Along The Path

I just want to let my loyal readers know, that I have moved the blog from Wordpress to iWeb.  It will still be called Along the Path, and you can still get it through RSS.  It has a nicer format to it, and it is directly accessed from the church homepage.   I will keep the Wordpress blog up for a while, but will not be adding to it, you can continue to access Along The Path by clicking here .  Thank you for following, and I hope you enjoy the new page layout!  For those of you that have me linked on your blogroll, don’t forget to change the link.

Our home Bible Study group is going through the Book of Joshua, and quite frankly, Joshua can be quite gory at times, but we always learn about God and some great things to apply to our lives.  Today, we looked at one of the goriest chapters in Joshua, and that was chapter 10.  Joshua chapter 10 talks about the annihilation of 5 cities and 5 kings.  I ask the same six questions every time we get together to study the Bible:

1.  What did you like about what we just read?

2.  What didn’t you like, or what upset you about what we just read?

3.  What didn’t you understand about what we just read?

4.  What does this passage tell us about God and/or Jesus?

5.  How can I apply what we just read to our personal lives and the church?

6.  Is there a verse or part of a verse we want to think about this week?

Well, as you can imagine, if you took the time to read Joshua 10, there were a lot of things people didn’t like.  Most of it being all the killing going on.

We talked about this, and we talked about just how evil the Canaanite people’s were.  Here are some examples:

1.  Archaeologists have found alters made out of bronze hands that Canaanites would heat up until they were glowing red hot and place a live infant on those hands to sacrifice to their demonic gods.

2.  Canaanites were originally a nomadic people that would come in and take people’s land.  That is what they did in this case, and they would shackle the men’s feet together and shackle their arms behind their backs, then slide a hook through a nostril of each man that would go around the cartilage of the nose, and connect to a chain to the next person’s nose.  After that, they would march them out of town, and didn’t care where they went, as long as it wasn’t there.  They would keep the women and the children in order to rape them and make them their slaves.

3.  The Bible says that God is slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness.  He promised Abraham that land centuries earlier, but told him that he could not have it yet because the sin of the Canaanites had not yet reached it’s full.

So looking at this, God really gave the Canaanites centuries to repent of their sin, secondly, their sin was so horrible that God needed to bring justice.  God is a God of justice, and He used the Israelites to do this.  (Just a little side note, God is not partial to any man, and when justice needed to be put on the Israelites centuries later, God used to other nations - Assyria, and Babylon - to bring justice on Israel.)

So we saw that God is a God of justice, and that He wants us to bring justice to Medicine Hat.  Not in the way the Israelites did, by killing off a bunch of people, but by bringing justice to those who have been let down and hurt by other people.

Some things that we are looking at doing is volunteering at the Champion Centre, visiting patients in the hospital, or visiting the elderly, or volunteering at the Salvation Army.  We will choose one of those in the next two weeks.  We will also start cleaning up city parks as a church too.

It is so cool to see God work in this way, to see everybody grasping hold of the vision, and making this their church and their vision, and just not mine.

I am almost to the halfway point of my 40 day fast from television.  I never thought it would be this hard.  This is what I have noticed in my life since I gave up TV 15 days ago.

1.  Technology plays a huge role in how I relax.

I am so used to unwinding in front of the TV.  We have 2 televisions in the house.  One in our bedroom, and one downstairs in the living room.  My wife needs the TV on in order to fall asleep, so I have a hard time relaxing there also.  I can’t complain, because she is fasting from facebook, and is doing a great job at it.

2.  I thought that I spent a lot of time in the Bible, but I was fooling myself.

This is a hard thing to say, as I am a pastor.  But I thought that I spent a lot of time in the Word of God before I started my fast.  Now in the evening when I have nothing to relax with, what do I do?  I spend a lot more time in the Word.  I am realizing that I still don’t spend enough time there.

3.  I focus on God by not focusing on God.

Ok, that one probably confused you, but as I go through this fast, I realize how much of my life is spent not focussing on God.  As I see how much of my day is not focussed on God, it makes me want to focus on God.  I get upset with myself when my mind slips away from focussing on God to other stuff.  I think I could take a great lesson again from Brother Lawrence.

4.  I listen to a lot of other pastors.

Since Leigh needs the TV on to go to sleep, we made a compromise.  We have a computer in our bedroom, and we will turn on YouTube.  We will find a preacher with about an hour long sermon, or a preacher with a consecutive play list.  Both of us are enjoying listening to Jarrod Roberts, Mark Driscoll, Kent Hovind, Ravi Zacharias and the like.  We are learning some great apologetics, and having our minds renewed by the word of God.

5.  The Spiritual Warfare gets intense

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan for 40 days.  This is a time of testing for me, and it is hard.  Satan has thrown some obstacles in may way that have been mind blowing, but God has seen us through.

6.  God has grown our church.

You praise God in a brand new church every time He adds somebody to your congregation.  In the past 3 Sundays, God has brought 3 more people.  One every Sunday.  People just come in and feel welcomed.  We are very excited to see what He is doing.

