Everyone knows how to cut, paste and crop these days – my kids included. I was cropping our family picture one morning for a Power Point presentation in time for a seminar I was going to teach in.
Coming back to the office, I thought about how people try to ‘crop God’. Cropping God?
People try to reduce God into ‘managable sizes’ so they can pull Him out of their pockets whenever they need Him.
But He is above and beyond that. In fact, we wouldn’t want a God we can manage. When circumstances overtake us, we want Someone who is much bigger than our situation.
Remember, our God is ALL-MIGHTY…
Question: How big is your God?
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the LORD. Isaiah 55:8
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:9
Every so often, I would hear people talk about their small group (Bible study/prayer group). I love it that many are so involved with making disciples. At Victory, we are really just about 2 things: Honoring God and making disciples.
However, there are times when I cringe. I’m sure people don’t mean it the way I’m hearing it but it really just doesn’t sound right.
I’m talking about the phrase “my disciples.”
They’d talk about having a meeting with “my disciples” or fellowship time with “my disciples.”
Worse, they refer to the people in their group as “under me”.
Whose disciples are they really?
When we look at the Scriptures, when “my disciples” show up, it is Jesus speaking. Whose disciples are they? Not mine, not yours, but HIS.
John 8:31. To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.
John 13:35. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
John 15:8. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.
Minor adjustment in terms but a HUGE change in mindset.
I asked one of my sons last night, “Do you feel people expect more from you because you are a pastor’s son?”
He said, “Not really.”
“Great!”, I said.
Throughout the years of my kids growing up, my wife and I have been very deliberate to make sure our kids understand that they don’t have to act a certain way because they’re parents are in full-time ministry. However, people can still fall in the trap of looking at our kids and expect that they have to be the most behaved, well mannered, ‘perfect’, ‘di nakakabasag pinggan’ type of kids.
We consistently check that and ask our kids.
At the end of our conversation, I told him, “You do what you gotta do because you love Jesus not because you are my son.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do what I gotta do because I am God’s son, not because I’m a pastor’s son.”
I think he hit the nail on the head.
Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. (John 1:12)
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Everyone knows how to cut, paste and crop these days – my kids included. I was cropping our family picture one morning for a Power Point presentation in time for a seminar I was going to teach in.
