God Uses Real People

The devil would love to convince you that the only people whom the Holy Spirit can use POWERFULLY are those who have all day to read the Bible, pray in the Holy Spirit and sit in God’s presence.  In other words, He can only use some “super-spiritual” person who doesn’t have a family, doesn’t have a secular job, doesn’t spend time volunteering at church, doesn’t have to shop for food or cook or do laundry or take out trash or fill out tax forms or pay bills or spend an inordinate amount of time getting a car registration sticker in a place with long lines.  In short, He certainly couldn’t use YOU.

But Mark 16:17-18 says that BELIEVERS will cast out demons and lay hands on sick people and see them recover.  John 14:12 says that whoever BELIEVES on Jesus will do the works that He did and greater.  Jesus said that rivers of living water would gush out of the one who “BELIEVES on Him” (John 7:37-39).  Don’t you think that He knew when He said these things that most believers would have secular jobs and families?  So as always, the devil is a liar.  He’s just out to rob you of the joy you can have when you allow the Holy Spirit to minister through you to bless others.  The Holy Spirit can use YOU and He can use all the other REAL people out there who make themselves available to Him.  You SHOULD pray and you SHOULD read your Bible and you SHOULD listen to what the Holy Spirit has to say to you, but you don’t have to set aside the entire all day for such things!  Jesus said that His yoke is easy and His burden is light (Matthew 11:30).  He is not going to stress you out and wear you out just so that you can do His will!

I was bi-vocational the entire time that I pastored in Maine – and most Maine pastors were bi-vocational as well or had a wife who worked.  Maine was 3% born-again Christian and I was in a small town in a sparsely populated county.  It was unrealistic to expect that our congregation would pay me a full-time salary while paying the other church expenses.  So I worked.  There would be times when I had to put in a lot of extra hours at work to meet urgent deadlines.  It was my own business the whole time, but even with my own business, if I didn’t keep a customer happy, he could have become someone else’s customer.

During such crunch times, I still had to preach the Word to the flock.  God didn’t abandon me and say, “Sorry, I set you up with an impossible situation.  You obviously don’t have enough time to be a REAL pastor even though I called you to be one.  Get up there and fail Sunday morning without a decent message because you don’t have enough time to prepare one.”  To compound matters, I kept my resolve to NEVER, EVER preach a message that I just got out of a book or off the internet.  (I have still never done that in my entire life.  People deserve to have a message tailored to them by the Holy Spirit.)  I would take what little time I had Saturday night to seek God, and sometimes He would just “download” a whole message to me as quickly as I could write down notes.  Within 20 minutes I could be ready to go the next morning.  I would often spend less time preparing than I spent actually delivering the message.  And they were really good messages!

Some pastors might smirk and think, “I spend 10-20 hours a week on ‘sermon prep’ so there’s no way you could preach a decent message if you were that time-constrained.”  But God is fair!  There were even weeks when He said, “I’ll just give you what to say when you get up there,” and the message would end up being one of my best ones even though it was basically all done as a 45-minute prophecy!  (I had enough Word in me so that I would not get up and say kooky things that disagreed with the Bible.)  God understood my situation.  He is merciful.  He isn’t unfair!

Now if I DID have more time to prepare, I didn’t operate in presumption by just getting up and winging it.  I believe in preparation to be able to “rightly divide” the Word, and normally that was my mode.  But one week I had to spend almost the whole night before the message in the Emergency Room with a parishioner in dire straits.  God was merciful again.  (I did have a long nap after I got home from church!)

What I want you to see is that God isn’t unreasonable!  If He called you to do something, He will GRACE you to do it!  He won’t wear you out by giving you an assignment that you can’t possibly do because you don’t have enough time.

Now, you might not have enough time to do what God said AND frivolous activities like clicking through endless internet biographies of classic rock bands.  You might not have enough time to do what God said AND a number of nice-sounding Christian things that God DIDN’T tell you to do.  But God is fair, so you ALWAYS have enough time to do what He called you to do without burning out!  His grace is sufficient for you (2 Corinthians 12:9)!