Then if you live within striking distance of Manchester book in here NOW for the Diamond Geezers Men’s Day on Saturday April 13th before it’s too late.
(If you have any trouble watching the video here, go to http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/lecrae-explains-true-manhood)
Is it an insult to be called a Jar of Clay? It’s not the worst thing I’ve been called by a long way, but last week I had the pleasure of speaking three times on the same passage; 2 Corinthians 4, where Paul described himself that way. The deeper I dug into the passage, the more instructive and inspiring I found it in a world where sometimes we feel all too frail and inadequate and others are only too glad to affirm that picture.
Opponents – in the church – were saying Paul was unimpressive and ugly, a rubbish speaker, manipulative, a deceiver, a false teacher, money grabbing (anyone would think he was trying to do ministry in the 21st century! If you want to see vociferous nastiness like this just google Rick Warren’s name – look what bloggers galore write about him, and the guy’s amazing!).
What was Paul’s response?
Well it wasn’t like mine. I’d step right up to defend myself on every point. I’ve done it before for sure, perhaps because we are taught to defend our image and self esteem at all costs. Now Paul does declare that he has nothing to hide, because integrity matters – but then he also shows that he’s got nothing to prove either. How?
They said, “You’re rubbish!” And we’d want to affirm our self worth etc. but Paul says the most surprising thing…
‘You’re right.’
You’re absolutely right.
‘…we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.’
Remember Paul described himself as being the ‘chief of sinners.’ He said at the start of this passage he only had any ministry at all because of the MERCY of God.
The God who puts his treasure not in the best china, but disposable containers.
The greek word he’s using for ‘earthen vessels’ (ostrakinos) denotes not a decorative item but a pot used for dishonourable things, the slop buckets, containers you wouldn’t let the guest see what was in it. The wheely bin.
Cheap, common, breakable, replaceable. Not essential but essentially valueless. The only value they had was the service they performed. Again, this may not build your self esteem!
Paul says, “We have this treasure in a waste basket, in a slop bucket.” In other words, ‘It’s not about me.’
Whole talks I’ve heard about this passage and blogs I read around it etc talk about being ‘cracked pots.’ There’s a problem with that. It’s not in the text. It doesn’t say anything about the pots being cracked. I wonder whether we want to add that in because we want to make it about US again. The point is not about your cracks. Don’t make it about that.
The point is, the container is NOT the point. It’s what’s inside that matters.
We’re made to contain God! To be containers of God! In Ephesians it says God wants to put his FULLNESS in us. We’re made in his image to carry his glory! This sets us apart from everything else in the whole of creation! We’re meant to carry and contain GOD IN US. That’s why it’s accurate to describe anybody living without God as living an EMPTY life. Don’t let them fool you. Jung said the world’s suffering “a neurosis of emptiness.” Whatever a person tries to eat, drink, sleep with, sniff, buy or sell to temporarily feel full, will never last or satisfy. They’re empty of what they were made to contain and sometimes some people feel that. Like hollow men and women, dressing up outward shells of busyness – inside resounds echoing emptiness.
Many of us have found that if you ask Jesus, he will give you life to the FULL (John 10:10). You will become a container for God’s glory. Jars of clay don’t have to be pretty. They’re the most ordinary containers. But there’s something different about them. What? They don’t have TRASH in them but treasure!
That’s how it is with us Christ followers. We’re nothing special filled by Someone Awesome! We have HIM in us who is ‘the hope of glory.’ People may look at us and say, ‘Nothing special…’ But if they take a closer look maybe we can show them what we contain, because we’re containers for God. We’re made in His image to carry his glory! We shine His light! We are valuable – as containers. The treasure inside is priceless!
That’s why the Bible says the Lord didn’t choose many mighty or noble or wise people… (anyone else qualify ?). But it says He chose the lowly and weak, the humble, the despised, the ordinary.
So they said to Paul…”Give up! Stop trying to make a difference! You’re RUBBISH! You’re weak, ugly and unimpressive, you’re a rubbish preacher, too ordinary, not clever, you didn’t go to the right schools to learn the rhetoric, you’re too old…”
He said, “I know, I know, I’ve gone to pot.” (groan!)
But there’s treasure in the pot.
And when Jesus came looking for containers of his glory and messengers for his message he didn’t chose the brightest, the bestest and the beautifullest!
He bypassed people who thought they were wisest and wonderfullest; the kings and religious experts, powerful politicians and everyone who was so impressed with themselves. He called peasants, prostitutes and fishermen, tax collectors and so on – clay pots – who knew they were empty – to be filled with him and go for him and do what he wanted to do and what he would do if he was there, because where they went, HE IS!
