New Spiritual Strategies for a Changing World
Tom Shrader addresses how people respond to rapid social change by either going inner-directed (trusting feelings) or seeking authoritarian religion. He presents five timeless spiritual strategies from Acts 2:42: commitment to fellowship, dedication to learning God's Word, generous giving of time and money, working out salvation through service, and sharing faith with urgency. These basics remain unchanged despite cultural upheaval, providing stability and purpose for believers navigating uncertain times.
“Deep is basic - God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: How to Stay Afloat in a World That's Circling the Drain (2008)
Recorded: February 28, 2008
Duration: 39 min
Themes: change, uncertainty, fellowship, learning, giving, service, evangelism, stability, facing uncertainty, navigating social change, seeking direction, new believer, church member, spiritual seeker, feeling overwhelmed, young adult
Scripture: Acts 2:41-42, Hebrews 10:24, 2 Timothy 2:15, 2 Timothy 3:5, 2 Timothy 3:16, Luke 12:32, Matthew 6:19, Ephesians 2:8-10, Philippians 2, John 17:4, John 1:35-42, 1 Peter 1:12
Theological Themes: ecclesiology, church community, biblical authority, scripture study, stewardship, sanctification, discipleship, spiritual formation
Full Transcript
Grab your outline, we're going to follow the outline, and here's what I didn't do. I looked at having Sharon redo these because obviously they're dated when we're talking about 1980s and Megatrends 2000, and it was easy to update them. For me, I just had to make a few changes and give them to Sharon. I decided not to do that for this reason. There's something particularly powerful, it seems to me, about realizing that we put this study together 23 years ago, and hopefully you're going to see it's as fresh as today.
I've been doing this now for 26 years, I think. In reality, while a lot of things have changed, nothing has changed in the human condition. Since the problems that we face at our core are not economic or educational, but spiritual, the answers haven't really changed. We're going to look at what we've called new strategies, new spiritual strategies. In reality, they're not new. It's the same old thing.
Megatrends and Spiritual Seeking
In 1990, John Nesbitt and his associate published a book called Megatrends 2000. I remember when I read it, I thought, I'm going to save this book, still have it, just saw it the other day out in the garage, I'm going to save this book, because it had some predictions, and see how accurate they were. Here's what Nesbitt predicted, and I think it's on your outline. He said, when people are buffeted by change, the need for spiritual belief intensifies. That's true always.
When things are happening as fast, for example, as they are now, it's the equivalent of foxhole conversion. He said, most will seek insurance in one of two ways. One, they'll either go inner directed, they'll trust their inside feelings, or two, through outer directed, this is the way it is, authoritarian religions. Both are flourishing today. In periods of massive social change, the depth of religious experience exceeds organized religions' capacity to invoke it. I'm not sure what that means. Here's what I do know. He's exactly right.
Pick and Choose Spirituality
A friend of mine the other day was, and it happens to be Catholic, so if you're Catholic, this is not an anti, this is to tell the story, but they were up in Flag, and they were meeting some friends, and some friends had some other friends, and they were going to get together for Saturday dinner, and they said, our friends go to Mass on Saturday night. We can meet you at the restaurant, or you can go to Mass with us. My friend said, hey, we'll go to Mass with you. We'll see what this is about. Never been.
And so afterwards, they were at dinner talking, and he was questioning the man who felt compelled to go to Mass, and asking him about different issues, and they got to, the issue will cloud the topic, but they got to a lifestyle issue. And he said, what do you think about that? And he said, well, I think that it's this. And he said, but your church doesn't teach that. He said, I don't care. I don't care what the church teaches. This is what I think. This is what I feel.
Now, that's a particularly powerful illustration, when you think, this is a guy who's on vacation, who's dragging his four friends to a Mass, to watch the Mass, to say, I don't care what they say about these issues. So what I'm going to do is pick and choose, even within the denomination of the church. I'm going to put together my own theology, based what either seems right, or feels right, or makes sense to me. And so I would say to you, that's by, in my mind, that's by far the dominant position. Here's a church guy who's saying, he's full of hooey, and I'll just pick and choose.
The Alternative: Rigid Authority
The other is to go to something very rigid. I, when I say rigid, I want to go to this phrase. This is the way it is. We were doing, about two months ago, an autopsy on East Valley Bible Church. So that was the church that I, along with a group of guys, started in 1991. That was, I was going to say successful, but I don't know how you measure that. But it was numerically explosive.
