June 22, 2025

Numbers 23:18-24

And Balaam took up his discourse and said, “Rise, Balak, and hear; give ear to me, O son of Zippor: God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? Behold, I received a command to bless: he has blessed, and I cannot revoke it. He has not beheld misfortune in Jacob, nor has he seen trouble in Israel. The Lord their God is with them, and the shout of a king is among them. God brings them out of Egypt and is for them like the horns of the wild ox. For there is no enchantment against Jacob, no divination against Israel; now it shall be said of Jacob and Israel, ‘What has God wrought!’ Behold, a people! As a lioness it rises up and as a lion it lifts itself; it does not lie down until it has devoured the prey and drunk the blood of the slain.”

Good morning church family,

Human beings are born with great capacity but little proficiency. Any toddler, for instance, is up and dancing the minute the DJ spins a tune. But that doesn’t mean you’d want to have that little kid take the lead. From the first second their born, babies are engaging their vocal cords and communicating; but they’ll make their parents wait for years before they hear a single, grammatically-correct sentence come out of any of their little mouths. As soon as an infant has enough core strength to roll over onto his stomach, he’s instantly on the move; but it will be many moons before all the baby gates in the house can come down. And if I observed anything during my time as a parent of newborns, it was that babies are extremely gifted at going to the bathroom; but it took the better part of forever for them to be able to relieve themselves at the proper time, in the proper place, and in the proper manner. Yes; humans are born with lots of ability but precious little competency.

While parents are quick to correct their children’s grammar, get them potty trained, and help them to their feet; I see little of the same urgency on the part of the Evangelical Church to encourage similar growth in the spiritual newborns living under its roof.

Any convert to Christianity, for instance, is instantly able to pray. In fact, prayer was probably something he was doing long before he even came to Christ. But simply being able to pray cannot be the goal. Instead, Jesus would see His followers be able to pray both powerfully and effectively.

Every new believer with an elementary school education should be able to read his Bible. But there’s an ocean of difference between someone who can successfully read a chapter a day in the Bible and someone who can read that chapter for comprehension; understanding and applying the insights to his life and situation.

Any Christian who makes it to church on time is able to participate in worship; standing, singing, and lifting holy hands. But there’s so much more to worship than learning melodies and following stage directions.

And, from the first moment they come into the fold, every Christian has a testimony. Everybody can say something about his faith. But the believer’s defense of his faith and the articulation of the hope he has in his heart is something that should get more and more compelling, convincing, and quickening as the years go by.

But isn’t it a shame that so many Christians are living off the same level of spiritual proficiency they had when they first accepted Christ decades before. Indeed, the Evangelical church in the West is the most babied bunch of Christians the Faith has ever seen. The modern American church is filled with many converts but precious few disciples.

When I was pastoring in Augusta, Georgia, there was a man in the church there named David. He was a quiet, soft-spoken, and hardworking man who loved his little church; never missing a Sunday. His wife had died not long before I started pastoring there and he was doing his best then to raise their kids without her. David painted houses for a living and the sunbaked hand that I shook every Sunday always had splatters of paint on it. David sat in the second row with his family and always listened intently to everything that was said and sung. He loved dirt track racing and was successful one Saturday night in getting me out to one of the local tracks. I remember sitting there drinking Mountain Dew, eating boiled peanuts, and grinning through the cloud of dust. But the most time I spent with David was at my house. David’s youngest son, Cody, was in the youth group that I led at the parsonage on Sunday nights and David started hanging out and helping me in whatever way he could during the meetings. I was glad to have him there and he was a kind and loving toward the other kids.

It was during these youth group meetings at my house that I started to pick up on something about David that saddened and surprised me. I began taking note of the fact that David never offered to read the Scripture we were studying and always shyly declined if asked to. We sang songs out of the hymnal during our meetings (very unorthodox for a youth group but the kids loved it) and I observed that David never looked at the words even though the selection wasn’t well-known and the book was open on his lap. Reflecting further, I realized that David didn’t text message or email, didn’t fill out any of the forms for ski trips or camps, and never took a bulletin on Sunday. It wasn’t that David didn’t read – I came to understand that David couldn’t read.

