Ephesians 5:22-25 says this:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Reflecting on this passage, Brian Croft offers one question for husbands and one question for wives to ask each other:

Wife to husband: “What are some things I do (can do) that encourage you, make you feel respected and honored as the head of our family?”

Husband to wife: “What are some things I do (can do) that make you feel loved, cherished, and spiritually nourished by me?”

Hands down, if you want to remember something, the best strategy is to put it to music. That’s how I memorized the books of the Bible when I was in 3rd grade, the 50 states in 5th grade, and the Greek alphabet in seminary.

This fall, Harbor keiki are using this song to memorize the books of the Bible, but it’s useful for adults as well. If you need to learn (or relearn!) the books of the Bible, you won’t find a more infectious way to do it than this song.

Most people think of the Puritans as joyless legalists, but English Puritan John Flavel wrote this 350 years ago:

Ecstasy and delight are essential to the believer’s soul and they promote sanctification. We were not meant to live without spiritual exhilaration, and the Christian who goes for a long time without the experience of heart-warming will soon find himself tempted to have his emotions satisfied from earthly things and not, as he ought, from the Spirit of God.

The soul is so constituted that it craves fulfillment from things outside itself and will embrace earthly joys for satisfaction when it cannot reach spiritual ones. The believer is in spiritual danger if he allows himself to go for any length of time without tasting the love of Christ and savoring the felt comforts of a Savior’s presence.

When Christ ceases to fill the heart with satisfaction, our souls will go in silent search of other lovers. By the enjoyment of the love of Christ in the heart of a believer, we mean an experience of the “love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given to us” (Rom. 5:5). Because the Lord has made himself accessible to us in the means of grace, it is our duty and privilege to seek this experience from Him in these means till we are made the joyful partakers of it. (via)

In other words, Jesus wants to give you unmatchable joy. And if you’re not really finding “ecstasy and delight” in Christ right now, there are “means of grace” God has established to help you experience it.

So what are the “means of grace?”

Another English Puritan named Richard Rogers answered that question 100 years before Flavel. He divided the means of grace into two categories: public (things we do together as a community of believers) and private (things we do as individuals or families):

The public (such as are used in our open assemblies ordinarily) are these three:

• The ministry of the Word read, preached, and heard.
• The administration of the holy sacraments [baptism and communion].
• The exercise of prayer, with thanksgiving and singing of Psalms.

But because the public cannot be daily had and enjoyed, (and yet we need daily relief and help) neither although they could, were they sufficient to enable us, to honor God as it becomes us, therefore God hath commanded us to use private exercises:

• Watchfulness
• Meditation
• The armor of a Christian
• Prayer
• Reading

(see part 1 and part 2)

Paul is giving one last pep talk to the team in Ephesus. He wants them to be as influential as he is, so he’s reminding them of some character traits they observed in him that are worthy of emulation.

7. Eagerness to teach

And now, behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again. Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all of you, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. (Acts 20:25-27)

Declaring the counsel of God doesn’t just mean preaching sermons. It means bringing up God’s counsel in everyday life. Not to beat people over the head with the Bible, but to point them back to the ultimate source of wisdom and truth.

And Paul says that should include the whole counsel of God. Even the parts that make us uncomfortable. If I struggle with anxiety, I’m not likely to tell someone they’re worrying too much. If I struggle with self-control, then I’m not too likely to confront all the slackers around me. If I struggle with lust, I’m not too likely to ask another guy about how pure his mind has been lately.

But the implication Paul seems to be making is that if we fail to declare the whole counsel of God when it’s appropriate, and as a result there are people who fall away, or are driven away from God, then at least to some degree their blood is on our hands.

He’s quoting Ezekiel 3, where God says, “If I say to the wicked, “You shall surely die,” and you give them no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, in order to save his life, that wicked person shall die for his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hands.”

