A never ‘begrutching’ God!

I don’t like asking for help.

I am sure it has to do with pride. It usually isn’t so much the fact that I don’t want people to think I can’t do something as it is I hate the feeling that I might be bothering someone or that they will help me but inside they won’t really want to.

It can make for long nights and long walks.

I have walked many kilometers with suitcases because I didn’t want to ask others for a ride and I remember sleeping a night in my car after having run out of fuel. Now, the sleeping in the car was before I was married and before the days of the cell-phone so I can’t say for sure what I would have done but I imagine I probably would have had some difficulty calling on anyone other my parents at that point and they weren’t around.

It is foolish to be like this with people, though the truth is people don’t really always want to help. In fact, you have probably all experienced the moment where you asked someone for something and you could see on their face that they were looking for a polite way out.

God is not like that. This is unbelievably important for me to understand and you as well. It may be foolish to be like this with people, but it would be sin to be like this with God because God absolutely wants our best as believers.

We serve an unbelievably generous God. You can’t ask Him for too much. There never is a time where He hears your prayer request as a Christian and says to himself, would this person stop bothering me? Why are they asking me for help again?

Jonathan Edwards once put it like this, “God never begrutches his people anything they desire.”

That’s a great word, isn’t it? It’s to respond to someones request grudgingly or to hear someone ask you for help and think, many why I would I give to someone like that, they don’t deserve it. We know God’s not like that not simply because Jonathan Edwards said it, but because the Bible does.

James tells us to ask God for help because He is the giving God who gives to all without hesitation and without reproach.

This is awesome. God isn’t up in heaven uninterested in your best. The opposite. God wants your best more than you do. When you ask God for help you are asking someone who is more interested in your long term good than even you are. There are lots of times in life where you wonder if anyone besides your wife is as interested in your future as you are. Probably not. Except for one person. God.

There’s all kind of proof of this! First, the plan of salvation. He’s been working on your long term best since before the beginning of the world. Second, the cost of salvation. If He was willing to pay the price He did for your long term happiness, I don’t think He is suddenly going to lose interest in it. Third, the means of salvation. When you are saved you are united to Christ. You are in Christ. God doesn’t see you by yourself any longer. He always sees you as united to Christ and while you may have a hard time believing God the Father is interested in your good, you know He’s always interested in His Son’s good and you are in His Son. He doesn’t see you as separate from Him. Fourth, there’s the result of salvation or the benefits of salvation or I don’t really have the best word for this one yet, except to say that heaven is going to be lavish, the fullness of joy. If God’s planning this kind of eternity for you, I think He’s interested in your good.

There’s not going to be one moment in eternity that you can say you deserved. When you go to God in prayer and you are worried about whether He would want the best for someone like you, remember that God is really, really used to giving good, amazing things to people who don’t deserve it. You really can’t come up with a request that is bigger than what He already gave you. Can you imagine asking someone for eternal life? It is yours. Can you imagine asking someone for forgiveness of all your sins? Done. Can you imagine asking someone for constant access to the most important person in the Universe. You have it. Can you imagine asking someone to constantly be looking out for your good, making plans for your future, always be present to help you with what’s happening in your life? You got it.

This is awesome because it means when you are praying and you are not receiving the answer you might like, there’s one thing you can count out. It is not because God looks at your request and says, you know what, now you are asking for a little too much! It must be because what you think is best for you, really isn’t!

The myth of neutrality!

Vern Poythress, 

“The important feature here is that within the mainstream of modern culture Darwinism is not seen as religious, but merely “neutral” and “scientific.” Why? Because the religious assumptions have already been incorporated into the “scientific” theory in the form of underlying assumptions about lack of purpose and gradualism. We are simply told that “this is how science is done.” Because of the cultural prestige of science and scientists, many people simply accept the present state of things as if it were the only possibility. But once we question the underlying assumptions, it becomes clear that there are other possible ways of construing the meaning of science: Science studies the regularities of God’s providential rule, and can do so without making assumptions that ban the idea of divine purposes or ban God’s exceptional acts.”

Read the rest

Creeds without deeds?

I wonder if you have ever been around a group of Christians who say they are interested in doctrine but do not seem all that interested in making sacrifices for the cause of Christ throughout the world?  Or who say they are serious about the study of Scriptures but do not seem all that interested in sacrificially loving their neighbor for the glory of God?  

