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For Those Who Have Fire In Their Bones

Posted in Christian Missions, Other, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 30, 2010| Leave a Comment »

You are not the preacher. You are not the head of anything at church. But you have a great ministry just started, or a great ministry idea that you would like to see get traction and grow.  What do you do now? Here are a few tips from our experience of trying to get Let’s Start Talking established in lots of churches. This is what we have learned from watching people enthusiastic about short-term missions try to work with their home congregation.

  1. Don’t even start unless you are committed to doing whatever it takes to succeed yourself! Lots of people want to start things for other people to do. Just forget it! You should be able to accomplish the ministry yourself—at some level—or you will never get others to buy into it. For LST, this means that if you are not willing to go, you will not be successful in getting other people to go.
  2. Try to get the blessing of church leadership from the very beginning. If the preacher and/or church leaders are opposed to your ministry idea, it is not likely to survive. It might possibly survive if they are indifferent, but the chances are much better if you have their blessing.  Notice, I said blessing, not commitment. See below!
  3. Do not expect to get leadership commitment to your ministry until you have proven that it will be successful! LST actually made this mistake in our Centurion project which launched about three years ago. We asked churches to commit to a goal of sending 100 workers with LST over a five-year period—with no financial commitment whatsoever.  Although a few churches committed, we were absolutely shocked at how resistant most churches were to making any kind of a commitment at all.  We have since modified our approach, so that we only ask for permission to test run LST in their congregation to see if their members have a good experience with it.  Church leaders are much more open to us with this approach.
  4. Don’t reinvent the wheel! Join with established ministries who have proven track records and who can help jumpstart your ministry. So you think your teens should do mission trips to learn to share their faith! Rather than asking your youth minister or some parents to plan and organize such a trip, why not ask a ministry like LST YoungFriends to help you, since we have been planning short-term missions, including special ones for teen groups, for thirty years! If you want to start something for the poor, why not contact existing ministries and partner with them–or after-school programs, or abused women, or English As A Second Language outreach??
  5. Be spiritually prepared to be ignored. If I were a church leader and if I knew what kind of transformation happens to every person who spends two weeks on an LST project, I would do everything in my power to make it possible for every person in the church I was leading to participate—there, I said it as boldly and honestly as I can.  However, the fact is that a very small percentage of Christians really want to engage their faith as actively as most ministries require. If you, as the promoter of your ministry, let the massive indifference discourage you, then you are defeated! You must be willing to do your work without recognition, without popularity, and without any other reward than the smile of the Father!  If you need more than this, you will give up!
  6. God has His own schedule for growth! I love flowers—Sherrylee calls them annuals and perennials and I have a vague idea what that means. But I really love flowering trees. I love the blooms on our fruit trees, I love the beautiful white flowers of the Bradford pear trees, and I really love the Oklahoma redbuds!! The time from seed to bloom is very different for these plants. In reality, only God knows the proper time and season for your ministry to bloom. You can choose to acknowledge God’s sovereignty here—or you can try to set your own schedule. Occasionally, we may be able to hothouse something into rapid growth—but these efforts are rarely long-lived. I recommend you let God be in control.
  7. If you are called by God to a ministry, you will never be truly happy until you are answering the call—so get on with it!  I love the story of Jeremiah, called by God to be a prophet to the nations, who yells at God and says, “You deceived me! I did what you called me to do and I’m having a terrible time! In fact, I’ve tried to quit several times . . . but I couldn’t because your word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones–and I can’t keep it in.” (Jer. 20:7-9)

One of the biggest problems ministries have is surviving the exhilarating start-up phase.  I’ll give you some suggestions about that in the next post.

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What Does God Think About Fund Raising?

Posted in Christian Missions, Other, Short-Term Missions, tagged , , , , , , , on September 28, 2010| 4 Comments »

Consider the lilies of the field!

