Category: Miscellaneous (Page 3 of 10)

A Faithful Servant

May 3, 2019 / admin / 3 Comments

Today the world learned of the passing of Warren W. Wiersbe—man of God, student of the Bible, devoted family man, prolific author, and gifted Bible teacher.

I first became aware of Warren Wiersbe as I was trimming azalea bushes just outside Columbia, South Carolina in the early 1980’s. I worked on the grounds crew at a large condominium complex while working my way through seminary. While I worked I listened to Dr. Wiersbe teach the Bible on the Back to the Bible broadcast. I was amazed. He fed me and made me more hungry. He opened the Scriptures in a way I had scarcely heard before, and he did so day after day. The depth of his Bible knowledge was impressive; the depth of his heart commitment to the Lord was infectious.

After graduation from seminary a couple of years later I became a pastor and began teaching and preaching the Bible myself. Dr. Wiersbe’s books were an enormous help to me.

In the early 1990’s I had the privilege of sitting under Dr. Wiersbe’s instruction in a Doctor of Ministry class he taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. His insights on the role of imagination in preaching lit up my mind and heart and sent me out with fresh desire to be faithful to the Scriptures and powerful in the Spirit.

But one day during class Dr. Wiersbe gave us all a fright. As we regathered after a lunch break Dr. Wiersbe, standing at the front of the class, suddenly fell strangely silent and his eyes glazed over. Very quickly we realized something was wrong. Those closest to him in the front row rushed to his side and helped him land gently as he collapsed to the floor. Paramedics soon arrived and they wheeled Dr. Wiersbe out, strapped on a gurney. We prayed fervently for him. And we worried that perhaps the entire Bible-believing world would lay upon us the death of the beloved Dr.!

We were relieved when he returned to the classroom within a couple of days reporting that a drop in his blood sugar had been the culprit. We breathed a sigh of relief and lifted a prayer of thanks to the Lord our healer. Dr. Wiersbe completed a wonderful week of learning for us all.

Then in the early 2000’s God began to open a publishing ministry for me. My publishers wanted me to get endorsements from famous authors who could recommend my books. I’m not famous. I don’t know anyone famous. But I asked myself whom would I most desire to offer an endorsement for my book(s) if it were possible. Warren Wiersbe was the immediate response within my heart. But he didn’t know me. I was just one of hundreds of students he had instructed over the years in various seminaries. But I ventured a letter and Dr. Wiersbe graciously responded with an offer to consider my book. He wrote the following for my book Song of the Satisfied Soul:

There is always room on the shelf for another exposition of Psalm 23, especially when it is as balanced and practical as this one. The author allows the text to speak for itself as he reveals the richness of the believer’s relationship to Jesus Christ. The ideal book for a pastor or other care-giver to share with those needing encouragement.

Later he offered another endorsement for my commentary The Pastoral Epistles for Pastors:

I heartily welcome and endorse this encyclopedic study of Paul’s Pastoral Epistles. For years we have had Eugene Stock’s Practical Truths from the Pastoral Epistles and W. Edward Chadwick’s The Pastoral Teaching of St. Paul: His Ministerial Ideals, but this volume goes beyond them in exposition and application. The beginning pastor and the seasoned minister will both discover in these pages enlightenment, encouragement and a new sense of wonder and privilege of being a servant of God. You can live in this book for the rest of your life and have a more fruitful and rewarding ministry!

I found Dr. Warren Wiersbe to be a gracious, kind man. He was a man of great conviction and strength. He was a ravenous student of the Scriptures and he lived out a lifetime of faithful ministry for the Lord. I am just one of a vast multitude who has been profoundly blessed by this godly man. I give praise to the Lord for the grace He has poured into my life through him.

And, oddly enough, I discovered today that Warren Wiersbe was the same age as my father. They were both born in 1929, just months apart from one another. My father passed away nine days before Dr. Wiersbe did. I just conducted my father’s funeral three days ago.

