A Hodgepodge of Thoughts and Lessons...

The past three years have been a mixture of trials and lessons meshed together to bring about one purpose: to make me more like Christ. When you pray with the right heart and desire for God to work in your life, not to bring you more riches or more blessings, but to multiply His character in you and His influence in your life, He always answers. My prayers went from, "Lord, please give me the ability to move to the mountains. I will glorify You there. Please allow us to build the log home we've always wanted and have the good life" to "Lord, my desire is to get out of debt. Help us to sell that piece of mountain property so that we can have the means to be generous and serve You. I know we dug that hole ourselves and I'm so sorry for being selfish with what You have given us. Remove my desire for riches and replace it with things of You. Give me boldness and courage to be Your follower."
I am learning how to become a disciplined Christian, focusing on the things of God: meditation, prayer, study, simplicity, solitude, fasting, service, submission, worship, confession,etc. I've learned how to ask for God's glory to be revealed and to praise Him for who He is.

My desire for His Word has gone from a have-to to a want-to. In searching His Word I see my reflection and it doesn't look like what it should be so the Holy Spirit continues to reveal to me the areas where I need to remove sin. I feel disgusted with my sin nature...stupid flesh nature that always brings me down. In the revelation of my sin, God pricks my heart and says, "remove it and move on." He reveals things that need to be removed...things like television, movies, Facebook, negative thoughts, judgmental thoughts, selfishness in my marriage and He is replacing them with the craving for His Word and His thoughts, real study, the search for good supplementary resources, and submission in my marriage.

He has showed me that my time spent in Honduras was not worthless but misguided. I went with the mindset that I would "help" them when in reality the goal was to Americanize them. The purpose should have been to preach and teach the Word and only that. I heard a pastor once say that people don't need you to surrender your life for their cause, they need you to open your mouth and tell them about Christ. He says until we: open our Bible and study the Scriptures, memorize chapters, organize our thoughts into systematic theology, know what we believe, be able to defend that Truth, understand Christian history, and become a teacher of God's Word, we should stay home. Wow! Talk about a wake up call! Needless to say, that was helpful fuel for me to study the Word more and hide it in my heart.

I've learned what it means to be a true disciple. Pretty much all of what I've learned recently is what a disciple should look like and more importantly, what one should do. A disciple is not one who has "accepted" Christ into his/her heart and gotten fire insurance all the while living his/her life for himself doing whatever he/she wants. I should be a new creation and the Holy Spirit should be molding me into Christ's image. Whoa! First, to have God in me blows my mind. I have God living inside of me. Do I even understand the brevity of that? Furthermore, everything was created/is created for Him and by Him. God created me, yeah, I know that. But I was created FOR Him? That's too much. So what does that mean to me? If I am created for Him then I should live for Him. Hello! That's not rocket science so why has it taken me so long to realize that?

That epiphany brings me to becoming the weird person that I am. True, I was already a little strange before but now it is an intentional weird. A weird that makes you quit your job and stay home with your new baby girl when you have always been raised to work and work hard earning money in addition to earning all kinds of rewards in the job you were successful at doing. Success is redefined. It is the kind of weird that causes you to talk about God in every conversation that you have and have extensive conversations about theology with your husband. The kind of weird that causes you to sell a brand new truck and accept the gift of an SUV with over 200,000 miles, to not have cable or satellite, to sell all your DVDs that aren't Christ honoring, to give away things that you don't use and even some that you do. Need is also redefined. What a strange life it is to meet with women and talk about how God is working in our lives? To sit and listen to sermons online from great theologians. There is no greater joy than knowing that I am living the life God has called me to live. Nothing else matters.

So what else is there? Yeah, looking at these things makes you think that we have it altogether. Not so. God is still removing things, thoughts, and our control from our lives. How exciting!!! To be a follower of Christ means that nothing else matters. Not being so strict as to be legalistic but I am simply looking to Christ to supply my every need, looking to Christ to guide my life, and sharing Christ in every situation. There is no worldly possession, no success, no human reward great enough to make me turn back from this path I'm on. I imagine standing in His presence one day. Oh what a beautiful vision I have of that day yet knowing that any image that I conjure up doesn't compare to the magnitude of that day. Nonetheless, I imagine being in God's presence and being in such awe without being able to find the words to say. I hope that I would be able to muster up the words "Thank you. Thank you Lord for allowing me to serve You!"

If you don't know Christ. If you have ever walked an aisle and checked a box. If you have ever prayed a prayer and that is all. If you once believed. If you are not sure. If your life doesn't reflect what a disciple should be...search the Word, study, pray. If you are serious about following Christ, He will be reflected in your life. If He is not evident in your life, there has been no change, others would question whether you know Him or not, you dodge talking about God every chance you get, you are probably lost. Heaven is not the default. No one is good...good doesn't get you to heaven anyway; ONLY Christ does. Are you living for Him?

If you have questions, wish to know more, or simply want to be a follower of Christ, please contact me at wilks_leslie@yahoo.com so we can make arrangements to talk.

Be blessed! Follow Christ!

Go ye therefore...

