Category: Exploring Church Ministry Blog

Loving God with All Our Heart

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment

 

 
 
God prefers loving actions that come deep within our hearts more than any religious ritual we might perform.  He wants His will done by not just fulfilling the letter of the law, but the spirit of what is required – and what is required is love, a love for God with one’s entire being (Mark 12:28-34).
 
            I love my three girls with all my heart.  I think God made them all beautiful to compensate for all the ornery things they have done so that I wouldn’t go crazy.  Once Sarah (the ringleader of the three hoodlums) was at the top of the stairs with two year old Mikaela in a laundry basket and pushed her down with Charissa at the bottom to catch her.  I love my wife with all my heart.  Yet, Mary always thought it would be a good idea to have an open door policy for the girls to come into our bed at night whenever they needed us.  I’ve been puked on, peed on, kicked on and pushed out of bed; it’s like living with a bunch of drunks….  And that’s not to mention things like the hundred times I’ve been way-laid before going out of the house with “you’re not really going out in public looking like that are you!?”
 
            I have dealt with it all because I love my kids.  But larger than that, God has children all over this planet earth, and he loves them.  To begin to love God with all our hearts is to begin to see what God’s heart is – a big expansive heart for people all around the world.  God’s heart is close to the broken-hearted, near to those in need.  His heart is a heart of compassion.  God’s wrath is actually a response of his love to make things right in this fallen world.  His heart yearns for his creatures to love Him.  As early as the book of Genesis, just a few chapters in it says, The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.  The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain (Genesis 6:6).  So God sent a great flood and wiped out nearly all of humanity.  It bothers God and He is not okay with the sinful and idolatrous hearts of people.
 
            We cannot just have a Disney-style follow your heart.  Trusting in our own hearts is a mistake, for they are, apart from God, desperately wicked.  Jeremiah said:  The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure (Jeremiah 17:10).  The heart is beyond repair and the only way to deal with it is to have a heart transplant.  God spoke through the prophet Ezekiel and gave a promise:  I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 11:19).  A stony heart betrays not knowing God.  A soft heart of compassion toward others reveals loving God.
 
            Does your heart break for the things that break the heart of God?  God is concerned for suffering, injustice, and death.  To love God with all our heart means that our hearts beat for the things that touch the heart of God.  It means that God’s heart of compassion is the driving motivation of our lives.  It means that we will love people.  Hear what the Apostle of Love, John, said:  We love because Christ first loved us.  If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar.  For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.  And he has given us this command:  Whoever loves God must also love his brother (1 John 4:19-21).  The reason sins of the tongue get listed alongside things like murder and adultery in the New Testament is that they are offenses to God’s heart.
 
            God’s heart is with the children of this world.  Every year 15 million children die of starvation.  That’s more than 40,000 children a day.  Today over 8,000 people will die from AIDS.  The numbers are staggering not only of hunger but of war and disease not to mention other great problems of humanity including illiteracy and the sex slave trade.  My goal is not to depress us.  What I want us to see is a very small glimpse of what God sees every day.  And, what is more, God knows each one of their names.  When it comes to us, people need to move from being numbers to being names.  God is not okay with all the brokenness on this earth and his heart breaks over the sin of the world that causes such evil to go on day after day.  God wants His Church to champion causes that are close to His heart.  If we love God He wants us to aim that love with all our hearts toward people who need the compassion of Christ.
 
            Love is a deliberate decision to meet a need in another person.  Churches must see the needs and not allow their hearts to shrink.  Leonardo Da Vinci once observed that the average person “looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, inhales without awareness of fragrance, and talks without thinking.”  Sharing God’s heart for people is to have a heart of compassion that is aware of the great needs of the world and will do whatever it takes to be a part of meeting those needs.  In so doing, the Church follows her Savior who so loved the world that he gave himself for it.

Church Conflict

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment

 

 
 
            Conflict in inevitable.  Put a bunch of sinners together in one place (like in a church building), add a few grumpy old people and not a few know-it-alls and sit back and watch the fireworks happen.  I think every church is about one or two good fights away from being non-existent.  It’s a miracle that more congregations don’t call it quits every year, especially after their annual congregational meetings!  I myself have a long resume of handling ornery folks, family squabbles, and cantankerous curmudgeons that could make your head swim – or just get you down right angry.
 
