Ministry Remnants: The Work of the Holy Spirit in Daily Life

Years ago I sat through a conference titled something like "The Work and Scope of the Holy Spirit in Ministry." I remember even then thinking it was a grand endeavor and yet I loved the teacher and mentor who led it, Edsel Trouten, not least for his largeness of vision and passion for thinking big thoughts.

And so to title this "remnant" as I have is a bit grandiose, for books and lifetimes have been spent on the question. Thus I shall see once again if my penchant for saying too much can be redeemed, the "too much" shepherded into something helpful, worth your time.

I tried to craft a message working from Luke's account of Mary's visit from the angel, specifically the answer to Mary's question, "How can this thing be?" "The Holy Spirit shall come upon you," explained Gabriel, and then, after further detail, he summed it up with immortal affirmation: "For with God nothing shall be impossible."

Does this Encounter Teach us about the Holy Spirit in our own life?

The same Edsel Trouten mentioned above -- there is no other! -- once pointed out no Scripture has direct application because no situation is thoroughly identical to that which occurred at the time of the writing. So if we hold too strict a a rule for applying we would apply nothing, since our situation has no angel, no virgin, no child to come, no Elizabeth -- you get the picture.

But if we step back we see a person -- Mary; a word from God -- "With God nothing is impossible"; the intervention of God in a person's life -- "the Holy Spirit shall come upon you." Can these things apply? To you and me? Today? Well, let's not be subtle: OF COURSE!

But Who is this Holy Spirit?

He is God, co-equal with the Father and Son, eternal, to be worshipped, heeded and obeyed. He "convicts the world of sin", a gift to make aware of that which will undo us and in the end, damn us. Furthermore, he can be grieved. He is self-effacing -- does not promote Himself. And he, therefore, works behind the scenes, deep within, slow, steady, unobtrusive.

How Do we Receive the Holy Spirit?

This can be difficult because often great emphasis is put on a point-in-time, an encounter, a specific filling. This is well and good and has biblical -- to say nothing of logical -- basis. If we are "filled" or "indwelt"; if the spirit is to "come upon us" it will happen at a point-in-time. But I think we often neglect the equally important truth that his life in us is always ongoing. 

How do we receive the Holy Spirit and begin walking with his inner, quiet, patient teaching and transformation?

• Repentance -- this is an essential, grace-enabled response to God. We turn from our own way and the door is opened for God to come in.
• We ask. Jesus taught so simply in the Gospels: "If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him." Need the presence of God in your life? Ask. He will give.
• Be still. A W Tozer says it well: "...cultivating heart stillness may be our most valuable activity because then we can hear God's gentle whisper." Or as Dallas Willard has it: "When we learn to be really quiet we begin to feel the breeze of heaven in our face."

So that's the remnant for now, with this summation. 

What is your impossible? Whatever it is, bring it to God. With Him nothing is impossible. But He works by means of the Holy Spirit. Are you repenting of any known sin, learning to be still and listen, asking, truly asking? You will find the God of the impossible coming in and slowly -- always slowly by our reckoning -- transforming your inner life so that, in time, the impossible will be a memory, and from your life will flow rivers of living water.

Ministry Remnants: Laying Eggs, aka, Preaching Poor Sermons

There once was a preacher, so the story goes, who, upon retirement learned his wife had a stash of $2,000 dollars laid aside in an egg carton, along with several eggs. 

"Where did this come from?" he asked, amazed. 

"Well, honey, every time you preached a sermon that was, as the expression goes, 'laying an egg', I put an egg in the carton." Seeing only 5 eggs the preacher was relieved. "But what of the two thousand dollars?" 

"Well," his wife replied, "Every time I had a dozen eggs I sold them and kept the cash." 

Every preacher knows the pain of having preached poorly. The reasons are many, for preachers are human to be sure. One seasoned preacher once told me, "If the congregation knows you love them it doesn't matter what you say in your sermon." I think this must surely be right and there seems to be a corollary truth: "The better you love your congregation, the more your preaching will have effect." 