So I went from 400 to 1,000 in six months, and 1,000 to 2,000 in another six months, and was at 5,000, you know, by the end of whatever this period was. And he said, what do you think caused that? And so the right answer is always what? God. So you give that, and everyone goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what else?
And I said, here's what I think. I think that we were bold enough to say, hopefully in a loving way, same thing happened at PL, is that this is the way it is, not because I say so, but because God says so.
Personal Uncertainty in Changing Times
I had breakfast yesterday with a guy, and he said, I'm your age. Actually, he said, I'm a little younger. I'm 11 months younger. So I'm back at that age where we're now 63 and a half, you know, that kind of stuff again. I'm actually a little younger, but he said, I'm worried, but I don't mean worried. I'm concerned, but I don't mean concerned. I'm anxious, but I don't mean anxious.
And I said, which sounds weird, I know exactly what you mean. But he said, things are changing, and I don't know what I feel, and I see this stuff around me. It's the most fascinating thing I've ever seen in my entire life. I woke up the night before last three times. I'd been walking through the house. I know this is stupid, trying to walk on our planks. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
And in a way, it's kind of how I almost feel about life right now. It's like, well, I'm OK, and I have this 43-pound bar, and I tip it this way. Does that make any, I don't, if you say yes to, does that make any sense? I'm going to lose respect for you, really, because it doesn't make any sense, but it's how it feels.
And he was saying, this is how I feel. In moments like this, people grab onto things. I think it's me wanting to go home and see my mom and say, I want to take you to see your sister. And in reality, I'm not doing this for my mom to see my sister. I'm doing it to go to see my grandpa's house. It's getting to grab something and go, OK, is that still there? And I'm going to get down there, and I'm going to look at this and go, jeepers, here's a Starbucks in
Melrose, Iowa. What the heck is going on? But you see what I'm saying there? So in moments like this, the tendencies are, and they're on the left-hand column of your outline there. And let me go through them quickly.
People tend to stay away from organized religion. I told our guys two or three months ago, we need to develop a really good ecclesiology. In other words, why church? Barna says right now that people who go to church will say, "I actually go to three or four churches. I'll make that choice based on who's teaching, what they're teaching."
So I had lunch with a guy about six months ago, and I'm a church guy. He's saying, "Well, I go to this church, and I go to this church, and I go to this church." And I said, "If your kid got hit by a car, which church would you call?" Because whatever the answer is, that's probably your home church, and that's where you should put your time, your energy, your effort, and your money, in my view. But people drift away from organized religion, and they drift toward whatever feels right.
When Truth Becomes Bite-Sized
The capacity for truth becomes bite-sized. Now, I happen to think this is good. So I always hear things about sound bites. Well, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" was a sound bite. Sound bites can be good, sound bites can be bad. It's what I have the capacity to absorb.
And I've discovered that people buy big books, read little books, if they read at all. So you know this is true when you see even somebody like John MacArthur beginning to publish these 100-page, triple-spaced, lots of pictures and graphics books. And that's okay. I have friends that look down on that. They buy these Puritan books. They haven't even reset the type for 200 years. They're all scrunched up, and they think it's better. You don't know anybody that's got 300 pages of stuff in them. Every book I read should be a pamphlet, it seems like. And I want that little phrase. I want that catchphrase.
Here's the third thing: They discount financial appeals. There's always that idea. We're very cautious of it, for example, here. We're a product of that. And it came out of when Larry got saved and started Abundant Life, and we took the same philosophy. We are not—and back then, very different than now, because back then we only met in restaurants and bars. We never met in a church. Now we only meet in churches, because we've been thrown out of every restaurant and bar. But every time we get in there, they go out of business. That's why I'm uncomfortable going to the church.
So we knew we had a lot of people coming in who had trepidation about coming in, and to add money to that, because that's always what they were looking for. "When's the other shoe going to drop? When's he going to hook us for the dough?" And obviously, you understand, it costs money to do stuff. It costs us about 40 to 50 grand a year to give away those CDs like we do. But we trust God in that. But people get leery. That becomes an excuse.
Career Becomes King
The fourth thing: they emphasize career. There's this tendency, especially in economic times, where career tends to trump competing priorities. So I have a friend, and I said to him, "Have you read any good books lately?" And he said, "I don't read good books anymore." You know how to finish this. "I don't read good books. I read great books. There's too many good books." And that's probably true. There's just a lot.
