Feeling Inadequate?

I’m a pastor who hasn’t been to seminary and a preschool director who isn’t a licensed child-care provider. (We do have a wonderful licensed provider on our staff though!) Most of my relevant training has been on-the-job or through my own studies.

People tell me I’m doing well, but I still deal with feelings of inadequacy from time to time, especially when I’ve worked my tail off on a sermon and it still doesn’t feel quite right. It’s not to the point of impostor syndrome, but still.

That’s why I was so encouraged the other day when I read Paul’s words to the Corinthians:

Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:4-6 ESV)

If you’re like me and feel insufficient to the task sometimes--in your parenting, ministry, work, or school--let’s remember this: Our sufficiency is from God, not ourselves.

How about you? Do you ever feel like you don't have what it takes? How do you deal with it?

Photo by H. Michael Karshis

Belief and Obedience

So obvious, but so easy to neglect.

The message of the Cross contains two elements: (1) Promises and declarations to be believed, and (2) commandments to be obeyed. Obviously faith is necessary to the first and obedience to the second. The only thing we can do with a promise or a statement of fact is to believe it; it is physically impossible to obey it, for it is not addressed to the will, but to the understanding. It is equally impossible to believe a command; it is not addressed to our understanding, but to our will. True, we may have faith in its justice; we may have confidence that it is a good and right command, but that is not enough. Until we have either obeyed or refused to obey we have not done anything about it yet. To strain to exercise faith toward that which is addressed to our obedience is to get ourselves tangled in a maze of impossibilities."  -A. W. Tozer, Paths To Power, Chapter 3.

 

Paths To Power By A.W. Tozer / Wingspread Publishers

2013 Bible Reading Plans

At the end of every year, I plan how I will read the Bible the next year. I find that if I don't plan to read, I just don't read. These are the plans I've used for the past few years.

2010 (2009 too, I think) - Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan (pdf). This plan has selections from four different parts of the Bible each day and takes you through the whole Bible in a year. It gives you a few catch-up days each month. It's biggest pro could also be a con. Reading from four different places each day keeps things varied and allows for interesting serendipities. On the other hand, the reading can seem fragmented and it takes a while to get through the long books.

2011 - The Book-at-a-Time Bible Reading Plan (pdf). This one is also from Discipleship Journal. It allows a few catch-up days each month, but provides:

two readings for each day. The first reading alternates between Old and New Testament books, giving you three or four chapters a day. The Gospels are spread throughout the year. The second reading takes you through a chapter or so of the wisdom literature and Isaiah. Combined,these readings will take you through the entire Bible in one year.

2012 - The Daily Bible Meditation Guide (pdf). This provides much shorter selections, curated by Doug Wolter at  life2getherblog.com. The selections are short, but the idea is "not to read less, but to meditate more." 2012 was the year in recent times (after having children) that I meditated most and journaled most. The short, well-selected readings were helpful for that.

2013 - My plan is to read the New Testament four times (once every three months) in four different translations.

I'm starting with The Message, and will probably read the ESV, Phillips, and the NASB or NRSV. I have all of these translations in paper, and these and many more are available for free on biblegateway.com and youversion.com. Both of these sites have free audio Bibles if that is what you're into. Various smartphone and tablet apps are also available. Many people like the youversion Bible reading app.

Here are some recent blog posts about Bible reading that I've found helpful.

• Justin Taylor's Reading the Bible in 2013

• Trent Hunter's The Bible Eater: A Plan for Feasting on Christ in 2013 (This one looks good. I'll probably use it next year.)

• Trent Hunter also recommends books as Help for Understanding the Bible in 2013. To this list I would add Henrietta Mears's What the Bible is All About. It's a good book-by-book overview. Recently Eugene Peterson's Eat This Book was recommended to me. I haven't read it yet, but it's on my wish list.

• Good words from Matt Smethurst on How Not to Read Your Bible in 2013.

Whatever plan you use, remember that we don't read the Bible to check it off our to-do list or to attempt to gain merit. God loves us and wants to speak to us through his precious word!

Want To Be Blessed in the New Year?

5 ^1-2 When Jesus saw his ministry drawing huge crowds, he climbed a hillside. Those who were apprenticed to him, the committed, climbed with him. Arriving at a quiet place, he sat down and taught his climbing companions. This is what he said:

³ “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.

⁴ “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.

⁵ “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.

⁶ “You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.

⁷ “You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.

⁸ “You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.

⁹ “You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.

¹⁰ “You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom.

From Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of the Bible, called The Message. This famous passage from Matthew 5 is known as the Beatitudes.

Remainders (1/10)

• I recently put together a list of Bible verses about love. What amazed me as I researched for it was the overwhelming number of verses about God's love for us compared with verses about our love for God or others. It's really true that "we love because he first loved us."

• Justin Hyde gives a peek into his family's intentional evenings in a blog post titled "How I Pastor My Family." 

• If your the type who isn't into plowing through the Bible in a year, then maybe the Daily Bible Meditation Guide (pdf) is something you would be interested in. Actually, the whole life2gether blog is really good. (via)

• Flip teaching, or backwards teaching, is a classroom teaching innovation that interests me. The idea is that kids watch lectures and videos at home, and then class is for hands-on work and face-to-face interaction with teacher and peers.  Check out this article in the Daily Riff and this one in the Telegraph. Like many other educational "innovations," homeschoolers have been doing it for a long time.

My Bible Reading Plan for 2011

"Bible, Notebook, & Pen" by chunghow33

About this time every year I select a Bible reading plan for the following year. In 2010 I've used the Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan (pdf). It features selections from four book of the Bible each day and gets you through the whole Bible in one year. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It gives good balance between wisdom literature, other Old Testament books, gospels, and other New Testament books. Another great point about the plan is that it only offers selections for 25 days each month--great for catch-up or review.

The one quibble I have with the plan is that some books take so long to read through, that you can lose sight of the big picture. Several of the books take a month to read, the gospels even longer. That's why in 2011, I'm going with Discipleship Journal's Book-at-a-Time Bible Reading plan (pdf). Here's how they describe it.

The book-at-a-time Bible reading plan provides two readings for each day. The first reading alternates between Old and New Testament books, giving you three or four chapters a day. The Gospels are spread throughout the year.

The second reading takes you through a chapter or so of the wisdom literature and Isaiah. Combined,these readings will take you through the entire Bible in one year. 

To prevent the frustration of falling behind and to provide some reflection time, each month consists of only 25 readings. You’ll have several days each month to meditate more deeply on something that was significant to you in the past week, to catch up on missed readings, or to revisit favorite passages.

Discipleship Journal also offers the 5x5x5 Bible Reading Plan (pdf), which they describe this way:

5 minutes per day, 5 days per week, 5 ways to dig deeper. Takes you through one chapter each day. Read the New Testament in one year.

All three of these reading plans, with an overview of each and links to printable versions in English and Spanish are on the Navigators' Discipleship Journal website.

If none of these plans suits your, check out this extensive collection of other reading plans. The main thing is to stick with the reading and allow God's Word to do its thing in your heart. Like the old song says, "Read your Bible, pray every day, and you'll grow, grow, grow!"

If you liked this post, you might also like my post about a 31-day prayer calendar to help you pray for your children.

Turboboost your Bible reading in 2011 with the ESV Study Bible, my favorite study Bible by far.