Number | think and let think

Devotional:

Jeremiah 1.6-7

Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you.”

Weekly Devotional Image

I was out in my front yard when the two young men wheeled up with their too tight helmets and their too long black skinny ties.

Mormons.

I had seen them around the neighborhood on a number of occasions but always in passing and they never seemed to notice me. But now here we were, standing on the sidewalk when the taller of the two introduced himself and immediately began with, “Excuse me, but do you know Jesus?”

Do I know Jesus?

For a moment I thought about lying, I thought about pretending I had never ever heard of the man, just to see what kind of lecture I was going to receive.

But I was tired, and in no mood to be evangelized. So I simply said, “I sure do, and I tell people about him every Sunday, I’m a pastor.”

The two monochromatically dressed missionaries stared at me in disbelief until the smaller one said, “Gee, I thought pastors had to be old.”

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It has amazed me how much my age in relation to my vocation is brought up on a regular basis. And, to be perfectly honest, I don’t even look very young. I’m losing my hair and I have a fairly sizable beard.

And yet, there is this strange expectation that to be involved in the duties of pastoral ministry requires a look of weathering!

When called called Jeremiah to his vocation of being a prophet, Jeremiah promptly responded with doubts about his usefulness precisely because of his age. And God hears none of it: “This isn’t about you or your age or your experience; it’s about what I’m going to do through you!”

Throughout my varied experiences in varied churches there is this limiting belief that God can only call certain kinds of people to certain kinds of tasks. Churches want extraverted people leading worship, but they also wanted introverted people to visit them in the hospital. They want young ministers to help bring in young families, but they want old pastors who can work from experience.

In the church, almost more than anywhere else, age is nothing but a number. Time and time again throughout the Bible God calls upon people regardless of their age, or their experience, or even their talents simply because God is the one who will work through them.

Do you feel unqualified for something that’s happening in church? Do you believe your abilities might be best suited elsewhere? Has God called you to something that you think is impossible?

These are important questions, but like Jeremiah, we do well to remember that it’s not really about us; it’s about what God can do through us.

Devotional:

Psalm 90.12

So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.

Weekly Devotional Image

These are frightening words. We can read through the Psalms and discover just about every human emotion under the sun; we can dance with joy and weep with sorrow, we can raise our fists and anger and fall to our knees in gratitude. But confronting our mortality? That’s a challenge.

When I was in seminary one of my professors told me that the hardest thing about being a pastor is that I have to remind people that they are dying when everything and everyone else tries to claim the contrary. I have been given the unenviable tasks of proclaiming the deep truth of our mortality in hospital rooms, in church offices, and always at the grave.

Most of us are tempted to believe that we are invincible and that life will never catch up with us. We are tempted to believe that death isn’t real. Countless commercials and products are advertised with the sole purpose of prolonging our inevitable end. Even in church, we spend so much time talking about the joy and hope of God in the resurrection from the dead, that we fail to spend adequate time reminding ourselves of our own earthly finality.

I received a phone call yesterday afternoon from our church secretary informing me that there had been an accident on the church property. A man was driving under the influence and lost control of his vehicle, smashed into our church sign, and eventually flipped over until it came to a stop. The man was quickly rushed to the hospital where he was treated for relatively minor injuries. And when I spoke with the police officers on the scene they kept saying the same thing over and over again, “He’s so lucky it wasn’t worse.”

Death is a frightening thing. Contemplating our finitude is by far one of the strangest things we do as Christians. But in the end, we do it so that we may gain wiser hearts, so that God might sustain us in the midst of our sinful lives, and above all so that we can appreciate the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and take solace in the glory of the resurrection.

It is my prayer that the man who crashed his car into our church sign yesterday will count his days and gain a wiser heart. Through God’s grace I hope he see’s his life for the tremendous gift that it is, and he gives thanks for all that has been given to him; including one more day.