Just one month ago, Let’s Start Talking began our annual general fundraising drive.  We had approximately five weeks left in our fiscal year and were $135,000 short of our 2010 budget projections for fund raising—a very serious amount for LST.

We had a multi-pronged approach for reaching our fundraising goals: We all committed to prayerfully ask God; Sherrylee committed to calling all general donors (not worker donors) from the last two years; the staff committed to calling all our former LST workers who had been out of college at least five years, and we would ask the guests attending our Harvest Call Benefit Dinner on September 25th in Fort Worth to give. Our need/goal  was much greater than we had every even dreamed of attempting before.

By God’s grace and mercy, I’m happy to say that we received enough donations to cover the entire ministry shortfall!  I’d like to share with you, not how-to’s, but lessons remembered and learned in this month of intense fund raising!

  • God is rich! He has all the money in the world. If we look at money has something that belongs to us, then we should worry about the hard economic times many of our supporters are facing! If we understand that God is the Creator and Donor of everything we receive, then we and the people we ask for funds are just caretakers/managers/temporary users of His things!  And He is not short of funds!
  • God is grace-full! The core idea in the word grace is that of a gift!  When we ask people for gifts, we are asking for grace. If they give us a gift, they extend grace to us. If God is the First Donor of every good gift (James 1:17), then His generosity is the same as His graciousness—and He is rich in grace (Ephesians 2:7), full of grace (John 1:14), there is no end to His generosity!
  • Asking is part of God’s plan. I know we hate to ask, but this must be our problem because over and over, God has told us to ask!  Listen to these explicit instructions from God:

“If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” Matthew 21:22

“Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.” John 16:24

“We have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him”. 1 John 3:21-22.

Maybe our problem is that we have gotten into the habit of asking for ourselves.

“When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” (James 4:3)

  • Offering others an opportunity to be blessed is a wonderful act of Christian love! Donating is a special opportunity to receive God’s blessing, if we really believe  Jesus’ words, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35)

A Choice Between Fear and Confidence!

The economy is poor, everyone’s budget is tight, our home church just launched a huge capital campaign, the economic future is unpredictable—these are all good reasons to fear asking Christians for special gifts to meet big goals.

God is rich, God is generous, and God is good—these are all better reasons for not being afraid to ask Christians for special gifts to meet big goals.

The last month of asking for LST and the astounding goodness of God in fulfilling all of His generous promises has confirmed for me again that fear is a sin, not a choice.

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A Personal History of Let’s Start Talking, Pt. 2: Discovery and Genesis

Posted in A Personal History of Let's Start Talking, Other, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Project Germany team in Woodward home for training (Fall 1979)

I’ve heard Sherrylee tell the story many times of how I was sitting in the bathtub and had the ideas that became the core of the LST philosophy, but I think that is creative memory—mainly because I am a shower person, not a bath person! Here’s my version of the genesis of LST’s core philosophy.

Sometime before we left Germany in April 1979, I read a short article from Glen Jones, missionary in Kiel, Germany, about the power of the Word itself based on John 20:31:

“But these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

I asked myself if I really believed this to be true! And I didn’t know the answer because my experience was all about teaching people what the Word meant, explaining, clarifying, and supplying the missing historical, linguistic, or logical information that they needed to really come to faith.

Even if we believed that the Word was powerful, how were we ever going to get German skeptics to read the Word? With the exception of a few true Seekers, we knew that the masses were not open at all to reading the Word!

This was then the moment that God put all the pieces together! What could we offer the Germans that they really wanted? We could not count the times while living in Germany that people had sought us out to practice their English or to help them translate something important to them from English to German. So what if we offer to help them with their English language skills??

The question that every service ministry faces, however, is how to move from loving service to the Gospel story that produces faith! (This is such a difficult question for many ministries that they simply avoid answering it, sometimes even rationalizing the need for that bridge to faith-sharing as unnecessary. I think that is rowing with only one oar—but that’s a topic for another time!)

