Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching the clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: My wife doesn't even let me use hammers, never mind putting a roof on. I remember I was on the verge of crying. I was a grown man, and I just saw these clouds out there and the thunder. I'm standing on the whole roof of the church. It's Saturday and I've got to preach tomorrow, and I was all alone. I was absolutely overwhelmed with the thought. I called Ted Williams, a great roofer friend of mine, and he sent a crew out and bailed me out. But it was noon time. The workers worked good from 8:00 to noon. It was just from noon on that it got a little tiring for everyone, and it was, "Well, I'm done."

I don't think they realized they were leaving me there alone, even though I've had a hard time forgiving most of those people ever since that. But I remember the sense of loneliness, literally on the roof alone, thinking, "What am I going to do?" There wasn't one shingle, I had no tarp, it was just bare wood on the roof until somebody came. I was overwhelmed. I was overburdened. If we're conscious of the needs—sometimes ministry needs, family needs—these burdens can crush us.

I have a ministry perspective, but it doesn't always have to be ministry. It could be family, business, or just all of life and how busy life is. You have all these burdens, and these burdens attempt often to crush us. I know I had to learn early as a young pastor that there's a very important word in ministry that I think needs to be taught in Bible colleges. It's the word "No." We are always taught the word "Yes." We ought to, we better, we should have. Yes, do it. And so you get overwhelmed and you get burdened, but there's a bigger principle here.

Jesus doesn't need us to be mission-centric; He needs us to be Christ-centric. If we're Christ-centric, mission gets done. If we focus on Christ and draw near to Christ—as a Christian, as a pastor, as a leader—just drawing near to Christ. If I'm burdened in my family, I draw near to Christ. If I'm burdened in my finances, I draw near to Christ. If I'm burdened in my business, family, and finances, I draw near to Christ.

Sometimes these burdens aren't meant for us to work harder. These burdens are meant to push us and draw us closer to Jesus Christ. That's when the burden becomes easy and that's when the burden becomes light. I read a lot of books about the condition of the church and how the American church is failing here and there, and some of the burdens facing the church. In this day, I believe there's a creeping error coming into churchianity because we're becoming mission-centric.

The church ought to be doing this and the church should be doing that, and I would say amen to that. However, is the church drawing near to Christ? Christ is more concerned with knowing us intimately and personally and us growing in our faith with Him and our walk with Him than He is anything we can produce for Him. As we draw near to Christ and we sit in His presence and we let these spiritual disciplines take over our life, we bear fruit. We bear the fruit He needs us to bear and desires us to bear.

You see the principle of how we can put the cart before the horse? We can put the mission before the engine. Jesus Christ is the engine that drives ministry. It has to be the place that drives ministry. It says this in Ecclesiastes 3:10, "I have seen the burden God has placed on us all." Of course, Solomon is talking. "Yet God has made everything beautiful for His own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from the beginning to the end."

I call this the eternal burden. That's the burden I was talking about. It's a compelling point of motivation. It's a life-steering mechanism. It's the gasoline in our human engine, and it weighs us down until it's satisfied. We're driven by something outside of time, outside of our current life, what's going on in our life. It's a bigger burden that's inside of us. My friends, this burden gets us to the finish line. This burden makes sense when we're in the midst of madness.

This burden draws us near to Christ and compels us when everything else is trying to draw us away from Christ. John Bengel, a famous commentator and exegete from a long time ago, said this: "My greatest burden is not my weak physical frame, nor my relative afflictions, nor the attacks made on me. Though from all these I have suffered, my greatest burden has been hidden in my heart. It is the burden of eternity." It rewrites our life.

First thing it does is change our values. I go from a self-centered starting point to a Christ-centered starting point. I quickly realize my comfort and preferences and strip them of compelling authority in my life. I stop serving myself. Sometimes that can be hard to do—thinking about myself, whether it be the good, the bad, or the ugly. But if I'm the center of my own thoughts, then I'm self-centered. I become Christ-centered.

