March 2020 – Tri-Valley Baptist Church

“Social Distancing-The End of the World As We Know It?”

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Mar 152020

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Social Distancing-The End of the World As We Know It?” By: Ron Woodrum

Lorie Hill wrote a poem titled In Like A Lion, Out Like A Lamb. It goes like this:

“March roars in like a lion

So fierce,

The wind so cold

It seems to pierce

The month rolls on

And Spring draws near

And March goes out

Like a Lamb so dear”.

That was on our mind as we entered the month of March 2020. How would the weather be? In like a Lamb? Out like a Lion? We were also thinking about “bracketology” and March Madness. The Cubs and Cardinals were on our mind…who would win the rivalry this year? Most of us did not see the storm brewing on the horizon, one that had been coming our way since the last month of 2019. Hubei province, in Central China, the city of Wuhan, the Detroit City of China, was being invaded by the COVID-19 novel coronavirus. We watch reluctantly with worried eyes as over 80,000 came down with this new virus, and over 3,000 died. We watched as it spread to Iran, Italy, Spain, Europe, and now to nearly every State in our United States. But like other world pandemics-SARS, MERS, Ebola, N1H1, never in the United States of America. But we have watched this virus come in like a Lion, and it certainly doesn’t appear to go out like a Lamb. Unbelievably it has in a couple of weeks, silenced all the March Madness; Major League Baseball; Basketball; Hockey; concerts; schools; libraries; It has brought back echoes of the old REM song from 1987-“It’s The End of the World As We Know It!” America is wondering, in spite of all the voices assuring us all is well, is this a harbinger of the Apocalypse? After all is not one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse the Pale Rider of Pestilence? It brings to my mind the poem by T.S. Eliot, the Christian poet of last century, the poem Hollow Men. He writes about living in the valley of the dying stars; the hollow valley…of our lost kingdoms; the last of the meeting places; the hope of only empty men; over whom the shadow falls. Then he writes:

“This is the way the world ends…

This is the way the world ends…

Not with a bang-but a whimper”

Are these words prophetically coming true as a last day affirmation of Biblical truth? The crisis of recent days has certainly gotten the world’s attention. The question we have to ask and answer is “does the Church of our generation have anything relevant to say to this terrified world?” Two things are important for the Church. First, we must consider our mindset. How do we face these days we are experiencing? What kind of demeanor do we reflect to a watching world? Paul told young Timothy, that when we face the last days, he needed to remember that “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and love, and of a sound mind”. (II Timothy 1:7). The word for fear, is not the normal word “phobias”-but the word “deilias”. That word always has a negative meaning in Scripture. It means “cowardice, timidity, fear of loss”. That kind of fear causes us to withdraw from the circumstances that frighten us. Paul said we should have a mind-set of a “sound-mind”- The word is “sophron”– “a mind that is in control, and fits the situation”. When the world panics in the face of a crisis, this Christian mind-set demonstrates a calmness that does not run away from the situation. Someone has defined FEAR as “FALSE -EVIDENCE -APPEARING -REAL”; FAITH as “FRIGHTENED-ALARMED- I- TRUST- HIM”. Jerry Shirley in his recent sermon entitled-AFTER SHOCK: GOING VIRAL says “Now is the time to have faith, not fear; to pray, not panic; to believe God, not blame Him; to be assured, not Angry”. That is a good mind set for our day. C.S. Lewis spoke to this mind set. He was asked how Christians should face the shadow of the atomic age after WWII. In 1948 he wrote “In one way we think too much about the atomic bomb. How are we to live in an atomic age? I am tempted to reply-as you would have lived in the 16th century when the plague visited London almost every year…or as you live in an age of cancer…in other words do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me Sir or Madam, you and all you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented…we live with the high probability that a percentage of us are going to die in unpleasant ways. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering with long faces because scientists have added one more chance of painful death to a world that already bristled with such chances. The first action was to pull ourselves together. If the bomb comes it will find us doing sensible things like praying, working, teaching, reading, playing, or chatting with our friends, not huddled together like frightened sheep thinking about bombs! They may break our bodies, (a virus can do that too) but they need not dominate our minds”. We need to have a spirit of courage not cowardice; faith not fear; prayer not panic; trust not terror. That kind of mind set will bring calm to a crisis.