I've been reading a lot of David Platt and listening to his sermons on sharing the gospel and how to sew threads of the gospel into the fabric of our everyday conversations. It is such a desire of mine to do this but it is also where I struggle. The more I read and understand God's Word, the more I am convicted that I NEED to be sharing what God is doing in my life and more importantly, sharing His gospel. God has convicted me so that everywhere I turn and everything I hear and read is consumed by this idea.

Platt says in Follow Me:

    "Imagine your church. Don't picture the building or parking lot, and don't envision the activities and programs. Just the people. Whether there are fifty, one hundred, or five thousand of them, simple imagine the people who comprise your church.

     People living in a world of sin and rebellion, suffering and pain. A world where over three billion men, women, and children survive on less than two dollars a day, and a billion of those people live in absolute poverty--in remote villages and city slums where hundreds of millions are starving and dying of preventable diseases. A world where billions of people engrossed in false religions, and around two billion of them have never even heard the gospel. They are all (literally billions of people) on a road that leads to an eternal hell--suffering that will never, ever, ever end.

 But you and the people in your church have been transformed by the gospel of Christ. In your minds, you know that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the grave to save people from their sins. In your hearts, you have tasted and seen that He alone can satisfy people's souls. Your wills are now abandoned to His ways, and you long to be His witnesses throughout the world. God has banded you together as brothers and sisters in a local church with a global commission: make disciples of all nations. God has filled every single one of you with the power of His own Spirit to enable each of you individually and all of you collectively to reach the world with the gospel.

So if you had nothing but people--no buildings, no programs, no staff, and no activities--and you were charged with spreading the gospel to the whole world, where would you begin? Would you start by pooling together your money so that you could spend millions of dollars on a building to meet in? Would you get the best speaker, the greatest musicians, and the most talented staff in order to organize presentations and programs that appeal to your families and your children? Would you devote your resources to what is most comfortable, most entertaining, and most pleasing to you?

I don't think your church would do these things--and neither would mine. Not if we really believed God's Word and were honestly looking at God's world.

If we recognized that there are billions of people without the gospel, many of whom have never even heard it, and if we realized that there are hundreds of millions of people starving without food and water, we would probably not say, "Let's spend millions of dollars building a house of worship."

...the Bible never tells us to construct a house of worship. Instead, the Bible says that we as God's people are the house of worship. The New Testament never tells us to uild a place for people to come to us; instead, the New Testament commands us to give our lives going to people.

Similarly, if we really believed the Bible, we probably wouldn't limit ministry to a team of minsters who lead the church. After all, every single person in the church is already equipped by the Spirit of God for the purpose of ministry. Why would we want tto sideline the Spirit of God in the many in order to delegate the work of God to a few?

Instead, we would all go.

Every single one of us. We would scatter as rapidly as possible to make hte gospel known to as many people as possible. 

It would be difficult, though, and probably costly. So even as we scattered, we would gather together periodically. The purpose of our gathering would not be to soak in a show or sit in a class. The purpose of our gathering would be to share our lives--to share the hurts and joys we are experiencing as we spend our lives spreading the gospel to the ends of the earth. We would encourage one another, worship with one another, give to one another, and sacrifice for one another, and then we would scatter again to make the gospel of Jesus known to more people. We would do this week after week and year after year, and we would not stop until the Good News of Jesus spread from our houses to our communities to our cities to the nations."

 When Jesus rose from the grave, He told His disciples to go baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and teach everything He commanded them. They started as a group of about 120 but grew to over 400 in the first few DAYS. This did not happen through gifted speakers or big buildings. The gospel spread because ordinary people were empowered by an extraordinary presence and they proclaimed it everywhere they went.

I want to penetrate the world with the gospel through being a Spirit empowered disciple of Jesus who denies self and makes disciples of Jesus. The great commission is not a choice for me to consider but a command for me to obey. That's the kind of church I want to be a part of..."a people who really believe that we have the Spirit of God in each of us for the spread of the gospel through all of us; who gladly sacrifice the pleasures, pursuits, and possessions of this world because we are living for treasure in the world to come; who have forsaken every earthly ambition in favor of one eternal aspiration: to see disciples made and churches multiplied from our houses to our communities to our cities and to the nations."

Something that has blown my mind recently is the realization that my previous mission work could possibly have been in vain. Don't get me wrong, I believe we should help the sick, feed the hungry, and cloth the poor but in looking at my journey over the past few years, I have have had to ask myself several questions. In all the going and doing and helping, did I once share Christ with anyone? Sure I helped to feed many mouths for a while but did I share with them the One whom which they should rely on, the One who sent me? Without that and without discipling, it all just becomes just another thing we do. Is it really helping if I am throwing money, time, and food at something yet not taking the time to share God's love and salvation story with them? I am baffled by my lack of obedience.

No more! No more with I cower behind the security of handing out food when I need to be opening my mouth. No more will I try to Americanize a foreign village when I should be showing them how to rely on God to provide. No more will I walk down my street without being open to the Holy Spirit to guide me to share His gospel. No more!

I challenge you to join me! Go ye therefore and make disciples. While we are at work, we will make disciples. While we are on the baseball field, we will make disciples. While we are at the gym, we will make disciples. While we are going to school, we will make disciples. We will open our mouths and share the greatest life altering event ever. Share your story! Share Jesus!

If we aren't making disciples, then what in the world are we here for?