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Dangerous Calling Email – Daily Intervention

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Here’s the email I sent leaders at Crestview today, 4/3…

As we continue to think about Paul Tripp’s Dangerous Calling and follow up on Sessions 3 and 4 of the DVD, I turn my attention to Chapter 5, Joints and Ligaments.  I don’t know if you realize this or not, but, as Tripp says in this chapter, 100% of people reading this are deceived by sin.  “The blinding ability of sin is so powerful and persuasive that you and I literally need daily intervention.  What the writer of Hebrews is crushing with this warning and call [that none of us are hardened by the deceitfulness of sin] is any allegiance we might have to an isolated, individualized “Jesus and me” Christianity.  He is arguing for the essentiality of the ministry of others in the life of every believer. 
“And what is this daily ministry of intervention protecting us from?  The answer should sober every one of us: the grace of having our private conversations interrupted by the insight-giving ministry of others is protecting us from being spiritually blinded to the point of hardening our hearts.”  (both of these quotes are found on p.73)
I don’t know if any of you let anyone into your life with this kind of transparency but this isn’t a call for the zealous or the extrovert.  It’s a call for anyone who tends to be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin (which would be all of us).  Next time you get defensive or push back when someone appears to be prying into a personal area, why not realize that it’s God’s grace rather that some pushy person that coming to rescue you. 
For us to be godly leaders, men, we must embrace the daily intervention required to bring sin to the light.  Let’s embrace this for the glory of God and the good of those we are privileged to serve. 
Have a great week.

Dangerous Calling Email – It’s About The Heart

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Here’s an email I sent to our Elders and Deacons this week:

We enjoyed a great Elders/Deacons meeting this past Monday and watched Sessions 3 & 4 of the Dangerous Calling DVDs.  As usual, Tripp delivered pointed and Biblical counsel.  And, as we follow up on the suggested reading, we end up back in Chapter 4 entitled “More Than Knowledge and Skill.”  If you’ve had time to interact with this chapter at all, you know that what Tripp is driving at is that ministry isn’t so much about what we know or what we’re able to do, but the nature of our heart relationship to God.  That heart nurtured before the Lord makes all the difference, for instance, in how we care for our wives, parent our children, relate to our coworkers and a host of other countless little things.  The heart processes our engagement with others. 
So, how is your heart this week?  If we go by Jesus’ standard that out of the mouth the heart speaks, what have your words revealed about your heart?  Might you need to repent and return again to Jesus?  Your ministry is about the impressive acts of service you can muster or what latest and greatest theological piece you’ve mastered.  It’s about your heart in right relationship to Jesus.  Nurture that this week, for the glory of God and the good of His people. 
Have a blessed weekend.  

Dangerous Calling Email – All Too Familiar

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My email to leaders in our local church highlighting a chapter from Paul Tripp’s Dangerous Calling book went like this on 3/6/13:

So far as we’ve moved through recommended reading out of sessions 1 and 2 of the DVDs, we’ve been working through Dangerous Calling chapters 1-5 consecutively.  Now, we fast forward to Chapter 8, Familiarity.  Tripp’s big point here is that there’s a great danger for those of us in church leadership when it comes to God.  “What is the danger?  It is that familiarity with the things of God will cause you to lose your awe.”  “Awe of God must dominate my ministry, because one of the central missional gifts of the gospel of Jesus Christ is to give people back their awe of God.”  One part of this that was especially relevant and convicting for me was the relationship between our awe of God and theology.  Here’s Tripp: “Awe of God is one of the things that will keep a church from running off its rails and being diverted by the many agendas that can sidetrack any congregation.  Awe of God puts theology in its place.  Theology is vitally important, but whatever awe of theology we have is dangerous if it doesn’t produce in us a practical awe of God.”   
Now, there’s probably much more that could be said about this, but, gentlemen, have you lost your awe of God?  Have you slowly began to confuse awing Him with activity?  Today, as Tripp concludes, “I don’t have a set of strategies for you here.  My counsel is to run now, run quickly, to your Father of awesome glory.  Confess the offense of your boredom.  Plead for eyes that are open to the 360-degree, 24/7 display of glory to which you have been blind.  Determine to spend a certain portion of every day in meditating on his glory.  Cry out for the help of others.  And remind yourself to be thankful for Jesus, who offers you his grace even at those moments when that grace isn’t nearly as valuable to you as it should be.”
With you in the all too familiar, longing for more of Him…

Dangerous Calling Email – Needing The Body

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As our leadership team reads through Dangerous Calling together, I try to pull together a devotional insight for us.  Here’s one from Chapter 5:

Chapter 5 of Dangerous Calling (if you’re reading roughly a chapter a week) is the chapter we come to this week.  It’s called Joints and Ligaments.  The point: leaders are not above the ministry of the body of Christ, they are in need of the body of Christ.  Using Hebrews 3:12-13 as a springboard, Tripp outlines the critical warning: see to it that none of you has an evil—unbelieving, falling away—hardened heart.  He then follows that up with the essential call of this passage: encourage each other daily so that sin doesn’t do its blinding work in you.
Much of this chapter is written to pop the ministry bubble that pastors often live in, devoid of the body of Christ.  So, it’s a great reminder for us.  The question Tripp began this chapter might be an appropriate way to end: “Who are you and what do you spiritually need?”  Know that I’m here for you if you need to talk and I know many of you are there for me.  Let’s model the body of Christ in action to our body and see if it doesn’t help our people see how glorious the Gospel we believe is.

