How Billy Graham Would Have Lead A Church
Once, when asked what he would do as the pastor of a church in a city, Billy Graham shared this strategy:
I think one of the first things I would do would be to get a small group of eight or ten or twelve men around me that would meet a few hours a week and pay the price. It would cost them something in time and effort. I would share with them everything I have, over a period of years. Then I would actually have twelve ministers among the laymen who in turn could take eight or ten or twelve more and teach them. I know one or two churches that are doing that, and it is revolutionizing the church. Christ, I think, set the pattern. He spent most of his time with twelve men. He didn’t spend it with a great crowd. In fact, every time he had a great crowd it seems to me that there weren’t too many results. The great results, it seems to me, came in his personal interview and in the time he spent with the twelve.1
So, I’ll ask again…why aren’t you starting a house church?
1This quote is famously captured in Robert E Coleman’s important book, “The Master Plan of Evangelism.
A Particular Type of Heartsickness
It was a normal Saturday. I was mowing the lawn when a woman I knew from a previous church walked by me and struck up a conversation. Much of the conversation was just the normal catching up, but then she turned to tell me a bit about one of her relatives who had been fiery for Jesus but was now struggling to find purpose and had stopped meeting with believers altogether. She asked me to pray for him, which I did.
I sat there, praying, and a thought hit me that seemed to be spontaneous enough that I should consider whether the Lord was inspiring it. This is what I heard: “There’s a certain kind of disappointment that can paralyze a man’s soul.”
As I pondered the thought, I realized that often we can have high expectations for God to move and for things to change, but there are two different responses in the heart of men. One response is to continue to press in more. The other response is to become heart sick when you don’t see the type of Christianity you’ve been believing for lived out among a group of people. Proverbs talks about this when it says “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life,” (Proverbs 13:12).
This is the danger that so many of us risk running into. If we truly believe in apostolic Christianity, we run the risk of being disappointed if it doesn’t take root with our church. We can have a vision for revival and a move of the Spirit and when it doesn’t come in the time or the way we thought, we can become so heartsick we backslide. We can want to be a part of a house church so badly that we suffer in our walk with Christ when one doesn’t materialize. This isn’t just a theory, I’ve watched it happen with young men and young women who I thought were among the fieriest people I knew.
Disappointment makes our heart sick. So what do we do? Do we stop believing? Do we set the bar really low so no one can be disappointed? Not at all.
Instead, we press in to the heavenly vision that is given us. We also need to set our hearts on Jesus and not our vision. We take refuge in being loved by God regardless of whether we see everything we thought we would see. Often, those of us who are heartsick end up that way because the love of Jesus is not alive and active in our hearts, only the love of our vision. With the seeming death of our vision, we at best backslide and at worst walk away from our faith.
Friends, carefully guard your hearts so that your vision for Christianity and your life serve Christ. Make sure that Christ isn’t serving your vision. It’s the only way to protect your heart from this particular type of heart sickness.
And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.
The Character of God from the Book of Romans
For a while now I’ve been fascinated with how the Bible describes who God is and what He feels. For some, the idea that God has feelings or emotions and reveals them to us may be a strange thought, but we feel deeply because God is a being full of emotion.
Lately this fascination with who God is has taken a more important turn. It seems at every turn there is someone new presenting a different view of who God is that is contrary to the Bible. This would be understandable if it was an enemy of the faith, but more and more often it’s someone claiming the name of Jesus.
So for the last few weeks, as I’ve been reading through the book of Romans I have been paying close attention to what the apostle Paul says about the emotional makeup of God. Who did Paul say He was? What did Paul say God felt? What is God like according to Paul? The following are some thoughts from my study:
- God’s Wrath: Surprisingly, God has strong, stern, fierce anger, which the Bible calls wrath. This wrath is revealed against those who seek to suppress or lessen the truth of holy living through their actions (1:18), God has vessels designed for wrath (9:22), He is severe towards those who fell (11:22), and this wrath is a basis for Paul warning against believers taking revenge on others (12:19). Obviously this severity is held in tension with God’s kindness (11:22) but it should not be ignored. God feels anger against those who do evil. This is significant because often we want to believe that the Old Testament God who showed wrath was a mischaracterization of God. In fact, Paul, the apostle of grace believed that God still felt wrath.
- God is kind: I love this about God. He deals with us with kindness though He could deal with us a thousand different ways. It’s His kindness that leads us to repentance (2:4) and it’s this kindness that He continues to display to us who continue to believe (11:22). This kindness must be held in tension with God’s severity (11:22), since He has both and one doesn’t cancel out the other.
- God is just: God’s justice means He does what is right. He has a just sentence against those who do evil (1:32) and the idea that God would ever be unjust is unthinkable to Paul (9:14). We would do well to remember that God doesn’t bend His thoughts or actions around our thoughts about what is right or not.
- God is merciful: God gives mercy to those who don’t deserve it out of the goodness of His character. The idea that God would invite humans regardless of ethnicity or sin into His very life is mercy that should motivate us to submit to God (12:1) and His mercy is especially revealed in welcoming Gentiles who weren’t looking for God (15:19).
- God feels love: God actually feels affection for human beings. He is not an unfeeling stoic or an unloving Father. In fact, when we follow Christ, we receive from God a love that we cannot be separated from despite our circumstances (8:39) and this love motivates us to pray (15:30). If you understand the meaning of love but don’t feel loved by God, I would encourage you to spend time meditating on these verses. God actually wants to pour out love into our hearts experientially.
- God can be pleased: God can actually be happy based on the actions of His people. Paul says that God is pleased through a life lived by the Spirit and by believers living without judging other believers (14:8). God is ultimately pleased by the death and resurrection of His Son, but he finds pleasure when those who have experienced the reality of the cross live lives trying to please Him.
- God is generous: There is no stingy-ness in God, despite what you sometimes see in His people. Paul says that God “abounds” or overflows with generosity (10:12) to those who call on Him. This is a God who isn’t half-hearted in His commitment to us, He overflows with generosity.
- God is faithful: This means God doesn’t change. Paul says His faithfulness remains in spite of our faithlessness (3:3). If God has spoken, we can trust Him to do it regardless of the situations going on around us.
- God is wise: You can’t read the book of Romans without believing that God is smart and knows what He’s doing. Paul calls Him the only wise God (16:27). He stands out in His wisdom, even though the world often believes that the things God says are foolish. They don’t see the end like He does.
Paul believed that God had a deep well of emotions. God was full of wrath, kindness, justice, mercy, love, pleasure, generosity, faithfulness, and wisdom. He was all of these without denying any of them. This is the God of the New Testament–the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must not deviate from this representation of God, even if it makes us uncomfortable.
What surprised you? Did I miss anything? How does what is revealed here mean for our lives?
Photo Credit: Hope Does Not Disappoint by Dane Vandeputte
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 