~ John Wooden, English teacher and basketball coach.  Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success  

John Wooden moved success from the realm of comparison with others to a kind of self-awareness or knowledge regarding the effort you have exerted.  Through the application of his view, Wooden became one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history.  He coached teams to ten national basketball championships.

Grades are a product of comparison.  While they are important for some moments and opportunities in life, they have a short shelf life.  Your character will last much longer and will go with you far beyond your university years.  Pursuing your studies for the grade is short-sighted.  Jesus Christ called for a longer view of life when He said, “And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?  Is anything worth more than your soul?”  (Matthew 16:26 NLT)

You have to be secure.

John Wooden’s definition of success and Jesus’ long-view of life requires an incredible sense of security.  Security is a product of assurance in relationships.  As Wooden grew as a coach, he sought to give a sense of security to his teams by assuring them that he wasn’t looking for wins; he really was looking for them to give their best effort on and off the court.

Assurance of God’s love for you can become a constant in your life.  At Origin, Born for More, we believe Jesus came to show God’s love for us as a reality that we can daily experience.  His love, demonstrated through the Gospel of Jesus, creates lasting security.  In His love, we don’t need to compare ourselves to another.

Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.”  Jesus lived the life of “the beloved” and now invites us to live the same by receiving His love poured out for us through His death on the Cross.  God’s love becomes a constant that makes comparison less powerful and ruling.  Responding to His grace and love doesn’t destroy ambition as some might accuse.  Rather, by trusting in God’s love for you through Jesus, you will possess a security that empowers you to keep growing, keep learning, and actually risk becoming the person God created you to be, no matter “the grade.”

You were made to be loved.

We do hope you succeed on your exams.  But more than that, we hope you will experience God’s love in Christ Jesus as the constant that gives security and shapes your life.

(I wrote this article for our exam care packages that we are delivering this week at UBC.)

Rejection has many faces.  It comes to visit us if our passion runs counter to prevailing attitudes and actions.  Rejection can sit like a bitter pill in the soul for church planters.  We will become sick if it not metabolized or digested.  After an enjoyable conversation with a bright UBC scholar, I was served the most gentle rejection.  It was even accompanied by a blessing, “I hope you enjoy your life.”  Yet, I felt the weight of it in my gut.

Jesus was familiar with rejection.  His rejection ultimately became the pathway for our inclusion in the Kingdom of God by grace.  However, the great purpose attached to his experience did not shield him from the pain.  Researchers confirm that social rejection lights up the brain as if we have been punched in the gut.  It hurts!

When Jesus went “home” he experienced rejection as he lived out his Heavenly Father’s purposes (Mark 6:1-13).  After he taught in the local synagogue, Nazareth could not deny the greatness of his teaching or his works.  However, Nazareth would not accept him.  They rejected Jesus.  In the the anatomy of their rejection they got really personal.  They raised suspicions about his birth.  They limited him because of his training as a carpenter.  They compared him to the rest of the family.  And in the end they took offense at Jesus.

Planting the Gospel dominates our disciple-making journey at UBC.  Sharing what God has done through the birth, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus sometimes provokes rejection of not only the message but also the messenger.  Because rejection strikes at the heart and generates fear, I have found it helpful to look closely at how Jesus metabolized rejection.

1.  He recognized it.  He said, “A prophet is not without honour, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”  vs 4

2.  He refrained from provoking them further.  Jesus began to withdraw.  “And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.”  vs 5

3.  He marveled at their unbelief.  vs 6  Jesus reflected on their rejection and found their unbelief surprising for it was contrary to what had been revealed to them.

4.  He got back on mission.  Jesus set out and “he went about among the villages teaching.  And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two…”  vs 6-7

5.  He equipped the disciples for rejection.  “And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.”

Jesus knows the spiritual warfare connected with rejection makes disciples vulnerable.  When rejection sticks to us we are in danger of anger, discouragement, vengeful thinking, and perhaps even abandoning the mission and the message of Jesus.  The prophetic act of shaking the dust off was meant to “shake off” the slime of rejection for the benefit of the disciples.  And the act also served as a note of caution and an invitation to those who rejected them to reconsider.  At Origin we are seeking to be a Gospel-shaped church.  Thank you for your support and prayer for us.  As you pray, ask the Lord to give us grace to metabolize rejection when it comes and then to get back on mission.

