MINISTRYPHOBIA (Part Four): PAST RECORDS AND SELF ASSESSMENT By FEMI A. Falade

MINISTRYPHOBIA (Part Four): PAST RECORDS AND SELF ASSESSMENT

By FEMI A. Falade

(Dedicated to Evangelist (Now Reverend) Bobola Akinleye on Your Ordination Today)

For many of us, our pasts was nothing to write home about. We were once stinking, rotting and wasting away. We are men who have once stood against what we now stand for now. Our records of sins are so pronounced that it seems we have a permanent stigma in the world of sin. We were regular customers of sinful centres all around the societies and we were shameless about those lives in those days.

Something has happened to us! We are now ashamed of those experiences when they crossed our minds and now that we would need to stand against what we have once stand for, we reason within ourselves, "will they hear me?". The worries of, how will I identity myself totally with the cross among my former fellow identical sinners are fore in our minds. We are also concerned about the marks and cracks of the past and what people would say if they see us with collar since we cannot deny our present in those conners in those years. 

Further matters of our ignorant confession and denial of Christ and His call upon us also come to play when we carry our bibles. Those people we fought when they called us "pastors" and said, "I will never be a pastor in my life, over my dead body". Thank God, it is all over our living bodies. 

What do we reply those sin partners that something has changed within and outside us? These and many are another cause of ministryphobia and it cannot disappear by our boldness and ability to overlook matters.  

Well, that you have those experiences is not the problem but that you still nurture them. The first fight against such aspect of ministryphobia is to know. Know that your old man is not your new man. Your old man is dead, your new man is here. The experiences of the old man's life should be left in his grave. After Paul the Apostle explained his isolation to the Galatians from chapter 1, he exclaimed in chapter 2:20 that:

It is as though I was with Christ when he was crucified {died on the cross} [MET] (OR, It is as though my old way of life ended when Christ died on the cross.) No longer am I directing the way I behave as I did before I believed in Christ. Now Christ is directing how I behave. And whatever I do now while I live, I do it trusting in God's Son. He is the one who loved me and offered himself as a sacrifice for me. T4T Version

The life now is not the one you used to live. Your old life is gone let the memories go too. A faithful minister of God's word told a set of leaders of which am one of them last year. He said if anyone planned to make you fall and invested her strength on you as a man of God and thought she had crashed your ministry by that, rise and pursue what God sent you by aligning to God whole who called you. Every such person would not go freely from God. Anyone who made you worse are not to be blamed, but now you are here. This is your new beginning.

On the other side, self-assessment is a great weapon to help a man remained a nonentity. Not for the now only but forever. No matter who you are now, it is still a bit of what you would be. Many people have died small because they see themselves powerful, good and well okay now. There is no longer desire to push forward in them. Others see themselves weak and poor and so they develop fear for the what they need to do and they cannot also run to God. 

No self esteem is better. Whether low or high, self esteem is a fake and unbalanced way of looking and estimating yourself. It either result to self relegation or pride. 

In both cases, God detest it. We better find alternative for that thing we call our self esteems. Whatever is self is self, it cannot take us out of wrong self assessment. The Bible told us that, we have no audacity to class or compare ourselves with some of those who indulge in self-commendation! But, when such persons measure themselves by themselves, and compare themselves with themselves, they show a want of wisdom. 2Cor. 10:12. 20CnT version

So, instead of self esteem, we should have Christ esteem. I owe no apology to those who have defined self esteem and those who have used it over the years, but I want to define Christ esteem and say that, it is better and more better than anything else. 

Christ Esteem is the ability of a man to measure himself by the mirror of Christ within him. It is the act of imaging your Christ image through the fullness of the stature of Christ. The instrumentality of this is simply God's word. What did the word of God says about you? The scripture told us that no believer is permitted to think more highly than he ought to think but to think in a measure of grace that God has bestowed on Him, (see Rom. 12:3-4). 

So what can you do with the strength you think you have. Nothing! What can you do with the weakness you think you are filled with? Nothing. Why can't you see the source of your strength as God. I can do all things through Christ that strengthen me. (I discuss the two types of strength in part two of this piece, please check the site and read again). 

So, stop assessing yourself by the virtue of the work. Examine God who call you to the task. If God is able to do it as a God, you are able to do it as a man that carries God the Doer. 

Let this ministryphobia perish at every instance it appear to you. Your past is passed, your now is God's. Your strength is weak, but God's weakness in you is a strength undefined. 

Ride on!

Happy Sunday!

…..To be continued