My Life-changing, Mind-Blowing Moment

Yesterday was a day that I hope and pray I will never forget. It has been a long time since I had an epiphany like this. But what I realized yesterday could change my life forever, and I want to share it with you. Now some of you may already know this, but I am just discovering it for myself, which makes it exciting for me. Some of you may be like me and really had never put two and two together; I hope today will be life-changing to you as well.

Let me set the stage for you. I am trying to finish out my reading challenge that I gave myself on Good Reads. Last year I read quite a lot, and so this year my goal was to slow it down a bit. My problem was that I slowed down too much. I wanted to read 20 books by the end of the year, and so fart I’ve completed 16. I have many that I’ve started, but subsequently have gotten distracted from, so I picked one back up: Holiness by J. C. Ryle.  In order to finish four books (previously started), I need to read large swaths of them each day. Thus yesterday, I read 55 pages (I read slowly, so this took time). Half of those 55 pages were of one chapter that I had already begun months before. It was a chapter on assurance of salvation. I must admit, 1) I don’t tend to have a problem with assurance of salvation. I may have a tinge of doubt once in a while, but by and large I am not fearful or fretting, 2) Ryle’s writing on the subject was somewhat helpful, and I like Ryle, however, the extended quotes at the end of his chapter were what were most-powerful to me. It was while reading these quotes that I had my life-changing, mind-blowing moment.

Many of the quotes were saying the same thing in different ways using different illustrations and anecdotes. But as I was reading them, I kept coming across words like “cling” or “lay hold.” There were sentences like this one: “The least bud draws sap from the root as well as the great bough. so the weakest measure of faith doth truly ingraft thee into Christ, and by that draw life from Christ, as well as the strongest,” (Samuel Bolton).  Many of the quotes in this section dealt with laying hold, and about being a bud and drawing sap. Some spoke of growing in assurance as we grow in the faith. And that is where my train of thought left the depot.

You see, this is not only true with assurance, but with any aspect of faith in the Christian’s life. I am no different than most Christians; we tend to look at “giants of Christian history” like Luther, Augustine, Calvin, DMLJ, Spurgeon, and the like wishing we had their faithfulness in prayer, in Bible reading and study, in giving, in faith, etc.  Often what we do is set a new resolution. I’m going to pray more or I’m going to pray longer. I’m going to read my Bible all the way through this year. I’m going to give more. And so forth and so on. We end up praying for a week or two, nearly every day. We get all the way to Leviticus (again!) and then begin to lag in our devotions. We give a few times, a little more than we are comfortable with and then it’s back to the same old same old. We see no fruit; we see no benefit. It’s more of a drudgery than anything else. So we give up. We let it all just slip away.

This was the realization I had yesterday: we never give time for fruit to come. What tree do you know of that is planted one day and bears fruit the next day? Or for that matter the next month or year? We are an impatient lot, are we not? We are so used to going to the supermarket and picking up our produce that we have forgotten that it took months and in reality years for that fruit to be borne. We expect that our lives will be changed every time we pray or every time we read the Bible, and that is not the case.  The moments that we pray, read, give, evangelize, etc, are usually never immediate life-changing moments. They are cultivating moments. They are fertilizing moments. They are pruning moments. In time, our lives are changed. In time, fruit is borne, but it typically takes a while. 

What we tend to give up on is what is necessary for fruit to bear. We cease to abide, lay hold of, or cling to that which is necessary. We still believe in Jesus; we still desire to obey God. But that which brings life (the Spirit bringing life through the “sap” of God’s Word, prayer, etc.), we cut ourselves off of for large portions of time. We are so often like a child who wants to play an instrument, but only practices once or twice a month for just a few minutes each time, and then wonders why he/she isn’t getting any better.  It’s not a matter of trying harder; it’s a matter of abiding longer–longer as in forever.  It’s a matter of holding on even when we want to let go.

When we lived just outside of Chicago, we owned three apple trees. Every spring, as soon as the thaw was true, I would have to go out to those apple trees and pound three stakes of fertilizer around each one. Throughout the spring and summer, I would weekly need to go out, look for disease, blight, or spots on the leaves cut them off, and rake up any that were dropped. I’d spray (organic?) pesticides when the blooms came so that the apples wouldn’t be wormy.  The first couple of years we got no apples. It got tempting to forget the whole thing; what’s the use, there’s no fruit. But the third year, doing the same things, we began to find little apples on the trees.  I had read that it takes about three years before fruit bears, and on the fourth year, one will start having edible apples (the sad thing is that we moved to just outside St. Louis the fourth year). The only question then, is will the grower be faithful, even when no fruit is seen, knowing that if he endures through the seasons of barrenness, one day the harvest will come.

Not feeling like your getting much out of Bible? Switch things up, but don’t just let it slide. Get a Bible study from CBD.com or your local Christian book store (a good, biblical one). Instead of reading straight through every year, study a certain section (perhaps the Minor Prophets or the Pauline epistles). Not feeling it in your prayer life? Switch things up, but don’t cut yourself off to just a couple of quick two-second prayers. I’m not dogging on those two-second prayers, but we cannot be sustained by them. I started having a “Little Book of Prayer” in my back pocket. It’s just a little blue notebook that I’ve put every person in our church into. I’ve got prayer requests from most of them that I will pray for at various times during the week. Get with a “prayer warrior” and pray with them. Read books on prayer. Get a prayer journal; read the prayers of saints from yesteryear.

