Welcome, Purpose, and Links

Hello,

My name is Mike Sechler. I am currently the pastor at Oakland Evangelical Free Church, and this blog is a place for me to set down some of my thoughts about life, scripture, church life, discipleship and whatever else comes into my mind at the moment. A number of my posts are articles that I have written in the past or that I have just written for the local paper or for my church.

I hope you find them enjoyable and edifying.

Along with this blog, I also have a blog where I review and recommend various resources including books, movies, websites, podcasts, and all sorts of other media.

I am also keeping a record of all the sermon recordings, so if you are interested in listening to them here are the links.

2017

What Time Is It?

I've recently been preaching through the book of Ecclesiastes and came to Ecclesiastes 3, where the music group the Bryd got the lyrics of their song  “Turn! Turn! Turn!.” If you know the lyrics then you know some of the words of the Scripture. 

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh.

We can learn several lessons about time from this passage. First, we should prepare for different seasons of life. Sometimes we get to rejoice in the birth of a new baby, and other times we have to go to the funeral of a loved one. Jobs come and go. Friends come and go. Families come and go. The weather and the season change constantly. If we can only be happy and content if we get all the circumstances just right, then we are going to end up discontent tomorrow because a new season of life will come upon us.

Second, we need to understand what time it is. We need to spend time considering the times. Each day we should reflect on what that day holds. At each season of life we should consider how things have changed. Parenting a 4 year old is different than parenting a 14 year old and still different than parenting a 24 year old. And it will be different still when you are 84 and your kids need to help parent you. If you do not recognize how things have changed you are not going to love others well. For instance, if you think a 14 year old is just going to believe you and obey you just because you said so in the same way a 4 year might, then you are in for a shock! Likewise, if you are getting older, you should consider that in your desire to not burden your kids and to remain independent, you may be causing them more trouble because they can see you need help, but you keep resisting them.

Therefore, at each stage of life and each change of circumstances you should reconsider how things have changed and how your attitudes and actions might change accordingly. Furthermore, wise people will plan for the future recognizing that changes will be coming. How might you plan for retirement? How might you help your kids or grandkids prepare for their futures? If you do not know what to expect or how to prepare, then get help from those who have been through those changes already.

A final lesson from this chapter is that God has put eternity in our hearts, so that we can see that there is more than just this earthly life, so our consideration of time needs to be made with eternity in mind. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount talked about things on this earth will be destroyed, but we can build up treasures in heaven. It is always the right time to consider our relationship with the eternal God. Am I spending my time today in such a way that God is glorified and I am becoming the type of person who is ready to spend time with Him in heaven? The more we learn to love like Jesus in our time on earth, the more we will be prepared to spend eternity with Him.

Who is your family?

 

In my last article, I talked about the goodness of family, and that we as Christians should promote and support families. But many people do not have great families, and because of that they lack the natural support that is supposed to come from a Dad, Mom, siblings, and extended family. In our current culture we do see more brokenness in families than in previous generations, it is not a new problem in the world. Scripture tells us on a number of occasions to look after widows and orphans (see James 1:27; Psalm 146:9), so we know that throughout time people have been without good families.

The biblical solution is not just to set up a program to minister to the needs of people “out there” who need help, but rather to become a new family. When questioned about His family Jesus did this: “And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother”” (Matthew 12:49-50). In other words, Jesus was intentionally setting up the church to be a new kind of family. We see the early church live this out when they started to meet in the homes of members and treat one another like a big extended family (Acts 2:42-47). 

This new eternal family will last longer than our earthly families. For those who follow Jesus, God is our Father because we are adopted into His family (Galatians 4:5, Romans 8:15) and Jesus is our older brother (Hebrews 2:11, Romans 8:29). In light of this in the early church they called one another brothers and sisters. In that culture, family was the source of your identity, so for the early church to welcome outsiders as family was a very big deal. The gospel is open to anyone who follows Jesus, so this new family included people of all kinds of ethnic and economic backgrounds. 

