daily java

Daily Java:

For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for you Gentiles, too. And this is the secret: Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing his glory. So we tell others about Christ, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all the wisdom God has given us. We want to present them to God, perfect in their relationship to Christ. (Colossians 1:27-28)

Because the kingdom came out of the Jewish faith, the Jews thought they had primary rights to both the entrance into the faith and establishing entrance requirements for everybody else. And as far as they were concerned, to become a Christian, you had to become a Jew and do it their way.

Paul said no. God is a God of grace, not of works and the old system was based on works.

Arguments ensued and Paul was run out of town in almost every occasion by those who were his spiritual kin. He didn’t do things their way so they beat him and threw him out.

Many times, that is how it works. Those who have been somewhere a long time begin to want to decide how others can come into what they perceive as their property. We want the church to grow, it is said. Well, how will the church grow? By doing what we want, by doing what we did when we were young.

As America gets older, the licensing departments in almost every organization gets more and more complex. In the old days, all a person had to do to be a lawyer was take the bar exam. Now he has to go to an accredited school before he could. Most lawyers before about 1950 or so had never gone to law school. They just had a mentor show them how it worked and they read a lot. Then they passed the exam.

The same is with ministers. At one time, all one did to be a minister of many denominations was to announce they had that desire and, if their lives showed evidence of that desire, a church would employ them.

One of the denominations I was associated with in the past had an incredibly detailed entrance examination. In just a couple of years, their history and polity course increased a thousand percent in size and complexity.

This was a denomination that had come out of extremely common people and I could be wrong, but I think they were trying to prove to the rest of the religious world that they were cool now, too. And yet they bemoaned the fact that no young people would advance in the ordination process.

These young ministers would achieve the first step and then stay. The reason, of course, was that they didn’t want to hassle with all of the bureaucratic steps. They felt God had called them and didn’t feel the need to have a bunch of people make them confirm that by paying a lot of money for unnecessary courses and jumping through unnecessary hoops.

That may or may not be true. The denomination came out of a group of people who were at times proud of their ignorance and known for their ignorance. They needed to move beyond that. But at the same time, they had to recognize that God empowered people, not denominations.

In other words, if Christ lives in you,  you are empowered. Yes, you need to read and not look like a hick. Ours is an increasingly complex and educated world. For a pastor to do well, he has to fit in. An ignorant preacher will not do much good in most of society.

At the same time, what we preach can only be what is in us. We can only present them to God, perfect in their relationship to God if we have him in us, perfect in our relationship.

We can only teach with all the wisdom God has given us if we have wisdom in us in the first place. And we can only get that wisdom from God who gives wisdom.

God empowers, man obeys. I do not believe in ignorant preachers. But an highly educated credentialed minister who does not have God nor his wisdom is worthless in the sight of God. You cannot teach what you do not have, no matter how credentialed nor how educated.

You can only preach Jesus if you have Jesus in your heart.