From the Pastor(s)

Summer is over. It seems like only yesterday that Spring was in full bloom, students were just getting out of school, and we were looking ahead expectantly to all the things that go with Summer. It’s been a great few months. We’ve enjoyed great worship services, picnics, mission trips, and we have continued to see God work in the lives of individuals who make up our church family. We are told to remember the blessings that have come from God. Summer 2011 truly is a season to remember.

 It is a season to remember, but it isn’t a season to look back on longingly. We are moving into the Fall of the year and as we do we are eagerly preparing for all God has in store for us over the coming weeks and months. It will not be long before there will be a crisp change in the air, colors in the trees, and fall decorations in the yards. Those of us at FBC
Henryville are excited as we head into this new season. We hope you are too, and as we move into the month of September and beyond we want to encourage you to make this season one of determined faithfulness. We want to challenge and encourage you to make a renewed commitment in the following areas:

1. GROW
   We hope that this season you will commit yourself to growing in your
   relationship with Jesus Christ. Spend time with him. Talk with him. Learn more
   about him. Fall more in love with him. We want your affections for Jesus Christ
   to increase. Read the Bible. Pray. Cry out to him. Obey him. Do not settle for
   complacency. (Ephesians 6:10-17)
2. GIVE
   In times of economic hardships it is easy for us to lock ourselves into a
   mindset where we view our incomes as our greatest treasure. Sometimes we fall
   into the habit of desiring to guard our money from any interference. That is
   especially true as we look toward the end of the year with the upcoming holiday
   seasons. We want to encourage you, however, to make an increased commitment to give sacrificially to the local church. By consistently giving a portion of
   your income each week and month, you partner with others for the support of
   missionaries, help meet the needs of people in our community, and help us meet
   the necessary obligations to keep our church and ministry functioning. Everything belongs to God and he provides for his children. Being assured of that truth, we hope you will give out of the generosity of your hearts for the ongoing work of proclaiming the gospel to Henryville and beyond. (2 Corinthians 9)
3. GATHER
   Finally, we want to encourage you to make this season a time of increased
   commitment to gather weekly with the local church for worship and Bible study.
   Worship services with other Christians are not extracurricular activities for
   the Christian. They are the foundation for your growth and maturity as a
   believer. They are not optional. They are essential. FBC Henryville regularly
   offers three worship services each week. On Sunday mornings we meet at 11:00 am for our main service. During that time we will be finishing our series entitled Beholding His Glory: Seeing Jesus in the Gospel of John. During Wednesday Worship we will be beginning a series entitled The Galaxy of the Gospel: Jesus and Joy in the Book of Philippians. That service is held every Wednesday at 6:30 pm. Finally, we are especially excited about our Sunday Evening Worship Services (6:15 pm). Beginning on September 11^th our children’s ministry will be kicking off the new year of AWANA. Children will have a great time as they learn more about the Bible, while our Adult worship service will continue our casual and focused time of worship. Last year we spent a year exploring a family and marriage series entitled Gospel Centered
   Homes: Following Christ for the Life of Your Family. This year we are excited
   to begin The Dance of Discipleship: Learning the Steps of Growing in Faith. We are going to spend the entire school year tackling the practical nuts and bolts of the Christian life. We hope that you will make plans to gather with us as we worship our great God and Savior each week. (Hebrews 10:24-25)
4. GO
   Ultimately those of us at FBC Henryville do not exist for ourselves. We exist
   for one Person and many peoples. We exist for the glory of the gospel of Jesus
   Christ and the proclamation of that gospel to people who desperately need to
   hear it, here in Henryville and around the world. This Fall we hope that
   the passion of the gospel to the peoples of the world will consume your
   passions. We want to mobilize and motivate you for the cause of missions. This
   season you will have the opportunity to be involved in service projects,
   evangelism, Operation Christmas Child, Thanksgiving Food Pantry Ministry, and
   our upcoming Honduras 2012 mission trip. We do not exist to serve ourselves but
   exist to spread the gospel to others. Will you make that priority your passion? (Matthew 28:16-20)

We love Fall – Cooler weather, beautiful colors, football games, bon-fires, apple cider, and upcoming holidays. We hope the most important adjective that describes this season for you, however, is faithful. We hope that you are faithful to Jesus Christ and to his church. Then and only then will this Fall be all that it was meant to be.

