Ben Lemery | Church & Culture

Becoming an Accidental Mentor

"Hey do you know who that guy is?"

That was the question that started it all. 

Two of the gifts that God has given me is prophecy and discernment.  I have a love/hate relationship with these gifts because it is great to hear God but it also means that you pick up on things a lot.  You sense things, feel things, a situation will present a red flag in your gut and you have to weed out if it is God or gas or pizza.  As you grow closer to God those things are easier to read but it certainly presents its challenges.

So one night, I was talking to some youth before their meeting at the church and a guy walks by and I sensed something different about him.

This happens to me a lot when I know that the Lord wants me to connect to someone, it's like a radar antenna grows out of my head and the person simply bleeps on the radar screen. 

I am not trying to sound hyper-spiritual about this because when this happens to me, I actually have a lot of fear rise up in me.  I HATE meeting new people that I don't know, look more popular than me, stronger than me....simply who are not me.  So, I escaped before I had to make any introductions.

At this point in my life, I was running a Bible study and a ministry on campus.  I was more than happy to be doing those things and meeting with people every so often.  I was certainly not looking to take someone under my wing....much less a high schooler.

But you can try and run but God will always give you door number 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 to connect with someone when He wants it to happen.  We have an event at church and this guy walks in to attend it.  Which brings us to the beginning.  I turn to the person helping me man the table and ask, "Hey do you know who that guy is?"

They did and asked if they wanted to introduce him to me.  I was like, "no, I just wanted to know, duh duh duh duh duh."  Fifteen minutes later, Curt brings John up to me to introduce him.  This wasn't a typical introduction, it kinda went like this:

"Hi, I'm Ben"

"I'm John"

"John, I feel like the Lord wants to get ahold of your heart and you want that too."

Once you say something like that, you kinda shirk back a little hoping that they don't: one, punch you; two, walk away awkwardly or three, do something crazy.

Instead, it resonated in John and in an email later, he had been praying for a mentor.  Accidentally, I stumbled into this and over two and a half years later, I was part of seeing this high school jock turn into an on-fire for Jesus high school jock, ha ha.

But from an accidental encounter came a bounty of fruit.  Mentoring John led to John seeing his brother come to the Lord; John invited his friend Nick to one of our "mentoring times" and eventually Nick came to Jesus; Nick now is a leader in the Christian fellowship at the college he is attending; soon we had a whole group of guys meeting once a week to talk about truth and life.  Now John is ending a season where he co-led a Bible study and impacted a bunch of those guys. 

I am not saying that to toot my own horn or anything.  But mentoring does produce radical results.  Primarily, I simply planted a lot of the seeds but each of these guys had to make a choice to let them grow and then run with the calling that God has for them.  Even more importantly, many of these guys are now some of my best friends and truly brothers.

So, thanks God for making me an accidental mentor.

My Own Nearsighted World

When your head is down and you are only looking at yourself, your own situation and your own problems it becomes difficult to look back up and see far away because your vision will be blurry.  Your eyes need to adjust and depending on how long you have been looking at something near to you, it will take longer for your eyes to adjust to something far away from you.

So last week I wrote the blog, "You're So Ugly!  So You Can't Preach!" Admittedly I wrote this from a very self-centered perspective, looking very close at myself and my own problems.  Of course, it took the weekend for me to look up and let my eyes readjust to other people and the fact that other people do go through issues.

How God got me to do was only something God could do.  Now that I have a bike, I enjoy getting on my bike around midnight and going down to the ocean, about two miles away.  There is nothing better than looking out upon the darkness of the ocean and seeing the waves turn white, crashing against the shore. 

However, getting there was a little more challenging.  As I am biking, hoping that a car doesn't mistake me as target practice, the fog was misting.  I wear glasses without built in windshield wipers.  As the ocean approaches, my glasses are getting misted more and more to the point that everything around me is relatively blurry.

Being stubborn in nature, I keep on peddling until I reach the cliff overlooking the ocean, take off my glasses and wipe them off with my shirt.  Then God whispers to my heart, "see how blurry you have allowed your vision to get because you wanted to keep on going your own way; but in two seconds and your vision is clear again because you stopped and cleaned off your glasses." 

Sigh.

God: 1,567,040,204,021,326
Ben: 0

In my world, I have had a difficult life and everyone else has had it better.  In God's world reality resonates.  He decided to give me a stronger worldview this morning as I read through a couple of blogs.  Jon Acuff wrote a blog called, "#605. Having a Doesn't Count List," and I was floored. While he uses excellent humor to get Christians to think a different way, he then becomes "clear as glass" transparent and talks about a past relationship that led to drug use and not so Godly stuff. 

