William Booth, who was the founder of the Salvation Army in 1865. He died in 1912, which makes the above quote over 100 years old. It’s also frighteningly accurate and prophetic. Too many so called “churches are no different than the culture that they’re supposed to be influencing and transforming. Instead, they’ve conformed to this world, adopting the same ideologies and beliefs and throwing away the tried and true doctrines of the faith that were the only hope they had to offer.

Lord, help us.

After the week I’ve had, I’m ready for some R & R. I mean I want to move just enough so that no one things I’m dead.

I’m not saying or implying that I had a bad week. It was a good one. It just felt longer than normal. I was more than ready for 4:30 when it finally arrived.

So my plan is to lie on the floor. Or possibly on the couch. The whole petting me and bringing me snacks part is optional, although I do like some snacks.

What if we really took what Jesus said seriously? What if we actually committed our selves to obeying what He told us to do? What if we stopped using the Bible as a collection of proof texts to support our own political and social and spiritual ideas and actually read it and did what it said?

What if we stripped back worship services from smoke-and-lights concert experience back to gathering together in order to love God, each other, and our neighbors? I think David Platt is the one who said that if we took away all the comfortable chairs, the glitzy production, the lighting, the air conditioning, and the state of the art buildings, would the proclamation of the word of God and the glorifying of Jesus be enough?

I don’t believe that Jesus called us to be relevant and trendy as much as He called us to be faithful and obedient. We don’t change what we believe to fit in with an ever-evolving society. We don’t compromise away core convictions and values for the sake of conforming to culture, thus throwing away the very hope we have to offer a world in desperate need of saving grace. In Paul’s words, we preach Jesus crucified, buried, and raised again. We preach that all have sinned but that God so loved the world that He gave Jesus, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. And if we don’t, maybe we need to start calling ourselves by other names than Christians and the Church.

“A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its members for one another, or the community will be destroyed. I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me. In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner. That is a blessed discovery for the Christian who is beginning to offer intercessory prayer for others. As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife that cannot be overcome by intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

I would suggest the next time someone does something to annoy or anger you, instead of posting about it on social media, try prayer instead. Instead of passive aggression, try intercessory prayer.

I really think that most of us (including me) greatly undervalue prayer as a whole. As a result, we spend little to no time actually praying for those things that occupy our thoughts and concerns. We very rarely turn our anxieties into asking or our problems into petitions. We pray polite little prayers and seldom engage in prayer as an intentional act of the will, mind, heart, and soul. Think of Jacob wrestling with God and you have the idea of intercessory prayer.

Pray for your neighbor. Pray for your co-worker. Pray for your boss. Pray for your parent. Pray for your friends. Pray for your enemies. Pray for the leadership on a local, state, and national level (including the President). It doesn’t matter whether you voted for them or agree with their policies. You can still pray for them.

Intercessory prayer is to take your burden or concern into the throne room of God and leave it there. It’s to keep bringing it before God, day after day, with expectation that God will act. He may not act according to your will or desire, but He will always act in accordance to His will and His desire. He may not act according to your time table, but He will act in perfect timing.

The above quote has been attributed by many (including me a time or two) to F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it’s actually a line from the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, with the screenplay written by Eric Roth. Fitzgerald may have said or written something similar, but Eric gets the credit. But whoever wrote it, the truth remains.

It’s never too late to start over and be who you always dreamed you could be or, better yet, be who God dreamed you could be. All it takes is about twenty seconds of insanely brave courage to take that first step and start over. Maybe this is your time to take that step.

“What is my barrenness? It is the platform for His fruit-creating power. What is my desolation? It is the black setting for the sapphire of His everlasting love.

I will go in poverty, I will go in helplessness, I will go in all my shame and backsliding, I will tell Him that I am still His child, and in confidence in His faithful heart, even I, the barren one, will sing and cry aloud” (Charles Spurgeon).

Face it. There will be days or weeks or even months when you don’t have it. Whatever that proverbial “it” is that makes you tick, that makes you come alive, is missing. You feel almost like a car engine that is running with only half of its cylinders firing.

The truth that is both humbling and freeing is that it was never about your ability to begin with. It was never about your performance. It was always about God’s strength being perfected in your weakness, even in those moments when you felt strong.

