The reason we need to read Scripture is because we need something to remember. Let me explain. In John 2, Jesus turns the Temple upside down or rightside up. He drives out the animals and turns over the tables. And it says the disciples "remembered" what was written: "Zeal for your house will consume me." If you don't read the Word you can't remember it. It's like not studying for a test. It's real hard to remember what you haven't read in the first place. The reason many of us don't have any revelation is because we haven't read the Word, therefore we cannot remember it. The disciples have a revelation in this moment because they remember what they have read.
Here's a revelation equation: Reading + Remembering = Revelation.
We need to read the Word so that the Holy Spirit can selectively and strategically bring to mind those words that He inspired thousands of years ago. We need to read so that we have something to remember. And it'll lead to revelation.
When you are seventy or eighty, and you wake up from bed one morning and look back on your life, how will you feel about it? Now that you are so old, you won't have to answer to anybody or fulfill their expectations - not your parents, not your boss or business associates or colleagues; not even your spouse. What would you have done with the gift of life? What story would you have left to tell that will keep you still relevant to the younger generation; still inspiring to the future you won't live to see?
The answers to those compelling questions above will be important to you then, so the question should be important to you now.
The course of your life is deternmined by three things:
1. The Relationships you form 2. The Decisions you make 3. The Actions you take
Each has the potential to change the course of your life.
If you are not doing something with your life, it really doesn't matter how long you live. If you are doing something with your life, it really doesn't matter how short it is. Life does not consist of years lived, but the usefulness of it. Life does not consist of how much you have accomplished or acquired but how well you have lived it to honour your Maker.
Your focus must be beyond yourself. Your life is just too small to give your glory to. You look better and you live a greater life when that life is lived for God's glory.
If you are giving, loving, helping, serving, encouraging, and adding value to others and in the course of it all returning glory to Him who has blessed you with much, you will be living a life that is well lived.
That will be your greatness! Live life to His glory!
The church in Corinth was so divided that you might say it was diced. There were divisions over which apostle was superior, sexual morality, lawsuits, marriage, eating meat, head-coverings for women, the Lord’s Supper, spiritual gifts, the resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection of believers, and I’m probably missing some.
Paul, who really wanted these saints to “be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Cor 1:10), said something in chapter 11, verse 19 that is important for us to remember:
There must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized.
Factions though painful serve the church. They provide opportunity to show up the hearts of people. How?
Well through 1 Corinthians Paul tells us how. Like, exposing an unwillingness to submit to the apostles’ teaching is certainly one thing (e.g.1 Cor11:16). But a lack of love is the biggie (1 Cor 13). Paul said love is greater than faith (1 Cor 13:13). And if we have truth and not love, we’re nothing (1 Cor 13:2). Nothing.
There are people in churches who are disagreed over issues and that in itself is not altogether wrong. There will be differences. There will be disagreements. But when we disengage just because we disagree, we have violated a higher rule – the law of love. It shows up the heart. There may be truth but there is no love. And where there is no love, we are nothing. It is the bottom-line measure of discipleship.
Paul said there must be factions. Factions reveal hearts. So in our disagreements and divisions, Paul wants us to measure our motives, words, and actions by the gauge of chapter 13. The less
they look or sound like biblically defined love, the more concerned he wants us to be about the genuineness of our discipleship.
I have been wired to be a very trusting person. I love to believe in people. As a result, anyone who knows me - even a little bit - knows that loyalty and trust are my highest values in relationship.
But as someone very smart once said: An unguarded strength is a double weakness.
So my intense desire to trust others and be trustworthy has - at times - come back to bite me. And usually, the damage had little to do with the actions of the other person. It had everything to do with my approach.
This past weekend, I was led to look at some of my failed relationships in the past where I had so trusted someone only to discover that they had betrayed me. I am not bitter about those relationships. Every failed relationship blessed me with some level of growth (through pain, of course).
And this is what I discovered: I’m learning that it’s as important to define what trust is not as to define what it is. Here are my current thoughts on the subject:
* Trusting someone doesn’t mean they’ll never fail you or hurt you. It just means they wouldn’t intentionally do it, or do it the same way over and over again.
* Trusting someone doesn’t demand that they’re a part of your life forever.
* It’s okay to trust someone in one area of your life, but not in another. Just be clear - with them, and yourself.
* Trust is not a pass/fail class. There are degrees and shades of trust. Discerning the different dimensions is the first step toward developing more trust.
* My level of trust in someone is often about my own moods, experiences, and perceptions. I must monitor these conditions and factor them in.
* People can’t earn your trust where expectations aren’t defined. Everyone you truly care about deserves to understand your standards.
The only one who is completely and eternally trustworthy is Jesus – The man who trusts in Him will never be put to shame.
When Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked his Father to let the cup of suffering pass him by he wasn't, for the most part, cringing before the prospect of brute physical suffering. He was cringing before the prospect of a very particular kind of suffering that is generally more feared than physical pain. When he asked God if it was really necessary to die in this way he was referring to more than death through capital punishment.
Crucifixion was devised and designed by the Romans with more than one thing in mind. It was designed as capital punishment, to put a criminal to death, but it aimed to do a couple of other things as well.
It was designed to inflict optimal physical pain. Thus the procedure was dragged out over a good number of hours and the amount of pain inflicted at any given moment was carefully calculated so as not to cause unconsciousness and thus ease the pain of the one being crucified. Indeed they sometimes even gave wine mixed with morphine to the person being crucified, not to ease his suffering, but to keep him from passing out from pain so as to have to endure it longer.
But crucifixion was designed with still another even more callous intent. It was designed to humiliate the person. Among other things, the person was stripped naked before being hung on a cross so that his genitals would be publicly exposed. As well, at the moment of death his bowels would loosen. Crucifixion clearly had humiliation in mind.
In the case for Jesus. His nakedness was exposed, his body publicly humiliated. That, among other reasons, is why the crucifixion was such a devastating blow to his disciples and why many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn't connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph.
Interestingly there is a striking parallel between what crucifixion did to the human body and what nature itself often does to the human body through old age, cancer, dementia, AIDS, and diseases such as Parkinson's, and other such sicknesses that humiliate the body before killing it. They expose publicly what is most vulnerable inside of our humanity. They shame the body.
Why? What is the connection between this type of pain and the glory of Easter Sunday? Why is it, as the gospels say, "necessary to first suffer in this manner so as to enter into glory?"
Because, paradoxically, a certain depth of soul can only be attained through a certain depth of humiliation. How and why is this so? It isn't easy to articulate rationally but we can understand this through experience:
Ask yourself this question with courage and honesty: What experiences in my life have made me deep? In virtually every case, I will venture to say, experiences that have deepened you will be incidences that you feel some shame in acknowledging, a powerlessness from which you were unable to protect yourself, an abuse from which you could not defend yourself, an inadequacy of body or mind that has left you vulnerable, an humiliating incident that once happened to you, or some mistake you made which publicly exposed your lack of strength in some area. All of us, like Jesus, have also been, in one way or another, hung up publicly and humiliated. And we have depth of soul to just that extent.
But depth of soul comes in very different modes. Humiliation makes us deep, but we can be deep in character, understanding, graciousness, and forgiveness or we can be deep in anger, bitterness, and revenge-seeking. Jesus' crucifixion stretched his heart and made it huge in empathy, graciousness, and forgiveness.
In the crucifixion, Jesus was humiliated, shamed, brutalized. That pain stretched his heart to a great depth. But that new space did not fill in with bitterness and anger. It filled in instead with a depth of empathy and forgiveness that we have yet to fully understand.
Congratulations to the many who have finished reading the New Testament in 30 days! What a wonderful journey this has been. What a way to grow in our sopiritual disciplines. What a deposit made into our souls. What new habits we have acquired!
Now is the time to keep reading and reading. The Bible is inexhaustible.
Here is a quote from Spurgeon to encourage all of us:
“I have many an old book in my library in which there have been bookworms, and I have sometimes amused myself with tracing a worm. I do not know how he gets to the volume originally, but being there he eats his way into it. He bores a hole in a direct line, and sometimes I find that he dies before he gets halfway through the tome. Now and then a worm has eaten his way right through from one wooden cover to another; yes, and through the cover also. This was a most successful bookworm.
Few of us can eat our way quite so far. I am one of the bookworms that have not got halfway into my Bible yet; but I am eating my way as fast as I can. This one thing I have proved to myself beyond all question; I shall never, never exhaust this precious book. Much less shall I exhaust the wondrous person of my divinely-blessed Lord. He is that bread which came down from heaven. He is utterly inexhaustible.”
C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, 1950), II:365.
Here is athe celebration video of the NTin30 journey. Enjoy!
The other night they screened Titanic again. I was just about to switch channels but I got gripped to those final scenes where the rich and famous would push to save themselves at the expense of the children and women and the poor.
Well did that really happen? I was browsing a book just today, and I saw this illustration. D.A. Carson’s latest work, Scandalous: The Cross and Ressurection of Jesus, is simply excellent. The writing is crisp, the exegesis superb, the theology invigorating.
