Road Warriors for God

I recently read that one need not go overseas to be a missionary. The concept was not new, but it reminded me that I have another take on that thought I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. This is it.

You also don’t have to be sent out by a mission organization to be an effective missionary for God. My last ministry position and current home church is First Church of God in St Joseph, Michigan. We have an awesome missions program that began over a hundred years ago when a group of German immigrants gathered in St Joseph and found there was no Church of God congregation. They started one and in so doing began one of the greatest home, national, and international mission organizations in the state of Michigan.

But a large amount of our missions outreach has nothing to with our mission program. We are in the unique position as a congregation to be in the communities the Whirlpool Corporation and several other world class corporations call home. Working in Whirlpool and other great companies of Southwest Michigan are a huge number of godly men and women who love the Lord and love their jobs (or at least love their families enough to do their jobs). They may be in church on Sunday morning, but on Monday they may be on their way to any continent in the world. Wherever they go in the world they take their faith with them and live it out day after day in all the places they go. Their salaries and travel expenses are paid by their employers and their primary concern is to do the work they are sent to do—selling product, training workers and leaders, solving problems, or doing a multitude of other significant tasks I can’t even comprehend.

My point is that they do it as godly men and women who love the Lord and show it in simple, but significant ways that impact the people with whom they work and interact in their travels. They may work for Whirlpool or some other corporation, but they are no less on mission for God than I was when I went to Africa as a missionary. They go as caring, considerate individuals who lavish God’s grace on the people they meet in the airports, hotels, and restaurants in addition to the places where they do the work they are sent to do.

One friend often goes to China and India. Some time ago in China, when he finished teaching a class, he had a young lady approach him who asked if he were a Christian. My friend was a bit shocked. He had been very careful to not be an evangelist for Christ, because it wasn’t allowed in China, so he couldn’t imagine what he could have said that would make her think that. He told her he was a Christian, but asked how she knew. She said something like this, “I’m a Christian too, and I thought you acted like a Christian.” Even in a normal Christian life, God’s grace shines through.

I’ve heard so many stories like this. A frustrating experience in an airport with the temptation to lose it, but by God’s grace you don’t, and God reveals himself through you to someone who really needs to see him in a practical real-life situation—and God gets the glory!

It doesn’t matter what you do. If it is a job that somehow adds to the good of society you can do it as a form of ministry that is just as significant as preaching the Gospel or “going” on mission.

I'm Rick Blumenberg and that's My View from Tanner Creek.
    

A Gift of Music

by Rick Blumenberg / @rickblumenberg

The Lord God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, loves us (humanity) with an unconditional love and one of the most wonderful expressions of this great love for humanity is the gift of music. God built this wonderful gift into the DNA of the universe. It blesses our lives in so many ways, from the privilege of listening to its beauty, or perhaps, even participating in the creation of music through singing or playing an instrument. To some God even gives the gift of composition, so that He is able to share the music of heaven, by putting it into our hearts and minds so it can be written, and sung, and played, for the enjoyment of us still here on earth.

Recently I had the experience of hearing a recording of Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen, as sung by K. D. Lang at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I don’t know if either of them are believers—Cohen is Jewish, but I’m not sure if he is a man of faith. On the other hand, God must have great faith in him or he wouldn’t have given him such an amazingly beautiful song. The song is really about the brokenness of humanity, and how God is able to draw out worship from our brokenness so he can inhabit our praise and thus fill us with his healing Presence.

And God’s praise breaks out in some of the most amazing places! I’ve never had the least desire to even see the movie Shrek. I don’t care much for cartoons. But I understand this song was included in that soundtrack. It reminds me of the words of Jesus when he said, “If we don’t praise God the rocks will cry out.” In our day God’s praise is breaking out in some amazing places through the medium of music.

God is amazingly generous with his marvelous gifts of life and love….such as the ability to sing and play inspired music. For his wonderful gifts, let us give heartfelt praise, genuine appreciation, and most of all, sincere worship. Hallelujah is such a marvelous word of praise to be sung so beautifully and thus penetrate the hearts of those who are not yet believers, but cannot help but be so when they hear it sung or when they sing along in these words of exuberant praise to Almighty God.

