Drakos7

This past Sunday I was honored to be able to present God’s word to CCPC Metro in Arlington, VA. Looking at the crowd’s reaction to Stephen in Acts 6, I examined how God uses change in our lives. You can get the audio here. CCPC Metro is the satellite service for Christ Central Presbyterian Church which has just moved to Centreville, VA. Drop me a comment if you have thoughts or questions.

A hearty thank you to all our prayer and financial supporters as we went to Cherokee, NC at the beginning of July to minister on the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. Feel free to grab our Cherokee STM 2010 Followup pdf to catch up on what happened.

So I have spent the past week in Portland, OR at the O’Reilly Media’s OSCON 2010 and learned some useful things for my job, but it has also generated a fair bit of dissatisfaction.

The fun talks were more on the geeky side, like how to build a device to monitor the environment. It would be fun tostick a box on my parent’s dock to monitor Cayuga Lake’s water temperature, or better yet to make a small radio telescope and record the data.

In-between the very geeky things was a lot of rather boring stuff, so boring that I wonder what my role is in the programming world. Sure I can build large web-database applications that meet the needs of international health care research. Sure I can add little widgets to display pretty charts. Is this what I want to do? It was often more fun reading the ModRef magazine I brought. It does not help that a lot of people in the programming community think an open bar is the most exciting part of a convention. I really do not want to smell the partially digested alcohol on your breath. It is not pleasant.

So, I am sitting in between the Psychology and Religion sections at Borders doing some work before a church event. It is the “Metaphysical Studies” section. I look over and see the title of one of the books: “The Magic of Shapeshifting”. For some reason I do not think it is referring to this kind of shapeshifting. If I could shape-shift I think I would make myself look exactly like my brother. That or a large red panda.

Well, upgraded to wordpress 3 and been mucking around. Had to switch around a couple of the plugins as older ones had not been made compatible yet. Also toying around with using WP as the basis for a new church website. An upgrade is really needed. WP is powerful enough to be a basic CMS, and with some plugins like Connections it is fairly well suited for other tasks.

Remind me again why I normally sit in front of a computer in Maryland…

“It is the truth of the gospel, reaffirmed in our hearts daily, that puts desire into our duty. … It is the gospel that motivates us to seek to be in our daily experience what we are in our standing before God.” – Jerry Bridges Respectable Sins

Pi Are Squared.

I had a fun time trying to explain the concept of Pi to my daughter. Not sure it took. If she remembers 3.14 tomorrow I will consider it a success.

Has this happened to you? Someone comes to you for advice, or to settle a dispute. You carefully consider the situation and tell them your answer (possibly with ample support from scripture). They don’t like the answer, ignore it, and do what they wanted to in the first place.

We live in a culture that does not accept the possibility that we may be wrong. “Have it your way” is the rule of the day. “Everyone is right”. “That is your opinion”. There is always another voice we can listen to that will declare what we want. It is easy to gather a group of followers to side with us against the wisdom of God. Kind of like the saying in statistics, “if you torture the data long enough it will confess to anything”, we can always find a sympathizer if we look long enough or sow enough discord. Ultimately, we do not want the objective truth because it may just conflict with our desires. In regards to dismissing pastoral advice, Deuteronomy 17:9-13 has a very interesting solution.

Some may think it a bit strong to say that “if I don’t listen to my pastor I am rebelling against God”, but scripture is pretty clear on the subject. It is difficult for us to even comprehend the fact that when the apostles told people to obey the civil authorities it was those authorities who were hunting down and killing Christians. How much more so are we to obey the spiritual authorities God has given us. We are not really at liberty to question the creator of the universe why He has chosen our under-shepherds. God, in His providence, has ordained these people to shepherd His people, and that includes us.

Our position of disobedience is on even less solid ground if we elected them to church office. If we have voted them into the positions we are even more responsible to take their advice. By voting for them we have affirmed that they are worthy to be honored, respected, and listened to. Furthermore, most denominations, when installing a leader, will have the members take vows to pray for them, listen and obey them. These are not just vows to the leader or fellow congregants, they are a covenant with God. We break that covenant to our peril.

But what if we know the leader is wrong? Why should we listen to someone if we think their advice is bad? Some will submit out of fear of church discipline, but that is rare these days. Many people will submit out of false humility, secretly praying that God will vindicate themselves. We “rest” knowing that God will hold them accountable (yet somehow forget He will hold us accountable for our sinful attitude). Alas, very few will submit out of true humility in worship of our Savior. The majority maintain a sturdy self-righteous rebellion against submission.

At the core are two issues, a defective view of God’s sovereignty and an unwillingness to submit ourselves to God. We make ourselves to be wiser than God. We do not believe that He is working in this situation, and it is up to us to fix things. We think we know better than Him, revealing the fact that we have already placed something else on the throne of our lives.

Is there any positive to submitting to our leaders? Of course there is! Listening to our leaders is not only the responsibility of a church member, it is also God’s grace and advantage to us. We are freed up to live in faith that God is working all things out to His glory. We do not need to worry, fret, stress over the details because God has chosen faithful people to fulfill His plan. As such, submission is actually a form of worship.

Worship? Accepting a leader’s counsel is worship? That’s right. By submitting to God’s righteousness (and righteous plan) in faith, we offer an acceptable spiritual sacrifice, confessing that God is God, and ascribe the worth due His name.

Well, it is late now, and I must sleep. A lot more could be written, but I hope that gets some of you thinking.

I need six LR1120 batteries for the kids’ cute animal flashlights. The local RadioShack had them for $5, each. And they only had 4. That would be $15 in batteries for a $5 flashlight. No thanks.

Ooo, look, Amazon has a 10 pack for $6.40 with free shipping. And I can get 20 for $9.75 at http://24hourbatteries.com (including shipping).

No wonder RadioShack is in the dumps, and changing its name to The Shack is not going to help.