Hands-on Knowledge

“If you love me, you will obey my commands. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” – John 8:31b-32

When I was in college, I had a chemistry class. The chapter happened to be on chemical reactions and there was the formula for touch explosive there, along with information about the chemical reaction that caused the explosion. I called my brother, who was an avid fan of explosives and said,

“Dude, I know how to make touch explosive”.

His response? “It’s easier in deer hunting season.”

“Huh?” I thought… “What does he mean by that?”

He went on, “Yeah, the hardest to get chemical is then at Walmart, because people use it to cover their scent when hunting. Oh, and don’t make too much of it at one time, otherwise it can set itself off on the toaster oven and scare your roommate half to death.”

Who really knew touch explosive? Sure, I had read about it in a textbook and 100% of what I learned was factual, but I didn’t really understand it. I didn’t have the experience my brother had. I think that’s like a lot of believers today. There’s an understanding of God and a deep understanding of scripture, but nothing replaces that experiential practice of living out the word of God.

We want to know the truth before we act. We want God to convince us that what He’s told us to do is right, but Jesus said it doesn’t work like that… It’s only after you obey that you’ll understand. When you read a scripture, are you looking for more head knowledge? Are you looking for scriptures that say what you already believe? Or are you looking for answers for how to live? 

When you read about Abraham being told to sacrifice Isaac, are you glad He hasn’t asked you to do that, or do you search yourself for the things he is asking you to give up? The real power of the Gospel isn’t found in the words, but in the application and the obedience. We can say we know Christ like I thought when I read that formula in a textbook, or we can really get to know him, daily, with all of the reality and pain that entails.

My health has been deteriorating over the past couple weeks and I realized that my workload was the #1 thing I could do to fix it. There was really no way around the fact that I was doing too much stuff. The past two weeks, I have spent quite a bit of time telling people no. I have called to cancel a couple key contracts, including the one that was keeping our family financially afloat. It was good money but the stress and always-on hours inevitably occurred during my quiet time or on vacation. Carla has complained that many vacations had been ruined by it, and I struggled to delegate it. A phone call could be in multiple languages from multiple countries about anything from networking to system analysis to a crashed server, and unlike our website business, it was 100% on my shoulders. I knew it was bad when she said she would support me cutting the contract even if it meant moving into a smaller house or getting by without a personal car, but thank God for that kind of support.

I am again in a place where I need faith, again in a place where I am waiting for the Lord to break through. But instead of dreading that place, I think we should all greatly desire it. After all, when things are going well, I end up spending less time with God, and my prayers aren’t as fervent!

 

The Role of Profit in the Christian Life

“I am the Lord your God, Who teaches you to profit, Who leads you by the way you should go. Oh, that you had heeded My commandments! Then your peace would have been like a river, And your righteousness like the waves of the sea." Isaiah 48:17 & 18

This is a difficult verse for me. I have always seen profit as undesirable - anything more than you need is excess. That’s not biblical. Now I’m stuck investigating profit’s role in the Christian life.

I hated money. That’s why I wanted to go into ministry, counseling, mission work, etc. If you think about it, non-profits survive on someone else’s earned money. If you don’t understand godly business, it’s easy to judge our donors as less-than’s because they’re not in ministry. Actually, it’s sometimes the opposite. People who are faithful to God in their business face greater character challenges and hotter fires of temptation.  I thought I flunked out of the kingdom when God kept me in business. Having to deal with money and profit forces you to wrestle even harder with keeping God first. In the end, you develop even greater Christlike character.

In my study a couple things are very clear to me - one is that this you can’t make profit a hard and fast rule; as a general rule will you be poorer or richer for following Christ? It’s impossible to say - Christ raises up from dust and poverty kings and princes, and humbles the wealthy and powerful. He leads business owners to become monks and the homeless to create empires. The same God that called Jeremiah to live in the bottom of the well called Daniel to run a kingdom! When looking from our own human eyes it seems unjust but I have to trust God’s plan more than my own poor eyesight. The only thing you can say for certain is that following God will change your world.

The Bible seems to focus much more on the internals, which makes sense. Money is a proxy for so many things in life. Some people crave wealth because it brings security, others because it brings fame or respect. But God can give all of those things without you owning a penny. But on the other hand He loves giving His children good gifts.

