TILL HE COMES Blog

I officially graduated from Seminary on Saturday (even though I didn’t go to the ceremony, I still count it as my graduation day).

About three years ago before entering Seminary, I wrote what I wanted to be able to say when I came out. I haven’t looked at it in three years, and only last week did I remember that I wrote it. So I searched through my files and found what I had written. At the time, I was a pastor in a church in Montana. I loved the people, I loved the church, I loved the area, I loved what I was doing. Nevertheless, I felt God leading me to seminary. I was terrified to go, but I went anyway. Here is what I wrote:

On Entering Seminary (What I want to say when I come out)

I am thankful for my seminary degree, but I am not glad I have it. It shows a compromise with worldly standards that are not necessarily God’s. It is what man wants of a pastor. God doesn’t really care. Letters and degrees and accolades mean nothing to Him. The Lord looks at the heart.

I will never put letters before or after my name, unless they are I.C. - in Christ. I will never stand upon the work I have done, but upon His work alone. I will never believe that I have earned my position of authority, or a certain level of respect because of the schooling I have received.

I was a pastor before I went in, and I am a pastor coming out. Any church I serve, fame I acquire, or recognition I receive is due to the grace of God upon me, and nothing else. I am worthy of nothing.

I will not become an academic. I will not talk about Greek and Hebrew unless it is absolutely necessary to explain the text. I will never say the words, “When I was in Seminary…” unless it is to humble myself.

The training I have received is but rubbish if it causes my heart to grow cold and my love for Jesus to wane.

Dear Lord Jesus, draw me ever closer to you. Let the education I have received not be a stumbling block to what You want for me.

I am making this public because I want to be held accountable to it. It really is amazing the work that God has done in my heart and mind while in seminary, not because of seminary, but in spite of seminary, and because of other things that have happened in my life while I have been here.

I have often wondered why God brought me to seminary. The truth I have learned is that seminary was simply a cover (an expensive one!) for something greater that He actually wanted to perform in my life. He had truths to teach me, and things to show me about various idols in my life which I may never have seen had I stayed in Montana. I had to learn things and see things that I never would have learned or seen as a Pastor in Montana. Seminary didn’t teach me these things, but I did learn them while I was in Seminary.

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I have found that when I criticize others, it always comes back to bite me, generally with me doing the same thing I criticized others about. I guess this is just one way God keeps us humble, and teaches us not to judge a fellow servant. After all, to our own master we stand or fall (Rom 14:4).

I have so many examples of my criticism coming back to bite me, but let me just share one. Last year at this time, I remember talking with a fellow student at Dallas Theological Seminary who was graduating. He was two weeks away from graduation, and when I asked him what he would be doing after graduation, he said he didn’t know.

I remember thinking, “How could you not know? You’ve known graduation was coming! Why weren’t you looking for a job!? How can you allow your wife and kids to live with such uncertainty? Why didn’t you try harder to make simple life decision about a career?” I remember going home and telling my wife about this silly seminary student who was two weeks away from graduation and had no clue what he would be doing afterwards.

Well….now I am in the same boat. I’ve been frantically looking, applying, and praying for a job for well over a year (I started looking even before I had talked with that student). I can’t count the number of applications I have filled out and the number of places I have sent my resume in to. And so far…nothing. I am ten days away from graduation, and have no idea what I will be doing afterwards. My current job (which follows the school year) ends on May 9. I graduate on May 10. I will preach on Sunday, May 11. I have no job as of May 12. I remember that when I came to seminary, I thought it would open a lot more doors for me. Well it has, but so far, all of them have also slammed shut in my face.

I’m sure I could get a job “flipping burgers” but those sorts of jobs won’t provide enough to even pay off my school loan.

It’s a scary place to be, but also a great place, because I am learning to not depend on my degree or my education, but solely on God. He is growing my faith. If/when I get a job, He’ll get all the glory.

I’ll keep you informed!

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I’ve been invited to co-author a story with one of the best selling novelists ever! He’s sold more books than Tim LaHaye! It is quite an honor. I can hardly believe it!

I have already seen an outline for about the first half of the story, and from what I can tell, it’s going to be amazing. It’s basically the true life story of someone who is very similar to me, which I suppose is why I was chosen. It ultimately is a story about a man who constantly searches for truth, and he spends all his time and money in this search. Yet every time the end of his search seems near, and truth seems within his grasp, something happens which makes him realize he is on the wrong path, or asking the wrong questions.

There are twists and tragedies in the plot that seem almost excessive. Just when it seems that the author has developed a pattern for the main character, everything changes. I talked to the main author about this, and he assures me that this is the way it happened in real life, and that all these turns must happen because they are preparing the man for something that will occur later in the story. I don’t know what that is, since I’ve only seen about half of the story so far. The author tells me that though he’s written the first half, he wants me to help author the second half. I’m not sure I’m up to it, but if he think I am, I’ll give it a shot.

Who is this author? It’s God. Yeah, He’s the best-selling author of all time.

And what’s the story? It’s my life.

