The covenant with Noah was a terrifying precursor to Pentecost, an outpouring of divine anointing previously unmatched in the history of the human race. In its wake, Noah’s children and grandchildren walked as gods among men, outliving their great-great-great grandchildren and ruling as no one has since. The great river valley civilizations were born overnight, deliberately created from whole cloth by men and women divinely commissioned to build human culture from the ground up.
A non-literal reading of Gen. 1-11 is boring, boring shit. Why do theological liberals persist in the silly notion that Tolkien is better at world-building than Yahweh?
The irony here is that these same people can’t help noticing the evidence of literary design in the text, but can’t imagine that God would display marks of authorship in the actual world. They can imagine God telling a dramatic story, but not making one.
I had the privilege of going to the inaugural facilitator training course for the Paul Tripp/Tim Lane How People Change small group curriculum, several years back. One point that Tripp made over and over has really stuck with me. “If all we needed were principles, then God could have done everything we needed on Mount Sinai. If all we needed were principles, then why did Jesus come and die? Because we don’t just need principles; we need rescue.”
Indeed. I’d like to address that same line of thought at a slightly higher resolution.
1. If Sinai is sufficient, then why Calvary?
If principles/doctrine alone were sufficient, then God could have gotten it all done at Sinai. If that were true, then why Jesus? Because living by principles is never enough. We needed to be saved from ourselves, and this is something we simply could not do for ourselves, no matter how good the principles might be. The seeds of the problem are inside us, and we can’t excise them.
We have sinned “in thought, word and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone,” as the Anglicans say. We simply could not resolve the problem for ourselves; it took Jesus dying our death on the cross. We participate in His death, and in this way we are reconciled to God.
2. If Calvary is sufficient, then why Pentecost?
If Christ’s finished work on the Cross was all that we needed, then why send the Holy Spirit? Isn’t the work all done? No, it isn’t. Calvary reconciled us to God, but reconciliation is only the beginning of what God wants to give us. He wants to give us life.
Through our union with Christ, we participate, not just in His death for us, but also in His life. Ongoing participation in the life of Christ is a continuing miracle of the Holy Spirit, who indwells us and comes upon us in anointing for service just as He came upon Jesus for His earthly ministry. It is through the guidance of the Spirit that we advance God’s Kingdom here on earth.
3. What does it look like to live Sinai, Calvary, and Pentecost?
If we mess up the first question, we make the moralistic mistake of trying to earn God’s acceptance. Life turns into a never-ending round of “service” that is much more about our need to see ourselves as useful than it is about meeting actual needs. We become the sort of person that C. S. Lewis was talking about when he penned the epitaph, “She lived her life for others. Now she has peace…and so have they.”
If we mess up the second question, then we make the mistake of trying to seek God’s Kingdom and His righteousness without taking advantage of all His guidance for us. We’ll operate based on the general principles in Scripture — which (to be fair) give far more guidance than most people think. But the Scriptures also give far less guidance than is needed for the life that God would have you to live.
If we get both questions right, if we live into Sinai, Calvary and Pentecost, then we live a life that is guided by the Scriptures. Our character becomes deeply aligned with God’s character as He has expressed it in the Scriptures. And our lives become masterpieces, unpredictable works of art. Just applying the principles on our own would generate a decent life, but it would never yield the beautiful surprises that come from a living relationship with God.
For example, God used me to help a homeless guy named Michael last year. The biblical principles would lead me to helping homeless folks–the stranger in your gates, the least of these, and all that. But I have no shortage of opportunity to minister to homeless folks, and Michael was not hanging around the places I would usually go to minister. What led me to Michael was that God literally told me to turn the car around, go back to that exit ramp, and give him $5 and a message: “God has not forgotten you.”
I did. As the relationship developed over subsequent conversations, it turned out there were certain truths Michael needed to hear, and then to live. It just so happened that these were the same truths God was teaching me right then.
