Sean Rheaume

A new Babel

Genesis 11:1-9

11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

8 So the Lord scattered them from there, over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there, the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

God blessed humanity with great INGENUITY and DRIVE however; we are ALWAYS due to our sinful spirit drawn to SELFISH desires.

We live in a Culture of ME.

Snap chat is an app on our phone that literally just sends messages by taking selfies.

Reality shows are commonplace on television, these shows have nothing to do with reality and more to do with fantasy living out by common folk looking for their fifteen minutes of fame.

Donald Trump is a legitimate candidate for president of the United States. This man is the very definition of self-absorbed blow hard.

We are a society of self-aggrandized, self-promoting, self-loving people.

When you read the account in Genesis it could be perceived that God was being mean spirited and stifling mans pursuits.

The intention of God was not to destroy mans endeavors but to correct mans motives.

Motives Matter

Why you do what you do matters.

Why you say what you say matters.

From then to now…

Today we are advancing at such a rate that we are looking remarkably like the people of Babel.

We are inventing gods

We are inventing morality

We are inventing salvation

God will do to our culture what he did to their culture unless we repent and come back to God. Why? Motives Matter.

How? What if God allowed the enemies of our nation to destroy the Internet? After all isn’t that the language of our culture today? What would that do to us as a culture or as a people? What would that do to you? If you no longer had the Internet, the smart phone, email, texting?

As a people, we need to draw our attention back to God and away from ourselves or maybe just maybe we will be in for another Babel.

Surge Review

As we approach the end of the year I was reviewing the sermon series that we have done in 2015. We had a pretty great year.

January – Erasing Lies – During this series we looked at lies that Christians often buy into.

February – One Bite – This series was devoted to battling temptation.

March – House Divided – We actually did a church wide series on the family and ended it with a seminar called “Understanding your Teenager”

April – The Road – We exegeted the passages of the Roman Road.

May – Core – During this series we examined our core values.

June/July – Summer Surge – during the summer we had camps, outreach events and lots of fellowship

August – Rag Tag – This series looked at the early church and inspired students to be the change

September – Wakes – This series we used stories from the book of Genesis to examine the consequences of our actions.

October – Old School – This series we examined the lives of three old testament prophets…Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah.

We will finish the year with a sermon in November called Gobble Gobble – a talk on materialism and a sermon in December called Grinches looking at the things that steal our Christmas joy.

5 things I’ve learned working with teen recovery ministry

At the church I currently serve we offer a ministry to those who struggle with addiction, codependence and other struggles called Celebrate Recovery. Last January we began to offer the youth arm of this ministry called “The Landing”. As a pastor I love this ministry. Taking the broken, the down trodden and the needy and offering prayer, love and the word of God to them. My heart was overwhelmed at this very raw and rewarding ministry.

As most things, it wasn’t what I thought it would be. It was like herding cats. It was the very definition of stress. However, over the past year we seem to have hit our stride and I have a few things that I can point out that may save you if you ever want to establish a ministry to teens with hurts, habits and hangups.

THEY ARE THERE FOR SAFETY NOT YOUR PROGRAM

If pushed they will tell you they are grateful for what you are doing but at first they don’t really care what YOU are doing. They are just glad to be able to hang out with like minded students in a safe environment. Many of these students homes are anything but safe. I had to learn to offer plenty of margin in my meeting and to allow students time to hang out and talk with their friends. I had to put my ego in check and realize it’s ok that they were not there to see me.

2. THE GOSPEL IS DIFFICULT FOR THEM TO ACCEPT

Tell a student whose father beats them that God is “Abba”. Talk about the family of God to students who have no healthy concept of family. Talk about respect and spiritual authority when the students have no concept of respecting authority. It makes teaching the word more difficult and it must be done with a gentle spirit and an open heart willing to answer any student needing to push back based on their present circumstances.

3. BE READY TO HAVE YOUR HEART BROKEN

I stopped saying “I have heard everything.”. My heart gets broken anew all the time. Students exposed to sexual abuse from family members. Physical and verbal abuse is just the way of life and that doesn’t even count the neglect. The saddest story was when I had a 15 year old girl miss getting baptized because she got an abortion that weekend.

It can make you feel helpless and disheartened. I have many times shaken my head and cried “what’s the use?!?!” Then I remember Jesus. When my sins came upon him like a wave on the cross, he cried out “My God my God why have you forsaken me!” The pain of sin is real but it is not victorious…Jesus wins.

4. BE CAREFUL

Having an adult care for them is rare and they will love you for it. Sadly sometimes girls don’t know how to show love in a platonic way and so inappropriate feelings, situations and temptations arise. Protect yourself by never being alone with a student. Avoid physical contact. Share with someone in authority immediately if a line has been crossed or even approached.