It reminds me that a faithful generation is passing off the scene and the responsibility to live wisely and well for the honor of the Lord is upon me and my generation in a new and unique way. May the God who empowered these two faithful men also empower me to faithfully serve and honor Him for however long I have left on this earth.

My Place

December 16, 2018 / admin / 0 Comments

“… history is to mankind precisely what the experience of living is to an individual – that is to say, a drama to be lived through. We do not write the script, nor do we choose our allotted parts; what is required of us is to speak our lines, make our entrances and our exits, until the curtain falls and our role is for the time being exhausted. … Our business is to find God, the dramatist behind the drama, and, having found Him, to follow Him in the light of the revelation vouchsafed us in the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” (Malcolm Muggeridge, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim, 78)

God: The Great Intolerance

August 28, 2018 / admin / 0 Comments

“Tolerance is, no doubt, a virtue without which none of us can live, but we must, nevertheless, at least understand that it is, strictly speaking, destructive of fellowship, for it is a gesture by which the divine disturbance is rejected. The One in whom we are veritably united is himself the great intolerance. He willeth to rule, to be victorious, to be—everything. He it is who disturbs every family gathering, every scheme for the reunion of Christendom, every human cooperation. And he disturbs, because he is the Peace that is above every estrangement and cleavage and faction.” (Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans; quoted in Robertson McQuilkin, Five Smooth Stones, p.198)

Concluding Punctuation’s Point

April 5, 2018 / admin / 0 Comments

“I will question you …” (Job 38:3a; 40:7; 42:4)

“Jesus said to them, ‘I will ask you one question …'” (Mark 11:29)

Periods are boundary markers. They limit, mark off, define. Periods are specks, scattered indiscriminately and profusely across the landscape of our conversations to guide us on our way. Periods are plentiful, profuse, prolific–with a gestation of mere seconds before one spawns a fresh litter of statements, assertions and observations. Periods are too commonplace to arrest anyone’s attention. Periods can become self-centered, too quick to assert what one thinks he knows. Periods at one and the same time both define and bore.

Explanation points on the other hand are tall, elegant and demanding. Exclamation points are brash, bold and boisterous. They are found far less frequently than the common period, but in this way they serve their purpose–to arouse interest, to demand attention, to scream “Here! Look at me!” Yet the exclamation point’s power diminishes with its proliferation. Not everything can be urgent and ultimate. Not everything can be equally worthy of immediate attention.

Then there is the question mark–that lonely, bent figure, humbled under the weight of its query. What is this? Is a question mark a period risen up in protest in the face of assertions and declarations shouted loudly and presumed upon universally? Or is it an exclamation point that has gone off prematurely and now wilted under the weight of what was once giddy excitement and bravado? Or is the question mark a humble, bowing invitation to leave off our boastful assertions and our loud exclamations and to enter into real communication, genuine relationship?

The period is too nondescript to demand attention. The exclamation point is too gaudy for long term serious consideration. The question mark, however, is where real conversation begins. The question mark is the place where communication is birthed.

Those Inner Conversations

March 17, 2018 / admin / 0 Comments

More than once Moses warned the new generation poised to enter the Promised Land: “Do not say in your heart …” (Deuteronomy 9:4a).

God is concerned over the self-talk of His people. It is what we “say in [our] heart” that is of consequence.

It is worth pointing out the obvious—God knows we talk to ourselves! These inner conversations are of constant occurrence. In fact, they can’t be turned off, only redirected. And that only by the grace of God. We see this warning repeatedly throughout the Old Testament. There are a number of ways to go wrong in talking to yourself.

1) The danger of self-congratulation. “Do not say in your heart, after the LORD your God has thrust them out before you, ‘It is because of my righteousness that the LORD has brought me in to possess this land,’ whereas it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is driving them out before you.” (Deuteronomy 9:4; cf. 8:17)

The Israelites faced a danger from the seductions of the peoples of the land. Of this God constantly warned them (see, for example, the disaster at Peor, Numb. 25:1-9). But the ideas of others, as dangerous as they were, were not the only or even primary danger facing the Israelites. It was the conversations going on within their own hearts that made them especially vulnerable.

