Reflections on my 27th Birthday

June 30^th marks 27 years of God’s faithfulness in my life. It is funny how the American culture treasures youth, and makes us believe that our young years are the best ones we have because our muscles are stronger, or bodies trimmer, and our faces have less wrinkles.

I was jokingly bemoaning to my sister, complaining about feeling like an old, single, unemployed, late-twenty-something. She replied with good words: “I don’t feel that way at all. Am I doing what God put me here to do? Am I serving Him? Am I being faithful to my gifts? If I am, then I am happy, no matter how old, and no matter what to circumstances.” Amen. Joy that is founded in being young, accomplished, or unusually high of the corporate (or other—ministry?) ladder for one’s age is a joy that is thin and feeble compared with joy of knowing that you are doing what God called you to.

A confirming word from Spurgeon. Read, “measure your work” as “measure your years.”

“I pray, moreover, measure you work in the light of God. Are you God’s servant or not? If you are, how can you heart be cold? Are you sent by a dying Savior to proclaim his love and win the reward of his wounds, or are you not? If you are, how can you flag? Is the Spirit of the Lord upon you? Has the Lord anointed you to preach glad tidings to the poor? If he has not, do not pretend to do it, if he has, go in this thy might, and the Lord shall be your strength.” (Lectures to my Students, 317).

Adios, Antigua!

Arrived back yesterday from Guatemala. Overall a great trip, with many memorable experiences. A few random highlights, insights, and odds and ends.

1. We spent two weeks in Guatemala, and subtracting the time spent on traveling and “touring” we were able to work six days. Our team was broken into three groups, one at a school, and two at “construction” projects. I was the leader of the groups that helped Hector, a local Guatemalan who uses construction projects to build relationships with the people in spiritually dark villages. For our team, construction included taking a corn-stalk wall and replacing it with corrugated sheet metal, building benches, building a porch, stacking firewood, painting two houses (much easier when the houses are about 10’x 10’!), and repairing a leaking roof.
2. The trip confirmed the truth of 1 Timothy 3:1-13: what is most important in a leaders is character. A key reason the trip went well was that we had good leaders, and they were good leaders because they had character (I am thinking of the leaders besides me!). They talked about Christ often in relation to the experiences of the trip, they sacrificed their own comfort for the high schoolers, and they were patient with kids who acted spoiled when faced with the challenges of developing-world living standards, and they made decisions with a spirit of prayer.
3. Playing with molten lava was one of the hottest experiences of the trip. It oozed out of the charred mountainside with a consistency about like cookie dough, glowing bright red in the daytime from its 1,700 degree temperature. We were able to pick up a glob of it on a stick, and wave it around while it burned up the wood. Trying to pose next to it I singed the hair off my leg, and have a while all of our feet were hurting from the heat that was slowly creeping through the rubber soles. Our world is dangerous, unexpected, and wonderful.
   
4. “What is the biggest need the church has here in Guatemala?” I asked Hector. “For the church to be different than the corrupt society around it instead of an imitation of it," he said, "and for the church to look outward and reach out where there is needs instead of focusing on itself and expecting the lost to come knocking on the church doors.” There I was working in a area that had a church with a dirt floor, two dilapidated instruments for worship, and one Bible, and the problems are essentially the same as they are here in America. The Missional writers are saying the later, and the Restless and Reformed groups are saying the former.
5. I remember before leaving both hearing and saying myself: “Trips like this will change your life!” It’s partly true. But thinking about some of the students on the plane home I realized that geographical location is not necessarily a dynamic of change. Some students might only love the materialistic comforts and idols of America more than when they left. Seeing new places, people, and historical sites fills your mind with memories and experiences, but nothing can change a heart like God working through his Word. In the pages of scripture we have something more wonderful than the rich experiences of Timbuktu, Antigua, or Marseilles. And it doesn’t take an airline ticket to see them.

Guatemala

I wrote these few paragraphs before leaving on my first mission trip, to Kenya in 2002. It is just as true now as it was then.

Ultimately, Missions is not a humanitarian effort to help suffering people, nor is it a frantic and hopeless effort to spread fanatic religious ideas.

Missions is God’s sovereign and unstoppable plan to draw people from all tongues and nations to himself (John 10:16). It is the carrying of the best news in the world; namely that there is reconciliation to God from his wrath, and an adoption to God by his love.

It is our awesome privilege to spend our energies and our lives for this high cause– God does not need us, but rather he chooses to use weak people like us to carry and proclaim this eternally priceless message.

Pray that we do not go to Guatemala because we desire to be exotic tourists or earn stars on our Christian crown. Pray that we go because the message is worth telling at any cost and at any distance. The value that we place in the Gospel is validated by the efforts we exert to see it proclaimed and spread. We hope that this summer- whether in an Guatemalan village or downtown Libertyville- our lives will reflect that we value the Gospel to biblical proportions.

Some suffering is not Apostolic

For example: the suffering of an overweight person. Overweight is such a powerful illustration for spiritual truth, but one I dare not use from the pulpit for fear of being insensitive to the number of overweight people in the congregation (am I just sacred?). To be frank—overeating is a sin. It is a lack of self control at best, and idolatry at worst, and in most cases a mixture of both. If Christ cannot help us master our love for food, who is to say we can master our love for this world?

If someone overeats to the point of flirting with obesity, there is price to pay on the body. Joints start giving out, the back is strained, and it simply takes more energy and effort to do everyday chores. Life becomes more difficult—an element of suffering is introduced. While we can pray for such things—we should take all our burdens to the Lord in prayer—such suffering is decidedly not the same as the suffering so often mentioned in the New Testament letters. And unfortunately, there is a lot of suffering of this category in the American church.

• Guys suffering from singleness because they don’t have the guts to get married to another sinner who is not the latest Miss Evangelical. Girls then also end up suffering (innocently).
  
