Success

There are many definitions of success:

• It is the favorable outcome of an action.
• It is growth, development, improvement and getting better.
• It is achieving what you have set out to do.
  
• Passing your driving test.
• Getting the job you wanted.
• You feel it when someone you love tells you that he/she loves you too.
• It is the pleasant and powerful feeling of achievement.
• You experience it when you win or earn a large sum of money.
• When you see your garden blooming.
• After meditating for ten minutes, without thoughts disturbing you.
• When you fix a broken instrument with your own hands.
• It is promotion at work.
  
• Getting good grades at school.

The definitions of success are far and wide:

Success is to laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've got my faults, but living in the past isn't one of them. There's no future in it" Sparky Anderson - former manager, Detroit Tigers and Cincinnati Reds

“Go out and make people feel good for no good reason” Richard Bandler

“Happiness is a perfume you choose to wear. And when you do wear it others enjoy it as much as you do” Peta

The man who is always killing time is really killing his own chances in life; while the man who is destined for success is the man who makes time live by making it useful. Arthur Brisbane

The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today. Henry Jackson Brown

It's hard to beat a person who never gives up. Babe Ruth

For the last 20 years I have never given up on one dream. That dream is to achieve a PhD. The largest obstacle to accomplishing that has always been doing language study. As I come to the end of the first full year of my PhD I have time tonight to reflect back on this past year. I have taken 3 quarters (30 weeks) of language study. I have received an A- for two of those quarters in Hebrew and have finished that requirement. As of 8:30 tonight, I have completed another quarter of language study, this time in Latin. While I am not hugely proficient in either language (though I am becoming much more comfortable in Latin, having translated the entire 5th chapter of Revelation as a class project) I have completed the requirement. As of tonight, I am finished with language study as part of my PhD requirements (I have a couple of classes to take in this overall area but neither requires the study of a foreign language). Tonight I took my Latin final. I spent many hours these last two weeks translating a passage from the Gospel of John, another from a poem written by Virgil and, yesterday, spending the day translating a medieval commentary on Galatians 3:10 (we received the passage at the end of class on Tuesday, so we had one day to work on it). Each of these made up 3 parts of the 4 part final. Tonight, we worked in groups translating an ancient Latin text comparing the plight of humans and animals. With the help of the group, we came up with a very high quality translation of the text. We handed it in confident that it would receive an A grade. My hope is that I will get an A in the class (actually, the professor indicated that is the grade I will receive).

Success has many definitions. For me, this is success. I have climbed a mountain, finished this part of the race, overcome my insecurities and fear, and established a new benchmark in my learning process. In addition to all this language study, I completed a 55 page term paper on Charles Finney and his influence on D.S. Warner, helped my wife get through her hip surgery, and taken on the interim pastorate of Church of the Foothills. All in all, that is the definition of a successful and productive summer. And on top of all of that, I am about to become a grandpa! Success!

Sight But Not Vision

There is a difference between sight and vision. Unfortunately, in our society, the two ideas seem to be equated. I think they are vastly different. Sight is a physical attribute that allows us to physically see. Vision is something that goes beyond sight to see what can be but is not yet. The reality is that sight can get in the way of vision. I preached this morning on the story of the Deuteronomy. The book begins with the story of the 12 spies who went into the land to scope it out before the nation would transverse the Jordan. When they came back, 10 of them told why the nation should not go into the land. All the reasons were valid, as long as all you were doing was looking at the things you could see with your eyes. The people, the spies said, were taller, stronger than the Israelites. The cities, said the 10, were fortified with walls that went up to heaven. They convinced the nation not to go over into the land. They had been betrayed by sight.
40 years later, Joshua led a new nation (all the others except he and Caleb and their families had died) across the same Jordan. What did they find? Exactly what the spies had reported. The people were strong, tall, living behind incredibly fortified cities with walls that seemed to go to the sky. But now, with a long, hard Wilderness wandering behind them, these people came with a vision that was greater than their sight. The vision? They believed that God was greater than strong, tall men; they believed God was greater than fortified cities and high walls. So, according to the word and vision they had received, they marched around the city a few times and, lo and behold, the walls came tumbling down. The vision was greater than what they could see.
I just listened to Joel Olsteen (not one of my favorite preachers but a great speaker) and he talks about imagining your future before it comes to pass. It sounds a lot like The Prayer of Jabez idea of claiming your territory. Regardless of how you state it, the principle is the same. It still is based on the idea that sight is human and vision is divine. You can only have a vision through the eyes of God's Spirit.
If you need a fresh vision of the future, don't bother getting some self-help, self-actualization book. Instead, pick up the Bible and read Deuteronomy (OK, some of it gets tedious but do it anyway) and then begin reading Joshua and you will see the difference between a group of people who could only see and a nation of people motivated by a divine vision that changed the course of history.

