Welcome to Part 6 of the weekly release of my book, Unless God Builds It: A Proposal to Radically Rethink the Church.
In the last post, we explored the Old Testament story of Abraham’s sons, Ishmael and Isaac, to contrast our self-driven efforts with the true promises of God. I also shared a simple “waiter” analogy to reframe what it means to wait on the Lord.
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In this post, I’ll provide even greater clarity about what it means to wait on the Lord, and just as importantly, how the traditional church machine doesn’t make this very easy.
This is the end of Chapter 1, after which (in the next post) we’ll move onto Equipping the Saints—a vision for “ministry” that few have understood well.
Preaching in Vain
I understand that this concept may still seem a bit vague to you. Perhaps you are thinking: What does it practically look like to wait on the Lord, and how would it change the way we operate in the Church? This can be easily illustrated with a real-life example.
In the traditional church model, I had regular preaching responsibilities on Sunday mornings. For preparation, I would always start by acknowledging that, despite whatever ideas I may have had for the sermon, if I wanted it to be impactful, the best thing I could do was to seek the Lord in prayer before doing anything else, waiting for him to confirm my direction and inspire my thoughts.
But how did I know if it was him speaking to me versus just my own thoughts? This is an important point of clarity, and it is something that, apart from an objectively supernatural experience (which isn’t the norm) can only be discerned by faith. For me, it was pretty easy to tell when I was striving to put something together in my own strength, when I was uninspired and grinding my gears to produce something (anything!). But what about when I caught a wind of inspiration? I couldn’t necessarily prove that it was from God and not self-engineered. However, the point isn’t to prove it or to know it as much as it is to believe it. When waiting on the Lord, much of what we are waiting for is for God to give us confidence/faith that it’s truly him who’s speaking and moving within us, at which point it’s no longer spiritual to “wait” but to go with it. In the waiting, we’re resisting the urge to move in our own strength. We press into prayer, asking for what we need/desire, and trusting that when God moves, we’ll be able to sense the difference, not because of our great senses, but because of his ability to get through to us. If you aren’t familiar with what I’m talking about, it comes by way of having a relationship with God, talking to him about things, and believing that he speaks back to you (because he does). As such, you don’t need to be a spiritual elite for this, but you may step into it any time.
So, despite that I always sought the Lord for help with writing my sermons (usually for many hours), I would often find myself without any inspiration. Sunday wasn’t going anywhere, and my pages were blank. But I had to preach anyway, for that was everyone’s expectation. It’s what I was hired to do, and it was not acceptable for a teaching pastor to come without a message on Sunday, let alone to make that a regular practice.
So, what did I do? If the wind wasn’t blowing (i.e., if the Spirit wasn’t giving me a message), I turned on my engines, using the abilities of my flesh to get the job done—whether that be through my intellect, my Bible knowledge, my creativity, my work ethic, etc. Sometimes what the Spirit put on my heart was only a 2-minute message, not a 30-minute message. In these instances, I still felt the need to conjure up more content (that the Spirit didn’t give me) in order to make the sermon a more acceptable length. Thus, “getting the job done” required conforming to something other than the will of the Spirit.
And the results spoke for themselves. When I considered the people in my congregation, I saw very little long-term life-change as the result of my preaching/teaching.
The scary but obvious truth is that it doesn’t take the Holy Spirit to write a sermon. People without the Holy Spirit write speeches all the time, and they can be highly motivating, too. But only the Holy Spirit knows what God’s people need to hear on a given day, and only the Holy Spirit can give people lasting growth.
On a very practical level, then, what I wanted was the freedom not to preach when the Lord wasn’t stirring me, even if that meant the church didn’t get a sermon that day. What I needed was a structure that actually encouraged the practice of waiting on the Lord, not discouraged it. For this reason, I began to deeply question why we structure the Church and its gatherings in such a way as to put pastors in this position.
You may think it is irrelevant that I wasn’t always feeling inspired and that I went about writing the sermon, anyway. You may think that it was my job to preach, regardless of how I felt about it on a given day or week. But this is where we must properly understand the role of a spiritual leader and the way God intends to build his church.
