Friday, December 12, 2008

The Christmas Gift

For years I’ve been heart-sick from the realization that the church of modern times, at least in the United States, is no where near the church God intends us to be in terms character, community, and her ability to transform lives. Nor does my life emanate with the clarity, confidence, and conviction that every believer should possess. As a pastor, these are agonizing thoughts to me for they are related. No individual can live the fulfilling life offered to him or her through Christ without the influence of a powerful Christian community, and powerful Christian communities cannot exist without individuals who are experiencing, not talking about but experiencing, the fullness of life Jesus died to give us.

Dallas Willard writes in The Sprit of the Disciplines[*] of the human condition and our efforts to address it through political and societal revolutions. He asks whether or not modern Christianity is the answer.


And amid a flood of techniques for self-fulfillment there is an epidemic of depression, suicide, personal emptiness, and escapism through drugs and alcohol, cultic obsession, consumerism, and sex and violence – all combined with an inability to sustain deep and enduring personal relationships.


So obviously the problem is a spiritual one. And so must be the cure.


But if the cure is spiritual, how does modern Christianity fit into the answer? Very poorly, it seems, for Christians are among those caught up in the sorrowful epidemic just referred to. (Willard, p. iix)


I am not throwing stones as much as I am recognizing a need and acknowledging a longing, a hunger within me and many, for that which I lack as a child of God and that which we lack as a church. It is sometimes hard to name what we lack, but we know we lack because the longing is real.


We turn many things to satisfy the longing. If it is not “escapism through drugs and alcohol, cultic obsession, consumerism, and sex and violence” then it is good things like a great worship experience, a moving prayer meeting, excellent Bible teacher with a great message, or dramatic works of power. While these are beneficial, they fall short as an end in themselves. We are constantly changing methods, changing churches, and sometimes changing spouses thinking that our emptiness is due to the circumstances around us instead of the circumstance within us. We keep looking to God wondering why he is withholding good things from us, and that is the problem. We are looking for the things instead of him. We are seeking what he can give us with his hand instead seeking his heart and face. He is THE GIFT and all other good gifts come with Him.


It is Christmas time. At Christmas time, we celebrate the entrance of Christ into the world as light, love, joy, and peace. These are not things he gives us as much as they are who he is. It’s a total package, but it comes by nurturing his character within us while we create community among us. For our common commitment to him compels us to be committed to each other – to the other believers in our fellowship. It can be no other way, as our relationship with him strengthens our relationship with each other, and as our relationship with each other strengthens our relationship with him. Until we get that, we get nothing. Let this Christmas mark the year we begin to get it.



[*] Willard, Dallas. The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Success and Circumstance

As long as I can remember I have always wanted to succeed. When I was a child, the successful endeavor was scaling the newly erected fence that was put there to keep me in the yard or climbing the next door neighbor’s tree to a higher height. Granted, my endeavors and the measures of my success have changed over the years, but success remains a constant theme – even if I do still get an urge to climb a tree every once in a while.


In our culture we worship success. We are especially fond of the “self-made man,” the one born into humble or adverse conditions yet still achieving greatness through their abilities and hard work. I suppose that’s why I found myself puzzled when I read these words, words that indicate time and chance may be as big a factor to success as abilities or hard work.


"I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all." (Ecclesiastes 9:11, NIV)


Recently I read Outliers, a book by Malcolm Gladwell.* The subtitle of the book is “The Story of Success.” Only the book is not your normal “how you can be a success” book. Gladwell weaves his customary outstanding research into a very interesting read on all the factors involved in success. He shares with us the stories of Bill Gates and the Beatles – focusing on what they have in common that contributed to their success. He takes us through time and space as we examine the Canadian hockey leagues as well as the century’s old practice of rice farming in China. He demonstrates how factors outside the individual’s control such as culture, history, intelligence and nationality – combine to impact one’s ability to succeed. He concludes…


…success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed…Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers [the exceedingly successful] are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. (Outliers, p. 267)


His conclusion is success is not only about effort and innate ability, but it is effort and ability coupled with the right conditions – conditions often beyond our control – that give rise to success.


