Leadership Burnout

April 27, 2009 By in Brokenness, Burnout, Grace, Healing, Pastors, Woundedness 9 Comments

Many leaders – including church leaders – suffer from burnout due to emotional and spiritual wounds which they mistakenly rationalize as Godly brokenness. But it’s not; it’s just profound hurt.

In their despair, they often become soothed by God’s love in their woundedness and want to stay there. The problem with unresolved wounds, however, is that they ultimately debilitate us, but Godly brokenness can bring new life – and sometimes literally a new life – if we let it.

That’s because true brokenness goes beyond hurt and changes the core of who we are – and if we’re willing to meet God there, He’s able use our burnout for our ultimate good.

Continue reading →

Rick Warren Disavows Support for Prop. 8

April 24, 2009 By in Faith, Gay Marriage, Grace, Homosexuality, Truth 2 Comments

This article (see full text here) confirms my worse fears about Rick Warren, who has shown a troubling tendency to fall into the false trap of thinking that “compromise” is “compassion”. Worse still, he then publicly lied about prior comments he made on the issue of “gay marriage”.

The great thing about America is we have the right to be wrong. But that doesn’t mean we must have state-sanctioned sin. I minister a lot to people dealing with homosexuality, and showing grace to those in bondage to homosexuality does not mean compromising the truth. Grace and truth are not either/or, but yes/and. Grace without truth is sloppy agape that leaves us in bondage, while truth without grace is death. But when we reach out with both, there is life.

This is Exhibit A on what happens when our “leaders” fear man more than God. God help us all if we allow ourselves to be reduced to this type of of “leadership” in the Church today.

Continue reading →

Woundedness

April 21, 2009 By in Christian, Counseling, Faith, Grace, Healing, Joy, Truth, Woundedness 12 Comments

On Sunday I taught men in the jail, using Psalms 116:5-7 (ESV), about moving from woundedness to life. I challenged them not to settle for mere comfort when confronting hurt, but to embrace life instead.

Gracious is the LORD, and righteous;
   our God is merciful.
The LORD preserves the simple;
   when I was brought low, he saved me.
Return, O my soul, to your rest;
   for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you.

When hurt and wounded, too often all we can muster is a desire for God’s comfort or soothing presence. Although he’ll sometimes do that, what he really wants is to move us past woundedness into brokenness – that low place where we are willing to surrender to him. Only then can we hope to experience the bountiful life, both in us and around us, that comes from finding and finally doing God’s joyous will.

Continue reading →

Conversion

April 11, 2009 By in Christian, Conversion, Forgiveness, Repentance, Tears 7 Comments

It’s interesting how God sometimes returns us to our spiritual roots, even while we are pressing forward in the faith.

Forty-three years ago on Resurrection Sunday, 1966, I became a Christian at eight years of age in response to a sermon preached by George Batson.

George was then a young Assemblies of God pastor starting his first church in Annapolis, Maryland, and my parents were among the first members of his young congregation.
Continue reading →

Sufficient Grace

March 30, 2009 By in Brokenness, Fatigue, Grace, Healing, Peace, Prayer, Scleroderma 22 Comments
Sufficient Grace

When did Christians start believing that God wants us to always be healthy, wealthy and free of adversity?

If asked directly, most believers would deny that’s what they think. But our actions say otherwise.

A Devastating Diagnosis

I started noticing this when I contracted a rare, degenerative autoimmune disease called systemic sclerosis (aka scleroderma) in 2004. It took years to finally link my symptoms to a specific diagnosis, but when it came, it was devastating.

Although it initially hit me hard, it seemed to hit others even harder.

As family and friends learned of my condition, they often reacted with shock. Some simply deserted me – usually because they couldn’t deal with their own pain or awkwardness over my condition. Other times, they left because I couldn’t continue being the fount of money or financial security they had come to expect. I quickly learned who were my true friends, and my true family.

Praying At God

Among my remaining friends, many responded by asking to pray over me. Sometimes they’d say that God told them I’d be healed. Although God hadn’t told me that, I would be gracious, let them pray and listen to their assurances. I appreciated their concern, but what struck me most was how they were reacting more out of their own anxieties than anything else.

