On Creatureliness and Limits

Zack Eswine:

To relinquish; to admit that some dreams are presumptuous; to acknowledge that some needs outlast me; to recognize my inability to fully supply what is lacking; to admit that I am limited; to say no to competition with brothers and sisters, and to give to others what I strongly desired for myself; and in it all to still take up the pen or give voice to preach Jesus— these indicate a surrender to noble limits.

Darryl Dash comments:

To summarize: you carry on you the bacteria that will take you apart when you die. Your dog may collapse and die today. And you must realize that many of your dreams and presumptuous, and the needs you’re trying to meet will outlast you. Happy New Year!
All of this could sound depressing, but look at it a different way. 

At the beginning of a new year, it is not my goal to be awesome. It shouldn't be yours either. We are here for a short while. We are not the Savior of anything. There are needs that we can’t meet, and there are things that we can’t control. We are limited at best, and dependent on God’s good grace every moment of every year. 

Depressing? Only to the extent that we've lost sight of reality. These truths are actually freeing when we understand them. It’s especially freeing because all of these realities are met in God, and more. God is awesome. He needs no resolutions. He is the Savior of everything. There are no needs that exceed his ability; he is eternal and he withholds nothing good from his children. Even death, which is not good, has been overcome. Everything sad will become untrue. And I am here, now, to enjoy what he's given me, with the hope that there is even more for me when I'm gone. 

If I have a New Year’s Resolution, it’s not to be awesome. It’s to rediscover my creatureliness and limits, and to rediscover God’s awesomeness and the richness of his grace. 

So far I’m off to a good start. Dragging a limp dog across the road sure seems to help. But if I finish the year more aware of who I am, and who God is, then it will have been a year spent in the best possible way.

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Redemptive Vulnerability

Zack Eswine:

He set down his coffee, leaned forward, and looked me in the eyes. 

"I can no longer respect you as my pastor." 

The reason for his loss of respect? The gas station story from my sermon. 

I had told the congregation how I stopped at a gas station to fuel up. Inside, on the shelves, sexually explicit magazines peeked out from behind brown paper. Temptation smiled. I ran out of there and drove on. In the sermon I said something like, "The endings to our temptation stories are not always this happy. Sometimes, we don't run when we should and we regret it. But one thing that I know is this. No matter what, the grace of God can meet you in the gas stations of your life." 

Recounting those words, the man sipped his coffee, sat down the cup and said, "No one who is a pastor should be tempted the way you seem to be. You have a real problem."
My head fogged. I respected this man. I was thankful for him. I also knew that four or five other men had responded in an opposite way toward the gospel in light of the story. 

"Well," I mustered. "I'm very sorry to hear that." 

Then I paused. Paul's words came to my mind. For better or worse, I spoke them. "All I can say is that I am what I am by the grace of God. I hope for the grace to always handle temptation in the manner of that gas station moment. But, I believe that your hope and the hope of our church should be in Jesus' perfection, not mine." 

Since that exchange a question about vulnerability has dogged me. How transparent should a church leader be? I believe an answer to that question begins with something I call redemptive vulnerability.

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Zack has a new website.  I'd strongly encourage you to follow it.  He has GREAT content.

Ministry is Not For The Superhuman

Mike Emlet reflects on Zack Eswine's book on pastoral ministry, Sensing Jesus, and our tendency to want to be omnipotent and omnipresent.

So what does it look like to lean against the temptation to be “everywhere-for-all”? 

• Frame your day with pauses that remind you of your absolute dependency on God and ground you in the present. Eswine suggests using the time-honored tradition of breaking the day into four portions—morning, noon, evening, night—and pausing at the beginning and end of each period of time to pray and read Scripture for a few minutes. Although my consistency in this discipline waxes and wanes, I can attest to how it acts as a speed bump to what would otherwise be a frenetic, prayerless, and unreflective day.

• Focus on the here and now as you meet with people. Truly attend to the people in front of you—their words, smiles, grimaces, and furrowed brows. So much of interpersonal ministry is being with a person, not arriving at a destination. We are like children on a long car ride who whine, “Are we there yet?” while missing the glory of the ordinary passing scenery, not to mention the blessing (OK, sometimes!) of being together as a family.

• Learn to value the ordinary, “exult in monotony” (66). If you don’t do this, you miss much of daily life! Without those eyes to see and ears to hear, it’s no wonder the here and now feels insufficient and the whisper to be somewhere else for someone else beckons. Can you smell the sautéed asparagus? Feel the warmth of your child’s hand? See the impish grin of one of the preschoolers in your Sunday School class? Taste the bitter goodness of that first swallow of morning coffee? Savoring these ordinary moments, gifts from God for a given place and time, reminds us that he will give us what is needful for the moments of ministry as well.

