just thinking out loud

 Pastor Loran preached today April 6, 2025

Talking about the school of faith and the school of anti-faith…

“What do you want the Lord to say?” Song came to mind

“What do you want the Devil to say?”  “Ha,ha, I made her quit?”

The sacrifice of praise is Praise Halleluia! Anyhow!

Above the fray.

In spite of praise

Glory to God in the highest, when you are lowest

Make the devil mad, praise

No matter when and how many times it happens, Satan doesn’t quit his attacks.   His goal—-   to make you quit.   Did God hold you up in the last traunch of attacks?   He has an allotment of attacks for each season.  Is that surprising?   He has them scheduled and set, for the dispatch at just the right or wrong time in your life.  

What do you want the Lord to say?   That is the song.  The answer is "Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter in the joy of the Lord"

Diddys like that remind us of a strategic concept in a repetitive way that helps us remember that we are in a fight.   Float like a butterfly sting like a bee, was the song of Mohammed Ali.  It kept him floating and stinging, when the discouragement kicked in.  Nice strategy.

Often we lose sight of our part in the spiritual battle of the church, giving God praise when there are seasons of struggle.  Lifting Jesus up and seeing HIM draw men to himself is a concept swiftly forgotten.   The “talkatives” have convinced us that it is us who draw people to Jesus.  

Praise is a team

Prayer intercession

Soul winning

Praising and worship in unified manner is part of the hedge of protection that guides and guards us from the strength of the onslaught that comes against us in the battle of living for Jesus. 

Some of the victory is given to us individually, as part of the corporate relationship of our individual church and part of the corporate interchurch battle as we intermingle with the church Triumphant and the “church militant”.   The vision of the church militant’s labor of fighting against the onslaughts of the enemy.  “Confessing our faults one to another”, Not holding long term grudges, bearing one another’s burdens, giving to the needy, holding one another accountable are the areas where we are Lifting Jesus up that HE may “draw all men”.  Hedges of protection that God sets up for His people are not words only they are laid out in scripture for us to earn them and grow them sowing the seeds that God has placed in our hands through his word.

Give Grace that we may see your servants protected and guarded by your hedges of protection and that we may live on earth as a visual expression of Your letter of intention of what life on earth should and can be.   We love you Lord and we would exalt your word as you do above, even all your name.  Help us not make the Devil rejoice.

In Jesus name Amen.

End times sermon???

 Toxic Masculinity Unleashed!  In the pulpit…

The Lord is high and lifted up and He is lowly to condescend to men of low estate.  What an impossible balance maintain,perhaps?

As a sensitive soul, I must say that I am strengthened in my spiritual walk by the preaching of many an overzealously pounding ministerial style.  It is my preference, I would say.  Still, the whispering, whimpering slow speaking terrorists, who use the scripture to bludgeon God’s defenseless sheep into oblivion always, always stuns me.   They hide behind supposed scripture knowledge and a heady professorial gait; behind which they conversationally batter their hearers with present sins and future events of Jesus’ second coming to gain a control and lordship that I don’t believe God intended.  Religion intends it!  Religion seeks to control the masses through the gnostic expressions of knowing more about what God intends in the future.   Jesus doesn’t do that!

He said search the scriptures.  Do we preach Christ and Him crucified and seeking to save?  Or make we fearmongering and cowering minions to our subjection?

There are so many who love to watch the women clutch their pearls as though at a horror film at the future of the earth’s demise, because they hate the green movements and political pundits.  Is that your calling?  Did the Holy Spirit inspire this?

Jesus is Lord and he spoke to the woman at the well with no single threat in his mouth.  He didn’t seem as though he would giggle in the judgment when he sees her burning and begging the rocks to fall upon her.  He didn’t.  “He loved at her”.  The cursedness of self exaltation and fearmongering is everywhere in scripture, but it nearly never finds its way into the sermons of the towering!

Oh, You are so great and you are so versed and you are so beautiful in language and form, but is your message prayed over and spoken to your people, of whom you will give an account or to the untold unknown who you think, are eavesdropping.   What has God called you to do?  Set a trap to ensnare the outside world or preach the gospel?