Was the guidance to engage that specific homeless guy at that specific time biblical? No. It was far more specific than I could have gleaned from the Torah, or from the Old Testament, or even from the completed canon. But it didn’t conflict in any way with Scripture; it just went further than general instructions to the whole Body could go. Was it God? Of course, and the good fruit bore that out, as Jesus taught us that it would.
In other words, to add to Tripp, we didn’t just need principles; we needed rescue. And we don’t just need rescue; we need relationship.
I attend an Anglican mission church (PEARUSA, for them as keep track of such things), and Lent is kind of a big deal for us. But I don’t believe in Lent.
Why not? Well, Lent is a 40-day fast, a time to meditate upon and lament your sins. That is a great thing to do, but it’s badly imbalanced. When Yahweh Himself created a religious calendar, He had a time for fasting, meditating upon sin, and (as He put it) “afflicting your souls.” It was called Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The operative word, for our purposes, being day. All the rest of the religious festivals in Yahweh’s calendar were parties. Under the Old Covenant, it was mostly through parties that you learned to fear The Lord (Deut 14:23). It cannot be that now, after the victory was won on Golgotha and the Messiah is ascended to the right hand of God until His enemies are made His footstool, now we get less celebratory and more into mourning and fasting.
You will say, “But Jesus did it! Jesus fasted 40 days; following Jesus is what Lent is about!” Yes. Yes, He did. Once. When He was 30. And He didn’t just give up ice cream and swearing, either. So fine, if you want to be like Jesus, go for it — fast for 40 days when you’re 30. If you live to 60, you can do it again.
Of course, meditating upon one’s sins really is a good idea, which is why God built it into His calendar in Yom Kippur. I don’t particularly observe the Jewish calendar, so Good Friday seems to be an appropriate day for that.
And yet here I am, part of a community that observes Lent. These are my people. We observe Lent. We have for centuries. Nobody will complain if I just blow Lent off — we’re not legalistic like that. But I don’t want to just blow it off. These are my people.
So how can I navigate this in a manner that is agreeable to my conscience? Well, this year, I settled on a positive Lenten observance. I can’t get my head round a 40-day period of mourning and flagellation, but I certainly can get my head around a 40-day period of waiting and receiving from God. So I selected a stack of books for devotional reading — about 900 pages altogether — that I’m committing to get through during Lent. It’s enough of a load that I will have to alter my lifestyle to get through it. I’ll end up giving up something for Lent, just in the course of re-prioritizing to get through the reading. A few weeks into it, I’m well into the 900 pages — definitely on track to finish before Easter. But I’m honestly not sure what I gave up.
Whatever it was, I don’t miss it. But God’s giving me a ton.
Comments Off on What I’m Getting for Lent | Uncategorized | Permalink Posted by Tim Nichols
In American politics, our financial policy is an obvious disaster and has been for years. Any thinking person knows that no matter how big you are, you can’t just keep creating money out of thin air forever. You can’t live on a credit card forever. Life is not a something-for-nothing kind of game, and that’s all there is to it. Yet — Democrat or Republican — we keep electing people whose only differences of opinion are about how much money to create out of thin air. We do not elect people who will tell us that this is a bad business from end to end, and we need to stop it right now.
We tell ourselves that all these politicians are liars, and we will blame it all on them when, inevitably, the consequences of our poor decisions catch up to us. And it’s true. They are liars. But we focus on that only to distract ourselves from a much more important truth: we elect liars. We do it on purpose, and we do it again and again, because we would rather have liars than be told uncomfortable truths.
This is also true in the church. We have no end of scandal as prominent pastors and ministry leaders fall publicly, their double lives exposed for all to see. They were lying to us. Some of them were lying to us the whole time! Most of them, though, started off well, and gradually became hypocrites and liars. But who put these particular people in positions of prominence to start with? Us. Who didn’t want to hear it when they were having an off day? Us. Who cheerfully kept supporting them without taking a deeper look at their lives? Us. Who rewarded flashy stories of street evangelism and pictures of converted headhunters with attention and showers of money? Us. Who couldn’t be bothered with hearing about building relationships over a cup of coffee or leaving the ministry behind for a week to go on a much-needed marriage retreat? Us.
