When leaders are going through tough times

Here is a passage takes us right into the heart of an intimate conversation between father and son: “You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus... Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:1-3).

Paul is teaching Timothy. Teaching in the body of Christ is meant to take place in the context of relationship. That’s why our main source of teaching is supposed to come from the elders and leaders of our local congregation. Why? Because they are spiritual fathers we know and trust. You can read good books and listen to great recordings, but your basic spiritual diet should come from the leaders of your local church.

Paul had appointed Timothy to lead one of his greatest churches, the congregation at Ephesus. Though that church had previously seen a great move of God (Acts 19), Paul was writing at a time of great difficulty in the congregation. A substantial number of the people had left (2 Timothy 1:15). Some who remained were openly promoting false doctrine (2 Timothy 2:17-18). Still others were using the church to take advantage of some of its weakest members (2 Timothy 3:6-7).  It seems hard to believe that people could walk away from such a church, yet they did. Perhaps the days of city-wide revival recorded in Acts had died down. Perhaps persecution had arisen. It’s easy to be part of something riding the crest of a wave, but it takes faithful people to hang on when things get tough.

Timothy as a pastor must have felt a total failure. If he knew a letter from Paul was on the way, what would he have felt like? He had presided over the decline of a great work Paul had built. Would Paul rake him over the coals because the numbers were down, or remove him from his position? No, not at all. Paul was many things, but above all he was a father. In Paul’s day, there was a shortage of fathers in the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 4:15). That was perhaps understandable, given the church was so young. There is no excuse for a similar situation today, yet sadly the shortage remains. There are far too many administrators, managers and bureaucrats in the higher ranks of church leadership, but, at least in my experience, very few fathers.

Paul had had his own share of disappointments as well. This was far from the first time people had taken what he had to offer and then cast him aside. So now he comes to strengthen Timothy. He believes in Timothy. When we believe in people, we don’t cast them aside even if they have made mistakes.

So Paul did not arrive with a rebuke, but he did come with an answer, and it was a very simple one: “You, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus.”

When we see Christian leaders suffering or their church going through a rough time, what is our response? Too many people jump ship at the earliest opportunity. Others become critical. Few understand the spiritual dynamic of what is going on. Timothy’s church was suffering not because God had deserted Timothy or because he had done something wrong. No, Timothy was suffering because of his faithfulness to God. Religious consumers out for their own benefit leave the moment trouble arrives. But faithful people see tough times as an opportunity not to leave but to serve, so that the church is preserved and its leaders are strengthened.

We need to learn from Paul. He knew that Timothy did not need criticism -- he was probably beating himself up already. He knew that Timothy did not need to attend a church growth seminar or try a different strategic plan -- he already had a plan the great apostle himself had laid down. He knew that Timothy did not need people giving stupid, superficial opinions on what had gone wrong. No, Timothy needed one thing and one thing only: the grace of God.

Grace is an amazing thing. It is not a concept or a doctrine, though it can be described in those terms.  Above all grace is the power of God.

When your leaders or pastors are going through tough times, and they are faithful folk, come to them with grace. Ask God for his strength to flow through you to serve and strengthen them. Call on God for him to meet them in their valley and bring them out the other side. Don’t be critical. Be graceful.

Timothy knew his call would bring suffering, and in the last words we quoted above Paul reminds him of that. The suffering should come from the wounds inflicted by the enemy, not from supposed Christians. What a tragedy -- yet how often it takes place -- when Christian leaders are shot from behind.

Come with grace. The future of your church may depend on it. Not to mention the health of your own relationship with God.

And pray God would raise up more fathers. We need them.

The real meaning of faith (part 2)

In the last post, I started to explain the real meaning of faith using Paul’s account of Abraham’s faith in Romans 4. This post picks up where the last one left off.

In Romans 4:19, Paul tells us that Abraham “considered his own body.” The Greek verb for “consider” means this: “to direct one’s whole mind to an object, to study, examine, consider reflectively, ponder, or to apprehend something in its fullness by immersing oneself in it.” That means one thing: Abraham was not afraid to face the human facts. Yet somehow he did this “without weakening in his faith.” Faith does not run away from what is there in front of us. Faith does not deny that the problem exists. Faith does not say it is a “negative confession” to admit we are sick. That is not faith, that is deception. And it’s a deception born of fear. Faith states that, in spite of the undeniable reality of the physical evidence, the evidence of the word of God is stronger still. The word of God is the only evidence faith needs. When faith comes up against the brick wall of circumstance, it does not pretend obstacles do not exists. It does not pretend we have the ability to do anything to change the circumstance other than to cry out to the God who can change everything.