Be that as it may, every preacher wants to do well, likely worries too much about it, and feels deeply pained when the message falls flat. So what to do? It is tempting to leave off, for no one needs platitudes and weary analysis. But daring to believe this could be helpful, if only to me, I will offer a few brief solutions to poor preaching.

• First things first: if you have not prayed, forget it. Pray for your people, pray regularly and at length, pray for wisdom and insight, effectiveness, anointing, unction, humility, brevity. Read Bounds for motivation. It will work if you are breathing. But pray. 
• Spend time with your people. Nothing helps you relate better to others than really knowing them. Nothing. This is a central natural means we must use to help our preaching. You need to know their perspectives, the things on their mind, their worries, ideas, concepts of God and the spiritual life. This will humble you, and will shut your mouth on half the pontificating to which you may be prone. There is no substitute for personal time with the folks who listen to you on Sunday morning.
• Study. Of course. Widely, regularly, grounded in Scripture. Listening to other preachers must be part of this. Learn through trial and error what study methods work best, how best to shape the message and delivery. And there is no substitute for going over the sermon multiple times while standing in the pulpit. Or at least do it once before you preach it for the congregation.
• Stay with the task -- few preachers get really good without years of practice. It is easy to want to give up for any number of reason. The struggle is real. But few things are more important than perseverance. God will help you. Quitting short-circuits that process, painful as it is.

I could go on with ideas perhaps, but that is enough. Discipline is required, as in any task. A preacher must submit to the disciplines of the calling if he would avoid laying the woeful egg. 

That's all for now. I want to be better, and this encourages me. I hope it may help you, too.

Briefly, on Faith

Faith isn't faith unless confidence in the object is maintained at all costs. I believe in a real, living God who is the only possible reason for good in the world. I believe He is personal, actual, morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing. I recognize the cognitive merit of objections; I recognize the cognitive merit of substantiations. I realize there are many ways in which I will die because of this belief for it requires more of me than I wish to give. And I am no hero, certainly no masochist. I just find that though faltering, painful, and tentative I still believe and can do no other. If that is untenable for the unbeliever, so be it. Unbelief is its own faith with equal vulnerability to the truth question. I believe there is Good. If there is a God who makes such a thing real, He will have mercy. If there is not, we will wish He were.

Indulge in the Delight of this Piece from Chesterton

There are reasons GKC is much-loved. His prose is so winsome and imaginative. I hope you will take time to enjoy A Piece of Chalk, one of so many choice selections. Here's an excerpt:

I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long, and the age of the great epics is past.

From Samuel Clemens on the things we know for sure...

"It's not what you don't know that'll get you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." ~Mark Twain

Solzhenitsyn's Reminder: What is the object of life?

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

Ministry Remnants: Pray for Your Pastor

Ruminations on a Sunday Morning...

What does a pastor do early Sunday morning?

• pray
• wonder
• worry (yes, pastor's do that, too)
• pray
• prepare
• think of details like lights and announcements and music
• worry about who no longer comes and why
• pray
• worry about normal struggles with health and family and finances and planning
• wonder again how it is possible to effectively preach, lead, love
• struggle to affirm the expected confidence in God from the inside out
• (the list is long)

On a Sunday morning early when I need to be doing something other than random ruminations, I remind all who may see this that the pastor is human, too. Yes, pastor's have responsibility like you have responsibility, and no one is holding a gun to the preacher's head. It is a 'chosen' mix of love and duty and least of all should a pastor seek pity.

Prayer, however, is in order, for every Sunday morning is a reminder that this is God's work and sheer folly to engage without His help.

Bottom line? 

Pray for your pastor today.

- He deserves criticism, no doubt, and heaps enough on himself. 

- He's not world-class or even close, that is true, but he wishes he were. 

- He may overlook you and your concerns: this grieves him. Try to find it in your heart to forgive. 

- He has too many things going. Scold him for it if you must, but remember he is probably like you: Do you have too many things going?

Your pastor loves you, loves the church, and wakes every Sunday with a mix of trepidation and hope:

"I can do this!"

"Are you kidding?!"

