A favorite author of mine said something in a post that struck me. As she was thanking her online community for their support, she admitted that she always felt overlooked and lonely. When she would have a book signing in her own hometown, no one would show up. And if it weren’t for her loyal readers, she wouldn’t have any friends. I couldn’t believe it. She is a talented, award-winning author of multiple books. I assumed she was somewhat of a rockstar at home. How sad to feel invisible in “the real world”!

It led me to consider a few things:

• Online community should complement, not replace, real life community. As an introvert, I get the appeal…digital connections can be way easier. But they’re nothing compared to genuine friendship and in-person fellowship.
• No one is invisible in the Lord’s church. We’re family. We see, love, and pray for each other (Rom. 12:9-15). We even have shepherds who watch over us (Acts 20:28). We’re real people in each other’s real lives. Our joys are shared and so are our sorrows. We don’t go through anything alone. We have a whole church family who pays attention, cheers us on, and holds us up when we need it.
• If you ever do feel overlooked or invisible in your church family, it might be a good opportunity to get more involved in the lives of others. You can look for ways to make sure others feel seen, loved, and served. Who’s hurting? Who keeps to themselves? Who lost a loved one? When you invest in the lives of others, you become entwined in the body of Christ as an essential member. Certainly not invisible.

For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you—that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.

(Romans 1:11-12)

Matthew 9:36 NKJV “But when He (Jesus) saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd.”

The caller I.D. displays “potential spam,” and just as you guessed, your car warranty has expired yet again. With an eyeroll, you hang up the phone only to realize “Mr. Potential Spam” woke the baby who now demands a diaper change and bottle. But while soothing the fussy baby, your smoke alarm blares and before you can bolt to the kitchen, dinner is burned. You consider bailing but forgot to fill the car with gas so your only means of escape sits useless in the driveway.

Oh well, just another Monday!

Our most mundane days accumulate to overwhelm us. Relentless schedules scatter us in every direction and leave us weary to the bone. But friend, if misery loves company (and it does), take heart. We not only find our tribe of “weary and scattered” people in scripture, we also find the solution.

In the book of Matthew as Jesus traveled the towns, masses of people followed. This Jesus was a breath of fresh air who taught with authority. It was as if He knew God. He performed spectacular miracles and provided new insights on old teachings. As the people surrounded Him, the heart of Jesus felt compassion on them, for they resembled a “weary and scattered” flock of sheep in need of a shepherd.

Let’s stop here for self-reflection. Do we ever find ourselves in a state of weariness? Are we scattered to the wind with schedules that exhaust our bodies and deplete our souls? Like the multitudes of long ago, do we seek the teachings of peace and grace that only the Savior can offer?

The Son of God did not depart His perfect heavenly home and come to earth so that we might live a weary and scattered life. No! Humans, easily achieve that on their own. Christ came to lead us to an abundant and victorious life of peace found only in Him. How refreshing to know that even amid our hectic schedules today, the Savior remains the cure for the weary and scattered.

Father God, may we refuse to live a weary and scattered life.

Blessings,

Rita Cochrane

A young woman, a Christian, had committed some terrible mistakes. She deceived people; she made up stories; she hurt several people very badly. Those people she hurt suffered financially, emotional, and spiritually from her actions. When she was finally confronted with her sins, she said, “there is no way God can forgive me for what I have done.” She did repent, she confessed her sins before the church, and she asked for forgiveness. We know that if we ask God’s forgiveness, He will forgive us. John tells us, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (First John 1:9).

The thought occurred to me the other day that the devil uses just such things as what happened in the story above to tempt us. He uses our sins to make us think we have spoiled our relationship with God, and that we can never get it back.

I wonder how many people go through their lives believing their sins cannot be forgiven, and they just give up. They continue sinning because they believe they have no hope.

Peter was a great example of failing Jesus on more than one occasion. Jesus told him he lacked faith when he tried to walk on the water with Him. There were other times when he and the other disciples showed a lack of faith, and I’m sure they wondered if they would ever be forgiven. He certainly would have felt that way on the night Jesus was betrayed. In front of many of Jesus’ accusers, Peter denied Him three times, even saying he didn’t know the man. He cursed and swore that he was not associated with the Lord.