I’m reading a book right now called To Be Told by Dan Allender and it has really helped me view my life as a coherent whole that is going someplace (I don’t exactly know where) rather than just a string of events while I’m in a holding pattern for heaven. Furthermore, it helps me see that I can help God write my future. I can make choices and decisions that make my life more of an adventure romance full of tragedy, risk, and triumph than a mind-numbingly dull home video of a dog playing in the grass.

So how are you doing in writing the Screenplay of your life? Is it going to be a Blockbuster?

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I finished reading Vince Antonucci’s book I Became a Christian and all I got was this Lousy T-shirt with my wife tonight. We read through it out loud together. We laughed. We cried. We talked. It was great.

Vince’s book is unique in that he includes Greek word studies about as often as he uses the word “crap.”

Though Vince is already writing his next book (called Guerilla Lovers), I think the third book he should write should be called “Holy Crap.” It would be about how our lives are a mixture of holiness and crapiness, and sometimes, it’s hard to determine which is which. But if we focus on living for Jesus and loving Him, Jesus can take even the crap of our lives, and use it for good. Maybe as fertilizer to help others grow, or for use in the annual Alaskan Moose Poop Festival  (I have just put this on my Bucket List. …Do you think they really drink out of those Moose Poop Mugs?).

I don’t know what Jesus can do with the crap in your life, but if your life is like mine, He’s got a lot to work with.

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Yesterday I introduced you to my “life prayer.” After I wrote that post, I went and read the other blogs that I read (68 of them), and found another prayer that I want to start praying daily. It comes from my church planting coach who doesn’t know me: Vince Antonucci. (I’m coached by reading his blog every day). Here is what he wrote yesterday:

God, I want more. I want to love, cry, smile. I want to be a radical. I want to pray. I want to sweat blood. I want to feel. I want intimacy. I want passion. I want power, resurrection power. I want to see You. I want to touch Heaven. I want to hurt, to suffer. I want to walk, run, and fly. I want to scream. I want to rejoice. I want to laugh till I ache. I want to ache. I want to care. I want to be in the rebellion. I want to lead the rebellion. I want to be the rebellion. I want to live with reckless abandon. I want to be astonished and afraid. I want to dream. I want to see visions. I want to hear the clatter of dry bones coming together. I want good friends. I want to love my enemies. I want holiness. I want to experience the sacred, the divine. I want to hallow Your name. I want to walk on water. I want to dance on water. I want to touch the sick, I want to experience their pain, I want to heal them. I want truth. I want to be set free. I want to be hungry, and I want to be full. I want the Spirit. I want to drink the Spirit. I want to be falling down drunk on the Spirit. I want guidance, direction, discernment, wisdom. I want to be a warrior. I want to never look back, turn back, or go back. I want to attack. I want to cause trouble. I want to induce fear. I want to turn the world upside down. I want to pour myself out and pour myself into today like there’s no tomorrow. I want to be comforted. I want to thirst for righteousness. I want to be an agent of justice. I want to shine. I want to blaze. I want to bathe in grace. I want beauty from my ashes. I want to seek first the Kingdom, I want to bring the Kingdom, I want the Kingdom to fill me up and spill out of me. I want to carry the cross till my legs burn and my shoulder bleeds. I want to see that the tomb is empty. I want Jesus. Lifted up, easy to see, leading my life, overwhelming my life with His life. I want Jesus. I want Jesus.

Thanks, Vince! I want that too. Thanks for being someone who can help show me the way.

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Yesterday I made a post about how God is a stripper, meaning that He strips things out of our life to make us more usable for Him. I’ve been going through some trying times in my life recently, and amidst all of the frustration and questions of “Why, God?” it was as if God said to me, “Jeremy, it’s because you’ve been praying for it! I’m only answering your prayers.”

You see, one of my prayers while in seminary has been for God to make me into the kind of person He can use to reach the kind of people that many churches cannot or will not reach. More on that in future posts…  I guess that to make me into that kind of person, God has has to strip me of some things.

So the anwer to “Why God?” is “He’s answering my prayers.” 

In fact, He’s answering my “life prayer.” The prayer of my life is not found in the Bible. Oh sure, I pray the prayers in the Bible, and I pray Scripture, but the prayer I pray most frequently was penned by my favorite poet, John Donne. If I had realized how painful the answer to this prayer would be, I’m not sure I would have ever started praying it. 

Anyway, here is my prayer, as prayed first by John Donne in Holy Sonnet XIV.

Holy Sonnet XIV 

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, overthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captive, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

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God is a stripper. No, not that kind. (Though if you believe Jesus, strippers are probably closer to the Kingdom of God than many religious people - Matt 21:31.)

When I say “God is a stripper” I am reminded of a “looking for work” advertisement I saw in the newspaper a few years ago. At the top of the ad in big bold letters it said, “I’ll strip for you!” This ad was placed by a lady who owned a furniture stripping company. She was offering to strip and refinish your wood furniture. If you have ever tried to refinished your furniture, you know how valuable her services are. If I had to refinish the antique table my wife and I own, I would hire a stripper.

