Becoming God's Masterpiece: Part 3

Dr. Eric Geiger, pastor, author, vice-president of LifeWay’s Church Resource Division, said, “The Christian life is not about trying more, it is about dying more.” In our series on Transformation through the month of January, we have been examining how we can cooperate with God in His work of transforming us into His masterpiece. Our efforts are not to be simply trying harder to “do” spiritual things so that God will bless us. It is exactly as Dr. Geiger said; our efforts to cooperate with God’s work in us are all about surrender. We surrender ourselves more and more to Him as we carve out time in our lives for Him. As we invest time in His Word, in prayer, in worship and meditation, God works in us to shape us into the image of His Son Jesus. It’s not about doing, it’s about dying.

On January 15 & 22 we explored how God uses worship and prayer to transform us, and we offered some suggestions on how to incorporate both into our daily routines. Do you remember them?

Worship

• Prepare for Worship – Deliberately set aside everything else, plans for the day, worries and cares, and focus on giving God His due praise and adoration. Confess any known sin and make right any known wrongs.
• Participate in Worship – Sing! Pray! Give! Respond as the Spirit leads! Don’t just be a spectator as others worship God. Worship Him as if no one is present except Him and you.
• Add Worship to Your Week – Make worship a daily exercise. Spend time before God in simple praise and thanksgiving. Add some praise music to your day whenever possible. Sing along. Begin a worship lifestyle.

Prayer

• Set a Time for Prayer – Set aside time to pray. Guard that time as you do every other important appointment.
• Use Prayer Lists – Create lists to aid in focused, deliberate intercession for others. Pray through your lists regularly. Make notes of any answered prayers or situational changes. Keep praying.
• Pray the Scriptures – We can always steer our prayers toward God’s purposes when we pray His Word back to Him. Saturate your prayers with Scripture. (Scripture memorization that was discussed in a previous week helps greatly here!). Allow God’s Word and will to guide and shape your prayers.
• Pray as Communication – Converse throughout the day with God. Shoot “arrow prayers” to Him as you face every new challenge of the day.

As you read and study the Word, pray, and worship daily, God will work the process of transformation in you bit by bit. Go back and watch the “God’s Chisel” video again. Review how the process works. Don’t be discouraged; it’s a marathon not a sprint.

In the closing message of the series we will examine how God uses partnerships in the process of transformation. God works in us so that He can work through us; and as He works through us He is also working in us. It’s an exciting journey. Will you join us?

More on Being God's Masterpiece

YOU are God's Original Masterpiece. On January 1 we explored Ephesians 2:10 which declares us to be God's "workmanship". The word means masterpiece, a unique composition. We learned that God does this work in us, but we must cooperate, and that it is a long journey. We are spending the month of January learning ways we can cooperate with God in this process of transformation, so that we will become His perfect Masterpiece. 

The message on January 8 dealt with "Transformation Through the Word" using several different scriptures, but primarily focused on Hebrews 4:12. The Word of God is the primary tool He uses in the work of transformation. As we saw in the video from January 1, God cuts away everything that does not look like Jesus. This verse tells us that God's Word cuts through and reveals the thoughts and intents of our hearts. It shows us what is not like God, and how we are to remove those things. It is spiritual surgery, and any surgery is painful. But the results are well worth the pain of the process!

Are you joining us on the journey to become God's Masterpiece? Here are the Bible challenges we are taking:

• Read the Bible every day. Yearly Bible reading plans are available at church, or there are literally thousands available free on the internet. I personally use one through www.youversion.com. It is free, and sends reminders to me daily in my email, and I can even get reminders and read it on my smart phone with a YouVersion app. Check it out.
• Use Sunday School material to supplement your daily Bible reading. The free material we provide is an excellent resource to guide you, and provide additional understanding as you read. If you don't take one home, start this week.
• Memorize Scripture. Memorizing Scripture allows you to carry more tools in your toolbox for the Holy Spirit to use as He seeks to help you each day. We have begun memorizing a verse or passage every month. For January, let's seek to memorize the key verse for the Transformation message series:

"For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them." Ephesians 2:10 (NKJV)

Remember to read with a pencil and paper nearby. Make notes about what you read, do not understand, or when God speaks to you. Seek to understand what you read. And when you understand it, ask yourself, "so what?" What do you need to do with what you have read? How do you need to respond? How will you begin and when? with whom do you need to share what you have learned? 

Set aside time each day and get to know God's Word. Before you know it, you will experience transformation!

I Like Being Married

I like being married. That statement produces a veritable smorgasbord of responses and reactions when spoken aloud. Depending on the hearer's opinions or previous experiences, I have been the subject of coy smiles, unbelieving laughter, and unmitigated contempt. Why should such a benign statement spark such emotional responses?

