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Contempt

I haven't posted in a week or two. Lately I've just been critical, and I don't know why. A few words come to mind: disillusioned, ticked, cynical, etc. These feelings are rather distracting, and its hard to focus on God sometimes.

I read today's Utmost and now I know why. Here's an excerpt:

The Distraction of Contempt

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Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us! For we are exceedingly filled with contempt —Psalm 123:3

[...]When we discern that other people are not growing spiritually and allow that discernment to turn to criticism, we block our fellowship with God. God never gives us discernment so that we may criticize, but that we may intercede.

I believe I have been given a degree of discernment... that I don't know what to do with.

It's like going to medical school but only learning what can go wrong with people. You desperately want to be able to do something about it, but you don't even know where to begin or even what to do. A few fumbled tries and soon you just feel like giving up. Then you look at other people pretending to know what they're doing and you begin to criticize them. They fail too, and you're not happy that they failed, you're even more upset that you were right.

No wonder I'm depressed, ticked off and confused.

The fact is, I will never know how to help people as God helps people. I can only submit myself to be used of him when he desires, and in the mean time I am to intercede for the problems I have been allowed to discern. I think that has been the source of my frustration: instead of turning my concerns into intercession, I have chosen the road of despair.

And that wreaks havoc on your relationship with God.

I always feel better when I take some time to really just give it to God, and I don't mean yell at him or get mad at Jesus. I mean really get mad at sin in prayer and passionately intercede for a situation. Maybe even shed a few tears for someone who is bound by chains of sin and can't seem to get free or doesn't seem to be growing. I'm talking some real Davidic Psalms type of prayer. Not only do I feel better, but isn't that way more valuable to everyone than me walking around in an endless "sigh"??

anonymous revisited

So I finished anonymous by Alicia Chole, and let me say this book is amazingly relevant to me at this point in my life. I've never been more encouraged to take advantage of the hidden times in my life.

Chole's writing style is much like her speaking style: like poetry that cuts you to your heart. She nailed me on several different areas of my life, but I had to keep reading more. This book is a treasure, I would rank it next to A Tale of Three Kings in awesomeness.

I do want to summarize one main principle from the book: today's trials and temptations reflect our decisions in past times of obscurity.

Her main illustration was the wilderness temptations of Jesus, and how his ability to overcome temptation in the most extreme of conditions was directly proportional to the previous thirty years he spent in hiddenness, just living an obedient life. He had waited thirty years...obeying God day after day, refusing to take shortcuts and refusing the attempts of people to thrust him into the public eye. He followed the voice of his Father during the times when he had no audience and no affirmation. This strengthened him to follow his Father after he began his ministry.

This made me realize how important my daily decisions are. Sometimes we let little compromises into our spirituality because it doesn't seem like it affects anything. When you realize that every decision you make today will affect how you respond to a temptation that is still to come...you take them a little more seriously.

Needless to say, my response to this concept has been repentence. I've also been awakened to importance that every day holds. There is no "main course" that is yet to come. Every day is a gift from God, and the decisions of today WILL affect tomorrow, however insignificant they seem.

Lead a Quiet Life?

I just started reading in Thessalonians a few days ago and this verse jumped out at me. After a whole bunch of introduction and prologue (borrring..how do you preach that stuff??) in this letter, Paul finally starts giving the Thessalonians some instruction in chapter 4.

11Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, 12so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

This is interesting advice considering the fact that Paul knows all about the spiritual gifts and the miraculous and spectacular ways God can reveal himself to people.

I've been around Pentecostal Christian ministry for a bit now, and if there is one thing I've noticed about us it is that we have a deep desire to be used of in miraculous spiritual gifts like healing and prophesy and raising people from the dead. This is, of course, a completely Biblical desire, but I believe there are hidden consequences of focusing on power too much:

(1) You overestimate the power of miracles toward making disciples of Christ.