7.  More people are getting involved.

Almost everybody in our church now has a ministry they are involved in.  It is an exciting time when people are excited to serve the Lord!

Denying myself the pleasure of television, is wearing on me, but I have just over three weeks left.  The great thing is that God is doing a wonderful work at Pathway, and we are excited about it.

God definitely has a great sense of humor.  As we are preparing for our kids day camp, Leigh is planning for 100 kids.  I, being the realist that I am, told her that there was no way that we were going to get a hundred kids for Kids Day Camp.  She said we were going to get a hundred kids, and if we get them, then the pastor gets a pie in the face.

I had a meeting friday morning with Cory Hunt from P2C Kids, a para-church organization under the umbrella of Campus Crusade.  He shared with me the vision of P2C Kids, what they were doing in Lethbridge and asked if I wanted to help out.

After seeing that they want the local church to be a huge part of this, and for the local church to do visitation with these kids and their families in order to bring them to the local church, I was in.  I drove the bus for the ministry yesterday and there were close to 50 kids there (not to bad for Mother’s Day weekend) and on the way back, one of the mothers (non - Christian) asked if we could start something like that in their condo project for 2-4 year olds.  She said if we could do that, we would get half the condo project out!  I told her that I’m in.  My wife is totally in to it, and this morning I get to tell the church about it.  Can you imagine, regular people asking the church to come and do something in their neighbourhood?

I told Leigh that she better make it a BIG pie she is going to throw in my face.

We just started a brand new sermon series titled Live Wild! Live Free!  You can check it out here if you would like.  We are looking at the ministry of Jesus as told in the Book of Mark in the New Testament.  We saw that the call to follow Jesus is also the same call to live a wild life.

As we looked at Jesus’ ministry, we saw that he started out with a 40 day fast.  So I challenged the church to go on a 40 day fast with me.  I am giving up television for 40 days, some people are giving up pop, some are giving up texting, and some are giving up smoking.

We are going to take this time to focus on Jesus, who He was, and how He lived.  If we claim to be His followers, we will have to live and love the way He did.  So this will be an intense 40 days.  I pray that we will be able to be Christ imitators in every way at Pathway.

I went to our new local Tim Horton’s this morning.  It’s not a new Tim Horton’s, but it is my new local one since our move.  As I had my extra large double double and a sausage breakfast, I noticed a familiar looking lady across from my table sitting with her husband.  As she got up to leave, I told her that she looked familiar.  She remembered me from volunteering at Medicine Hat Stampede last year.  She is very excited that our mission team from Anna, Illinois will be here again.

Volunteering helps people remember us in a positive way.  People see us as bringing value to a community, and not taking people away from the community in order work in our religious institutions that take from communities.

I am getting very excited for what God is going to do this summer as we volunteer again at Spectrum, Stampede, Canada Day, and, and so on.  I’ll keep you posted as to how God is working through us this summer.

Our story has now officially been published in the Sunday School curriculum for the Kids4Christ Sunday School material.  There will be CNBC churches and SBC churches throughout North America reading about us up here in Medicine Hat.  To view lesson, click on following link.  www.namb.net/k4c_canada

The most twittered word today has been pandemic.  The WHO has upgraded pandemic level for the swine flu to 5, and is saying this thing could be as bad as the Spanish flu in 1918.  That being said, I think we should be careful with it, but don’t blow it out of proportion.  Chances are you will not get the swine flu.  You may not get AIDS or cancer, but one thing you can take to the bank is that you are going to die.

Each person on your street, in your town, country, and continent is going to die one day.  Instead of worrying about a flu pandemic, you may want to concern yourself with the question of afterlife.  A great question is, “Is there an afterlife, and if there is, how do I guarantee that I get it?”

Let’s take a look at this question.  Canada is a very pluralistic society - meaning that a bunch of people have different beliefs about religion, God (god) and afterlife.  Tolerance has been the buzz word in Canada for over a decade, meaning that we don’t have the right to tell people that what they believe is wrong.  If I tell somebody that what they believe is wrong, then I am labelled as being intolerant.

If I were tolerant (which means to put up with something I don’t agree with), then I would probably take the view as most Canadians do, which is that all religions lead to heaven/God/god/higher level of consciousness, or whatever.  If that were true, that would make God/god a pretty jacked up psychopathic, pathological liar.

He tells the Buddhists that He doesn’t exist, that heaven doesn’t exist and all we have to do is meditate on the right things, do enough good and so on to reach a higher level of consciousness.  He tells the Hindus that he can be found in a plethora of gods, and that we need to give the proper god the proper offering so we get the right blessings and enter nirvana, or we would be reincarnated into a worm, or a tree, or whatever.  He would tell the Christians that the only way to heaven is by putting their full faith into Jesus Christ, His Son, through repentance of sin, loving God with their whole heart, and loving their neighbour as themselves.  Still, He would tell the Muslims that God has no Son, and that everybody needs to bow down to Allah, and if they don’t, then they must kill the infidels.

