WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING THIS WEEK

I’ve been in a pretty intense seminar/discussion group all this week. It’s called “Contemporary Issues in Pentecostal Missions.” 

Some of the topics we have discussed are:

• Status of Women
• HIV/AIDS
• Poverty & Economic Uplift
• Persecution
• Church Planting
• Business as Missions
• Contextualization/Syncretism/Religious Pluralism
• War, Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons
• Migration
• Short-Term Missions

The group of participants is made up people from Myanmar, the Philippines, the US, Samoa, Singapore, Bhutan, & Zimbabwe.

Here are the primary things we’ll each be taking home to our respective places of ministry:

The world is a mess.

Jesus is the only hope of the world.

God wants to use the church to make Jesus known to the world.

The Holy Spirit is available to empower & guide the church to make Jesus known in the world.

It’s been a great week.

GOD'S GREAT LOVE

I read Genesis 22 in my devotions today, about what was no doubt the greatest test of Abraham’s faith & obedience to God. There are incredible parallels with Christ’s crucifixion. For example, at least 3 times God refers to Isaac as Abraham’s only, beloved son.

The passage indicates that they spent 3 days traveling from their home to Mount Moriah, where God had instructed Abraham to take Isaac. Can you imagine the deep anguish that Abraham must have undergone every step & every moment of that journey toward the place of his son’s execution?

In addition, the one to be sacrificed carried the wood to which his body would be attached as he died.

There are many more details & observations that could be made, but we learn that at the very last instant, the angel of the Lord stopped Abraham from killing Isaac.

As we remember the Father sending Jesus into the world to go to the cross to give His life for our sins, one of the beautiful truths we see about God is that He doesn’t ask someone to do what He is unwilling to do.

Someone once asked a preacher, “Where was God when my son was brutally murdered?” The preacher, with tears in his eyes, said, “He was in the very same place He was when His Son went to the cross.”

For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die.But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:6-8).

How great & generous God’s love is for each one of us!

PERSEVERANCE

This word is very much a theological team. I learned about it in Bible college while studying the differences between Calvinism & Arminianism etc. But the idea has a lot of relevance for us today as we see our culture degrading before our eyes.

In my devotions today, I read several passages about various Bible characters who needed to persevere in following God’s plan in their lives.

Perseverance is a pretty unpopular word & concept for many people. The quest for immediate gratification mixes with it about as well as oil does with water.

It’s ironic that individuals & groups with evil intentions seem to be better at practicing perseverance than those with good, innocent, or even godly agendas or desires.

We live in a fallen, sinful world. The devil seems to infuse an insidious kind of perseverance in those who serve his purposes.

Good, godly intentions are worth persevering over. If we don’t know how to persevere, we will by default be overcome in the marathon of life. Allow God to develop in your life a quality that one of my old Junior High teachers used to call “sticktoitiveness.”

I love this old hymn:

CREATING DEPENDENCY

Something that we see regularly in life is what some have called the “need to be needed.” It manifests itself in many ways – the domineering family member who just can’t allow others to make their own decisions; the power-hungry elected official or bureaucrat who mistrusts the ability of the people he serves; even in the missionary who holds the purse strings & thus has the final word on what “the natives” do & how they do it.

In each of these cases, the underlying problem is in the one who supposedly has the power, the best ideas, & the most abilities. That person needs others to need him/her. It is sometimes called the “messiah complex.”

When we put our own emotional need to be needed over the need of others to function as God intended them to, life takes a nose dive. We don’t know the satisfaction of seeing the fruit of our mentoring & investment in others. We cheat others of the experience of making mistakes, & of experiencing God’s grace & our encouragement.

More than that, we are unintentionally trying to force them to put us in God’s place. The bottom line is that we are telling them to become idolators.

How can my insistence that someone do what I say make them an idolator? It is because I am usurping God’s place in my relationship with that person. I am becoming the source of their wisdom, the plumb line of what is right or wrong in their life. I’m making them dependent on me. No one can develop the kind of healthy relationship that God want to have with them if there is a dependency creator standing in the way.

Mentors, parents, spiritual leaders, & even public servants are responsible to respect, believe in, & prioritize the best interests of those they serve. The best interest of every human being is predicated on a personal experience of the truth of God’s Word & continued growth based on that truth. 

Let’s be a bridge to genuine growth, not a barrier to it!