8. Vigilance

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; 30 and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish everyone with tears. (Acts 20:28-31)

God has given you a flock to tend, whether it’s a church, a small-group, a family, or a group of friends. Wherever you have influence, caring for the flock means protecting them! Paul is giving us three things to be vigilant about:

• Ourselves. The further you get in your walk with God, the more you realize how much sin, pride, and selfishness is in everything you do. J.I. Packer said this: “Our best works are shot through with sin and contain something for which we need to be forgiven.” Our best works! Someone who’s seriously being vigilant over themselves will assume that there’s something sinful in everything they do, and they’ll take the initiative to root it out.
• Enemies outside the church. There are fierce wolves around us who want to tear down everything that Christ stands for. We need to watch out for them.
• Enemies inside the church. Paul says there are people who say they follow Christ, but they try to divide his flock. There was a book that came out a few years ago called Well-Intentioned Dragons, about Christians who truly believe they’re standing up for God’s will, but are really just pushing their own agenda, causing needless conflict and confusion. They usually don’t mean to be difficult – they don’t consciously plot disharmony and destruction – but somehow they end up leaving nothing but carnage in their path. These kinds of divisive Christians take people’s eyes off of Jesus, and onto peripheral issues.

9. Generosity

And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. I coveted no one’s silver or gold or apparel. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me. In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ (Acts 20:32-35)

I love that little phrase in there… “these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me. These hands.” “You, Jeremiah… I helped you fix your roof with these hands. And you, Hezekiah… I helped you put a new radiator in your car with these hands.” Paul’s not fishing for a thank-you, he’s reminding them of his generosity of time and energy and money because he wants them to emulate it!

If you want to influence the people around you, you just can’t be selfish. With anything. Not your free time, or your comfort and convenience, or your energy. Influential people know there’s no such thing as “me-time.” There’s God-time (like we saw at the beginning of this passage) and there’s “others-time.”

And here’s the result of a life lived like that:

There was much weeping on the part of all; they embraced Paul and kissed him (Acts 20:37)

These guys in Ephesus absolutely adored Paul! And that’s how people will respond when you live your life like Paul did. When you’re passionately committed to them … selfless and generous in everything you do … bold enough to proclaim the whole counsel of God to them … then people are bowled over!

Why? Because nobody else in the world lives like that. Only those who have experienced the passionate commitment, selfless generosity, and boldness of Jesus Christ.

(see Part 1)

Paul is talking to his old friends, the elders of the church in Ephesus. He says this:

You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia,
serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me (Acts 20:18-19)

When Paul says, “I’ve been serving the Lord with all humility and with tears,” he’s showing another characteristic of influential people:

4. Passionate Commitment

It’s not like Paul’s the kind of guy who cries whenever he sees a lost puppy in the street. He’s not renting The Notebook, and sitting on the couch all night with a box of Kleenex in his lap. Paul’s about as tough a guy as you’ll ever meet.

In 2 Corinthians 11, he says he’s been whipped 5 times with 40 lashes… he’s been beaten with rods 3 times… he’s been shipwrecked 3 times… and it doesn’t look like any of that made him shed a single tear.

But when it came to the people he was ministering to, the spigot was open. All the time! He was so passionately committed to the people God put in his path that he just couldn’t help but to get emotional over them. Their struggles were his struggles. Their victories were his victories.

Paul shed a lot of tears over the people he influenced. But that didn’t keep him from boldly confronting them when he needed to:

5. Boldness

I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. (Acts 20:20-21)

Paul never flinched from saying what needed to be said, and it basically boiled down to two things: Repentance toward God, and faith in our Lord Jesus. He was bold enough to tell people that they were sinners who needed to repent and believe more fully in Jesus.

Most of us hate doing that. We hate confronting people with the gospel, whether they’re perfect strangers or the people we’re closest to. Usually, we lash out at people because of things they do that annoy us. Our primary goal is to make them stop annoying us.

It’s infinitely harder to lovingly confront them with the goal of making them more like Jesus. To say, “I’ve been praying about this, honey, and from my perspective, it seems like you need to repent of this sin and believe in Jesus and his power to help you overcome it.”

But when we’ve humbled ourselves like Paul, and shed a few tears over the state of the people around us, then we will inevitably be bold like Paul and point people toward the savior.

6. Selflessness

I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. (Acts 20:24)

Paul’s main goal in life is not to be successful, by any worldly measure of success. It’s not to live a long time and die peacefully in his sleep. His only goal is to finish his course and the ministry that he received from the Lord Jesus.

That should make us ask ourselves some tough questions. “What are my goals in life? To make a nice living, to have a nice family? To make a name for myself? To get the respect of the people around me?” … “What if I lived only to finish the ministry that Jesus laid out for me… whatever that is? What would that look like?”

