trying real hard

May the words of my mouth
      and the meditation of my heart
   be pleasing to you,
      O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

I have always tried to do what is right, to make my life a praise offering to God. I have not always done well, and have made some bad mistakes.

Even in my failures, I have always tried.

But I was thinking about the end of my pastoring. It is in many ways, the death of a dream.

Back in seminary, Gene, a classmate and a friend, told me that the best thing about all this (preparing for the ministry) was that we got to do what so many people wanted to do, but didn’t have time. It, to him, was almost like working your hobby as a job.

We were excited. We would preach and teach people. We always made promises that we would never give half-hearted sermons, stuff we had taken from other people.

And for the most part I have kept that promise. Occasionally I will get a sermon idea from someone else, but I always try to make it mine from my perspective. I can no more imagine preaching someone else’s sermons than wearing someone else’s underwear.

I always preached from a minimal outline if an outline at all. Some preachers preach fully written out sermons, basically reading back to the audience what they have written in long from. Some use long outlines, some short. I have learned to preach using no outline. I always liked it and made it more extemporaneous.

But  I have noticed in the past couple of years, my sermons are becoming less alive. As I have gotten older I have gone more to a teaching style anyway rather than a bombastic one.

And I have gotten tired. That saps the juice out of what you say.

One of the people who left the church came by the house to tell me in detail why he didn’t like me and why the Lord didn’t like me. He was pretty explicit, even to my moving of some church furniture to places he didn’t like. He also mentioned my “sermonettes.”

I suppose that in his mind a sermon should be long and full of bluster, what one called a “God shouter” sermon. Mine are typically 30-35 minutes long. He was mad because I didn’t use enough scripture, even though my sermons are usually filled with scripture. The difference, I suppose, is that I do not read the scripture with my Bible open and hammer on the Bible while I do.

Anyone who knows me and listens to what I have to say knows that I tend to quote a lot of scripture with some reference, like Jesus and the apostle Paul did. But he didn’t like that.

Another woman, who was a friend of the man’s, also told me that the Foursquare Church was wrong in ordaining me because I had no anointing. I was just no good. She did this over Facebook which I thought was truly holy.

But even so, it has come to me that maybe they are right. Maybe I have lost what I had and need to stop.

So I am stopping what I have done all my life. And it hurts. I write this and will probably write more to try to figure out how to deal with the pain of the death of the dream.

The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 3:11-14:  

For no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have—Jesus Christ. Anyone who builds on that foundation may use a variety of materials—gold, silver, jewels, wood, hay, or straw. But on the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done. The fire will show if a person’s work has any value. If the work survives, that builder will receive a reward. But if the work is burned up, the builder will suffer great loss. The builder will be saved, but like someone barely escaping through a wall of flames.

So I guess here I stand with a house made of straw. I stand before God with not a whole lot, but I know he will save the builder: me. He built his church (Matthew 16:18) and I build on his foundation.

Maybe not very well, but it is too late to worry about it now.