Donald Miller’s new book, the one with the awkwardly long title, is all the rage. Last week three of my friends who teach in churches started the new year off with a reflection on “living a better story”. I thought the book was some of his best writing. The challenge to live out better scenes in the narrative of life is something all of us can respond to.

This morning, I was reading a short reflection by a guy named Will Willimon, who gives a different pitch to the concept of living out one’s story:

“Although the modern world has attempted to convince us that we are writing our own stories, the Christian faith keeps asserting that we live in stories that we did not write. Preachers have the privilege of talking people into a world where much is afoot and some Other is the author of the true story of what is going on in us and in the world. As Paul told his congregation, ‘You are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God’ (2 Cor 3:3).”

Here are the books I plan to kick off the new year with, as I take some time to study the theology of preaching. I wish I could say they are self-selected, but they’re all a part of a class I’m taking with Will Willimon, former Dean of the Chapel at Duke Divinity School.

Bryan Chapell, Christ-centered Preaching
Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to read the Bible for all its worth
James F. Kay, Preaching and Theology
Thomas Long, The Witness of Preaching
Doug Pagitt, Preaching Re-imagined
Haddon Robinson, Biblical Preaching
James Stewart, Heralds of God
John Stott, Between Two Worlds
Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life
William Willimon, Easter Redone: Keeping Preaching Fresh
William Willimon, Proclamation and Theology
William Willimon, Peculiar Speech
William Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching

The simplest way for love to come to life, is when we give. And not just money, not just stuff, but when we give ourselves,

our time,
our attention,
our service,
it’s when we sacrifice for someone else.

That’s when love comes to life. For God so loved the world, that he gave.

So this Christmas, as you’re celebrating traditions, maybe some of you are creating traditions. What if this Christmas became the best Christmas, not because of what we received, what we got, or where we went, but because we gave.

Jesus knew that this was the best way to live. One day he said,

It is more blessed to give than to receive.

This week I came across a study, that John Ortberg writes about, in which high school students, who were tested below grade reading level, were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group helped tutor younger children, and the other group didn’t do anything. No serving, no volunteer work. The students in the group that tutored ended up being twelve times more likely to graduate from high school than the students in the non-serving group. High school students involved in volunteering are less likely to drop out, less likely to use drugs, less likely candidates for teenage pregnancy, more likely to graduate, more likely to have a higher level of esteem, and more likely to go on to college.

It is better to give than to receive, because that’s what love always does – it gives itself away.

What a great thing to remember this time of year, when we are inundated with images and stories and ads, that brainwash our minds with a consumerist,

want more,
spend more,
buy more,
charge more,
get more way of life.

It is more blessed to give, than to receive.

That’s what Christmas love is all about.

A powerful picture of what it means to love someone in the tension between grace and truth.

My mentor in preaching sent me this last week, words written by Oswald Chambers.

“If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you can. If you do not, someone will be the poorer all the days of his life. Struggle to re-express some truth of God to yourself, and God will use that expression to someone else. Go through the winepress of God where the grapes are crushed. You must struggle to get expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else; but if you say lazily—‘I am not going to struggle to express this thing for myself, I will borrow what I say,’ the expression will not only be of no use to you, but of no use to anyone. Try to re-state to yourself what you implicitly feel to be God’s truth, and you give God a chance to pass it on to someone else through you.”

“Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily. Our position is not ours until we make it ours by suffering. The author who benefits you is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been struggling for utterance in you.”

It is through the patient struggle of learning to communicate a truth through our own lives, that our words can become “the very wine of strengthening” for someone else.

If you’re looking for a state-of-the-art speed dating service, this would be one worth looking into.

Henry Cloud asks a great question for ever leader in his recent book, "Integrity":  Are you working on closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be, in terms of character and integrity?  

There are three dangers around the corner for any leader who lets their character growth begin to slide:

1.  Hitting a performance ceiling well below one's potential.

2.  Hitting a big challenge, obstacle or scenario that derails you.

3.  Reaching high levels of success only to self-destruct and lose it all.

If you look at where you are, and see that you're not yet where you want to be, that's the character gap. It's one of our greatest challenges, but it's also a daily opportunity for growth.

Agree or disagree: when a church puts “multigenerational” in their tagline, or on their website, what they really mean is, “we are an aging church that wants to have more young people attending so that we don’t die, but we don’t want to change enough to actually attract any of them to come.” John Ortberg wrote a fascinating article a few weeks ago in which he talks about the divide between generations, especially when it comes to cultivating vibrant communities of faith. A couple of his key thoughts:

• Older church members tend to underestimate the difference between the generations, while younger people tend to overestimate that divide.
• One of the greatest threats to healthy growth in a church is that each generation or group of people tend to ask the question, “am I gaining or losing influence in this community?”
• If there are not regular disagreements in leadership circles of a church, it’s likely that as leaders we have not fully engaged with people of each generation.

Trying to reach multiple generations will inevitably lead to conflict – and that’s not such a bad thing, because that’s where we grow.

The article can be found here.

Cats

This pretty much captures my thoughts about cats. I can’t wait to use this in a sermon.

Interviewing Satan

Craig Groeschel is a pastor in Oklahoma, who is always finding creative ways to communicate help people think about faith and life. I didn’t realize he was this funny, though…