The Teachable Will Lap the Gifted

We have a new teammate. And we have been praising God for her heart. Why? Because she is teachable, humble, and lights up when we talk about gospel truths.

We have come ourselves to light up when we encounter a heart like hers. This is because we have learned that what the psalmist says is true. Mark the man of peace, for he has a future (Psalm 37:37). Not only will someone who has a humble and teachable heart flourish under God’s kind hand, but those around them will flourish also. Teachable peacemakers make the best teammates and colaborers in the trenches of ministry. They also make wonderful friends.

Looking back on my Bible college and seminary days, it’s interesting to note how some of my most gifted classmates didn’t really end up flourishing spiritually in life and ministry. At least not to the same extent that the steady, humble, teachable ones did. In fact, over time the seemingly gifted ones were lapped by the ones most of us would have been tempted to initially overlook. The unassuming, the unpretentious, the ones who didn’t have to lead, but who eventually led anyway because of their steady faithfulness and consistency – these friends are the ones who quietly got started in ministry, have so far persevered, and are now harvesting righteousness (James 3:18).

How do we spot them? Well, the humble show up. Consistently. They listen. They are open to feedback and counsel and eager to learn how they can grow. They don’t pine after influence. They are willing and even eager to serve. They know how to laugh at themselves. They know how to follow and how to rejoice in others’ successes. This, even though there is very much a quiet gospel fire burning in their souls and often very wise things in their minds. It just seems to take a while for the rest of us to gradually shift our gaze away from the flashy ones so that we can see the better and more trustworthy embers burning in the hearts of the lowly. But time will inevitably expose the humble, and sooner or later we will not only see them, but come to lean on them more and more.

It’s just as true for marriage prospects. I remember walking down the road as a college student debating with myself about this girl that I had recently started dating. In some ways she was different than what I had imagined. Looking back, like a typical idealist, I was putting way too much emphasis on secondary things. But suddenly a thought stopped me in my tracks. A.W., you fool, what would you give for a woman with a heart of gold? It was a valid and pointed question expertly aimed to undo my wrongheadedness. Right then and there I decided to stop focusing so much on minor things and to pursue this godly woman who had a gracious and humble heart. Ten years now into marriage, I daily experience the rewards of having gone for the heart over the external details. Turns out that beauty in the heart unfailingly spills out and beautifies the world around it.

The teachable will lap the gifted. Every time. I need to keep reminding myself of this as we eagerly look for new local believers who could be future leaders and as we recruit for future teammates. If someone is very gifted, but proud, I need to remember that it’s OK to move on, in spite of the great needs around us. A better harvest comes from the hands of the humble. It’s an exercise of faith to let these types of people go, or at least to not invest in them in as deep a way as I would initially like to. And, wonderfully, some of these eventually become humble themselves, more often than not after having walked through the fire of suffering or failure. Or by simply learning to not take themselves quite so seriously. There’s frankly more spiritual power in that than we often admit.

Want to impact the world for Christ? Go all in for teachability, grace, and humility. And after others in your church start affirming the grace they see in your heart, then consider attaching yourself to some struggling church or rag-tag team of church planters like ours somewhere in the world.

Humble yourself. Sow Peace. Trust God with the timing. A harvest of righteousness awaits.

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

Closer to Islam than to Liberal Christianity

When I was twenty one, *Henry, a good friend from the Middle East, came to the US on a summer exchange program. I was excited to see him again and eager to see how he was doing in his young and still mostly-secret faith. He had not been willing to gather with other believers yet, which was disappointing, and he was terrified to tell his family. Still, like a Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea, his faith had continued. I was relieved when we met up and he was eager to pull me aside to talk in hushed tones about spiritual things.

His hosting situation was a peculiar one. He was staying with an elderly couple, the husband a retired pastor in a liberal mainline denomination. Another student, a conservative Muslim from Egypt, was also staying there. This Egyptian student was eager to ply the elderly pastor with hard questions about Christianity. His host was mostly willing to engage his questions, but with an inclusivist air that made the answers quite disappointing for the Egyptian – and for me. Now, this elderly couple was wonderfully kind and hospitable, admirably so, hosting two young Muslims (or so they thought) during the height of the War on Terror. But having had very little interaction with liberal American Christianity, I found myself growing more and more concerned that his answers were so, well, squishy. Did this man actually believe that Christianity was true? If so, where was his backbone, where was his conviction, where was his Bible? The Egyptian’s bias against Christianity was only being confirmed by this man’s very NPR-style politically correct responses. Henry, for his part, was not going to jump in and risk revealing to his Muslim Brotherhood-influenced roommate that he himself had apostatized.