Could it be that many are not finding their marriages to be wedded bliss? Neither do I and my spouse. Might it be that some are discovering to their chagrin that marriage is work? My wife and I came to that conclusion ere we were scarcely out of town on our wedding day. Would we be correct in supposing that many had a skewed dream of what marriage would be, and the dream-bubble exploded soon after the nuptials, covering everything with a sticky mess? I must confess I had delusional aspirations for our married life that I have found to be unrealistic and even unhealthy. We do not have a perfect marriage. I hasten to add the overwhelming cause for that lies with me. However, I enjoy the ongoing challenge and pursuit of being married, and wish to offer a few suggestions I feel contribute to our continuing success.

• The most important element in our pursuit of marital success is commitment. My wife and I determined long ago, before our wedding day in fact, that we were in this thing for life. There are no loopholes and no escape clauses. Our only recourse is to do and be what is necessary for success in the relationship. If there is any way out, it is too easy to quit.
• Second, I choose every day to love my wife. Sometimes I must choose to love her every moment! I choose to love her when she is dressed to kill and I choose to love her when she is killing me trying to get dressed. I choose to love her in the heat of passion and I choose to love her in the cold of apathy. I choose to love her, to quote some timeless phrases, "for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part". The pivotal word in this entire paragraph is not love; it is choose. Love is a decision and a commitment I make of my own free will. I am resolved to choose daily to love my wife. No matter what.
• Third, I choose every day to pursue. I choose to pursue Christ. I choose to pursue a vibrant relationship with Him that transforms me into the best husband possible. I choose to pursue the things that build up my wife. I choose to set myself far aside. I must never give up the pursuit; for there will always be improvement that can and should be made. My wife is a priceless gift from God and is worth every effort I make and much, much more.
• Last, I believe. I believe what the Scriptures teach concerning the marriage relationship. When choosing a metaphor to illustrate the incredible relationship Christ has with His church, God chose marriage. Just as in Christ's relationship with His church, there is in our marriages the potential for unblemished purity, unrivaled holiness, unbroken commitment, unequaled sacrifice, unbridled love, unfathomable strength, and uncontainable joy. If it were not possible, our painfully honest God would have told us so. I believe it is possible.

I have not completed this journey. But these few concepts guide me like a tall and shining beacon guides wayward ships toward home and safety. They are, I believe, the foundational steps to realizing the best God has for us in our marriage relationships. I am not satisfied with where I am in my marriage; there is much progress that needs to be made. But I like the pursuit. I like being married.

The Benefit of Social Media in Ministry

Social Media are taking the world by storm. We increasingly connect with others electronically more than through any other medium. Should churches and ministries utilize this new phenomenon? Does it at least demand serious investigation?

Social media isn’t really new. While it has only recently become part of mainstream culture and the business world, people have been using digital media for networking, socializing and information gathering – almost exactly like now – for over 30 years.

The original social media network is called the telephone. Other methods of social networking through the 1970's and 1980's included several attempts at chat rooms, podcasts via voicemail, and electronic bulletin board systems. Social networking as we know it today began when the world wide web became publicly available on August 6, 1991. By the late 1990's, internet forums grew in popularity and began replacing the old systems. The first social networking website was SixDegrees, which let people make profiles and connect with friends in 1997. This kind of interactive, social web application style became popularly known as “Web 2.0” and it really gained momentum with Friendster around 2002-3, followed by MySpace (2004 – 2006) and then Facebook (2007 -> ). The big trend on the web is moving away from static “pages” and into real-time stream of status updates on what is hot and happening right now. The most popular mediums capitalizing on this demand are Twitter and Facebook. Although is trails in actual use, Twitter has caught up with Facebook in awareness and brand recognition.

The significant problems that arise in the realm of social media are human. For example, with this great new way to express oneself, users can at times post things they would not share on reflection. Social media is a public forum, and anything shared is potentially shared not only with one's friends, but with the entire planet. Therefore, expressing one's dissatisfaction with one's employer via social media is a good way to end your employment in a matter of hours. a good rule of thumb is if you would not print it on a billboard, do not post it via social media.

Another problem arises with the sheer number of social media outlets available. If you sign up even a handful of social networks and web services — think Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn — you've got multiple lists of contacts to manage in each place. Most of these services let you import contacts from at least two of the others, and even do repeat imports to find friends who've recently signed up for a service you've used for a while. However, you get the most out of each of these social tools when you take the time to groom your contacts, organizing them around different contexts and scaling your level of contact to the closeness of your relationship. But there is no way to keep your Twitter lists in sync with your Facebook lists, or to create LinkedIn relationships that reflect your contact organization in Gmail. With so many networks and contacts to keep organized, the experience becomes less than satisfying and even burdensome. Information overload is a common problem.

