Category Archives: Spiritual Life

A Key to a Meaningless Life

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Some time ago, a couple came to the local churches asking for financial help. When the pastor asked, “Where do you attend church?” the answer was, “We don’t.” They are professing Christians, but they don’t go to church anywhere. This is common.

I was thinking about why folks who call themselves Christians don’t regularly fellowship with other Christians, and while I know there are a variety of reasons, I think one reason is because they have been injured in the past. Sometimes avoidance of church is symptomatic of aversion to social interaction in general.

However, God created us as social people. The phrase, “It is not good for man to be alone” does not only reveal the origin of marriage, but verbalizes our need to interact with others. This interaction is essential if our lives are to have real meaning.

Paul Borthwick stated this well just over two decades ago.

It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows through the cultivation of an insignificant life. Indeed, if a man’s ambition is to avoid the troubles of life, the recipe is simple: shed your ambitions in every direction, cut the wings of every soaring purpose, and seek a life with the fewest contacts and relations. If you want to get through the world with the smallest trouble, you must reduce yourself to the smallest compass. Tiny souls can dodge through life; bigger souls are blocked on every side. As soon as a man begins to enlarge his life, his resistances are multiplied. Let a man remove his petty selfish purposes and enthrone Christ, and his sufferings will be increased on every side. (Paul Borthwick, Leading the Way, Navpress, 1989, p. 86)

Borthwick says a mouthful in those few words. He speaks of being significant. He encourages sanctified ambitions. He addresses the purpose-driven life.

To me, he’s saying: Brave the pain, risk the injuries, and dream big for the sake of being significant in the eyes of Christ.

Replacing Discouragement with Expectancy

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The story is told of a man who was walking along the beach, after the tide had gone. Scattered densely on the sand were thousands of starfish that the tide had brought in, but neglected to take out. In a short time, the sun and wind would dry the starfish, leaving them dead. The man, on his daily walk, was bending down, picking them up one at a time, tossing them back into the ocean.

After watching this for a while, a tourist approached him and said, “There are so many starfish on this beach. What difference could what you are doing possibly make? What does it matter?” The man bent down, picked up another starfish, and just before tossing it into the sea said, “It matters to this one.”

If there is one tool of the enemy that is nearly universal in its effectiveness, it is the tool of discouragement. Often, because the task embodied in The Great Commission seems overwhelming, believers just give up. This podcast strives to help us avoid this. It helps us recover our lost expectations.

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Setting Your Sights on Spiritual Depth

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In the 1800s, in the area of Virginia City, NV, Americans discovered a bonanza — a vein of silver which is said to have funded a great deal of the Union’s part in the Civil War. The shaft of silver was called, “The Comstock,” named after one of its early investors. The discovery was so important that it is argued that the city of San Francisco would have been nothing more than a ghost-town, were it not for the Comstock. The Comstock was an unusual mine in that the deeper they dug, the hotter things got due to the hot-springs in the ground. The temperature in the Comstock silver mine was in the triple digits —even around 150 degrees F. When they hit a vein of water, miners would be scalded — sometimes to death.

A man named Adolph Sutro put together the money to dig a tunnel, almost four miles long, to meet the miners as they were digging down from Virginia City. The tunnel was one of the wonders of the time, being able to accommodate teams of mules in and out. Sutro’s plan was for the tunnel to meet the mine shaft as it descended. It was an impressive project.

But Sutro set his sights too shallowly. By the time his horizontal tunnel intersected the vertical mineshaft, the digging was being done below his tunnel. Sutro sold out and went to San Francisco. When I first heard that story, I thought of how much we tend to be like that — missing the mark when we set our sights. Whether you’re speaking about, students in high school, young adults thinking about college, or people choosing a vocation, setting our sights deeply enough is often a struggle. It’s not the end of the world if you do that academically or even vocationally. Anyone who studies human beings can tell you that those outcomes don’t dictate happiness. And I can tell you, as a pastor, that success in life can actually hinder closeness with God, unless you set your mind to prevent that from happening.

On the other hand, if I may, I’d like to say that often spiritually, we all tend to set our  sights too shallowly concerning spiritual objectives we might want to reach.

In this podcast, we think about where we want to be, spiritually speaking, down the road.  In order to be sure to set our sights deeply, we’ll look at Philippians 3, reading our way through it as we go.

And we’ll take our cue from the Apostle Paul — who set his sights on something deep.

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