For Whose Sake Does the Christian Teacher Minister?

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Part I of our series on Preparation

The church which I pastor takes time each year to prepare for and be sensitive to God’s leading in listening for the ways in which he is calling us to grow individually over the following year.

In this Preparation series, I’d like to do the same with you, dear reader, as we look forward to the next year of blogging and growing together, should the Lord tarry.

Today, I want to talk about discipleship.

The comprehensive discipleship of individual Christians is one of the most important responsibilities of the church, and yet it is an area that is chronically overlooked. We Christians and churches don’t spend anywhere near enough time in this area. We don’t have a plan.

And, in some cases, we don’t even believe that it’s possible for Christians to grow to full maturity in Christ.

Unfortunately, most of the church’s focus ends up being on making the church grow in terms of the number of Christians who come to church.  What we lack in maturity we hope to make up in numbers!

According to the Bible, the focus in not on numerical growth, but on each Christian growing to full maturity in Christ.  So, we’re going to spend some time during this series looking at some of the Scriptures that emphasize and underscore the need for all Christians to be a part of a comprehensive system of discipleship that helps them grow to fullness in Christ.

To begin, we look at Ephesians 4:11-13:

11 So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, 12 to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

You can see in verse 11 that the Scripture defines our roles as pastors , teachers and missionaries as supporting and serving the body of Christ. In a secular classroom the teacher would be up above everyone and the students would be trying to win the teacher’s favor.

But Christian teachers are servants.  We teach (and blog) to support others and help them grow.

As we’ve seen for many popular pastors out there, that has become synonymous with helping people achieve their dreams or obtain those things they think they need to get by.  But that is not so.  The Christian teacher serves for Christ’s sake, not the student’s (see 2 Corinthians 4:5).

Neither do we serve for the sake of the church. We often misunderstand that phrase “build up the body” in Ephesians 4:12 to mean “make the church as large as possible.” But we can see in verse 13 that the building up of the body is primarily about maturity, not size.  And it is a ministry to all Christians which means the Christian pastor should have a vision and plan for each individual Christian which Christ has given them to grow them to full maturity in Christ.

With this in mind we’ll turn our attention in our next post to the first of three ways in which discipleship is often done today described here only as “hot mess.”  You won’t want to miss it.

What do you think?  Is maturity in Christ possible?  Whose responsibility is it to guide Christians towards that?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Why Are Some Healed And Others Not?

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Part III of our series on Healing and Comforting

In our last post, we discussed how the primary category for healing is not miracle, but sign.  Healing points toward something.  Namely, hospitality set right.  We were designed to host Christ in our hearts and lives, but instead we host illness and sin.  Healing, then, is about the progressive reversal of that reality.

When hearing that, our mind jumps to the question:

Why isn’t everybody healed physically?

If illness mars the image of God in us, and if God desires us to bear his image, then why do some illnesses remain?

Some are quick to claim a “lack of faith.” And clearly the Bible talks about that. You can see that in Mark 6:1-6 where, because of the unbelief of many, Jesus was unable to perform a “mighty work” though he did still heal some.  And you can see the effect of the presence of faith on healing, like in Mark 9:20-23, where Jesus heals a demon-possessed boy and proclaims that, “everything is possible for him who believes.”

But, just as discipleship involves submitting our whole selves to Jesus (and not just that which is “spiritual), so, too, does healing.  It’s not just about submitting our illnesses to Jesus.  What he starts in one part of us – whether body or spirit – he intends to bring to completion through our whole existence.

Healing is about submitting our whole lives to his care. It is about hospitality, remember?  It’s not about miracles.

But the Bible also portrays Jesus as not healing when he could. Check out Mark 1:32-39.  Here, after a full day of healing and ministry, Jesus leaves one town (where “everyone” was looking for him) and goes to another.  You can picture the line of patients Jesus has waiting for him there!  But Jesus leaves.   He is not trying to heal everyone in town but rather to raise up a witness for himself in every town.

Surely today, after two thousand years of the Christian faith growing and penetrating the world’s cultures, he has enough ambassadors that he could heal everyone if he wanted to – or at least everyone who had faith – right?

The apostle Paul shows that even Jesus’ lack of healing is still about human beings bearing his image:

“So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.  Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.  For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:7-10, emphasis mine)

The Bible never says what Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was. It may not have even been a bodily illness—we just don’t know. But the principle Paul lays out here applies to bodily illness, too: We humans have an amazing ability to take blessings of God—like health—and use them as means of sinful self-sufficiency and ignoring God.

So sometimes we bear the image of God by bearing illness, either for a time or permanently, so that we can show the world – and ourselves – that his grace is sufficient, his strength made perfect able to keep us from falling. 
 
