Preach The Gospel, Die And Be Forgotten.

Are you willing to follow me into obscurity?

This has been God’s question, rebuke and call to me over the past month. The interaction between God and myself has reminded me of Jesus’ interaction with the rich young ruler.

The rich young ruler was willing to give up everything to go after Jesus except for his money. He couldn’t pry his fingers from it and it cost him Jesus. It cost him everything.

But my response to his loving question has troubled me. I want to be known, recognized and remembered, but Jesus loves me too much to let that be my end.

I have been begging God to change me, to grant me a heart that chooses him over fame because I am struggling to let go of my name. The reality of being a pastor in America is that one can exalt Jesus and be known. But what God is showing me is that for a movement to happen I must be forgotten.

No one can remember our church. It has to be bigger than that. There has to be so many hands, so many leaders and so many disciples trained for the worship of Jesus to consume Austin and the world.

If I have to be apart of everything and known by everyone, a movement will not happen. All I will have are moments of power, moments where I saw what God could have done. I must fade into the background as new leaders are raised to start new works and expand the gospel to people who will never know me.

So the question remains, “am I willing to follow him into obscurity?” I am begging God for the grace to say yes so that I don’t lose everything for small moments and small recognition.

It is going to cost my name, but I want Jesus.

I want to see what I have only read and dreamed about

Life Hermeneutic

her⋅me⋅neu⋅tic-interpretative; explanatory

I have been a follower of Jesus by faith in His gospel for almost 6 years and during this time of interacting with churchy people or other followers of Jesus you pick up/advocate interesting, sometimes heretical views of God. This is very easy to do when you want something to be a certain way. So if I want Jesus to not put people off I can read the bible selectively and rationalize away the parts I do not like while I distort/lose God. Or if I do not want to give up certain aspects of my life and personality I can emphasize all the good that is in my personality/life while I work against God by attempting to make people into my image and not His. Or if I want to feel good about myself through comparison to others I can exalt the sins that I do not commit as the most heinous and feel pity for those who struggle with such things while I communicate the lie that the gospel is for everyone else. The easy part is then finding people who want what I want. We surround ourselves with others who inherently desire the same thing until we blindly accept our latent goal as truth.

Well, I want to address one in particular that I and so many other followers of Jesus or churchy people have perpetuated for far too long.  It is the “God called me…” card. Now, let me clarify from the get go that prayer is vital and that the Holy Spirit can/will lead us but the call must fall in line with the already explicit, clear call of God in the scriptures.

There is a biblical hermeneutic that instructs us to interpret unclear texts with the blatantly clear ones. So when I read James 2:24 “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” I may think that my works are necessary for my salvation. But what I should do is make sense of this verse in light of its context in James but also the entire Bible. I must put this one verse up against Romans 3:28-30, 4:5, 5:1, 9:30, 10:4, 11:6, Galatians 2:16, 2:21, 3:5-6, 3:24 and all the myriad of other verses that make it clear that through faith alone are we saved. So I then interpret the one confounding, cloudy verse in light of the many. The same is true for God’s call on our lives.

When I approach a foggy, unclear decision and situation I should definitely ask God for guidance. But I should not neglect the guidance and truth already given to me. We should rummage and scour the word of God to see clearly who God is, His gospel, what He has called his people to do and then think and pray through how my life story fits into His. But we normally skip this aspect and go straight for seeking this mystical feeling that will somehow lead me to the answer. This is the same process that I explained in the first paragraph, where my desire is to follow God as long as I can consume what hits the spot for the time being. Like  my mentor Todd Engstrom said, “Ask somebody to go on a mission trip overseas and they will need to take ample time to pray about it and wait for some fuzzy feeling, but ask them to go on vacation overseas and there will be no prayer needed to make that decision.” When comes to us actually serving and not consuming then we go to a feeling we have instead of the command from Jesus to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you…” and making our decisions in light of the already explicit call.

I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, and just like them I wonder where the power of God is in my life as we deny God’s explicit, revealed calling and embrace our reason, wisdom and feelings in the hope that it would produce what only God can. Radical, enduring joy!

Other great blog posts on calling

http://jdgreear.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/09/sendrdu.html

http://toddengstrom.com/2009/09/18/called-jd-greear/

North Africa: A Man Worthy of Imitation

I am taking a break from writing about my influences to reflect on my trip to North Africa. God’s workings in my soul while I was there were different from what I expected. I expected to be even more impassioned for the people who are blinded and oppressed by Islam, which did happen, but this was overshadowed by the leader there and the sin in every culture (which I will discuss in two different posts). The first was that God refreshed my faith and humbled me through an authentic friendship with one of the spiritual leaders of the underground church.

Humility
The leader and I instantly clicked and had many great conversations about ministry, leadership and how to best advance the kingship of Jesus to those who have yet to flourish under His reign. I learned so much from this man. God is doing unreal work through his ministry and nobody knows about it; but it has to be this way for the security of the underground believers and this only bothers him because he needs prayer support. He does not care about people knowing how successful God has made his ministry. He wants Jesus worshipped and people freed through the gospel, thats it. I know a lot of people who say that, myself included, but their lives don’t match that. We say we want Jesus exalted above all but we wouldn’t mind being a close second.

