The Bipolar Life of Ministry

"To identify with Paul's experience we do not need to be shipwrecked or imprisoned or lowered in a basket from a city wall. Even without the physical dangers of Paul's career, anyone who throws himself into the work of Christian ministry of any kind with half the dedication of Paul will experience the weakness of which Paul speaks: the times when problems seem insoluble, the times of weariness from sheer overwork, the times of depression when there seem to be no results, the emotional exhaustion which pastoral concern can bring on - in short, all the times when the Christian minister or worker knows he has stretched to the limits of his capacities for a task which is very nearly, but by God's grace not quite, too much for him. Anyone who knows only his strength, not his weakness, has never given himself to a task which demands all he can give. There is no avoiding this weakness, and we should learn to suspect those models of human life which try to avoid it. We should not be taken in by the ideal of the charismatic superman for whom the Holy Spirit is a constant source of superhuman strength. Nor should we fall for the ideal of the modern secular superman: the man who organizes his whole life with the object of maintaining his own physical and mental well-being, who keeps up the impression of strength because he keeps his life well within the limits of what he can easily cope with. Such a man is never weak because he is never affected, concerned, involved or committed beyond a cautiously safe limit. That was neither Jesus' ideal of life nor Paul's. To be controlled by the love of Christ means inevitably to reach the limits of one's abilities and experience weakness."

- Richard Bauckham, Weakness - Paul's and Ours  

What Punishments of God are not Gifts?

This from a GQ interview.  Stephen Colbert describes the plane crash that suddenly killed his father and brother when he was 10 years old.

 “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that’s why. Maybe, I don’t know. That might be why you don’t see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It’s that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”…

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I’m grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.”

Sin, Righteousness, and Judgment

Within the churches are those who defend the historic Christian teaching on sexuality.  It is assumed that there will always be some discernible dissonance between the Church and the world and that part of the mission of the Holy Spirit through the Church is, as Jesus says in John 16, to “tell the world that it is wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.” 

On the other side are those who reject the historic Christian teaching and who seem to believe that the world, as represented by its most self-consciously progressive institutions and thinkers, is ahead of the Church in ushering in the Kingdom of God. Indeed, that the world is right in telling the Church that it is wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement. They say that God is doing a new thing. But they seem unable to imagine that God might say ‘no’ to any new thing done in the world in the name of progress. There seems to be no room on the part of the revisionists for any truly prophetic word to be spoken to the world’s claims about love and justice.

-Ken Myers

A Helpful Explanation

“We objectify everything and begin to think of our bodies as an achievement… We see the body as a problem, as a hindrance to spiritual life – in order to get to the true self, who we really are, we have to somehow control the body and make it do what we want it to do.  In that way we will finally be who we’re ‘supposed to be’,  ‘who we are’.  Previously secular women have a lot of interest in spirituality.  And what drives this is the idea that spirituality is a way to find your ‘true, inner self’ as seen in opposition to your ‘bodily self’.  In other words, we want to escape the body and the limitations of our bodies by becoming spiritual in a disembodied spirituality.  This comes from Descartes’s mind/body opposition.  What happens when you do that is everything done immediately through the body – your eating, your work, your sexuality - becomes meaningless.  So you can do anything you want to, sexually, or through surgery, or manipulation of any kind that you want.  These things are considered acceptable because you’re just trying to get down to ‘who you really are’ your ‘inner self’.  Now, we are more than our bodies, but we are our bodies.  And we need to think of ourselves and other people holistically – not think, ‘Well, there’s somebody in there who really is who you really are’.  In the Christian paradigm, this is how our faith is supposed to be lived out.”

Lillian Calles Barger, author of Eve’s Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body and President of the Damaris Project

Zeitgeist as Fog not Wind

"We live in an age that keeps authoritative institutions, philosophies, and religions at arm's length, mixing and matching and analyzing them with a market-place mentality.

