Priority #1

So my thought tonight will go along with my last post. As I have moved one step further into my journey with God each day I seem to be reminded that no matter what I do, I must put my family first. I believe this will be vitally important when I get into full time Pastoral ministry. 

I have first learned to sense when my wife and better half is in need. I have notice that unless I bring her along with me in this journey and share with her a lot of what God is doing in me and through me, she seems lost. I have noticed that her gauge is tuned into mine. When I feel close to God she is strong confident and is a great support. But when I become distracted, disillusioned, and totally over burdened in life, she to can become irritable and a stress factor for me. This also then factors into her spiritual heart beat and relationship with God. This challenges me to because I believe that God makes the man accountable to Him for the spiritual heart and the wife. 

God is reminding me through each step that when, Lord willing, I become enthralled in my ministry and my faith family that I shepherd that I will only go as far as my wife's support. My wife must come first because then and only then will my ministry succeed. As Paul reminds us in Ephesians, "husbands are to love their wives as Christ loves the church". 

This means practically that my ministry cannot come first before my wife. My wife must come first. She must be the ultimate sacrifice and my first choice. She must realize that she means the world to me and that even as the weight of ministry and love of God's children, she is still my first and most important love. 

God created the man and women and the relationship of oneness in marriage before sin entered the world, before His mission through Christ, and way before the church. This union is the foundation for the rest of the Christian life and it is also what I found to be the foundation for success in what happens next. That means and what I have come to realize my wife is the most important thing and relationship in my life next to my bond and relationship with God. 

Money and Ministry

So today I am going to try and be a little more open and  honest. Some people might even say I might be about to rant. In most of my previous post, I was more practical in what I was trying to get across. I wanted to connect the Bible to relationship and try and drive myself to be a stronger and deep follower of God and lover of Jesus. But tonight I just want to fire away from the hip and begin maybe a week of doing so about my journey. 

So first when I mean my journey, I am talking about the call of God in my life to serve Him and when I mean serve Him, I mean work in a full time pastoral role. This has been an interesting and exciting journey. I have trusted God each step of the way and He seems to teach me something new everyday. One of the biggest things I am continually learning about is the relationship between my family (my beautiful bride and my lovable and crazy kids) and my future ministry. A discussion I have been reading about over the last few days that has many sides to it is money and a Pastor. How much is to much and how much is not enough for a Pastor. That can be a tough question. This is where I think the relationship between my family and my ministry is important. I believe that my family should and will always come first before my ministry. I will dive into this conviction in my life in the next post but it is what has stemmed me with every decision I have made up to this point in regards to my position in ministry. But when it comes to money, I believe I need to make enough that my family is supported and not hurt by my ministry. This does not mean my family has to live in luxury and have a vacation home with 4 cars and a 4,000 sq/ft house, but what it does mean is my family is taken care of and not in need. The money level in my life and pay for doing God's work must not make my family despise the church and God for the sacrifice but love Jesus even more for the blessing and grace He has give the family for serving Him. This means as I am looking at the ministry God will lead my family in, the level of money that He will provide must be sufficient to support and meet the needs of my family. I have come to follow God's leading in my life by using money to guide me in my search and not have money be the root of evil and despair. 

Service

So this morning in my worship service the passage from Luke 10 about Mary and Martha was the text preached on. Listening to this text talked about and the implications of Martha's heart issue compared to Mary's got me thinking. I also talked about, in my Adult Bible class, what a real relationship with God looks like rather than just a life of belief. I dove into the fact that God, or Jesus, should be our great treasure, most prized relationship, and ultimately where the source of great pleasure and joy in life stems from. I think Mary understood this because in the verse in Luke 10, she just sat at Jesus feet and basked in His glory and the pleasure of His presence.

