We're having a Sunday School "commissioning" service this Sunday at church as we launch into a new year of reaching, teaching, and ministering to our community. As part of this we're going to bring all the leaders, teachers, and helpers up front, both to be recognized, but more importantly, to be visibly "set apart' by our church to do the work God has called them to. These 35+ people in our church touch lives in ways no other single person could, and I love them all.

We're coming up with a bulletin insert talking about the importance of "commissioning" and a little "responsive reading" to get everyone involved in the service, and I thought I'd post the reading here:

Pastor: Jesus said, “Go and make disciples.” (Matthew 28:19)

SS Workers: We will make disciples, and we will be disciples.

Pastor: Whatever your assignment may be –  leader, teacher, or helper – your ministry is important to our Sunday School.

SS Workers: We believe that we are guides for the blind, and lights for people lost in darkness. We will do our part. (Romans 2:19)

Pastor: No ministry can function with leaders alone. We must ALL participate.

Congregation: We will support our Sunday School workers. We will faithfully and regularly pray for them. Lead us. Equip us.

Adults in Congregation: Create opportunities for us to reach, teach, and minister. We will follow you.

Children and Youth: Teach us truth. Help us learn to follow the Lord.

Pastor: Many barriers could keep you from your work. Fear. Busyness. Distraction. But we believe in you, and trust in the Lord, because with God, all things are possible. (1 Corinthians 10:13, Matthew 19:26)

SS Workers: With God, all things are possible.

Congregation: With God, all things are possible.

Everyone: With God, all things are possible. Amen.

I am tired. I don't know but perhaps it's been such a full week I need to refresh. For now, some memory joggers for later.

• Talked to the neighbor kid about his drummer. He sees where I'm coming from, what my complaint is, and where we can compromise.
• Played quite a bit of softball; had a blast, and finished strong.
• Helped Erin husk and freezer-prep 2-3 bushels of sweet corn.
• Brought in another key spot to our Sunday School leadership team that we've been praying for. PERFECT FIT, I think.
• Made it through the weekend of softball without compromising my desires but at the same time refusing to allow any conflict of interest with other "real" priorities.
• Made some serious progress on projects, alone and with help: retaining wall, garden fence, mowing grass.
• Talked to my next door neighbor.
• Prayed with my wife and feel leading / direction with her mother.
• Rode horses... by my self, with my son, and with my wife.
• Had lunch with a TON of friends today. I am so blessed.
• And now, blogging for just a minute to jog the memory later on. And then 42 minutes of Jack Bauer and my elliptical machine.
• Note to self: also need to recount the story with the horses gone missing a few months ago.

What I didn't do:

• I need to find a way to get my Bible reading in on the weekend instead of playing catchup on Mondays and Tuesdays.
• Prayer. Prayer. Prayer.

I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties; indeed, in your better moments, I trust you would hardly even wish to do so. In the meantime we must make the best of the situation. There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a I brief sojourn in the Enemy's camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour.

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do riot mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes I our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather in oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy's side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of "Christians" in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real—though of course an unconscious—difficulty to him. Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.

Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His "free" lovers and servants—"sons" is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to "do it on their own". And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.

I have been writing hitherto on the assumption that the people in the next pew afford no rational ground for disappointment. Of course if they do—if the patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is a fanatical bridge-player or the man with squeaky boots a miser and an extortioner—then your task is so much the easier. All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question "If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?" You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is! Handle him properly and it simply won't come into his head. He has not been anything like long enough with the Enemy to have any real humility yet. What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these "smug", commonplace neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE

PRAYER

• What is prayer?
  
  • Talking "to" God?
  • Talking "with" God?
    
    • Does He talk back?
  • Conversation with God
  • Listening to
• Is it a two sided "conversation" or a one way street?

PRAISE

• Is praise always a joyful thing?
• Ps 145:1-8
  
  • what is the importance of the words?
  • Do we need to be specific?
• Ps 88:1-9
  
  • A song FOR the choir director
  • Heman
  • Never "gets joyful" (ex. V. 18)
• Why is praise important?
  
  • Start with recognizing God for who he is
• Eldridge Quote: "It's not what we do when we're strong and feeling great that makes us holy."

THANKS

• Focuses on what God HAS DONE. Before we look into the future, we must be able to look confidently at what God has done in the PAST.
• List stories where God brought Israel "out of" something?
  
  • Egypt
• How do / can you keep track of what God has done in your life? Joshua 4:1-9 (pile of rocks on the bank and in the middle of the Jordan)
  
  • Rank them… Memory, pile of rocks, journal, myspace
• How important is this "step" (thanks)
• Psalms 107:1-2

CONFESSION

• What does it mean to "confess"?
  
  • "I'm Sorry?"
  • "I did it."
  • Do the words matter?
• Story of David & Bathsheba, plus the related Psalms (2 Sam. 11:1-5, Psalms 32: 3-5, Ps 51:1-4, 10:12)
• Forgiveness à Confession è Restoration (is this the right order?)
• Why do we need to confess if we're already forgiven? (Psalms 51: 16-17)

REVIEW

• So all of that is review… last week we talked about 3 kinds / parts of prayer
  
  • A big part of prayer is simply getting us on the right page with God – WHY?
  • coming to understand who HE is, and coming to understand who WE are,
    
    • both simply as creations
    • but also as people who have been adopted and are now full fledged sons and daughters of God.
  • Is all of that introduction to just getting around to the asking, then?
    
