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Q.O.D. By John Piper

Quote of the Day

Salvation is owned by faith. Salvation is shown by deeds.  (Future Grace Page 365)

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Quote on Patience

Quote of the Day

The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours.

—John Piper, Future Grace, p. 174

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Pray For Your Pastor

I came across this at www.justinchilders.blogspot.com and wanted to share it with you.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Pray for Those who Preach

In most of Paul’s letters, he included a record of exactly what he prayed for the churches or individuals he was writing to. His prayers are rich with insights into the character of God and Paul’s own love for the churches. However, Paul did not just pray for his readers. He often asked them to pray specifically for him. For example, at the end of Ephesians, he asks the church to pray that he would be given boldness that he might preach the gospel (Eph. 6:19-20). In Colossians, Paul requests prayer for his ability to make the gospel clear when he preaches it (Col. 4:3-4).

Prayer is essential to the fruitfulness of preaching. God has ordained that prayer be one of the means by which He accomplishes His purposes through preaching. Once, Charles Spurgeon (The Prince of Preachers) was asked about his obvious success in preaching. He simply replied, “My people pray for me.” What a profound insight from a man who knew that he was not alone behind that pulpit. He was confident that God was with him because his congregation was laboring in prayer for him and with him.

Christians, how often do you pray for your pastors who preach the Word of God to you? How devoted in prayer are you for the work of preaching? The health of the church is dependent on a man of God standing with an open Bible and declaring the glory of Christ’s person and work. The success of the sermon depends upon the sovereign work of God to open our hearts to hear and apply His Word. Thus, we must plead with God for His blessing on the preacher and on the message he preaches.

Here are a few suggestions of what to pray for those who preach:
1. During the week, pray for God to reveal the burden of the text to him.
2. During the week, pray that God would grip the preacher’s heart with His glory revealed in the text.
3. On Sunday morning, pray that God would free him from distractions.
4. On Sunday morning, pray that he would proclaim the truth boldly and clearly.
5. On Sunday morning, pray for God to powerfully speak through him.
6. On Sunday morning, pray that Christ would be treasured by all gathered.

Think of the effect on your own heart of praying for those who preach. When we plead with God to do these things, we will wake on Sunday with an anticipation of what He is going to say to us as we hear His Word. All glory for successful preaching should ultimately go to Jesus Christ, who purchased all good things on the cross. However, pray in such a way that your pastor will be able to say, “My people pray for me” when he senses the help of God to proclaim the gospel.

A concluding word to parents: What an impact it would make on your children to hear their father and mother regularly praying by name for their pastors.

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How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Sunday School

Written by David Francis

How do you measure the effectiveness of your Sunday School? Here are a few numbers and ratios, some old and some new, you might find helpful. There are certainly others, but here are some key metrics that may help you evaluate your Sunday School at any level: the entire organization, a division, a department, or a class.

The Classics: Enrollment and Attendance
These are the two tried and true metrics, and the ones SBC churches report on the Annual Church Profile. If you were only going to measure one thing, it should be enrollment, because enrollment is the driver of Sunday School growth. Attendance is also a useful metric, especially when expressed as a monthly, quarterly, or yearly average. There are too many factors involved in attendance to fret too much over comparing attendance for one day versus the same Sunday a year ago! Comparing a monthly average versus the same month last year would be more meaningful.

Attendance/Enrollment
This ratio can also be a useful metric. Nationally, the SBC ratio is about 50 percent. If the ratio is less than 40 percent, that may be a signal that more teaching units are needed. If above 60 percent, it may indicate that you need to become more aggressive about enrolling new people or that you have been too aggressive at purging inactive members from the ministry list (class roll). One of those strange and inexplicable laws of Sunday School is this: If enrollment goes up, so does attendance. If enrollment goes down, attendance falls, too - even if the people you’ve taken off the roll never come! Don’t know why! Just does!

Active Enrollment
Sometimes we can make the mistake of thinking that the gap between attendance and enrollment represents members who never or seldom come. You might be encouraged to discover that’s not true! How? By tracking active enrollment: the number of members who attend at least one time per month. Do you count visitors? Only if they enroll! I also add an additional number to this total to measure the effectiveness of an adult department or class: the number of associate members serving in preschool, children, or student classes. I published a monthly report for all leaders to see based on this total, which I believe is the primary metric to measure the health of an adult class.

Attendance/Units
The first step in calculating this ratio is to accurately determine the number of teaching units you have. For adults, students, and children, that’s usually pretty easy, since they typically meet only one session. Each class is a unit. For preschoolers, typically you will count each room as a unit, even if it is used/staffed multiple times. (Even with three sessions, most of the preschoolers are in the room the second session.) If you use a master-teacher approach with small groups, you might count each group as a unit if they sit together each week with the same group leader. Once you’ve got the number of units, you can arrive at your average attendance per unit. You may want to calculate this by age-group or division. This number will tell you at least one important thing: how much you can expect your attendance to increase with each additional unit you add. As a rule of thumb, that number is usually about ten.

