Thoughts Along The Journey

A must read for the heart

Posted on March 23, 2022 by wtdavid

We all have trusted friends who serve as references for good books to read. Two of those friends for me recommended the same book within a week of each other. The book is entitled: Gentle & Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners & Sufferers.

Some of you have already read or are in the processing of reading this book. However, with this blog post, I want to strongly encourage you to pick up a copy and join us in reading through this book. If you need a copy, just contact me directly and we will figure out a way to get you a hard copy or a Kindle copy.

I happened to mention the book at one of the recent Ministry Support Centre board meetings, and a board member followed up with a call to ask me more about the book. He asked this insightful question: How did the book actually impact your walk with Christ?

Here is what I said: One of our guiding principles (perhaps THE guiding principle) within World Team is the Gospel. We often talk about it, write on it and even preach on it. However, this book will push each one of us to reflect on how that Gospel practically addresses and changes our own heart and actions. We need this constant rehearsal of Gospel for ourselves. The book will also cause each of us to stop and to reflect on truths that we know, but consider them from a different perspective or angle. It’s like holding up a gem and turning it in a variety of directions to notice every aspect of the gem.

On my first read through the book, I came across this statement: “Christ died to confound our intuitive assumptions that divine love has an expiration date. He died to prove that God’s love is, as Jonathan Edwards put it, “an ocean without shores or bottom.” God’s love is as boundless as God himself.” When I read that bolded phrase, I couldn’t help but pause to reflect on the “boundlessness” of His love. How often I have limited it and fallen back into a “I need to do more for God” approach in order to earn His favor and love.

I hope that I have whetted your appetite a bit for reading this book. And here’s hoping you will join me!

Filed under: Gospel, Heart of Christ, Jesus Christ | 4 Comments »

18 months

Posted on February 7, 2022 by wtdavid

This month, we launch the 18-month challenge.

The challenge? To ask God, and work with all our strength and wisdom, to put workers on the ground in our two (2) global priority projects within 18 months.

These two global priority projects are each focused on an unreached people group with limited access to the Gospel. One is in South Asia, the other in Chad.

In South Asia, over 150 million people have very limited access to the message of Christ.

In Chad, almost 60,000 people, in the specific people group on whom we are focusing, have no access to the Gospel with only one known Christian family among them.

When I read these figures, my thoughts turn to that passage in Luke 24:32 where the travellers on the way to Emmaus talk about their encounter with the resurrected Christ: “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”

I pray that we as a World Team Global community will be stirred to join in participating in this 18-month challenge. It will only be by God’s grace and intervention that we will finally see workers on the ground in 18 months. However, God is calling us to participate in what He longs to do: to bring to Himself people from all nations, language groups and peoples.

Maybe your part to play will be prayer. Maybe it will be sharing your networks of potential candidates. Maybe it will be navigating interested people through the process.

At the very least, I pray that your hearts will burn with the passion and vision to see these two people groups touched with the Gospel in the very near future!

Filed under: Faith in God, Prayer, Unreached people groups | Leave a comment »

Finding a good friend

Posted on January 28, 2022 by wtdavid

The Bible tells us that “a friend loves at all times” (Proverbs 17:17).

For most of us, we read that text as meaning a friend will always be kind to us, never critical. However, a quick survey of other passages in the book of Proverbs, for example, shows us that a friend is someone who with grace can bring us up short for our own good and growth in Christ.

“Listen to advice and accept instruction, that you may gain wisdom in the future.”

“Strike a scoffer, and the simple will learn prudence; reprove a man of understanding, and he will gain knowledge.”

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.”

“Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.”

Finding a good friend involves building a friendship with someone you can trust to remind you of the love of God for you demonstrated at the cross. But it also involves finding someone you can trust to honestly confront or challenge you when your words and your actions are not aligned.

Most of us don’t like that element of friendship. I don’t like it. And yet, it is one of the essential components of how God seeks to sanctify our hearts and deepen us in our communion with Him and others.

We can add another twist to this search for a good friend. Most of us live in a culture which is not our home passport culture. Many of us will build friendships in this second culture with those from our home passport culture who happen to live there as well, and there is nothing wrong with that. However, building a good friendship with someone from the new culture where you live and serve adds another dynamic.

It teaches us dependency upon God (we could call it: humility) in a different way. It reminds us of the immensity and depth of the body of Christ. And it offers us a friend who may be able to point out areas of our life that we were able to hide from others in our own home passport culture.

If you haven’t found such a friend in the culture where you serve, I would challenge you to pray that God would lead you to such a friend for His glory, your growth, and the ongoing demonstration of the power of the Gospel to change hearts, beginning with our own.