I listened respectfully to their conversation, observing the retired pastor with a good deal of inner astonishment – and hoped that Henry would not be led astray by this well-meaning but watered-down Christianity. And I prayed for a chance to get to talk with the Egyptian myself. Thankfully, after a pleasant dinner and evening together, we got our chance as the three of us ended up bunking in the same room. Out came the polemics. The Bible has been changed. Christians Believe in three gods. Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God. The Bible prophesies Mohammad. And finally, out came the Bibles.

We discussed Christianity and Islam late into the night, open Bibles in front of us. Even Henry got into it, making some good points here and there while never quite revealing his own faith. Long after midnight we got into the concept of the Trinity. It was a rousing debate. Both the Egyptian and I loved it. We loved it because, young though we were, we both knew that truth matters. We both knew that Islam and Christianity make exclusive truth claims. We both believed that an honorable believer doesn’t insult his opponent by pretending that the differences aren’t real. We knew that the promises of squishy humanism were coming up empty. Somehow, strangely, we knew we were “older” than our elders and that we must muddle forward together in the pursuit of absolute truth. We debated and muddled until we finally called it a night around 2 a.m. To my great joy, Henry’s heart was freshly encouraged in the gospel.

The next morning we attended the mainline church where our hosts were members. Having grown up a Baptist in Melanesia and having recently been part of underground house churches in the Middle East, it was just as much a cultural spectacle for me as it was for my Middle Eastern friends. I had never been part of a liberal mainline service before. I was encouraged that so much truth was still remnant in the liturgy, but discouraged that no one seemed to take it seriously, not even the female pastor. At the end of the service, she called us up to the front. She wanted to welcome us as guests and to present the three of us to the elderly congregation. She let us introduce ourselves and when we were finished, turned to the congregation.

“Pastor *Smith,” she said with a smile, “who is hosting these young men, tells me they were up until 2 a.m. discussing, of all things… the Trinity!”

The congregation erupted into chortles of laughter and knowing smiles. The pastor egged them on.

“Well, boys, when you’ve figured it out, be sure to come and let us know!” More laughter. More respectable snickering.

There we were – the secret young believer, the Egyptian who would later become a mullah, the young American missionary – the brunt of a joke because we took the Trinity seriously.

We stood there awkwardly as the laughter died away. I looked at Henry and at my new Egyptian friend, realizing in that moment that we had more in common with one another than we did with all these chuckling church-goers. In fact, we lived in a different world. As a believer, I had more in common with my Muslim friends like this Egyptian than I did with many of my own countrymen who claimed to be Christians. What a strange and tragic thing.

There have been few moments where I’ve been more ashamed of Christianity in my homeland than I was that day. Though as Machen rightly maintained in Christianity and Liberalism, it was not Christianity at all, but a new religion entirely, gutted of the gospel. What would these cultural Christians say if Henry’s family found out about his faith and kicked him out, or tried to kill him? Would they try to comfort him by telling him that “We all really believe the same thing, after all?” What would they say to my other Middle Eastern friends who had lost everything for the sake of Jesus, for holding to beliefs that these wealthy westerners had long ago dismissed as intolerant or not progressive enough? For all of the residue of truth that clung to that church because of its once-faithful tradition, it had become a community impotent. Impotent to represent Jesus to serious Muslim theists, and even more impotent to mentor those who could lose their lives for their faith. Just a shell of what is was supposed to be, full of nice and polite grey-haired members who chuckled at the silly young men who thought it was worth it to stay up late and debate the nature of God.

It’s not always easy to live among Muslims. Sometimes we want to pull out our hair in frustration at how illogical Islamic belief and practice are. But there are many times when we actually find ourselves strange bedfellows with our Muslim neighbors, scratching our heads side by side at the absurd but confident assertions of Western modernity. It’s frankly refreshing to live in a society where the existence of God is strongly believed by most, where male and female still mean male and female, and where the question most wrestle with is What is the truth? rather than What is truth?

