I know that all of us can benefit from an older, wiser person speaking into our lives, but I am especially concerned about pastors. Too many times pastors are seen by others as the “go-to guy” for anyone who needs help, and we pastors begin to believe that we don’t need to go to anyone else for help.
Check out this short 4-minute teaching from my friend Rev. Tim Dilena about the value of “grey heads” in our lives—
My fellow pastor, humble yourself and accept the help of a wise mentor. It will not only enhance your ministry, it could literally save your ministry from crumbling.
My dear pastor, our task is not an easy one. It is one of heavy responsibility: Caring for God’s sheep.
They are God’ssheep. They are not your sheep or my sheep. But you and I have been given the stewardship care of God’s precious lambs.
I hope these words God spoken through the prophet Ezekiel don’t describe you. But may all of us pastors take them as a sober reminder of the weightiness of our role as the under-shepherds of God’s flocks…
Then this message came to me from the Lord: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds, the leaders of Israel. Give them this message from the Sovereign Lord: What sorrow awaits you shepherds who feed yourselves instead of your flocks. Shouldn’t shepherds feed their sheep? You drink the milk, wear the wool, and butcher the best animals, but you let your flocks starve. You have not taken care of the weak. You have not tended the sick or bound up the injured. You have not gone looking for those who have wandered away and are lost. Instead, you have ruled them with harshness and cruelty. So My sheep have been scattered without a shepherd, and they are easy prey for any wild animal. They have wandered through all the mountains and all the hills, across the face of the earth, yet no one has gone to search for them.
“Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As surely as I live, says the Sovereign Lord, you abandoned My flock and left them to be attacked by every wild animal. And though you were My shepherds, you didn’t search for My sheep when they were lost. You took care of yourselves and left the sheep to starve. Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord. This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I now consider these shepherds My enemies, and I will hold them responsible for what has happened to My flock. I will take away their right to feed the flock, and I will stop them from feeding themselves. I will rescue My flock from their mouths; the sheep will no longer be their prey.” (Ezekiel 34:1-10)
This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.
The Etceteras
Do you regard yourself as a highly respectable, dignified Christian? Are you religiously self-important, placing yourself where you fancy you ought to be placed, in stately surroundings? If so, you are not following Jesus Christ’s example.
If you cannot do ordinary things and live as nobody anywhere, you are not a saint. Jesus left Heaven and lived nowhere of any importance all His earthly life. There is a religiosity that is inspired by the devil, that gathers its skirts around it and says, “No, I cannot be in ordinary places, or in ordinary avocations; I am a servant of God.” Then you will be found nowhere but in the very commonest of common places.
You say you are called to be a missionary, a minister, a Christian worker: you are called to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, other things are etceteras.
I can think of only one reasonable response to this: I need to go look in the mirror and ask the Holy Spirit to show me where I’ve been more focused on the etceteras than I have on being a disciple of Jesus Christ.
God is not unjust; He will not forget your work and the love you have shown Him as you have helped His people and continue to help them. (Hebrews 6:10)
I don’t work for God’s blessings. I work for God becauseHe has already blessed me!My labor is alabor of love and gratitude!
How do I show I love God?
I help others.
Not just once, but continually. In the next two verses the writer of Hebrews goes on to say that my labor of love should be:
Diligent
Sincere
For as long as I’m alive
Without any laziness
Through faith
With patience
No coasting. No waiting for others to serve me first. No slacking.
God has blessed me so that I can be a blessing to others. This is how I show my gratitude for the blessings of God I have been given—
HARD WORKING LOVE
For those who have been loved by God there’s no other way to live and love.
“The heart’s fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest. Remember that always the greatest Christians have come out of hard times and tough situations. Tribulations actually worked for their spiritual perfection in that they taught them to trust not in themselves but in the Lord who raised the dead. They learned that the enemy could not block their progress unless they surrendered to the urgings of the flesh and began to complain. And slowly, they learned to stop complaining and start praising. It is that simple—and it works.” —A.W. Tozer
Listen to the podcast of this post by clicking on the player below, and you can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Audible.
When Jesus was arrested, almost all of His disciples ran away. Peter, however, stayed somewhat close to Jesus, but not for the reason I originally thought.
Meanwhile, Peter followed Him at a distance and came to the high priest’s courtyard. He went in and sat with the guards and waited to see how it would all end.(Matthew 26:58 NLT)
Peter waited to see how it would all end.
Peter thought, “This is the end, roll the credits, turn out the lights, we can all go home now.”
When we think we can figure out how it will all end, our faith is too small. It’s not our story—it’s HIS story. And God’s story never ends for those who love Him. Their story is a perpetual, never-ending love story that gets better and better as eternity rolls on!!
Don’t put a period where God hasn’t put one. Don’t look for how it’s going to end. If you are a follower of God, you have His eternal life. That means the story never ends. It goes on and on and on and on….
Trust in the Lord always, for the Lord God is the eternal Rock. (Isaiah 26:4)
Listen to the podcast of this post by clicking on the player below, and you can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Audible.
Today some call her “the holy mother” and revere her as a saint. But 2000 years ago, Mary saw herself as only an ordinary, faceless, fame-less, Israelite girl.
She came from Nazareth (a town of which people said, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?!”)
Nazareth was in the region of Galilee (an area of which people said, “No one special has ever come from Galilee”)
She was pledged to be married (probably a marriage that she had no say in)
And she was a young teenager
What did Mary think of herself? We can infer her self-image from what went on her mind when God’s angel greeted her with the words, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
She was greatly troubled and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. Psychologists today would describe Mary’s response as inner dissonance—the feeling that something is not quite right, but she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what was wrong. The phrase greatly troubled is a single Greek word which means agitated and perplexed by doubts.
