I am in my fortieth year of preaching ministry; thirty-six plus a Memorial Drive. I can hardly believe it. While I was eager with hope in the beginning I am ecstatic with it today. God is so much that the closer I get to Him the bigger He becomes and the obvious less I am.
My word to younger ministers, teachers, and leaders is to never give up on God...or people. Due to the call of creative faith, it is our work to believe people and circumstances into the flow of life. Sure there are stresses and the stressful. And yet, there is God and His abundant mystery.
Oh, I know too well the disappointment you find in others....and yourself. We are glitched very badly. However, this merely substantiates our calling and clarifies our drive. We are in this for the disgusting and the depriving. We want to to see what will become of what isn't yet. This is a Romans 4:17 moment. We live to believe that even the deadening can be reversed.
Eugene Peterson puts a surprise into words as to his perspective of being in a church.
Every time I move to a new community, I find a church close by and join it---committing myself to worship and work with that company of God's people. I've never been anything other than disappointed: every one turns out to be biblical, through and through: murmurers, complainers, the faithless, the inconstant, those plagued with doubt and riddled with sin, boring moralizers, glamorous secularizers.
Every once in a while a shaft of blazing beauty seems to break out of nowhere and illuminate these companies, and then I see what my sin-dulled eyes had missed: word of God-shaped, Holy Spirit-created lives of sacrificial humility, incredible courage, heroic virtue, holy praise, joyful suffering, constant prayer, persevering obedience.
This would be us...in both counts...the strugglers and the saints...all in one piece. We are both.
Therefore, we never give up on God and we never grow cold toward others. We are all caught in the same boat receiving the huge pelting of life's storms. All of us. A difference in some would be that maybe a few dare try to get out of the boat and face the winds....only to sink in our brave strategies and courageous ploys.
The end is the same as the beginning. Jesus is the caller and the saver. We, then, never give up on God for He is faithful to us at every ebb and flow. Plus, we never give up on another because we simply take turns either trying to rescue others or being rescued by the same.
It matters not how rough life has become, there is ample reason to praise God and to believe in the goodness of each other. That's what Love does.
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