Ken Pierpont's Blog, page 29

Six Ways To Influence the Next Generation

Six Ways to Influence the Next Generation Spiritually

“Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth! I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done. He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments;” (Psalm 78:1–7, ESV)

Through my over forty years of ministry I have done some crazy things to get try to influence and inspire the next generation to follow Jesus. After attending the Summer Institute in Youth Evangelism I got a curly permanent once because I thought it would kinda’ impress kids to follow me follow the Lord. I once nearly died in a dirt-bike crash trying to impress a kid I was trying hard to influence for Christ. He is a faithful believer today—but I’m not sure the dirt bike had anything to do with that. I know a guy who used explosives to illustrate one of his talks at camp and another who rode a skateboard into chapel and jumped the altar… I’ve seen YouTube videos of pastors riding Harley’s into their building to impress people—with really embarrassing results. Why is that? I will tell you why. When people really know God in the deepest part of their hearts… more than anything they want to pass down that faith to those they love most in the world.

When you still have them at home you can walk in the next room and have a long talk. You can take them to coffee. You can hike and camp with them in the rain… but when they move away and your opportunities are limited or when they seem to resist your influence for you see them making questionable choices…. What do you do then?

If we are wise our goal is to train them for incremental release as soon as possible. Recently I saw our son took our oldest grandson on a personal camp out, tent, bear siting, big lake, jet boil coffee The Who deal. I said; “Kyle did your dad give you the “talk” about girls… “No.” I said to Kyle, what did you talk about. He said; “I just wanted him to now that I love him and that I want him to love Jesus. That is all.” But he just has a few years for that and then how will we influence him?

Luke, the gospel writer tells a story about an old man of spiritual influence. His name was Simeon. Simeon was an old man who was a spiritual influence on generations to follow him. Luke wrote that he was a man who was led of the Spirit. Once our children are out of the home they move out from under our direct authority and training. I once heard someone say that when they are in our home they are in the chain of command, but as they mature we want to move them into our circle of influence. It is important that we don’t lose hope and confidence in our ability to influence them spiritually when we do not have direct control. In fact wise parents try to move their children out of the chain of control—command and into the circle of influence as soon as they can.

Here are six things ways to have a powerful spiritual influence on the next generation even wen you are no longer in direct control. Indirect influence .

1—Seek the Spirit’s Power to Be an Example of Spiritual Vitality. “They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green,” (Psalm 92:14, ESV) Joy and the fruit of the Spirit. “I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.” (Psalm 104:33, ESV) “I will praise the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.” (Psalm 146:2, ESV)

2—Seek the Spirit’s Guidance for New Ways to Love “…the fruit of the Spirit is love…” (Gal. 5:22-23)

3—Seek the Spirit’s Conviction to be tender over sin “But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged.” (1 Corinthians 11:31, ESV)

4—Seek the Spirit’s Resolve Pray and never doubt. “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing,” (1 Thessalonians 5:16–17, ESV) —never stop praying

5—Seek the Spirit’s Clearance About What to Say and When to Say it .

““Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.” (Matthew 7:6, ESV)

“About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.” (Hebrews 5:11, ESV)

“To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”” (John 10:3–5, ESV)

Each of the seven churches in Revelation is addressed this same way: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Revelation 2:7; 2:11; 2:17; 2:29; 3:6; 3:13; 3:22).

2 Timothy 2:24-26 Living Bible 24 God’s people must not be quarrelsome; they must be gentle, patient teachers of those who are wrong. 25 Be humble when you are trying to teach those who are mixed up concerning the truth. For if you talk meekly and courteously to them, they are more likely, with God’s help, to turn away from their wrong ideas and believe what is true. 26 Then they will come to their senses and escape from Satan’s trap of slavery to sin, which he uses to catch them whenever he likes, and then they can begin doing the will of God.

6—Seek the Spirit’s Resilience to never Quit in Discouragement. to the last beat of your heart.  “O God, from my youth you have taught me, and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds. So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come.” (Psalm 71:17–18, ESV)

Souter Hoople

When I was a boy I attended a small camp in southern Ohio every year. There was an elderly bachelor pastor by the name of Souter Hoople who was always a counselor at camp. He was from deep in southern Ohio—in the part south of Cincinnati in Scioto County hugging the Ohio River. Souter Hoople was a pastor and a farmer. He had an orchard that he inherited from his father that was started when a man came through the area in the 1880’s—planting apple trees. They knew him as Johnny Appleseed.