Jesus is Lord of His Church and not you and not me.   We must pray not to enter into temptation of sowing fear and torment.   Jesus came that men might have life not that Christians would leave church saying “he told those sinners today!”

The meditation of Rev 10

"Lord, show us the reality of the victory that you have attained for us"

Pastor Loran prayed in this way, on the second Sunday of this new year, 2025.  It is January 12th.  It was a sunny Sunday and freezing cold.  We had a sense of accomplishment for having braved the frigid temperatures after the expected blizzard that turned out to be just a dusting.  North Carolina has weakened us.   What started out as an admirable quality of Charlotteans that they are "so submissive to the providence of God that they shut down the city for storms, has become in us an excuse for a limp and weak lack of perserverance to do the will of God.  Shame on us for taking an attribute learned and using it to excess.

Nevertheless, we laid aside our limp laziness, both of the holiday vacation and of the region we abide in and we pressed our way to the house of the Lord, which was certainly not as full as it usually is.  Pastor Baker commented on it in his welcome...  We must all be Northerners, who have braved the elements, he said.  Our Northern pride that we don't consider the elements as "providential hinderances" to the privilege of worship make us feel good at such times.  We have something admirable, coming from New York and the northern regions of our country.  These things we couldn't appreciate when we migrated here.  We could only see the beauty of the culture of common graces that had been so affected by Christianity that there was more sky to look at than sultry billboards.  We are Charlotteans now.  We have been adopted and we have adopted them.  We use their language and we follow some of the mores of the natives.

The worship was more sober than usual.  Four of our sisters are travelling to Italy for a missions trip to contend with the trafficking industry that we support and pray for.  That is a dark trip to contend with principalities and powers that project worldwide.

Jesus paid it all and Jesus has won it all and Jesus still has work for us to accomplish was the gist of the music.  They sang, Take Me to the King, which I haven't heard in quite awhile.

And then Pastor prayed for the preaching.  I always wish I could be taking notes on the prayer.  There are always gems of truths that Pastor just tosses out in prayer that make me need to chew more and more on, but because my eyes are closed, I never get the whole thing when I try to write it down after we say amen.

Jesus does something and we do something, but we have the victory, whether we can sense it in our part of the battle right now!  Lord help us see it.  

He started with Psalm 16:8.   My paraphrase is when we "set" the Lord (like my volleyball) always before our eyes that is the reason that we won't be moved.  Imagine that?   If I take the Lord as a practice and place him as dear to myself as the skill of setting with the silent skill, he stablizes us and improves our skill in the spiritual battle.  He gives us some of himself as a result.   

I had been meditating on God setting us,  because I know he is a much more skillful setter than I am.  But this word picture was far more challenging to me.   I love to have a moment to practice 100 sets to myself just because I like the part of my mind that is engaged and the memories of tremendous spikes that have  won us games so many years ago.  

At present the setting is God before my eyes.  God has the game mapped out and he has his team working against the principalities and powers.  I see that He loves to be engaged in the warfare of the spirit and to show off how his people notice the nuances of his presence in worship and in ministry.  Do we really seek His face to do for us what we have asked?   Do we really notice His pleasure and His displeasure in our service?

The consequences Pastor inferred about "Sin always makes you feel empty" Righteousness has rewards.  We seek those rewards of righteousness.  The protections of His presence.  The angels encamped around those who fear Him.  God's adding blessings without sorrow, etc.,etc.,etc.

Then, on the way home we discovered David Jennings song.  It is my new prayer for our nation!  God grant that we may get home to heaven and see that we are dancing around his throne because of the righteousness that has exalted our whole nation.  Use your word to draw our politicians to You and living for Your glory and not their own.  After Jimmy Carters funeral, it made me imagine all of us as the young people singing for Jesus and rejoicing in the Victory in Jesus.   This is truly God's Country.  I believe it and I pray you would set it before your eyes and be glorified in Your people for the sake of the Church. In Jesus' wondrous name,  AMEN