All I can say is Come Lord Jesus. Yes - whatever your plan is for me, I say Yes Lord. In either abasing or abounding, I will praise your name.

 

 

Multiplication

 “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” -Genesis 1:28

We were made to manage and govern. What starts with control of our own lives grows to governing a family, a small group, various projects, then employees, departments, and organizations… The more faithful you are, the more God puts you in charge of. I’ve seen this happen even with stay-at-home moms; when they govern their kids wisely, other parents flock to them to hear their advice. While their domain may appear small to our eyes, the reality is a much larger impact.

The results of good governance can be seen in these verses: fruitfulness and multiplication. Whenever something is being managed well, it will multiply. While I have usually only looked at these verses from a people perspective (that we are supposed to multiply people) I actually think it goes much deeper, talking about all aspects of our lives like the rest of the passage is saying. Multiplication:

• Deals with a geometric increase, and has a compound interest-like growth curve. Addition can be seductive because you get results faster and quicker. In multiplication if you do the right thing for 20 years, you may see little to no fruit for the first 10, then the growth starts and the impact is way more than addition.
• Multiplication implies the fruitfulness of the fruit. For example, in finances getting a salary is addition; every month the amount goes up. But that money isn’t producing more money, whereas in an investment it would be. Addition to the church is where we are adding people to the pews but not training them. Full discipleship is multiplication, and each disciple in turn creates other disciples. Even though the process is painful and slow, when the compounding effect kicks in there is great fruit.
• Multiplication can work in positive and negative directions. 10 x 5 is 50, but -10 times the same number is -50. We need to be careful when we have been elevated in governance because both our strengths and weaknesses are multiplied.

We spend so much time in management setting goals and talking about what are positive results, and it drastically changes depending on what you are managing. However, in one word, God sums up all of his expectations and the results of good management: multiplication. It’s absolutely true… In the library I want people who can multiply the attendance and impact of the books, in the sewing school I want people who can multiply their teaching and products, in the IT sector I want people who can multiply my investment in them.

I am also amazed at how different from accepted reality this one word is… Most people think good management is stability; things will look just like when you left them, but we need to know God expects more and to the people under us we need to give them the freedom and expectation of multiplication.

 

Measured According to Faith

“Don’t think you are better than you really are. Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us.” -Romans 12:3

It’s not really clear whether we are measuring ourselves by the faith we are given, or measuring our actions in accordance with our faith, but because I believe God is just and we have free will, I think it’s the latter. The former, you can’t change your score - you are measured BY how much faith you have. The latter, you can change it; you are measured ACCORDING to your faith. 

After following God into crazy circumstances for so long, I have found Carla and I have a deeper level of latent faith. I know people who are hugely stressed out if they don’t have money after 6 months. Others are constantly stressed over retirement. If we are judging according to faith, then my act of obedience and faith in trusting God over thousands in a week can be equivalent of someone else’s faith of trusting Him when they don’t know where the money will come from in 6 months. Everyone has a different threshold, their limit of when they freak out into anxiety--and what they freak out over. 

I have, time and again, seen God pull through in bringing the right people, dealing with documents and licenses, resolving intense disputes, and uniting the church. Someone without the same experiences is judged at a lower level because they haven’t seen the things I have.

There is an expectation God has for us that when we see a miracle or His provision in a powerful way that we are changed. Think of Jesus in the boat and the disciples were worried about bread. Jesus’s questioning brought them back to the 2 instances where he multiplied bread then said they didn’t understand. If they had really understood the miracle, they would no longer have been worried about bread!

How about Chorazon and Besaida? “If the miracles performed in you were done in Sodom and Gammorah, they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes” (Matt 11:21). They would be judged harsher because they saw the hand of God and didn’t believe. To really understand a miracle means understanding it’s a revelation of an aspect of God, and that our faith grows in that situation.

There are a couple interesting points about faith to pull out here:

• Faith should be continuously growing. Just like in weight lifting, if you are not able to lift more this month than last, you’re doing something wrong. In the same way, if our circumstances aren’t building and growing our faith muscles, we are doing something wrong and have an opportunity to live differently.
• We need to be kind and gracious to the people who have less faith than us. Make a point to see where your friend’s faith is at and encourage and support them to take the next step.
• The measure of heaven is faith. It’s not money or power or programs or numbers, but how we make decisions based on what God says and not on what our eyes see. Sadly for those of us who like numbers, that is difficult to quantify, but we always need to keep this in mind.
• Don’t judge others too harshly, especially if they came from a more difficult background - after all, we need to look through heaven’s eyes. However, we can expect everyone following Christ to be growing in faith.