• Jesus himself said that a wicked generation requires a sign (Luke 11:29). When we try to bypass faith by making God do a trick for us, we attempt to make ourselves gods. This is fake faith; therefore it is not pleasing to God.
• Jesus also said that miracles often do NOT necessarily work on people unwilling to come to repentance (Luke 16:19-31). A lot of pentecostal environments have this false belief that if they can just get God to give them a word of knowledge for someone or the gift of healing, people would come to Jesus in droves. It's just not true. Miracles confirm faith more than they increase it. The battle is spiritual, not physical.
• The truth is people don't remain unbelievers because a Christian hasn't come along and healed them of their asthma yet. They don't believe because they love to sin. Perhaps when they are ready to repent and become a disciple, God will use me to heal them of their asthma to confirm His faithfulness. This healing is contingent on information that the average christian does not have (only God looks at the heart). Thus, our goal should not be to get more power but to become more obedient.
  

(2) You underestimate the power of faithful obedience in simple, everyday situations.

• There can be such a focus on trying to manipulate the Spirit into doing something for you (and the motive is often selfish), that you can forget to do the things you already know how to do...like loving your family, working your job as unto the Lord, being nice for crying out loud, etc. This is how we get charismatic evangelists who can tell a whole wheelchair section to stand up...but can't even properly run their households. By the way, the bible calls those people "worse than unbelievers."
• In order to have influence in someone's life to lead them closer to Jesus, they need to have your respect (v. 12). So the question becomes how do you live in such a way that earns the respect of the unbelievers in your life? Do you have to yell at them in tongues when they have an itchy throat in hopes that they will be healed to win their respect? Do you need to raise their relative from the dead at a funeral to win their respect? I would argue that winning the respect of unbeliever is far simpler than that, but not necessarily easier. Winning respect takes time...winning respect requires patience and persevering faith, but it is way more effective than becoming a show stoppers. People don't respect show stoppers, they fear them.
  
• True religion is visiting the widow and the orphan. Any Christian can do that, but not all are willing because no orphan visitor will be recognized or complimented for their ministry. When you are faithful in the everyday little things...like doing your job, loving your family, serving the helpless, you are living as salt and light. This is a life worthy of respect.
  

Loving power more than people is lust. Let's start working on our faithfulness and THEN expect God to reveal himself through miracles.

anonymous

Going along the lines of my previous post about recognition being its own reward, I was thinking about a sermon Alicia Chole gave at a CMF (campus missions fellowship) service last year.

After expressing her excitement for what our generation seems like it's going to accomplish missionally, she spoke on 9 woes that await those who deviate from the path that God wants us to take. I can't remember exactly how she worded it, but one of the woes was aimed at those who would misuse ministry as a cover to make a name for themselves. It was only one of her 9 points, but it stuck with me.

I just googled her to see if I could find a blog or something, and I found an awesome video preview (she's so smiley) for this book I am going to read as soon as I can get my hands on it: anonymous.

Aside from the obvious problems with isolationism, in this broadcast-everything world, there is a huge temptation to focus on marketing oneself before "being misunderstood, persecuted, and ignored" to develop character. This is proving to be a huge mistake (I can think of a few Christian celebrity examples), and one that I sometimes have a desire to commit. Hopefully this book will give me the encouragement to stay in obscurity as long as God would have me stay a nobody...even if its a lifetime.

Above the Water

Now that I'm starting to get more oxygen (even though I'm sick right now), there are a couple things I'm realizing:

1. Doing service just for the sake of receiving recognition is its own reward. We have to posture ourselves to become servants instead of just serving on occasion to feed off of the praise of men. MUFHH: It is ingrained in us that we have to do exceptional things for God—but we do not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things of life, and holy on the ordinary streets, among ordinary people—and this is not learned in five minutes.

2. God will provide everything you need if you put his kingdom and righteousness first. There are way too many short cuts in this country and not nearly enough reminders that our God has more than enough to satisfy our every desire. God can give me a job. God can give me a supportive and loving family. God can give me genuine friends. We cannot out give God. Knowing this, we must continually pour ourselves out to each other. I am not done serving just because I'm finished with a pastorate.

