I recently started using a CPAP because of severe sleep apnea. The first moments I tried on the mask were not positive. It felt like I couldn’t breathe out at all. Since I have asthma, that’s a familiar and scary feeling, so I had an anxiety attack right there in the poor respiratory therapist’s office. The good news is that we got through it, and I am using the CPAP successfully and sleeping much better than I was before.

Anxiety attacks are not a common phenomenon for me, but general anxiety is something I deal with, as many do. After all, there’s a lot in this life for me to worry about: sons, husband, daughters-in-law, grandson, friends going through various trials, getting my research program going again, going back to the classroom full-time after too many years out of it, leaving the department in someone else’s hands. I could go on at length.

I do want to be clear that I’m not only talking about baseless concerns. There are real current problems or significant transitions going on in every case I mentioned above. But God tells us not to worry, even in cases of real concern. The point of Matthew 6:25-33 isn’t that we don’t need food and clothing. God knows that our lives here on earth do require such things. However, Jesus tells us not to worry about them.

It’s easy to beat up on ourselves about worry. The reasons we’re told to avoid it are clear. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Time spent worrying about my family members changes nothing about their situation. There are things I can do to get my research on track and prepare for my courses this spring, but worrying is not one of them. In addition, worry indicates a lack of faith. If God is in charge, we don’t need to worry. We need to trust that he’s got it.

However, I have always found that kicking myself about my worrying doesn’t help a whole lot with it. It mostly makes me anxious about my worrying. The Bible gives us some help on this one. The first source comes at the end of that passage in Matthew, where Jesus tells us to seek God first. Matthew 6:33 often gets pulled out of context, and it is good advice in general, but the words come as the final part of the message on worry Jesus gives us here. If we are focused on seeking God rather than everything else, we will worry less.

There’s another passage that speaks to me on this subject with great reassurance: “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7 ESV). In this passage, Paul gives us a great formula for avoiding worry: 1) We ask God about everything with urgency and thankfulness and 2) God gives us peace.

One of my challenges is that I feel that I need to get rid of these feelings of anxiety. But that’s not really my job. My job is to seek God first and to let him know about everything. Paul makes that point, and Peter tells us to cast all of our anxieties (or cares) on Jesus (1 Peter 5:9). If we do that (often many, many times), Paul tells us that God’s peace will protect our hearts and minds. We’re not going to change our feelings by berating ourselves for them, but God can and will ease our anxiety if we entrust him with all of our cares. 

Even those about worrying.

 

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I am writing this on my 55th birthday, one that feels like a somewhat significant milestone. Some places consider me a senior citizen. I could now officially retire from my university position and own the title “Professor Emerita,” though that is unlikely to occur any time soon.

This milestone has me thinking a bit about what I have learned from the years I have spent on this earth. After all, the gray under my hair coloring is supposed to come with some wisdom.

What Matters

Of course, I have accumulated a fair bit of knowledge as you might expect for someone with my education and over twenty years of experience as a university professor. I value that knowledge and constantly work to add to it, but one thing I have learned is that it is not actually worthwhile as an end in itself.

There was a time when knowledge itself was one of the things I valued most. As my husband supported me through my graduate degrees, I think he was beginning to be afraid that I would spend my life as a professional student, and I once believed that would be the most enjoyable way to live if we could only afford it. I have since learned that knowledge is only truly valuable if it has a point. For me, the important point has become using the knowledge to help students learn the skills and concepts they need to succeed in their field. The knowledge matters only as I can use it to impact people’s lives for good. And my greatest professional joy is not the new knowledge I create through my research, but the alumni whose lives I have impacted.

Being Me

For many, many years, I lived with tremendous insecurity. I did not handle the teasing I faced as a child well. That and certain events in my childhood helped to build very low self-esteem. I spent much of my adolescence in pretty deep depression, and only concern for my family and a reluctance to suffer pain kept me from attempting suicide.

Over the years some counseling, some dear Christian friends, the love of my family, and a lot of time in the Bible have helped me learn what a lie I lived in. I have come to understand that God actually wants me to be myself. That he created me the way he wanted me to be. Yes, I am to die to self, to deny my fallen nature, to grow closer to Christ and learn to have his desires. However, the result of that process is not a cookie-cutter, bland non-entity, but rather the best version of the unique person created by the God who loves me more than my parents or my husband or my children ever could.

So I have learned to be myself. I have learned not to waste time worrying about what others around me think. My focus has to be on where I am in relation to my Father and doing what God has called me to do, not where others may think I fall short.

