Repairing a Fractured Faith: Timothy Paul Jones on His Conversion and Ministry

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It all started in a library.

A product of a Christian upbringing, Dr. Timothy Paul Jones, was the first in his family to attend college.

And the culture shock was real.

“It was a Christian college and the professors, for the most part, believed the Bible, but they didn’t believe the Bible quite the same way I had been taught to believe the Bible,” Timothy said with a smile. “For us it was King James Version only and all these extraneous things, but in college I started learning about the New Testament text and all these things I never knew about and I found myself questioning my faith.”

Enter the library job.

Timothy, a preacher’s kid, began work in an academic library surrounded by thousands of books and plenty of time.

One night, as he shelved books returned that day, he looked down to find Bertrand Russell’s 1927 essay Why I Am Not A Christian.

“I was questioning my faith in a lot of ways, I was struggling with certain things, and so I just thought, ‘Huh, this is interesting. Why I Am Not A Christian.’”

After reading Russell’s essay, Timothy continued to run into conspiracy theories about Jesus and, as a result, the next several months were spent poring over every skeptical and atheistic work he could get his hands on.

“My faith just began to fracture and crack beneath the weight of all I was reading,” he said. “I was simply not prepared to answer any of the questions that I was being faced with.

“I had never heard about apologetics, I didn’t know what apologetics was. It wasn’t anything I was familiar with at all; I was just reading all this stuff that was attacking the faith in so many different ways.”

MERE CURIOSITY

As his crisis of faith continued, Timothy discovered C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

Due to Lewis’s books being banned at his Christian grade school, Timothy’s interest was piqued.

“I began to read and see there is a reasonable case to be made for trusting in Christ,” he said. “But more than that, what really got me was [Lewis’s] sensibility. He wasn’t panicking as if the faith was under attack and he had to angrily respond in attack or anything like that. It was simply, calmly, saying and showing there is a reason to believe in Jesus Christ.”

Maybe it was that calm, winsome way of communicating that did it, or maybe it was Lewis’s prudent way of making sense of the world in a way that told a bigger and better story than he had heard before, but Timothy was hooked.

Over a brief course of time, he was introduced to other writings from F. F. Bruce, R. C. Sproul, and others that took his curiosity from questions to conviction. Conviction about Scripture, reasons for the Christian faith, and, most importantly, the bigness of God.

Timothy, who has authored or contributed to more than a dozen books, went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in biblical literature before getting his master of divinity in church history and New Testament studies and a doctorate of philosophy with an emphasis on the psychology of faith.

FROM STUDENT TO TEACHER

Timothy is now the associate vice president of the Global Campus of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., as well as a C. Edwin Gheens professor of Christian family ministry.

He also teaches courses in applied apologetics and serves as a pastor at the Midtown congregation of Sojourn Community Church.

Fueled by his own internal struggle to find good reasons for what he thought true about the Bible, Timothy landed in teaching and writing on apologetics in effort to prevent others from struggling the same way he did.

Family ministry, though not his primary focus in research and writing, was his focus as a pastor, minister, husband, and father.

So how do those two fields connect?

“When I teach my class here, for example, on apologetics and the local church, a lot of what I’m doing is talking about what are the factors that contribute to college students losing their faith?” he said. “What are children’s natural inclinations about God and how do we correct false views of God in a way that makes a faith that is more resilient for the future? That’s a lot of what we do, which is the nexus, it’s that point where family ministry and apologetics do interconnect with one another because both are about developing resilient faith that will last into the upcoming and forthcoming generations.”

Firmly persuaded that the call to apologetics is not a call for a certain gender, profession, or role within the church, but for the church as a whole, Timothy is convinced of the necessity of women being trained to reasonably defend the faith.

“Some of the most important apologists in the world are going to be mothers because they are going to hear the questions a long time before the rest of us,” he said. “We need to train our young women to be apologists. We need to train our young single women to be able to mentor young girls and try to help them unpack the issues they are facing in the challenges to their faith. That’s part of what we ought to be doing because 1 Peter 3 is not given to one particular class within the church, this is given to the whole church.”

Timothy and his wife Rayann have been married for 23 years and have four daughters, Hannah, Skylar, Kylinn, and Katrisha. They reside in Louisville.