This is what he says about those scenes of the Titanic:
"Did you see the film Titanic that was screened about a dozen years ago? The great ship is full of the richest people in the world, and , according to the film, as the ship sinks, the rich men start to scramble for the few an inadequate lifeboats, shoving aside the women and children in their desperate desire to live. British sailors draw handguns and fire into the air, crying “Stand back! Stand back! Women and children first!” In reality, of course, nothing like that happened. The universal testimony of the witnesses who survived the disaster is that the men hung back and urged the women and children into the lifeboats. John Jacob Astor was there, at the time the richest man on earth, the Bill Gates of 1912. He dragged his wife to a boat, shoved her on, and stepped back. Someone urged him to get in, too. He refused: the boats are too few, and must be for the women and children first. He stepped back, and drowned. The philanthropist Benjamin Guggenheim was present. He was traveling with his mistress, but when he perceived that it was unlikely he would survive, he told one of his servants, “Tell my wife that Benjamin Guggenheim knows his duty” –and he hung back, and drowned. There is not a single report of some rich man displacing women and children in the mad rush for survival.
When the film was reviewed in the New York Times, the reviewer asked why the producer and director of the film had distorted history so flagrantly in this regard. The scene as they depicted it was implausible from the beginning. British sailors drawing handguns? Most British police officers do not carry handguns; British sailors certainly do not. So why this willful distortion of history? And then the reviewer answered his own question: if the producer and director had told the truth, he said, no one would have believed them.
I have seldom read a more damning indictment of the development of Western culture, especially Anglo-Saxon culture, in the last century. One hundred years ago, there remained in our culture enough residue of the Christian virtue of self-sacrifice for the sake of others, of the moral imperative that seeks the other’s good at personal expense, that Christians and non-Christians alike thought it noble, if unremarkable, to choose death for the sake of others. A mere century later, such a course is judged so unbelievable that the history has to be distorted" (30-31).
“What is the single most important skill that church leaders needs to have in order to be successful?”
Somebody asked me this the other day, and I thought it was a pretty good question.
I didn’t have to think about it very long… because I just knew the answer was leadership. The ability to motivate and inspire people, and the wisdom to construct systems that reinforce the vision.
But then I thought about preaching… maybe that’s the most important piece of the church growth puzzle. I don’t know of a church that has ever succeeded apart from the anointed communication of God’s Word connecting to people in the context of corporate worship.
At this point, all of the major categories hit me like a flashflood:
leadership, preaching, administration, vision...
How could I ever narrow it down to one “most important skill”?
There are so many skills that are integral to growing a church. Then I thought: there is actually one critical skill that is the foundation of all the others: The single most important skill in growing a church or a minstry is the fine art of hearing from God.
But are you sure you can handle what He has to say?
I hear a lot of people express a desire to hear from God… but sometimes when God speaks, He delivers a very tough message. I’ll give you an example: 1 Samuel 3 is one of the most popular passages preachers use to illustrate “How to hear from God”. But when God finally does open His mouth, the content isn’t very uplifting, warm and fuzzy, or even hopeful. In fact, God’s first message to Samuel was that his mentor, Eli, was about to be judged severely for the sins of his house. And to make matters worse, Samuel had to turn around and personally relay the message to Eli.
Do you still want to hear from God?
� When you ask God to speak to you about His will for your life, make sure you’re ready to embrace the repercussions. Be prepared to obey.
� If you ask the Lord to reveal any sin in your life that is separating you from Him, be very aware that He’ll probably do it.
� When you ask God to speak to you about a financial decision, He might not tell you what you want to hear. Instead, He might fill your ear with what you need to hear. And His instruction might require a deep sacrifice, or a step of big faith.
When God speaks, He doesn’t always just whisper sweet nothings into your ear.
In fact, sometimes the announcement He makes will leave your ears ringing, and your head spinning. Other times, the words He speaks fill your soul with inexplicable encouragement and peace.
So here’s the summary:
God often speaks words of deep comfort.
But He also speaks words of deep challenge.
And you never know which one you’re going to get.
Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.
Gal 1:10
I just finished reading Galatians. And the verse above? I just love this verse from Galatians. It fires me up. I hope it does that to you as well.
This is the question that has been holding way too many of of us back from what God is telling us to do for far too long. This is what keeps us from getting out of the boat and experiencing the tension of faith and this is what keeps us from walking in big, big faith!
Some of you heads of ministries and cell leaders are currently contemplating a bold move of faith. God has told you to do something. He has spoken to you to change something, start something, stop something, grow something, build something, move something… but you just keep revving your engine, fronting like you’re still praying about it. You’re not praying about it. You’re stalling out because you’re more concerned about what the members think and you think too much about "what if it fails" kind of thing. More than what God has said about it.
Dear leader, you won’t stand before the people at the end of your life to give an account. So go ahead. Seek to please God. You answer to Him for what He put in your heart to do.
