Hey! For the next month, we’ll be working through three challenges to living by God’s Word. This month I’m teaching our staff on our shared value, Biblically Serious: We Live by God’s Word. I loved reading and writing for it, so I’m making a short June series and opening the comments for all so we can talk about it.
There are parts geared toward vocational ministers and pastors, and if that’s not you, hang in. There is plenty of meat on the bone and questions to consider.
Thanks for reading!
MK
God's Word is our starting point. We are to think Theo-centrically, meaning that God is at the beginning, and we begin with him.
In our definition of discipleship, following Jesus is the continual surrender of all of life to God's good design for identity, purpose, and belonging.
Surrendering to God means that we surrender our pattern of primarily trusting our feelings, our interpretations, and our conclusions of reality to make sense of daily experience. It means we recognize our proneness toward self-reliance instead of dependence upon God's wisdom.
And we learn God's wisdom through God's Word. How else do we make sense of ourselves, of God, and daily life? We need an active and expanding first-hand knowledge of our sacred text, one that bears fruit in prayer and delight in the Trinity before it ever moves outward toward others or our ministry.
Many vocational ministers get in the gig because the Lord did a work in our life, and at some point our gratitude, passion, love for Christ, and desire for others to know Him moved us to put all your chips in on serving God. We have given your time to the work of the Kingdom.
What a privilege.
For some of us, there also has come a point where the privilege turned toward professionalism.
We learned the job, and the job seemingly required more task execution and less prayer, more meetings, and less marveling at Christ. We learned how and when to say the right things and that people can still be hard to deal with inside a church staff. We grew older in our jobs, and the demands of the work grew with us.
About eight years ago, I was talking with a fellow elder in a previous church and said: "I'm pretty good at my job, and that scares me because I could not touch my Bible, and it'd be months before you noticed."
We were in a season of a lot of change and crisis. My schedule was overrun with people and tasks. I started early and came home late, and I was emotionally undone by the weight of it all.
I told this to my friend because I felt the temptation in me to perform and drive out of my own talent, of some mythical reserve of Godliness that I had stored up, and I knew that if I got far from daily communion with God through the Word, I'd get in trouble - because I was feeling the edges start to fray.
Many of us could do this same thing: perform in our jobs for months without living by God's Word, and we'd probably be successful. But it starts to show up in our interactions with each other and the people we serve. In the attitudes of our heart, the grumbling of entitlement, the frustration of self-pity, the narrowing of perspective and assumption of other's intent. It shows up in our humanity.
I love getting a Route 44 drink when I take the kids to Sonic. Just as much Coke and styrofoam as I can hold. I can get a lot of mileage out of a drink like that. Sometimes, I think my soul is a Route 44 when it's really a thimble, and I run dry much quicker than I want to admit. It's that John 15 reality of abiding that we can do nothing apart from him, and we're tempted professionally to think we've got it, we've learned it, we know the path to success.
Maybe. I want effectiveness. In my own heart, in yours, and then in our work together.
During my masters, I read B.B. Warfield’s Lecture The Religious Life of Theological Students, and a passage of it has haunted me for years.
Whether you are a vocational minister, CRU or YL staff, an engineer, student, or a remote worker, we are all tempted to let familiarity breed neglect. Dallas Willard once said, “Familiarity breeds unsuspecting unfamiliarity.”.1 You think you know a thing, and then you realize you stopped knowing it long ago. This is where Warfield gets me every time. Also, if you're not a theology student, substitute "paid Christian professional" and stay with me.
This is the first of three challenges to living in God’s Word:
The Privilege and The Danger.
Warfield:
There is certainly something wrong with the religious life of a theological student who does not study. But it does not quite follow that therefore everything is right with his religious life if he does study. It is possible to study—even to study theology—in an entirely secular spirit.
I said a little while ago that what religion does is to send a man to his work with an added quality of devotion. In saying that, I meant the word ‘devotion’ to be taken in both its senses—in the sense of ‘zealous application’, and in the sense of ‘a religious exercise’, as the Standard Dictionary phrases the two definitions. A truly religious man will study anything which it becomes his duty to study with ‘devotion’ in both of these senses. That is what his religion does for him: it makes him do his duty, do it thoroughly, do it ‘in the Lord’.