Paul understood what the nature of Abraham’s faith was. It was not a mind-over-matter arrogant declaration of the person who believes they have the power within themselves to make anything happen. No, it was the same faith which had enabled Paul himself to move ahead in obedience at the darkest hour of depression and despair. That was the time when he wrote to the Corinthians admitting that he felt the sentence of death had been passed upon him (2 Corinthians 1:8). That was the time he felt afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; hunted, but not killed; struck down, but not struck out (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). That was the time he felt he was carrying about in his body the dying of Jesus (2 Corinthians 4:10). Like Abraham, Paul knew that the key in such circumstances was to look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen. Those things can only be seen with vision given by the Holy Spirit on the basis of the revelation of the Word of God (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Paul continues: “With regard to the promise of God he did not waver in unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God” (verse 20). The man or woman of faith, like Abraham, has an undivided heart. Whatever the state of their emotions or mind, they will trust God and obey him. But notice this: it was “with regard to the promise of God” that Abraham did not waver. The most crucial thing here is not Abraham’s faith, but the promise of God upon which that faith rested. Abraham’s faith was directed toward something entirely independent of him: the promise of God.

Genuine faith has nothing to do with mind over matter or positive thinking or speaking. Such a “faith” is human-centred. It is not the faith of the Bible. Abraham’s faith was based on and controlled entirely by the divine promise. Faith does not contain its own power, as some preachers seem to suggest. Such a “faith” would be a form of magic or even witchcraft – an attempted manipulation of God by human efforts. Instead, the promise on which faith rests is its power. Faith exists, Charles Cranfield wrote, because a person has been “overpowered, held and sustained by God’s divine promise.”

So many fall into condemnation, frustration or disillusionment because they feel their act of believing is the critical part. They discover that their “faith” does not work, because in truth it is not Biblical faith so much as human positive thinking. And what is the promise that holds us? The promise is the Bible in its fullness, as that Word is understood and applied through diligent study, prayer, discipleship, submission to godly wisdom, and expressed in a commitment to live not for oneself but to walk in the way of the cross. As we walk in obedience to the Word, its promises take hold of us.

Abraham “was strengthened in faith.” He did not strengthen himself by his own “positive thinking”, will-power or emotional self-control, all of which were entirely inadequate. He found his strength only and entirely in God. God himself will come alongside the one who is attempting to move forward against all the heavy currents of doubt, fear and despair the world and the enemy can stir up against him. Abraham made a choice to believe God, but that opened the door for God to help. Where everything is ranged against the promise, faith is “being enabled” by God to rest on the promise alone, refusing to demand any visible proof or evidence. People of faith are not strong people, they are weak people with faith in a strong God.

Faith begins the minute we believe what God says. Once we have believed what he has said about salvation, the big decision of faith is accomplished. The heavy lifting is over. It should be easy, by comparison, to believe him for anything which comes after that.

Then the promise of verse 21 will come up under our feet: whatever God has promised, he has power to do. This faith of Abraham – our father – is available to every one of us today.

The real meaning of faith

In Romans 4, Paul gives a powerful exposition of the faith of Abraham. Abraham is the father of faith for all of us who believe in Christ (verse 16), and so what was true of Abraham’s faith should be true also of ours.

The most basic thing that can be said about Abraham was that he believed God. Of all the things Abraham did, this was the most important and fundamental. So what is Biblical faith? Abraham’s faith was not just intellectual belief or emotional assurance. The passage Paul refers to here is from Genesis 17, where Abraham’s first response to God was a form of bitter sarcasm: he laughed at God! I doubt his emotional or mental state was any better the day he walked up Mount Moriah with Isaac at his side and a knife in his hand. The strength and power of Abraham’s faith did not depend on his emotions or his mind. It came from a much deeper place in his spirit, and gave him power to obey no matter what his emotions and his mind told him. Biblical faith operates at a much deeper and more supernatural level. Biblical faith is a conviction birthed in our spirit in an encounter between our spirit and the Holy Spirit, in which we choose in our spirit to respond to God speaking to us. This response comes in the form of our choosing to believe that God is who he says in his Word. That was Abraham’s basis of assurance.