‘God has a university. It’s a small school. Few enroll, even fewer graduate. Very few indeed.God has this school because he does not have broken men. Instead He has several types of men. He has men who claim to be God’s authority…and aren’t; men who claim to be broken…and aren’t. And men who are God’s authority, but who are mad and unbroken. And he has regretfully, a spectroscopic mixture of everything in between. All of these He has in abundance; but broken men, hardly at all.
In God’s sacred school of submission and brokenness, why are there so few students? Because all who are in this school must suffer pain. And as you might guess, it is often the unbroken ruler (whom God sovereignly picks) who metes out the pain. David was once a student in this school, and Saul was God’s chosen way to crush David.
GENE EDWARDS, ‘A Tale of Three Kings.’
I followed a link from somewhere (maybe I heard Andy Stanley reference it?) and ended up downloading this amazing little book to my Kindle. It seems to be well known in the USA but perhaps less so here? It’s a gem. I read a lot of books this year but this one and Andrew Murray’s Absolute Surrender seem to have been the ones God really picked out for me.
If you’re a leader, or a follower – it’s a must read. If you’ve ever been hurt by people in church, especially by leaders, (people like me), read this – and pray for us, and do it better than us.
Written as a cautionary tale, the narrative style keeps on fooling one into recognising a bad guy- then seeing that it’s not him, or her, maybe it’s you!
The character studies of the ‘Three Kings’ are…
1) King David – the anointed and broken. He learned as the forgotten shepherd boy that he didn’t have to be top dog. God ‘went door to door in Israel’ looking for someone like that, who He could use, because he could trust him. But there was more breaking that needed to be done to him. He had to learn true submission. This took place through…
2) King Saul – the anointed unbroken. Gifted, charismatic, a ‘born leader.’ But he threw spears at people. As I read this I naturally thought of this leader and that I’d worked with. Then the Holy Spirit reminded me of how many times I’ve tried to pin people to the wall! ‘Kings claim the right to throw spears…‘ We do so to protect ourselves/ our position/ the truth as we see it etc. Problem? It turns you into a mad king. One can be simultaneously anointed and a mad king!
David had the opportunity to learn humility and brokenness in the school of pain under that mad king. How? By not throwing the spears back.
If you throw spears back, you’ll prove…”You are courageous. You stand for the right…You will not stand for injustice or unfair treatment. You are tough and can’t be pushed around. You are defender of the faith, keeper of the flame, detector of all heresy…all these attributes combine to prove that you are also a candidate for kingship… the Lord’s anointed. After the order of King Saul.”
But if you choose to be like David you’ll learn to dodge the spears instead. He stuck it out as long as he could; not moving on till God moved him on. If he’d not done this, he would have ended up as King Saul II! But in doing so ‘God cut king Saul out of HIS heart.’
And notice when David did leave, he didn’t try to take anyone with him. He didn’t split the kingdom. He left alone.
I think of two good friends who have confided in me similar stories of taking a ministry he took on, only to find the predecessor who invited them to the post, then refused to leave – until he had lined his own nest and badmouthed the new ‘incumbent.’ What do you do? They didn’t pick up spears, they didn’t defend themselves, and as a result they did not become Sauls but Davids, men I’m privileged to call friends. They will look back at those painful times and see that they were in ‘God’s small school’ – and did not fail the test. Now they’re prepared for greater things in the Kingdom.
The difficulty is you can’t judge whether anyone else is a Saul or a David. You can just decide for yourself, “I shall not practice the ways that cause kings to grow mad. I will not throw spears, nor will I allow hatred to grow in my heart.I will not avenge. I will not destroy the Lord’s anointed.”
Making that choice makes you a vessel God can use.
3) King Absalom.
So much to chew over in this particular character deserves a post all of its own – I’ll get back to you!
This post – originally a talk at the New Wine National Leader’s event, has recently been published in Sorted magazine.
I stopped going to church as soon as I had a choice. In my early teens my parents decided they’d only ever gone out of occasional religious duty and were going to stop. They said I had a choice as to whether I went. Starsky and Hutch were on, no-brainer.
Years of fun, sin and regret in pretty much equal measure prevailed until at twenty-one I came to know Jesus after an undeniable experience of meeting him; a story for another day.
Even though I now saw myself as a Christian I probably still wouldn’t have bothered with church if not for a couple of clergymen who bust the stereotype for me early on; Neil was the first. He accepted me where I was at- a copper who grew up on a council estate now working a rough Manchester central beat. When I came to the little Bible study group I’d been invited to he laughed at my (colourful to say the least) jokes and inappropriate remarks rather than making me feel terrible or expecting me to feel bad for just being me. I wanted to be like Neil.