Shoes

I will be going with Joanie today to a store in LA so she can buy shoes. Over the course of 32 years of marriage, I have attempted to avoid doing this as much as possible. Joanie hates to go shoe shopping because she can never make a decision and the decisions she makes are often ones she regrets after getting them home. However, the course of the last few years has made this process even more difficult. Let me explain.
About 3 years or so ago, Joanie had foot surgery. She had a bunion removed - a process that involved breaking her foot, shaving the bone and resetting the break with a pin in her foot. Ever since then, shopping for shoes has become even more problematic. Now, since her hip surgery, she has to go to a special store to get orthopedic shoes. As a result of her surgery, her left leg is slightly longer than the other one. This means she has the added burden of finding comfortable, fashionable shoes that will be helpful to her walking issues.
So, I'm going shoe shopping today. This would come under the "for better, for worse" injunction of the marital vows. But it is important for Joanie - for her health and well-being. And, therefore, it is important for me. I am reminded that not everything is about me and my needs. Marriage is a partnership with significant give and take. I get a lot and I give a lot. That is the nature of a marriage partnership. So, it's the shoe store today. It may not be the most exciting thing I will ever do, but it is part of what it means to be in relationship together. O Lord, please help Joanie find shoes....quickly. Please. Amen.

The Trouble with Translating

I have a problem with translating from one language to another. It's the same problem everyone has. There are times you can't find out what to do with a word. It doesn't fit the patterns you know; it's not in the dictionary you have; it breaks all the rules of what you have come to know as normative for translating. It just won't work. And the problem is, when I get stuck on a word, I get stuck for a long time. It can take me hours to try and work through the problem or figure out how to get around the problem. It becomes so frutstrating at times that I just give up.

• You ever get stuck?
• You ever get bogged down by a problem in your life and just can't figure out how to move beyond it?
• You ever waste an hour/a day/a week/a season of your life trying to figure something out that just wouldn't work out?
• You ever get so frustrated with getting stuck that you just give up on a project/a career/a decision/a person/ a problem?
  

Churches, Christians, believers, ministers, laity, women, men, children, and parents all get stuck. One of the reasons God put us living on dirt was to see the effects of mud and learn what it means to get stuck. When you are stuck, all the writhing around in the world will not free you from the mud. Joanie and I have been watching a show called "Man vs. Wild" where the host, Baer Gyllis, is a survivalist who goes into wilderness areas with next to nothing and finds his way out. It is all designed to teach you how to survive in the wild. More than once he has jumped into quicksand or a mud bog and taught the audience how to get out. You know how you do it? You stop wiggling. You try and relax. You work your way out slowly and calmly. You "monkey crawl" out of the mud. You use a stick if you have it, to lay on top of and try and get yourself to the surface before you attempt to extricate yourself from the muck. That's what you do when you get stuck.

So, if you are stuck translating Latin (OK, that may not be a popular problem) or facing a difficult decision (that one may be a bit more popular) all you have to do is relax (that's called praying in faith), stop wiggling around (that's called trying to solve it on your own), get on the surface (that means allowing God to bring you above the muck by his grace), and crawl your way out (that's called worshiping God when you are still stuck). Try it, you may find that can get unstuck from where you've been.

Preaching Ears and Eyes

One of the things that I have discovered about preaching has come through the experience of evaluating trial sermons by the seminary students here at Fuller. It is a subtle but desperately important principle. It can change and revolutionize how you approach the preaching event. What is it? Well, let me set the stage so you will know what I mean. Here are the principles:

1. Any good preacher or any preacher desiring to do well in the pulpit will spend considerable time in their study researching and exegeting the text. This involves reading the text in several translations of the Bible, sitting with books that help inform your mind about the text - such as commentaries, word study materials, and historical information - and filling up the blank pieces of paper that you have in front of you. Your time is spent in research and writing down the insights and information you find. That's the first step in producing a sermon.
2. The second step is to try and figure out how to put this mound of material into sermonic form. It is here that many preachers begin to slide off track. Too many of the students I teach and the preachers I hear seem to think that you can take the material you have on those now filled "blank" pieces of paper and put it into the sermon. Preachers cut and paste the material into several points (usually three) and find an introduction to those points and a way to conclude (well, how to do that would be another blog at some point). The results are usually less than satisfactory. Why? Because the material is in the wrong form.
3. At Fuller, the students I listen to have just come through two years of learning how to do exegesis. Most of them have learned how to do that through study of the original languages (Greek and Hebrew) and how to try and get down to the centerpiece of the text. They then put that into a paper (called an exegetical paper) and hand that into the professor for evaluation or grading. Some of them become quite proficient at this process. Then they come to the preaching task (or to Homiletics Class) and they attempt to follow the same pattern they learned in their exegetical class. Inevitably, it fails as a sermon. The reason is simple but profound. You can't write a sermon for the eye. It has to be written for the ear.