If you are like me you find Gladwell’s conclusions, coupled with the words of Ecclesiastes 9:11, almost discouraging. I want to believe my success, whatever it may be, is the result of the choices I’ve made. To be fair, neither Scripture nor Gladwell say my efforts don’t have an impact, but they both indicate circumstances beyond my control will frame any success I have. So as a disciple of Christ, what do I make of that?


First, God is in control of when and where I was born. He knew who my parents would be. He knew the culture into which I was born, and the historical context of my life. He knew the opportunities I would have and the obstacles I would face.


Second, God has a plan for my life. We see that in Psalm 139:16 where the Psalmist talks about the days of lives having been ordained before we were born. We see that in Jeremiah 29:11 where God is speaking to those in exile about the good plan he has for them.


Third, God judges success in very different ways than we judge success. I bet you’ve heard or read, “Whoever has the most toys when he dies wins!” Our culture in preoccupied with manyness and muchness, while God is interested in Christ likeness. When the Bible talks about Jesus being perfect, it is not only talking of him being without sin – but of the perfection achieved in his completion of his mission. We tend to judge our successes through contrast and comparison with others when God’s plumb line is to measure our efforts against his plan for our lives.


“…we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original. (Galatians 5:26, The Message)


So then, I realize these three things:


  1. God is in control of the things which I cannot control and is fully aware of their impact on me.
  2. God has a plan for my life. There is purpose behind why, when and where I was born.
  3. God’s standard for the success of my life is not determined by comparing my life to others. Instead, the measure of my success is found in my completion of God’s individualized plan for me.


With those realizations I can relax about those things that are out of my control, for I know God has not left the circumstances of my life to chance, so I am exactly where and when I need to be. I also need not worry about my life in comparison to the life of another. I am only concerned with completing the course he has marked out for me – not someone else’s course. So I go back to Ecclesiastes for guidance that now seems helpful rather than discouraging.


"Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun— all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might…" (Ecclesiastes 9:7-10, NIV)


I’ll confess I do not understand why the passage refers to our lives as meaningless, but what I do understand from the passage is we are to live. Be glad. Be joyful. Now is the time of God’s favor for our lives. Enjoy living life with your spouse, and whatever you do, do it with all your might. After all, while we cannot control the circumstances into which we were born, we can control whether we make the best of those circumstances or not knowing that to do so, is to fulfill God's plan for our lives. This is success.


*Gladwell, Malcom. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

From an Absurd to an Obedient Life

I thought some of you might enjoy this selection from the writings of Henri Nouwen as taken from Devotional Classics, edited by Richard J. Foster and James Bryan Smith and published by HarperSanFrancisco.

Nouwen writes...

From all that I said about our worried, overfilled lives, it is clear that we are usually surrounded by so much outer noise that it is hard to truly hear our God when he is speaking to us. We have often become deaf, unable to know when God calls us and unable to understand in which direction he calls us.

Thus our live have become absurd. In the word absurd we find the Latin word surdus, which means "deaf." A spiritual life requires discipline because we need to learn to listen to God, who constantly speaks but whom we seldom hear.

When, however, we learn to listen, our live become obedient lives. The word obedient comes from the Latin word audire, which means "listening." A spiritual discipline is necessary in order to move slowly from an absurd to an obedient life, from a life filled with noisy worries to a life in which there is some free inner space where we can listen to our God and follow his guidance.

Jesus' life was a life of obedience. He was always listening to the Father, always attentive to his voice, always alert for his directions. Jesus was "all ear." That is true prayer: being all ear for God. The core of all prayer is indeed listening, obediently standing in the presence of God.

