Author: Tim Ehrhardt

I'm just a common ordinary pastor, chaplain, father, grandfather, and dog owner who loves the smell of a genuine leather Bible and the aroma of its message. I'm on a quest to track down the best Bibles, how to best read and use them, and to discover the encouragement inside.

Spiritual Growth

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
            When it comes to church ministry, the value and necessity of spiritual growth within individuals is of vital importance.  When we were created, God made us in his image and like himself – a spiritual person.  Since this is who we are, we must therefore recognize that the area of our greatest value, potential, fruitfulness, and life fulfillment will be in the realm of the spiritual.  If we deny our spirituality, whether in thought or in practice, we will inevitably become confused and set ourselves up for failure because our basic nature is one of being spiritual persons.  Nothing is more valuable for us than spiritual growth and the provision God has made for us to experience this growth.
 
            There is a verse tucked away at the end of Peter’s second epistle that states:  “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18).  Grace and knowledge are important words that both point to Jesus.  Grace refers to all the benefits of being redeemed people; knowledge denotes all the benefits of God’s revelation to us.  I want to make a simple yet profound observation of this verse:  the word “grow” is a command.  It is not optional.  It is not something to maybe think about having happen when we get around to it.  God insists that we grow.  He has made every provision for our spiritual growth and we have been given the ability as God’s redeemed community to do so.  So, then, each and every believer in Jesus Christ must face his/her personal responsibility to obey this scriptural exhortation.  To do otherwise is to live outside of God’s will.
 
            Sticking with the Apostle Peter’s words, here is another verse of importance for our spiritual growth:  “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation” (1 Peter 2:2).  This verse explains that we are to seek the Word of God with the same kind of intensity that a newly born baby will seek for food.  As babies, my girls were barracudas when it came to feeding time.  They went at breast-feeding with so much gusto that my poor wife was often left in downright pain afterwards.  That same kind of desire for feeding must be present with us as believers in Christ’s church.  When we obey this command of Peter and make it a priority in our life, then we will grow.
 
            The problem with this spiritual growth is that we all have a disease-like force in our lives – a destructive tendency toward lethargy and passivity toward spiritual things.  It is ironic that people who confess Jesus as Lord can be so determined and attentive about trivial things and yet can, at the same time, be so unconcerned about giving focus to feeding on the Word of God.  We cannot go on living like this and expect to be successful in the Christian life.
 
            If we are going to grow spiritually we must be about the business of “speaking the truth in love” with the result that “we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ” (Ephesians 4:15).  In other words, we are to have an aggressive application of the truth in both speaking and in life that impacts our daily faith walk with Jesus.  The only way we are going to grow up spiritually, whether personally or corporately, is through practicing the truths of Holy Scripture.  Our priorities, goals, and values need to reflect a solid commitment to fulfill scriptural truth in daily life.  We must ask ourselves some penetrating questions:
 
–Have we humbled ourselves before God and confessed the things we have done and left undone when it comes to God’s revealed will?
–Have we humbled ourselves before one another in the church and asked for prayer?
–Have we read the Bible on the subject of spiritual growth and followed its teachings so we can know the joy and love God has for us?
–Would we be this lethargic and passive about treating a physical cancer in our lives?
 

 

            God has given believers his Holy Spirit for our spiritual growth so that they might be brought into close fellowship with the Lord Jesus.  Once we begin to obey the Scripture in this area of practicing biblical truth we will begin to experience spiritual growth and the joy of the Lord.  However, if we allow ourselves to remain lethargic and apathetic concerning spirituality we will never become our true selves.  We must choose to make a biblical response both to God and to one another in the church.  This is not a matter of personal willpower that can be achieved or cured by our own efforts.  We must face our spiritual condition and seek help within the community of the redeemed, the church.  Only then will spiritual growth become a reality.

Who Is Your Master?

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
There are many people in this world that carry with them an invisible backpack.  They lug it around everywhere they go.  It is a backpack of unacknowledged grief, of ignoring problems and difficulties.  The problem is that over time items are added on top of old ones. Hard feeling after hard feeling gets caked on top of unresolved issues.  When that happens, the backpack becomes our Master.  It begins to influence the way we talk, what we do, and don’t do.  It becomes sin because rather than Christ, the Spirit, and the Word informing and influencing what we say and do, the invisible backpack calls the shots.
 
