[Pastors] need to have a vision of success rooted in spiritual terms, determined by the vitality of a pastor’s own spiritual life and his capacity to pass that on to others. When pastors don’t have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success—models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture. They begin to think their job is managing a set of ministry activities and success is about getting more people to engage those activities. Pastors, and those they lead, need to be set free from that belief.
Dallas Willard in Leadership Magazine
Filed under: Procrastination
Doug Wilson:
“When it comes to work, just hit it. Excuses are always plentiful. Too hot. Too cold. Too late” (Joy at the End of the Tether, p. 103).
From Mark Horne:
Twitter summary: Without grace and a promise of mercy, awareness of sin only leads to despair and more sin.
One might think that, when a person becomes aware that he is sinning, or of the seriousness of a past sin, that he would want to correct himself and pursue new obedience.
I’m not talking about people who don’t believe that their sins are sins. A person may know he is a philanderer but boast in it rather than being ashamed of it. Such people are not “aware” in the sense that I mean it.
What I mean is that person who is aware that he is a philanderer may in fact wallow in the sin once it comes home to him that he has committed it.
Rather than seeing the odiousness of sin as an incentive to avoid it, people tend to see the odiousness of sin as a reason to believe that there is no point in obeying. They have already blown it. Nothing they do can change the past so there is no point in trying to change. (Some groups who traffic in sins make a point of recruiting by getting a prospect to commit a serious sin so that he or she will forget about ever going back to their former way of life.)
That’s why it is important to remember that grace precedes obedience. God did not give the Ten Commandments to Israel as a way to get out of Egypt, but only after he had already declared that they were His children and had already liberated them from Egypt.
Q. 101. What is the preface to the Ten Commandments?
A. The preface to the Ten Commandments is contained in these words, I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Wherein God manifesteth his sovereignty, as being JEHOVAH, the eternal, immutable, and almighty God; having his being in and of himself, and giving being to all his words and works: and that he is a God in covenant, as with Israel of old, so with all his people; who, as he brought them out of their bondage in Egypt, so he delivereth us from our spiritual thraldom; and that therefore we are bound to take him for our God alone, and to keep all his commandments (Westminster Larger Catechism).
Likewise, when God calls on people to repent, the call presupposes that God loves the sinner and is waiting to accept him. It is true the Prodigal Son managed to return without realizing this but one point of Jesus’ parable was to tell people that God was waiting longing for sinners to repent. As the Westminster Confession puts it (ch 15), repentance is not possible with only a recognition of the evil of sin, but also requires an understanding of God’s mercy:
By it, a sinner, out of the sight and sense not only of the danger, but also of the filthiness and odiousness of his sins, as contrary to the holy nature, and righteous law of God; and upon the apprehension of his mercy in Christ to such as are penitent, so grieves for, and hates his sins, as to turn from them all unto God, purposing and endeavoring to walk with him in all the ways of his commandments.
Without grace and a promise of mercy, awareness of sin only leads to despair and more sin.
Filed under: Vocation
Paul was a tentmaker – that was his job but it wasn’t his calling.
North:
“The calling is the most important task that a person can perform in the kingdom of God in which he would be most difficult to replace … A calling is less specific, unless it is a job. There are a few jobs that serve as callings. Ordination to the ministry is one of them. You get paid to do your calling. Teaching in a Christian school can be a calling.”
Paul had confidence in his calling because it wasn’t his occupation and nobody would replace him unless also called by God. Paul was irreplaceable.
“The hard part about identifying a calling is not judging it’s irreplaceability. The hard part is judging the tasks value to the kingdom of God. As a man who has several occupations – writers are afflicted with low specificity – and at least one major calling, with two additional ones looming, let me say that assessing the value of a calling is the hard part. That something which doesn’t pay needs to be done is easy enough to assess. Lots of non paying tasks need to be done. Large armies could not do them all. The difficult question is ‘does this need to be done soon, and by me?'”
Pauls job was crucial. If you seek a crucial calling, forget about status.
The Brooks 