Category: Approach God (Page 3 of 18)

How to Guarantee Success

May 25, 2015 / Bruce Pagano II / 0 Comments

This past weekend I had the opportunity to hear Pastor TL Rogers, from The Triumphant Church in Washington D.C., preach on the importance of being a single, whole person before getting married. It was a great message in and of itself (you can watch it HERE) and there’s a ton more that could be said about the importance of wholeness, but there’s one thing that he said that I’d like to key in on. He said, “Success is predictable.” He was talking about success in marriage, but the idea spans the whole of following Jesus and Christendom.

He pointed to Joshua 1:8 as evidence. In that verse God is commissioning Joshua to lead the Israelites after Moses death. God tells Joshua, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.” There it is. Follow the law then you’ll be prosperous and have good success. To be sure, God wasn’t simply talking about material success. He was telling Joshua what it would take to have success as His people and that started with following the law as He gave it to them.

If that’s true, we can extrapolate that out and apply it to the New Covenant in Jesus and use that verse as our guideline for success and prosperity. By the time Jesus hit the scene the Jews had over 600 laws that were required for “righteousness.” An impossible task, if ever there was one. When asked which is the most important, Jesus said, “And he said to him, “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 neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” If all the other laws depend on those two commands, then the promise of success found in Joshua 1:8 requires our continued obedience to them.

What that mean in a practical sense is that as followers of Jesus our success, in everything, is dependent on not letting love depart from our lips, meditating on it day and night and being careful to do all that Jesus commanded surrounding love. That means being His witness to an unbelieving world by caring for widows and orphans, being agents of healing, loving each other well, displaying grace and forgiveness and not seeking to condemn others. Success looks like the love of Christ acted out by His followers.

Let’s be successful.

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Making Jesus Attractive

May 22, 2015 / Bruce Pagano II / 2 Comments

Creating converts is easy. There are whole programs designed to convince people of their need to believe something different. Christianity isn’t the only religion that seeks to create converts and really isn’t even the most successful at it. But, still converting others tends to be our main goal. It isn’t necessarily wrong, but it should be our end game; making disciples that make disciples should be. I’m convinced that creating converts remains our main focus because it requires far less from us than making disciples. We’ve diminished Jesus’ commission to create followers that are enabled to create other followers down to handing someone an invite card and hoping they show up. My 6 yr old does that. So when we talk about inviting people into Christ, what are we talking about? What makes them want to come? Isaiah 53:2 says that there was nothing physically appealing about Him. There was nothing in His looks that drew people to Him. If He was here today, He’s not getting picked to be The Bachelor. But yet, over the last 2000 years, millions of people have been drawn to and follow Him. Why?

In John 6:44, Jesus tells us explicitly that the only way people come to Him is at the drawing of The Father. Does that mean we have no dog in the fight? Is Jesus letting us off the hook for implementing the Great Commission? Not even a change. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul lets us in on our part of making Jesus known to others. He says, “…be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.“ He saying that the fruit of our following Jesus well, will cause others to glory and praise God. We get to be a part of positioning people for the Father to draw people to Jesus. I love the way The Message translation says it. It says, “Live a lover’s life, circumspect and exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of: bountiful in fruits from the soul, making Jesus Christ attractive to all, getting everyone involved in the glory and praise of God.” Our life of following Jesus ought to reflect a love and righteousness that makes Jesus attractive. But it isn’t a gushy love. And it isn’t an unintelligent or naive love.

Love often and well.

Some may argue the need to be “honest” with unbelievers about the very real truth of God’s wrath and hell. Both of those are very real things and we, as believers, ought to be concerned about them for ours and others’ sake. You can no more divorce love from wrath than you can mercy from justice, but that can’t be our introduction of Jesus to an unbeliever. Those are important conversations, but they’re conversations that come as relationship develops. If we introduce a world to a Savior, they don’t even believe in, by asking, “If you died tonight, where would you go, heaven or hell?” That question bears little weight on the majority of those that don’t believe in Jesus. In reality we’re not actually attracting them to Jesus, we’re trying to scare and coerce them into converting. It’s almost the equivalent to a far milder modern day version of the Inquisition, only we’ve traded instruments of physical fear for instruments of mental fear. If thought through that tactic honestly would we use it as an approach to initiate any of the other relationships we try to build? I assume if we did, we’d all be pretty lonely.