My neighbors largely believe that God exists, that he created the world, that he sent prophets and holy books, that heaven and hell are real, and that we should strive to live according to God’s will. This is not a bad theistic starting point, even given all of the distortions that Islam introduces. For many Muslims, like Henry, they are not far from the kingdom of God. They need a friend. One who will tell them of Jesus, open the Bible with them, and pray until the miracle of the new birth crashes in and changes everything.

Woe to the many respectable, progressive, and nice church-goers of the West. For while they chuckle and exchange the power of the gospel for niceness, it is the scrappy Middle Easterners who will get into the kingdom of Heaven before they do.

Photo by Alexis Mette on Unsplash

*Names changed for security

A Proverb on Crows and Critique

A crow said to another crow, “Your face is black.”

Local Oral Tradition

Or as we say in English, the pot calls the kettle black. Before judging others we must take care that we ourselves don’t exhibit that same issue. Especially if that issue is even worse in our own lives. As Matthew 7:3 says, Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?

After we have dealt with the sin in our own lives, then we will be in a position to judge with right judgement (John 7:24) – and equipped to provide truly helpful critique.

Photo by Sreenivas on Unsplash

A Fight Song From Revelation 19:1

A friend I’ve been praying for for three years came to faith a few days ago. We were completely surprised. His best friend and I met with him at a coffeeshop as he confessed his brokenness and sin and need for true faith. Among the passages we looked at together was Luke 15, the parable of the lost sheep and the rejoicing of heaven when one sinner repents. This is likewise a song of celebration. I love how this song steadily builds musically, grounded in the lyrics of praise from Revelation 19:1. Make sure to listen to the whole thing, especially for the transition at 2:35 and for what comes around the 4:20 mark.

I can hardly listen to this sound without tearing up. Imagine the kind of musical beauty and worship coming in heaven.

Sexual Sin and The Wider, Deeper Battle

We’ve made it back to our home and city of service, so next week I’ll pick up with more writing again. For today, here’s one more article that over the years has proved extremely helpful. It’s Sexual Sin and the Deeper, Wider Battle by the late biblical counselor David Powlison, and it deals with the other issues of the heart and flesh that are often fueling sexual sin. As a young man laser-focused on killing sexual sin, and often frustrated by its stubborn nature, I remember being greatly helped when I first learned that there was wisdom in widening the war. What? If I fight greed by giving generously to the church I might be undermining the power of lust? Yes, sin is connected. Breakthrough in one area almost always spills over into another.

Consider this quote about a man who turns to sexual sin as a false refuge from a stressful job.

Erotic sin is part of his picture, but there’s lots more. Every deviant motive—each lust of the flesh, lie, false love—is a hijacker. It mimics some aspect of God. It usurps some promise of God. Consider that about two-thirds of the Psalms present God as “our refuge” in the midst of the troubles of life. Amid threat, hurt,disappointment, and attack, God protects, cares, and looks out for us. Our friend has faced troubles: people out to get him, threats to his job, intolerable demands, relentless weeks. But he’s been finding no true refuge during this frenzied month. Now, in a spasm of immorality, he takes “false refuge” in eroticism. His erotic behavior serves as a counterfeit rest from his troubles. Psalm 23 breathes true refuge: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.” This man pants after false refuge: “After I’ve walked through that god forsaken valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because the photograph of a surgically-enhanced female wearing no clothes is with me.” A false refuge looks pretty silly when it’s exposed for what it really is.

The idea that there are deeper things going on of which sexual sin and temptation is mainly a symptom, a piece of evidence of something broken – this piece of wisdom has been marvelously helpful time and time again. A good God-given desire for refuge – and a failure to place that refuge in God – will result in counterfeit refuge. Every time. If I am being tempted toward false refuge in sexual sin that almost always means I’d better press into actively taking refuge in Christ. The main battle is the battle for refuge! The sexual sin is the aftermath of ignoring that first crucial battle.

More often for me, it’s the desire to be fully alive that is most susceptible to hijacking. If I am not finding my whole self (especially my affections and emotions) engaged with God’s beauty, then I am in danger. On the other hand, when I am finding my heart, my soul, my affections deeply engaged in my relationship with God, that is when I most strongly feel (rather than only know) that I don’t need the counterfeit.