Sherrylee and I talked a lot and decided in the fall of 1980 to try something completely new—at least we knew of no one else doing anything similar at all. We decided to recruit a team of college students to go to Germany with us for eight weeks. Instead of moving from city to city in short campaigns, they would stay in one place to enable them to develop stronger relationships with the people they would be talking with.  They would be a small group (4-6 people) rather than a large group, so that they could function more as a “family” rather than as a tour group and so they would not be such a burden on the small German churches that they would be working with.

Members of LST First Team: Valerie Kinnell and Chip Kooi

But the riskiest part of this experiment was that we were going to ask the German church to advertise free English conversation classes and see if anyone would respond. It was very important to us not to trick people into using the Bible, so we had people respond to the advertising by calling a member of the local church who was instructed to always tell them that this group would be using the Bible as the textbook for these conversations.  That’s where we had no idea how Germans would respond!!

In the fall of 1980, Sherrylee and I recruited ten students from Oklahoma Christian, several of whom had been a part of the Project Germany group that we had led under Ralph Burcham the previous summer. We meet with these ten students weekly throughout the school year, sharing our experiences and knowledge about the German culture and training them to open the Word and release its power in a relational and non-confrontational way.

One team worked in Braunschweig with the Gemeinde Christi and the other worked in Bremen, Germany, both German churches that Sherrylee and I knew well. The teams lived independently, cooked for themselves, rode public transportation, and made their own schedules—all of which was pretty new strategy for campaign groups at this time.

The first signs that God was doing something new and wonderful were that there was an amazing response to the advertising and many, many people called, seeking help with their English.  The next amazing discovery was that most of them expressed surprise that they were going to be using the Bible as the conversation guide, in fact, they always asked why; nevertheless, most of the people agreed to register for the program in spite of their skepticism!

At first our workers tried to just open their Bibles to Luke’s Gospel as the conversation guide, but this really put many of their early Readers (our new term for the people who participated with us!) off, so we decided to cut sections out of Luke and make a little worksheet  with a few little exercises for them each time they came—and this made all the difference! They had no problem reading the same biblical texts if they were part of a workbook of some kind.

But would this be an effective strategy? The most common opening statement by every person who came that first year was, “Thank you for offering to help me with my English, but I want you to know that I do not believe that anything in the Bible is true! Is that OK?” That’s when we learned how important it was to serve them unconditionally by helping them with their English, forcing us to believe even stronger that the Word was powerful enough to break through this unbelief!

LST First Team Members Galen and Larale Rawlins (1981)

At the end of this first summer, we came back to the States and told our friends who had sent us that we had seen a miracle! We had seen skeptical Germans read the Bible every day for weeks with our students. The numbers had grown as the summer progressed, not diminished—which we did not expect—because the Germans loved their experience.  They even asked who would continue the program after the Americans left, so we were able to introduce them quite naturally to the local American missionaries.

But the real miracle was that some of those same people whose opening sentences were so defensive and skeptical had been touched by the living Word. Now at the close of the first year, in answer to our prayers, the most common summary of their experience that we heard was “I came only wanting to know English, but I got so much more. Now I also know Jesus!” And a few added, “And I believe!”

They had been changed, and we were changed—and Let’s Start Talking was birthed—although we didn’t know it.

Next:  The 1980s — Genesis Expanded!

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A Personal History of Let’s Start Talking Ministries, Part 1: The Idea

Posted in A Personal History of Let's Start Talking, Other, Uncategorized on September 16, 2010| 1 Comment »

This is Let’s Start Talking’s 30th Anniversary, which we are celebrating September 25th at our Harvest Call Dinner in Fort Worth. I thought it might be fun to write a brief history of the ministry to this point. Look for a new installment each day until the 25th.

Mark Woodward with other German missionaries ca. 1976

I’m pretty sure someone has used the teaching of English in order to tell the Gospel story since St. Patrick returned to Ireland as a missionary in the second half of the fifth century. The first time I encountered this ancient idea, however,  was during the summer of 1966, when I was doing evangelistic work in New Jersey with Campaigns Northeast.  I remember distinctly talking to an older woman with Eastern European heritage who told us that she had converted to the Jehovah Witness faith after they taught her English using their version of the New Testament.

After graduating from Harding University in 1969 and already committed to leave for Germany with a mission team two years later, I accepted an interim employment offer from the Oxford Church of Christ to be what was called then a campus evangelist. They could not pay a full-time salary, so they offered to pay tuition for graduate school at Ole Miss. I started a program in Psychology, thinking that counseling skills would serve me best in our mission plans. After one semester, however, I realized that this program was all about rats and not people, so I switched to one of my college minors—English. My thinking at the time was that with this degree I would be able to teach English in a foreign country if I ever wanted to do vocational missions, so I finished my Masters degree in English there shortly after Sherrylee and I married in 1971. It’s amazing the way God moves us through life, isn’t it!

In 1971, Sherrylee and I left with a mission team to work in Germany as missionaries. We were always searching for some way to open new doors to faith for a people who had been inoculated so long with an impersonal form of Christianity that they were pretty immune to personal faith. I heard about a group of Christians in New York City who were offering to help foreign businessmen improve their English and were using biblical texts as conversation pieces.  I actually sent off for a sample of their material, but we never used it.  The time was not ripe—yet!

In our eighth year in Germany, we initiated an exciting project to start a Christian international school in Stuttgart. Almost a year had been spent in the scouting, planning, and searching for a facility. In February 1979, I even made a quick trip to the states to recruit teachers to begin in the fall. But in March, all of the start-up funding—including our salary—disappeared with one phone call.  Suddenly, we found ourselves in Germany with three children, no income at all—and no clear path as to what to do next.

We literally had to sell most all of our missionary family belongings to purchase plane tickets back to the states, where we moved in with relatives and sought God’s will. In pretty severe shock at having been torn from our home in Germany–a place and a work that we loved dearly–we looked for any kind of ministry position anywhere in the country. Slowly opportunities started appearing, but something just wasn’t right—but one day God blessed us with nothing short of an epiphany.

I don’t have a vision of the seventh heaven to tell you about, but what I do know is that on a very specific day, both of us came to the firm conclusion that we had been called to be missionaries—and that nothing had changed about the call—so we were only going to look for jobs that would allow us to continue being missionaries—and to Germany, if possible. Well, that vision shortened the list of potential employers considerably, which actually made all of our decisions much easier.

As Providence would direct, Oklahoma Christian University had a one-year, temporary job opening for an English instructor. We knew that teachers have summer’s free to do missions; we knew that Ralph Burcham, an OC professor had been bringing students to Germany for several years on campaigns, and we knew that the 12th and Drexel  Church of Christ had supported the work in Germany heavily over the years, so we jumped at the opportunity, interviewed for the job, and was hired for the one-year position—one year that turned into twenty-four!

Honestly, I can hardly describe the emotions we had during that first year in Oklahoma. We were so happy for the job, but we could not imagine why God had put us in Oklahoma! We were missionaries. The churches were large and did not need us; the friends we made were wonderful, but did not understand us. And we did not understand what we were supposed to do.

But we knew we were missionaries, so we volunteered during the first semester there as sponsors to go with Project Germany the summer of 1980. These groups did traditional campaigns, passing out invitations to preaching services and some street singing. We did, however, try out one new idea:  we offered to help people practice their English, if they would come to the church building one hour before the preaching started.  Our idea was to get them in the building, hoping they would stay and hear the preaching in German.

But the response to even this very limited and ill-prepared offer of English was surprisingly strong, so strong that I came home that summer thinking that God is working here somehow. I promised myself to pray and search for a better understanding of what He was trying to show us.

Tomorrow:  1980/81 – The First Team and the Discovery of LST

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Do You Really Want To Be Humble?