(This article was first published in the April 2012 edition of the WestCoast Challenge, a publication of the WestCoast Baptist Association.)

I was reminded of this aspect of our human experience as I read this morning from Exodus 20:33-34.  ”When a man opens a pit, or when a man digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the owner of the pit shall make restoration.  He shall give money to its owner, and the dead beast shall be his.”  On the surface a reading of the Old Testament social code may sound archaic and outdated to our ears.  However, I believe these pages contain an ethic we need to hear.  If I dig a pit and another is damaged by my neglect or lack of due diligence then I bear some responsibility for their restoration.

As I read the Torah I find a compelling argument for a moral reckoning when it comes to the matters of water, soil, and air.  Our treatment of water, soil, and air matters to God.  Some of our activity may be called immoral.  The  Creation mandate in Genesis is not for the destruction of the Creation but for the just stewardship of Creation as humanity continues to increase in number.  The Genesis account lets us know that enjoying the good blessings contained in Creation will require both rest and work.  The Creation possess a wildness that will require work.  The Creation also possess a blessing from God that requires our rest from work to actually enjoy it with Him and people.

The stuff of earth was never meant to be divorced from our conversation of relationships.  The manner in which we steward the earth has great implications for our relationships with God and people.  Jesus summarized all the Law and The Prophets in these two commands, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”  Matthew 22:34-39  Loving God and loving people requires that we become thoughtful about life and our relationships.  These two commands require repentance and a deepening understanding of God’s provision of grace and power to us through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  But for this article I’m left with this:  the way I handle land, water, and air must be informed by the mandate to love well.

With every word I’m aware that the mandate to love well seems to over simplify the complexity of the land, water and air conversations filling our newspapers and blogs.  However, this simplification is not  necessarily a bad thing.  If we use economic models as our guide we have fewer reasons to move ourselves, our family, our nation, out of the centre and therefore we lack the capacity to choose certain limits for the benefit of others.  If we use the mandate to love well as we steward the Creation then I must be thoughtful and perhaps restrained about the pits I dig.  When I dig a pit I must take due diligence to prevent harm of others.  And if others are harmed by the pit I dig then I must compensate them.

While the Gospel of Jesus does position the followers of Jesus to anticipate His return, we are never excused from the thoughtful application of love to our decisions regarding the stuff of earth and other people.  The myriad of social concerns that arise is dizzying.  As our growing fellowship (Born for More & Origin) at UBC develops I have been delighted to meet followers of Jesus in the University setting who are tackling social concerns with the best knowledge and research available to them while simultaneously seeking to apply love and the Gospel to their decision making processes.  Their passions of study are not divorced from the call to love God and love people.

In Canada we are digging our share of pits.  The ones on the forefront of our news are called out as tarsands, pipelines, mining, Agriculture Land development, logging in watersheds, fishing, energy development, and treaty negotiations.  Its no wonder that British Columbia and Vancouver is the birthplace of Greenpeace.  Yet, I fear that our affection for nature increasingly lacks a developed ethic of love.  And therefore we lack the capacity to help other people come to the discipline required for a moral reckoning and the internal motivation to accept limits as good.

Steven Sample, President of the University of Southern California, writes in his book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership of his two general rules for decision making:

1.  Never make a decision yourself that can reasonably be delegated to a lieutenant.

2.  Never make a decision today that can reasonably be put off to tomorrow.

His first rule is my interest today.

Leaders can find good reason to send decisions back down to others, not as a matter of shirking responsibility but as a way of developing the organization and the people who serve with them.  The leaders that empower others to make decisions are generally characterized by a strong sense of internal security, clarity regarding the values informing the organizational life, the ability to describe/story these values, communicate trust as the expectation that others will make good decisions, and a delight in seeing others excel and grow.  Why would leaders delight in others making decisions?  Sample gives three reasons:

“Even in small organizations there are compelling reasons why a leader should consistently delegate most decision to selected ones of his lieutenants.  The first has to do with time constraints.  Making a good decision is hard, time-consuming work, and no leader can make many good decisions in a month’s time, much less in a day or a week.  So he needs to carefully reserve for himself only the most important decisions and cheerfully delegate the rest.