When I go into Amazon, and I go into my recommendations, and I look at this, there's an amazing amount of books that look fascinating to me. But it's like good things. I can't just do good things anymore, because my dance card's filled with good things.
So tomorrow, or Saturday, Haley and Tyler's 10th, or 12th, or 13th anniversary—I don't know. It's amazing to me. Tyler wants to do a little staycation, just leave Friday about 10, come back Saturday afternoon. Sandy said, "I'm going to go take care of the kids. If you can come down and help, that would be great. If you get there, great. If not, I don't care." Well, this is the week that I'm teaching at Gilbert. The other day, I'm with a guy whose mom is dying. She subsequently died. He calls and wants to do the funeral Saturday.
And I have all these things converging that are all important, and I have to sit back and say, "What's the most important priority there?" Now, here's how I rank them. I don't know if this is right. The number one priority are the grandkids. The number two is the teaching. The third is that funeral, and I found myself saying—as much as I hate to do it—I found myself saying, "I'm going to have to find somebody to do that funeral for you." So in your life, there has to be this prioritizing of things.
Faith Becomes Private
And then the fifth thing is, this whole faith thing gets relegated to a place where it's considered very, very, very private. So in the whole discussion about same-sex marriage, not to get into that, it's like, "Don't thrust your morality on me." Well, they just shoved their morality down my throat yesterday. We have undone thousands of years of human history to say that something that's generally regarded as—and I'm going to let you fill in the word there, because there's a lot of words that you can put in there, and each one gets progressively maybe combative.
But something that is viewed as, certainly, let's just say abnormal, counterculture, is now normative, and if you don't like it, something's wrong with you.
Five Strategies for Changing Times
Well, in the midst of all of this, we can go 1,000 ways. Open your Bibles, Book of Acts, Acts chapter 2. We're going to give you five strategies. Now, let me say this to you again. They are not new. There are five things for you to review, five things for you to get into.
As you turn there, let me read you a passage. This is from 2 Peter chapter 1, verse 12. Peter's writing, and he writes this. I'm going to read from The Message: "Because the stakes are so high, even though you're up to date on all this truth and practice it inside out, I'm not..."
The Basics Matter Most
Peter is not going to let up for a minute in calling your attention to what lies before you. Here's what he says: I'm not going to teach you this stuff just because it's important and you're not doing it. Rather, he says, this is important, and you're doing it, and I'm going to talk about it again. It's the basics.
I watched a David Feherty interview with Ben Crenshaw the other night. For whatever reason, I've never been a huge Ben Crenshaw guy, and you push me and say why, and I don't have an answer. But Crenshaw, I thought, was really good. He was talking about Harvey Penick, his mentor, and he said Harvey just kept everything simple. He was talking about designing golf courses, and he said in his design, they try to keep everything simple. In a world that's gotten so complicated, with so much information, we sometimes forget the simple.
I have all these people who want to go deep in their faith, and I keep saying, Larry Fitzgerald goes deep. But what they basically mean by deep is, tell me something confusing I don't understand. Therefore, it must be deep, because it never occurs to them that they're stupid. Deep is basic. "God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life." Let me tell you something, that's deep.
In golf, it's the basics. Every once in a while, when I play—once a year, I play golf with Duff Lawrence. Duff used to be the pro at PV and out at Desert Highlands. I'll meet him on the range, and we'll loosen up, and I'll always say the same thing to him. I'll say, "Duff, will you check my grip, and just kind of look to see how I'm set up?" Because if my grip's right, and my setup's right, my theory is that after that, I can do almost anything and still hit it pretty well. Now, I can get screwed up a little bit and lay the club off. My tendency is to lay it off and then cast it. But if I'm set up right, and my grip's right, I'm just going to swing down the line.
Strategy One: Be in Fellowship
Well, here are five basic things for you. Number one, you need to be in fellowship. Now, what that's going to mean is commitment. In Acts chapter 2, let me give you the setting here. Verse 41, what we're told by Luke as he writes, is that Peter's delivered a sermon, and 3,000 people were saved that day. And now the question is, what do you do?
Acts chapter 2, verse 42: "They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer." The idea was they were together. Hebrews chapter 10, verse 24 said, "Let us consider how we may spur one another on." Live life together. Be encouraged by it. Be encouraged toward love and good deeds.
