How do we see ourselves, ladies?

 

Posted on September 21, 2023

By Elizabeth Prata

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes. ~Job

To possess dignity is to be worthy of respect. Worthy of high esteem. Absorb this: you are worthy of respect. ~Beth Moore

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” ~Isaiah

Be kind to yourself. Be compassionate to yourself. Be loving to yourself. Be patient with yourself. Have the courage to be yourself. ~Christine Caine

But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” ~ Simon Peter

Who you are is more important than what you are called to do. ~Priscilla Shirer

Man was created to glorify God. (Isaiah 43:7). Our inherited sin nature makes it impossible to do that without His redemptive work in our heart. It’s important to see ourselves as we are (were). Ladies, yes, it’s good to have “self-esteem” to the extent that we know who we are: We’re sinners, saved by grace alone.

Women’s Ministries these days over-emphasize that we are women of valor, courage, of worth, esteem, and bravery. We’re princesses, running around sunlit meadows in wedding dresses dripping pearls.

Or we are as Isaiah, Job, and Peter saw themselves when they saw God: as worms in the dust, sinning with the pigs and needing to rely totally on the Father for any scrap of righteousness we might possess.

Praise the Lord He came, died for sin, was buried and resurrected. He glorified the Father and His reward will be…us. The Father will give Him a Bride, redeemed and washed. It is all about the Trinity and His work. It is not about us, our worth, our esteem, dignity, or “who we are.”

O Lord, depart from me, I am a sinful woman. Yet He lifted me from the muck and mire and gave me His righteousness, robes, Spirit, and future. From that moment, when I search inside myself to see my worth, esteem, or dignity, what I see is His.

from the-end-time.org 

The Crushing Obligation to Keep Doing More and More

 

by Kevin DeYoung

Doing More for God

I understand there are lazy people out there who need to get radical for Jesus. I understand that many people are stingy with their resources and fritter their time away on inane television shows. I understand there are lots of Christians in our churches sitting around doing nothing who need to be challenged not to waste their life. I am deeply thankful for preachers and writers who challenge us to risk everything and make our lives count. I know a lot of sleepy Christians in need of a wake-up call.

But I also know people like me, people who easily feel a sense of responsibility, people who easily feel bad for not doing more. I was the kid in grade school who was ready to answer every question the teacher asked. I signed up for things just because they were offered. I took on extra credit just to be safe. I never skipped a class in college and would have felt bad for missing any chapel service. I took the practice ACT the year before I really took the practice ACT, which was a year before I took the real ACT. For all sorts of reasons—pride, diligence, personality—opportunities have often felt like obligations to me.

And surely I’m not the only one. Surely there are many Christians who are terribly busy because they sincerely want to be obedient to God. We hear sermons that convict us for not praying more. We read books that convince us to do more for global hunger. We talk to friends who inspire us to give more and read more and witness more. The needs seem so urgent. The workers seem so few. If we don’t do something, who will? We want to be involved. We want to make a difference. We want to do what’s expected of us. But there just doesn’t seem to be the time.

Calming the Crazy Man Inside

I think most Christians hear these urgent calls to do more (or feel them internally already) and learn to live with a low-level guilt that comes from not doing enough. We know we can always pray more and give more and evangelize more, so we get used to living in a state of mild disappointment with ourselves. That’s not how the apostle Paul lived (1 Cor. 4:4), and it’s not how God wants us to live, either (Rom. 12:1–2).1 Either we are guilty of sin—like greed, selfishness, idolatry—and we need to repent, be forgiven, and change. Or something else is going on. It’s taken me several years, a lot of reflection, and a bunch of unnecessary busyness to understand that when it comes to good causes and good deeds, “do more or disobey” is not the best thing we can say.

Here are some of thoughts that have helped me get out from under the terror of total obligation.

I am not the Christ. The senior sermon for my graduating class at seminary was given by Gordon Hugenberger of Park Street Church in Boston. The sermon was based on John the Baptist’s words, “I freely confess I am not the Christ.” Hugenberger’s point to a group of soon-to-be pastors was simple: “You may be part of the bridal party, but you are not the groom. You are not the Messiah, so don’t try to be. Along with the Apostles’ Creed and the Belgic Confession and the Westminster Confession, make sure you confess John the Baptist’s creed: I am not the Christ.” I still have a copy of the sermon and listen to it whenever I can find a tape deck. Our Messianic sense of obligation would be greatly relieved if we confessed more regularly what we are not.

There is good news. I was also helped with my busyness issues in seminary by reading a little book by Tim Dearborn called Beyond Duty: A Passion for Christ, a Heart for Mission.2 Dearborn, the director of faith and development for World Vision, argues that for too long the church has motivated people to mission by news of natural catastrophes, complex humanitarian disasters, unreached people groups, and oppressed and exploited minorities. We’ve been given statistics and stories about the all-too-sad conditions of the world. The good news of Christ’s death and resurrection, Dearborn maintains, has been turned into bad news about all the problems in the world and how much more we have to do to make things right. The take-home then becomes: serve more, give more, care more, do more. Dearborn reminds us that the gospel is good news of great joy, and that God is the only hope for the world.