It can be a strange situation.  When you talk about missions or mercy or service, they think you are losing interest in doctrine. Or they will speak as if they aren’t as interested in these things because they are more interested in doctrine. The exact opposite is true, or at least should be true.  It is because of a love for doctrine that we are motivated for missions, mercy and service.  The two are connected.  In fact, when there is a lack of concern for these things the primary problem is doctrine or maybe more specifically the problem is that doctrine hasn’t truly turned into doxology because doxology results in a deep desire to spread the fame of Christ and to sacrifice for the glory of Christ.  

I like how Michael Horton puts it:

“If deeds without creeds is possible, how about creeds without deeds? While it is certainly possible to have a church that is formally committed to Christian doctrine-even in the form of creeds, confessions, and catechisms, without exhibiting any interest in missions or the welfare even of those within their own body, I would argue that it is impossible to have a church that is actually committed to sound doctrine that lacks these corollary interests. With respect to individual Christians in their common vocations, the mercies of God in Christ propel a profound sense of obligation and stewardship. God has given us everything in Christ, by grace alone, so our only “reasonable service” is to love and serve our neighbors out of gratitude for that inexhaustible gift. In other words, there is no such thing as “dead orthodoxy.” I take this to be the point that we find in James’s letter. He does not say that faith without works is incomplete or insufficient for justification, but that a faith that does not bear the fruit of good works is dead–in other words, it isn’t really faith at all.

Within my own circles, I have seen a difference between churches composed mainly of those who have come either from non-Reformed or even non-Christian backgrounds and churches that have come gradually to take their doctrine for granted. The former tend to be animated by doctrine freshly discovered, while the other tends to assume, in a variation of the rich young ruler’s response, “All this I have believed since my youth.” Losing the joy-the doxology-of our salvation is the result not of “dull doctrine,” but of dull churches that have begun to forget the wonder of it all. They need to start over again with Paul’s famous letter: moving from doctrine to doxology, yielding grateful lives. I think if Paul wrote a letter to churches today that are only formally committed to orthodoxy, he would not begin, “Now, I realize that you know the truth, so I’m going to fast-forward to the exhortation.” I think he would begin the letter, as he did all of his letters, with the assumption that if people understand the gospel better-which is to say, doctrine better, they would get caught up in it all and it would make a difference in their lives, their relationships, their witness, and their loving service to their neighbor.”

 

On Leadership and Mercy Ministry

Should church leadership work on developing structures for believers to engage in mercy ministry?  Or should church leadership allow this to develop naturally and on an individual basis within the church? 

This is a real debate.  It also seems to me to be a bit of a strange one. 

The leadership of a local church should of course want individual believers to engage in acts of loving compassion for those in need.  If they don’t want that, then they are not interested in making disciples.  It is that simple.  If I am content with a self-absorbed church so long as they can say the right things, I am not a biblical pastor, bottom line. 

I think that’s pretty obvious, but what about leaders purposefully developing structures that will help motivate, encourage and provide opportunities for the individuals within their church to engage in mercy ministry?  Again, I am not sure how this is so complicated.  This is part of what leaders do.  Leaders think about how to help the members of their church succeed in serving Christ.  

We do this in so many other areas of Christian obedience. 

We want our people to evangelize.  We don’t believe that evangelism is just a program or an event.  And yet we also think hard about providing opportunities for training in evangelism and ways in which to make it easier for believers to take steps to obey the command to proclaim the gospel. 

We want our people to disciple their children.  We are convinced that parents have a unique responsibility in bringing up their own children.  But at the same time, when someone suggests having Sunday School or some sort of parenting classes or a holiday club, we usually don’t respond by saying, we should be teaching parents to do this kind of thing on their own. 

Why wouldn’t we do this with helping our people love their neighbor?  Showing love to those in need is difficult.  It requires great wisdom.  Just look at the history of foreign aid in Africa and you will see very quickly that it is easy to help in a way that hurts.  It seems like an abdication of leadership for church leaders to simply say that they want their church members to basically figure this out on their own. 

It is also silly.  When we as a church became involved in starting a baby home, did that distract us from our mission?  I don’t think so – not if we were on mission in the first place.  That baby home is not just a baby home.  It is also a discipleship center.  We have had incredible opportunities to talk with members of our church about parenting.  We have amazing opportunities to talk with unbelievers whom we never would have met apart from the baby home and to share the gospel with them as a result.  The starting of the baby home has actually provided an opportunity for inter-church fellowship as we have joined forces with churches from literally all over the world for this ministry. 