A second major factor in favour of delegation is that it helps develop and nurture strong lieutenants.  As we’ll see in a later chapter, a leader can’t expect his lieutenants to grow and grow up unless he gives them the opportunity to make real decisions that will have real consequences for the organization, without their being constantly second-guessed by the leader…

Finally the contrarian leader who is willing to delegate almost all decisions to lieutenants has an opportunity to build a much stronger and more coherent organization than does the leader who tries to make all the decisions himself.  This assertion is very counterintuitive; one would think at first blush that strength and coherence would be on the side of the absolute dictator.  But here’s the key:  the leader who delegates is forced to build coherence by putting together a team of lieutenants who have shared values and common goals.  If he’s successful in this regard, his organization can survive the loss of the leader himself (which will always happen eventually).

By contrast, when a dictatorial leader leaves the scene there is usually no strong and well-knit set of lieutenants to carry the organization forward in a coherent way.  An abrupt ending of years of dictatorial repression usually leads to an eruption of bitter factions and infighting (think of Yugoslavia after Tito’s death).” p. 73-74

I arise today through God’s strength to pilot me:
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s way to lie before me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s host to secure me—

against snares of devils,

against temptations of vices,

against inclinations of
nature,

against everyone who shall
wish me ill, afar and anear,
alone and in a crowd.

Christ to protect me today.
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,  Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today through a mighty strength, the
invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the Threeness, through confession of the Oneness towards the Creator.

Salvation is of the Lord.
Salvation is of the Lord.
Salvation is of Christ.
May Thy salvation, O Lord, be ever with us.  AMEN.

I did not share all of the following quotes in the sermon, but I have been affected by them.

“The disciples cannot know who Jesus really is without accepting the necessity of his suffering and death.  And they cannot be his disciples unless they accept that fate for themselves.”  William Lane

“To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us.  Once more, all that self-denial can say is ‘He leads the way, keep close to him.’”  Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship p. 97.

“The cross is the heart of the gospel, and bearing a cross is a central requirement of discipleship.”  David Garland, NIV Commentary

Are you beginning to see how radical Jesus is?  It’s not a matter of saying, “I’ve been a failure, I’ve been immoral, so now I’m going to go to church and become a moral, decent person.  Then I’ll know I’m a good person because I am spiritual.”  Jesus says, “I don’t want you to simply shift from one performance-based identity to another; I want you to find a whole new way.  I want you to lose the old self, the old identity, and base yourself and your identity on me and the gospel.”  I love the fact that he says “for me and for the gospel.”  He is reminding us not to be abstract about this.  You can’t just say, “Oh, I see: I can’t build my identity on my parent’s approval because that comes and goes; I can’t build my life on my career success; I can’t build my life on romance.  Instead I will build my life on God.”  If that’s as far as you take it, God is almost an abstraction; and so building your life on him is just an act of the will.  The only that can reforge ad change a life at its root is love.

 

Jesus is saying, “It’s not enough just to know me as a teacher or as an abstract principle; you have to look at my life.  I went to the cross–and on the cross I lost my identity so you can have one.”

Once you see the Son of God loving you like that, once you are moved by that viscerally and existentially, you begin to get a strength, an assurance, a sense of your own value and distinctiveness that is not based on what you’re doing or whether somebody loves you, whether you’ve lost weight or how much you’ve got.  You’re free–the old approach to identity is gone.”    Timothy Keller, King’s Cross, p. 105.

