us aim for harmony in the church and try to build each other up.

The Power of Prayer

My favorite shore excursion on our recent Caribbean cruise was a four and a half hour walking tour of old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Growing up in the shadow of Jamestown and Williamsburg, my knowledge of colonial history is a bit slanted toward the Anglo; I know very little of the much older Hispanic side of colonial times. It was very interesting (and tiring) to walk all over old San Juan and listen to our tour guide Ramone discuss another aspect of our history.

One of the things we toured was the Square of La Rogativa, a small park with a statue of a rather scary looking priest leading a procession of women. The statue comemorates a British attack on San Juan in April of 1797. San Juan's defenses made it very safe from attacks from the sea, but this invading British force landed up the coast and had flanked the city's defenses by attacking from land. In response to this very grave situation, a local priest organized a Rogativa (prayer procession) in which dozens of townspeople carried torches and marched through San Juan praying to God to deliver them. The British mistook the torchlit procession as the arrival of reinforcements, and they retreated without launching their attack. Someone decided that such a story deserved a statue.

A Barna Research poll indicates that while more than 90% of Americans pray and 60% pray daily, less than half of those expect God to answer their prayers. Do we? Do we believe in the power of prayer? Are we really convinced that God breaks into human history and touches lives with His power? When we wrestle in prayer with problems, do we believe that God both hears us and acts to answer? In the case of La Rogativa, the power of prayer was seen in the prayer itself. If the people of san Juan would have sat in fear behind locked doors with ringing hands, they would have been defeated. But by boldly marching to the throne of God in prayer, they were led to liberation and freedom. God does not always answer prayers so dramatically; if He did, then we would spend all of our time building statues! But God does answer prayer! May He give us the faith to spend more time in 2006 on our knees than we did in 2005!

A Really Cool World

Lynn and I have returned safely from our week floating around in the Caribbean. We appreciate so much the church sending us on this cruise for our 25th anniversary (last May) with the congregation here. (Although I did get a little suspicious when there was no return trip voucher to get us back to the airport and then our return flight was cancelled!) We had a wonderful time. Thank you so much, church.

Sunday afternoon there was to be an interdenominational worship service on the ship just as we were leaving Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas to return to Ft. Lauderdale. Whoever was in charge of conducting the service failed to show up, so about 20 of us sat around waiting. There were hymnals there, so we sang for awhile until it was certain that no one was coming. So we decided to just share some scriptures and thoughts, and so we had our own little small group. We then ended with a chain prayer.

One of the prayer phrases used stuck in my mind and heart. We had just spent the day on a tropical island where you could swim with tropical fish, ride horses on the beach, snorkel with giant stingrays, sail, kayak or just lounge in the 88 degree sun... or do all of the above. As we were thanking God for the blessing of the trip and asking His mercies on our return trip, someone added "and thank you, Father, for creating such a really cool world for us to enjoy." I'm not sure I'd ever heard "really cool" used in a prayer before, but that about said it. God did make a really cool world to bless us. He wants us to enjoy His goodness; He wants us to bless and serve others so that they can enjoy His goodness as well. We need to step back more often to take in the magesty and goodness of God to remind us who we are and who we are called to be. You don't need to be on a tropical island to do that. But if you just happen to on one...

Happy New Year!