Letting God Do It

Perhaps the most important thing I have learned in the last few years is that the Christian walk is not something I do for God, but something God must do in me.

I think it is very easy for Christians to fall into the trap of focusing on good deeds. After all, it is certainly a common trap for humanity as a whole. Even those of us who emphasize that faith is a matter of grace, a free gift of God, too often worry about works and not having visible sin in our lives.

Now, I’m not advocating for sin, visible or otherwise, and good works should certainly be part of every believer’s life, but I think we approach things backwards. We worry about others seeing our sin, but we are called to confess our sins and pray for each other and let God forgive our sins and clean us up and heal us (1 John 1:9; James 5:16). We are to walk in the good works which God prepared beforehand (Ephesians 2:10), not just do what we think we should for God. 

God has been bringing to my attention more and more verses that point out that the sanctification process is never something that I am to do on my own, never something that I am to feel guilt over. Instead, God will provide the fruit; God will shape the desires; God will do the work: my job is to spend time with him, to immerse myself in the word and in prayer, and to obey. That’s it. Remarkably freeing.

Are you approaching any milestones? What has God been teaching you?

 

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My husband and I recently met with our financial advisor to go over our retirement situation. Neither of us will have a pension, so we will be primarily dependent on what we have put away in his 401K, my similar account, and elsewhere. At the same time, both of our sons’ families are undergoing transition times that are impacting their incomes. As a result, I’ve been thinking about money.

Many believe the Bible says that money is the root of all evil, but it actually doesn’t. Rather, 1 Timothy 6:10 says, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs” (ESV). As usual, God is concerned with our hearts and minds rather than our circumstances.

God is certainly concerned about how we get our money. A perusal of Proverbs turns up warnings about oppressing the poor and several statements about how much better it is to be poor than to be a liar or “crooked.” When Jesus drove the money-changers and pigeon sellers out of the temple in Matthew 21, it wasn’t only because they were conducting business in the temple. He says they have made it a “den of robbers.” God really doesn’t like it when people who claim to be his are cheating the poor.

We are told to do more than simply avoid oppressing the poor. In Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, in addition to the warnings about treating the poor fairly, we see calls to be generous to the poor.

It’s easy to take all of this and take from it a legalistic view of money and how to act with it, but that’s not what we see in the New Testament. Instead, we are called to treat money well because our hearts are right. We know that God loves a cheerful giver, and so we try to force ourselves to give cheerfully, but that’s not the point of the passage:

Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. (2 Corinthians 6:8-9 ESV)

Instead, we are able to give cheerfully because of the grace of God and our trust in him. I recently came across a verse I had somehow missed for many years. It happened to be in a collection of verses I picked to memorize. It’s another place where we hear about the love of money: “Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’” (Hebrews 13:5 ESV)

God isn’t asking us to browbeat ourselves into handling money correctly. Instead, he seeks to assure us that we can handle it correctly and be content because he will be with us and care for us. That’s the point in the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus talks about seeking God first and laying up treasures in heaven. God’s in charge and he actually cares about us. What happens here on earth may or may not look the way we think it should, but if we trust him, it’s all going to come out right in the end. And if we believe that, really believe it, we can save ourselves a world of anxiety and suffering.

 

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Last week I was reminded again that my focus is not always on the things that really matter.This seems to be a common problem for Christ-followers (and for humans in general). Those of us who claim to follow Christ ought to be able to get our priorities right. After all God has laid them out for us very clearly:

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40 ESV)

But far too often we don’t. We miss the mark on both of these, but lately I’ve been most reminded of my failures in the second area. Yet loving people, actually just loving fellow Christians, is supposed to make our Christianity obvious to the world. Jesus made this very clear in his last extended conversation with his disciples before the cross: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35 ESV) A little later that same evening he prays in front of them: “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” (John 17:22-23 ESV)

This shouldn’t be news to any of us, and most of us at least pay lip service to loving other Christians, especially the ones in our own denomination or local church body. But how many of us love them the way Christ is talking about? Can that old song “We Are One in the Spirit” actually be applied to us? To me?

I’m grateful to say that I’ve been in situations where I have truly experienced that kind of love, especially in smaller groups. I always think of one particular Sunday School class that was way too large to work well in human terms (30+people), but was an extremely close-knit group of people dedicated to the Lord, growing in faith, and loving each other. I’ve seldom grown so much or felt so supported as the years with that group.

Of course, God’s intention for us is that we have this kind of experience all of the time as we associate with fellow Christians. And we often don’t. 

