Asyougo

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A little habit started for me as a kid. I’d put things on the bottom steps of the stairway, so I’d be sure to see them and grab them as I went upstairs to my bedroom. After a while, everyone in our family had his or her own “step.” I called these asyougos: as you go upstairs, please take these with you. The principle was pretty simple, as I would naturally see these things going about my regular route.

Jesus had a similar idea for His followers: Go into all the world and preach the Good News to all creation (Mark 16:15). The verb tense and definition of the word go literally means that Jesus said, “Asyougo into all the world, preach the Good News.

In fact, this is exactly how Jesus lived His life. As He went about His normal life, His life intersected with people who needed Good News (check out Mark 10:17, 46; Luke 8:4, 42; 17:11; and John 9:1 as examples).

Peter summed up all of Christ’s life like this: God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how He went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with Him (Acts 10:38).

Jesus lived an asyougo lifestyle, He called us to do the same, and He empowered us to live our asyougo lifestyle with the same power He had (Matthew 28:18-19; Acts 1:8).

Here’s the big idea—We don’t need to go anywhere special to find people who need Good News…

  • asyougo to school, you will attend class with them
  • asyougo to work, you will work alongside them
  • asyougo to the grocery store, you will interact with them
  • asyougo to do yard work, you will talk over the backyard fence with them
  • asyougo out to eat, you will sit next to them

People who need the life-changing, disease-healing, sin-forgiving power of Jesus are all around you. ASYOUGO share the Good News of Jesus Christ with them!

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Links & Quotes

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“The Kingdom of God is Good News because it ushers all who receive it into God’s good plan for their lives, a plan which brings them, among other things, pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11).” —T.M. Moore

“Remember a little more the intimate connection between the body and the soul. Go to the poor man and tell him of the bread of heaven, but first give him the bread of earth, for how shall he hear you with a starving body?” —Charles Spurgeon

“We must open our Bibles every morning with this prayer—‘Give us this day our daily bread.’” —Charles Spurgeon

“The Lord rebukes his people for seeking ‘their own’ pleasure on His holy day [Isaiah 58:3-4]. But what does He mean? He means they are delighting in their business and not in the beauty of their God. He does not rebuke their hedonism. He rebukes the weakness of it. They have settled for secular interests and thus honor them above the Lord. Notice that calling the Sabbath ‘a delight’ is parallel to calling the holy day of the Lord ‘honorable.’ This simply means you honor what you delight in. Or you glorify what you enjoy. The enjoyment and the glorification of God are one. His eternal purpose and our eternal pleasure unite.” —John Piper

“We may conclude that the chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy Himself forever. He stands supreme at the center of His own affections. For that very reason, He is a self-sufficient and inexhaustible fountain of grace.” —John Piper

David Wilkerson warns, “We think that when we fail to trust God in our daily situations, we only harm ourselves. We think we’re simply missing out on His blessings. But that isn’t the whole story. … Unbelief is the mother of all sins.”

Stan Guthrie writes about the strange spectacle of Christian surrender in cultural ideas. He states, “We need more cultural engagement, not less, particularly in the realm of ideas.”

Max Lucado recalls an amazing story from the life of John Wesley and then asks, “How bold are your prayers?”

 

Links & Quotes

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“The question, then, isn’t, ‘when am I going to get promoted?’ No, I think the question is, ‘will I grab these openings to become someone who’s already doing work at a higher level?’” Read more from Seth Godin’s post.

“Faith is not a distant view but a warm embrace of Christ.” —John Calvin

“The honest truth is that I have seen God do more in people’s lives during ten minutes of real prayer than in ten of my sermons.” Read more of Jim Cymbala’s post The Day Jesus Got Mad.

