"A Difficult Dance in the Dark" this Sunday morning March 31

The "dark" days of Noah's day is filled with persons pursuing their own agendas first, seeking more leisure and pleasure, unrestrained sexual immorality and wickedness and the most unusual experience of increased demonic infestations.

WOW - no wonder God is grieved of what man has done and determines to wipe them off the face of the earth.

But in the midst of such darkness comes a man by the name of Noah who is said of him, "Noah walked with God." (Genesis 6:9).

How do you walk (dance) with God in such a wicked time?

Since we may be living "In the Days of Noah," then how do we walk with God in dark days?  As Bruce Springsteen (yes, I mentioned his name...oh my goodness, I can't believe it) sang "Dancing in the Dark."  How do we "Dance in the Dark?"

We will look at this as we gather this Sunday morning, March 31 at 10:15 in worship at Rainsville First Baptist Church.  Can't wait.

This Sunday afternoon at 3:00 we have the privilege of ordaining ("setting aside") Zac Gardner for the Gospel Ministry.  What a joy and pure delight Zac has been to our church since calling him as our Student Pastor in July 2017 and then last month full time with us as our Associate Pastor and Student Pastor.

Dr. Nathan VanHorn, Marshall Henderson, Wayne White and others including friends and family of Zac and Anna will be joining us as our church family gathers to set-aside Zac for the ministry.

Due to this afternoon service, we will not have any Sunday night service this week.

"The Next Level" report was shared with the church this past Sunday.  If you did not get a copy of the report, they are available in the foyer this Sunday.

From How to Who by James Emery White

From How to Who It was the summer of 1925. The place was the small mountain town of Dayton, Tennessee. The issue at hand was a legal confrontation that made headlines around the world. On one side was William Jennings Bryan and on the other was Clarence Darrow. Their confrontation was not over a crime or misdemeanor; it was not over a legal suit involving a will or a trust. It didn’t even involve special prosecutors or a grand jury. In fact, the courts had never encountered a case quite like this one. The subject was the very origin of human life. It is known in the history books as the Scopes Trial. A young biology teacher by the name of John T. Scopes was charged with violating a Tennessee law stating you could not teach evolution. As a result, the trial posed defenders of evolutionary theory against those who wanted public schools to teach what was considered to be a biblical view of the origin of the world’s inhabitants. William Jennings Bryan represented the state and, by default, those who believed in the biblical view of the creation of human beings. Clarence Darrow represented those who embraced the evolutionary theory.

The three main parties of the Scopes Trial: William Jennings Bryan (left), John T. Scopes (center), Clarence Darrow (right). Source: Wikimedia Commons