A Merry Heart

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This a true and humorous report that reveals what level of thinking our generation has; just enjoy;

These are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and published
by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while the
exchanges were taking place.
______________________________ _
ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
______________________________ ______
ATTORNEY: What is your date of birth?
WITNESS: July 18th.
ATTORNEY: What year?
WITNESS: Every year.
______________________________ _______
ATTORNEY: How old is your son, the one living with you?
WITNESS: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can’t remember which.
ATTORNEY: How long has he lived with you?
WITNESS: Forty-five years.
______________________________ ________
ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his
sleep, he doesn’t know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
______________________________ ______
ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He’s 20, very close to your IQ.
______________________________ ___________
ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Your Honor, I need a different attorney. Can I get a
new attorney?
______________________________ ___________
ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess.
______________________________ ___________
ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town, I’m going with male.
______________________________ _______
ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant
to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________ ________
ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you
performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
______________________________ ___________
ATTORNEY: ALL of your responses MUST be oral, OK?
What school did you attend?
WITNESS: Oral.
______________________________ ___________
ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 PM.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished.
______________________________ ___________
ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Are you qualified to ask that question?
______________________________ ________
ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

We all should enjoy a good laugh regularly–a merry heart does good like medicine!

To Scotland and Beyond

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Returning to Scotland was always the plan.

Burdened for the people of Scotland to know and embrace the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Matthew Spandler-Davison left his job in Scottish Parliament in 2002 to participate in a ministry internship at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. 

The next year, Matthew moved to Louisville, Ky., to pursue a Master of Divinity degree from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary with every intention of returning home to Scotland and planting a church.

“When I came to seminary here, I came with a strong conviction that I was not going to be that guy that doesn’t go back to Scotland,” he said. “The struggle we have is that in places like the UK, we lose our best because they get trained up and they don’t go back. I didn’t want to be that guy.”

But God had other plans.

Matthew Spandler-Davison is the executive director of 20schemes, an organization committed to building healthy Gospel centered churches for Scotland’s poorest communities through church planting and revitalisation.

Though born in Norway, Matthew, 37, grew up in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he now knows of only six Gospel-preaching churches in the entire city of almost 237,000.

“Most of them have considerably less than 100 people in those churches,” he said. “For me to come [to the States] and see so many churches and so many good churches and faithful churches, and to be in a seminary that is literally pumping out thousands of ministers every year, was such a culture shock for me and it just increased my burden for Scotland.”

Matthew’s home church in Scotland, where he was converted as a teenager, does not have a pastor nor can they afford one. Even if they could, Matthew said there are no men to hire.

“I know churches in Scotland that have been sitting without a minister for years and have been desperate for a minister to come but there’s no one applying,” he said. “There are churches around here where, if a job opens up, you get hundreds of resumes. A job opens up in a church in the UK and you may spend three, four, or five years before you get your first resume from somebody interested in that position.”

With that kind of weighty information, Matthew was plagued with the question: How can I be here and yet see such a need there?

Yet, in 2004, God called Matthew and his wife Tracy to plant a church in Bardstown, Ky.

“There were many churches but not healthy Gospel-preaching churches in the area so we were convicted to plant a church and start a small group Bible study in our house,” he said. “It was a Tuesday night meeting that became over time a church, not necessarily by design, but it developed into a church. But from the very beginning, the first year of our church, we had a mission trip to Scotland. From the very beginning we were thinking through, ‘How can this church really be used by God to see a church established and planted in Scotland?’”


Enter Mez McConnell.

Mez, the pastor of Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh, Scotland, grew up in a scheme, served time in prison, and was himself caught up in addiction.

When released from prison, Mez was converted. He moved to Brazil and started a church among street kids before experiencing the same convicted as Matthew.

“He was surrounded by all these missionaries and he thought, ‘Who is sharing the Gospel back home? Who is starting churches back home?’” Matthew said. “So he felt led to go back to the United Kingdom and went to this little community on the edge of Edinburgh called Niddrie.”

A community known for poverty and violence, Niddrie was a place people typically avoided. And it was just the place Mez planted a church in 2007.

“I was fascinated by a number of things,” Matthew said of meeting Mez in 2011. “One, his own story. Second, the fact that he is seeing a church growing in Scotland. That is unusual to see a church grow in Scotland. I’m used to seeing struggling churches but he’s seeing a church thrive. He’s seeing people come to faith. He’s seeing a church grow through conversions.