We didn’t know what was really going on. You know why? Because we liked it that way. We liked it that way because for us, it was never about building the Kingdom of God. It was about idolizing the celebrities; it was about how it made us feel. As long as we felt like we had a piece of that perfect celebrity action, we didn’t give any of it a second look. And in order for us to feel like we had a piece of the action, something flashy had to happen. Paying for a marriage retreat so the couple could recharge and reconnect just didn’t do it for us.
Scandal wasn’t the only consequence of this kind of foolishness on our part. Writing a useful support letter became an exercise in spin control. (You can read more about that here, and I highly recommend it.)
Want to do better? Here are three suggestions:
1. Go local. Support a ministry you can actually see, so you know what’s going on. There’s nothing wrong with sending money halfway around the world, but start with what is near and clear. If you can’t handle the issues involved in feeding the undernourished kids that live within an hour’s drive of your home, how do you propose to be wise about feeding undernourished kids in Sudan?
2. Support people you actually know, and actually know the people you support. Don’t just throw money at things; along with your money, commit the time and effort to build and maintain a real relationship. (Big bonus here: you’ll pray passionately for people you know. That’s really good for them, believe me–and for you too.)
3. Be a missionary. Invest your time and effort in tangibly loving your actual neighbors, the people who live just a few yards from your door. Nothing reorients your priorities faster than being on mission yourself. Nothing will give you a better reality check. And besides, Jesus said to do it.
When missionaries and pastors talk to other missionaries or ministry people in the know, they tell a different set of stories than the ones in the prayer letters. The real stories. You know why? Because they trust people who are in the trenches with them, who understand what it’s really like. You want to know what’s really going on with your missionaries, your pastors? Then be one of those people in the trenches.
This has got nothing to do with what you do for a living, and everything to do with living on a missionary footing, in everything you do. Take the risks, struggle, fail, try again. And for the love of all that is holy, talk about it! Share your stories — good and bad — with your friends, with your pastor, with the missionaries you support. Two reasons to do this. First, notice who reciprocates. Those are people you want to support. Second, we’ve got to change the conversation. Missionary living is a messy business, and we need to be comfortable with the mess. If we want truth in prayer letters, we’ve got to tell the truth ourselves.
I resigned my post teaching and writing curriculum at the seminary a couple years ago, and owing to the vicissitudes of small-school scheduling, my classroom presence had been spotty the year before that. I must admit I wasn’t really looking forward to this much time away from the classroom, but in hindsight, I’ve found it refreshing, and it’s not as though I’ve lacked for other work to do.
The disengagement has allowed me time to reflect on our ways of preparing people for ministry, and alternatives that might actually be preferable to our existing classroom methods. As I contemplate what sort of partners I want for the front-line work I’ve been doing in the past few years, I’ve got to admit “seminary graduate” doesn’t leap to the top of my list of desirable qualifications (doesn’t even crack my top five, actually) — about which more in another post, perhaps. In fact, my present partners include at least one guy who, a couple of decades back, dropped out of seminary in disgust and seems none the worse for the experience. Another partner got all his (very thorough) preparation for ministry in a local church, and looks at the whole seminary enterprise with more than a little suspicion. I get asked periodically whether I’d seek to re-engage in the academic milieu if the opportunity arose. As I consider it, I find myself thinking of it as a fairly dangerous undertaking.