Because their theology couldn’t explain why God allowed this to happen to me, they needed to vigorously pray at God and at me in order to drown out their own uncertainties and insecurities. They knew that if this could happen to me, then it could happen to them or their loved ones. That’s not what they signed up for when they became Christians!

Rather than “hearing” from God about my situation, they were telling God what He needed to do or what they thought He should do. After all, if He’s God and all powerful, loving and just, then they couldn’t understand why bad things happen to good Christians.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate prayers! But prayers motivated by anxiety over God’s seeming failings, and by our own fears over sickness and adversities, quickly become tiring to the purported beneficiary.

I have one very close friend who’s an associate pastor. He has cancer and would duck out of church several minutes early to avoid all of the “words from God” and anxiety-filled prayers that otherwise descended on him at the end of each service. I could relate (although things have since cooled down for me, and, I understand, for him too).

Touching God’s Heart

When I was first diagnosed, maybe one out of twenty-five of my remaining friends and acquaintances, at most, would actually come and pray for me in the security of God’s sovereignty and could then truly touch God’s heart regarding my condition. And God’s heart was to simply say He was with me. By ministering from that place of peace which only comes from total surrender to God’s will – without presumption or expectation of outcome – their prayers were like cool drinks in a barren land.

Those ministering out of anxiety, however, couldn’t understand why God would let this happen. Implicit was the assumption that God owed me, and Christians in general, a free pass when it comes to the realities of our fallen world and imperfect mortal bodies.

But there’s no such promise in Scripture. Rather, God simply assures us that His grace is sufficient for all that may befall us.

Peace Despite an Uncertain Fate

I have several very close friends who also have faced a life threatening issue or other major crisis. Once they were able to accept God’s grace in their situations, and surrender to His will without precondition or expectation of outcome, a depth of fellowship and understanding developed between us that’s hard to describe. To a person, we would not trade that grace for anything – including health and healing.

I’m no saint, and I have my down days. I want to be a good steward and so I struggle at times with my future and with what, if any, plans and decisions I can make given my uncertain fate. But generally, the high price of admission has been worth the grace gained as God embraced my infirmities.

Unless you too have been there, I suspect this is hard to understand.

It’s not fatalism – far from it. It’s life from brokenness. It’s peace and calm from being able to finally surrender to God’s perfect will, even with no idea what His will may be, because you finally understand – both at the logical and also at the emotional level – that life only has significance and fulfillment in Him. He created us, so who knows better what to do with our lives?

It’s not premised on any assumption of outcome, other than knowing that your life never belonged to you anyway and it’s God’s to do with as He pleases – even to the point of death.

Becoming Whole Despite Infirmities

I’m in God’s hands. If His will is to call me home, that’s OK. If His will is healing, that’s OK too. If it’s something in between, then there is peace in the promise of His grace for the journey.

It is, more than anything else, being with Jesus in the garden on the night He was betrayed. He was all too human as He cried out for deliverance from His impending cross. After getting past His initial deep, deep anguish, Jesus found assurance only when He could truly say to the Father “not my will, but thy will be done.” He could then endure the cross because of the resulting peace that comes from trust and obedience.

To my healthy friends, think about this. If everyone who made Jesus their Lord suddenly experienced perfect health, perfect wealth, and no adversity or pain, then who would come to Jesus for Jesus’ sake? No one, that’s who! We would all flock to him for what He can do for us, rather than for what He wants of us.

And what does He want? Simply everything, including our will and our very lives. He then uses our total commitment to redeem His creation, despite its fallenness …

And to reconcile people to Himself, despite our brokenness.

In His wisdom, God normally doesn’t exempt us from our frailties or the consequences of a fallen world. Rather, He makes us complete in our weakness. Our lives then demonstrate that His grace is sufficient, despite the consequences of humanity’s rebellion, and that it is only through Him that we become whole, despite our infirmities.

I truly don’t know what God intends for me. I only know that I need to walk in His grace and abide in His will day-by-day as I trust my future to Him – without any presumption of outcome.

When He’s done with this life, He’ll take me home. Until then, my life is His and my imperfect desire is to serve Him with all I have, and all I am, as He gives me grace for the journey ahead.

