Recently, I hit a spot where I was put in my place in a very good way. There are very few times I can recall where I felt so undeservedly honored to a point where I couldn't really bear it.
I went to our middle-aged fellowship gathering (don't know what else to call them, haha) at one of the senior couples' home. When I got there, I was just making my rounds saying hello to everyone when I got to the man of the house, an original founding member of the church I pastor at, and an incredibly wise man.
He asked me if I could spare a few minutes of time with him because he wanted to know how I studied during my devotion time. I was glad to have the chance to share, but I quickly realized that he didn't really ask me what he wanted to ask me. So I get brought into his study room, and I'm blown away by the amount of books and bibles laying around, from shelves to tables, much like a scholar and deeply devoted man would. He started pointing out a little bit of what he did, how he tackled the Word of the Lord, and I was so blown away at how devoted and faithful he had been all these years. I saw commentaries, dictionaries, maps, shelves of notes, teaching material, etc. My initial thoughts were that I could learn from this man, he's got wisdom of generations stored up in his house.
And then the moment came. He turns to me and asks, "Can you give me advice on how I can do a better job in studying the Word?"
Picture an 80 something year old man, essentially bowing down, and asking his 25 year old pastor on advice on how to study the Bible better. I can count on one hand how many moments in my life where I'm so caught off guard by something that I am literally left speechless, unable to open my mouth even if I wanted to. This situation added to that number.
I stood there with a dumbfounded smile on my face, not able to come up with anything to say, because I'm thinking to myself that I should be learning from this man. But instead, he has the grace and humility to ask me on how to do better in studying God's word. Needless to say, I felt embarrassed; I wish I was half the man this guy was in diligence and faithfulness to studying the Word.
Sheepishly, I confessed to him that I think I really should be learning from him, but he asked again. Looking at his anticipation of my response, I simply couldn't offer him anything that I thought would enrich his studying. This man has traveled the world, served tirelessly for years, studies with fire, and is asking me, some dork, who grew up in Edmonton and could barely keep a conversation moving, on how to better study the Bible. Honestly, what can I even say?
My response is irrelevant because I've already been put in my place. Humbled doesn't even begin to describe the honor that I felt that he would ask me. For a while I'd been concerned that I can't make a difference in the lives of those who are beyond my experience and stage in life, but God just really has a way to show me how he's going to use me however he pleases.
It's been a few days and I'm still not over the fact that this happened. I can't help but to praise God for giving me the opportunity to know this man and to learn from his example of humility. What do you even say to that?
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Saturday, June 11, 2016
Vapor
Two nights in a row, I'm reminded of how fragile life is and how quickly we come and go. We're not as invincible as we try to be.
"Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes." James 4:14 (ESV)
For the Christ follower, "to die is gain" right? If that's so, and if I truly believe it, then death shouldn't be all scary like people make it out to be. What has begun to concern me more is what precedes that phrase in the well known Philippians passage.
"To live is Christ." When standing before the face of death, especially these last two evenings, I'm becoming more convicted that we, ones who call ourselves Christians, do an awful job at living the way Christ has called us to. We're too concerned about our own comfort and safety that we'd rather not cause any trouble, fearing that we might get hated on or something - because we're totally unaware and surprised that people don't like us to begin with, right?
When will we rise up as the Church to bring hope to the broken hearted? We lose good people everyday. I can't help but think that the people who are affected by such loss will only be able to find peace in Christ. I've been praying for revival, for the Holy Spirit to be blowing the winds of a resurgence, and for the sails of the church to catch this wind. There's been no other time that I've been alive where a need for Christ has been so strong. The world's been preaching a message of false hope and false salvation long enough. I want to be part of what Christ is doing in this city and this country; I firmly believe I'm no longer content to just sit quietly in my space and let people wander aimlessly with no real hope in their lives.
Our lives are way too short and fragile to just casually waste away.
"Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes." James 4:14 (ESV)
For the Christ follower, "to die is gain" right? If that's so, and if I truly believe it, then death shouldn't be all scary like people make it out to be. What has begun to concern me more is what precedes that phrase in the well known Philippians passage.
"To live is Christ." When standing before the face of death, especially these last two evenings, I'm becoming more convicted that we, ones who call ourselves Christians, do an awful job at living the way Christ has called us to. We're too concerned about our own comfort and safety that we'd rather not cause any trouble, fearing that we might get hated on or something - because we're totally unaware and surprised that people don't like us to begin with, right?
When will we rise up as the Church to bring hope to the broken hearted? We lose good people everyday. I can't help but think that the people who are affected by such loss will only be able to find peace in Christ. I've been praying for revival, for the Holy Spirit to be blowing the winds of a resurgence, and for the sails of the church to catch this wind. There's been no other time that I've been alive where a need for Christ has been so strong. The world's been preaching a message of false hope and false salvation long enough. I want to be part of what Christ is doing in this city and this country; I firmly believe I'm no longer content to just sit quietly in my space and let people wander aimlessly with no real hope in their lives.
