Archives by: Gary Hoag

Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. 1 Timothy 6:9-10

“I am not a wealthy man, and I will never be a wealthy man. This statement arises not from an inability to generate wealth. In fact, my various professional endeavors have well-recognized income-generating abilities. It is not that I am unable to be wealthy, but rather I am unwilling to be wealthy. Why would I wish to fall into a trap, be plunged into ruin and destruction, be pierced with many griefs and risk wandering from the faith?

In my own heart, where these things must ultimately be decided, I feel deeply the words of the apostle John: “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?” That particular verse has dwelt with Linda in a closely bound friendship since her college days. Additionally, we are convicted by the example of John Wesley, who said, “If I leave behind me ten pounds for which I have no use, I am a thief and a robber.” It just seems to me that according to the investment firm of John and John, we should keep our needs low, our generosity high, and our expectations heavenward.

We only buy older cars and seldom buy new clothes. We eat simply, and Linda bakes almost daily. She cuts my hair. I don’t own a suit and even though traveling and speaking around the nation and the world, I get by with one sport coat. We cut and burn wood to supplement our gas furnace without central air conditioning. We often buy used books. Our fishing boat is 1950s vintage. Yet we have a rich and fulfilling life in every way.”

Richard Swenson in Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2004) 136-137.

I too feel like my life is rich and fulfilling. Even more so over the past two days thanks to the many people who have expressed warm birthday greetings to me while I have been and remain Down Under.

At dinner with Gary Williams and Peter Murphy on my birthday, both talked about this book so that spurred me to share this classic section from it, entitled, “The Investment firm of John and John.” My favorite line pertaining to financial wealth: “It is not that I am unable to be wealthy, but rather I am unwilling to be wealthy.” That sentiment is spot on with the biblical text and what Jenni and I have experienced. My wife also cuts my hair. We too buy older cars. She’s likely baking something delicious today. I only wish we had a wood-burning fireplace, though I will take my fly rods over any fishing boat!

Let’s resolve to be rich not in finances but in the things money can’t buy. Today and tomorrow I facilitate a retreat for 25 Christian Super staff members and their families. Pray with me that they grasp this.

“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him.” 1 Corinthians 2:9

“I am learning the far more secret doctrine that pleasures are the shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility. As it impinges on our will or our understanding, we give it different names — goodness or truth or the like. But its flashes upon our senses and mood is pleasure.

But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly there are. But in calling them “bad pleasures” I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean “pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.” It is the stealing of the apple that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory. That does not palliate the stealing. It makes it worse. There is a sacrilege in the theft. We have abused the holy thing.

I have tried, since that moment to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean by simply giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I mean something different. How shall I put it? We can’t — or I can’t — hear the song of a bird simply as a sound. It’s meaning or message (“That’s a bird”) comes with it inevitably . . . This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew. This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore.

Gratitude exclaims, very properly, “How good of God to give me this.” Adoration says, “What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!” One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun . . .

I don’t always achieve it. One obstacle is inattention. Another is the wrong kind of attention. One could, if one practiced, hear simply a roar and not the roaring-of-the-wind. In the same way, only far too easily, one can concentrate on the pleasure as an event in one’s own nervous system — subjectify it — and ignore the smell of Deity that hangs about it. A third obstacle is greed. Instead of saying, “This is also Thou,” one may say the fatal word, Encore. There is also conceit: the dangerous reflection that not everyone can find God in a plain slice of bread and butter, or that others would condemn as simply “grey” the sky in which I am delightedly observing such delicacies of pearl and dove and silver.”

C.S. Lewis in Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (Orlando: Mariner Books, 2002) 89-91.

Today I turn 49. The benefit of being from America but serving in Australia over your birthday means that you get to have it twice. Though the day has just arrived in the States, warm greetings from family and friends have already made me feel profoundly grateful for many little things that are not little but tiny theophanies, as Lewis would rightly say.