There are deep waters in the soul which fuel the struggle with sexual sin. Widening the war can be extremely helpful no matter where we are in our struggle with the flesh, whether naive and just beginning or decades in and jaded. There is always hope for change. Read the whole article by Powlison here.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

Why the New Rome?

Rome remained the sole capital of the empire until Emperor Constantine I (ruled 312-337), for strategic reasons, made the city of Byzantium on the Bosporus into a second, new capital, thus shifting the imperial centre of gravity to the east. Constantine I took this step for two reasons. First, increasing military pressure from the Goths and Sarmatians on the Danube and the Sassanians on the Euphrates called for the presence of the emperor and the organs of government close to the threatened eastern border. Second, the new capital controlled the maritime trade with Egypt and the Middle East, as well as the continental trade routes that linked Europe with Asia.

Baumer, The Church of the East, p. 11

Better profit and fear of the barbarians, plus a leader not afraid of upsetting the traditionalists. Remember, this is the same Constantine who also called for the council of Nicaea and made Christianity legal and then later the official religion of the empire. The man was obviously OK with shaking things up.

Photo by Engin Yapici on Unsplash

Church Size Cultures

I continue to learn just how important self-awareness is in the effort to do good missiology and contextualization. In order to understand my target culture and know how to apply the gospel to it, I am deeply handicapped if I do not understand my own preferences and my own culture. The danger of confusing personal and cultural preferences for biblical principles and commands lurks ever hidden under the surface – not unlike the sea mines in the Bosphoros that prevented the allies from taking Constantinople in WWI. In this vein, I have been greatly helped by this article by Tim Keller that addresses church size dynamics.

Every church has a culture that goes with its size and which must be accepted. Most people tend to prefer a certain size culture, and unfortunately, many give their favorite size culture a moral status and treat other size categories as spiritually and morally inferior. They may insist that the only biblical way to do church is to practice a certain size culture despite the fact that the congregation they attend is much too big or too small to fit that culture.

My mistake as a former house-church-only advocate was this very thing, confusing a house church size as being a more biblical choice. Small was holier than big. Simple was holier than complex. Just as good missionaries need to constantly remind themselves that many strange things in their new culture are “not wrong, just different,” so Christians must remind themselves of this same truth when interacting with churches of different sizes. The key takeaway is not just that churches of different sizes usually have different cultures, but rather that they inescapably have different cultures. To refuse to let the culture change because of some personal size preference is to do damage to the church and to impede its healthy growth, like new grandparents insisting that Christmas must always look the same even though their grown children now have their own children plus another other set of in-laws that need to be honored.

This article is also full of specific wisdom to help leaders when their churches are passing from one size culture to another. Since many of the churches that are planted in Central Asia will exist in the house church to small church range, I am helped to be aware of how to proactively lead or help the local leaders anticipate what kind of shepherding is needed to make this transition.

If it opts to grow out of the house-church size into a small church, it needs to prepare its people to do this by acknowledging the losses of intimacy, spontaneity, and informality and agreeing to bear these as a cost of mission, of opening its ranks to new people. This has to be a consensus group decision, to honor the dynamics of the house church even as it opts to change those dynamics.

Read the full article by Tim Keller here.

Photo by Tory Doughty on Unsplash

Ripping Open the Inconsolable Secret

As I continue this week of posting articles that have been particularly influential for me, tonight I post one which has almost become cliche in the Reformed blogosphere – to which I say, “Praise God!” The Weight of Glory is a sermon by C.S. Lewis that has been called by John Piper one the most influential pieces of writing he’s ever read. This sermon for Piper was key in his discovering for himself what he would later call Christian Hedonism.

For me, this Lewis sermon has been influential in a related, yet distinct way. When I first read it, my heart blazed. But this was because the sermon spoke so plainly of my inconsolable secret.

In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

I do not know when it started, but as a child or teenager I began to experience a profound longing for something which I could not quite describe. I did not know what to call it. This longing came through nature, missionary biographies, late afternoon sunshine and wind, times of corporate worship, holidays, and times of private prayer. It was a longing for the new heavens and new earth, a longing for the resurrection, a longing to see the face of God. Lewis diagnoses this as a longing for glory, which is both honor and light, recognition from God and the chance to actually become a part of the eternal beauty.

