Daniel Darling's Blog, page 40

A modest, post-election goal for everyone

We just finished perhaps the most divisive election in modern history. The good news is that the election is over and we are experiencing what few countries experience: a peaceful transfer of power. It was good to see the President and President-elect meet and discuss the transition. But there is still much division in the country that still remains. I can commend a few pieces to you on this. First one by my boss Russell Moore and another by a favorite pastor of mine, Erwin Lutzer. You might also read this great piece at Desiring God and this analysis of the election by Kirsten Powers. I also loved this beautiful gospel testimony by Ernie Johnson.

We are a divided nation and, even if they give it their best, our political leaders and parties and movements cannot bring the kind of unity we need. Only neighbor-love, expressed by the people of God, can help show a better way. Regardless of what happens in Washington, you and me can embody this in our communities one relationship at a time.

So here is a modest goal for myself and, I hope, a goal for you: intentionally endeavor to meet and befriend someone who is different than you, who probably voted the other way. So if you are a proud Trump voter, go meet a minority who might be fearful about the election outcome. If you were a Hillary Clinton voter, go meet and befriend someone with a red hat on. If you were #nevertrump or #neverhillary, perhaps you might need to make two friendships.

And when you meet with someone who voted differently, sit and listen. Try to empathize with the concerns. Resist the urge to combat those arguments. Hold off on the data and the news stories and the talking points. Avoid fighting the last battle.

I’ve been deeply convicted in my own heart about my unwillingness, at times, to listen to those who disagree with me. Listening and emphasizing doesn’t mean we have to compromise what we believe, but it might soften the edges of our arguments a little. It might give us a window into people’s pain. And it may go a long way toward stitching back together the torn fabric of our communities.

After all, we who profess faith in Christ have a God who came down and lived among us in Jesus. A God who is near. We are called on mission to live in and among the people of this world, image-bearers of their Creator. We don’t do this by talking down to people different than us, but by building relationships and loving them with the love of Christ.

So will you do this? Will you, in the coming months, meet and befriend someone who thinks differently than you do?

The Way Home featuring Jon Ward

What is it like to cover a presidential election? What is it like to work in journalism as an evangelical? Why should Christians care about good reporting and storytelling? Jon Ward joins the podcast to talk faith, politics, and his journey into journalism.

Jon Ward is one of the most respected journalists in Washington D.C. Jon is a journalist for Yahoo News. He previously worked for Huffington Post and Washington Times.

Show Notes

Twitter: @jonward11
Website: yahoo.com/author/jon-ward

Five Great Reads on Theo Epstein

If you haven’t heard, the Cubs just won the World Series. No really, they did. The pathway from a team mired in mediocrity to a first-class operation began with the brilliant hire, by new owner Tom Ricketts, of Theo Epstein as president of baseball operations. When Ricketts made this move in 2011, I knew the Cubs were finally serious about building a wining club. I’ve been indulging, lately, in profiles of Theo. Here are a few of my favorites:

The Curious Have Won – a terrific Ringer piece by Rany Jazayerli on the vindication of the gradual move in baseball toward a data-driven approach.
Theo’s Curse Breakers – the Five-Thirty-Eight Treatment. Really the combination of Five-Thirty-Eight and Theo Epstein is like the nerd/analytics/data perfect storm
Theo Epstein is the Man Behind the Cub Season – the Wright Thompson treatment. I love reading Wright Thompson and here he really gets inside Theo’s world. A terrific long read.
How Theo Epstein Broke Another Curse and Built the World Series Champion Chicago Cubs – Jeff Passan. I love Jeff’s MLB coverage. This describes in detail Theo’s method in Boston and Chicago.
Theo Epstein for President – from the Boston Globe. And who can argue? If he can fix the Red Sox and Cubs, could he not fix Obamacare and the national debt? I’m only partially joking here.

photo credit: CHARLES REX ARBOGAST/AP

The Way Home featuring Jason Romano

What is it like to work, behind the scenes, at ESPN? Jason Romano shares about his love of sports and his Christian faith on today’s Way Home Podcast. Jason is a social media strategist at ESPN, specifically working with the Mike and Mike morning radio show.