A second kind of approach the Church needs, in addition to a Mind set, is one of Ministry. The prevalent watch word for the hour is “SOCIAL DISTANCING”. We are being told-cancel sports; cancel concerts; cancel school; cancel work; Avoid contact at all costs. Isolate yourselves. Flee to your castle. Pull up the drawbridge; batten down all the hatches! All the voices are encouraging the Church to close it doors for the time being! What are we to do? Christian history speaks to this issue. We need to have ears to hear! Between 250-280 A.D. a terrible plague devastated the Roman Empire. At the height of the plague, named the Cyprian plague, because he chronicled it, 5,000 people died daily in the City of Rome. Decius, the Emperor, blamed the Christians for the plague. That claim was undermined by the facts that Christians died of the plague too just like everybody else. But unlike everybody else, the Christians did not run from the plague, they stayed and cared for the victims, including their pagan neighbors. Christians had also done that a century earlier in the Antoinine plagues as well. Historian Rodney Stark, in his book The Rise of Christianity, says “Christians stayed in afflicted cities, when pagan leaders and physicians fled. They cared for the victims and buried the dead”. Candida Moss, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity adds, “an epidemic that seemed like the end of the world actually promoted the spread of Christianity”. By their loving action they showed the pagan world that Christianity is worth dying for. Dionisius, a first hand witness from that era, wrote “Heedless of danger they took charge of the sick, attending to every need and ministering to them in the Name of Christ, and even departed life with them, serenely happy in spite of being infected with the disease, and accepting their pains”. Ancient Church historian Eusebius wrote: “During the plague, all day long some of the Christians tended to the dying and to their burial. Countless numbers had no one to care for them. Christians ministered to them, even bringing bread to those withered from famine. The deeds of these Christians were on everyone’s lips, and they glorified the God of the Christians”. Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor recognized the ministry of Christians to the victims of the plague. He wrote to one of the pagan priests that served under his supervision-“When it came about that the poor were neglected and overlooked by our priests, the followers of the impious Galilean devoted themselves to this kind of philanthropy. They supported not only their own poor and sick, but ours as well. All people see that we have neglected our people. It is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead, that have done the most to increase their atheism”, (a pagan term for the Christian faith).

These are difficult days. We must not be reckless in our approach. But we must not run from the situation either. We must have a mind set of faith not fear! Then the world will see that we have a God who can be trusted. A Savior who is worth believing in. We have a faith that sustains us even in the face of illness, epidemic, and death. We must find careful ways to bridge the “social distancing” with “loving ministry” to the frightened, sick, and dying, in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. When others run away in fear, we can run to the need in faith!

“MYSELF: THE MEETING PLACE FOR EVENTS I NEVER STARTED…AND CANNOT STOP?”

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Mar 082020

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “MYSELF: THE MEETING PLACE FOR EVENTS I NEVER STARTED…AND CANNOT STOP?” By: Ron Woodrum

President Abraham Lincoln had a disarming and engaging ability to laugh at himself, especially his own physical appearance. When Senator Stephan A. Douglas once called him a “two-faced man”, Lincoln responded, “I leave it to my audience. If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?” Another time he told a group of editors about meeting a woman riding on horseback in the wood. She “looked at me intently, and said, ‘I do believe you are the ugliest man I ever saw’. Said I, ‘Madam, you are probably right, but I can’t help it’. ‘No’, she said, ‘you can’t help it, but you could stay at home!’” Potentially we Christians can be two-faced. We can at times show our spiritual image in Christ, or Carnal image in the flesh! More often than not, we let our ugly natural, fleshly, and carnal identity have full expression. The answer is not to stay at home and hide our ugliness. Instead it is a better option to yield ourselves to God, in Jesus Christ, and let His Holy Spirit energize our transformation and supernaturally show our best side. C.S. Lewis said it best, he wrote, “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become’…the alternative is a real disaster. The more I resist Him and try to live in my own strength, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact, what I so proudly call ‘myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and cannot stop!” That is the greatest danger we as Christians face! Letting our lives become merely “the meeting place for trains of events we never started and cannot stop!”. E.E. Cummings, in his unique poetic way expressed the struggle that everyone has in preventing the world from defining us. He wrote,

“To be nobody but yourself

in a world which is doing

its best night and day

to make you everybody else-

means to fight the hardest battle

which any human being can fight-

and never stop fighting.”