It really was the clash of two worlds. Bryan was the good-old-boy, religious Southerner. Darrow, in favor of evolution, was the outspoken, religious agnostic from the North, polished and intellectual, supplied to defend Scopes by the ACLU. Many people do not know that the result of the trial found the teacher guilty, but not before Darrow (the evolutionist) had made a fool of Bryan (the creationist). Bryan allowed himself to be cross-examined by Darrow, arguably the greatest trial lawyer of his day, on the precise accuracy of the Bible. In the course of that examination, Darrow forced Bryan to admit that he couldn’t answer even the most basic questions about what the Bible puts forward as truth. Not because there weren’t answers, but because Bryan wasn’t the sharpest biblical scholar around. So the verdict as it stands in history is intriguing: Bryan won the battle, but he lost the war. While he technically won the case, the conflict stamped the entire debate with an unmistakable image. Evolution vs. creation came to be seen as the city vs. the country; places like New York and Chicago vs. backwoods Dayton, Tennessee; science vs. ignorance; the modern world of the 20th century vs. the American Religious Fundamentalism of the 19th century. That image has remained firmly in place for nearly a century and so have the lines of debate. Evolution has become the accepted scientific theory of how human beings and all of life developed and came into being. Whether through evolution or not, the biblical idea of a God creating is seen as a view that is anti-scientific and out of touch with the real world. But is that the caricature we should have in mind? A divide between smart and dumb, sophisticated and backward, science and the Bible... or even between evolution and creation? Or is there something more to be considered? Namely, that the real divide is between a naturalisticview of the universe (seeing nature as all that there is) and a theisticview of the universe (remaining very much open to the existence and activity of God). In other words, a view of the world that sees nothing but the temporal, the material and the natural, over and against a view that is open-minded toward the eternal, the spiritual and, yes, even the supernatural. To be sure, those who are Christians believe that God created human beings. If you are a Christian, you are, by necessity, a creationist. You believe that we were wonderfully and carefully designed, and that the entire creative process was miraculously and supernaturally generated and guided by God. But this is the “who” of the matter, not the “how”; which, in truth, is the real debate. And according to a new study released this month by the Pew Research Center, this is where most Christians land. The majority of Christians today (as in 58% of white evangelical Protestants and 66% of black Protestants) “agree that human evolution is real—and that God had a hand in it.” Pew acknowledged that perhaps they had, in the past, been asking the question regarding evolution wrong, meaning not phrasing it in a way to allow both the embrace of evolution along with a role for God. Of course, any reasonable glance at evolution cries out for some kind of intervention. The timeline alone is problematic. While the age of the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years, the age of the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years. But life didn’t exist 4.5 billion years ago. It couldn’t. It was a geologically violent time, there was constant bombardment from meteorites, and the Earth itself had to cool and its surface solidify to a crust. Life on Earth, the latest thinking goes, began about 3.8 billion years ago, in the form of single-celled prokaryotic cells, such as bacteria. Multi-cellular life didn’t come into play until over a billion years later. It’s only in the last 570 million years that the kind of life forms we are familiar with even began to evolve, starting with arthropods, followed by fish 530 million years ago, then land plants 470 million years ago, and then forests 385 million years ago. Mammals didn’t evolve until just 200 million years ago, and our own species, Homo Sapiens, only 200,000 years ago (according to theorists). So humans have been around for a mere 0.004% of the Earth’s history. That’s the evolutionary time frame, but also the evolutionary problem. The whole idea behind naturalistic evolution is that it’s a product of time plus chance. But there just hasn’t been enough time for the Earth to cool and life to be produced naturalistically by chance. One-time Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University, Sir Fred Hoyle, has determined that if you computed the time required to get all 200,000 amino acids for one human cell to come together by chance, it would be about 293.5 times the estimated age of the Earth. Even further, Hoyle, along with his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe, calculated the odds for all of the functional proteins necessary for a one-cell animal to form in one place by random events. They came up with a figure of one chance in 10 to the 40,000th power—that’s the number 1 with 40,000 zeros after it. Since there are only about 10 to the 80th power atoms in the entire universe, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe concluded that this was “an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.” For the current proposed evolutionary timeline to work, it would be like having the working dynamics of the latest iPhone along with the entire corporate campus of Apple that produced it to be instantly created – by chance – through a single explosion in a computer geek’s garage. If you are going to embrace the theory of evolution, you also need to (seemingly) embrace some kind of outside, guiding, enhancing force that sped it along and guided it strategically in the time frame of the age of the Earth. There is, of course, more to consider, such as the initial complexity of life from which evolution had to begin (How did that initial complexity come into being?). Also, there is the problem of explaining how the evolutionary process created ever-increasing diversity (How one species creates a completely different species is, at best, vague.). But beyond the lack of time for evolution to have done its work without outside help, beyond tracing the origin of life back to its roots and finding that its starting point was so complex that it couldn’t have evolved naturally (step by Darwinian step) to get there, there’s the beginning of life itself. You can’t say “Life exists because 3.8 billion years ago it began evolving from single-celled prokaryotic cells” and consider the case closed. Just like Big Bang theorists have to wrestle with where the stuff that got banged came from and who made it bang, evolutionary theorists have to ask how those first bacteria came to life. How did life come from non-life? You can say that within chemically rich liquid oceans organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life, but that’s like saying your SUV became Optimus Prime after it went through a car wash. It doesn’t just happen. So the real decision is not between creation and evolution, but between theism and naturalism. And it would seem that those who have the most scientific problems are the naturalists, as everything in science that reveals “how” repeatedly points to a very necessary “Who.” James Emery White Sources Nadia Whitehead, “Origins Opinion Surveys Evolve from ‘How’ to ‘Who’,” Christianity Today, February 12, 2019, read online. George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925. Dr. Devleena Mani Tiwari, “Origin and Evolution of Life on Earth,” Science India, read online. Sir Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space. About the Author James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and the ranked adjunctive professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Meet Generation Z: Understanding and Reaching the New Post-Christian World, is available on Amazon. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit ChurchAndCulture.org, where you can view past blogs in our archive and read the latest church and culture news from around the world. Follow Dr. White on Twitter and Instagram @JamesEmeryWhite.

