God's goal...

Reading this week in the early chapters of Exodus, I've been struck by how many times we read the same phrase: Let my people go! Countless numbers of people are familiar with the story behind these words, but many would not be able to tell you the second half of the sentence. If you read closely, you'll discover that these well known words are nearly always followed by another, not so well known phrase: Let my people go, so that they may worship me. (For example in vs 1 and vs 20 of Exodus chapter 8.)

God wants His people to be free, but He has an even greater purpose for our lives than freedom: He wants us to be able to love and worship Him wholeheartedly without any hindrances. It's easy to focus on what the Israelites would be freed from (slavery in Egypt) and forget what they would be freed for: a loving, trusting, worshipful relationship with God. Even as we've just celebrated Easter, I realise that Christians today sometimes also have a tendency to focus on what Jesus freed us from (sin, death, addictions, selfish lifestyle, fear, etc) but to neglect what we were freed for:  a new life in close friendship with God.

In verse 25 of Exodus 8, Pharaoh tries to negotiate a compromise: he'll allow the people to worship, but he won't let them go; they'll have to meet with God while still in the context of their slavery in Egypt.  When Moses and Aaron refuse this compromise, Pharaoh is forced to concede a little more ground: he'll allow them to go to worship, but they mustn't go "too far away." (verse 28)

The enemy has lured many believers into the same sorts of compromise in the 21st century. Perhaps they're saved, but they're still slaves to bad habits or to destructive thought patterns like worry, rejection or self pity. Perhaps they've broken free of some shackles, but they haven't gone "'too far away" from their old slavery and haven't experienced the total freedom of a joyful relationship with Father God.  Like Pharaoh, the kingdom that once held us captive will always try to maintain at least a partial grip on our lives. But God's goal is for us to know complete freedom to worship Him, and Easter reminds us of the price that Jesus paid to make it possible for us.

Think back on your own life over the past week. How much time have you spent enjoying the freedom of chatting to God and worshipping Him without hindrance? With the Easter celebration still so near in our memories, let's tell God this week that we want to enter into His true goal for our lives.

Dealing with backlash

During the LDC (leadership development course) we have a few days where we teach on the topic of leadership timeline. This involves looking back at the timeline of your life and identifying the different processes that God has used to develop you as a disciple and as a leader: times when your obedience or your integrity was tested; times when you learned to hear God’s voice or to trust Him for financial provision.

One of the process items that every leader will experience at some time in life is called “leadership backlash.” This happens when the team or church faces difficult circumstances and there’s a reaction of blaming and complaining against the leader. I came across an example of this in my daily Bible reading this morning.

At the end of Exodus chapter 4, the people of Israel are convinced that Moses and Aaron have been sent by the Lord, and they start to praise God for the encouraging news that He is going to deliver them from their slavery in Egypt. If you remember the continuation of the story, however, after Moses and Aaron have spoken to Pharaoh (in Exodus chapter 5)  he punishes the Israelites by insisting they make the same number of bricks as before, but refusing to give them straw for the task. As a result of this harsh treatment, the people begin to grumble and complain against Moses and Aaron, saying, “This is your fault. May the Lord punish you for this.”

That’s what we call leadership backlash.  Leaders not only carry the consequences of a chosen course of action; they also sometimes bear the negative reaction of the people who had supposedly agreed to that course of action.

In KKI, a ministry that I’ve worked with over the past thirty years, we have a couple of ministry values that seem to reduce this backlash just a little. One is the value that we place on youth ownership - involving the young people in hearing from God and being part of the decision about what we’re going to do. Another is our strong belief that everyone can hear the voice of God, even the youngest child in the team.

I remember a situation in Southern Africa where we had a time of prayer with our team of children and teenagers, asking God what was on His heart for our outreach that day. There was a strong sense in the group that God was asking us to bless a slum community by working with local young people to clean up their neighbourhood and pick up litter from the beach next to their home-made shack dwellings. One of the teenagers felt God saying that it would be challenging, but it would demonstrate to the people that we were coming to serve them and not to judge them.

When the time for the project arrived, the weather had suddenly become incredibly hot and the beach area turned out to be a lot more dirty than we had realised. It was a situation ripe for leadership backlash, for children and teenagers to complain that this had been a stupid idea, and to grumble about having such a hard and disgusting job to do.

But no one said a negative word. Not only did no young person complain; they actually carried out the task with joyful energy and with loud songs of praise together. Because this job hadn’t been the leader’s idea; it had been God’s idea, and the young people themselves were the ones who had told us that. 

No pastor or Christian leader can completely avoid the sting of leadership backlash. But I wonder if it would happen less often if our teams and congregations all learned how to hear from God and make important ministry decisions in corporate obedience to His voice.

