Humble Helping

The LORD sends poverty and wealth; he humbles and he exalts.  1 Samuel 2:7

God has blessed me with job(s) that keeps me humble. 

I sell cattle and horse drugs for a living, and on a daily basis some of my customers treat me disrespectfully.  The 20 year old at the front desk with her first job doesn’t care that I’m old enough to be her father and maybe deserve some respect just for that.  The stressed manager doesn’t grasp that I actually want to help him, instead I’m an interruption to his day.  The doctor expects me to always pick up or call back within 5 minutes, yet she never bothers to return my call…..ever.

I also work on our family farm with beef cattle, and it is calving season.  No matter what you do some of the baby calves just aren’t going to make it.  After YEARS of effort and planning, they lay down and die…..and there’s not a thing in the world you can do about it.

So God has blessed me.  He hasn’t sent me poverty, but instead sustained me with a modest degree of wealth.  And he’s provided my income by placing me in vocations that continually humble me rather than exalt me.  That combination is on my Thanksgiving list this year.

Leading Me in Worship

O come, let us sing for joy to the Lord.  Psalm 95:1

A lot smarter and more godly people than me have written entire books about this.  I, myself, would never even attempt to lead worship.  However, being a self-absorbed Christian blogger, I felt the need to offer suggestions to anyone that might attempt to induce me to sing for joy to the Lord.

1. Take me with you.  Don’t just get up there and do your thing, whatever that thing is, and leave me in the dust.  If you feel like I’m not with you, at least TRY and come get me.  Don’t just keep going with your set.  Stop and pray and come back for me if you can.  My son Chris, an aspiring worship leader in his own right, posted about this on his blog a few days ago.  Check him out at http://chrism08.wordpress.com …..if you dare.

2. Don’t make a fashion statement on stage.  I’m easily distracted.  Wear clothes that DON’T draw attention to you.  I know that’s hard for you cool young artsy types.   Just keep in mind that if I look on stage and my mind is on how very attractive you are, or how goofy it is for a dude to wear a Fedora, scarf, and sunglasses indoors in July …..well, then it’s probably harder for me to fix my attention on God. 

3. Cover for me and make it safe for me to sing with you.  My biggest fear is someone beside me actually hearing my voice….all alone….singing the wrong words….WAY out of key.  I cringe and they suffer as well.  Please play at a consistant volume and speed…..none of this nuanced soft then loud, fast then slow, stuff that YOU know is coming but I don’t.  If I can trust you to watch my back with volume and make the music and lyrics simple and easy to follow, then it’s easier for me to forget myself for a moment and actually worship my Creator.  (And remember the guy running the sound and projector with the words to the song is as important to my experience as you are.  Work with him please.)

4. Have a word with the band.  If the dude playing bass is singing along with you, I’m more likely to join in.  If the lady playing the keyboard looks really pissed at the world, I wonder who she’s mad at.  If the guitar player gets a bit carried away with theatrics on a solo riff, tell him to  stop it and do that in his basement playing GUITAR HERO.  If one of your backup singers just GLOWS with the Light of Jesus, put HER up front once in a while.  We’ll still love you.

5. Talk to me some.  Don’t need your life story every week, but make an effort to connect with me.  Be yourself and be real.  Maybe tell me about the song we’re about to sing…..what it’s about….why you like it…. why it was chosen this week.  Lots of time the songs are familar to you but foreign to me.  And let’s face it, some of the language and phrasing is difficult to grasp.  “O for a thousand tongues to sing?!”  “”Out of Zion’s hill salvation comes?!”  Help me out with that.

Forgive me for not being a good follower when you try to lead me in worship.

Without Love

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. f I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.   1 Corinthians 13:1-3 (The Message)

I’m SO guilty of missing this.  The Bible says I can communicate with incredible depth of understanding, have enough faith to perform miraculous deeds, give half my salary away, and sacrifice myself body and soul for my belief in God……and still miss “it,” (see previous post) because I don’t live out of love. 

I find it so much easier just to do things, perform tasks, than to focus on people and care for them.  And church provides me an opportunity to “do” lots of things for God, but I don’t do them out of the right motivation (love), then I’ve accomplished precisely nothing.  Indeed, if I blog and do not love, I’m just wasting my time, and yours too.  My apologies……  I’m working on it,

Must Read

“it” by Craig Groeschel has just been officially added to my list of “must read” books.  If you do anything at a church besides showing up and sitting, you must read “it.” Get “it?”

