What is self-care in ministry? Well, first let’s look at our definitions of success, obedience, trust, and significance. Our earthly definitions of these things often conflict with God’s definitions. What does it look like to trust God and let go of our own understanding? In this episode Gina talks with Bruce Smith about his journey from his highly successful life in the corporate world to being a mentor for pastors and leaders across the US.
Click below to listen starting at 23:16 to follow along.
Living in the Rhythms of Grace
Gina:
I would love for you to talk a little bit about care. You’ve met with pastors and leaders. God continues to bring people across your path from all over the place: midwest, west coast, Chicago.
You’ve had influence and have people that you have spoken into and walked with all over the place in various positions, ministries, para-church organizations, within the church. You’ve met with people who are very broken and very wounded and really have had to be on a journey of healing and everything in between. In that, what do you see?
Bruce:
What do I see? There aren’t many people that receive and are taking care of themselves. And if they can’t receive and they can’t be in a healthy place to receive, then they aren’t in a place to be a healthy vessel to pour out to other people. And what we do is we sacrifice ourselves rationalizing that we’re helping others.
We carry the weight of others and it becomes an anchor. And we can’t release ourselves of those things that we’ve lived through or people have told us is truth. We all carry a lot. The only truth is God and His Word and what He knows to be the truth about each of us.
Yet, each of us carry this baggage and the difficulties that this earthly journey brings to us. What I see is, when people trust and they release control and they truly believe they love the care that God gives. Care is God’s expression of love. That’s what it is. And if you look at the breath and the footprint of God’s love and the definition of what God says is His expression. It’s everything.
It’s you and I sitting down today bringing us together, because He cares about those people that will be listening and He wants His Word to be heard. It’s all the connections. It’s everything that happens. If you look at it, God’s fingerprint is on everything that’s happening. And we don’t realize that. We don’t accept it or we don’t receive it.
And care is fundamental of what a Father does for His children. God does such a beautiful thing. He’s such an incredible Father, such a loving Father. And yet many of us don’t believe we deserve it because we’re so broken or we are so empty, we can’t receive it. And we can’t be the vessel that can receive it. Therefore we can’t be the vessel that pours out.
The other thing is we don’t take the time and the space to care for ourselves. And if we don’t give the time and space for God to renew us, for God to allow us to sit on His lap or sit next to Him or just talk to Him and for Him to show how much He cares, how much He loves. But everything that He’s doing is from a loving, caring Father with a pure heart of just loving His children.
Gina:
It’s interesting, if you pay attention to Jesus’ life, He lived His life with a rhythm of care. He knew when to come away from the crowds. He knew when to just be with the 12 because He needed to be filled up with community. It wasn’t always just about Him teaching, it was about Him living in community. He also knew when He needed to leave them and needed to go by Himself and be with God.
He understood this rhythm of rest. I did a dwell episode of Matthew 11:28. I love the line in the Message Version. It’s talking about the rhythms of grace, it’s the easy yolk passage. But He talks about “Come away with Me and learn how to live freely and lightly. Watch Me watch how I do it. Learn from Me.”
And we so want to go into either religion mode, work based servant mode, because if I serve really good, then maybe it’s okay that I’m here. But God is inviting us into this partnership. Abiding shouldn’t be coming from a place of striving. It shouldn’t be coming from a place of weary. It’s a place of balance.
It’s a place of understanding and receiving, not just who Jesus is as our Savior, but who His Father is that He reconciled us with through His death. It’s through receiving the Holy Spirit that He sent as our Comforter as our helper to empower us to do the work of the ministry and to live out this life with Him.
If you want to be healthy, if you want to raise a healthy child, if you want to give them a balanced diet, you don’t feed them just sugar, you don’t feed them just carbs, you don’t feed them just lettuce, you don’t feed them just protein. You give them a balanced diet.
We want them to get exercise and some sun, and some rest and play. But as believers, we tend to just gravitate towards one thing, and we gorge ourselves on one thing and then completely miss out on the rest that is required for a healthy, sustainable relationship with God and each other.
The Foundation of Care
Bruce:
God shows all of us the foundation of what we have to keep is solid, the cornerstones. And if we deviate from, or we start chipping away from that foundation that God shows us, then we start building and the walls fall. God is there and He is waiting to help us put the mortar in with the rocks. He’s there to make sure that we don’t sacrifice any of those things.
When I work with people, I always say, “What are your foundational rocks? What are your cornerstones?” God is in there. God is in that cornerstone. And then when they talk about what they do and how they manage their lives, and all the things that are those earthly things, I make sure that people don’t compromise that foundation. And that means taking time.
That means sitting down with God in the morning. It means taking care of yourself. So many people, because we’re such a tangible society, look for God’s expressions and say, “That is God”. And that’s not God, it’s an expression of God. But when we get focused on the wrong things, we lose track of our industry.