But all of us have something more important than our furniture, and that is our life. And in the life of every single one of us there are blemishes and defects. We all have areas of our life that need to be refinished, refined, or removed. And when we pray, “God, make me usable to you! Make me into the kind of person who can do great things for you!” He comes in and begins stripping away all in your life that holds you back and drags you down. He makes you into something useful.

Such a process is long and painful. It feels as if God has abandoned or forgotten about you. But when you emerge out the other side, you are beautiful and usable for His purposes.

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OK, this crisis series is starting to depress and bore me, so this will be my last post on it. I’m learning more and more every day, and so I am realizing the series could go on forever. But I want to move on. So in this post, I will close with three things: Some advice for those who have friends facing a crisis, some advice for those facing a crisis, and a story my wife ran across yesterday which sums it all up for us.

1. For those who have friends facing a crisis.

If you have a friend facing a crisis, just go be with them. Just listen to them vent. Don’t chide them for their emotions, fear, anger, hurt, despair. Please don’t quote Scripture unless they ask you to. Don’t offer theological truths which you think will help them. Don’t ask them what sin they might have committed to make God discipline them. In other words, don’t throw rocks. If you are afraid of saying the wrong thing, don’t say anything at all.

Most of the time, hurting people just want others to be there. If you see something tangible that they need, offer to provide it for them, food, clothing, money, helping hands, resources. The only intangible aid you should offer is prayer, and only say “I’ll pray for you” if you are also thinking of ways to be an answer to your own prayers.

Though our crisis is not catastrophic, my father died when I was two, and my mother says that what I have written above holds true in that sort of crisis as well. A friend of mine lost his brother in a hiking accident a few years ago, and he confirms this as well.

2. For those facing a crisis.

One of the things that bothered my wife and I initially is how when we shared with others that we were going through a crisis, they responded by sharing a crisis that they were facing or had faced in their own lives. Our first reaction was, “Don’t try to turn this around to you. I’m the one in pain!” But then we realized, “Wow, how self-centered is that?”

Yes, pain hurts, and sometimes life stinks. But it’s this way for everybody at times. And one way to get over your own pain, fear, hurt, and disappointment, is to realize that it’s part of life, that others are facing it too (and many of them much more than you are), and that you can either have a pity party for yourself, or try to help others through their own pain, which in turn helps you. And to help others through their own pain, go back and look at point number one above.

3. A Story

One day a Rabbi stood on a hill overlooking a certain city. The Rabbi watched in horror as a band of Cossacks on horseback suddenly attacked the town, killing innocent men, women, and children. Some of the slaughtered  were his own disciples. Looking up to heaven, the Rabbi exclaimed, “Oh, if only I were God.”

An astonished student, standing nearby, asked, “But, Master, if you were God, what would you do differently?” The Rabbi replied, “If I were God I would do nothing differently. If I were God, I would understand.”

Like it or not, I think the Rabbi is right. The best we can do in a crisis (and maybe the most we should do) is simply say, “I don’t understand.”

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I’m in my final semester at Dallas Theological Seminary, and wow, am I looking forward to being done! I love studying; I don’t like seminary. Maybe someday I’ll explain why.

But here is a hint: In my “Eschatology” class (study of the End Times), three different students who were interacting with the professor used the following terms: “ontological bridge,” “theological taxonomy,” and “epistemological center.” And yet we wonder why the average seminary graduate has a difficult time connecting with the average person on the street.

Thanks to seminary, I understood what they were saying, but all I could think was, “I hope those students don’t preach much.” If seminary is teaching us to talk like this, seminary is a failure. If you ever catch me talking like this, come burn my books.

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Ok, so I have a problem. It’s more than a problem; it’s an addiction. There I said it. The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem, right? Of course, I’m not sure I want to recover from this problem. That’s probably another problem.

I have a book addiction.

But it gets worse. My wife has the same addiction. So do my three daughters. We are doomed. When we moved from Montana to Texas three years ago, our moving van was half filled with books…over 100 boxes. While in seminary, I have easily added another 10-15 boxes. In my study, I have ten bookshelves crammed with books, and on top of every shelf is a pile of books almost to the ceiling. Out in the garage, there are 20-30 boxes of books that I was not able to unpack  because there wasn’t room in my study.

And I am not just a “book collector.” There is not a single book I own that I don’t want to read. The ones I don’t want to read, I give away, throw out, or sell on Amazon. I want to read every single book I own.

Here’s why I am posting this. I counted today, and in my pile of books that I absolutely MUST read as soon as possible, there were 191 books. With a lot of pain and heart-wrenching agony, I was able to narrow it down to just 40. As I looked over these 40 books, I realized that they fell into three categories: Bible backgrounds, church planting/leadership, and missional living.

That tells me a lot about what I want to do with my life and where I am headed. I want to understand the Bible so that I can take what it says and lead a church to reach out into this world with the love of Jesus Christ. Even as I think about this, it gets me excited.

So what’s on your reading list, and what does it tell you about who you are?

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