How To Respond The Day After Election

After several months of campaigning the election has come to an end. Now that the vote is over some of you may be happy with the results and others not so happy. My word is for those of you who are not so happy. I want to share some biblical advice on how every Christian should respond during this time.

1. We Need To Respond With Prayer

As I mentioned in my last email concerning the election it is every Christian’s responsibility to pray for those in authority. The Bible says, “I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone—for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good and pleases God our Savior” (1 Tim. 2:1-3). Barack Obama is stepping into a volatile time in America and we need to be pouring our hearts out in prayer for him that God would give him bucket loads of wisdom for leading our country (James 1:5).

2. We Need To Respond With Hope

Our true joy should never be determined by who sits in the Oval Office. Rather, our true joy comes from Him who rules the universe. When we respond in a hopeless and desperate manner we forget that the true Oval Office is in heaven and He who resides there is King Jesus. Let us not forget to be heavenly minded. When Christians fall into despair they lose their testimony. We must celebrate God’s sovereignty and His rule. He reigns and nothing, that’s worth repeating, NOTHING can take that away. So let us stay hopeful. One sure way to never lose a sense of hope in life is for us to remember that God can strip everything away from us, but He never strips Himself from us.


3. We Need To Respond With Love

When I watch Fox News or CNN it grieves my heart to see the bitterness that people express towards each other. Sadly, too often Democrats and Republicans treat each other with hate and if we as Christians are not guarded and Spirit-filled we can respond with the same immaturity. Jesus still showed love to those whom He disagreed with. In fact, the Bible teaches us that it is easy to show love to those we like, it is a much greater act of faith to show love towards those we dislike or disagree with (see Matthew 5:46-47). I believe these three pillars of prayer, hope and love will carry us till our dying day or His returning day. So be encouraged Christians we have a great opportunity before us to respond in prayer, hope and love.

Till next time,

Bobby

The Art of Family Worship

Could you use a few tips for maximizing the art of family worship in your home? I cannot express how critical it is that we as families put life on pause “often” in order to invest our time GODWARD. We need to be frequently reminded as a family unit that God is majestic, glorious and that He is “pause-worthy.” Family worship is a time for us to gather our families together in order to spiritually recalibrate. It is the place where God takes the heart of a family and gives them His heartbeat, His passions and His character.

First and foremost, family worship has to become a family priority. It is so easy to get side tracked if we don’t guard this time with our lives. I have been guilty of it myself. We must understand the importance of pulling our children together for a God-centered conversation. Without it being a priority it will never happen. Time is flying by and our children are growing fast and we must not let the busyness of our daily schedules stop us from feeding them spiritual truth. Before I offer a few suggestions for how to do family worship let me say this: All families should have set times with God and spontaneous times with Him. From morning to evening we want to be breathing the life of God into our families.

1. We need set times. In our home, for example, these set times take shape each day starting in the morning. Before the kids go to school Heather does a “word of the day” with Dawson and Haley and then prays over them. Like most families we aren’t able to sit at the table every night for dinner, but four to five nights a week we have dinner as a family with the television turned off. It’s conversation and family time. Following that time is when we do our family worship, which I will discuss in a moment. The last set time is when we tuck them in we make sure to pray over them. Sometimes this is very brief and other times we have a more extended time of prayer. These are set times of gathering to God throughout our day.

2. We also need spontaneous times with God as a family. In Deuteronomy 6:6-7 it says, “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” In these two verses we see that we are commanded to instill spiritual truth in our children, but these verses call us to something more than just set times with God, rather God is calling us to a lifestyle of spilling spiritual truth into the souls of our children. This only happens when we as parents sit at the fountain of God’s Word and drink deeply that we can in turn pour spiritual truth into the hearts of our children.

Spontaneous opportunities take place when our children ask us questions about God, it takes place when we learn that someone needs prayer and we pause to pray, it takes place while driving in our mini-vans together, while singing praise music and praying to God, it takes place before road trips while praying for safety during the drive. You get the picture. By having these times of spontaneous worship we teach our children that Christianity isn’t a religion or a mere pit stop, rather it is enjoying an ever-present life-changing relationship with our eternal God.

*Now the final question remains: how do we have set times of family worship?

The nice thing about family worship is we don’t have to complicate it. In fact, it is rather simple. For example, in our home following our dinner I simply open the Bible and spend a few minutes reading a certain passage from God’s Word. I ask my children questions that have surfaced from our study time. I want them involved in the process so I let them know before we start, “Pay attention kids because Daddy is going to ask you a few questions.” I do this because I want them to learn how to interact with God’s Word. After spending a few minutes or so in Bible study and conversation about the passage we always drive for application (see James 1:22). I will ask them, “How does this passage of Scripture apply to our lives today?” Kids have a way of catching some great insights. They often become our teachers! Following this time we spend a little time in prayer and I love when we include a song for us to sing as a family. Well, that’s it! Nothing fancy. I am sure there are better ways to do family worship. We certainly don’t have it all figured out, but this approach has worked for our family and hopefully this can be helpful for you as well.

Here are a few extra tips you may want to consider for your family worship:

• First, commit to a time. I would encourage you to do it each night following dinner. Just reserve ten to twenty minutes to enjoy spiritually enriching one another.

• Get a hymnal and teach your kids how to sing out of a hymnbook or print off your favorite worship songs online and create your own family songbook.

• Go to joshuaproject.net and pray for the unreached people groups in our world as a family together, thereby giving your family a heart for God’s globe.

• If your children are really young get a pictorial Bible so they can learn through viewing pictures of the story. Your format may need to be adjusted according to their age range.

• If they are older perhaps take turns leading the devotions and give them an opportunity to learn how to facilitate.

• If you don’t have any children or they are raised already try this approach with your spouse for marital worship.

In the end, just have fun and learn to enjoy God together. Hey, that sounds like a good definition for family worship, “The place where we learn to enjoy God together.”

Till next time,

Bobby

Let’s Not Be “PC” but “PC”

Might I be so bold as to say, "The Gospel was never intended to be “politically correct!’” I know this goes against the cultural motto that says, "At all costs keep everyone happy.” We must have a God-sized burden that is large enough, big enough and passionate enough that we are willing to share the Gospel without compromise. Frankly, I am growing more concerned with being BC (i.e. Biblically correct, not Bobby Conway) than PC (politically or socially correct).

Paul the apostle modeled a BC passion through his life and writings. He warned us that the Gospel wouldn’t be PC. In fact, he said, "…the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18). You see God never intended for us to preach a clever Gospel, rather He wants us to teach and preach the correct Gospel and that Gospel is "folly to those who are perishing." In fact, it's a biblical crime to make the Gospel say something God never intended it to. When we as a Christian culture try overly hard to make the Gospel PC we can fall into several traps:

• We begin to compromise God’s Word, by picking and choosing what we like and treating God’s Word like a buffet to be picked at verses an entire meal to be digested.

• We begin relying on our own creativity verses the Spirit of God to work in and through us.

• We begin worrying more about what people think, rather than what God thinks.

Therefore, let us avoid the traps of being PC and let’s be BC. Yes, let us ALWAYS speak the truth in love, but for God’s fame-sake let us speak the Gospel truth, the whole Gospel truth and nothing but the Gospel truth, while trusting in God’s Spirit to lead those to the cross whom He is drawing.

Speaking the Gospel truth with you for His fames-sake,

Bobby