(c) Copyright 2009, Fulcrum Ministries. All Rights Reserved.

.

Soon after writing this in early 2009, my systemic sclerosis began to slowly and miraculously retreat and by the end of 2009 had gone into low level remission – to the astonishment of my doctors. Needless to say, however, the experience of dealing with the implications and initial health effects from the disease changed me deeply.

In late 2011, my symptoms started re-surging, and in early 2012 a pulmonary function test indicated that the disease had entered my lungs, which is not good.

Although I don’t know what the future holds, I nonetheless remain eternally grateful to have found sufficient grace. Or, to put it more accurately, that Sufficient Grace found me. 

Been Hearing God Lately?

March 25, 2009 By in Epiphany, Gifts, Grace, Life, Redemption 11 Comments

joy

Life and Joy

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how Jesus fellowshipped with Adam.

It was in the garden, where the two of them walked side by side and talked face to face in the cool of the evening. Jesus met Adam in his full humanity, where life sprang forth both in and around Adam.

It took me a long time to learn that it’s OK to be human and that God wanted to meet me too in my full humanity.

Continue reading →

Them Dry Bones

March 22, 2009 By in Burnout, Christians, Church, Elder, Emergent, Leadership, Mentor, Pastor 9 Comments

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning here in Virginia, but I’m stuck with a lingering cold and sore throat. That gives me a good excuse to skip church and my ministry commitments later this afternoon in the local jail.

So what to do? I just let my ADD dog out and he’s happily occupied digging a new hole in my otherwise nice green yard, there’s some good coffee brewing (I’m partial to Gold Coast from Starbucks – two level scoops per 14 oz.), the light of a crisp blue March sky is streaming through my sun room windows, my favorite worship music is playing in the background on my iPod, and I’m relaxing in my over-sized Lazy Boy recliner thinking on the things of God.

I guess that makes this as good a time as any to bang out some thoughts on effective New Testament leadership.

Continue reading →

God is Not Passive

March 21, 2009 By in Brokenness, Church, Conversion, Faith, Kingdom of God, Repentance, Sovereignty 4 Comments

I’m seeing others who also are quietly moving forward, with fire stirring in their spirits, to proclaim true repentance, Christ’s Lordship and the Kingdom of God rather than conformist, complacent Christianity.

These co-conspirators are being compelled by God to preach outside our churches because too many of our pastors have been unwilling, so far, to be jarred out of their desire for peace, stability and the comfort of long-standing personal relationships. For those pastors, complacency has become a hindrance to God’s progressively expanding Kingdom.

Continue reading →

Ukraine Trip Report

February 17, 2009 By in Faith, Great Commission, Missions 9 Comments

ukraine_map

Ukraine

I wrote this report in early 2007, following an extensive ministry trip in Ukraine. Ukraine previously was the western-most region of the former Soviet Union, where it bumped up against Europe, but is now an independent nation.

With all that’s happening in that part of the world, I thought it might be interesting to post this on Crossroad Junction. Please be in prayer for our brothers and sisters in Ukraine. Since this trip, the situation in the country has deteriorated as Russia continues to challenge Ukraine’s fledgling democracy, the economy is in shambles, and political infighting grips the nation.

Continue reading →

God Shows Up

February 13, 2009 By in Bondage, Counseling, Grace, Healing, Jail, Ministry, Repentance 20 Comments

As “Mr. Analytical,” I’m the least probable person I know to be doing pastoral counseling, but God seems to have given me a special grace to walk with people to those places where He wants to meet them in very powerful, transforming and healing ways. I guess it’s one of those spiritual ironies that God uses to confound us. He works through the least likely to ensure that the glory is His.

Whether in the jail or in my home study, I deal weekly with issues that – believe me – exceed anything you might imagine. But the Lord meets us in amazing ways, and folks find freedom in just one or two sessions from decades of emotional and spiritual bondage.

God shows up!

Restoration

The Lord patiently, lovingly wants us to go to those places in our lives where we need his healing. Those places are at the core of our beings, where all the accumulated “yuk” lies. But it’s hard to go there, because there’s pain and hurt there.