A true spiritual leader isn’t one who goes through the motions, who musters up his own strength and resorts to using his own knowledge whenever God doesn’t provide him with what he thinks his church needs. Even if he is trying to serve the Church, a true spiritual leader knows that this doesn’t actually serve the Church. Rather, it teaches the Church a way that is not from God. A true spiritual leader does not eat the bread of anxious toil; he learns the way of bearing fruit while at rest. A true spiritual leader is one who demonstrates the Way, always resisting the ways of man and insisting on the ways of God. Through his own life, he proves to those whom he leads that God is faithful to build his Church even when we, individually, don’t feel like we have anything to offer. Therefore, by his lived example—not merely through good sermons—the true spiritual leader teaches everyone around him to rest, believe, and depend on God at all costs. In this way, and in no other way, both he and his followers bear fruit.
Now, compare the situation I was previously in to the last five years of my life in the house church. From the outset, this was one of the things I was most excited to change. Never again would I live under the pressure of having to conjure something up that the Spirit wasn’t providing to me. I became determined to practice total dependence on God, which meant that if I weren’t feeling empowered or inspired to speak, if I didn’t believe that God was giving me anything to say, then I would not speak. If God put a scripture on my heart but gave me no teaching, then I was free to read the scripture to the congregation without giving a teaching. If God gave me a two-minute mini-sermon, then I was free to teach for only two minutes, thereby always operating in a state of empowerment—never experiencing burnout, yet bearing fruit.
I am no longer required to spend hours upon hours putting a sermon together to meet others’ expectations. There is no part of my job description that requires me to give a sermon each week. My job description is (unofficially) to rely on God and teach others to do the same. To this end, I seek the Lord on behalf of the church, and if I get something, then I go with it. If not, then I don’t. It’s that simple.
Just to clarify, the Spirit doesn’t only lead through spontaneous expression. I’m obviously not opposed to the hard work of planning and preparing, or of putting together spiritual teaching in a way that is didactic, comprehensive, cohesive, and ultimately helpful to the Body of Christ. Or else I wouldn’t be writing this book. The real question is: Should a shepherd spend even one minute of his time preparing a sermon that he does not feel God stirring within his heart? I don’t think so. All effort that is not born of the Spirit and sustained in the Spirit is, by definition, anxious toil and vain labor.
At the end of the day, preaching and teaching effectively don’t depend on going to seminary and taking an exegesis or hermeneutics class. It doesn’t depend on being a naturally charismatic speaker. It doesn’t depend on countless hours of preparation, planning, and study. It depends on learning the ways of God to rely on his Spirit, such that you always have exactly what you need. Here, it is safe. Here, you do not speak about something you don’t actually know. You do not move beyond where God is moving within you. You do not become a play actor or a hypocrite, speaking on holy things with a seared conscience because you’re not living up to the standard. Here, you can only operate in the grace that is being given to you for that day and time. And as you grow faithful in operating this way, the grace you’ve been given multiplies.
At Odds With the System
So far, I’ve only provided the one example about preaching, but this principle can be applied to just about everything. One memory that has stuck with me for years is what I experienced on my first day on staff at a church.
I was hired, in part, because I was already doing quite a bit of ministry—leading small groups, discipling men individually, preaching occasionally, and things like that. All of these were things I felt the Lord empowering me to do outside the confines of my nine-to-five job. But during my first day on staff at the church, I remember sitting down in my office, opening my laptop, and feeling the new sensation of having to figure out how to fill my day with “ministry.” All of a sudden, my way of approaching ministry had to change. No longer could I do it strictly as the Lord was leading. Even if/when he wasn’t leading, I still felt the pressure to fill my time with whatever type of activity justified my pay.
It’s important to note that my superiors at the time (whom I still deeply love) are Spirit-filled believers who always encouraged me to spend time on the clock in prayer, and they regularly did it with me. It wasn’t that there was a lack of effort to be a Spirit-led church. In fact, there was considerable effort put toward that end—more than in most churches, as far as I’m aware. However, in spite of our desire to be that kind of church, I personally found the unspoken pressure to “do” and “prove” and “move” too powerful to keep me (and all of us) from actually waiting on the Lord as long as was needed. I’m sure others may see it differently, and that’s okay. But this is what I sincerely believe.