I’ve been coming to some realizations of late about my own shortcomings in this area. Maybe they will resonate with some of you:

I have come to realize that I need to work on finding a better way to love the poor in the community of Christ than giving a twenty dollar bill to the benevolence fund every fifth Sunday. 

I do not understand why God included the color orange in his palette. It looks terrible on me in every shade, and I just don’t like to look at it. It is also the the logo color at my church and the color of the t-shirt worn by all of the greeters and ushers and other volunteers with similar roles. I have had to get over that and specifically over the resentment toward the people who picked out the color scheme. That’s a silly cause for disunity, but how often have churches been hurt by a fight over the color of the carpet or the seats? 

There are a few members of my church with whom I really just don’t seem to have anything in common, and sometimes I just don’t like them much. But I’m coming to recognize that I need to love them anyway. After all, I do have at least one thing in common with any person who loves God, and our differences may be just the source of an ability to support one another. This is a lesson I learned a long time ago when working in Vacation Bible School. 

I was the leader for the 6th grade class. I had a fellow teacher for the class with whom I had very little in common. I was working on my PhD in computer science, and I was focused on the intellectual, the academic, and the scientific. She was a stay-at-home mom with much less formal education. I respected the choice to stay home with one’s children, but I just struggled to connect with her. Yet here we were working together. Now, I love to teach, and doing the Bible study was great, but we were also expected to do crafts. Given that we were doing sixth grade, I could get around that a little bit. We typically had an option where the kids were creating a newspaper or a video, and I could supervise that. However, we also needed to provide some actual crafts, where they made things. Creative, physical things. This was not my forte. My fellow teacher, the one I struggled to work with at first because of our lack of compatibility, was great with crafts. Very capable, super creative, everything I am not when it comes to making physical and/or artistic things. 

This is the point Paul is making in 1 Corinthians 12 as he talks about the value of different gifts and the need of all members of the body of Christ.

I think there are many things that we allow to take over the priority that God and people are supposed to have: colors, music styles, music volume, personal interests, money. God has made it clear that these things must take a back seat to loving him and loving people. I’m going to try to do better this week. How about you?

 

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Last month I was in Oregon, visiting family in Umatilla, which is a small city in eastern Oregon. To get there we flew into Portland and drove along the Columbia. That’s a pleasant drive, but one that takes you through a fairly dramatic shift in scenery as you move from the lush Willamette Valley area into the high desert of eastern Oregon.

As the scenery turned brown and the vegetation became scrub brush and tumbleweed to the south, I noticed clumps of trees right next to the river. It brought to mind both Psalm 1 and the passage below.

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
    whose trust is the Lord.
He is like a tree planted by water,
    that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
    for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
    for it does not cease to bear fruit.
                                      Jeremiah 17:7-8 (ESV)

I’ve been thinking about this passage lately, and I’ve come to recognize it as a picture of the Christian life as it is meant to be lived.

There are a number of sayings floating about our culture that tell us about living and dealing with problems in the Christian life, such as: “God helps those who help themselves” or “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” The problem with such sayings is that they’re not Biblical and just not true. 

Even worse, they put a tremendous burden on people. Is it fair to say to my friend who just lost her husband of 32 years to cancer that she can handle it? Is that the message for the next friend whose 20-something year-old sister was just diagnosed with cancer or the one dealing with her own serious illness along with children with autism?

The good news is that Jesus didn’t say that to any of us. He said, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” John 16:33b (ESV). Not “you will overcome,” but “I have overcome.”

In 2 Corinthians 12:8-9 (ESV) Paul reports, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

And this, I think, is why God uses the analogy of the tree. The tree has no ability to handle the heat or drought by itself, just as we often cannot handle the tribulations of this world by ourselves. Only the abundant water allows the tree to thrive in such conditions, just as we can only thrive if we send out our roots through prayer and obedience to the word so that the Holy Spirit in us provides the power and grace to handle the trouble that comes our way.

 

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In a faculty meeting, we were voting by secret ballot in one of those situations where the bylaws were forcing multiple rounds of votes. One faculty member needed to leave to pick up her daughter from daycare and asked me to serve as her proxy. I agreed, of course, and stepped out of the meeting with her to get some guidance on how she wanted me to vote. Her response? “I trust you.”

We are called to trust God. In addition to Bible verses, I can think of a number of hymns with that theme starting with “Only Trust Him” and “Trust and Obey.” It seems to me that we often treat trust as an easy thing, as we tell people that all they need to do is trust in Jesus. That’s true, but is it easy? And do we always trust when we say we do.

