The Fruit of the Spirit Pt 6 – Faithfulness – what does it look like in the Ministry?

Faithfulness – I guess I have to record a video on this, it’s the next fruit in the series I have been working on. Been very much tested on this over the last week or so, but I didn’t realize what was happening. I wasn’t tested the way I expected to be tested, and it pretty much smacked me out of nowhere. I really should be used to not being able to predict my tests by now.

I was going to do a video on whether or not we should flee to the woods or stay where God wants us to minister, but then Daniel McGirr did a teaching on that yesterday and I did not want to encroach upon his important message. Even though he covered it slightly differently, it just didn’t seem appropriate for me to cover that angle.

Faithfulness, when I looked it up contextually in logos – well, it came down in a great many cases to being trustworthy to do the job you are called to do and I had to take a good hard look at that yesterday. I find that when we are doing our jobs, things flow fairly well because we are equipped, like Bezalel, who was endowed with all the wisdom, understanding and knowledge required to build everything in the Tabernacle. When we are not doing our jobs, we are generally not going to have the right skillset and gifts. Interestingly enough, I find that in doing my own job, I am at peace and generally only get a strong emotional rush from doing something outside my giftings.

I can teach, and I can answer questions about and challenges to what I am teaching – but what I am not equipped to do is host forums where people discuss various issues. Not my job, not my skill set, not at all. I sit here, stressed out, wondering when someone is going to pop in and promote their ministry that I may know nothing about and therefore don’t want to be associated with (especially if I don’t know a person’s character or calling), post a video that I won’t have time to watch, or be a total jerk to the other people. Even when people are being cordial and civil, like yesterday, the whole thing just drains away all my energy.

I am a teacher, and specifically a writer, that is where the wisdom, understanding and knowledge of the Spirit have been granted into my life. I have not noticed those three spiritual gifts to be present in any other area of my life. Certainly not in leadership – I could never be an elder! Nor would I make a good evangelist, shepherd or really anything else. The question is – do I continue to follow the modern church model of ministry or do I specialize and realize that I have no obligation or even the right to try and do more than what I am called to do – which is to teach people new to either the faith or to specific contextual concept blocks.

We are still used to pastors who are required to teach, lead, equip, counsel, manage, and everything – and we still tend to hold people, who can do one thing well, responsible for doing all the other things as well. But I am here to tell you that I don’t have the equipping to do anything but teach. Sometimes that teaching comes in the form of instruction in context, other times in the development of character and sometimes in encouragement and rebuke – but it is always under the auspices of being a teacher. I do what I do within the boundaries of my gift. When I leave those boundaries, I suffer – I get overwhelmed and exhausted. But people want me to host discussions, they want me to provide a forum so that they can be heard because I have a reputation for providing a safe place to do so. People want to redirect a teaching thread sometimes to talk about the government, or to promote their own ministries. People want me to minister to them and solve their problems – and it is draining the life out of me. I have not been given those gifts and I have only helped people out of a sense of obligation – because people who do one thing are, as I mentioned before, expected to do it all. There are forum managers/administrators out there, but who are they? There are good counselors, but where are they? (I actually do know a great administrator and a great counselor – and they stick within their giftings, which is why they are so successful)

You want to know why we see so much abuse from the pulpit? Because those in the pulpit are being used and abused by people who demand that they have an impossible number of skillsets and a system that trained them to accept that as all “part of the calling” – so they do what they do well, and in the areas where they are not gifted, but operating in the flesh, that’s where they resort to worldly tactics.

I can’t host off-topic discussions. I can’t be a ministry billboard. I can’t do personal counseling – not if I am going to faithfully excel at the job that I am called to do. Right now, I am not faithfully doing that job because people are wanting me to do other jobs and I haven’t been saying no. I have fallen into the modern ministry trap of performing functions that I have no business performing. And part of me is scared to stop doing what I have been doing – for fear of losing “my audience” – my audience – more like, NOT my audience.

Perhaps we should all look at what we are demanding of people in the ministry, and back off. Is the person we are going to for help someone we simply admire or someone who we recognize has a definite skill set from God? And more than that, most people who I see preaching and teaching and prophesying and whatever else – well they obviously are not called to it. They are called to something else, something that they probably either aren’t doing, or aren’t focusing on because they are also too focused on trying to do something they wrongly esteem as being more important. We need to get focused, so that ALL of the jobs in the Kingdom start getting done and not just the flashy ones. Especially in the HR movement, we are suffering because a multitude are trying to be preachers, teachers, or at the very least, critics. We have fear-mongers and the pagan police causing confusion. We are a mess because we are not doing our jobs, and every job is important – not just the ones that get you public accolades (and a lot more hassle than you can probably imagine).