There are several reasons for this, but the first one is that engaging in scholarship in our society is not a neutral endeavor. As in any field, there are (relatively arbitrary) conventions. Credit must be given where due, but how? Style manuals have whole chapters on footnote, endnote, and bibliography formats to answer this question, and MLA has different formats from APA, which is different from Chicago, and so on. This is not a bad thing in itself. Every guild has its standards, and it is important to the corporate identity and cohesion of the discipline that this be the case. Every initiate chafes at seemingly pointless constraints, but it’s a matter of loving your guildmates enough to show that you value their wisdom and have a place in their discipline. You will never have an opportunity to give to them if you can’t show them that you have something worth giving.
On the other hand, Christians have always had a very tense relationship with professional guilds. Making sacrifices to idols always seems to be a membership requirement in guilds controlled by pagans, and the American academic guild is unequivocally controlled by pagans and administered for purposes that, at very best, are in service of secularism.
Secularism is a false god; it is a competing theology, as antithetical to Christianity as the worship of Dagon. In it, “neutrality” toward all things religious is a sacred duty, and bowing the knee to any particular deity in any way that affects the public sphere is blasphemy. If it is to be practiced publicly at all, a religion must agree to the equal validity of all other competing religions — or at least manage to behave as though all other religious paths are equally valid. You’re allowed to practice whatever religion you want, as long as you don’t act like it really matters. A private hobby-religion is fine. Some people build ships in bottles; some people juggle geese; some people go to church. Whatever floats your boat.
Christians are required to be at war with secularism, root and branch. The earth is Yahweh’s, and everything in it, and we are not allowed to pretend otherwise for the sake of getting along. In the sphere of education, even the education of ministers, we are not doing well at honoring the Lord who bought us.
Churches and individuals give sacrificially to seminaries in order to support the training of the next generation of pastors. But few, if any, such donors show up at the school to give it a thorough review and see exactly what their money is supporting. We simply assume the work is getting done; we believe seminary newsletters and press releases as if they were the fifth gospel. On the other hand, the authorities of the academic guild — who owe their allegiance to Dagon, let us not forget — police their boundaries religiously. If you’re going to award Ph.D. degrees, you must have x number of faculty, themselves with recognized Ph.D.s in this or that field, y number of books in the library to support the program, and so on–and they do show up on campus to check and see that you’re in compliance. Some of these standards make sense. Others not so much. The point, however, is that we allow ourselves to be inspected by the priests of Dagon, and attempt to manage the affair without making any compromises. Since the results of this have been discussed elsewhere as well as I could write them here, I’ll just link to one such discussion.
For my purposes, though, the point is that submission to the priests of Dagon is not a particularly helpful posture for a minister of Yahweh’s gospel. Perhaps in a given instance no harm comes from it, but does anybody really think it’s desirable?
There’s a lot of talk lately about pastoral plagiarism. It even got a mention in the NAE’s code of ethics a year and a half ago. Christianity Today’s Andy Crouch has a different, and extremely helpful, perspective on the real problems involved, and Doug Wilson has weighed in, in his own inimitable way. I won’t try to repeat what they have said so well. But as a working pastor (albeit in a nonstandard venue), I have my $0.02 to add to the conversation, for whatever it’s worth, and here it is.
In a nutshell, we’ve lost all sense of proportion, in two ways. We’re acting as though the citation standards for a college research paper apply to everything, which is nuts. Even more importantly, we’re getting distracted from what pastoral work is supposed to be, about which more in a moment. But let’s talk about citation standards first.
Apparently some academics would have me wear my cap, gown, and hood when I go swimming, but I ain’t gonna do it, and I don’t see any reason to pretend like I’m the crazy one here.
It doesn’t help that the citation “requirements” being advanced come from the academic world and have little relevance to other venues. (We’re now hearing about Twitter plagiarism, for heaven’s sake.) I’ve encountered the problem of academic customs being misapplied in pastoral settings in a number of places, but D. A. Carson’s article on the subject is a representative example.
