Tim Clark’s Blog

As a pastor I’ve always loved Exodus 18 and Acts 6 because of the wise and practical action that the leaders took to distribute the work of the ministry. I just think it makes good organizational and strategic sense to do this, and I’ve regularly revisited these passages to rethink how I could put those principles into practice.

This year, as I was meditating through Exodus in my devotional reading, I had a new thought. God told Moses at the time of his calling (Exodus 3) that He would use Moses to lead His people out of Egypt and into the Promised Land, and that the first important stop along the way was to be the mountain of God.

What happens at the mountain? This was where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, as well as where Moses stayed 40 days to receive the instructions for Worship. It’s where a motley but massive group of Jacob-descendants became transformed into the nation of Israel. If you had to pinpoint an important moment in the formation of over 4,000 years of Jewish History, or recognize an epochal event that would lead to the coming of the One who would fulfill the Law, I imagine that Moses’ time on Mt. Sinai would rank way up there at the top.

And here, the timeline is very important: Moses doesn’t get to go to the mountain (chapter 19) before he figures out how to give away ministry (chapter 18).

While he was busy being burdened “from morning till evening” sitting and having people come to him to make life and ministry decisions, he was never going to get to Sinai. Jethro’s advice to his son-in-law to distribute the leadership was not just a practical pastoral principle, but was an absolute mandate if God’s people were ever going to make it to their land of promise. Yes, the people had been delivered from bondage and formed as a community, but the Divine journey towards their ultimate destiny would not be reached if Moses continued to act as the hero-martyr and fill his days with things others could and should be handling.

Similarly, in Acts 6, the Apostles were not ‘above’ waiting on tables and serving widows, but they realized that if they were busy hoarding ministry from morning till evening, the things (prayer, preaching and distribution of ministry) that would move the infant church into its glorious promise would never happen.

How many congregations do we know that are right on the edge of amazing momentum into God’s design for them, but they will never get there because only the primary leaders are fully released to do ministry and make decisions? How many of those primary leaders can spend significant time listening to the Lord and responding in obedience while they are overwhelmed in the day-to-day needs of their people that others are competent to meet?

The life of the Kingdom was not ever meant to flow through only one person (in Exodus) or a small group of people (in Acts), and leadership bottlenecks often occur because of the pride of those who think they have to have their thumb on every decision. True, releasing ministry might make for mistakes and messiness (some of which will never even be seen or cleaned up), but if the alternative is a well-oiled machine that never gets a church to its call and promise, I’ll take the mess every time!

A couple of weeks ago my wife and kids and I took a vacation to visit family in Oregon. Our California kids kept asking if it would snow for Christmas; we told them the forecast didn’t look good, but they could pray. December 25th didn’t have snow, but the 28th—well that was a different story.

All I can say is: ‘freak snow storm’. Though driving back from Portland to Newberg took 3 hours (it usually takes 40 minutes), it was finally worth it when my kids dashed out of the minivan, threw on some gloves, and jumped wholeheartedly into joyful play in the cold white stuff. It was perfect snow, too: not soggy-wet but also not so dry that you couldn’t form and hold shapes. And enough stuck to the ground that we could play as long as we wanted!

So, the family built a snowman. Not just any snowman, but in typical Clark artistic fashion (disclaimer: the Clark kids are artistic, not the dad) this one had shoulders, a body and a face that made it look more like a Michelangelo masterpiece than a fake Frosty. It was a proud moment, and we all went to bed exhausted but satisfied with a job well done.

But, of course, it was Oregon, and the unexpected snowstorm was quickly followed by a very-expected warm rain. When the kids went out the next morning to visit our guy, my wife and I realized we’d have to explain something about snowmen; they are fun while they last, but they don’t usually last very long at all. And when they are gone, you pick up the carrot and the coal and the hat, and you appreciate the memory of building it.

Yes, snowmen die. So do a lot of other things. Living beings, of course, die, and that can be very sad. Death comes to that which is intangible as well: Visions, hopes, dreams, passions—each of those has the potential to die.

Of course, some dreams do come true and it is appropriate to pursue a God-given vision. We like to celebrate people who see their visions realized—we all love a good underdog story! But for every dream that comes true, there are many that die. Nobody likes to admit that, but it’s a fact of life.

It would be easy if we knew which dreams were destined for reality, because then we’d only pursue those visions we knew would be accomplished. But it doesn’t work that way. We can’t always know which dreams will materialize, so we do our best and we joyfully pour ourselves into bringing a dream to life, and in the end we trust God to bring about the dreams birthed by Him and to hold back the ones that are not.

And often it’s not the outcome that matters as much as the process we embrace. God is the Lord of the outcome; we are responsible to engage the process well. Proverbs 16:9 says, “In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps”. I think it’s essential to dream and important to plan, but it’s also vital to understand that God really does know what is best.

The wise man Theodore Geisel  (a.k.a. Doctor Seuss) once said, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” Sometimes the Lord blesses us with great experiences that in the end don’t turn out the way we think they ought to. We should learn to joyfully embrace those moments as part of the process He is using to get us not to the fulfillment of our dream for our lives, but to the fulfillment of His dream for us.

No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this, never so much as imagined anything quite like it—what God has arranged for those who love him. (1 Corinthians 2:9)

When I was in 4^th grade a group of friends and I were talking about our vision; we had just gotten our eyes tested. One member of the group had thick glasses and shared that he had 20/100 vision.  That meant what he could see clearly at not more than 20 feet away, the rest of us could see well from 100 feet. Thus the coke-bottle spectacles!

However, most of us fell somewhere closer to 20/20; that is the visual acuity required of a fighter pilot: Perfect sight—or so we thought. One of our friends finally piped up, bragging, “That’s not perfect sight…I have 20/10 vision”.

We didn’t believe him! None of us had ever heard of 20/10 vision. We had to go ask the school nurse if it was true, and we found out that it could be (I had to check ‘visual acuity’ on Wikipedia to make sure I remembered this fact accurately).

A person with 20/10 vision can see clearly from 20 feet away what the rest of us can only see from 10 feet. Though 20/20 is considered ‘perfect’ vision for most needs, it is possible for people to have better than perfect vision, though it is more rare.

I lost my 20/20 physical vision years ago, but I want to be a person who strives for 20/10 spiritual vision. What everyone else is content to see clearly at 10 feet, I want to contend to see from 20. I want to “fix my eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:17)

Is it possible that we can train ourselves to be that discerning and to change the condition of our sight? I have not known my physical sight to improve, though there are those who claim that you can make your eyesight better through vision exercises. I’m not sure what I think about that, but I do wholly believe that our spiritual vision can improve with constant conditioning. By being attentive to the Word of God and by responding to the reality of the spiritual world around us, the unseen but most important dimension is more and more engaged; it becomes clearer.

I want my vision for this period leading to the year 2020 to be based on clear 20/10 spiritual sight. That way I will see more quickly and distinctly what the Lord is leading me towards in this decade. Things like: What kind of man I am to be in 2020, how I will have loved and developed my kids as they are getting through their teenage years (10 years from now), how I will have grown in the Lord, stayed healthy, built a solid marriage, been effective in my assignment, etc… And when I am able to view those year 2020 issues accurately from far away—both from the year 2010 and with 20/10 vision— I can better prepare to follow Jesus towards those goals.