There is a fear of change, but who wouldn't be afraid of change?  St Augustine in The Confessions is a freshman in college and reads this book by Cicero that is a call to pursue wisdom for its own sake, so he says it changes his life and he goes after wisdom, but at the moment of his conversion, he looks back on the previous ten or twelve years and, although he set off to pursue wisdom, he realized that nothing really changed, because he didn't really want to be different.

It's scary.  Our habits whisper in our ear and tell us that without them we wouldn't be who we really are.  And Augustine says that in the end that's right.  We wouldn't be who we are.  Part of the genius of The Confessions is to affirm that the journey of faith really is a death to self; it is a really disjunctive and wrenching kind of transformation.  Who wouldn't be frightful in the face of that?"

R.R. Reno, author of "In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminishing Christianity"

Marriage Gospel

"Half of our marriages end in divorce." No they do not. The real numbers are in and it seems that little more than half of half end in divorce.

As a homeschool dad, I often refer to the “smell test” when reviewing math assignments with my sons.  ‘Okay, if you multiply a big number by another big number, the answer is not going to be a small number, right?’

Well, perhaps we can do the same here.  How many married people do you know?  Okay, now how many divorced?  This is a difficult thing to get our minds around, but try.  Think about the sheer staggering number of married adults you know.  It is far easier to list the unmarried adults than the married.  Now think about the divorces.  Do they even begin to approach half?

Jeff and Shaunti Feldhahn are Christian marriage counselors, popular conference speakers, and family enrichment authors.  This month Shaunti released The Good News About Marriage reporting the findings of an 8-year research project reviewing the statistical data on marriage and divorce in America.  Her conclusions are shattering many of our most common conjugal clichés. 

Among her more noteworthy findings were:

-          The divorce rate in America has never even been close to half.  While the actual divorce rate is impossible to establish, [the Census Bureau stopped trying in 1996] realistic estimates put the societal divorce rate as low as 27% with almost every source reporting a decline in divorces for the last 30 years!

One of the Many Lies Surrounding Divorce in America ...

Golden Career Advice from an "Expert" that Applies to the Church [& why YOU are in Charge of How You Feel!]

QUESTION:

Hey Mike! I’ve spent this last year trying to figure out the right career for myself and I still can’t figure out what to do. I have always been a hands on kind of guy and a go-getter. I could never be an office worker. ...I like trying pretty much everything, but get bored very easily. I want a career that will always keep me happy, but can allow me to have a family and get some time to travel.... Thank you!

- Parker Hall

MIKE’S ANSWER:

Hi Parker,

My first thought is that you should learn to weld and move to North Dakota. The opportunities are enormous, and as a “hands-on go-getter,” you’re qualified for the work. But after reading your post a second time, it occurs to me that your qualifications are not the reason you can’t find the career you want.

...

Consider your own words. You don’t want a career – you want the “right” career. You need “excitement” and “adventure,” but not at the expense of stability. You want lots of “change” and the “freedom to travel,” but you need the certainty of “steady pay.” You talk about being “easily bored” as though boredom is out of your control. It isn’t. Boredom is a choice. Like tardiness. Or interrupting. It’s one thing to “love the outdoors,” but you take it a step further. You vow to “never” take an office job. You talk about the needs of your family, even though that family doesn’t exist. And finally, you say the career you describe must “always” make you “happy.”

Book List [what I've been reading lately] ... 4 biographies

Since It's been ages since I've posted one of these ... I did recently just finish this latest set of 4.
You are what your mind eats ...

Lewis's Other Trilemma

"This is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what he has, not what he has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not.  To be God or to be like God and share his goodness in response to his blessings or to be miserable; these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows- the only food that any possible universe ever can grow- then we must starve eternally... 

Law said “If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead.” Those are hard words to take. Will it really make no difference whether it was women or patriotism, cocaine or art, whisky or a seat in the Cabinet, money or science? Well, surely no difference that matters. We shall have missed the end for which we are formed and rejected the only thing that satisfies. Does it matter to a man dying in a desert by which choice of route he missed the only well?" 