30 And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it?31 It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth,32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”  Mark 4:30-32

3 observations:

1. This big shrub was not a usual garden plant.  However, Jesus has it planted in the frequently visited place — the garden.  So it is with the Kingdom of God, when we proclaim the Kingdom through the Gospel of Jesus, it is to be in the normal pathways of our lives.  Our relationships in the normal patterns of study, work, life, and play become our “garden” for the Kingdom of God.   Quit diminishing the value of your normal and usual relationships.
2. The seed contains immense potential.  Although the seed is not the focus of this parable it is important to note that the big “change” that is the focus of the parable starts with the seed.  Mark 4 has conditioned the followers of Jesus to view the seed as the Word of God — the word of the Gospel and the Kingdom of Jesus.  The Gospel story of Jesus’ life, death, burial, and resurrection has a power of its own to bring change in the lives of people.  Quit diminishing the value of the Gospel.
3. The growth of the Kingdom is not only for our benefit.  Jesus describes the impact of the seed’s great growth as the creation of a refuge for the birds of the air.  Jesus may be drawing an allusion to the birds of the air references in Ezekiel and Daniel.  The nations shall take refuge in the Kingdom of Jesus.  We don’t get to choose who we are nesting beside.  By design others are to benefit from the change occurring in the lives of those who take refuge in Christ.  Quit diminishing the Kingdom call for open engagement with people who are “not like you;” then, we will experience the blessings of the Kingdom of God together.

O’Leary writes:

It’s no exaggeration to say that enrolling in special education changed my life completely.  To be told that my dyslexia had an upside shifted my perspective on myself and the world around me, and it left me with five very important principles that carried me through the rest of my education, all the way to my MBA and into my business life.

1.  Stick it out through difficulties.  You don’t have to be perfect; you just have to finish.
2.  Stand up for yourself.
3.  Explain what you need, clearly.
4.  Ask questions.
5.  If you don’t understand the answer, ask for a better, clearer explanation.

Margie gave me this list, reminding me again and again that no one else would do these things for me.  I had to do them for myself.  Cold Hard Truth p. 22

Until a child has the means to advocate for themselves parents, teachers and others must do it for them.  Early intervention with dyslexia has proven helpful over and over.  Its important to intervene before the spirit of a child is crushed and they become infected with a resentment that spoils most of their life.  O’Leary goes on to say, “There is a lot of shame when children are told over and over they can’t do something.  These children rarely grow up to be success stories.  Margie Golick removed that shame at the exact right time in my life, before it took root and hampered me, and for that I’ll be forever grateful.  I hope everyone finds his or her Margie.”

1 Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying,2 ”Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.”3 So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey in breadth.4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”5 And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.  Jonah 3:1-4

Our active participation in life with Him means we become authors in His story.  The story of Jonah is not just about a city that repents (Jonah 3) but it is also of a man who has trouble with the character and will of God.

Culture, nationalism, prejudice, and love of self, conspire to create resistance.  When violence and oppression is normalized we yield to fatalism.  The “good” act like “those evil people” will never change.  The “evil” act like they have run out of choices.  Until God interrupts our lie, we will not know the end of fate.

God gave grace to the king of Nineveh.  The king recognized a God who was rightly angry.  We would say there is a God who cares that all is not right in the world.  The king said, “Who knows?  God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.”

Fate would require no opportunity.  But we have a God who creates opportunity.  For three days His prophet traversed that great city with a warning.  The city repented  This is the end of fate.  People can change.  They can be changed through an experience of the grace of God.

Ultimately we have Jesus who traversed heaven and earth to conquer the greatest liar and prince of death, Satan.  Jesus is the end of fate.  He invites us into His Kingdom of life.

Thank you Lord for the grace to hear and know you.

The kids of Admiral Seymour Elementary are semi-finalists in the Aviva Community Fund Competition.  The school has proposed to equip a space and enlist an Expresive Art Therapist.

“Our goal is to set up and provide our students with a well equipped therapeutic art room where an Expressive Art Therapist (EXAT) can counsel our emotionally fragile students. EXATs are trained in child centered therapy through the use of drawing, painting, music, dance/movement, storytelling, journaling, sculpting, play, drama etc. We would use the funding to successfully create an inviting, resource filled Therapeutic art room. Any remaining money would be used to top up our Art therapist’s time so that we would have a full time therapist from January 2012 until June 2013. “

Read more here and vote.