Alpha Children Ministry

In 1986 I traveled with a group of Christians to Bangalore, India, to share Christ’s love and the way of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. During that trip I met Abraham and his wife Lydia and began a friendship with them that has spanned these many years. Three years after that mission trip, Abraham came to the USA and asked me to help him begin a ministry to orphans and poor children. Both Abraham and Lydia’s parents died when they were young and they had to live in children’s homes while growing up. They know first hand what it is like to grow up without their parents and desire to help children who are in similar circumstances. Thus they began the remarkable ministry known as Alpha Children Ministry.

This coming week Abraham and Lydia will be visiting here in Michigan and sharing about their ministry back in India. Saturday, May 4th at 7:00pm we will be having a dessert fellowship and presentation time at Crossroads Community Baptist Church at 2580 Packard Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48104. I hope you can join us and hear their incredible story.

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress…” James 1:27 NIV

To learn more about this ministry go to: www.alphacm.org 

 

Worship

“What then is worship? The term comes to us in our modern speech from the Anglo-Saxon, “weorthscipe,” which later developed into, “worship,” meaning “to attribute worth to an object.” Worship is the “worth-ship” of the one you worship.” (How To Worship Jesus Christ by Joseph Carroll). To worship God then is to attribute worth to him. How do you attribute worth to something or someone? You become devoted, focus your attention, spend time and money, make sacrifices, and show reverence to it or them. What do you worship?

Isaiah 6:1-4 ”In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.” NIV

 

Freedom – Getting Free

Drawing from the twelve steps, the Bible, and personal experience; here is the process I recomend for gaining freedom from addiction:

1. Get honest. If you think about it confession is really just agreeing with God. He knows everything you have done or thought so your telling Him about your struggles and sin is really just you agreeing with what He already knows. It is also important to tell someone else. Hidden sin takes on a power of its own. Revealing sin deflates it and it loses its power over you.

2. Realize you are no longer under the power of sin, but free in Christ. Romans 6:1-14 “Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? Or have you forgotten that when we were joined with Christ Jesus in baptism, we joined him in his death? For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives. Since we have been united with him in his death, we will also be raised to life as he was. We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin. And since we died with Christ, we know we will also live with him. We are sure of this because Christ was raised from the dead, and he will never die again. Death no longer has any power over him. When he died, he died once to break the power of sin. But now that he lives, he lives for the glory of God. So you also should consider yourselves to be dead to the power of sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus. Do not let sin control the way you live; do not give in to sinful desires. Do not let any part of your body become an instrument of evil to serve sin. Instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life. So use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of God. Sin is no longer your master, for you no longer live under the requirements of the law. Instead, you live under the freedom of God’s grace.” NIV

3. Begin to grapple with the core issues that contribute to the stress and pain in your life and the resulting baggage you are carrying with you.

4. Pray and seek God’s help.

5. Meditate on the truth, of who you are in Christ, as found in God’s Word.

6. Seek out others to help and mentor you along this journey.

This week take some time and examine your life. Do you have some type of addiction and do you need to get honest and begin to do what is needed to get free?

 

Freedom – Understanding Addiction

The first step in gaining freedom is to understand some of the dynamics of addiction. The addiction cycle describes the reoccurring process that takes place as we struggle with our addictions. It begins with stress. Stress is caused by a variety of things that we encounter in life and can come from past or present experiences and circumstances. Some examples of stressors are: the expectations of others, fear of rejection, lack of sleep, school, anger, relationships and a fear of failure. There are many stressors out there, but this short list is to give you a feel for what they look like.

“Acting out” are the behaviors we do in trying to relieve our stress in inappropriate, destructive ways. As Christians this is what we call sin. Its where we look to other things or people, rather than God, to find life. One recovering alcoholic once said that anything you look to for life becomes your god. Once again some of the ways of acting out could be an indulgence or over indulgence in Facebook, chocolate, TV, pornography, food, drugs, gambling, self-stimulation, fantasizing about a romantic relationship, sports, etc…

After acting out there is usually immediate guilt and remorse, due to the fact that we know what is sin and we feel badly about sinning. This leads to shame and depression where we move from feeling badly about the act to feeling badly about ourselves. We feel like failures and slide into depression. As a way to rebalance and climb out of our depression we tend to make recommitments, “I will never do that again,” or, “I’ll get help this time.” These recommitments drive us to want to perform better. Having to perform is always stressful and we find ourselves back accumulating stress, which drives us to acting out, and the cycle begins anew.