"My head hurts, I am not yet ready -- I can't do this."

"Yes, you can!"

The voice goes silent and the pastor presses on.

Pray for your pastor today.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

"One word of truth will outweigh the whole world"

So once said Alexander Solzhenitsyn , Russian dissident, Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, exhile to US for 16 years, hero in his native Russia. He is perhaps most well known for The Gulag Archipelago, his account of the Soviet prison system in which he lived for many years. While I am not a Solzhenitsyn scholar, of course, I am in the ranks of a great many who find him an inspiration and modern prophet.

I read some of his Oak and Calf, a sort of literary bio. Among the more remarkable accounts therein is his record of how he preserved his writing during the years when his work was forbidden. He literally memorized — if my memory serves — entire books. He also would write in tiny print and save the rolled MS in cannisters which were then buried.

I often wished I had taken time to travel to his American home in Vermont in the ’80’s though it’s doubtful I could have met him. And, of course, he had his detractors in recent years — you can find a dissenting view here.

But on any account his life is remarkable: from a young soldier on the front lines in WWII to political prisoner to father (one of his sons is Ignat Solzhenitsyn, conductor and composer in Philadephia) to dissident author, Nobel laureate, exhile, a Soviet non-person, modern prophet, American resident, returning hero to his beloved homeland in 1994.

He seemd like the aged sage that would always be here — and so he is for some time to come if we will have the sense to remember the kind of thundering and wise things he said. I have excerpted below some of his statements from the famous speech he gave at Harvard on June 8, 1978 . It was not what Harvard wanted to hear, but they, and we, need to take to heart what he said.

I was sad to hear of his passing. Ironically I have been reading his novel Cancer Ward not knowing he had died. My friend, Steve Blakemore, posted about his death on his excellent Third Millenium faith email which you can join here . He quoted from Solzhenistsyn’s 1978 Harvard Speech and I enjoyed re-looking at it. I hope you will have time to savor — and receive a helpful jolt — from the comments excerpted below.

It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Mere freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones. . .

We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.

After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die.
It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline.

People also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press.
Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary.

Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

Very well known representatives of your society, such as George Kennan, say: we cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West…. There are no other criteria.

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.
Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil…was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected.
Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed….[However, yours is the opposite error, so I would say],whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.

On Javert, Breaking Rules, Love, and the Easy Burden

Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart,

and you will find rest for your souls.(Mt. 11:29)

In Rafael Yglesias' screen play of Victor Hugo's timeless Les Miserables, Javert, the soul-less villain, finally captured the convict Valjean for good and has a gun to his head.

“It's a pity that rules don't allow me to be merciful,” Javert says. “I've tried to live my life without breaking a single rule.”

The line is thunder to the human heart. We imagine the keeping of rules is a good thing and the breaking of them is bad. We are right, and suffer the pride or shame that goes with either.

And yet Javert, it seems, had made rightness his highest goal. Separate from God, rightness builds its own prison, an echo-chamber of moral superiority that, in the end, can justify almost anything. Javert had devoted his life to rightness and in the end his life was forfeit at his own hand: he self-destructed in suicide. Javert found himself in a vortex from which not even Valjean's mercy could save.

And how else could life end for us if we make our supreme goal – the idol to which we daily bow – “living without breaking a rule?” Rules beget rules and crush the soul. Mercy cannot breath, and eventually dies.

A dear friend once said this to me in a different way. Listening to my struggle through tears and meandering, he said, “Sounds like you are in a valley.”

"Yes," I replied. "But what are we doing looking at all of this stuff, misunderstandings, stubbornesses, ideals all but crushed. What is this!?”

“We are in the laundry room, sorting.”

I liked the analogy, helpful instead of condemning. I wanted to say something about diapers and their messes, for that was the kind of 'laundry' at hand.

“I think you are fighting a phantom,” he continued. “I think the answer will be found when you quit straining. I think the answer is gentle, and you've not tried that much. How 'bout gentle?”

I didn't know what to say and then the conversation was abruptly interrupted.

And so I have often wondered: “Gentle. What does that mean?”

