What goes first when your time gets crunched?

I had a busy weekend.  I spent 13 hours at LC on Friday, half of which was for boreintation, while the other half was much more fun and useful as we dug into Pastoral Ministry with the first ever classes at the Caskey School of Divinity.  For those of you unaware, I am pursuing a Master of Arts in Pastoral Ministry.   This will be a 36 hour program, added to my 35 hours from Southern Seminary, so, combined, I’ll almost have an M.Div., but on my resume I’ll have a Master of Arts in Teaching and a Master of Arts in Pastoral Ministry.  I think people with two masters should get a title like people with doctorates do.  I think I would like to be called, “Double-Master Palmer.”  Or the more fitting, “Make Up Your Mind Palmer”! (It’s not really fitting for me…but it makes for good humor…you chuckled, right? No? At least an “inner smile”?)  But that’s a couple years away.  We have time to work on this.  The best part of this is that a good 24-27 of these hours is specifically geared towards expository preaching from all across the Bible.

But I digress.  Friday – 13 hours in uncomfotable seats.  Saturday – 7 hours in those same uncomfortable seats (but with even better content than the night before!) and then Link’s birthday party from 4-getting home at 8:30.   Today – Jackson woke up puking, Claire’s either been sleeping or screaming, we did laundry, we went swimming, and I went to Sam’s to get a new battery for my truck.  And now, at 9:15pm, I am writing this and Leah and Lincoln are scrambling to put together an assignment that’s due tomorrow.

In the midst of making copies of pictures for said assignment, Leah said, “I wish we would’ve thought about this earlier.”  To which I replied, “I did put it on my list this morning…but I haven’t looked at it in…….8 hours.” Oh, the to-do list.  Right.  That has a bunch of stuff on it that got pushed to the side by other stuff, even though I’ve been thinking about it non-stop.

And THAT, my friends, is when the thought hit me:  When everything gets crazy and my time seems to be gobbled up by anything and everything, my tendency is to drop people first so that I can focus on getting all of my tasks done. OR, the tasks go because people present the most pressing demand, but my mind isn’t really with them, it’s still thinking about how to get the tasks done (which is how today went).

What is it for you?  What goes first when your time gets squeezed?

Is it people?  Is it tasks?  Is it hobbies?

If you’re a minister (and even if you’re not technically), here are 3 things you CANNOT afford to drop when life gets crazy hectic (and I know this isn’t easy!):

1) Your relationship with Christ, which is grounded in time in the Word and prayer, through which you submit to the Holy Spirit, without whom you will have no real success in ministry.

2) Your relationship with your family (if you have one).  At 28, I’m blessed to already be thinking that at the end of my life, whether I got a few extra things done on a Sunday afternoon doesn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to spending that same time with my wife or playing with my boys or taking Claire so Leah can have some rest from the demands of being a nursing mother.

3) The people you minister to.  Again, in the end, your time invested with your people will have a much greater eternal significance than whether or not you got that Powerpoint to run just right or you made an amazingly awesome flier for the event two months down the road or a thousand other small, menial tasks that could probably be done well (or at least done) by less-busy others, without taking so much time away from your people.  Yeah, they’ll notice the typos.  They won’t be WOWed by the so-so looking flier.  But they will look past all that stuff if they know you care deeply about them and their walk with Christ because you’ve shown it with your time. YOU are the one who ministers to them, not the programs or the lights or the powerpoints or the “et cetera.”

Notice a pattern?  Relationships.  Is it coincidence that God said, “It’s not good for man to be alone…”?

I…think…NOT.  (What’s that from?)

Alright…. I’m going to get back to the to-do list (which this post was not on).

After I pray with my boys before they go to sleep.

The Fate of the Jungle Man

If you’ve run in Christian circles long enough, you’re familiar with the jungle man debate. A couple of weeks ago I ran into this question twice in the same day from polar opposites (one a fairly new believer just into his twenties and the other a seasoned veteran believer in her 60s or 70s for whom I have much love and respect). Naturally that got me thinking.

So what is the jungle man debate?

