H. Henry Williams

Going Deeper with the Weekend Message

If you want to go deeper regarding the ethics of in vitro fertilization, a good start is an article from Christianity Today called "Souls on Ice."

If you want to go deeper with the whole of idea of God requiring a redemption for the firstborn sons, as well as more material on the Abraham and Isaac story, listen to one of my favorite all-time messages by Tim Keller called "The Story of the Lamb" (much of this material is also found in Counterfeit Gods chapter 1, but I think the message is masterful).

 

Going Deeper with the Weekend Message

Here are some details on the five steps I suggested this weekend for keeping our resolve.

• Admit to God where you’re deviating from his will for your life. It may be in a relationship or in your thought life or in the use of your time or money. Confess it to him.
• Write down your resolution for change and review it regularly.
• Share it with someone who will ask you about it. Encouragement and accountability. Just sharing your goal may hurt your chances of success.
• Put Edwards’ words at the top of the page. (Being sensible that I am unable to do anything without God's help, I do humbly entreat him by his grace to enable me to keep these resolutions.)
• Set aside a regular time for cultivating your relationship with God. The more you know him and spend time with him, the more you will grow to love him and desire to honor him.

And here is an article on the limits of willpower.

Going Deeper with the Weekend Message

Two items for going deeper. The second one is POWERFUL!!!

#1 - I did a bit of research on what Mary's song would have sounded like and I had to let it go for the sake of time before coming to any conclusions or really getting much understanding. I went with New Testament scholar N.T. Wright's description. But here are a couple of sites that you can explore. One includes what might be the earliest document of a Christian song that includes notes. You can even hear a rendition at one of these sites.

• Go here for a quick introduction
• Go here for the song performed. 
• Go here for a quick introduction to one scholar's work on ancient Jewish and Christian music.

#2 - One of the themes I did not address in Luke 1:39-80 this weekend is the value of life in the womb. John the Baptist is filled with the Holy Spirit from conception and leaps for joy in Elizabeth's womb. The word describing John in the womb and the word for the baby Jesus are identical. Mark Driscoll deals with this topic in a powerful way in a message he did on Luke 1:39-45. Start at 10:22 into the message and it finishes at 37:19 into the message. You have to stick with him. There's a emotionally powerful twist well into his "diatribe" on abortion. You might be tempted to quit before you get there. Don't! In fact, please don't start listening unless you are willing to finish it no matter what. I wish all the parents at Five Oaks would play this for their pre-teen and teenage children.

Illiterate and Misguided

I use prayer cards in my personal devotions. It's an idea I got from one of the best books I've ever read on prayer, A Praying Life by Paul Miller. One of those cards is focused on Five Oaks. I don't list immediate needs on it. I don't need to write those down. I have four big prayers. One is for the people who walk through our doors and stay. I pray that they develop a biblical worldview and biblical literacy within three years of joining our church family. I pray this almost every day.

I don't need to review the statistics. Most people today lack a strong, spiritual foundation, including those sitting in churches who are simply hoping for a shot of spiritual adrenaline to keep them going for the next week. They are mostly biblically illiterate and misguided for lack of a biblical worldview. It's why I developed the Story of God series and now the Story of God small group for people who missed the series or were unable to fully engage at that time. And it's why we're offering Five Oaks U courses that help us take the message deep into our hearts and into our lives.

Will you pray with me for this? Will you encourage others to engage in their own spiritual growth? Are you modeling it for others?

Spiritual Depth

Here's author and former pastor Gordon MacDonald's definition of a person who is spiritually deep. What do you think?

Deep people are those whose lives are organized around Jesus, his character, his call to a serving life, and his death on the cross for their sins. The abilities (or giftedness) of deep people may be quite diverse, but each has the power to influence others to follow Jesus, grow in Christ-likeness, and live a life of faithful service. They love the world, mix well with people, but are wary of spiritual entrapments. They are known for their wisdom, their compassion for others, and their perseverance in hard times.

Impacting Others Through Your Love of Study

Do you love to dig into the Bible and study it? Then consider using that love for helping others study the Bible by becoming a Group Life writer. Contact me if you're interested (email link is under my picture at my blog site). Check out the Group Life writing video if you didn't see it last weekend.

