Tim DeGroot knows what’s up with this blog post. Simple and right to the point. This is what I long for every week…if this isn’t our heart about church, we’re probably not aiming for the right things! Jesus said to make disciples of all nations…when was the last time you envisioned an entire country being reborn in Christ and living in obedience to God? We are called to do everything we can to make “nations of salvations.”
Dream big…because God is bigger!
The vision that God gives us for our ministry to others is so vital to the life of that ministry. Without God’s dream for our lives placed in our hearts, we will always burn out and lose focus. But WITH God’s calling, we cannot STOP being on fire for it!
However…just because God gives you a vision doesn’t mean He gave everyone that same vision. And sometimes it is really easy to try and force your vision onto others, because you think it’s right and it’s what God wants. But you can only know what God has called YOU to do, not anyone else. And forcing your vision onto others results in them burning out and losing focus, because you are not God, and He is the only one that can inspire people beyond their imaginations. If you want someone else to be sold out on your vision, you’ve got to rely on the wind of the Holy Spirit to spread the fire in your heart to others – it cannot ever be forced on someone. As Brad Cooper said, “Vision is caught, not taught.”
With that being said, every single person that is involved in one particular ministry MUST be sold on the vision. When two people are working together but have different goals, it will cause a split. So many different ministries fall apart because not everyone is sold on one vision, and end up trying to steer it in multiple directions. “The vision must be identical or it’s ‘double vision,’ which is the same as ‘division,’” Perry Noble said. When we have double vision, we can’t see straight, depth perception is gone, focus is impossible, and nothing is accomplished. When we have division, things simply keep getting smaller and smaller, and there are remainders (that in ministry end up being people who need God to speak through you) that we push off to the side. If we want our ministry to succeed, we have to all be clearly seeing the same goals, be in agreement on how God wants us to get there, and be absolutely zeroed in on our purpose…and when that happens, God makes things bigger and BIGGER and BIGGER and instead of leaving people behind in our hurry to accomplish our own individual passions (see 2 Samuel 4:4 for a Scriptural example) God continually brings people to us so that they can see and be a part of the unifying power of Jesus.
I recently attended the ONE conference at NewSpring Church for senior pastors, youth pastors, and children’s pastors and man, did God speak to me there! I’m going to do a series of blogs on some of the things the Holy Spirit revealed to my heart, starting with this:
Because my friends and fellow leaders are such visionaries and big dreamers, a common topic of conversation is how big other churches are, how many people attend different conferences, and even how much growth is happening in different ministries of the same church. This is an awesome way to encourage one another and get bigger vision for where God may be leading us (after all, Ephesians 3:20 says He can do “immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine”), but it can also be dangerous, because it’s really easy to start comparing churches and ministries. When we start comparing “ours” to “theirs,” we lose sight of God’s Kingdom because we are obsessing over our own kingdoms.
This can lead to “strategic evangelism,” in which ideas are pitched and people are talked to and ministries are promoted in such a way that one ministry (yours, if you’re the one doing this) should get everyone, and other ministries shouldn’t get anyone. Selfishness, greed, manipulation, and lying go on all the time under the banners of revelation (“God told me He wants MY church to be the biggest”), calling (“God called ME to be a successful minister, so I should succeed”), and other common church words. BUT…
God wants HIS Church to be the biggest – the body of Christ, the Kingdom of God, the Church (with a capital C), not the church (with a lowercase c). And God may have called you to be a minister, and He may bless your ministry to appear successful, but HE is the one succeeding, HE is the one who should be famous, and without HIM your ministry and/or church would be a building filled with dead people condemned to hell – YOURSELF INCLUDED – and everything that’s done there God would see as filthy rags.
We can’t ever take possession of the things God has blessed us with; that includes leadership ability, lots or few people attending your ministry, a big or little building, one or eight services. And we can’t ever become jealous of that church being bigger than this church, because we are all part of the body of Christ, serving different purposes in different places so that the gospel can be preached to everybody!
“Do you want to control a move of God, or do you want to unleash it?” -Perry Noble
Distractions—things which are usually felt to be pleasurable yet take our mind off of seeing heaven—quickly become habits, in which the distractions become much more desirable but much less pleasurable. Habits are the beginnings of idols. We must protect ourselves from distraction then, for Satan is most successful when taking things from us rather than when giving us more. We must seek poverty (which is more than simply the “things” we may or may not possess) so that he has nothing which he is able to take from us, and we must be on guard of the small things, for it is the small things that find their way into the deepest areas of our hearts and then do the most damage as they grow without our knowledge. We must be careful to defend against what C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters says is the most dangerous way of temptation:
“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
Hopefully at least one of these will inspire you as they did me until I can write something of my own that is worth reading. Still not sure who determines what’s worth reading and what’s not, and even I don’t know how or where I get that information, but here’s some quotes nonetheless.