Show Notes

Twitter: @JasonRomano
Website: jasonromano22.com

The Way Home featuring Christian George

What shaped Charles Spurgeon’s early ministry? Christian George joins me to talk about a recently discovered trove of Spurgon sermons. George, curator of the Spurgeon Library at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is the world’s foremost Charles Spurgeon scholar. On this episode we discuss Spurgeon’s preaching style, his prolific output, and what he would say to young pastors today.

Show Notes

Twitter: @_ChristanGeorge
Website: center.spurgeon.org

The Way Home featuring Eric Geiger

What does spiritual leadership look like? We ask Eric Geiger, the vice-president of church resources at LifeWay Christian Resources. He is also the senior pastor of Clearview Baptist Church in the Nashville area. Eric is the author of a brand new book, Designed to Lead: The Church and Leadership Development[image error] coauthored with Kevin Peck, from Austin Stone Church. Eric and me discuss the difference between leadership and shepherding, why the church should be the locus for leadership, and what is on his reading list.  

Show Notes

Twitter: @EricGeiger
Website: ericgeiger.com
Book: Designed to Lead: The Church and Leadership Development [image error]

How Pastors Can Help Their People Find Their Calling

I remember sitting in church hearing sermon after sermon on the importance of giving it all up to serve God. These were great convicting sermons God used to melt my heart toward him. But I never knew exactly what God’s will looked like, specifically.

Did it mean leaving it all behind to go to the mission field? Did it mean surrounding to so-called full-time ministry? Could non-professional ministry types possibly be doing God’s will in the “secular” culture?

It wasn’t until much later, after studying Scripture and reading some helpful books such as Just Do Something by Kevin DeYoung and Work Matters by Tom Nelson that I grasped a full-orbed theology of vocation. The truth is that calling is not restricted to those receiving a paycheck from a Christian organization. And as a pastor, I’ve seen the vital importance of teaching this to our people, most of whom will enter the workplace on Monday feeling as if they are somehow on the Christian junior varsity, doing work that has less eternal impact as the saints who work in religious contexts.

As leaders, we need to help Christians recapture the doctrine of vocation. We do this in two ways, I believe. First, we should infuse our preaching and teaching and counseling with the important truth that Christian ministry is but one place where God empowers people to serve him. We should resist the one-sided teaching that guilts hard-working lay people into thinking that their Monday-thru-Friday gigs are good only for the ten percent tithe, evangelism, and supporting their families. We should affirm their workplaces as areas where God is present and their hard work as a gift to the Creator. A plumber may be just as radical in his devotion as the missionary who digs wells in Africa. A stay-at-home mom may be as sacrificial as the translator in Equatorial Guinea. An airline pilot may be as much God’s man as the Senior Pastor.

I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had throughout the years with lay people who, after attending church for many years, felt their jobs were just “necessary evils” a means to a more eternal end. Hundreds of times I’ve heard them say to me, “Dan, you are so lucky you get to work for God every day of the week.” My response is always, “You are working for God every day of the week, too.”

The second way we affirm this doctrine of vocation is to help others identify their unique life purpose. Ephesians 2:10 reminds us that each person was placed on this planet to do works ordained by God before the world began. The gospel doesn’t call us away from our gifts and talents—it restores to us the purpose for which we were gifted in the first place. When I discuss this with fellow believers, I typically use this grid: pleasure, gifting, need, and circumstance.

We tend to make the discovery of God’s will harder than it is, as if finding out our purpose is some nebulous, hard-to-grasp, ethereal thing. But it’s not. God speaks to us through prayer and through the Scriptures, but he also desires that we steward well the gifts and opportunities we’ve been given. To help people find their calling, I like to ask them a few leading questions: What kind of work gives you pleasure? What job would you do if you could choose any job in the world? What do people say you are good at?

Everyone has a package of gifts and a talents that makes them unique. Sometimes people don’t even recognize what they are good at until someone pats them on the back and says, “Hey, you are really gifted at this. Have you thought about pursuing it?”

When you combine pleasure and gifting, I think it leads people to the next step: how can your gifts and your desires best serve human need in the world? This is moth a market question (what careers best suit your unique talents) and a surrender question (how can I give away my life to serve others). Sometimes this leads to a career earning a paycheck from a Christian organization. Sometimes it leads to a career earning a paycheck from a business or corporation.

