The Road to the Cross*” is a series of thoughts for the Lent season. These convey some of my hopes, prayers, and even fears as we traverse this season and prepare for the celebration of Easter.
I am a ministry failure. That is not an overstatement or a means to evoke pity, but a realistic assessment of my life in ministry. Every church I have been a part of shrank while I was there…in fact I don’t think I have ever been part of a group that has grown numerically in my life. Nobody clamors to hear me preach, and nobody is itching to read any books I may write and in fact nobody really reads this blog, so I am mainly writing to myself. I have never been on anyone’s ‘fast track’ or ‘hot list’ and have not even been asked to be on any committees in my denomination.
Failure is not a word that many people like to comprehend or even think about themselves. As I approach middle age, I am tempted to think that perhaps I would have been a better data entry personnel than a pastor and perhaps wonder if I had ever really been called into ministry at all.
I look at the people who succeed in ministry and often wonder, “why?” and “how?” Take a minister like Joel Osteen, whose theology is bankrupt and who peddles in trite religiousity and yet has millions of followers. I have watched God bless the ministry of those who were self-interested, self-serving and self-promoting while those who were more faithful struggled to eat and put food in the mouths of their children. So either I am more incompetent than these or I am just simply a failure.
And I have failed and learned to fail at so many things in my life. Again, this is a relatively self accurate portrayal. My life is not all that exciting. I haven’t traveled to exotic locales or learned to be cool or hip or have not developed a taste for a unique cuisine. I am not a spy nor is my job filled with adventure (although the Navy does know how to ‘accelerate your life’). And I am not complaining about this either…it is just to say that from the exciting life point of view, I am an EPIC fail.
But this then brings us to Lent…a time to find and reflect on redirection in our lives.
When I (we) begin to think of ourselves as failing in life, we tend to get lost and misdirected.
We have to remember that Jesus came for the failures. He came and lived among those who had failed at life. He came for the prostitutes and the tax collectors, the poor anonymous fishers and the people in the field. He shunned the people in power, the successful ones who had it made. He came for the losers and those who have gotten lost along the way.
Jesus talks about this in the parable of the lost sheep. He says, “If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?” (Matthew 18:13 ESV) It’s not that the 99 are not important, but that the one is just as special and important and God cares about it just as much as the other ones.
When we get lost in our mind…we begin to think of things as more important as they really are. We begin to think that our lives are not worth anything unless we have met certain mile posts or we act like a certain person. It is not that we are physically lost, but that we are spiritually lost. And if we stay lost long enough, our entire world seems out of balanced and life loses all hope, meaning, and purpose.
In the ancient world, sheep were herded by listening to their shepherds voice. It may seem hard to believe, but sheep are able to tell the voice of their shepherd. When they began to follow another shepherd’s voice, that’s when they would get lost. The same is true for us. We begin listening to other people’s voices…we listen to other shepherds and as we listen to these other shepherds, the voice of OUR shepherd, the GOOD shepherd grows more and more distant until we are on unfamiliar ground.
During Lent, we have to open ourselves up to listen for the voice of our Shepherd. We need to pause from the activities of our lives and get our bearings. We tune our hearts to Scriptures more and try to avoid the things that bog us down in our lives and we give ourselves over to prayer more.
By doing this, we hear the voice of our shepherd and this is what we hear:
–we hear that the world’s estimation of our worth is not nearly as important as our Father’s delight in us
–we hear that the things of this world are momentary and transitory while things of our Father are eternal
–we learn that we each have a purpose to fulfill and that purpose is unique to us and our lives
–we learn that we are loved apart from what we accomplish in our lives
–we learn that our God loves us so much that He sent His Son to bear the penalty for our sins and to give us eternal life
So if we are lost on the way, it’s time to pause, to take some time to listen and get back on the road to the cross
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