So what was wrong with Martha's heart and her issue. I do not believe she was sinning but she was rather serving out of the wrong motive and heart. Martha's relationship with Jesus in this story was about the service not the pleasure of the relationship. And I find that is where I am a lot of the time. Do I teach in Sunday School because I find pleasure in enjoying God or because I am doing His service? Do I tell others about My Jesus and what He can do because I find joy in that relationship that I cannot contain or because I find it a duty? I truly believe that the relationship with Jesus should stem everything else. My relationship with Jesus, the pleasure, joy, and excitement that this brings should stem the service. This was Martha's issue. After Jesus was done teaching, I can imagine that Mary would then love Jesus and enjoy Him by helping serve Him with her sister. But in the moment the more important task was enjoying the relationship with Jesus. The relationship should drive the service. That is the heart issue, service being driven by pleasure in the relationship rather than service out of duty. Next time I find my service for God to be draining or frustrating, I should check my relationship with God and see if that needs fixed first. When my service becomes anxious and stressful, I should check my pleasure and joy in God. My service should be like Mary, driven by my love and pleasure in God, not the reversal of serving to find love and pleasure. Thanks to Mary and Martha I need to find what is important before I begin my service.

Thirst

Before I get into the meat of what I want to say tonight, congratulations to my good friend and brother in Christ Seth on getting a nice prize only hours into the season. But now onto more important things. So in last nights post I talk about keeping a focus on God rather than on life's problems and the God solution to meeting the need. But I began to think what exactly do I mean when I say the person needs to focus on God. This is also something I have been thinking about as I have prepared this week to teach in my church family. What do we mean when we say focus on God. I have come to find what I believe is the clearest picture of focusing on God. It is the first 8 verses of Psalms 63. And here it is

O God, you are my God;

I earnestly search for you.

My soul thirsts for you;

my whole body longs for you

in this parched and weary land

where there is no water.

²      I have seen you in your sanctuary

and gazed upon your power and glory.

³      Your unfailing love is better than life itself;

how I praise you!

⁴      I will praise you as long as I live,

lifting up my hands to you in prayer.

⁵      You satisfy me more than the richest feast.

I will praise you with songs of joy.

⁶      I lie awake thinking of you,

meditating on you through the night.

⁷      Because you are my helper,

I sing for joy in the shadow of your wings.

⁸      I cling to you;

your strong right hand holds me securely.

I began to read this verse every day in preparation for understanding what it means to focus on God or even better to know God. I believe these verse are the perfect picture in the life that know's God and is continually seeking after Him. To focus on God is to know Him, have a relationship with Him, seek after Him, and ultimately have Him as the greatest treasure in our life. I pray that I can say truly that God is my greatest joy and treasure and that I can echo what the writer of this Psalm is expressing. 

The Focus

So, I pray that this post is kind of what the question that I was asked about the other night. I also would like to spend the next few post dealing with this question and many layers that are underneath this discussion or idea.

So I was asked how can a person or group of people totally rely on God, in the midst of challenging and tough circumstances, stay humble without getting prideful and arrogant as God continually provides and meets the need each time?

I believe this is very challenging. When life is hard because of health problems, money situations, or life's bad breaks, a true believer in God must turn to Him in those times of need. This is where it must begin. First, let me say that God is in no way required to meet the need and provide sustenance for the person, but in His grace and mercy He can provide for the situation. But how can the person stay humble in the life that is continually carried by God through many dire needs?

I believe the first place the humility begins is in the focus of the person. When life gets us down and money runs out, do we focus on the need or do we focus on the God who meets the need? That is the first question that must be asked and the beginning of this discussion. When God is continually meeting the needs of His children, does the situation distract us from God or help us focus on God better? The answer should be that focus must be on God and not the situation. "Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again, Rejoice". (Philippians 4:4) Paul was not saying the person should rejoice in the provision of God or the need being met, he was telling the reader to rejoice in God. Rejoice, focus, and praise God. That is where it starts and that is where it must end. Finding the true happiness and joy in the Lord rather than in what He does while keeping the focus on God and not on what He is doing for us. The focus then is on God and not on what He is providing so that pride in what He continually is doing for us should not be. Pride in our God is what it should be. When the person in the situation or life that is being met has pride in God, it is humbling to understand who He is and why He cares for us enough to show us favor and grace.

So the first place to keep humble when God is providing again and again is to check where is the focus, the problem and provision or in the God who loves us. That is the first step in staying humble. I pray this starts to answer the question that has been raised.

