Friday, April 30, 2010

25 Questions To Ask Before Making Major Decisions

Fellow Labourers-

Someone is thinking of making a decision today or very soon. Check the list below before you make the move. Also pray and read the word of God.

25 Questions To Ask Before Making Major Decisions

By Author Unknown

Not every question in this list will help you in every situation. This is simply a check list to help you keep from overlooking important considerations before confirming and carrying out major decisions.

1. At it's essence - in one sentence - what is the decision I'm really facing? What is the bottom, bottom line?
2. Am I dealing with a cause or a symptom? A means or an end?
3. Am I thinking about this situation with a clear head or am I fatigued to the point that I shouldn't be making any major decisions.
4. What would the ideal solution be in this situation?
5. Should I seek outside counsel in making this decision?

6. What are the hidden agendas that are pushing for a decision in this situation? Why do we or they want a change? What is the source of the emotional fuel that is driving this decision?
7. If I had to decide in the next two minutes - what decision would I make and why?
8. What decision would I expect each of my three most respected advisors to favor in this situation?
9. Can an overall decision in this situation be divided into parts, with sub-decision.
10. What are the key assumptions in my thinking that underline the decision I'm leaning toward? What do I assume it will cost? What do I assume will be it's real benefits?

11. Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? How much?
12. Have I given myself 24 hours to let this decision settle in my mind?
13. Is this decision consistent with our values in the past, or does it mark a change in direction or standards?
14. How will this decision affect our overall master plan? Will it side track us?
15. Will this decision help to maximize my key strengths?

16. Have I verified what the results have been for others who have made a similar decision in similar circumstances? Have I verified this thoroughly?
17. How do I really feel about this decision?
18. Is this the decision I would make if our budget was twice as large as it is? Half as large? One-tenth as large? Is it the same decision I would make if we had twice as many staff members? Half as many?
19. What would happen if we did not carry out this decision?
20. If we didn't carry it out, what would be the best three alternative decisions?

21. Is this the best timing for carrying out this decision? If now now, why and when?
22. Is this truly appropriate in scope and size to the situation we face? Am I possibly hunting an elephant whit a BB gun, or a rabbit with a cannon?
23. How does my family feel about this decision? How will it affect them?
24. What aspects of the problem will not be resolved or solved by this decision?
25. Should we write a policy about this decision to guide us in similar situations in the future?


Pax Vobiscum

Robert A. Stewart

There Behind the Clouds

Fellow Labourers-

Those of us that are normal human beings can say amen to this article. The song comes to mind "Standing somewhere in the shadows you will find Jesus." It is not that he is not there, but somehow our view is obscured. There are many factors that are capable of obscuring our view when it comes to seeing Jesus. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish him from the cloud. What type of clouds are hiding him from your view? Could it be the low Clouds - Stratus? The middle clouds - Altostratus? The high clouds - Cirrus? or the clouds with vertical development - Cumulus? Remember these different clouds are formed under different circumstances, but whatever the circumstance we have an all-purpose God.

The thing to remember though is that we might not see him because of the clouds, but he is there. I know you feel a little unsure, but I know he is there. I also know I have not been where you are, but I am still sure he is there. Yes, you can sing "My faith looks up to thee, Oh Lamb of Calvary - Saviour divine." Today you may be unsure, but "Faith is the substance of things hope for, the evidence of things not seen."

Pax Vobiscum

Robert A. Stewart

In Kingdom Proportion

Fellow Labourers-

Note this paragraph lifted directly from the article attached- "I recently read an account of a pastor in Bellevue, Washington who reminded me of one such thing. Wanting his congregation both to represent and to identify itself with its missional calling, he called them to see life in its broadest context. He asked them "to recognize...that their missional calling involves the witness of their quality of life together as much as it involves service to real human needs and verbal witness to Jesus Christ."(2) I am so accustomed to the phrase "quality of life" referring to ethics and medicine that the idea actually took a minute to comprehend. But once it did, I realized how short-sided I had allowed that phrase to become."

This strikes at the very heart of what I am trying to achieve. Church has become so loaded with activities most of which is planned at arousing emotions and cater to the baser side of our humanity. We seek to please and appease the desires of those whom we fail to teach the real meaning of why we are saved.

