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To God be the Glory

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It is good to be back in Kansas City. Our team was an exceptional team of fifteen people from Grace Point. Debbie and I really enjoyed sharing the beauty and culture with our family from Grace Point.

The schedule was demanding, and the team was exhausted, but they approached every day with zeal and optimism. Even as we struggled with sickness and cold early mornings, there was no complaining.

I got regular text messages from our ministry partners asking for the team to return and pray for more people because the Lord was moving so powerfully wherever they went.

There was so much that God did, and still doing in the lives of the people we encountered. Lives were eternally changed, simply because we brought the Gospel message, prayed, and invited the Holy Spirit to do his work.

We served a wonderful ministry called Living Hope in Fishoek, South Africa, near Cape Town. Founded by John and Avril Thomas almost 24 years ago, they serve thousands of people annually. The entire Living Hope team are heroes and some of the most selfless people you could meet.

During our time in Fishoek, we served in many different capacities; we served with after school programs, helped with the sustainable farming, sorted donations, rebuilt and stained a deck, prayer walked, taught and served at a drug and alcohol recovery center, led staff devotions daily, served and prayed for people in their in-patient medical facility and served with their disabled and home health care teams. We prayed for people, served food, shared the Gospel, washed feet, and taught the Bible; it was such a powerful experience for our whole team.

One of the questions often asked about short term missions is, what is the fruit? Can we quantify the “return on investment”?

A lot of money was raised, and many people sacrificed in order to go to South Africa, how can we know if it was worthwhile?

Short team missions is a double edged sword; lives are impacted as we pray and share the Gospel, ministries are encouraged, churches are built up, people are healed and souls are won for the kingdom of Heaven.

But missions is also a tremendous discipleship tool for those who go. They grow in their faith as they rely on the Lord. Being stretched to speak in front of people and lead when they never thought they could. Seeing the faith of others around the world who have little or nothing in the way of material goods, yet they joyfully praise God. Seeing people with absolute faith that God will come through and heal or provide daily bread. This mission team are changed people and they will continue to grow as God leads them to serve and share what they have learned.

I love to invite people into a relationship with Jesus, and I had the opportunity to do that on several occasions.

During the after-school ministry, Bob Strawn had just taught the children the parable of the Good Samaritan. As we closed, we impressed on the children that without Jesus Christ they would not be able to love their neighbor. Many of the children have been abused by their neighbors, how could they love them?

As we spoke about the power of the Holy Spirit to enable them to love like Jesus does, we invited them to make Jesus lord of their lives, about twenty of the children responded to the Gospel that day.

A few days later, at the recovery center, we were asked to come and pray with Samuel. Samuel was writhing in pain as he was going through heroin withdrawal. Tim Bardy and I prayed with him to be set free from pain and he prayed to make Jesus Christ lord of his life. A temporal and an eternal miracle. Two days later we saw Samuel again and he was a visibly different person as the Lord had begun to transform his life.

A number of our team spoke at the recovery center, and I was scheduled to close with a Gospel invitation. I took them to Romans 6:1-6 and specifically verse 6, “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.”

The clients could all identify with being a slave to sin, and six of them responded to the Gospel invitation. It was a great day, we were seeing a harvest of souls.

Throughout the trip, the Lord would wake me up early, each morning I would look at my watch and it was 4:38am. This happened day after day, each day the exact time I looked at my watch was 4:38am.

As we spoke about it, I wondered if it was maybe a scripture reference that the Lord was calling me to meditate on. I began looking and immediately came across John 4:38, Jesus speaking to his disciples said, “For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” The Lord impressed on me that we are simply experiencing the harvesting of the fruit of other peoples’ faithful labors.

There are seasons of sowing, nurturing, and reaping. God moves his servants around and we must always be aware of the season that we are in. The people at Living Hope have sown for years with incredible sacrifice, then God sent a small team from Kansas City to reap the harvest that they had been praying for. What a joy to be used by the Lord to partner with these incredible people thousands of miles away from home.

Kansas City is our mission field, it is the primary area of our sowing and nurturing. There are thousands of people in our community that do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Are we faithfully sowing and praying to the Lord of the harvest?

Thank you to all who sacrificially gave and blessed the people of South Africa.

kuThixo makube luzuko (Xhosa)

Aan God die eer (Afrikaans)

To God be the glory.