Nocturnal nebuliser… daybreak deliverance

Oooh, I was so sure that this bronchitis was much better, but it's been getting increasingly hard to breath again over the past two days. Whenever I lie down, I feel like I'm going to suffocate. Finally, my neighbours (one of whom used to have a family member on oxygen with a lung condition) persuaded me to go to the clinic last night and have it checked. Sure enough, the doctors were surprised to find my lung function seemed to be down at 30%. (That's not as bad as it sounds, as my underlying lung condition means that they function at just 54% all year round.) They put me on oxygen and on a nebuliser for a while, and did all the usual checks to make sure that the chest pain wasn't due to a heart problem. They confirmed that I should use both of the inhalers that the doctor in Scotland prescribed for me recently (so that I get enough air to breath and clear the phlegm from my lungs) but discovered that one of the inhalers had been causing a fungal infection and that's why my throat has been so incredibly sore again over the past few days. Finally they released me, sending me off to the all night pharmacy (an interesting experience, where you stand outside, putting your prescription and your money through a trap door, while a disembodied voice speaks to you from inside the pharmacy.)

All of this nighttime adventure, plus the fact that the clocks went forward this weekend, meant that I arrived home in the small hours of Easter Sunday morning. And it seems I was able to save a life on resurrection Sunday! When I arrived home from the clinic at 3 am, I found a little paralysed sparrow sitting on my upstairs terrace. Presumably it had fallen from somewhere and was paralaysed with fright. The three cats came and stood around it, staring (fascinated, but with no killer instinct) and the little bird didn't move, even when I picked it up and put it in a box. In the end, I put the box safely on my front balcony. The bird was still there when I looked out at 5 am, but was gone a couple of hours later. 

My neighbour claims that sparrows can't fly in the dark, and the little creature would have stayed motionless until sunrise on Easter morning. I didn't know if that was true or not, but I rather liked the imagery of being set free to fly when Easter Sunday dawns. (The wonders of Google have confirmed that most birds can fly at night, but usually choose not to, as many breeds don't see well in the dark and might risk injury.)

Update: if you're reading this on Tuesday 29th, I can report that I saw the doctor again yesterday. My throat is beginning to improve a little, but my breathing is still slightly challenging. There's a dry hacking cough in the mornings, which sometimes improves a little throughout the day.  They've given me a combination inhaler to replace the two I was using, and also a stronger antibiotic to clear my airways and sinuses. Hopefully my breathing will get back to normal fairly soon. (As this week's schedule mainly involves sitting in meetings and prayer times, I'd been expecting to be able to take part. … but it doesn't look like I'm going to make it for the start of the meetings tonight. We'll see if there's any improvement in the course of the coming days.) 

From desert to destiny

The first two chapters of Exodus have set the scene for one of the greatest escapes of all time, and chapter three is the moment where God will call a leader to see the people through those challenging times. We’re probably all familiar with the story of where Moses meets God at the burning bush, but I was struck this morning by a small phrase in the first verse of that chapter. Exodus 3: 1 tells us that Moses led the flock far into the wilderness until he came to Sinai, the mountain of the Lord.

Moses was God’s chosen leader to shepherd the people of Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the Promised Land. So what we see him doing at the beginning of this chapter is in line with his God-given gifting, but is only a shadow of his true destiny: he’s leading and caring for sheep instead of leading and caring for people.

All kinds of things can prevent us from stepping up to what God has for us in life. It could be fears or laziness that hold us back; it could be difficult circumstances or opposition from other people; it could be our own sin and disobedience. In Moses’ case, it was his deep sense of failure: he had tried once before to help the Hebrews and had failed badly, ending up killing a man.

When such things happen, they often catapult us into a wilderness journey. Moses had fled from Egypt and settled down in the desert of Midian; he even married and started a family there. And on this particular day, in Gen 3: 1, he goes even further into the wilderness, until he finds himelf at the place whre God’s presence dwells.

It’s easy for us to settle down, like Moses, in the dry desert place and get so used to it that it becomes our “norm” and we forget that it’s wilderness terrain. We may even have forgotten the failure, the disappointment, the unanswered prayer or the unconfessed sin that started us heading in that direction in the first place. Sometimes, like Moses, we need to venture far into the wilderness place before we’re truly ready to meet with God.

The wilderness is not intended to be God’s final destination (or destiny) for any of us. Perhaps, like Moses, we’re called to go to a particular place or do a specific task. Perhaps we’re simply called to stay right where we are, and to live in such deep friendship with God that we make our neighbours, friends and family hungry for Jesus. Either way, the moment and the place where we embrace that calling is special and sacred. As God says to Moses in verse 5, “This is holy ground."

Have you met with God on holy ground? Have you embraced His holy calling on your life, or have you settled indefinitely in the wilderness place? During this Easter weekend where we celebrate the joy and power of the resurrection, let’s not settle for a desert experience, but let’s push on to the place where we can truly encounter God.

