I’m always so well intentioned. I intended to listen again to all the messages from the NCFIC conference and then post my comments here, and I still intend to do that. But it is taking me longer than I intended it to…

Right now I am taking a break over lunch. We are very near the finish line for, “The Peasall Sisters - Family Harmony.” If all goes well, we will set it to encode to mpeg 2 (DVD format) over the weekend, and author it on Monday. I highly recomend this film and you can buy a copy at Franklin Springs Family Media. If I do say so myself, we do great work. Actually, I think it is because we have such a great director.

My jog today is to get the end credits together, and since my lunch is about over I’m going to post this and get to it.

Maybe more of those comments will be coming along soon… we shall see.

On one of the forums I participate in someone said they believed that faith must preceed regeneration.

This was my post in response.

But the Bible says that faith is a gift… how then can we exercise faith to please God first? Does God give the gift of faith to those who are unregenerate?

God must regenerate us, give us the gift of faith so that we can then please him because our works are as filthy rags.

If we must exercise faith to please God, and we must exercise faith before we are regenerate, then we must please God to become regenerated. This then is salvation by works because God is saving us because we pleased him with our faith. Unfortunately for this viewpoint, our salvation is not merit based. It is a free gift from God to those whom he choses to give it.

Comments on Jeff Pollard’s Why the Church Needs the Family and the Family Needs the Church from the NCFIC Uniting Church and Home Conference.

Jeff reminded us that there are two uses of the word church. One use is when it means the universal Church, or all those who have been, are, or will be a part of God’s salvation, or God’s elect. Then there is the usage which means the local expression of the universal church, or the visible church. I usually differentiate in writing by using a capital “C” for the Universal (or invisible) Church, and a small “c” for the local church. Being a member of the visible church does not equal election/salvation. In other words, you can be a member of God’s covenant and not be elect.

This was a part of his introduction to the definition of the church. He said very little I disagreed with, but I found myself wishing he would use more scripture to back up the assertions he made, especially since I agreed with him and knew that the scripture was there. Even when you are preaching to the choir you need to use scripture.

He talked of the family’s need of the church for discipline and fellowship and support which I agree with. And he also did mention all the commands in scripture that talk of relating to one another in the body. That is impossible to do if you are not part of a local body of believers.

One funny story he told was of a man that he was talking to in a restaurant. Jeff asked the man if he worshiped, and where he worshiped. The man replied, “O I worship.” Jeff noticed he hadn’t answered his question so he said, “Yes, but WHERE do you worship?” The man replied, “O, I worship in my living room. I watch this preacher on TV every Sunday morning.” Jeff said, “Then you aren’t part of a local body of believers?” The man replied that he was not. The problem with this is that he can’t go look in the mirror and say to himself, “I rebuke thee!!!” It doesn’t work that way. We all need accountability and discipline and fellowship and comfort.

Anyway, all in all I really enjoyed the message. I can’t think of anything I really disagreed with.

Here is a few of my comments on Scott Brown’s – The Sufficiency of Scripture from the Uniting Church and Family conference.

Scott affirmed the doctrine of Sola-Scriptura which is a very good thing. It’s not God’s word plus something, God’s word is sufficient. He said his wife liked to say that the Word of God is like water, it is totally sufficient. You can try coke and tea and all kinds of other drinks, but water is sufficient and necessary. As opposed to the Roman Catholic doctrine of scripture plus tradition. And I would add that tradition is not bad if it is biblical tradition. Tradition is defined as the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation. That is good and healthy as long as it is biblical.

I would also like to add that generally drinking other things besides water is not bad, but you must have the proper water intake. And I think it is the same with scripture. You need scripture, you don’t need anything else. But there are other things that are good for your spiritual health. It’s not wrong to read works published by someone else, and can be very beneficial to your spiritual health, but you must have the intake of scripture.

He also mentioned that most churches are moving away from the practice of reading the scripture. One Pastor he talked to said he has started showing movie clips in place of the reading of scripture because people would start to zone out while he was reading the word.

I think that is pretty amazing and an indicator of the church, a thermometer if you will, and the church has the signs of a sickness. It’s a famine for the word of the Lord.

