Punch me in the face and tell me I'm not doing enough...

When you've been teaching in the same church for 7 years you have an opportunity to see trends in people's response to preaching and teaching. My teaching ministry is mainly expository and chronological. By expository, I mean is that I'm usually teaching a Biblical text and desiring for the themes of my teaching to come out of the Scripture. By chronological, I mean that I usually teach right through a book of the Bible, verse by verse. People's response to this type of teaching is underwhelming to say the least. It's like my mom's cooking. There's plenty of meat on the table and it fills you up but you don't rave about it for weeks.

But every once in a great while I do a topical series. I tackle topics like sexuality, relationships, stewardship, worldliness, or other charged issues. This is when I get the most response. "I've never heard you teach like that." "That was awesome... it was so practical." This type of cooking is like the cooking at Red Robin. The meal tasted great and it was really fun to be there but if you eat like that every night you'll be a nutritional basket case. You'll be overweight and under nourished. The compliments go on and on and at the end of those times of teaching and usually I am utterly distraught.

I'm distraught because the reason people like those topics is because evangelical Christians love to be told their not doing enough. The thinking goes something like this 'if you tell me I'm not doing enough, then I can make better decisions and then I can fix the problem and make some progress.' This thinking springs out of a belief that when we have spiritual problems, through the power of our will/choices we can better ourselves. We gravitate towards being punched, feeling sorry for ourselves, and attempting to pull ourselves up rather than ceasing to attempt to pull ourselves up. We want to work but we don't want to trust. We want to wallow in ourselves but we don't want to know God. We want a quick fix to our self centeredness not a life-long discipleship process. We want a soft spoken teachers who spout a lot of self help not a hearty herald of God's Word who holds out the promises of God. We want answers not the discipline of the Lord. We want crystal balls not walking by faith. We want works not grace. I want me not the Triune God.