Our lives are way too short and fragile to just casually waste away.
Friday, May 20, 2016
Deeper
A big personal challenge of mine that I'm being called upon is to go deeper into my relationship with God. I don't want to say I've stagnated, because I've still had to learn to depend on God in new ways in the last couple of years, but that has never lead me to going deeper into knowing Christ.
"If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?" (Luke 9:23-25)
This passage has long been one of my all time favorites. It's a reminder to me that everyday I need to surrender myself, all of me, to the will of God - much like how Jesus had to do it when he was praying in the garden. I've always said that everything I have is from God, so I give it all back to him. We all know that anyone can say that, but it's never completely true. So I need to learn to surrender more and more of myself. It's a tug-of-war because I'm always holding on to some piece of everything. I'll be scared that if I let go of control in some way, that I'll be lead somewhere I don't want to be.
This means death to self. It makes total sense, but is so difficult to do. If I rely on myself and my own power to grow and go places, I'm depending on the very strength and power that has lead me to living a life of sin, and hoping that I get closer to Jesus with it. You don't mix poison with poison and get clean water.
Fact of the matter is, if I want to go deeper, I have to be willing to let go. Unity in Christ leads to holiness, and I don't make progress if there are always little things I'm holding onto.
A challenge I wake up to, every morning.
"If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?" (Luke 9:23-25)
This passage has long been one of my all time favorites. It's a reminder to me that everyday I need to surrender myself, all of me, to the will of God - much like how Jesus had to do it when he was praying in the garden. I've always said that everything I have is from God, so I give it all back to him. We all know that anyone can say that, but it's never completely true. So I need to learn to surrender more and more of myself. It's a tug-of-war because I'm always holding on to some piece of everything. I'll be scared that if I let go of control in some way, that I'll be lead somewhere I don't want to be.
This means death to self. It makes total sense, but is so difficult to do. If I rely on myself and my own power to grow and go places, I'm depending on the very strength and power that has lead me to living a life of sin, and hoping that I get closer to Jesus with it. You don't mix poison with poison and get clean water.
Fact of the matter is, if I want to go deeper, I have to be willing to let go. Unity in Christ leads to holiness, and I don't make progress if there are always little things I'm holding onto.
A challenge I wake up to, every morning.
Monday, April 4, 2016
When It Kicks In
Over the last several months, I've personally experienced a lot of growth in terms of the way my life is evolving and unfolding. I owe much of this change to the vision seeking that I mention a lot about in the latter half of 2015.
As church life gets busier and busier, my mind is also getting busier and busier with the way I think about how to approach church. I think it all started when I heard a guest speaker talk about church growth. The comment he made was that it's easy if you want a big church. All you have to do is have the right programs and the right marketing, and people will come. Make everything look pretty, and your church will grow in size.
Such a comment put me into a bit of a deep search about what it means for a church to grow. And throughout the following months, I kept coming back to the idea that disciples of Jesus are to make disciples of Jesus. In order to make a disciple, we have to know what a disciple is and how to be one.
And then I fell into a bit of a struggle in finding that a lot of our modern churches don't really do a good job at explaining what a disciple is and how they're made. If we don't even know how to be a disciple of Jesus ourselves, we can't go make more of us. So this has been a big reason of why I've been preaching the book of Philippians. Very few places in the Bible show us what an authentic and true follower of Jesus looks like in the way that Philippians does.
My struggle didn't stop there. I thought to myself that another reason why we don't seem to be good at making disciples is because we don't even know what makes a disciple. It may sound a little weird at first, but the common theme these days is to get people to accept Jesus into their hearts - this will make them a disciple. Really? All of our methods, those of which include raising up your hand, walking up the aisle, saying a prayer, to ask Jesus into our lives, these are what makes us disciples of Jesus? I've witnessed so many people do that, some even go as far as being baptized, but their lives look nothing like that of a Christ follower.
It makes me think: has this person really met Jesus? Or is he/she just going through the motions? Do they do all these actions just because it's what they've been doing all along? I've expressed to a few people recently, partly because it's weighed heavily on my heart, that I find it really hard to believe that someone can encounter the Jesus described to us in the Bible and not be radically changed.
To cut to the chase: our evangelism methods suck. We try too hard to make it all about "the decision" to put up your hand and to pray some kind of prayer that I'm still trying to find in the Bible that we're told to pray. The closest I've come is all of "repent and be baptized" in Acts. Still nothing on a prayer about accepting Jesus into your heart.
What lead to "repent and be baptized" is what we actually miss out on and what we need to focus on. We need to be able to present a full picture and story of the gospel of Jesus. We're good at the "believe in Jesus so you'll have eternal life!" But that's not the full picture. And unfortunately, we've tried to sell our entire faith on that one statement.