The Canadian teacher and psychologist, Jordan Peterson, gives a clue in one of his life rules: “Learn to treat yourself like someone for whom you are responsible and for whom you care a great deal.”

Really?! “Care for a great deal?” I care for myself well enough, especially my bodily wants. But can I be tender with myself? Can I forgive? Can I begin to ignore, and eventually quit the negative, perversely addictive self-talk? I think Peterson has it right. If I cared for someone else a great deal, how would I treat them? The answer gives guidance for how I should treat myself.

And so, how does this come around to Javert? Javert was his own cruel task-master. There was no room for love, only rules. He could not show mercy to himself, nor, in turn, to others. He self-flaggelated, and in it all a creature emerged whose only goal was to avoid breaking rules.

This is like Lewis's deep remark about selflessness. “We have it backwards” – my paraphrase. “The emphasis must not be on avoiding selfishness but on showing love, learning to demonstrate care and consideration for the needs of others.” Merely avoiding selfishness, like Javert's avoidance of rule-breaking, defines our life by a negative. It is a trajectory of despair. Love could not save him because he was bound to rules.

How we need this lesson. Do I care about others, or do I care about being right? We can live both of course. But we will find, I think, we are most right when we lay aside a singular focus on rightness and consider those around us. In this, love sets us free and we find the gentle way, learning to be free of striving, learning to be gentle with ourselves so we can, in turn, be gentle with others. How I long to learn this good way, this easy way to carry burdens, this letting go of the need to be right.

God is with us, and Jesus calls us, so beautifully, to His easy burden. That's the one I receive today, with gladness. And I want to be together on that journey with my wife and family, and with all who share this wonderful gift of life.

On being "Merely Dead"

Wonderful lines from Wendell Berry

What hard travail God does in death

What hard travail God does in death!
He strives in sleep, in our despair,
And all flesh shudders underneath
The nightmare of His sepulcher.

The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;
All night the cold wind heaves and pries;
Creation strains sinew and bone
Against the dark door where He lies.

The stem bent, pent in seed, grow straight
And stands. Pain breaks in song. Surprising
The merely dead, graves fill with light
Like opened eyes. He rests in rising.

Keeping Relational Reverb in Check

My friend, Roger, explained how reverb works in recording. “While playing in a room with normal recording, that is recording as heard in 'the house', there will be reverb: the normal echoes and bouncing of sound the ear is accustomed to. Then, when the recorded music is played back in a room, especially the same room, the reverb is doubled and can be unmanageable to the ear.”

The same happens in our relationships, especially those 'in the house.' We have all kinds of reverb going on in our souls and minds. We see shortcomings that trip us up. We can't quit a bad habit, we feel cantankerous most of the time, or we are self-critical without relief. This creates reverb. It bounces around within and drags us down in self-imposed defeat.

Then, the inevitable happens. Our faults, for which we already feel deep pain and which cause no small bit of internal noise, irritate those closest to us. Well-meaning, having borne with us for long days and years, they do not mean to add to the noise. But often that is exactly what happens. Either we assume they feel this way, or they actually say it: “Must you really keep doing that? Is something wrong?”

Now the sound is doubled and spills out, either silently or in painful words: “Want to know what's wrong? I'll tell you what's wrong. You! If you would leave me alone we'd be ok!”

And so it goes, one pain feeding another, rebounding, unmanageable, painful to the ear, devastating to the soul.

There is a better way. Take it to the Lord in prayer. Let him heal both the self-talk and the behaviour it breeds.

How does he do this? Time, talking, others, learning. There is no other way but the the patience and quiet and taking it on the chin when others object, learning to help them bear the burden you yourself have helped cause. Without this we never grow. But when we give up our selfish desires and refuse to insist on our own way we die the death of Psalm 126, putting the seed of self in the ground.

And then, as with all seeds, “the corn of wheat” comes to life and we find a harvest of joy, bitter tears forgotten.

Relational reverb is real and when it doubles we can't live with it for long. Learning the peace of Christ brings the sound of forgiveness which doubles joy instead of pain.