If we refused to be controlled by the constant demands of ministry, and if we resigned ourselves to prayer until we were confident that the Lord alone (not performance metrics or self-confidence) was initiating our movement, how long would it take before we started seeing results? Could we risk the possibility that it would take much longer than expected? What would people think about how we were spending our time if we didn’t have any immediate and visible results? What would they think if no one on staff had a sermon to give for weeks or months, if the worship leaders didn’t have any songs to sing, if the kids didn’t have a Sunday school lesson? What would people think if we started ceasing the ministries that we realized we’d been doing in our own strength and not coming up with any new ones? What might be the ramifications of all this? People leaving? Losing tithes? Losing the building? Losing our jobs?
You get the idea. This system, within which most Christians operate, has them captured in a way that even the leaders have never fully comprehended. Only when you embrace the practice of waiting on the Lord can you begin to see how the system inherently works against this practice, for it demands that you move even when God isn’t moving you. Thus, the structure that’s meant to support spiritual growth ends up inhibiting it.
This was, above everything, the main reason that I left the system. My deep sense of urgency to wait on the Lord put me at odds with its expectations and demands. I didn’t know how to continue in it without tearing it all down, which I didn’t have the heart or the authority to do. But I felt God calling me to go and learn a different way and to see if that way was viable. Thankfully, it is.
When I started the house church, the first thing I set out to do was wait on the Lord. This meant that for many weeks, I spent most of my days in prayer and intercession. I spent hours and hours each day sitting in the same light-blue sofa chair, seeking God for some type of movement that I couldn’t deny was him. This culminated in the most powerful spiritual experience I’ve ever had (which I’ll describe in Chapter 5: The Gospel), and it dramatically changed the course of my ministry, equipping me in ways I didn’t know that I needed to be equipped. If there’s any testimony here, it’s that God is faithful to reward those who diligently seek him (Hebrews 11:6).
Since the inception of the house church, I’ve continued to function this way in all things. If there is something that I desire to see, some fruit I desire to bear, I don’t immediately start thinking of all the ways I could accomplish it. I am usually somewhat skeptical of our human ways. So instead, I remember that I can do nothing apart from him, and then I seek him in prayer until he answers, remaining at rest in the meantime.
I could go on and on with examples of how waiting on the Lord has changed the way that I go about ministry (or, honestly, the way that I go about anything). But the point is that God has proven to me, time and again, that he moves when we wait, and the result is always better than if we move ourselves.
What does this mean for you or your church?
First, to be clear, I’m not advocating that anyone immediately dismantles everything their church has put into place. Before you do anything (build or dismantle), wait on the Lord for wisdom.
Second, as I said in the beginning, I’m not the Holy Spirit. I can’t tell you when God will move you or in what direction, but I can tell you for certain that God will move if you wait on him. I can’t tell you how God will lead you to build the Church—it may look different than how he leads me—but I can tell you that he will build the Church if you wait on him. And the fruit you bear—which will be far greater—won’t be because you toiled and labored and spent yourself for him, but because you rested from your works and trusted in him, ceasing to put any trust in the flesh.
Let’s stop trusting in the ways and the wisdom of men. Regarding everything you do, start asking, “Is God empowering this?” because if he isn’t, then your labor is in vain. If you don’t believe that he’s empowering something, then quit it, kill it, cut it off, and trust with your whole heart that he will provide you the supernatural means to do something better.
Today, remember his promise that if you learn from him, you’ll find rest for your souls (Matthew 11:39), all the while being exceedingly more fruitful than you ever could be otherwise. Let this promise be your compass to know whether or not you’ve learned his way. Hold onto it as you hold on to Christ, for God wants us all to know this kind of life—that is, bearing fruit while at rest. It won’t be without trial, but each trial is simply to teach us to “rely not on ourselves but on God” (2 Corinthians 1:9), who alone can build his church.
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Questions for the Comments:
Have you ever felt the subtle or overt pressure in a church environment to “do,” “prove,” or “move” spiritually even when you didn’t feel the Holy Spirit initiating that movement?
In the “sofa prayer experience,” the author spent weeks doing nothing but seeking God in prayer before initiating any house church meetings. Why is it so difficult for modern ministries to risk this kind of slow, invisible ministry
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In Christ,
Jake