ECIPLESHIP for Passionate Christ-Followers

Now that I’m listening more on Sundays rather than preaching all the time, I’m seeing some very regular patterns that bother me. In fact, there are two fallacies I see speakers commit over and over.

• FALLACY #1 — People want to hear what I have to say.
• FALLACY #2 — Longer is better.

Consider fallacy #1.

If a speaker assumes people want to hear what they have to say, there is no drive to be captivating, relevant, or creative. This assumption leads a presenter to simply present material without much attention given to capturing and holding the listener’s attention throughout the presentation.

God gave me a gift–and it wasn’t public speaking. The gift God gave me was the gripping assumption that people don’t really want to hear what I have to say. Right or wrong, this has shaped my public speaking for 35 years. I am always amazed that people will give me their attention for 25 or 30 minutes (at least most people). What my “people-don’t-want-to-listen” assumption does for me, however, is that it drives me to continually capture the interest of the audience, constantly connect my teaching to real life, and make sure everyone has a little enjoyment in the process (because a little pleasure with teaching has been proven by psychologists to be the one ingredient that will make it stick).

When a preacher/teacher assumes people want to hear what I have to say, the message becomes more about me than them–or the important topic at hand. The person at the podium becomes the reason people are sitting there. “They want to hear me!” Wrong. Fallacy #1 can makes us boring–really boring and terribly ineffective.

Consider fallacy #2.

Longer may be better on very rare occasions–like if you have so much profound content that it absolutely cannot be presented in the current attention span we are allotted. Trust me, this is rarely the case. Almost never. Instead, 95% of the time, a longer presentation means that the message is less potent and not fully prepared. [And don't assume you're in the 5% that can preach long.] We are rarely as good as we think we are.

In my years as a pastor, as I prepared week after week to teach the Word, I always forced myself to take a 45 minute message and widdle it down to less than 30 minutes. It was a rare Sunday that I went over that time limit. The discipline of forcing myself to be brief did several things to my sermons:

• It forced me to be sure I stay after the big idea
• It was necessary for me to cut out “the fat”
• It kept the message clearly moving somewhere all the time
• It eliminated my natural tendency to “camp out” on my favorite element for too long
• It shortened my stories and illustrations down to be really effective instead of letting me be a wordy storyteller
• It kept my audience engaged
• It made me prepare really well (an unprepared message is a long message)

Fallacy #2 — longer is better — is just not true. We can falsely assume that we get deeper. This is rarely the case. Instead, we are usually less effective. Regularly engaging in this false assumption will hamper people’s enthusiasm for the teaching time and may even drive people away.

So if you’re a pastor, preacher, teacher, or public speaker, take note and act accordingly. Rarely will your audience tell you the truth about these things…and usually, we preachers don’t like to hear it anyway.

Does God expect or intend every believer to have a heart for the world? How about every church?

I just finished a brief study to answer this question. It’s a fair one, by the way. If the answer is “no”, then we can go about our business without much personal concern for the “remotest parts of the earth.” As a Christian or a church, it’s reasonable to query whether or not God expects me (us) to ALL be engaged with global concerns. We know that God “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son”, but how does that affect us as individuals? How does that affect my church?

I’m unable to give you the nitty gritty details of the full Bible study, so here are a few highlights:

• God is committed that every people group hear the gospel and respond to it (Matthew 24:14)
• Jesus’ final imperative statement accentuates our responsibility to “disciple the ethne’” (the nations). This, by the way, was not only for those standing there when Jesus spoke these words. He knew these few would never reach the remotest parts in their lifetimes. He was thinking of us… (Matthew 28:19)
• John’s future vision reveals that ALL nations will worship the LORD. Want to get in on what He’s doing? (Revelation 15:4)
• God set apart the great apostle Paul to be the catalyst to reaching the Gentiles — all non-Jews. (Romans 11:3; Galatians 2:8) This is a God-priority.