When my colleague walked out of the building, she was not concerned about how I was voting for her. She had left that in my hands, and her focus was on her daughter and the evening ahead. She had no fear that I would use the power she had given me in any way that she would dislike.

This is the same kind of trust that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego expressed when they stood before the fiery furnace and declared, “If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king” Daniel 3:17 (ESV). It is the kind of trust that let Paul to say, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances” Philippians 4:11b (NIV).

Do we always trust God that way? Is it really trust when we grit our teeth and say we’re going to trust God, but then we spend the whole week worrying about whether God is going to come through for us? Can real trust happen by a simple act of will?

Look at one of the key passages about trusting God: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” Proverbs 3:5-6 (ESV).  This doesn’t say close your eyes and let God do what he wants even though you’re worried that it won’t be what you want, or even let God do what he wants because it is best despite the little voice of fear. It says “with your whole heart.” How we do that?

The key, I believe, is exactly what allowed my colleague to walk away leaving complete trust in me: relationship combined with knowledge of character. She’s known me for over six years, and she has come to believe that I have good judgment regarding the kinds of things we were voting on.

The only way to trust God with our whole heart is to come to know him in both his character and his amazing love for us. There are two songs playing on the radio these days that help me think about the degree to which God is worthy of trust. “Reckless Love” by Cory Asbury simply talks about the “overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God” that we could not earn and do not deserve. The other, “I Give You Control” by Tenth Avenue North, talks about how God doesn’t need us, but he wants us and loves us deeply, and that love is what frees us to let go and give him control of our lives.

I cannot will myself to trust God with my whole heart. I can look each day to recognize a bit more of his amazing love for me and I can work to understand his character a little better so that my trust because more deep and more complete with each day. As I understand God’s heart a bit better, he lays claim to more of my heart.

 

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** If you question the term “reckless” in referencing God’s love, I recommend checking out the video at https://youtu.be/6xx0d3R2LoU, in which Cory Asbury explains his use of the term about 5 minutes in.

As a scientist, and more generally as an academic, I have been trained to be a skeptic. There is value in skepticism, but there is also a great deal of danger in too much skepticism.

Back when I was in my teens and twenties, it seemed that people were trying to help me figure out my spiritual gifts every time I turned around. It wasn’t that often, of course, but I did take quite a few spiritual gift inventories in my younger days. Some were better than others, but one thing that was pretty consistent was that teaching always came up as one of my top spiritual gifts. I was skeptical. Yes, I love teaching and there is evidence to support the hypothesis that I’m good at it. However, I’ve wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember. I’m pretty sure I owe my sister an apology for my attempts to teach her to read when she was three. That puts the gift of teaching a few years before my profession of faith. It bothered me that none of the inventories seemed to be able to distinguish between a natural gift that came at birth and a spiritual gift that came at rebirth when I accepted Christ. And it seemed that leaders were constantly emphasizing that spiritual gifts might have nothing to do with natural talents.

What I finally came to accept was that it didn’t actually matter whether my teaching was a natural talent or a natural talent enhanced by a spiritual gift. The reality was that God gave me the gift whenever I got it, and he expects me to use my natural talents for his purposes just as much as he expects me to use the spiritual gifts he’s given me. All of my skepticism, all of my fretting, was just a waste of time and energy that could have been spent on things of value.

Unfortunately, skepticism is often more debilitating. I’ve been reading Hearing God by Dallas Willard, which I highly recommend. Willard makes the point that we often don’t hear God and don’t see him working in the world answering our prayers simply because we refuse to see. We work hard to explain away God’s activity on our behalf and convince ourselves that he’s not responding.

I saw an example of that in college. Several years before, I had been aware of an incident that I consider miraculous. A bomb hadn’t gone off. This bomb was in a hospital called Rumah Sakit Immanuel. The bomb was found ten days after it “should” have gone off, and authorities described it as large enough to level the hospital complex and damage the buildings on either side. No one could explain why the bomb hadn’t detonated. I had surgery at that hospital a few week later.

I was telling the story of the bomb that hadn’t gone off to one of my professors, someone who professed Christ. He immediately rejected the notion that the incident was miraculous, and started offering explanations. You may have some of the same thoughts he did. After all, this occurred in a third world. Maybe the investigators weren’t up to the task. Certainly, he believed that the incident had to have a natural explanation.