Lastly, I think we need to help people funnel all of these criteria into the circumstances. These involve leading questions like, How can I do what I love and still feed my family? Are there seasons of life where I do what I don’t love so much and built toward my ultimate calling? I don’t think we should lead people to make wreckless choices to pursue a calling. Providing for a family is a holy calling in and of itself. Jon Acuff has written on this pretty well with his book, Quitter.

Every Christian leader will help equip his people differently, but it’s important that we affirm the unique callings of those people God has called us to serve, both in our public proclamations and in our private discipleship.

This originally appeared at the Catalyst Space blog.

Shepherding the Flock: A Conversation About Pastoral Ministry and Cultural Engagement

At the 2016 ERLC National Conference: Onward, I sat down with David Prince, Robby Gallaty, Jimmy Scroggins, and Bryan Loritts to discuss pastoral ministry and cultural engagement. 

I asked Bryan Loritts, “Do you feel that many churches, by being afraid of speaking on cultural issues, have seeded authority in many ways to other voices in the culture?”

He responded saying, “Absolutely. I think many of our preachers and pastors lack prophetic courage, and I think that if the gospel we preach does not have what my grandma called “shoe leather” and it is not portable, and we can’t take the timeless truths of what happened in Jerusalem and connect it to a Baton Rouge, Dallas, or whatever our context may be, then we are going to look at people who are going to be discipled more by CNN and Fox News than by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Watch the rest of the panel discussion below:

The Way Home featuring Jason K. Allen

Dr. Jason K. Allen serves as the fifth president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Kansas City, Mo. He is the author of the new book Discerning Your Call to Ministry: How to Know For Sure and What to Do About It[image error]. 

Show Notes

Twitter: @jasonkeithallen
Website: jasonkallen.com
Book:  Discerning Your Call to Ministry: How to Know For Sure and What to Do About It [image error]

Teach Us to Pray: Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

This is part of an occasional series of posts on the Lord’s Prayer. You can read the previous entries in this series , , here, here, here, and here.

Today’s post looks at the phrase “Give us this day our daily bread” from the Lord’s Prayer. This is the first in a series of three so-called “earthy” requests, in contrast to the first three “heavenly” requests.

“Give us this day”, we are to pray, “our daily bread.” What does it mean to pray this prayer? Even in what seems like a rather simple request like “Give us this day our daily bread,” we find six important qualities God wants to grow in us through prayer:

1)   Worship

The first thing we learn from this simple line of request is the nature of worship. You notice that before we get to our concerns, we have prayed through God’s concerns. This is an important life principle, when it comes to prayer and when it comes to our spiritual lives. This prayer begins first with God’s concerns—that His name be glorified, that His will be done, and that His kingdom come.

God cares deeply about our most basic needs. He knows the hairs on our heads. In fact, God is more in tune with our needs than we are. Jesus in Matthew 6:32 says that “Your Father knows you need these things.”Jesus was speaking to people for whom daily bread was sustenance.

Yet God tells them that they must put the Kingdom first. Today, it might look a little different. It might mean we’re praying for a job, or a car, or a house or a baby or some extra cash to pay the bills. It might mean praying for health, for our insurance to cover an expensive operation, for us to find a deal on a new water heater.

These things sound so pedestrian, so un-kingdom like and yet we know from this that meeting our basic, specific needs is exactly what God delights in doing.

But we pray for this things with a kingdom filter. We first align our hearts to God’s so that His purposes are our purposes. It involves putting God’s concerns above ours in such a way that we trust Him to provide for us. This really shapes the way we pray. It filters out the frivolous. It adds more weight to our needs.

2)    Stewardship

The second trait we learn from this simple request for bread is “stewardship,” which is bound up in the idea of gratitude and ownership. You notice the words, “Give us” – this acknowledges a simple fact: that it is not us who generates our daily bread, our sustenance. It is God.

This idea says that everything we have belongs to Him and we are simply stewards. Everything good we have comes from his hand. We typically think of our possessions, our basic needs, in terms of ownership. This is my house, my car, my bread, my stuff. But God says our possessions are not ours. He gives and he takes away and he is the sustainer of all of life.

