Failure and success

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Terrifyingly awesome

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Terrifyingly awesome

A great business opportunity had just opened up for the friend I was having lunch with this week. “Wow!” I thought. “What a terrific series of possibilities that would open up for the glory of God!”

Easy for me to say, of course. For my friend, the opportunity brought an equal mixture of great excitement and sheer terror. One minute all he could see was the risk, the next minute all he could envision was the reward.

And that is where so often God has us. One of my favourite phrases about following Jesus is the one my friend Don Smith often uses: terrifyingly awesome.

The kingdom of God brings with it endless opportunities to experience the supernatural and the mind-blowing, but at the same time makes incredible demands on us that stretch us far beyond our natural capabilities. We may complain about this, but we shouldn’t be surprised.

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The root of the problem

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The root of the problem

A lady was sharing her woes with my wife in the changing room at the gym. Her problem was simple. She had to keep dying her hair every couple of weeks, or the roots would start to show.

And this is a pretty decent description of how people handle more serious problems in their lives too. We coat our issues with something that makes them disappear, but before too long they all come back. The reason, of course, is that the roots of our problems have never been dealt with.

A frequent mistake in pastoral care is to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. An over-the-counter painkiller will deal with an ordinary headache, but it won’t do anything much for a brain tumour.

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Lessons from the whirlwind

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Lessons from the whirlwind

After about an hour listening to a man’s story the other day, I said to him, “You’ve been living in a whirlwind.” He thought that was a pretty apt description.

Life seems like a whirlwind every so often. When we’re caught up in it, things can seem to be out of control. We lose sight of God, we find it hard to see any purpose in what’s happening to us, and we feel helpless, abandoned and lost.

But I think God operates in the whirlwind. The fact that he created the world and he also sustains it means he is always in control. The whirlwind that looks like confusion to us may in truth be full of his purposes.

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Following the cloud

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Following the cloud

People allow their lives to be directed by all sorts of things. Some people follow careers, some follow sports, some follow money, some follow pleasure, some follow happiness.

But as for us, we are (or should be) following the cloud.

I am alluding, of course, to Numbers 19. When the cloud rested over the tabernacle, the people remained. Whether it was a day or a month or what the Bible describes without further definition as “a longer time,” they stayed put. But as soon as the cloud lifted, they set out, and kept on following the cloud until it came to rest again.

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Dumbing down or calling up?

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Dumbing down or calling up?

Just the other day, I had a discussion with a good friend. He was expressing his frustration with the popularity of certain Christian media personalities who have the ability to attract enormous crowds, sell millions of books and take in vast offerings, without seemingly having the capacity to make a single decent Biblical or theological point when they preach.

Some people seem to think that we need to adjust our preaching in a downward direction in order to accommodate the fact that we live in the age of attention deficit. It’s a little bit like the idea that the purpose of a youth group is mainly to provide light spiritual entertainment for teenagers who would never have the ability to sit in church and listen to a proper Biblical message. Doing this, I suspect, will produce a generation of youth group graduates who want to be entertained the rest of their lives. Or a generation of millennials who are checking their phone throughout whatever shreds of truth are left coming out from behind the pulpit.