This promise of resurrection glory continues to be one of the major themes which dominates my spiritual life, pulling me out of discouraging seasons time and again. If you are a believer who has never read The Weight of Glory, you can do so here. Or even if it’s just been a while, do your soul a favor. Stir up those bittersweet longings for another world that you can never quite shake nor suppress. Then rejoice that they are not empty longings. They are, for us believers, prophetic echoes of our future and true home.

Theological Triage

In my context overseas I’ve heard it said that we should only partner with those with whom we share the same theology and methodology. This statement falls short for at least three reasons. First, it assumes that theology and methodology are equally important. Second, it fails to recognize that within theology and methodology are different levels of varying importance. Third, it practically means that if you draw such a tight circle as your prerequisite for partnership, you’ll hardly be able to partner with anyone. It’s only a matter of time before you discover some difference in theology or methodology. When that happens, this mantra leaves you poorly equipped to do anything other than part ways.

Far better to recognize that we can partner with others in various ways according to our theological and methodological likemindedness. This is where the concept of theological triage comes in.

The word triage comes from the French word trier, which means “to sort.” Thus, the triage officer in the medical context is the front-line agent for deciding which patients need the most urgent treatment. Without such a process, the scraped knee would receive the same urgency of consideration as a gunshot wound to the chest. The same discipline that brings order to the hectic arena of the Emergency Room can also offer great assistance to Christians defending truth in the present age.

A discipline of theological triage would require Christians to determine a scale of theological urgency that would correspond to the medical world’s framework for medical priority. With this in mind, I would suggest three different levels of theological urgency, each corresponding to a set of issues and theological priorities found in current doctrinal debates.

Al Mohler

Mohler, in this article, calls the church to a mature approach whereby doctrine is ranked in primary, secondary, and tertiary importance. Issues of primary importance are gospel issues. These issues divide orthodoxy from heresy, e.g. doctrines like the Trinity. Secondary issues are issues by which Christians cannot disagree and be part of the same church in a healthy way. This would include topics such as the proper subjects of baptism. Tertiary issues are those which believers can disagree with and still be part of the same church, such as differing views of the millennium.

Interestingly, Mohler points out that the error of liberalism is to deny that there are any first-level issues while the error of fundamentalism is to make everything a first-level issue.

What I have not seen done yet is for someone to take this helpful concept of theological triage and to apply it to the mission field and to methodology. We are in desperate need also of methodological triage. The sad truth is that many evangelical missionaries overseas are operating as methodological fundamentalists or liberals. Issues of strategy and methodology have become of first-level importance, without acknowledging whether the scriptures themselves give said method that kind of weight. Or methodology is treated as a neutral endeavor where there’s no connection between form and meaning and into which the scriptures really do not speak. Either way, this should not be.

Read the full article here.

Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

The Greatest Social and Cultural Transformation

I’m currently on a trip to my previous city and engaged in multiple days of back-to-back visiting. So I will likely be writing a bit less this week and instead posting a few articles that I have found very influential over the years.

This first one addresses the very relevant question of how missionaries can achieve the greatest social and cultural transformation. Should they make this kind of transformation a direct focus of their work or should they only focus on the “spiritual” work and trust that the transformation will follow in due time? In this article, John Piper comments on the research of J. Dudley Woodberry. Woodberry’s stunning thesis in his project, “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy” is to show that the historic presence of conversionary protestants is the most important variable in whether a society has developed a free and democratic society or not. When these conversionary protestants focused primarily on preaching the gospel and planting churches, significant social change was the consistent result. Piper says,

The implication is that the way to achieve the greatest social and cultural transformation is not to focus on social and cultural transformation, but on the “conversion” of individuals from false religions to faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins and the hope of eternal life. Or to put it another way, missionaries (and pastors and churches) will lose their culturally transforming power if they make cultural transformation their energizing focus.

I live and work in a part of the world where we have many acute social needs. There are a thousand good causes I could devote my time to and if I did this many people would find real and meaningful help. So why do I spend so much time studying language and focusing on sharing the gospel, discipling believers, and ultimately, planting churches? How can I do this work in good conscience when my place of service is full of honor killings, FGM, refugees, genocide-related trauma, domestic violence, unemployment, human trafficking, and dozens of other issues that desperately require reform?

This article and the accompanying research help provide data that accompany the conviction that it is not unfaithful to focus on church planting in such a context. It is in fact the truest path toward true and lasting reform.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash