The Book of Acts and the Holy Spirit

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Recently at White Fields I started a new series in which we will study through the Book of Acts.

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After announcing it I got some interesting comments which I hadn’t expected.
One person commented: “Wow, I never thought the Book of Acts was this exciting! I’ve never paid much attention to it.”
Another told me that in all her years as a Christian she had never been in a church that taught the Book of Acts because it was considered too controversial – all that stuff about the Holy Spirit.

I found these comments surprising because to me, the Book of Acts is the most exciting book in the Bible. It is the first book I ever taught in church and the book I continually come back to for vision, direction and inspiration.

How sad it is that some churches would find the Holy Spirit – God’s Spirit – too controversial a topic to teach people about.
I love what John Stott says about the Holy Spirit:

Without the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, even impossible. There can be no life without the life-giver, no understanding without the Spirit of truth, no fellowship without the unity of the Spirit, no Christlikeness of character apart from his fruit, and no effective witness without his power. As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.
– John Stott

Massive Mobile Phones and the Apostle Paul

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Last week I got a gigantic phone – a Samsung Note 4. It’s so big I can barely fit it in my pockets. And it has a stylus, which I wasn’t sure if I would like or not, but which I have actually used a ton – to my own surprise.

I was inspired to switch carriers for several reasons:

  • On my recent trip to Hungary and Ukraine, my colleague had T-Mobile, which allowed him to text internationally for free without any extra fees or plans, and he was able to make international calls for 5x less than I was able to even with my “international package” I had to pay an extra fee for.
  • My wife and I have been working hard for the last 6 months to get out of debt, and switching carriers allowed us to lower our bill by about $50/month.
  • We got all those benefits, and new phones, which we didn’t necessarily NEED – but we certainly didn’t mind. I was able to get my wife the Nexus 5, which was not available on our previous carrier, and I got a phablet. It’s huge – but it’s also awesome, because we don’t have a physical office for our church, so I work off of my laptop and mobile devices all day every day.

I was thinking to myself the other day: “If the Apostle Paul were alive today, what would his attitude to modern technology be?”  How about Martin Luther?  How about John Wesley or George Whitefield?

And here’s what I think:  I think that if any of these men would have lived in our day, they would have owned massive mobile phones, and they would be blowing up the internet all day long. Why? Because it is an amazing vehicle for spreading ideas and starting movements.

I’m convinced the Apostle Paul would have had a Note 4 – or maybe an iPhone 6 plus… He probably would have a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel and a Twitter account. And he would have worked those things all he could for the Gospel. Imagine if you would have told Paul the Apostle that there is a way that you could spread the Gospel around the world without having to get on ships, get shipwrecked, bitten by snakes and facing crowds of angry people who wanted to beat him up: he would have freaked out! He would have been all over it.

I think that we should be too.

Life in the Field Radio Program Expanding to Every Weekday

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The radio outreach of White Fields Community Church, “Life in the Field”, will be expanding starting this Friday, May 1st, to every weekday at 2:30 pm MST on 89.7 GraceFM.

heroRADIO2Our Sunday morning broadcasts at 10 am will continue to air as well.

We are excited to see how God will use this broadcast to reach people along the Front Range with Gospel-centered Bible teaching, and we ask that you pray that God uses it in a great way for His glory and the good of people in this community.

Let your friends and family know about the broadcast, so they can tune in!

GraceFM can be heard on 89.7 FM from Cheyenne, WY to Castle Rock, CO.  In and around Colorado Springs it can be heard on 101.7 – and you can also tune in online at 897gracefm.com.

I’m Back – and Shelby the Elder

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I just got back from a 12-day trip to Hungary and Ukraine, the bulk of which was spent visiting the church my wife and I planted in Eger, Hungary. This church was celebrating their 10 year anniversary, so I and my fellow pastor from White Fields Church went to celebrate with them at a weekend retreat where we did the teaching. We also had great times of fellowship with church members and were able to spend some quality and hopefully encouraging time with the church leadership.
Conference in Eger, Hungary

After Hungary we travelled to Ukraine, where we visited a church which White Fields partners with in the city of Svitlovodsk.