Paul calls this “sharing in the fellowship of his sufferings” in Philippians 3:10-11:

“…that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”  (emphasis mine)

Healing will come, in this life or the next.  

But we have to realize that healing is not the only way we are able to bear the image of God to the world.  Our illness and death can do that as well.

In God’s Kingdom, healing, illness, and death are a lot more closely connected than we think. The healer heals at great personal cost and risk in each of the three dimensions: physical (body), social (soul), and religious (spirit).

It is not coincidental that in the parable Jesus tells of the Good Samaritan and the wounded man, the Good Samaritan says (and this is made emphatic in the Greek), “I, not the man, will pay.”

Biblically, the healer always suffers the most.

As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Christ bears the illness and sin in himself. Society, religion, and the power of sickness and death were arrayed against Jesus—all sought to cast him out; none would host him.

So hear the proclamation of Isaiah 53:5: Christ freed us from our involuntary hosting of sin and illness and death…by hosting these enemies of humanity in himself, on the Cross:

But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.

How will you participate in this Work of Mercy differently, now?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Healing Points Toward Something

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Part II of our series on Healing and Comforting

We kicked off this series by noting how deep the connection between salvation and hospitality is, ending with the question: How do salvation and hospitality relate to healing and comforting?

The answer is found in the beginning. Or a few chapters after it, to be more precise.

Sin entered the world through Adam. Or, put differently, Adam hosted sin. And as a result of that hospitality—which we call “original sin”—all human beings throughout all of history have hosted things we were never designed or intended to host.

There’s a word—and a cost—for hosting what one is never designed to host: disease.

Disease, sickness, illness: we don’t typically think of these as hospitality problems.  That’s why it’s hard for us to understand Jesus expelling them, often with explicit reference to demons. But we need to come to grips with this important biblical truth: Humans host illness and death involuntarily. It’s not a natural process. It’s a forced occupation that gradually incapacitates us physically, socially, and spiritually.

And ultimately it’s fatal: we all die. As playwright Noel Coward puts it, we live on a “death-sentenced planet.” So remember these two principles about illness and death, because you’ll see them in Scripture in every story about illness:

  • First, illness and death are forms of involuntary hosting due to original sin. They’re not natural parts of what it means to be human.
  • Second, illness and death are involuntarily hosted in every part of the human frame. Illness is physical (i.e., it infects the body), social (i.e., it infects the soul) and spiritual (i.e., it infects the spirit).

But here is the Good News: Christ’s death and resurrection signal the eviction of sin and death!

Christ is the true host and the true guest of every human being. Human beings are created in order to be hosted by him on earth and in heaven–and we are created to host him, too: in our spirits, which will manifest his presence in our souls and in our bodies.

We bear his image to the world: that’s our purpose in creation.

So for Christians, the basic category of healing is not miracle. It’s sign.

Healing points toward something: hospitality set right.  Human beings hosting God, bearing his image—all made possible because Christ first hosted us. If you miss that each healing is a signal of Christ’s eviction of sin and death, you end up with the idea that each healing is an end in itself–a miracle, a kindness that Christ grants against the backdrop of a cruel, evil world. But Christ isn’t about granting kindnesses. He’s about making all things new.

So with these thoughts in mind, let’s return to the story we started with in John 9:1-7. It begins with the disciples asking Jesus a question: Is this man blind because of his own sin or that of his parents?

It’s a fair question, because as we’ve talked about so far, illness is joined at the hip to sin. And certainly some illnesses are caused directly by our own sins, whether those be smoking or drinking or overeating.

But interestingly, absent from the Bible is a division of illness into ones we’re directly responsible for through our own sin and ones that we host as a result of Adam’s original sin. And this is consistent with how God views sin, too: Humans go to hell for sin—separation from God–whether it’s original sin from Adam or our own name brand sin that we pile on top of what we’ve inherited. So differentiating between the two is pointless, whether we’re talking about being healed of sin or illness.

Further, as Jesus makes clear, illness is not intended to point toward sin and death but rather to the power and presence of God, to which it must ultimately yield.

In the case of the man born blind, Jesus says, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

And think of Jesus’ similar words in John 11:1-4 when he heard that his friend Lazarus was ill:

“Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent to him, saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.”

But when Jesus heard it he said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

Illness is always the platform for the revealing of the glory of God, the restoration of God’s image in every part of the human being—spirit, soul, and body.

That’s what the Work of Mercy of healing is all about.  I know what you’re wondering: if that’s true, then why are some healed and others not?

Tune into our next post and find out!

How might thinking of healing as a sign, rather than a miracle, change the way we pray for those who are sick (including ourselves)?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments