Timothy's Thoughts

S tephen Wilkes made the observation that “The act of sharing has become more important than the experience itself.” He made this statement in a TED talk in which he was telling about his work as a photographer. To achieve the affect he is looking for, he spends many hours in one location, shooting thousands of photos of tourist attractions. This gives him a lot of time to observe human behavior. While doing so, he noticed that people were using historic locations more as a backdrop for photos of themselves, rather than exploring the site. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. We’re unlikely to change it. I’m more interested in why this is the case. This hasn’t always been the way things are, but one thing we know about humans is that we don’t change much. Our motivations today are very similar to what people’s motivations were when the Bible was being written. It’s unlikely that the change in what people do at sites has anything to do with a chang...

H ow is salvation like a helmet? I’ve heard many sermons about the armor of God. More often than not, emphasis is placed on what a helmet is rather than on the armor itself. Just as we aren’t battling flesh and blood, we aren’t actually wearing armor. There is value in knowing that a helmet protects the most valuable part of our body and we might point out that like a helmet, salvation keeps us alive, even if we have other injuries. But maybe the point of Ephesians 6:10-20 isn’t that spiritual things are like physical armor, but we are to prepare ourselves for battle. Truth When we stand in battle, we are to have truth. We are battling for hearts and minds. The enemy is lying to those we are trying to reach. When we speak the truth, the enemy is caught with his pants down. No lie can stand up against the truth. So, we go into battle with truth like a belt. Righteousness Of course none of us are completely righteous, but Jesus is our righteousness. Even so, one of Satan’s favor tactics ...

A couple of years ago, I went on my first official “Mission Trip” to Albuquerque, New Mexico. This year, our church has returned to do much of the same thing we did then. In fact, some of the work we are doing this week includes repairing picnic tables we repaired two years ago and replacing windows in a mobile home that we repaired windows in two years ago. I find myself, again, asking, why do we do these mission trips? Before we answer that question, I think we need to define two different types of mission trips. Interestingly, a mission trip may be one type for one person and another type for someone else on that same trip. I see these two types as expert mission trips and training mission trips. An expert mission trip is one in which a person with special knowledge and experience, such as an eye doctor, travels to a mission field to put that knowledge and experience to use. A training mission trip is one in which people travel to a mission field to perform tasks that they do infreq...

W hen I was in high school, I had a number of times when I was required to speak in front of a group of people, both at school and other organizations. I hated it. If I could have gotten out of it, I would have. I still remember feeling ill from nerves, leading up to the speech. But now, I kind of wish I could go back and do it again, with the knowledge I have now. There were things that our teachers tried to teach us about public speaking. Most of it, I didn’t get, because it didn’t help me with my situation. Here are some things I wish I had known: 1. Knowing the subject matter is more important than wording. My approach to giving a speech was to write out what I wanted to say and then develop ways to memorize what I had written. The problem is that when you are standing in front of people, you don’t trust yourself to recall your memorized speech, which makes you nervous, which causes you to forget even more. Now, I don’t write speeches, I write outlines. The better I know the subjec...

I ’ve been doing a lot of thinking about small groups. Part of that is because I’ll be taking on the leadership of one of our adult Sunday school classes (pending church approval). A church without small groups will struggle to be more than just a performance venue. If the only interaction people have at church is shaking hands with a few people, it is unlikely that people will miss them when they are gone and when they are hurting, there is no one there to help them. That’s not what church is about. But just what is a small group? From Acts, we know that the disciples met from house to house. We don’t know exactly what this looked like, but we know they did it. Today, different churches do small groups differently. Some people will say something like, “We don’t do Sunday school; we do small groups.” But we need to be careful that we don’t turn that around and say, “We don’t do small groups; we do Sunday school.” Sunday school is just one of several things that can be considered small ...

S ome people say that the church website is the new front door to a church. Their argument is good, since most people visit a church’s website before they visit church. But then they go immediately into what the home page of the website should look like. There’s nothing wrong with having an attractive home page, but we must be careful that we don’t forget everything we know about church doors. I’ve been to many church buildings. There are quite a few of them that I’ve entered, but not by the front door. The church I grew up in had two doors. There was the front door, which was at the top of a set of steps. There was a side door that closer to the parking lot and had not steps to get to it. Most people used that door. The only people who used the front door were visitors who made their way around the side of the building by walking across the rocky and uneven yard, before climbing the steps. But that was the door that had a sign above it, stating the name of the church. The other door w...

H ave you stopped to think how many times in the Bible that God answered prayer by sending a messenger? When Daniel couldn’t understand a vision, God sent a messenger to set him on his feet. When Abraham prayed for Lot’s protection, God sent messengers to forcibly remove him from harm’s way. When Peter was in prison, God sent a messenger to free him. When a eunuch was seeking to understand the scripture, God sent Philip. When some women were praying on the river bank, God sent Paul. With it happening so frequently, you might think that is God’s preferred method. And you just might be right. When Jesus looked at the multitudes in Matthew 9:37-38, he said, “The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Pray ye therefor the Lord of the harvest, that he would send laborers into his harvest.” And when Isaiah saw a vision of the Lord in Isaiah 6:8, the Lord said, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah responded, “Here am I; send me.” Could it be that we have the wro...