by admin | Aug 20, 2020 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
Even though it’s been gone from most schools for generations of students now, adults often still call for prayer to be returned to school, particularly at times of great tragedy in our communities or the country. There are many times we find ourselves feeling like circumstances would be different if we honored God more through prayer in schools.
Many kids are back in school with many more heading that way in the coming weeks. But with the unpredictable nature of Covid and our responses to it, many have no choice but to home school right now while a lot of parents are choosing that option temporarily and even permanently.
You can see where I’m going with this. Now is the chance to bring prayer back to ‘school’ wherever you’re teaching your kids. With a certain amount of control over your children’s time, having them at home more, you can start your day with prayer and spend time around their scheduled or required work, teaching your kids how to pray. You can even devote some time to Bible study.
Even if your kids are going back to a regular classroom and routine, let this be an encouragement to make time at home anyway to do this. Prayer may be formally gone from schools, but you can still send your kids to the classroom ready to respectfully pray for their classmates and teachers.
If you’re not comfortable with it yourself but believe it’s important, well, there’s never a bad time to learn to pray and learn how to study from your Bible. The Bible has no age requirements for when you start to learn from it.
Matthew 22:37 “And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’”
Throughout Scripture, we’re taught the significance of prayer.
But what a great verse in Matthew for us as we think about how important it really is to give God everything that’s in us. The education system is entrusted with our children’s minds but we can teach them privately how to love God with heart, soul and mind! That responsibility is ours given to us by God.
For the Christian cowboy and cowgirl, or however you identify yourself in our rodeo, ranch and bull riding industries, we’ve been struggling for months now with all the changes and politics going on around us. Here’s just one positive step we can focus on among all the negativity we’ve been staring down. While teaching our kids to love God with all their hearts, souls and minds, we can be teaching ourselves to do the same.
A child in kindergarten or a new Christian, we all have to start learning sometime and that can be done independently, as a whole family or both. If you’re new to it, that can feel intimidating, but for a lot of us, so was our first day at school. It gets easier the more time you give it.
by admin | Apr 30, 2020 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys Of The Cross
We are slowly coming out of a period of, for many, self-isolation but reflecting on that time, we’ve seen almost everything we normally give our attention to put on a pause.
Things that distract us like sports and entertainment have been put on hold with the PBR (Professional Bull Riders) being the first sport to come back to stadiums in the past couple of weeks. We’ve been isolated from our churches and families, from shopping and hobbies and interests. All of these things can become idols to us—anything we give attention to before God.
Jonah 2:8 “Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.
We often think of idols as being that golden calf statue the Israelites were worshiping in place of God.
But as we head out of this giant pause, it’s worth thinking about how we spend our time.
Christians understand that sickness and disease are a result of sin and this being a fallen and broken world. What we’re enduring in this pandemic is not a punishment from God but He is allowing us to go through this.
If He’s allowed us to go through this and has allowed many of our idols to be temporarily removed from our daily lives, it seems God is giving us a chance to give Him more attention than we have in the past.
Jonah 2:9 9 But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.’”
Jonah’s words are coming from the belly of a whale. He had ignored God’s commands, tried to go his own way, but God sent a whale to get him back on track and that’s ultimately what Jonah did, praising God and following His commands.
This pandemic may not have been sent by God the way He sent a whale to get Jonah’s attention, but it is a chance for us to get back on course for those of us who may have been more distracted than we realized by the trappings of our culture. Our western society has blessed with technology to access church services from across the country and we can literally open the Bible from our phones. Many of us are fortunate to have multiple copies of the Bible in our homes while people in other countries have to smuggle Bibles and are lucky to get their hands on a single copy.
Let’s take advantage of the opportunity we have to refocus our attention back on God through prayer, time in His word and gathering together to worship Him, online and in our churches as we’re allowed to gather together again.
by admin | Apr 9, 2020 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Josh McCarthy / Cowboys of the Cross
Unless you’ve been practicing your social distancing in a hole somewhere, chances are that you’ve heard some interesting ideas about the cause or who’s behind the coronavirus pandemic. Everyone from right, left, or center of the political scale has some idea or theory as to who’s to blame and why.
I want to first go on record saying that I personally think there has to be a middle road between thinking, “This is just like the flu or not even real,” and, “We need to buy every store out of toilet paper and if you step out your door you must hate everyone else on the planet!” To paraphrase ol’ Martin Luther, most people are like drunks: they fall off one side of a horse only to climb back on and fall off the other side. I think we all need to sit our horse right and get a little balance.
