The Forgotten God

Sorry, it's been awhile since I've written. I just got a job and I jumped into a new ministry as well as taking on some new responsibilities in an older ministry and Foot Soldiers is starting up again this Saturday so between it all I've just been trying to figure out how to justify wasting a third of my day on something like sleep.

So one of those new ministries I got involved in was entering the Sunday Highschool teaching rotation. Once a month I'm given a piece of scripture to read/pray over and give a lesson on. I had no flipping idea how hard that would actually be. It's always been, 

'Hey, I need you to teach a lesson. Do whatever you'd like.'

That's no problem. I can whip up a lesson in a few hours with scripture to back up every sentence and enough life lessons to fill a pin cushion. Not so with a set piece of scripture. It's like telling someone to go fishing in the ocean and catch whatever they'd like and then telling them to go fishing in an obscure mountain lake where they can only catch a brown trout or a red gyarados or something.

I was literally up until 1 AM that Sunday morning still trying to piece together a lesson that wasn't complete gibberish. It didn't happen so I decided that instead of knocking my head against my desk and ticking off my dog who was trying to sleep I needed to pass out. I woke up at 6 and managed to get something together before class started. I thought it might just get me through what I was imagining was going to be the worst next 30 minutes of my life.

I had to teach on Isaiah 1:10-20

Funny now that I look back on the piece of scripture and the irony of it. God, funny guy.

That lesson was filled with so many stutters, repetition and awkward silences that when it was over I literally couldn't look anyone in the eye as I stepped away from the teaching stand. Sure, people told me it was a good lesson and that I didn't do as badly as I was saying but let's be honest, it's a rare person who will tell you how badly you actually did and I knew one thing - that lesson had been a complete flop.

So while I was having a little pity party for myself on the drive home it came across my mind that I should pray. I mean, this was a lesson for Church right? Why not ask Him why He hadn't delivered me from this Goliath? He'd let me be humiliated. That wasn't cool  and I needed to make him aware of that little fact. My sister told me awhile back that her time to pray is on the way to school. Stuck in traffic it's the perfect time for her to talk to God. I thought I'd give it a go. 

Father Goose. Probably one of Carry Grant's best movies and yet hardly anyone knows about it, but that's not my point (but really, a great movie. Go watch it!). There's a scene in it near the end, after Leslie Caron gets drunk and they're shouting each other out on Grant's boat over how stupid each of their lives are. Grant running from life while Leslie is stuck with her head in some royal cloud. Suddenly Carry Grant steps over the line, calling her out about one of her past relationships that, in her drunk stupor, she told him about and Leslie, red in the face and shaking with fury, steps in and slaps him hard across the face. That's what the first six seconds of that prayer was like for me. 

I had this romantic view of teaching - I'd stand up there and sling out fancy word play and weave together sentences that would pierce the hearts of every kid listening. I'd pound the pulpit and if things got crazy I'd throw off my hat and people would look at me like I was some amazing speaker - and that was so bloody far from what God was calling me to do...it's a little pathetic to look back on it now and actually even write it out but there it is. It was all about me. How I looked and how they were going to look at me and want to talk to me about their problems. It was going to make me important. The moment I began that prayer God thundered down at me, 'No. It's about me and I just set you in your place.'

Boom.

I'd just turned an opportunity for God to use me to change kids lives into a rock concert for myself. It hit me so hard that I just white knuckled the steering wheel and prayed to God for His forgiveness. It was all I could do.

But so many times that's what we do. It becomes about us, about the halo that we can make shine even brighter so that people will look at us in awe. We get involved in something because we want people to see us and thank us for what were doing and in the end how is that what God has called us to do?

I was supposed to give a lesson to those kids because they needed help. They're struggling in ways that no one can see. The Devil sits behind them, cutting apart everything good around them, his claws dug into their hearts, feasting on the torment of their souls while God reaches out to save them and here I am deciding on which of my hats will make my face look thinner.

See, when we take that step into ministry everything about our Christianity changes and I literally mean everything. Look at why I got saved. It was because I needed salvation from Hell, right? Because I needed God to save me from a life that was so torn in its foundation that only God could help me rebuild it. Me, me, me, me, I, I, I, I. All about me. But ministry - it's about them.

It turns from looking at our life and becomes us spending everything we have to try and lead whoever it is to God. It's about finding those hearts that are screaming, sobbing, for God in their life but who cover it with music and video games and porn and drugs and failing relationships and cheap entertainment and leading them to the only help that can save them. It's about going into someone's life and dedicating everything to bringing them to the peace that God has brought us. It's love on a level that only a relationship with God can bring.

You want to know how deep ministry is? It's Christ dying on the cross. That's where Church ministry began, when He breathed his last. That's the level He compares it to when he calls us out. You think I'm just making it up?

Luke 9:23-25

"And He said to all, 'If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, buy whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the world and loses or forfeits himself?"

2 Cor 6:3-10

"We put no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit genuine love; by truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; through honor and dishonor, through slander and praise. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished and yet not killed as sorrowful yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything."

There are so many more verses on giving up ourselves for Christ and other but those are two that I really like.