So, Do You Write Your Own Sermons? by H.B. Charles, Jr.

I went to the office early to work on my Thanksgiving sermon before the rest of the team arrived. I stopped by the Waffle House on the way. As I sat at the counter, a man in a nearby booth asked, “Is that Psalm 100 on your file?” It was. I was working on several projects at the same time and I had marked Psalm 100 in large print across the folder.

I told the man I was working on Psalm 100 to preach for Thanksgiving. With a confused look, he asked, “So do you write your own sermons?” When I answered affirmatively, he was shocked. He went on to tell me that he did not think preachers wrote their own sermons anymore. He assumed most preachers got their sermons from the internet. He even told me about a preacher friend of his who writes and sells sermons to other preachers. I did not have much to say in response. I didn’t know what to say. As if he did not believe I prepare my own messages, he asked about my church location and service times to “come check me out soon.” Then he told me he would let me get back to my work.

What made him assume preachers steal their material from others, rather than doing the hard work of sermon preparation? Was he right? Do you write your own sermons?

The Apostle Paul charged young Timothy:

“Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.”(2 Timothy 4:2)

To “be ready,” you must first get ready. A commitment to preach is a commitment to prepare. A burden to preach without a discipline to study is a desire to perform. If the Lord has called you to preach, he will give you something to say. You will not have to make it up, but you will have to look it up.

As you prepare to preach, you should learn from the wisdom of others. It is arrogant to refuse to learn from others. Any text you choose to preach has a record of centuries of interpretation and we are blessed to have access to the thinking of faithful preachers around the world today.

There is no excuse for us to ever go to pulpit unprepared. We should take advantage of the available resources to help us mount the pulpit armed with a clear and faithful message from the word of God. But we should not build our pulpit ministries on another man’s work.

Of course, there are times when a preacher is in a jam. The week gets away from you and you need help to get through Sunday morning. But that should be a place you visit on occasion; it should not be the place where you live from week to week.

Study the Bible for Yourself

Pick a biblical text. Ask the Lord for illumination (Psalm 119:18, 34). Gather your resources on that text. Then get to work. Read, think, and study until the God-intended meaning of the text becomes clear. Don’t let distractions undermine your study time. Stay in the seat until the hard work is done. Personal Bible study is essential for effective sermon preparation. Moreover, it is essential for your own sanctification. Do not study the Bible just to get a sermon. Study the Bible to draw closer to God. Then, preach from the overflow of what you learn from God’s Word. The one who steals preaching material from others robs himself of the fruit of personal devotion.

Craft the Sermon for Yourself

After you study the text, your work is not done. You still have a ways to go to get from text to sermon. Pages of study notes are not a sermon. Your exegetical data is the raw material of the sermon, but the truth you have learned from the biblical text should be clearly communicated. The sermon should have a crafted thesis, big idea, or main point. The message should have purpose, unity, and movement. Think through your sermon introduction and conclusion. Prayerfully work through relevant application points. Find illustrations that open windows into the text. As you have read helpful points, quotations, or stories from others, use it where it fits. Give credit where credit is due, but don’t build your message around someone else’s work. When you stand behind the sacred desk to preach, be a voice, not an echo.