I was like, what the crap!  This guy has the looks, the writing style and the looks of a perfect life and he has gone through some pretty difficult trials.  PLUS, he still struggles.

Pause.

Think.

Sigh.

Then I move onto one of my favorite writers, Anne Jackson.  Who I know has gone through issues but have minimalized that with, "she is cool, has the cool hair and wears cool clothes; hence why she is the most popular thing since sliced bread."  She writes a blog on her trip to Baton Rouge, LA last December.  It is about a visit her and a group made to a lady named Ella. 

Ella is a grandma that lives in a 300 square foot room, in an almost condemned motel building.....with six to seven grandchildren at the same time.  Certainly not a situation that most of us have grown up in.  Read the rest of her blog to get the full picture.

But Anne struggles within her blog also, returning to her hotel room which is safe and even a little bigger than what Emma has. 

Pause.

Think.

Sigh.

My vision is getting a lot better now as I look up and refocus on the world around me.  Sometimes it takes a quick bike ride in the fog to do it though.

God As Sovereign

Tyler Braun will have to forgive me for stealing his topic but it is something that has weighed on my heart, even more this weekend. 

I have been in this wilderness season of life for a year and a half now.  To refresh you, after leaving my former church there was a lot of woundedness and pride that God had to deal with in my own life.  Instead of coming to California guns blazing, ready to take over the world; I came to no ministry, a couple of friends and no idea what the future had for me. 

When God allows for a wilderness season to happen in your life, you are given two choices: run from it or embrace it.  Overall, I have done a little of both. 

Part of the wilderness seasons is recognizing God's sovereignty.  We easily recognize Christ as the Savior, that is the easy part.  We can easily sing, "thank you for saving me," and that is all relevant and good.  I would surmise that most Christians live in a saved life but not a submitted life.  That is where the word sovereign comes in. 

Sovereign means: a monarch; a king; a person who has sovereign power or authority.  It could also mean Lord.  While listening to Winkie Pratney's 21st Century Reformation series part 3, he gives some interesting stats regarding the word Lord.  "The Lord is mentioned 7,836 times in Scripture, in over 6,668 verses.  He is called the Lord God in 1,594 of these. Whenever He speaks, even in the Old Testament about sending a Savior, it is always as the Lord." 

He continues, "In the NT, whenever Jesus is specifically called Savior (11 times) almost always He is first called Lord." 

This was new to me and quite revealing.  He writes in his bullet points at the beginning of the section that "we do not come to a divided Christ; we cannot receive only one part of Him."  and "there is no Biblical basis for an optional surrender after an initial salvation." 

I don't know if you ever listen to a message and get a gut check but listening to Winkie's sermon on this certainly did so for me.  When Christ was asked what the Greatest Commandment was he didn't start out with the second greatest commandment which plainly states, love your neighbor as yourself.  He instead says, "Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength."  Everyone one of those areas speaks to the submitted lifestyle we are to live before the King.

It seems that we have forgotten that; let me restate that, I have forgotten that.  I enjoy living in the fields of salvation, running in grace and leaping over the waters of refreshing everyday.  But if my leaping was becoming destructive and I was simply doing my own thing, it would only be a partial life in Christ.  The other part is a heart, soul, mind and all of my strength submitted to the Lord.  Meaning not my will but Your will be done Lord!

Christ did not come to simply be our Savior but to be our Lord, King over all.  It makes me uncomfortable because that never changes, it is ours to accept or reject.  My mind tosses and turns over this subject but even more so my Spirit is wanting that surrender to God but my flesh doesn't.  I want both, the Sovereign and the Savior. 

You're Ugly! So You Can't Preach!

I was watching "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" on Bravo (make fun of me all you want) One of the housewives, Kandi Burruss, is attempting to get back into the music business as a singer and has had good success in the past.  As she was preparing for her photo shoot, she said that the industry had evolved so much that you no longer couldn't be a great singer, you also had to have the looks.  In fact, if you had the right looks, you could simply digitize your voice and not even be a true singer.

So they got her hair extended, tons of makeup and attempted to make her look like a million bucks. 

That one sentence that she said bothered me for the rest of the night because in the Christian industry, there isn't much of a difference.  If you have the looks, the speaking talent and the ability to put together the semblance of a book, you can start a ministry.  If you have the right photographer, you can look relevant and important, that you are someone and you should have your picture on the next conference postcard.  If you can speak and make someone laugh, that is an even greater gift.  Psh, I wonder if God is involved with half of the promoted people we see on stage?