Today we're more likely to be drowned in a river of feeds, not to mention e-mail, texts, updates, voicemail, and the phone. There are great tools for creating, finding, organizing and viewing content, but very little to help thin out and manage the volume of information that now flows online. The challenge of information overload and attention management isn't just a technical problem, it is a human problem.

Despite the inherent problems in using social media, it has taken the world by storm. "A recent study surveyed just over 1000 Americans and asked questions such as when, where, and how much time they spend on sites and services like Facebook and Twitter. It turns out that many of us are obsessed.

Not only do we check Facebook and Twitter throughout the day, almost half of the respondents said they check in on the social media scene in bed, during the night, or as soon as they wake up in the morning. And no big surprise here: users under the age of 25 tweet more at night than older users" (Dyer, 2010, ¶3).

Recently, Starbucks® used social media to attract customers in a very successful advertising campaign. Starbucks’s Vice President of Brand, Content and Online, (Van Grove, 2010) revealed that "last year’s Free Pastry Day was a whopping success, driving more than one million people to stores" (¶1).

The Free Pastry Day promotion offered via Twitter and Facebook a free pastry alongside the purchase of any beverage until 10:30am local time. Activity on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook became electric on the day of the event as the free pastry news spread in digital form. Starbucks credits fans with the idea to use social media to drive new business (Van Grove, 2010). Starbucks also "speaks to the success of the company’s Tax Day green initiative to get customers to bring in their own tumblers in exchange for free coffee, which — like Free Pastry Day — was primarily promoted online via their Facebook Page" (Van Grove, 2010 ¶3). "Right now there’s no big brand better embracing social media than Starbucks. The coffee retailer has managed to dominate on Facebook, made news as the first company to offer a nationwide Foursquare deal, and was selected to try out Twitter’s Promoted Tweets ad platform before other advertisers will have the chance" (Van Grove, 2010, ¶ 4).

Currently, Facebook leads the way as the preferred medium of sharing information with our social network (Carlson and Angelova, 2009). In fact, with 400 million users, Facebook boasts more users than some countries' population (Zuckerberg, February 4, 2010, ¶1).

Twitter is not far behind. A recent study captured and articulated the popularity of Twitter in the United States. Edison Research and Arbitron Internet recently surveyed 1,753 Americans age 12 and over to reveal the people using Twitter and defining a new era of communication. They found that the social media giant can boast 17 million users in the United States alone (Edison 2010). With growing use and popularity, social media is here to stay. As a technologically savvy population increasingly turns to the internet for news, research, and information, the use and proliferation of social media will undoubtedly continue to skyrocket.

In fact, according to journalist Stephanie Gleason (2010), “Social media’s prominence has led many news organizations to hire social media editors, full-time staff members – sometimes several full-time staff members – completely dedicated to the rapidly growing phenomenon” (p. 6). These new managers of “citizen journalism” (Gleason, 2010, p. 6) monitor social media for news tips and trends of interest to users, making sure that traditional news reporters are abreast of current happenings of interest. They also provide news bits via social media outlets that direct interested readers to their news outlets for more information. The secular world of news and media has jumped into social media with both feet and plans to stay.

SOCIAL MEDIA IN MINISTRY

Christian author, researcher, church-planter, and social media mogul Ed Stetzer (2010) sees four distinct benefits of social media to ministry:

• Social media assist in community. “Social media itself cannot create enough community for us to live as God intends, but they can be a part of it” (¶2). Virtual community and real community are not at odds with each other. They should be and can be friends, virtual helping the real. Social media can connect people in ways that allow them to share over issues large and small. Many times people will share over social media aspects of their life they would not share otherwise. This allows friends to share that part of life with inspiration and encouragement.
• Social media assist in communication. In this age many reply on electronic communication over other forms of communication. Better still, these forms of communication follow us around, and cannot be forgotten or misplaced.
• Social media assist in inspiration. While many choose to share only the mundane via social media outlets, others are choosing to share valuable theological, classical, Scriptural, and read-worthy information. “Therefore, this medium can serve as a means of introducing participants to theologians, pastors, writers, musicians, books, conferences, and so on” (¶6).
• Social media allow better introductions. “Admittedly, people who use social networking choose to share more of themselves. However, in doing so, they have the opportunity to show the work of the gospel in their thinking, family, and lives” (¶7).

Southern Baptist seminary president and theologian Albert Mohler (2010) writes, “In 1 Peter 3:15, the faithful Christian is described as “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” Christians must be engaged in the public conversation that goes on all around us. Like the old media of print and airwaves, the new media demand our attention — not just because they are the conduits of what is new, interesting, and entertaining — but because these are the media currently shaping the minds around us, igniting the interest of the public, establishing what our friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens understand as reality” (¶9).

Missionary Karl Dahlfred (June 4, 2010) agrees. On his blog post, entitled “Should Missionaries use Facebook and Twitter?”, he gives similar reasoning for why social media can be beneficial, including increased communication with one’s support base and potential supporters. For a missionary living abroad, the quick and easy communication social media provides can be invaluable.