This faith, this deep conviction of the Spirit in the truthfulness of God, is a powerful thing. It is what motivated and empowered the heroes of faith of Hebrews 11, even to the giving of their lives. It is what compelled the great Biblical figures of faith to take their lives in their hands, to disregard all human considerations and consequences, in order to do what they believed God had told them to do. It impelled Moses into the presence of Pharaoh, it sent Elijah to the top of Mount Carmel, it put Jeremiah at the bottom of a muddy well, it caused Isaiah and Ezekiel to engage in acts of personal humiliation because it was the only way of making God’s point. It sent Stephen to his stoning, Paul to his prison, John to his exile on Patmos, and Jesus to his cross. Faith is the lifeblood of the church, and where it grows weak, and men and women are more interested in self-preservation than in obeying the word of the Lord, the church will die.

Over a period of thirteen years, from Genesis 12 to Genesis 17, God spoke five times to Abraham, yet nothing happened. Just more promises! Yet God was teaching him to rely on his Word and not human circumstances, no matter how daunting or even devastating those circumstances appeared to be. Abraham’s response to such a hopeless situation was this: “Against all hope, in hope he believed” (verse 18). Abraham had been hoping for a very long time that God would fulfill his promise, yet it had not happened. That is why his believing was “against hope” – human hope, that is. Human hope will achieve only human results, and that is what the church often settles for – what we can accomplish without God. That is a sometimes comfortable, but wrong, place to be. From time to time it will take us quite a way, and we may look successful – until we hit a roadblock we cannot remove. Everyone comes to the end of their ability, but God never comes to the end of his. But Abraham chose to place his hope somewhere else – in what God had said. To achieve eternal results, our trust must be in the ability of the eternal God.

Genuine faith always brings results, and these results are expressed here: “so that he became the father of many nations, according to what had been spoken, ‘So shall your descendants be’” (verse 18). Abraham’s faith was an act of defiance in the face of everything that was around him. Every time we obey the word of God we are defying the logic and opinions of people and the force of circumstances around us. If we ever lose our capacity to do that, we have lost our power to be part of advancing the kingdom. Abraham was desperate. ‘Desperate’ literally means running out of hope. But when his human hope ran out, instead of giving up, he chose to step out in faith and trust God for a hope he did not have and could not create. When the power went out, he turned on a generator on, and discovered there was more power in the generator than there is in Niagara Falls.

It’s not bad to be desperate – think of Moses with the Egyptian army at his heels, think of Gideon with his three hundred men, think of David eyeballing Goliath, think of Jonathan and his armour bearer climbing up the cliff to confront the entire Philistine army. Think of Elijah against the four hundred prophets of Baal, think of Hezekiah with the massed armies of the greatest nation of earth outside his city walls. It’s not bad to be desperate – but it’s what you do when you’re desperate that matters. God often puts us into desperate positions because it’s only when we are up against impossible situations that we stop relying our limited resources and start to access his infinite resources instead.

The purpose of failure

Failure is part of God’s plan for us. That was the last post. If you survived that, here are four specific God-designed purposes of failure.

Failure teaches us we are really nothing. Life is not all about us. Failure teaches us the only thing that matters is God’s opinion of us and God’s plan for us. If that plan took Jesus to the depths of humiliation in the eyes of the world, maybe the same will be true for us. Never accept the world’s standard of failure or of success. One of the worst problems is when those wrong standards enter into the church and into our thinking as Christians. Prosperity, ease of life, personal fulfillment, no challenges, no fears to face.... that’s what we all want. The problem is not just that these are wrong, it is that they are a delusion. The main cause of disillusionment is because we have believed an illusion. We need to prepare ourselves for failure, or for what will look like failure.

Second, failure leads us out of our plan and into God’s plan. Many years ago, I had a great plan to return to England, take a very promising ministry position, and get out of the dead end rut I had sunk into in Canada. God had a different plan. He kept me in Canada. Years of apparent failure were the result, but I hung on because I knew it was God’s plan, and I never believed I was a failure in his sight. Eventually I realized there were areas of pride and need for recognition that the failure was forcing me to confront. Dealing with that brought release, but there were more years of failure before God’s plan started to come to deeper fruition. Something in me had to die. I came to realize that God was using my apparent failures to reveal his sovereign plan. Now, looking back, I can see that God uniquely positioned me for a day he knew was coming. I had to be there waiting and preparing. My plan would have taken me out of human failure and into human success, but God’s plan took me out of human failure into Kingdom success.