 

Personal Relection

This afternoon I’m going to be delving into why I can step out in such extreme faith in other ares of my life, but I am afraid of a lack of finances. Why am I so stressed out that my ribs would go out? 

Any stress I am experiencing goes to my back and, if it gets too bad, it throws out a rib. That’s where I am at the moment - stuck laying down because a rib went out. This is the first day I’ve been able to sit up in a while. My rib hasn’t gone out since 2006.

So getting right into it, clearly there are burdens in my own life that I should be giving to God that I am not. Last week when the financial breakthrough came, I was incredibly relieved. However, in that moment I saw the stress I was under for what it was and there was a large portion of the stress that wasn’t affected by the miracles of provision.

So what is it? My thinking that leadership is intercession; sharing in the pain of the people under you? Or my false assumption that I have to carry everyone on my back and my faith?

I have a problem. I expect that I will sacrifice, give up everything, pray, have faith etc, but I don’t expect the people around me to do the same thing. Naturally this means that I will be carrying burdens God never meant for me to carry. And it’s a fatal flaw in my discipleship… If I don’t teach people to do it all, what am I really teaching them? Christian life without sacrifice? I’ve always been shocked at how much health and wealth the American church preaches in Africa without meaning to… Have I done the same thing without meaning to?

If I preach the good and not the sacrifice and the bad, am I really creating full disciples out of the people under me? What happens when I leave? Will they be prepared? To the outside world I am a tremendous success but to me it feels like I’ am just discovering that I have dropped the ball on the most important part of God’s call on my life.

Paternalism - doing things for other people that they should be doing themselves. It’s our biggest enemy here and I thought I was doing well, only to realize its roots stretch deeper than I thought.

Ugh… I think the first step is to bring my team in on the issues we face at the moment. I need to give them the opportunities to sacrifice like I have had, in time as well as in finances. And I need to be putting them in situations where it is actually possible they fail and I don’t bail them out.

Rough Times

God can give you all you need. He will give you more than enough. You will have everything you need for yourselves. And you will have enough left over to give when there is a need. -2 Corinthians 9:8

Sunday was a rough day. I was at a really low point and finances were really bothering me. It takes $7,000 a month to keep us running and August and September only brought in $4,200. We had a couple bills we couldn’t pay and were in ‘creative accounting’ territory with some others - delaying payment so we could pay others. I was on the verge of picking up the phone and starting to call the people I knew that may be able to help in case of emergency, thinking this may be a test of my pride. I ended up choosing to contact some people God had put on my heart to encourage instead. Carla and I had a long conversation; she hasn’t been nearly as bothered this time around.

Then breakthrough started. After multiple months of no unexpected donations, we had 3 in the same day. Tuesday was breakthrough in our website work - after much discussion we had three people pay for work and a large contract for next year finalized. God came through again in incredible ways.

In college, living by faith was cool. We got to see God’s miracles around us and he provided over and over again for mission trip and other things he was laying on our heart. Then faith was me and Carla, going to Africa with less than $200 for 9 months but full of faith. That was scarier because it was our lives at risk; we knew no one and didn’t even know where we would be staying. But it was just us.

Then the kids came along. People started freaking out when they heard what kind of situations we’d be raising our children in… They only knew a small portion of it - that’s when we started down-playing some of the issues we were facing because others would worry if they actually knew the danger we were facing.

And then we started Equip Mozambique and things got even more real and more intense. Now other people and other families were depending on me. This responsibility is a great burden on me and the thought that we may not be able to pay salaries is always a huge worry. My friend pointed out to me…

“You’ve risked a lot of Jesus. You’ve sacrificed. Are you allowing others to risk and sacrifice as well?”

Anyway, today is a day of praise - that God does generously provide, and that we are taken care of. Today is also a day of reflection - why do I still feel this heavy burden when I am certain God will provide, and how can I give that to God? This seems like my never-ending struggle; as soon as I overcome it at some level, God ups the ante and I have more staff, larger projects, or more people depending on me. Maybe what I really need is a paradigm shift.