How to Be Ready for What Comes Next

Quit worrying so much about the future. Figuring out your calling isn’t as hard as you think it is. You will live with much more peace and will be much for effective at what God is calling you to do with your life if you follow the deep wisdom in this quote:

What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.
-George MacDonald

From 2 to 5 in 4.5 years

Four-and-a-half years ago my wife and I left the South Bay and moved into our small two-bedroom Peninsula condo, a family of two. Tomorrow we move out and move back to the South Bay, a family of five. We never expected our family to grow so fast.

Our family more than doubled in four-and-a-half years. We went from one man and one woman, to four men and one woman.

We went from 2 to 5 in 4.5 years.

More Gospel!

Read Dane Ortlund, The Radical Gospel, Defiant and Free. The heart of the article:

…so to startle this restraint-free culture with the gospel of free justification that the functional justifications of human approval, moral performance, sexual indulgence, or big bank accounts begin to lose their vice-like grip on human hearts and their emptiness is exposed in all its fraudulence. It sounds backward, but the path to holiness is through (not beyond) the grace of the gospel, because only undeserved grace can truly melt and transform the heart. The solution to restraint-free immorality is not morality. The solution to immorality is the free grace of God—grace so free that it will be (mis)heard by some as a license to sin with impunity. The route by which the New Testament exhorts radical obedience is not by tempering grace but by driving it home all the more deeply.

This is Straight-Up Awesome

“This is Straight-up Awesome” is the only title I could think of for this post. Watch this video (get through the first minute of advertisements) to see straight-up awesomeness in action. I hadn’t heard of “Gymkhana” until seeing this video. There’s no need to drive like this, but this would be so fun to do.

PS. Note that the car is a Subaru. Every man should drive a Subaru.

Churches Losing Their Sanctuaries

The lead-in from today’s Wall Street Journal, Churches Find End is Nigh:

ROSEVILLE, Calif.—Residential and commercial real-estate owners aren’t the only ones losing their properties to foreclosure. The past few years have seen a rapid acceleration in the number of churches losing their sanctuaries because they can’t pay the mortgage.

Just as homeowners borrowed too much or built too big during boom times, many churches did the same and now are struggling as their congregations shrink and collections fall owing to rising unemployment and a weak economy.

The article is informative, but badly titled. The loss of a building is not the end of a church. Fortunately the final quote in the article makes this statement.

Remember Your First Love

Whatever your vocation, there is some great content for you in this post by artist Makoto Fujimura, A Letter to Young Artists. My favorite quote from the post: “Strict moralism has never produced great art.”

Pastors, Quit Trying to Be Perfect and Let Jesus Love You

From as far back as I can remember I’ve been a perfectionist. Most pastors are perfectionists. I’m starting to think that a main reason God called me to be a pastor is to crush my perfectionism and set me increasingly free through the gospel. I don’t think I’d cherish Jesus like I do were it not for the past 9 years as a pastor. As I’ve said before, the pressure of being a pastor will either make you a better man or a worse man.

One of the worst things to hear as a pastor are disparaging comments about how you don’t work “in the real world.” I like how Steve Brown responds to this:

I can’t tell you the irritation I felt when someone would tell me that I didn’t live in the real world. I wanted to say (and often did), “You don’t know anything about the real world, you twit! I see more of the real world in a day than you’ll see in a lifetime. I’ve cleaned up after more suicides, stood beside more deathbeds, buried more babies, listened to more confessions, bound up more broken hearts, shared more secrets, and experienced more pain than you’ll ever know. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

Often unknowingly, some people can demean a pastor for not having a “real world” job while at the same time expecting their pastor to be Superman, to be perfect. Here is one humorous expression of the expectations that can be placed on pastors:

The perfect pastor preaches exactly 10 minutes. He condemns sin roundly but never hurts anyone’s feelings. He works from 8 AM until midnight and is also the church janitor. The perfect pastor makes $40 a week, wears good clothes, drives a good car, buys good books, and donates $30 a week to the church. He is 29 years old and has 40 years experience. He never forgets a name and spends most of his time praying to God. Above all, he is handsome.

He also knows when somebody is sick and needs visitation even without anyone telling him about it. He loves to spend time with his family and the perfect pastor has no problem with you dropping in unexpectedly. And he also spends most of his time in preparation to speak God’s Word. He remembers everyone’s birthdate and of course, their anniversary dates as well. Before and after services, he never fails to speak to each person present and will also take the time to listen to you for 15 minutes and pray for each person no less than 10 minutes after listening to them.