Posted in Bible Study, Christian Culture, Other, tagged , , , , , on September 14, 2010| 2 Comments »

Twice in the last few days, I’ve heard star athletes described as humble. The Dallas Cowboys just signed Miles Austin to a six-year multi-million dollar contract, and when asked what made Austin—who has really only had a partial break-out year—special, the notorious Jerry Jones, owner and general manager of the Cowboys (and head coach), used the word humble over and over again.

Then this morning, I heard Coach K (Mike Krzyzewski ) talking about Kevin Durant, a third-year NBA player, and he used these very words: “he is pure; he’s humble.” Kevin Durant has just led the USA men’s basketball team to its first world championship since 1994 and was voted MVP for the tournament.

Is humble a trait that superstars  are supposed to have? Is humble something you can learn in the minor leagues or in college?  Is humble found in the gym or on the practice field?  What makes humble important enough for it to be an important description for outstanding athletes—or outstanding people, for that matter.

One of the strangest verses in the Old Testament raises for me the same question. In the context of a fairly mundane case of jealousy between Moses and his siblings Miriam and Aaron, the biblical writer makes a parenthetical statement: “Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. (Numbers 12:3).  There it is again!

Don’t forget who Moses was and what he had done! He was raised as a prince of Egypt. As a young man, he killed an Egyptian overseer in defending his people. Later he drove off a whole group of bully shepherds from the well in Midian. Forty years later, he returns to Egypt, challenges Pharaoh over and over again to his face, then leads hundreds of thousands or more people out of Egypt.

In the face of certain destruction, he walks them through the Red Sea. Then days later, he explodes in fury at their whiny rebelliousness in the wilderness as well as their flagrant relapse into idolatry at Sinai. These same former slaves Moses leads into armed conflict.  This is no humble guy! This is Rambo!

In our culture that values and promotes assertiveness, self-sufficiency, self-confidence, self-esteem, self-promotion—SELF–what do we do with these New Testament exhortations to humbleness?

Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. (Ephesians 5:2)

Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble. (1 Peter 3:8)

And especially listen to the words from Jesus:

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11:29)

Here are just a few concrete suggestions for teaching ourselves and our children to be humble:

  • Learn to respect every person—every person—as equally important to God as you are! We do lip service to this, but, in fact, what about the people we disparage: foreigners, alternate lifestylers, athletes, nerds, tea party people, liberals!!, et al. When we disrespect someone, we are putting ourselves above them. God does not love you more than he does that person you disrespect—no matter who you are!
  • Learn to see yourself as the result of God’s work, not your own! Are you wealthy, are you smart, are you talented, are you kind, are you generous, are you a great athlete, are you spiritual?  Why?  If we answer with reasons that describe our work, then we are mistaken and showing our own conceit.  It is God’s work in you that makes you everything that you might be tempted to think sets you apart from others.
  • Learn to be about others, not yourself. Learn to praise others, serve others, allow others to go first, even to get the credit for what you did. I suspect this is why Moses needed to stay in Midian and herd sheep for forty years before he was ready to lead Israel. The prince of Egypt needed to learn to lead sheep, to serve sheep—without any glory—before he could be a true leader –a great leader–of people.
  • Learn that you not only can be, but SHOULD be great at what you attempt to do! Moses was a great leader and continues to be honored by all Israel today. Humility is not antithetical to excellence!

If we start with our kids and grandkids in T-ball or pee wee soccer, making humbleness a virtue to be learned and practiced, if we the parents and grandparents will continue to humble ourselves under God’s mighty hand (I Peter 5:6), all the while striving for greatness—to God’s glory—then the promise of Scripture is that we will have all the glory we can stand—and much more than we deserve!

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Did Bush Cheat?

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, tagged , , , , on September 10, 2010| 5 Comments »

No, not the president—not either one of them—nor their good wives! I’m talking about Reggie Bush, who won the Heisman Trophy in 2005, the award given to the best player in college football.  For those who don’t follow college football, don’t worry. I want to talk about cheating, not football.