I think this is why, when it all comes down to our works passing through the fire – that most of them will burn like wood, hay and stubble – it won’t be the works that were actual transgressions, although some will fall into that category, I think it’s going to be the jobs we did that were not faithful to our own calling. I have a lot of wood, hay and stubble to answer for. It’s time to produce more gold and less tinder. In His mercy, maybe God will consent to lighting that wood, hay and stubble right now, so the impure gold I am producing might undergo some refinement.

A Life of Service Pt 1: It isn’t beneath us, even though we often treat it that way.

I sense a change in the air – have you noticed that when there is a movement within the Body of Messiah that a lot of people start getting the same message? I mentioned a series of dreams I was having yesterday and I was shocked at how many of my friends have been hearing the exact same thing – well, not shocked, but just blown away. The Body is being directed back to the factory specifications, and in this case the servanthood of Yeshua (Jesus Christ) who washed the feet of His disciples (considered to be the filthiest part of the body in the ancient Near Eastern world).

I am not going to detail the entire dream – needless to say, you can just trust me as I tell you that myself and a whole lot of other servants were doing a wretched job of serving. It was an “Upstairs/Downstairs” situation, or in modern lingo a “Downton Abbey” situation. I was one of the servants, but it seemed like everyone was just winging it or standing around doing nothing at all. I was trying, but my lack of desire and competence in being a servant was really making a mess out of the situation – no one in the house truly knew how to serve and had the right attitude about it, EXCEPT –

Except for the guy emptying the chamber pots (pictured below). And it was full, full of a ton of….. well you know, up to the top. And yet there was no hint of disgust on his face, and there was so much seriousness and dignity in his demeanor that when I woke up I wanted to cry. That man carrying the chamber pot was the most dignified person I had ever come across in my life. He took pride and had satisfaction in his work, he did not consider it beneath him or a burden – it was simply his job. It was the job given to him by the Master of the House and so he carried it out with quiet dignity and seriousness. He didn’t announce that he was doing his job, he just did it.

That man humbled me. While I was simply trying to find my way around the house and trying to figure out what to do and desiring the delicacies on the upstairs table, he was doing his job. We were all so frustrated that there was no one there to train us, that we were ill- equipped, but there was a man who continually dealt with people’s…. crap, and he was showing us exactly what to do. Quiet. Dignified. Without Ego. No disgust. Not considering the job beneath him. Taking pride in our part of keeping the Master’s house functioning. Finding out what our job was and just doing that and not anyone else’s job.

Take my job, for instance. I have known for years that I am, for all intents and purposes in the language of an Edwardian home, a nanny. The Nanny raises and loves children that aren’t hers – she has to give them what they need when they need it, teach them at the level they are ready for and yet consider her charges to be her superiors. She must teach them character and explain the basics to them. Give them the basic context of life so that they are prepared for adolescence. Teach them their letters and numbers and the basics of reading and writing. The job of the nanny is to diminish – to be very important at first and then give way to to the specialists, never forgetting that the children do not belong to her. The job of a nanny is not to replace the parents but to teach the children how they are to relate to their parents and to society as a whole. The job of the nanny is to pour their love and wisdom into each and every new person and then watch them walk farther and farther away, as it should be. The nanny has to have good fruit, possibly more than anyone in the home because the next generation rests in her hands.

And yet, my fruit is not yet at nanny level. And sometimes I want to be a high school or university instructor like my friends and mentors. I have to pull myself back occasionally, because that’s their job and they are great at it. I support them by teaching what they teach, but at the abc and 123 level, not by replacing them. I need to be the nanny, always there and yet less and less needed as time goes on – but in a great house there are always more children on the way. The house we serve in, is a very great house indeed. There are many more children to be born into this great House, and I need to learn how to serve them far better than I do.

Because frankly, babies have diapers – and like the man in my dream, I have to be a lot more like him and be willing to deal with what’s in them without disgust and without thinking it is beneath me.

I’m not there yet. I’m not even close. Looks like that needs to change.

Confronting Pseudo-archaeological memes Pt 4: Was Byblos the Goddess of Writing? Is the word Bible pagan?

Ok, this one was sent to me by a friend and it made me angry – angry because I was able to debunk it without even having studied the subject, that’s how ridiculous it was. This is the sort of thing that makes both Jews and Christians turn up their noses at anything Hebrew Roots or Messianic and who can blame them?