“Success is a tale of obstacles overcome, and for every obstacle overcome, an excuse not used.” —Robert Brault

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Wishing is not enough; we must do.” —Goethe

“The good news of the Bible is that God is not at all disinclined to satisfy the hearts of those who hope in Him. Just the opposite: The very thing that can make us happiest is what God delights in with all His heart and with all His soul. With all His heart and with all His soul, God joins us in the pursuit of our everlasting joy because the consummation of that joy in Him redounds to the glory of His own infinite worth.” —John Piper

You may need to bookmark this: 15 Scriptures on starting over.

60+ eminent legal scholars call on elected officials to not recognize the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision on homosexual “marriage.”

Another place to reject culture’s language is on the issue of abortion.

Jeff Jacoby has an important look at Christopher Columbus.

 

Preach Like John

John the BaptistThis is a post for my fellow preachers (but the rest of you are free to listen in as well).

When Jesus says someone is the greatest preacher in history, it gets my full attention. Think about what John didn’t have…

  • No church building
  • No platform or pulpit
  • No worship team
  • No sound system
  • No Logos software
  • No library or study
  • No commentaries
  • No PowerPoint or handouts

He only had the Word of God and the Holy Spirit.

His sermons were thoroughly grounded in Scripture (Luke 3:4-6).

His sermons were anointed by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:66).

His message was simple: “Repent from your sins, and produce fruit in keeping with repentance” (Luke 3:3, 8).

His messages prompted people to ask, “What should we do?” and he gave them Spirit-anointed answers (Luke 3:10-14).

His messages “exhorted the people” and brought “the good news to them” (Luke 3:18).

His sermons unashamedly called out sin (Luke 3:19).

And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. (Luke 1:17)

Fellow preachers, may we be of the same spirit in our preaching!

Links & Quotes

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“People in the unbelieving world have witnessed a good bit of hypocrisy, shallowness, disingenuousness, dishonesty, and corruption among the members of the Church. Many of them have installed a spam filter on their brains which automatically blocks anyone calling himself a Christian as having anything meaningful or significant to say. The only way to remove that filter is through a credible life of goodness, sincerity, and love. … Our credible lives, by themselves, won’t lead anyone to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. For this, we must be bold to make God’s Good News known, and to make it make sense.” —T.M. Moore

A related post: 5 Big Things We Get Wrong When Talking To Atheists About God.

“God is a mountain spring, not a watering trough. A mountain spring is self-replenishing. It constantly overflows and supplies others. But a watering trough needs to be filled with a pump or bucket brigade. If you want to glorify the worth of a watering trough you work hard to keep it full and useful. But if you want to glorify the worth of a spring you do it by getting down on your hands and knees and drinking to your heart’s satisfaction, until you have the refreshment and strength to go back down in the valley and tell people what you’ve found. My hope as a desperate sinner hangs on this biblical truth: that God is the kind of God Who will be pleased with the one thing I have to offer—my thirst. That is why the sovereign freedom and self-sufficiency of God are so precious to me: they are the foundation of my hope that God is delighted not by the resourcefulness of bucket brigades, but by the bending down of broken sinners to drink at the fountain of grace.” —John Piper

Pornography destroys lives! Here are 5 ways porn devastates lives.

In his battle against pornography and gluttony, Jimmy Needham wrote, “Real freedom came for me when I began, by God’s grace, to see that my cravings were for more than just food or sex. All my appetites were, at root, for an all-satisfying God.” Read more in his post Our Odyssey Against Sexual Temptation.

“If America is to survive, we must elect…individuals who will seek Divine guidance in the affairs of state.” —Billy Graham

“God commands you to choose for rulers, just men who will rule in the fear of God. The preservation of a republican government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty; if the citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted.” —Noah Webster

[VIDEO] John Maxwell shares one of my favorite anecdotes to make a good point about efficiency—

https://youtu.be/g_oY7ZJ51tY

Thursdays With Oswald—Speak Out Now

This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.

Oswald Chambers

Speak Out Now

     How many of us in times of peace and civilization bother one iota about the state of men’s hearts towards God? Yet these are the things that produce pain in the heart of God, not the wars and the devastation that so upsets us. The human soul is so mysterious that in the moment of a great tragedy men get face to face with think they never gave heed to before, and in the moment of death it is extraordinary what takes place in the human heart towards God.