So let me conclude with three brief, but important challenges:

1. Love who God loves.
2. Pursue what God pursues.
3. Receive God’s FULL favor through FULL obedience.

Yes–I’m convinced that intends every believer and every church to be engaged in reaching the world for Jesus.

Now what?

So we tend to “fudge” on this concept of the sabbath rest. We figure that real commitment presents itself in earnest unrelenting activity toward a godly goal. The sabbath is undoubtedly an Old Testament concept. As a result, we have a habit of denying its value for our lives in this current era. “Does it still really matter?” we may ask.

In reading my Bible this morning, I came across these intriguing verses from Leviticus 25:20, “But you might ask, ‘What will we eat during the seventh year, since we are not allowed to plant or harvest crops that year?’ 21 Be assured that I will send my blessing for you in the sixth year, so the land will produce a crop large enough for three years.”

Of course, the context here is the admonition to plant crops for six years, but the seventh is a year of rest for the land. It was absolutely required and, when observed, guaranteed God’s blessing in large enough measure to more than make up the difference. How cool is that?!

Let’s move to some New Testament teaching on this. Jesus said that “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” In other words, this “day off” is not for God’s benefit, not just another rule to obey, but is actually provided for OUR BENEFIT! We get to take a day of rest out of every seven! Guilt free! In fact, the more we observe it, the more obedient and “spiritual” we are! I love this gift from God.

Now–don’t you think that if God makes up the difference for that sabbath in the dirt that He will certainly make up the difference in our lives and work? Absolutely! Obeying the sabbath rest is actually a matter of faith. Will God come through to make up the difference for the day I rest? Without a doubt.

Here’s what I’ve personally observed in my life. When I take a day of rest every week, I get more done at a much higher level of excellence. When I miss my day of rest, I become stressed, ineffective, and produce things of much lower quality.God has a great plan! Why not trust Him in it?

As I was reading my Bible this morning, I came across an interesting little verse in Luke 6:7: “The teachers of religious law and the Pharisees watched closely to see whether Jesus would heal the man on the Sabbath.”

What I find unique about this statement is that:

• The teachers of law and the Pharisees knew Jesus could heal
• They were intent on finding error even in the good things Jesus did

Fortunately for us, the New Testament gives us a magnified look at what hypocritical religion looks like. The leaders of religious life in Israel were simply religious. They were not righteous.

• Religious people are intent on the details of life but often miss the big and important things. Of these people, Jesus stated, “You tithe mint, dill and cummin, but overlook the weighter things like justice, mercy and faithfulness.”
• Religious people are determined to make themselves look good or feel spiritual, even if it means pulling someone else down.
• Religious people are bound to legalism — a system that measures spirituality by deeds done, laws obeyed, and a right standing with God being earned.

Righteous people know that who they are, what they become, and however they influence their world is all through the grace and power of God alone. They live with a contagious enthusiasm for life, a passion to be the presence of God in their world, and a gratitude that compels them to do what’s right.

• Righteous people live for God’s pleasure and affirmation.
• Righteous people demonstrate unrestrained compassion for people…even on the sabbath.
• Righteous people overlook the judgmental assaults of religious people.

The religious can only become righteous through the miraculous intervention of God. Self must be crucified, the old way of legalism is recognized as filthy (Paul described it as “waste and garbage”), and in humility, they must fall before God seeking His gracious intervention. Only then can the religious become righteous.

I’ve recently struggled with judging. When I exert judgement on others, I’m taking a position of strength and casting my “superiority” on others. We can often use the phrase “truth-telling” or “honesty” or “transparency” to justify our strong stance or expression of strong feelings. But think about it — what good comes out of judging? There are Christians littering our wake who are tattered and torn by the “honesty” we freely cast on others. Over and over and over. Don’t misunderstand me — there is a right and wrong (and not always what we’ve concluded) and there are rare times when pronouncing judgement is necessary. But we often do that to people sincerely seeking after God who fail to conform to our expectations of what that might look like.

Maybe I’m rambling, so let me simply state it this way — my new conviction today:

• Transparency is a beautiful thing when we reveal our weakness to others. It dispenses God’s amazing grace on those who need it most.
• Transparency is a destructive thing when reveal our “strength” to others. It imprisons people in the bondage of legalism.

I’m always amazed at the ways in which God uses “the weak things of the world to shame the the things that are strong.” God takes our weakness and makes it our greatest strength. We’ve been using the terminology “ministry of weakness” in our missions leadership team recently. All around the world, we see how God is using weak people to do His greatest work.

This principle is true every day in my life, too. God wants to use my weakness, vulnerability, humility, and failures for His glory. He wants to use this weakness to be the strength of my life — so much so that it becomes a lifestyle — a lifestyle of weakness.

FAITHLESSNESS is something I never want to be known for. The first generation of  freed Israelites are characterized as being faithless. Numbers 14:33 states, “…they (your children) will pay for your faithlessness, until the last of you lies dead in the wilderness.”

What did faithlessness look like for the generation of Israelites who chose to turn away from the Promised Land?

• They did not believe that God was good — especially after their Egyptian slavery of 400 years.
• They overlooked the promises God had made to them years before, such as those to Abraham and his descendants, “I will make you a great nation” and “I will give you this land.”
• They were suspect of the miracles God had performed on their behalf (the 10 plagues of Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, water in the wilderness, etc.).
• They chose to continue life as the victims they were rather than the victors God intended to make them.
• They chose a familiar bondage over an unfamiliar freedom.
• They wouldn’t believe that they could have a life as good as what God told them they would have.
• They lived by human intuition rather than by divine guidance.

As I was jotting down this non-exaustive list, I was humbled by the fact that these “bullet points” are a part of my life way too often. How I long to live every day in the arena of faith rather than faithlessness. After all, “without faith, it is IMPOSSIBLE to please God.”

God is moving in such amazing and unique ways around the world right now. Thom Wolf, with his finger on the pulse of what God is doing in the world, believes that the 21st century will be most ever like the 1st century — especially in India. Three trends stand out that led him to this conclusion:

• The ministry is given back to the common Christians, not the highly educated or social elites.
• The Holy Spirit is igniting and empowering movements way beyond human manufacturing.
• Persecution is prevalent and purifies the church to do great things for the glory of God. Persecution always makes the church stronger, by the way…

I have been fascinated by the church planting movments (CPMs) around the world. If you want to be inspired and challenged, read “Church Planting Movements” by David Garrison and “Miraculous Movements” by Jerry Trousdale. You will find that, even though as Americans our Christianity is fairly stable and consistent, many places in the world are seeing mind-blowing Holy Spirit-led multiplication of disciples and churches — the kind that have been rare in the history of the church. God is up to something. Take notice, people.

In a recent round-table discussion of denominational mission leaders, we talked about our deep desire to see God do a new thing among our churches in the U.S. too. It led to some great conversations and valuable insights. For me, the crux of the issue is the following:

• In our American Christianity, we have a knowlege-based spirituality. Learning leads to spiritual maturity in our motif of belief.
• In many places in the world, there is an obedience-based spirituality. Obedience leads to spiritual maturity–simply doing what God’s word tells us to do.

What does the Bible say? Of course, so much. However, those that were the least mature in Jesus’ eyes were the Pharisees — those that had the most knowledge and information. The Scriptures tell us that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” In contrast to this, Jesus told us that “if you love me, you will obey my commandents.”

Back to movements in the world: Movements happen where obedience rather than knowledge aquisition leads the way. This doesn’t mean information is bad, it simply means that the believers in Holy Spirit-led movements understand that obedience to what they know is essential–and they do it. In our American motif of knowledge-based spirituality, we take years to learn what we’re “supposed” to know about the Christian life…and by then we’re stale and stagnant.

As James reminds us, “For him who knows what to do and doesn’t do it, to him it is sin.”

Can we change the American spirituality motif? Of course not — only God could do that. But each of us can choose to begin a movement in our own hearts…one of complete and immediate obedience to God.