In the service of the gospel,

Toby, Cade, and Michael

A year ago this week (on July 20, 2010) Amy and I moved into our apartment in Henryville. We left our family and our jobs in Mississippi and settled in Indiana. We could hardly have imagined then the great blessing and gift of grace that God had given us in placing us in Henryville. This last year has been an extraordinary witness of God’s provision and it has come largely through the love and friendships we have found in the town, the community, and the church that has adopted us.

As we look back on this last year our minds spin with the changes that these twelve short months have brought. We have joined a team of ministry at a great local church. We have been blessed by being allowed to serve and participate in worship and discipleship with an amazing group of believers. I have completed a year of graduate school. Amy has left her comfort zone of the classroom and begun working two different jobs. Amy’s grandfather died in November and my grandmother died in April. We survived our first Indiana winter! We have experienced the full range of emotions from worry and grief to confidence, comfort, and celebration. This year has been remarkable and will be one that will stay sweet (even with the pangs of sadness) for the rest of our lives.

We want to express to you our church family how much we appreciate your love, support, encouragement, patience, and friendships. Each of you have blessed our lives by entering our lives during this last year. Words cannot fully express the affection and love that have connected our hearts to yours, to FBC Henryville, and to this wonderful place that we have been privileged to call home. As we think and remember God’s work in bringing us here we are forced like Paul to exclaim: “I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now” (Phil. 1:3-5).

Like Paul we are joyously thankful for such amazing gospel partners, and like Paul that leads us to a firm confidence as we face the future together (Phil. 1:6). We are excited to live here. We are excited to serve here. We are excited to look into the future with you here. And so as Amy and I have just marked a year in Henryville we begin to move into a second year. If there is grace in Christ (and there is), and if his providence and purposes are greater than we can ever imagine (and they are), then this next year will be a very good year indeed.

Thanking God for you all with love,

Cade and Amy

This summer at FBC Henryville we are planning to enjoy Picnics in the Park (PNP) on June 12th and August 7th. In July, our PNP will be a VBS Celebration at the church. In June and August, however, we will be enjoying an afternoon at the Clark County Forestry just north of Henryville. After our morning worship service (11:00 am) we will dismiss and meet back at the park between 12:30 and 1:00. The next few hours will be spent with fun, food, music, games, laughter, and lots of fellowship. Additionally, the church picnic will take the place of our Sunday evening worship service. When the picnic is over we want to encourage everyone to spend the rest of the day with their families and friends.

We hope that you’ll make plans to be at the Picnics in the Park. Bring some food, some drinks, some games, some lawn chairs, and your friends and neighbors and plan to have a great time!

And one other thing…these special events that we plan aren’t simply fun activities. They are important! Just today I read an article by Pastor John Piper entitlled “Toward a Theology of Church Picnics.” I hope you’ll read it as you begin preparing for all the many things FBC Henryville has planned for the summer!

      Just this last week I had a conversation with a friend about Ernest Hemingway’s great memoir A Moveable Feast. The conversation started me thinking about the book that I’d not picked up in years and over the last few days it has simmered into my own reflections about the life of the Christian and the ministry of the church. If you haven’t read the memoir, Hemingway’s book recounts the years (during the 1920’s) that he lived in Paris alongside many other well known American expatriate authors. The title was supposedly stirred from a conversation in which Hemingway, reflecting on those formative years in Paris, remarked that “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” The years that he spent in Paris stuck with him and the impact that it continued to have in his life was akin to packing up Paris in a “to-go-box” and taking it with him throughout his life.

