Kay Yow's Life: To Live Is Christ and To Die Is Gain

I watched this evening Kay Yow's memorial service. Kay Yow was the head coach of the N.C. State women's basketball team for over thirty years. She died this past Saturday from cancer. Today was her memorial service held in Cary, NC.

The whole service is a testimony to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the whole servce glorified God. Twenty minutes of the service was a videotaped message from Kay Yow in which she shared her testimony and recounted the Gospel to all who were there to show their love for her. Wow! What a way to die! To live is Christ and to die is gain!

Memorial Service:




Kay Yow's Message:

A Good Read

Over Christmas, I was actually able to read some and was blessed and encouraged by reading David Horner's A Practical Guide for Life and Ministry: Overcoming 7 Challenges Pastors Face. David Horner is the Lead Pastor of Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC. The book contains sound, biblical, encouraging and convicting wisdom for pastors and this was both convicted and encouraged. I wanted to share a few quotes that stood out to me.

On the Calling of a Pastor:

The good news is that God never intended for pastors to try to satisfy the demands of every model for ministry ever developed. He did not call you to crush you. God calls you to engage in a lifetime of effective, satisfying ministry in which he maximizes your spiritual gifts, considers your calling (not someone else's), recognizes your strengths and weakenesse, and commits to shaping you into a godly individual who grows more mature every day in your walk with Jesus Christ.

Our calling will often be misunderstood, challenged, and even attacked by those who see pastoral calling as a one-size-fits-all issue. The churches we serve will have stated and unstated unexpectations about the particular calling they envision for their pastor. Individuals within those churches will further complicate matters by adding their own expectations to the mix and keep us, as pastors, off balance by their constant questions about why we do not do what 'pastors shold do.' If that is not expasperating enough, deep down inside we wonder if perhaps they are right and we are not cutting it as a pastor. Talk about adding guilt on top of confusion! No wonder pastors have a hard time keeping their equilibrium!

You may ask, 'Since my calling is from God, should I be unconcerned about the expectations people have?' No, that is unrealistic. You cannot simply ignore them, but you do not have to satisfy them...Eventually I discovered what every pastor must learn: my calling is from God, and my equipping is from him as well.

Just because we are willing to do anything does not mean that we should do everything.

On Vision

As the shepherd of the flock charged with leading your congregation, you have been placed by God in a position of strategic importance. Without leadership, the status quo becomes the vision. Therefore, developing a vision falls to the pastor and his...leadership team in order for the church to make progress in its calling to be made complete in Christ.

Lots of roadside standshave been erected on side streets because once passionate dreamers and visionaries found the main road to their dreams too touch and decided to settle for the place they landed when they fell asleep. When pastors and churches begin with the assumption that numerical growth is the only validation of effective ministry, for example, that presupposition can lead to compromise on important issues in order to attract people. Theological assumptions will give way to more practical and popular ones.

The Lord has given no vision, nor has he inspired any dream that can be realized without prayer. Never settle for any dream you can plot out and plan from beginning to end without any aspect of mystery. Dreams that require no walking by faith may be achievable, but they are unlikely to be expansive enough for the glory of the Lord to be made known through them.

Pastors cannot forge an identity as a pastor without first making sure they are living up to their identity as a Christian. Perhaps the surest and quickest test of the godly validity of your vision is to consider how sharply focused it is on Christ and how deeply rooted it is in his Word.

Nothing else matters more than to know that where we are going, Christ is, that what we are doing, Christ honors, and that how we are doing it, Christ applauds. Simply put, Christ Jesus is our vision and must remain so even as the rest of the details unfold before us.

My own vision of ministry primarily has to do with equipping, not evangelizing. Yet if I am to understand my vision in full balance as God wants it to be, part of my committment to equipping will always include training and preparing and teaching others believers how they can be actively involved in being witnesses for Jesus Christ.

When God gives a vision, it will always be proportionate to the majesty of God...If our vision as pastors is only to be a little more spiritually minded and a little less sinful than the world around us and a little less ambitious than the pagan junior executive, we may well succeed, and in so doing prove to know nothing of a vision from the Lord. If our vision is to keep from becoming fanatical about walking with Christ, careful not to become too concerned about being distinguished as holy unto the Lord, once again we may progress toward such shallow dreams but never know the glory of living in his way.

On Spiritual Leadership

It is far better to weather the storms upfront, during the selection process, than face years of unresolved conflict if unqualifed leaders take their place on the team. The standards of spiritual leadership cannot be compromised if you expect to enjoy fruitful years of ministry in a loving, growing community of like-minded teammates.

