Full Time Ministry

“Full Time Ministry.” What an interesting phrase.

I hear a lot about Full Time Ministry. I hear it from my brothers and sisters in my church, and in pretty much every church, every conference, every home group I visit. I hear it on many of the blogs and twitter streams of brothers and sisters that I follow. I hear it most often among those who are most passionate about their faith. I hear it explicitly and I hear it implicitly in many of our conversations.

And the thing that I hear is this: a consistent desire to be in Full Time Ministry (and yes, it’s spoken with capital letters!).

This is what I hear: I hear so many believers that are frustrated with the limits of how well they’re able to express their commitment, their appreciation, their devotion to God, in their secular workplace, and they’re looking to Full Time Ministry as a means of satiating that need. “When I’m in Full Time Ministry...” they say wistfully. Some of them are tired of dealing with “Non-Believers” (as if “believing” is the thing that defines us) and wanting to work among Believers so they can let down their defenses. But mostly it’s a longing to serve Christ better.

First of all, I understand the desire for more freedom in living out our faith; I understand the desire to have a job that allows me to express my joy in the One who ransomed me from sin and judgment during my work day; I understand the frustration with feeling like so many of my hours working are wasted in the sense that they are building something that will make no eternal impact.

And so we have a large part of a generation of the Church longing to be on staff at a church, wishing they could be part of a Christian missions group, thinking and planning about starting some sort of ministry so that they can be in Full Time Ministry.

Here in America, we have a tendency to define ourselves by our jobs, our careers. We talk about “Pastor John” or “Dr. Miller” because of that force. When we introduce ourselves, there’s very often a need to describe what we do for a living, because that’s how we know each other in this country. It’s not the only way we define ourselves, but it’s a bunch of it.

And so we have a second motivation for wanting the Full Time Ministry position: it defines us publicly as someone who’s committed to Christ, who’s given themselves to the furtherance of the Kingdom of God. It’s not that we’re looking for public recognition (well, not usually), but that we want to see ourselves that way: I’m committed to the gospel, because I’m in Full Time Ministry.

I say again: I understand and I applaud the desire to serve God with our whole day. I need to make that clear because of what I’m going to say next.

Every time I hear about people wanting to be in Full Time Ministry, I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and shout, “You’re aiming too low. Aim higher!”

Yes, it’s true that for most of us, working 40 hours a week for a Christian cause would represent a larger fraction of our lives spent in furthering the cause of Christ. Assuming we get an hour a day in our “Quiet Times”, and that’s almost 50 hours a week! Fifty hours a week with God; what a wonderful thought!

Again I say, “You’re aiming too low. Aim higher!”

The standard that we’re given in the Word, the example modeled for us by Jesus and Paul and the rest is that we don’t limit ourselves to serving the cause of Christ a mere 40 or 50 hours a week. Fifty hours a week is an improvement, but it’s not our goal. Our goal is … (let’s see… 24 hours a day x 7 days a week…) our goal is serving Christ 168 hours a week. Every breath we take, every word we speak, every relationship, every conversation, every email, everything we do is part of our life in Christ.

My relationship with Christ is about who I am, not about how I spend my time. A friend of mine put it this way: we were made to be Human Beings long before we began to be humans doing. I am a Christian not because of what I do with my day, but because Christ lives in me, because I am in Him. Which means that all of my day is His.

When I worship, that’s an expression of the Kingdom of God, of course. When I help church volunteers overcome their technical challenges, that’s an expression of the Kingdom; I understand that. But when I talk to the mechanic who’s fixing my truck, I’m an expression of the Kingdom, because I am the ambassador of the Kingdom, perhaps the only one he’ll talk to today. When I go grocery shopping, or pay my bills, I’m doing the work of the Kingdom, because I am a king and a priest in this Kingdom. I’m not an ambassador only when I’m talking God Talk or doing God Things. I am an ambassador. That’s who I am. That’s who you are.

Let me be more direct: I don’t need to be doing something expressly “Christian” to be doing the work of the Kingdom. I am not an ambassador, a king, a priest because I happen to be talking about Jesus or about my church at this moment. It’s not about what I do. It’s about who I am.

The other end of the spectrum, then, is also true: when I snarl at my kids, when I grumble at the guy who cut me off in traffic, I am still doing that as a king and a priest of the Kingdom. Which leads me to change my behavior, but not because I need to do the right things, but because of who I am. I am a king, a priest, an ambassador. I need to live like that. I need to make choices based on who I am, not on what’s right and wrong. (We’re still eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, aren’t we?)

So here’s my encouragement: live like you mean it. Be who you are, you ambassador, you. Live in Christ 24/7 and be an ambassador in all you do.

And quit settling for the goal of merely Full Time Ministry.

Weeds in the Garden!

Have you ever grown a garden? Do you know the joy of preparing the ground, planting the seed and coming back to harvest your supper from the garden? There’s something special about a garden; that’s probably why God created Adam & Eve in a garden.

I sometimes look at a garden as a metaphor of my life: if I want God to have a harvest of good things from my life, then He and I need to prepare the soil that is me and plant good seed in it.

Preparing my soil is not often easy, but it is simple. There’s hard stuff that needs to be plowed up, often (but not always) through difficult circumstances. There are things that need to be removed from my life through a process of purification or refining. There’s order that needs to be built into my life.

Then there’s the planting of the seed. That’s another process. It’s worth examining, but I’m looking at something else today.

