Vol 1 No 17 - Consecration Recap

Praise be to God for a glorious day in worship the past Sunday. It was a pure joy to see the Pharr Chapel family worship as one and to experience the excitement of being able to fellowship afterwards over lunch. Along with most all of you, I found Rev. deGraffenried's message to be inspiring and challenging - and one that hit home in many places in my life (and the life of the church) as well.

Let me also give praise to God for the work that the Holy Spirit has done so far in our Consecration Sunday celebration. As of this morning, we have seen a 22% increase in the number of pledge cards and a 59% increase in the dollar amount pledged for 2007. It is a tribute to your faith and your belief that God has great things in store for Pharr Chapel, and I am grateful to be with you as we continue down this journey together.

We are soon going to be entering the time where our country celebrates Thanksgiving and the church celebrates a new year with Advent. May you be in prayer now for your hearts and minds to be continually shaped and formed by the Holy Spirit working within you.

See you Sunday!
Lamar

Vol 1 No 16 - Hey! That's MY Pew

I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am about this upcoming Sunday. We are going to have a great day in worship and fellowship as we come together for one service @ 10:00AM. As of right now, we have 129 reservations for our Celebration Luncheon - how exciting to know that there will be a full house!

One thing that keeps running through my mind in preparation for this Sunday, however, is what happens when you walk in and someone from the other service is sitting in your seat? How are you going to react to it? This will be an interesting phenomenon to experience for us all. Let us be in an attitude of praise as we spend time catching up with one another and being a part of the same service. As I mentioned during worship last week, I am firmly convinced that God's got great things in store for Pharr Chapel - our best days are ahead of us - and this Sunday will be a milestone as we go along this journey of seeing what God's potential is for us.

Please join me in prayer for this weekend - I am just bursting at the seams ready to get there.

See you Sunday!
Lamar

Vol 1 No 15 - The Blank Slate

The blank slate. Sometimes the most intimidating sight we see. To be confronted with a canvas, or paper, or any open space, and charged with the task of putting something there is at the same time a thrilling proposition and a potentially paralyzing disaster waiting to happen.

This morning, as I sat down to write this column, I realized that, unlike most weeks, there wasn't a message deep within me that I could not wait to share with you. Often, the seeds for the following week's column hit me late in the previous week and I spend Monday and Tuesday fleshing it out for Wednesday morning. However, today I was confronted with the blank screen, knowing that there was something for me to share with you even though I did not see it yet. So, I just started to type, eager to see what came out of my fingertips as they danced across the keyboard. Toward the end of the second sentence, it hit me.

We are hit with blank slates in our lives more often than we ever will realize. Each moment of our lives is an encounter with the opportunity to make something out of nothing. We, and we alone, dictate how we respond to any given situation. We, and we alone, determine how the actions of others will affect us. We, and we alone, are responsible for how much we allow God to shape our responses to life. The question we face is: Are we going to allow God to guide our hands and our hearts as we fill the blank slates of life, or are we going to allow others to paint our blank slates for us?

See you Sunday!
Lamar

Vol 1 No 14 - Voting for Perspective

This past Saturday was yet another election day in the state of Louisiana. As I try to do whenever the polls are open, I went down and had my vote counted for the various offices on my precinct's ballot. I did this after reading the paper and seeing who was running for what, what their stated (for we truly don't know a politician's position until we see their voting record) positions are on the various issues, looking at various online forums to see who was endorsing who and why, and did my dead-level best to vote for those people and propositions that I thought was best.

As a pastor, I always get nervous during election time. I see people spending more time paying attention to the politics of the day than anything else. I hear people repeating what they've heard after a day of watching cable news and listening to talk radio. People get visibly and violently angry with one another discussing the issues. Families divide over what position to take on an issue. It's gotten to where I don't watch the 'discussion' shows where people are supposedly going to talk rationally about these issues. As you see who have been booked you can basically script the discussion based on the topic (some of them are so over-programmed by the time you see them twice you can give their spiel word-for-word the third time). All that gets accomplished is people getting mad with one another, and getting more self-satisfaction that their viewpoint is right (when far too often, NO one is right). In other words, divisiveness.

The reason I get nervous is that far too often we in the church get way more passionate about our political views (no matter what they are) and rely more on the freedoms of our constitution than the freedom of life fully devoted to Christ. This is never clearer to me than during election time.

One of the more popular quotes in politics is: "What did they know and when did they know it?" The King of Kings knew you were going to be free from sin and death at the cross - when did you (if you have) know this?

If you truly want to make a difference this election season, be more intentional about exercising the only absolute freedom you have - freedom in Christ Jesus - and let the world make fools of themselves by worrying about these other things. Go vote, as it is our responsibility to do so, but keep it in perspective.

After all, why pray "thy Kingdom come" if we don't mean it?

See you Sunday!
Lamar