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared at HBCharlesJr.com and is used with permission.

8 Scars of Wounded Church Members by Chuck Lawless

I start with this caveat: we’re called to be obedient to God, which includes being a part of His local church body, and we can’t let scars keep us from being obedient to Him. On the other hand, I’ve seen people bear scars of church life for many years. Here are sources of some of those scars – and I encourage you to use this list to see if you have any of the scars. 

1. Betrayed confidence. I’ve written previously about my personal reticence to offer confidentiality, but I nevertheless recognize this issue. It takes only one broken confidence to make you distrust others for some time.
2. Fallen leadership. This scar is especially painful if you were close to the one who has fallen. When our friends and heroes fall, it’s sometimes tough to ever get close to anyone again.
3. Church conflict. I’ve met people who still remember with pain a congregational conflict that occurred years ago. Decades even. The wounds can be deep, and the scars are obvious.
4. Member hypocrisy. I know it’s an excuse (“The church is full of hypocrites”), and it’s often an exaggerated one – but the problem is real. If you’ve known only a few apparently genuine Christians in a church, it’s easy to get jaded against “believers.”
5. Family hurt. It’s one thing when somebody in the church attacks you in some way; it’s another matter when somebody goes after your family. Forgiving an offender feels like you somehow have chosen not to defend your family—so it’s easier to stay angry.
6. Ministry neglect. The deeper your pain is, the more it hurts if your church somehow fails to minister to you in your time of need. And, the more it happens, the deeper the scars become.
7. Spiritual warfare. We often open the door for the enemy to build up our scars, but we’re foolish to ignore the reality of Satan and his forces. They delight when our hearts get calloused, regardless of the cause.
8. Personal sin. This cause is a bit different from the others. In this case, the “scar” is a heart hardened by ongoing sin—including some hearts that attend church every Sunday. Blaming the church for something is easier than taking responsibility for our sin.

Thursday, March 7, 2019...From the Shepherd's Heart

This weekend is the time we have been preparing for, planning and praying....it is our Prayer Conference.

Schedule:
Friday, March 8 - 6:30-8:45
Saturday, March 9 - 8:30-12 Noon
Sunday, March 10 - 10:15 and 6:00

Our leader for this time is Scott Price, Pastor, The Fellowship Chapel, Bristol, Virginia. 

You can read more about him on our web site and the conference here. 

This conference is free and no offering will be received.  If you can't be here in person, you can watch online here. 

Wednesday, March 6, 2019....From the Shepherd's Heart

This is Wednesday and the day the people of God gather in His house for prayer, praise and the Word.  Students meet, children, meet and adults meet.  It all begins at 6:10.

I continue to speak on "The Kingdom of God" tonight as we begin to examine that Jesus is the "Prophet, Priest and King."  The three-fold office of our perfect Lord.

God is moving deeply in my heart on this subject of the Kingdom and it will be our teaching point for this year on Wednesday nights.

See you tonight at 6:10.  Can't wait....

10 Reasons Racism Is Sin by Kevin DeYoung

Most people know that racism is wrong. It’s one of the few things almost everyone agrees on. And yet, I wonder if we (I?) have spent much time considering why it’s wrong.

We can easily make our “I hate racism” opinions known, but perhaps we are just looking for moral high ground, or for pats on the back, or to win friends and influence people, or to prove we’re not like those people, or maybe we are just saying what we’ve always heard everyone say.

As Christians we must think and feel deeply not just the what of the Bible but the why. If racism is so bad, why is it so bad?

Here are ten biblical reasons why racism is sin and offensive to God.

1. We are all made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). Most Christians know this and believe it, but the implications are more staggering than we might realize. The sign pictured above is not just mean, it is dehumanizing. It tried to rob Irish and blacks of their exalted status as divine image bearers. It tried to make them no different from animals. But of course, as a white man I am no more like God in my being, no more capable of worship, no more made with a divine purpose, no more possessing of worth and deserving of dignity than any other human of any other gender, color, or ethnicity. We are more alike than we are different.

