Saturday Morning Musings: The Art of Working into Being
Christianity is all about the being, not the doing. While it is true that faith includes action, it is expressive action of inward belief.
But what about this being? Once we are born-again, how then are we conformed to the image of Christ?
Every December, I pick up one of those smaller Moleskines and carry it around with me wherever I go. During the month I stand, in a sense, in the middle of a road, looking back to where I have been and forward to where I appear to be headed. My interest in the road ahead really doesn’t have anything to do with our fashionable “accomplishing something great for God.” It, rather, has much more to do with who Peter Smythe is going to be come the next December.
As I go about this little exercise each year, ideas about “what to do” for the following year seem to waft in from out of nowhere. As they begin to solidify and gain traction in my thought pattern, I jot them down in my little Moleskine. At the end of the month, I usually have a handful of “things to do” for the following year. A great thing about these little “do’s” is that they invariably lead me on the path to becoming more conformed to the image of Christ. I have also found that once they are written in the Moleskine, somehow they become a part of my inner soul consciousness and I rarely, if ever, need to look at them again. More than a few times, I’ve opened the Moleskine six or seven months down the road and found that everything that I had jotted down had already been accomplished.
While American Christianity likes corporatize (yes, not a real word, but it works) the salvation walk, the New Testament shows us that each of us must run our own race. As you begin 2008, let me toss some thoughts over to you that might help you decide which way you’re going to walk.
Tongues
There is a minister that I know who sometimes takes an informal poll at his meetings about praying in tongues. He queries the congregations about how much time each day folks spend praying in tongues. He says that, by his poll, less than ten percent of Holy Spirit-baptized Christians spend more than ten minutes a day praying in the Holy Ghost. As Paul boasted to the Corinthians that he spoke in tongues “more than y’all,” praying in tongues should be an important part of the Christian’s prayer life.
Bible Study
If the majority of Christians went about their daily work in the same way of their Bible study, the largest churches would be found in the unemployment office. Becoming “rooted and grounded in the faith and in him” requires much more than those daily bread scriptures or even the latest Christian leadership book. While I understand that Jesus could return any day, one of the best things that I’ve done is take a long-view of Word study.
Thinking Outside of the Box with Church Culture
This is my personal attitude, but church culture is not too different from Starbucks or McDonalds. Go to virtually any Sunday service in the States and you’ll be hardpressed to find a smidgen of difference from your home church - say hi to the greeters, sing for half an hour or so, shake hands with everyone, sit down to hear the offering sermon, listen to the sermon, and then be dismissed. Sometimes I have a hard time connecting the dots of the story of our glorious Gospel with the metronomic singsong of our modern church services. What can you do to get out of the box (or the church out of the box)?
Recently, my wife and I imposed (yes, imposed) ourselves on our local pastoral staff to shake things up a little and take pictures of the church’s kids’ ministry. We thought that the church could use some real pictures since all their ministry materials used those (awful) stock photos that you see on every church site. When the staff finally relented, we got out our cameras, went from room to room, got to know more of the kids, took some great pictures, and had a great time. Sometimes it’s best just to go out and do something than wait for someone on the staff to “hear from God.”