Matthew 3:9
"And do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father', for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham."
John Piper is my favorite pastor. I have been listening to him for a couple of years now, and I have really grown in my understanding and knowledge of God through his ministry. I am going to a conference later this year where he will be speaking, and I'm looking forward to it.
One of the reasons I am looking forward to it, is because it will be the only stateside speaking engagement he will hold all year. He is taking a sabbatical this year, and he may not even come back to the pulpit.
When I heard this, it filled me with sadness. I will miss hearing my pastor, for I consider him one of my spiritual fathers.
And when I heard yesterday that Francis Chan is stepping down from his pastorate, it made me sympathize for his flock out in California, and what they must be going through.
But as I've been reading through Matthew, and savoring and chewing on the words of the Master, it got me thinking. Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, are the only ones who do the teaching in Matthew. Jesus comforts his disciples when he tells them he will leave by promising them that the Holy Spirit will come and personally teach them in John 14:15-31.
And when the early church was trying to form factions around their favorite teacher, whether it was Paul or Peter or Apollos, the Holy Spirit rebuked the church through Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:4-9.
"For when one says, 'I follow Paul,' and another, 'I follow Apollos,' are you not being merely human? What this is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Aploos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who planst nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building."
I say all this to remind myself, and you guys, that whatever is good about church, whatever is uplifting, whatever is powerful about church, is God.
It's not our lesson.
It's not the preacher.
It's not the luncheon we have after the service, or the fellowship we have in the hallway.
These things are only good if and when the Holy Spirit breathes life into them.
This is why a good lesson at church stays with us for so long, when a good business meeting rarely carries it's weight for longer than a week. This is why a good preacher can show us something in the Scripture that will change our lives, and an equally good teacher at school can present an awesome lesson that will be forgotten at the end of the semester.
God is bigger than John Piper, or Francis Chan, or Andy Jobe, or Brett Crawford. I think he removes men like Piper or Chan to remind us that it is our Father in Heaven who does the work. We are just the messengers.
And lest we become worried that there will be nobody with the ability to carry on the ministry that these men had, remember the verse at the top. We all have hearts of stone, before God transforms them. If he ever needs a need filled, he just breathes life into another rock, and puts it to work.
Praise God!
-Brett
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