Charity in Belief

Over the last 24 hours I have been reminded multiple times about having charity in my theology, or as Joshua Harris would say, "humble orthodoxy". This is important for anyone with belief to remember but even more important for brothers and sisters in Christ to remind themselves of continually. I was listening to N.T. Wright defend his position on women in the ministry and then had to respond;  first with what I liked about his methodology and what I agreed with him on. Doing this simple exercise before I started to defend what I believed was good because it got me to realize that there were even some things I had in common with this man I disagreed with and more importantly I could hear his passion and even see the humility coming through in his defense. Then, I was talking today with a good friend and mentor today and we always rib each other in fun about our theological differences but in the end we love each other an take it back to the core unity in Christ. He was reminding me today, "what hill are we willing to die on and what hill is a waste to fight on".

So, this charity in belief is important to remember. We should always be finding the common base of the belief; the grace of God that washes away all our sins in the life of faith and spreading that great news to others, the common core. Now I am not trying to say that having positions, on spiritual gifts or how salvation actually works or does man have free will to not, is a bad thing. The bad thing and maybe even sinful things is how do you defend those positions. Is speaking in tongues a hill worth dying on, to quote a great friend of mine. Or is a women preaching on mothers day, a thing to split a church over? I think in both of these cases not it is not. Where is the charity and humility in the belief? As brothers and sister in unity under Christ, we need to show love to each other, humility in what we believe, and charity in how we share it. This will then allow the world to see a true Christ in His church, rather than a hypocritical and fight brood of people.

The 4 Gospels part 2

I am sitting here tonight as I write listening to my Pittsburgh Pirates play their first postseason game since I was 10, so I cannot guarantee how good this post might be. That being said, I want to finish my thoughts on the importance and differences in the 4 books of the Bible we call the Gospels.

Up front, I want to say that these thoughts are not deep and no where close to exhaustive. If you desire a better understanding of the complete aspects of the 4 Gospels look to a good commentary or New Testament introduction, like "An Introduction to the New Testament" by DA Carson and Douglas Moo. But in a previous post I talked about how the different gospel accounts fill in the holes of each other and the important parts of the story. The 4 gospels fit together like a mosaic.

I want to touch a little in this post on why some of the gospels have the same story or teaching by Jesus but have it in a different way or format. We can have confidence in that each Gospel account is true and without error and that there is no mistake in a certain set of verses in the different accounts, especially the passion stories to end each Gospel. I believe we can have this confidence for 3 simple yet important things to remember.

First, each Gospel account is from a different person's perspective or view of the story. Matthew was a disciple with Jesus, so He got to see many events and teachings first hand. Mark, is the view of the Apostle Peter, and he is unique in that like Matthew he was there first hand but Peter was also one of the inner 3 that got special privileges that some of the others, like Matthew would not have. Luke is a descriptive narrative in that he interview many people including Mary and Paul to get his account. John, like Peter, was an inner apostle and got many first hand and intimate times with Jesus but John also does not include a lot of what Mark, ala Peter, records.

The second thing to remember is that the 4 Gospels were written by each author to different people and places. We know who Luke was writing because he says it right away in the beginning of his writing. So Luke was writing to a Greek man who was probably connected a lot to Greek and Hellenistic Jews. Church tradition teaches us who the other 3 accounts were writing to, Matthew was writing to a Jewish church in Syria, Mark was writing for the Christians in the city of Rome, and John was writing in essence for the whole world about a particular issue.

This brings us to the third thing to remember when reading and comparing the 4 Gospel. Each author had a different topic or issue to write about. Each author wanted to show Jesus in a certain light or an important aspects about the Savior. Matthew was writing to the Jews to show that Jesus was a better Israel and the true King. Mark had a key in that he wanted to show Jesus as a servant who would suffer for those he loves and that to follow Him meant the follower might have to suffer. Luke wants to show the things that have been said about Jesus are true and that he was a man who lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. John make is really clear why he is writing when he states it in 20:31, Jesus is the Christ the Son of God.

So in bringing this long post to a close, I could not have imagine not having each of the 4 different, unique, and amazing Gospel accounts to read and learn more about each day like some of the early 1st century church's. So we to can take confidence in know that all of the Bible is unified and complete for our benefit and knowledge of God's Word.