That being said…no matter what, cling and lay hold of Christ. Stay connected through His Word and through prayer. Every fruit of faith comes through abiding. “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me,” (John 15:4, ESV). It’s not “try harder,” but “abide longer.” The branch doesn’t try to bear fruit. The fruit naturally comes because the branch abides on the vine or on the tree.

Book Review: Gather God’s People: Understand, Plan, and Lead Worship in Your Local Church

Brian Croft, pastor of Auburndale Baptist Church, teamed up with his associate pastor Jason Adkins who leads and plans ABC’s worship. This is the sixth book review I have done for Pastor Croft’s works, all of which are wonderful resources for new or even seasoned pastors. You can read my other reviews here: The Pastor’s Family, The Pastor’s Ministry, The Pastor’s Soul, Caring for Widows, and Pray for the Flock.

That being said…Gather God’s People: Understand, Plan, and Lead Worship in Your Local Church, published by Zondervan in 2014, is a pretty good book. I know that isn’t the best language to use when reviewing a book. It’s very non-committal. Let me explain why, and perhaps you can forgive me for such a review. Having read five other books by Pastor Croft, most of which were co-authored, Gather God’s People simply had an altogether different feel or vibe to it. I should have expected it, since the first words of the introduction are, “I (Brian) have a confession to make. Jason, my coauthor, is really the one who wrote this book,” (p. 13). Pastor Croft does directly contribute to portions of the book, but by and large this is Jason Adkin’s book, with Jason Adkin’s thinking and writing style.  I have often read that we are not to review the book that we wish we had read, but the book in which we actually read. And for that reason, I want to say that outside of the writing style that I’m used to from a Brian Croft book, this book was well-written and wonderfully practical, as I have come to expect from Practical Shepherding books.

The premise of the book is simple and doable. While giving examples from their own experience and their own worship planning and services, the author’s readily admit that this is not the only way, but it is a biblical model for worship. After all, “Through the Old Testament, Christians learn that God cares deeply how he is worshiped. In the New Testament, God explicitly teaches believers how he is to be worshiped,” (p. 19). Thus by chapter 2, Pastor Adkins laid out the five-part objective to worship: Preach the Word, Read the Word, Pray the Word, Sing the Word, and See the Word. This is not a new understanding, but simply a clarification and a practicum of how and why these objectives are biblical and right.  These five objectives make up the book.  However, I would not recommend simply taking these five objectives to memory and ignoring the actual reading of the Croft/Adkins material. There is wisdom to be found in these pages. Wisdom such as “Do no hermeneutical harm to your congregation’s understanding of Scripture,” (p. 60), and

The task of planning worship songs for a weekly gather is not about perpetuating perceptions about your church. Worship planners ought to equip believers to carry out the commands to edify one another through “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” and to address their praises to God with a heartfelt melody (Ephesians 5:19, ESV).

p. 73.

Gather God’s People is laid out into three sections rather than two like many of these practical guides. Normally the layout tends to be the why and the how. In this particular book it is more of the why, the how, and the do. After all, “Ministers must prepare to present the various elements in the service in a way that aids the worship of the congregation rather than hinders it,” (p. 86). The first part is written to help us “Understand Worship.” Its chapters are about the biblical theology, elements, and spirituality of worship. It is a crash course in worship which quickly goes through what many worship books deal with as a whole. The second part is showing one how to actually “Plan Worship.” This was the most helpful part of the book for me. It is made up of three chapters as well. Interestingly enough, there is not much on “preaching the word,” though it is the first element or objective. I would venture to say that the reason is that this is not a book on hermeneutics, but worship as a whole. Pastor Croft’s book on The Pastor’s Ministry would deal more with that, as well as many other books on preaching. The three chapters deal with the reading, praying, and singing of the Word. Pastor Adkins details how to plan each of these aspects and does not shy away from the fact that emotions (though not emotionalism) are involved in worship. There is a feeling that is invoked as we worship, and leaders/planners need to be mindful of that. “Acknowledge the emotional and spiritual condition of your congregation in your planning. Furthermore, intended emotional responses should play a role in planning,” (p. 77).  The final part is about leading the congregation in these areas. The final three chapters (not including the Conclusion or appendices) are in this section. It is there that the authors deal with the actual worship service and the implementation of what has been planned. It is also here that the ordinances (the “seeing the word”) aspect of worship is brought up.

A quick note on the appendices: they are mostly showing how the Psalms can be incorporated into the music aspects of congregational worship. There are arguments for doing so along with examples of them set to familiar tunes.

All in all, this was a helpful and practical book. It is probably the most practical book on worship I have read. Much of what I tend to read is theoretical or theological, but rarely do authors have the gumption to get down to the nitty-gritty details of planning and executing the worship service. While it took me a little longer to read this work, coming in at only 143 pages, due to the writing style and the holidays, I appreciated the contents of it. I readily give it 4 stars on Good Reads, and readily commend it to every pastor and/or worship leader.