One of my
favorite things to do when I was in ministry was preaching. When I was out of ministry and living back in
California, I preached a Saturday service for my church, but without pay (my
favorite ministry so far). I really
enjoyed the preaching, but my preaching never brought people to the church or
to the Saturday worship. One of the
remarkable things about my experience preaching was when I felt the message was
a disaster, how many were touched by it.
I learned, slowly, that it has so little to do with me, and so much to
do with my Master. I loved to preach,
but it was always an exercise of my own spiritual development first, and so
little of my ability.
Essentially,
what I learned is that the preaching I did wasn’t about me either. I could get really excited about a passage,
pour myself into study and prayer, and then let all that excitement blow out
all the results of my study and prayer all over the sanctuary. That really didn’t have the effects I wanted. I wanted people to join me in my excitement
over what I found in the passage. They
really didn’t, or at least not enough of the time for me to consider it a normal
response. Even though my Master worked
me over with a passage, He did His own different work with the congregation
when I preached. It was a really
confusing lesson to learn.
When I took
a course on storytelling, the instructor said that a story, once told, no
longer belongs to the teller, but to the listeners. I think sermons are like that as well, but
for different reasons. With stories,
different elements impact different people at different points depending on
their own life experiences. With a
sermon, I found that my Master as their Master worked on them using what was
preached to affect His own ends.
Sometimes, and the most obvious examples, I saw when what He used was a
very insignificant side comment, and what He did had little or nothing to do
with my “main point” of the sermon.
This blog is
sort of like that as well. I put into
these entries what I sense my Master doing in me, and He does with them
whatever He wants in others. With this
media, He can use them long after I’ve written them. At least I hope He uses them. I have to remind myself that it’s not about
me even though I write about what’s going on with me. These, like the sermons, are about my Master. Once written, they really don’t even belong
to me anymore. Like time, they are
things in the past hopefully affecting a better future with my Master. I should probably survey them from the beginning
to see if there is any progression.
So here is
another entry. I will do another twelve
(up to December 15), and then post the entries that never made it to the blog
site but were either diary or Facebook entries last year (they begin on
December 16, 2010). After that I think I
will begin to work on the Gospel of John and a project to survey examples of
Hebrew Torah legal texts searching for relevant lessons. I won’t do both every day, and my plan is to
work on them sort of back and forth. But
my plans are just ideas I pursue while waiting for my Master to direct me into
something else. I have no idea how long such
blogs will run. Welcome to the Winter of
my Contentment. It feels…odd, but very
peaceful.
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