     For the Christian, the feast that we are to savor is the Word of God – the Bible. There is no nourishment for the Christian’s life apart from the daily and weekly diet of Scripture. Christ, as he was engaged in the great temptations in the wilderness quoted Scripture in response to Satan: “Man cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Just as we cannot expect to physically live apart from eating physical food, the Christian cannot live apart from the life giving strength of the Bible.

     Sadly churches are far too often filled with emaciated and malnourished Christians who live through each week believing that their meager and shallow lives are the norm, when in fact their lives are meant to be far more vibrant if they would only take, taste, and see the delights of Christ’s feast found in the texts of Scripture. Far too many Christians, and far too many churches, weakly survive because of their spiritual starvation while the abundant delights and delicacies that nourish the soul lie unopened on their bedside tables.

     What about you? Are you enjoying the feast that God has placed into your hands? Do you feel a bit sluggish in your walk with Christ? Are you savoring the supper that Christ has provided, or are you allowing yourself to waste away while a feast is calling your name? If so, I want to encourage you to take and eat:

     First, recognize the great wonder of the feast that we are allowed to savor. So many Christians throughout the centuries (and even in many places around the world today) have not had the access to the Bible like we do. No generation in history has had more copies of the Bible in their language, more versions of the Bible in their language, and more technological helps for reading and understanding the Bible (Bibles on iphones, free online concordances, commentaries, devotional helps, word studies, maps) than Americans living at the beginning of the twenty first century. How will God judge us if we ignore this great gift? To whom much is given, much is required. 

     Imagine two neighbors living next door to one another. In one house the family has an abundance of food, snacks, and beverages in their pantry and refrigerator. They have so much excess that on a daily basis their dumpsters are filled with the food that they are wasting, and yet on a daily basis they refuse to eat what they have, choosing instead to stubbornly starve themselves while they lay in the very lap of luxurious plenty. In the other home, a family scrapes to survive – eating meager crackers and stale bread and drinking tap water because it is all they can afford. Each night the children in this second home are put to bed with rumbling stomachs and dreams of a good meal. Such a disparity should outrage us! Yet every day Christians in churches just like ours never touch their Bibles, while our neighbors around the world would give anything for just one copy of the Bible to have as their own. We are far too comfortable with the abundance that we have, and woe to us if we carelessly reject it.

     Second, read the Bible daily! Make the reading and study of God’s Word as normal for your daily life as drinking coffee and having physical food. Place notes on your refrigerator or in your car that jog your memory into thinking of the Bible as being just as crucial to your life as eating. Make reading your Bible each day a priority.

     Third, savor the feast! Don’t simply gorge yourself hurriedly. Read through the passages slowly. Stop and pause. Meditate. Pray. Memorize. Write down your thoughts. Tis far better to slowly savor the Bible daily than to gulp down large portions of the Bible sporadically.

     Fourth, feast with your fellow Christians. The primary way that we are fed the Bible together is through the church’s weekly worship services and preaching ministry. Reading and studying the Bible alone is crucial. Yet it is absolutely essential for us to join the feast with other brothers and sisters in Christ through weekly worship services. Additionally, it is critical for you to make participation in every worship service a priority. Worship services are like family meals. Sunday morning worship services are like breakfast (the most important meal of the day!), Sunday evenings are like dinner, and Wednesday evenings are like lunch. It is good to come to one service a week. That’s certainly better than nothing! Yet if you only come to one worship gathering (like Sunday morning), then it is like you living your life while only eating breakfast every day, every week, every month, and every year. You need multiple meals! Your body needs to eat more than once a day! Sure, cereal, eggs, toast, and juice are great, but your body craves salad, chicken, vegetables, steak, and dessert! Your spiritual diet needs to be fed by more than one meal per week. So for a well balanced diet, come to the table with other Christians every time the dinner bell is rung!