Alan was amazing. What I liked about Alan was that he was a man – and a man of God. United fan. Generous, funny, too humble – and you knew he loved you. I wanted to be like Alan. It’s men like that who got me not just to go to church, but to stay there, stick at it, and not just moan or leave but do my best to make it better.
The church has a problem, Houston. Over the last twenty years 38% of believing men left the church. Believing men – deciding they still believe but don’t want to go to church anymore! So we are facing a crisis before we even think about connecting more effectively with men like many who read Sorted but are still not at all sure about this Jesus stuff. It’s like running the taps without the plug in.
The person most likely to regularly go to church in this country according to the Tear Fund research report is a black, professional middle class woman, over 60. We all love Moira Stewart so that’s great. But where are the blokes?
Gender Gap Widening
In the UK the ratio of women to men in church is 65% to 35%, but far too few churches have anything like 35% of men regularly attending. Worse news than the Coalition budget? The gender gap is widening – and the less men you get, especially young men, the less people generally you get. In the last 20 years 49% of men under 30 left the UK church!
Now does that mean British men are not that interested in spiritual things? Maybe we just point to the parable of the sower and decide that men are generally hard soil, while black, middle class, middle aged women are good soil? (It’s their fault, not the church’s fault in other words). We can’t get away with that, because there is no gender gap in Islam, Buddhism, Judaism or Hinduism. In fact in all those other religions there are MORE men than women! Men are interested in spiritual things, and I maintain that there’s no message to compete with gospel truth, so why is it not reaching the average British bloke?
Peter Williamson - Mr Average?
Mr Average
Peter Williamson’s wife put him forward for the title for a Channel 4 Documentary, and I know not all of this will apply to him (or you) as I’ve cobbled it together from various sources the average British man…
Had 8 sexual partners before he got married in his early thirties,
Has two children
Drives a Ford Fiesta
Is 5ft 9in
Owes £9k of unsecured debt
Has size 10 feet, a 40 inch chest and a 35 inch waist
Weighs 13 stone
Owns 16 pairs of underpants – this being the only item of clothing he buys with confidence.
Spends one month of his life looking for lost socks
Says ‘Sorry’ 1.9 million times in his lifetime
Considers himself working class
Reads the Sun
Has sex eight times a month, but thinks about it thirteen times a day…
(which explains a lot)
Can cook at least four meals, including spaghetti Bolognese
Has at least one Harry Potter novel in his house
Watches three hours of TV a day,
Uses the bathroom six times a day,
Is one inch taller than the average Frenchman
Will die of a heart attack at 76
His most popular conversational subject is sport, then work, after that politics and economics, or disputes about abstract ideas such as How The World Began.
He believes in God…
But most men completely by-pass church! Even in a crisis, few of them think Church might be the place to go anymore, they’ll go to the fridge and TV, or feel better at the pub or the match or sitting on their own fishing. They see Church as a place that according to a BBC Radio survey is for wimps, women and irrelevant. Church as we are generally doing it, is generally repulsive which means the opposite of attractive to men.
The Repulsive Church
You might not like the word repulsive? The Dictionary states the word means – “Causing aversion, having the ability to repel.’ I was disturbed but not surprised by the recent survey conducted by Sorted and CVM that found men would feel more at home in a ladies lingerie dept than to go to church.
So how did a faith founded by a Man and His twelve male (mostly working class) disciples, who were told to be ‘Fishers of men’ become fairly popular with older women, but repulsive to the average man? If you go to church, or especially if you lead one – are you part of the problem or part of the solution? Are you a fisher of men or is your church repulsive to men?
Nineteenth century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon said, “There has got abroad a notion, somehow, that if you become a Christian you must sink your manliness and turn milksop.” When I was at theological college I saw a strange thing happen, as those who came to train as church leaders started out fairly normal, but learned how to do the concerned face and by the end of training have a particular voice –you know what that sounds like unless you do it – you learn a particular tonality that nobody else but clergy talk like. The good news? You can UNLEARN that too, if you want to connect to the average man you’d better! While we’re at it, unlearn using words and having arguments about things nobody in the real world gives a toss about.
I’m not going to go into detail about what some writers have listed as being what puts men off church, the feminisation argument – because they are often very sweeping and generalising, and I know there are exceptions. No doubt someone will tell me that your church is led by an all woman team, and that in the pastel coloured room a flower arranging, hymn singing crèche group at your church is packed full of hairy legged blokes in their twenties.
But listen if you will to David Murrow who gives one big reason why men hate going to church – it’s not ‘because of all the women,’ but because the men there aren’t really men. That’s the perception at least.
