A letter to the Men…

This is a letter to the boys….ahem….men….who have recently graduated out of student ministries at NCC and have headed off into the “world” to pursue further education, future careers, and ultimately their lives as individuals.  Though I only served as your Youth Pastor for the final 14 months of your high school career, I am reserving the right to speak into your lives.  Not because I’m a control freak.  Not because I don’t trust you.  Not because I claim any extra helping of wisdom.  Just because I love you guys…

So….these are somethings I learned…cliffsnotes from a Pastor and Friend…

Dear Chad, Sterk, D-Mac, Tyler, Dylan, Mace, and Ryan,

  Man I hope you guys are all doing well!  Things are definitely different without you guys around…alot less tall people around!  I am wondering how school is going?  I know it was an overwhelming thing when I first went to school and realized that college isn’t really like high school.  If you don’t do the work, you can’t really bluff your way through tests anymore.  I think my first test in college was in Spanish 102….I think I got an F.  Maybe a D.  We’ll say it was a D.  Anyway, that’s when I realized that things had changed.  You’re adults now….nobody is watching over you constantly and telling you that you can’t go to the movies or to a concert until you get your homework done.  When you tell a professor that you didn’t get the reading done, it’s no one’s fault but your own…after all, “You’re an adult”.  College is full of lying to yourself, you know?  I’ll finish studying after I get back from the concert.  Waffle House?  Sure!  I’ll finish studying after Waffle House.  Don’t lie to yourself.  It ain’t gonna happen…and you’re gonna end up taking that test and having no idea what the heck the Battle of Waterloo is.  I am almost positive it was a D.  I hope I’m not lying to myself….

There are going to be lots of people fighting over the right to speak into your lives and decision.  Be careful who you let affect you.  It’s amazing how quickly we allow people to influence our decisions when we’re finally out of the house and away from mom and dad.  “I’m free to make my own decisions…what should I do everybody?”  Don’t trade in the influence and instruction of those that love you dearly for the influence of those who don’t know you at all.

Be men.  This world is desperately in need of young men who love God, guys.  I know that statistics say that of the 7 of you, 6 will have turned their back on God and the Church by the age of 30.  I don’t want to see that statistic come true with you guys….you know why?  There is not one of you that I am willing to give up, much less six.  You guys mean too much to me.  You mean too much to Mr. Brown.  You mean too much to God, guys.  I know that sounds cliche, but I hope you all know that it is 100% true.  God made you in his image…and as much as we have distorted that image with living for ourselves, He loves us.  Do you think that the galaxies are the pinnacle of creation?  The Milky Way perhaps?  Nope…it’s you.  Psalm 8 tells us that we are greater than those things…and you have infinite worth because, through the cross, He paid the ultimate price…that is love.  Too few young men right now understand what love is.  The world tells you all sorts of lies about love.

  The decisions you guys are making are determining who you are becoming.  So, are you choosing to live for yourself right now?  Are you telling yourself, “I’m just gonna try life without God for a while.  No rules.  No guilt.  If things don’t work out, I can straighten up later”?  Let me give you a hint.  Things aren’t gonna work out.  Trust me as someone who lived by their own plan.  Most of the regrets of my life happened about the time you guys are at now.  The things I did.  The things I didn’t do.  The ways I treated others.

I love you guys….not nearly as much as God does…but I seriously love you.  Mr. Brown loves you.  Your parents love you.  But God LOVES you…in a way none of us can even imagine.

My door is always open.  My phone is always on for you guys.  I can be to all of you within 2 hours…

²⁴Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, ²⁵ to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen (Jude)

Praying for all of you guys!

 

Zach

The Role of the Family in Ministry

As I type out the title of this post, I admit that it should be titled “The Role of the Church in Ministry”.  Some may say, “Wait…I thought the church is ministry”?  Hmmmmm…is it?

I am being challenged on many levels by a class I am currently enrolled in at Phoenix Seminary entitled Marriage and Family Ministry.  As I began the class, I saw it, ultimately, as 2-hours of elective credit…another hoop to jump through on the way to my much elusive and far distant MDiv. 

But now, as God often does, he is surprising me with how much I am being impacted by the reading.  And here is the central thought that is coming out of the reading: Why have we taken and/or allowed family to drop out of the ministry equation?  Sometimes I feel as if I am being handed students and told to “fix them”!  And I want to ask the parents, “What are you doing at home”?  When a person visits a doctor, that doctor keeps a record of what treatments/prescriptions are made for that patient.  If that patient is then sent to a specialist for this or that issue, the first thing the new office needs is the medical records from the primary doctor.  It is a partnership.  The specialist gives treatment based on what is being/has been done. 

