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A Glimmer of Hope in the Shadows of Despair

Today for my devotions I was reading in the book of Lamentations.  This is a powerful book, written by the prophet Jeremiah, over the destruction of Jerusalem.  The book as a whole is really a downer.  It is verse after verse of hopelessness, helplessness, despair and anguish.  The prophet is lamenting what has become of this amazing city, the kingdom, and the people.

But while most of the verses in this book are sad and discouraging, in reality the book contains a message of hope.  Actually, because most of the book is so bleak, the verses that are not become like brilliant little lighthouses of hope.  Nestled in the middle of the book, among all the despair, we find this phrase, “Yet, I still dare to hope when I remember this:” (Lamentations 3:21, NLT)

What a powerful statement.  Jeremiah gives us a glimmer of hope in the shadows of despair.  This is a profound statement for those who are living in dark places right now.  In the midst of such darkness, when a glimmer of light shows up, like this verse, it acts as a beacon of hope, beckoning all who are in despair to come and bask in the light.

Jeremiah is calling out to all who are hopeless, discouraged, anxious, and lost.  He says, I have found hope!  Even when the world is falling down around me, I still have hope.  Actually, it is because Jeremiah says these words while in the midst of such lamenting that the words take on such power and shine so brightly.  Jeremiah has hope, and then he tells us why…

“The unfailing love of the Lord never ends!  By his mercies we have been kept from complete destruction.  Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each day.  I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!”

What powerful, hopeful, encouraging words!  Jeremiah reminds us that even in the darkest of times, still we can hope in God.  I want to encourage you with those words today.  If you want to find out more about this hope, then please feel free to gives us a call, or send an email, or even come on out and visit us some Sunday.  We would love to talk more about this hope!

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Am I Going Backward?

Today in my devotions I was reading in the book of Jeremiah and came across a very powerful rebuke from God to His people.  He said, “But my people would not listen to me.  They kept on doing whatever they wanted, following the stubborn desires of their evil hearts. They went backward instead of forward.”  (Jeremiah 7:24, NLT)

I know that God was talking about the people of Judah, but it also sounds so much like us.  We have a terrible tendency to follow our own desires instead of God’s plans for our lives.  We forget that God’s ways are so much better than our own and we run off chasing after things that just don’t matter.

We should be like David who said in Psalm 17, “My steps have stayed on your path; I have not wavered from following you.”  (Psalm 17:5, NLT)  But instead we are like those mentioned in Isaiah 53, “All of us have strayed away like sheep.  We have left God’s paths to follow our own…”  (Isaiah53:6a, NLT)

What we don’t realize is that when we go our own way instead of God’s way, we are moving backward instead of forward.  We are heading in the wrong direction.  We don’t realize it, because our eyes are focused on the wrong things.  We are like a hiker who finds himself lost, because he was focused on the wrong landmark.  We get so focused on what we think we want and when we finally arrive at it we realize that things are really not quite what we had hoped for.  But worse, we find ourselves alone and lost, looking around to figure out where God is.  But God didn’t leave us.  We left Him.  We thought we were walking forward and all along we were walking backward.

I challenge you to stop and ask yourself, “am I going backward?”  Are we chasing after our own desires instead of listening to God and following Him?  We need to learn from that rebuke that we find in Jeremiah.  It’s time for us to move forward!

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The Meaning of Life

Ecclesiastes is an interesting book.  It is the ruminations of one of the wisest men to ever walk the earth.  We find King Solomon sharing some very profound statements as he philosophizes over the meaning of life.  If you have never given this book much time, I encourage you to give it a chance and examine this thought-provoking essay for yourself.

In Ecclesiastes we find verses that have been the inspiration for songs, “There is a time for everything, a season for every activity under heaven.”  (Ecc. 3:1)  We find one of my favorite verses of all time, “When the clouds are heavy, the rains come down.  When a tree falls, whether south or north, there it lies.” (Ecc. 11:3)  We find practical warnings,such as, “Laziness lets the roof leak, and soon the rafters begin to rot.”  (Ecc. 10:18)  And we find a scathing rebuke of greed, “Those who love money will never have enough.  How absurd to think that wealth brings true happiness!”  (Ecc. 5:10)

At the end of the book we find a powerful conclusion, “Here is my final conclusion.  Fear God and obey his commands, for this is the duty of every person.”  (Ecc. 12:13) That is a fitting ending that brings the book full circle and provides meaning in the midst of a bunch of meaninglessness.  But one of my favorite portions of this book actually comes a little before the end as the author seems to put his wisdom into place.  In chapter 9 he writes this, “This reminded me that no one can discover everything God has created in our world, no matter how hard they work at it.  Not even the wisest people know everything, even if they say they do.”  (Ecc. 9:17)

Throughout this book we see Solomon wrestling with the meaning of life and it seems that even with all of his wisdom, power, and money that he still finds life meaningless from an earthly perspective.  It is only when he sets his eyes Heavenward that life begins to take on meaning as we see in his conclusion.  But along the way Solomon needed to put his own wisdom and powers of observation in place.  He needed to realize that he does not have all the answers, even though he was one of the wisest men to walk the earth.  Ultimately wisdom must begin with the fear of the Lord.  We need to start with God if we are to find any purpose or meaning to life.