Thank you, Leonard Cohen and K. D. Lang, and all of you “sweet singers of Israel” who use your gifts to praise the God of heaven and all creation.

I’m Rick Blumenberg, and that’s My View from Tanner Creek.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e26D3w5Glqk&list=PL19612EE4524F32A3&index=4

         

Building Up People

I love to build—people! (I don't mean create people of course—that's God's business.) But many times people have been beaten down by the circumstances of life, or mistakes they have made until they don't have a very good impression of themselves. When that happens they need someone to build them up—to help them see themselves as God sees them. Beautiful! Creative! Full of exciting possibility and unlimited potential!

That's what the church is all about—building up people. All of us who are in God's family (the church) are responsible to build each other up by helping each other to grow, to learn, to improve and to be all that God has created us to be. The Bible word for this activity is to "edify". We do the things that “edify” or build each other up.

The building in which the church meets is merely a tool to build up people. It is a convenient place to introduce them to the radiance of the living Christ, to help them to love him as we do, and to help us all to love him more and become more like him. The building in which people worship is a marvelous tool for which we fervently thank God, but it is only a tool and not the church.

It is time the people of God began saying no to our own limitations and Yes to God's unlimited potential. We can say it with our money, with our time, with our talents, and our energy. It is important that we all share the load so we can all share in the process of building people, as well as the satisfaction that comes in seeing a job well done.

A smile and/or a word of encouragement or compliment for a job well done is a powerful building tool. It makes for strong persons who will last through the hard times as God uses these encouraging thoughts by bringing them to our remembrance when we need them most—when we’re feeling down and detestable and really need to know there is someone who thinks we’re someone special and who thinks well of us even when we find it difficult to think well of our selves.

This attitude should be the norm for all our interactions with people, both in the church and in the wider world. Some people have the gift of encouragement and this comes natural to them, but all of us can do it if we try.

When buildings are needed to do the work of God, it is good to build them, but we must not confuse a construction project with building the true church. Our efforts may help to erect a building that will last a mere hundred years or so, or we can build up people who will live for eternity.

I'm Rick Blumenberg . . . and that's My View from Tanner Creek.
   

Slaughter of the Innocents—40th Anniversary

by Rick Blumenberg / @rickblumenberg

     
It is difficult to imagine a man like Herod. He was pro­bably one of the cruelest men who ever lived. Because of a pervasive fear someone would take his throne and he would be killed, he was vicious toward any threat, real or imagined. When he heard wise men had come to wor­ship a new Jewish king he called them to his palace to find and destroy the baby Jesus. (Matthew 2:13-23) His plot was foiled when God directed the wise men to go home by another route, but Herod devised another plan so vile we can hardly imagine it. He att­em­pted to destroy Jesus by taking the lives of every baby boy born in that part of the world who was under two years of age!
     

As horrible as that may seem, Herod's evil scheme was far surpassed in horror and bloodshed when the Supreme Court of the United States made it legal for anyone who chose to do so, to destroy their own unborn children through the practice of legalized abortion.

     
As we think about the 40^th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, now more than 55 million children have had their lives callously snuffed out in hospitals designed to be in­stitu­tions of healing. In hospital mater­nity wards and nur­series throughout the world, doctors struggle to save babies youn­ger and smaller than those being destroyed in legalized abortions!

   
Abortion by choice is a self-inflicted death-blow to the home. If we can so easily destroy our unborn children, our living ones come next. When “pro-choice” groups first advocated legalized abortion as a means of birth control one reason in its favor was that it would diminish the incidence of child abuse since unwanted children would no longer be born. We don't hear this much anymore because we all know that since the legalization of abortion the incidences of child pornography, child abuse and child molesta­tion have literally skyrocketed upward. When we devalue any person or people, we devalue us all.

  

Any mother who has ever carried a child to term, any father who eagerly awaits the birth of a child, or any parents who lost an eagerly awaited child by miscarriage, will tell you that at eight months the baby is very much a per­son—a living being with an already developing personality. Thus life (as an individual hu­man being) must begin at conception or somewhere between conception and eight months....or is it seven? Six? Two?