My job is to help people get there. When we do, I simply ask Jesus what he has to say. The Lord then dramatically speaks to them in real, personal ways and brings healing and peace to some of the most unspeakable experiences and issues in their lives – including sexual abuse, child prostitution, occult oppression, abandonment, drug and alcohol addiction, sexual compulsions, anger and fear.

I’ve done this hundreds of times, and have never needed a “re-do” session where God has spoken his gentle truth. When God speaks (and He always does if there is a willingness to expose what needs to be healed!), the lies at the center of the hurt and the pain – which have caused bondage and been so controlling – immediately die. Simple and complete; wholeness and health. It’s wonderful to see.

Too often we forget that God wants to restore us to health, and have fellowship with us, because he loves us in deeply personal ways. After all, God valued Adam so much that he walked and talked with Adam in the garden during the cool of the day. God values us just as much, and desires a relationship where we can once again commune with him, and He with us.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I value the historic tenets of our faith, but we can’t major on correct doctrine to the neglect of the personal relationship God wants with us. Doctrine and Biblical truth provide a context for our day-to-day faith, but are not a substitute for intimacy with God and learning to hear his voice. We need both.

Hurt or Health?

It’s sad but true – too many churches have become a refuge for hurt people, led by hurt people, rather than a place of health that reproduces health.

It’s OK to be hurt – there’s no condemnation in that! But we have an obligation before God to seek his healing and restoration.

Perpetual Hospital Ward or Health?

I’ve had lots of challenges in my own life: emotionally crippled close family members, the death of several very close friends, a degenerative and potentially fatal autoimmune disease, an unwanted divorce, and the need to start over again financially. But despite it all, I have chosen life, not hurt.

Too often, as we go through the motions with our day-to-day routines, we forget why God redeemed us. Instead, we slip unawares into a rut of accumulated hurts and emotional pain, and start believing that’s normal.

I encourage those who are burdened with hurt to choose life and seek help.

True Repentance

Jesus, in his parting instructions to the disciples, told them to go forth and proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins (Luke 24:44-48). That “great commission” applies to all believers, even now!

We have distorted repentance and think it simply means saying we’re sorry, or else we confuse it with confession. That’s not repentance – although authentic confession and forgiveness often are essential components of repentance.

The Greek word for repentance, as used in the New Testament, means to change the way we think so that we then change the way we act. In my experience working with and mentoring lots of men as they get out of jail, it is rare that someone can change the way he acts unless he lets God change the way he thinks. Having the will power, dedication and commitment to change how we act, without letting God change how we think, is seldom enough.

Changing the way I think means much, much more than believing correct doctrine or precepts in the cognitive, rational part of my mind. It also involves changing what the experiential and emotional side of my mind believes. You may rationally believe that “all things work together for the good of those who love God,” but when you lose your job or your daughter comes home drunk or you get a deadly disease, your emotions and reactions demonstrate your true belief. Our emotions and how we react to things spring from, and point to, our true beliefs.

Exposing the Crap in Our Lives

Life’s Septic Tank

For God to change the way we truly think, we need to be willing to open up and expose those beliefs, and their source, to Him. To help make this process understandable, I tell guys in jail that our lives contain a septic tank, and it holds lots of crap and stink. Although God forgives us, He still wants – and needs – to replace that crap and stink with health and wholeness. But to do that, He needs us to remove the septic tank’s lid so all that nasty stuff inside is exposed.

This process of removing the septic tank’s lid and exposing the crap and the stink is confession and repentance – and it often does not involve sin (although it can)! It may simply involve wrong beliefs based on lies that took hold in our lives through no fault of our own – often before we became Christians and often due to experiences during our childhood when our lie-filled belief system formed about ourselves, others, the world around us and God.

Emotions Show Beliefs

Our emotions – based on what we really believe despite cognitive facts and logic – are pathways that lead back to root lies. If we want to allow God to change the way we think so that He can then change the way we act (and react!), then we need to expose those lies to God by taking the lid off of the experiences and emotions that contain them. Once we expose those lies to God, we can invite God to speak His truth to us. In the jail, as God speaks His truth to men about themselves or about things that happened in their lives (as opposed to me giving them a cognitive to-do list of right living – which may be needed, but that’s another process for another time!), wholeness and health floods in and replaces the crap and stink!