“Aim for heaven and you get earth thrown in, aim for earth and you get neither.” -C.S. Lewis
“If someone asks if we are Christ-followers, can we say ‘Tell me what you see?’” -Shane Claiborne
“After the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.” -Unknown
“The solution to life is life itself. Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis, but first of all by living. For until we have begun to live our prudence has no material to work on. And until we have begun to fail we have no way of working out our success.” -Thomas Merton
“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.” -Screwtape the demon (C.S. Lewis)
“The only reason God’s cultural refugees seem so peculiar is because of how far the world has moved from God’s dream for it. We should live in ways that don’t make sense without God.” -Shane Claiborne
(Note: parts of this blog were taken from a sermon given by Perry Noble. Just giving credit where it’s due.)
Can I lose my salvation?
It’s a big question. It comes up quite often. But as long as we believe that scripture is the inerrant word of God (which is kind of a key belief for Christians), there is a very definite answer:
NO.
And here’s why:
The real question is not whether or not you can lose your salvation. The question is, have you ever at one point committed your life completely to Jesus and relied solely on His power? The common scenario is that someone was saved and then “fell away” from the faith. Whatever that means. I personally did no climbing to get Jesus in my life, I simply surrendered and He carried me the rest of the way. And I am quite confident that Jesus doesn’t just drop people.
This is the real issue with that scenario : if you can receive God’s grace and then give Him the middle finger for the rest of your life, did you ever really receive His grace in the first place? Because if you can sin without experiencing conviction, you probably do not know Christ. And we are, before anything else, called to KNOW Him (Mk 3:14). If you have not been with Jesus, you are plainly not saved.
But the bottom line is this: You are a much greater sinner than you might think. Because it only took one sin, in the entire history of all creation, to separate us from God. I have quite a few more on my list. But with that is the fact that Jesus is a greater Savior than you think, too. He doesn’t love us because _____, He just loves us. Period.
The story of Jesus feeding five thousand (although including women and children it was probably in the area of fifteen thousand, if there were five thousand men) is a common one, I heard it plenty of times growing up in Sunday school, but I never cease to be amazed at God’s ability to reveal something new to me every time I read scripture, regardless of how familiar I am with the text.
I think that scripture is commonly thought of as, at best, well-written text with truthful life teachings. In the realm of Christianity it is also believed to be inspired by God. This is all well and good, and much can be taken from the Bible this way. But this also limits scripture to the words that are there, which begins to cause confusion when there are numerous versions and translations and some of them sound quite different than others, and it tends to make things a little blurry sometimes. And I’ve found that this common conception of scripture is, while not false, extremely basic…and there seems to be a lot more to it. How else could this be explained when I find something new every time I read it?
But the author of Hebrews says that “the word of God is living and active (Heb 4:12).” And this seems to be the only explanation for the things that it does. And when we look at scripture as well-written text, we are only looking at the skin—the outer surface—of this living, active breath of God (2Ti 3:16). There is an infinite complexity beneath the mere text of scripture, just as there are countless veins and arteries and nerves and organs that all work in different ways, doing different things, to keep the body alive. Scripture is alive, and too often I find myself satisfied with what I see on the surface. My God is so much bigger than just words.
Questions sparked by Jesus feeding the five thousand (specifically in Matthew 14:13-21, though it’s also found in Mark 6:33-44, Luke 9:12-17, and John 6:1-14):
This something I read today from Aaron Weiss’s online tour journal entitled “A Very Dull Entry:”
A lot of the e-mails I get are saying what a good job my band is doing at some lofty religious mission and what a good guy I must be, this makes me wonder if I’m really telling the truth, as in many cases it seems that telling the truth does not earn applause but exclusion, imprisonment or even worse (11 of the 12 apostles were killed, Dr. King, Ghandi, Jesus himself…). I’m grateful for people trying to encourage me, but I think I would be far more encouraged by some harsh discouragement – or better still, say a short but sincere prayer asking whoever made us to help me. Heaven knows I need that!
This strikes me as very true. Of course, truth can be appreciated by those who know it to be truth, and we should not doubt our beliefs if we know them to be true but are not taking part in the “exclusion, imprisonment or worse.” But it is just a thought; a reminder to pursue truth over applause and acceptance, to pray for our friends, and that we are by no means self-sufficient and we need more grace than we oftentimes think.
I’m reading Soul Cravings by Erwin McManus. And it’s pretty incredible. So incredible, in fact, that I want to share an entire page from it. Every word that was on this one page. Because it all was so good, and hit me—not because it was any earth-shattering, ground-breaking idea, but because it was simple and yet so powerful and important. So here it is, I pray that its gravity would click with you too, and set the tone for a real giving of thanks for the rest of this week (don’t take me wrong, I’m not idolizing this book or its author…but God speaks truth through each one of his children, and I’m just trying to share that truth):
All you need is love.
God is love.
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39
That’s all I really need to hear. Hope it speaks to you like it does to me right now. It kind of should.
