Talk Is Cheap

For the kingdom of God is not in talk but in power.
1 Corinthians 4:20

I am pretty full of hot air, I can talk and talk, part of that comes with being a preacher, the other part from my mom, you should hear her go. I also talk very loud, don't no why, I have good hearing. But what is talk worth well, Rush Limbaugh just singed a 400 million dollar contract. That might be a little overboard. But, talk honestly it is worth very little. We get very good at church talk, "Praise the Lord," "I can't make it without God," "Power in prayer," but very few of us do these things consistently. We talk or as A.W. Tozer says "Christians don't tell lies they just go to church and sing them." Tozer says this to note how we sing, but don't the words have their impact in our life.

You see, we need more power, more action, more involvement, less complaining, less verbal patting ourselves on the back, less bickering, more action (politicians would do well to remember this). Jesus gave short parables and sermons, but He was long on action. He showed His love on a cross. How can we show our love to God, church, and others? What lies have been singing? Not living in amazing grace, not trusting and obeying, not going in the highways and hedges, not deciding to follow Jesus?

Shutting my mouth and getting to work. Pastor Phillip

Religion Clause: A First Look At Sarah Palin's Religious and Church-State Views

Curious about McCain's new VP's relegious views. Then check this article out Religion Clause: A First Look At Sarah Palin's Religious and Church-State Views

I am imprssed so far in all that I have read about her. Her selection certiantly makes things interesting.

Pastor Phillip

Book Of The Week

I read Crazy Love by Francis Chan this week. It is a good book in ithe says his goal “is written for those who want more Jesus. It is for those who are bored with what American Christianity offers. It is for those who don’t want to plateau, who would rather die before their convictions do.” He spends the first three chapters of the book examining our understanding the character and relational aspects of God. The next seven are devoted to fleshing out a relationship with God. He achieves the by causing the reader to spend time in uncomfortable realizations at how anemic the Christianity we practice is and how much Jesus calls us to.

I found the basis of this weeks sermon (Rev 3:14-22) on one of the themes he addressed in the book. He said “a lukewarm Christian is an oxymoron; there’s no such thing. To put it plainly, churchgoers who are ‘lukewarm’ are not Christians. We will not see them in heaven.” I am not completely certain of the statement, but I don't want to test it, so the solution is to give all to God.

He then calls for us to put faith into practice. He says that we order our live so that we don't need God. Sure God is nice, but we have a back up plan if our plan does not go through. He argues that “God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. He calls us to trust Him so completely that we are unafraid to put ourselves in situations where we will be in trouble if He doesn’t come through.” I know in my life, I love the secure and frankly get afraid of putting myself in those positions. How about you?

I will make one critique, he addresses our need to serve the poor around us. This is good and Jesus did identify with them, but the Biblical poor are different that the poor we find today in our society. Not to jettison our responsibility to help, but some of the equations he makes are a little weak. I do agree that helping the poor is as much about us growing in obedience in faith and lessening our love material things as it is helping the person in need.

But, Crazy Love is overall a very challenging, but easy reading book. Pastor Kyle says that Chan is an amazing preacher and that you can get his sermons for free offline. This book offers a message that Christians desperately need to hear. As another reviewer of this book said "Too many of us are living too safely and too easily. But for the brief moments we spend at church each week, we are practically indistinguishable from the unbelievers around us. This is not the way it is meant to be."

Put yourself in positions to step out in faith, Pastor Phillip

Being Used

Here is a great devotion on being used of God and being used by others. It is very much worth a read and consideration. It is here at World Magazine Blog.

What Really Matters...

I am reading a really challenging book by Francis Chan called Crazy Love (not a book about romance in an insane asylum, or an ex-girlfriend of mine). Very good so far, it reads easy and raises big questions and he has so far not offered easy or trite answers and wants the reader to wrestle things out. This is nice, as most Christian books tend to tell you what to think, feel, or how to act. It makes you feel uncomfortable sometimes as he simply shows God's word, expectations, demands, and our often lack of apparent concern for it. The only criticism is that he paints in broad strokes and could offer more information on some of the provoking topics he elucidates. But, enough of that, the book is great and you would do well to devote some serious and reflective reading of it.