Maybe God is calling you to go preach the gospel in dangerous places around the world and die for your faith like Paul did. But that’s not the ministry God’s called most of us to. He’s called you to testify to the grace of God right where you’re at… in your job, in your class, wherever you are.

What if you had the same attitude as Paul… what if you didn’t count your life, or your own ambitions of any value, and you focused all your attention on finishing the course he’s set before you – whatever that is?

It can be, according to self-confessed introvert Noel Piper:

Good things can happen in solitude. Quietness can be a sweet place to meet God. But there’s a dark side to solitude when I crave it above all. The I comes to mean not “introvert” but literally only “I”: I don’t want you around, because I am the one who makes me happy. I can solve my own problems. I am all I need.

Right now as I lay those thoughts out so bluntly, I recoil from my arrogance. Do we really think, “I am all I need?,” as if we were God?

O Lord, protect me from myself. Please help me to be still and know that you are God.

I am still an introvert. My dream day still is a day by myself, but only once in a while. I thank God for the women he gave me when I needed to receive friendship. I pray that God will shape my heart to give friendship like they do — like Jesus told us to: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).

Read the rest of her story here.

(via)

In Matthew 10, Jesus lays out the risks (arrest, betrayal and death) and rewards (greater awareness of God’s presence, guidance, and providence) for those who take the gospel to places where Christ is not welcome.

My prayer is that God will call many people from Harbor to go proclaim his kingdom in dangerous places where Christ is hated and slandered. This kind of calling doesn’t (usually) come suddenly. It’s slowly built on a foundation of passionate concern for the lost people God has already put in your life right now.

But what if you just don’t feel it? What if you’re happy to worship God, study his word, and fellowship with his family, but not at all drawn to developing gospel relationships with people who don’t know him?  In Let the Nations Be Glad, John Piper says it’s rooted in a lack of (true) worship:

Where passion for God is weak, zeal for missions will be weak. Churches that are not centered on the exaltation of the majesty and beauty of God will scarcely kindle a fervent desire to “declare his glory among the nations” (Ps. 96:3). Even outsiders feel the disparity between the boldness of our claim upon the nations and the blandness of our engagement with God.

For example, Charles Misner, a scientific specialist in general relativity theory, expressed Albert Einstein’s skepticism over the church with words that should waken us to the shallowness of our experience with God in worship:

The design of the universe . . . is very magnificent and shouldn’t be taken for granted. In fact, I believe that is why Einstein had so little use for organized religion, although he strikes me as a basically very religious man. He must have looked at what the preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming. He had seen much more majesty than they had ever imagined, and they were just not talking about the real thing. My guess is that he simply felt that religions he’d run across did not have proper respect . . . for the author of the universe.

The charge of blasphemy is loaded. The point is to pack a wallop behind the charge that in our worship God simply doesn’t come through for who he is. He is unwittingly belittled.

Sharing meals with others can be a simple but powerful way to demonstrate and talk about the grace of God. But it takes discipline. It’s a lot easier to grab a quick bite to eat and plop down in front of the TV or the computer.

According to Hebrews 13:2 (“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers”), we don’t have the option of barricading ourselves behind our front doors. So how can we break that tendency? Jeff Vanderstelt tells the story of how he developed a discipline of hospitality:

When we first arrived and got settled into our neighborhood, we had a house warming party and invited our friends and neighbors over for a party with good food and drink. We were very intentional to ask them about themselves, how long they’d been in the neighborhood and general questions about their life. Each time, we were careful to listen well looking for the opportunity to be a blessing to them with what God has given us.

We realized that we needed regularity to this kind of activity so during the Spring and Summer we started doing a BBQ/party every Friday night. The regularity was a key to making this happen. (Too many settle for doing a party a couple times a year . . . this will not do it . . . there needs to be consistency to your hospitality). Eventually, everyone in the neighborhood had joined us and there was a genuine sense of connection and warmth between us relationally. Over time, others volunteered to host the parties so that our neighborhood started sharing the responsibility.

All of this would have been good neighborly activity, but not enough all by itself. It led to us getting to know the felt and real needs of our neighbors. We eventually started working on our neighbor Nicki’s home together since her home had fallen apart after the passing of her husband 15 years prior. During our times of serving together, we would often look for opportunities to share the Gospel reason for why we were serving. Most often, after serving we would invite people over for dinner and the conversations continued.

