Church meeting devotions: I Like Bread - Luke 11:3

Luke 11:3 Give us each day our daily bread.

I like bread. I like it a lot. Whether it’s the bread that I toast in the morning, the sandwich that I eat for lunch or in the roll that I may have with dinner, my conclusion is the same: Bread Rules! When I was growing as a teenager, I could sometimes eat half a loaf loaf at night with butter and jam. I don’t know how my folks afforded it, but there was always bread in the pantry for all of us hungry Stuart kids.

In Scotland, there is something called a plain loaf which is a doughy loaf of sliced white bread. At each end of the loaf is a thick slice which is either called the ‘heel’ or the ‘outsider’. In our house, getting the outsider was an extra helping, so we took it turns to receive it. Whenever it was toasted, covered in butter, and put on a plate, I felt as though I was feasting like a king. As I am writing this, I can still experience crunching through the dark crust and tasting the texture of the bread. As a poor kid, from a large family, living in a deprived area, white bread was my staple diet. Eating the thick crunchy heel was a wonderful blessing that meant a lot to me.

When the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, He instructs them to ask God to give them their daily bread before they ask Him to forgive their sins. He wants them to rely upon God to sustain them first and then forgive them second. It’s not that forgiveness is less important than meeting their needs; it’s just that Jesus wants them to be grateful first and then seek God’s mercy.

Sometimes I need to remember that lesson. Frequently I feel guilty about my mistakes, so that when I talk to God in prayer, I reel off a list of sins in order to seek His mercy first. I forget to be grateful and thank God for His daily goodness; instead I focus on being forgiven in order to make me feel good. Perhaps if I changed my prayers to concentrate on thanking God first, then I would not dwell upon how much I disappointed Him again.

Questions for personal reflection

What are the daily gifts in my life for which I should be grateful to God? Are my prayers more about me or God?

Prayer:            Lord Jesus, thank You for teaching us how to pray and for drawing our attention to the daily blessings and needs that God provides. Keep us from being self-centered or ungrateful. In Your Holy Name, we humbly pray. Amen.

John Stuart is the pastor of Erin Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you would like to comment on today’s message, please send him an email to pastor@erinpresbyterian.org.

Today’s image is a bulletin cover design for Communion drawn by John based upon Christ’s own words, “I am the Bread of Life.” If you would like to view a larger version, please click on the following link: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3560/3770073328_9c57843113_b.jpg

Church meeting Devotions: Christian Contenders - Philippians 1 v 27,28

Philippians 1:27b-28a                       I will know that you stand firm in one spirit, contending as one man for the faith of the gospel without being frightened in any way by those who oppose you.

Like most kids, I was bullied at school by several people who loved to intimidate me on a daily basis. They would bump into me on the soccer field and trip me up deliberately, or they would gang up on me in a quiet corner and seek to terrify me.

It got so bad that I didn’t want to go to school. My grades plummeted and instead of being in the top ten group in my class, I sank almost to the bottom. My mom wanted to go and face my daily oppressors, but that would have shamed me even more. She wasn’t mentally fit anyway, so I didn’t think that she could make any difference.

And then one morning during recess, just as the bullies were coming to get their usual sadistic pleasure out of intimating me, my mom appeared out of the blue. She verbally tore into them and publicly humiliated them. As I watched their faces get redder with embarrassment I realized that they were just children like me. My mom gave them a dressing down and the other kids in the school playground cheered her on. I guess that some of the other kids had been bullied by them too.

After that incident, things got better. I wasn’t afraid any more and got back into the top ten students in my class. The bullies’ reign of terror was ended and my mom became the heroine of my heart. Sadly, insanity and schizophrenia would expunge the incident from her mind, but even although it has been more than forty years since the event occurred, I still admire her what she did for me that day.

These days, Christians are contending for the Gospel in the face of persecution and harassment, imprisonment and even death in many lands. Their undaunted faith is a living testimony to the truth of the Gospel and work of Jesus Christ in the world. Society sometimes seeks to diminish Christianity and make it irrelevant. But the more that we are philosophically and socially opposed, the more true Christians appear to contend for the faith of the Gospel and stand up for Christ’s holy words. We will not be bullied, berated, or beaten down.

Prayer:                        Lord Jesus, faith is a precious gift and one that world desperately needs. All over the earth, Your Church and Your people are being made to feel insignificant and irrelevant. We are told that we are intolerant by intolerant people. We are viewed as being reactionary by those who violently react to Your teaching. We are humiliated and harassed all over the world by brazen bullies and godless governments. Help and empower us to contend for the Gospel, just as our brothers and sisters in our faith did so long ago. In Your Sacred and Holy Name, we pray. Amen.

John Stuart is the pastor of Erin Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you would like to comment on today’s message, please send him an email to pastor@erinpresbyterian.org.

Church Meeting Devotions: A Great Christian - Acts 11 v 26

Acts 11:26b     So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.

