I realise that a lot of what I shared last month was pretty practical – the things that we were doing, the places we went, etc. – but I didn’t share a lot about how God spoke to me and challenged me during our time there.
Last month was challenging first in that it is near the end of the race and we are all getting warn out. Furthermore, having everyone in one place, i.e. lots of people, makes it easy to succumb to the thought “someone else will take care of [whatever]…”. Factors like this made it tempting to be more chilled out than I perhaps should have been at times and so, like in previous months, the call to be faithful in the little things was present. A lot of times I would find myself doing enough that people wouldn’t be able to accuse me of not working but not more than that, trying to ‘get away’ with the bare minimum, when God has really called us to give our all, and so I would have to push myself to go out and do more than I necessarily wanted to. Doing so was usually rewarding in the end, and it is a good way of life to try and build.
I also listened to a great podcast by Zac Poonen called True Discipleship (it’s a great podcast that you can access for free through Sermon Index on iTunes) and there was a challenge in there that really got me thinking. Zac Poonen reflects on Paul’s admission that he is the chief of sinners, which is easy for us to think Paul wrote because he was such a great persecutor of Christians before his conversion. But Zac makes the case that he is the worst of sinners, that you are the worst of sinners and that I am the worst of sinners. This is because we all have the capacity to be that – if I had been born in Hitler’s place, his family, his culture, his adolescence, his experiences and so on, I would have likely become him. All of us have the capacity for every sin if we had been given a different upbringing, different teachings and different opportunities. All of us have the capacity to be the greatest of sinners and therefore we are all the greatest of sinners. This gives such a challenge to the state of mind, that I will admit comes easy at times, that says “well I’m better than so-and-so because I have never and would never do that sin”, a form of Pharisaism. As I have shared in previous blogs about my struggles with arrogance or thinking I am better in some ways this is a reminder that I can never look down or judgementally on anyone because if I had been in their shoes I would have done the same thing. This really prevents developing any sort of mindset of comparison or superiority, which has been a really interesting thing to reflect upon.
There have been other things but this blog is already long enough and I just wanted to highlight some of the challenges of spiritual growth that have been developing over the last month. I will endeavour to share more about the challenges our final month brings and what we are doing in the upcoming blogs.