            When we peek into the bible, the Apostle James is blunt about where the heart of conflict comes:  What causes fights and quarrels among you?  Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?  You want something but don’t get it.  You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want.  You quarrel and fight.  You do not have, because you do not ask God.  When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. 
 
            All people have things they want and desire.  When those desires go unmet it can begin to be a burr in our saddle that leads to a lack of satisfaction.  The focus then becomes not my own heart but another person or people that are standing in the way of my desire.  Within the church we have expectations, whether they are reasonable or not.  If those expectations are not fulfilled, we ourselves feel unfulfilled.  Someone has to pay.  Thus, passive-aggressive behavior, sins of the tongue, and bitterness begin to consume us.
 
            Let me entertain a question:  Are your desires and expectations so important to you that they have become your idols?  In other words, is your happiness dependent upon what another person does or does not do?  If so, you have crossed over into that arena of idolatry and conflict is not far behind.  In his fine book on conflict, The Peacemaker, Ken Sande describes the progression of an idol.  Conflict, he says, begins with some kind of desire, and if it is unmet, moves to being a demand.  Our idolatrous demands usually lead to judging other people.  After all, if you really care about me you will meet my desires.  Finally, the progression ends in punishment, typically by simply withdrawing from a relationship with the intent of hurting another.
 
            The only legitimate and biblical answer to all this crud is grace.  Finding our true and lasting satisfaction in God alone is the only way to deal with the idols that we hanker to bow down to.  John Piper has said that “sin is what you do when you are not fully satisfied in God.”  Returning to the foot of the cross and receiving the grace of God’s forgiveness helps us to not only experience personal contentment, but frees us to give grace to the people for whom we think stand in the way of how we think things ought to be done.
 
            So, before we point the finger at another person let’s first take a good look at our own hearts.  
Before we jump to interpreting and misinterpreting another’s motives, let’s examine what is going on with our own desires.  A good place to start is looking in the mirror.  Maybe today is the day that you need to leave your religious offering on the altar and go reconcile with that person you have a problem with.  Or perhaps it has been too long since you cracked open your bible, and you need to be reminded again that it is the person who looks intently into God’s Word that experiences freedom and is blessed in what they do.
 
            May the peace of Christ overshadow us all as we seek grace in all things.

Observing the Sabbath

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment


             At a conference many years ago I heard the late Dr. Howard Hendricks, who was a professor at Dallas Seminary, tell a story of being picked up from the airport for a speaking engagement by a local pastor.  This pastor, in the course of conversation in the car, droned on about how he worked hard for the Lord.  He bragged about laboring seven days a week because, as he put it, “the devil never takes a day off.”  Dr. Hendricks’ was known for his pithy comebacks, and so he calmly replied to the over-functioning pastor:  “Gee, I didn’t know Satan was your model for ministry!”
            Somehow pastors and committed church leaders and servants have gotten the wrong-headed idea that working long hours and doing ministry every day of the week with no break is godly.  Needless to say, burn-out among church leaders is common.  Every day pastors walk away from their churches never to enter vocational ministry again.  Loyal church members might put so much effort into their ministries that eventually they quit, unable to do any more due to sheer overwork.  The pressure of responsibility, fear of failure, perfectionist impulses, and the just plain stress of dealing with people and conflict can all contribute to crack-ups and breakdowns, both emotionally and physically.  Those in leadership find the shame of failure too unbearable to let up on the gas pedal, and so keep going day after day worried that they might be letting someone down.  But the irony is that the constant movement only leads to an eventual and abrupt stop. 
            There is, however, a very biblical answer:  observe the Sabbath.  And there is a clear theological reason for it:  God himself rested from all his work.  It sounds easy.  It is anything but easy.  Our society prizes hard work and self-sufficient behavior.  To need a day, an entire day of Sabbath rest is counter-intuitive to our current Western cultural sensibilities.  Some months back I asked my church to help me in keeping a Sabbath each and every week by contacting me and calling me, if at all possible, on the six days of the week that I am working.  To be honest, it wasn’t easy for me to say.  Furthermore, some of my parishioners didn’t like what I said.  They mistakenly thought I must not like my job.  People who don’t like their jobs have no problem staying away from work.  But most pastors, including me, love what they do and enjoy being ministers of the Word.  It is hard to stay away.  Yet, if we are to take the Scriptures seriously, all of us, whether preacher or parishioner, pastor or pew-sitter, will avoid loading up our Sabbath day with all kinds of work.  Instead, we will rest – really rest!  We will use the time to restfully connect with and worship God, take leisurely walks with family, enjoy good friends over a meal, and, of course, delight in a well-deserved nap.
            It is time to stop making excuses, engaging in ridiculous hermeneutical gymnastics, and offering crazy rationalizations for neglecting a very clear scriptural command:  obey the Sabbath.  For many a church leader, finding hope in the midst of darkness and seeing a light at the end of the tunnel begins with putting in the planner a weekly Sabbath to the Lord.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  Wise and rightly ordered priorities come from well-rested Christians.  The Sabbath affords an opportunity to know God in ways that we cannot on the other six days.  So, may you rest well and know God better.