Our home became known as the house where you could find a party or a place to rest, converse, share a struggle or receive some prayer. We let people know that we had an open door policy—if you wanted to stop by and visit or join us for dinner, you were always welcome. This led to people stopping over after a bad day, losing a job, looking for advice on child rearing or crying over a broken rela- tionship. If we needed to be alone for a particular reason, we would politely make that known, but many times the Spirit prompted us to set aside our own interests and pray for strength to love our neighbors when it wasn’t always convenient for us. . . .

We have found that the mess and the difficulty of loving hospitality done in the power of the Gospel is one of the most powerful witnesses we’ve had to our neighborhood.

Our family loves throwing parties. We don’t love all the planning, inviting, coordinating, cooking, and cleaning (which is why we love it when others have generously hosted our parties at their homes), but we always love the opportunity a good party gives us to connect with different people, and especially to connect different people to each other.

Parties are the perfect place for us to introduce our non-Christian friends to our church family. A few years ago we had 100 people at our place for a surprise birthday party. Our house and backyard were packed elbow-to-elbow with our church friends, neighbors, and fellow soccer and football families, all enjoying a great evening together. Our friends still talk about the relationships they developed that night.

In A Meal With Jesus, Tim Chester comments on how many times you’ll see Jesus at parties in the gospels, and says this:

We should have a reputation for throwing the best parties. It’s not hard to find an excuse to throw a party:

• Personal occasions:birthdays, anniversaries, new jobs, exams, house warmings
• Sporting occasions: the Super Bowl, the World Series, the soccer World Cup
• Seasonal occasions:the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year
• Cultural occasions: Mexican food theme night,the American Idol final

There are reasons enough to have a party every week. Parties, of course, are not enough. They create a great plat- form for gospel opportunities. But they must be accompanied by a passion for people and a passion for Jesus. You don’t have to give a little sermon—just be attentive to people and open about your faith.

And you don’t have to throw your own party… Chester also says we can find gospel purpose in other people’s parties as well:

Join in with the cultural events in your neighborhood. The chances are food will be involved somewhere, because food is such a powerful bond. Look for opportunities to reinterpret what is happening in biblical categories. In Acts 14 Paul addresses the people of Lystra. They want to worship him and Barnabas as gods because the two healed a crippled man. Paul calls on them to turn from idolatry, and then says that God “did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17).

How many evangelistic messages have you heard along these lines? “[God] provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy” (NIV). So let’s give thanks to him rather than worshiping “vain things” (v. 15). We should engage in party evangelism.

On Sunday morning we were commissioned by Jesus to join him in his mission of proclaiming the kingdom to the small slice of the world he’s given us as a mission field.

Still feeling intimidated? Maybe it’s because the task still seems too extraordinary. Here’s some great advice from Tim Chester’s new book A Meal With Jesus on using your everyday meals as an opportunity for mission:

Meals bring mission into the ordinary. But that’s where most people are—living in the ordinary. That’s where we need to go to reach them. We too readily think of mission as extraordinary. Perhaps that’s because we find it awkward to talk about Jesus out- side a church gathering. Perhaps it’s because we think God moves through the spectacular rather than the witness of people like us. Perhaps it’s because we want to outsource mission to the professionals, so we invite people to guest services where an “expert” can do mission for us.

But most people live in the ordinary, and most people will be reached by ordinary people. Even those who attend a special event will, for the most part, have first been befriended by a Christian. For those looking to connect with people in the local community it isn’t that hard if you really want to. Just invite people round, let them know they can go home if they need to and then enjoy a meal together. You’re going to eat anyway, so why not do it with others!

People often complain that they lack time for mission. But we all have to eat. Three meals a day, seven days a week. That’s twenty- one opportunities for mission and community without adding any- thing to your schedule. You could meet up with another Christian for breakfast on the way to work—read the Bible together, offer accountability, pray for one another. You could meet up with col- leagues at lunchtime. Put down this book and chat to the person across the table from you in the cafeteria. You could invite your neighbors over for a meal. Better still, invite them over with another family from church. That way you get to do mission and community at the same time; plus your unbelieving neighbors will get to see the way the gospel impacts our relationships as Christians ( John 13:34–35; 17:20–21). You could invite someone who lives alone to share your family meal and follow it with board games, giving your children an opportunity to serve others through their welcome.