|
|
Dalton
Roberts |
|
|
I take my car to a little oil change place that I love. In just a few minutes, they change my oil and while one guy is doing that, another guy is checking my tires, battery, transmission fluid, windshield wipers and a half dozen other things. I don’t know about you, but I need to take a day now and then to check my spiritual fitness. It’s not a big guilt trip for me. I never tried to inflict guilt on my children and I have never felt God wants me to be afflicted with guilt. The whole spiritual check-up for me is a desire to fully experience a quality spiritual life and to keep myself in shape to be of service to others. One thing I check myself for is gentleness. Jesus said, “Come unto me all of you who labor and are heavy laden … for I am gentle.” Jesus was saying something similar to what my mother often told me: “Son, you can tell how strong a man is by how gentle he is.” Jesus was saying the way to help people who are stressed and deeply burdened is to be gentle with them. We do not go to people who claim to have all the answers. We go to those who do not bruise us with a know-it-all attitude. We go to those who have an antenna to see when we are hurting and touch our souls with kindness in their hands. I have what may seem to be a silly illustration of this point. When I got the sniffles in my childhood, mother would rub my chest with Vick’s Vaporub and I would sleep like a creek rock. When I grew up and had colds, I would rub my chest with Vicks but it did not seem to help me as much. Why? There was a missing ingredient: mother’s gentle touch and the sweet love that always attended her healing work. Sometimes when I do my one-man show I tell one of my life stories or sing one of my songs that touches me and I shed a few tears. The first few times this happened, I apologized for “losing my cool.” One day it dawned on me that I was apologizing for the gentleness that is imparted to us as followers of the gentle Jesus. Now I say, “I do not apologize for being tender-hearted. There are enough hard-hearted people in this world and I don’t want to be one of them.” One thing that gentled me out as a teenager was watching a foot-washing service in a missionary Baptist church. The man who took me was an almost illiterate Baptist minister who ran a dairy farm and most of the men there did hard manual labor. I am sure their feet were not fastidiously clean and well powdered. But they cried and hugged as they washed each other’s feet and without knowing it, they washed a whole layer of foolish pride right out of the heart of a 16-year-old boy. Nothing has ever happened in any church I have attended that made the presence of Jesus more real to me. Part of my check-up is making sure I have not developed an attitude of superiority about myself and my personal ministry in life. We are all ministers. There are no high and low levels of ministry. A cobbler’s work is just as important in the eyes of the Lord as being pastor of the Crystal Cathedral. People will tell you how wonderful it must be to be able to play an instrument and write songs and sing but don’t you think for a moment that any of this is more important than the ministry of the church janitor. John Gardner once said, “We must have respect for both our philosophers and our plumbers or neither our pipes nor our theories will hold water.”
|