     Finally, let what you hear and read daily and weekly strengthen and nourish you throughout the week. The Word of God is to be the Christian’s moveable feast. Like Paris for Hemingway, the strength we gain from our feasting on Scripture gives us the nourishment and life we need throughout our life. We eat our meals because we know that we will need our physical energy later in the day. We continue to eat food because we know that for every day that we live we will need physical energy. We read the Bible daily because we know that we’re going to endure hours, encounters, conversations, trials, and temptations that will make spiritual strength necessary. We feast with other Christians at worship services, hearing the Word of God proclaimed, because we know that in the next week we will face spiritual hunger, weakness, and trials that will make these meals necessary. We have a moveable feast greater than a city in France. We have the moveable feast of God’s Word, and if we neglect it we do so at our own peril.

Taste and See: Tithing, Trusting, and Treasuring Christ

Week 1: What is Tithing?

Malachi 3:10

            Throughout the month of April we want to call our church to  a commitment to pray, study, and worship through our being obedient to God by tithing. April is the month of taxes and while we’re all thinking about fulfilling our obligation to our government we want to call ourselves to dwell seriously on our obedience to our God.

            Over the next few weeks we want to explain what tithing is, why it is important, and how it glorifies God in the local church. We want to especially show how trusting Christ in our finances is not meant to be a burden but a liberating delight in the goodness of God. God is not the government and the call to tithe is not meant to be a dreaded strain like tax season. Tithing to God, trusting God financially, is all about abundant liberty and joy.

            So what is it? Simply put tithing is the commitment made by followers of Jesus Christ to trust God with their incomes through giving a portion of those incomes back to God through the local church. Essentially tithing can be understood in six ways:

1. Tithing is willingly giving a portion of your income to support the ministry of the local church and the proclamation of the gospel. Normally that is an encouraged portion of ten percent. A good motto might be “if you have a dollar, give a dime.”
2. Tithing is obedience to God. God demands both that we hold nothing back from him and that we support the ministry of the local church. Members of the church are not merely the recipients of ministry but are participants in ministry. To not tithe is to disobey God. (Malachi 3:8)
3. Tithing is a visible and tangible way we participate in the ministry of the local church. Through our tithes we all unite together to support preaching, evangelism, missions, and ministry.  (2^nd Corinthians 8-9)
4. Tithing is a declaration that God owns everything and that every good gift we enjoy comes from him and him alone. Sometimes we don’t like the idea of tithing because we believe our incomes are really ours. Tithing forces us to remember that nothing we enjoy is truly owed to us. We deserve nothing. Everything we have is a gift from God –  even our paychecks. (Psalm 24:1)
5. Tithing is a physical display of trust in God to provide everything we need. Money, incomes, taxes, bills, and basic needs all have a tendency to lead to anxiety and fear. God calls us, however, to confident trust in his provision. God promises to take care of us. Tithing expresses our confidence that his words are true. (1^st Timothy 6:17-19)
6. Finally, tithing is the freeing invitation to find our greatest delight in God. There is a reason why Paul called the love of money the “root of all evil” (1^st Timothy 6:2-10). Money, and our need of it, has an almost unimaginable tendency to make us want it more and more. Additionally, we are always tempted to use money as a means of achieving greater happiness in things which ultimately can never satisfy. Tithing, giving a portion of our incomes back to God through the local church, is a discipline which displays our great joy and satisfaction in God alone. It is a testimony that he and he alone is our treasure. He and he alone is the object of our great love. He and he alone is worth more to us than any material object we could purchase, and he has given himself to us freely by his grace. When we tithe we do not buy his joyous presence. We simply declare outwardly that his joyous presence has been given to us and we are finding everything we need in him and him alone. (Psalm 37:4; Matthew 6:19-21)

Next Week: What Tithing Isn’t

Why is it that we don’t look forward to death?  Is it because we are afraid?  We look at the Apostle Paul like he is nuts when he says, to live is Christ and to die is gain?  Christians should wait for death like I waited for the Poison Ivy shot the doctor would give me when I was a kid.   I can remember how afraid I was going to the doctor knowing he was gonna give me a shot.  I don’t think they knew about pills yet.  If you had a stomach ache they would give you Pepto through a syringe.

