A Pastor's Thoughts

We are processing in fighting Alameda County, who wants to shut down our church.  In order to inform churches and pastors about this fight, this email was sent to over 2,000 churches via email: To all pastors, church leaders and Christians, There is an assault on our church in Alameda County.  For the last 8 years the county has been coming against us with ambitious tax charges, health code violations and sanitary sewer inspections. We have chosen to expose their attacks and we are asking for your prayers as we proceed.  You need to know this:  if the county successfully shuts down our church, your church could be next.  No church is safe. We will supply further information as things progress.  God bless you and your church as you serve your king. Please continue to pray for our church

God speaks.  Not often, in an audible voice from the sky, but he does speak.  In the Bible he spoke with a voice, he showed pictures and visions and dreams to people.  Today people speak of impressions in their spirit or mind, which was not talked about in the Bible. Today, I believe that people claim God speaks much more than he does.  The primary reason I say this is that God does not need to speak at all.  God has said all that is needed in his Word, the Bible.  We have everything that is required for life and godliness in the pages of our Bibles.  Bibles are not hard to get, except in anti-God countries, yet we still manage to smuggle them into every country and people group.   For those that claim God is a veritable chatterbox I have to wonder what value that brings to their life.  People who claim to hear God’s voice all the time do not seem to have greater biblical understanding.  In fact, people who hear God’s voice all the time tend to be less educated in the theologi

Recently my wife and I went to Lake Tahoe to get away, deal with my stress and relax.  Over the years, South Lake Tahoe, near Stateline has morphed into a timeshare and resort mecca with Marriott buying many acres on one side of the street and a company called Zalanta buying the other.  Since there is no gambling allowed in California, yet, restaurants, resorts and movie theaters keep families entertained on the California side, just a couple blocks from Nevada. When we come up to Tahoe, we usually stop at a local grocery store and get provisions and ammenitites.  Today, we were walked by a man in the grocery store selling vacation ownership, or timeshares.  He offered us $150 at a local ChartHouse resterount and a 2 day, 3 night stay at his resort.  All of this for a 90 minute presentation.  Many people I know and know of would jump at the chance of a $150 steak and lobster dinner and a free stay at a luxery hotel.  As we walked around the grocery store, I thought about what I w

Psalm 18 is a rather long psalm with 50 verses.  In this Psalm, David remembers and recounts the various victories he has had.  For David these would be military victories.  Specifically, David fought against Saul, or usually ran from him, he fought the various armies that were occupying the promised land and he fought against his son Absolom when Absolom wanted to take the throne by force.  David, near the end of his life, takes the time to understand that God’s hand was the victory in each battle David fought. In the first part of the Psalm, David lists 7 metaphors to describe God.  These metaphors denote strength and safety.  The most repeated name for God in this psalm is “rock.”  The Lord is David’s rock.  A rock can be a place of safety and a place of refuge. For us today, I think we can get so busy in doing the right thing, or doing things just to survive, that we forget how much God has done for us.  Few of us today will be leading vast armies to take promised land, yet eve

Many years ago, I was caught in a highway patrol sting.  They had parked a school bus on the sidewalk in the industrial section of town.  There was clearly no one in the bus and the school bus was from a town many miles away.  I drove past it and as I got even with it, all the lights on the bus began to flash and the little stop sign popped out.  Then a highway patrol office ran into the road, on foot and stood in front of my car.  He wrote me a ticket for passing a school bus that had flashing lights.  The ticket turned out to be $695.00. I fought the ticket and even went to traffic court.  The officer who wrote the ticket did not show up so I won.  Eight months after the event, after I paid the ticket, I received the $695 back from the court. This event has stayed with me and brought to my thinking a distrust for police officers and highway patrol.  What was done was illegal.  My behavior has also changed.  Whenever I see a parked school bus, I will turn so I do not have to pass

In the Psalms, David is usually telling God something, or asking God something.  Sometime he is talking to other people or talking about God, but the psalms are songs that can be used as prayers. As previously written, David tells God about his standing, what he is doing right or wrong and he even tells God what God has done or is doing.  In most psalms, David also includes supplication.  Supplication is a fancy word which means David asks for stuff.  He might ask for things or safety or for revenge or for damage done to his enemies.  There is little to no tracking on whether David gets most, some or few of his requests answered favorably.  Therefore, people have not studied, at length,  David’s requests. Yet, we know David was called by God a man after God’s heart, so we can look at what David did and see how it fits into our practice. There may be more books, websites and articles on prayer than any other biblical subject.  This is because, there is a desire in many people’s he

Throughout the Psalms, David proclaims various aspects of the Law or the Covenant given at Mt. Sinai.  He states the benefits and promises that God gave to Moses and which are part of the covenant that David stands on.  This covenant contained aspects of forgiveness that were obtained through the sacrifice of animals in the Tabernacle. Modern Christians are also under a covenant.  This is because God always interfaces with and has a relationship with people based on a covenant.  The Christian Covenant is called the New Covenant because it is presented in opposition to the Old Covenant.  Just as David would repeat aspects of his covenant, we can repeat aspects of our covenant in our prayers.  This would be done to state our standing before God, in Jesus Christ. Some might say that this is not necessary because God knows our standing and he knows our covenant.  After all, he invented it.  But if we take God’s omniscience as a basis for what we pray and what we do not pray, we would e

In various Psalms, like Psalm 17, David makes the point of how righteous he is.  He uses the fact that he does not lie or is not involved in violence, as a reason that God should grant his request.  We can read these claims of David and wonder what planet he is living on.  After all, David killed Uriah and essentially raped Bathsheba.  Yet David can claim his righteousness. To understand David’s standing before God, we need to understand the covenant that he lived under.  God made a way at Sinai for the forgiveness of sins.  Once the Tabernacle was built and the high priest was consecrated, animals could be sacrificed and atonement for sin would be provided.  Annually on the Day of Atonement, a sacrifice would be performed for the entire Jewish nation.  When that sacrifice was completed and the blood was taken into the Holy of Holies, for a brief second, Israel would stand completely sinless before God.  Then someone would speak or act and the sins would begin to pile up. David was

God made everything that exists.  God did not create random things and spin them off into the universe, never to interact with them again.  God created everything for a purpose.  Being in relationship with his people moves that purpose along.  From God’s first interchange with people, God presented rules.  For Adam and Eve, there were two rules.  Eat of every tree was the first rule.  Do not eat of that one tree was the second rule.  Built into the second rule was a consequence, which was death.  We all know how the story went and they were ejected from the garden, they became spiritually dead and their mortal bodies eventually died. Then God worked on forming a group call the Jews.  When he finally got them to Sinai, he gave them their rules.  Adam and Eve basically had 1 rule, the Jews have 613 rules.  If they kept all the rules, they would be blessed, if they broken the rules they would be cursed.  The Old Testament is the story of them breaking the rules.  The Northern Kingdom wa

Some people are considered prayer warriors.  Other seems to always be speaking of the great things God is doing, while others just wonder what God is doing.  Others seem so frazzled and disconnected that they don’t seem to have any relationship with God. As we read through the Psalms, David seems to have great confidence in God.  He asks great things of God and we know from the rest of Scripture that David was the King of Israel, and Jews today consider him the greatest king of Israel.  God picked David’s throne to be the eternal throne of Jesus and everywhere you look, even with David’s sin, David was confident in God and God blessed him. There are many reasons for David’s attitude and they are reflected in the Psalms.  The foundation of David’s relationship with God is that David acted righteously, kept righteous people around him and tried to be obedient.  Today there seems to be the belief that once people are saved by grace, they are done.  They can now live anyway they want a