            When the Scripture talks about not offering ourselves to wickedness but offering ourselves to God (Romans 6:12-23), it means that we must take off the backpack because it has become our Master.  We may have become so accustomed to it that we cannot imagine life without carrying it around.  But we are to take it off, unpack each and every item we have stuffed into it, and allow ourselves to face the pain and hurt and take up Christ’s easy backpack, his yoke (Matthew 11:28-30).  We are told that, since we are redeemed people, baptized into the death of Jesus Christ that we do not need to and ought not to carry a load of sin any longer (Romans 6:1-11).
 
            We were actually meant to have a Master and to carry a backpack – just not the backpack of unconfessed sin and unresolved problems, but the backpack of righteousness which listens to and follows the Master, Jesus Christ.  Who is your Master?  Jesus Christ, by his grace, took the backpack of sin that you were carrying and took it upon himself.  He took the crushing weight of our backpacks of sin for us.  Jesus took out the stinky gym socks of sin and the half-eaten sandwiches of bitterness within; they were then nailed with him to the cross.
 
            We must deliberately and intentionally take off that invisible backpack.  Perhaps, like me, you have known people who were moral and ethical and well-respected; and, you never would have guessed that they carried such an invisible heavy load on their backs.  The backpack as Master caused them to work themselves into the ground in order to keep ignoring the hurt, to keep everything completely clean and in control on the outside because on the inside it was emotional chaos.  What appears on the outside may not be true of the inside.  When we look at one another in the church, we cannot assume that just because everything looks good on the outside that the inside is just fine.  Our stronghold of secrecy and invisibility needs to be broken and pulled down in Jesus’ name!
 
            It is time to put off the backpack of sin and put on Christ’s righteousness.  It is time to say the following statement with some flavor to it:
Ø  “I will not carry you any longer, old Master, because I belong to God!”
 
The church must stop looking for either some dramatic deliverance or expecting others to change, and do the hard work of confession and offering/presenting ourselves to God:
Ø  “I will not carry a load of immorality any longer because I belong to God.”
Ø  “I will not carry an unresolved load of pain any longer so that I keep using my tongue to gossip and slander and backbite another, because my tongue is not my own.  My tongue belongs to God.”
Ø  “I will not be burdened by the clock and let it control my life, because my time is not my own.  My time belongs to God and I will steward it wisely.”
Ø  “I will not let the invisible backpack keep me in bed because my true Master desires me in prayer.  My waking hours belong to God.”
Ø  “I will not carry the troubles of my job with me by working myself into the ground, because my job belongs to God and my Master calls me to a Sabbath rest.”
Ø  “I will unload this backpack of pain and deal with it so I do not keep compulsively spending my money, because my money belongs to God.”
Ø  “The invisible backpack no longer has any power over me because I have unloaded it, grieved my hurts and losses, and have moved to taking on Christ’s backpack.  I belong to Jesus Christ!”
Show me a miserable Christian, and I will show you a Christian who is carrying the crushing weight of an invisible backpack that informs and influences every decision and each action.
 
            The church does not need an attitude adjustment or behavior modification; we need to do away with the backpack of sin completely because Christ has already taken care of it.  To put that backpack of sin on is to do something that Jesus died to take away.
 
            Who is your Master?  Are you a slave to the invisible backpack?  Or are you a slave to God and his righteousness?  If you find that you want to change but seem unable to, it might be because you have a kind of spiritual Stockholm syndrome where you identify more with your captor who is oppressing you than with freedom in Jesus Christ. 
 

 

            Today, take the backpack off.  Unpack it.  Deal with the pain and the hurts you have accumulated but have not lamented over.  There will be no spiritual growth and development apart from doing this.  You cannot have Christ as your Master unless you get rid of all competing masters in your life first.  What has the backpack every really done for you?  What benefit do you receive from lugging it around everywhere?  The wages of continually carrying the unconfessed load on your back is death – it will eventually catch up to you and you will die (Romans 6:23).  But the gift of God is life, freedom from sin and a life under the new management of Jesus Christ.  Take it off.  Unload the contents.  It may take a long time depending upon how long you have been carrying the weight.  But there will not be freedom apart from it.  You have been set free from all other Masters, and have become slaves to Christ.  Do the hard work of dealing with the contents of your backpack so that you may know freedom, that others will no longer feel the tyranny of your backpack, and so that you will enter the life that is truly life.

