Uganda/Kenya 2008
As many of you know, I have had the opportunity to serve the Lord in several recent summers by training local pastors in Uganda and Kenya for Church Planting International. Click “Missions” to read about those ventures (with pictures). Serving the Lord alongside my African brethren has been a great privilege.
This year I have been invited to teach a modular course in theology to 30 pastors working on their certificate with Christian Life Teachings International, July 14-25. CLTI is a local indigenous training ministry founded by a man who was my student on one of the early trips. The course will take place in Mbale, Uganda. My topic will be the theology of the Holy Spirit, a very crucial doctrine in an area ravaged by “Health and Wealth” teaching and other less than biblical emphases in this area. We will use my book The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit as our text. While I am with these men I will also preach in as many of their churches as I can, so they can hopefully see me using the very things I am teaching them.
These pastors are usually men with only a high school education, for whom the cost of formal training at a local Bible College is prohibitive. Their rural parishioners may “tithe” by bringing a sweet potato or a cassava root or an ear of maize, since they are subsistence farmers. The pastors aren’t going to starve, but they have no way of raising cash to pay for Bible College or seminary. I therefore try to take a little Bible College to them. They have good hearts and love the Lord, but are understandably weak in such critical areas as hermeneutics, methods of sermon preparation, and theology. What I am able to give them in our concentrated time together has made a huge difference, for they are eager to learn and to “put their training on the ground,” as they like to say.
In order to fulfill this assignment I will have to raise at least $3,000.00 to pay for updating my shots, plane fare, transportation within the country, etc. Many of you have generously helped with these missions in the past. If the Lord should lead you to participate this year, I can promise that you will be part of a team whose ministry will bear fruit in the churches of Eastern Uganda for years to come. Whether you can help with a gift or not, your prayers are critical to any success the ministry can hope to have.
To receive a receipt for tax purposes, please make out your checks to Church Planting International. You can send them to me at P. O. Box # 800807, Toccoa Falls, GA. 30598.
Current Sermons: The Gospel of Luke
The Via Dolorosa
As we follow the sufferings of Jesus Christ, who, like Paul, “finished the course and kept the faith,” we are come to the very last lap: the “Via Dolorosa.” This is that sorrowful path that will lead directly to Golgotha, to the cross. Every detail that is recorded about our Lord’s steps on that path is laden with significance and tells us why he was going that way. Let us recognize the love of our Lord Jesus Christ demonstrated here for us. It was a costly love, a love with commitment that calls on us to take up the cross like Simon and weep for our generation. Therefore, as we remember that love, let us respond to it in kind. African theologian Philip Muinde puts that response this way: “Following the despised Galilean means a willingness to say, ‘Lord, I will follow whithersoever thou goest,’ not only to be excited about the Triumphal Entries but also to travel the Via Dolorosa. It is voluntarily to embrace a faith which exposes Self to fresh denial, disgrace, and death. It is also to acknowledge and identify with the Lordship of Jesus Christ at every moment, whatever the cost. It is to be crucified with Christ, and continually to unlearn Self and learn Him.”
Click Luke 23:26-31 for full sermon.
All sermons on the Gospel of Luke.
The Thief on the Cross
We have been studying in the last few weeks the most profound and inexhaustible theme in all the Bible: the love of Jesus Christ for his own. For we have seen something of the magnitude of the price he paid for our redemption. We have seen his agony in Gethsemane, his betrayal by his friends, his rejection by his people, his mocking by Herod, his condemnation by Pilate, and his stumbling beneath the Cross on the Via Dolorosa. And now, finally nailed and dying, we see him still steadfast in his commitment to commend God’s love to us in this, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. In the passage we reach today, all this is revealed in two ways: by the Prayer of the Savior, and by the Penitence of the Sinner.
Click Luke 23:32-43 for full sermon.
All sermons on the Gospel of Luke.
Reviews
Nim's Island
Nim's Island is a sweet little picture with much in it to enjoy, although one's suspension of disbelief gets rather challenged by having not one but three Lassies: a sea lion, an albatross, and a lizard, any one of which would have beat the original Lassie back to Mom with the message that Timmy was in the Well. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Read the full review.
Comment
As I look at the current scene, I see a church in desperate need of three great movements of God:
Renaissance:
A recovery of the life of the mind. An increasingly illiterate generation is harder to reach with a faith founded on the message of a Book; an increasingly illiterate church is incapable of experiencing full-orbed Christianity based on the whole counsel of God;
Reformation:
A recovery of sound doctrine. Otherwise, we gorge ourselves on spiritual junk food while the great truths of the faith slip through our fingers;
Revival:
A recovery of vital spirituality. The great error of our generation is to believe that this recovery is possible apart from the first two. Biblically and historically it is not. Without Renaissance and Reformation, all our zeal for Revival is vanity and striving after wind.
On February 2, 2002, I delivered 5 Theses on Ministry at University Church in Athens, GA. This sermon is a revision of my "Final Tirade and Last Diatribe at Trinity Fellowship of Toccoa." It is available here as a Microsoft Word document: 5 Theses on Ministry.