What else is on the list?  Since you asked…..

Mere Christianity – C. S. Lewis

Blue Like Jazz – Donald Miller

The Screwtape Letters – C. S. Lewis

Chasing Daylight – Erwin Raphael McManus

The Chronicles of Narnia (especially “Dawn Treader”) – C. S. Lewis

The Pursuit of God – A.  W. Tozer

Space Trilogy (Out of Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength – C. S. Lewis

The Jesus I Never Knew – Philip Yancey

The Great Divorce – C. S. Lewis

OK, I really like C. S. Lewis’ stuff.  And I wish I could put an Andy Stanley book on the list because I admire him so much.  His books are good, but his gifting translates better spoken than written, if that makes any sense.

Hunt You Down

I stopped in to see a friend that’s gone underground on me yesterday.  It’s a longish story.  Anyway, didn’t really go all that well.  As I drove away I thought of something I shared via e-mail back in Juoly 2005.  I copied it from the liner notes off a CD by Nichole Nordeman called “Brave.”  It’s not like it’s in the Bible or anything, but it speaks truth to me really deep down. 

“His love is not at all passive.  It is so relentless in its pursuit of our terrified hearts.  The love of God will hunt you down until you finally spin around in exasperation (‘okaaaaay!’) and admit how cherished you are.”

Grace

God saved you by his grace when you believed.  And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God.  Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.  Ephesians 2:8-9 (NLT)

Paul wrote this to Gentile Christians at Ephesus a couple of thousand years ago.  They missed it then and I miss it now.  I was dead, with Satan at work in my cold heart, and God loved me and saved me anyway…despite myself.   

Sometimes, in a effort to be more Christ-like, I’ll see someone that, deep down, I look down on or dislike and I’ll say to myself, “They are just as good as you.”  While technically true, it would be much more accurate (and much more helpful) to say, “I’m just as bad as them.”

Rather Not

Dear brothers and sisters, if another believer is overcome by some sin, you who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path.  Galatians 6:1a (NLT)

I would really rather not.  She should have know better.  He’s just gonna have to live with the consequences of his actions.  Why should I get mixed up in their messy life?  I have my own reputation to think of, you know.

What if Jesus had this view about me and just left me on my own?  If I take the name “Christian” at all seriously, I’m to do things I’d really rather not.

Well Said

Headed out today (after I vote) to the far reaches of my sales territory and will be gone rest of the week.  It looks to be a busy one so I thought I’d drop a quote on you that I read the other day.  I’m a fairly verbal person and occassionally I’ll run across something that is so well said, or that just captures and translates something so meaningful, that it stops me in my tracks. 

This is from Matt Chandler’s blog at www.deepwell.net

In 1 Timothy 4:10 Paul writes “For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.“  I love that verse.  We toil, yes. We strive, yes, but where is our hope?  What, or rather, who is the goal?  I love preaching the Gospel and I love planting churches but I do those things because in them there is this unbearable weight of His presence.  This crushing majesty that makes me want to cry, sing and scream all at the same time.

When I am closest to God, what it feels like is summed up in that last sentence fragment.  Well said.

The One Thing

How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God.   1 John 3:1 (NIV)

Heard three very talented professional pastors and gifted communicators speak yesterday.  And they really are good….don’t want to take anything away from them.  Then this 18 year old college girl stood up last night and said how she only had a couple of minutes to talk, and that the “one thing” she felt she needed to say was how much God loves us.  And so she talked about that for a few minutes and read a few verses.

The thing was, you could just tell that she actually believed that God did love her, that she had experienced and relished His love, and that God was as real her to her as the ground she was standing on or the air she was breathing.   I gotta say it was pretty breathtaking.  And that’s just to a spectator seeing one of God’s children understand and enjoy the love that God lavishes on us so extravagantly.  The Power behind all that love is more overwhelming still.  And it takes Him to move us towards Him.  His Love is what we ultimately have to either accept or reject, and Jesus is the ultimate expression of Love.

What this young lady was grasping and gripped by and sharing with us was just taking a song she learned as a little girl and putting it into her own words.  It begins like this, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”