“And the fact that it’s in a scheme, that we’re seeing someone come from heroin addiction be converted and now being trained for ministry in this little church right there in Niddrie, Edinburgh, a church of 60 or 70 people, I was just so excited.”

Though the men differ in personality and background, they share a love for the church, a love for the Gospel, and the same heart and passion for church planting in Scotland.

“I want to see churches like this established right across the schemes of Scotland,” Mez told him. And right then and there in the backyard of Mez’s house, the pair started mapping out what would become 20schemes.

“Let’s do it,” Matthew told Mez. “Let’s come together as two churches where we can watch this ministry and let’s recruit workers. Let’s get other churches to partner with us. Let’s raise some money and plant some churches right across Scotland.”

Matthew smiled. “That’s how the Lord in His providence and wisdom uses a little church in central Kentucky to do the very thing I felt like I was called to do: plant churches right across Scotland.”

Now, five years after launching 20schemes, the organization has seven church planting teams in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glascow, all at various stages of planting or revitalizing the Gospel work in Scottish schemes.

“It is incredibly exciting to see what the Lord is doing, to see His church built right across the most unlikely parts of Scotland in the schemes,” Matthew said. “As you reach the poor then other churches across the city will take note. You cannot deny Gospel transformation in the poorest parts of your city. When you see a community that has been transformed by a Gospel-preaching church, when you see someone converted from heroin addiction to life in Christ Jesus, when the government has been pumping money into these communities to try to deal with the drug culture and the decay and the urban blight, and yet you see a church started and all of the sudden families are transformed because of the Gospel—people will take note of that. I don’t think that will just affect the schemes but the whole of Scotland for the sake of the Gospel.”

“That’s what Jesus does, right? That’s where He went first. He went first to what seems foolish to the world. He went first to the most unlikely of places and yet the leaders took note. The Pharisees took note, the governor took note, the tax collectors took note, because they saw a transformation happening in the most unlikely of places, and I think that’s what’s going to take place in the schemes of Scotland.”

The country, which is home to almost 5.5 million, is not the poorest nor the least reached nation in the world, but there is a great need for the Gospel and a great opportunity to meet it.

“There’s a wide open door right now, there’s a great opportunity to come and be a part of this ministry,” Matthew said. “Ministry is actually pretty easy there. You’re not trying to create ministry opportunities, it’s everywhere. In fact, people are very open to having spiritual conversations.

“Jesus is worthy to be worshipped in the schemes of Scotland. We’re convinced of that. There are parts of Scotland where He is not being worshipped today and so our motivation is that Jesus be worshipped amid the poor of Scotland where He deserves to be worshipped and across the poorest of Scotland. Who will go? Who will join us?”

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Joy in the Midst of Trials

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The Greek term chara appears throughout the New Testament. It is translated by the word joy and refers to an inner feeling of happiness. Holy Scripture refers here to an emotion, a sense of delight and gladness.

Paul declares that he is rejoicing even as he experiences suffering, and that he will continue to rejoice in the future. This is not to say that the presence of sadness in our lives is a moral blemish. The same apostle bears witness to his perpetual sorrow as he contemplates the Jews in their unbelief: “I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart” (Romans 9:2). It is possible to have joy in our hearts even while there is an undercurrent of sorrow. This is the way it was for the Lord Jesus Christ. Isaiah prophesied that he would be “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Is. 53:3). Yet he also spoke about an inner happiness: “These things I have spoken unto you, that my joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full (John 15:11). There was simultaneously joy and sorrow in the heart of Jesus, and we can expect to find the same in our experience too. Joy unmixed with sorrow must await the consummation of the eternal kingdom.

How was Paul able to have joy in his innermost being when he wrote Philippians? He was not a superhuman or a divine person, but simply a man among men, an earthen vessel.The joy Paul experienced was supernatural, generated by God Himself. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Joy is a beautiful manifestation of the moral renewal which the indwelling Holy Spirit produces within the person who is united to Christ by faith. Paul determined to face life’s trials with joy. We must resolve to do the same.

– Mark Lawson

Let us fight bravely against all the trials of this brief life, confident that our Lord will uphold us by his power until we have fully overcome.