Learning from Others' Success
I was at a coaching conference, the FCA coaching conference a couple weeks ago, and I was doing a little Bible stuff, and I did my thing. But there was a guy there who was talking about coaching, and I don't know why, this guy just captured my imagination. I thought he was fabulous. He was talking about when an athlete loses confidence. He said, what you need to do is to remind them that they've already done this. You're having trouble hitting a curveball? Let's go back and remember that you've hit a curveball. You're having a hard time making that free throw? Here you go, you've made nine out of 10 free throws.
Then he said something really interesting to me that ties into this "spur one another on." He said, then you need to let them see other people do it. I said, really, that gives you confidence? And he said, yeah, because when they see somebody else doing it, they're going, "I can do that. I've seen how that's done." That's the spurring one another on.
It's that you encounter these things in your life, and you're going, "I can't imagine." That guy walking across the Grand Canyon—all I kept doing was putting myself in his moccasins or whatever he was wearing, and I'm freaking out on this thing, and I'm going, how does he do this? The mental capacity, forget the physical part. Just try today when nobody's around. Try putting one foot in front of the other just like this and standing, and then kneeling down—not on a wire, 1,500 feet in the air with the wind blowing with gusts up to a two-club wind.
So it's not just the physical, but the minute—because the minute I do this, I start to waver. How does he not just go, "Agh!" I was talking to Sandy. How many times have you started a marathon, and you're three miles in it and go, "This just isn't—there's no way." I might be able to finish, but I'm just going to ratchet it back. Or she's on one of her long swims. You're going to swim nine miles, and you're two miles into it, and you're tired and cramping. The mental capacity of that—and I'm not talking now about walking the Grand Canyon, because that's not going to happen, I don't think, for us.
I wondered how many kids were falling off garages all week is all I could think of. My mind was going nuts. I said, he's going to have that celebratory prime rib and choke on it, or he's going to get in a car wreck on the way to Flagstaff. I don't know. My mind was a mess.
This Is Not an Individual Sport
Well now I get saved. This is not an individual sport, this Christian life. What He's calling us to—there are four things in Acts chapter 2, verse 42, that should be present in a church.
George Barna some time ago released the top three things people look for in a church. You want to guess what they are? I'm sure you can. I'm going to guess—just fire some things out. Coffee? Preaching?
Number one was parking. Number two was a place that's caring and sharing—I thought of the Elks. Number three was to have your needs met, and nobody does that better than Nordstrom. Can you make that more self-centered?
Get Into Fellowship
They're kind of implied, but the number one thing is you want good teaching. You want this idea of communion and prayer, but there's this idea of fellowship. In many ways we do a disservice when we name our buildings, and this is more prevalent in the older churches. You even have a place that's called Fellowship Hall. You go in there and we fellowship, which typically means eat food. That's not good for us.
You go in there and you fellowship? Okay. But boy, we don't do that out here. The depth of life that we have on a Sunday morning is: "How are you?" "Fine." "How are you?" "Fine." "Hot out there, isn't it?" "Really? I didn't even notice. 117, barely knew it."
It's this idea of living life together. You need to be in fellowship, and this will happen at church. It's not just about you going in and getting something out of it, but it's what you bring into that relationship in a church.
Get Into Learning
There's a second thing: you need to get into learning. 2nd Timothy chapter 2 verse 15: "Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth."
Sandy said the other day, and I think she was talking about me but didn't want to confront me—although she doesn't have a track record of dealing with things that way—but she was saying, "Gosh, everybody's reading books about the Bible, but it's like nobody's reading the Bible." I would tend to plead guilty to that. I read that scripture some, but my days or weeks are filled with reading books about those biblical truths. I happen to think both are good and fine.
I need to be learning. "Well, I'm not a reader." Here you go: if you read 10 pages a day—and I picked 10 because the math is easy, but almost anybody can read 10 pages a day—if you read 10 pages a day, that's 3,650 pages a year. If the average book is 250 pages, you're reading 14 books a year.
Now if I came—this is a great example—if I came in today, January 1st, and said, "You're going to read these books," you'd say, "There's no way." But if I said, "You're going to read 10 pages," you'd say, "Well, I can do that."
The Power of Scripture in Last Days
I need to be learning. Paul goes on in that section in 2nd Timothy chapter 2. He moves to chapter 3, and He talks about the last days. People will be lovers of self, lovers of money, and He describes them. Here's the key, and this ties into what we talked about at the beginning: 2nd Timothy chapter 3 verse 5, "Having a form of godliness though they deny its power." They'll be very spiritual people, but they won't truly be godly people.