Carson’s very restrictive stance is not surprising; he is an academic. In the academy, plagiarism is a major issue, because academics are being paid to come up with ideas and propagate them. An academic who is merely curating the ideas of others is not doing the job for which he is being paid, and he ought to be fired — especially if he’s trying to pass those ideas off as his own. A student in that arena is in the process of paying his dues to the academic guild, and has to learn to stick to the guild standards. This is not just a matter of “do it ’cause we said so” either. When I assign an essay in the classroom, I am finding out what (and how) my students think. I can’t learn what I need to know if the student appropriates someone else’s words or thoughts and doesn’t tell me that he’s done it. Academic citation standards are right and good, and glory to God for them; Carson’s article is wise counsel for the academic workplace. Unfortunately, Carson for some reason thinks that the standards of his workplace also apply to the pastoral workplace. They don’t.
A pastor is a shepherd and a physician of the soul. He is responsible for feeding the sheep, for facilitating their healing and growth, for delivering food and medicine. He is not responsible for documenting the provenance of every last bit of food and medicine any more than your waitress is responsible for documenting what farm the lettuce in your salad was grown on, or your surgeon is responsible for documenting which Chinese factory worker sharpened his scalpel. Now, should the lettuce or the scalpel blade turn out to have been contaminated with E. coli, we shall want to know exactly where they came from. Under the pressure of that sort of necessity, we will undoubtedly be able to find out. But under normal circumstances, no one cares, and no one should.
Now, a pastor may also be an author, an academic, a conference speaker, etc., and the overlapping roles can make things complicated. A popular book, a sermon, a master’s thesis, and a session at a marriage seminar all have their own standards and expectations. My Master’s thesis was expected to be my original work, and it was. Anything that wasn’t mine was supposed to be footnoted, and again, it was. If I one day publish a book, a similar set of expectations will apply, although exactly how it works will depend on the sort of book. An academic treatise will of course have many footnotes. In a different kind of work, credit may be given via a bibliography, a line in the acknowledgements, or a comment in the text itself. The genre sets the expectations.
When I preach a sermon on Romans 8, nobody expects the sermon to be made up entirely out of my own head. After all, I am preaching a passage that thousands have taught before me, and a truly original take on it is likely to be neither true nor helpful to the flock. Originality in this context is hardly a virtue, and adorning the simple truth of the passage by name-dropping famous commentators is just a waste of breath. My goal is to tell the truth about the passage, and to tell it in such a way that my people will live the truths of the passage, and be fed and healed as a result. If they are fed and healed, I have done my work well. End of story.
Moreover, when I construct a sermon, it is a collage of my own exegesis and experience, the insights of friends and mentors, things I’ve read and heard over the years, and more. Some of the influences I’m aware of, such as the commentaries sitting on my desk as I work. Others are half-remembered — analogies, exegetical insights or turns of phrase that I know I heard somewhere, but I can’t remember where. There are also influences that I’m wholly unaware of, things I ran across years ago that I have long since forgotten about, but that pop out in response to the need of the moment. I might very well believe that some of these are original with me — and I might very well be wrong. I am blessed to be well-read, well-traveled, and widely experienced, and there’s a lot of other people’s wonderful stuff lying about in “the leaf-mould of my mind,” as C. S. Lewis once put it. Any researcher with Google and a grudge might very well catch me out at any time, proving that someone else said thus-and-such long before I came along. In the event that happens, I’ll be happy to acknowledge that whether I came up with it independently or just read it and forgot about it, somebody else clearly said it first, and deserves credit for same. But the real problem there will be with the guy who spent 16 hours in front of a computer in a vengeful effort to convict me of “plagiarism,” not with me.
I have never tried to conceal my sources, and I have always been open with anyone who asked where I learned something. I appreciate it when people give me credit for stuff they learned from me, and I try to do the same for others as best I can. But I don’t pretend that academic practices of citation are appropriate for every venue for the same reason that I don’t wear my graduation regalia everywhere I go — because academic trappings are fine for the hothouse environment of academia, but woefully out of place elsewhere. Apparently some academics would have me wear my cap, gown and hood when I go swimming, but I ain’t gonna do it, and I don’t see any reason to pretend like I’m the crazy one here.
