Like high GI foods, many Christian experiences can lift you up quickly but then soon let you down.
A high glycaemic index diet (high GI) comprises fast burning carbohydrates that have some place in providing quick spurts of short-term energy. However, they are not good for us as they lead to weight gain and high cholesterol levels. Low GI foods keep you feeling full and healthy for longer intervals between meals, thus reducing our craving for junk food and stimulants. Caffeine has a similar effect in that it picks us up quickly and then lets us down, whereas vitamin B and proteins provide us with sustainable energy and a sense of healthy wellbeing or vitality.
The Christian diet is full of high GI experiences. We go to church to be fed with all kinds of highs, using music, experiences and exciting ministry or prayer lines to keep us coming back for more. The problem is that by Monday, when the reality of life bites again, those stimulants quickly wear off, leaving us depleted and frustrated.
There is a need for the low GI sustenance that will keep us burning until Jesus returns. I allude here to the seven wise virgins who trimmed their lamps (Matthew 25:11-12), until the bridegroom arrived at the wedding feast. I won’t go into the background as it is not deeply critical to the story, but will say that seven other (foolish) virgins burnt their lamps at full wick and ran out of oil before the bridegroom returned, the bridegroom being an allegory of Christ returning for His church.
Many of us fall into the trap of burning on our wicks instead of burning on the oil. The oil is the spirit, the wick is our flesh. We burn out readily when we consume our own limited human capacity. We burn long into the night when we are fuelled by God’s Spirit.
It is not possible to sustain believers from high to high and far too many church leaders have made a terrible whip for their backs by trying to sustain crowds through programs. Someone once said, “the way you win them is the way you must be prepared to keep them” and that is the fate of any minister who uses programs to drive bums onto his church seats.
Jesus never commanded us to go and make crowds or converts, as such. He commissioned us to be witnesses, a powerful turn of phrase that implicates our whole lives not just what we say. He also said, “Go and make disciples”. Disciples are the product of discipline, the activity of those who take charge of their own response to God and seek to grasp His truth in a deliberate and committed way. I am against spoon-feeding and believe that believers need to grow up into their Holy Faith (2 Thessalonians 1:3).
Leaders have an important role to play in mentoring and instructing believers through the growing-up period, just as a father ought to instruct his children. But it is not required of us to keep babying believers, nor indeed do I think real believers seek to be babied. They are sheep, needing shepherds to walk with them to higher ground and green pasture. They are not cattle to be herded from program to program or from event to event.
We must facilitate the transformation of every son into a practicing priest in the house of God. I am deeply opposed to the clergy-laity model and feel it has permeated the entire spectrum of Christianity. It is pervasive and self-defeating.
Believers learn far more from doing than they will ever learn from sitting and listening. Teaching is not an end to our faith but the means to an end that will transform novices into effective, contributing priests and active stakeholders in God’s kingdom.
That demands a very different diet. A condescending approach is not going to do it. The assumption that only a few can minister and the rest should remain the ministered to, is a bankrupt concept as it induces no buy in, no investment of lives into the enterprise. A passive involvement never bred maturity, but active engagement brings us into the middle of the river to flow with the life of His kingdom.
Believers must be weaned off milk (Hebrews 6:1-10) and into the meat, which implies a walk of real personal faith and an end to dead-works or compensatory, religious or compliant behavior. It demands that we pursue the resurrection of the dead as something to be attained to, not as a right (Philippians 3:11), and that we account for our own souls in full understanding of God’s eternal judgment.
© Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com
A high glycaemic index diet (high GI) comprises fast burning carbohydrates that have some place in providing quick spurts of short-term energy. However, they are not good for us as they lead to weight gain and high cholesterol levels. Low GI foods keep you feeling full and healthy for longer intervals between meals, thus reducing our craving for junk food and stimulants. Caffeine has a similar effect in that it picks us up quickly and then lets us down, whereas vitamin B and proteins provide us with sustainable energy and a sense of healthy wellbeing or vitality.
The Christian diet is full of high GI experiences. We go to church to be fed with all kinds of highs, using music, experiences and exciting ministry or prayer lines to keep us coming back for more. The problem is that by Monday, when the reality of life bites again, those stimulants quickly wear off, leaving us depleted and frustrated.
There is a need for the low GI sustenance that will keep us burning until Jesus returns. I allude here to the seven wise virgins who trimmed their lamps (Matthew 25:11-12), until the bridegroom arrived at the wedding feast. I won’t go into the background as it is not deeply critical to the story, but will say that seven other (foolish) virgins burnt their lamps at full wick and ran out of oil before the bridegroom returned, the bridegroom being an allegory of Christ returning for His church.
Many of us fall into the trap of burning on our wicks instead of burning on the oil. The oil is the spirit, the wick is our flesh. We burn out readily when we consume our own limited human capacity. We burn long into the night when we are fuelled by God’s Spirit.
It is not possible to sustain believers from high to high and far too many church leaders have made a terrible whip for their backs by trying to sustain crowds through programs. Someone once said, “the way you win them is the way you must be prepared to keep them” and that is the fate of any minister who uses programs to drive bums onto his church seats.
Jesus never commanded us to go and make crowds or converts, as such. He commissioned us to be witnesses, a powerful turn of phrase that implicates our whole lives not just what we say. He also said, “Go and make disciples”. Disciples are the product of discipline, the activity of those who take charge of their own response to God and seek to grasp His truth in a deliberate and committed way. I am against spoon-feeding and believe that believers need to grow up into their Holy Faith (2 Thessalonians 1:3).
Leaders have an important role to play in mentoring and instructing believers through the growing-up period, just as a father ought to instruct his children. But it is not required of us to keep babying believers, nor indeed do I think real believers seek to be babied. They are sheep, needing shepherds to walk with them to higher ground and green pasture. They are not cattle to be herded from program to program or from event to event.
We must facilitate the transformation of every son into a practicing priest in the house of God. I am deeply opposed to the clergy-laity model and feel it has permeated the entire spectrum of Christianity. It is pervasive and self-defeating.
Believers learn far more from doing than they will ever learn from sitting and listening. Teaching is not an end to our faith but the means to an end that will transform novices into effective, contributing priests and active stakeholders in God’s kingdom.
That demands a very different diet. A condescending approach is not going to do it. The assumption that only a few can minister and the rest should remain the ministered to, is a bankrupt concept as it induces no buy in, no investment of lives into the enterprise. A passive involvement never bred maturity, but active engagement brings us into the middle of the river to flow with the life of His kingdom.
Believers must be weaned off milk (Hebrews 6:1-10) and into the meat, which implies a walk of real personal faith and an end to dead-works or compensatory, religious or compliant behavior. It demands that we pursue the resurrection of the dead as something to be attained to, not as a right (Philippians 3:11), and that we account for our own souls in full understanding of God’s eternal judgment.
© Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com
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