This week do a self-assessment on yourself and identify your addictions. Write down your thoughts in a journal and express your discoveries to God in prayer. Come back next week to find out how to break out of the addiction cycle.

 

Silence – Being Still Before God

Noise

Noise is all around us and increasing as time passes. It is distracting, affects our mental health, and makes it hard to hear God. What about you?

- What kind of noise do you have in your life?
- Do you ever surround yourself with noise intentionally? Why?
- Does all the noise in your life make it harder to hear God?
- When was a time that you heard  God clearly?
- Does silence make you uncomfortable? If so, why?
- What could you do to eliminate some of the noise in your life that keeps you from hearing God?

Silence & Solitude

How to:

1. Identify a sacred space.
- Quiet and comfortable.
- Begin with a modest goal.
2. Settle into a comfortable yet alert position in your body.
3. Ask God to give you a simple prayer that expresses your openness and desire for God.
4. Close your time in silence with a prayer of gratitude of God’s presence with you.
5. Resist the urge to judge yourself or your experiences in silence.

He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” Psalm 46:10, NIV

Go and try this, this week. Then come back and share your experience.

 

Priorities

Back when I was a college student there was a notion that life is made up of a number of important things and that as Christians we needed to keep them in the right order, priority-wise. So we would dutifully list them out as columns on a grid and then write down goals under each one. This tended to work out much better on paper than in real life. Dr. Richard Swenson M.D. writing in Margin: How To Create The Emotional, Physical, Financial, & Time Reserves You Need, comments on this  approach. ”It does not make sense to have sequential priorities in terms of love or even in terms of commitment. We love each person fully. Additionally, we are committed to doing good in all areas of life. Priority thinking is appropriate when we speak of time, however. Time, then is the key. When we couple it with our goals, desires, and responsibilities, we have some priority decisions to make.”

Thus this diagram better represents how we should organize our lives around God, so instead of stacking priorities we should rather view life as centered around God with everything emanating from Him. He should be the center of all that we do.”But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” Matthew 6:33 NIV

 

The Word Hand

As we think about engaging the Word of God there are a number of ways of going about it. To the left is an illustration of six key ways that should constitute our intake of the Word.

1) Hear. “Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.” Romans 10:17 NIV. We listen to the Word being read aloud by others. Back in the Biblical times this was the main way people learned the Word. There were only a few scrolls of scripture and they were largely kept in the synagogues.

2) Read. “Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.” Revelation 1:3 NIV. Reading the Bible should become a regular habit in the Christians life. Starting off your day with a time of reading the Bible and prayer will strengthen your walk with Christ.

3) Meditate. “But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.” Psalms 1:2-3 NIV. To meditate upon scripture means to think upon or ponder it. To weigh the meaning and implications of the scripture involved. What does this mean? How does this apply to my life? What changes are necessary in my life as I consider the truths that are revealed?

4) Study. “Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” Acts 17:11 NIV. There is a difference between reading something and studying it. Study implies digging deeper, working to get more understanding, and remembering what was read. It also means to make connections with other truths and as a result develop a greater comprehension of the subject at hand.

5) Memorize. “How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word. I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands. I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” Psalms 119:9-11 NIV. One of the most powerful ways God uses to change our hearts is through truth that is memorized and meditated upon. With so much coming at us from the world, we need solid truth to strengthen our soul and help us to resist temptation.

6) Apply. “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” James 1:22 NIV. If we merely listen to the Word but do not apply it, we just become more knowledgeable at the best and more arrogant at the worst. God’s Word was given to us to apply to our lives, that by learning it and following it, we might be changed.

Now every time we engage the Word we may not use all these ways of taking in the Word, but we will certainly use some of them. Generally the more you use it, the better grasp of the Word you will have.

This week I would like you to share about your favorite way of engaging the Word of God.