Relationships

Letter of Recommendation

As a college professor, I often get asked to write letters of recommendations. Whether for graduate school or a professional opportunity, students want me to help provide verification of their qualifications for a particular opportunity. Because the student is presumably more informed about what the recipient of the reference letter needs to know, I often ask them to let me know what they want to make sure I include in the letter. Most, nearly all of the time, they respond with some version of “I don’t really know” leaving me to guess what qualities the letter needs to convey.

In 2 Corinthians 3 we learn that along with professional letters of recommendations, Christians have spiritual letters of recommendations written about them. These letters, however, aren’t written by pen or by keyboard, they are the result of our relationships with other people. As Paul writes to the church in Corinth,

“You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all (2 Corinthians 3:2).

Did you catch that? Those we minister to our those that will “recommend” us – because they will be the ones that attest to the fruitfulness of our ministry. Not by putting pen to paper, but in how they live their lives.

It’s an amazing thing to ponder.  So often we think of our “testimony” as being something we say, but this demonstrates that our testimony of sanctification is about what we do – how we serve God by serving others, and how we love God by loving others. It puts a new perspective on our service, the things that we do for other people, as it will be through our service that people will see our commitment to Christ.

And we must ask ourselves, “What type of letter are we writing?”

 

Now it’s your turn…how does it change our relationships when we realize that through them our spiritual letter of recommendation is being written?

 

Continue Reading

Purpose

Time for Worship

As  I’ve written about before, one of my “pet peeves” is when church services are segmented into “worship time” and the rest of the service. Generally this is done with the time of congregational singing. That’s designated the time of worship, while the rest of the time, for lack of any designated, is something else. Often I think this is probably done unintentionally; we don’t realize that by saying, “Now it’s time for worship” that somehow we’re indicating that the rest of the time, worship is not required.

What we do in church services, we also do in our daily lives. We comparmentalize when we serve God and when we don’t. We set aside “prayer time” and then go the rest of the day without communicating (or listening) to God at all. We designate certain hours of the day as the time where we “go to worship,” not realizing that this should be what characterizes our lives..

As A.W. Tozer said,

If you do not worship God seven days a week, you do not worship Him on one day a week. There is no such thing known in heaven as Sunday worship unless it is accompanied by Monday worship and Tuesday worship and so on. (“Tozer on Worship and Entertainment“)

As Tozer indicates, eternity will make this clear. In Heaven there won’t be times where we are worshiping and where we aren’t – our very existence will be focused on giving God glory. There may be times where this is through singing songs, or attending Heavenly church services, but other times this will likely be through a variety of other things that because of the way that we do them, we will be demonstrating how good God is. Worship time won’t be relegated to a specific hour or occasion – it will be the timbre of our lives.

If this is what followers of Christ are going to be spending eternity doing, shouldn’t we get busy about making our lives look increasingly like this now?

 

How can we worship God in all we do and not just at specific times?

Continue Reading