One night I ended up driving Cody home from some youth event we’d had and David happened to be sitting out on his front deck when I pulled into the yard. David and his family lived in a humble backwoods home that was situated quite a ways down a lonesome dirt road. David was enjoying a cold drink at the end of his day and his enthusiastic wave encouraged me to park the car for a minute and chat a while. I sat down on one of the plastic patio chairs on the deck and declined the offer of an in-kind cold drink. I don’t remember now how the conversation turned personal but I do remember seeing an opening for broaching the question of whether or not he could read.

“Say, David,” I said; speaking casually and wishing I had one of those cold drinks to sit back and sip on, “you don’t read very well, huh?”

“No, sir,” David said without hesitation while staring into his lap. Then looking up at me briefly, he continued, “I don’t suppose I rightly read at all. Never have.”

Even though I had suspected it, I was still surprised to hear it. But I tried not to betray my wonder at the confession. I was amazed that this man who owned a home, had a business, was raising a family, and serving in the church; wasn’t able to read a lick. I was instantly both humbled by David’s pluck and determination in life and burdened to help him finally learn. I asked him that night if he’d like some help in trying to read and he said that he would. We arranged to meet one evening a week at the church and I’d try and teach him his ABC’s.

Those first few meetings were pretty comical. I learned pretty quickly that teaching someone how to read is no easy task. I, of course, took being able to read for granted and believed anybody could just “pick it up”. Well, I was wrong about that. So, as David was learning how to read, I was learning how to teach reading. Like I said, it was pretty comical. But in fits and starts, we started making a little progress. David humbled himself and I, with homemade flashcards in hand, stopped trying to get this grown man to be able to read in a single day and began patiently working with him.

As David got better at being able to sound out words and fitting them into the orders of the sentences he was given, he suddenly seemed more comfortable in sharing about his efforts with others in the church. And as the open secret of David’s illiteracy became a rooting interest of everyone in the church – a better and more able teacher was found for David and I was relieved of my duties. As time went by, I was glad to see David begin picking his way through passages on Sunday morning and seeing his eyes crossing the page of the hymnal as he sang out the lyric. He never said much about it but I knew he was grateful for that front porch conversation we’d had years before.

I think about that episode often when I reflect on the lack of spiritual proficiency I see among the faithful folks I’m walking with. There are so many of us that ought to humble ourselves as David did and confess some of our incompetencies in the realm of Christian disciplines – myself included.

So, let this email be an invitation to a front porch – yours or mine – and a confession that I’d like to try and do a little more teaching if you’re up for trying to do a little more learning. Then maybe, just maybe, the Lord might let the American church out of the nursery!

We’re looking forward to gathering together in the morning to spend some blessed time in the Lord’s house with God and His people. Praise the Lord for His Kingdom! These times together are so good for the soul. May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

  • Pastor Tate

June 15, 2025

1 Corinthians 16:13

Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.

June 8, 2025

Genesis 1:1-2

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Good morning church family,

I have no way of proving it, but I believe America is a much less sanitary place since the introduction of electric hand dryers into public restrooms. This conviction of mine isn’t based on my assessment of the effectiveness of hand dryers, mind you. I’m sure they work just as well if not better than paper towels. No, my argument is not that they don’t work but that no one uses them. And who can blame them? The cacophonous roar created by these “energy savers” is enough to make your ears bleed. I mean, with the amount of noise coming out of one those little wall-mounted boxes, you would think it was preparing for takeoff. When my girls were little, I can remember being in a rest stop bathroom with them when one of those dryers roared to life. Bryn and Ingrid’s fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in and all I saw was bobbing pony tails as they ran screaming from the bathroom.