Anyway, I remember going back to that room, agonizing because I knew he was going to give me a shot.  The nurse came in the room, and she could read me like a book, so she reached down and pulled open that bottom drawer.  I could hear the hallelujah chorus fire up in the background.  My doctor had a drawer full of little toys in the room where he gave the shots.

The nurse would come in and pull open the drawer and tell me that I could look and decide which one I wanted, but I couldn’t have the toy until I was a big boy for the doctor and let him give me a shot without me giving him a fuss.  Dr. Bolton was a very smart man.  I dug around in the drawer of toys until the doctor came in and said, “young man did you find something you like?”.  Yes sir, I replied.  He said, “Well pull your pants down and lets get this over with and you can have your toy, and if you are real good, I may let you have two”.  I jerked my pants down so fast it would’ve made your head spin.  My eyes pinned to that open drawer of toys by the door.  I wanted him to give me that shot.  I would have even been mad if he decided not to give me  a shot.  I was excited with joy about getting a shot!

What happened to me?  Why did my attitude about the shot change?  Was it because the needle wasn’t going to sting?  Was it because the medicine wasn’t going to burn like fire as it moved through my hip?  Was it because I wasn’t embarrassed to pull my pants down in front of that nurse and doctor?  No! No!! and NO!!!  It was going to sting, it was going to burn like fire, and I didn’t even want my mother to see me with my pants down.   I endured the stinging and burning.  I despised the embarrassment of pulling my pants down for the joy that set before me in that open drawer.  My attitude changed about the shot because my eyes were fixed on the prize in that drawer.

Paul wasn’t nuts.  He just had his eyes so fixed on the prize that he saw dying as gain.  Philippians 3:14- I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.  Do you see?  The prize that Paul’s eyes were so fixed on was Christ Jesus, and so beautiful was Christ to him that he counted all things but rubbish, or KJV (dung) so that he might be found in Christ.  Listen to what Paul says in Philippians 3:7-9-But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.  ⁸Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ  ⁹and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith

Do you see?  This is not the rantings of a deranged mad man.  These are the words of a man who opened the drawer and saw the prize, and it was so beautiful that he was willing to loose everything that he might gain it.  He was like the man who found the pearl of great value in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 13:45-46.  When he found the pearl he sold everything in order to buy it.  Paul’s eyes were so fixed upon Christ that when he looked at all of the hardship he went through like: being beaten, shipwrecked, and homeless.  He replied, the sufferings of this world are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us through Christ Jesus.

So Christian, I can tell you why you are afraid to die.  I can tell you why you sing in agreement with Kenny Chesney, “everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to go right now.”  It is because you have not opened up the drawer to behold that most beautiful prize.  The drawer, of course, is the Word of God, and the prize is not some 50 cent plastic toy.  It is Christ!!  Open up His Word and look at Him, and I promise the longer you look, the more beautiful death becomes.  It won’t take long before you see death as gain, and you will look at Christians who are afraid of dying and think why won’t they just open the book and look at the prize.  If they would do that they would see Him, and they would know that death is only the sable coated butler that leads to Him.  To the One who has holes in His hands and feet.  Death is that beautiful limousine that drives us to the home of the One who loves us more than we love ourselves.  WOW!!!  I can’t wait.  I get excited just thinking about it.  Don’t you?

Now, if you don’t know Christ then you have great reason to be afraid, but it’s not dying that you need to be afraid of, it’s the wrath of God that will be poured out on the unrighteousness of men, Romans 1:18.  However, I have good news.  Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, Acts 16:31.  Those of you who are Christians, join in with creation and groan for the day when Christ will come and make all things new.  Let us cry Revelation 22:20- even so now come Lord Jesus!

In Christ,

Toby