Thomas Adams: watching the enemy

Let us watch Satan, for he watches us. There is no corporeal enemy, but a man naturally fears; the spiritual foe appears less terrible, because we are less sensible of him, Great conquerors have been chronicled for victories and extension of their kingdoms; Satan is beyond them all. Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands; but Satan his millions. He that fights with an enemy, whom nothing but blood can pacify, will give him no advantage.

Thomas Adams, A Golden Puritan Treasury, p75

Dying to listen

For me, what most resists dying is the idea from leadership seminars to scrutinize the time we spend with people and do a sort of cost/benefit analysis: Will this person become a key leader, giver, or server? In leading, time is an investment. But in pastoring, time spent with a person is a gift, a grace, a broken bottle of perfume. To listen without filtering is to give our best time and energy to this person, right now, knowing full well nothing may come of it for my organizational agenda, and that's okay.

Leadership

So great a salvation

This has sprung from me reading Hebrews this morning- I haven't looked at the Greek nor checked any commentaries...just wanted to give a disclaimer.

Hebrews 2:1-4  
The writer warns against drifting from the faith and, it seems to me, gives at least two motives for not doing so.

The first is: things will go very bad if we do.  If, under the OT period, departing from God's revelation was punished, just think how things will work out now if you abandon the gospel.   Straight forward, and perhaps a common way of speaking to congregations about the dangers of drifting from Jesus.

But this idea works because it is lesser-to-greater (in one sense): if that's what happened before then how shall we escape with so great a salvation as has been revealed in Christ?  Which means, it seems to me, that the other way we help prevent drift is:

Secondly, by showing the greatness of salvation.  He wants us to concentrate on the details of this salvation (v1) which is great (v3).  We warn of the dangers of drift BUT we also make it harder to permit drift by magnifying the greatness of salvation - it's wonder, splendour, mind-boggling dimensions and costs, and the Man at the centre of it.

We try to prevent drift by telling people not to let go, don't orbit too far from the Star. And by increasing the gravitational pull of that star, so that its sheer attraction makes it a very hard thing to leave behind.

Dyafink?

Peterson: prioritising the central = time for everything else

I can't listen if I'm busy.  When my schedule is crowded, I am not free to listen:  I have to keep my next appointment;  I have to get to the next meeting.  But if I provide margins to my day there is ample time to listen.

"Yes, but how?"  The appointment calendar is the tool with which to get unbusy...The authority once given to Scripture is now ascribed to the appointment calendar.  The dogma of verbal inerrancy has not been discarded, only re-assigned.

The trick of course is to get to the calendar before anyone else does. I mark out times for prayer, for reading, for leisure, for the silence and solitude out of which creative work - prayer, preaching, and listening - can issue.

I find that whenever these central needs are met, there is plenty of time for everything else.  And there is much else, for the pastor is not, and should not be, exempt from the hundred menial tasks or the administrative humdrum.  These are also pastoral ministry.  but the only way I have found to accomplish them without resentment and anxiety is first to take care of the priorities.  If there is not time to nurture these essentials, I become a busy pastor, harassed and anxious, a whining and compulsive Martha instead of a contemplative Mary.

The Contemplative Pastor, p22-23

Community against easy stragglers

Is that struggle something each of us has to do for himself or herself?

No. Satan is best fought within the community of the church. When I've preached on the shield of faith I was told shields in those days were beveled. They were linked together, so that one warrior was next to the other. It was like a wall going into battle. In the same way, I believe that it is in community where there is deliverance. It's in the context of community that we can find help, and where there is intercessory prayer, we fight together. So it isn't just you and the devil. It's you and other believers against the devil.

The other day I was watching the Animal Channel, and I saw something that really struck me. There was a huge herd of buffalo and about six or seven lions. And the lions were plotting to have a buffalo for dinner. Well, they found one buffalo that had strayed from the herd, maybe a couple hundred yards, and they went after that buffalo. So how do a few lions stop a buffalo? Well, as it happened, one lion grabbed the heel of one back leg of the buffalo, the other on the other back leg. And they just hung on until that buffalo slowed to a stop. Then one lion hopped on his back, another went after his stomach. And from there on you can just visualize what happened. It was gruesome.

But here's what shocked me. There were perhaps 100 buffalo, if not more, all standing and staring and watching this go down. I don't know if buffalo can think. But if buffalo could think, you know what they're thinking? Boy, am I ever glad that's not happening to me! Imagine if this herd had decided we're not going to let those lions get away with anything, and together they ran thundering in that direction with their horns down. Those lions would have scurried away immediately. The lions would never have a buffalo for lunch, if the buffalo stuck together.

There's a lesson for us there. First of all, Satan separates somebody from the herd. He makes them mad at the church and Christians, or angry because of some other reason. Once they're away from the herd, he intensifies his attack. And then when we hear of the spiritual/demonic struggles that a person faces we say to ourselves, Boy, am I ever glad that's not me! What we have to do as a congregation is to hang together. We have to close in and say we will not allow the devil to do this to our people.

Erwin Lutzer, Leadership

Postman: the statistician who drowned

We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.  That is to say, in a culture that reveres statistics, we can never be sure what kind of nonsense will lodge in people's heads.

Technopoly, p132

Prayer: detachment from the insatiable self

I know it takes time to develop a life of prayer: set-aside, disciplined, deliberate time.  It isn't accomplished on the run, nor by offering prayers from a pulpit or at a hospital bedside.  I know I can't be busy and pray at the same time.  I can be active and pray;  I can work and pray;  but I cannot be busy and pray.  I cannot be inwardly rushed, distracted or dispersed.  In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than my clamouring ego.  usually for this to happen there must be a deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day, a disciplined detachment from the insatiable self.

The Contemplative Pastor, p20.

Peterson: first-hand prayer

Peterson asks what would I do as a pastor if no one else asked me to do anything?  His first answer is:

I can be a pastor who prays. I want to cultivate my relationship with God.  I want all of my life to be intimate - sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously - with the God who made, directs, and loves me.  And I want to waken others to the nature and centrality of prayer.  I want to be a person in this community to whom others can come without hesitation, without wondering if it is appropriate, to get direction in prayer and praying.  I want to do the original work of being in deepening conversation with the God who reveals Himself to me and addresses me by name.  I don't want to dispense mimeographed hand-outs that describe God's business;  I want to witness out of my own experience. I don't want to live as a parasite on the first-hand spiritual life of others, but to be personally involved with all my senses, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good.

The Contemplative Pastor, p19-20

Peterson on Lewis on laziness

It was a favourite theme of CS Lewis that only lazy people work hard.  By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us;  then we find ourselves, frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half dozen different demands on our time, none of which is essential to our vocation, to stave off the disaster of disappointing someone.

The Contemplative Pastor,  p19