    • NO.

SUPPLICATION – THE PRAYER OF INTERVENTION

• What does "supplication" mean?
  
  • "intercession"
• Why is "getting things done" listed last here?
  
  • Psalm 55:16-18, 22
• "I prayed about it, and God said "no""
  
  • Closed doors?
  • Do we / should we just accept that?
• Persistant Prayer – can we "change God's mind?"
  
  • Moses – Sodom and Gomorrah
  • JC @ Transfiguration
• YouTube clip - David
• Is prayer just going to God "for help?"
  
  • Or getting our marching orders?
    
    • Are you "on task?"
    • What is that?
• What's the "biggest" thing you've ever prayed for?
  
  • Are there things you'd love to see happen but are just not comfortable taking it to God?
    
    • Like what? Why?
  • Is it a lack of faith?
  • Where IS the power? Is it in our faith, or in the power of what is behind our faith?
    
    • How much faith does it take to move a mountain?
    • Not really all that much… "faith of a mustard seed" Matt 17:20
    • The power is not in the FAITH… the POWER is in what that faith is placed into… He's just waiting for us to ask!
    • What holds us back then?
  • How big of something would you like to start praying for? Can you believe it could happen? Could it be YOU holding it all back?
    
    • Change the weather?
  • So, just WHAT IS FAITH?
    
    • Is it believing something to be true?
    • Is it where salvation comes from?
      
      • "For BY GRACE you are saved through faith, not of yourselves, it is a GIFT OF GOD" eph 2:8-9
      • Mark 2:5 – 4 guys faith gets 1 guy saved?
      • Were people like Abraham "saved" because of their faith, even in the OT? Gen 15:6, Gal 3:6 (Abraham)
    • So is faith and belief the same thing?
      
      • "confess with your mouth… believe….you will be saved." Is that all there is to it?
      • Can you believe something without having faith in it?
      • Salvation = gift. Faith = accepting it is for me and opening it.
      • Plane won't crash but I won't get on it.

IF GOD ALREADY KNOWS EVERYTHING, WHY PRAY? … GOD WANTS YOU TO DEPEND ON HIM AND TALK TO HIM.

• What are some of the reasons God doesn't answer prayer right away?
  
  • Yes, No, Wait
  • "I want you to TALK TO ME."
  • Spiritual Warfare - Daniel
• If God already knows everything, why do we even need to tell Him what we want?
  
  • Is prayer giving God new information?
  • How does this correspond with the way we go about our own prayers when we pray for "lists?"
    
    • "be with all the people on our prayer list."
    • Do we really, really, care?
    • Does prayer move God to action? Does it move US to action?

GOD KNOWS EVERYTHING

• What does it mean when we say that "God knows everything?"
  
  • Do we even have a say in the matter?
  • Or are we little robots?
  • "Freedom of causality" ß how it works here is impossible to totally understand, but that does not make it any less true.
  • When I am asked something I don't know at work, I often respond, "let me ask Google… Google knows everything." How is all the information that GOOGLE knows different from all the information that GOD "knows?"

WE DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING

• Where do you get your guidance from?
  
  • Trial and error?
  • Friends?
  • Parents?
  • Church?
  • God Himself?
• Does God WANT to see us come to understand?``
  
  • James 1:5 – if anyone lacks wisdom, ask of God, and he gives generously.
  • Solomon
• Is there a difference between knowledge and wisdom?
  
  • Compare…. Faith is putting belief into action. (believe + CONFESS) ß confess is where we put legs on our beliefs. WORDS MATTER.
  • Wisdom is putting knowledge into action.

GOD WANTS YOU TO TALK TO HIM

• Jer 33:3 "CALL TO ME"
• Third Day – Call My Name… I want you to "never doubt."
• God wants us to be confident in him. He wants us to trust him. He wants us to really "cast our cares on him."
• Do we really trust God? Do we talk to him about things as deep as we talk to our best friends? Do we let him talk back?

WRAP IT UP

• Have you ever asked God what to pray for before you even start praying?
• The Bible is not a book of exceptions. It is a book of examples.
  
  • James 5:13-20… Elijah was a man, "just like us."
  • There is POWER in the words of your prayers. If you feel like it's a waste of time, maybe it is.
    
    • But it's not because PRAYER is a waste of time, but perhaps the way you're going about it…
    • Maybe you're praying for something outside of your realm.
    • God has something, somebody for you to influence. For you to AFFECT CHANGE on. Do you know what it is? It may be small… there's nothing wrong with that.
• Prayer is an expression of a RELATIONSHIP between you and God.
  
  • If it's not close, it will be awkward.
  • It can be shallow, it can be intimate. It can be enjoyable, it can be painfully awful.

My vision for Sunday School... for my local church involvement of any sort, for that matter...

"From Christian Clubhouse to Kingdom Outpost"

I am starting to see this... and someone on DAB gave me this quote today:

"Some wish to live within the sound of Church or Chapel bell;
I want to run a Rescue Shop within a yard of hell."

- C.T. Studd.