Discipleship Letter 97 August 01st, 2010
“It is no easy task to walk this earth and find peace. Inside of us, it would seem, something is at odds with the very rhythm of things and we are forever restless, dissatisfied, frustrated, and aching. We are so overcharged with desire that it is hard to come to simple rest. Desire is always stronger than satisfaction. Put more simply, there is within us a fundamental dis-ease…” [Ronald Rolheiser, Seeking Spirituality: Guidelines for a Christian Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century (London: Hodder & Stoughton), p. 3.].
What do we do with our unrest? Our longings? Our desire? The way we deal with our unrest is our Christian living. Augustine said, “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” We are not at ease because we have a dis-ease within us as creatures. Only the Creator can fulfill our total needs.
Christian growth has something to do with how we handle our longings. The practice of solitude creates space for us to detect the source of our unrest and for God to say to us, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10).
Don’t quench our longings by staying busy or ignorant, for our longings point us to the transcendent One and help us more attentive to the “still, small voice” of God (1 Kgs. 19:13).
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Discipleship Letter 98 August 08th, 2010
This is what I usually feel in my pastorate:
“Most of our people have no idea what two or three new messages a week cost us in terms of intellectual and spiritual drain. Not to mention the depletions of family pain, church decisions, and imponderable theological and moral dilemmas. I, for one, am not a self-replenishing spring. My bucket leaks, even when it is not pouring. My spirit does not revive on the run. Without time of unhurried reading and reflection, beyond the press of sermon preparation, my soul shrinks, and the specter of ministerial death rises.”
And this is the vision that I’ve been pursuing in my pastorate:
“The great pressure on us today is to be productive managers. But the need of the church is for prayerful, spiritual poets…I mean pastors who feel the weight and glory of eternal reality even in the midst of a business meeting; who carry in their soul such a sense of God that they provide…a constant life-giving reorientation on the infinite God. For your own soul and for the life of your church, fight for time to feed your soul with rich reading. Almost all the forces in our culture are trivializing. If you want to stay alive to what is great and glorious and beautiful and eternal, you will have to fight for time to look through the eyes of others who were in touch with God.”
[Taken from John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2002), p. 66.]
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