Sermons are experienced by listening to them. How you express things in writing and how you express them in speaking are not nearly the same thing. How your mind processes things verbally and how it processes things visually are totally different processes. You can do very well with the written word and very poorly with the spoken word. A great example of this is Thomas Jefferson. Without question, Jefferson is one of the greatest writers of all time. His words have inspired generations. However, he was such a poor speaker that he never personally delivered a State of the Union address or an Inaugural Address. He wrote them but never delivered them. Others read them. It was not because he was bashful. Jefferson was not a public speaker. He could write for the eye but he could not speak for the ear. They are two different specialties. Oh, how I wish more preachers understood this concept. Too many of them try to preach to the eye. Too few know how to speak to the ear.
If you want to change how you preach, begin here. Change your process of communication. Listen to the Word (don't just read it) and Preach to the Ear (not just to the printed page).

Little Things Mean a Lot

So, I started doing an interim pastorate at a church here in Pasadena called Church of the Foothills. It is a small (35-45 on Sunday morning) here is Pasadena, about 2 miles from our house. We have traded in a 45-50 minute commute to Santa Ana for a 3-4 minute drive down the street. Hooray, just in time for the NFL!. Service starts at 10:30 and I'm home before noon. Sounds good to me!
I am preaching about 3 weeks out of the month and the Associate is preaching once. The church is small and loving. I went into the office last week for the first time. I am planning on being there part of one day per week. I was in the office for about an hour when we received a call that a lady in the church had died. So, I did a funeral my first week. I called Joanie and told her about it and she said, "Sounds familiar" (My last three pastorates have all begun with a funeral my first week). It did give me a chance to get to know some of the folks rather quickly.
Being at the church gives me a chance to continue plying the preaching trade while studying at Fuller. That means that I can continue to have practical experience while studying the theory, history, and theology of preaching. By doing this, it solves one of the concerns that was shared with me by the man who has influenced my understanding of preaching more than any other person - Dr. James Earl Massey. In a phone conversation, Dr. Massey and I were talking about my PhD program and I told him about meeting, at a conference in Florida, some of the professors of preaching from various institutions around the country. Dr. Massey reminded me that not all of them (actually, not many of them) are practitioners of the preaching craft. They teach it but do not practice it very well. He was grateful to know that I would be one who would be able to both teach homiletics and put into practice in the life of the church the very principles I will be teaching.
Having a young man as my Associate gives me a chance to mentor someone, one of the major tasks of being a teacher in a seminary. Having a small church gives me the opportunity to concentrate on my studies at Fuller. Having an office gives me a chance to get some things done that are hard to do at home. It gives me access to a copier and that could be very handy. You know, sometimes it's the little things that mean a lot.

The Church of God

I have been working diligently on a paper that will complete the requirements for the class I took this spring. Fuller allows you to work on your paper until the next quarter is completed, so the paper is not due until the end of August. It is the longest paper I've done, now approaching 55 pages with the bibliography and addendum's included. That's longer than the 40 page requirement but the subject has fascinated me a great deal. The final section of the paper has to do with the Church of God and it's foundations. A few of the conclusions I came to might be interesting to note.