Man, there was this quote from some guy named Tim Kizziar who said

“Our greatest fear as individuals and as a church should not be of failure, but of succeeding at the things in life that don’t really matter.”

This means we find success, but our success does not matter. No one cares, it makes no real impact on anything. We look good and we enjoy it, it provides focus for life, but we racing towards a wrong goal (read about Ray Wrong-Way Riegles). Parents want to be best friends with kids, but offer no leadership or discipline. Churches want to grow and water-down the message and lower expectations. People want to make a good living, but work so hard they fail to enjoy the fruit of their labor. You can just going on here.

I asked myself what was I successful at in my life that did not matter to eternity. I though about Antioch Baptist Church, where I pastor, we by most accounts are a fairly successful church, but is our success and is goal that of God? These are big questions? I can't answer them all right now, but I want each of us to pray and think about in our own live and in the life of our church: what are our goals, do we have them, where are they taking us, and do they truly matter.

Asking Everyone To Pray For The Direction and The Goals Of Antioch Baptist Church, Pastor Phillip

Quit Reading My Blog!

Hey, as election season continues to heat up, I will become a little more political in some of my posts. But, this will only be about one issue: Abortion. I can't fathom how our country allows children to be killed in the name of a woman's right or a right to privacy. So, I encourage you to check out this out Pro-Life Blogs. It is from a Catholic religious perspective, while I have some differences with my Catholic brothers, I applaud them for thier staunch support of life. This site keeps up with both candidates positions and news about abortion in our country. So keep up, election 2008 matters.

Pastor Phillip

Cason Beach Pictures

I just got this new wireless broadband card and it rocks! So here is a link to some pictures you can check out. Here is Cason this summer enjoying the beach!

African-American Genocide: Who Abortion Kills The Most...

One of my favorite magazines is World Magazine. It covers all areas of news from a clear cut Christian perspective. I am going to recommend you read two well written articles from World Magazine concerning abortion.( Black Genocide and Abotion By Race) I was appalled when presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked by Rick Warren when life begin last week. Obama replied that "that is above my pay grade." Barack is one of the most pro-choice and anti-life senators in the US Senate (Read The Article to see how cold blooded he is). He even went so far as to refuse to protect babies who survived late-term abortions because he did not want to concede as he explained in a cold-blooded speech on the Illinois Senate floor -- that these babies, fully outside their mothers' wombs, with their hearts beating and lungs heaving, were in fact "persons.""Persons," of course, are guaranteed equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment. I find this odd, that he and many African-Americans are so staunchly democratic and support the anti-life agenda of that party. So, look at these numbers on who abortion truly affect the most!

• If someone wiped out the entire African-American population in Oakland, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., the number still wouldn't equal the number of black babies lost to abortion in one year: 683,294.
  
• According to the Allan Guttmacher Institute, African-American women are nearly five times more likely than non-Hispanic white women to have an abortion.
  
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost one in every two African-American pregnancies ends in abortion.
• Black women account for 6 percent of the population, but 56 percent of abortions.
  
• Blacks and Hispanics together account for 88 percent of abortions
• American history books frequently mention the lynching of African-Americans; one count from 1882 to the 1960s records 3,445 blacks dying that way.
  
• Other facts, though, go generally unrecorded: Since 1973 the number of aborted African-American babies totals 12 million, and every day in the United States some 1,500 die through abortion.
• The abortion industry began with a focus on African-Americans in 1939 with Margaret Sanger’s involvement with the Negro Project. Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, supported the project’s mission of promoting sterilization and birth control among African-Americans because she believed that “the procreation of this group should be stopped.”
• Sanger believed in to embrace eugenics, the pseudo-science that seeks to improve races through the control of hereditary factors by eliminating bad genes from reproductive populations. Sanger wanted to help the African-American community by ridding society of “increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents.

Praying For Our Nation & An End To Wholesale Slaughter Of Children, Pastor Phillip