And really I could go on and on.  I am with those who say that the mission of the church is not to start baby homes!  It is to glorify God by proclaiming the gospel and making disciples.  But it grieves me when people hear those who say that the mission of the church is to make disciples and interpret that as automatically meaning it is necessarily a distraction from that mission when leaders of the church actively and deliberately think about specific ways to help their members engage in showing the love of Christ to a lost and dying world.

The Dangerous Sin of Insecurity

I am not completely sure what people mean when they say they are “insecure.”  I suppose they mean that they aren’t very confident and have a negative view of themselves and what is happening in their lives.  

For those of us who are believers, feelings of insecurity are usually tied to a lack of faith.  We tend to be kind to sins like these in ourselves because they don’t seem as bad as others sins, because after all we are supposed to be humble and insecurity sometimes looks like a kind of humility but really at the end of the day it is not humility as much as it is a refusal to trust that God is really as good as the Bible says He is.  

We don’t overcome insecurity by only beating ourselves up for it but instead by going to the gospel and praying that God would transform us through it; but at the same time, we won’t overcome insecurity until we see it for what it is.  We need to be careful not to pamper feelings of insecurity. One way to see the seriousness of not believing God is for you as a believer is by thinking of some of the results that this sin has in our lives and in the lives of others. Insecurity (the way I am defining it) is not a sin that keeps to itself.  It will impact the way you relate to others.  Here are five examples that I thought of this Monday morning, perhaps you can think of some more. 

1.  You will often overreact to the criticisms of others.  What may be minor suggestions become major attacks and you will often make something out of which is mostly nothing.  

2.  Ironically, while you squirm under the criticisms of others, you will be overly critical yourself. This overly critical spirit may show up in a strange way, where you are overly critical not only of others but also of yourself and the ministry you are involved in. You will be overly critical of what is happening and fail to see the good in what God is doing which will result in the people around you becoming tired and discouraged.  It is good to want to be better, but sometimes in wanting to be better, you become so focused on what is not quite right that you miss what is going well and you are always talking about what you and others need to do to become better that you miss what they are already doing. 

3.  You will exaggerate the compliments people give you and make them into something much bigger than they were intended to be.  Instead of being evidences of God’s grace, you will be tempted to make them the foundation for your identity.  This will sometimes result in looking for compliments, shaping your service so that it will produce more compliments, being excited and happy about people who do compliment you and upset and disappointed by those who don’t, drawing into your close confidence only those who are constantly complimenting you and keeping at a distance those who don’t. You will be tempted to speak poorly of those who don’t encourage you as much as you would like (i.e. feed your idol the way it wants to be fed) and to treat them as if they were the enemy. 

4.  You will easily become jealous when others are doing well and have a difficult time being excited about works other than your own.  You will end up shouting where you should be whispering and magnifying legitimate differences as sinful issues rather than rejoicing in what God is doing elsewhere.  If you are a leader, this attitude will promote a self-righteous spirit in those who are around you who will find their security in being attached to someone like you and to remain secure themselves will need to do what you are doing and that is making you more important than other leaders and making the differences between you and other leaders bigger than they really are. 

5. You will become overly competitive with others. Instead of enjoying winning, winning will become an absolute need. Now, of course I am not only talking about winning in sports. Everything can become a competition for the insecure person. This is why insecure people often need big churches, lots of people knowing about what they are doing, and on and on. Instead of being able to enjoy God’s blessing in some of these ways, there is an absolute drive for these things because it is these things that make you feel important and secure. You will need to celebrate your accomplishments over and over, and this is a tough one because there is a legitimate place for giving thanks to God obviously, but you know your heart, and it is easy to begin finding religiously appropriate language for trying to get others to glory in yourself.

For these reasons and many more, I challenge you not to be soft on insecurity.  It can feel good to feel bad about yourself.  But, take heart!  You are really worse than you think you are, but God is much better than you think He is.  Believe it.  Honor God today by enjoying how for you He really is.  You can please Him.  You will please Him.  One day if you are a believer you will obtain the glory of His Son Jesus Christ.  God is going to look at your life and say success because of Christ.  He is at work in your life.  He is actively glorifying Himself through you.  Don’t think you are so important that God is going to break all the promises He has made for little old you!  

Hope of Glory

I have a hope of glory.  