Souter Hoople was a sweet, quiet, humble man. He love the Lord. He loved kids. He influenced many to follow Jesus. After the vesper services in the evening on the Old Christian Union Campgrounds the boys would return to the dorm and get ready for bed. To settle them down he would promise to play his harmonica when they got quiet.

He would walk up and down the dorm and play songs like Whispering Hope and The Church in the Wildwood while the boy lie quiet in their bunks spent from a day of rowdy play. Harry died in 1994. Souter lived to almost 95 years old and died in the year 2000.

I snooped around yesterday to discover some things about Souter and Harry and the Hoople Apple Farm… The farm still exists, though a late April frost killed the whole crop this year. They are closed on Sundays to put God first—the sign says. But I discovered someting even more interesting this week.

In 1969 Souter Hoople and his brother Harry had given away 33 acred of their family estate to build a Christian camp. In 1973 when I was 15 years old I would have been a counselor with Souter Hoople that year in Greenville—The camp, called Mt. Hope Bible Camp hosted its first campers.

Now in the hills of southern Ohio A-frame cabins dot the hillsides near a town called Otway. In those cabins on a summer night little boys and girls lie still after a long day of play and fun, friendship and food, chapel songs and messages and they listen to the crickets on the cooling night air. May even someone plays the harmonica while they go to sleep. The Hoople brothers knew and loved Jesus. They wanted other generations to know him too.

 

Bittersweet Farm Journal (Number 84) Simple Things Remembered

Today all the upstairs windows are thrown open out on Bittersweet Farm. A storm roiled though the area last night and behind it ideal clear skies, breeze, and cool temperatures. It is a pleasant peninsula indeed this afternoon. Today I have a little memory for you that you might find useful if you have a few minutes…

Simple Things Remembered

Mom and Dad, my older sister Melony and my two little brothers Kevin and Nathan all dressed in our Sunday clothes and drove to Indiana for a church conference one summer. Suits and ties for the men, dresses for the ladies. I don’t remember the name of the town or the name of the conference. The conference was held at a small church in the community. I don’t remember the name of the Church. We met some nice Christian people. I don’t remember any of their names. We had a simple pleasant experience. I have never forgotten that.

The conference would have been a simple affair. Preaching. Singing. Fellowship. There would be a time for coffee and a good lunch prepared by the farm ladies. There would be a dry business session where someone presided half-following Robert’s Rules of Order. There would be a church supper that would be as good as the business session was bad. There would be potato salad, corn-bake casserole, ham, friend chicken, various hot dishes. There would be pies and sheet cakes and tepid coffee in little styrofoam cups or some fruit drink or weak lemonade.

After supper we would return for the evening session. The church would be full of locals as well as out-of-town visitors for that session. The keynote preacher would be featured, someone from out-of-state, someone of some notoriety. I don’t remember anyone who spoke. They would always save their best music for this session, perhaps a combined choir or gifted soloist. I’m sure it was a warm, edifying experience but I don’t remember anything about it. When the evening meeting was through we were introduced to our hosts for the evening—also farm people.

The family we were staying with for the night led us over gravel back roads to their home. They lived back a lane in a picturesque farmhouse. It was a tidy working farm with barns and outbuildings, silos and farm implements here and there. The people were kind, hospitable, Christian people who made us feel welcome. I don’t remember anything about them other than that. I don’t remember what they looked like. I don’t remember their names. I don’t remember anything about the inside of the house and the bed we slept in.

We arrived at the farm at dusk. We sat down on a glider on the back porch. The woman of the place said; “Can I get you a cold Coke.”

We looked at Dad. Dad said; “We can share.”

She said, “Oh we have enough for everyone.”

 

She went back in the house and came out with a little green-tinted 6 oz. bottles of Coke, one for each of us. I remember the feel of those little cold glass bottles and the taste of the Coke and the bubbly sweet goodness of it.

As the night fell and turned cool the fireflies rose and fell out over the lawn we sat on the swing on the back porch and drank those wonderful little ice-cold Cokes in glass bottles.

That simple pleasure happened over five decades ago and for some reason it comes back to me over and again. Usually it is the simple memories that you will cherish for decades—an evening on the porch with people you love, the sound of their voices, simple food, quiet conversation, shared experiences, the laughter of children, the stories of old people, the whirr of the wind in the treetops, the fragrance of honeysuckle, a flash of heat lightning in the distance, or bright dots of hovering over the grass while the glider moves gently beneath you.

