Tag Archives: ministry

The Most Important Sermon on Ministry That I Have Ever Heard

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I know I am supposed to be taking a break. But today I have listened to a sermon by Russ Moore that I first heard in college. I listened to it several times then and it had a profound, humbling impact on me.  I consider it the most important sermon on ministry that I have ever heard. Yes. Not one of the most important– but the most important I have ever heard.

Listening to it today has gripped me again. It is shocking. Several times I had to stop, put my ear closer to the speaker, and turn up the volume. I hope to come back to the sermon regularly and I pray that the Lord use its truth to continue to humble me.

I beg you to go hear it. Please, listen to this sermon and may the Lord do what seems good to Him.

The Kingdom of God in the Wal-Mart Break Room: Poverty, Partiality, and the Perils of a Gentrified Christianity

Partnership in the Gospel

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“I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.”
(Philippians 1:3-7 ESV)

Paul’s affection for the Philippians is rooted in their gospel partnership, which he also expresses by saying, “you are all partakers with me of grace.” This partaking is deep and intense. It is a partnership that persevered both in Paul’s high points of defending the gospel, and in the pits of his seemingly hopeless imprisonment.

Partnering in gospel ministry means mutual partaking of grace, despite the circumstances. May God grace us with such partners for the sake of Christ.

What Am I Doing Here?

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Am I really in this thing for me?

What a question to ask as a Christian Hedonist. The answer is “of course!”, right? I am in this for me because God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him. Careful, careful.

Don’t misuse CH to shirk the question that we should ask ourselves regularly. Am I in this thing– this gospel community, this ministry, this training– am I really in this thing for me? Is this about me? Me, me, me?

I want the very thought of such a possibility to send chills down my spine. Moreover, I want the evidences of such defilement in my heart to send me to my face in prayer, asking God to slit my throat before it would become a reality. Yes, slit my throat. Put me down. Prayers interrupted with thoughts about research and papers and publication and books and Phds are enough distemper to make me nearly pull my hair out. I want no part of that. None.

And I don’t want the “it’s all about Jesus” flag to be in theory only. How can I practically live in decrease so that Christ may increase? How can I get the heck out of the way? Much heart work is needed. Oh, damn the subtlety of wanting my own name to be known (in the name of making Jesus known)!

Brothers, we cannot live any other way. Let us put this out there, from our souls to the Lord. If this is about us then let us get out of this thing now. Now. And Jesus, you must come and do something. Please! The last thing the church and the world needs is another gospel minister made up of the things I see in my own heart.

We Should Beware: Radical Love for Jesus Does Not Create Snobs

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We should beware–in the  name of ‘not wasting our lives,’ we could become  self-righteous and sadly uncharitable. We should beware of the wartime-lifestyle-go-to-the-hard-places-snobbery that thinks ministering in places vacant of gang graffitti and homeless people is somehow second rate. I believe in ministry of a radical flavor–holding our lives cheap, seeking that city which is to come, going to the places nobody else wants to go, heralding the surpassing worth of Jesus above all things. Amen. We should do this. And at the same time, we should understand that it takes more than a zip code to actualize this kind of ministry. And if we aren’t  careful, we’ll create this false picture of how it looks and we’ll form these nonspoken leagues–one Major and another Minor–there are superstars and rookie wannabees… ‘those guys go there and these guys come here.’ And this is wrong.

We should remember that the gospel is needed everywhere. This doesn’t mean that we just go anywhere. Be strategic. Seek the Lord. But never forget that the folks down at the hardware store where ‘everybody knows your name’ and the prostitute in New Orleans who sells her body for crack have one thing in common–they both need the gospel. The wrath-bearing death of Jesus Christ on the cross is their only hope, period. And God would say that same thing of Mayberry that he would say of Los Angelos–”I have many in this city who are my people.” He sends servants to both to go and stay, and we should be thankful for that.

So let us not be weak and pass judgment on our brothers by the neighborhoods in which they serve. Each of us will give an account of himself to God. Instead, let us be grateful and pray for our brothers. Pray for radical ministry for these whom God has sent and is sending everywhere… and let us go to the hard places with all that in mind.

Prayer and Study: What Are We Preparing For?

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Among all the influences which go to make up a man honoured of God in the ministry, I know of none more mighty than his own familiarity with the mercy-seat. All that a college course can do for a student is coarse and external compared with the spiritual and delicate refinement obtained by communion with God. While the unformed minister is revolving upon the wheel of preparation, prayer is the tool of the great potter by which he moulds the vessel. All our libraries and studies are mere emptiness compared with our closets. We grow, we wax mighty, we prevail in private-prayer.

Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to my Students, 43

I don’t care how well we may learn to arc or diagram Greek sentences. We may memorize every ecumenical creed there is and recite Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections by heart, but if we’re not praying now than we’re not being prepared for ministry. We are preparing for something else, but not ministry–not God’s mission in the world, not a task so huge that we tremble at the thought of our utter inadequacy.

Brothers, we should pray before, during, and after we study.

Actually, Mission Fueled By Eschatology is Best

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I don’t meant to say that we should see Acts 1:6-7 as separate from v. 8. Luke is not saying that Jesus is changing the subject. In fact, mission has everything to with eschatology. Mission is wrapped up with ‘where we are.’

Moreover, the theme of witnesses in the Book of Acts has a connection to the messianic mission in Isaiah 55:1-4. The mission of Jesus is continued by Jesus’ people. And that mission has everything to do the final picture. Isaiah 65:17-25 doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

121 Church in Winston-Salem

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We got to worship Jesus with 121 Church in downtown Winston-Salem, NC this morning. It’s been great to tag along with Stephen Wagoner and get a closer look into the life of a church planter. 

They let me preach James 4:1-5. I meant for this to be one of the mot important things I said…

The degree of God’s jealousy for us is not measured by the extent of our value, but by how much He is infinitely better than all the stuff that we worship in His place.

A Robust Theology and Gratitude for Inverted Warts that Are Not Cancer

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The pastor opened the floor for a season of testimonies.

I had finished my sermon where I yearned to highlight the glory of God in His superiority over all the good things He gives us. God is infinitely better than His gifts. I’ve said something like that every chance I’ve had to share in this ‘christian culture.’ Mainly because I feel that it is good news that needs to be heard among a people that make such a big deal about God’s ‘blessings.’ Mainly because it was a eureka experience for me when I read Piper and he said that. Primarily because it is so amazingly true–life-changingly true, paradigm-shatteringly true.

So we all sat there waiting for the first person to stand and give testimony to God’s greatness. I admit that I hoped to see some effect from my sermon on the people. I was hoping for a word of gratitude for God’s covenant faithfulness that culminated in Jesus on the cross. Perhaps a word on the gift of the Spirit to set our eyes on Jesus as we hope for the eschaton. Maybe even a quote from Anselm, some type of doxology that grows from the ontological argument– something like God is greater than that which can ever be imagined.

I was waiting for that, hoping for that. Only two people stood up to speak. The first was a sweet senior lady. She thanked God for a spider bite that did not go as bad as it could have. She thanked the church for their prayers and for God’s guidance to prompt the request for prayer. The next lady stood with an array of gratitude. The one that stood out the most was her sincere thanks to God that the spot on her foot was just an “ole inverted wart” and not cancer. She sat down and the service drew to a close.

I felt a little baffled–I was happy and sincerely thankful and also kind of disappointed at the same time. Writing about it now is helping me. I think I wanted to hear something lofty and way up in the sky. I expected something deeply theological. These people just spoke from where they live. They live with spiders and warts and neighbors with problems and everything else that dummies like me forget about when I have my head stuck in a book on the canonical-linguistic approach to Christian theology.

They did something that too many of us actually cannot do. They were not loving God’s gifts more than God. They were seeing God in the mundane. They can see His hand in the details of life that we are too embarrassed to mention. They credit His power in realms of day to day life that we Christian Hedonists can find cute but not really praiseworthy. I want to punch myself in the mouth. Everything they said was theological! More theological than this fatheaded ‘young theologian’ could dream of! I want to see God there, too!

Father, please make us to see You there, too. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Andrew Walls on Change in the ‘World Christian Movement’

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In the final essay of his book, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, Andrew Walls discusses the shift of the world Christian movement to the southern continents and its mission implications. Things are changing. Walls writes:

The territorial “from-to” idea that underlay the older missionary movement has to give way to a concept much more like that of Christians within the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries: parallel presences in different circles and at different levels, each seeking to penetrate within and beyond its circle (258-9).

Societies and boards that trace their roots back to William Carey and 1792 must admit that things are different now. The one-way traffic of sending and giving needs to become two-way traffic of fellowship, sharing, and receiving within the global church. It is the work of God that the church of the global south, economically poorer and less educated, is doing more for the gospel reaching the nations than we are in the West. This is not an indictment, this is cause for celebration. Let us celebrate the work of God and embrace our role not as the model, but as servants of Christ and of our brethren around the world.

The task of world evangelization that formed the declared programme of the missionary movement is not over; it never is. The essentially missionary nature of the church, the essentially missionary calling of the Christian, is where be began; and perhaps the twentieth-century fading of territorial Christianity enables us to see better that recession is as much a part of Christian history as expansion, part of the vulnerability, perhaps, of the means God has ordained to make the human witness to Christ… What is changing is not the task, but the means and the mode (261, emphasis mine).