Preaching to the Choir

I have spent most of my adult life living and working among Muslim peoples. Few of my friends there had even a rudimentary understanding of Christianity or Christ.

As a follower of Jesus, who has tasted and seen that life with Christ is truly the best kind of life, I was eager to share with them. I was often the first, if not the only Christian they had ever met. As I, and my family, lived among them, they watched our lives and our interactions closely. Although few were eager to embrace Jesus, many were interested in hearing more. They wanted to learn more about what I believed and why we lived the way we did.

I now find myself living the the United Kingdom, in Wales specifically. I live among a people who would generally consider themselves Christians. We have public, government sanctioned, ceremonies where prayers are recited and hymns are sung. The head of the government, Queen Elizabeth II, is the head of the Church of England. My being a Christian is nothing interesting or worthy of notice.

Since moving here I have struggled with how to effectively reach a people for whom the Gospel is no longer new, or of interest. How do you share the good news, when it is not received as either news or good?

Recently, I have been drawn back to the Old Testament prophets. These men lived among the people of God. The Israelites were steeped in the knowledge of God through their law, festivals, and culture from their birth. These were, by definition, the chosen people of God.

The prophets of Israel to Israel were preaching to the choir. With the exception of Jonah, the prophets were called by God not to take the good news to those who had never heard, but to remind the people of what they should have already known and been practicing. But the people didn't want to know. They repeatedly rejected the prophets messages and often treated the prophets badly, even killing a number of them.

I now find myself in a similar position. I am encouraged to know that others have gone before me, and to learn from them. On the other hand, I'm not wild about the track record of the prophets and do not hope to emulate their dangerous and frustrating experience. In the end, I don't need to worry about any of that. I just need to answer the call and step out of the boat to follow my Master across the waves wherever He leads.

Ministering to the Lord

As I read this morning, I was struck by this phrase, "bless the Lord". It sounds strange in my ears. "The Lord is the source of blessing," I thought. "He does not need to be blessed."  Then I remembered the phrase "ministering to the Lord." I looked it up and found that it occurs several places in the Scriptures. 

As I pondered this, I wondered why it sounds strange to me. ministering to the Lord and blessing the Lord were important, even central, aspects of the life of faith in the Old and New Testament periods. Why do they sound so strange to me?

Then I realized that we have exchanged "ministering to the Lord" with "ministry for the Lord." We have subtly moved God out of the center and moved the focus of our lives onto the work. This new perspective puts us at the center. It is a way of subtly exalting ourselves and what we can do for Him. It puts the focus on us, or perhaps on "the lost". We wrap our idolatry up in spiritual sounding language.

He invites us to minister to Him, to bless Him, to enter into real relationship with Him. Then, He does the work. He does the saving. He does the ministering. From that place of humility and dependence He sets us aside for the work that He has for us (Acts 13). We tend to identify what we think we should be done and to ask Him to empower our plans, our methodologies, and our efforts. Then, as our plans succeed, we praise the Lord while siphoning of some of the glory for ourselves because we were the ones doing the ministering.

We need to recover the centrality of God. We need to place Him at the center. We need to focus our lives on ministering to Him rather than for Him. I choose this again today. I choose to wait on the Lord. I choose to bless the Lord. I choose to minister to the Lord.