Quit Looking at Yourself
While we are looking at God we do not see ourselves — blessed riddance. The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the Perfect One.
-A.W. Tozer
HT: Mark Lauterbach
The Gospel is Advancing Around the World
I’ve just returned from a ministry trip in Guam and the Philippines. My one great observation/conclusion from the trip: God’s gospel is advancing around the world. Over the coming weeks I plan to write a series of posts reflecting on how, halfway around the world from where I live, I found reason upon reason to rejoice over how God’s kingdom is breaking new ground.
All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth. Colossians 1:6 (NIV)
Pastor’s Spiritual Health
I wonder how much more effective our churches would be if we made the pastor’s spiritual health–not the pastor’s efficiency–our number one priority.
-Philip Yancey
The Ministry
Why you shouldn’t be a pastor:
The ministry is a matter which wears the brain and strains the heart, and drains out the life of a man if he attends to it as he should.
-Charles Spurgeon
Christian Community amid Suffering
I have a great team of leaders who lead community groups and disciple disciple-making disciples in our 20s ministry. The past two weeks I’ve loved watching our Christian community at work as suffering hit.
My friends/fellow leaders Ryan and Lailah got news that Ryan’s sister Jamie was in a car accident in Kazakhstan, leaving her in a coma and the other two passengers dead. Immediately Ryan and Lailah got on a plane and flew east. As Ryan and Lailah walked through this suffering and asked for prayer and help, I watched two other members of our team, a married couple who have suffered greatly the past 4 months, pass on care and counsel from the Word of God. Here is one of the emails that this couple sent to Ryan and Lailah and our whole team:
These are the verses we have been hanging onto through our season of trial:
Romans 8:15 “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the spirit of sonship, and by him we cry “Abba”, “Father”.
Romans 5: 2b – 5 “And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, for God has poured out his love into our hearts”
John 16:33 “in this world you WILL have trouble (tribulation – severe suffering). But take heart! I have overcome the world!”
Psalm 86: 5 – 7 “You are forgiving and good, O Lord, abounding in love to all who call to you. Hear my prayer, O Lord; Listen to my cry for mercy. In the day of my trouble I will call to you, for you will answer me.”
Lamentations 3: 21 – 23 “Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Becasue of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every mornings; great is your faithfulness” (this is a GREAT chapter in general)
Psalm 34: 17 – 18 ” The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; He delivers them from all their troubles. the Lord is close to the broken hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit”
Romans 8:28 ” And we know that in ALL THINGS God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his son…”
1 Peter 1: 6b – 7 ” For a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
Keep going! Keep trusting in God’s GOODNESS, His SOVEREIGNTY and His WISDOM… know that God is able to use ALL THINGS for our good and for His glory! Remember that we only have small brains, capable of only understanding what God allows us to understand. We do not have His perspective and so we cannot grasp His infinite wisdom… but also, remember that “Jesus wept” – even though God’s ways and thoughts are SO much beyond ours, He STILL CRIES WITH US!!!
We are weeping with you and praying for you through this trial…
Heaps of love…
It’s a New Day
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Great Man is One Sentence
In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, on of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy. ‘A great man,’ she told him, ‘is one sentence.’ Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.’ Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.’ Luce feared that Kennedy’s attention was so splintered among different priorities that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph.
…One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about your sentence.
-Daniel Pink, Drive, pp. 154-155
Power on Earth
Oswald Chambers in a letter to his sister, Dec 17, 1906:
You see, I believe that Jesus Christ our Lord has all power in heaven and on earth; do you? I find most people believe that He has all power in heaven, but are not sure about earth. I am finding out day by day more wonderful things about Jesus our Lord and what He can do.
Philippines Preaching Conference
On Saturday I travel to the Philippines for a week, along with fellow pastors/close friends Mark Mitchell and Rob Hall. There we will put on a preaching conference for 100+ Filipino pastors. My component of the conference includes lecturing on Gospel-Centered Preaching and Preaching the Parables. On the way there we will spend a day in Guam visiting with friends at Pacific Islands University and Seminary.
This is going to be a great trip. I can’t wait. I love serving at a church that cares about preaching, training pastors to preach, foreign missions, and sending its pastors on adventures such as this. I love that our church here in the Bay Area is full of Filipinos who love the gospel and want to see it advance in their home country.
I’d like to ask all of you to pray for this trip.
- Pray that God would use our teaching to equip and inspire the pastors we will be training, most of whom have never received any preaching instruction before.
- Pray that God would teach us much through the friendships we form with the Filipino pastors and our stay in their culture.
- Pray for the Philippines, that the gospel would advance and local churches would thrive in this country of 7,107 islands and 92 million people (the world’s 12 most populous country).
- Pray for our wives and kids while we’re away.
- Pray for our safety, sleep, and stomachs.
- Pray that we’d have a lot of fun.
Thank you for your prayer.
I’ve decided to fully unplug during this trip: no computer, phone, email, etc. So, unless I pre-write some posts to appear while I’m away, I will not be blogging next week.
Tim Keller on The Shack
Tim Keller offers his opinions on The Shack:
At the heart of the book is a noble effort — to help modern people understand why God allows suffering, using a narrative form. The argument Young makes at various parts of the book is this. First, this world’s evil and suffering is the result of our abuse of free will. Second, God has not prevented evil in order to accomplish some glorious, greater good that humans cannot now understand. Third, when we stay bitter at God for a particular tragedy we put ourselves in the seat of the ‘Judge of the world and God’, and we are unqualified for such a job. Fourth, we must get an ‘eternal perspective’ and see all God’s people in joy in his presence forever.
…However, sprinkled throughout the book, Young’s story undermines a number of traditional Christian doctrines. Many have gotten involved in debates about Young’s theological beliefs, and I have my own strong concerns. But here is my main problem with the book. Anyone who is strongly influenced by the imaginative world of The Shack will be totally unprepared for the far more multi-dimensional and complex God that you actually meet when you read the Bible.
Read the whole thing.
