Favorite Mistake part 4

          Word of mouth was decent for Live Like Jesus class.  The students of year one encouraged other students to join it the following year.  Do to some scheduling complications the class was actually cancelled. It didn’t start again until 2012.  It had become a mythical legend.  During the 2 year hiatus I sought God’s face on how to fix it.  I felt He had directed my path in gathering the checkpoints but I knew I was still doing it wrong.  In my personal life I pleaded for intimacy with Him.

          I made a few tweaks that aren’t even that describable and the class exploded.  I don’t mean grew in numbers, I mean the students just grew!  Teachers and coaches were coming to me and asking me what I was doing with them.  I’d just smile gently and say, “Live Like Jesus class.”  We were a success.

          Except for the frequent failure, guilt, and shame associated with trying so hard, having great intentions, and only seeing results when…God was involved.

          That was the secret.  It should have been obvious all along.  The students and I experienced growth and “checkpoint” success when God moved in us.  That first semester we just so happened to have God meet us on a lot of checkpoint efforts.  Ask some of the students who stayed in the class second semester.  God stopped showing up.  We were picking the wrong ones or somethingJ

          That summer God reached out to me and broke me completely.  But His grace and mercy He opened my eyes to how He actually works and what my part is in it, and it was liberating.  I started changing a lot.  I changed how I approached things, how I prayed, how I read, how I taught…how I taught.

          Entering the 2012-2013 school year I had a real problem.  I taught a class that was waaaaaaay more legalistic than me.  I taught a class that was not freedom, but the opposite.  What to do with Live Like Jesus?  Ugh, I even hated the name now.  God had shown me that obedience falls within our freedoms not our slavery.  But how to I apply that to class?  You still have to come every day, you still must be assessed.  Hmmm.

          So I started the first semester with tiny tweaks.  Pouring as much grace on people as possible and using phrases like, “Don’t just pick a checkpoint, but be led to one.”  I desperately wanted to be a part of what God was doing and had zero interest in busy work Christianity. 

          It was hit and miss.  Then some circumstances came together like a perfect storm to turn Live Like Jesus class into a book.  A published book for the world!  Yikes, it wasn’t ready.  In October 2012 I started writing it.  The first draft had heavy hints of legalism, and some residual lordship salvation from my past.  I prayed and prayed and I revised and revised and I searched the scriptures in the wee hours of the morning for the axiom’s.

          I was walking one night and talking out loud to Jesus and it hit me.  Terminology and ways to communicate what I was learning. All of those checkpoints are really opportunities.  In no way could we ever do them all.  In no way could we ever consistently guess which one God is going to be a part of.  But if we had an awareness of the opportunities then we might noticed more readily when God is moving and cooperate with Him. 

          I re-wrote the book.  I came to class with a grin and said, “class there are no more checkpoints, there are only opportunities.”  I will admit at first it was just a change of terminology and not in method.  But by second semester we had made some monumental changes.  The first one was a whole new list of opportunities that were added based on Jesus’s heart and attitude.  These became my personal favorites.

          Now the class selects a group of 5-6 opportunities to be thinking of for the week.  We call it our pool, and we swim in that pool for a week.  A week later we read the list and ask anyone if they freely entered into Jesus life in any of those ways.  Sometimes we do some together as a group when God provides a group opportunity.  We still share victories and failures but the guess work is gone and the busy work is gone.  There are no more self-assignments instead we react to Jesus in us.  The intimacy that I had longed for is available!  I think we miss what Jesus is doing when we are too busy being good Christians.

          So goes the book, it evolved into Opportunity Jesus. We claim Romans 8:29 as our heartbeat.  For those He foreknew (all Christians) He also predestined (meaning it’s going to happen) to be conformed into the image of His Son (yes that’s what we were trying to do and God is already doing it!)  Jesus paid it all and made us new.  As new creations God is working on our on fire days, sure, and even on our ice cold days.  Now where the opportunities come in is this…each one that shows up in your life gives you the choice to cooperate with what God is already doing in you.  That is where freedom meets obedience and that is where maturity/growth meets trust. 

That’s our story…will this be your story too?    