Each time I recall the story of the woman with the issue of blood and the child who died at age twelve I am forced to think of the relationship between the two. The two incidents run right into each other and are therefore not coincidental. The woman with the issue of blood had her problem for twelve long years, but the child lived for only twelve years. What's the difference? It's about quality of life and quantity of life.

The paradigm within the Pentecostal church must shift from "happy hour" to meeting real needs. We can't sit around attempting to parallel the world in almost everything it does and then expect to have a better world. We must challenge the popular culture and raise the level of our thinking. We need some Jeremiahs, some Daniels, some Stephens, some Timothys and some Pauls. Let us stop making excuses and begin to identify our Church with its missional calling. We have a mission to go into all the world, not to sit in our pews and stand our soap boxes.

Pax Vobiscum,

Pastor Robert A. Stewart

What Is Truth?

Fellow Labourers-

As we think about truth let us consider these words- Idea, Thought, Opinion, Conviction, Belief, Fact, and Preference. All of these can sound like truth but are not necessarily true. These all have their places but we must be able to distinguish among them. Truth needs no argument to defend it. When Jesus said I am the truth he did not have to defend a position. Truth is knowable and is found in Jesus. You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. But, this is contingent upon us continuing in his word.

Pax Vobiscum

Pastor Robert Stewart

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The Privilege of Pluralism

Fellow Labourers-

In reading this article the sense of being in the world and not of the world resonates in my spirit. It is indeed how we live out our faith that will make the difference in the end. We have a golden opportunity to use our distinctiveness as a starting point of our Christian witness, and not as a tool for divisiveness.

The Declaration of Independence under The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America July 4, 1776 states the following "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation."

Separation it would seem is necessary, but the reasons must be known. Alvin Reid in his 'Handbook on Evangelism' has a chapter 'The potency of Consistency: Character' under which he lists the following:
  • Live by principle, not by feelings
  • Listen to God, not to popular opinion
  • Prioritize sacrifice rather than comfort
  • Consider the long-term consequence of your decisions
Let us think on these things.

Pax Vobiscum

Pastor Robert A. Stewart J.P.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Liminal Lent

Fellow Labourers-

A more fulsome understanding of the concept of liminal may give you a better grasp of this article. So, please note the derivative of the word. "The notion of a liminal period was first introduced by ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his exposition of the “rites de passage,” or rite of passage “which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age."

For van Gennep, a rite de passage consists of three stages: the separation, or detachment of a subject from its stabilized environment; the margin, which is an ambiguous state for the subject; and the aggregation, in which the passage has completed and the subject has crossed the threshold into a new fixed, stabilized state. The liminal period of the rite de passage is the second stage that is characterized by being passed through; i.e., the purpose of this period is to transfer the subject from the original site to the new site.


What all of this is saying is "Be anxious for nothing." C.S.Lewis says we are anxious because we are out of place. We were never meant to live in a world so corrupt and destructive. Hence, Jesus came to show us how to live until he returns the second time. Even in uncertainty take it easy. Be anxious for nothing.

Pax Vobiscum

Pastor Robert A. Stewart, JP

The Death of God

Fellow Labourers-

Isn't it amazing that even God chose the path of death to bring life? Yet those of us who follow him refuse to die that we may live. We are not willing to surrender. I love this quote from Chambers "Our utmost for his highest."


What are you willing to give to follow Christ?

Robert Stewart

The Death of God
 
“God is dead,” declares Nietzsche’s madman in his oft-quoted passage from The Gay Science. Though not the first to make the declaration, Nietzsche’s philosophical candor and desperate rhetoric unquestionably attribute to its familiarity. In graphic brushstrokes, the parable describes a crime scene:
 
“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God,’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I! All of us are his murderers...Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?...Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”(1)
 
Nietzsche’s atheism, unlike recent atheistic mantras, was not simply rhetoric and angry words. He recognized that the death of God, even if only the death of an idol, introduced a significant crisis. He understood the critical role of the Christian story to the very underpinnings of European philosophy, history, and culture, and so understood that God’s death meant that a total—and painful—transformation of reality must occur. If God has died, if God is dead in the sense that he is no longer of use to us, then ours is a world in peril, he reasoned, for everything must change. Our typical means of thought and life no longer make sense; the very structures for evaluating everything have become unhinged. For Nietzsche, a world that considers itself free from God is a world that must suffer the disruptive effects of that iconoclasm.
 