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Sunday February 2, 2020 – The Value and Qualifications of Deacons

Acts 6:1-7

This past weekend we had the joy of praying for three new deacons as they were installed into the role of deacon. But, is the role of a deacon still relevant in the twenty-first century?

The first deacons were appointed in Jerusalem as we read in Acts chapter 6. In the book of Acts, we get a glimpse of the first century church. The church was growing rapidly and due to the work of the Holy Spirit it is estimated that the church had grown to somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 disciples.

The Church was a radical movement of people gathering daily for prayer and teaching. The believers sold their belongings and gave to anyone who had a need. The early church was a healthy and thriving community as the Gospel message was being told from person to person all over the region.

But then a complaint arose. There was a disagreement that some of the people were being overlooked as food was being distributed to the poor and the widows.  This imbalance may have arisen due to the logistical challenge caused by the rapid addition of Hellenistic Jewish Christians.

The church was initially made up of Aramaic and Hebrew speaking Jews who believed in Jesus, but as the church grew into the region, more and more Greek speaking Jews came to faith in Christ.

The church had two distinct groups, Hebrews and the Hellenists. It was sadly a form of racism that was being practiced as the needs of the widows and the poor among the Greek speaking believers were overlooked.

The Apostles called a meeting and said in verse 2, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables” Acts 6:2b.

Does this mean that the original disciples who were trained by Jesus himself were above helping the poor? Not at all, but they had a primary purpose and calling to preach the word and to pray.

This is the primary calling on pastors in the church, to primarily focus on the clear and correct teaching and preaching of the Word and to prayer. For the health of the church and the continued growth of the Gospel message in our community, I must give attention to prayer and preparation for preaching, constantly hearing from God the word that he would have for us as a church. It doesn’t mean that I as the pastor do not care about people, I do very much. I love to visit and share life with people, but I need to prioritize my time and remember my primary calling.

Research has shown that if a pastor would be the only one in the church doing the ministry of visitation, care and prayer for the congregation, that pastor could only put his arms around seventy people. Hence the average size of churches in America is around seventy-five.

The number of our current active members and adherents at Grace Point is a little over 260.

That is impossible for one or two pastors to stay in touch with. The role of the deacon in our church is the same as it was in the first century; to assist in member care, to minister and love the people of God.

In the first church in the book of Acts, the people chose seven and brought them to the Apostles. These men had particular requirements, they were “men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom” (Acts 6:3). These were men of godly Character.

As we held our deacon meeting on Thursday night, I shared with the men from 1 Timothy 3:8-13 what the Apostle Paul wrote about the qualifications of a deacon.  It is a very intimidating and demanding list of qualifications. Can anyone meet those requirements? And in verse 10 we read that they must prove themselves blameless! Well that excludes all of us, because we all fall short, we are all sinners saved by Grace. But there is a key verse of hope in what Paul wrote, 1 Timothy 3:9, “They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience.”

What is the mystery of the faith? It is the mystery of the age in which we live, the current church age, between when Jesus came to the earth to die for our sins and when Jesus is coming back again to make all things new.

The mystery is that we who have placed our trust in Jesus Christ as Lord, are covered by his righteousness, we have died to our old way of life and have literally put on Christ like a garment. When God the Father looks down on His children, He sees us covered with the righteousness of Christ. We are not perfect; we will never be perfect until Jesus comes again, but by God’s grace we are being made more like Christ every day. This is the mystery of the Gospel; this is the only hope we have of being able to stand before our Heavenly Father in prayer.

Getting back to the first century church, the result of the deacon ministry was healthy growth. Notice that verse 7 says that the number of disciples multiplied, these were disciples, not believers, adherents or attendees. No, these were followers of Jesus, people who looked like and spoke like Jesus – disciples. This is the result of effective church ministry; this is a sign of a healthy church.

You may wonder if we have deacons in the church helping with visitation, discipleship and member care, does that mean the rest of the church is not involved in the caring ministry?

Absolutely not, in 1 Peter 2:9, the Bible clearly states that we all are royal priests in the kingdom of God. We are all in ministry and we all carry the responsibility to do the work of the ministry as we read in Ephesians 4:15-16.

As we grow as a church we will continue to see an increase in opportunities to serve one another, the deacons are to spearhead the care for the needy, but the entire church is to be a part of the care and the visible demonstration of the Gospel being lived out.

Let us continue to pray for the leaders in our church as they serve the Lord.