Now if Christians really live like family, we are going to get uncomfortable. People who are different than us can be part of this family. They might have different customs, and they might even have shady backgrounds. They might not know how to behave properly in church society, especially if they have had the blessing of a good earthly family. And frankly, we might be that person for someone else. They might look at us and think, I do not want that person in my family! But just like with human families, the kids don’t get to choose. It is the Father who draws people into the family and adopts them. If we do not accept those who He accepts, then we are dishonoring our heavenly Father, and we will miss out on the blessings of God’s family where love, grace, and mercy reign. Just like we receive those from Him, we have the opportunity to show that kind of family love to people who might not have experienced it before.

In practice this means being willing to have people in your home for meals or even providing shelter when necessary. It means taking time to listen and be a friend. It means going into places, homes, and communities where they live to show that you care about them on their own turf. Obedience to God is challenging because He wants us to become like Him and welcome those He welcomes. But take heart, He is a good Father and He wants good for you too. Helping to welcome the single person, the widow, the orphan, and the disconnected, into the family will be a blessing to you and the rest of the family.

The Goodness of Family

Have you ever taken someone for granted and not understood their importance until they were gone? Sometimes the good things in our lives are like background music that we don’t even know is playing. A few years ago, I was listening to a news report about how to fix some of the societal problems in depressed areas, and various solutions were offered such as better education, better healthcare, counseling, and more social services in general. I was fascinated that at no point did any of the reporters mention the word family or talk in any way about how to restore and/or strengthen families. Yet, I can show you in study after study that family breakdown precedes larger societal breakdown. Family is so fundamental to our well-being that we sometimes take it for granted and only feel its lack when we see so many people hurt by not having it.

Even Christian ministries can get so focused on doing social good and sharing the good news about Jesus that we can take family for granted. I was reading 1 Timothy 5 the other day where Paul is instructing Timothy and the church about how to take care of widows who would otherwise be destitute. In the midst of encouraging the church to this good social work, Paul makes this comment in verse 8, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” The family was so central in society that Paul assumes that even non-Christians would take care of their relatives, and that the church should only have to come along and help those who have no family to take care of them.

The Bible story is a family story from the creation account of the first family to the Old Testament history which follows family lines, and into the New Testament where Christ comes to adopt people into a new eternal family. While the church should be a family, it is clear from Paul’s admonition that it does not replace the physical family. We were created to function best in families. Most men and women have a natural and God-given desire to have a mate and so should seek to get married. Marriage is one of the good things God has given us, and we should show and tell young people about its goodness. Further, kids were meant to be raised with their Dad and Mom in a secure marriage, and on average have much better outcomes when they are.

Even as we age, having family is the best social security that you can have. Just like in Paul’s day, it is still much better to have family to rely upon than an impersonal government program. The other day, I got to take a 4 generation picture with my dad, my son, and my granddaughter, and later this week, our family will celebrate my wife’s parent’s 50th anniversary. It is great being part of a legacy of faith and family that runs for generations. While none of us is perfect and our families are not perfect, our parents have given us a firm foundation upon which to continue building no matter what happens in the wider society around us.

Furthermore, families built on the solid foundation of Jesus have the physical and emotional resources to reach out in love to those in society that do not have that foundation. In my next article I want to highlight how the church can and should be a welcoming family to those who do not have that legacy of faith and family, so that their lives can be changed and solid families can be built that create new legacies.

Celebrate Jesus

 

As anyone with a TV or internet knows, the summer Olympics are going on in Paris right now. There was quite a controversy caused by the part of the opening ceremonies that featured what looked to many like a mockery of a famous painting of the Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci. The part of the ceremony featured a celebration of various sexualized behaviors and identities, with men in drag, several nearly naked individuals, and some children there as well.