Thursday, December 04, 2008

Living Water for India - A Christmas Missions Offering

Living Water for India

Our Christmas Missions Offering


A letter to Friends and Members of RCF from Senior Pastor, Ed Wandling


Little did the staff know when we selected a ministry in India for RCF’s annual Christmas Missions Gift that Mumbai, India would be so prominently and tragically in the news, but that’s exactly what has happened. While no one, including God, would want this senseless loss of life, there is now greater opportunity than before to influence India for Christ.


Times of India, an Indian Newspaper, conducted a survey in which it asked what one thing the people of India wanted more than anything else. Ninety-three percent of the people wanted clean water. Through Sower of Seeds International Ministries, Inc., we are going to be able to help meet this vital, physical need felt by nearly every Indian while spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ.


The typical Indian family’s life revolves around obtaining enough water for cooking, washing, and drinking. Half the day is spent waiting in long lines or walking long distances to contaminated water sources. Thousands of children die every year due to waterborne illnesses, and water is often auctioned to the highest bidder - taking half of a family’s earnings.


Sower of Seeds is an international ministry, based out of Keller, Texas, providing water wells in India. One well provides 1,000 people with water for the next thirty years. Almost always these wells are paired with the ministry of a Christian Church, allowing the people of the church to become the town heroes as they point out Jesus Christ provided them with clean water – something their 30,000 Hindu gods had not been able to do. You can see the power of this approach.


Our 2008 Goal for our Christmas Mission Gift is to supply $4,800 to sink one well that will provide 1,000 people with clean, convenient water for the next 30 years. It’s an aggressive goal, and we have no money in the budget for it. So we will be receiving special offerings throughout the month of December to meet this opportunity. The challenge for us is to give above and beyond what we would normally give so our local ministry does not suffer while we support this important mission.


On January 18, Chase Wilsey of Sower of Seeds and Champions for India will be speaking in our service. It’s my hope we will be able to present him with a check of at least $4,800 at that time. Let’s make a difference, not only in the lives of 1,000 people for a day, but for a generation and for eternity!

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Thanksgiving

We often track the origins of our thanksgiving celebration to 1621 when the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians broke bread together in a harvest celebration. However, Thanksgiving did not become an “official” part of the American landscape until 1863 when Abraham Lincoln invited his fellow countrymen everywhere to set aside “the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

Lincoln proclaimed “The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies.” When one considers the backdrop, that is a startling statement. These words were penned in what is still today the bloodiest conflict in our nation’s history. 550,000 people were killed – 150,000 more Americans than were killed during World War II. Yet, Lincoln urges Americans everywhere to take a day to praise God and give thanks to Him.

As you enjoy your Thanksgiving holidays, I thought you might also enjoy reflecting on the proclamation by one of our greatest Presidents – a proclamation made almost a century and a half ago.

Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation


The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.
In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.
By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

Friday, October 24, 2008

The Struggle to Forgive

An E-mail sent to friends and member of Ranch Community Fellowship on October 16.

The Struggle to Forgive

By Pastor Ed Wandling

Have you ever struggled with forgiving someone – I mean really forgiving them and not just saying you’ve forgiven them? It’s a common struggle and a major threat to receiving and living the fulfilling and significant life God wants to give us. Who do we forgive? What should we forgive? When do we forgive, and how do we forgive? These are questions with which we all struggle. These questions are among the most important questions we will ever ask. Our answers and our application of those answers in how we live our lives will most certainly be the determining factor in whether or not we live lives of fulfillment or lives of misery.

Jesus taught us to pray that God would forgive us in the same way we forgive others. Those are strong and terrifying words, for those of who have been hurt so deeply that we either won’t or can’t extend forgiveness. And even if we can mentally bring ourselves to forgive, often our emotions don’t seem to get the message. See if the following scenario seems all too familiar.