This, then, is what we’ve been doing in the jail. God shows up and changes how men think by speaking to them His truth about them in deeply personal ways. And when he does, His truth sets them free!

His Truth Will Set You Free!

God’s Truth Displaces Lies

When God speaks His truth, lies are displaced. Horrendous memories and experiences that were a source of pain, hurt and bondage become places of righteousness, peace and joy. Our job in the counseling sessions is to simply facilitate the ministry of the Holy Spirit as the men take the lid off the septic tanks of their lives and let God pump out all of the crap and stink, then bring health and wholeness by speaking His personal, loving truth to them.

Sometimes it’s not easy for people who come to me for help to do this, because they don’t want to expose the pain and the emotions. But when they do, God speaks his truth to them in tender, loving, personal ways and the lies that previously held them in bondage disappear.

Sometimes, after these counseling sessions, I have to sit quietly to let the glory of God’s presence subside enough for me to reconnect to the so-called “real” world.

Reproducing Health

Our churches were never intended by God to be hospitals or way stations, and our Sunday gatherings are not places intended by God to perpetually sooth our hurts. My vision is that our churches and our lives become places of health that reproduce health.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have problems or have issues, but do we have the zest to confront life and let our sovereign, personal God continually transform us, even through hard times, into the people He calls us, and created us, to be?

Are we willing to repent by opening up the crap and stink in our lives so that God can speak His truth to us and bring His transforming peace and joy?

That’s what the world wants to see – not perfect people, but imperfect people who can traverse life’s issues with God’s grace evident in us.

God is not about covering over or burying our hurt and pain, like old wounds under thick callous scabs. Rather, He calls us to repentance so that He can get at the lies in our lives and heal us through His truth – which means not only doctrinal truth but also truth about our past, who we really are, how God really sees us, and who He created us and wants to empower us to be.

That process not only changes the way we think, but also can’t help but change the way we act.

~ Jim Wright

Related article

Fashionable Scorn

January 30, 2009 By in America, Culture, Faith, Politics, Self Government, Society, State, Tyranny, Worldview 2 Comments
Fashionable Scorn

The following is an op-ed I wrote and the Baltimore Sun published on December 3, 1986. I was in my late twenties at that time and leading the main pro-life, pro-family organization in Maryland, which I started six years earlier and had over 15,000 active members with offices next to the General Assembly in Annapolis. I like to say I’m now a refugee from Maryland living the good life in Virginia. I no longer describe myself as “fundamentalist”, at least regarding my attitudes, even though I strongly adhere to the essentials of the faith.

I’m re-publishing the op-ed because it’s interesting to see how much has changed, yet how much remains the same!

Continue reading →

Essentially Reformed or Hyper-Calvinist?

January 19, 2009 By in Calvinism, Grace, Sovereignty 10 Comments
Essentially Reformed or Hyper-Calvinist?

I typically describe my Biblical perspective as “essentially reformed” because of the influence John Calvin’s writings, and his views on God’s sovereignty, have had on me. Yet I have this problem with so-called Calvinists and their attempts to hijack Calvin: Their extreme view of God’s sovereignty can’t be found in Calvin’s writings, and actually debases God’s sovereignty.

Continue reading →

Pentecost in the Local Jail

January 7, 2009 By in Baptism in the Holy Spirit, Healing, Jail, Ministry, Repentance 12 Comments
Pentecost in the Local Jail

In 2007 over 75 men in the local jail – comprising more than a forth of those incarcerated in the “modular” building – had a dramatic encounter with God.

For some time, I’d been feeling that we were falling short with the men who were coming to the Lord or re-dedicating their lives through various outreaches in the jail. God was bringing men to salvation on a weekly basis, and over the previous months I’d been involved in scores of men becoming Christians. Others involved in ministry at the jail were having similar reports.

We were being successful in leading the men to Christ and were doing a good job teaching them God’s principles. The men had a heart to follow the Lord, and a basic understanding of how God wanted them to act and live.

The problem, however, was that they lacked the power to do so effectively, and when they got out, they were falling prey to old habits and circumstances. Although they had hearts that want more of God, and had understanding, they lacked the power to be overcomers.

Continue reading →