I elevate my inner eyes to an eternal point of view. I look to give and don't take. It changes my perspective on how we view things. I don't let CNN or my college professor form my worldview; the Bible does. The culture doesn't form how I view life. Every believer needs to take time, especially our young folks, and define what our worldview is and what lens you see the world through. I talk with people all the time and they'll make statements, but if you look at those statements and follow them through, they're incoherent.

Someone might say, "I think truth should be whatever we want it to be." Well, that's a pretty incoherent statement. If you follow that all the way through, you'll find that there is anarchy. In other words, there is no standard by which we can judge truth. There is absolute truth. There has to be absolute truth. You'll find a whole bunch in this generation that think everything is nebulous and however I need it or want it to be.

I had a conversation with a young person, a thirty-something, not too long ago. He said, "I just think everyone needs to find what works for them." I said, "Okay, I see what you're saying, but I'll tell you what works for me. I like hitting people with two-by-fours. That just works for me. It enriches my heart and my soul. Every time I whack somebody with a two-by-four, I just feel so much better." He's looking at me a little weird.

I said, "I know that's a little weird, but don't you understand that that's my truth? If you don't give me a standard, I'm going to make it up. I'm going to make up what I want to make up." So I'll narrow down truth, morals, ethics, whatever it is, to make up what I want to make up. While that worldview sounded pretty good when it came out of his mouth, when you trace it from end to end, it's a cartoon. It doesn't make any sense.

When I have an eternal burden, I view everything differently. My business is different. I view money differently. I see everything with an eternal impact. I did a lot of studying when I was on vacation and read a really interesting book. He gave a perspective of what's going to happen to the American church in the next 30 years and he was talking about the economics of the church. If everything keeps going in the direction it's going right now, what I do as a full-time pastor and preacher is going to virtually disappear in the next 30 to 50 years.

There will be some people that do it depending on how big the church is, but the economic reservoirs of the church will dry up when the next couple generations die off. There won't be enough money left behind to keep the functions of a local ministry like this one going. His advice was if you've got a twenty-something-year-old person thinking about going into full-time ministry, you better tell them to learn a couple different jobs because he might have to be bi-vocational. Full-time ministry will be isolated. it won't be the norm; it'll be the exception in about 30 to 40 years.

It changes our relationships when we have an eternal burden. Souls become a passion to us. We look to serve and not be served. We forgive and we honor those who don't deserve it. We treat others with dignity and respect because we're driven by something higher. It changes how I view non-Christians and the world. I don't see them as an irritant; I see them as a mission field. There's a huge difference. I'm blessed because I work within the body of Christ, but when I did work in the world, I remember every time I punched that time clock, I thought, "This is my mission field."

And it was. I acted in a way, spoke in a way, and behaved in a way where my life would be a testimony to those people around me. I had a worldview back then that this is what I live for. This was a job and I got paid for it, but I had something bigger that this was just part of the bigger picture. I was a member of the body of Christ, a member of the church. The eternal burden prepares us for what we call the great moment.

An eternal burden is constrained by a forward view. It sees things in the distance. Hebrews 11:10-16 says Abraham was confidently looking forward to a city with eternal foundations, a city designed and built by God. All these people died still believing that God had promised them. They did not receive what was promised, but they saw it from a distance and they welcomed it. They agreed that they were foreigners and nomads here on Earth.

Obviously, people who say such things are looking forward to a country they can call their own. If they had longed for that country where they came from, they could have gone back. But they were looking for a better place, a heavenly homeland. This is why God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them. I love those verses. It talks about this elevated view that the patriarchs had. They had a burden for the future that was always before them. It kept them focused in the present.

Life was in its proper perspective. They lived for a higher purpose and higher ideal. Contentment never comes by ridding ourselves of a burden. Contentment comes when we add an eternal burden.