Can a religious man stand in the presence of God and not worship? It is possible. I have said, to study even theology in a purely secular spirit. But surely that is possible only for an irreligious man, or at least for an unreligious man. And here I place in your hands at once a touchstone by which you may discern your religious state and an instrument for the quickening of your religious life. Do you prosecute your daily tasks as students of theology as ‘religious exercises’? If you do not, look to yourselves: it is surely not all right with the spiritual condition of that man who can busy himself daily with divine things, with a cold and impassive heart. If you do, rejoice. But in any case, see that you do! And that you do it ever more and more abundantly
We are frequently told, indeed, that the great danger of the theological student lies precisely in his constant contact with divine things. They may come to seem common to him because they are customary.
As the average man breathes the air and basks in the sunshine without ever a thought that it is God in his goodness who makes his sun to rise on him, though he is evil, and sends rain to him, though he is unjust; so you may come to handle even the furniture of the sanctuary with never a thought above the gross earthly materials of which it is made.
The words which tell you of God’s terrible majesty or of his glorious goodness may come to be mere words to you—Hebrew and Greek words, with etymologies, inflections and connections in sentences.
The reasonings which establish to you the mysteries of his saving activities may come to be to you mere logical paradigms, with premises and conclusions, fitly framed, no doubt, and triumphantly cogent, but with no further significance to you than their formal logical conclusiveness. God’s stately steppings in his redemptive processes may become to you a mere series of facts of history, curiously interplaying to the production of social and religious conditions and pointing mayhap to an issue which we may shrewdly conjecture: but much like other facts occurring in time and space which may come to your notice. It is your great danger. But it is your great danger only because it is your great privilege. Think of what your privilege is when your greatest danger is that the great things of religion may become common to you! Other men, oppressed by the hard conditions of life, sunk in the daily struggle for bread perhaps, distracted at any rate by the dreadful drag of the world upon them and the awful rush of the world’s work, find it hard to get time and opportunity so much as to pause and consider whether there be such things as God, and religion, and salvation from the sin that compasses them about and holds them captive. The very atmosphere of your life is these things; you breathe them in at every pore: they surround you, encompass you, press in upon you from every side. It is all in danger of becoming common to you! God forgive you, you are in danger of becoming weary of God!
Do you know what this danger is? Or, rather, let us turn the question—are you alive to what your privileges are? Are you making full use of them? Are you, by this constant contact with divine things, growing in holiness, becoming every day more and more men of God? If not, you are hardening! And I am here today to warn you to take seriously your theological study, not merely as a duty, done for God’s sake and therefore made divine, but as a religious exercise, itself charged with religious blessing to you; as fitted by its very nature to fill all your mind and heart and soul and life with divine thoughts and feelings and aspirations and achievements.
You will never prosper in your religious life in the Theological Seminary until your work in the Theological Seminary becomes itself to you a religious exercise out of which you draw every day enlargement of heart, elevation of spirit and adoring delight in your Maker and your Saviour.2
Two more challenges, and then a way forward. Each week, I’ll interact with a pastoral voice from the past, and provide some questions for reflection.
Questions for Reflection
Today: Do you value the study of God's Word for yourself?
Are you alive to what your privileges are? Are there any you take for granted?
Where have you become too familiar with the things of God?
Are you coming in contact with the things of God in your workday and think that satiates your need for Him?
Do you find it hard to get time and opportunity so much as to pause and consider God? What helps you acknowledge his presence throughout the day?
Thanks for reading!
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I live in Flower Mound, TX, with my wife Carly, our three kids, and our chocolate lab. I pastor, teach, and lead at The Village Church, serving as the Executive Director of Discipleship. In my spare time, I’m working on a Ph.D. program in Church History, studying Jonathan Edwards and character formation.Also, last year I released A Short Guide to Spiritual Disciplines: How to Become a Healthy Christian. If you read it, I’d love to hear what resonated or was encouraging.
Talk soon,
Mason
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: “Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity—unsuspected unfamiliarity, and then contempt.”
https://bbwarfield.com/works/sermons-and-addresses/the-religious-life-of-theological-students/