Bittersweet Farm

July 11, 2020

Keepers of the Story (Sermon) Audio

Keepers of the Story (Psalm 78:13-17)

Bethel Church–Jackson, Michigan

June 7, 2020 AM

Ken Pierpont, Lead Pastor

 

https://kenpierpont.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/6-7-20.mp3

Keepers of the Story (Sermon) Video

Keepers of the Story (Psalm 78:13-17)

Bethel Church–Jackson, Michigan

June 7, 2020 AM

Ken Pierpont, Lead Pastor

 

Bittersweet Farm Journal (Number 83) Summer of ’68

The story of the Bible makes sense of even the most confusing and disheartening things that shake the world around us. Why do people do evil? Why do others have such a powerful capacity for kindness and humanity—some of whom are not even Christians? What is happening in this world? Is this the end of the world?

The Summer of 1968

I remember April 1, 1968 clearly. I turned 10 in 1968. We moved from Battle Creek, Michigan to Logansville, Ohio. April 1, 1968 was my first day of school at the elementary school in Quincy, Ohio. Now every trace of the school is gone and the property where it stood is an empty field, but at the time it was alive with grade-school children every day.

As a ten-year-old boy at the time, living in a small parsonage in a tiny village with two businesses and a church, I was not deeply aware of what was happening in the world. We did not even own a television at the time, though my parents kept themselves well-informed. Three days later Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. America would erupt again into civil unrest and rioting.

Anti-war sentiment would boil over into demonstrations, campus unrest, even shootings. On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong, an Ohio boy, became the first man to walk on the moon. By then we did own a black and white TV set and watched the grainy pictures wondering if it was real or staged. A year later, on Monday May 4, 1970 students on the camps of Kent State University in Ohio were fired-on by national guard. Thirteen students were shot. Four of them were died. Anti-War demonstrations multiplied. It was a time of incredible tension and division.

Talk of a revolution of sexual promiscuity, the dark threat of communism sweeping the world, and anti-war demonstrations, all contributed to a sense of despair and insecurity.

Logansville Boy

On a summer afternoon in the summer of 1968 I was unaware of any of those earth-shaking things going on in the world around me. I was preoccupied with my job—mowing the church lawn for a dollar a week, my tree-fort, my red fat-tired bike, and my friends Steve Strunk and Glenn Fairchild.

Commonly on a summer afternoon I would ride the back roads around the village searching the ditches for empty pop bottles. When I gathered enough bottles I would return them to the Mr. Knight’s Sinclair Station. His wife attended the church. Their house was between the church and the their gas station. It was an old-school service station with a porch. Mr. Knight and his adult son would sit out on the porch and jaw about this and that between infrequent customers.

The service station had a sign with a Dinosaur and a wooden porch, a screen door with a spring that “ping-ping-pinged” when you opened it and slapped shut behind you. A fan whirred overhead on a summer day. We would gather our deposit for our empty bottles and then go back to the bath-style Coke machine in the back of the store, deposit our coins, and fish out a cold pop. I almost always chose Orange Crush back then.

I’ve given it a lot of thought and I think there were three reasons that I have almost never tasted any soft drink so satisfying. The first reason was that I had to work so hard to get it. The second was that my parents, wisely, did not often give us soda pop. The third and paramount reason for the delicious cold satisfaction unmatched by any modern counterpart is that it was sold in cold glass bottles. The abomination of the soda can had not yet corrupted Mr. Knight’s Sinclair station on State Route 47 in Logansville, Ohio in the hot summer of 1968.

So a boy in cuffed Levis, with a red wool ball cap, and Red Ball Jets tennis shoes, sitting on the wooden porch of a filling station on a summer afternoon could nurse an icy-cold orange soda in unhindered bliss. That’s how I remember it.

What I didn’t really know while I was whiling away hours in my tree-fort, or mowing the church lawn, or sipping my Orange Crush, was that adults were trying to keep the world right-side-up that summer.

Young men were being maimed and dying in South Vietnam, the Russians were trying to beat us to the moon and probably aiming weapons of mass destruction at major American cities. A university not far away the next spring would erupt into deadly violence, Detroit had barely survived a horrific season of rioting just the summer before, and now the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. would result in riots in over 100 more American cities.

All this while a boy with blonde bangs jutting from his cap, who led an Opie Taylor life sat listening to the radio broadcast of the Cincinnati Red’s playing baseball in their sparkling new stadium on the banks the Ohio River.

(The Reds reached the World Series in Riverfront’s first year (1970). They would reach the World Series four times in the stadium’s first seven years, then win back-to-back championships in 1975 and 1976. This was a part of the soundtrack of my childhood. In 1975 and 1976 the first thing I would do every morning of the spring and summer before light was get the papers I was about to deliver and get under a street light and open the sports page to check the baseball standings for the western division of the National League).

