daily java

Daily Java:

Arise, O God, and defend your cause.
      Remember how these fools insult you all day long.
Don’t overlook what your enemies have said
      or their growing uproar. (Psalm 74:1-2)

I was just listening to that old song Have I Stayed Too Long At The Fair (in the post before this one)?

It was a rather plaintive song in which a woman asked if she had just lived too long. Had they outlived their usefulness, their dream? The music had stopped, the clown was no longer clever, the ribbons were no longer shiny and pretty.

There’s nothing to sin and there’s no one to want me. Have I stayed too long at the fair?

I think I stayed too long at what I have been doing. For the past several years it has seemed that I was spinning my wheels, accomplishing nothing, being in general a fool.

I always thought of myself as a fool for Christ (1 Corinthians 4). Here the apostle Paul says that so many had considered them foolish for what they did and what they suffered. His answer was that he would gladly be considered a fool for the sake of Jesus Christ.

I always thought that. Then I began to wonder: what if I was just a freelance fool and just happened to be working for Christ and not for, say, Amway or something like that?

What if I had been doing what I had been doing for too long and had ceased to be useful?

What if the calling of God – if ever there in the first place – had ceased in my life and all I was doing was “kicking against the pricks” as the Old King James Version says in Acts 9?

Things which were good are no longer that, ways in which I worked I am unable to now. Preaching itself, something that was so easy to me, has become difficult. I have gotten to where everything I do in ministry seems wooden and rote, and all of the joy is leached out of it.

Some of it is the resistance against me that has always been in my ministry and always will be. I have gotten tired of the people who feel it God’s will to tear me down. And I have gotten tired of the people in the churches I have sacrificed for who have felt it inevitable to give in to them.

This very church I am leaving has gone right back to the people who were tearing it up and accepted them back into their fellowship. It is almost too much to bear. These people have driven off two ministers now that I am leaving. They have done a lot of damage to the kingdom. Yet they are back to leading worship and dictating policy for the church.

They left when I was there because they knew they could not control me, but now that I have left, they crow about how they were “praying me out.”

This has gone on too long, I suppose, that I have come to feel that whatever anointing I had, if any to begin with, is gone.

There are things I did so easily as a minister, and many of them I felt God had given me. but they seem gone and so is my spirit, my joy.

I just stayed too long and need to go do something else. I just wish God would do something about these fools who insult him by their very presence in his church.

Someone once said that we knew it was God’s church. Otherwise, the brethren would have destroyed it.

So it goes. Today I move and, lucky me, it is raining. Why am I not surprised?