#1. Was Byblos a Roman goddess at all. No, she wasn’t. Neither was she a goddess mentioned in any other pantheon. Not even a goddess of “among other things.”

#2. Did the Romans have a deity of writing and libraries. No, not really. They weren’t so much focused on literature as with laws and virtues. Minerva was a goddess of wisdom and the arts and Apollo was a god of intellect and knowledge – but neither of them seemed to possess a library card.

#3. Was Byblos called Kypris – well, no because Byblos wasn’t a goddess, but Aphrodite was called Kypris on the island of Cyprus, which was a cult center for her (rumored to be her birthplace). Was Aphrodite a goddess of libraries? Um no – try love, pleasure and procreation – oh and beauty. She spent too much time primping in front of the mirror and in bed, and not much time reading, I guess.

#4. Is there a city named Byblos. Yes! In Lebanon on the Mediterranian (biblical Phoenicia). Along with Damascus, authorities have suggested that it is either the or one of the oldest inhabited cities on earth.

#5. Was it built for a “well loved” goddess. Um, no. In fact it is mentioned by the 12th Century BC author Sanchuniathon (who I have mentioned in previous blogs) as the first city built by Cronos, one of the Titans – meaning that the Greeks, who recognized the Titans as the precursors to their own gods, would never have suggested that a Titan would build a city to a goddess who had not yet even come into existence.

#6. Who was the main deity of Byblos? That would be Ba’alat Gebal – The Lady of Byblos. She was associated with the Semitic goddess Astarte and Aphrodite – mother goddesses, not wisdom goddesses. Here is her picture:

#7. What was the origin of the word Bible? It quite simply comes from the fact that the city of Byblos was where Egyptian papyrus (the ancient source for paper-making) was imported into Greece, which would be made into scrolls and later books. That’s it. Nothing nefarious.

#8. Did anyone have a goddess of libraries and writing? Yes, the Egyptians did – Seshat – but I find no evidence to tie her to any of the mother goddesses cited in the meme. As they served entirely different functions, it would be entirely out of character.

This meme is built on fallacies – during the Roman rule of Byblos, it was a center of Adonis worship. Why would Romans build a city to a goddess of libraries millennia before the Romans as a viable people even existed? It is fiction that doesn’t even have a shred of logic, much less even the slightest bit of truth.

Look, there are people out there who want to influence you, keep you in fear and try to “set you apart” from the world and they aren’t very honest or diligent at times about how they go about it. A pretty meme can contain ridiculous lies that haven’t been personally investigated and will be used to terrify people into not even knowing which words they can and cannot speak. A lot of people out there are quick to believe everything they read on the internet or in debunked books but won’t take an iota of time to make sure it is actually true before telling you all about it. Every language on earth contains words that are derived from, or sound like, words that are of pagan usage in another culture. Ancient peoples deified everything, from functions to attributes. Everything was of divine origin – we can’t talk about anything (not even in hebrew) without calling up things that pagans ascribed divinity to. So we just need to stop this wild goose chase.

On top of that – a lot of these words that people claim to know the pronunciation of are from reconstructed languages and best guesses. We don’t even know what the words they used sounded like – we have reconstructed the languages for the purpose of understanding them, not for the purpose of going back in time and actually thinking they would understand us if we spoke with them.

Calling on the name of a false god isn’t the same as saying the name of that god. We couldn’t even obey the commandment to read the Torah out loud every seventh year if that was the case. Calling on the name of a god required swearing oaths in his or her name, praising them, or doing something to increase their reputation in some way. Pronouncing their name does not qualify as calling on “their name” – which meant to call upon “their authority” and “their character.”

Too many people are out there teaching and they haven’t studied and they are throwing this movement into utter chaos. They bring shame to the testimony of Yeshua (Jesus) and bring reproach upon the validity of the commandments. Don’t let a meme freak you out – anyone can write one. The information for this meme seems to have been taken from a very badly vetted secular site that referenced absolutely none of it’s findings but made wild claims. Even a wikipedia search debunked almost everything it said. I found nothing in any of my books supporting any of it, and my sources aren’t just nameless, faceless internet contributors – they are respected archaeologists and real scholars subject to peer review of what they write.

Unravelling Headcoverings – The Historical Context of First Century Roman Wives Pt 1

First things first – this will not say whether or not women can wear them. In fact, I don’t care if people wear them. I don’t care why people wear them. Personal choices, as long as they don’t hurt anyone, are at the top of my “I don’t care” scale. I have no dog in this fight, so to speak. I don’t care if you do or do not wear head coverings any more than I care if you read Agatha Christie novels. This is simply a Biblical context study and should not be seen as anything else. Please don’t bombard me with comments about why you do it (and especially about why you think I should or should not do it too) because that is beyond the scope of this teaching – I teach context, not doctrine.