Spiritual Dementia

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry Blog1 Comment
 
 
            Last week I spent a few days in my native Iowa visiting my elderly Mom.  She has dementia.  Dementia is a general term for a decline in mental ability severe enough to interfere with daily life.  I have watched her faculties slowly erode and decline over the past few years.  My Mom is now at a point where she rarely remembers my name, only knows me once in a while, and never recalls the conversation we just had thirty seconds ago.  It is difficult to watch and to experience, this woman who once cared for me.  Now my siblings and I care for her in ways that were unthinkable to us five years ago.
 
            As I made the drive home from my visit I spent the hours reflecting on how much church ministry needs to be a memory unit experience because Christians are continually forgetting their identity and what they are supposed to be doing.  This is not a new issue that is endemic to the contemporary church; this is a problem as old as sin itself.  There is even a book of the Bible, Deuteronomy, completely given to memory issues.  The constant refrain of the author of Deuteronomy is to “remember.”  Since the ancient Israelites were in danger of forgetting and having a kind of spiritual dementia, Moses reiterated the covenant and the law for the people before they entered the land.  It was a fresh re-hashing, nothing really new, of what God had already communicated to them.  God’s people were to continually remember that they were once slaves in Egypt and that God had delivered them and brought them out to be a people for his name.  They were to remember that they had provoked the Lord in the desert and that an entire generation of people had been wiped out because they had, well, forgotten what God told them.
 
            The New Testament is no different.  Jesus miraculously fed a great crowd of people not once, but twice.  The second time he called his disciples to remember what had happened the first time in order to understand the second.  In the Epistles, Paul kept reminding the Jews in the churches that they should remember the ancient covenant, and called the Gentiles to remember that they were once estranged from that very same covenant.  Both Jews and Gentiles together needed to collectively remember the death of Christ that united them into a new covenant community.  Like them, we are to “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David” (2 Timothy 2:8).
 
            We, as the church of Jesus, are to remember who we are and what we are to be about:  we are blood-bought people of God, belonging to Christ, and given a mission to make disciples and participate with God in the redemption of all creation through remembering the poor, seeking justice, and being peacemakers in the church and the world.  Maybe the ancient words in the book of Revelation to the church at Ephesus ring true for us today:  “Remember the height from which you have fallen!  Repent and do the things you did at first” (Revelation 2:5).

            There is a difference between my Mom and the church – my Mom will never recover but will only worsen, yet the church can recover its collective memory by listening again to the ancient Word of God and being constantly refreshed with the promises and covenant of God.  We must neither rely on pragmatism nor simply by doing things the way we always have done them without any understanding of why we do it. 

            Why does your church exist?  How does the Word of God inform and influence your identity as a church?  Does the mission and practice of your church intentionally remember the risen and ascended Christ?  Are disciples being formed around collective remembering of God’s covenant and promises?  Are ministries and policies being established based on Christ and his commission, or on something else?  Let’s reverse the trend of spiritual dementia and give our memories to Christ.  Amen.

Trinity Sunday

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
At its heart, the Great Commission is a call and invitation by Jesus to participate in the life of the triune God through making disciples (Matthew 28:16-20).  The reason many Christians intentionally give focus to and celebrate the Trinity on a designated Sunday is because the God we worship exists as One God in three persons:  Father, Son, and Spirit.  This doctrine of the Trinity was articulated by early worshiping and serving Christians, who, under the stress and in the face of questions and challenges, took pains to say with clarity just who God is and why he is important.
 