– John Calvin

Glorious Truth

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What are you really living for? It’s crucial to realize that you either glorify God, or you glorify something or someone else. You’re always making something look big. If you don’t glorify God when you’re involved in a conflict, you inevitably show that someone or something else rules your heart.
– Ken Sande

Humility is nothing but the disappearance of self in the vision that God is all.
– Andrew Murray

Amy Carmichael’s great longing was to have a “single eye” for the glory of God. Whatever might blur the vision God had give her of His work, whatever could distract or deceive or tempt other to seek anything but the Lord Jesus Himself, she tried to eliminate.
– Elisabeth Elliot

Every blossoming flower warns you that it is time to seek the Lord; be not out of tune with nature, but let your heart bud and bloom with holy desires.
– Charles Haddon Spurgeon

God is the greatest thing that exists, ever has existed or ever will exist; so for us to glory in anything else would be sin, as there is nothing greater than God, and there is no calling greater than praising God.
– John Piper

Our gifts are very pleasant to Him. He loves to see us lay our time, our talents, our substance on the altar, not for the value of what
we give, but for the sake of the motive from which the gift springs.
– Charles Haddon Spurgeon

We ascribe to God. We don’t add to Him.
– John Piper

A Celebration of the Hard Place

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The church of Jesus Christ has never been in a good place.

It has forever lived in a hostile environment. It was born in the dragon’s lair where the hot breath of the beast is always felt. Its infancy was bloody; antagonists surrounded it and adversaries attacked it, and nothing has changed in two millennia. The world hates the church because it hates its Founder, Jesus Christ. The world and the church are on opposite courses. They represent two different kingdoms, two diverse realms. So, the church has always existed in a hard place.

But hardness is not necessarily bad for the people of God. By the amount of adversity God allows His church to endure, it must have some positive effect. The church’s finest hours seem to be when she stands bravely in stark contrast to the wicked world while feeling the fury of the beast against her. It is then the people of God, though tried by fire, have sung their best song. They have shown a watching world the beauty of their King, who also suffered the Serpent’s bruise.

The western church’s difficulty is not the heavy hand of persecution but the easy hand of prosperity. It is when we court the politician’s favor, the academia’s admiration, and the media’s approval that we suffer both morally and spiritually. We are like Samson in Delilah’s tent; we are flirting with captivity and begging to have our eyes put out. This is the hardest place for any church. When it wants success and stature in a world that is destined for destruction, it can’t end well for either church or world.

How many churches have become comfortable in its environment?

How many are comfortable with the world? Ease in Zion is not a good sign. Comfort always precedes collapse. But it’s when the church is in the hard place that it advances and the gates of hell cannot prevail.

It has always been that way. God’s people are not strangers to pressure or peril. When the children of Israel stood before the Red Sea, they experienced a hard place. With a vengeful Pharaoh and his well-equipped army in battle formation behind the former slaves, it looked hopeless. But the man of God lifted his rod and the Lord performed a miracle of deliverance by creating a highway through the sea.

Gideon suffered a 450-to-1 deficit. The enemies of Israel were the undefeatable Midianites. They had a 135,000-manned military, while Gideon didn’t have an army. It was more like a small battalion of 300 men. And their weapons were unconventional. Each man had a lit torch, a pitcher, and a trumpet. That was their entire weaponry. But as it played out, they needed no swords because God brought confusion upon the Midianites who turned on themselves and slaughtered each other until hardly a man was left standing.

King Jehoshaphat experienced something similar, only his army sang their way to victory, and God turned an ambush into a bonanza of loot. When the dust settled, the enemy army lay dead before Jehoshaphat and his praise team; all they had to do was pick up the treasure trove. The plunder was so much; it took them three days to collect it all.

Surely, my reader, you know the stories, each one a tale of impossibilities.

A brother sold by his jealous brothers to foreigners and winded up ruling over the foreigners. A shepherd boy against a warrior giant, three young men who wouldn’t bend or bow, but also wouldn’t burn when thrown into the fiery furnace. A praying old man thrown into a lions’ den slept comfortably among the ferocious felines, while the king who threw him into that hard place tossed and turned all night, unable to sleep in his palatial bed. Yes, all of these and more were in hard places, places no one, including the men and women who were there, would have chosen to visit or occupy. But in the hard place, God wrought deliverance and made them all unlikely heroes of the faith.

