You especially noted that after all these years of ministry, you don't know of anyone becoming a Christian through your work. Looking back over my own life and ministry, I would say that one of my greatest weaknesses has also been trying to figure things out on my own without taking the time to be alone with God and opening myself to what He wants to teach me.
What I would stress then is that a man of vision gets his vision only in and through prayer. Only prayer with a goal of glorifying God at any cost can give God's vision to a man or a woman. I covet this for myself - and for you.
I would encourage you to remember that such a desire for vision is already a gift of the Lord, and what He has begun to give He wants to increase. Hindrances there are. One of these happens to be reservations in our hearts about the nature and character of His will for our lives. We secretly suspect that His will might be more demanding, more crucifying of our desires, than we can handle. But daily surrender to His will as you pray, and it will bring a freedom from anxiety that you cannot believe.
But whatever grace Abraham has is elusive for most of us. Abraham had a spiritual vision that allowed him to see beyond the eleventh hour, but the rest of us live with reading glasses that exaggerate what is in front of us and blur everything beyond three feet.
In the wilderness story, God tells us up front that he is the God of suspense. In the course of that story, he assures us that there will be times when we feel surrounded, facing insurmountable odds with no apparent way out. That, in fact, is part of his good plan for us. He also tells us that he will bring us to the end of our cleverness because that is when we are most apt to acknowledge his strong hand alone.
In many ways the term "Scientific Revolution" is as misleading as "dark Ages". Both were coined to discredit the medieval Church. The notion of a "Scientific Revolution" has been used to claim that science suddenly burst forth when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it, and as the recovery of classical learning made it possible. Both claims are as false as those concerning Columbus and the flat earth. First of all, classical learning did not provide an appropriate model for science. Second, the rise of science was already far along by the sixteenth century, having been carefully nurtured by devout Scholastics in that most Christian invention, the university.
It is easy for us to say whatever comes to mind, our role as pastor compensating for our inane speech. It is easy to say what either flatters or manipulates and so acquire power over others.
The word charis is found one hundred times (in 95 verses) in Paul’s letters, signifying that it represented a most important theological concept for him. With only nine exceptions (where charis is used of the kindness shown by believers or to express thanks), it denotes the grace of God. It is found frequently in the opening and closing greetings of Paul’s letters (e.g., in 1 Cor 1: 3: ‘Grace and peace to you from God our Father’, but most often to refer to God’s goodwill expressed in action for the benefit of believers. Paul speaks of God’s grace, God’s goodwill expressed in action, in many different connections. He mentions it in relation to (i) his own calling and empowering to be an apostle (1: 5; 12: 3; 15: 15; 1 Cor 3: 10; 15: 10; 2 Cor 1: 12; 2: 14; 12: 9; Gal 2: 9; Eph 3: 2, 7-8; 1 Tim 1: 14), (ii) the calling of believers to faith in Christ through the gospel (Gal 1: 6); (iii) God’s gift of salvation and justification (3: 24; 5: 15, 17; 2 Tim 1: 9; Tit 2: 11; 3: 7); (iv) God’s empowering of believers (2 Tim 2: 1); (v) the fulfillment of God’s promises and the hope he places before believers (4: 16; 2 Thess 2: 16); (vi) the standing believers have before God (5: 2; 6: 1, 14-15); (vii) God’s redemptive activity through Christ (5: 20-21; 2 Cor 4: 15; 6: 1; 8: 9; Gal 2: 21; 5: 4; Eph 1: 6-7; 2: 5, 7-8; Phil 1: 7; Col 1: 6; 2 Thess 1: 12); (viii) God’s choice of the faithful remnant (Rom 11: 5-6); (ix) God’s gifts of ministry (Rom 12: 6; Eph 4: 7); and (x) God’s work enabling generosity and concern for others in the lives of believers (2 Cor 8: 1, 6-7, 16; 9: 8, 14).
Another characteristic of the adolescent that has spread into the larger population is the absence of historical sense. The adolescent, of course, has no history. He or she has a childhood but no accumulation of experience that transcends personal details and produces a sense of history. His world is highly personal and extremely empirical.
As a consequence the teenager is incredibly gullible...they have no feeling for the past, for precedents and traditions, and so have no perspective in making judgments or discerning values...The result is that they begin every problem from scratch. There is no feeling of being part of a living tradition that already has some answers worked out and some procedures worth repeating.
This state of mind, typical in adolescence, is, within certain parameters, accepted. The odd thing today is that there is no change when a person reaches adult years...
Each generation is, in poet John Berryman's words, "unwell in a new way." The way the present generation is unwell - that is, the forms under which it experiences sin - is through episodes of adolescence. There was a time when ideas and living styles were initiated in the adult world and filtered down to youth. now the movement goes the other way: lifestyles are generated at the youth level and pushed upward. Dress fashions, hair styles, music, and morals that are adopted by youth are evangelically pushed on an adult world, which in turn seems eager to be converted. Youth culture began as a kind of fad and then grew into a movement. Today it is nearly fascist in its influence, forcing its perceptions and styles on everyone whether he likes it or not.
...instead of being over and done with when the twenty-first birthday is reached, it infects the upper generations as well. It is common to see adults in their thirties, forties and fifties who have not only adopted the external trappings of the youth culture but are actually experiencing the emotions, traumas, and difficulties typical of youth.
Obviously religious organisations have often demonstrated this principle. But insofar as the suppression of science is concerned, the bloodiest incidents have been recent and have had nothing to do with religion. It was the Nazi party, not the German Evangelical Church, that tried to eradicate "Jewish" physics, and it was the Communist Party, not the Russian Orthodox Church, that destroyed "bourgeois" genetics and left many other fields of Soviet science in disarray. No one has been prompted by these examples to propose an inherent incompatibility between politics and science. By the same token, that there have been conflicts between churches and science does not justify belief in an incompatibility between religion and science. It is, rather, that autocrats do not tolerate disagreement.
Only enough for today. The tests follow a particular pattern: God will give us what we need for today and today alone. No mystery here, it is all spelled out.(EX.16:16-19)“Take as much as you want, but don’t keep a crumb for tomorrow.”...In various forms, this will become God’s plan for human life...The plan of course is genius. Dump a year’s supply of manna into cold storage and, guaranteed, you will forget about God until the supply disappears (DT.8:10-14). Such prosperity would be a curse. God’s strategy is to give us enough for today and then, when tomorrow comes, to give us enough for that day too.Do you see this is exactly what we need? Fears and worries live in the future, trying to assure a good outcome in a potentially hard situation. The last thing they want to do is trust anyone, God included. To thwart this tendency toward independence, God only gives us what we need when we need it. The emerging idea is that He wants us to trust him in the future rather than our self-protective plans.
Think of the kingdom-agenda of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), which itself points ahead to the cross: Jesus himself loves his enemies, goes where the Roman soldiers force him to go, and turns the other cheek before being set like a city on a hill, like a light on a pole.
God is the One Who Tests, and He will test you. Don’t think of final exams and test anxiety. Think of this test as a way to expose traitors during wartime. We are potential traitors and don’t even know it. God tests us because we are so oblivious to the mixed allegiances in our hearts. The purpose of the test is to help us see our hearts and if they are found traitorous, we can turn back to God. God is not playing mind games with us, He is forging a relationship.
We tend to judge to judge God’s words by our own feelings and sensory observations...When our feelings conflict with God’s communication, we must side with God’s interpretation. Any other decision puts us above God, which we already know isn’t true because fear reminds us of our own puniness. We certainly are not gods!
Running Scared, p68,69