I’ll admit, I can’t prove that the incident did not have a natural cause. However, I am certain that God kept that bomb from going off, whether he did it through natural or supernatural means.

Why am I so sure? Well, that hospital was functioning as a powerful witness to a community that was very closed to the gospel, and God had shown up many times in small ways and bigger ones over the time of its existence, starting with the name of the place. The secular authorities suggested the name Rumah Sakit Immanuel instead of Rumah Sakit Baptis (Baptist), and the missionaries quickly agreed to having the “God with Us” hospital.

My professor did not convince me that God was not behind the bomb failure, though I did give up on trying to convince him pretty quickly. I have come to recognize that faith has to be a willing choice.

God doesn’t hit people over the head. He calls gently. Even when Jesus was actively working miracles before people, they didn’t always believe:  “Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him” John 12:37 (ESV). Our skepticism hurts us first when we refuse to believe despite what we see. We also run the risk that our lack of faith will limit what God does on our behalf. ” And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.  And he marveled because of their unbelief” Mark 6:5-6a (ESV).

Does some of your skepticism need to be replaced by a willingness to see and believe?

 

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One of the things I love about the Bible is that it’s not about sugar-coating anything. Christians sometimes (often) sugarcoat, but the Bible doesn’t. I was reminded of that while reading Psalm 88. It starts out, as many Psalms do, with a plea to God for help in trouble.

O Lord, God of my salvation,
   I cry out day and night before you.
Let my prayer come before you;
   incline your ear to my cry!
For my soul is full of troubles,
   and my life draws near to Sheol.
                                   Psalm 88:1-3 (ESV)

Now that’s not unusual. Many Psalms begin with such cries and end with praise to God.  The one that immediately comes to mind for me is Psalm 22, which begins in despair and ends with praise. Others include Psalm 3, 4, 6, 10, 13 . . . . I could keep going, but you’ve got the idea. However, Psalm 88 is a bit different. Here is how it ends.

But I, O Lord, cry to you;
   in the morning my prayer comes before you.
O Lord, why do you cast my soul away?
   Why do you hide your face from me?
Afflicted and close to death from my youth up,
   I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.
Your wrath has swept over me;
   your dreadful assaults destroy me.
They surround me like a flood all day long;
   they close in on me together.
You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me;
   my companions have become darkness.
                                      Psalm 88:13-18 (ESV)

The psalmist is still in the dark, both in the sense of circumstances and in his understanding.

I see this as one of those places where the Bible gets very real and gritty. It’s a reminder that God does not promise a trouble free life to his people. He promises a joy filled life, a fulfilling life, but really also a trouble filled life. While he solves problems for us, he solves the ones he sees as beneficial to solve, and he solves them on his time. And, of course, his concept of beneficial is not always the same as ours. He left Paul with his thorn in the flesh for a long time.

This psalm is also a reminder that we must be faithful in crying out to God. The psalmist is in or at least near despair, but he cries out each morning. I find that very convicting. I have a few of those long-term prayer requests that God has yet to answer, requests that I’ve been praying over for 3-5 years. I think of these as the deepest cries of my heart, and they matter immensely to me. But after praying for a few years, I find myself occasionally missing a day of praying about them.

I also note that the psalmist is crying out to “God of my salvation.” Even in the dark, God is the source of salvation. He is, in fact, our only salvation. And we as Christ-followers have one huge advantage over the psalmist. We live in a time when we can know for sure that the darkness will end.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.  2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Are you in the dark right now? Will you commit with me to pray daily in that darkness and to trust in the coming light?

 

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I’ve been thinking today about worship for a couple of reasons. One spur came from responses to a Facebook post where I shared a call for people to volunteer for the production team at my church (the people who do lights, sound, video, the words on the screen, etc.). One reaction questioned the validity of production being juxtaposed with worship, but another suggested that doing the production work was itself a form of worship. Since I serve on the production team at present, that got me thinking about my worship and what my service means in terms of worship.

The second spark of thinking about worship came from my reading in Psalm 86 this morning. In the NIV I was reading, verse 11 reads, “Teach me your way, Lord, that I may rely on your faithfulness; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.” In ESV, the same verse is “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name.”

So what do I think about worship? Like most people, I suspect, my immediate image of worship is singing my heart out to or for God. That is certainly the way I want to worship, since losing myself in a worship song, singing with abandon, is one of my absolute favorite things to do in this world. I think that’s why standing in front of the congregation and singing on a worship team is my favorite way to serve at a church. I get to do one of my absolute favorite things and call it service. However, when I think about offering a “sacrifice of praise” (Hebrews 13:15), I have to admit that there is not much sacrifice involved there for me. Maybe the time to prepare and learn a harmony part, maybe getting up a little early on Sunday and giving up more of my weekend than I would otherwise, but nothing in the moment.

