I had a chance to talk to Dannye Welch today, one of the elders at the Northeast Church. Dannye is a guy I really respect and whose life I admire. He just does God. Serving God isn't some big struggle between himself and God. It seems to come naturally to him. He is super approachable, thinks everything is "coool," and leads the "redneck bible study" group full of bikers and truck drivers and all the people you wouldn't expect to be at a bible study. He does Christianity the way it was meant to be done, simple and real. Obviously I think Dannye is awesome and was really excited to get to talk to him and hear his ideas.
We talked about a lot of stuff but the main thing I want to share here is about our role as Christians (mainly in one-on-one studying) in connection with God and other people. I've learned -- especially through studying with people -- that I don't know much, don't have many of the answers, can't impart incredible wisdom, and can't do much of anything useful. Am I even necessary in this trinity between God, myself, and the other person?
John 6:44a
Ok so I can't bring anyone to Jesus, only God can do that. (So what good am I? Why am I here again?)
Paul wrote this:
Ok so God does the work of making it grow. But the one who plants and the one who waters still have a role to play. (Maybe(?) there's still hope for met yet!)
This was quite puzzling.
I know that somehow I have a key role in this three way relationship between God, myself, and the person I'm studying with, the question I've been pondering this whole semester is what exactly that role is... Apparently I can be a gardener for God, planting and watering, but what does that mean? God made the earth and the plants by Himself, He certainly doesn't need me to help Him make things grow, He can call them into existence. Back to being useless :(. There's something more though, it doesn't make sense but God chooses to use me (Christians) to reach out and touch other people. He used the apostles to spread the news about Jesus. He uses relationships to lead people to Him, somehow. People, for some unknown reason, are included in the equation.
Back to Dannye - I asked him about this. He said that God is always training us to be servants, from now until the day we die. The "coool" thing about it is that we just need to do what God tells us to and He takes care of the rest. If God wanted things to get done smoothly He could build robots which would be much more reliable than we humans. Luckily, God likes us for some reason and doesn't hold our flaws against us. That got me thinking, maybe God just wants us there for our warm-blooded, fleshy bodies (told ya I didn't have much wisdom to impart ;) ). Maybe He chooses to work through us because He wants to work through a PERSON. It's hard for people to relate to something they can't sense, even more so when they are being told that thing is a all-powerful deity that created everything. People can relate to people though. (Perhaps one of the reasons Jesus came...?) God Himself may not be visible to my friend but God can be seen in His servants (that's us). My sister can't touch God when she's crying but she can feel God's love in a hug from me.
We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.
2 Corinthians 5:20a
So we get to play God! Not that we get to create stuff or punish/forgive sin, but we get to be His hands and feet! His tools to reach people! To my friend that doesn't know God, I am the closest they've come to God. That's a pretty big deal... *If people based their whole idea of God on me, what would their God be like? ...scary thought...* God doesn't send robots to do His work because He's a personal God so He uses people (now that's good news! I don't wanna be replaced by a robot). ...And I've lost my train of thought... Oh well, at least that's a good start to answering my questions and it means I'm not completely useless to God. :D
This is where my question first came from and how God's been teaching me about the answer:
I made a new friend this semester named Mahesh. He's the most encouraging, positive, energetic person I know; I love hanging out with him. He wanted to read the Bible together so I told him that would be great. He's from India and since I don't know much about Indian culture, I didn't know how I would go about explaining about God. We'd talked about it before and he had questions about the Holy Spirit and the trinity which I tried to answer but quickly noticed my explanations left something to be desired. If I can't explain these two things, how the heck am I going to explain Jesus? I decided (and felt God telling me) that since I didn't know what to say or do, I would leave that part up to God, I would let God do the talking Himself. With that plan we flipped over to the Gospel of John (I picked it because John's Gospel is quite useful for learning about Jesus) and just started reading. We read, he asked questions, I answered them as best I could, but I knew it wasn't my eloquent (not) answers that were going to show him God, it was God's Word that was doing the real work. God's Word was growing the fruit, which is fine by me, He can say it a lot better than I can. It's been great so far, we've both been learning a lot of "coool" things about God and life. Turns out "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness," pretty sweet huh?
The "coool" thing is that even though I don't have much to offer, God doesn't need a whole lot. He did feed a few thousand people with a couple pieces of bread and fish (TWICE!). I don't have much to offer but like the little kid with the bread, when I do offer the little that I have, God can multiply it to as much as He needs it to be. Now that's freakin' awesome!