In short: the way the angel greeted Mary didn’t jive with the way Mary saw herself (see Luke 1:26-38).
Mary, like many of us still today, didn’t think she was worthy of God’s attention, let alone His special blessings.
But the word the angel used when he said she was highly favored is a wonderful word! It’s root word is grace, and it only appears twice in the New Testament. This word means God’s grace which is constantly reaching out to us, even when we’re unaware of it. Look at the other passage where this word is used—
God decided in advance to adopt us into His own family by bringing us to Himself through Jesus Christ. This is what He wanted to do, and it gave Him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace He has poured out on us who belong to His dear Son. (Ephesians 1:5-6 NLT)
How amazing! God wants to adopt you! It’s something that brings Him great pleasure, so He constantly pours out the blessing of His grace on us!
Are you worthy of God’s favor? YES!! Not because you did anything to earn it, but because Jesus paid the price for you on the Cross.
Now you need to respond the way Mary did. The angel told Mary to “Fear not!” The verb tense implies that Mary needed to stop fretting about her (un)worthiness, and simply accept the grace that God was extending to her. In other words, she needed to see herself as God saw her.
Mary’s response should be our response: “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.”
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is My word that goes out from My mouth: It will not return to Me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:10-11)
Pastor, please carefully read these words from Oswald Chambers, written nearly a century ago, but still so relevant for us today—
“God’s Word is a seed. The ‘seed-thought’ idea is one that preachers and evangelists need to remember. We imagine we have to plough the field, sow the seed, reap the grain, bind it into sheaves, put it through the threshing machine, make the bread—all in one discourse. …
“The truth is we don’t believe God can do His work without us. We are so anxious about the word, so anxious about the people who have accepted the word; we need not be, if we have preached what is a word of God it is not our business to apply it, the Holy Spirit will apply it. Our duty is to sow the word, see that it is the word of God we preach, and not ‘huckster’ it with other things, and God says it will prosper in the thing whereto He sends it. …
“He says, ‘My word…will not return to Me empty.’ Every temptation to exalt the human, human experience, human interests and blessings, will fall short; the only thing that prospers in God’s hands is His own word.”
I need to be reminded of that again. Perhaps, my fellow pastor, you needed it to. This Sunday just preach the word God has given you, and then let the Holy Spirit take it from there. God WILL bring the harvest in His time.
UPDATE: In the final chapter of my book Shepherd Leadership (a chapter entitled “Applause”) I wrote this:
Did you catch that? Twice Paul reminds us that it is God who makes things grow [1 Corinthians 3:4-8]. God, not man. So is the only successful ministry the one that harvests? How did they harvest without someone watering the seed? What exactly were they watering if no one had planted any seeds? And even with everyone doing the work, it is still God who makes things grow.
According to Paul, what does God reward? It’s not numeric growth, but shepherds “will be rewarded for their own hard work … the work the Lord gave us.”
This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.
Not A Happy Life, But A New Life
This attitude is spreading amongst us today amazingly, people are enchanted with the truth, sympathetic with the truth of God, but remaining in sin. “Repentance” is not in their vocabulary, only regret; there is no confession of sin, only admitting. Religion is turned into education, and the Christian life is made to mean a happy life instead of a new life.
Has God been convicting us of spiritual pose before Him? Have we taken the great passion of the Atonement and made it simply mean that we must have a right attitude to God? We have to have much more than a right attitude; we have to get into an active, living relation to God, the inspiration of which is a great deep true penitence. Have we forgotten all about penitence these days? Has penitence ever rung down to our very soul, or have we only known regret? Have we ever known what it is to confess our sin, to unfold our life before God until there is nothing folded up, and God’s penetrating truth has its way? If not, we shall find as [Ezekiel 33:31] reveals, that it is perilously easy to have amazing sympathy with God’s truth and still remain in sin.
Sometimes my new life in Christ won’t be a happy life in Christ. Why? Because if I’m truly letting God’s Word penetrate my heart, I’m going to be unhappy with the sin His penetrating look reveals.
What will I do then? Will I just feel sorry for my sin? Or will I confess it, be penitent because of it, turn from it, and leave that sin behind?
That’s the new life God is calling me to.
A new life will become a happy life. But a happy life won’t become a new life.
I want to think clearly about You and exercise self-control in the way I live. Help me to always be looking forward to the gracious salvation that will come when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world, and not looking back on the past.
Help me to live as Your obedient child. I don’t ever want to slip back into my old ways of living only to satisfy my selfish desires. I didn’t know any better before, but I do now. May I be holy in everything I do, just as You, God, who chose me is holy. For You said, “You must be holy because I am holy.”
I know that You have no favorites. You will judge or reward me according to how I live. So I want to live in reverent fear of You throughout my entire life. I know that You paid a costly ransom to save me from the empty life I would’ve had without You. The ransom You paid for me was not mere gold or silver; no, it was the precious blood of Jesus Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. You chose Him as my ransom long before the world began, and now through Christ I have come to trust in You. I have placed my complete faith and hope in You because You raised Christ from the dead and gave Him great glory.
I was cleansed from my hideous sins when I obeyed the truth, so now I want to show my sincere love to You by living holy and loving others as brothers and sisters. Help me to love others deeply with all my heart. For I have been born again, but not to a life that will quickly end. My new life will last forever because it comes from You, and is confirmed in Your eternal, living Word.
Help me to always live in a way that brings You glory. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen!
Friends, I encourage you to use the Bible to enhance your prayer life.
I know that all of us can benefit from an older, wiser person speaking into our lives, but I am especially concerned about pastors. Too many times pastors are seen by others as the “go-to guy” for anyone who needs help, and we pastors begin to believe that we don’t need to go to anyone else for help.
Craig T. Owens 