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Archive for the ‘Mind Muddling & Soul Stretching’ Category

Do our modern evangelistic presentations build walls or bridges?

Over the last several months I’ve been involved in an extended conversation with a friend who is seeking spiritual truth.  These conversations aren’t about the predictable issues of apologetics, and they don’t fit into any of the traditional categories my theological education equipped me to engage.

These conversations are turning my evangelistic understandings inside out. How much faith does it take to be “saving faith”?

One well-meaning friend asked recent, “Has he prayed the prayer yet?” (I wanted to smack her in Jesus’ name!)

I’m resisting the urge to “close the sale,” or get my friend to “pray the prayer.”

Cause the moment I do, the door that is now cracked open slightly will come crashing closed, and four neatly packaged spiritual laws will become four damning spiritual walls.

And I can’t live with that.

One of the thing I enjoyed when our children were smaller was working connect-the-dots puzzles with them.  They were great tools to teach them their numbers, but it was equally fun to try to guess what the picture would be once all the dots were connected.

Everything went well until they day we were on vacation and went into a local discount store and picked up a connect-the-dots book. The kids were so excited because they had a new, big, thick book of pictures to work through. Only problem was, when we got to the car we discovered that it had no numbers–just a random assortment of dots on the page. Oh, I’m sure that with a great deal of effort we could have figured out what the pictures were supposed to be, but that was just way too much work!  In our frustration, we finally just threw the book away.

As I’ve reflected on my connect-the-dots adventures, I’ve found some deeper lessons.

I believe that God is active in our world and in our lives, and He wants us to be able to spot His activity.
We are not naturally wired to look for what God is doing. It’s a learned skill. As we become more intimately acquainted with Him, His purposes and His ways, we become more adept at recognizing His activity around us. We get good at God-spotting, and suddenly we find ourselves living the adventure of a Godspotted life.

But there are some folks need us to help them realize there are dots.
They surround us every day–these folks who are happy with a God who is more like “the Force,” who shows up and does things once in a while, but is not personally interested or involved in their lives.  For the most part, they are blissfully unaware of God’s little kindnesses that litter the landscapes of their lives. They may sense that there is something more. And the kindest thing we can do is to help them realize that there are dots–Godspots–before we try to connect them. (Most of our modern propositional/apologetic-based evangelistic presentations are more concerned about connecting dots that most folks don’t even realize exist. But that’s another post for another day!)

Other folks have the dots and no numbers, and they need us to help them give order to the dots.
These are folks who may have grown up in church. They know the lingo. They know–at least at an abstract level–that God does things. But for the most part, their dots have no numbers. Consequently they piece together a worldview that is pretty incoherent. This is a pretty damning indictment of our present methods of discipleship.

Some folks have the dots, but all the numbers are in a foreign language.
Many of these folks have grown up in church, too. But their dots are codified in complex theological systems that categorize and define and exclude. Only problem is that God keeps showing up in the strangest places at the strangest times, and most of the time it doesn’t fit their religious system. They need us to be translators of God’s grace into the everyday language of the heart.

Learning to identify the activity of God around us–Godspotting–will lead to a Godspotted life.

If God has called you to be truly like Jesus in all your spirit, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility. He will put on you such demands of obedience that you will not be allowed to follow otherpeople or measure yourself by other Christians. At times, He will let other people do things which He will not let you do.

Other Christians who seem to be very religious and useful may push themselves, pull wires, and work schemes to carry out their plans, but you cannot. If you attempt it, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you sorely penitent.

Others may boast of themselves, their work, their successes, their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing. If you begin to do so, He will lead you into a deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.

Others may be allowed to succeed in making great sums of money, or may have a legacy left to them, or may have luxuries, but God may supply you only on a day-to-day basis, because He wants you to have something far better than gold, namely, a helpless dependence on Him and His unseen treasury.

The Lord may let others be honored and put forward, and keep you hidden in obscurity because He wants to produce some choice, fragrant fruit for His coming glory which can only be produced in the shade.

God may let others be great, but keep you small. He will let others do a work for Him and get the credit, but He may make you work and toil without knowing how much you are doing. Then, to make your work still more precious, He will let others get the credit for the work which you have done; this to teach you the message of the Cross, humility, and something of the value of being cloaked with His nature.

The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch on you, and with a jealous love rebuke you for careless words and feelings, or for wasting your time, which other Christians never seem distressed over.

So make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign and has a right to do as He pleases with His own, and that He may not explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle your reason in His dealings with you. But if you absolutely give yourself to be His child, He will wrap you up in a jealous love and let other people say and do many things that you cannot.