Third, failure proves I am loved and valued by God. Even as Christians, we think of our failures as proofs that God has judged us, forsaken us or forgotten us. The opposite is the case. God loves me enough to use failure to deliver me from the delusion that success by the standards of this world is the goal I should live for. God loves me enough to save me from the kinds of superficial success that would rob me of achieving my eternal inheritance. C.T. Studd gave away his fortune and spent his life in poverty on the mission field, achieving little human recognition. He was a failure by the standards of the world. Yet the money he gave away financed significant Christian advances in various parts of the world, and the seeds he planted in China, along with others like Hudson Taylor, laid the foundations for the greatest revival in history. C.T Studd is a hero primarily because, by the world’s standards, he was a failure.

Finally, failure proves we are children of God destined for glory: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs -- heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:16-17). Suffering, including failure, is a privilege which proves we are God’s children. In fact, it is a necessary prerequisite for our being glorified. Why? Because we must follow down the same road as our Saviour. The greatest apparent failure in history involved a naked man hanging on a Roman cross. Mission failed? No, mission accomplished.

In 1774, the poet William Cowper wrote an amazing hymn, God moves in a mysterious way. The words of the third verse of this hymn were used powerfully by the Lord 35 years ago to strengthen me at one of my many times of failure:

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy and shall break

In blessings on your head!

Whatever your circumstances, may his mercy clouds break with blessings on your head today.

Facing failure

Several years ago I was driving out of a city on a major highway feeling deeply disappointed and hurt - why that was the case doesn’t really matter. I don’t usually listen to music in the car, but that day I put on a CD I happened to have with me. Immediately I heard the words, “His love never fails, never gives up, never runs out on me.” And God met me.

Paul experienced disappointment in a way I will thankfully never know. It runs throughout the first seven chapters of 2 Corinthians. He poured his life into people, and received nothing but rejection in return. Things were so tense he postponed a personal visit, fearing more trouble. And in the midst of this, he suffered a personal disaster so great he describes the effect of it as a sentence of death passed on him. He felt a failure.

Suffering often comes in the form of failure. Nothing is more debilitating than facing the fact we have failed. I know this is true for men, and I am sure it is true for women also, though it may come in a different shape. But Paul had a plan for facing failure and disappointment.

First, he focussed on God. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3). He knew God is a Father who will never abandon his purposes for us. No apparent human failure will stop the purposes of God. He brings strength in the darkest hour. Failure is the time to run toward God, not away from him.

Second, he understood that God is in the trouble: He “comforts us in all our affliction” (verse 4a).  God takes us out of our troubles, but first he meets us in the midst of them. He is not afraid of crisis. He does not promise us that we will be shielded from it. But his plan is to bring good out of it. Ninety per cent of our growth comes in times of trouble. That’s when we are driven to go deeper into him.

Third, he knew that this comfort is not just for us. It overflows into the lives of others (2 Corinthians 1:4b-7). We can help someone in trouble only because we have been through it ourselves. It is a powerful thing to be in the presence of someone who has passed through severe trials and emerged victorious.

Out of all this come an unshaken hope (verse 7). “Unshaken” is a Greek word referring to a gilt-edged security. It’s always worth going through it because there’s gold at the end of it. Suffering and failure drive us into God. If that’s all our suffering accomplished, it would be worth it.

Paul was able to survive because the experience of failure and suffering did not for him detract from his understanding of a sovereign and loving God. Because he knew God was loving, he was confident of an inner peace in the midst of the turmoil. Because he knew God was sovereign, he was confident that God was working a purpose through it all that in the end would be worth the pain.

Failure is the route to deeper fellowship with God. Failure is the means of knowing and understanding God more deeply. Failure draws us closer to God. If failure is all we see, it is only because we have defined success incorrectly. We think of success as achieving a particular goal (as defined by us), but often God has an entirely different goal in mind. Failure is often the door to finding the real purpose of God for our lives. This is just another way of saying that failure is the doorway to success. The experience of failure enables us to redefine and understand the meaning of success.

And when we redefine success, we redefine failure. We need to start to look at failure through the lens of God’s purposes. Who would have considered Jesus a success at Calvary? Even his closest friends had deserted him. His life’s work had come to nothing. Jesus understood things differently. For him, the only success was to remain obedient to the Father, all the way to the cross. For three years, Jesus had viewed success and failure by that standard, even while his disciples were viewing things entirely differently. That’s why they never understood his warnings about his death, and why they deserted him at the cross. They wanted to make Jesus the political leader of Israel and get themselves places at his right and left. If Jesus had succeeded at that, he would have failed in his mission from God.

If failure was part of God’s plan for Jesus, failure is part of God’s plan for you and me. Failure is just as important as success, and it is usually through failure that we understand success. Embracing failure will lead you deeper into God and his plan for your life. And that is success!