Some uni student reading this blog needed to dump that charming, spiritually empty guy she’s dating, a long time ago. But what would her friends think? What would the guy think? Young lady, you need to be more bothered with what God thinks! Look that dude in the eye, tell him the goodbye that God told you to tell him, and date Jesus exclusively for a year, and watch your spiritual life begin to soar again. Then trust God to bring you His guy He has made just for you. That's big faith. That is pleasing God.
Some 36 year old dude with 2 kids, an SUV, and several intimidating loans, car, housing... has a dream to start a business. The plan is solid, and his wife is behind him. But the last time he mentioned it to his friends and in-laws, they all smirked and gave him 101 reasons why it might not work. So he shrugged it off and continues sleepwalking through life; cruisng without faith! Hey friend: Why are you about to let your no-faith friends talk you out of what God has put inside of you? Who cares whether they think you can pull it off or not? Your God has spoken to you. Get up and step out of the boat. Follow His command. Just please Him. There is nothing more adventurous and more growth triggering than that!
It amazes me how many times we let the opinion of a loser silence the will of our God.
Mark 4:38 Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, "Teacher, don't you care if we drown?"
The disciples are in the worst storm of their lives. They fear they are going to drown. And Jesus is asleep! They accuse Him of not caring because He’s doing nothing. They ‘awaken’ God to accuse Him.
Did you know that God often 'sleeps' so we wake up!! He will stay silent to get us truly desperate; so that we cry for those things we really need from Him. For the disciples, it was not a time to ask God to stop the storm. It was time for them to discover the authority they had in their own lives. That was what they needed - the revelation that He had given them authority and all they needed to do was to rise up to the faith that He had given them the authority.
Some of us, (many of us) need to stop praying about a thing, stop feeling angry with God because He is not doing anything and speak to the storm ourselves. Take a step in big faith, today!
Yesterday, I finished reading the Book of Acts following the NTin30 campaign. And I cannot get enough of it. Let me share some thoughts.
In Acts 2, 3000 people were converted to faith in Christ and numbered with the believers.
Acts 2:42 begins the description of the strategy for discipling this throng of new Christians: They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
Did you catch it? They devoted themselves. Who devoted themselves? The new believers! Nobody devoted them to the teaching. They had to do it for themselves. The apostles taught with authority, clarity, and consistency. But the burden of discipleship rested primarily on the new believers, not the leaders of the church.
As church leaders, it is our job to create and sustain processes and systems that responsibly enable people to grow in their faith and move to the next level after receiving Christ. But if a new Christian is not willing to devote himself to teaching, community, and service, and growing in big faith, it doesn’t mean we failed in discipling him. It might mean he’s not yet a truly regenerated born again believer after all. He may still be journey towards it.
A new nature produces an insatiable appetite for the things of God. And that’s an appetite only God can create.
Fast growing churches catch a lot of flack for failure to disciple new converts. But Biblical discipleship isn’t about spoon feeding. According to Acts 2:42, it’s an all you can eat self-service buffet. Get your own plate. Refill your own drinks.
WILLOW CREEK COMMUNITY CHURCHEphesians 3:20 is one of my all time favorite verses:
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine…
That’s a hot verse right there. An astonishing promise. God can do so much more than what you’re expecting.
His performance isn’t limited to the confines of your imagination. The implications of this statement are hard to believe…but simple to understand. It’s a straightforward fact: The wildest dreams you can conceive don’t even compare to the endless power of God.
I must have quoted that verse countless times just this year! And every time I do, I kind of interpret it this way:
God wants to give me more of whatever I’m asking for. God gives BIG and He wants us to ask BIG in BIG faith!
If I ask for a certain level of provision, He can exceed what I need and give me even more provision.
If I ask for favour with a certain person, He can give me even more favour than I asked for with that person. Whateer I ask, God can superceed it!
But I’ve learned that sometimes God doesn’t bless you with more of the thing you asked for.
Instead, He blesses you with something completely different. He rewards you with a different kind of currency. He switches the category altogether. Sometimes the way God exceeds our expectations isn’t by giving us more of what we think we need…He gives us something that He knows we need even more. Instead of repairing the thing that’s broken, He gives you brand new equipment.
In other words, sometimes the immeasurably more takes on a completely different form.
Instead of giving you the promotion at work, He gives you more opportunity to spend time with your family.
Instead of sending you a boyfriend, He sends you more opportunity to serve Him in your season of singleness. Instead of answering your now prayer, He answers a future need.
Sometimes God gives you more of the same.
Sometimes He gives you something even better than that.
Be confident that whatever He gives you is the best for you. But, pray BIG prayers with the BIG faith that God is able to do immeasurably more than all you ask or imagine.