You’re driving down the highway thinking of nothing in particular. One thought leads to another and all of sudden you notice your heart is beating faster, your breathing is more vigorous, and your grip on the steering wheel is way tighter than it needs to be. You realize your wandering thoughts have found their way to that person or those people who hurt you. In your mind you see yourself saying or doing things to “even the score.” Some of those things are so violent you are surprised and ashamed that you could even think them. When you come out of your trance, well – let’s just say you are not in a positive mental state. Unfortunately you are left with a reservoir of yucky emotions that negatively impact everything and everyone around you. Your ability to enjoy life, at least for the moment, is gone.

Sound familiar? That’s an example of how, even though we have decided with our head to forgive, our hearts don’t always follow. We get drawn into that vortex of darkness where all vitality and zest for life is sucked out of us. It happens before we know it, and it is the guerilla warrior that attacks the heart to rob us of the joy God wants us to have. This enemy of God’s heart in us must be defeated!

Over the next two to three weeks in our both our Sunday 10:30 worship service and our 9:00 discussion, we are going to be talking about how to nurture and sustain a heart of forgiveness. I’ve been looking forward to bringing this teaching as God has used it in the past to help people find freedom and catapult into a whole new level of victorious and fulfilling living. It’s important, so if it’s in your power to make a decision to be with us over the next several Sundays or to be somewhere else, for your sake you need to decide to be with us.

The Stronghold of Unforgiveness

This is a copy of an e-mail sent to members and friends of Ranch Community Fellowship on October 23, 2008.

The Stronghold of Unforgiveness

By Pastor Ed Wandling


"The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds [emphasis added]. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." (2 Corinthians 10:4-5, NIV)


This is one of the most familiar verses among Christians, but have you ever asked what is meant by “stronghold?” The context tells us it is about thought patterns. The words use in verse five that help us understand the nature of a stronghold are “argument…. pretension [meaning opinions],” and “thought.” A stronghold is a way of thinking that is different compared to God’s way of thinking. Ed Silvoso describes it this way.


A stronghold is a mindset impregnated with hopelessness that causes the believer to accept as unchangeable something that he or she knows is contrary to the will of God.


This is precisely where we are when we do not forgive. We know we are to forgive, but because the wound is so deep or the offense is so unjustifiable, we cannot or will not bring ourselves to do so. We have no hope that we could or would ever extend forgiveness. So we have accepted a position that is contrary to the will of God, and it is eating away at the meaningful life God wants us to have.


One reason we do not forgive is our definition of forgiveness. Our misunderstandings of what forgiveness is and what it is not prevent us for experiencing the joy God has for us in this area. We need a Biblical understanding of what it means to forgive.

This Sunday at RCF, in our current message series entitled “Guard Your Heart,” I will continue to teach about forgiveness. An unwillingness to forgive is among the most common strongholds believers face. All of us struggle with it. Many of us are gripped with it. You are not alone in your struggle. Come this Sunday as together we lay this down at the foot of the cross. Let’s let Jesus, by the power of his most holy Spirit, set us free.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Developing Your God-Given Gift

"For God did not give us a spirit of timidity [fear], but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline." (2 Timothy 1:7, NIV) [1]

I was meditating on this verse before going to bed tonight. It's a another one of those Christian favorites to which many of us often turn. I began to wonder to what the "For" was there for. So often we pull this verse out any time we are afraid of something or struggling with self-discipline issues, but I realize now the Holy Spirit had a more specific purpose in mind when I looked at the verse that immediately precedes this one.

"For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands." (2 Timothy 1:6, NIV)[1]

Through Paul I think God may be telling us how to use and a develop the gifts he has placed within us. To use those gifts it takes an exercise of strength (power). They are to be exercised in love for without love they amount to nothing. (1 Corinthians 13) It also requires self-discipline to develop the gifts and to use them at their proper time. The good news is that God has not only gifted us, but he has empowered us with the abilities we need to "fan" those gifts into a "flame:" power, love, and self-discipline. That's awesome!

[1] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984 (electronic ed.). Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
[1] The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984 (electronic ed.). Grand Rapids: Zondervan.