My argument is that the primary ministry needs to happen in the home!  “What?”, you say!  Isn’t that what we pay you for?  Isn’t it the youth pastor’s job shepherd my child?  Yes.  Isn’t it his job to urge my student on towards righteousness?  Yes.  Isn’t his job to teach the truth of God’s word in hopes of instilling a love for Christ and his bride?  Yes.  Isn’t his job to relate to my student?  Yes!  This is my passion….this is what I love doing.  The problem is when the meaning behind the questions are understood.  Isn’t it the youth pastor’s job shepherd my child so I don’t have to?  No.  Isn’t it his job to urge my student on towards righteousness so I don’t need to?  No.  Isn’t his job to teach the truth of God’s word in hopes of instilling a love for Christ and his bride so we don’t have to?  No.  Isn’t his job to relate to my student because I can’t?  No!  Here’s a newsflash…you can relate to your kids, parents.  In fact, you can relate in ways I can’t.  The challenge is that you haven’t related to them on spiritual matters (i.e. inquiring about their devotion time, holding them accountable, praying with them, having family Bible study, etc) in so long, that now when you do ask (without explaining to them that you haven’t done a good job and want to change the way your family interacts), their kinda creeped out!  And maybe it will take a while for the creepiness of parents who want to know how their children are doing spiritually to wear off, but I promise that it will be revolutionary in your family and the student ministry at your churches!

Now, it’s my turn to apologize.  Parents, if you have fallen into this trap of depending on your church or youth pastor to handle the entirety of your students spiritual formation, it is partly do to the fact that we have allowed it!  We have received that burden with open arms.  We want to be the spiritual superman to your students!  The truth is that we have become as the medical specialist…faced with daunting (and sometimes quite terrifying) issues in students without any knowledge of what prior treatments have been done…if any have!

This is not an attack on my church.  I don’t feel like this attitude of spiritual babysitting is rampant at my church, but I do feel like it’s there in some degree.  I want to see families that are having ministry in their homes…not because I want my job to be easier, but because I want my job to be effective.  I do nothing on my own…the only way I am able to teach your children, to love your children, spend late nights counseling your children, to spend sleepless weekends smearing peanut butter on thier faces for marshmellow games…is because Christ has called me to serve the church, your students, and Him.  That calling is not about entertainment.  It’s not about wacky games.  It’s about teaching your students with a shepherds heart.

I will end by asking you to meditate on Deuteronomy 6:4-7…pay special attention to the part that says, “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.  You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise”…

Wow…a lot to think about….my mind is exploding over what this looks like in NCC Student Ministries…

Grace and Peace,

Zach

Why I Don’t Have a Television and Rarely Go to Movies :: Desiring God Christian Resource Library

John Piper shared this on his desiring God website…what a challenge!

Now that the video of the Q&A at Advance 09 is available, I can look at it and feel bad all over again. Here’s what I regret, indeed what I have apologized for to the person who asked the question.

The first question to me and Mark Driscoll was, “Piper says get rid of my TV, and Driscoll says buy extra DVRs. How do you reconcile this difference?”

I responded, “Get your sources right. . . . I never said that in my life.”

Almost as soon as it was out of my mouth, I felt: “What a jerk, Piper!” A jerk is a person who nitpicks about the way a question is worded rather than taking the opportunity to address the issue in a serious way. I blew it at multiple levels.

So I was very glad when the person who asked the question wrote to me. I wrote back,

Be totally relieved that YOU did not ask a bad question. I gave a useless and unhelpful, and I think snide, answer and missed a GOLDEN opportunity to make plain the dangers of the triviality you referred to. . . . I don’t know why I snapped about the wording of the question instead of using it for what it was intended for. It was foolish and I think sinful.

So let me see if I can do better now. I can’t give an answer for what Mark means by “buy extra DVRs,” but I can tell you why my advice sounds different. I suspect that Mark and I would not agree on the degree to which the average pastor needs to be movie-savvy in order to be relevant, and the degree to which we should expose ourselves to the world’s entertainment.

I think relevance in preaching hangs very little on watching movies, and I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. Sources of spiritual power—which are what we desperately need—are not in the cinema. You will not want your biographer to write: Prick him and he bleeds movies.

If you want to be relevant, say, for prostitutes, don’t watch a movie with a lot of tumbles in a brothel. Immerse yourself in the gospel, which is tailor-made for prostitutes; then watch Jesus deal with them in the Bible; then go find a prostitute and talk to her. Listen to her, not the movie. Being entertained by sin does not increase compassion for sinners.

There are, perhaps, a few extraordinary men who can watch action-packed, suspenseful, sexually explicit films and come away more godly. But there are not many. And I am certainly not one of them.

I have a high tolerance for violence, high tolerance for bad language, and zero tolerance for nudity. There is a reason for these differences. The violence is make-believe. They don’t really mean those bad words. But that lady is really naked, and I am really watching. And somewhere she has a brokenhearted father.