One thing this pandemic has brought to light is our fascination with conspiracy theories. Now the more harmless of these “what if” stories are interesting and some may be fun to ponder, but I think as Christians we need to be careful how much we let wild speculation on past and present events affect our thinking and everyday lives.
The thing about most conspiracy theories – like those surrounding the coronavirus – is that the people who believe in them usually think they have some secret knowledge that most “sheeple” don’t see (which is pretty prideful, don’t you think?). They can also involve a lot of accusations against people we either disagree with politically or just plain don’t like. On that last point, I want to remind us as Christians of a couple Scriptural principles. Luke 6:27-28 says: “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
Or consider 1 Peter 2:1: So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.
Now, do I think people with a lot of power, politically or otherwise, probably do some shady things? Yeah, sure: they’re sinful humans like the rest of us, and hold power in a fallen world. But we already know Planned Parenthood murders babies. We already know the DNC supports abortion in a variety of ways. We know some Republicans have fallen into the sin of greed. We know certain celebrities, sports stars, and various influential people support a lot of sinful lifestyles, so why do we need to add the idea that they must all be working together in some massive plot to destroy the American way of life? As Christians, we believe God is in control of all things.
Colossians 1:16-17 tells us: For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
History has an over-arching theme throughout all of it. It all serves to bring God ultimate glory in the saving of His people through the work of Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son. Jesus’s death on the cross on Good Friday was for the sins of His people. He received the punishment for sin that we deserved. He rose from the dead three days later, on Easter Sunday, to bring us, through the work of the Holy Spirit, into God’s family as sons and daughters of the Most High God.
You want to know the whole plan behind everything? That’s it. We don’t need to dig into some article on the internet to figure it out, because God put it all in the Bible. Maybe we all (myself included) should be taking this time we have in self-isolation to be focusing on that. I’m not suggesting you spend your time reading the book of Revelation or Daniel to try to figure out if Trump or Obama is the anti-Christ, but that we actually take time to read the Scriptures for what they are, and do our best to read them in the proper context. They are God’s Word to us, in which He tells us the way to know and love Him. And in loving Him, we learn to love our neighbors, whether they are hacking up a lung or just filled their cart with more toilet paper then anyone could ever use.
So wash those filthy hands, cover your mouth when you cough, and take this time to be reading your Bible and going in prayer to the God who holds all things in His hands, including the interesting times in which we live. And for goodness’s sake, only buy toilet paper when you need it.
by admin | Mar 27, 2020 | Behind the Bucking Chutes
By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
Faith says to trust God’s plan, wisdom says to wash your hands.
Most of us know not to lick a doorknob. Somewhere, we’ve been taught that it is dirty and could make us sick. Yet many of us have had to be told of the importance of washing our hands recently because of the spread of the coronavirus.
Proverbs 3:5-6 Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.
Proverbs offers us just one of dozens of verses and teachings through scripture that tell us to trust God and have faith. When life is challenging like it is now with so many unknowns from economic to health concerns, we know God has a bigger plan in store for us. We know how His plan ends, with those who have put their faith in Jesus having a perfect life with Him for eternity, but we don’t know what happens between now and then. When it gets hard, it can be harder to trust in Him but that, again is what faith is—believing in Him and His word and believing His promises to be true.
We can’t see Him, the world doubts Him and yet we believe in the evidence we have, largely through Scripture and historical supports of it.
Faith tells us to trust His word to us in the Bible and that becomes where wisdom kicks in.
Throughout scripture, we’re given instruction and counseled to be wise. That means application of what we learn from scripture but also in life.
Proverbs 13:10 Pride only breeds quarrels, but wisdom is found in those who take advice.
We can misapply faith into thinking that if I have enough, I won’t get sick—the poison from the snake bite won’t hurt me or the coronavirus won’t affect me.
So where most of know not to lick doorknobs, we still don’t always know or understand how to handle every situation we face. We can choose to simply trust God and blindly walk through life as if nothing bad could happen to us, or we trust God and the brain He gave. In that case, we make decisions based on information from what we know to be true in the Bible but also what we know from our experiences and the knowledge we’ve gained as we’ve grown. When we don’t have the knowledge we need, we seek and advice, use wisdom to assess and apply that information. We can come to the conclusion that the medical experts know more than me and that not only shouldn’t I lick a doorknob, but I should really wash my hands after I touch it, especially when out in public when the flu or other illnesses are spreading like the one we’re currently facing.
Faith and trust in God should give us peace instead of fearing what’s yet to come but wisdom is needed to navigate what happens on our path to wherever God is taking us.
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