I thought we should start off the New Year right by reminding ourselves of an essential role we have as pastor-teachers.
Take some time right now and watch this message I delivered to those about to enter ministry. My challenge to them is the challenge that you and I will face every week this year: to preach the Word.
—Chuck
If I may borrow from Charles Dickens’s famous opening line, Christmas can be “the best of times, and the worst of times.” As pastors, we have them both, don’t we?
Who hasn’t cringed in September as stores drag out and display the artificial Christmas trees? Who hasn’t felt uneasy about the obligatory exchange of gifts with individuals you hardly know?
Something about those annual experiences can make them seem like “the worst of times.”
But they don’t need to be.
Did you feel the tightening squeeze this time of year brings? On top of an already demanding schedule of preaching, teaching, counseling, and calling, you had to add Christmas parties and programs, a creative Christmas series that you’ve never preached before—and still another eloquent sermon for the Christmas Eve service.
Such a schedule has a tendency to turn us into Scrooge-like characters, doesn’t it? (We secretly think: Humbug!) Work, work, work . . . nothing and no one will get in our way.
May I assume the role of one of old Scrooge’s ghosts for you? Let me escort you to your home. Peer into the window. Look closely. Is your chair empty at the dinner table?
It’s baaaack! The age-old yuletide season is about to slip in the door once again. Better not shout, better not pout, for the malls will be playing “Jingle Bells” several thousand times between now and December 25.
If you’re not careful, the crowds and commercialism will weigh you down like that fourth helping of stuffing at Thanksgiving dinner.
And there’s nothing worse than a jaded attitude that resists the true spirit of the season.
Although this has been a challenging year in numerous ways, we have a practical reason to look back over it with gratitude for God’s protection and grace.
This reflection sets in motion the ideal mental attitude to carry us through the weeks ahead.
When Jesus tells us to “seek first the kingdom of God,” the very word seek implies a strong-minded pursuit (see Matthew 6:33). J. B. Phillips paraphrases the idea with “set your heart on.”
The Amplified Bible says, “Aim at and strive after.”
The Greek text of Matthew’s gospel states a continual command: “Keep on continually seeking.” The dominating thought is determination, which I define as “deciding to hang tough, regardless.”
All of this urges us to keep in mind the difference between natural sight and supernatural vision.
We dare not miss an important dimension to hanging tough. It is the thing that keeps you going. I call it a dream. I don’t mean those things we experience at night while we’re asleep.
No, by dream, I mean a God-given idea, plan, agenda, or goal that leads to God-honoring results.
Most pastors I know don’t dream enough. If someone were to ask you,
What are your dreams for this year? What are your hopes . . . your agenda? What are you trusting God for?
Could you give a specific answer? I don’t have in mind just ministry objectives or goals, although there’s everything right with those. But what about the kind of dreaming that results in character building, the kind that cultivates God’s righteousness and God’s rule in your life?
My love affair with Thanksgiving takes me all the way back to my boyhood days. I had just turned 10 years of age and was in fifth grade at Southmayd Elementary School in East Houston.
As I recall, I was still going barefoot to school—and I combed my hair, maybe three times a week. Girls didn’t matter a lot to me when I was 10! It was on a Wednesday, the day before our Thanksgiving holidays began.
The year was 1944. Our nation was at war across the Atlantic into Europe as well as in the Pacific and far beyond.
Times were simple back then but they were also rugged. Everything was rationed. Framed stars hung proudly in neighborhood windows—and sometimes they were quietly changed to crosses.
Everyone I knew was patriotic to the core. Without television, we relied on “newsreels” that were shown at the movies, bold newspaper headlines, and LIFE magazine, which carried photos and moving stories of courage in battle and deaths at sea. Signs were posted inside most stores and on street corners, all of them with the same four words:
Just before Moses died, he spoke these words to God. Read them carefully:
‘May the LORD, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation, who will go out and come in before them, and who will lead them out and bring them in, so that the congregation of the LORD will not be like sheep which have no shepherd.’ So the LORD said to Moses, ‘Take Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the Spirit, and lay your hand on him; and have him stand before Eleazar the priest and before all the congregation, and commission him in their sight.’ (Numbers 27:16–19)
I don’t know your circumstances today. I cannot be certain how God intends to use this episode from the life of Moses in your own life.
But I do know what it’s like to be a shepherd . . . and so I can imagine some possible scenarios.
A church as God intends it is not a gathering of people who sit back and listen to one person preach. Instead, one life touches the life of another, who then touches the lives of people in his or her sphere of influence—those whom the originator would never have known.
To make it even more exciting, those recipients, in turn, touch the lives of others also. That is a contagious ministry.
The medical profession models the idea of multiplication very well.
May I get very personal? The pressures of our times have many of us pastors caught in the web of the most acceptable yet energy-draining sin in the Christian family: worry.
Hey . . . don’t look so pious!
Chances are good you awoke this morning, stepped out of bed, and before doing anything strapped on your well-worn backpack of anxiety. You started the day, not with a prayer on your mind but loaded down by worry. What a dreadful habit!
(It happens to me far too often.)