When we talk about attracting people to Jesus, it starts in how we love each other, as Christians, and how we love our neighbors, which is everyone else. If God is love, everything we do, our entire life, should reflect that. That’s what makes Jesus attractive. Love is the thing that will soften the hearts of others and open them to the possibility of who He is. In that, the Father draws them to Him.

Love often and well.

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Loved People, Love People. (2015)

May 20, 2015 / Bruce Pagano II / 2 Comments

I messed up. When I wrote Monday’s post, Loved People, I was supposed to stick to the idea that although God loves everyone, as Christians we’re aware of this truth and we can find wholeness and peace in that. I didn’t. Instead, I went off on a tangent about how because we know we’re loved and we’ve experienced the joy of that, we ought to be compelled to love others. That should have been this post. But, I’m not sorry. Over the last few years I’ve gotten to a place where I can’t separate the two. In this post I’ll just expand on Monday’s.

The thing about love is that humans have turned it into a feeling. I’m convinced it’s not. Inarguably there are feelings that accompany love, but as a feeling all it’s own, that doesn’t do love justice. I say that for a couple reasons. The first is found in how feelings surrounding love change. The love I feel for my wife now, as opposed to when we first met, feels totally different. When I look at her now my love has solidarity and carries the weight and depth of years of struggle and success. I look at her differently. We talk with each other differently. Our love for each other is more mature, though still maturing further, but it’s far more mature than it was on our wedding day. The second is that feelings ebb and flow based on circumstance. If love was simply a feeling, the cross might have looked different. But, for Jesus to still display love, while He hung there, torn to shreds, dying, surely that is more than a feeling. At the least, it was a conscious decision and the most, it’s something we can’t even understand, but still get to experience. I’ll agree that love is in part a collection of feelings, albeit different ones at different time, but what makes love actually love, is the action that accompanies those feelings.

In the Kingdom of Heaven, love begets love. If we are a loved people, and we know that, we have to love others. There’s no exception; Jesus doesn’t leave room for it. For those that are business, or even process minded, think of it in terms of Vision | Mission | Strategy.

Vision: 1 Timothy 2:3-4

“This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

Mission: Matthew 28:19-20

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

Strategy: Matthew 22:37-39 & John 13:35

“And he said to him, “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 neighbor as yourself.”

“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

If God desires all to be saved and Jesus commissioned us to make disciples of all nations, teaching them all He commanded, so that they’ll teach it, then the strategy that He developed around that is love. His strategy is not just drenched in love, it is love. All that He taught revolved around healing, caring for others, turning the other cheek, goodness toward our neighbor in spite of their intent. And all of that requires love as the plan of action. What Jesus introduced was higher level thinking in the area of glorifying God. It revolved around acknowledging our inability to make good on our sins and instead reoriented our attention toward relieving the burden of others, through acts of love. It’s the only reason we’re still here and He hasn’t returned; that all might be saved.

Love is the foundation of Jesus’ ministry.

You can argue theology. You can twist scripture to support what and who you think God hates. You can even put your own spin on what is required for salvation (but, to be clear, it’s by grace through faith alone, both a gift from God). But, you cannot argue that Jesus was not a minister of love. If God is love and Jesus is God and Jesus is the cornerstone, then love is the cornerstone. Love is the foundation of Jesus’ ministry. As a Christian, it’s also yours. As a loved people, you’re expected, and ought to be compelled, to love people.

Loved people love people.

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Category: Approach God (Page 3 of 18)

How to Guarantee Success

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