 

John Piper's Take on The Purpose Driven Life

This is John Piper's short take on The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren after an in-depth analysis of the book and after reading many of its critiques.

“Frankly, I’m appalled at the kinds of slanders that have been brought against this book by people whose methods of critique, if they were consistently applied to the Bible, would undo it as the Word of God."

"I'm one of these Reformed types. My type tends to get on your case pretty often. And when I read the book, I thought, 'What's the issue here?'"

You can watch Piper's 1.5 hour interview of Warren by linking here.

Weekend Messages: Response

This is the last in a series of posts on changes in our approach to the weekend messages. Previous posts:

• From Application to Implication
• From Trying to Be Relevant to Demonstrating Relevance
• More Bible Teaching
• From Believer/Seeker to Gospel Saturation

This last change is the most obvious one of all--we've pretty much flipped the order of the service and added a variety of ways for people to respond to God and his Word in personal and corporate ways in the service.

Someone recently commented on it by saying, "We use to set up the message with the music, but now it's like we set up the music with the message." I prefer to say we give time for people to respond to the message right there in our service.

A few months ago Lois and I were visiting our youngest son's home church in Appleton, WI. Great church. Great service. But when Lois left, she said she wished we had had some time to respond to the message in the service. She wasn't saying that they do it incorrectly. She was just saying that she's grown to appreciate that time to respond in our services. And from the looks of it, so have a lot of other people.

How does this impact the messages themselves? Not so much except that I'm constantly thinking about how to tie the message to the response and offer some spiritual direction weekly.

 

 

 

Weekend Messages: From Believer/Seeker to Gospel Saturation

(This is one in a series of posts I started here.)

Again, I don't want to make too much of this contrast. It's subtle, but I've gone from thinking of my messages and our worship services as targeting believes but seeker sensitive to simply being services that are saturated with the gospel. The idea is that people far from God and followers of Christ have the same need--the Gospel.

The person far from God needs to understand and receive the Gospel message. But the follower of Christ needs the Gospel every day and needs to go deeper and deeper into the reality and meaning of the Gospel. As Tim Keller is fond of saying, the Gospel is the not the A,B,C's of Christianity; it's the A to Z.

So the clearer we are when we explain and teach and illustrate how the Bible story (whatever part we're studying on any given week) relates to Christ and the Gospel, the greater the likelihood that people far from God will draw nearer and those who follow Christ will go deeper.

Weekend Messages: More Bible Teaching

(This is one in a series of posts I started last Thursday.)

One of the primary changes in my preaching in recent months is to include more Bible teaching. Messages are a mixture of Bible teaching with other elements like introduction, illustration (stories, quotes, etc.), conclusion, challenge and encouragement.

Listen to your favorite preachers on podcasts and you'll see that they all spend a varying amount of time illustrating biblical truth through stories, analogies, quotes, etc. We're continuing to use all those elements, but we're including more teaching and a little less of the other elements.

We are convinced that the kind of inspiration that brings lasting life change is rooted in biblical truth that takes hold in our minds and hearts. Stories are the most powerful way to impact our hearts, but I'm afraid that sometimes we go for the heart without enough teaching that transforms the mind.

I've written before how I use to say, "Our church is educated beyond it's ability to live the truth it already knows." I don't say that anymore. Thanks to REVEAL I know that our biblical and theological knowledge and depth is low. We need more information, not less.

So I am devoting more time in the weekend messages to teaching what the Bible says in that particular text and tying it to the broader Bible story. That means less of some of the other elements in the message, but always remembering that it is preaching, not a Bible lecture.

I describe the shift in my thinking and practice like this: If we want to see our members become more engaged in sharing their faith, we can inspire that change through Bible teaching and sharing inspiring stories and videos that will fire everybody up for a short time (sometimes all the way to the parking lot!). Or we can teach truth that penetrates the heart and matures the soul, thereby seeing deeper, long-lasting change. This is not an either/or proposition. But with the time we have each week for the message, we're leaning more toward biblical teaching.