The creator of this part of the ceremony, Thomas Jolly, said that he did intend to offend and wanted the production to “celebrate community tolerance,” and I believe that was his intent. What the controversy shows is the wide divide between what various people think should be celebrated. The producers of the show are likely far enough removed from people with traditional religious views that they likely do not understand that rather than a celebration of various identities it looks like an intentional mockery of traditional Christian values and beliefs. 

But in their desire to celebrate tolerance, we do see an expression of the universal need to belong and be accepted. We all ground our understanding of ourselves in something. When we do not have a stable grounding for our identity outside ourselves, we look inward to create our own identities. This happens for many people in the western world because of the loss of faith in the external things which used to ground our identities. Many people have lost their trust in God, their families have broken down, and they’ve also lost trust in many other societal institutions. Unfortunately for us, we, in ourselves, are not a stable enough foundation upon which to build an identity. That is why people who seek to create their own identities crave affirmations from others. They want and need to be celebrated by others because they are not okay simply by themselves.

Jesus says in Matthew 7:24-27 that we should build our lives upon His words. When we follow Him as our Lord, we will stand firm on the rock of Jesus in the midst of the storms of life. Everyone will face the storms of life, such as illness, financial insecurity, and interpersonal conflict, so it makes a difference what we use as a foundation. If we build on anything in this world, including money, friends, family, country, or our own self-concept, these will eventually prove to be sand and cause our lives to crumble when the trials come. Jesus is the risen again Savior, who has even defeated death. He is the Lord of the whole world, and He wants us to recognize our need for Him. If we build our lives upon who Jesus is and what He has done, then we will not need any other source to celebrate us to make us feel valuable.

 When we humble ourselves before Him, He will lift us up (James 4:10). So, by celebrating Jesus and making Him the foundation of our lives, we ground our own identity on the strongest rock possible. Then whether we are at the pinnacle of the sporting world in Paris or living a simple life in NE Nebraska, we will not be shaken by any of the storms that will inevitably come. 

Is Your Love Bank Full?

 

I am currently rereading a book called, Love is a Choice, by three professional Christian counselors, and it is about the condition that they term, “codependency,” which they say many people have. The main issue with this condition is that people become unhealthily dependent on people or things, such as drugs, work, sex, anger, food, and bad relationships. Most of these unhealthy dependencies started in their childhood because they did not get the love that they needed and then sought to fill their internal love tank with things or people that could not give them true love. These things or people cannot truly make them whole again when they have such a love deficit and so they go deeper and deeper into an addictive cycle.

We are created to love and be loved. The greatest commandments are first to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-39). The most famous verse in the Bible is about God’s love for us through giving His son so that we could have eternal life (John 3:16). So it should not surprise us that when we face a lack of love and/or abuse, especially in our early, formative years, that we end up being wounded and seeking to make up for what we did not get. Unfortunately, when we do not know good love, we do not know how to give good love. Our addictions and sinful patterns perpetuate the problem to the people around us, especially if we have kids of our own. They end up not getting the appropriate love that we should be giving them, and thus the cycle continues on and on until someone intentionally seeks to break the cycle.

Some of these addictions, such as drugs or alcohol, have more immediate outward effects that others can see and lead to lives collapsing more quickly. If you go to jail for a DUI or your kids are taken away because of your drug addition, you are forced to at least consider what has gone wrong in your life. But other patterns are more subtle and sometimes are even encouraged by the society around you. Many of the examples given by the counselors in the book are of people who are externally very successful, but who are miserable in their marriages and personal lives. They highlight multi millionaires and starlets who have “made it” in worldly terms. Their clients even include “good Christians”  who put on a mask of happiness in public, but who hate each other in private.
Are you one of these people? We live in a fallen world where each of us has experienced some love deficit or abuse in our lives, so almost certainly you and I have sought out wrong ways of making up for that. Have you ever taken the time and energy to examine how you have been impacted by your past and what patterns have developed as a result? If you are living in pain right now, even private pain that you hardly even admit to yourself, God does not want you to stay there. Jesus came to give us an abundant life (John 10:10), but before we can love well and even be loved, we have to be willing to let God examine our hearts (Psalm 139:23-24). Then we can understand how we have run to the wrong things to find love and let God’s true love heal us. This is not just a one and done process, but rather a lifetime of learning to examine ourselves and then letting God change us into the person He created us to be!