Settle it forever; you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit. He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue or chaining your hand or closing your eyes in ways that He does not seem to use with others. However, know this great secret of the Kingdom: When you are so completely possessed with the Living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the vestibule of heaven, the high calling of God.

Rev. G. D. Watson
1845-1924

(Many years ago I heard a speaker read from this little tract, which has meant much to me through the years. I posted it on the fore-runner to this blog a couple of years back. I shared this one morning last week with the World Changers Summer Staff during our devotional time, and wanted to post it again here. Hope that you find it as challenging as I have through the years.)

• 11:24 AM robedwardslive - Lance is with Replenish Ministries.
• 11:25 AM robedwardslive - What does it look like to lead from a healthy place?
• 11:27 AM robedwardslive - Over the last 25 years we have been intoxicated by vision and leadership
• 11:28 AM robedwardslive - What does Spiritual Leadership look like in our generation? What does it look like to lead from a healthy place?
• 11:29 AM robedwardslive - Inadvertently we have marginalized the issues of the soul.
• 11:31 AM robedwardslive - The backstory of those who fail in ministry that isn’t told is the relational isolation, the character drift, etc.
• 11:31 AM robedwardslive - Every month 1,500 pastors permanently walk away from ministry.
• 11:32 AM robedwardslive - Pastors are asking: Is there a different way to do life and ministry?
• 11:34 AM robedwardslive - If we plot the trajectory of the path we are on, what does the final scene look like?
• 11:35 AM robedwardslive - What does it look like for us to lead ourselves?
• 11:35 AM robedwardslive - We cannot separate leadership from the leader. We cannot separate the messenger from the message.
• 11:36 AM robedwardslive - Chocolate-covered cyanide: It tastes great going down, but it is deadly: The Toxin of Ambition
• 11:36 AM robedwardslive - Ambition is a double-edged sword. When it is driven by ego, the damage it can do is enormous.
• 11:38 AM robedwardslive - Am I driven by God’s agenda, or by me?
• 11:39 AM robedwardslive - Do we love our ministry more than we love Christ?
• 11:43 AM robedwardslive - We have a generation that is coming unglued. We are equipping a generation with all manner of growth principles, but not how to keep their walk with God where it needs to be
• 11:44 AM robedwardslive - If we are not careful, our success will blow up our transformer
• 11:44 AM robedwardslive - We need an ambition patrol in our life.
• 11:45 AM robedwardslive - Side effect of Ambition # 1: Acceleration
• 11:46 AM robedwardslive - Acceleration is about busyness.
• 11:48 AM robedwardslive - What drives me to be so busy? Why cannot I be still? Why cannot I be quiet? Is there some insecurity in me that is driving my busyness? What kind of example am I setting?
• 11:49 AM robedwardslive - Speed and intimacy do not make good partners.
• 11:50 AM robedwardslive - You cannot live at warp speed without warping your soul. You cannot follow Jesus at a sprint.
• 11:51 AM robedwardslive - Often we live at the pace we do not because God has put those demands on us, nor has our church, but we have put them on ourselves.
• 11:53 AM robedwardslive - I know how to take ambition and cloak it in Kingdom language. But the one place I cannot get away with it is in the presence of my Heavenly Father.
• 11:54 AM robedwardslive - ((Maybe the reason we avoid our relationship with God is that we don’t want him to put his finger on this in our lives))
• 11:55 AM robedwardslive - Side effect of Ambition #2: Image management
• 11:55 AM robedwardslive - It’s possible to succeed in ministry yet have a disconnected soul.
• 11:55 AM robedwardslive - Over time our whole identity gets wrapped up in this thing called ministry.
• 11:57 AM robedwardslive - What God wants from us is just our faithfulness.
• 11:57 AM robedwardslive - Image management is devastating.
• 11:57 AM robedwardslive - We are loved by God. We are created in his image, and we are loved by him. Period. It’s not based on anything we do.
• 11:58 AM robedwardslive - Side effect of Ambition#3: De-personalization
• 11:58 AM robedwardslive - Depersonalization is about people.
• 11:59 AM robedwardslive - When the shepherd is not healthy, the sheep will begin to pay the price.
• 11:59 AM robedwardslive - Rather than ministering to people, we manage them.
• 12:00 PM robedwardslive - Do the people who know us best respect us the most?
• 12:00 PM robedwardslive - You’re not leading if you’re not loving people.
• 12:01 PM robedwardslive - Alignment versus attunement
• 12:02 PM robedwardslive - Alignment is getting all the parts going in the right direction. Attument is about the heart.
• 12:02 PM robedwardslive - Signs of Attunement: Joy, Gratitude, Freedom, Courage
• 12:03 PM robedwardslive - Jeremiah 6: Stand and look for the ancient ways, and walk in them, for then you shall find rest for your soul.

• 9:44 AM robedwardslive - Chris is praying that God would transform us through His Word
• 9:45 AM robedwardslive - Chris’ church was the first plant in the ARC
• 9:47 AM robedwardslive - Didn’t know anything about planting a church when we started.
• 9:48 AM robedwardslive - They do round-tables, two-day gatherings for pastors called Up Close.
• 9:50 AM robedwardslive - I grew up knowing how to get it right. I’ve done it all my life. But there is no substituting what goes on inside the person. You can get it completely right on the outside, but miss it on the inside, and wonder why it isn’t working.
• 9:51 AM robedwardslive - There has to be more than going to church more often and doing all the stuff, but if there is not a transformation of the inner man, it will not work.
• 9:52 AM robedwardslive - It’s human nature to want external forces to drive our behavior.
• 9:52 AM robedwardslive - The Gospel is a transformation of the inner man.
• 9:54 AM robedwardslive - The Fruit of the Spirit grows naturally, not because you work on it.
• 9:54 AM robedwardslive - Religious sermons are behavior modification sermons.
• 9:55 AM robedwardslive - Don’t teach people to be faithful. Lead people to a transformative relationship with God so that the become faithful.
• 9:56 AM robedwardslive - I worked hard for C’s in school.
• 9:58 AM robedwardslive - What did we do? We did a lot of things right. But if you do everything we did and do not understand what we had to become, it will not work for you.
• 9:58 AM robedwardslive - What was taking place on the inside of you is more important.
• 9:59 AM robedwardslive - Don’t think about what you are doing, think about what you are becoming.
• 10:00 AM robedwardslive - Two scriptures: Hebrews 8–even God found fault with His system. God changed it from externals to internals. No longer on tablets of stone, but written on their hearts.
• 10:00 AM robedwardslive - Principles of the Old Testament are external. Principles of the New Testament are internal.
• 10:01 AM robedwardslive - Matthew 23–Jesus confronted the religious establishment of the day, but he always confronted what was going on inside of them.
• 10:02 AM robedwardslive - If I make sure I maintain a healthy inside, the outside stuff will take care of itself.
• 10:03 AM robedwardslive - If I were to give you one message, I would say focus on three internal motivations and ministry will work:
• 10:04 AM robedwardslive - 1. Loving life.
• 10:06 AM robedwardslive - The good old days are never the days you are in. They have either gone by or they are coming up, but they are never the days you are in.
• 10:07 AM robedwardslive - As soon as I embraced that Today is a Good Day!, then things began to work.
• 10:07 AM robedwardslive - Enjoy the now! Enjoy this moment!
• 10:08 AM robedwardslive - Pet peve: People who surrendered to the call of God. For heaven’s sake, we get to serve the King of Kings every day! We’re not like the rest of the world that are spending all their time out there trying to figure out what to do with their lives.
• 10:09 AM robedwardslive - 2 Corinthians 6:10. Memorize it. Print it out. Say it. Spray it. Get it into your life!
• 10:10 AM robedwardslive - Check your attitude. Focus on the internal things.
• 10:11 AM robedwardslive - Do I love life? Do I love today?
• 10:11 AM robedwardslive - 2. Loving people.
• 10:13 AM robedwardslive - You may start out loving people, but it doesn’t take long for people to give you reasons not to love them.
• 10:14 AM robedwardslive - I know pastors who love the crowd but doesn’t like the person. They love to be in the limelight, but then they whisk themselves away to hide out in the green room.
• 10:15 AM robedwardslive - If you don’t love people, you can’t fake it. They know it, and that’s when they go to somebody else’s church.
• 10:16 AM robedwardslive - Do you love people?
• 10:16 AM robedwardslive - 3. Loving God.
• 10:17 AM robedwardslive - Are we in love with God?
• 10:21 AM robedwardslive - ((Chris is singing snippets from Fiddler on the Roof))
• 10:21 AM robedwardslive - The Spirit of the Lord sings to us today, Do you love me?
• 10:22 AM robedwardslive - Do I really love God?
• 10:23 AM robedwardslive - These three internal motivations create a culture that makes success possible.
• 10:23 AM robedwardslive - Love people. Hate the devil.