"I'm not getting fed"

The Christian life-cycle is like the human life-cycle.  When we are infants we need to have our food fed to us, we need our diapers changed and we can't do much of anything for ourselves; except fill our diapers and cry.  We are continually learning.  In the Christian life, baby Christians don't know much, other than that they're seeking to follow Christ.  They need to be "fed" and be learning continually.

As we move through childhood we can handle more types of food, feed ourselves the food that is prepared for us, and we continue to learn and do more and more things for ourselves.  In Christian adolescence we begin to learn to do things as we follow Christ.  We can serve people and evangelize, but have much to learn of God's Word, how to study it and hear His voice.

As we move through life we learn to do more and more for ourselves as we continue to be taught.  At some point in our lives (though we never stop learning) we reach a tipping point where we cease being professional learners and we start doing what we've learned.  We no longer need to be taken care of.  We get a job and move out of our parents' house.  We start to fend for ourselves and take care of others.  We eventually become the teacher, then leader and eventually an elder statesman.  The Christian life is the same.  We should become self-sufficient in our faith; able to feed and fend for ourselves.  Know the Word and how to study it for ourselves.  Know how to hear Him speaking to us and rely on Him to do so.  We continue to learn and live life with others, always helping one another, but we become able to provide for others like a father provides for his wife and family; teaching his children and guiding his household.

You may be a 55 year old man getting to know Jesus for the first time, and if that's you,  you NEED to be fed.  Be discipled.  Learn to study the Word for yourself.  However, if you've been a "follower of Christ" for many years or decades, I hope you are not relying on your pastor and local church to feed you.

It bothers me that we, as "mature Christians" will leave our church or complain about our pastors because we're "not being fed."  FEED YOURSELF!  Serve the church, don't drain it!  The church is not a restaurant, it's a fitness center.  You don't go there to get fed, you go there to PARTICIPATE!  Disciple others.  Serve.  Study and apply the scripture!  Follow Jesus!  I'll admit to you right now that I need to get better at studying (not just reading) the Word and I want to do a better job of hearing His voice.  I commit to you today to seek Him and follow through on this so I can be a better disciple-maker and be transformed daily into the likeness of Christ.  Will you?

Crawl through the mud like a...butterfly?

I just started reading Francis Chan's book Forgotten God, about the Holy Spirit.  At the end of chapter one he talks about how crazy it must be for a caterpillar.  "For all its caterpillar life, it crawls around a small patch of dirt and up and down a few plants.  Then one day it takes a nap.  A long nap.  And then, what in the world must go through its head when it wakes up to discover it can fly?"  What he does is relates that extraordinary change to the change a person goes through when they are born-again of the Holy Spirit.  That before we begin to follow Christ we are just crawling around in the mud (our sin), but then after our rebirth we can FLY (live empowered by the Spirit of God)!  What occurred to me next I may have heard Chan or someone else say before, or maybe it's my own little gem of an idea that God downloaded to me, but what if the caterpillar just continued to crawl through the mud and never flew?  What if all his other caterpillar friends still didn't have wings and so he just kept doing what he knew and what he saw his friends do instead of what he was made to do?  Do you see where I'm going with this?  Do we, Christians, continue to crawl through the mud because it's what we know or because it's what we see other people doing instead of accepting what the Holy Spirit has transformed us into?  Do we fail to do what the Holy Spirit enables us to do with our new life?  What if we look to the Holy Spirit and to God's Word and began to fly!?  What then Church!?  What then!?

Too Blessed

After reading Genesis 36:7 I thought it was interesting that Jacob and Esau were so blessed that they weren't able to live near each other because they had accumulated too many possessions and the land could not sustain both Jacob's and Esau's livestock in the same location.  They we so blessed that they couldn't receive another blessing; living near family.  If they were poor they would have been able to live near each other and may have even been forced to share a home, but would have had the blessing of living the end of their lives together.

I think that sounds a lot like the United States and other wealthy nations; we're so blessed that we miss out on other blessings.  We're so wealthy that we can buy or borrow anything and everything we need instead of waking up each day wondering if there will be food on the table or a place to sleep.