If there is a sin that most tempts American Christians it is the sin of ingratitude. We are so blessed, so prosperous. Most of us don’t ever wonder where our next meal is coming from and yet rarely do we acknowledge God. In many ways, when we bow our heads to pray for our meals, we are not simply praying for the food to nourish our bodies, but we are, first, thanking God for putting food on our table in the first place. We are acknowledging that we are not the original source of our provision. 

3)   Dependence

The third thing this prayer forces us to do is to live in daily dependence on God for our physical needs. We are to pray “give us this day our ‘daily’ bread.” It means something like, “give us what we need for tomorrow.”

Wondering if we will have enough food or shelter or necessities for our daily existence is not something many of us have experienced. Most of us have never been in a position where we literally do not know where our food will come from today or tomorrow.

But even though we don’t understand this, we are still called to live daily. There is a certain importance to living in dependence upon Gods, of praying, “God give me today what I need for this day.”

God wants us to bring our everyday, seemingly trivial concerns to him. I have to admit that I struggle to live this way. Maybe it’s a feature of being young, but my default position is to try to get myself through the day, with my ingenuity and planning and grit. This might explain why I often stress or get frustrated.

What if we said to God, “God I’m going to depend on you?” What if we took our deepest needs to the Lord and trusted him to provide, every day? This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t engage in long-term planning and intentional living, but we should hold our plans loosely. We should recognize that we need special grace and provision for today, then new provision for tomorrow.

4) Contentment

This passage calls us to be satisfied with exactly what we need. There is a sense, too, in this verse that we are to pray for exactly what we need. Bread was and is today a basic staple, enough to sustain us.

This speaks of contentment. That we are satisfied with God provides. That what we have from the good Giver is exactly what we need.

Sometimes God gives more than bread. Sometimes less. If you’re wealthy, praise the Lord. If you struggle from week to week, praise the Lord. That was Paul’s attitude. He knew what it was to have the luxuries of life and he knew what it was to live sparsely. And Paul’s attitude was, “I have learned to be content.” And do you know what helps us learn this way? Praying the prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Our prayer should be a prayer of contentment. “Lord give me just what I need. Nothing more, nothing less.” And sometimes God chooses to shower us with more than we need—if you’re a middle-class American you enjoy much more than what God promises—so we should enjoy it as God’s rich and good gifts. Don’t feel badly about it, but don’t let it drive you to materialism.

5) Generosity

Fifth, praying this prayer should drive us to generosity. You can’t help but notice that this is a “plural” prayer. Give “us” this day our daily bread. We should pray not simply for our own needs, but for the needs of others. Millions around the world die every day from a lack of good water and proper nutrition. This tells me that we should care about poverty.

And not just care, but we should share. Imagine praying this prayer, “Give us our daily bread” and yet you and me have enough daily bread to last for many years and our fellow brothers and sisters have nothing? Can we pray this prayer with integrity if we are doing nothing for the poor?

Too many of us accumulate lots of bread and pray to God, “Give me my daily bread.” And I think prosperous Christians will be judged more harshly by God in the end for how wealthy we are and how indifferent we are to the needs of the poor around the world. I’m amazed at how many references the Scriptures make to the poor. Do we care when others have nothing to eat? We should.

It’s praying this, “Dear God, we are a needy people. Care for us, provide for us this day with exactly what we need to get by today. Give us no more or no less than we need.”

6) Spiritual Hunger

We cannot conclude looking at this phrase of The Lord’s Prayer without seeing how it points us back to the One instructing us to pray. Jesus is our spiritual bread. Bread in those days was the main sustenance of life. When you said, “give us our daily bread” you are saying, “give us the food we need to eat.”

Christ is our spiritual sustenance. He is our bread of life (John 6:35). Just as the Father gave manna each day, fresh provision, for the physical hunger, so Jesus is the manna we need every day to feed our starving souls. That deep-lasting, longing hunger can only be filled by Jesus, the bread of life. Too often we have full stomachs, but empty souls, physically nourished, but spiritually starved.

photo credit: I am Tester