In June of this year, the NCAA (which regulates large college sports) found the University of Southern California—where Reggie Bush played football—guilty of major violations, so guilty that they banned their football team from participating in any bowl games for two years, put them on probation for four years, and stripped them of thirty scholarships—AND, USC had to forfeit all of their games for 2004, which was their national championship year.

The reason for these very severe penalties was that the institution knowingly allowed Reggie Bush to receive “improper benefits” from USC supporters, but continued to report him eligible to play.  Interestingly, both the NCAA and USC—and Bush–everyone agrees that Reggie Bush took money from supporters, which is a violation of his amateur status and would make him immediately ineligible.  Now the Heisman Trophy Trust appears to be on the verge of stripping Bush of his Heisman trophy—which he won in a year when he was playing illegally.  That makes sense, doesn’t it?

It’s the outcry about how wrong this action against Bush is that is so disturbing to me. The main arguments seem to sound like this:

  • He was a college kid playing college football, so what’s wrong with that? (Just pretend there is no rule—and there won’t be !)
  • “Improper benefits” are everywhere! He just got caught because he is so good!(Everybody is doing it! OR, they are just after him!)
  • Bad rule. We should make all college players professionals, then you don’t have to worry about it. (Take away the parking meter and you have no more parking violations! True, but do you then have parking problems—or city financial problems?)

Here’s what I think I hear in all of these responses though: cheating is just really not so bad.

When I was teaching college English at a Christian university where over 80% of the students were from Christian homes, integrity questions appeared every semester—with multiple students. I’m talking about

  • Students who purchased term papers and submitted them as their own.
  • Students who paid or cajoled other students to write their papers for them.
  • Students whose parents wrote their papers for them.
  • Students who stole journals and submitted them as their own.

And I have not even hinted at the infamous bane of all students plagiarism yet!  Plagiarism is using words or ideas that aren’t uniquely yours but claiming them as uniquely yours.  I don’t want to get into the gray areas that you might want to get into.  Let’s just stay with copying an entire chapter out of a reference book, or copying whole paragraphs out of research articles, stringing them together, adding an introduction and conclusion and turning it in as your own research paper.  These are blatant examples of plagiarism and were extraordinarily common among students.

If you cheat in English class, then it must be OK to cheat on the football field. If you cheat on the field, then it must be OK to cheat on your taxes—or vice versa. If you cheat on your taxes, what about  . . . ?  Where does it end?

The virtue of integrity borders on being indefinable in today’s culture. I’ve tried to think when respect for the idea of integrity started to fade.  It may have been Nixon’s lies about Watergate that suggested that nobody in power is really honest, so why should anyone else be?  What’s your theory?

All I know is that honesty and integrity should be not only respected, but expected! I know we live in an age of all kinds of cheating that we are half-truths, marketing, spin, business, and politics, ad nauseum.

What if you and I agree to always tell the truth and to never cheat? And what if you and I agree not to make excuses for those who do?  What if we Christians really become the people who love the truth?

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Can You Always Tell A Flower From A Weed?

Posted in Bible Study, Christian Culture, Christian Missions, Other on September 8, 2010| 5 Comments »

How would Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who organized the International Quran Burning Day, respond if a local imam in Chicago organized an International Bible Burning Day?  I never ceased to be amazed at what people will say and do in the name of Jesus!

Before anyone begins to think that I am a typical post-modern religious relativist, let me just put that idea to bed. I believe that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus (John 14:6), that there is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved (Acts 4:12).  I do not believe that Mohammed was a prophet of God. Is that said clearly enough?

I bet this pastor has no Muslim friends. Having friends you love who differ from you changes the tone of your conversations, even when you cannot change the core truths of those conversations.