Of course, taking a whole sermon script from somewhere else — whether it’s a history book or one of those download services you can subscribe to — is another matter. I haven’t ever done that, and I don’t imagine I ever will, unless it’s a historical re-enactment of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” or some such thing, and presented that way. A pastor who thinks he can download a sermon once a week and in that way effectively feed the people God has given him doesn’t know his people very well, or doesn’t understand his task very well. But the problem here is much more serious than plagiarism or the ethics of ghostwriting; it’s poor shepherding. He isn’t tailoring the food and medicine to the needs of the unique sheep God has committed to his care — and that is his task.
That is a serious problem, and it is by no means limited to people who are willing to crib whole sermons from somewhere else. We are up to our necks in pastors who don’t know how to make disciples, which is the thing Jesus gave us to do. The people are wounded and starving, and all too often their pastors don’t know how to help them. It’s not entirely the pastors’ fault; little in their training prepared them to minister nourishment and healing in a timely fashion to actual people, so that they really heal and grow. And we’re worried about pastors that don’t footnote properly? Jeepers.
There is such a thing as a real case of appropriating someone else’s work and pretending it’s your own, and that’s a violation of the eighth and ninth commandments. There is such a thing as inadvertently failing to give credit for something that’s clearly someone else’s work — which seems to be what happened in the recent Driscoll situation — and that’s an honest mistake, to be confessed and rectified when it’s discovered. But this obsession with the bugbear of pastoral plagiarism is a waste of time, and distracts attention from a much more serious problem. “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.”
Perhaps we’ll be better off if we worry less about how pastors footnote, and more about how seminarians don’t learn to make disciples.
New Year’s Day is upon us, and with it, a flood of New Year’s resolutions. Gym memberships and workout DVDs will be purchased. Yoga pants will be worn (once). Classic works of literature will be opened. Journal entries will be written. Healthy recipes will be googled, and wheat grass juice will be guzzled. Scales will be dusted off. Credit cards will be cut up. File folders and closet organizers will be purchased. Hopes will be high. This year, I’m gonna do it! No, really!
And by Valentine’s Day, all will be forgotten. Because New Year’s resolutions, like Christmas trees, Jack-o-lanterns and fireworks, are a seasonal thing. You would no more keep a New Year’s resolution in May than you would carve a pumpkin in July. It’s the American way.
That said, the end of a year and the beginning of another is a natural time to stop and evaluate. For a few years now, I’ve had a practice of setting annual goals. Here are my rules:
Standard goal-setting wisdom applies. Goals should be realistic, measurable, etc. Metrics can be totally subjective, but they need to be meaningful. (e.g., if the goal is to exercise enough to feel better, then me feeling better is the measure. If the goal is to be more tender toward my wife, my subjective evaluation is not worth much — but hers is.)
Cover the range. Hitting my goals for the year should mean a fairly balanced life. This means, at minimum, goals that will challenge me physically, mentally, relationally, and spiritually.
Review goals constantly. I write my goals out and keep that piece of paper on my desk where I can see it all the time. I consciously review the list at least once a month, and evaluate how I’m doing. How I’m doing has to boil down to a simple statement, with no shilly-shallying about: “I am on track.” “I am lagging.” “I am ahead of schedule.” “I am failing.”
I am free to fail. If something that seemed worth doing in January just turns out not to be worth doing in the cold light of March, then I won’t feel obligated to do it. This is not a contract with myself. That said, it stays on the list through the end of the year. I will have to face it no less than once a month and say, “I am failing at xyz.” If I am pleased to be failing at it because the other things that are taking precedence really are more important, then so be it. If not, maybe I need to get back on the horse.