The truth is the hardest battle the Christian will fight, and must never stop fighting is to resist letting the world squeeze us into its mold. Another danger is to let our carnal self have full reign and rob us of experiencing the transforming work of the indwelling Spirit of Christ’s power to make us the Spiritual person God designed us to be in the first place. That is what C.S. Lewis was referring to. We are actually in danger of living all the days of our Christian life and missing out on that very thing! John Henry Newman said, “Fear not that your life shall come to an end, but fear rather it shall never have a beginning”. Oliver Wendall Holmes said, “the ultimate tragedy is that many people go to their graves with their music still in them”. That should be our fear…that our Spiritual life shall never have a beginning…that we die with the Spirit-filled melody intended for us still be unexpressed. Jesus intends for us to get out of our boats, follow Him, and by His power find ourselves like Peter-“walking on water”…doing what is physically impossible because He bids us come! He said that those who follow Him will do even greater things, by the power of the Spirit. That is how we will show the world the reality of following Christ…of demonstrating His power and nature. Karl Barth, one of the greatest theologians and Christian thinkers of all time, said, “the Word became flesh-and then through theologians it became words again”. To him the greatest challenge of the Christian community was to incarnate Him in flesh again. How do we do that? By yielding to the control of the Holy Spirit in our lives moment by moment. Paul Brandt explained it this way, “He is asking us to be the chief bearers of His likeness in the world. As spirit He remains invisible on this planet. He relies upon us to give flesh to that spirit, to bear the very image of God”.

When the natural Christian teams up with the Supernatural Spirit of God something Theanthropic happens! That is, it becomes a Divine-human synergy. The product always exceeds anything we can anticipate or imagine. Even in the physical realm we can be fascinated by emerging results from some combinations. In his book on Synergy Physicist Buckmaster Fuller goes to geometric gymnastics to prove that two triangles, when combined geometrically, the result is unusual. He writes, “By conventional arithmetic, one triangle plus one triangle equals two triangles. But in association as left helix and right helix, they form a six-edged tetra-hedron of four triangular faces…when seen as negative and positive helixes they complement each other…and our two triangles now add up as one plus one equals four!”. He lost me somewhere in the explanation. But he does demonstrate that there are times when additions are made, and things are combined, that the product far exceeds the normally understood realm. He then illustrates it in another way easier to understand. He says synergy-the combining of elements-explain how metals increase strength. All alloys are synergetic. Chrome-nickel-steel combined to make extra-ordinary strength. This alloy combination produced a high cohesive strength and structural ability to withstand the temperatures necessary for the jet engine. Engineers invented jet expulsion from watching squids. By developing explosions to cause similar expulsion to jet a plane into the air required temperatures that would destroy normal metals like steel. But by combining Chrome-nickel-steel together it became possible to do the impossible! That is a poor illustration from the natural realm of what can be true in the supernatural realm. When God combines our human nature with His divine nature, the combination exceeds one plus one. It is a physical-Spiritual alloy that jettisons us beyond the natural and helps us excel to be transformed into the image of Christ! That helps us become more than ourselves-more than just a meeting place of trains of events we never began nor neither can we stop. We can, by that alloy “give flesh to that Spirit, and bear the image of God, in the person of His Son”, and our Savior Jesus Christ, to a world that desperately needs to see Him real in us! That makes us “Holy, Wholly, Holy!” That is what today’s message is about. Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, expressed the adventure of this Spirit-filled life in this way, “The word ‘Christian’ means different things to different people. To one person it means a stiff, upright, inflexible way of life, color-less and unbending. To another it means a risky, surprise-filled venture, lived tiptoe at the edge of expectation…if we get our information from the Biblical material, there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.” (Traveling Light)

“Be Pedestaled in Triumph”-Robert Browning.

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Mar 012020

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Be Pedestaled in Triumph”-Robert Browning. By: Ron Woodrum

Paschal, in his masterpiece Penses, tried to explain why the world in his day, like ours, seems lost in their insatiable pursuit of pleasure at any cost. He said, “What else does this craving, and this helplessness proclaim but that there was once in man true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, thou none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words (can only be filled) by God Himself”. In other words, Pascal was saying that man, created in the image of God, can only be fulfilled when, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism states, “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever!”. Part of the wages of sin is to “fall short of the glory of God” but have this insatiable desire to know, love and experience Him. If we do not come back to Him, and experience Him fully, through the salvation provided in His Son Jesus Christ, we will spend our lives seeking Him in an infinite insatiable experience, only to be left empty, disappointed, disillusioned, frustrated. Even living lives of reckless abandon to all kinds of so-called pleasures and vices are affirmations that we are hungering for a God we were made to know, love and experience to His satisfying fullness. That is why Augustine said, “We are restless until we find our rest in you oh God!”. C.S. Lewis, in his book The Abolition of Man, made this very amazing point when he said, “Pleasures are shafts of glory as it strikes our sensibility…but aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? (you ask). Certainly, there are. But in calling them ‘bad pleasures’ I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean ‘pleasures snatched by unlawful acts’. It is the stealing of the apples that is bad, not the sweetness of the apples. The sweetness is still a beam from glory.” Lewis was saying enjoying pleasure and ecstasy, even in immoral ways, are in themselves an act of seeking to enjoy and experience God. We may experience the pleasure through immoral and illicit means, but it is not the sweetness that is bad, but the means. It still reflects the original desire of God to give us His “every good and perfect gift”. But the reason we fail to retain the enjoyment of these illicit experiences is because we were never intended to enjoy them outside of Him. They come, through proper means, from His Hand, with His blessing, and cause us then to react to the pleasure by enjoying Him. That is what Lewis went on to say-“The sweetness is still a beam from glory…I have tried since …to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks, but I meant something different…Gratitude exclaims very properly, ‘How god of God to give me this’. Adoration says, ‘what must be the quality of that Being (God) whose far-off and momentary blessings to me are like this! One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun…’ “