He said in the midst of that, here's the key: 2nd Timothy 3:16, "All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work." Twenty-twenty foresight: how I can see the world ahead of me.
Truth Beyond Personal Experience
My friend Larry Wright—Larry's like a role model, hero, everything all rolled into one for me, the most influential person of my life by a million miles. Larry and I, first of all, early in the relationship, I would never have the courage to contradict Him. At the end, He had one thing—we probably disagreed on a nuance or two of theology—but He had one thing He did, and every time He did it, it drove me nuts. I would tell Him, "Larry, don't do that," and He couldn't stop Himself.
Here's what He'd say. He'd get carried away, He'd start talking, and He'd say, "I know this is true. I know this is true. I've put it in the test tube of my life, and it works." I'd say, "Larry, listen, I know it's true because it's true, not because you put it in the test tube of your life and it worked."
I got guys that I run into all the time that say, "I tried Buddhism, and it works. I tried meditation, and it works." Well, it may work for the angst that you feel, but it won't solve your spiritual problem.
The Real Problem and Solution
Does this work? Yes. Does that mean everything turns out exactly the way you want it to? No. I still had the kidney stone. It means that my biggest problem in life is not my kidney stone or my bank statement or my pedigree or my resume. My biggest problem in life is spiritual. My biggest problem in life is I'm a sinner, and my sin—even as a follower of Christ—screws up my relationship with Him, my relationship with other people, and my relationship with myself. I find out how to live and where truth is when I get into learning.
Get Into Giving
Here's the third thing—you want me to dismiss this, but we're not going to do it—it's get into giving. By giving, I do mean time and energy and effort, but I mean money too. In Luke chapter 12 verse 32, Jesus begins to challenge us, and He ends by saying, "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." In Matthew chapter 6 verse 19, Jesus says, "Don't store up treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourself treasures in heaven where moths and rust don't destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
In 2008, maybe, when things went bad—and they went bad fast—I'm listening to a guy who's a financial advisor, and He said, "Many of my clients have experienced a serious episode of asset erosion." Okay, now I'll translate that for you: I have lost a lot of money.
The Reality of Asset Erosion
Jesus is saying, "Listen, anything other than investment in the kingdom of God ultimately results in asset erosion," whatever it is. Naked I came into the world; naked I'll leave.
It's not—let me do my qualifiers here—it's not that we don't plan. It's not that we don't prepare. It's not that we don't save. But we don't hoard. I can't be unusual, I don't think. As I prepared all through my life, I had in my mind the number—okay, the number, whatever the number is. That's the number I need when this is over to live well.
That number, as I learned from others, that number changes as you get closer to the end. One of the things that changes is: what if?
If this, what if that? That number was predicated years ago on anybody could earn seven to ten percent. Now I don't even ask for return on investment. I just ask for return of investment. There's a very big difference there.
When in the midst of this, what tends to happen is God gets choked out. The percentage of giving among the Christian community now is lower than it was during the height of the Depression. It's about two point three percent on average. This is to me fascinating. Thirty-two percent of Christians say they tithe, meaning they give approximately ten percent of their income. In reality, based on statistics, the number's three percent. How I handle that money is an indicator of where my heart is.
Get Into Working
Number four: Get into working. Ephesians chapter 2, verses 8, 9 and 10 say by grace through faith that not of yourself, gift of God, so no one should boast. Then verse 10 says, "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works."
We studied it when we studied Philippians chapter 2 where Paul says, "Work out your salvation in fear and trembling." Live a life that's influenced by the reality that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior. The night before He died, in John 17:4, Jesus prayed this: "I brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do." God's given you a work to do and you glorify Him as you do it.
I'm not a travel guy. I was talking to somebody the other day and I just said I don't even have a bucket list. When Susan was really sick but still fairly mobile, somebody came to us and said, and they were very generous, they said we'd like to send you guys on a trip anywhere in the world. I said, okay, that's cool. I know where this is going to go. So I went home and I said, hey, we got this opportunity, go anywhere in the world, where do you want to go? And she said, I don't know, Coronado? Flagstaff? I'm just not a big traveler.
In 1983, I left the country and part of where I went was to India and it was the most depressing thing I'd ever seen. I'm walking down the streets in Calcutta going, these people don't even have a chance. It's what makes America great, by the way. They don't have a chance. It's not because they're inferior. All you got to do is go down to St. Joe's. You can't find a doctor named Murphy or O'Brien. Every one of them got, I'll buy a vowel and you got four of the ten letters, and they're Indians.