The perfect pastor always smiles and tells you what you want to hear. He also goes out to eat after church with each individual family, spreading his time evenly between all, and he also pays for all their meals. The perfect pastor eats nutritiously, gets his rest, exercises daily, and is always there to listen to you night or day. The perfect pastor has a burning desire to work with teenagers, and he spends most of his time with the senior citizens. He smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his church. He makes 15 home visits a day and is always in his office to be handy when needed.

The perfect pastor always has time for church council and all of its committees. He never misses the meeting of any church organization and is always busy evangelizing the unchurched. He meets with the all the other pastors in town because they all have so much time on their hands. He also stays focused on the vision of the house. And he attends all the town meetings for PR’s sake. He takes family vacations and attends all the latest church and ministers conferences and listens to your favorite TV preachers and is completely up to date on each prominent TV preacher’s messages. He spends all day each Saturday preparing the Sunday sermon, and he focuses on his family too. He also doesn’t overburden the church finances, so he holds down a full time secular job as well. He never spends your tithes on his children’s Baskin Robins Ice Cream cones. (Author unkown)

To the pastors who are reading this, many of you are weary and burdened. You think you have to be perfect. Perhaps, like me, that has driven you your entire life. You think your people expect you to be perfect. And, though you don’t think this theologically, in your heart you just might live by the lie that you must do all things perfectly in order for God to be happy with you.

Pastors, quit trying to be perfect and let Jesus love you.

Your Father knew all about your sin, flaws, wounds, and baggage when he called you to shepherd his sheep. Jesus doesn’t demand your perfect performance, he summons you to find rest in his perfect love for you, and to let that deep, deep acceptance be what drives and transforms your ministry.

Being a pastor is a great joy, but it’s also really hard. You can spend the next 30 years as a weary, fake, trying-hard-to-be-perfect-for-Jesus-and-my-church pastor. Or, you can quit trying to be perfect and let Jesus love you, and you can watch how that will change everything in your life and in your ministry.

Billy Graham on Aging and Regrets

Christianity Today has posted their recent interview with Billy Graham. Here is the first question and answer:

What advice would you give to people who are aging?

First, accept it as part of God’s plan for your life, and thank him every day for the gift of that day. We’ve come to look on old age as something to be dreaded—and it’s true that it isn’t easy. I can’t honestly say that I like being old—not being able to do most of the things I used to do, for example, and being more dependent on others, and facing physical challenges that I know will only get worse. Old age can be a lonely time also—children scattered, spouse and friends gone.

But God has a reason for keeping us here (even if we don’t always understand it), and we need to recover the Bible’s understanding of life and longevity as gifts from God—and therefore as something good. Several times the Bible mentions people who died “at a good old age”—an interesting phrase (emphasis added). So part of my advice is to learn to be content, and that only comes as we accept each day as a gift from God and commit it into his hands. Paul’s words are true at every stage of life, but especially as we grow older: “Godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Tim. 6:6).

The other piece of advice I’d give is the other side of the coin, so to speak. It’s this: As we grow older we should focus not only on the present, but more and more on Heaven. This world, with all of its pains and sorrows and burdens, isn’t our final home. If we know Christ, we know we have “an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you” (1 Pet. 1:4). I know it won’t be long before I’ll be going there, and I look forward to that day. Heaven gives us hope, and makes our present burdens easier to bear.

Find a Job You Love

Check out Matt Perman’s spot-on post about how to choose a job. An excerpt:

In other words, in addition to becoming more efficient and effective in our jobs so that we can have more free time to serve, we also need to see our jobs themselves as a means of serving. And, further, we need to take jobs that fire us up, that spark a passion in us, so that we are fully engaged and truly serving in the way that we are called to serve. We need to get away both from the mindset that says “I’ll do a job I hate for 40 years so I can retire with freedom and money,” and the mindset that, as Warren points out, says “I’ll do a job I hate for now so I can make a lot of money and then at some point do a job I love.” Avoid the deferred-purpose mindset. Find a job you love now, so that you can serve with maximum enthusiasm now – not in 20 years.

Things To Do With the Gospel

Scripture invites and calls us to do many things with the gospel. What can you do with the gospel? You can:

-Believe it

-Rest in it

-Rejoice in it

-Preach it

-Be strengthened by it

-Hope in it

-Share it

-Pray it

-Bank on it

-Experience the power of it

Add to the list…

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