• Highly moralistic Christians who think that working out salvation with fear and trembling means approaching every moral decision with sweaty-palmed fear and trembling and having a hair-trigger finger on the guilt-gun of moral failure. Sin requires a kind of “evangelical penance” of giving the speech at accountability group, setting new “boundaries” and doing some new spiritual discipline.
• Long term laziness and lack of basic life skills. For example, if a seminary students did not grow up in a family that taught him or her how to have a conversation and be responsible, it is likely to introduce awkwardness and possibly rejection from the church.
• Having the expectation of living a comfortable, secure life in the suburbs and experiencing the “suffering” when this expectation is not met.

More on this topic later.

What is the opposite of a cliché?

Clichés are the fruit of lazy thinking. The way a lazy farmer puts sawdust in flour, so that his sacks look fuller than they are, the “umms”, “like”, “and stuff” slide into conversations, smoothing them out and making them sound like more than they are.

What filler words are to speech, clichés are to thinking. They slide into the way we think about truth, God and the church and soon when people ask us good questions we begin filling their food sacks with sawdust. They might look full when they leave, but in the end they leave them with a stomachache.

What is the alternative?

I am not sure, but I have a hunch. I think the best prescription is hard work and suffering.

Fresh words take mental sweat and muscle. At the local taco joint, the phrase: “we ensure you the freshest ingredients” means they have to transport tomatoes from California. People who have fresh words have thought outside of their little group—transporting thoughts from the early church, from cross culture experience, and from a wide range of gifted writers. Not only that, they know how to really listen to people, and see what interests them from their respective perspective.

But nothing eliminates sawdust from flour like the Calvary road. People who suffer don’t rely on clichés, because they know that they aren’t strong enough of sustain the soul when the soul is submerged in darkness or the body with pain. Paul spoke of the “fellowship of Christ’s sufferings” that went hand in hand with knowing the “power of his resurrection.” Christ’s sufferings hammer out the crud inside us so that we can be filled with the power of his resurrection. When this has happened, it becomes clear how tinny and weak the clean clichés were. They are just too small to hold his richness and love.

Parables

This summer we are doing a series on the parables of Jesus at church. Kyle Snodgrass, who just published a major work on the parables, shows that parables were nothing new at the time of Jesus. They exist in almost every culture and as far back as texts go. What made Jesus unique was his remarkable mastery of the parable, and how he used them as vehicles of divinely inspired truth.

Good modern parables—convicting and compelling illustrations—are rare. Consider a simple one from Kierkegaard

“Once upon a time there was a rich man. He purchased a team of entirely splendid horses, which he wanted for his own pleasure and the pleasure of driving them himself. A year of two passed by. If anyone who had known these horses earlier now saw him driving them, he would not be able to recognize them. Their eyes were now dull and drowsy, their gain lacked style and precision, they had no staying power, no endurance. Moreover, they had acquired all sorts of bad habits, and though they had plenty of feed, they grew thinner and thinner as each day passed.

So he called the royal coachman. The royal coachman drove them for a month. In the whole countryside there was not a team of horse that carried their heads so proudly, whose eyes were so fiery, who gain was so beautiful. There wasn’t a team that could hold out running as they did, even thirty miles in stretch without stopping. How did this happen? It is easy to see: the owner, not being a coachman, drove the horses according to the horses understanding of what it is to drive. The royal coachman, by contrast, drove the horses according to the coachman’s understanding of what it is to drive.

So it is with human beings.”

(Provocations, 149)

Without being filled with the Spirit, without being drawn to obedience of our master, we languish and grow dull. Submission to the Lordship of our Master does not take away strength and beauty; it engenders them.

Pastor-Scholars

This is a good article on the temptation and the benefit of PhD studies from an wise teacher. I have been encouraged by meeting several "last group" students here at Trinity.

HT: TB

Small Groups

I have been asked to help with the small group ministry at church. This is a daunting task for the simple reason that I am not an experienced small group leader (nor am I interested in the topic in the first place!). While I don’t think it is an ideal fit for me, it is a great place to grow.

Some kind of small group atmosphere, where people can “do life together” and exercise the basics of Christianity is essential. In an ideal church, you would not need to prop this up with a “small group program” because members would engage with each other instinctively. When churches are suffering, you don’t need “small group programs” because suffering makes us aware that Christian community is not optional to the Christian faith. Or, when churches are born into communities that are already tightly knit, regimented small groups would be like offering to teach driving lessons at a truck stop. When I was in Africa, community was not something people talked about very much because it was the air they breathed. In the villages they all knew each other, depended on each other, and could not really imagine our North American suburban struggles that are born from the fact that we can go—with the help of an automatic garage door and a tall fence--- for months without seeing, let alone talking, with our neighbor.

But North American Suburban culture in the culture where my church is located. And one of the great struggles is to foster community that is more than an hour and a half on Sunday morning. Pastor Eric has asked me to help head up this ministry with the goal of “re-launching” the small groups in the fall. I plan on posting some of my thoughts in the future on “Small Groups” as I work toward this goal.

Sisters

One proof to me that a healthy family is God’s best “small group” is sisters. A godly girl I can be honest with, pray with, and ride bikes around Chicago with—all without a moment of awkwardness reveals the brilliance of God’s design.

Laura is heading to Ethiopia next year for a three-year term. "David, you are in the seminary world—what are some good book recommendations?" I point out a few sources, but the question is slightly unsettling as I peruse my bookshelf. How many of these books really build, clarify, sustain, or empower faith that will blossom under the pressures (both the routine and dramatic!) of the mission field that can be more oppressive than the hot African sun?

My eye lands on a book by Amy Carmichael. Oh, wait. Laura recommended that one to me.