I got a pulmonary guy, he's an Indian guy. He's a great guy, smarter than snot. But if you put him in Calcutta, this guy's got almost no chance. And yet God put him there for a reason. Rather than focus on him, why did God have you born here now? What's He giving you to do?
The Urgency of Sharing Faith
The fifth one is John chapter 1, verse 35 to 42. Jesus encounters two disciples and one of them is named Andrew. Andrew was Simon Peter's brother. He discovers who Jesus is. John tells us in his gospel, the first thing Andrew did was go and find his brother Simon Peter and say, "We found the Messiah," that is the Christ. He brought him to Jesus and Jesus looked at him and said, "You're Simon, son of John. You'll be called Cephas," which is translated Peter.
I've taught that a billion times, always from this angle: he evangelizes Peter. But there's a phrase that John adds that changes it to me, maybe intensifies it. He said, the first thing he did, Andrew did, the first thing Andrew did was go and get Peter. There's a sense of urgency to this.
Sometimes it works just to have you recall your past experience, especially if you became a Christian at an older age. There's an urgency where you almost become a problem at dinner because you can't shut up. That first Thanksgiving when you're home with your family's a problem because they can't shut up. You've alienated all your friends because you can't shut up. There's an urgency there. What's strange to me is as time goes on where you would think the urgency would increase, it seems to decrease.
Your faith is a deeply personal issue, but it's not a private issue. That's to be shared with the people around you. In the environment we're in now, in the midst of crisis and upheaval, is in some ways the easiest time to share your faith if you're open to it.
Everyday Opportunities
If when somebody says to you, "How long have you guys been married?" "Fifty years." "Fifty years! How do you do that?" What they're saying to you is, "Tell me about Jesus." "Wait a minute, you're going in to see Dr. Burrito, what's going on there?" And then you tell them, and they go, "How do you handle that?" They're saying, "Tell me about Jesus."
I went to hospice the other night. A guy called and he said, "My mother's dying, will you come and see her? She's in hospice." It was the hospice that Susan was in, first time I'd been back there. I walked in and I had this flood of thoughts. I beat him there and I was waiting for him and I walked down. I don't know why. This makes no sense. I walked down to look into the room Susan was in. I don't know why.
I went in to see his mom and she's 95. There's some pictures of her there. She was a dancer. She danced all around the world with the Sun City dancers. I said to him, "This may not be appropriate, but your mom's got some serious great legs here. Really cute." I'm looking and this is not lost on me. I'm looking at this lady who's vibrant with great legs and a great attitude. I look over to the bed and she's laying there. That's the future. That's everybody's future.
There may be some variation of that. If God's good to you in some way, you don't linger around for seven or eight years. Like my dad, you listen to Lawrence Welk, you go up and
You fall as you die. I always point out there's no cause and effect there. My dad listens to Lawrence Welk, does it every Saturday, goes upstairs. My mom hears thud. The hospital's less than maybe a mile away. By the time the guys get there, which is minutes, he's essentially gone.
Some variation of this is everybody's future, which should take these things seriously. It's not just your future, it's the future of everybody around you, and that intensifies this. If I can live with that reality in my mind, I'm sure that if we get to 2024, I'm sure that's part of that process.
Summer Break and Continued Growth
So I give you some stuff to think about as we think about a summer break. I will be praying for you. I hope that a break doesn't mean that you stop, but that you retool.
If you're looking for something to study and really get into, every summer it seems like I say this same thing: you can study the Gospel of John chapters 14, 15, 16, 17. That would be really good to get into and study.
We will send you a reminder card. I can tell you now we'll start again on September 11. I'll send you a reminder card—if you can't do it, leave me something with your name and address on it. When we start on September 11, we'll probably do what I learned on my summer vacation, but it will be just a variety of new topics with the same old basis and conclusion.
Closing Prayer
Father, thank You for these amazing truths. You are God that doesn't change, Your truth doesn't change. We pray for the country we're in, we pray for the president, Congress, our state legislature, our governor. We pray that You would have men and women in power who first want to serve You and then serve us.
God, as we drift away now for summer, unite our hearts together in our love for You. Let us continue in the midst of this to be together in fellowship and learning, to be people who are generous and give, and for us to be people who are open to sharing our faith. Father, help us hang on to this deeply personal but not private relationship with Your Son Jesus, and we pray to You in His name. Amen.
Have a great break, we'll see you in September.