On the eve of my birthday (at least in Australia time) I had a good long day in Melbourne, and then flew back to Sydney just before supper and rode the train to Circular Quay (properly pronounced: “key”) with Gary Williams (head of CMA, which is hosting these seminars). We picked a cafe with a great view of the Harbour Bridge (pictured above). Though people were walking to and fro in the bustling epicenter of this amazing city with seeming inattention to the view, I could not stop looking at it.

If catching glimpses of this massive bridge was not enough, little did I know that because our hotel was in the Castle Hill area, we would soon drive over it. I felt giddy, like a kid on Christmas morning. When I got to my hotel room, God then gave me the best birthday gift ever for a weary traveler: seven hours of consecutive sleep.

When I awakened I opened my first of two cards from Jenni (as instructed). I do believe, though I admit my bias, that Jenni Hoag is the most thoughtful person on the planet. “No wonder she sent me two birthday cards!” I exclaimed to myself. Here I just discovered I’d experience my birthday twice, and she must have known it all along.

Anyway, I opened her first card and felt warm all over. Then the first wave of birthday greetings began to trickle in from people in Australia, Hong Kong, India, and other part of Asia. Sitting in the silence of my room I was so moved that tears formed in my eyes.

I asked God how to process what I was experiencing and felt led to turn to Lewis and his thoughts on gratitude and adoration. That’s where I found today’s meditation. It moves me to join Lewis to pay attention so I don’t miss the “shafts of the glory” about me each and every day, including and especially today! They are but glimpses of the glory that no eye has seen nor ear hath heard.

Then I had another good day of teaching. Really good! It’s easy and fulfilling when the seminar attendees are deeply committed to Christ and eager to be equipped for His service. The perfect ending to my birthday in Australia was a harbor cruise under this amazing bridge and dinner on the boat with Peter Murphy of Christian Super and Gary Williams of CMA.

Before turning in, I read my second birthday card and was moved again. I am deeply loved and not alone. God is with me, and my wife loves me (as does my family and so many dear friends)! It makes a person with lots of words simply speechless. I saw “shafts of the glory” everywhere. Perhaps these glimpses of God’s generosity have always been there, I just noticed more of them today. Each one is a “channel of adoration” so with praise to God I say with Lewis, “This is also Thou.”

I did not miss my birthday. I got the longest birthday ever, and it’s far from over.

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. Colossians 3:23

Enjoy The Little Drummer Boy by Pentatonix.

“The power of this story demonstrates how anyone can take a small talent given from God and use it as a gift in return.

For the little drummer boy, glory to God means taking a simple act like drumming and doing it to the fullest so that it brings glory and honor back to the Lord. He infuses his drumming with a love that makes it more than just drumming. He takes “the only thing he has” and turns it into a gift like gold.

Every one of us has been given talents that, in a similar way, we can infuse with our love to give as gifts to Christ.”

Irene Smith in 7 December blog post entitled: “Like the Little Drummer Boy, Every One of Us Has Been Given Talents We Can Give as Gifts to Christ.”

I loved this. My teaching in Melbourne today (as Monday draws to a close) and Sydney tomorrow, as well as my consulting on Wednesday and retreat speaking on Thursday and Friday are my gifts to Christ. What are your talents and how might you give them to Christ this week? This year? 

I confess, am thinking about the former question as I have seven more days in Australia and am starting to really miss my wife, Jenni, and the latter question as I turn 49 on Tuesday, which for me is “today” by the time you are reading this.

So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. Luke 14:33

Here’s a poem from this Advent book I have been enjoying. It contains a powerful message that comes into view more clearly each time I read it.

If we want to get ready for Christmas, we must raise the bar. It starts with repentance, moves to renouncing our former relationship to possessions, and then reorients how we think and live from greediness to generosity.

“A Lament for What is Best”

How long Lord will You allow us to lower the bar?
How long will You permit us to reduce discipleship
down to this sticky syrup of mere conversion?

Our greedy hands withhold the broken bread and shed blood.
Our mouths are full of barbed wire. Our feet carry us
Always to the places of comfort and ease.