Dangerous Calling Email – Heart of the Matter

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Here’s the email I sent leaders at my church this week related to Paul Tripp’s Dangerous Calling book, Chapter 4:

Did you grow up watching Bugs Bunny cartoons?  It seemed that ever so often the plot involved Bugs being very tired and drained in a desert, only to see an oasis of rest in the distance.  He would run up and start drinking what he thought was water only to have sand in his mouth.  This mirage deceived him.  In Dangerous Calling, Paul Tripp unpacks the mirage of ministry for us in Chapter 4: “More Than Knowledge and Skill.”   He begins with an illustration of a church that hired a pastor only to learn that he didn’t end up being what they thought he was. 
Here’s a great summary paragraph: “I’m convinced that the big crisis for the church of Jesus Christ is not that we are easily dissatisfied but that we are all too easily satisfied.  We have a regular and perverse ability to make things work that are not and should not be working.  We learn to adjust to things that we should alter. We learn to be okay with things we should be confronting.  We learn how to avoid things we should be facing.  We would rather be comfortable that to hold people accountable.  We swindle ourselves into thinking that things are better than they are, and in so doing we compromise the calling and standards of the God we say we love and serve.  Like sick people who are afraid of the doctor, we collect evidence that points to our health, when really, in our heart of hearts, we know we are sick.  So we settle for a human second best, when God, in grace, offers u so much more.” 
Wowzer, that’s definitely the case often isn’t it?  Tripp continues saying that our ministry is never just shaped by our knowledge, experience and skill.  It always shaped by the true condition of our hearts.  On pp.61-62 there are some great questions that might reveal our hearts.  I commend those to you for study.  The solution is so simple: we “must be enthralled by, in awe of—can I say it: in love with—[our] Redeemer so that everything [we] think, desire, choose, decide, say, and do is propelled by love for Christ and the security of rest in the love of Christ.”  “The heart is the inescapable X factor in ministry.”  So, today, what’s being revealed in your heart?  This chapter, for me at least, is one in which I need to put away my “inner lawyer” (Tripp’s words again) and ask for a tender spirit before the Lord.  What’s being revealed out of your heart today?  Find encouragement in the glorious Gospel.

Dangerous Calling Email – Chapter 2

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Here’s an email I wrote to our church leadership about Tripp’s Dangerous Calling.  I entitled this one “Losing Focus.”

I don’t know if you take many pictures, but I find myself taking pics all the time on my phone.  Just this week, I snapped one to use in a document only to find that once I transferred it, the picture ended up being blurry.  Evidently, my desire to take pics isn’t matched by a steady hand.  In chapter 2 of Dangerous Calling, entitled, “Again and Again,” Tripp helps shine light on why so many can lose their way (read focus) in ministry.  Here’s the nine points he makes:
1) Ignore clear evidence of problems.
2) Be blind to issues of his own heart.
3) Lack of devotion.
4) Not preaching the Gospel to himself.
5) Not listening to those closest to him.
6) Ministry became burdensome.
7) Begin to live in silence.
8) Begin to question calling.
9) Give away to fantasies of another life.
Here’s the concluding charge:  “No, not all of these characteristics are in the lives of each of the men I have talked with, but in all of them many of these things are operating.  And not only are they operating, but they are operating outside of the motivating, encouraging, empowering, transforming, and delivering truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I write this because I am concerned for me and I am concerned for you.  And I am concerned for the culture in our churches that allows this to happen unchecked.”
So, gentlemen, let’s take a look at our hearts today.  Let’s check them so that we can freshly apply the Gospel to them and grow in our fellowship to God and one another. 
Have a great week.

Dangerous Calling – For All In Ministry

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The latest book from Paul Tripp entitled Dangerous Calling helps show the unique temptations that go with being involved in Christian Ministry.  Tripp is masterful, as usual, in exposing our hearts and their most desperate need: God and the Gospel.  This year, we will be taking our leaders through the DVD and taking some time to consider how God might be directing us, exposing our weaknesses, so that He might be supremely glorified.

Here’s a teaser of the videos:

Dangerous Calling from Crossway on Vimeo.

Relationships & Eternity…

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I’m reading Paul Tripp’s latest book, Forever, and today was privileged to read a chapter entitled Forever and Your Relationships.  Read this amazing excerpt unpacking how forever reminds us of where we are living:

Most if not all relationships will go through times of difficulty and stress. A good relationship, then, is a humble and needy relationship in which both parties admit that they haven’t arrived and are not perfect. They are approachable, willing to listen to the concerns of the other, willing to admit and face their shortcomings. They do not give way to thinking that they are mature and the other person is not. A good relationship doesn’t get stuck in a cycle of expectation, disappointment, criticism, and punishment. It doesn’t give way to the hopelessness that often grips relationships when change doesn’t seem to be happening. A good relationship is good because each person is patient and understanding. Each seeks to encourage the other to grow while resisting laying unrealistic burdens on the shoulders of the other person.

And Tripp’s point of pursuing this is that

“Forever tells us that all relationships exist in a world that is broken in need of redemption.”

Might it be that one reason your relationships are so frustrating and not “good” is that you are not viewing them in the light of eternity which is screaming to us that one day God will make all things new. We are in process. Therefore, be patient with your spouse and those you relate to. God’s not finished the work of sanctification in you or them yet.

Paul Tripp on Marriage

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I’ve used Paul Tripp’s What Did You Expect? to walk with people in pre-marital, marriage enrichment, or marriage class about 5 times since it came out and continue to commend it.

As he begins in session 1 of this, he says “A marriage of unity, understanding, and love is not rooted in romance; it is rooted in worship.”  As you think about your relationship, how is worship affecting you?  We must put our identity over our activity (to quote Tripp again).  We won’t honor God in our marriages until we honor God in our marriages.  He must be supreme.

Today, look at what your heart is revealing as the true source of worship and see if this isn’t just part of what God is seeking to change in you.