2. We are all sinners corrupted by the fall (Rom. 3:10-20; 5:12-21). Everyone made in the image of God has also had that image tainted and marred by original sin. Our anthropology is as identical as our ontology. Same image, same problem. We are more alike than we are different.

3. We are all, if believers in Jesus, one in Christ (Gal. 3:28). We see from the rest of the New Testament that justification by faith does not eradicate our gender, our vocation, or our ethnicity, but it does relativize all these things. Our first and most important identity is not male or female, American or Russian, black or white, Spanish speaker or French speaker, rich or poor, influential or obscure, but Christian. We are more alike than we are different.

4. Separating peoples was a curse from Babel (Gen. 11:7-9); bringing peoples together was a gift from Pentecost (Acts 2:5-11). The reality of Pentecost may not be possible in every community—after all, Jerusalem had all those people there because of the holy day—but if our inclination is to move in the direction of the punishment of Genesis 11 instead of the blessing of Acts 2 something is wrong.

5. Partiality is a sin (James 2:1). When we treat people unfairly, when we assume the worst about persons and peoples, when we favor one group over another, we do not reflect the God of justice, nor do we honor the Christ who came to save all men.

6. Real love loves as we hope to be loved (Matt. 22:39-40). No one can honestly say that racism treats our neighbor as we would like to be treated.

7. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer (1 John 3:15). Sadly, we can hate without realizing we hate. Hatred does not always manifest itself as implacable rage, and it does not always—or, because of God’s restraining mercy, often—translate into physical murder. But hatred is murder of the heart, because hatred looks at someone else or some other group and thinks, I wish you weren’t around. You are what’s wrong with this world, and the world would be better without people like you. That’s hate, which sounds an awful lot like murder.

8. Love rejoices in what is true and looks for what is best (1 Cor. 13:4-7). You can’t believe all things and hope all things when you assume the worst about people and live your life fueled by prejudice, misguided convictions, and plain old animosity.

9. Christ came to tear down walls between peoples not build them up (Eph. 2:14). This is not a saccharine promise about everyone setting doctrine aside and getting along for Jesus’s sake. Ephesians 2 and 3 are about something much deeper, much more glorious, and much more cruciform. If we who have been made in the same image, born into the world with the same problem, find the same redemption through the same faith in the same Lord, how can we not draw near to each other as members of the same family?

10. Heaven has no room for racism (Rev. 5:9-10; 7:9-12; 22:1-5). Woe to us if our vision of the good life here on earth will be completely undone by the reality of new heavens and new earth yet to come. Antagonism toward people of another color, language, or ethnic background is antagonism toward God himself and his design for eternity.

Christians ought to reject racism, and do what they can to expose it and bring the gospel to bear upon it, not because we love pats on the back for our moral outrage or are desperate for restored moral authority, but because we love God and submit ourselves to the authority of his Word.

This Sunday Night...."What's That on Your Teen's Phone?"

As parents, we struggle with this age of technology and the ease with which our children have access to the world through their phone.  We did not grow up with cell phones and it can be a daunting responsibility to keep up with what is happening.

Our staff has felt for some time to offer a seminar to help parents with this issue and I'm delighted to share with you this Sunday night that vision is becoming a reality. 

Emily Hamilton, from Gadsden, has conducted seminars and wrote on this topic for several years.  She is leading one-session only for us this Sunday night, March 3 at 6:00 "What's On That Phone?:  Redeeming YOur Teen's Phone." 

Don't miss it and help us get the word out so other parents can be here for this valuable help.

This Sunday morning I am continuing the series on Noah as we look at "The Daybreak of Grace" in Genesis 6:8.  The "first" mention of anything in the Bible is significant and this is the first time grace is mentioned.  We are going to drill down to see what Genesis 6 teaches us about grace that can survive the test-of-time - even to our time.

Can't wait.....