All the world enters our eyes upside down. But You
Oh Lord made the brain to turn it, to orient life toward
What is best. Deliver us from arrogant, unthinking certainty.

Save us from ignorant addiction to inalienable
rights and all of our piled-up offences and slights.
Make us to walk in the way of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Press our hands into the rich soil of creation and harvest
the Good News of His character grown in us on Earth
as it is in Heaven. May it be so.

John Ballenger in “A Lament for What is Best” in Not Yet Christmas: It’s Time for Advent by J.D. Walt (Franklin: Seedbed, 2014) 29.

Today’s verse and the poem together illustrate the whole new way of life celebrated at the Hillsong Church campus at which I worshipped this morning (Remember I am 18 hours ahead of Denver time). Hillsong has raised the bar of discipleship and God is working through them to help people see the world right side up.

Father in heaven, forgive me for lowering the bar. Reveal to me the thinking and actions that I must renounce and shape Your character in me by Your Holy Spirit for the glory of Jesus this Christmas. Amen.

The crowds kept asking him, “What, then, should we do?” He answered them, “The person who has two coats must share with the one who doesn’t have any, and the person who has food must do the same.” Luke 3:10-11

“Two coats. It’s quite a call to repentance. I like coats. I must have a dozen coats; one for every possible climate I might face. There’s that Banana Republic warm-up coat, and the Barbour all-weather coat, and the Diesel pull-over coat, and the J. Crew barn coat, and the Mossy Oak camo-hunting coat, and the L.L. Bean denim coat and … you get the picture. I like them all so much that when it comes time to give a coat away, I’ll go into the way-way-back of the closet and pull out an old one I don’t wear anymore.

This year I’m finally going to do it. I’m going to take one of the coats I like, maybe even one of the new coats, and give it away to someone who doesn’t have a coat. It’s too bad John didn’t tell me how many to give away if I had twelve coats. And you? Have you counted your coats lately? We so often think of repentance as an inner feeling of sorrow over bad behavior and a resolve not to do it again. John says it’s a lot bigger than this. When there are people without coats and I have twelve … you get the point. Count those coats.”

J.D. Walt in Not Yet Christmas: It’s Time for Advent (Franklin: Seedbed, 2014) 26-27.

This is a great little Advent book in which Walt astutely notes that “when the Church reclaims Advent, the culture will behold Christmas.” Imagine if every Christ follower preparing for Christmas focused on sharing coats with shivering people rather than baking cookies and hanging stockings?

Now I am not saying that Jenni, who is back home baking cookies for us to enjoy and share and getting our home ready for Christmas should stop. With Walt and John the Baptist long before him, I am saying let’s show the world who Jesus is not through “inner feelings” but by way of “outward actions.”

With Walt I will admit that I have been acculturated to have a coat for every occasion. I need to learn from my own son, Sammy, who has only three: a fleece for cold, a shell for rain, and an all-purpose coat. When I get home I need to count my coats and do some sharing before Christ arrives.

I notice less “commercialization” linked to Christmas down under. Sadly, many in Australia pay little attention to Christ, though they have the most beautiful Opera House and Harbour Bridge in the world (pictured from my ferry ride between meetings today). Let’s show them Christ through our outward actions!

Join me in counting your coats and doing some sharing. Whatever you give to the poor you give to Jesus.

If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. James 1:5

I post this today as I meet with the board of Christian Super in Sydney to discuss biblical suggestions for helping them better serve their 26,000+ members.

“Since accountability is one of the three principle lenses of steward leadership [the other two being ownership and motivation], it is important to define to whom the board and chief steward is accountable, and for what? We have already demonstrated that the board as steward and trustee of the organization is accountable to the explicit and implicit owners for how the organization is governed. So, in general terms, the board is accountable for achieving the goals and objectives of God and the stakeholders.