But not all the stories end up with a “slam-bang finish.” Some hard places end with tears, pain, and suffering. Some end in death, but that doesn’t mean the hard places were a defeat. When Jesus stood before His enemies all alone, there was no miraculous deliverance. He may have been able to call for twelve legions of angels, but He didn’t. He chose Calvary. The cross was His weapon, but it brought no deliverance from death; it became the instrument of His death.

In the most confusing twist of plots and storylines, the God-Man died an unjust death, the just for the unjust, the innocent for the guilty, the righteous for the unrighteous.

Jesus did not come down from the cross by divine power. He came down by two men pulling the nails out of His lifeless body, removing Him from the cross timbers and burying Him in a tomb.

For Jesus’ weak and cowardly followers there could be no harder place. Their Messiah dead and gone. Their sorrow compounded by the guilt of forsaking Him in His hour of need. How bitter was this place of hardness! But out of the jaws of defeat God secured His victory. The weakness of God was still more powerful than all of hell’s might. Satan bruised His heel, but nipping at someone’s heels puts your head in a vulnerable position. Jesus crushed His enemy’s head, and the blow was fatal. And in so doing, God proved that the hard place does not have to end in miraculous deliverance for Him to bring about His good purposes. He doesn’t need to display His power to win; He can win by demonstrating weakness, humility, and infirmity. Over and over this has been the weaponry of God: allowing His church to suffer hardship and through weakness win.

Martyred in the Ecuadorian jungle in January 1956, no one could imagine what the sacrifice of five young men would produce.

The men, Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian were endeavoring to take the Gospel to the Waodani people, whose tribal rivals called them “Aucas,” meaning savages. Why did they have to die? Why did their blood stain the river beach and their speared bodies get cast into the river’s current? Days later only four of them were found and then buried in a common grave on the spot where they died. Why such a waste of youth and missionary zeal? What a hard place for the wives and children of the martyred.

But the mystery of the hard place once again proved that God’s weakness is stronger than anyone or anything. Within days, volunteers came forward to resume the outreach to the Waodani. As news of the tragedy spread throughout the western world, thousands of young people were emboldened to respond to the call to foreign missions. Within two years, Elisabeth Elliot, the widow of Jim Elliot, along with their daughter, Valerie and Nate Saint’s sister, Rachel Saint, entered the Waodani encampment extending forgiveness to the very men who had killed their loved ones. They lived among them for years administering the Gospel and medical care.

The Indians saw the love of God lived out before their eyes; the Gospel came alive to them. They heard and saw the Gospel and conviction had its perfect work. Many of them were converted, and today the church of the Waodani prospers in Ecuador.

Yes, the church thrives in the hard place.

But many who profess the name of Jesus find themselves responding very differently to adversity. You see, the hard place is a gift from God to bring us to the end of ourselves. It is His love that leads us to the position of desperation to free us from the self-reliance that so often keeps us from trusting Him. Desperation is designed to lead us to dependency. That is God’s purpose, but Satan perverts the hard place in the mind of the Christian. Instead of desperation leading to dependency, it leads to despondency. And despondency leads to unbelief, a distrust of God and His hard places.

Everyone faces difficult times. Hard times are no respecter of persons. But it is the severe places in life that proves who you really trust. They expose what we truly rely upon. The principle of sin still remains in the Christian and, if allowed, it will work in us a self-reliance that is both stubborn and tough to detect. It is the hard place that drives self-reliance out of hiding and makes us see that it must be absolutely abandoned so we may totally trust in God.

If we are going to live a supernatural life, (the only kind of life a Christian is to live), we must believe God’s will is best and that the hard place is necessary for us. It is not a matter of learning to adapt to difficulty or adopting a tougher mindset. No, it is believing that your God is a Father who so loves you that He will never abandon you in your hour of need. You must have faith that He has brought you to the place of need to see your real need, not deliverance from the circumstantial problem, but deliverance from a self-will that determines a plan different from God’s agenda for you.

Your weakness is the vehicle He uses to win the day, not your strengths.

Too many Christians are trying to overcome by becoming better, better at faith, better at making wiser choices, better at being more sanctified. This is only asking for more trials by fire. The whole purpose of the hard place is not to show how strong a Christian you are, but how God’s weakness is greater than any power. It is to display through your inabilities that God is the One who brings us through. God is not looking for strong believers; He is looking for impotent instruments to demonstrate His great power. Some of us need our sanctification sanctified.