- C S Lewis

from The Problem of Pain and A Slip of the Tongue

2014 Resolutions

1. Listen to all of Bach's Church Cantatas
2. Complete reading requirements and registration process for Biblical Counseling Certification
3. Begin Master's Coursework
4. Complete either: 1-armed pullup; BP of 225x12; or 300x1
...
5.  No library fines [cough, avert eyes, awkward clearing of throat ...]

Qualifications of a Pastor

"Qualifications of a pastor: 

the mind of a scholar, 
the heart of a child, 
and the hide of a rhinoceros."

- Stuart Briscoe

"Be the change..." Another Counseling Nugget

"Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible." 

-- St. Augustine

Managing Pain - thoughts for counselors

Dan Ariely on the results of his pain management research.  How might these principles be applied by pastors and Biblical counselors in discipline cases as we think through the "how" of repentance and make plans to move forward while attempting to imitate our Lord Who would not break the bruised reed?

Counseling Principles of the Early Church Fathers ...

"People are the authors of their own tribulations."

 - Ambrose

Preaching like Augustine

The 3 Goals of Augustinian Preaching are to:

1. Teach
2. Delight
3. Persuade

St. Augustine quotes Cicero as saying, “to teach is a necessity, to delight is a beauty, to persuade is a triumph.”

What ever happened to Promise Keepers?

"Men relate shoulder-to-shoulder with a common quest/vision/passion/etc.  Women sit face-to-face [romantically relating].  Try to make relationships happen to men when the relationship is the end and it is not going to last.  It's just not going to last.  There needs to be principles/Scriptures/a mission/a project/something there.  Because they bond deeply when they have a common passion.  I think forcing the relational thing as a constant getting together to talk about your relationship will abort eventually."

-John Piper

תהום tĕhowm: [n] "the deep; primeval ocean; abyss"

This week, while preparing a sermon for Mark 6.45-56 in which our Lord walks on the water of the sea in a wind storm, I came across this quote, which struck me as a timely reminder:

"[Columbus's] sailors imagined all manner of sea creatures and sundry monsters of mythic proportions.  They fathomed horrors out of the deep recesses of their own souls - where indeed the fiercest horrors do dwell."

- George Grant, The Christian Almanac for August 3rd

Managing Oneself

Managing Oneself

by Peter R Drucker ,  HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, JAN 2005 [abridged]

Most of us will have to learn to manage ourselves and develop ourselves. We will have to place ourselves where we can make the greatest contribution staying mentally alert and engaged during a 50-year working life, which means knowing how and when to change the work we do.

What Are My Strengths?

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at – though more are wrong than right. Yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. 9 or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations. I have been practicing this method for 15 - 20 years now, and every time I’m surprised.

Practiced consistently, this will show you within 2 - 3 years, where your strengths lie - and this is the most important thing to know. It will show you what you are doing or failing to do that deprives you of the full benefits of your strengths, where you are not particularly competent, and where you have no strengths or ability to perform.

#1:  Most importantly, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.

#2: Improve your strengths. Analysis will rapidly show where you need to improve skills or acquire new ones. It will also show gaps in your knowledge.

#3: Discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it. Far too many people - especially people with great expertise in one area - are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge.  Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.

Your bad habits - what you do or fail to do that inhibits your effectiveness and performance - will quickly show up in the feedback - problems like a lack of manners. Manners are the lubricating oil of an organization – simply saying "please" and "thank you", knowing people’s names, or keeping up with family news - enables two people to work together whether they like each other or not. Bright people, especially bright young people, often do not understand this.

Comparing your expectations with your results also indicates what not to do. We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre.

One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence.

It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from 1st-rate performance to excellence.

Yet most people, teachers, and organizations concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer.

Leah in the Morning

“In the morning it is always Leah, never Rachel.”

-Tim Keller, Counterfeit gods
[using the Biblical allusion of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel to illustrate the utter disappointment that always follows the frenzied pursuit of fulfillment in sex, money, or power.]