Paul was not any different. He went to the high priest and asked for letters of authority to go to Damascus into the synagogues to find those believers, whether men or women, to arrest and bring them bound to Jerusalem. With an appearance from the Lord, he fell trembling before the Lord and begged to know what to do to change his life. With the help of Ananias, Saul was converted, his sins forgiven, and his life was changed forever.

Paul never forgot what he did. When he wrote to Timothy, his son in the faith, he says, “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief” (First Timothy 1:15). He goes on to say that he received mercy from God. God showed him a degree of patience that He bestowed on even the greatest offenders and sinful mankind.

He goes on to say that this kind of forgiveness could be used as a pattern to those following him in wickedness and unbelief. So, the precedent is set. God forgave, and he will continue to forgive when we confess our sins and ask for forgiveness.

Now this gives a whole new meaning to the process of our forgiving others, and it shows another way in which the devil tempts us. He creates in us a resistance to forgive others. When we don’t understand God’s forgiveness of us, we can’t understand how we should forgive others. Remember the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:12, “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

This was another lesson Peter had a hard time understanding. He asked Jesus, “How often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus had to tell him the story of the king that forgave his servant a huge debt and the servant in turn throwing his servant in prison for owing him a small amount of money. That is the comparison we need to remember when we are tempted to withhold our forgiveness. Our debt is greater than any debt anyone could owe us.

We can’t let the devil use our past to keep us from doing the Lord’s work by thinking we can’t be forgiven. We can’t let our past relationships with people who sin against us keep us from forgiving them and showing God’s mercy to them. Once we realize that the devil is behind both our misunderstanding of God’s forgiveness and our problems with forgiving others, we can deal with both in a much more realistic way. We can be assured that our sins can and will be forgiven, if only we will repent of them and ask God’s forgiveness. We will be able to forgive others when we realize our debt to God is greater than anyone else’s debt to us.

Sandra Oliver

When we lived just outside Richmond, VA, Michael Shepherd came and held a gospel meeting for us. One night he preached about absolute truth and said, “Even a young child understands this principle.” He stepped down from the pulpit in the middle of his sermon and walked over to where we were sitting. He pointed to our five-year-old and said, “What’s two plus two?” Our son panicked and said, “I don’t know…I’m homeschooled!” Brother Shepherd said, “Son, you just ruined my illustration.” We still laugh about that moment. And tucked away in my heart are plenty more memories from worshiping with my family:

• Slipping my young sons Cheerios one at a time to keep them still
• A handmade “quiet book” from their Grandma Pollard
• Singing “Because He Lives” the very first Sunday after having our youngest child and crying when we got to the verse, “How sweet to hold a newborn baby…”
• Their giving styles: oldest son would place his change in the basket like a normal person; middle son would sling them in there like he was skipping stones; youngest son would drop them in one. at. a. time.
• Adopted grandparents spoiling our kids
• Singing in the car on the way to worship
• A pair of red boots that each son wore after their older brother outgrew them
• A son crushing on his pre-k Bible class teacher and then getting mad at her when she got married
• A son belting out the “Ring It Out” part because those were the only words he knew in that song
• Their first times doing the Scripture reading or serving on the Lord’s table or leading a song
• Thinking how handsome they looked in their little button up shirts with freshly combed hair
• The moment in each of their lives when they said, “I want to be baptized.”

I could go on and on. It wasn’t always easy. Sometimes I felt like the service was a blur because I spent the whole time wrangling little boys. But that phase didn’t last very long and was followed by years of meaningful worship. I don’t know how it went by so fast and my heart aches with the missing of it. Now those boys are grown (still wearing boots) and leading their own families to worship. I think about what Sunday mornings in their homes must look like. I imagine it looks a lot like ours used to, trying to get everyone fed and dressed and out the door on time. Perhaps a little frazzled by the time they get in the car. They’re just getting started, and I pray they’ll give themselves some grace and soak in the moments, even the messy ones.

Worship looks a little different for me these days as Neal is the only family sitting with me on the pew. But I LOVE seeing other young families all around me and hearing their children sing. I love knowing that the whole church is my family and we always get to worship together. And I especially love it when the grand babies come to visit and I get to experience the wonder of worship through their eyes all over again.