Ten Year Olds in the Summer of 2020

They cancelled baseball this summer. Most of the over 200 church camps in Michigan will host no campers this summer. Every day we have to think about the possibility of contracting the plague. Incomprehensible acts of racial injustice are now played over and over again on-demand for anyone who wants to see them. An in-color video version of the worst agonies around the world is displayed in high-definition on little pocket devices for 10-years-olds everywhere. Every boy and girl has a front row seat to violence, perversion, hatred, every imaginable uncensored ugliness. But they won’t go to any picnics with the symphony, they won’t cool off in the community pool, they won’t visit the big-league ball park, and they won’t lay in their bunk at summer camp on a summer night and listen to the night sounds though the thin walls of their of their cabins.

But God is In His Heaven

Still the Spirit of God broods over every neighborhood and village and hamlet and city, every township and every county and every state where ten-year-olds live. Still the Spirit of God possesses every genuine believer, even little ten-year-old believers. Still in almost every hamlet and village and city God has his people gathered an assembly of the faithful. No matter how humble, local churches are God’s plan for the age and they are resilient beyond human explaination. God owns outright every square inch of planet-earth. Every square inch of the universe is his. The world is moving at the pace he ordained toward the glorious destiny He has arranged—The kingdom of this earth will become the Kingdom of our God and of his Christ. He is now gathering a people for his name out of every nation and people and tribe and tongue on earth… and some of them are ten-years-olds this summer.

Bittersweet Farm

June 5, 2020

Three Timely Reminders

A world-wide pandemic of disease. An ugly incident of evil. A flood of iniquity in our land. What are we to make of it all? How are we going to survive the disease, the ugliness, the prejudice, the injustice, the anarchy, and the apostasy. What are we to make of it?

1. You are not alone.

You are not the only faithful one left. God has his people–his faithful remnant everywhere. He is working in and through them. I’m not the last faithful pastor. Our church isn’t the last faithful church. America isn’t God’s only hope. The Kingdom of God always has and always will survive the onslaught of apostacy in every age. As God told Elijah when he was discouraged and he thought he was the lone remaining faithful prophet: “…I have reserved seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.”

2. This thing is not over.

There may be temporary setbacks. There may be local defeats. There may be dark times and ugly losses, but Jesus wins and he wins big-time. He will not be defeated. His Kingdom is an eternal Kingdom. He is good and he will do good and all that is wrong will one day be made right. Trust him and never doubt it.

One day; “…the kindgom of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ and he shall reign forever and ever…” (Rev. 11:15)

3. It is serious.

This is more important than life-and-death… It concerns of eternity. This is a matter of heaven and hell. Don’t get distracted. So much is so much at stake. Satan does want to crush people who are precious to God and to us and drag them into hell. We really are locked on mortal combat with evil–even immortal combat with evil. This is a call to prayer, fasting, repentance. This is a call to faithfulness. Witness. Give the gospel. Have gospel conversations. Talk to your children and your grand-children. Be an example. Walk with God. Confess any known sin. Search your heart. Love one another. Be a light. Now more then ever our world need believers who are “…blameless, innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation among whom you shine as lights in the world…” (Phil 2:14ff)

Don’t be discouraged by what you see around you. The Bible makes sense of all of it. Nothing is happening that the Scriptural story does not explain. People do evil because they are fallen and disfigured by sin. People have an inclination for good because they are made in the image of God. No one has escaped the curse of sin and it’s foul effects. Without redemption through Christ all are lost forever. The world is in turmoil because there is a conflict between good and evil that God is using for his glory and he is moving it to a certain victory in his time. He turns things that are evil to his own purposes for our good and his glory. Nations rise and fall. God’s kingdom is eternal. Sometimes even believers do things that are inexcusably wrong. Get a Bible. Know it well. Grow in Christ. Walk in the Spirit. Don’t give in to doubt or despair.

Bittersweet Farm

June 5, 2020

A Thousand Generations (Sermon) Video

A Thousand Generations (Psalm 78)

Bethel Church–Jackson, Michgian

May 31, 2020 AM

Ken Pierpont–Lead Pastor

You Lost Me (Sermon) Video

You Lost Me

Bethel Church–Jackson, Michigan

Ken Pierpont, Lead Pastor

May 24, 2020 AM

When God Ordains A Rest (Sermon) Video

When God Ordains A Rest

Bethel Church-Jackson, Michigan

May 17, 2020 AM

Pastor Ken Pierpont

A Thousand Generations (Sermon) Video

A Thousand Generations (Psalm 78)

Bethel Church–Jackson, Michgian

May 31, 2020 AM

Ken Pierpont–Lead Pastor