Spelling “ministry” with a “me.”
Oct 14th by Jon- Tagged in:
- ministry
My friend Joel Thomas is incredibly cool and calm before he speaks to large groups of people. I’m pretty sure my friend Jarrett Stevens could perform lasik laser eye surgery before he takes the stage his hands are so perfectly chill.
Me? I’m sweaty. I’m anxious. The butterflies in my stomach aren’t tangled and nervous, they’re on meth.
Maybe I’ll lose that if I get the chance to speak more, but for right now that’s what happens in the moments before I speak. Except at the North Points Singles Retreat. That one was a little different.
Ten minutes before I jumped up on the stage and did my thing in front of maybe a few hundred people, I told a friend about one of things I was going to talk about.
He casually replied, “Oh, that’s cool. The woman who spoke last night covered that same verse and idea.”
If it were possible to do it without anyone seeing, I probably would have thrown up in my pants pocket at that exact moment.
Let me translate what my friend said into Jon language …
“Oh, that’s cool. The woman who spoke to everyone who is about 10 minutes away from hearing your breakout message spoke about the same thing. Her speech was really original. You should have heard it. You would have liked it, much like everyone else. They loved it. You should have heard the life change that was happening in the room last night. I mean it was audible, like bubble wrap popping. Just amazing. I’m sure they’ll like hearing that same message a second time though, ten hours later. Sure, it’s always fun to hear something ‘newish.’ I mean brand new is better, but newish is nice too. You should probably change whatever your opener was though to ‘I’m not original.’ Good luck with all that Jon.”
Into an already cluttered head, that message tumbled like marbles down a flight of wooden stairs. I started to worry that everyone in the crowd would think I stole her idea. That I was a hack of a public speaker. That I couldn’t come up with material and that they shouldn’t have invited me to speak. Me, me, me, me, me.
Suddenly the whole thing was about me. My ministry. My reputation. My speaking. My message. Suddenly I crowded God right out of the picture and made the whole thing about me.
And it’s weird how that happens. Sometimes even when you think you’re headed in the right direction, even when you think you’re out serving the Lord, it gets tangled. You get a few readers to your blog. Your church grows a little. Your ministry gets a bump and people start thinking you’re something a little special. And then it’s complicated, much like Avril Lavigne tried to warn us. The lines of doing something for God and doing something for yourself get a little blurred.
I don’t want it to be so complex. I want it to be simple and it turns out, it is. Though I often wrestle with issues without consulting the Bible first (which is ridiculous when you think about it, we’ve got more than 1,000 pages of God saying “here, this is what life is all about”) this time I did. And lo and behold, the Bible has five words that to me, define what it’s all about to have a ministry.
In John chapter 1, John sees Jesus for the second time. At this point, John has his own followers. He’s built up a nice little ministry. There are disciples of John. He has a crew. An entourage if you will. And what does he do when he sees Jesus walk by? What does John say to his disciples in 1:36?
“Look, the lamb of God.”
What do his disciples do in response?
They leave. They follow Jesus. They abandon John standing there suddenly short two disciples.
I didn’t want that to happen when I spoke a few weeks ago. When I found out I might look repetitive or like a copycat during my speech, I got worried that people would leave “my” ministry. I missed the point.
The point isn’t me. The point is Jesus.
I think the point, no matter if you’ve got a blog with two readers or a church with 20,000 people attending is pretty simple:
“Look, the lamb of God.”
Look, the lamb of God.
Don’t worry about yourself. Don’t get lost in trying to grow your thing. Just say five words and get out of the way. It’s that simple.
Look, the lamb of God.
Does having a ministry, whether that’s talking to your coworkers about church last weekend or actually leading a church ever feel complicated to you?
“Look, the lamb of God” is my mission for ministry, what’s your mission?
Comments
This is a super late comment, but just to encourage you, once I was at a conference years ago where i heard almost the exact same message preached twice in a row and it really impacted me because I needed to hear it so much, but the first time I was hard-headed and didn't really let the word of God into my heart. The next day when almost the same thing was preached it made me think that just maybe God really wanted me to believe in that message, that it was meant specifically for my life, which really gave me hope.
There were probably a lot of people that really needed to hear that message more than once.