“But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

(Joshua 24:15)

By Kathy Pollard

I was seventeen. I’d wake up in the morning and listen to “Layton and Dearman In the Morning” on WERC radio in Birmingham. I had just about three choices of music for my drive across the metro area to school. Today I have thousands of choices that I can activate by voice and stream to various spots in my house without moving a single device. I can regulate the music using  the watch on my wrist. At 17, my mom would hurry me to the breakfast table, lamenting that the eggs and biscuit and gravy would be cold if I didn’t come on. There was no quick microwave reheating. Sometimes I would ask my dad to let me go to the office with him and deliver me mid-morning to school because I had to finish a research paper or project. I’d need transportation to the big library downtown and I’d have to take note cards for documentation. There was no googling or running computer references or printing from an online document. If I needed to reach a parent while at the library, I’d have to hunt a phone and I’d need change. I had eight track tapes—just a few —of the Carpenters, Barry Manilow and John Denver in my old Impala and I had a machine to play them that covered the entire top of my chest of drawers. It would be a few months before I would meet my future husband, and, then, when we were apart, our calls, from rotary phones, would be strictly timed, because every minute was charged. Often we would wait till after eleven p.m. to talk, because then the rate dropped to half price. I couldn’t order most things from home. I couldn’t just ‘erase” or delete an error on the sheet on which I was typing. I had to actually get out white paint and a brush and paint over my mistakes, and they were many. Further, my typewriter seemed to always be running out of usable ribbon. If I needed a copy of something I was typing, I had to travel to the library and pay for Xerox copies to be made. If I missed The Brady Bunch on Friday night…well, I just missed it. There was no retrieval of a missed program. In Birmingham, racial unrest reached phenomenal proportions and Vietnam was still at the forefront of the news programming in that little one-(teeny) bath, three bedroom house I shared with five other people.

What hits me hard, almost every day, is that I have so much more now—technology, funding, convenience, living space. But all of that has not made life easier or better; just different. This is not a lament. It’s a praise.

I praise Him that happiness is independent of the physical circumstances, and is, instead, found in Christ. If you are significantly happier today than you were ten years ago, you likely put on Christ in that interim. When this reality hits hard—that the presence of more ease is not the presence of more peace—I praise Him for the constitution of real contentment. Contentment in Christ spans years, and changes and accumulation or loss of possessions. It remains mostly unaffected by whatever is happening “out there” and rests squarely in what He is doing through the Word, “in here”—in my soul.

Someone else expressed it better: “Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content” (Philippians 4:11).

I’ve never truly learned to be abased. I’ve abounded in His mercy every day of my life. I’ve never been hungry as was Paul. But I’ve lived long enough to know that happiness never emerges from wealth, health, what eases the plans or what pleases the palate. He is the source of contentment. I’m thankful for the consistency factor of contentment in my Lord. He provides.

Cindy Colley

Years ago, my husband was preaching a sermon on Noah. He talked about how Noah followed God’s instructions exactly. God said to use gopher wood, and that is what Noah used. Then he said, “If God had told him to use concrete (had it been available), that’s what he should use.” A lady sitting behind me whispered to her husband, “And it would have sunk.” As a young minister’s wife, I didn’t find that particularly funny, since his point made perfect sense to me.

I don’t need research to prove that Noah built an ark or that it protected eight souls and animals, but the research does prove it to be sea worthy. God’s design always works.

The tabernacle was another structure that was designed by God with specific instructions for its construction and its use. It was portable and could be loaded onto carts and moved as the Israelites moved toward the land of Canaan. It had specific areas, some available only to the high priests. The furniture was designed for specific uses—altars for sacrifices, lavers for washing, etc. Even the clothes of the priests were specifically designed with instructions for cleaning and discarding. The ark of the covenant was the only piece that could not be handled by anyone but the Levites.

King David wanted to build the temple, but God would not allow it. Instead, He gave that responsibility to King Solomon, David’s son. First Chronicles 28 records the plan for the temple, and verse 19 says David received the plan “in writing from the hand of the LORD, all the work to be done according to the plan.”