So as you can see, this “many roads lead to God” is nothing but garbage.  It makes more sense to say that no religion is right, than to say that all religions are right.  However, since humanity has this overwhelming desire to worship something and believe in an afterlife, it would be accurate to say that religion plays an important role in humanity.

I hope you have seen how unintelligent and illogical it is to believe that all religions are right.  However, humanity sees religion as valuable, so it would be logical to say that one religion is right rather than no religion is right.

As you look at all the different religions out there, some believe in an afterlife, some do not.  Some believe in reincarnation, some do not.  Some believe in polytheism (worship of a plurality of gods) while others believe in monotheism (the worship of one God).  It is hard to figure out which one could be correct.

Instead of looking at what their view of heaven is and whether they are monotheistic or polytheistic, try to determine how salvation happens in each religion.  How does one get reincarnated into something better, how does one reach nirvana, how does one become part of the universe, how does one get to heaven?

When you start looking at the different religions in this fashion, you will see a trend.  All of them are based on how hard you work at your religion, except for one.  Every religion out there says that you need to work your way to God or gods except Christianity.  Christianity is the only religion where God did all the work.

That is why Christianity is so offensive to people.  There is nothing we can do to earn eternal life.  We are not worthy to get it, but God in His love for us had His Son sacrificed to pay the penalty for our sin so we can spend our afterlife with Him.  The only thing He asks in return is for us to give Him every part of our lives.  Does this now make me intolerant, or does it make me more logical?  You can be the judge of that, but I ask that you do your due diligence to find out if you are on the right track to an afterlife.

I am starting a new sermon series this Sunday titled Live Wild! Live Free!.  It is based on the story of Jesus from the Book of Mark, the second book in the New Testament.  We will be looking at the wild side of Jesus.  I know that most people don’t think of Jesus as being the wild type.  You know - the guy who started the Church, and we all know how boring church is.  The reason why church is boring is because we have a bunch of religious nut jobs doing a bunch of pointless religious things that are growing the Kingdom of God.

I know, you are probably thinking, why would you call them religious nut jobs.  Well, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result.  We have been “doing church” the “proper” way for 50 years here in Canada, and what do we have to show for it?  85% of our churches are in decline and dying, 14% are growing by transfer growth only and 1% are actually growing by conversion growth.  Then when those 1%  actually start growing by conversion growth because they are doing church in some abnormal way (a little on the wild side), 85% of the churches in town start criticizing them for not growing the church biblically.  It sounds too much like the religious nut jobs that Jesus ran into day in, day out.  No wonder He couldn’t stand them.

So I had to make a road trip yesterday to go get a commentary for the Book of Mark.  You know there is a problem amongst the Christian community when a pastor cannot find a commentary in a Christian bookstore in Medicine Hat (has over 40 churches) or Lethbridge, which is two hours away.  I had to make an 8 hour round trip to Cochrane to spend $20 on one book.

Randi went with me, and she really likes the seminary in Cochrane, but on top of that, they are starting the Bachelor degree online this year.  So we get to send her to seminary without losing her!!!  Woo Hoo!!!

The road trip was well worth the $20 book, and prayerfully Live Wild! Live Free! was well worth the road trip.  If you are in town this week, come check us out at the Volunteer Centre located on 4th St SE up behind the downtown DQ.

This summer is turning out to be a very busy summer.  Hopefully, and prayerfully we will see some lasting fruit from the efforts of our missionaries this summer.  Here’s the scoop:

First Mission Team - West Rome Baptist Church from Rome, GA.  They will be here the first weekend in June.  They will be helping Pathway serve the City of Medicine Hat by setting up, helping run, and taking down Spectrum.

Second Mission Team - Anna First Baptist from Anna, Illinois - will be up during Stampede to help Pathway run the Volunteer lounge, and Medicine Hat Police Service run their child-find booth during the Medicine Hat Stampede.

Third Mission Team - Snyder First Baptist Church, from Snyder, OK.  They will be here in July to help us prayer walk and to see what God is up to in Medicine Hat.

Fourth Mission Team - Sunnyside Baptist Church from Cheyenne, WY.  They will be here late July - Early August to help hand out 2000 invitations to Pathway’s Kids Summer Day Camp, plus they will help Pathway run a block party to kick off the summer day camp.

Fifth Mission Team - Genesis Church from Castle Rock, CO, will be here to help run Pathway’s Kids Summer Day Camp, and to serve the city.

Sixth Mission Team - Students from Current Canada will be here right after Colorado leaves.  They will help us with our last block party to wind down Pathway’s Kids Summer Day Camp, form relationships, and serve the City of Medicine Hat.

I ask that you start praying for the missionaries who will be coming up to serve our city.  Click on their websites, and learn more about them.  They are very abnormal people.  They are people like me, and the people of Pathway, who love Jesus and live for him.  Pray for safe travel, and that God will bless the fruit of their work, and they will leave with a greater blessing than what they gave.