Life of Learning…

I’ve been reading a lot lately, for the TIMO curriculum, and I’m enjoying what I’m learning. We’re on our church-planting and discipleship unit, which is cool. In the other units, I think maybe the theory was a little more distant from the practice. Or maybe I’m just more into this stuff.
Granted, we don’t have many folks here who can be disciple. There are very few Christians. But that’s what’s golden—remembering to focus on a few, and trusting God to work through them to the rest. And it is the same with my friends in the village. I don’t have people who are already Christians, but I have people who I can be something to and witness to. As a house, we learned long ago to have a close core, not to spread ourselves too thin. That’s what you always hear about the same folks.
Anyway, I read J.I. Packer’s Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God last week. Excellent book. It talked about these two great truths—God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility. Lots of folks get all bent out of shape wrestling with these two things that they see as contradicting. And they run themselves ragged trying to reconcile these two truths. But it was nice to walk with Packer on a road I’ve walked before; to again have my thinking swiveled is always good for me. I love deeply the sovereignty of God and feel equally the responsibility of man. I love what C.H. Spurgeon said when someone asked him to reconcile the two truths—“I wouldn’t try. I never reconcile friends.” So, it’s nice to be reminded that both truths are from God’s Word. God never lies. And sometimes we have to accept what maybe to us is a mystery—and live our lives holding both in equal esteem, not playing them off against each other, because God doesn’t.
I also was reminded that God is sovereign, and because of that, what I’m doing out here isn’t pointless. God will move if and how He wills to. “Were it not for the sovereign grace of God, evangelism would be the most futile and useless enterprise that the world has ever seen, and there would be no more complete waste of time under the sun than to preach the Christian Gospel.” :)
What else? I read a book by some Guillebaud guy who does ministry in Burundi, For What it’s Worth. It’s about no holds barred discipleship. What I took from it was about the Christian life. Though living a Christian life sometimes seems like an insurmountable thing, we have to press on it in. He quoted Christopher Columbus who, though his crew was on the verge of mutiny and things were looking grim, he ended his journal each day with, “Today, we moved westward!” So, each day I want to be able to say I moved “westward” in my sanctification. I also liked this, from Newton: “I’m not what I ought t be, I’m not what I’d like to be, I’m not what I hope to be, but I’m not what I was, and by the grace of God, I am what I am.” Superb.
It all tied in well with my recent Piper sermons on Romans 7. We have hope in the face of our weaknesses and struggles in this world because we have Jesus Christ.
I listened to a sermon this morning by a one Brent Rue (don’t know this fella at all), the gist of which was that our relationship with God should be rooted in intimacy. And he said that we need to spend more time being loved by God, to be able to love him. He said that love is recognizing what God has done in our lives, and telling him all about it. An interesting point.
Then I just started last night a book called Creative Ministry (Nouwen), which said in the introduction: “If it is perhaps possible for a doctor to cure a patient even where the doctor hardly believes in the value of life, a Christian minister will never be able to be a minister if it is not his own most personal faith and insight into life that forms the core of his pastoral work.”
It’s actually funny how God weaved all my recent reading and studying together. I’m reminded that the whole string of what I just talked about—discipleship in ministry, the sovereignty of God in grace that undergirds and justifies that ministry, God’s grace in my own life that I can live my Christian life from and on, and how out of that Christian life, my ministry flows, and I’m able to lead others to Christ in discipleship. A neat little circle, isn’t it?
Oh, that I will have a lifetime of such learning. :)