            Christ’s Great Commission is still in force for us today.  What is more, the way to fulfill this command of Jesus is to participate in the life of the Trinitarian God.  Sometimes we need an outside perspective to understand our own situation and how we are to live into these important words of Jesus.  Missionary and author Nik Ripken (which is not his real name because he ministers in countries that are not open to the gospel and missionary activity) writes that he once met with a group of Chinese house church leaders and was marveling to them about the explosion of new converts and believers to Christ – many estimates discern at least 100 million Christians now in China.  What Nik Ripken heard from those leaders in response is not what he expected to hear.  This is what they said concerning his estimates of the numbers of Christians in China:  “Probably two-thirds of the people you mentioned regularly attend a house church.  Most of those people have been baptized.  Most of those people contribute financially to the work of a house church.  But we do not consider church members to be true followers of Jesus until they have led other people to Christ and until they have helped plant more house churches; only then do they truly know God.”
 
            I would suggest that one of the chief reasons the Chinese church has exploded in numbers is because they have taken up the mantle of Christ’s mission of making disciples to such a degree that leading others to Jesus and developing disciples into the life of the Trinity and forming churches is “normal.”  One of the obstacles for us as Western believers is that we look at what the Chinese are doing not as normal but as “radical.”  But what if what we consider as radical is really supposed to be the normal Christian life and experience of all believers in Jesus?  Please understand I do not make this point in order to guilt us, but rather to let our Chinese brothers and sisters lead us into godly sorrow that results in new life and inspire us in this wonderful privilege of making disciples.
 
            The Trinity is mentioned in the Great Commission because God himself is a missionary God.  The content of our discipleship and teaching is to be in orienting believers into the life of God as Trinity.  After Christ’s resurrection, the original disciples went to a specific mountain – maybe the mountain where Jesus began by teaching about righteousness with the Sermon on the Mount.  This would give the disciples a connection with understanding Christ’s authority.  They needed to grasp Christ’s authority because when they saw him some worshiped and some doubted.  The text does not tell us why some doubted.  I would suggest that based on the gospel accounts of the disciples having not figured-out that Jesus was bringing in a spiritual kingdom where people are transformed and follow Christ’s teachings, that they doubted what the real mission was all about and may have doubted their ability to engage in that mission even if they understood it.  Therefore, Jesus made the clear call and invitation that what he wants done (since he has the authority) is for the church is to be about the business of making disciples.
 
            The term “make disciples” is perhaps so overused to the point of losing its punch and meaning.  Here are some other faithful ways of understanding this verb to make disciples:  “spiritually form followers;” “develop interns in the faith;” “build committed believers in Jesus;” and “apprentice others in the ways of Jesus.”  The idea that Jesus is conveying here is one of investing deeply into mentoring-type relationships that will result in faithful Christians who will, in turn, invest in others.  The Apostle Paul would say later to his apprentice Timothy:  “The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Timothy 2:2).  In other words, we need to be mentored in the faith and to then turn around and mentor others in the faith. 
 
            We reflect the image of our triune God when we take up the mantle of being, as the Nicene Creed puts it, one holy catholic and apostolic church.  That is, just as God is not three gods but one God, so the church is to be one; just as God is holy, we are to be holy in all we do; just as God gathers people from every nation, so the church is to gather all kinds of people for worship and discipleship; and, just as God is a missionary God who sends himself to reach the nations, so we are to be apostolic (which means those that are sent), not only gathered together but sent out to make disciples, to mentor others in the faith.
 
            We all long to see this world a better place and to see our culture and society come into greater conformity with Christian morality.  For that to happen, we can learn from our Chinese brothers and sisters that making disciples will need to be a normal every day attitude and action.  It is my sincere desire that every one of us who has been mentored, apprenticed, and oriented in the faith in such a way that has impacted our lives will put that same ministry into others.  We all need three levels of relationships:  a spiritual mentor; someone who is a fellow friend on the journey to fellowship with; and, another for whom we are calling and inviting to participate with us in the life of the triune God. 
 

 

The Father sent the Son to this earth.  While he was here he poured his life into some disciples.  Then, when he died, those disciples were filled with grief.  But they later understood that he had to die so that others who hungered could live.  “Take eat, this is my body given for you.”  What the Trinity means for us is that our missionary God has reached us and is using us to reach others.  Through the situations of our lives we learn the ways of Jesus.  We learn compassion.  We learn humility.  We learn how be at peace.  And we are made disciples, united to Christ and participating in the life of the Father, Son, and Spirit.