The stand of the Lenin statue in Svitlovodsk, which was toppled last year and then painted with the colors of the Ukrainian flag

It’s good to be back home and I look forward to writing more as time permits.

In the mean time – I wanted to recommend a new blog, authored by one of the elders I serve with at White Fields: Shelby the Elder.

Check him out, engage with him and leave him comments and encourage him to keep on writing!

Making the News

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The past 2 Sundays White Fields Church and yours truly have been mentioned in the local newspapers in Boulder and Longmont.

Last Sunday I was honored to be featured in the Times-Call's annual 100 People of the St. Vrain Valley, in which I got to share about mission work in Hungary as well as what I enjoy about being a local pastor here in Longmont. You can find that article online here.

This past Sunday, White Fields' annual Easter Outreach in Roosevelt Park was reported on by both the Boulder Daily Camera and the Longmont Times-Call. Check that article out here.

Sometimes you can't be sure how what you say to reporters will actually get reported, but I was very pleased with how the Camera and Times-Call reported what I said.

 

Easter Weekend in Longmont

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This weekend, White Fields church will again be hosting the annual Easter Egg Hunt in Roosevelt Park on Saturday, April 4th at 10:00.

It’s hard at this point to only call this an Easter Egg Hunt, it’s almost like an Easter Family Festival, because of all the activities available to families. If you live in the area, do come and check it out; we’ve ramped it up this year!

Also, we invite you to join us on Sunday morning at 10:00 in the St Vrain Memorial Building for our Easter Celebration!

For more information, click here.

Thoughts on Representative Klingenschmitt’s Comments about the Judgement of God and the Assault in Longmont

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Last week Colorado State Representative Gordon Klingenschmitt from Colorado Springs stated on his YouTube channel that the Bible says that the Longmont woman who was assaulted and had her baby cut from her stomach was the wrath of God coming against America because we have failed to protect unborn children. To make this point, he quoted from Hosea 13:16.

Since then, both conservatives and liberals have distanced themselves from Klingenschmitt and he has been removed from at least one comittee that he was a member of.

I went and checked out the statement he made, because I know how sometimes things can be misconstrued when relayed by media – I was curious if that was the case here.

Here are my thoughts:

  1. The one way that Klingenschmitt might have been misrepresented was that he was not saying that God was judging this woman individually, who was the victim of the assault – rather he said that God is judging our soceity in general, and what happened to this woman was part of that judgment.
  2. He quoted from Hosea 13:16, a verse about how both Israel and Samaria would face God’s judgment (in the form of war) as a result of their rebellion against God. The prophet describes what will happen when war comes: no one will be spared; children will die, and even pregnant women will be killed with the sword (cut open).
    This is, first of all, not even talking about the kind of assault that took place in Longmont. Secondly, the important detail in understanding what is being said by the prophet is that judgment will come in the form of war, and in war, these are the kinds of atrocities that happen.
    In other words, it isn’t God saying that He’s going to judge them by sending people to kill their children and cut open their pregnant women, it’s God saying that he will allow a time of hardship by removing His hand of protection and allowing a foreign nation (the Assyrians in this case) to overrun them. Historically, this is exactly what happened. However, in the context of the Book of Hosea, it is important to note that this is said as a warning of the judgment that will come if the people continue in their wickedness and rebellion, and is followed in the next chapter by the urging of Hosea about the blessings and restoration that repentance would bring to the nation instead.
    In other words: “You have a choice to make. It’s not too late! You can choose to continue rebelling against God, in which case God will not protect you from the impending onslaught of the Assyrians (and just to remind you, here are the kinds of terrible atrocities that happen in war…), or you can repent and turn back to the Lord and he will restore you and heal your nation.”
    Conclusion: Klingenschmitt is clearly taking this verse out of context.
  3. The difficult question this brings up is: when do we consider something to be God’s judgment, and when do we not? In the Bible, it seems that many times things happened that were indeed the judgment of God, which, if they were to happen in our day, we might not see them as such.
    For example, in the Old Testament, in Korah’s rebellion, people got swallowed up by the Earth as God’s judgment upon them. Nowadays, if someone gets sucked up in a sinkhole, calling it the judgment of God is not exactly politically correct. In the Old Testament, wars and attacks from foreign nations were often related to God’s judgment. Do we still consider that to be the case? Or how about Ananias and Saphira – they lied to make themselves look good, and God struck them dead. We don’t often think in our day about heart attacks as being God’s judgment on a person. I’m sure that not all heart attacks are God’s judgment on people – but it would seem that sometimes they might be.
    It is incredibly difficult to discern or to say with any amount of certainty which things are God’s judgment and which are not, apart from divine revelation.

My conclusion is that this man is not evil or heartless, but perhaps a bit misguided and could use some lessons in exegesis, because he is very dogmatic about some things which he doesn’t have proper basis to be so dogmatic about. Furthermore, having a platform like the one he does as a State Congressman, he should be much more careful about what he says.

Much more importantly, my heart goes out to the victim of this terrible crime. We pray for her physical and emotional healing. We pray that she will be able to have more children after this. I have been so impressed by her graciousness in her public statements, and we do pray that she would sense the love of God and presence of God and the hope of the Gospel.

Running on Water

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I have recently started running regularly along the St Vrain River from Roger’s Grove to Golden Ponds. The other day my running partner and I discovered this row of rocks that allows you to cross over the middle of one of the lakes.
Longmont, thanks for being awesome.
Here are the pictures we took of it today. The first one was taken by my Samsung Galaxy and the other was taken by my friend’s iPhone. Not trying to be a hater – just sayin’… 🙂

The Rise of Christianity in China

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I read this interesting report from the Financial Times on the rise of Christianity in China.

Here are some highlights:

There are now about 100 million Christians in the world’s most populous nation, eclipsing the 86.7 million-strong membership of the ruling Communist party.

Christianity (particularly the Protestant variety) has been the big winner in the competition for Chinese souls. If it continues to spread at its current pace, the country is very likely to be home to the world’s largest Christian population within the next 15 years.

“By 2030, China will almost certainly have more Christians than any other country and the Communist party is very alarmed,” says Fenggang Yang, director of the centre on religion and Chinese society at Purdue University. “Chinese officials often cite the experience of Poland, where they believe the Catholic Church helped destroy communism and, although the two situations are not really comparable, the party still sees Christianity as a very serious threat that it needs to suppress.”

The truth is that, as this article reports, for all the news of the decline of Christianity in Europe, Christianity is still spreading quickly around the world, particularly in the developing world. These are exciting times!

Longmont Baby Abductor Will Not Be Charged With Murder

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I was talking to a friend in Romania the other day and he said it feels like he is always seeing Longmont in the news.

It’s true. Longmont has made national (and apparently international) headlines a lot in the past few years, and not for good reasons: catastrophic floods, carjackings involving kids, and most recently a fetal abduction in which a woman who was 7 months pregnant responded to a Craigslist ad for free baby clothes was beaten, stabbed and had her baby cut from her womb and kidnapped.

For what it’s worth – crime rates in Longmont have actually decreased in the last year, as opposed to Boulder, which has higher crime rates which haven’t decreased, but this kind of stuff, although not characteristic of this fine town, gets a lot of publicity – as it should.

The suspect’s arraignment will be today at 1:30, but the Times-Call reported that the DA has already stated that murder will not be among the charges brought against this woman, the reason being that Colorado law does not count the death of an unborn child as murder, unless the child lived outside of the womb for some time. The issue in this case is that it’s not possible to prove that the child lived outside of the womb, and if so, for how long – so Colorado’s wording of the law will not allow a murder charge in this case.

People in Longmont were protesting this and picketing on Main Street last week when it was first announced. The charges expected to be brought against the suspect are: suspicion of attempted first-degree murder, first-degree assault and child abuse knowingly and recklessly resulting in death.

The problem with those charges are that even all together they will not lead to as strong of a sentence as if murder or manslaughter had been part of it. Since the mother survived, and there is no proof that the baby lived outside of the womb, Colorado law has no way to charge her with anything stronger.

What do you think?  Is this justice?

The sad part of this is that if this attack had not happened, this baby would have lived. The baby’s life was clearly taken by this attack. I find it hard to accept that we have no way to prosecute that.