The church was born in the environment of adversity, and it is in that climate the lungs of the church are best suited to breathe. As the eagle is made to navigate the thinner air of the higher atmosphere, so is the church built to soar on the absence of human strength. It was made to fly in the power of God only. So, celebrate the hard place because it is there God manifests His glory. It the glory of God revealed that makes us rejoice. The less visible our human glory, the more of His glory will we see and so will others.

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Delayed Deliverances

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Immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened. (Acts 16:26)

In this age, God rescues his people from some harm. Not all harm. That’s comforting to know, because otherwise we might conclude from our harm that he has forgotten us or rejected us.
So be encouraged by the simple reminder that in Acts 16:19–24, Paul and Silas were not delivered, but in verses 25–26, they were.
First, no deliverance:

“They seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace.” (verse 19)
“The magistrates tore the garments off them.” (verse 22)
They “inflicted many blows upon them.” (verse 23)
The jailer “fastened their feet in the stocks.” (verse 24)

But then, deliverance:

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God . . . and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened. (verses 25–26)

God could have stepped in sooner. He didn’t. He has his reasons. He loves Paul and Silas.
Question for you: If you plot your life along this continuum of Paul’s initial suffering and later deliverance, where are you? Are you in the stripped-and-beaten stage, or the unshackled, door-flung-open stage?
Both are God’s stages of care for you. He has not left you or forsaken you (Hebrews 13:5).
If you are in the fettered stage, don’t despair. Sing. Freedom is on the way. It is only a matter of time. Even if it comes through death. “Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2:10).

— John Piper

Words for the Wind

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Do you think that you can reprove words, when the speech of a despairing man is wind?” (Job 6:26)

In grief and pain and despair, people often say things they otherwise would not say. They paint reality with darker strokes than they will paint it tomorrow, when the sun comes up. They sing in minor keys, and talk as though that is the only music. They see clouds only, and speak as if there were no sky.

They say, “Where is God?” Or: “There is no use to go on.” Or: “Nothing makes any sense.” Or: “There’s no hope for me.” Or: “If God were good, this couldn’t have happened.”
What shall we do with these words?

Job says that we do not need to reprove them. These words are wind, or literally “for the wind.” They will be quickly blown away. There will come a turn in circumstances, and the despairing person will waken from the dark night, and regret hasty words.
Therefore, the point is, let us not spend our time and energy reproving such words. They will be blown away of themselves on the wind. One need not clip the leaves in autumn. It is a wasted effort. They will soon blow off of themselves.

Oh, how quickly we are given to defending God or sometimes the truth, from words that are only for the wind. If we had discernment, we could tell the difference between the words with roots and the words blowing in the wind.

There are words with roots in deep error and deep evil. But not all grey words get their color from a black heart. Some are colored mainly by pain and despair. What you hear is not the deepest thing within. There is something real and dark within where they come from. But it is temporary — like a passing infection — real, painful, but not the true person.

So, let us learn to discern whether the words spoken against us, against God, or against the truth, are merely for the wind — spoken not from the soul, but from the sore. If they are for the wind, let us wait in silence and not reprove. Restoring the soul, not reproving the sore, is the aim of our love.

— John Piper

Renewal of the Man of God Conference

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Renewal of the Man of God is a free one-day event for pastors and church leaders to refresh and recharge their personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Too often, pastors and leaders give of themselves and have nothing in reserve for their own souls. Ministry then becomes routine and mechanical and, as a result of going through the motions of ministering to others, their own spiritual vitality can be lost.

This event is hosted by Real Truth Matters and Solid Rock Baptist Church to give church leaders a day to focus on their own spiritual needs and relearn how to maintain fellowship with God. How do you walk with God and keep ministry operating out of the overflow of your relationship with Christ? That is what this conference is about.

RTM Director Michael Durham will teach five sessions on keeping the heart before the Lord and experiencing Him as a constant, present reality. Time will also be given to extended prayer.

Breakfast and lunch will be provided and wives are welcome to attend. Make it a day for you both to meet with the Lord and other leaders in a day dedicated to renewal.

For more information, call: 270.898.8496

Please register by February 26, 2018 to attend.