I think Scott did a fair job with this subject, though it felt like he wandered off topic too often and chased rabbits. He didn’t really say much that I disagreed with, at least not worth noting except for a statement that didn’t really seem to do with anything else. He said that Family integrated churches are not cultic. My issue with that statement is that it is a blanket statement. I think that many, many are not. I am a part of one that is not. But I feel that there are others that are. They idolize the family over God and it becomes their God. This is cultic, it’s the cult of the family.

But that is the only one worth noting, and it’s mostly something that I wouldn’t want someone to take the wrong way.

We had a great time at the regional Uniting Church and Family conference in Alabama. The topics were:

• The Sufficiency of Scripture – Scott Brown
• Why the Church Needs the Family and the Family Needs the Church – Jeff Pollard
• The Family is the Factory of Church Leadership – Scott Brown
• The Father’s Role in Family Worship – Jeff Pollard
• Establishing Biblical Church Government – Jason Dohm
• If, When, and How We Leave a Church – Don Hart, Esq.
• The Father’s Administration of Christ’s Kingdom in the Home – Jeff Pollard
• How Do You Train Children to Stay in the Worship Service – Scott Brown
• Panel Discussion
• Building God-Centered, Word Centered, Christ-Exalting, Family Integrated Churches – Scott Brown.

I hope to have comments and general stuff coming on most (okay okay, maybe only some) of these topics soon, including what I liked and didn’t like. I’m not going to just lavish the praise heavily and skip anything I disagreed with. I also should have a few pictures up soon from the conference.

As Christians, we are called to deliberately impact the culture in a positive way, for the Lord Jesus Christ. This is seen in the dominion mandate in Genesis, and again in our Great Commission to teach, or disciple the nations. But too often we look like a dim shadow of the world around us. The pagans are creating the culture and discipling the nations and we just sit back and follow suite. This is especially true in the area of education. Most of us Christians are perfectly content to hand our children over to the priests of baal… er ahhh… I mean evolution. And by the way, Darwinism is a religion. If you don’t believe that, why don’t you try to blaspheme against it in public? You will probably be ridiculed, scorned, maybe you’ll even get your face and name in the paper as a loony that belongs on the funny farm.

But the area of education is not the only problem! On Sundays, the one day when the family might get to be together, we are content to send the kids of to Sunday School and Children’s Church while we go to the “Big People’s Church and Sunday School.” Let somebody else deal with the children, never mind that they have to miss out on any good teaching that goes on while they watch over and shepherd and train our children.

And as if that weren’t enough, we have many Christians whose wife works to help win the bread for the family. And if the children are too young to go to school, we must send them to day care. Unless of course you work at the day care… then you take care of all of the other mom’s children so that they can work as well.

The problem is, we are trying to bring the world into the church… and what do we get? We get the world in the church. Big surprise there!!! We are worldly. And what is worldliness? Worldliness to a Christian is that which the world does that is contrary to the scriptures either in practice or in notion. Now I know that someone will take this to an extreme and say, “If the world does it, we can’t do it.” This is entirely wrong headed. However, we must know why we do what we do. Worldly people sleep and so do Christians. Just because they sleep does not mean that we cannot. That is not the point I am trying to make here. Rather, we must know that everything we do is Godly and effective in building the kingdom of God, and at the very least that we are not tearing down the kingdom of God. We must seek to impact our culture for Christ and His kingdom. This means that when the Bible says that we should train up our children in the way they should go that we don’t send them off to the priests of Darwinism. This means that we don’t send our kids off to the little peoples church while we go eat meat and place the spiritual well being of our kids in someone else’s hands. This means that the husband is responsible for making the ends meet in the family.

But let me address any concerns or misunderstandings that someone may have. For us to provide for the education of our children does not imply that we can never allow someone besides mom or dad to train the children. It means the parents are responsible for the training. It means that you cannot send you child to the priests of Darwin without being held responsible. And when I talk of send the kids to children’s church, I am not saying that it is always wrong to have separate activities for the young people. The problem is that we place the responsibility of our Children’s well being upon other members of the body of Christ who aren’t responsible for their well-being. And when I talk of women working outside of the home, I am not saying that a women must never do any work outside of the home. But the women is not the primary bread winner. That is the man’s responsibility.

It seems to me that the pendulum swings too far in either direction and I very rarely see it fall where is should. This makes it very hard for Christians to have the impact on the culture that they are supposed to.