Make it All About You!

This Christmas I want to encourage you to make it all about you!

I know. That isn't what you'd expect someone—especially a pastor!—to encourage you. I'll explain.

Christmas is often a time of being around family, friends, social gatherings, etc. In any of those environments there are often people that stretch your ability to love and be patient, or whose ways or words wound or challenge or anger you. Often there are people with whom there is a history and things hard to let go of. In this most beautiful of times, often the people we are around can strain us, and the times that should be the most wonderful can become the most ugly.

An account of a time in David's life has become one our family returns to often. It has a lot of bearing on this subject. It is told in 1 Samuel 25 and it involves a time when David sent men to an awful, rich man named Nabal, asking for food. David told his men, "And thus you shall greet him: ‘Peace be to you, and peace be to your house, and peace be to all that you have. I hear that you have shearers. Now your shepherds have been with us, and we did them no harm, and they missed nothing all the time they were in Carmel. Ask your young men, and they will tell you. Therefore let my young men find favor in your eyes, for we come on a feast day. Please give whatever you have at hand to your servants and to your son David.’” (verses 6–8)

Well . . . Nabal is Nabal, and he basically mocks David and sends the men away with nothing and David responds by telling his men to strap on their swords. David said, “Surely in vain have I guarded all that this fellow has in the wilderness, so that nothing was missed of all that belonged to him, and he has returned me evil for good. God do so to the enemies of David and more also, if by morning I leave so much as one male of all who belong to him” (verses 21–22). In David's response his heart is revealed. He did good for Nabal, but he expected something back for it. And when he didn't get something back, he got angry and set off to sin, driven by his response to another man's ugliness and rudeness and ungratefulness—in response to another man's sin. And, this is our challenge—can we keep ourselves free from sin, despite the sins of others that drive us to anger, hurt, feeling walked on, etc.?

And so, I encourage you this Christmas season, if you are put into positions where the people around you make feelings rise in you that aren't Godly—make it all about you! Focus your heart and prayers on being the one who is Godly, regardless of how those around you might be. Fix your eyes on God and yourself, and purpose in your heart that each person's actions will be between them and God—but that their actions won't cause you to sin. Make it about you. Focus on you. Say, "I will love. I will respond with gentleness. I will not sin. Regardless of those around me. I will not let them have the power to cause me to sin. I will not change who I am with Christ in me, because of who they are."

How other people act is up to them, and between them and God. How I act is my responsibility. If I let another person cause me to sin, I have let them have more power over me then God in me has at the time. You and I can't do this on our own—we are weak, fleshly, and sinful without Christ. But with Christ in us, we can do all things. Christ showed us the way. He loved when not loved back. He served when unappreciated. He lived His life in response to God and not man. And He has promised us that in Him there is no temptation too great that there is not provided for us a way out. And to sin in response to another's sin is surely a temptation we all face.

Make it about you! Focus on you and your responses. Love others, but don't give them the power to quench the light of Christ shining out of you. It is Christmas! It is a glorious time of year. It is that time when many who otherwise might have hard and angry hearts find a little softness toward the message of Christ and we can not only tell, but we can show, the good news of great joy that is unto all people! But it begins with showing that Christ in us—our glorious Immanuel Christmas reality!—is greater than the power of the world to change us.

Using “Sacrifice” to Self-Justify Disobedience

When Saul disobeyed the Lord’s commands through Samuel to devote everything and everyone of Amalek to destruction (1 Samuel 15) it didn’t bode well for him—in fact, it cost him his kingship.

1 Sam 15:13-15   And Samuel came to Saul, and Saul said to him, "Blessed be you to the Lord. I have performed the commandment of the Lord." And Samuel said, "What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear?" Saul said, "They have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God, and the rest we have devoted to destruction."

Saul gave all the right “religious” sounding reasons for sparing the king and the best of the livestock, saying, basically, “It’s for a sacrifice to the Lord.” The problem in Saul’s situation is that God didn’t ask him for that sacrifice—He had told him to devote it ALL to destruction! (How often, I wonder, do we justify our own plans and desires that God never led us to by saying that it’s for the Lord, or that we will glorify Him in it, or that it will enable us to do more for Him? Instead of letting God lead us, we set out on our own and try and drag Him and His blessing behind us.)

Samuel countered Saul with a piercing commentary for us all to take note of (a passage later quoted from in Hebrews). In 1 Sam 15:22-23 Samuel says, "Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king."

How easy it can be to consciously, or subconsciously, excuse, or move past, or minimize in our mind, our disobedience (doing wrong things, or not doing right things) because we are doing “religious” things that make us feel it is OK, or balanced, or better—or that even convince us we are pleasing God? We may go to church, or a Bible study, or tithe, or write blogs, or pastor churches, or serve on church boards, or ???, but if we are doing things that are in disobedience to God, then our “sacrifices” are missing the point.