Barnabas is one of my favorite people in the Bible. He always seemed to do the right thing at the right time. When his Christian community needed money to survive, he sold his property and helped to sustain them. When no one else would trust Saul, Barnabas befriended him and taught with him. Barnabas was a great encourager, so it’s no surprise to me that he happened to be teaching in the very place where followers of Jesus were called Christians for the first time. Barnabas was and still is a great example of what it means to be a Christian.

Encouragement is something that we call can use each day, but it’s also a gift that we in the church could do better at sharing. As a pastor, I have seen people come and go to church as they please and I wish for their sake they could be more regular worshippers. I guess they are just waiting for the right word of invitation and encouragement, acceptance and love.

Perhaps today our mission is to be a Barnabas amongst our families and friends. An encouraging word goes a long way, even amongst Christians.

Prayer:                        Lord Jesus, help us to reach out to those who find it difficult to be in church on Sunday mornings. Enable us to encourage and embrace them, and not treat them as outsiders or backsliders. Let us see and accept them as God’s children and Your followers. Remind us also that we are far from being perfect ourselves. In Your Holy Name, we sincerely pray. Amen.

John Stuart is the pastor of Erin Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you would like to comment on today’s message, please send him an email to pastor@erinpresbyterian.org.

Church Meeting Devotions: Picking on Paul

1 Corinthians 15:2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

It’s very theologically fashionable these days to bash Paul and his writings. I come across many people who want to discard any of Paul’s statements and just concentrate on the Gospel. After all, these people insist, “why should I listen to Paul when Jesus can tell me everything I need to know?”

What they really mean is that they want to practice their faith on very loose terms. Their whole theology tends to be summed up in two neat phrases: ‘Jesus loves me this I know’ and ‘I’m OK ,You’re OK.’ It’s a very infantile form of faith and one that has no merit in God’s Kingdom.

You see if our faith was very simple and agreeable to everyone, Christ would never have been crucified and people like Paul would not have been martyred. We need to take seriously what Christ and Paul both have to say, because they’re working off the same page. Christ dies to save the world and then chooses Paul to spread the Gospel. What Paul writes doesn’t come from him alone – it all originates in Christ.

That’s why when we read a statement like ‘by the gospel you are saved’ with the condition ‘if you hold firmly to the word I preached’, we have to take them both together. The Gospel is not just a collected bundle of holy stories about Christ, the Gospel is an invasive forceful word of God that challenges our lifestyles and changes our souls for all of eternity.

Paul also gets it right when he states “otherwise you have believed in vain.” People are constantly diluting the Gospel to suit themselves and end up with no salvation. They believe what they want to accept, and end up with a cozy version of an uncomfortable faith.

So the challenge for us today is this: what Gospel do we believe in? Our own or Paul’s?

Prayer: Lord Jesus, we are so fiercely independent these days that we become indignant when Your teaching or Paul’s writings interfere and meddle with our lives. We sometimes resent the constraints that the Gospel places upon us, but instead of accepting Your words, we make up our own ideas and opinions. Forgive us, Lord, for disrespecting and disassociating ourselves with You and Your Chosen Apostle. Help us to honestly reevaluate our commitment to You, Your Church, and Kingdom. Amen.

John Stuart is the pastor of Erin Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you would like to comment on today’s message, please send him an email to pastor@erinpresbyterian.org.

Church Meeting Devotions: Faithful Foundations

Psalm 11:3 When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?"

Our modern Western Church is facing a dilemma and we are at a turning point in our history. For centuries, Western Christianity has been one of the most dominant forces on the planet. Much of history has been shaped by the ideas, beliefs, and teaching of the Western Church, and our modern civilization would not exist today without it.

The crossroads that we have come to has a lot to do with our foundational beliefs. People no longer apply them in their everyday lives. In fact, we have so “dumbed down” the teachings of the Church that many of our own people would find it difficult to recite the Lord’s Prayer, list the Ten Commandments, or even name all the Twelve Disciples of Jesus. It’s almost as if we’ve given the importance of those sort of things over to the church professionals and so long as they don’t meddle with our individual rights, opinions, or beliefs, we can all live in harmony.

Sadly, that was the condition of the Church before the Reformation. People let their priests hold the keys to salvation and biblical knowledge. Church people tolerated ignorance and illiteracy, placing too much authority into the hierarchy of the church, rather than paying attention to the substance and foundations of the Christian faith.

I have been a pastor for almost 25 years and I would love to say that Christians have become more dedicated, influential, and effective. Sadly, the reverse is more often true: people talk the talk, but really don’t care to walk the talk.

If God allows me to pastor for the next 25 years, then I think I’ve got to work on establishing foundations of faith in the lives of the people I serve. It may not be as exciting as being innovative or creative, but it will have a lasting effect. After all, if the foundations of our faith are being so easily destroyed through our desire to be accepted by the world, then what is the point of being a Christian? To make a difference in the world, we’ve got to be different.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, help us to focus on the foundations of our faith. Give us the grit and determination to follow through on applying our beliefs in our everyday encounters and circumstances. Re-teach us the merits of our faith and put us back on the right track. In Your Holy Name, we earnestly pray. Amen.

John Stuart is the pastor of Erin Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you would like to comment about today’s message, please send him an email to pastor@erinpresbyterian.org.