Once again, we see that a plan was put in place so that there would be no deviation because it was instruction from God. His expectation was that it would be done per His instructions.

There are two examples of specific plans being given by God for the establishment of the church and His pattern for worship. Matthew says in chapter 16 that Jesus asked the disciples who men thought He was. They answered, “Some say John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets”. Then He asked, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”. Jesus then told them that on this rock, Peter’s confession, He would build His church. He then promised to give the keys to the kingdom (the church) to Peter, and later to all the disciples in chapter 18, verse 18.
In Acts 2, this plan came together as the disciples, now called apostles, preached to the Jews the fulfillment of His church. When the people cried out “Brothers, what shall we do”, Peter said, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”. The Holy Spirit provided the details, and Peter passed them on to the crowd.

Everything was different after this, except that God still was the center of worship; and He still is. Colossians 2:14 says that the Old Law was nailed to the cross. Paul told the Galatians that even an angel can’t preach any other gospel than what he and the apostles had preached to them (Gal. 1:6-9). John said were to abide in the doctrine (Second John 9).

The pattern for our worship today is shown to us through Scripture and through examples in the New Testament. We are to sing (Ephesians 5:19), give (Second Corinthians 9:7), take the Lord’s Supper (Acts 20:7, First Corinthians 11:23-28), pray, and study God’s Word. There are numerous examples of praying and preaching in the New Testament.

Why would we think God would not give a pattern for the church when He so specifically gave patterns for all worship throughout the Old Testament? He even says that we, as Christians, are to show ourselves a pattern of good works, in our teaching; show integrity, dignity, and sound speech, none of which can be condemned. All of this is to put to shame our opponent, so the unsaved can have nothing evil to say about us (Titus 2:7-8).

God gave specific instructions for leadership in His church. First Timothy 3 and Titus 1 lay out the specific qualifications for elders and deacons. Titus 4 presents the directive for preaching. First Timothy 3:11 places women in submission, not in leadership. There is much teaching they are expected to do in giving instructions to younger women.

Violating His commands for worship will be no different than Cain in Genesis 3 or Nadab and Abihu, both priests, who were punished for offering strange fire on the altar (Lev. 10:1-2). He will not be pleased with us, if we violate His instructions.

May God help us to study and understand that the details do matter, and may we follow the pattern and worship Him in spirit and in truth.

Sandra Oliver

II Timothy 3:16 “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Isn’t it comforting when you desperately need advice, and you find just the right person with just the right wisdom at just the right time to help you? Still, I venture to guess that at some point, you have encountered the wrong person with the wrong advice at the worst time possible, intensifying your problem. Forrest Gump might say, “Advice is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” 

So, in the quest for good advice, where might one go? Well, older people are known to have great wisdom, but their advice can sometimes be a bit unorthodox. I recall as a child having older and wiser persons catch me outside playing with wet hair and warn me that I would catch my death of cold. Had this proved true, I would be dead many times over.

Then, what about the advice of a child? Children are a wealth of unsolicited advice, such as, “Never let your mother comb your hair when she is mad.” Got to admit the advice is spot-on, but is it the advice you seek?

Advice comes in many forms, in many ways, and from many well-intentioned people and places. But if advice is going to be useful, it must be applicable to our lives and saturated in wisdom. So where might one find wise advice? Right where wisdom originated: in the Word of God.

So. . . .

When grief fills your soul, seek the wisdom of Psalm 34:18.

When envy and jealousy creep in, pray for the love found in 1 Corinthians 13.

Deuteronomy 31:6 – 8 offers the wisdom to battle loneliness.

Read Psalm 34:17 to help you navigate the flood of depression.

When your life spins out of control and your soul cries out for patience, read Colossians 1:11-13.

When you seek to praise and worship our gracious Father, read Psalm 100.

God’s wisdom is never risky. God’s wisdom is always relevant. God’s wisdom is forever true. So, open God’s book of wisdom and pick any piece you want. Unlike that box of chocolates, God’s advice never disappoints. You always know just what you are gonna get.

Father God, help us seek true wisdom from you, knowing you are the author of all that is true and wise.

Blessings,

Rita Cochrane