Who are you to think you can help other people?

Maybe I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility as an oldest child; I know I am the middle of five, but the older two were eleven and thirteen years older than I was, and not really living at home by the time I started school.  Anyway, I have always felt as though we are stewards of everything we have, stewards of more than the stuff you buy or make, but the stuff you learn.

Last Thursday night I had the amazing privilege of teaching the Seminary wives, part two of a six session series, preparing them to minister as women teaching/counseling women.  This morning in my blessing journal I recorded the blessing of teaching last night, and it came to me about how this is another one of those areas where the evil one whispers lies, like “You don’t have the education for counseling, so you wouldn’t be any good at it. Or Who are you to think you can help other people, look at your own broken pieces.  Or You think you can help other people, that’s a sin issue, pride in your life!  Or, There’s no place in your church for you to teach women, so just relax.  If you should do it, someone will come after you.

So we give up, and all those amazing opportunities to make an eternal difference evaporate.   In 1 Corinthians 4: 1-2 Paul writes these words to the Corinthian believers, and down through time to us, “So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God, Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.”  (NIV)  The King James version puts it this way in verse 2, “Moreover it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful.”

First, man here is not just male, so don’t get hung up there.  The question is, What have you done with your stewardship of the Word of God and the learning you have acquired in personal study and in your reading and in whatever kind of classes or services God has used to teach you?  Certainly, if you are a mom, you have a great audience in your children and great opportunities to teach them.  And Sunday School teachers and youth workers have amazing opportunities to pass on what they have learned.

My fear is that too often we allow others to set the agenda for what and when we teach, and we settle for that…and too many young girls and young women and adult women never have the opportunity to learn what you have learned, about what it means to be a godly woman or how to handle the crises that life hurls at you or how to delight in God.  And men, you can just substitute men and boys for women and girls.  Paul was writing to all of us.

Too many young people are going into marriage ill prepared, perhaps because we are not doing a very  good job of preparing them, and that’s why the divorce rate in the church is so close to the divorce rate outside of the church.  And we are the church...we as individuals.  So when we are looking for ways to escape responsibility, there are none.

Well, I have been delighting in the privilege of teaching the Sem wives, and I see this blog as one more way to pass on what I have learned and right now, I am praying about how I might be used in my church.  Oh I serve now, but not as a teacher of women.  And maybe, it will only be in one-on-one opportunities, but I feel like God is poking me, so I will follow as far as He leads me.  How about you?