If you’ve ever grown a garden, you know about weeds. No matter how well you prepare the soil, no matter how good the seed you use, weeds always seem to get in to spoil the perfection of your garden. Jesus had the same problem: tares grew among the good wheat

Following the metaphor, weeds grow from the seeds planted by “the world, the flesh and the devil” in the garden of our lives. Weeds are messed up thinking, wasted or unfruitful choices and other things that don’t come from God’s seed and don’t produce a harvest that either he or I would choose.

I hate weeds. They seriously mess up both the beauty and the fruitfulness of a garden, and they do it in several ways.

First, weeds consume resources supplied for the legitimate fruit. In the natural garden, they consume the nutrients in the soil, the water, the sunshine. In my spirit, they consume the time and energy that could be more profitably spent. (Don’t get me wrong: rest is not a weed. But squandering time is.)

More than that, weeds create a false, fruitless beauty. A field covered in blackberries and nettles is actually fairly pretty, but it’s not fruitful. That’s the same in my life if I have lots of activities that look good, but lack the power and presence of God in them. I know people who have started dozens of “good things” for God, but haven’t done much “with God.”

Weeds make room for other invasive pests. They are not part of the weeds themselves, but the weeds make it comfortable for other nasty stuff to feel right at home. Under the berries and nettles are rats, cockroaches, slugs, ungodly beliefs, discouragement, hopelessness. I don’t want to be making room for those kinds of things.

Weeds make it hard to see what God’s doing. I don’t know why it is that weeds – both natural and metaphorical – are substantially better at commanding attention than the quiet fruit-growing plants beneath them.

So my goal is to submit myself to God, to identify and repent of the weeds He shows me, and to make myself ready for good seed.

It's Reasonable

I have found myself thinking about my thinking processes recently. I’ve been thinking about how my thinking fits in with the Kingdom.

I grew up in a very intellectual community. My family treasured thinking, reading, and a college education. My education was all about rational thinking: find the evidence, and think about what it means: if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist. My church taught that scripture is to be interpreted through the theology that I hold.

I was taught that the opposite was blind faith, which was ridiculed.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I was taught poorly. I’m sure they had intentions that they considered to be good intentions, and this is not going to be a diatribe against the people that taught me. Rather, it’s an admission that I’ve learned some things new.

As a man that was taught to know, to understand, I read an interesting verse in that Book that I consider authoritative in all things, and it said,

Acts 1:7-8 “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…”

It’s written in red letters: this is Jesus himself speaking, and he’s speaking to the disciples who are trying to understand what’s going on, what God is up to. They’re trying to make sense of a move of God that is way outside their boundaries. (Doesn’t that look familiar?) Since I’m in the same place, it would be hard not to read this as speaking to me, personally, in my own struggle to understand what God is up to in this season.

I struggled for a bit with that first phrase, “It is not for you to know the times or seasons.” More specifically, I stumbled over “It is not for you to know.” I looked for a loophole: maybe it’s not for me to be confused about? But alas, the Greek word, ginosko, means it’s not for me to “learn to know, come to know, [or] get a knowledge of … understand, perceive” (Thayer’s Greek Lexicon).

It is not for me to know, to understand the times or the seasons.

I’ve grown up in a culture that’s fascinated by the study of end times. I know people who have made a career out of studying and talking about end times prophecy. And here, the Son of God says that’s not my job. Don’t waste your time on that.

As a result of this verse, I stopped reading the Left Behind series of books, back when everybody was reading them. I wasn’t real impressed with the books anyway, either as theology or as literature, but I was reading them because so many people I knew were reading them. But it’s not for me to know, to understand, to perceive the times or seasons – and he was specifically addressing questions about the end times when he made this statement.

But at the heart of this statement is a value, a principle: knowing is not as important as other things. Here he says it’s not as important as receiving power. Not as important as receiving? But I can’t control receiving! I can only receive what someone gives, and that’s beyond me. I can control knowledge by studying and arguing and becoming learned.

“It is not for you to know.”

But as big as those red letters are, this is only one verse, and maybe I’m jumping the gun. Maybe this is an isolated thought in scripture.

This morning I was reading what I thought was a safe passage where Jesus and the boys are talking about lunch as they’re sailing across a lake. And there in the middle of that conversation, Jesus makes this statement:

Mark 8:17-19 “Why do you reason because you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive nor understand? Is your heart still hardened? Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember?”

Again with the red letters: Jesus’ own words. And again, he’s rebuking them. He’s saying that in this situation (“We forgot lunch!” or “We don’t have enough provision!”), “reasoning” is a sign that my heart is hard, that I don’t perceive or understand.

The lesson is blindingly clear: when I’m with him (and where else would I want to be?), the means to my provision is not my ability to reason. Exercising reason in that situation illustrates that my heart is hard.

Again, what does he offer instead: see; hear; remember.

In the ensuing conversation, he reminds them of previous circumstances where he miraculously provided for them (the feeding of the 5000 is his first example).

So again we have come to another circumstance where reason fails me, where knowledge is insufficient: when I have a need.

Instead, he commands me to see, to hear, to remember. I can almost hear him now.

“Come on guys. If you can’t trust God’s provision for you, then at least look at (remember) His provision in other times. If you can’t see, then can you hear other peoples’ stories? If you can’t hold still to hear their stories, then at least remember what He’s done from way back!”

So I am working on making that change in myself. They call that repentance: changing the way I deal with things. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that times are difficult right now, particularly in the realm of provision. There’s this little thing called a recession going on. It’s hit us pretty hard, and it’s probably hit you or someone close to you as well.

My goal is to pray, yes. But instead of trying to figure things out, instead of “reasoning because [I] have no [provision],” I think I’ll try to soak myself in testimonies. I’m going to try to see, to hear, to remember what God is doing, and what He has done, in order to be able to walk in confidence for what He will do.