In looking at first century Roman women’s statuary and coins, you will see three main types (I will not take into account statues of goddesses here because they are idealized and ripe in symbolism) – those that showed married women, unmarried women, and fashion icons. Married women, as in this picture of the Roman bride to the left, wore part of their garment pulled up over their heads in the same way a modern woman wears a wedding ring (although, having worded it that way, I should hope that no one actually pulls their wedding ring up over their head). Unmarried women wore their heads uncovered – as it would have been considered highly inappropriate to take upon themselves the clothing status of the married woman. In the Roman Empire, you see, fashion was heavily legislated and you could always tell a person’s status in life by how they dressed. A wife had her head covered, and the unmarried maiden had her head uncovered while her hand would be specifically placed at the hip in order to denote the protection of her virginity (as we see in the picture of this bride, who is both wife and virgin, which is why I used it). The only exceptions to the veiled/unveiled model of sculpture were in those artworks meant to promote proper and dignified hairstyles among the women of the Roman Empire. Often the Empress would be sculpted displaying the latest modest hairstyle of the day, or her image would be displayed upon coins in order to set the Imperial example for propriety – but the Empress would never actually appear in person without her veil. Which leads to the question why!

Quite simply put – a married woman who went out unveiled in public was the ancient equivalent of a 21st Century married woman going to a bar without her wedding ring. She was actively expressing contempt for her marriage, and trumpeting her availability for sexual liasons. This concerned Augustus so much that he actually pronounced laws against such things – for although it was legal and expected for a man to be promiscuous and adulterous, for a woman it was a capital offense. Unless, of course, she was a prostitute – called a hetairai, a high class call girl and a perfectly legal profession.

In the first century BC, Roman wives all over the Empire began showing contempt for their marriages and their husbands by adopting the dress of hetairai – instead of dressing modestly and being industrious in the home, they turned to lives of luxurious pleasure seeking. They removed their veils, wore the purple and gold see-through clothing of prostitutes, donned pearls and gold jewelry and wore elaborate braided hairstyles. They neglected their families and the management of their home, and in order to maintain their figures they took dangerous contraceptives and even had abortions. They were both regaled and scolded by Philosophers such as Seneca, Ovid and Cicero. They were legislated against by Caesar Augustus. And unlike the modern adulterous, ringless woman in the singles bar – these women were doing it all right under their husband’s noses and often at their own dinner parties – with their husband’s own friends. The Emperor’s own niece, Julia, was tried and convicted as an adulteress and given the prescribed penalty for that crime – the shaving of her head.

But worst of all, we see these women mentioned in I Cor 11, I Tim 2 and Titus – wives and widows who forsook decency and respect in order to enjoy the same pleasures of the men of their times, but did so while members of the local assemblies! In the coming weeks, I will be exploring the impact of these shameless wives, mothers and widows on the early church assemblies and why Paul specifically rebuked those in Corinth, Ephesus and Crete for inappropriate behavior and for bringing shame to the testimony of Messiah.

In summary, head coverings were the ancient badge of being the modest Roman wife in a society where how you dressed told people exactly who you were. As head coverings no longer mean this in our greater society, and have been replaced by wedding rings in the West, golden pendants and colored bangles in Hinduism, specific hairstyles among the Zuni, white aprons in the Tibetan culture, etc. it is important to put head coverings in their place – as a personal choice and not as a doctrine that would mean anything to most of the outside world outside of Orthodox Judaism, where women cover all or some of their hair and in Haisidic communities where women cover all (and not just some) of their hair with either scarves or wigs. I Cor 11, far from being a commandment to wear head coverings, was simply telling the married women in the assemblies to act like decent married women and not like, well – whores.

So this will be an extended series – but if you can’t wait that long, I suggest an excellent resource – Bruce W Winter’s Roman Wives, Roman Widows (affiliate link, I earn commissions on qualifying purchases). For sake of brevity I cannot here lay out his level of foundational proof, the numerous historical sources he brings to the table, and the backing he has from many other scholars in the field. I am going to give you the basics, but I recommend going much deeper into the historical documents so that you can read Paul’s epistles from the vantage point of the people they were specifically written to.