5. HAVE FUN

A student in this world only knows of fun in the sinful sense. Show them how to have fun without the sin. Play games, watch movies, tell stories…laugh.

The Landing is the hardest ministry I have ever done. However, I just got off the phone with a counselor at school letting me know of one of my students stuck in a bad situation where drugs are in the home. I will pray for her and know that this Sunday there is a safe place where she can come and know that there is a better way.

Change

Most people are not indifferent to change. You either thrive in changing environments or it paralyzes you in fear and anxiety. However, if you lead an organization change is a way of life.

I have been at my current position for over two years now and I have made more changes than I am comfortable with and I am about to initiate a sweeping change in my department. This can be difficult to manage and difficult for people to follow so I thought I’d share a few times when change is important.

change is important when the program isn’t working.

A leader should never be so attached to a program, system or plan that they refuse to change if it isn’t working. Pride will kill an organization. Chip Kelly is the head football coach for the Philadelphia Eagles. He brought into the NFL a college system that worked well for him when he was the coach at the University of Oregon. He came in and got rid of blue chip players all because they didn’t fit into his system. The team began to lose and he was adamant to an arrogant fault about his system. Everyone could see that he had to change in order to win games. You have slowly seen him change. Why? Because pride will get you fired.

change is important when it moves the vision forward.

Sometimes leaders change for the sake of change. They want to shake things up, create a buzz. However, the best time to change is when you need to find a different way to move the organization forward. When I got to this church the ministry had it’s premier program on Sunday nights. That was baffling to me because I always held that meeting on Wednesday nights. It made sense to me. It fit the ethos of the church programming schedule and so I changed the meeting to Wednesday nights. It fell flat. I have kept it there for two years waiting for it to catch on until I realized recently why the program was on Sunday nights. Recreation sports are HUGE on the island and there are several clubs that already had a foothold on the teens that meet on Wednesday. This severely cut into my attendance and caused severe inconsistency. We would have a few dozen one week and ten the next.

My experience trumped the environment. I allowed my experience to make the decision rather than studying and learning the environment.

So, in January I will go back to the schedule I inherited with much humility and a bruised ego. However, the important thing is not my expertise, experience or ego, the important thing is moving the vision of the ministry forward.

change is important enough to communicate

The larger the change the more time and communication must be given. If you are changing something small then a week or two is fine. If however, you are going to shift your schedule, vision, direction drastically you need months of lead time to communicate. Why? A couple of reasons…

People are not as consistent as you think they are. If they attend every other week there is a good chance they don’t hear your information at all.
People only listen half the time…I know as a pastor this is depressing.
People need multiple forms of communication…don’t rely only on the pulpit, email, social media or letters…use all of them.
People need to process how it affects them. My pastor likes to say that people don’t mind change, its transitions that scare them. This is pretty spot on. It is the transition that usually is ill planned and affects the common person.

Don’t be afraid of change. Sometimes it is necessary. However, when you change. Do it for the right reasons. Do it well.

I Love the 80’s

This month at Surge (our youth ministry) we are doing a series called “Old School”. We will be looking at 3 of the major prophets in the Old Testament. To add some creativity to the series we had the student vote which decade they wanted the leaders to dress in. I was elated when they said the 80’s! I myself am a product of the 80’s. I am a product of Coca Cola shirts, tight rolled pants, Michael Jackson and Big Hair Rock bands! I loved the music and the style. I loved that style was in style.

Youth ministry was different back then than it is now. Here are some youth ministry throwbacks from the 80’s. Though I am a child of the 80’s most of my ministry was done in the 90’s…however the 80’s left a mark.

CLIP ART

Back then there was no software to find images. Most pastors didn’t have computers and they weren’t used often for creativity (God bless Steve Jobs). So to make flyers you had to buy a clip art book, copy a page, actually clip it out, paste it on your flyer and make copies.

VISITATION

I contend that this one was a good idea and could be a good idea today if we weren’t such a private culture today. On Monday we would gather together at the church and all the visitor slips from the visitors from the previous several weeks were divided out and any youth were given to the youth pastor and a few volunteers and they would defend upon their houses and thank them for coming.

PAGER MINISTRY

I am pretty proud of this one. I had a pager…this was actually around 1992 but hey close enough. I gave students a card with my pager number and codes. (1) pray for my test (2) relationship troubles (3) sick. Then the students could use the payphone at the school and page me their number and code and I’d pray for them. It was pretty rad.

PETRA

The big hair band of the 80’s…of course their was also Stryper. But Petra was my favorite. It is still my go to jam for working in the office. Big Hair meets Big Faith meets Loud Music!

There are also some problems that came out of the 80’s in regards to youth ministry. The youth ministry from the 80’s gave birth to big flashy programs with little substance. It gave birth to horrible games like chubby bunny and it gave birth to Lock Ins.