I have to stop making decisions in my life based on worry or lack of faith. It's not enough for faith to line the major decisions of one's life. Faith should drive us every day even in the little things.

Interim Pastor Andy No More

Tonight was my last night preaching to the youth. It's been four months that I've been an interim youth pastor, and I have to say honestly that the experience has been excruciating. Numerous confirmations led me to the solid conclusion that God was calling me to lead my old youth group for a season, but nonetheless this has been the hardest four months of my life. I had the following against me from the start:

(a) I already have a full time job and people to minister to at Indiana Wesleyan University
(b) I knew my online classes would start very quickly, removing at least another 8 hours from my week
(c) My fitness schedule also cannot be tampered with because I support someone financially with the wellness pay I get for working out
(d) I'm not the "typical" youth pastor type (I'm not loud)
(e) I'm not even the "traditional" pastor type (I don't like listening to myself talk)
(f) The youth group has been through a lot and was by no means "booming" at the time

Thanks to Mark Batterson and his inspiring book "In a Pit, with a Lion, on a Snowy Day" I saw the above as challenges to my faith...challenges that must be met with the insane act of accepting the position. So I looked my lion in the face, and I can now say that I have conquered him. And in the process I have learned a few things about myself:

(1) I love preaching through entire books. God set up my preaching schedule perfectly so my last night speaking to the kids would be the last sermon in the second sermon series we completed. We started in the New Testament with Colossians and then moved to the Old Testament with Jonah. I like it because instead of preaching my own spin on every sermon I've already heard before, I was forced to learn new stuff and teach it to the kids. Colossians taught me to stay Christ-centered, and Jonah taught me about God's character.

(2) I hate ministry without relationship. Doing an interim pastorate means you will lose one way or another. Either you are resented for not interacting with the kids enough or selfish for making the next guy's job harder by building relationships that will leave the kids disillusioned when you have to leave. I chose to do all I could to create opportunities for the youth sponsors to relate to the kids instead of me. Needless to say, it is very hard to keep a teenagers attention when they don't think you care about them. I had to love them by developing a fun service with a hard hitting message at the end. I like how most of the services turned out, but if I could have built close relationships first, I wouldn't have been so drained at the end of each service.

(3) I can be resourceful when I want to be. We turned a service that was boring the kids to death into something that was both fun and convicting.
-I utilized my Firefox video downloader to acquire new viral videos every week to break the ice
-Found a fun and exciting games for the kids from websites
-Developed fresh, themed sermons with a graphic every week
-Founded the five dolla holla, a weekly game segment to start each service off
None of these are really that amazing, but when you consider I didn't have much time every week, it kind of all came together miraculously.

(4) I suck at church discipline, but at least I do it. Talking to one of the kids I confronted about a serious sin problem, I heard something that really saddened me: "none of the other youth groups I go to thought it was a problem." How are we loving the people we minister to if we refuse to correct them in love? To Jesus, "filling the seats" was secondary to producing REAL disciples. This meant getting in their face when they said something that was inspired by satan. I don't like confronting people about sin, its awkward because I have no tact and deep down I know there a few (hundred) things I need to work on. Nevertheless, looking the other way is committing the sin of knowing what we ought to do and not doing it.

(5) I have a lot more faith building to do. You don't realize how dependent upon God you really are until you are deep in a pit with a lion. There was no hiding my inadequacies in the position I have been in. I've never been in less control of my emotions. I felt powerless every day. The good news is that I lived through it all, and I still love Jesus.

It's through suffering that we are able to have fellowship with Jesus, because he suffered. If I had turned the position down, God would have found some other way to humble me. I have no reason to fear the future, but I know that this won't be the last time I have a tough time for Jesus. (I just hope the next step is a little easier because I feel like taking a permanent vacation to Jamaica right now.)