Tag: Service

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Teaching and Power

Job 36:22 “God is exalted in his power. Who is a teacher like him?”

This passage makes me uncomfortable, mainly because it connects power and teaching. The two sentences form a causal relationship. Because God is exalted, Elihu appears to say, who is a teacher like him?

The answer is no one. In his absolute power, God confronts us with our powerlessness and offers to teach us contingent on our fear and awe.

It jars against the image we have of Christ in John 13 washing the disciples feet, telling them they are right to call him rabbi and to do as he has done: serve their students.

The Job verse makes me uncomfortable because I don’t want to think through the kind of power that I have at my disposal: be responsible for the factor I play in a student’s educational future or the duty I have to God to make sure that what I’m teaching glorifies him.

The power God has is not an end in itself. He does not teach in order to exert power. He uses that power in order to teach, love, and serve. In the same way, Christ lowers himself not as a way of making himself less the Son of God but as a way to show us that his power is a means to an end: communion with us through service.

I pray that I will use the power God has given me to better serve my students: neither denying or remaining unconscious of that power nor using it as an end. It is by following Christ’s example that I can best merge education and discipleship.

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Revision and Discipleship

Revelation 2:19 “I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first.”

This is a season of revision for me and my students. I’m revising a journal article that’s been rejected. My students are going back through the semester’s first graded essay and, if they feel so inclined, revising them even as they’ve turned in a second essay and working on a third. I’m revising my teaching methods to address the concerns I have after seeing their first two essays.

In both my writing and teaching, I see the need for constant improvement.

This is happening in my discipleship as well. Books by Richard Foster and Shane Claiborne have called me out for my complacency, the ways that I explain away lingering selfishness or disregarding ways I know God wants me to live out the gospel. The books have pushed me to listen harder, seek growth in community, and find ways to bear fruit in my roles as a father, husband, friend, and teacher. In short, the books have given me reasons to serve and persevere: to confront the places in myself and others that most needs God’s help and what I can practically do to extend God’s care in love and faith.

One measure for me of that renewed commitment to service and perseverance is this blog—not just this site but this actual blog. It’s 9:20pm, and I’m long past being focused enough to offer substantive and constructive feedback on the 30+ papers I need to grade over the next few days.

I am trying. This is not an essay or extended argument, but it is an effort to think with a passage from my daily reading that spoke to me.

If you are familiar with the Thyatira sermon from Revelation 2, then you know the above verse is just a warm-up to the extended criticism of Jezebel and her relationship with the church. That is worth its own deep engagement.

For my purposes here, I singled out verse 19 which intrigues me because of:

  1. God’s attention to the church’s actions
  2. In particular, the attention to “love and faith” which are signs of compassion and reliance borne out in serving and doing so in the face of obstacles
  3. and the progress Thyatria has made in that service and perseverance

In the midst of revision and the inevitable pain that comes with knowing you didn’t get it right the first time, we find that iif we work in love and faith, God will complete the good work He began in us.

I pray for a commitment to daily writing and teaching, for those practices to be grounded in love (service to others) and faith (an allegiance to God), and the fruit from those practices to grow over time.