From Christian Disciplines 

Many people will question their beliefs during times of crisis and change. It’s fine for the church and Christians to be there during those times of upheaval, but it’s far better for us to be there before the upheaval.

I developed a friendship with my next door neighbor for seven years and never had a chance to share very much about my faith in Christ. But when a tragedy hit his life, his first phone call was to me and then I had an opportunity to really share with him. Why did he reach out to me? Because I already had a relationship with him.

Let’s not wait until a tragedy strikes to begin to share the Good New of Jesus, but let’s speak out now. Be a great neighbor, coworker, study partner, friend, citizen now so that there is an open door for those folks to come to you when their life is in crisis.

Fear Not!

Christmas is a time of celebration, peace on earth, and goodwill toward men! But have you ever stopped to wonder why the celebration? Yes, it’s the time we celebrate Jesus Christ’s birth, and the advent of His ministry on earth. But what’s the real good news about that?

In the Christmas stories recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, there is a recurring phrase—

FEAR NOT!

Fear paralyzes. Fear blinds. Fear immobilizes. Fear exaggerates all that is wrong. Fear obscures all that is right.

Before Jesus comes into our lives, we are slaves to fear. Before Jesus comes into our lives, we aren’t truly alive.

So let the good news of Christmas ring out again—FEAR NOT!

We will be talking about the good news of this Christmas message each Sunday leading up to Christmas. I hope you can join me at Calvary Assembly of God as we learn more about the fear-busting, joyful news that Jesus can set you free.

If you missed any of the messages in this series, check them out here:

Say It With Love (book review)

There is a verse in the Bible that tells us to speak the truth in love. And that’s exactly what Howard Hendricks lives by in Say It With Love: The art and joy of telling the Good News.

For Professor Hendricks, the good news about Jesus Christ is not something that is just shared by a pastor on Sundays, but it’s something all Christians should be sharing all the time. And not just with words either, but with our very lives.

Dr. Hendricks challenges us to know why we are sharing the message of God’s love; to put ourselves in a position to share that message effectively; and then to live that message out in all of the roles of our life. This third section was the most impactful for me. Dr. Hendricks talks persuasively about living the message…

  • …with God
  • …with your mate
  • …with your children
  • …in your church
  • …in your neighborhood
  • …in your daily contacts

This is both a hopeful book and a convicting book. It’s an easy read with lots of Dr. Hendricks’ personal stories sprinkled in as examples. If you want to do a better job communicating the message of the gospel, you should check out this book.

Less Giving = Less Good News

We just finished talking about what the Bible says about tithes and offerings at Calvary Assembly of God. Right on the heels of this, I noticed this article in the Grand Rapids Press: “Study reveals church giving at lowest point since Great Depression.”

Here are some of the sad findings:

  • Regular church attendees aren’t even tithing. The average giving is only 2.4% of the attendees’ income.
  • While giving to churches is down, giving to other faith-based organizations is up.
  • The study’s authors noted a “long-term turning inward of congregations.” In other words, of the money that is given to churches, less and less of it is going to needs outside of the church’s walls.
  • Church’s spending on benevolence has dropped 47% since 1968, and now stands at just 0.35% of attendees’ income.
  • “Fewer people are seeing churches as the primary conduit for meeting the larger (charitable and evangelistic) need.”

Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about the overflowing joy of giving to help the needs of others. He commended those with rich generosity, and encouraged the church to excel in this grace of giving.

Here’s the sad fact: The less we give, the less the Good News about God’s love is shared.

God wants us to give because we want to give. Paul even said I am not commanding you to give, but instead…

Each of you must make up your own mind about how much to give. But don’t feel sorry that you must give and don’t feel that you are forced to give. God loves people who love to give. (2 Corinthians 9:7)

Let’s change this around. Let’s buck the nationwide trend. Remember…

MORE GIVING = MORE GOOD NEWS

!