Favorite Mistake Part 3

          Live Like Jesus class was going to be epic.  I had thought a lot about the checkpoint study and had concluded that two things had been missing from the evening services that I could incorporate in the class.  Number one was commitment.  As a high school student you have to come to class every day.  Sure it’s by compulsion but I wasn’t against that yet in my life.  To make it clear how serious LLJ class was going to be I handed out a covenant for them to sign on the first day of class.  I had grown up with covenants.  I thought they were binding to dedication but truly they only bind us to guilt when we fail.  Here is the covenant…

 Live Like Jesus

Covenant

I, ________________________, have exchanged my life for Jesus life.

I will look to encounter Him daily.  Y/ N

 I will enrich the lives of others because of Jesus in me. Y/ N

 I will engage my world with Jesus love. Y/ N

 I will emulate Him with my whole heart, mind, soul, and strength. Y/ N

I promise to forget the failures in my Christian walk prior, and promise to make new strides in my emulation of Jesus Christ future.  Y/ N

Today I make a willful commitment to this experience and will give 110% on a daily basis.  Y/ N

As I become enemy number one of the Enemy number one I commit myself to prayer, for myself and others fighting this battle with me.  Y/ N

I understand it will not be easy, but I will fight for victory by Christ who strengthens me.  Y/ N

I will open myself up to the Holy Spirit to work in me.  Y/ N

I will open up to my peers who are in this with me.  Y/ N

I will be unashamed to become a new creature, unrecognizable from the creature that first began.  Y/ N

To all of these things I commit, this will be the year that defines me.  Y/ N

____________________________________

Signed

          Oh my goodness I thought this was a good idea?  First of all, the first line proves that I was living in a paradigm where I needed to somehow buy Jesus.  This is false.  I will forget my failures?  Ok, that’s actually smart.  And try harder?  Oh no, I really thought that would work?  I did.  Give 110%?  That isn’t even possible.  The year that defines me?  No pressure though right? 

          4 students bailed out after that first day of class.  At the time I bragged that we were doing something so legit that the flakes couldn’t keep up.  Now I question the ones who stayed.  At this point I am tempted to go into self-loathing and wonder if I should be fired for this.  No, everyone involved thought this was great.  Thousands of people today would think this is great.  It looks great.  But it doesn't work.

         Here is the second thing I added to the class we didn’t have in Illinois…assessment.  Every good class has assessment.  Now believe it or not I still held onto grace and knew that we could never rightful grade each other’s walk with Christ.  This truth was a seed planted in me that God eventually caused to grow.

          Our assessments looked like this.  As we did the Bible study students would write down in their notebooks all of the Jesus checkpoints.  At the end of each week we would go around the room one by one and select a checkpoint to apply to our life.  Then a week later we would report strengths and weaknesses associated with it and select a new one going forward.  I graded them gracefully, as long as they shared they got A’s, it didn’t matter how they did.

          It started off great, high energy good reports.  But then mid-semester people start forgetting their checkpoint, lying about checkpoints and by semesters end a few people are openly not involved.  Visibly I was disappointed and “encouraged” them on to do better.  Privately I was exactly the same.  I had weeks go by that I couldn’t remember what my checkpoint was either.  I had weeks I didn’t want to do it at all. And many times my checkpoint seemed to hard for me to do on my own. But we had to. 

          That isn’t a relationship with Jesus, and that isn’t Christianity.  That is a mess that causes spiritual retardation.  I began to wonder if my relationship was just broken.  Because I couldn’t make myself grow.  The checkpoints weren’t as powerful as they should have been.  I wondered if the students would eventually think the whole idea was a sham.

          All this time God was at work in me.  And eventually He would flip the script and show me how these “checkpoints” were really opportunities!  He would work a mistake into something good.  To be continued…

Favorite Mistake Part 2

           One day I was in my office trying to figure everything out when God prompted me to go to Arizona.  This wasn’t a Jonah situation where Arizona was Nineveh or anything.  My wife’s family lives in Arizona.  My wife and I went to college in Arizona (Southwestern Bible).  My grandfather lives in Arizona.  There was quite a draw anyway.  When we headed out west we thought we would be planting a church in Surprise with God’s blessing.

          After moving to Surprise in 2006 it was clear that Surprise didn’t need another church.  Every school in the town had a church renting its facilities for jumpstart churches of every denomination.  I wasn’t sure what was going on.  God had clearly prompted me to leave Illinois and go to Arizona, so why wasn’t there a ministry for me to do?  Turns out He had only pointed at Arizona and not at church planting.  I had filled in a blank that He wanted to fill.

          After a few weeks I realized that to feed my family of four I need a job.  A job that pays you money while you try to plant a church on the side.  So I looked online for just about anything and I found a job opening at Northwest Christian High School.  They needed a Bible teacher for 8^th grade.  Perfect.