And knowing Jesus changes the tone of your conversations.  What do you do with these words even if you consider Islam of the Enemy:  “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27)?

I’m sure this pastor has said that they don’t hate the people, just the Sin that the people represent. I’ve said those kinds of things myself, but why does it always feel like a very, very impoverished expression of love?  What parts of Sin can we hate before we can’t tell the difference any more between the Sin and the Sinner?  This is a legitimate question.

Isn’t the problem that in our frailty, we  do not control our “hate” well—such a strong and terrible word—so we have difficulty avoiding the slippery slope that starts with the SIN, but finds its way too quickly to the sinner.  Maybe it is more God’s role to hate Sin?  Since God is perfect Love, He doesn’t slip at all where we too often slide.

Perhaps this is why Jesus told the parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13:

24Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.

27“The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’

28” ‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.
“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’

29” ‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. 30Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’ “

We Christians apparently are not adept at telling wheat from weeds—at least that’s what Jesus said.  The day will come when He will judge with righteous judgment—and it will be a terrible day for those who do not love the truth!  But until then, God “is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9).

I don’t think Paul would lead a church to burn the Torah. He didn’t take a baseball bat to the idols in Athens! He didn’t melt the silver Artemis icons in Ephesus. I don’t think he would have burned Qurans either.  Paul’s words that I keep hearing are “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some (2 Corinthians 9:22).

My wife and I have a lovely back yard with lots of flowers and shrubs and beautiful growing things that we inherited from the previous homeowners. We are this week, for at least the third or fourth time, changing our yard service. They keep pulling up flowers because they can’t tell them apart from the weeds! And they are professionals!!

I gave up weeding our yard long ago! I’m gradually learning to give it up in the world as well!

What about you?

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What Do You Think About Working on Labor Day?

Posted in Bible Study, Other, tagged , on September 6, 2010| 4 Comments »

You get up at least five days a week, go to work, work at a job that you are so ready to leave by 5pm—or 55years old, but you can’t retire yet. So you work for ten more years, so you can retire and not work.

Then just as you are ready to retire from work and enjoy life, the stock market dives, your grown children come home—with their kids–, or someone gets seriously ill—and you have to keep working. Aren’t you asking yourself: now why are we celebrating Labor Day?

I think we—also Christians–have skewed the whole concept of work in the way we in the industrialized world live today! Those misconceptions might look something like this:

  • Work is the result of the curse placed on Adam for sin, ergo, work is the result of sin.
  • Working is so that I can afford to live in a way that brings me happiness.
  • Working is for me and what I want.
  • Working is so that someday I don’t have to work.

Try these brief ideas and see if they don’t help you think differently about working!

  1. Working is what God does, so when we are working, we are in sync with the image of God within us.  From Day One of creation in Genesis until the Judgment Day, God is working. Jesus talked about coming to do the work of his Father.  God’s work at creation was the first day of his working for the salvation of the world as well.  Our work, if woven into the fabric of His, would suddenly take on a completely different, an eschatological perspective.
  2. If affecting the world around us as farmers, bank tellers, janitors or computer technicians in a way that brings glory to God is what the nature of God in us is, if working to finish the work of the Father is what we were created to do, can there be any doubt that the deep, deep joy of being in harmony with God will provide the happiness that we so long for?  Working is the complete fulfillment of God’s plan for your life! Trying to escape it is running to Ninevah!
  3. Even your daily job is not about you! If we can get the right answer to go in the following blank, I think we will be a lot happier:  “I am working today in order to ______________________. “ If the blank is about you, you will not find satisfaction. If your answer is about others, you will have the joy that passes understanding!  (Acts 20:35; Ephesians 4:28)
  4. This last misconception is the trickiest because it is almost true. The Sabbath rest that is built into our basic desires by the image of God within us is not something bad; quite the contrary. What derails us is our human attempt to equate our Sabbath rest with retirement, thinking that is when life begins.  In fact, it was always God’s plan to give us rest from our working. Our ever-resent error is trying to create our own resort in this world and our own Sabbath on the golf course or the cruise ship.