It is when we begin talking to ourselves about ourselves and our circumstances that we are in the most danger of going astray.

We all have this kind of self-talk going on within our hearts all the time. We see and experience and try to understand—but are prone to interpret and talk to ourselves in self-affirming ways (“because of my righteousness”). This stream of thought forms a jet stream that powerfully circles planet self, threatening to pull everything else into its flow.

What we fail to see is that God sometimes blesses one (in this case, Israel) because he is disciplining another (here, the Canaanites). We must talk and walk humbly. The reasons “why” our lives are as they are is much bigger than our performance before God.

2) We may err in our inner conversations by self-exaltation. We may not elevate others or our accomplishments over God, but we may elevate our very selves: “Now therefore hear this, you lover of pleasures, who sit securely, who say in your heart, ‘I am, and there is no one besides me; I shall not sit as a widow or know the loss of children’ (Isaiah 47:8). “I am” – that name has already been taken (Exodus 3:14); its Owner says He’s not sharing (Isaiah 42:8).

Self-exaltation was literally the problem of the Edomites. They dwelt in the physically lofty heights of a God-given land. They thought their elevated position made them untouchable. Thus they were warned: “The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rock, in your lofty dwelling, who say in your heart, ‘Who will bring me down to the ground?’” (Obadiah 1:3).

God did with the Edomites what he does with all who exalt themselves within their own hearts: “he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts” (Luke 1:51).

3) We go astray when we engage in self-dependence. The self-talk can also lead us stray in the opposite direction: “If you say in your heart, ‘These nations are greater than I. How can I dispossess them?’” (Deuteronomy 7:17). Instead of elevating ourselves and denigrating others, we may overly exalt them in our eyes—making them even bigger than God. And with God out of the picture all we have left to depend upon is ourselves. That leads to fear, paralysis and despair.

4) We err when we talk ourselves into self-justification. The people of Jeremiah’s day denied their hardships arose from their responsibility: “And if you say in your heart, ‘Why have these things come upon me?’ it is for the greatness of your iniquity that your skirts are lifted up and you suffer violence” (Jeremiah 13:22). Ultimately, denial of responsibility is a denial of hope.

But not all self-talk is bad-talk. The Bible depicts the power of telling yourself the truth.

Take, for example, David as he prays Psalm 62. He begins his prayer so positively and confidently: “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation” (v.1).

But, as so often is the case, things get difficult. Our confidence wanes. Our faith wavers. Our prayers change. By the middle of the psalm David is still praying. In fact he is still on the same theme with which he opened, but he has transitioned from talking to God, to coaching himself: “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him” (v.5).

This telling-yourself-the-truth kind of self-talk is the application of faith to a wavering, struggling heart. We talk to ourselves this way because deep down we believe Jesus was right: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31b-32a).

We talk to ourselves as a hold out for Jesus’ rescue, Jesus’ deliverance, Jesus’ promised freedom.

When we keep this up God’s blessings of freedom become increasingly real in our lives. Perhaps we even come to the place, as Isaiah predicted the people of Israel would, where we have to start talking to ourselves about the compounding, stockpiling grace He is pouring into our lives: “The children of your bereavement will yet say in your ears: ‘The place is too narrow for me; make room for me to dwell in.’ Then you will say in your heart: ‘Who has borne me these? I was bereaved and barren, exiled and put away, but who has brought up these? Behold, I was left alone; from where have these come?’” (Isaiah 49:20).

Don’t stop talking to yourself. Just start telling yourself the truth. And then keep it up. Those with ears to hear might hear the sound of heaven’s applause. Those with eyes to see might detect life, freedom and grace standing just off in the distance, rising with a smile on their faces as the conversation begins.