No repeats on failed goals. If it wasn’t important enough to do last year, then I’m not going to clutter up my list with it again this year. If I still think it’s important a year from now, it can go back on the list. Note that this does not apply to partial successes. The difference between partial success and abject failure is somewhat subjective, but it mostly hinges on whether the goal changed my lifestyle. Let me illustrate with a couple of my goals from last year. I set myself a goal to read through one book a month in a certain area. I think I did it through February, and stopped. That’s a failure. I still think it’s a good idea to do, but it clearly wasn’t a priority, and therefore it’s banned from this year’s list. I also set a goal of learning Sun Lu-Tang’s 98-posture Taiji form. It crossed my mind that it might take more than a year, but I figured I could handle it in a year if I really tried. In fact, the foundational movements and power-development exercises I had to master before I could even start the form ended up taking the first half of the year. I’m finishing the year with only about a third of the form learned. But I practice 4-6 days a week. The goal changed my lifestyle, so I consider it a success; I just didn’t get as far as I was hoping. I had never done Taiji before, and didn’t have a realistic appreciation for the learning curve. This year’s goal (to learn the remaining 2/3 of the form) is much more realistic.
I don’t have a rule about this, but I’m a big fan of brevity. My entire list of annual goals will fit on one side of a 3×5 card. More than that is too much to juggle, and makes it hard to constantly review.
Here’s a partial (but representative) look at my evaluation for the past year:
Spirit: Develop in marital and spiritual leadership.Success. I’ve been presented with leadership roles that I couldn’t have handled a year ago, and been able to step into them handily. The spiritual focus in my marriage is stronger than it was a year ago — we’re more in sync with God and each other. (Sounds fuzzy, but I can feel the difference.)
Body: Regular workouts.Partial success. My martial arts workouts were regular and numerous. My workouts for attributes (strength, endurance, looseness, freedom of movement) were no less than once a week, but much more sporadic than they could have been.
Body: Focus on power generation in my martial arts practice.Success. I had occasion not only to focus on power generation in my own practice, but to teach a lot of what I know — and I probably learned more by teaching than I’ve ever learned any other way.
Mind: Write the novel I’ve been working on over the course of the year.Failure. I did nothing until October, prepped a little, and then tried to ram through it in November, using NaNoWriMo as a vehicle. It didn’t work; I can’t improvise my way through a mystery story — just too much to have in my head at once.
Career: Greater control of my schedule. Success. My better choice of bus route package this year allows me more freedom to make and honor commitments. We are well positioned to begin curriculum sales that have a good chance of freeing me from the need to drive a bus over the next couple years, which would greatly increase my flexibility. Meanwhile, I have increased my margin by dropping a weeknight commitment, and I have successfully maintained a day of rest most weeks.
Where there is success here, it is very much God’s doing. In a number of these areas where I was seeking growth, I didn’t have a clue how to make it happen. The goal was more a prayer than anything else, and overwhelmingly, God answered those quasi-prayers, often in very unexpected ways. It’s been my pleasure to learn from what God did, and apply what I learned to setting further goals for this year.
Do you set goals for your year? How do you decide on them?
Headwaters Christian Resources has just released a brand-new Bible curriculum sample packet containing 3-4 lessons from each of the three years: Old Testament, New Testament, and Christian Worldview. Of course the intent is to fascinate you so that you buy our curriculum when it’s released this spring — but quite apart from that, consider what you’re getting. The samples consist of entire lessons, and most of them will teach well as stand-alone lessons. They’re yours, absolutely free. We encourage you to read them for your personal benefit, and use them in whatever venues you like. Have a look!
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God of all comfort, who sent Your Son to be for us a man of sorrows and to bear our grief even to death: Grant that we may keep our eyes fixed on You in hope, and hoping in You, that we may live as agents of Your blessing in the world, through Jesus our Lord and brother, who having passed before us through shame, despair and death and triumphed over them now lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.
Posted by Tim Nichols 
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