Leadership
God also reminded me that true leadership is not found in gifts or titles but is found in a character refined and satisfied in Jesus. When you first meet this man, you think this guy is goofy but then you slowly learn that he is a brilliant MD, leads a huge and impactful ministry, people willingly follow him and his life is on the line everyday; yet he listens to instruction from anyone, few people know the extent of his work with God, he constantly mocks himself and he serves silently. He is one of those guys who people naturally want to follow because his authority comes from his character shaped by God. Like Charles Spurgeon said to his students, “Our characters must be more persuasive than our speech.” His leadership is one that sustains because it depends solely on God and not popularity and status. I am not like this man but God has graciously brought him to this point and in the depths of who I am I know God is calling me to imitate this man’s affection and attitude towards God and His creation.

Rip Tide: Michael Maldanis

Rip Tide Series Intro

The next man on the list rivals my dad with his ability to relate to people. God has graced Michael (or Moldy or Moldyanus, a little gross but funny) with the ability to meet people where they are and make anyone feel welcome and comfortable with his presence. He started mentoring me and some close buddies of mine when we  were 18 and even though he was 10 years older than us, he never treated us as if he were superior to us in any way.  He was the first person to teach/propel me to follow Jesus. Most people up to that point in my life had taught me about God and faith but Moldy pushed me to go after God through Jesus on my own. In line with the old proverb, he did not catch my fish, only feeding me for a day; instead he taught me how to fish and fed me for the rest of my life.

Tell Me the Answer!
Moldy had assigned us a passage of scripture to read. We were supposed to read Philippians 3:7-11 and then discuss the next time we sat down together. As we went over the passage, we discussed what we had seen in the first couple of verses and even learned from Moldy that the word “rubbish” in verse 8 was a harsh greek word for dung. The bible sort of just cussed and we loved it. But as we went through the verses, all of us (me and my buddies) had no idea what to make of verses 10-11. It was confusing so we asked Moldy. His response was not what we were used to. He responded with, “what do you think?” To which we shot back, “I do not know, that is why I am asking you.” But he wouldn’t budge. He told us to go read it and think through it ourselves. I do not think he ever told us his take on the text and he did it in love. We left wondering and questioning its meaning because he was creating learners of Jesus, pursuers of the One who had saved us.

No One is Perfect
Throughout my time with Moldy, he never acted as if he had anything figured out even though, deep down I wanted him to be that way. He would always remind me of his inadequacy and that sin so easily enticed him in the same way it did me. He was no different than me, just a little further down the path. I did not want this at first. I wanted him to be superman and show me that one day, when I got older, I would have everything figured out like he did. But his honesty and humility before God proved to be the best medicine for my soul. I always felt accepted by him, never ostracized. So often when I get the opportunity to counsel someone through a difficult area in their life, I literally think about how Moldy used to deal with us because we always walked away closer to healing. We always walked away knowing that we were not alone in the sorrow and that was a great comfort.

Conclusion
All of us who were mentored by Moldy that summer look back on that time together as monumental in our walk with God. We had been told who God was all our lives but we had a man who was not afraid to leave us in limbo. A man who trusted that the Spirit of God inside of us would lead in our time of confusion. This time with Moldy impressed on my heart the necessity of giving people what they need for the season they are in. Sometimes people need to be taught the truths of God explicitly, sometimes people just need to be listened to, sometimes people just need to hang out and laugh, sometimes people need to know they are not alone and sometimes people need to be left wondering with more questions than answers. Mike did all these things for me and they will not easily be forgotten.

Rip Tide: John Piper

Rip Tide Series

This next man is probably the most popular of all my influences. John Piper is the pastor of preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis and his personal ministry spawned the free resources of Desiring God. God has used this man mightily to ignite a love and passion for Himself in the younger generation through two themes. First, that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him” and the whole counsel of God. Early in my faith in Jesus, no one influenced my theology and understanding of God more than this man.

God is the Gospel
“And this is eternal life, that they may know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent.”(John 17:3)
I read his book “Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ” when I first got to Texas State University-San Marcos and it was a breath of fresh air to my spirit. I thought God’s gift to me in Jesus was heaven and eternal life but what Piper showed me in the Bible was that God’s gift to me was himself! That the good news of Jesus Christ is that he saved me so that I could delight in him forever, not just gain heaven and lose hell. That our longings and desires were God given, not to be denied but rather satisfied and overwhelmed through knowing and experiencing God in Jesus Christ.

God of the Bible
“For I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.”(Acts 20:27)
My knowledge of the bible was anemic at best. The bible was definitely important but reserved for the pastors and scholars, not regular folk. On top of this, the church I grew up in had weak theology, but Piper showed me the great God of the whole Bible who was the untamable ruler of the universe. My world was flipped upside down by the texts where God made it clear that everything is for His glory (including my salvation), the authority of the Bible, that He was sovereign over everything, that He was the most happy being in the universe and that He chose me to be saved by his good pleasure. At first these things were difficult for me to accept because of my man-centered theology, but by the grace of God these truths have become a place of rest, fuel for worship, and ballast in my ship.

Passion
As great and bible saturated as his theology is, what ties it all together is his genuine delight and passion for God. He writes and speaks in a way that indicates he has been humbled and enamored by the God who loved him in the cross of Christ. (Click here for example) He reminds me of what I have already experienced, that obeying God is so much sweeter than anything else. I thank God for his ministry and I look forward to letting him know all that God did through his life for my benefit when we join together around the throne of Jesus.