It sounds funny to say that – that I have a certain confidence about my future glorification.  But I do.  And if you are a Christian, so do you.  Paul actually says that this part of the glorious mystery that is revealed in the gospel, Christ in you, the hope of glory.

This glory is so important that not only does God reveal it to us in the gospel, He sends the Spirit to help us believe it.  In Romans 8, Paul tells us the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. 

Now, it is easy for me to think about Christ being glorified, but me being glorified along with Him?  That’s tough.  Believing that definitely takes a supernatural work of the Spirit of God, because the kind of glory we are talking about is not something small. 

Glory is a very big biblical word.

It actually takes a number of words to define it.  Glory has to do with repute and honor.  It has to do with importance.  There’s even this element in the New Testament of beauty, radiance.  It is something that is impressive, even awe-inspiring.  

Which means I have the hope of repute, honor, importance, being beautiful, impressive, awe-inspiring, and majestic.

What?

That sounds like almost too much.  When we think of glory, we first think of God and Jesus Christ and of course we should.  But when you start chasing this word glory around the New Testament, you see there’s a lot of talk not only about believers glorifying God, but also about God glorifying believers.  

The difference being God of course deserves to be glorified and we of course don’t.  When believers glorify God they aren’t adding anything to Him. When God glorifies us, He is adding something to us.  

Maybe because of that, my hope of glory can get a little shaky.  I have been given a certain confidence of future glory, but in practice, I don’t always feel so certain.  I look at myself, my ministry, my life, and I start wondering if I really am headed for this.

But God doesn’t.  

I may be worried about my future glory, but God isn’t.  This glory is so certain that Paul says in Romans 8:28, those whom God justified, he also glorified.  It makes sense that He’ll get this done, because He’s been working on it a long time.  He says in Romans 9:23 that we have been prepared beforehand for glory.  This is actually part of the reason Jesus came to earth, to bring many sons to glory, Hebrews 2:10.  How glorious are we talking?  We read in Philippians 3:21 that when Jesus returns He will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.  In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul tells us our body is sown in dishonour, but raised in glory.  This is a glory that is so big, it makes all the shame and suffering we might experience now seem small.  Paul says in Romans 8:16, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”  We look at creation and sometime our heart aches with the beauty of it.  Creation though right now is aching.  ”For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.”

I want to wait on that too.  

I want to be certain about my certain confidence, because I am convinced if I believed that on a daily basis, it is going to change my life on a daily basis.  

It is definitely going to change the way I pursue ministry.  The problem many of us have is not  our desire for glory. It is instead the kind of glory we desire and how we are seeking to obtain it.  The glory God has in store for believers is much bigger than having a few people get excited about a book you have written.  It is something much more significant than having a number of people visit your web-site.  Why spend your life chasing temporary celebrity when you have future glory in store?  We get in such trouble when we try to take glory out of the oven too early.  God’s got glory cooking for us, but don’t open up the oven door and try to eat it too soon or you are going to make yourself sick.  

What’s more, this glory God’s preparing is ultimately a gift.  Glory comes by grace.  It has to.  We get glory so God will be glorified, not us.  When God takes people like you and me and makes us impressive, awe-inspiring, He does it in such a way, that it is obvious to the entire Universe, that He is the One who deserves to be praised for such a transformation.  That’s part of what makes our hope of glory so certain, because it is not about what we are able to do with our lives, our confidence is in what God is able to do with us instead.     

Some things to remember when life and ministry feel overwhelming

I wish we woke up every day feeling like it was the absolute best day ever.  But the fact is there are some days where things don’t seem so great.  

This is true in life.  This is true in ministry.

In fact for me, these ups and downs are one of the great challenges of church planting.  You’ll come home from church one day thinking, it’s happening, we are on the move.  Then you will go back to church the next week and think, are we really going to make it to next Sunday.

There’s a sense in which it is fairly normal to have times that are more exciting and times that are more frightening.  I would imagine if you were skydiving there would be moments when you would say this is awesome and other moments when you think what in the world am I doing?  

It is tempting when we are feeling more insecure and frightened by our circumstances to overreact.  Looking back on my life so far I have found that some of the worst and longest lasting mistakes I have made have not come not so much because of the difficult situation I found myself in, but because of overreacting in the middle of that situation.  

To help myself not overreact when I am feeling overwhelmed, I try to remember of some of the following things: 

1.  It is normal to have times where you feel sorrow and discouragement, but I need to be very careful not to allow that sorrow to become self-pity.  