          I applied and then went to Colorado to speak at a youth camp and the whole time I was there I became fully convicted in my spirit that Northwest was God’s plan.  When I returned the position had been filled.  I couldn’t believe it.  I checked online again and saw this same school needed a high school art teacher.  (I had a big time art background so I thought, well that’s something.)  So I went to this Northwest Christian High School and met with their then principle Ernie Molina. 

          I said to him, “I want to be your art teacher.”  He asked proper questions like, do you have a teaching degree, and art degree, the ability to even draw?  Of course I didn’t have the degrees so I took a few days to prove that I could not only draw but many other types of art and that I could teach it with a biblical worldview.  (I had seen they were big on that on their website.)

          By God’s mercy he hired me.  I had a job!  A part-time job that allowed me to try to plant a church; that would never start.  Turns out my good friend from college Chris Gardner had gotten the 8^th grade Bible teacher job instead of me.  In hindsight that was God protecting me too.  He is the perfect guy for that age, not me.  Never me.

          The school took note of my biblical worldview integration in my art classes and gave me some study halls the second semester to make me full time.  Then during the second semester the high school Bible Department interviewed me for the 11^th grade Bible position.  I got it.  Over the next seven years God revealed why He pointed at Arizona and just wanted me to trust Him. Wow, that was hard and I don’t think I was very good at it, I know I complained a lot and got discouraged but I’m here. 

          

          Wait, what about the mistake of the Jesus checkpoints and accidental legalism I created in Illinois?  In 2008 the Bible guys were approached by Mr. Molina for new ideas on Bible elective courses.  I offered my Jesus study as an idea and they loved it, I loved it, and the office named it Live Like Jesus class.  (Doesn’t that sound intimidating and like a command?  We didn’t notice!)  16 students were in it in year one.  It was exciting times!  To be continued…   

Favorite Mistake

So in the year 2004, I believe, I was a senior pastor of a little town in Illinois called Glasford.  It was a town of around 500 folks, and a church about 1/5 of that size.  I was 24 years old and leading a church by God's mercy.  I miss my friends from their as I didn't keep in touch with them all.  I'm sorry about that development.   Now I made many mistakes while I was there, but I only want to share with you one of them.  It's my favorite mistake because it turned into a huge blessing.

The church had one Sunday morning service, one Sunday evening service, and Wednesday night prayer meeting.  I was golden for preparing Sunday morning, sermons are my thing, actually they might be the ONLY thing I did well as a pastor.  Wednesdays were a whole other story but at least they were on another day.  But there sat Sunday evening service.  Traditionally, the pastors before me shared another sermon.  I couldn't imagine doing that for very long because we don't retain that much of what is said to us in a sermon anyway and then a second one in the same day just seemed like it would muddy up our thinking.  (This was when I still believed sermons had a huge impact on spiritual growth.)

I decided instead of a sermon I would give a Bible study that would be chalk full with application.  Not a bad idea, right?  Except for the fact there is no difference between a sermon and Bible study when the pastor is standing and delivering it from a pulpit and nobody dares to ask questions or converse:)

I thought the most applicable thing in the world would be a WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) theme.  Except for the fact the WWJD never worked for me because I wasn't always sure what He would do.  He didn't play baseball, video games, or deal with parenting.  So I sat back in my office chair and thought up a very bad idea.

Enter my mistake.  I decided that instead of WWJD, we could do WDJD (What Did Jesus Do).  I made it my task to go through the life of Christ and pull from the Scriptures every single thing Jesus did that we could do. I believe that God not only allowed me to do this, but He helped! I called them checkpoints. And at the time I honestly believed that I and all of my congregation could simply go through the checklist and systematically do them.  Literally becoming like Jesus!  How spiritually mature were we going to be?  

There I stood week after week for two years delivering the life of Christ and all of it's checkpoints from my pulpit.  Wondering if anyone out there was doing any of the checkpoints because I couldn't assess it, and secretly knowing that I was failing in my own efforts.  It was overwhelming.  There were almost 300 of them.  Who had the time?  Who had the energy?  Who had the ability...except Jesus? I had become an accidental legalist.

I started dreaming of how we could do it better one day, figure out a stricter system (oh my), but Jesus had a whole different plan for these 'checkpoints.'  One day many years later He would reveal to me they are opportunities.

Until next time...