I do encourage you to give Ecclesiastes some time.  And if you are interested in talking more about this subject, please feel free to send me an email or give me a call.  Or better yet, stop by Dunn Bros. in downtown Chaska some afternoon and let’s have a chat.

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A Roll Of The Dice

So I have been in the book of Proverbs recently in my devotions.  If you have never read through the book of Proverbs, it is a list of wise sayings.  There are so many great instructions in that book that it can become overwhelming as you read, because it seems like there is so much to learn.  But the point is not for us to be overwhelmed, but rather for us all to learn that true wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord.

As I have been reading through the book I have noticed several wonderful wise proverbs that I had never really noticed before.  Some of them are very practical, while others caused me to pause and ponder them in greater depth.  One of my favorites that I came across today was Proverbs 16:33, “We may throw the dice, but the Lord determines how they fall.”

That is such a profound thought.  So often we tend to think that we are in control of most everything in our lives, and that whatever we are not in control of is left up to chance.  But this proverb reminds us that ultimately it is God, not us, and not even chance, who is really in control.

It is really a powerful image of the roll of the dice.  We can picture a guy at a crap’s table in Las Vegas deciding whether or not to keep rolling the dice and then blowing on them and rolling them down the table hoping for a lucky number seven to come up.  When you think about it, that is often a picture of the way we live our lives.  We make decisions based on what we think or hope will happen, then we roll the dice, hoping that everything will come out the way we want.

But if we really understand this proverb, then we know that God is the one in control.  So a better process would be for us to be connecting with Him to find out what His will is for us and then trusting ourselves into His hands, instead of relying on chance.

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I think we have the problem fixed

I still don’t really know what was going on, but I think the blogs are back to working again.  I am sorry for all those who have tried to follow us over the last few months, but hopefully we will have some smoother sailing from here on out.  Thanks.

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Why No Blogs?

Over the last month and a half I have not been able to post new blogs.  I have been trying to figure out what the problem was and kept hitting a brick wall.  Every solution that I came up with proved to be no solution at all.  I actually wrote three separate blogs thinking that everything was working fine, only to find that when I went to post the blogs they simply disappeared and all my work went down the drain. Believe it or not, I actually thought for a moment that maybe it was God not wanting me to blog about a particular topic, but after the problem persisted I quickly ruled that out.  I thought it was a problem with the WordPress software or our hosting site, but after checking with our site administrator, he assured me that things were working fine for him.  He suggested that I check my firewall settings, because I had recently purchased a new computer and that is when the problem started.  I tried every firewall and internet setting that I could think of and nothing allowed me to fix the problem.  It was very frustrating.  Finally today I found out that it was simply a problem with the way Internet Explorer version 9 was handling the blogging site and so I switched back to the IE 8 interface and everything went back to normal. 

For those of you who check back regularly at The River website for new blogs, I am sorry if you have been frustrated over the last month or so.  I plan to get back to my regularly scheduled blogging practices moving forward.  Thanks for your patience!

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Get In The Boat!

We had a great time this past Sunday in church talking about leaving our comfort zones to follow Christ in a whole new way.  We looked at Matthew 14, where we see Jesus walking on the water and then Peter joining Him.  The main point was that while we tend to identify with the guys who stayed in the boat instead of walking on the water, in reality we probably are not even in the boat.  We are more like the crowd of people who followed Jesus enough to be fed (the feeding of the 5,000 is the passage right before this one), but who did not leave everything behind and get in the boat like the disciples did.  So in reality, the challenge is not for us to get out of the boat and walk on the water, it is for us to get into the boat so that eventually maybe we can get out of the boat and walk on the water.

That opens up a great discussion on what does “getting into the boat” represent in our lives?  In what way is God calling us to a more radical following of Him than we are currently doing.  And once we establish what that is, are we going to be willing to go beyond simply being fed by Jesus and take that step of faith to follow Him in a radical way?   