He says most men have a religion: MASCULINITY – they are serious students of what it is to be a man, disciples of other men on TV or sports or whatever, wanting to work out what it is to be a man, whatever that is, and they don’t see the church has having any answers to that.
“Tough, earthy, working guys rarely come to church. High achievers, alpha males, risk takers, and visionaries are in short supply. Fun-lovers and adventurers are also underrepresented in church. These rough-and-tumble men don’t fit in with the quiet, introspective gentlemen who populate the church today. The truth is, most men in the pews grew up in church. They enjoy participating in comforting rituals that have changed little since their childhood. There are also millions of men who attend services under duress, dragged by a mother, wife, or girlfriend. Today’s churchgoing man is humble, tidy, dutiful, and above all, nice.”
That’s what Murrow says the unconscious message the church is giving to church, come and be nice. Oh and if you really want to be really nice it would be awfully nice if you could help cut the grass in the graveyard. The nice message is repulsive.
Jesus said, “If any man would come after me, let him take up his cross and die.” That’s not nice. It’s the verse that brought me to faith.
Here’s my World Cup quiz. (Like the Irish Times prize crossword once, answers at bottom of pg.)
1. Who was England’s football manager in the 1970 World Cup?
2. In which World Cups did Bryan Robson appear?
3. Who scored England’s dying seconds winner in the 1990s World Cup?
How did you do? Anyone score a hat trick?
The world of men is split roughly in two. Some blokes would know all the answers to those questions, or at least take an informed guess. Then there’s ones like me. I only know the answers because I pinched the questions off the internet. In fact. I’ve already forgotten the answers. If I was in your pub quiz team I’d have to sneak a look at my Iphone in the loo – or wait for the 80s music round while trying to look as if I had the foggiest.
Being from Manchester, this has disadvantaged me man and boy. I always got my Macaris mixed up with my McIlroys , while the reds I was at school with always knew the line up, manager’s name and which brand of gum they chewed in the 81-82 season- for every team in leagues I’d never heard of. Others wearing sky blue had their team’s full collection of ’20 Greatest Throw In’ videos. But I’m more like that bloke in the pub in the Fast Show who tries manfully to join in with football conversation and then, “I’ll get me coat.”
Since coming back to the rainy city my mate Andy – who knew all three answers above – has declared his mission now is to make me a better United fan (not many of us actually come from Manchester so it’s good to stick together). I’m afraid it’s a losing battle.
I was put off footie for years while working in the cops because it became just a place where you had to fight drunks, but now I have to say I like watching football. I can even get embarrassingly excited, but (I am ashamed to admit it), I couldn’t tell you the score of the last game I watched. My brain doesn’t work like that. 
Lots of men are like this when it comes to things religious, and the Bible in particular. It’s a big book – where do you start? Pick a page at random and it gets worse. All those weird names, and places with funny names. There’s a book called Numbers but that’s full of names too! All a bit boring – very confusing – and there’s nothing men like less than not appearing to know something about anything, so let’s blag it, like people do about Shakespeare.
Wasn’t Joseph married to Mary? Didn’t he sing in that West End musical in a nice coat? One teenager in our church was recently overheard saying Jesus was ‘the carpet-fitter of Nazareth.’
Some guys I talk to have more of an idea than that, even a few bits from school RE. Lots have a wife, friend or colleague so far advanced in this kind of knowledge you know you’ll never catch up – so you’ve given up. Your brain just can’t hold that sort of information.
I have good news for you. Christianity is not a bible trivia quiz, it’s a relationship.
When some people came to Jesus – these religious scholars knew the whole of the Old Testament back to front, – but he said, “You diligently search the scriptures…but refuse to come to me for eternal life.” They knew all kinds of trivia, but the star player was standing right in front of them and they missed him.
Here’s what I have found. If I spent more time learning football statistics it might make me a better fan, but the more I study the Bible, I become a better man. Because the Bible’s not just a story. It’s God’s message about how he’s rescuing the world one life at a time, and the part you play in that. Not just as a spectator, but as a player on his team!
At the end of your life, when all the trophies are forgotten, God’s not going to ask you to name all Ten Commandments (answers in Exodus 20), but he will ask, “When you broke them, did you come to the only One who can fix you? My Son, Jesus?”
God’s not going to ask you to name all Twelve Apostles (and who replaced Judas on the first team – answers in Matthew 10 and Acts 1). He’s going to ask, “Did you know… ME?”
The answer to that question will decide a lot more than who buys the next round.
ANSWERS: 1. Sir Alf Ramsey 2. 1982, 1986, 1990. 3. David Platt.
(This article is featured in the latest edition of Sorted magazine – get it now!)