On Loving the Triune God

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment

 

 
 
Each year on the Christian calendar there is a Sunday set aside to especially focus on and celebrate the Trinity.  This year Trinity Sunday is May 26.  While every Sunday is a celebration of our triune God, Trinity Sunday helps us to remember the mystery, power, and beauty of the Father, Son, and Spirit – three persons, one God.  Both our identity and mission are completely wrapped-up in who God is.  We are baptized into the name of all three persons of the Trinity.  Our worship together is an expression of the unity and common purpose of the church.
 
            Everything comes down to God, to the Father, Son, and Spirit.  The distinctive manner in which we are to live is to be an expression of the triune God who exists in perfect unity, harmony, love, and mission.  Whether it is in our families, our neighborhoods, our jobs, or our church, God wants to exercise his very personhood through us.
 
            The Scripture says that our triune God is love (1 John 4:16).  His nature and purpose is love itself.  The reason we are to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength is that God himself is love.  As people created in the image and likeness of God, there is within us a deep desire to know and love God.  Yet, it is possible to lose touch with this primal instinct to love God.  We may be so familiar with hearing about God that we go about our days not really knowing Him, going through the motions of Christianity but doing it without love.  Like spiritual zombies we might walk about the earth, but are really dead to what is going on in God’s world.
 
            As Christians, our first love is Jesus.  We may live moral lives, operate with sound ethical principles on our jobs, and diligently serve family and church but miss the heart and soul of loving God.  Jesus himself said to the church at Ephesus whom had performed good deeds, that they had forsaken their first love (Revelation 2:4).  Paul put it this way to the church at Corinth:  “If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3).
 
            We are able to love because the Father first loved us, sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, and gave us His Spirit in order to display God’s love toward one another (1 John 4:10-13).  As we think about and take the time to meditate on the blessed Holy Trinity, His love takes root in our hearts and then overflows toward others.
 
            We know from the Lord Jesus that all of Scripture hangs on the dual command to love God and neighbor (Matthew 22:37-40).  This has been understood throughout church history as the Great Commandment.  We also know from our Lord Jesus that the supreme task of the church is to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19).  This has been rightly discerned through Christian history as the Great Commission.  We are, then, to have a “Great Commitment” to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.  Why?  Because our great triune God – Father, Son, and Spirit – exists as a community of love and desires that His love extend to every kind of person throughout all the earth.
 
            A crucial question for church leaders and committed believers is:  how do we, in God’s 21st century world, faithfully and obediently live into this calling we have been given by our Lord?  How do we effectively engage this primal quest of loving God, loving one another, and loving our neighbor? Let us all seek to discern fresh ways of being faithful to this fundamental calling.
 
            May the God who is and who is to come fill all our hearts with faith as we journey together on the way of love.