I’ll put it bluntly. The only nude female body a guy should ever lay his eyes on is his wife’s. The few exceptions include doctors, morticians, and fathers changing diapers. “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1). What the eyes see really matters. “Everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Better to gouge your eye than go to hell (verse 29).

Brothers, that is serious. Really serious. Jesus is violent about this. What we do with our eyes can damn us. One reason is that it is virtually impossible to transition from being entertained by nudity to an act of “beholding the glory of the Lord.” But this means the entire Christian life is threatened by the deadening effects of sexual titillation.

All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. There is not one man in a thousand whose spiritual eyes are more readily moved by the beauty of Christ because he has just seen a bare breast with his buddies.

But leave sex aside (as if that were possible for fifteen minutes on TV). It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

One more smaller concern with TV (besides its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects): It takes time. I have so many things I want to accomplish in this one short life. Don’t waste your life is not a catchphrase for me; it’s a cliff I walk beside every day with trembling.

TV consumes more and more time for those who get used to watching it. You start to feel like it belongs. You wonder how you could get along without it. I am jealous for my evenings. There are so many things in life I want to accomplish. I simply could not do what I do if I watched television. So we have never had a TV in 40 years of marriage (except in Germany, to help learn the language). I don’t regret it.

Sorry again, for the bad answer. I hope this helps.

Pastor John

How It Should Be….

This July, Caitlin and I will be leading a group of seven high school and college students to the Czech Republic for 17 days of teaching English in the mountains north of Prague.

As we are preparing to go with team training meetings and fundraising, I am overwhelmed that God, in his infinite knowledge and forethought, has set this group aside for this trip since before life (much less our lives) began. As I think about those we will meet, I wonder at how God has ordained these meetings from the beginning. I am excited to see how this trip (but mostly God) impacts the lives of the students while we are away from what we know best and the comforts of home.

Recently, I have been challenged on the way we (I) have allowed the idea of The Church to become withered and decrepit, replaced by denominationalism and “my church”. I am, therefore, excited to spend time with my brothers and sisters in the C.R. The Church…loving and serving the lost together…how it should be.

FOXNews.com – Mass. Lake With 45-Letter Name Spelled Wrong – Local News | News Articles | National News | US News

FOXNews.com – Mass. Lake With 45-Letter Name Spelled Wrong – Local News | News Articles | National News | US News

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This is epic…why don’t they name things like they used to?! And don’t miss the translation…”You fish on your side, I fish on my side, and no one fishes in middle”!

Epic Fail…

Wow…really?

Bunnies and Fish…

Yesterday, as I was driving home from work, I saw something a bit unusual…to me at least. I was driving behind one of these huge, raised up, ready to drive over anything including me trucks. Dead center on the back window was a Playboy Bunny with the words “Playboy” underneath (this detail was shared to assure that this person was not just a friend/fan of small mammals in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha…this was THE bunny). So what? That’s not unusual, right? I mean, between the playboy bunnies and the SKIN stickers, you can account for about half the vehicles in Maricopa County, right? Alas, the thing that made it unusual (and frankly disturbing) was the Christian fish on the lower left corner of the same window…hmmmm. It just struck me as odd…not because I’m perfect….not because I never let things become more important than God in my life…but because I am fighting to live for an audience of one! What says doubleminded quite like highlighting sex and salvation on the same SUV? Matthew 6:24 says, “”No one can serve two masters, because either he will hate one and love the other, or be loyal to one and despise the other”…

I know in the epic story of the Tortoise and the Hare, the bunny loses…but I’m afraid, my friends, that in the battle of the Bunny and the Fish, the bunny is winning….because all the witness and testimony and encouragement of that little fish sticker is voided and overshadowed by the sticker that claims allegiance to the World…

Just a thought….

Hmmmm….

Trying to decide if this is real….what do you think?

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Chopra Winfrey…

I am starting to think that these two should get together…join forces…give the world ridiculousness like it’s never seen before!

This video is of the nightline special from 3/26/09 on ABC…it is a look at the question “Does Satan Exist?” from the view of an evangelical pastor (Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, Seattle), Annie Lobert, former prostitute, now minister to sex industry, Carlton Pearson, a Bishop and denier of hell/satan, and Deepak Chopra, medical doctor and philosopher extraordinaire…

Tell me what you think!

more about "Nightline Face-Off – Does Satan Exist…", posted with vodpod

more about "Nightline Face-Off – Does Satan Exist…", posted with vodpod

Hosanna…

Hey Folks!  This is just a beautiful version of the “Hosanna” song I talked about on Sunday….the one that talks about “Generation rising up to take its place, with selfless faith”

This is the worship band from Cornerstone in Chandler…some of you may recognize Brian Wurzell, their worship leader…he is the lead singer from Brayline, who played for us at SE7EN on March 8th!  The girl is his friend Audrey Assad, from Nashville, TN…

Beautiful, guys!