I feel so strongly about this because in a few instances over the last while, I've asked for an explanation of the Gospel and salvation told to me, and all I proceeded to see were blank stares. People who've allegedly grown up in the church, know all the Bible stories, know everything you'd expect them to know, but don't actually know the Gospel. This is what living in a post-Christian society has done to us.
It was amazing, actually. In one of these instances of a failure to explain the gospel of Jesus, I then changed my original plans and decided to explain the Gospel to the best of my ability. Some time in the middle of my explanation of the Gospel, I saw it. I visibly saw the relevance of Jesus take form in the faces of the people I was telling it to. It was a surreal moment for me, when the reality of the Gospel kicked in and suddenly came to life. Even though these two people had been taught all of these different things growing up, I think for the first time in their lives Jesus became real to them. One of them even confessed afterward, about how they were taught all these things growing up, but they didn't know what the Gospel truly was until that moment.
So I'm really thankful for this experience. It's tragic that pastors and leaders try to give people something other than Jesus for the very thing Jesus is trying to do in their lives. I think a lot of what we'll be needing to do is to restore the Gospel into the lives of our churches.
I would go through lengths again if only I can see more people come to the realization of what the Gospel means to them.
As church life gets busier and busier, my mind is also getting busier and busier with the way I think about how to approach church. I think it all started when I heard a guest speaker talk about church growth. The comment he made was that it's easy if you want a big church. All you have to do is have the right programs and the right marketing, and people will come. Make everything look pretty, and your church will grow in size.
Such a comment put me into a bit of a deep search about what it means for a church to grow. And throughout the following months, I kept coming back to the idea that disciples of Jesus are to make disciples of Jesus. In order to make a disciple, we have to know what a disciple is and how to be one.
And then I fell into a bit of a struggle in finding that a lot of our modern churches don't really do a good job at explaining what a disciple is and how they're made. If we don't even know how to be a disciple of Jesus ourselves, we can't go make more of us. So this has been a big reason of why I've been preaching the book of Philippians. Very few places in the Bible show us what an authentic and true follower of Jesus looks like in the way that Philippians does.
My struggle didn't stop there. I thought to myself that another reason why we don't seem to be good at making disciples is because we don't even know what makes a disciple. It may sound a little weird at first, but the common theme these days is to get people to accept Jesus into their hearts - this will make them a disciple. Really? All of our methods, those of which include raising up your hand, walking up the aisle, saying a prayer, to ask Jesus into our lives, these are what makes us disciples of Jesus? I've witnessed so many people do that, some even go as far as being baptized, but their lives look nothing like that of a Christ follower.
It makes me think: has this person really met Jesus? Or is he/she just going through the motions? Do they do all these actions just because it's what they've been doing all along? I've expressed to a few people recently, partly because it's weighed heavily on my heart, that I find it really hard to believe that someone can encounter the Jesus described to us in the Bible and not be radically changed.
To cut to the chase: our evangelism methods suck. We try too hard to make it all about "the decision" to put up your hand and to pray some kind of prayer that I'm still trying to find in the Bible that we're told to pray. The closest I've come is all of "repent and be baptized" in Acts. Still nothing on a prayer about accepting Jesus into your heart.
What lead to "repent and be baptized" is what we actually miss out on and what we need to focus on. We need to be able to present a full picture and story of the gospel of Jesus. We're good at the "believe in Jesus so you'll have eternal life!" But that's not the full picture. And unfortunately, we've tried to sell our entire faith on that one statement.
I feel so strongly about this because in a few instances over the last while, I've asked for an explanation of the Gospel and salvation told to me, and all I proceeded to see were blank stares. People who've allegedly grown up in the church, know all the Bible stories, know everything you'd expect them to know, but don't actually know the Gospel. This is what living in a post-Christian society has done to us.
It was amazing, actually. In one of these instances of a failure to explain the gospel of Jesus, I then changed my original plans and decided to explain the Gospel to the best of my ability. Some time in the middle of my explanation of the Gospel, I saw it. I visibly saw the relevance of Jesus take form in the faces of the people I was telling it to. It was a surreal moment for me, when the reality of the Gospel kicked in and suddenly came to life. Even though these two people had been taught all of these different things growing up, I think for the first time in their lives Jesus became real to them. One of them even confessed afterward, about how they were taught all these things growing up, but they didn't know what the Gospel truly was until that moment.
So I'm really thankful for this experience. It's tragic that pastors and leaders try to give people something other than Jesus for the very thing Jesus is trying to do in their lives. I think a lot of what we'll be needing to do is to restore the Gospel into the lives of our churches.
I would go through lengths again if only I can see more people come to the realization of what the Gospel means to them.
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