Pause: with Pastor Aaron

When I was a boy I was introduced to a little chorus that went something like this, "Practice makes perfect, practice makes perfect. I guess if I practice the better I'll be." In this age of video, they communicate it a lot better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm-RztsGDEw This truth is not Christian per say, but a hard reality.  For anything that we do in life, which we want to do with excellence, we must practice. In practicing we are training. Thus to be excellent, we must commit to training. I hated that season as an athlete. I loved the game. I loved to run and move for the prize of winning the game, but I hated the practice because I could not see the goal. My coaches could. My body did. I could not and did not because I wanted quick satisfaction. I fear I never became the athlete I could have been for my lack of drive to practice. I fear that I developed bad habits that God, failures and life have had to break. The truth here is simple, if we want to ...

Perhaps the hardest time to trust God is when we are being attacked by those who we think do not have the truth on their side.   Our human instinct is to rise up in defense of ourselves, to try to 'set straight' the people who argue as if they are right and you are wrong.   There are many tactics that we often employ in defensiveness, but what if they are all wrong save one.   What if defensiveness was as great of a sin as the wrong being committed against the person at that time? Consider todays verse that gave me pause:   Mark 15:32, "Let this Messiah, this king of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.   Those crucified with Him also heaped insults on Him." The context of the verse is Jesus at Golgotha.   He has been already been falsely charged, assaulted, sleep deprived, man handled, taken to illegitimate courts, handed over to Rome as a common criminal, rejected by those who a week ago 'loved' him, scourged, humiliate...

As the pastor in several churches in my career, and a pastor's son in many others,  I have spent a lifetime learning the culture of church.   My conclusion is that you can have a variety of denominations, but in most cases human nature is human nature.  We may believe differently, but in many ways we act the same regardless of what church we worship in. An example is in our giving.  What my experience has been is that we often neglect the simple truths of giving, out and out reject them, or we complicate them with rules and extra Biblical thinking.  We neglect to remember that we are stewards of His greater resources.  We are managers of His money, His time and His giftedness within us.  He asks so little of His own resources, yet we rationalize from a mixed bag of priorities what we think we need to do, spend money on and invest in. Make no mistake, God will judge us on this.  It's that big of a deal. My quest lately has been to read the gosp...