Abortion Amendments

 

Dear Nebraska Friends & Family

I wanted to make you aware of some possible state constitutional amendments about the issue of abortion. This is a moral issue that is dear to my heart and that I think is important for our state and our country. 

Here is a description of three potential amendments taken from this article. https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/05/28/nebraska-abortion-initiative-with-the-most-votes-would-become-law-if-voters-pass-more-than-one/

"Three groups are circulating potential constitutional amendments on abortion for the November ballot. Each appears at odds with the others.

One initiative, put forward by Protect Our Rights Nebraska, would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution up until fetal viability, which most place between 22 and 24 weeks.

A second, put forward by Protect Women and Children, would prohibit most abortions after the first trimester, much like current law, but it would let the Legislature restrict abortion further in the future. 

A third, put forward by Now Choose Life, would grant “personhood” under the law to embryos and fetuses in a mother’s womb, making the law treat them like a child who has been born."

The first of these is supported by pro-abortion lobby and has had a great deal of support, meaning that it already had enough votes to make it on the November ballot. While the amendment says abortion would be legal until the age of viability, which is a subjective time, it also gives doctors the right to make exceptions later in pregnancy based on a very board definition of "life or health" of the mother. In practice this language has been used to mean that a doctor and a woman could make exceptions for abortions through all 9 months of pregnancy.

The second is a middle of the road amendment by some pro-life groups meant to specifically counter the pro-abortion amendment that would allow abortion for all nine months of pregnancy. This pro-life amendment would constitutional restrict later term abortions and still allow for further laws to be passed that would restrict abortion even more.

This is the amendment I am supporting because it has the greatest practical chance of being passed and gaining more votes than the pro-abortion amendment. They need signatures for the petition to get it on the ballot, and Dacey Nelson is working on this effort as she works for Senator Ricketts. If you would like to sign (and I encourage you to do so) and do not have her contact info, please contact me.

The last amendment is the one that reflects my true understanding of the issue, namely that all human life from the moment of conception on is valuable and should be protected. This attempt is late to the game and because it would basically restrict all abortions will likely not pass at this time in our history. Now you can sign both pro-life petitions and I probably will, but I do not believe a total constitutional ban is likely to pass and may even cause the pro-abortion amendment to do better if it is the only other option.

Finally, I want to make a short defense of why the issue of abortion is so important to me, and why I believe it should be to you too. The main moral issue is the value of human life. Not just unborn life, but all humans. Why is your life important? Why do you have value? The prevailing view in the western world over that last century has come to be a secular one that says that humans are simply the result of random chance accidents and have not more or less value than other forms of life. Therefore our value is contingent on various factors such as quality of life or utility to society. This has lead to a devaluation of not just unborn life, and we see this idea playing out with the promotion of assisted suicide and euthanasia in many places now. Older people, handicap people, and even depressed people are being encouraged to end their lives in countries like Canada because the value of their life is being judged by its utility.

The previous understanding of the value of human life came from the Christian understanding of the inherent value of all human life, grounded in the concept that we are made in the image of God. Therefore, no matter the age, sex, skin color, ability level, or utility to society, a person has value because they are valuable to God who is the grounding for all morality. The founding of our country that began to extend individual rights, the abolitionist movement, the women's suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights movement were all grounded on the idea that inalienable rights are tied to our value given by God.  Likewise, unborn humans are just that, human. They should be afforded the same basic rights as other humans because they have the same value. If your life has intrinsic value, then their life should as well. If we begin to make the value of their lives subjective, then it is only a matter of time before the value of every life is subjective. 

If we don't defend those who cannot defend themselves, then we will find ourselves in the position of German Pastor Martin Niemöller who said after WW2 in 1946,

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.