Interested in more Ancient Near Eastern and First Century Context written in plain, easy to understand language? Check out my book King, Kingdom, Citizen: His Reign and Our Identity (affiliate link). Context doesn’t have to be confusing, let me make it less intimidating for you.

Part 2 here.

In Error or in Disagreement?

Anyone who has studied and taught knows this frustration all too well.

“I just heard your teaching on X, and I am sorry but you are in error on this issue.”

“Oh, did you study my sources? I gave my sources, I’ve been studying this for a long time now and I would like to hear why you think I am in error.”

“The Bible says you are in error, and when I heard your teaching, the Spirit within me rose up in anger.”

(Here is where the conversation gets dangerous because you have to let the “spirit” comment go by as if it never happened – most folks attribute their own offense to be the leading of the Spirit and if you disagree with them, then they make it into a proclamation that you are saying they aren’t hearing from the Spirit, which generally they don’t nearly as often as they think they do – but we’ve all been there, right?)

“The Bible is one of my sources, please show me where it disagrees with what I teach because I certainly don’t want to be unbiblical.”

At this point they either will or will not agree to show you. Sometimes they will show you something out of context, and if you try and insert context they will reject it because the Holy Spirit “teaches them all they need to know” (again, this is a conversation ender). Sometimes they will outright refuse and just tell you that you need to study or listen to X’s teaching on that subject. I like to ask people what they have studied on the matter, and if all they can say is that they got their doctrines through Bible reading and prayer, or by listening to other people I just let it go. It’s a Catch 22. I read the Bible, and I pray, and I listen to other people but time and time again it has been my experience that the Counselor only tells me things that I need to hear and nothing that I want to hear. Who needs a counselor to tell them what they already believe? The Spirit restrains me, more often than not, and quenches my offense, more often than not, and rebukes me, more often than not.

But the problem here doesn’t simply lie in attributing everything to the Holy Spirit, the biggest problem is in not being willing (still, even after having been wrong so many times on so many things for so many years) to first consider the possibility that we are the ones in error, and that we are simply in disagreement with the other person.

I have a mentor who recently taught me something I did not like, and a spirit of offense rose up in me immediately. Not a violent one, but definitely an unhappy feeling inside. I heard them out and my biggest problem wasn’t disagreeing, but in agreeing that their evidence really only led in one direction and it was a direction that my flesh hated because it went against everything that I had ever been taught about it. But as I heard the evidence it was like, “Oh gosh this hurts but I can’t argue with their logic or evidence other than to cite what I have always been taught and bad english language translations.”

It hurt like it hurt to hear that the Law was never done away with. Cutting flesh away hurt badly. To be honest, it hurts right now even just thinking about it. If I didn’t respect their decades of study, I would toss it out the window, but here is a person of proven track record and character and I know that they don’t just put stuff out there lightly – especially stuff that challenges paradigms. In this society today, few are willing to consider the possibility that the reason they don’t agree with such and such teacher is because they haven’t spent the same amount of hours studying. We want everything to be easy – we want to read a quick blurb on an internet site and be experts, or we want to spend some time in prayer and have the Spirit reveal everything to us when most of us are more than capable of spending some time studying if we wanted to. But in this area, although I haven’t read all of their sources, the Bible did back them up – and I only knew this because a completely separate teacher had shown me a translation problem years ago. I was stuck attributing my offense to the flesh, even though I wanted it to be the Spirit.

So I sent them a note that read something like this, “I don’t like this teaching, it is messing with what I have always been taught and my flesh is screaming – BUT, the reason I hate it most is because everything you have presented, along with everything I read in the word is backing up what you are saying. It’s going to take me a long time to deal with this, but I want you to know that I am struggling with it and certainly not disregarding it just because it offends me.”

Paradigms don’t shatter easily, and we always have to be on guard against our flesh – which doesn’t want to change, not ever. Our flesh likes to reside in this fantasy world of “knowing it all” and “not being challenged because we know it all.” Unfortunately, I don’t know it all, and whenever that is made apparent my flesh is going to remind me that it isn’t going to change without a fight – and my flesh will try to masquerade as the Holy Spirit every single time, masking my offense in mock holiness.

As a teacher, it is incredibly frustrating to me when people disagree without having studied, or without having studied legitimate sources, or who mistake their own discomfort for the leading of the Spirit – but it is all part of the job. People want to be heard, people want to be authorities, people want to retain their beliefs – no different than when we were all sitting in the pews in Sunday churches. We really aren’t as different from them as we like to think we are – challenge our deeply held paradigms and we will react in exactly the same way they do.

Defensively and pridefully.