I want my ministry to be marked by three guiding principles: Apostolic Focus, Prophetic Passion, and Pastoral Care. Yesterday I wrote about the need for Church to move toward an Apostolic Focus. Today I’m sharing with you where I’m coming from when I talk about “Prophetic Passion” — the idea that discontent with the status quo moves us to proclaim in word and deed the truth of the Kingdom. Be watching for a blog dealing with the idea of “Pastoral Care”.
I’ve been in conversation with a young woman who is struggling through recovery from substance abuse and dependence. She will resist the draw of her past addiction for a while, turning to the Lord, and then she will turn back to drugs and alcohol. She gets disappointed with herself and says, “God I need more of you!”
This was part of my response to her the other day when she emailed me after a relapse:
The problem is that you still want God to fill the role of alcohol, or weed, or vicodin. You want Him simply to take away all the pain. The problem is that’s not how He works.
Pain is crucial. We have to walk through the fullness of the pain before we can experience the fullness of the joy. It is the pain that makes us aware that joy is possible. As long as the pain is unresolved, the joy is unavailable.
The pain that drives you to self-medicate is the key to your freedom in joy. You need to find a place where you are comfortable enough to feel these things. You need to find people who will push you to feel them.
The step that comes after that is to identify the pain as a result of a broken world. We are living in a reality where the Kingdom of God is advancing against a world caught in Sin. While the reality of the Kingdom is fully available to us in the spiritual realm, it has not yet fully manifested in the natural realm. This means that although Christ empowers us to live life in fully healthy relationship, husbands still beat their wives and parents still neglect their children.
The weight of a broken world leaves us feeling pain. This is the pain that most of us numb with things like drugs and alcohol. Our natural existence moves us to avoid the pain.
The longer we avoid the pain, the more we are blind to the depth of despair in which our world is stuck. But it is just this despair, that to which we are often blind, that leaves us crying out for a Savior.
As long as everything is “fine” and “OK, there is no need for a change. There is no need to advance the new way of the Kingdom of God.
We need to identify with the pain of a broken world, a pain that is often our own, that it might move us into dissatisfaction. We need to be dissatisfied that we might be stirred to act. We need to be stirred to act because this world is not good enough. This world is not yet what God promised us it would one day be.
I have seen the eyes of an orphan. I have heard the weeping of a mother who has lost her child. And I walk away saying, “This cannot stand!” I will declare the truth in love that none would be fatherless and that death might have no sting. And I will look for a way to act as part of the living answer — the manifestation of God’s Kingdom.
I do not view pain as something to be avoided. I believe that in the depths of pain lie the keys to the Kingdom. A holy, passionate discontent with the status quo moves us to confidently proclaim the whisper of truth that we have heard from the Lord. Our discontent forces us to be Jesus to the world.
