Ministries:
Adult | Teens | Children

Pastor's Pen's:
2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001

Sermon Series:
Following Jesus
Earthly Cross
His Name Is
Apostles Creed
Dealing with Feelings
Jonah
Get Real
Promised Land Living

Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

(262) 763-3021

Email:
Pastor Scott Carson

Secretary Patti Hall

PASTOR'S PENS 2005

Grace Church of Burlington August  28, 2005 “The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall.”    Francis Bacon         Two friends who hadn't seen each other in years met in a grocery store. One woman asked, "Tell me, Ruth, how is your son, George?"       "He's getting along fine," Ruth replied. "He's a poet. He just received his master's degree in literature from the university."        "And what about Mary?"        "She's just as smart as George," Ruth replied. "She graduated from college with a degree in modern art."        "Wonderful. And how is little Freddy? What is he doing?"       "Well," Ruth said, "Freddy is still Freddy. He wouldn't go to college – he became a plumber instead. If it weren't for him, we'd all be starving."         As a pastor, I love to teach. And one of the qualifications of a pastor is that he is “able to teach” (1 Tim. 3:2). To be honest, I’m an educator at heart. I just love to teach...just about anything. Anything that I know, I love to share with others. Most of all I love to teach people about God, the Bible, the gospel, the Christian life. But that word about causes me pause. I don't want just to teach people about God, about the Bible, and so on. I want to drop the preposition in the same way the apostle Paul does in Ephesians 4:20 (NASB), when he speaks of the need for people to "learn Christ," not just learn about Christ.       Jane teaches piano but she isn’t just teaching her students about the piano, how strings vibrate, the difference between the black and white keys, or why the quality of the soundboard is important. While she may share this information. It may have some value. But Jane wants to teach piano.       This difference between learning and learning about parallels an important shift that is signaled by the change from "Christian education" to "spiritual formation." In many quarters people slap a more interesting new label on what they've always done, but elsewhere the shift in language reveals a profound shift in values, from teaching about God to teaching people God, from teaching about the Christian life to teaching people to live it, enjoy it, practice it. At its best, the change in language signals a shift in priority from transferring information to training for transformation.       This shift flows from a reality many pastors quietly acknowledge but seldom verbalize: that too many of our most "educated" Christians are some of the most carnal. They may know the most information about the Bible but are the least Christ-like. Too often there seems to be a direct correlation between knowledge about the Bible, theology, etc., on the one hand and arrogance, contentiousness, and an uncharitable spirit on the other. No one is in favor of ignorance, but mere knowledge that "puffs up," as Paul points out, isn't much better. It is not enough to have spiritual information. The Bible commands us to have and calls us to spiritual transformation. We must have a behavior that coincides with our beliefs. This is not salvation by works, but because there is salvation there must be works. As Dallas Willard says, we've realized that the gospel is opposed to earning but not to effort.       God has given all of us an unquenchable thirst that makes us ask, “What will help me experience God and experience personal spiritual transformation?” A true believer does not want to learn about. He/she wants transformation. They want to learn Christ.       Spiritual transformation begins to happen when there is Biblical application. All of the Bible studies in the world are a waste, if we do not take the truth learned and allow it to change our lives from the inside out. Too frequently the contemporary church has well developed curricula and structures for teaching information, but we are still quite primitive when it comes to training for radical spiritual transformation. That, though, is our purpose and goal at Grace. Not those who know more but those who are living more and more in the light that they have.      As James exhorts us, “Do not merely listen to the Word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what It says. Anyone who listens to the Word but does not do what It says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it--he will be blessed in what he does” (James 1:22-25).