Posts
My brother recommended Dinner with a Perfect Stranger, and I got the book on CD from the library.
It has been such a treat ... one of those books that, if you're listening to it in the car, makes you not want to get out when you get to your destination. :)
Exercise report: Still using that EyeToy Kinetics program and loving it ... you burn a ton of calories, and it's lots of fun!
Studying: still not where I'd like it to be, but I've enjoyed a book by Max Lucado on looking at your past to see how you best serve the Lord, and using that info., to plan your ministry. It's been very good. There's a web site related to the book that has a little mini-seminar - it was what encouraged me to buy the book. See what you think!
Trinka
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I want to know how bad it hurts when you get whapped by Eye Toy. Rachel
Hmm...
Okay, Trinka. Here I go!
I listened to Lucado's spiel. And I'm curious. How does this fit into the epistles that Paul wrote to us? If anybody was qualified to look back on his life and make an assessment as to what his ministry might be, it was Paul. A Pharisee of Pharisees, circumcized on the 8th day, as keeping the Law, blameless, etc. This would have set him up perfectly to have a ministry! Yet he counted all of it but dung and said he was choosing rather to forget it all, and be found in Christ. In Christ he found his ministry - not in his past and not in his abilities.
And if we choose or make a ministry, do we actually have a ministry? If it's something we make or choose, is it not rather a vocation? When I read in the Bible about the apostles and deacons recorded there, the only ministry I find written in the Bible is the ministry of Jesus. Of all the evidence stacked up in the Bible I can only conclude that God doesn't choose His ministers according to their ability but according to the ability which He gives - and He gives us the ability to be fashioned and formed into the image of Christ. As we behold the glory of the Lord in the mirror (the Word is the mirror), the Bible says we are transformed into the same image of the Lord from glory to glory even as by the Spirit of the Lord. Our past can't make us like Jesus anymore than we ourselves can make us like Jesus. This is a work that only God can do by the Holy Spirit as we take hold of the Word of God by the Holy Spirit of God. And only He can make us able ministers by Christ Jesus.
And, of course, the ministry of Jesus is preaching the same Gospel that He preached, healing the sick, opening the blind eyes, raising the dead - all the stuff he sent the 12 out to do then the 70 others prior to His crucifixion. Then after Jesus' resurrection, they were empowered with the same Holy Spirit in the upper room on the day of Pentecost that He was empowered when He was baptized by John in the river Jordon so that they could continue that same work which He began. He told them just before He was taken up that they would be witnesses of His resurrection taking His Gospel to Jerusalem, to the regions round about, and to the uttermost parts of the earth but that they could not be those able ministers until they were endued with power from On High, and He told them to wait until that power came. And when it came, they did the works of Jesus. They were ministers according to the grace and ability which God gave them.
Post a Comment