On Conflict as a Pastor

You know, there will always be cellar voices in the church. For them, nothing you ever do will be good enough, nothing will ever be right. But then there will always be balcony voices. They love everything...all the time...they take great pleasure in pumping you up. Still, the truth always tend to be on the main floor.

Who we are before God matters far more than what we want others to think of us.

As a pastor you are not called to protect and defend yourself but to proclaim Christ. If you succeed in destroying your attacker, then you have failed to shepherd someone in your flock.

Your role as a pastor is to lead the entire flock, not just those who agree with you...Although you cannot keep others from seeing you as their enemy, you can determine to never reciprocate and view them that way.

In light of eternity, how big a deal is it that not everyone likes who you are and what you do?

Although you are committed to the flock allotted to you, and you love them all, your primary calling is to serve Christ and enjoy His favor, not to serve in such a way that you curry the favor of the crowd. No one likes to do things that consistently upset people, but the bottom line is that we are not in ministry for the applause and approval of the people we serve. We are to be devoted to Christ first and foremost. It is for Christ that we do what we do, and it is ultimately to him that we will answer.

So if you know that you are doing what he wants, and as a result you stir up the ire of those around you, so be it. Basing your ministry on the eternal truth and unchanging principles of God's Word will seldom be without critics, of for that matter seldom ever be popular. But it is the Lord Jesus Christ whom we serve, and if he himself was hated, why should we be surprised when we run into opposition as well?

A Good Word for the President

Here is an excerpt from John Piper's sermon this past Sunday, celebrating the sanctity of human life and charging the President with truth.

The Life of Obama

Breaking the Silence

It seems like forever since I posted anything. But there is no more important day than today to break the silence. Today is the 36th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade--the Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion for practically any reason at any point in a woman's pregnancy. The result of that decision is in the U.S. alone, 50 million babies have been barbarically slaughtered. 1.3 million are killed annually from abortion. That number is more than all the U.S. war casualties of all wars combined. 40 million babies are killed by abortion worldwide each year. That's seven times the number killed in the Holocaust--each year!

All for what? All because of "want." "I don't want this baby at this time in my life." We have become a nation, not unlike the nations of the Old Testament, who sacrifice our children to the god of self. Today is a day for us as the Church to cry out to God for mercy upon us, for the end of this heinous practice and safety of these babies, and for repentance to be given in the hearts of those who advocate and participate in this atrocity.

Below are a few links/quotes that are helpful on this day as we remember and as we pray and as we hope.

http://www.abort73.com/

Here's what really happened in Roe vs. Wade from the Roe herself.

In commenting on 1 Peter 2:17 in relation to abortion and our current President's attitude towards it, John Piper asks the following questions of our new President:

1. Are you willing to explain why a baby's right not to be killed is less important than a woman's right not to be pregnant?

2. Or are you willing to explain why most cities have laws forbidding cruelty to animals, but you oppose laws forbidding cruelty to human fetuses? Are they not at least living animals?

3. Or are you willing to explain why government is unwilling to take away the so-called right to abortion on demand even though it harms the unborn child; yet government is increasingly willing to take away the right to smoke, precisely because it harms innocent non-smokers, killing 3,000 non-smokers a year from cancer and as many as 40,000 non-smokers a year from other diseases?

4. And if you say that everything hangs on whether the fetus is a human child, are you willing to go before national television in the oval office and defend your support for the "Freedom of Choice Act" by holding in your hand a 21 week old fetus and explaining why this little one does not have the fundamental, moral, and constitutional right to life? Are you willing to say to parents in this church who lost a child at that age and held him in their hands, this being in your hands is not and was not a child with any rights of its own under God or under law?

Robert P. George has written an excellent article concerning abortion and our fight against it here. He concludes with these words:

Thanks be to God, the conflict over abortion has not produced, and will not produce, a civil war. Still, we must not forget that we are a people under judgment. We are called to account for the national sin of abortion. Like Thomas Jefferson reflecting on the evil of slavery—an evil in which he was personally complicit—we must "tremble for our country when we consider that God is just." Like Abraham Lincoln, whom President Obama invokes but does not emulate, we must pray that God, in His mercy, will not abandon us, but will rather restore us to the true and lofty moral ideals of our founding. Even at this dark hour for our movement, let us here highly resolve to hasten the day when this nation, under God, will be truly and fully and finally dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.

I'll end with this video: