JANUARY-FEBRUARY NEWSLETTER 2008
FROM THE PASTOR

Greetings,

I was just on the phone with long time friend and spiritual mentor Chuck Baily who shared with me a line from Francis Schaeffer. “Our faith for this morning is not sufficient for this afternoon and evening.” What Schaeffer meant is not that God is not sufficient for the whole day but that our faith in, our commitment to, God needs to be re-upped, not every once in a while, but every day, indeed several times a day. There is of course a certain sense in which our coming to Christ, our surrendering to Christ is a once done thing. That seals the deal of salvation. But in a much more complete sense, in a much more hands on sense we are choosing for – and often times against – Christ in every decision we make, every word we speak, every thought that lingers in our mind. So if we are not regularly inviting His presence in our lives, we will soon become folks who have made a one-time decision that has no fruit, no life and therefore no reality.

I was thinking about this the other day as I was looking over our church membership rolls that our clerk An’Etta Neff is in the process of updating. No surprise to any of you that there were folks on that list whom most people who worship with us regularly have never heard of. These folks are not those who appear as members of the church in their obituaries though they had never graced the doors of the church. They are folks who at some point in their lives took an active part in the church family, publicly acknowledged Christ as Lord and Savior in baptism, but for one reason or another have fallen away from active participation in the Body life. Their faith for the morning was not sufficient for the afternoon and evening. Please, in saying that I am not entering the domain that is only God’s to enter – judgment about an individual’s salvation. I am just saying that they have not pressed on to the fullness of life in Christ Jesus that God so obviously desires for all of His people.

And what we need to face honestly is that we – I more than any - hold some responsibility for that drift, for that insufficient faith. Certainly each individual believer is responsible before God for what they do with Jesus. But as those who are a part of the Body with them, as those who are arms and legs and hands and feet together with each other, we bear responsibility to make the Church a place that loves people into a greater and deeper faith. We bear responsibility to make sure that we ourselves are modeling that daily, hourly recommitment of our own lives to the Lordship of Christ so that we can be good and right models for others. We bear responsibility to train and to equip, to encourage and to challenge, to inspire and to insist and to assist others as well as ourselves in growing up as disciples of the Lord Jesus. 

Grace and peace,
John