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.
Showing posts with label method. Show all posts
Showing posts with label method. Show all posts
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Monday, May 18, 2009
Technique and Methodology
I find myself wondering about our fascination with technique and methodology this morning. It seems that every problem from a difficult marriage to church planting among the unreached has been, or is being, reduced to technique. The reason that your marriage isn't going well is that you haven't discovered or applied the "5 secrets of a happy marriage". The reason that your sex life isn't satisfying or intimate is that you haven't read the most recent issue of Cosmopolitan or Men's Health to discover the "6 steps to sexual satisfaction". The reason that the billions of unreached people haven't embraced Christ is that we've been doing it wrong all these years and this NEW and IMPROVED method of evangelism and church planting will do the trick; just buy this book and follow these "10 principles to lead Muslims to Jesus".
Is it all really that simple? Can our relationships be reduced to arithmetic and formulas? Can the interactions between souls, human or divine, be quantified and mechanized? Can we study ourselves into love, can we strategize ourselves into intimacy? Do we really believe that we are so far superior to those who have gone before us? Do we really believe that we have finally found the method(s) that will solve our problems? Or perhaps there is something else going on here. Perhaps this is all just a way of creating or sustaining the illusion of control.
If the answers to perennial problems, spiritual or relational, can be reduced to techniques or formulas then if we learn the right methods we will be in control of the outcomes. All we have to do is learn the right parenting techniques and our kids will be healthy and happy, the right marriage techniques and we'll have a problem free marriage. But all of this misses the point. We are not in control. We were never designed to be in control. We are not the Controller, the Creator and the Sustainer of the Universe. God is. We are invited to walk with Him and to talk with Him. We are invited to work alongside Him.
The emphasis on method and formulas flows from the Enlightenment. This period of history gave us modern science and the scientific method. I am grateful for science and all that we have today as a result of the pursuit of understanding how the universe works. I could not right this blog if someone had not figured out how to push electrons around. My point is not that techniques and methods are bad, but that they are limited. When we are dealing with material objects they are extremely useful, but we have allowed this way of thinking to creep into our thinking about all aspects of our lives.
Science is great as a far as science can go, but science alone cannot answer the really important questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What is the point of all this? Science is helpful for understanding and manipulating the physical world, but there are other realities, more important ones. We are not just chemicals and reactions. We are souls. After all you can't put love in a test tube, and you can't quantify a snuggle with your kids. When we try to reduce our interactions with each other and God down to technique, we dehumanize those that we are using our methods on. We treat them as objects in our experiment rather than human souls to be interacted with, or in the case of God, a divine soul to be pursued, loved, and known.
In our pursuit of technical perfection we miss real relationship. We miss real intimacy. We miss real love. We miss the the real heart of the matter.
Is it all really that simple? Can our relationships be reduced to arithmetic and formulas? Can the interactions between souls, human or divine, be quantified and mechanized? Can we study ourselves into love, can we strategize ourselves into intimacy? Do we really believe that we are so far superior to those who have gone before us? Do we really believe that we have finally found the method(s) that will solve our problems? Or perhaps there is something else going on here. Perhaps this is all just a way of creating or sustaining the illusion of control.
If the answers to perennial problems, spiritual or relational, can be reduced to techniques or formulas then if we learn the right methods we will be in control of the outcomes. All we have to do is learn the right parenting techniques and our kids will be healthy and happy, the right marriage techniques and we'll have a problem free marriage. But all of this misses the point. We are not in control. We were never designed to be in control. We are not the Controller, the Creator and the Sustainer of the Universe. God is. We are invited to walk with Him and to talk with Him. We are invited to work alongside Him.
The emphasis on method and formulas flows from the Enlightenment. This period of history gave us modern science and the scientific method. I am grateful for science and all that we have today as a result of the pursuit of understanding how the universe works. I could not right this blog if someone had not figured out how to push electrons around. My point is not that techniques and methods are bad, but that they are limited. When we are dealing with material objects they are extremely useful, but we have allowed this way of thinking to creep into our thinking about all aspects of our lives.
Science is great as a far as science can go, but science alone cannot answer the really important questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What is the point of all this? Science is helpful for understanding and manipulating the physical world, but there are other realities, more important ones. We are not just chemicals and reactions. We are souls. After all you can't put love in a test tube, and you can't quantify a snuggle with your kids. When we try to reduce our interactions with each other and God down to technique, we dehumanize those that we are using our methods on. We treat them as objects in our experiment rather than human souls to be interacted with, or in the case of God, a divine soul to be pursued, loved, and known.
In our pursuit of technical perfection we miss real relationship. We miss real intimacy. We miss real love. We miss the the real heart of the matter.
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