Home » Posts tagged 'ITINERANT'
Tag Archives: ITINERANT
MORE LIKE JESUS
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, September 27, 2022 – When you tell God you want to be more like Jesus, watch out! That’s one prayer God loves to answer in spades. Before you know it, you’ll be roaming the country a homeless, penniless outcast, just like Jesus was during his ministry years.
But you’ll have God’s Spirit powerfully with you. No amount of wealth can rival having God’s Spirit powerfully with you.
It’s better to be a penniless follower of Jesus than someone with excessive funds who doesn’t know God. I say this from personal experience but also from observation. The most spiritually miserable and misdirected people I’ve ever met are not poverty-stricken but those with more money than they need. Money is not a blessing when it exceeds your needs. Money beyond your needs becomes a burden, a temptation, and a curse, driving a wedge between you and God.
Becoming more like Jesus (that is, learning to make the choices he made and following his lead in everything we do) should be our lifetime goal as his followers. We’re not to model ourselves after movie stars or sports heroes or superheroes or anyone else, including our favourite relative, friend, or pastor. We follow the lead of no-one but Jesus; that’s what it means to be his follower.
You grow into the role of being a follower of Jesus. You’re not reborn and automatically become like Jesus. It’s a process that unfolds over time. It’s first and foremost a spiritual education, bearing in mind that Jesus was as much a teacher as he was the Messiah, and that the whole purpose of his ministry work was to teach people about the Kingdom and how to live in it. God, through his Holy Spirit, taught Jesus so that Jesus could teach his disciples, who in turn taught his other followers, who in turn then taught yet other followers, and so on and so on, all the way down to blogs like this one today.
As followers of Jesus, we keep on learning to be more like Jesus right up to our last breath as humans. Even Jesus himself was learning up until his crucifixion (remember the Garden of Gethsemane). I don’t think we ever reach the point where we can say: “Well, I’m exactly like Jesus now, so I can stop learning”. Every day, we learn from God through his Spirit, but also from scripture (especially the Gospels), and from making mistakes.
Maybe because I make so many of them as a former atheist who wasn’t “raised in the faith”, mistakes tend to be my dominant learning mode. We learn best by mistakes, as the adage goes, and they also keep us humble, as my grandmother used to say, so mistakes do have a positive aspect if used correctly. But mistakes can also hurt you and leave you troubled and confused for a time. And they can ultimately turn you against God.
So it’s critically important when we fail our tests or fall to temptation that we run to God as soon and as quickly as possible. Our instinct will be to run the other way to avoid God and lick our wounds in private, but we need to run to God, not try to hide from him. Scripture says that God will wipe away all our tears; it doesn’t say that we won’t cry or not give ourselves reason to cry; it says God will wipe away all our tears, and that includes tears that result from self-inflicted wounds from failed tests and temptations or downright stupidity.
I have done both – cried and run away from God and cried and run to God, and beyond a shadow of a doubt it was far, far better to run to God for healing than to try to avoid him and fix things in some other way. God’s healing is miraculous and therefore instantaneous and perfect, whereas anything I did to try to rectify my mistakes only made things worse. I laugh as I write this, because with the passage of time, I tend only to remember my stupidity rather than the pain my stupidity caused me. That shows the perfection of God’s healing, that the pain is gone even in remembrance. There’s no rankling or regrets or self-loathing. I only think: “Well, that was stupid of me. Won’t do that again”, and I move on.
We need to move on after we’ve made mistakes, especially ones that involve failed tests and temptations. The temptation will be to wallow in self-pity or self-hatred, to beat our breasts publicly, or even to think we’ll never regain our spiritual footing so we might as well just give up. Those are all temptations in themselves and they come straight from the devil. Don’t fall for them. God wants you standing firmly on your feet and looking up to him, not wallowing in self-pity and looking down.
Becoming more like Jesus is a lifetime pursuit. We shouldn’t get angry or impatient with ourselves if we occasionally (or more frequently) make choices that Jesus didn’t make and suffer the consequences for it. We should instead learn from our mistakes and use them as cautionary tales to teach others. We should never wallow in our mistakes or in self-pity; we should always run to God and God only for healing.
****
Even as we continue to learn about the Kingdom ourselves, we can still teach others. Our knowledge will never be perfect while we’re here on Earth, and it doesn’t need to be. God doesn’t expect us to be perfect and in fact hasn’t enabled us to be perfect until we get Home. What he does expect of us is to remain actively willing to become more like Jesus. That means not only praying to be more like Jesus, but accepting the reality of actually being more like Jesus, which of necessity is going to involve being itinerant, penniless, and at odds with mainstream society, including mainstream Christianity.
