Verity Christian Fellowship

I recently received an e-mail of an interview with Rick Warren. I found it so helpful that I thought I should reproduce it here.

‘You will enjoy the new insights that Rick Warren has, with his wife now having cancer and him having “wealth” from the book sales. This is an absolutely incredible short interview with Rick Warren, “Purpose Driven Life ” author and pastor of Saddleback Church in California

In the interview by Paul Bradshaw with Rick Warren, Rick said:

People ask me, What is the purpose of life? And I respond: In a nutshell, life is preparation for eternity. We were made to last forever, and God wants us to be with Him in Heaven.

One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be the end of my body– but not the end of me.

I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going to spend trillions of years in eternity. This is the warm-up act – the dress rehearsal. God wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in eternity.

We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life isn’t going to make sense.

Life is a series of problems: Either you are in one now, you’re just coming out of one, or you’re getting ready to go into another one.

The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your comfort.

God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in making your life happy.

We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but that’s not the goal of life. The goal is to grow in character, in Christ likeness.

This past year has been the greatest year of my life but also the toughest, with my wife, Kay, getting cancer.

I used to think that life was hills and valleys – you go through a dark time, then you go to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don’t believe that anymore.

Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it’s kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life.

No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on.

And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for.

You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems.

If you focus on your problems, you’re going into self-centeredness, “which is my problem, my issues, my pain.” But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others.

We discovered quickly that in spite of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people, God was not going to heal Kay or make it easy for her.

It has been very difficult for her, and yet God has strengthened her character, given her a ministry of helping other people, given her a testimony, drawn her closer to Him and to people.

You have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life.

Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me instantly very wealthy.

It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never had to deal with before. I don’t think God gives you money or notoriety for your own ego or for you to live a life of ease.

So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do with this money, notoriety and influence. He gave me two different passages that helped me decide what to do, II Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72

First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our lifestyle one bit. We made no major purchases.

Second, about midway through last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church.

Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan to plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor , care for the sick, and educate the next generation.

Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24 years since I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was liberating to be able to serve God for free.

We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? Popularity?

Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God’s purposes (for my life)?

When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say, God, if I don’t get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love You better. God didn’t put me on earth just to fulfil a to-do list. He’s more interested in what I am than what I do.

That’s why we’re called human beings, not human doings.

Happy moments, PRAISE GOD.
Difficult moments, SEEK GOD.
Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD.
Painful moments, TRUST GOD.
Every moment, THANK GOD.’

Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
John 6:68

When Jesus gave his followers a hard lesson a number of them could not take it and left. Jesus then turned to the twelve and said ‘what about you?’ to which Peter replied ‘Lord, to whom shall we go?

Together with a lot of churches and Christians around the world we have been praying for the life of a small boy who has cancer. For weeks we had all been giving him some serious prayer time, hoping that God would heal him and spare his family.

Last night we received the sad news that he had died.

When I first received the news I must be honest and say I felt let down by God. Why did he not answer our prayers?

Then I thought of Job and how he felt that God had not been listening to him. However I had just finished reading the last few chapters of Job where God speaks and realised I have no grounds for complaint.

The truth is we only see a simple part of the picture. We see a small child and a family suffering. There is a much bigger picture which we cannot hope to understand and whilst in this case the answer to us seems simple we must just trust that ‘God knows best’ and leave it at that. To do anything else leaves us with nothing.

In the words of Matt Redmond:

Every blessing you pour out I’ll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in Lord still I will say
Blessed be the name of the Lord.

I am the Bread of Life

John 6:48

I was listening to BBC radio 4 yesterday and heard an interview with an Israeli drama teacher who is currently touring in the UK with a troupe of performers who are blind and deaf.

As you can imagine, this is a very challenging group to work with, not least of which is how do they connect with the audience? The answer is through the one remote sense that the audience and the actors still have in common, smell.

During the performance the actors make bread which is cooked on stage until the whole theatre is filled with the delicious aroma of new baked bread. During the making of the bread the performers talk of their hopes and dreams and what they want to happen in their lives. Through these the audience gets to understand that the people on stage, although so different in abilities, have the same human desires as the rest of us.

In the final stage one of the performers tells of how he wants a companion, a wife, and wants to get married, and how through the miracle of the stage a suitable companion is produced and so there is a wedding to which the whole audience is invited. They become the wedding guests and share the bread prepared.

Whilst listening to this it spoke to me on so many levels. We all have different abilities and we are all different, but by and large we all want the same things from life, love, happiness, security, family.

Jesus is the Bread of Life and through him we can achieve these things. But to do so we must take him in fully. If we do so then we shall be invited to the wedding. After all Jesus said that that was just what Heaven was like, a wedding party.

So I hope to see you all there for all are invited, actors and audience.

And if you give even a cup of cold water to one of the least of my followers you will surely be rewarded

Matthew 10:42

Being a Red Letter Christian is perhaps not as difficult as we would first think. We initially look to all those people who have achieved great things for God and think we must follow their example. That we should become a missionary in the third world and take care of the sick and poor in these places.

Whilst this is a great ambition and all credit to those who feel called to do this and respond to it, it is not what the majority of us can do. We have families and jobs and responsibilities, we cannot just turn our backs on them to follow what is really someone else’s call. Our job is to grow where God has planted us.

When Jesus sent out the twelve for the first time he specifically told them to stay local and to deal with the local people. He told them not to make big plans but to deal with the small stuff. The economist E F Schumacher coined the phrase ‘small is beautiful’ when he laid out his ideas on how to assist people. As well as the large government schemes of aid he recognised that you could make a bigger impact in someone’s life by empowering them personally, a micro loan to a farmer to buy livestock, a sewing machine to a mother to allow her to make clothes for her family and run a small business, a well to bring fresh water to a village.

Jesus instructed us to work in the same way. We don’t have to be part of a crusade in our town or put on a big show. We need to be kind to our neighbours and show then a good example. By doing this we will get a chance to practically demonstrate Gods love in action and perhaps a chance to talk to them about Gods kingdom. Sounds underwhelming doesn’t it. We all want to be super heroes. But by following Jesus’ Red Letters we can. After all are you going to tell him he was wrong?

….Jesus went up the mountainside with his disciples and sat down to teach them.

Matthew 5:1

There is a vast gap in the public perception between Jesus and what he taught, and Christians and the teaching of the church. People believe they should be the same thing and so they should. But over the years, usually for political reasons, the teachings of Jesus have been manipulated and adapted to make things more comfortable for us until sometimes there now seems little resemblance between some church doctrines and what Jesus actually told us to do.

An example of this is what is known as the prosperity teaching. Some say that if you follow God you will flourish and will have all your dreams fulfilled in this world. Jesus said you cannot serve God and money. Don’t look to earthly riches but store up your treasure in heaven by letting go of what you desire here on earth.

In America in particular the church has also been recruited into supporting the Republican party even though a lot of what it stands for does not align with Jesus’s teachings.

A result of this is a new movement in the church in America called ‘The Red Letter Christians’. The name is taken from the fact that in some bibles the words of Jesus are written in red letters. The movement is supported by Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis and details can be found in the ‘useful links’ section of this page.

The premise is that we try to get back to the real teaching of Jesus. The simple test of this is to ask WWJD in any situation. The answer may make us feel uncomfortable sometimes. I found a good demonstration of this by reading The Sermon on The Mount in The Message version of the New Testament. This give some portrayal as to how radical Jesus’ teaching are and how far off the mark we have become.

So perhaps we should go back to basics and re-evaluate what Jesus actually said instead of believing what we would wish he were saying. If we did this then perhaps we could have a real red letter day.