• Go to bed! “Sleep is a Sabbath-like act. We rest from it all and leave it all for God’s keeping while we lie motionless in the world for a while” (80). Honestly, this is hard for me. While I don’t have the stamina of twenty years ago, I still am often driven by an everywhere-for-all mentality that trades sleep for the diminishing returns of working late.

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We Hear What We Are Trained To Hear. What Do You Hear?

A story is told about a naturalist and his friend walking amid the frenzy of a New York City sidewalk. The naturalist suddenly stops as if he is listening for something. “Do you hear that cricket?” he asks his bewildered friend. “How can you hear a cricket with all of this noise?” the friend replies. “We hear what we are trained to hear,” the naturalist replied. Then he pulled a quarter out of his pocket and dropped it upon the sidewalk. Immediately a handful of passersby stopped and looked down.

While this story is fable-like, there is truth to recognize in the notion that “we hear what we are trained to hear.” Jesus knows this. The widow among the rich [in the Temple] puts in her two small coins. It is hard to hear her two coins amid the jingle and clink of the wealthy. Theirs drown out hers. Their voices fill our ears. Her tiny devotion, small, unnoticed, underestimated— it calls out and says among all the importance, “Look around. Listen. God is here.” Jesus recovers the sound of the widow and her coins, and the disciples learn to hear again (Luke 21:1-4).

According to Jesus, there are two kinds of hearing. This is what Jesus means when he says, “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mark 4:23). Jesus calls us beyond recognizing sounds to obeying or responding or discerning the meaning of the sounds.

To hear with the ear only is to recognize.

To hear with understanding is to discern.

To hear with the ear requires only that one's eardrums work.

To hear so as to understand requires that one's soul remain attentive and receptive to the goings on in another.

To hear with the ear one need only nod the head and shuffle the voice into “mhm” and “uh-huh.”

To hear truly, however, one must ready herself to experience the life of another, and from that experience, to understand that other.

To hear with the ear only is to categorize, explain, and move on.

To truly hear is to name the nuance, to understand the meanings, to separate out what is consistent from what is not, and to let what is mysterious or confounding remain for another day.

To hear with the ear only is to quote the Bible.

To hear truly is to bend one's life toward the meaning of the quote in Jesus and by his grace.

- Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus, pp. 194-195

If My Life Falls Apart Do I Still Matter?

Dr. Zack Eswine has had a profound impact on my life as a friend and preaching coach.  I can't commend his new book, and this short video below, highly enough.

An Interview with Zack Eswine about Life and Ministry as a Human Being

Get Zack's new book here. It is very powerful for those leading the church.

A Transgendered Person Enters The Congregation...

...a transgendered person enters the congregation to hear the preaching of Christ. This frightens parents, who do not come to church planning to explain to their children why two women are holding hands, why a man is dressed like a woman, or why the man in the next pew smells like alcohol. Parents in the church are outraged. I understand this; as a father with three children, I feel the tension.

But without realizing it, parents like me are sometimes embarrassed by Jesus.  Why would Jesus draw people like that to himself?  It is hard for parents to remember that children in the crowds saw Jesus with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners.  Parents want to go into Jesus' presence at church in order to keep their kids safe from the world.  But Jesus keeps drawing unsafe people from the world to himself. We are confounded.  We complain, "How am I supposed to explain this to my kids?"  With that complaint we lose sight of something vital:  To explain how Jesus reaches people no matter where they've been or what they've done is to explain to our kids the gospel.  It is to explain our own testimony.  It is to teach the next generation how Jesus relates to people and the world.   

A homiletic position that is able to treat the Scriptures without an awareness of those outside the church is hauntingly similar to the way preaching was being done by those religious leaders who challenged Jesus and whom Jesus challenged.  A community that was raised on the regular teaching of God's Word was shocked that Jesus would come not for the righteous but for those who need a physician.  

- Dr. Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World, p.  81

How a Pastor and Congregation Should Relate

Great post here from Zack Eswine on how a pastor and congregation should relate.

Learning About Suffering From Spurgeon

“To be cast down is often the best thing that could happen to us.” (Charles Spurgeon)

Zack Eswine:

It is rarely wise and often unkind to say what Spurgeon says while someone vomits from the chemo, showers off from bodily assault, exit interviews for their lost job, or weeps by the graveside of their child. In such moments, we learn from the best practice of Job’s friends. We say nothing. We sit in the ashes. We weep with those who weep. We talk more to God about them than we talk to them about God. We need not declare in these early horrid moments what grace and time in God’s hands can prove without our saying a word. So, we speak Spurgeon’s sentiment sparingly and in time, but nonetheless we learn to embody it daily. I say, “we learn to embody it” because we know full well that Spurgeon’s statement is not automatic. We know full well how sorrows can negatively change a person–it can harden us, embitter us, shatter our faith in God and make us cynical about people.

How then do we learn to embody a benefit to sorrow?

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