Then I wonder, do I always really worship when I’m singing worship songs. And the answers is clearly a no. I probably am focused on God more often than not, but I certainly wander from the point at times. I start noticing that the words on the screen are coming too slow. I wonder what the person in front of me thinks of my singing. I start focusing on trying to pick up a particular harmony part in a less familiar song. If on stage playing keyboard or singing, I may get distracted by a wrong note and start to be self-conscious. All of these things divide my heart and keep me from fearing God, which is what worship is really supposed to be all about.

What about the suggestion that service on the production team really is a form of worship? I personally do CG, which means I run the videos, show any pictures, and control the words on the screens. This means that during the songs I am most definitely not losing myself in the music or singing with abandon. My job is to hit that spacebar at  the right time, precluding any loss of self, and the person I share a little room with would have just cause for anger if I sang with any volume. Thus it isn’t worship in the same sense.

But worship is about acknowledging God, fearing God, and serving God. Any sacrifice made for God is worship. That’s why giving is a part of worship. So perhaps sitting in the little back room making sure that people see what they are supposed to see is greater worship than any of my music making because it serves God, facilitating others’ worship and knowledge (during the sermons), and it involves a greater sacrifice than my singing ever does. I probably even have a less divided heart, because the decision to be there and do my best at the task is made long before.

present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Romans 12:1b 

How do you worship? What is your sacrifice? What divides your heart that God needs to unite so that you can fear him?

Photo by Bill Hamway on Unsplash

This past weekend saw my church’s first services in our new building. All five services, because the larger new auditorium isn’t actually enough larger to let us cut a service. Of course, the leadership thought it would be when we started building it. We knew that we’d be looking at multiple services, but we thought we’d be reducing the number. Instead the only change was shifting the two Saturday services to what we hope will be more attractive times so that we can move more people from Sunday to Saturday. After all, since we bought the land, average weekend attendance has grown by at least 50%, and it’s something like 5 times what it was just 5 years ago.

Reflecting on our growth and on the sermon from the weekend, which had to do with who God uses and being willing to answer the call, led me to thinking about why us. There are a lot churches in our area, so why are we the ones growing quite so dramatically and bringing the unchurched. I think there are a lot of reasons, and I know that trying to copy the how from one ministry to the next can be unproductive and even just unwise, but I do think there are a few things to be taken from what is working at Vale that could be applied in other churches and in our individual lives.

Of course, a key for any church is who the pastor is and what he does. I believe that’s certainly true for us. Our pastor is someone with a past that he has repented of and is not proud of, but one that he is open about. He tells his story without concern for sensibilities, but with great concern for sharing the love and power of Christ. He is also open about his current flaws and struggles and what God is doing in his life. Thus, he becomes a great picture of a real human being walking more and more closely with God, a picture that can only attract those seeking truth.

Our pastor also grounds all that he says deeply in scripture, and preaches expository sermons in an accessible way. I think many churches (and individual Christians) miss the mark on one of those two things. Sometimes we are so concerned about being attractive and accessible that we bury the message in so much fluff that the message itself gets lost or watered down even to falsehood. I think churches that do this find themselves pulling people in the front door, but eventually leaving through the back, their thirst for truth and God ultimately unsatisfied. And people too often find themselves lost because they begin to mistake the packaging for the message.

Of course, some churches and people go too far the other way. They may speak the truth, but they don’t worry at all about whether others can understand it. They lose track of the love God has for sinners and the importance of living a life that draws others to him. I once was talking to an elderly acquaintance about her church’s services, and I asked about a new person who might not know what to do and might be put off by that, and her response was that the person should go somewhere else. It broke my heart.

There are other elements that help Vale be what it is. Our music is contemporary but not overly edgy and not so loud as to be painful for this 50-something. Our church welcomes and uses its older members, encouraging us to be as much a part of the church as the 30-somethings that our music is more designed for. We have great children’s programming, and the new building has significantly improved our children’s facilities.

All things considered, though, I believe the key to Vale’s success, and to any church or Christian’s success in reaching others for Christ is really quite simple: share the truth of Christ, both personal and biblical, authentically and understandably. That may not be blessed with huge numbers, but it will blessed.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:19-20 (ESV)

 

Photo thanks to Amy Max