Presby-Musings

I don't typically pray in conventional fashion.  I pray when I journal every morning.  I pray in conversations with other people.  I pray in silence while driving in my car.  I pray by reading prayers or poems by people who write the best prayers or poems.  And I pray the Lord's Prayer quite often, or read from the Psalms, or prayers and poems written by others when I can't think of what to pray.  I had to give myself permission to change my prayer life years ago when I realized that my efforts prayer weren't really working.  I always felt kind of bad that when I would set aside time to pray (just me, a place to sit comfortably or sometimes to kneel), I would doze off about halfway through all of my petitions to God. Sometimes it even happened when I was praying with other people. I'd be praying along, "Lord, I just want to you bless my family, shower us with your bountiful goodness. I pray that you would grant me more patience and peace, especi...

This past Sunday, I continued the sermon series I've been working on for the month of January, a sermon series entitled "My Story: Living the Story You Want to Tell."  The basic idea of this sermon series is pretty profound:   The decisions you make today, determine the stories you tell tomorrow.   I've been kind of living with this idea for the past several weeks as I've been working and studying for the sermons, and I have to say that it's one of the most important lessons that I've learned in recent memory.   Lately, I've been reflecting on how quickly time seems to be moving.  It's already January 29th as I write this, and it feels like New Year's Eve was last week. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of busy-ness.  I look at my calendar and can't believe that there are so many things that are on it, so many events, projects, meetings, programs--both personal and professional.   Sometimes my daily schedule gets filled with...

In one of his classic devotions, renowned Presbyterian pastor, missionary, author and theologian E. Stanley Jones wrote that when most of us pray the Lord's Prayer it's the only time most of actually mean the words, "Give us ."  Jones was referring, of course, to the part of the prayer that goes like this, "Give us this day our daily bread." He said that if we truly wanted to see the kingdom of God come to earth, and for all of the world's economic needs to be met, we would mean what we say when we say "Give us ..."   But unfortunately, most of us spend a lot of time praying to God, "Give me ."  Jones writes,  "If we continue to look after none bout ourselves, thinking only of No. 1, we'll think of ourselves so much that we become sick of ourselves, our complexes and obsessions.  That will be our punishment.  We asked for ourselves, and we got ourselves a problem.  Why? Because we said, 'Give me .'"  ...

This week the inspiration for our Daily Devotions will be drawn from the sermon that I preached this past Sunday for All Saints' Day--a sermon on grief, loss, hope, life, heaven, Heaven and resurrection. If you would like to read the transcript of that sermon, you can click HERE .  The Scripture that we used as our guide was John chapter 11--the story of Jesus raising of Lazarus from the dead.   When I was a kid, I remember hearing a preacher give a sermon on the horrors of hell as opposed to the wonders of heaven.  His graphic description of hell included visions of eternal fire, souls in torment, the smell of sulphur in the air--descriptions straight out of Dante's Inferno.    Then he described what heaven was going to be like.  He painted a portrait of a place with streets of gold, precious gems embedded everywhere, a crystal sea, trees filled with every fruit imaginable...  It was pretty spectacular.   His question, at the end of ever...

One of the many things I've learned about prayer is that most of us are fairly self-centered about our prayer life.   When I was a kid we attended a church that held "watch night" services on New Year's Eve.  Basically, it was a fundamentalist Baptist New Year's Eve party spent singing hymns, listening to a really long sermon, maybe watching an evangelistic family film like The Burning Hell , and then spend an hour or so "praying in the New Year."   I remember hearing people at the watch night service praying for Jesus to return that moment.  They begged God to start the Rapture presumably so that they would be discovered in church  when Jesus came back.  They would also spend a lot of time praying for friends and family members who weren't saved, and for God to punish the wicked, unrepentant and unchurched masses.   I sort of prayed that God would wait to start the Rapture until after I had learned to drive and kissed an actual girl. ...

This week I will be preaching the last installment of the nine-part sermon series, "The Greatest Prayer"--a line by line study of the Lord's Prayer .  And yes, this sermon is on " Amen. " I debated on whether to preach an entire sermon on one word---after all, common sense would suggest that such an idea would not be wise.  But in the end my common sense didn't win (like it ever does), which in this case I think is a pretty good thing.  First, I must address something that has bothered me for some time.  On the worship bulletins at my church we put this heading above everything else inside the bulletin: ORDER OF WORSHIP.  This suggests something that is fairly true for most Presbyterian worship services:  worship is orderly.  Presbyterians do things "decently and in order," which includes their worship services, too, as I've come to understand in my 20-odd years or so as a Presbyterian.   But should we order worship?  Should we dare...

This week I am continuing the sermon series that I've been preaching on the Lord's Prayer by teaching on the eighth line of the prayer: "For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever."  The fascinating thing about this line of the prayer is that it wasn't part of the original prayer that Jesus taught his disciples.  It was, in fact, added in later---possibly around the end of the first century or perhaps at the beginning of the second.  The Didache (or the Teaching of the 12 Apostles) was a guide of sorts for the early church that was used during the first and second centuries and it included this line of the prayer. Interestingly, many early church leaders in the first and second centuries were suspicious of the Didache and it's teachings and some even branded it as heretical.  When the King James version of the Bible was translated in the 17th century, it included the line even though scholars now know that it wasn't part of earli...

This week I am continuing the sermon series that I've been preaching on the Lord's Prayer , entitled "The Greatest Prayer."  We've been going line by line through the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, and this week we are studying "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil..." Throughout each of the sermons I've preached in this series, I've lifted up how each of the lines of the Lord's Prayer is full of meaning that we tend to gloss over on our way to other things.  As a result, we end up "saying" the prayer rather than "praying" it.  When we pray "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil"  I think what we are actually praying is, "We are forgiven but not completed."  We'll come back to this in a moment... How would you define "temptation?"  Most of us would say that temptation is what happens when you are given an opportunity to fulfill a desire---one...

This week I am continuing my line by line sermon series on The Lord's Prayer with "Our Daily Bread."  Every installment of this series has re framed the lines of the prayer in such a way that we've hopefully gained a better understanding of what they mean.  This week, our "take away" is pretty simple:  Life without the Bread of Life is no life at all.  Let's get into it. I love the smell of baking bread.  It makes me think of my grandmas.  I don't know why exactly.  Neither one of them baked bread all of the time.  I just have these memories, though...  My dad's mother was an old farm girl from Colorado.  The bread she baked was thick and yeasty and you would smear it with margarine and jelly and eat it like cake.  The smell of it would fill the whole house when she baked a loaf or two. She would always cut me a slice right out of the oven.  I can still see the steam spiraling up into the air from those pieces of bread ...

When I was a kid I used to like to go to Burger King .  This was in the days before the Happy Meal , and Burger King pretty much flogged McDonald's when it came to kid friendly crud because they gave you a paper crown to wear. I would wear my paper crown with pride even after I left the BK.  As my mom ran errands and did her thing around town with me in tow, other children would stare at me in jealousy because they knew I had just eaten at BK.  I felt like... well, royalty. Wearing a paper crown sort of does something to your psyche when your five years old.  At least it did to me, which may tell you way too much about my psyche.  At any rate, I felt different.  There were all the poor children shuffling through the grocery store without a crown and then there was me.  King.  Ruler of all that I surveyed.  I could sit in the grocery cart and wave to them with that sort of backhanded wave that kingly people wave.  The crown, howeve...