God just wants us here so that we are healthy, loved, and in a place where we can help others to be healthy and loved through Him. And ultimately, that’s what God says is success. If you want to put it in terms of having an impact on society or rather than a title or whatever it might be.
A promotion is meaningless if you’re not caring for others and being in a place where you’re a vessel for Him. Title is meaningless. More responsibilities is meaningless. I love that God expresses in healings, in the gifts that are given.
But there’s a foundational purpose. And if we lose track of His purpose, then we start focusing on those things, then you just have to say, “Hold on, stop.” God is intentional. He is purposeful in all He does. And we always have to anchor back to the purpose.
Gina:
I love that you talk so much about bringing people back to their foundation, because it’s very easy, especially if someone doesn’t consider themselves as someone who is in ministry, they have a normal job or they go to church, it’s easy for them to just abdicate the understanding of their foundation to whatever the guy on the platform says.
So they don’t discover it for themselves. They don’t mine it for themselves. They don’t go into the secret place with Jesus, they don’t go to the Scriptures and ask Him to define it. They want somebody else to define it. Then they abdicate their identity and their authority. So that when they are in a place where they’re overwhelmed, when they are in a place where the winds are coming and the waves are hitting, that foundation is not there.
And the sad thing is that abdicating comes with this disqualifying, because, “I’m not a pastor. I’m not a leader. I don’t have a title. I’m just a mom. I’m just in insurance. I can volunteer on Sunday school.” So now I’ve disqualified myself, and stepped back. But this whole life that you’re talking about, that you come alongside people to help them to discover, that is available for all of us.
That is what Jesus died for. This is a theme that comes up. This is something I’m passionate about. We can reduce the cross to Jesus dying so that our sins can be forgiven and we can go to heaven and we can escape hell. But Jesus died for so much more than that. And the veil was torn.
That wasn’t a small thing, that tedious, arduous, painful process of sacrifice and offering and priestly barriers that were between us and God. Jesus eradicated all of that so that we have access to that intimacy. We have access to that relationship. We are reconciled back to Him. We are seated with Jesus. We are heirs and co-heirs.
And it’s not that we aren’t saved. We are, but we are settling for what the prodigal son wanted to settle for, which was, “I’ll just wash dishes. I’ll just be a servant in my father’s kitchen.” But instead, the father came running at him with his robe and his ring, threw his arms around him, cried on his shoulder, gave him a kissed, threw him a party and sat him at the head at the table.
But that’s a hard thing to receive. And I think the enemy is laughing all the way to the bank, because he’s got us so convinced that we’re so unworthy, which we are. But if we don’t receive fully the gift of Jesus making us worthy then we’re missing out on so much.
Bruce:
We are. Society tells us that we don’t deserve, because we’re surrounded by what’s not. We’re surrounded by and receiving those things that tell us that we aren’t. And we start believing it. It becomes ingrained into our minds, which then says, “Hey, I’m going to protect your heart.” And once the mind says, “I’m gonna protect your heart” then it’s so difficult to get in.
What I try to do is to release people to see what is possible because of who they are. Each of us are created in this beautiful fashion for a specific purpose. Each of us have this incredible potential if we receive God’s love and we walk with Him, to have this huge impact in the kingdom, this huge impact on so many people on the journey.
It’s a beautiful picture when you look at the army that is coming together and that can come together when people join arms and believe that. But we’re in a society where darkness is the voice in many ways and we start believing it. We’re in a society where a lot of people didn’t grow up with or understand what it means to have a parent.
They don’t understand what it means to be a son or a daughter. So God is waiting there and He is waiting to show them, but they don’t know what it means. So many people will relearn how to be a son or daughter first. And when they understand that, then they understand their purpose as a father or mother. And then they understand what God means by family.
Then they know what it means to have community. God just releases this incredible view, this incredible horizon of what all those things mean. And yet sometimes we’re in the clouds. We have to hold steady to going back and relying on and being in relationship and walking right next to God.
If I’m going to be in the clouds, I’m not going to lose track of God. I’m going to walk right next to Him. I’m not going to walk ahead of Him. I’m not going to walk behind Him. We’re going to walk together.
Gina:
That’s good. I want to thank you for how you’ve walked with me in my life. God has used you in profound ways along the journey. I appreciate your friendship and how you represent the love of the Father in my life. You speak truth and love. I want to encourage people.
And I just want to encourage people who are reading, that we were made for a relationship with God and with each other. And part of receiving is also receiving relationship and having people in your life who you trust, who can speak truth, who can, through the power of the Holy Spirit, bring you to those places of repentance, of healing, of receiving something that might be hard to receive, or receiving something that’s really good, but you don’t know how to receive it. And you have a vehicle for a lot of that in my life in recent years. So I just appreciate you and I thank you.
Check out the rest of this conversation How Does God Define Success?
Check out the Dwell Meditations