Sovereign foundations - seeing the hand of God

After reading the psalms during the month of March, I recently returned to the account of early Bible history and began reading daily in the Old Testament book of Exodus. Exodus picks up where the book of Genesis left off, except that almost four hundred years have passed since Jacob and his sons settled in Egypt to avoid a famine in their own country. The ruling Pharaoh has no memory of the crucial role that Joseph once played in saving Egypt from the famine, and he feels threatened by the sheer size of the Hebrew people. Afraid that they might one day rise up and wage war against Egypt, he keeps them in oppression and slavery, and even reaches the point where he tries to limit their numbers by killing off all the baby boys that are born.

The first two chapters of Exodus are the exhilerating account of how God protects and prepares the generation that is going to experience one of the greatest rescue operations of all time. Perhaps many Hebrew babies were drowned in the Nile river at that terrible time, but perhaps many others were saved, like Moses, by parents and midwives who respected God more than they respected the cruel directives of the Egyptian King. Not only was Moses’ life spared in an amazing way, God also engineered his circumstances to give him the very best training and equipping for the special role he would play in Israel’s history. Raised by his own parents from earliest childhood, Moses would have grown up learning about the amazing God of Israel. Then, given back to Pharaoh’s daughter and raised for the rest of his childhood and adolescence in the Egyptian palace, Moses would have learned everything he needed to know about Egyptian language and culture. The end result was a young man uniquely equipped to serve God by leading the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt.

Have you ever taken time to look back and consider the unique ways that God prepared you for the things He was calling you to in life? It can be a fascinating experience that really opens your eyes to the amazing providence of God.

I remember, in the late 1980s, when I was working with teams of young people that used music and choreography to worship God and share the gospel, that I looked back at my life one day and was amazed to realise that my childhood experiences (even before I knew the Lord) of going to dancing lessons and working with youth theatre companies had given me a unique foundation of skills on which to build this area of ministry involvement.

When I moved to Spain some years ago, I was thankful that my youthful decision to study languages, linguistics and phonetics at university had prepared me to learn various different languages throughout my lifetime, and to actually enjoy adding Spanish as a sixth language in my later years of life.

More recently, when the University of the Nations asked me to be part of the faculty committee of the College of Education, I realised that my choice (in the early 1980s) to do post graduate studies in education had not only equipped me for various teaching related activites throughout my lifetime, but had also given me the qualifications needed to embrace this university role with integrity.

What about your life? What are the “sovereign foundations” that God built into your journey during childhood, adolescence or early adult years? Taking time to look back and see His hand in our lives will perhaps surprise us... and will hopefully fill us with thankfulness for His faithfulness from our earliest years.

Homeward bound...

Time has flown by, our two weeks in Hawaii are over and tonight I'll be heading back to Europe. Our leadership meetings went well and there were many encouragements (more about that in  my next newsletter) as well as one or two challenges - like the saga of my broken suitcase, and the fact that I came down with a bout of bronchitis. I'm hoping my lungs are sufficiently recovered that I can make my four flights without too much coughing. We had good times of worship and celebration with the broader YWAM family here on campus, including one night where they honoured us and celebrated the KKI 40th anniversary with us.

We were able to make some decisions about leadership structure and future steps, as well as to begin planning for the big events we are holding in Africa this summer. As this Hawaii trip draws to a close, my next step will be to find and book the plane tickets I need for going to the Ivory Coast and Senegal from July to September.

Amidst the many days of meetings, we also took a day and a half for relaxation. One day a group of us went to visit a Kona coffee farm, and another day we went for a picnic to a beautiful beach. Our meetings finished last night and the big exodus began today. Some have already left, and I'll be leaving this evening, flying from Kona to Seattle, then on to Amsterdam and Edinburgh. After a couple of days in Scotland, I'll fly back to Spain at the weekend. Thanks for your prayers.

Half way in Hawaii

Time is flying by and we're already half way through our  leadership meetings in Kona. One week is already behind us and a second week lies ahead. We've had some stimulating times of processing and prayer; I have the task of documenting the meetings, taking notes, collating feedback, etc, so there's been plenty to keep me busy. 
My first days here in the island were marred by baggage hassles. First, my luggage was delayed, leaving me without my stuff for three days. Then, when it finally arrived, I saw that my relatively new suitcase had been broken at the hinges. I'm hassling with the airline at the moment to get a new suitcase to replace the damaged one.

Last night, our meetings finished early. As it happened to be International Women's Day, a group of us went down to the village, to the Kona Inn Restaurant, to try their famous Kona Mud Pie - a coffee ice cream creation. The men paid for the women's slices of pie. The portions were so large that we only needed eight slices for seventeen of us.  It was fun to sit on the beachfront terrace, watching the waves breaking on the rocks and the palm trees blowing wildly in the wind. Those of us from more nocturnal nations (Spain, Hong Kong…) were surprised to discover that we'd got to the restaurant just in time: the kitchen closes and they stop taking food orders at 9 pm. (In Spain, many restaurants are only opening at 9 pm !)

Another full day of meetings lies before us, and we would value your prayers for things to be planned and decisions to be made that will affect the future of the ministry around the world. Thanks!