Tag Archives: Paul

What to Do with All I Want to Do

Music, The Mission, , ,

I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.  I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. — Philippians 4:12-13 (KJV)

American Christians have always loved this verse. In general, it has been interpreted to mean, “I can do anything I put my mind to because God will back me up.” What’s more, “You should stop whining, trust God, and get out there and make it all better. It’s up to you and your faith.” That’s the R. Kelly version.

It is a nice one-liner and a good verse for beginning memorizers. But it is a heavy burden to place on someone if they don’t know that Paul is under house arrest when he writes it and probably never leaves Rome again. His lesson is, “Even though I can’t fly and my mission ambitions are on hold, I’m OK. Even though I am dependent on others and am suffering in many ways, I have learned to let that be and let God strengthen me.”

I have a strong streak of “can do” in me. Lately, it has been running up against “can’t.” So I have been looking at my three basic relationships, in Christ, and needing to learn Paul’s lesson again.

Let God be the center.

My relationship with God is top priority. Everything around me changes, but God and I have a place where we live that is eternal. I need to let that be. Right now, I am kind of preoccupied with

  • people moving,
  • marriages beginning and trying not to end,
  • children being born and growing,
  • the next leaders, next pastors, next congregations,
  • how our mission is to “greater Center City” that is now considered to be at Tasker,
  • drones, income disparity, identity politics.

I’ve got to do something! I can. But not unless God gives me strength. And when I can’t, my despair could be overwhelming unless God gives me strength. I need to rest in that central place where God and I live, which I carry with me as I encounter a challenging world.

Let the body of Christ work.

My second main relationship is with others in the body of Christ. I am part of it. It is good to know that all I am called to do is not dependent on my one, limited body doing them all. Jesus has a body and it is all of us.

Rachel and I were excited about doing the Midsummer Night party that happened last night and about getting our new “living room” together as part of that. We were worried that no one was coming. We had to just let it be. The body is going to do what it decides to do. People have faith; they will express what they are given. I can encourage and catalyze that expression, but I can’t make it happen. It is a miracle that faith, hope and love happen at all! I need to appreciate what is, not feel responsible for what isn’t mine to do on my own.

Let God go before us.

It seems strange that I would try to butt in front of God and lead him around in my mission to the world. But I do that. I get excited about my relationships with the faithless and needy of the world and sometimes seem to think I am the Creator. I always need to remember that God is already present wherever I think to show up.

I think about showing up every day!

  • I want to help create new businesses to create jobs.
  • I want to have a bank to free us from financial predators.
  • I want to connect with atomized people walking by in headphones.
  • I want a peacemaking community to undermine the war machine.
  • I want a thriving counseling center, new missionaries, further relief workers, school reformers, racial reconcilers.

There is a lot to do! And that is just the beginning. If I am in charge of all that, the gospel is in trouble. But God is obviously at work in so many ways! Good is done. Jesus is honored even in a society in which the elites have kicked God out of their prevailing philosophy.

In each of my three basic Christian relationships – with God, with the body of Christ and with the hungry world, I need to let God be the one who is and was and is to come. As a result, I can do all those things I am compelled to do, as who I am given to be, with the strength I have been given to act. I can do all I have been given through Christ, who strengthens me, as part of the body, as one who delights in seeing God going before me in every place I stick my toe into his ocean of grace.

Lessons in Spiritual Depth from Paul: Wait, worship, listen

A life in the Spirit, , , , , , , , ,

I have received a lot of mentoring from the Apostle Paul — from my first real reading of the New Testament as a teenager, I felt a deep kinship with him. My thought was then, and still is, that, “If Paul can do it, so can I.” He is so obviously a real guy, with all his gifts and limitations in action. He has a personality that shows through. And God uses him.

Oldest image of Paul, 4th C., From Catacomb of St. Thekla in Rome

I look at the accounts of Paul in Acts and what he writes in his letters like a story about an action hero. He is such a persuasive teacher and a courageous missionary! He is so dramatic that it is easy to overlook the quieter, interior qualities that are basic to making him so influential.

I have learned a lot from Paul about how to deepen my relationship with God by learning to wait, listening in prayer, and moving with the promptings of the Spirit.  I felt like doing this little study to prove that he really was that kind of spiritual guy. It seems that, for most people who read his letters, Paul is all about principles, morality and preaching. He is primarily a great  example of an evangelist and church planter. But what about the quiet side? Is he ever silent? How does he get his direction? There are some hints about his personal relationship with God in the New Testament record. I want to list some main ones to encourage us all to move with the “regular guy” Paul as we attempt our own expression of our faith in this era of the world.

Waiting

Paul was cooling it in his home town after he escaped Jerusalem. It is important to learn how to wait.

Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. Acts 11:25-6

After his conversion Paul spent “many days” with the disciples in Damascus. The “scales” coming off his eyes also had to do with unlearning his passionate Jewish activism, and no doubt had to do with a major interior change. It took time. In Galatians he gives a more complete timeline:

But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days. Galatians 1:15-18

The timelines in the Bible are hard to put in order, since that is not the interest of the writers. But this at least implies that Paul spent a significant time in the desert after his conversion. He apparently had a sojourn like Jesus, being confronted and purged by God’s Spirit in preparation for his major role in building the kingdom.

Paul had significant times of waiting throughout his ministry and he used them. Many of them were the times he was in prison. He spent two years awaiting trial, at one point.

As Paul discoursed on righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come, Felix was afraid and said, “That’s enough for now! You may leave. When I find it convenient, I will send for you.” At the same time he was hoping that Paul would offer him a bribe, so he sent for him frequently and talked with him. When two years had passed, Felix was succeeded by Porcius Festus, but because Felix wanted to grant a favor to the Jews, he left Paul in prison. Acts 24:25-27

Martin Luther King did well with his imprisonment, too. We may face that ourselves, one day. Until then, we wait in all sorts of other ways – imprisoned in our jobs, or on the Schuylkill. It is good preparation time, if we use it to be with God.

Worshipping

Paul got direction by receiving it from the body as they received it from the Holy Spirit during times of worship and prayer.

In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off. Acts 13:1-3

If we have worried about our spiritual development at all, so many of us have spent our days interpreting spiritual material and applying the logic we concoct. As a result we often have little idea of what the writers of the Bible were doing to receive the material we are interpreting! They obviously spent a lot of intense time in prayer getting direction for what they were going to do. From the way Paul writes his letters, it might sound like Christians should all be articulate theorists. But he is obviously a lot more than that. His applications are resting on the foundation of his experience of Christ in his body.

Listening

Paul developed the ability, as have so many after him, to listen to the Spirit of God in any number of ways. Somehow the Spirit prevents him from doing one thing and directs him to do another.

Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. Acts 16:6-10

The boiled-down “science for the masses” we have all learned has made us very suspicious about spiritual promptings and visions. (And Paul tells us to test them well, himself). Combined with the excesses of the Pentecostal movement, so often portrayed in living color on TV, we end up tempted not to listen to the Spirit at all. So our own directability is pretty much nil. Meanwhile Paul is remembering his experiences of revelation as foundational to all he does and says:

I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell. I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. 2 Corinthians 12:1-5

He had a great experience of hearing from God fourteen years before he was writing, but he was still talking about it. He had regular experiences of being directed that his companions wrote about. I think that teaches me to stop and listen.

God still needs deep people. We have a lot of reasons why we are not developing into deep people. And we really have a lot of reasons why we are not going to follow the spiritual promptings we do receive. But one excuse we should never use is that such depth is beyond us. The wild movement of God’s Spirit is for regular people, like the Apostle Paul.

God causes the growth

Building community, Leadership, ,

I am moved to hang on to some basic teaching today.

What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. (1 Corinthians 3:5-7)

This morning, as I listened to God and prayed for the church, I took heart in in Paul’s teaching. He laments the deep problems in the church in Corinth, where he had spent so much time laboring and loving. They shocked people with their immorality. They divided up the church in factions. They had a strong contingent who thought they were spectacular, and better than Paul, their father in the faith. Some of them re-thought the gospel to reflect themselves rather than Jesus.

Some days, I look out over my beloved community of Circle of Hope and am tempted to lament. I just see the holes in the Swiss cheese. It is not a nourishing practice. Today God saved me from that by reminding me of what he has done, which is what he is likely to do again. Circle of Hope is so astoundingly rich in faith, hope and love that I begin to get nervous when there is a little dip in our storehouse of all the good things God has given us. My standards are very high. I forget that God created it all from nothing not too long ago.

It is, again, like Paul told the Corinthians:

“Think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. (1 Cor. 1:26-30)

I totally relied on this wisdom from Paul when I came to Philadelphia. I am convicted today to keep walking in it. God is bigger than our capabilities and our critics. God is greater than our wonderful history and our sinfulness. God is hopeful because of our good track record and in spite of our mediocritizing.

If we live or die, as the church, Jesus is Lord. But I am sure we will live and God will cause the growth. Here are several reasons to believe that such a life is likely which come from just the people I talked to yesterday:

  • A man walked into our door last week looking to be restored to God after medicating his mental illness with drugs and alcohol. He is finding rest.
  • A man is overcoming his sin and the wreckage it has caused in his family and circle of friends.
  • A man is experiencing the fruit of his act of courage in taking risks to follow his truest calling and it has opened up the door to welcome God into the deep parts of his being.
  • A woman is celebrating how our church came through for her when her husband was jailed and is thankful that her own new faith sustained her.

God is causing the growth. Like Jesus says, the kingdom of God is like a seed that grows day and night and one can only be in awe of it, not cause it. We plant and water, but nothing will happen without God creating the environment in which it can flourish. And that is just what God does.