When this happens, embrace the changes in your circumstances, don’t fight them. If God entrusts you with poverty, he has given you a very great gift and blessing. Don’t reject it. The more Jesus came into his power in the Kingdom, the poorer and more outcast he became in the world. The same will happen to his followers. Having poverty thrust on you is a sign that you’re becoming more and more like Jesus. It is reason to celebrate, not to mourn; it is a reason to double down on your commitment to God and the Kingdom, not cause to neglect the Kingdom to pursue money-making ventures in the world.
All prophets throughout the ages have had poverty thrust on them, and yet God still provided for them: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and everything you need will be given to you”. In becoming more like Jesus, there’s no need to fear poverty and rejection by mainstream society: these things should instead be celebrated as a milestone achieved. Paul says that the values of the Kingdom are foolishness to the world. If God saw fit for Jesus to be penniless, itinerant and outcast during his ministry years, we should expect to be the same.
It is a very great privilege to be given the grace to be more like Jesus. Wherever that leads you, embrace it.
I T I N E R A N T
ANNAPOLIS ROYAL, Nova Scotia, April 24, 2022 – Jesus was an itinerant teacher and preacher during his ministry years.
Most people tend to leave out the itinerant aspect when they talk about Jesus’ ministry, as if being itinerant were something undesirable. But I think the fact that Jesus wasn’t rooted in a single location is one of the reasons for his success. His itinerancy was integral to the work he needed to do.
Moving around is good for your soul: it keeps you mentally, physically and spiritually on your toes. We know, as born-again believers, that Earth is not our home; Heaven is our home. Jesus told us that he’s going there to prepare a place for us, and the place he prepares will be our permanent address. On Earth, we have no permanent address, just a series of places that we move through on our way home.
When you’re NFA (no fixed address) on Earth, it frees you to move around. It’s not a limitation to be NFA as a born-again believer; it’s a blessing and a freedom. It’s also, I believe, a necessary freedom.
When you move from place to place, you stay mentally and spiritually mobile. You’re adaptable. You’re flexible. You make do. You get more creative with your resources. You meet more people. And most importantly – you rely 100% on God. Being itinerant is good for faith-building, and we know that without strong faith, we’ll get nowhere, least of all Heaven.
Certainly, it was only logical that Jesus would be an itinerant preacher, as moving around was the only way he could reach most people – by making himself physically available in their location. But his itinerancy, I would argue, was baked into his success. I don’t think if Jesus set himself up in one location and made everyone come to him that he would have succeeded in his mission. In fact, I think he would have failed spectacularly.
One of the biggest flaws of mainstream Christianity is its near total lack of itinerancy. A building is considered the church, rather than the people who attend it. And so the flock flocks (or doesn’t flock) to the immovable building, week after week, wondering why they’re not getting much out of it. “Going to church” becomes a duty or obligation rather than an ongoing state of being.
When you’re born-again, you’re always in church, meaning that you’re always before God through the presence of his Spirit in you. You don’t have to go to a certain place to “be in church”. Jesus said that we would no longer have to go to the temple in Jerusalem to worship God, as we could worship him in Spirit and in Truth, which is the kind of worshipers God’s looking for. That’s how Jesus worshiped, and that’s how we worship, as his born-again followers. We don’t need to go into a building or build an altar to worship God; we can worship him anywhere and at any time, because our body in the temple of God’s Holy Spirit, and collectively we are the church.
I know a woman who, during the pandemic lockdown, would drive her car to the church building that she usually attended on Sundays and sit in the car in front of the locked doors, praying. I don’t say this to ridicule her; I say this in sadness. Many people have the same misguided notion – that they have to go into a building to be near or talk to God or, worse, talk to him only through a priest or minister. This is not God’s doing, this level of misinformation; this is the devil’s doing.
Jesus’ itinerancy was a way for him to get close to people – not to impose himself on people, but to make himself available. It also elevated the sense of urgency around his message, the sense of “now or never”, because Jesus was always on the move; if you didn’t say “yes” to him when he passed through your village, you might never get that chance again.
Born-again ministers and pastors preaching and teaching the Word today need to turn their ministry into an itinerant one. They need to blast out of their comfort zone of a “home church” and get on the road permanently. Paul’s ministry was, in large part, as successful as it was because Paul was also an itinerant preacher and teacher, modeled after Jesus. If you sit, week after week, in the same location preaching more or less to the same people who are likewise sitting in the same place, week after week, you’re all just spinning your wheels. You’re accomplishing nothing but putting a smile on the devil’s face.
I’m speaking to born-again believers here. Christians who are happy to have their faith only as a Sunday morning pastime can keep doing whatever they want. They aren’t our concern. (We’ll use their buildings as a resource tool, thank you very much.) But born-again believers need to get moving and keep moving. They need to look carefully at the itineracy aspect of Jesus’ ministry. Being itinerant wasn’t something Jesus was forced into because he couldn’t afford his own building; being itinerant was what Jesus had to be in his ministry, and so it’s also what we need to be in ours.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 