It’s interesting that we live in a culture that people can literally starve themselves while feeling full. How? By engorging themselves on junk food that lacks the nutrients essential to healthy living. It’s a wild thought that a person could actually feel full while not realizing they are actually starving. What is my point?
My life is wrapped up in the church. Unlike those who attend our church, I am an organizational cog. I am an insider. I see the church from a select vantage point. For me, church is not a weekend activity, it is a lifestyle and that could be a major problem. The lines of perspective can get blurry and the hours can run long and I could, along with many other insiders, think that my vocation makes me spiritual. Yet, while being spiritual is expected and understood, spirituality does not flow from some secret power source only accessible to the vocational few. My position as a pastor does not provide for me spiritual batteries that stay charged longer than the average person. On the contrary, I find leading, counseling, teaching, planning, witnessing, strategizing and the other “ings” very draining. I realize that the activity of dispensing the grace of God could, if not held in balance, actually stave me from partaking in the grace of God. I could feel full yet be starving….
Can you relate? How?
Yes, I can relate! It reminds me of the saying about the person adrift in a life raft who is “surrounded by water but dying of thirst.” Or the person who’s so invested in so many people that they feel completely isolated and alone. Or the person who boasts of how many years his cross-country running discipline will add to his life — never realizing he will spend those years running.
A “frantic ecclesiology” can make us too busy to be fruitful.
We’ve had some discussion lately in our Sunday morning teachings about the Sabbath. Jesus said it was created for man, not the other way around. Perhaps we throw the baby out with the bathwater when we say the Sabbath laws don’t apply? We’re not bound under the law – does that mean we don’t need rest anymore?
It gets into a subject that comes up all too often for me – the idea of “margin” or “slack” in our lives. When I look at the most edifying times in my life, when the best relationships were formed, when the fondest memories were forged, it was when I had time to spare. Parents look for “teachable moments” with their children – when, exactly, are they supposed to happen? You can’t schedule something like that!
Maybe it’s a subtle form of narcissistic idolatry when we schedule ourselves to the hilt – as if we know best what we ought to be doing every moment of the day. Instead, let’s leave room for those “divine appointments” that God seems to prefer scheduling when we’ve left Him the room to do so.
I relate, I had like four people call me to join a smallgroup on Friday nights. That’s like the one night we don’t have something scheduled. At the risk of seeming like I don’t want to be involved I declined.
I also feel like people generally fall into two extremes. They either A.) compartmentalize the church into certain parts of their life OR B.) they let the church become their life. The dangers of A are pretty clear but with B there is the tendancy to be consumed with the church as an organization and not the business of the Kingdom.
I think the reason it is easy to get over “baked” when involved in the church since church activities are great things to fill up your life with. Since that is true, how do you turn away from doing great things within a God-ordained structure – the church? I find myself needing to regularly evauluate if I am doing “stuff” based on a toxic brew of self-esteem/spiritual image/church growth or am I living God-centered priorities because He is worth it?
I find it easier to determine who the real me is when I spend time in the Word, getting counsel from friends(even in the BLOG world) and evaluating my family needs with Vicki. Any other suggestions that I can build into my evaluation grid?
Bottom line? How do you practically keep the work of God from killing the work of God in you?
NO. Learn to say it. There is freedom in saying no. Jesus had an opportunity to address some Greeks in John 12:20-23. He did not. I can remember Jesus walking away from a line of people needing to be healed. I don’t remember the passage.
Would it be a safe assumption that Jesus said no often, and instead kept to His Father’s business. Now that brings up a harder question. What exactly is the Father’s business in our lives? In order words, is the thing that is killing the work of God in you actually the work of God?