Reading with the Pastor
James 3 and Psalm 56-57
As a teacher, it is hard for me to get past verse 1 of chapter 3 in the letter of James.
“Let not many of you become teachers, my brothers, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment.”
There is a weight that any teacher feels “to get it right,” to do it well. But for those of us called to the ministry of the word, called to open the word of life for the people of God, that weight is sometimes overwhelming.
It ought to be overwhelming all the time and that is part of the problem. We ought to be running to prayer more often than we do, more often than I do. We grow comfortable with our libraries, and skills, and experience and lose the weightiness, the blood-earnestness of the task and the seriousness of the moment when people are assembled to attend to the public reading and exposition of the word of God.
I hope that those of you who are reading along with the READING WITH THE PASTOR guide will take a moment and pray for me and others who have the responsibility of weekly teaching of the word of God. I need it and covet your prayers. Pray that God would keep my spirit always sensitive to His Spirit and that I would do my work as unto the Lord so that those I teach would hear and see Jesus and not me. Thanks.
Another offering for The Poetry Project
Read Psalm 56
How Is It Possible to Write Without Pain?
How is it possible to write without pain?
How can anything be written worth reading,
. that doesn’t pulse from a pen dipped in
. the blood of a mortal wound?
Desperate
Lonely
Confused
Overwhelmed
Betrayed
Broken
Trampled upon
Attacked and
Abandoned
This is the soil that turns its gaze to You.
So make my heart turn.
Afflict it for my good.
Cauterize my wound with the hot poker of Your Spirit,
. so I might pray like David.
. “So that I might walk before You,
. in the light of the living.”
Teach my soul to praise the God I trust.
Go to Psalm 57
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