This world is not perfect.  Life can be painful.  You don’t need to feel guilty if you sometimes look at the mess in your life and think, man I wish this was different.  If you wonder about that read the Psalms.  Or just think about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.  This sorrow and discouragement can be such a mercy from God in that it can open your eyes to your need for Him and bring you to your knees in prayer.  

But, when you are feeling sorrow, watch out because we can take even good, normal things and make them weird and harmful by using them as an opportunity to focus our attention on ourselves.  It sounds strange but when I find my mind running through the things I am sorrowful about, I tell myself to be careful, because there are times where self-pity feels good.  I know though that the good feeling that initially comes from self-pity is an illusion however, and when I indulge in self-pity for an extended period of time it sucks the spiritual life out of me and causes me to wither spiritually.

2.  There’s no reason to pretend like things aren’t difficult, I just need to remember I am good at making them seem worse than they really are.

I don’t think I have ever asked a church planter how things are going and had them tell me, it is going terrible.  But that doesn’t mean things aren’t ever incredibly difficult. It’s easy however when things are going poorly, to pretend like they are going well when you are talking to others and make them seem much worse than they are when you are talking to yourself.

We can do that in a couple of ways.  One way is by thinking about actual circumstances in exaggerated ways.  A few people not liking your preaching becomes I don’t have any gifts from God in preaching.  A few Sundays where not as many people show up becomes everybody is leaving the church.  Another way is thinking about the meaning of certain problems in exaggerated ways.  A church plant not succeeding becomes I am a failure.  But really?  Does that event really mean that?  The local churches Paul wrote to in the New Testament are not around as the same organizations they were when they were first planted.  The church is around, but those local churches don’t exist in the same way any longer. And Paul’s not a failure. But even if it does mean that, if it does mean you are a failure, is that such a frightening thing, to be a failure and to know it?  From reading the gospels, it seems like Jesus drew close to people who knew they were failures and from reading the rest of the Scriptures it seems like God is near to the brokenhearted, so if God brings an event into your life that exposes your need, breaks your heart, and drops you to your knees in front of Him, that’s painful, but it’s not terrible because it may be that God is using what’s happening to draw you into a closer relationship with Himself. 

3.  While in the middle of difficult circumstances, I can easily lose sight of the great things that are happening.

If somehow once in my life I was walking through a cemetery, put my hand on a gravestone, prayed and someone rose from the dead, I would be talking about that FOREVER.  I would not think that was small.  Salvation is just as great a miracle as that, and if God uses us to preach the gospel and see anyone anywhere saved, that’s HUGE.  So is sanctification, really.  I know my own heart, I know how slow I am to change, and if I change, it’s a miracle and if God uses me to help others change, anyone change, that’s amazing as well.

4.  I am honestly not very good at telling when something great is happening.

If you were there the day they crucified Jesus and didn’t have the gospels to help you understand what was really going on, you would be tempted to think Jesus’ ministry was a failure.  But it was at that moment of crucifixion that God was doing a stunning work, shaming and humiliating the powers of darkness and providing us rescue from the penalty of sin.  And so often, ministry is a little like that as well.  You look at something and you think, man, where is God and yet God is right there in the middle of it, doing something tremendous.  Your job is to trust His promises.

Have you ever been with a child who didn’t trust you?  Can you imagine what it would be like?  You are driving with a child to Disneyland, but the whole time they are asking you why is this taking so long, can’t we just stop here and stay here at this restaurant, what would be even worse would be if they started questioning your love and wisdom.  We can be like that with God.  God if you loved me you would be doing this.  Well, He does love you and He’s not doing that so it must mean that what’s actually happening is better for you!

5.  No matter how alone I feel, I am not.  No matter how helpless I feel, I am not. 

Maybe I should say, I am helpless but God is not and He’s given me a great tool to use when I feel helpless and that is prayer.  I can look at ministry and God’s greatness and feel so overwhelmed because it is all too big for me, but it is not too big for God and because of the work of Christ and in the power of the Spirit I have access to the Creator of the Universe as my Father.  God is alive.  God is sovereign.  And God cares about what is going on in my life and so, yeah I can’t do what I want to do, but God can and if this situation, this feeling of hopelessness gets me to actually pick up the one tool that works, then that’s not a bad thing, not a bad thing at all.