Since Christians believe that Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life and no one comes to the Father but through (Him)” and that God is a merciful and just and forgiving God, the heart-wrenching dilemma of the fate of the jungle man is continually discussed and debated, and often times, given a pat answer to…something like, “God is sovereign and good, so He’ll take care of it.” While that statement is true, I don’t think the jungle man question is without a biblical answer.

For those of you who don’t know, the jungle man dilemma goes something like this:

“I know salvation is through faith alone in Christ alone, but what about the man in the jungle who has never heard and, thus, has never had a chance to believe? Won’t God save that guy? Wouldn’t God be unfair if He doesn’t? Does he have to call upon the name of Jesus Christ? Or is there some way in which God reveals enough of himself to the jungle man so that the jungle man can have faith in Him even if he doesn’t know His NAME?”

First, let’s be upfront about option 2…what could be called the “salvation revelation” – God just reveals enough of himself to some random guy in the jungle and he is saved.

My sovereignty-of-God loving friends will probably not find any problem with this, ultimately saying that God is God and He can save His elect however He chooses to save them (use of the word “chooses” very purposeful – wink wink). My free-will loving friends will probably find an issue with this if they will think deeply enough about it, namely, that it would be supremely unfair to the other jungle people if God only revealed Himself in such a way to a few and not to all.

Forget theological framework! What does the Bible say?

Act 4:12, “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

This is applicable because many times the argument made is that the jungle man may have a “concept of Jesus” without knowing His name. That’s true. But if you know your Bible, you know that God takes names very seriously, sending angels to make sure certain babies are born with certain names (John the Baptist and Jesus himself) and changing the given names of others after giving them specific callings, such as being the father of His nation (Abram to Abraham) or His primary missionary to the Gentiles (Saul to Paul).

As the old hymn goes, “there’s just something about that name.” That “something” is that it’s the only name given among men by which we must be saved.

There’s also Romans 1:18-21, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

In other words, God’s primary revelation of Himself to all men through the awesomeness of creation leads not to salvation, but to condemnation.

If you’ve ever had your heart stirred by the beauty of the stars or your smallness and fragility magnified by the Grand Canyon or the mountains before you, then you have perceived God’s eternal power and divine nature…and that perception of God is just enough to secure your guilt.

God’s revelation of Himself that leads to salvation is through the Word of Christ. So says, Romans 10:17, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”

Here’s the point: As believers who have been commissioned to be preachers of the Word of Christ (Romans 10:9-17), who are called ambassadors for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20), and who are given the command of Jesus to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18-20), we are not given the luxury of believing that salvation will come to the jungle man by any other means than God’s revelation of Himself through missionaries bringing with them the “Word of Christ.”

That brings us to option 1) Won’t God, in his mercy and fairness, allow the jungle man who has never heard of Jesus to get into Heaven? What if the missionaries never get there?

Here’s why I believe the answer is “No, the jungle man will not go to Heaven if he dies without ever hearing about Jesus Christ.”

Matthew 28:18-10, “ And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Romans 10:13-17, “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’
How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’
But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?’ So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”

2 Corinthians 5:18 – 20, “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

Here’s why I quoted these Scriptures first – I want you to see the necessity of the believers’ going and telling in order to “make disciples,” have others “call on the name of the Lord,” and for God to “make his appeal through us.”

Now, if all who never hear of Jesus go to Heaven, wouldn’t it seem like the best evangelistic technique would be for believers across the world to KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT ABOUT JESUS?

If this life is a “vapor” as we say it is, a speck on the eternal scale, if ultimate reality is about eternity and not this earth as we say it is, wouldn’t it be far more important for people to never hear about Jesus, thus securing their salvation, than for people to hear about Jesus, giving them the opportunity to reject Him and go to Hell?

This is the danger of the jungle man question and why, whether we like it or not, we cannot assume this man is going to Heaven.

If we do, we hamstring every passage in Scripture that talks about the necessity of going and spreading the Gospel, the Good News, of Jesus’ substitutionary righteous life, death for our sins, and death-defeating resurrection.

That being said, who’s going to go tell the Jungle Man about Jesus? His eternity depends on someone going.