You know the Bible is filled with wonderful stories of men and women that followed God in an unusual way.  They stepped out of their comfort zone in faith and experienced God in incredible ways.  Men and women like David, Moses, Joshua, Rahab, Ruth, Peter, Paul, Timothy and others.  Of course throughout the history of the Bible, there are men and women who followed God enough to be fed by Him and never took that extra step of faith to experience Him in a radical way.  Those people are mentioned only as part of the crowd.  They are not the people we look to as examples.  We don’t hear many sermons preached on them.  But most of us are content with simply living our lives as part of a crowd who are following God enough to be fed.  The question is, do we want more?  Do we dare to step out in faith and get in the boat with Jesus, leaving behind our comfortable lives to follow Him in a radical way?

I challenge all of us to consider this question: What does, “getting into the boat” mean for me?  What does it look like for me to leave behind my comfortable life and follow Christ?  How is He calling me to follow Him?

You can listen to the “Get In The Boat!” sermon from April 3 by going to our online sermon page (https://riveralliance.com/?page_id=70).  I received so many comments from people after the sermon that I will be following up this Sunday with a closer look at how these guys got in the boat in the first place.  So if you are nearby, please come out and join us this Sunday.  And feel free to comment on this post to start a dialogue about what “getting in the boat” means for each of us.

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Underdog

My family loves March Madness.  For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, each year at this time the college basketball season comes to a close with a 68 team tournament.  The 68 teams are put into a bracket that will decide the eventual champion.  That bracket is then posted online and people all across the country fill it in to show who they think will win. 

My wife and I and our 4 children fill out the bracket each year to have a little family fun.  Whoever ends up with the most points at the end of our tournament gets to be “king” or “queen” for an evening at our home.  This provides some great entertainment as we keep track of the winners and losers over the course of the 3 week tournament. 

Each and every year I watch the games and find myself amazed at how unexpected the outcomes are.  Each year there are teams that I am sure will be unbeatable, only to find them get upset in the early rounds.  And each year there are underdog teams that I am sure have no chance of winning, only to find them pulling off upset after upset and wreaking havoc on my bracket. 

For instance, last year I spent some time carefully choosing my bracket winners based on my understanding of basketball, my observations from games that I had watched during the season, and advice from several basketball analysts from ESPN and other sources.  On the flip side, my 6 year old daughter chose to base her bracket winners on teams that came from places where she or her family and friends have lived over the years.  For that reason she chose Butler, an underdog team from a small school in Indiana, to beat some much more highly regarded opponents.  Obviously, she turned out to be right and my family and I found ourselves watching Cinderella and having a “ball” in our living room because Kalyn was “queen for a night.”

This year I once again used my head and came up with what I thought would be a very solid bracket.  But all of my final four teams wound up losing in earlier rounds and my wife and 8 year-old daughter are now in position to win this year.  Once again, Butler proved to be my downfall.  I chose Butler to lose in the 2nd round, while my wife chose Butler to make it to the final four.  She was right, and I was wrong.

But surprisingly Butler is not the biggest underdog team this year.  Virginia Commonwealth University deserves that title.  When the bracket was first announced several analysts ripped the selection committee for including VCU in the tourament.  They believed that VCU didn’t belong.  One analyst even called the inclusion of VCU “indefensible.”  VCU did not have a great season.  They finished 4th in the weak Colonial Athletic Association conference.  That’s one spot lower than Hofstra.  They lost 11 games during the season including losses to Georgia State, James Madison and Drexel.  Many analysts did not even expect them to make the tournament, much less win a game. 

But they didn’t just win a game, they have made an unbelievable run, beating Georgetown, Purdue, Florida State, and Kansas on their way to the Final Four.  They were the underdog in each game and yet wound up beating 4 teams from bigger conferences who were all expected to win.  VCU is this year’s biggest underdog story.

Basketball analysts refer to games like these as “David vs Goliath” kind of matchups.  In each game they played, VCU has been like David facing Goliath.  That’s a great reference, because David was the biggest underdog ever.  No one gave him a chance.  He defines what we think of when we call someone an underdog. 

Consider this, David wasn’t even big enough yet to go to war.  His brothers were part of the Saul’s army, but not David.  He was keeping watch over the sheep and running errands for his father.  He was just a boy.  Goliath was a man.  A seasoned warrior.  He was battle tested and an impressive physical presence.  He stood over 9 feet tall.  His armor and weapons probably weighed as much as David.  And yet David came at him with just a sling and a stone, and won!

That is probably the biggest underdog story in the history of the world.  It was so big of an upset that to this day we still talk about upset matchups in sports as David vs Goliath.  But there is one verse in that story that I just love and that is I Samuel 17:48 where it talks about how David ran to meet Goliath.  David didn’t think of himself as an underdog, he simply faced the enemy in front of him with a courage born of his trust in God.