Care is not the same as do. At the Lausanne missions gathering in 2010, John Piper made the statement that “we should care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering.” He chose the word “care” quite carefully. He didn’t want to say we should do something about all suffering, because we can’t do something about everything. But we can care. This means when we hear about grinding poverty or legal abortion or biblical illiteracy, we are not indifferent. We think and feel that these things ought not to be so. We won’t all care about every issue in the same way, but there are some issues we should all care about, some issues that should at least prick our hearts and prompt us to pray. Not giving a rip about sex slaves is not an option for the Christian. Not doing something directly to combat this particular evil *is an option.
We all have a cross to carry. But it’s a cross that kills our sins, smashes our idols, and teaches us the folly of self-reliance.


We have different gifts and different callings. Every Christian must be prepared to give an answer for the reason for the hope that we have (1 Pet. 3:15), but not everyone will do beach evangelism. Every Christian should be involved in the Great Commission, but not everyone will move overseas. Every Christian should oppose abortion, but not everyone will adopt or volunteer at a crisis pregnancy center. We need Christians who spend their lives improving inner-city schools and Christians whose dream is to get great theological books translated into Polish. And we need Christians who don’t make others feel guilty (and don’t feel guilty themselves) when one of us follows a different passion than another. I read and write a lot. That’s what I do well. But that doesn’t mean anyone should feel guilty for not reading and writing as much as I do. You have your own gifts and calling. We have to be okay with other Christians doing certain good things better and more often than we do.

Remember the church. The only work that absolutely must be done in the world is Christ’s work. And Christ’s work is accomplished through Christ’s body. The church—gathered in worship on Sunday and scattered through its members throughout the week—is able to do exponentially more than any of us alone. I can respond to Christ’s call in one or two ways, but I am a part of an organism and organization that can respond and serve in a million ways.

I can always pray right now. Prayer can feel like the biggest burden of all. We can always pray more, and we can’t possibly pray for every need in the world. Even if we are extremely organized and disciplined, we won’t be able to consistently pray for more than a handful of people and problems. But that doesn’t mean our prayers are limited to the items we can write on a 3 × 5 card. If your aunt’s cousin has upcoming heart surgery, pray immediately after you hear about it. When a missionary shares her requests, pray right on the spot for them. Don’t let the moment pass you by. Pray a short prayer. Trust God for the results and, in many cases, move on.

Jesus didn’t do it all. Jesus didn’t meet every need. He left people waiting in line to be healed. He left one town to preach to another. He hid away to pray. He got tired. He never interacted with the vast majority of people on the planet. He spent thirty years in training and only three years in ministry. He did not try to do it all. And yet, he did everything God asked him to do.

Take Time to Be Holy

I pray that nothing in this encourages you to embrace cheap grace or easy believism. We all have a cross to carry. But it’s a cross that kills our sins, smashes our idols, and teaches us the folly of self-reliance. It’s a cross that says I’ll do anything to follow Jesus, not a cross that says I have to do everything for Jesus.

No doubt some Christians need to be shaken out of their lethargy and to get busy for the kingdom. But many Christians are too busy already. I can take “redeem the time” (see Eph. 5:16, KJV) as a summons to better time management when in reality it’s a call to be holy more than a call to possess the seven habits of highly effective people. I can turn every “is” into an “ought.” I can overlook the role that necessity and proximity play in establishing divine obligations.3 I can forget that my circle of influence will inevitably be smaller than my circle of concern.

Above all, I can lose sight of the good news that the universe is not upheld by the word of my power (see Heb. 1:3). That’s Christ’s work, and no one else can do it. Hallelujah—he doesn’t even expect me to try.


Notes:
See my chapter “The Pleasure of God and the Possibility of Godliness,” in The Hole in Our Holiness (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012).
Tim Dearborn, Beyond Duty: A Passion for Christ, a Heart for Mission (Federal Way, WA: World Vision, 1997).
Cf. Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, What Is the Mission of the Church: Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 183–186, 225. See also my article “Stewardship, Obligation, and the Poor,” at http://www.9marks.org /journal/obligation-stewardship-and-poor.

This content was originally published on Crossway

Packed and Ready?

Billy Graham, Sept 1969

Sharing the Faith

by Jan Harris


As the season of Easter comes to an end, and the day of Pentecost (May 15) is celebrated, and as the education wing of the church I attend nears completion, I ponder the subject of sharing the faith with others.

What is my responsibility? Am I called, as some may be, to stand on a street corner, proclaiming, "Jesus is Lord." Or, am I called, as some may be, to accost strangers in the street, and ask them the most personal of questions: "Have you asked the Lord Jesus into your heart"?