Maximum Effective Attendance
This is a metric you can use to discover when a class has hit the ceiling of its growth. It will be the attendance number the class celebrates, only to go back down the next week. If you chart it over time, you’ll discover a pattern. When the class reaches a certain number, the attendance falls after that. That’s not something to be depressed over. It’s just a signal that another class may be needed if growth is to continue beyond that level.

Annual Churn
Every church, every Sunday School, and every class experiences churn. What is that? Churn is the number of people each year who will die, move, or just get mad and leave! It is the number of new people you have to enroll each year just to stay even. You can calculate that number over a period of years. In the typical church or class, it is around twenty percent. In order to grow, you’ll need to first achieve that number, then enroll some more people on top of that - who will attend about 50 percent of the time! So if you’re averaging 100 in attendance, and want to grow to 120 next year, you’ll need to enroll 60 new people: 20 to cover the churn, plus an additional 40 who come half the time, for a net increase of 20. That’s a little over one new person per week. Now that we know the challenge, let’s get busy!

David Francis is director of Sunday School at LifeWay Christian Resources, Nashville, Tennessee.

Making the Most of Our Life

I found this article on lifeway.com, hope it encourages you in your journey.

iving a Life of Less

Written by Mark Tabb

This article is courtesy of ParentLife.

I love giving away books. Usually people enjoy receiving them as much as I enjoy giving them away. However, that changed when I wrote a book on downsizing life. Friends and family members alike took one look at the cover and shot back, “So what are you trying to tell me?”

Living With Less

Something as simple as the words Living with Less on a book cover touches a nerve because most people struggle with the never-ending battle between living in a culture of accumulation while serving a Lord who says to be content with what you have. Then there is the constant time crunch as you try to squeeze more activity into an ever-tighter schedule while also leaving time for God and your family. Living a life of less sounds like a nice ideal, but you probably wonder if it can ever be found in the mad dash of your daily routine.

Downsizing your life is a process that never really comes to an end. I have found that the key is not just choosing to buy a used car instead of taking on new car payments. Instead, living with less begins with a shift in the way you see yourself and your world — shifts that go to the heart of why you live the way you do.

Live With an Eternal Perspective
God made you for eternity, but you live in a world that is temporary. This means that the world of time can never deliver that for which your soul most longs. You want happiness, yet you live in a world filled with suffering and sorrow. You long for significance, yet you live in a culture where the accomplishments of the greatest heroes are forgotten soon after they die. You want your life to matter, yet all the pursuits that appear so large in this world of time are ultimately meaningless. The only way to find what you most want out of life is to shift your focus from the temporary to the eternal.

Moving from time to eternity not only changes your perspective on the stuff that eventually ends up in a yard sale or on eBay®; it changes your perspective on yourself. Living in the temporary world skews your perspective from the moment you first become self-aware. The problem is pride. Or more to the point, the problem is self-centeredness. Every person wrestles with the desire to place himself at the center of his own personal universe.

When you shift your gaze from the world of time to the realm in which the Lord of the universe reigns, you can see yourself for who you truly are. You are nothing more than a frail creature of dust, while God is the almighty, sovereign Creator. What other choice do you have but to fall on your knees and humble yourself before Him? Only then will you begin to move from the world of the temporary to the world that holds all you really want in life. Simply put, living a life of less begins with choosing less of yourself.

Redefine Success
My life and the lives of my children are markedly different because of the priorities a man I never met instilled in his children. My father’s father died before my parents ever met, yet his thumbprints are all over my soul. This Oklahoma dirt farmer with an eighth-grade education who struggled to survive during the Dust Bowl had a dream for his six children. He wanted them to go to college. This was before the days of Pell Grants and federally subsidized student loans. Even so, the dream took hold and is now touching the third and fourth generation.

Real success means living your life in such a way that it lasts longer than you do through the influence you exert on future generations. It has nothing to do with the size of your house and everything to do with the characters that are shaped within your home. Once you define success in these terms, the big questions about downsizing your life take care of themselves. You will no longer ask what size television you should buy. You will be too busy asking how you can maximize your influence on your child during this short window of time God has given you with her.

Time Is a Treasure
Many people treat life as though they have an unlimited amount of time at their disposal. If you do not get around to those important things you need to do today, it is no big deal. You can get to them tomorrow or the day after that or eventually. However, when you understand that you have been given a limited amount of time on this planet and that every moment is a treasure you can waste or spend but not save, everything changes. The Bible says to make the most of every opportunity time presents to you (Ephesians 5:16). These are not just religious words but a principle that must guide your life.

You need to get up every day and find the best way to invest this treasure of time so that it yields the maximum results. I never realized how precious this treasure was or how fast it slipped away until my children started school. One day my wife and I turned around and two of our daughters had moved to college. The last daughter will join them in just a couple of years. No one has all of the time in the world. Your supply is very short. The question you face is whether or not you will use it wisely.

These three principles are far from exhaustive. Living a life of less in order to have more of what you truly want out of life is a process that takes a lifetime to complete. The countercultural choices this lifestyle demands do not always make life easier. Far from it. Anything worth doing always comes at a high price. Yet, in the end, you will find the price worth paying.

Mark Tabb is the author of 13 books including Living with Less: The Upside of Downsizing Your Life and The Unusual Suspect with Stephen Baldwin. Mark and his family live in Indiana with their two dachshunds.

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