Filed under: Friendship, Grace, Honesty | 2 Comments »

Surprising nature of God’s love

Posted on January 19, 2022 by wtdavid

I read this quote in the book, Deeper, and thought I would share it for our reflection and to “drive our hearts” deeper into His love:

“They that find Christ [discover that] though he be so glorious and excellent a person, yet they find him ready to receive such poor, worthless, hateful creatures as they are, which was unexpected to them. They are surprised with it.

They did not imagine that Christ was such a kind of person, a person of such grace. They heard he was a holy Savior and hated sin, and they did not imagine he would be so ready to receive such vile, wicked creatures as they. They thought he surely would never be willing to accept such provoking sinners, such guilty wretches, those that had such abominable hearts.

But behold, he is not a whit the more backward to receive them for that. They unexpectedly find him with open arms to embrace them, ready forever to forget all their sins as though they had never been. They find that he as it were runs to meet them, and makes them most welcome, and admits them not only to be his servants but his friends. He lifts them out of the dust and sets them on his throne; he makes them children of God; he speaks peace to them; he cheers and refreshes their hearts; he admits them unto strict union with himself, and gives the most joyful entertainment, and binds himself to them to be their friend forever.

So are they surprised with their entertainment. They never imagined to find Christ a person of such kind of love and grace as this. ‘Tis beyond all imagination or conception.”

The quote is taken from a sermon by Jonathan Edwards: “Seeking after Christ”.

As the author of the book, Deeper, writes in response: “Let him love you all over again. Pick yourself up off the ground, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and allow his heart to plunge you into his oceanic love more deeply than he ever has before.”

May that be our prayer and our active response to His heart for us!

Filed under: Love of God, Spiritual Life | Leave a comment »

The WE voice

Posted on January 7, 2022 by wtdavid

In the midst of all the voices seeking to be heard in our world today, one voice that often seems predominant is: the “me” voice. It is not very often that one hears the “we” voice.

When I use the phrase: the “we” voice, I am referring to that heart response that longs to seek the good of others. Paul put it this way in Galatians 5:13: ‘It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows.” [The Message]

The “me” voice is focused on doing “whatever it wants to do”; it shuts off its heart from the needs of others and from the need for others. Rather than serving one another, the “me” voice pushes one to serve self and self only.

Honestly, none of us would say that the “me” voice is a primary voice of our heart and of our actions. And yet …

The Psalmist tells us to ask God “to search our hearts and see if there is any hurtful (or grievous) way in me” (139.23-24). So, that “me” voice must lurk somewhere in our hearts and seek ways to assert its will. For example …

— Hoping for a free Saturday for once, our small group proposes to have an outside picnic together on that very Saturday. The “me” voice comes up with at least twenty reasons why this would not be a good idea. With most reasons coming from my wanting a free Saturday.

— I have a new idea for our CP team. I bring it to the team, but when pushback comes, I choose to listen to the “me” voice and not profit from the insights found in the feedback from others.

— A fellow worker sits down to talk with me. During the conversation, this worker shares their disappointment with me and the way that I responded in a recent group discussion. The “me” voice goes into overdrive wanting nothing more than to defend myself.

Turning more to the “we” voice is not the simple answer. Our need is far greater. The “we” voice should drive us back to Christ where our true identity and acceptance is found; where our only hope for true and complete forgiveness can be received.

Listening more for the “we” voice will help us help one another to go back to the cross and receive again all that we need from the One who came to give His life for us, and to give us the freedom to love and serve one another.

Filed under: Community, One another, Serving | 2 Comments »

He loves us

Posted on December 14, 2021 by wtdavid

Dane Ortlund in his book: Gentle & Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners & Sufferers, wrote the following:

“What was the purpose of this heavenly rescue mission? “God shows his love for us …” (Romans 5:8). The Greek word for “shows” here means to commend demonstrably, to hold forth, to bring into clear view, to put beyond questioning. In Christ’s death, God is confronting our dark thoughts of him and our chronic insistence that divine love must have an endpoint, a limit, a point at which it finally runs dry. Christ died to confound our intuitive assumptions that divine love has an expiration date. He died to prove that God’s love is, as Jonathan Edward’s put it, “an ocean without shores or bottom.” God’s love is as boundless as God himself.” (192)

It is that last statement that struck me and on which I encourage you to reflect: “God’s love is as boundless as God himself.”

What does that truth stir up in your heart? How does it challenge you to respond?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section of this blog post, and bless other members of the World Team community with the insights and thoughts God lays on your heart.