The Lord, he is God.

After Elijah prayed during the showdown with the prophets of Baal, God showed up and consumed the offering with fire…the response. “And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, ‘The Lord, he is God; The Lord, he is God.'” (1 Kings 18:39)

When we pray for God to be glorified and our hearts are pure and when that is truly our desire…God will send down an exhibition of his power and people will have no other option but to declare, “The Lord, he is God.”

I realized this week that I have been praying wrong. I have been praying for my ministry. I have been praying for my students and I have been praying for my church. However, if I am honest my motives were not to allow the glory of God to grow but for my ministry to grow. If my ministry grows it validates my calling, my value and my talent. Motives matter. My prayers need to shift. I need to be praying for God to be glorified and in such a way that all people will look on in awe not of my leadership but of Gods power.

You see, simple fact of the matter is that Jesus is Lord. There really is no debate. He is. He may not be YOUR Lord but he is Lord. One day no matter if you fly a rainbow, rebel, isis or American flag…one day you will lay it down and bow before the feet of Jesus. The Psalms state that he WILL be exalted among the heathen and the earth.

Jesus is Lord. It helps to say it. It really helps to mean it.

My prayer is changing. May my prayers bring down the power of God so that HE may be known. Not ME but HE.

Whatcha think?

We asked for it.

“How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” – Elijah (1 Kings 18:21 ESV)

As a pastor I can’t tell you how many times I have thrown down that gauntlet. Choose today who you will serve! God or Man. We have struggled with this because for the past hundred years we have operated in a quasi-Christian culture. In the past being a good guy was to be “mighty christian of ya”. Good ol boy and polite society was synonymous with being christian. Over time this muddied the waters of what legitimate christianity was. So, pastors would stand in the pulpit encouraging people to discard “casual christianity” and submit fully to Jesus. Basically…we asked them to choose.

People did. Many chose the world…backfire.

There are many stats pointing to the failure of the local church. Showing declining attendance and offerings. I don’t deny those stats…I deny the reason. Some may be turning away from the church…however, most were never here to begin with. They came out of the shadows and did what we asked them to do…they chose.

They chose, they chose their comfort, they chose their lifestyle, they chose to gamble on the idea that if need be they can rekindle their affair with Jesus later in life…when things slow down. They chose.

So, what is left in this post christian society? In my humble opinion…clarity.

I believe this actually helps the church, here are 3 reasons why.

WE KNOW WHO TO TRUST

We now know who can be trusted with the leadership of the church. Our teams, deacons, leaders and teachers are followers of Jesus striving to live for Jesus.

WE KNOW WHO NEEDS TO BE REACHED

Let me be clear I am not in favor of creating an “us” verses “them” attitude in the church but if EVERYONE is a christian then who is left to be reached. I remember one time the worship pastor and I were asked to film a “man on the street” video at a local Walmart, on this video we interviewed people and asked “Are you a Christian? and Why? or Why not?” We were amazed at the result…EVERYONE WAS A CHRISTIAN. We went to the pastor and told him we may as well close the church because there was nobody to reach.

That is a ridiculous concept but it highlights the problem. You have to know who is lost if you are going to save them. Today’s culture is much more open to say they are NOT a christian. In fact the cool thing to do is to not believe in anything. With the honesty of people’s lack of faith so open it makes it much easier to know who to pray for, who to talk to, who to reach.

WE CAN STOP BLENDING AND START INFLUENCING

The cat’s out of the bag…christians are never going to be “as cool as the world”. We are so insecure to be loved that we blend our experiences to the worlds standards…that is not a huge deal but what can be is that churches have begun to blend their values with the worlds standards.

We can stop trying to fit it. We can stop trying to make Jesus cool. We can do more influencing and less apologizing.

WHAT DO WE DO?

– As Joshua asks, “Choose this day whom you will serve.”

Don’t play around anymore…choose a side. Follow the world or follow Jesus.

– Get involved. Don’t be ashamed of the beautiful gospel of Jesus. Communicate with love but with conviction

– Pray. Our community, country and world are at a tipping point spiritually and the people of Jesus need to pray. Pray daily.

Tell me what you think?

Is there a change?

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. – 2 Corinthians 5:17

We give the students who graduate High School Bibles at our church during a ceremony on the first Sunday in June. That is not uncommon but one thing that we do a little different is “pre”mark them with some important scriptures that will guide them through this next part of their journey. As I was highlighting this verse from 2 Corinthians the Holy Spirit would not let me go.