Therefore, the only real answer to overcoming addictions and destructive lifestyles is to see them for what they are. They are insatiable pursuits of trying to enjoy the pleasures God intends for us to find only in Him, and His Son Jesus. To try to experience those sweet pleasures from His hand, in illicit ways, will eventually prove to be “pleasure in sin for a season”-and lead to unhappiness. You and I cannot fill the infinite abyss with finite pleasures, even if they come from the hand of God, if they are experienced apart from putting Him first in our lives. That is why Emerson said, “Most men, (and women) lead lives of quiet desperation!” So, it is the enemy’s goal to lead us to seek to fulfill our God-given drives and desires independent of God. That is where most men and women in the world today are living. We have believed the lie-“you only go around once so you have to grab all the gusto you can”. But when we realize that we can overcome these destructive lifestyles, with the strength of God, we are freed to experience Him, and in doing so can experience pleasures just as sweet, but in a way that is a gift from Him, and is therefore fulfilling and satisfying. That is why Jesus said, in John 10:10 “I am come that you might have life…and have it more abundantly”. That is why Augustine said, “God permits temptation to sin, to transform it into greater good.” C.S. Lewis also hit the nail on the head, when he said, “Bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of evil impulse until we try to fight it!” It is a lie of the devil that God says no to us, because He wants to deprive us of pleasure and joy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Truth is pleasure and joy cannot be found, even in God’s gifts if they are sought to be enjoyed apart from Him. The Gifts are inseparably linked to the Giver! You can experience them without Him. He created us for them. But you can’t enjoy them without Him. That is the message of the Book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon tried and did everything. No limits! No restraints! His conclusion? Live your life for pleasure, apart from putting God first, and you will be “chasing the wind” and concluding “vanity of vanities all is vanity!”.

Robert Browning has written a great poem about Temptation- He wrote:

Why comes temptation, but for man to meet

And master and make, crouch beneath his feet,

And so be pedestaled in triumph.

God wants us to resist the temptation to seek out all the pleasures this world offers if we are not walking intimately with Him. He wants us to come back to Him. Embrace Him. Love Him. We will find that at His right hand are “pleasures evermore” (Psalm 16:11). He says, “Take delight in Me and I will give you the desires of your heart” (Ps. 37:4). That is why the Jesus people, of the seventies, found Jesus even more satisfying than a life of illicit sex and drugs. He proved to be the one who satisfied most, when all those things, pursued without Jesus, were only destructive dead-end streets! That why they talked about getting the genuine high with Jesus. He never lets you down. A genuine and intimate relationship with God, through salvation in His son Jesus is the only answer to the destructive call and pull of this world. This is illustrated for us in Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus was trying to get home to his family and was having a hard time doing it. Along the way he encountered the enchanting and dangerous Circe who, it was said, turned men into pigs. When Odysseus successfully avoided her attractions, she confided in him that a sterner test lay ahead-the Sirenes, lusty, luscious maidens whose island lay along the straits and whose songs lured travelers away from hearth and home. Circe advised Odysseus to have his men plug their ears with wax, and tie himself to the mast. Odysseus did have his men do just that! But he had an additional idea-his friend Orpheus, who was also an accomplished musician, was asked to sit on the deck and make a sweet melody that would turn Odysseus’ ears and heart away from the lure of the Sirens, as they passed by. In that way he stayed the course and passed the test. The best way to avoid being disappointed by the lure of the lesser is to fill our hearts with the lure of the greater-God, in His Son Jesus Christ. He will not only give us the pleasures we sought outside of Him, he will give us greater pleasures, that will satisfy our hearts. That is why Scripture implores us to “taste and see that the Lord is Good!” (Ps. 34:8).