Recognition is no longer based on how well you preach the Word, it's based on how well you communicate a message (Word based or not).  Marketing is no longer about the depth of a person, it's based on surface appeal (looks, clothing and weight). 

Now, it is not anyones fault if you are fat, thin, good looking, not so good looking, etc.  But if someone has the wisdom and knowledge with the backing of the Spirit to communicate a message but they don't have $100 jeans, should that disqualify them?  Of course you're going to say no but is it really something you have ever thought about?

In full disclosure.  This comes from my filter of being overweight, an ok looking person and not having the ability to smoothly communicate my message.  So in that sense, you could dismiss this as "Ben is whining."  That is ok but I would ask that you think again how you perceive people and rank them in your own mind. 

Christianity was never meant to be about the "Total Package" it was meant to bring many parts of the package together.  I think it would be worth it if we recognized those who are truly gifted, no matter what they wear, look like or even if they talk smoother than a baby's behind. 

There isn't a solution to this and God raises and lowers people from different positions of authority.  I may be looking through my filter and having an Eeyore moment because I am prideful and not on the stage.  But, it's a relevant question in my mind and I simply wonder if God is in it all the time.

Liberal vs. Conservative Christians: The Tornado Chapter

Balanced opinions are great but complete crap is another thing.  Tony Jones allowed Edward Green to guest blog on his site, the title is: "A Thoughtful, Reasonable, Pastoral Comment about Same Sex Sex."  Now if you want to learn how to understand heretical thinking, this blog will do it for you.  I passed this post onto a trusted friend who knows more about exegesis than I do and he said, "this guy is exegetically and theologically squishy and way off the mark.  He is trying to have it both ways and claim Evangelical identity." 

It is easy to read and cherry pick Biblical scriptures to make it fit your theological filter but that doesn't necessarily make it right.  Unfortunately Mr. Green steers way off the norm of what scholars for centuries have concluded to either make a "shocking statement" or to make culture the plumbline of interpretation.

This is unfortunate and dangerous.  In the end it is preaching a Jesus that is unrepresentative of the true Christ.

Yesterday the big news out of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) passed a statement affirming homosexuality.  Coincidentally, at the same time this discussion happened an unexpected tornado hit that church and caused some minor damage. 

John Piper, a Calvinist who would be a more fundamentalist Christian wrote this, "The Tornado, the Lutherans, and Homosexuality."  Summarizing, Piper opined, "The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin."  Well, this statement stirred the ire of liberal Christians, who couldn't believe that someone would one say that sin has consequences and that two, God would actually use weather to give a warning or to show judgment. 

Adam Walker Cleaveland, whom I respect, wrote a blog in response to Piper titled, "John Piper Contributes to Culture of Fear."  Adam believes that homosexuality is ok, so he paralleled Piper with an inaccurate statement that the government told us to fear muslims, which had nothing to do with the actual debate, he was simply connecting him to another statement to ratchet down Piper's character.

The comments about the blog are even more attacking towards Piper.  People calling for his resignation, calling him a fool, etc.  He has a viewpoint, standing on principals and didn't just pull it out of his rear-end yesterday.  He is consistent in what he believes and why he believes it.  That is no reason to attack him.  It is also hard to argue considering he backs it up with Biblical exegesis consistently whereas the homosexual argument is not.  (In my opinion)

So here is my take, so you can see how narrow minded I am.  When Katrina happened, I did feel it was a sign from God, of judgment.  When the tsunami happened, I felt similarly.  Does that make me an ignorant person who wouldn't understand grace if it hit him in the head?  I sure hope not.  But if we serve the same God yesterday, today and forever, then we must recognize that the God of the Old Testament is the same as the God of the New Testament.  Jesus brought a new day into the situation but He was part of the trinity in the beginning as He will be in the end. 

It does not shock me that God will use ANY MEANS NECESSARY to wake His church up from its own sin and issues.  It isn't just about homosexuality, it is about greed and wrong teachings, about pride and lust.  The church is in the thick of it and the ELCA isn't the only group, maybe they were just the ones to get a nudge from God to say "hey, I am still God no matter how much you want to steer the church away from the Bible."  It is amazing how little He thinks of our wisdom and how He enjoys confounding it constantly.

I think Mr. Green and Tony Jones are flat out wrong and are leading people astray with their viewpoints.  You can read their blog posts and come to your own conclusions.  I simply attempt to provide you with their postings, my opinion and what I really think and you can decide from there.