12-8-05

What do ministers want for their churches?  More people, more money, more
baptisms, more volunteers, more faithfulness, and I could name dozens of
such things.  I would love to see those things myself in our church.  But, I
really want to long to see God work in our church like He worked in the New
Testament church.  Somehow, all the reasons people give for why He does not
work that way just don't quite ring true to me.  

I have been in many churches that talked like God was doing just that, but I
never really saw it.  We went to a church once to sing when our bass player
was sick with terminal cancer.  We heard the next week that he had been
healed during that service when the church prayed for him!   He wasn't.  

It is not that we do not see physical healing - we have had some here which
were obviously miraculous and I am so thankful to even know about them
much less to know the people personally.  Lately, though, I have been thinking
about people responding to the gospel as they did in the early church, and
God's own people responding to His presence as they did then.   Those things
should seem more important to see and experience than healing, money, and
other things we often want to see more than we want to see God Himself.  

What am I getting at?  We want - long for - the wrong things so many times.   
Ministers must be careful to want the right things.  Things like Jesus being
honored as our reputation becomes meaningless.  Like people praising Jesus
for who He is rather than praising  what we have said about Him.  And like
people giving themselves completely to God and His purposes rather than our
projects and programs.  

I'm just talking to myself here and you are likely not a pastor anyway, but if you
belong to Christ you are a minister.  You are called to minister to Christ as a
living sacrifice and to minister to the body with the gifts given to you as the
Spirit of God willed to give them.  So, fellow minister, what do you want for
your church and what can we all do to ensure we desire in our very hearts the
best things?

Dale  


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