In addition to the auditory assault, hand dryers also have a huge efficiency problem. On a couple of occasions when a trip to the bathroom was a furlough from some painful event I was attending and thus in no rush to leave the lavatory, I’ve conducted experiments to see how long it would take for a hand dryer to actually do what its name promises. What I found, in those instances, was that no matter the make or model of dryer, I ended up having to rub my hands through at least two whole cycles of turbine torture. Most people I’ve observed only put their hands under the dryer long enough to trip the sensor before immediately despairing of the process and beating a hasty retreat from the bathroom; shaking their hands spasmodically before finishing the job by wiping them on their shirt and pants. I find all this, of course, to be a sad and unnecessary display. Can’t those wonderful, tri-fold symbols of American ingenuity be stacked high once again in men’s and women’s rooms all across the fruited plain? Public restrooms are already unpleasant enough, without having to go both deaf and grey waiting for one’s hands to dry. And given the irksomeness of having to leave the bathroom with hands sopping wet, I do wonder how many people forego washing their hands altogether?

Now, perhaps you think I’m being too harsh by half in this ranting take-down of hand dryers. Maybe you’re wondering if I’m not just using this platform to vent and let off a little steam. And I’m sure some of you are thinking I should reserve this kind of passionate editorializing for something meaningful. And to all of this, I’d say – you’re absolutely right. But now that I’ve gotten it off my chest, I do see in it, a possible application to our Christian life.

If I were to identify a correlative to hand dryers in the Christian life, it just might be the daily devotional. There are a number of reasons why fewer and fewer Christians are reading the Bible for pleasure these days, but one of them is certainly the breathtaking proliferation of daily devotional books. These neat, tidy, and attractive little volumes usually offer a short and pithy encouragement for each day, based on a verse or fragment of Scripture. Because there’s often little depth to these offerings and because their message and content is often remarkably similar to all the other writings in the book, most folks give up on them within weeks or even days. We all have multiples of these devotionals sitting on the edges of our desks and end tables like so much parsley sitting on the edges of our plates. But worse than the quality of much of this devotional material is the subconscious effect the books have on many of us. For far too many, the lesson learned from the prominent place given to these little books is that the Bible is too difficult and cumbersome to read for pleasure and enrichment. “Instead of getting bogged down and frustrated in the hurly-burly backwaters of the Bible,” the thinking goes, “why not let an author provide a tasty little morsel harvested from his hard work and toil.”

I know that the publishers of these daily devotionals are largely driven by good and earnest motivations. And I know that the good intention of everyone involved in their production is for the Kingdom to be built up and encouraged and for more and more believers to engage with the Bible. But I’m afraid that the net result has been less and less Bible reading over the years and a frightful infantilization of the American Christian mind instead. If the only scriptural nourishment one receives is from the pages of daily devotionals – that will make for an emaciated soul, a weak heart, and an impotent mind. Daily devotional materials make a wonderful garnish but a woeful entrée. And yet, in most of what we’re reading for encouragement in our faith, it’s the biblical Word that sits as an olive on a toothpick at the top or bottom of the page or as a little mint sprig tucked parenthetically into the text.

Nothing beats just picking up the Word of God and enjoying an unhurried read through any of its pages and passages. For times of study and reflection such as these never return void but instead inspire, quicken, and enlighten our lives. It’s the only thing that consistently satisfies our soul’s appetite.

So, the next time you visit a public restroom and you leave with your hands wet and dripping; wishing you could have enjoyed using a paper towel instead, maybe you’ll remember this little word of mine. And that night or next morning, when you pause your day’s doings to consider your Creator; pick up the Bible first and leave that daily devotional for dessert.

We’re looking forward to coming into our Father’s house tomorrow – to study, sing, and celebrate the Kingdom both now and to come. We’ll find sanctuary in each other’s fellowship and in the presence of our Lord and Savior. Our souls will revel in the hope of righteousness. It will be a good day! May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

  • Pastor Tate