Preaching Question of the Week: Where do you find reminders of God's love?

Dallas Willard writes that we preachers can tell if we are running dry spiritually by the kinds of questions we ask ourselves right after the worship service is over. When our first questions are, "How did it go?" or "What could I have done differently?" there is a good chance that we are running on empty. It's not because spiritually full preachers never preach bad sermons. They can and do. Rather, it's because those who have found their deepest satisfaction in Christ know that how the service or sermon goes depends upon God far more than it depends upon us. We should do our best, yes, but without God our best is never good enough.

Empty preachers are constantly attempting to fill themselves up with the assurance that the service went well - the preacher's equivalent of the schoolboy's good grade. Preachers filled to the brim with God's presence know that "successful" services are a poor substitute for the presence of God, who can be present in the poorest of services.

I admit, this word strikes at one of my most glaring weakness as a preacher. So often I look for satisfaction not in the love of God about which I preach, but rather, in preaching well about the love of God. How silly. How excruciatingly frustrating. My performance never satisfies, nor was it meant to satisfy that part of my soul that was meant for God alone. I remember a line from an old Switchfoot song, a prayer really, "God, let me know that you love me, and let that be enough." I don't pray that prayer nearly enough.

So the question of the week is this - Is this a struggle for you? If so, how do resist the urge to find your worth in preaching instead of in the God of whom you preach? Where in life and ministry do you find the best reminders of God's love?

Illustration-a-day: Judgment is a good thing.

N. T. Wright, one of the top Christian thinkers of our day, reminds us, that while the word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our postmodern world, “throughout the Bible God's coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.”

N. T. Wright,Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church(San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008), 137.

Illustration-a-day: I didn't know I was supposed to be seeing more

Recently, my eyes have been failing me. I'd get to about four o'clock in the afternoon and I just couldn't focus on anything anymore. It wasn't that I couldn't see, I could see fine (or so I thought) but man my eyes hurt. Reading was out of the question, but even watching TV seemed to be too much. So I went to the optomitrist. Interestingly, my eyes were not that bad, but they were just enough different from one another that after lots and lots of reading and computer work, they were fairly stressed out. He wrote me a perscription for some glasses.

The day I picked up my glasses, was quite a revelation. On the drive home I kept lowering and then raising my new glasses to my eyes. Amazing! I had no clue how much I'd been missing: individual leaves and twigs in the trees, the texture of the road, letters the street signs before you get to them. To be honest, the change wasn't as drastic as it is for most people with glasses - again, my perscription is a weak one - but I was giddy and my eyes rejoiced. No more stressing, squinting, and straining to see the world as it was meant to be seen.

The apostle Paul tells us that because of Christ's death on the cross we no longer "regard anyone from a worldly point of view." Instead, through the lense of God's love, we see them as they were meant to be seen, not as nameless faces, not as threatening competitors, not as hated enemies, but as men and women loved by God. When you look at others do you remember to look at them through the love of God?