I do believe that our own sin has caused working in this world to be harder than God intended in the Garden of Eden, but the more we allow God to forgive us of the self-centeredness of the Garden and the continual attempting to create our own Gardens (thus our own happiness), the more joy we will find in the work with which we are blessed.

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Follow-up: Take this Quick Poll

Posted in Bible Study, Christian Missions, Other, tagged , , , , , on August 27, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Following up my post on “I Just Have To Ask . . . ” I thought I would give you a chance to express your own opinion about being asked for donations.  If you didn’t read the blog, go ahead and take the poll, then click on this link (http://wp.me/pO3kT-6S) to go back to it.  Feel free to use the new share buttons and get some of your friends to take the poll. The more, the merrier.  (And you will not get a fund raising request by answering the poll–I know what you were thinking!)

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“I Just Have To Ask . . . .”

Posted in Bible Study, Christian Missions, Other, tagged , , , on August 26, 2010| 3 Comments »

I was caught off guard the other day in a conversation about fund-raising. We are just beginning our month-long annual fund-raising drive for the Let’s Start Talking Ministry, and I was talking to the staff about who we were going to be calling. Leslee spoke up and said, “Well don’t call Charlie Marshall (name changed) because he hates to be asked to give!”

Now I know Charlie pretty well. He does mission trips with LST every year and is a strong advocate at his church for this ministry, so I was a bit shocked to hear that he doesn’t like to be asked to give to the ministry. Here are the reasons that I came up with—and I wonder if they are generally applicable to more people than just Charlie??

  • He spends lots of his own money financing his own LST mission trips, so that should be enough.
  • He does his charitable giving for missions through his home church and thinks everybody should.
  • He doesn’t have any more money to give and is embarrassed to say no.
  • He has more money to give, but doesn’t want to and doesn’t want to have to say so.

Maybe you can think of other possibilities?

Then I was having  another conversation with missionary friends of ours who work in Africa. I was asking about a situation where some African brothers were asking LST to finance their church building project and a car—which is totally outside of LST’s mission.  He was reminding me that in many parts of Africa, asking for things from those who appear to have them is just like breathing. It is a survival technique that is not at all considered “begging,” or anything else that we westerners might find demeaning.

He then told me that just as it is natural for them to ask for what they feel they need, it is perfectly ok with them for you to say No as well.  He was telling me about how African preachers sometimes come to him and ask why the Americans get so upset when they are asked for something!!  Interesting, isn’t it!

I think a lot of us are Charlies who don’t like to be asked for money—maybe other stuff as well, but especially money, but here is a point I need you to think about

What if God were just like us—and didn’t want to be asked for anything, especially something that was His?

Our prayers would be a lot shorter, wouldn’t they!  In fact, as I think about asking and giving, several biblical texts come to mind that make me think that God is much different from us.

  • Matthew 5:42 – Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
  • Matthew 7:7 – Ask and it will be given to you. . . .
  • Matthew 7:11 – . . . how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
  • John 14:14 – You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it
  • James 4:2 – You want something but don’t get it.  . . . . You do not have, because you do not ask God.

Doesn’t this sound like it is OK with God to be an asker—in fact, He desires it!  I believe that means for me that if I am trying to be godly that it is OK , not only for me to ask others, but to be asked by others!

So my conclusion is that I am going to choose not to be offended when asked for something. And I am not going to be embarrassed if I cannot fulfill the request and must say no.  It’s a very liberating decision actually.

And where I would really like to get to is to be as God is described in Ephesians 3:20: “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask. . . .” If we love others like God loves us, then it will give us great pleasure to be asked for something we can give—and we will give more than we were even asked for!

I have a great illustration of a personal experience with someone already like this: Byron Nelson, one of the greatest golfers ever and a generous Christian. It’s longer, so I’ll post it next.

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