Herein, Nietzsche’s atheistic tale tells a story beneficial no matter the creed or conviction of those who hear it. Gods, too, decompose. Within Nietzsche’s bold atheism is the intellectual integrity that refused to make it sound easy to live with a dead God—a conclusion the self-deemed new atheists are determined to undermine. Moreover, his dogged exposure of idolatrous conceptions of God wherever they exist and honest articulation of the crises that comes in the crashing of such idols is universal in its bearing. Whether atheist or theist, Muslim or Christian, the death of the God we thought we knew is disruptive, excruciating, tragic—and quite often, as Nietzsche attests, necessary.
 
Yet for Nietzsche and the new atheists, the shattering of religious imagery and concepts is simply deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction. Their iconoclasm ultimately seeks to reveal towers of belief as houses of cards best left in piles at our feet. On the contrary, for the theist iconoclasm remains the breaking of false and idolatrous conceptions of God, humanity, and the cosmos. But added to this is the exposing of counterfeit motivations for faith, when fear or self-interest lead a person deeper into religion as opposed to love or truth, or when the source of all knowledge becomes something finite rather than the eternal God. While this destruction certainly remains the painful event Nietzsche foretold, God’s death turns out to be one more sign of God’s presence. As C.S. Lewis observed through his own pain at the death of the God he knew:
 
“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.”(2)
 
For Lewis, it was the death of his wife that brought about the decomposition of his God. For others, it is the prevalence of suffering or the haunt of God’s silence that begets the troubling sense that our God is dying. At some profound level, the season of Lent takes us to God’s death as well, perhaps for some in more ways than one. Like the Incarnation, the crucifixion leaves most of our ideas in ruins at the foot of the cross. The journey to death and Golgotha is an offensive journey to take with God. But blessed are those who take it. Blessed are those in pain over the death of their Gods. Blessed are those who mourn at the tombs and take in the sorrow of the crime scenes. For theirs is somehow the kingdom of heaven, a kingdom somehow able to hold Golgotha, a kingdom able to hold death itself.
 
Author: Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
 
References:
(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181-182.
(2) C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 66.

The Rule

Fellow Labourers-

Easter is now behind us so what's next? I trust you all had a memorable Easter.

Today's article is really thought provoking if you take the time to think about it. Rules pose a problem in almost every society and groups. Yet, without rules chaos would abound. Just imagine a rule-less universe! Even the cosmos is governed by rules. But, it seems human beings have an inbuilt resistance for rules. This last paragraph of the article is worth rehearsing:

"To be Christian is to follow God's Way in the world, a Way that compels us to move along with it. For some this will mean persecution, even martyrdom; for others it will mean laboring to avoid becoming at ease in Zion, moving to the beat of a drum that may take us where we don't want to go. But movement it will require: “As they led [Jesus] away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus. Then they brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means the place of a skull)” (Luke 23:26, Mark 15:22). The regula fidei is the heart of a startling story, a story that turns the world on its head and empowers a different kingdom. And thus, it is something quite like the heart of God, which brings rhythm to a chaotic world and sweeps many up into its mission."

Pax Vobiscum

Robert Stewart

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

The Recalcitrant Jesus

Fellow Labourers-

One of the words synonymous with recalcitrant is stubborn. It is not that Jesus is stubborn but it is hard to get him off your mind. There is no other person as studied as Jesus. And all the studies do not lead to the same conclusion. You see it's hard to start with a faulty premise and end up with a correct conclusion. In his book 'Jesus among other gods' Ravi Zacharias said "The inability to think in context is so manifest in the moral conflicts that we live with today. Every major battle we fight is either because we deny the text or because we justify the contrary by appealing to a different context."

According to the Handbook of Christian Apologetics "Huston Smith notes, in the world's religions, that only two people ever astounded their contemporaries so much that the question they evoked was not who is he? but what is he? They were Jesus and Budha. The answers these two gave were exactly opposite. Budha said unequivocally that he was mere man, not a god-almost as if he foresaw later attempts to worship him. Jesus, on the other hand, claimed in many ways to be divine."

The divinity of Christ is the most distinctively Christian doctrine of all. And no other religion has a doctrine that is even similar. Yes indeed the recalcitrant Jesus. Pilate could not wash him off his hand or get him out of his mind.

Pax Vobiscum

Robert Stewart