If we are in Christ we are a NEW CREATION. What does that really mean? Well to be in Christ is that movement from you to him. From the influence of the world to the influence of Jesus. This is what we know of/think of as the Salvation experience. When we are saved, when we have that conversion experience what is life like next? The word says we are a New Creation. The words there literally means a NEW, not improved but brand spanking new. Only God can create like that. The God of Creation is the God of Salvation. The God that saves you, changes you.

Have you changed? What is new in your life? A common saying of my mom’s when we used to have pity parties in my house would be “God don’t make no junk!” Grammar aside, the theology is sound. God creates…perfectly. The enemy distorts and destroys perfectly. As believers we have fallen under the authority of God. We are created once again…perfectly.

How we view the world should change. How we view humanity should change. How we view sin and sinners should change.

I don’t want to encourage you to doubt your salvation unless this post makes you realize you have never changed to anything close to the likeness of Jesus. If it has then I am glad that I encouraged you to doubt.

The salvation experience is much like a chrysalis morphing into a butterfly. From the struggle of the cocoon comes a new creation. It has the same personality, DNA and drive but is now different. It is now changed in its purpose and in its perspective. It’s purpose was once simply surviving, gorging and finding somewhere to rest. The purpose of the butterfly is to soar, to explore and to provide beauty. The perspective of the caterpillar was limited, low and lack luster but the perspective of the butterfly was high and limitless.

I encourage everyone to take a moment and examine your heart. Has it changed? Have you changed? It’s not too late.

Dear Jesus.

Thank you for loving me. Thank you for creation. I am fallen, my life is lacking without you. I surrender my life to your will and ask you to create in me a clean heart. Make me a new creation. I live for you, in Jesus name. Amen

Did you even try?

I have tried to stay out of this latest batch of circus mania that is the Bruce /Caitlyn fiasco. I have had to curb my intake of Social Media. At first there was the typical hate speech but then it was followed by and even worse reaction and that is calling Jenner a hero. Let’s not kid ourselves here, this is a person who has lived in the limelight his whole life and has been a camera hog since the seventies. He is not new to scandal and he is not new to media and scrutiny. He is a “famous” person that decided to be a woman instead of a man…period.

As a pastor I am not as concerned with his choice. That is between he and Jesus. I am concerned with the dialog going out about this. I am concerned with those in the faith that are saying that they are “proud” of her?! I don’t understand that logic coming from a Christian point of view. I am not proud of Jenner. I am not proud of people who put themselves under the knife to be someone other than who God created them to be simply because they “feel” different.

Feelings can’t be trusted. Faith can. That leads me to my question that I wish I could pose to Jenner. Did you even try Jesus? Did you even try to seek your creator before sinking into yourself? I have read reports about how your son said you were distant and mean. You posed for magazines in all your man-ness so I know at one point you loved yourself. When you got to your dark place of confusion did you ever try to seek Jesus and find fulfillment in him for he is love, joy and peace. Did you seek a pastor’s help? What did they tell you? Did they say that you should “just be you”. If so, I am sorry. For we are all broken in need of a savior. He makes us whole. Not a surgery, not a name change. Salvation.

John 10:10 says that the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. Jesus comes to give a full life. The enemy has lied to you and then he put you on display for all the world to be the demonstration of how far our society has strayed from God. I am sorry Bruce. My prayers are with you, your family and all of those partaking in this circus. All I can do is pray..

“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.” – Amen

I saw you

“How do you know me?” Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philiip called you.” John 1:48

What a great image. Nathanael under the fig tree, wondering, pondering, praying. I wonder what was going on in his mind. Was he crying out to God for something more in his life? Was he frustrated because he always felt that he was supposed to be part of something special and yet here he sat in this little town under a tree. Maybe it wasn’t like that at all. Maybe he was completely in awe of God at that moment basking in his creation and singing the Psalms. One thing that is for sure is that whatever was in his Spirit caught Jesus’ eye. Jesus declared, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” Jn 1:47.

These two verses speak to me.

First, I need to spend more time under a tree. Not literally, but I need more time in the solitude of God’s creation praying, seeking and pondering. Preparing myself for the time when Jesus comes calling for me to act.

Second, I want to live a life worthy of Jesus desiring to use me. If you were to walk up to Jesus, what would his description of you be? I tremble to think about what he would tell the disciples about me as I walked up. How incredible that Jesus said that he “saw” him. Not that the vision was that incredible but that Nat was worthy of being seen!

Finally, be ready. Don’t waste the time under the tree. Once it is your time to get up. Get up and get to work. Sometimes we get comfortable under the tree (and why not it’s comfy!). However, as much as we need time to ponder and pray…we were made to follow and obey.

I don’t have a lot of fig trees where I live, but I have a beautiful live oak outside my office and the ocean fifteen minutes away. That is where I spend my time praying and pondering and preparing for the call of Jesus to say follow me.

Where is your fig tree?