There are many very happy people in the world who do not know Jesus Christ. That’s where the following verse comes in…

“I came not to send peace, but a sword,” Matthew 10:34.

Of this, Oswald Chambers writes:

“Thousands of people are happy without God in this world. If I was happy and moral before Jesus came, why did He come? Because that kind of happiness and peace is on a wrong level; Jesus Christ came to send a sword through every peace that is not based on a personal relationship to Himself.”

And here’s the challenge we face in a society where abundance can mask need — people must realize that they were made for something more than themselves. They were made for God! Life is not all about happiness and contentment (peace), but instead a purpose and high calling (a sword).

When we get that, we’re not only happy…we’re passionate!

“He (Jesus) will come again, not to deal with our sins, but to bring salvation to all who are eagerly waiting for him,” Hebrews 9:28b.

This verse convicted me as I read it this morning. The “eagerly waiting” part clearly caught my attention.

The above Scripture follows a short treatise on the complete work brought about by Jesus’ death and resurrection — that He died once-for-all. There is no-longer any need for ongoing sacrifices or restitution for sin. It is finished!

We all know that Jesus will come again, but this passage delineated the fact that He is coming to “bring salvation to all who are eagerly waiting for Him.” I’m not so sure I eagerly wait for Jesus. In fact, I’m quite certain I don’t — at least not when things are going well. Know what I mean?

When I go fishing (which is not very often), I’m all in. I anticipate the jerk on my pole. I almost constantly picture the fish swimming toward my line and bait. My muscles are slightly tensed, my focus is clear, and I am ready to act when my time has come. In other words, I’m “eagerly waiting” for the fish in order to thoroughly enjoy the action that follows.

I don’t do this with Jesus so much. I don’t really anticipate. I’ve had to ask myself why…

• I love the world too much.
• I’m temporally minded rather than eternally focused
• I’m distracted
• I haven’t meditated on the awesomeness of Jesus’ return
• I don’t really think Jesus will come in my lifetime (He will, however, come in my death-time)
• I’m not as eager to be with Jesus as my words and thoughts would sometimes indicate

It seems to me that “eagerly waiting” involves emotion. Emotion cannot be faked. This human experience bubbles out of us to reveal what’s really inside of us. Emotion is one of the most authentic expressions of who we are–really. If I’m not emotionally moved by the thought of Jesus’ return, there must be something amiss inside, right?

I want to be “eagerly waiting” for Jesus every day. After all, those doing that are the target of Jesus’ return. I guess I have work to do…

The election is over. Whew! It was a long stretch.

Now we can move on and get our focus back on a few other things — some things that are more important than a presidential race. I know, I know — it’s important, we have a Christian responsibility to be vote and be involved in the political process. I believe that so much that our family stood in line for nearly 4 hours just to vote yesterday. Somehow, though, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we Christians were as passionate for the Kingdom of God as we are for our politicians.

We’ve all heard a lot of overstatements by fellow believers…and may have even stated a few of our own:

• “This is the end of things if this election goes bad.”
• “God will have to apologize to Sodom and Gommorah if he is elected.”
• “This will be God’s judgement on America if he is our president.”

So–in this post-election morning when we awake to our President’s re-election victory–let’s be reminded of a few very important truths:

1. God has been deeply involved in this election. Isaiah 40:21-22 states, “Haven’t you heard? Don’t you understand? Are you deaf to the words of God— the words he gave before the world began? Are you so ignorant? God sits above the circle of the earth. The people below seem like grasshoppers to him!”
2. God knows what He needs to accomplish and how to get it done. Romans 11:33-34 reminds us, “How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways! For who can know the Lord’s thoughts? Who knows enough to give him advice?”
3. Consistently and sincerely pray for our President and other leaders. God calls us ”therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty,” 1 Timothy 2:1-2.
4. Our true hope and ultimate focus must be Jesus. Remember John 16:33? “I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.”

All is well. God is on the throne. We have work to do. Peace, brothers and sisters…