1. The greatest influence on D.S. Warner may very well have been the fact that, as he was contemplating his call to ministry while a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, the school experienced two periods of significant revival. A revival is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that revitalizes the church and the believers while at the same time confronting the unbeliever with the Gospel message. During this time Warner changed his future plans from preparing for a career in teaching to preparing to enter the ministry. It appears that his call to ministry (which has not really been written about at all as far as I can see) came about in the midst of a revival on the campus of Oberlin led by Charles Finney, the great revivalist and theology professor at Oberlin. I cannot help but wonder how much that atmosphere affected Warner and his concept of ministry. It certainly gave him a passion for the lost and, I believe, affected his style of ministry. Finney was so blunt and so single minded in his focus about things that the headstrong Warner certainly found affirmation in the old revivalist or may have been permanently affected by the style of Finney.
2. The Church of God had a camp meeting that created quite a stir in 1886. The camp meeting took place in Bangor, Michigan and the reason for the stir was what took over the camp meeting one night. At a service, a young woman left the service in order to "pray through" some serious questions and issues in her Christian life. Joined by a respected leader in the church, she "got the victory". When she re-entered the service, she gave testimony to what the Lord had done. At the end of her testimony, the Holy Spirit fell on the service and no one could minister for the next hour. People fell to the ground, shouted, testified, and experienced a type of Pentecost-like event that took over the service. This kind of experience transformed the camp meeting from a gathering/preaching experience to a unique outpouring of the Holy Spirit. For the next 100 years, the camp meeting had a special place in the minds of Church of God folk. Part of the reason was that we came to expect or hope for that Pentecost-like moment when God's Spirit takes over. I cannot help but wonder if we have lost that expectation. Do we go to Camp Meeting expecting the unexpected? Do we go to service expecting the Spirit to descend in such a way that priests cannot minister on account of it?
3. The uniqueness of the Church of God is found in what we teach and believe not in our history. I know that seems blasphemous but I think it is true. We have spent too much time trying to find out the uniqueness of our history and of our calling that we have isolated ourselves from the greater history of what God has been doing. For instance, F.G. Smith wrote a book in the early 1900's called "Revelation Explained" in which he made a case for the prophetic calling of the Church of God into existence. It gave the Movement a sense of destiny but it also contributed to a sense of isolation from the larger Christian community. It gave fuel to the doctrine of "come-outism" that helped to isolate us for more than two decades after Smith's book. The frustration I have with this is that our history is really connected on a far greater level with what God was doing in the larger Christian community in the late 1880's. The paper I wrote provides a strong connection between the Second Great Awakening which began at Cane Ridge (I've written about this on this blog) and found a great expression in the revivalism movement of Charles Finney (I have also written about him here). All that connection put us in the middle of the great Holiness revival of post-war America. The movement of the Holy Spirit at Bangor was the same kind of experience that occurred at Cane Ridge. The message of Holiness and Revivalism was the same message as Finney preached - and that message changed the face of America, literally. As part of the Church of God, we were in the middle of all that. God did in us what he was doing in the revival of the nineteenth century. How exciting to be a part of the greater movement of God in America! That's more important than trying to find a dubious interpretation of scripture to justify your existence. Amen.
   

Possums

At 9:30 on Tuesday morning I met one of my classmates to work on a major project for Latin. We spent the morning working on translating Revelation 5. We got about halfway through the passage and broke for lunch. After lunch we spent the next 2-3 hours translating the rest of the text. At 4pm I left to go home and print out the 12 pages of work we had done that day (each of us had to do our own individual work but we collaborated on the ideas). At 5pm I met our professor for a study group we have prior to class. At 6pm class began. By the time we were underway, I had spent about 9 hours studying Latin.
The teacher gave us a quiz to do that he said we would struggle with - and most of us did. That was OK. Our prof is not real big on quiz grading. The rest of the class was about the same as most of our sessions. However, at the very end, with only 5 minutes left, the prof put up a verse of scripture (an obscure one we wouldn't know) of about 20 words and told us we would have to translate it. We could stay after class for a while, but we had to work on it alone.
For the last 20 years I have had a dream and a desire to do PhD work. I never doubted my ability to do the work - except for the language study. I have never done well at it. It has always, even since High School, been a struggle for me. I got through two quarters of Hebrew and I was relieved when it was over. To say I was successful in learning Hebrew and can translate it or work with it extensively is to go much further than is true. I passed the class, got an A- for each quarter, but basically regurgitated back to the teacher what I had to in order to get the grade. To actually handle the language . . . I don't think so! So, you can imagine what it felt like to be out alone on an island, having no preparation at all for this quiz, and having 20 years of fear behind me.
Well, I did my best, handed in the quiz, and smiled at the professor. He immediately picked up my quiz, looked at it and said, "99% right". He showed me the one small mistake I had made (It was something I didn't know so I couldn't have done it on my own). Then he told me, "You got all the big things right. You did a good job!". I left the class, got in my car, called up my wife and cried. For all the years of toil and fear, for all the time spent applying myself to learn this language, for all the apprehension that I didn't have what it takes - all were gone in a flash. And, it feels good to conquer one of your fears.
Now, I know that doing a Latin translation may not seem like climbing Mt. Everest or overcoming your fear of heights or snakes, but it has been that real to me. What is it that you fear? What have you told yourself that you cannot overcome? We all have our internal voice that tells us we can't or won't or aren't able. It speaks louder to us than it does to others. They look at us and say encouraging things like, "You can do it. I know you can." You hear the words and feel the support, but you still doubt the truth that poteris (that's the Future Indicative Active 2nd Singular of the Latin auxiliary verb, possom [to be able] and is properly translated "you will be able"). Well, from one who has spent a few years wondering if I can let me tell you this - potes (that's the Present Active Indicative 2nd singular and means - YOU CAN).