God has never asked for perfection from you. He never asked for flawless worship or faultless service. He just asked for you to be faithful — to show up expecting that God can still use you and can still work miracles through crackpots like you and me.

“O Word Made Flesh, stand guard at the gate of my mouth. Be my voice this day that the words I speak will be healing, affirming, true and gentle. Give me wisdom to think before I speak. Bless the words in me that are waiting to be spoken. Live and abide in my words so that others will feel safe in my presence. Place my words in the kiln of your heart that they may be enduring and strong, tempered and seasoned with love and resilience. Give me a well-trained tongue that has been borne out of silent listening in the sanctuary of my heart. May my words become love in the lives of others. Amen” (Macrina Wiederkehr, Seven Sacred Pauses: Living Mindfully Through the Hours of the Day).

I think the old adage has proven true: you have two ears and one mouth so that you can listen twice as much as you speak. May the words you choose be full of blessing and not curses. May the words you speak give life, not quench it. May the words of your mouth be pleasing and acceptable to the God who made your mouth. May we always be as merciful to others and God in Jesus has been merciful to us. Amen.

“Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community. Such people will only do harm to themselves and to the community. Alone you stood before God when God called you. Alone you had to obey God’s voice. Alone you had to take up your cross, struggle, and pray and alone you will die and give an account to God. . . . You cannot avoid yourself, for it is precisely God who has singled you out. If you do not want to be alone, you are rejecting Christ’s call to you, and you can have no part in the community of those who are called . . . . But the reverse is also true. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone. You are called into the community of faith; the call was not meant for you alone. You carry your cross, you struggle, and you pray in the community of faith, the community of those who are called. You are not alone even when you die, and on the day of judgment you will be only one member of the great community of faith of Jesus Christ . . . .Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

Yes, faith is an individual matter. You and you alone will stand before Jesus one day to account for your life. But faith is also a community matter. You cannot (and were not meant to) live out your faith alone. There are no Lone Ranger Christians (and heck, even the Lone Ranger had Tonto).

You need to carve out your own individual disciplines that will help you grow in your faith. You also need a body of believers to belong to as well as a smaller community to laugh with, cry with, share with, who will love you and hold you accountable. It’s not either/or. It’s both.

I’m a little done with the pro-vaxx,anti-vaxx, pro-mask, anti-mask debate going on. Not that I don’t think it matters, but at this point, both sides are preaching to the choir. I’m pretty sure just about everybody has made up their mind about where they stand. And no, yelling and name-calling on Facebook isn’t going to change anybody’s mind about anything.

I think what we could use is a mercy mandate. Make showing mercy a requirement, especially if you belong to the family of God. Make kindness a thing.

I hear you already telling me that those people don’t deserve any mercy. Those people being those who think differently than you and who are on the other side of the argument on whatever issue is at hand.

But I say that by its very definition, mercy is undeserved. You don’t earn or merit mercy. None of us did anything to earn or deserve God’s mercy or grace. The best definition of grace is getting what you don’t deserve and mercy is not getting what you do deserve. Or something like that.

Most of all, those who need mercy most often are the ones who deserve it the least. If you and I are honest, we can look back at times when we were the ones needing mercy. Sometimes we received it; other times, we did not. Remember how good it felt to be shown mercy. Remember how freeing it was to step out from under your own condemnation or the condemnation of someone else.

So let’s be a little more merciful in our dealings with each other and try for more understanding.

So I had a thing happen to me today. I was driving home from work today when the temperature gauge on my car shot way up and suddenly all this steam and water come shooting out from under my hood. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to pull into a gas station so I could call a tow truck. I felt very adulty.

The tow truck took almost four hours to arrive. Thankfully, I had an audio book that I could listen to in the car while I waited. It just so happened to be The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, my favorite of all the Narnia books. That definitely helped to pass the time.

As far as I can tell in my limited auto-mechanical knowledge, I probably have a busted hose. It could have been so much worse. It could have been so much more expensive. At least I’m hoping and praying it’s not super expensive. I’m a bit attached to the old Jeep.

My car is old, but I have a car. It’s mostly reliable. I can afford to put gas in it and go places, like to my job. And I have a job so I can pay for things like gas for my car and other stuff. So many people around the world are praying for what I take for granted on a daily basis. So many people would love to have one of my bad days, because my bad days would be an improvement over their best days.

So my day didn’t exactly go as planned. But that’s okay. I’m still blessed.