Maybe in your life today you feel like an underdog.  Maybe it feels like the problems you face are bigger than you are.  I want to encourage you to remember the example of David.  Don’t listen what others might say about your chances.  Don’t consider yourself an underdog.  Run to face the obstacle in front of you with courage born from a trust in God.

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The Investor

My Uncle Bob passed away about a week ago.  I wasn’t able to make it to the funeral, but I will miss him dearly.  He had a major impact on my life and I thought it would be worthwile for me to share why. 

For much of my life we lived within 45 minutes of Uncle Bob and his family.  So we were pretty close with him and Aunt Jan and their daughters: Karen, Erica, and Judy.  Through his life, Uncle Bob has been a missionary, a pastor, a journalist, editor, writer, and professor.  He has been the special assistant to the President of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, has written several books, and has even ghost written articles for Dr. Billy Graham, and President Ronald Reagan.  But I will always remember him as an investor.

Now when I say “investor,” I don’t mean that in the traditional sense of the word, but my Uncle Bob did invest in me in many ways over the years.  We had a lot in common.  He had a background in communication and design and enjoyed photography and art as well as writing.  Throughout my years growing up he was always supportive of me and nurtured my creative side.  He gave me some of his old cameras when I showed an interest in photography.  He always wanted to see my artwork and encouraged me in my pursuits as a graphic designer and then in web design.

When I was a graphic designer for the National Office of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, he worked there as a special assistant to the President and as the Director of Communications.  He had input on much of my work and helped me grow and mature both as a designer and as a person. 

I don’t know if he ever realized it or not, but I considered him one of my mentors.  But not only was he supportive of my artistic pursuits, he was also one of my biggest supporters when I felt God’s call on my life to enter the ministry.  He even committed to providing me with a subscription to Christianity Today every year that I have been a pastor. 

But one of the biggest investments he made in my life is one that he didn’t even make specfically for me personally.  This investment came through a book that he wrote 25 years ago.  That book is called, “All for Jesus.”  It is about the history of the Alliance, and was mandatory reading for my ordination when I became a pastor.  But to me that book is not just a historical book.  It helped shape my philosophy of ministry.  I have more notes in that book than any book I have ever read.  I have highlighted passages, notes in the margin, sticky tabs and paperclips marking pages, and other notes that I have written out and inserted.  I have quoted from the book repeatedly and I would put it among the top 5 most influential books in my life.  It is one more way that Uncle Bob has invested in my life.

That is why I think of Uncle Bob as an investor.  I hope that God is using me as an investor in the lives of others, because I have seen the benefit that I have received from those who have invested in me.  And I write this as a challenge to all of us, that we should remember to thank those who have invested in us and look for ways to be used by God as investors in the lives of those around us.

In case you are interested I am including Uncle Bob’s obituary below…

Rev. Robert L. Niklaus, Jr., age 77, of Deland Florida, died March 13, 2011. He was the husband of Janet M. (McIllwaine) Niklaus for the past 52 years.

Born and raised in Williamsport, PA, he was a son of the late Robert L. Niklaus, Sr. and Harriet (Sims) Niklaus. He lived in Nyack, NY for many years- before and after spending 12 years doing missionary work in Belgian, Congo- he then lived in Colorado Springs from 1989-2003 moving to Lakeville, Ma until 2009 and retiring to Florida. He was a graduate of Nyack Missionary Institute-now Nyack College, Class of 1955. He received his masters in journalism Syracuse University, 1968. While residing in Nyack, he was an adjunct professor at King’s College (Briarcliff Manor NY) and Nyack College.

In 1972 he became Assoc. Editor of the Christian Missionary Alliance’s (C&MA) monthly magazine and also worked for National Religious Broadcasting writing numerous articles for religious magazines, including being a ghost writer for Dr. Billy Graham when he featured as the cover of TV Guide Magazine and President Ronald Reagan for a convention. He had the gift of words and was a model wordsmith. From 1987-1996, he was Asst to the President and later Director of Communications. He authored several books penning the history of Alliance worldwide and traveled with a video team recording missionaries at work to show churches how their support was being manifested. Retired from the C&MA in 2000, he became Pastor of Mullein Baptist Church in Lakeville, MA serving with his wife from 2003 – 2009. Surviving In addition to his wife: 3 daughters: Karen Corinha of Marshfield, MA, Erica Butler of Overland Park, KA and Judy Poferl of Bartlett, IL; sister Mary L. Mapstone of Colorado Springs, CO; 6 nieces, 8 nephews and the “jewels of his crown”. He was “button poppin’ proud” of his 9 grandchildren! He also leaves his adopted children: David Trinn of Vietnam, Lan and Sophy Kong of Cambodia and he was the brother of the late William Niklaus.