God calls us to give it all up. It's a scary thought. I mean, I came from a life where I didn't care that I was causing my family to fall apart because I wanted to play video games and now I'm being called to give my life, riots and beatings and imprisonment for someone who isn't even my blood? But then I look at Christ and what I have in store - a mansion that God's spent 2000 years designing/building for me? And then there's the thought that I could possibly have a chance to have God use me to help bring someone to the same Heaven?

 Just sitting here in my chair and thinking about it all I can do is smile and think,  'Yes please'. I mean how could I dare to keep it to myself? 

But, weeks ago I would have look at my current passion and just have shook my head at this passionate version of myself. Sure, right now I was feeling pumped but give it few days and this feeling would probably ware off and when it came down to it I'd get scared and want to push all these ministries away and look for a way to get out of them...and after I gave that lesson I looked at my life and begged God to show me how to keep that passion for Him in my life. How do I keep this feeling in my soul, buried so deep that it seeps into every root of my life? How can I have a lasting love for people, a longing to bring them to God?

So, you read up at the start of this blog that I just got a job. Well the only reason I go to that job is because they pay me. I mean I only work because I'm paid for it or because it'll teach me something that will later on help me to earn money (either that or you're a cool friend haha) but see, no matter how much I hate having to pull poop from an old woman's main sewer drain out or dig trenches and blister my hands for 8 hours, I do it because I know I'm being paid for it (Sorry to my boss if you're reading this. Thanks for the job!). The strong desire to stop working isn't as strong as the urge to get that sweet pay check in my hands. I have something to fight for. 

It's the same thing with ministry. We need something to fuel us, to get us up and to keep us going out and get us past the times when we're made fun of and ridiculed and getting the door slammed in our faces. I didn't have a fuel. My fire had died and no matter what I did I couldn't seem to get it so stay alive longer than a few days at a time. What was I doing wrong??? I was doing the Bible study and praying and doing everything I was supposed to! Why wasn't it working? 

And that's what it all came down to. I'd forgotten God. Sure, I was studying the Bible and listening to Lecrae and going to my church  but I wasn't working on getting to know Him and that's what God calls us to do. He doesn't care about anything else - he just wants us to get to know Him and I was treating him like a school work assignment. Now I don't know about you but I never feel very inspired to go share my homework with the masses. If anything I'd like to shoot it through the face. I did homework because, 'it's the right thing to do'.

I'd gotten into teaching because, 'it was the right thing to do' but not because I was moved to do it. I was nothing but a clanging cymbal...I had no love. That needed to change.

But how do you change that? How do you learn to love? I mean I would do anything for my sisters because I love them but looking out at a bunch of highschoolers who I don't know, how can I learn to love them? It seemed impossible. I remember sitting in my room thinking about it. How was I supposed to learn how to love? How did I learn to be someone like Paul wrote about in 1st Corinthians chapter 13?

1 Cor 13

1  - If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have no      love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2  - And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries      and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove        mountains but I have no love, I am nothing.
3  - If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be      burned, but have no love, I gain nothing.
     Love is patient and king; love does not envy or boast; it is      not arrogant
5  - or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not            irritable or resentful;
6  - it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the          truth.
7  - Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all            things, endures all things. 
8  - Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as      for tongues, they will cease, as for knowledge, it will pass      away. 
9  - For we know in part and we prophesy in part
10 - but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away
11 - When I was a child, I spoke as a child. When I became a man,      I gave up childish ways. 
12 - For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now      I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been      fully known. 
13 - So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the          greatest of these is love. 

See, I wanted that kind of love! I wanted to be able to share THAT with people...but how? And then it hit me - I can't have a love like I have for my sisters or my mom/pops like I have for everyone else...I needed a different love. It was a compassionate love. A love that looks back on what my life used to be and causes me to ache with pain for those people without God, because they're hurting like I used to hurt. The numbness that I felt when I tried to sleep, feeling like my life was worthless and meant nothing. Where running away was the best option. Where a real laugh from my lips was a rarity. Where porn was the best part of my day.

It's a love that says, 'I want to help you...'

The only way to get that kind of love was to learn how to love God, and I mean a pure and humble love for Him, and from Him a desire to share that love, that relationship, would come from me. When we have something good, we want to get the word of it out there. Don't believe me? Girls, tell me that if you didn't find a new nail polish that absolutely blew your mind you wouldn't tell your best friend. Guys, Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, Walking Dead. I couldn't shut up about that stuff, trying to get people to watch/play it.   How can we expect to want to share God unless we're so truly in love with Him that we just can't contain it??

So I began a different kind of study - a study of getting to know God on a personal level. A John 17:3 level

(And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.). 

That's the answer right there. If you're having problems with ministry then I'd look at your relationship with God. Is it where it needs to be? Because if you don't have a longing for God then you aren't going to give a bullocks about anyone else. You're going to sleep in on Sundays, play video games instead of going door to door or do your laundry instead of helping someone work through theirs (in a spiritual sense of course) because you don't care about God, so you don't care about getting Him out to the world. You can't just have love, it has to come from something. It has to be taught. Let Him teach it to you because honestly, there's no other way to learn it. Let him slip into every rusty gear of your heart and let it turn again. Let love in. Let God's love flow through us.

Get to love God and he'll let you love the world in a way that will blow your mind. 

In His name, Parker L.