Early in my
ministry, Ezra 7:10 became something of a theme verse for me:
“For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach his statutes and ordinances in Israel.”
Like Ezra, I
devoted myself to study the Word of God, to do it, and to teach it to the
people of God. In retrospect, if I’m honest with myself, I devoted myself more
to the study and teaching, than to the doing.
To some
degree, I was trained academically to be like Ezra, “a scribe skilled in the
Law of Moses” (7:6), and teaching seems to be my area of giftedness—at least,
if you believe the spiritual aptitude tests and the feedback of church members.
And I still don’t know what to do with the sense that I am not using my primary
gifts very much—one or two adjunct courses a year at Lipscomb University, and
an occasional guest sermon at area churches—a reality that continues to
distress my devoted wife.
In our new
home in the city, we have a storage room above our garage. I built some shelves
in it to hold my books, in case I ever needed access to them. Several months
after we moved, I unpacked box after box of books onto those shelves—commentaries,
Greek and Hebrew dictionaries and grammars, studies on New Testament
backgrounds, resources for ministry—hundreds of books representing years and
years of perfecting my craft as a scribe skilled in the Word. As I unpacked a
long row of books on worship, I found myself beginning to weep. It seemed as
though I was putting everything I had worked so hard to become on a storage
shelf.
But this too
was a moment of truth. Perhaps, of all the discoveries I have made about myself
and my ministry, I think the most troubling is this: I have come to realize
that I have lived my life more as a
disciple of Ezra than a disciple of Jesus.
What does one
say after that?
“Sorry” seems
trite. But I am sorry. I must
apologize to God for failing to do what was most important in my service of
him. I must apologize to Jesus for misrepresenting his ministry—my ministry
didn’t look like his ministry. I must apologize to the good people who looked
to me as a spiritual leader. I believe I failed at the central task of a
leader—I failed to follow Jesus myself.
Followers of Jesus do what Jesus did. I
failed to do that. It’s just that simple.
Ultimately, I
feel this may be the greatest failure of churches today, whether traditional or
contemporary. We don’t really pay our scribes to be disciples, and so we aren’t
very good at making disciples. We have focused our efforts on making believers
in Jesus—either preserving and passing on the traditions of the faith, or evangelizing
people to become believers. As a result, our efforts have produced a reality
that I only recently have come to recognize: most churches are full of believers in Jesus, but not followers of
Jesus. As Denver Moore (The Same Kind
of Different as Me and What
Difference Do It Make) observes, we’re a lot more focused on Bible studying
than Bible doing. I helped perpetuate that reality.
For the past
3 years I have been trying to become what for 30 years I failed to be—someone
who goes where Jesus went, helps those he helped, teaches what he taught, and
is friends with those who were his friends. It’s not been easy—but it’s been
good.
And it’s 30 years too late.