God asks for obedience. Jesus said that if we love Him we will obey Him. Obedience is a mark of a surrendered heart to God and a love for God. It is much easier for us, often, to put the check in the offering box, or to go to church, or to do some religious “thing” than it is to obey God—and yet we can fool ourselves, and even others, by doing the religious and missing the obedience.

James 4:17 tells us: So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. This is a powerful verse! Obedience to God is not just not doing bad things, it is also doing the right things. We can be disobeying God by doing that which is wrong, or by not doing that which is right (this could be as simple as not visiting someone when the Spirit nudges us to!). We fool ourselves into thinking we are good Christians (or at least neutral) because we aren’t doing anything bad (and maybe we are even doing church things), but we might be disobeying Him by not doing the service, the loving, the forgiving, the laying down of ourselves, the giving, the seeking His plans and not our own, etc., that He has asked of us. God, it would seem through Saul’s example, is saying, “Yeah, I see that tithe check and that church attendance . . . but what about what I asked you to do?”

We must be careful, I believe, to not let our religious “stuff” numb us or fool us into thinking we are doing that which pleases God. I believe all of that pleases Him, but if it isn’t on top of basic obedience, then it would seem we’ve missed that which He calls us to, and that which is greater in His heart. The words of Jesus to the Pharisees in Matthew 23:23 come to mind, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”

Praise God we are forgiven! Praise God for His love and mercy! Praise God that He lives in us and through us and works out His plan for us through surrendered lives! But, let’s be careful to never use that as a safety zone to sin or seeking our own ways and pleasures and plans—and to never fool ourselves that God is joyous about our religious “stuff” if we’ve missed the basic heart of God and the obedience that comes from love.

God bless you all. Thanks for reading and being a part of my life.   —Erick

Another's Job

But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, "No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles."   1 Sam 8:19-20

In my reading through 1 Samuel I recently went through the time when the people of Israel cried out for a king that he might judge them and fight their battles for them. God gave them what they wanted, though it meant they were rejecting Him as their king and, it seems to me, trusting in man to do for them what God would have done for and through them.

I wonder how many times we seek another to do what we should be doing? I think that this is a real danger in Christian circles—especially organized "church." That may sound funny coming from a pastor, but I think that one of the greatest dangers of organized "church" is that it can, if not handled well, encourage the body of Christ (the true church) to pass its responsibilities on to a few instead of being the body of Christ in fullness.

I do not go so far as to reject organized religion—I believe that Acts and the epistles makes it clear the early church met both in large groups, and regularly from house to house. I believe that it is clear they joined their resources to meet local needs within the body, and to support needs out of their area within the body. I believe it is clear God appointed some within the local parts of the body to be elders and teachers and pastors within it. But . . . if leaders aren't careful they can consolidate things around themselves out of ignorance, or insecurity, or love of power, or ???

Ephesians makes it clear that leaders are given to equip the body for the work of ministry—to equip all the believers to do the work of God, not to do the work of God for them. Granted, if they are paid and full time, they have more time to do some things that someone working at another full time job might not have, but it is far too easy for the body to just say, regarding visiting others, or praying for others, or doing the stuff that holds a body together, "Well, that's the pastor's job. That's what he's paid for," or other similar things regarding church staff, or the organized church itself. But, the New Testament makes it clear, the body is only fully functioning when each person does its part and uses their unique gifts to knit the body together.

One change I have made recently in our services is that I've stopped asking who has a prayer request and started asking who wants to be prayed for (there's often a big difference). In the past I've found that we might get 10–15 prayer requests, and very few would be writing them down. Then I, as the pastor, would pray and we'd move on. I am sure some got prayed for during the week, but I don't know how many.

Now I am asking, "Who wants to be prayed for?" The Bible says the gates of hell won't prevail against the church, and we are all, as believers, the church, so we are starting to bang on the gates of hell on behalf of one another. I must admit, since I started this we are getting a lot fewer prayer requests, but I feel we are probably a lot closer to what we are supposed to be doing.

After people who want to be prayed for express their need, or the need of someone they want to be prayed for, we go in to a time of prayer, usually about five minutes. I re-read the requests and then ask that each person desiring to be prayed for has at least a couple people join with them—maybe someone who the Spirit nudged toward them, or someone who has faced a similar issue. Everyone is free to get up and join someone or stay in their seats, or come up to the cross, it is all up to them. Then, start praying in small groups, with and for the person or persons asking for it. When I feel it is time I'll go and close that, but not without saying, "If you are still in a group and you feel you need to keep praying keep doing so, even if it means you are praying through all of the worship time and through my teaching."

This is just one small step, but it seems to be a good one from my eyes. I, as the pastor, don't have any more access to God than another believer does. The body must be the body, each part doing its part, each part realizing that church leaders are simply their brothers and sisters, called to different positions and parts in the body, but not any more special, any more loved by God, or with any more access to God than them. We have to be so careful to equip ourselves and to not ask others to do what God has asked us to do. Only when the body is fully functioning as the body will the world truly see Jesus expressed through us.

God bless you all. As always, I'd love your thoughts.   —Erick