What to do next? |
| Posted by Bill Orf (billorf) on Aug 08 2007 at 10:06 AM |
I have always been the kind of person that moved from one thing to the next. Typically I would do something until I gained a useable level of competence, then I would quit. This kind of character is one that generates a jack of all trades, master of none. Throughout my first 30 years of life it showed up primarily in my sporting endeavors. From age 5, I played soccer, Baseball and was a gymnast all the way up through Jr. High, and then I decided to quit them all and began to play football, wrestle and pole-vault on the track team. In college I stuck with pole-vault but quit the rest and replaced them with being a race horse jockey and a bareback rider in the rodeo. A few years latter I quit the horse jockeying and pole vault and pursued a career in rodeo. I did that successfully for about six years and then that ended as well. Now I have been in full time ministry for about six years and I found myself reflecting on this pattern as I considered what I was to do next.
During the past couple months I have considered this question and examined what I believed the Lord had revealed to me. This is what I have found rest in. Only our Father knows what activities I will be involved in from day to day. But now I know that I only have one goal and that is a deeper and richer relationship with our Father. And I will be doing that same thing from now throughout all eternity. Our Father has shown me how it is not only those things that we typically categorize as sin that interferes with our intimacy with him. But it is anything, even a holy religious act, that becomes closer to our heart that obedience to him.
A couple months ago, our Father asked me to lay down the ministry. I was hurt broken and confused. Yet, I was so certain of what he had told me that I felt like I had no choice. For me to continue to do the work of the ministry would be disobedience. Although I had very little understanding, I did have a word from our Father. So for the next two months I did no traveling, and reduced my other activities to the bare minimum. I accepted less than a dozen phone calls and made even fewer. I even spent hundreds of hours in complete solitude as I desperately needed some breakthroughs in many areas of my life and the lives around me. Throughout this time one of the primary revelations our Father gave me was why he had told me to kill the very thing he gave me to love. You have to understand that the mandate to lay down the ministry was not a quitting of a job or a career, but it was the sacrifice of relationships with people I loved. To be obedient to what our Father had asked would require me to step out of a pastoral position yes, but more severely, I would loose my role in the lives of men that I cherished. During the first week of July our Father showed me what this was all about. If you look at the life of Abraham (The Father of our faith) you will see that God first told him to leave every thing he knew, all that was familiar. He asked him to go to a place and state of being whose founder and builder was God. After being there ten years, Abraham and his bride began to get tired of waiting for God to build and they took matters into their own hands and figured out how to make a baby. They thought the most important thing was to have a child so they got it done through a servant girl. After 13 years Abraham had to send away the boy that he loved so much. To see the fullness of God’s promise, he had to get rid of the works of the flesh, Sin. Then we find that even after Abraham had got the sin out and was enjoying God’s promise, the Lord told him to kill his son. He told him to kill the very thing that had been given to him as a fulfillment of the promise. The son wasn’t the problem, Abraham was. Abraham had to become a man who could posses and be a steward of Kingdom property without it contending for his heart. See, the problem is that we as people fall in love with the gifts and not the giver of the gifts. My brother Brooks first described this phenomenon like this. Imagine taking a bouquet of flowers to your wife and she leaves you and takes the flowerers into the room and begins to lavish her love upon the flowers. Although it paints some pretty graphic pictures in my mind, the analogy works. I had become a man whose heart had been consumed with the ministry of being a Husband, Father, and Pastor and had allowed these gifts to take my heart. I was guilty of the sin of Idolatry. I had let good and Holy things that God had given me become my focus, and I began to find myself trying to give people something I myself didn’t posses. Rest! We are supposed to give the promises of the Kingdom out of the abundance of our own heart. I was slowly but surely failing. The level of activity was not the sin, the way I had allowed it to rule me was. Our Father is a Father, not a task master. He is raising us to be more like him, not to be his slaves. The apostle Paul said he was a bond servant of Christ. That means he willfully submitted himself to the Lordship of Jesus. Paul did not say that he was a bond servant of Corinth. I had become a servant to duty. My life was being run by the demands of my responsibilities. I was spending less and less time with our Father in worship of him and more and more time running from here to there. Our Father told us we could not please both him and Man.
Just as the Lord gave Abraham back his promised son, he has given me back to myself. I will continue to serve in the same capacity and even anticipate new opportunities. The duties have not changed, the man has changed. I am sure that I am far from perfecting this but I have been transformed through this time and my love for our Father must continue to be proven by my love for people. But I offer the world no fruit that will last if I fail to keep the most important thing the most important thing; intimacy with my Heavenly Father. How about you? Who is the one running your life?
In the service of my King,
Todd and Leslie
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