      

Conception is the only answer that makes sense.

     

When we claim the unborn child is not human, it is only a small step to saying the helpless child, senior adult, mentally handicapped, or some other less than “perfect” beings are also less than human and they, too, can be exploited. Even as I write this, persons come to my mind in all of these categories and I remind myself they are all perfect just as they are!

     

When we claim unborn children are somehow less than human and therefore reasonable targets for abortion, we return to the mentality that produced slavery, the persecution and near destruction of the Native American peoples, and the holocaust of Jewish and Gypsy peoples by the Nazis. When we want to do a really evil thing to an­other human being we always seem to rationalize it by pretending they are not human, or, are somehow sub-human.

     

Someday history will look back on the abortion massacre of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the same revulsion with which we remember these other self-inflicted plagues of humanity.

     

On this January while we recognize the 40 anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, I know some of you who read this may have been deluded by the abortionists and agreed to a procedure for yourself, a loved one, or perhaps for unknown persons in an abortion mill. That agreement now leaves an ache in your heart that seemingly cannot be healed. I assure you Jesus Christ can heal your aching heart. He loves you and will bring grace and peace if you will surrender the pain to him. The Bible tells us there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1) so I urge you to trust him for complete healing.

     

I’m Rick Blumenberg and that’s My View from Tanner Creek.
   

The Christ Impact in Washington

by Rick Blumenberg / @rickblumenberg

In the words of Wikipedia, “The widow of a slain Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers will help open the inaugural ceremony Monday. President Obama has selected activist Myrlie Evers-Williams to deliver the invocation. She's the first woman and lay person to have the honor.”

This is now past tense instead of future and she did well, bringing honor to her gender, her race, to that great host of godly laity she represented but especially to Almighty God and his Son, Jesus Christ, in whose name she prayed.

I joined with Mrs. Evers-Williams as she prayed for blessings on our nation and on every family throughout our land, followed by a rousing and prayerful rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic by the awesome Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir and wonderfully sung again by pop singer Beyonce.

Before President Obama and his family came to the ceremony they joined the congregation at St John’s Episcopal Church for a time of worship, as has been the custom of presidents through the years.

When Associate Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor swore in Vice President Joseph Biden it was in the name of God. When Chief Justice John Roberts swore in our president, the oath included and ended with the words “so help me God.”

I know we are not perfect and have many failings, but I am convinced we are still “One Nation Under God”. Sometimes we don’t act like it and many who are blessed by Almighty God to live in this land do not recognize or worship Him.

When our president began his speech with words from our Declaration of Independence, including “we  hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” he was recognizing our relationship, as a nation, with the God of all creation, the only true and living God. I don’t know how deep his faith is, but I am convinced that leading this nation of believers draws the president closer to God. It doesn’t matter how the president feels about it when he/she comes into office, serving a praying people who hold him up in prayer day after day, soon makes him realize he could not survive without those prayers and in becoming thankful for those prayers becomes ever more believing as he senses the strong support of Almighty God in this awesome task as leader of this great nation.

I don’t know how many people in the United States are believers in God. Most are Christians, (about 73%) many are Jewish and a few are Muslims and other God-worshipping religious groups. Although many believers in God do not recognize Christ as Savior, they are nevertheless blessed by their relationship with God and they are blessed by the coming of Jesus, whether they know it or not.

But all in all, we are a Christian nation. Some scoff at such a concept and others scorn it if it were true but don’t believe it is, but that powerful praying, preaching, believing horde of godly men, women and children, who undergird our nation with their petitions to God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and who do their best to serve God day after day—they are the ones who make this a Christian nation. It is their faith that sustains us and brings us the favor of Almighty God.

Some question whether or not our president is a Christian, and we know faith in Christ is not required to serve in that high office, but regardless, we heard our president conclude his speech with these powerful words, “Thank you and God bless you, and God bless these United States of America”. We need to recognize that we really are a nation under God and we remain a Christian nation, if for no other reason than the sheer number of Christ-followers who make up the people of our land.

I’m Rick Blumenberg and these are my thoughts on the Inauguration of President Barack Obama—My View from here on Tanner Creek.