What resonates with me, when it comes to sharing the faith, is the word of Jesus when he said, "By this will all know that you are my disciples: by your love for one another." Now, that's easy to say, but it's no easy evangelism method. Loving each other is no easy task. There's no way to "fake it." Either we love -- or we don't. And mostly we don't. So, how do we do evangelism if we don't love one another? Not easily, friends. Not easily.

I've been reading Alan Jones' Soul Making, and a line in it struck me as the reason I have so much difficulty with many modern methods of evangelism. He says, 'The way of believing I want to avoid often adopts a bullying attitude with regard to those who don't see things in the same way."1 Until I read that line recently, it had never occurred to me what my real objection was to so much of what is done in the name of the Lord.

I lived in York, England, during the late 70's, and I was a member, and also worked at, a large charismatic Anglican church in the heart of that ancient city. The church had grown from eight people to over a thousand in a few years, because those eight, the rector, and his wife believed in prayer, and he had a gift for evangelism. When he spoke, people turned to God.

Every summer, the 100,000-population York was inundated with two-and-a-half million tourists. Among those tourists was a small contingent of very sincere, but very naive, young evangelists, whose task it was to confront the residents of York on the street and ask them if they had invited Jesus into their hearts. To the average York citizen, these Christian tourists might as well have been asking them in Swahili if they had signed up yet to go to the moon. After the week-long "blitzkreig" of these fervent young people, my church would do "recovery" work with people who had been confronted (and often offended) by this odd method -- for the UK -- of sharing the faith.

But, how to share the faith? How did Jesus do it? Did he bully people into thinking as he did about God? Should we?

My dad, who was a strong advocate of independent thinking and who believed, "If two people always agree, one of them is not thinking," taught us, his children, to express our opinions, to state our disagreements with each other, but to realize, no matter how well we did it, that we could not persuade or argue people into agreeing with us. "Remember," he would say in a sing-song voice:
A person persuaded against his will,
Is of the same opinion still.

That first Pentecost in the Christian era was a very interesting day. A crowd of people gathered obediently to celebrate the Jewish holy day. And something incredible happened. The Holy Spirit came among the crowd, and the people, many of whom were from other lands, and who speak other languages, heard the good news of the kingdom of God in their own native tongue. As a result, the Scripture tells us, many were added to the church that day.

What made the difference for those people? Since they had gathered to celebrate a holy day ordained by the God of Israel for the Jews, one can safely assume they were open to God. What those God-seekers experienced was an incredibly loving act by an incredibly loving God as he revealed the purpose of life to them.

So, I wonder -- is there a clue here for us in the events of Pentecost? Something for us to emulate? Do we "share the faith" with everyone we come in contact with -- or just with those who come seeking God? Do we always use a script, a formula, or do we use various methods? How should our love for one another affect our evangelism?

Jesus said, "I was hungry, and you fed me; I was thirsty, and you gave me water -- as you did this to the least of my brethren, you did it to me." We all know how far we fall short of these words of Jesus -- for most of us, we find it difficult enough to be kind to members of our own family and the people we approve of, without being confronted by strangers in need of kindness.

The church in York used many ways of attracting people throughout the city. Drama groups performed mini-plays in the many public places during the lunch hour: scruffily dressed youth workers sat on street benches, in parks, and in pubs, and struck up conversations with lonely people; various groups freely shopped, gardened, cleaned for, and drank tea with "shut-in's" and other city residents who didn’t even claim to be church members; every Sunday, several groups in the church provided and served a free pot-luck lunch in a nearby hall to which visitors to the church and to the city were invited; a small shop, owned and run by church members, within walking distance of the church, served light, home-cooked meals, and sold cottage crafts six days a week, offering companionship to anyone who dropped in; forty-plus small groups met all over the city on a weekly basis, inviting their neighbors to attend, and regularly helping those same neighbors (church members or not) with such things as child-care, shopping, and gardening chores.

Here is a thought from Alan Jones about sharing the faith:

Even though I am not much of a lover, I know that I am loved. This is a statement of faith the effects of which spill over, from time to time, into my experience. One of the side-effects of knowing that one is loved is the desire to tell others -- and to tell them in such a way that they are included in, not excluded from, the circle of love. 2

As my church completes its education building (sometime in the autumn), we will all be thinking seriously about how to share the faith that is such an important part of our lives. How best do we share the great gift we have been given? Because we know we are loved -- even though we may not yet be very good at loving -- we have a desire to share what we have received. How do we do it without bullying, without hurting, people? How do we share it so that it is a gentle gift? It seems that we must demonstrate it before we speak of it. Somehow we must show our love -- for God, for one another, and for all whom we desire be included in the loving circle that embraces us.

Sharing the faith with others bears thinking about, praying about, and doing something about -- not because we have to do something, but for love's sake. Because we have received so great a gift, because we are loved, and we know it, we are compelled to share what we have received, freely, without conditions. "Love one another, as I have loved you."