Conclusions

Based on the analysis of social media and its current successful uses in secular venues as well as some Christian ministries, the following conclusions are observed:

1. Social media are the fastest-growing new avenue of communication in the world today.
2. In a new era of global communication, people are connecting electronically more than ever before.
3. The costs of using social media are practically negligible.
4. Social media are already being used in various ministries with great success.

On the basis of these findings, the author recommends that local churches and Christian ministries investigate and utilize social media to enhance their ministry communication and productivity.

Sources:

Dyer, P. (March 21, 2010). We’re addicted to social networks: 48% of us check them in bed. Pamorama.net. Retrieved from http://www.pamorama.net/2010/03/21/were-addicted-to-social-networks-48-of-us-check-them-in-bed  

Starbucks used social media to get one million to stores in one day. (2010, June 8). Mashable.com. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2010/06/08/starbucks-mashable-summit/

Carlson, N. & Angelova, K. (July 21, 2009). Chart of the day: How people share content on the web. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-social-networking-sites-dominate-sharing-2009-7

Zuckerberg, M. (2010, February 4). Six years of making connections. Facebook Blog. Message posted to http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=287542162130 

Edison Research. (2010, April 29). Twitter usage in America: 2010. Retrieved from http://www.edisonresearch.com/twitter_usage_2010.php  

Gleason, S. (2010 Spring). Harnessing social media: News outlets are assigning staffers to focus on networking. American Journalism Review, 32.1, p. 6-7. 

Stetzer, E. (2010, June 1). The blessings of the new media. Tabletalk Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/blessings-new-media/

Mohler, A. (2010, June 1). After the revolution. Tabletalk Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/after-revolution/

Dahlfred, K. & S. (2010, June 4). Should missionaries use Facebook and Twitter? Dahlfred.com. Message posted to http://dahlfred.com/en/blogs/gleanings-from-the-field/351-should-missionaries-use-facebook-and-twitter

BSFL Life Truths Sunday School commentary for the week of March 7, 2010

Fractured?     1 Corinthians 1,3

I remember first discussing the options for writing this latest Sunday School material assignment for Bible Studies for Life - Life Truths. The Life Truths editor and I discussed writing on marriage or church conflict. We laughed at the similarities between the two! Although my wife and I will soon be celebrating 19 glorious and wonderful years of marriage, I still consider myself to be in a serious learning curve when it comes to marriage. Considering my past years of ministry, I really have more experience with church conflict!

That is not to say, however, that I have learned to deal effectively with every conflict that may arise in the local church. Sometimes churches can act and react in ways that defy rational explanation. Many of you reading this could supply examples from your own painful experiences. It is not my intention to air dirty laundry from the past or to tear down any local church. With the material I was privileged to author, and with these blog posts, it is my firm purpose to direct our attention to the Scriptures as our guide for healing from church hurts, and prevention from more of the same.

Paul wrote this first letter to a troubled church at Corinth. It is evident that he had received troubled news from this church that he had founded earlier, and so wrote to offer much-needed instruction to guide them through these rough spiritual and relational shoals. This week as we examine 1 Corinthians 1:10-15,26-29 it becomes clear that there were serious fractures in the Corinthian church. Misplaced loyalties and rotten human pride were evident in their words and actions. However, the crux of the problem is found in 1 Corinthians 3:1-4. Paul accuses the Corinthian believers as being "fleshly" and "living like ordinary people" (vs. 3). He uses a bit of creative word play to capture his readers' attention in verses 1 and 3. In 3:1 "flesh" (Greek sarkinos) is literally 'made of flesh'. In 3:3 "fleshly" (Greek sarkikos) is more accurately 'characterized by the flesh'. What is the difference?  There is no blame attached to those who are babes in Christ (3:1) when they act like babes. It is expected. But when those who have been Christians for years still act like babes, "characterized by the flesh" (3:3) and not the Spirit, this is scandalous.

Earlier in 1 Corinthians 1:10 Paul expressed his desire that the Corinthians be "united". This is a word that means to restore something to its rightful condition. It is used of James and John in Matthew 4:21 when they are "mending" their nets after a night of fishing. He also expresses in verse 10 his desire that there be no "divisions" among them. This word is the Greek schisma, and is the origin of our word "schism", which means a division. In John 21:11 when the disciples caught an enormous amount of fish, the text says there were no "schisms" in the net; no divisions, tears, or fractures that would allow fish to fall through and be lost.

What a picture of what church conflict does to our efforts for Christ's Kingdom! When churches fight and divide, a rift is made in our witness and precious souls needing Christ are turned off by us and slip through the gaps. How important is it, then, to heal these fractures in the fellowship? It is vital!