A board puts itself in a position of accountability when it develops an accountable relationship with God and the stakeholders. Boards of faith-based nonprofits will often engage in certain religious activities such as prayer and Bible reading to develop their relationship with God as the primary owner of the organization. However, in my experience, I have found that often these activities are either engaged in minimally (such as starting each board meeting with prayer) or the board leaves the spiritual relationship with God up to each individual member to pursue.

Faith-based boards often justify this hesitancy by saying that one’s spiritual relationship with God is an individualistic matter and are hesitant to push any one approach to spiritual engagement on all of its members. But as Christians and believers in God’s generous desire to share His will and wisdom with us (James 1:5-8), shouldn’t the board as chief steward lead by example seeking to continuously improve its relationship with the owner of the resources and its ability to hear from Him concerning His desires and objectives for the organization? As board members, we owe that level of commitment to a growing and vibrant relationship with God.”

Kent R. Wilson in Steward Leadership in the Nonprofit Organization (Downers Grove: IVP, 2016) 165. This is a great book for nonprofit administrators. Hot off the press. It was a privilege to endorse it.

Wilson’s wisdom applies to my meeting and relates to each of us who serves on a board or has any responsibilities linked to oversight. Because we are accountable to God for our governance, let’s position ourselves to hear from God during our board sessions because He desires to richly, generously, and abundantly give us the wisdom we need to steward His organizations.

How might this thinking shape organizations that you know and support? God generously desires to lavish wisdom for steward leaders from above. I thought of this as I snapped this header photo from above the clouds over the Pacific Ocean a few hours outside of Sydney.

Be very careful, then, how you live–not as unwise but as wise. Ephesians 5:15

“Redeem your time. Give your time back to God this Christmas, every second of every day. Look to Him to lead you and expect to be surprised. Some things you planned may never get done, some may get delayed and still others may need to be passed off to someone else. It is likely God will have a very different idea of how He would have you use your time. And it will always be redemptive, meaningful and rich. Stewarding your self means giving this most intimate gift of time back to God that He may fill your days with His peace and joy.”

R. Scott Rodin and Lindsay Kittleson in Stewarding Christmas (Colbert: Kingdom Life Publishing, 2015) 33. It’s a wonderful little ebook with great ideas for stewarding Christmas. Click here to visit the KLP webpage to download it for free.

I will spend today over the Pacific Ocean. I hope to get some sleep, but also have various things to read and study to make the most of my time.

In the journey of life, however, I am learning to be open to interruptions, schedule changes, and other spontaneous additions to my calendar. When we view time not as our own but as belonging to God, we approach each day (or each flight) differently. We welcome rather than resent interruptions. We go with the flow instead of grumble when schedules change. We smile rather than complain when extra things are added to our to-do lists.

All this rings especially true at Christmas. During this “jingle all the way” season, in which everyone moves at a hustle and bustle pace, everything magnifies. If we are kind and generous, it makes a person’s day, because so many are self-absorbed and demanding. If we are unkind and stingy (like the Grinch), well, you know what happens. It’s not good.

Generosity is fruit of God’s work in us. If we want to exhibit generosity at Christmas, perhaps we must start by “stewarding” the season (and every other day of the year) as a gift from God, like Scott and Lindsey suggest, and see what “redemptive, meaningful and rich” ways God will fills our days with His peace and joy.

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Romans 12:21

“I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil. For that purpose He needs men [and women] who make the best of everything. I believe that God gives us all the strength we need to help us to resist in all times of distress. But He never gives it in advance, lest we should rely on ourselves and not on Him alone. A faith such as this should allay all our fears for the future. I believe that even our mistakes and shortcomings are turned to good account, and that it is no harder for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds. I believe that God is no timeless fate, but that He waits for and answers sincere prayers and responsible actions.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in “After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Year 1943” in God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas (Louisville: WJKP, 2010) 79.

Today I fly to Los Angeles and then Sydney, Australia, to teach and speak numerous times in Melbourne, Leura, and Sydney for Christian Super and Christian Ministry Advancement until I return home on 19 December 2016. I’d appreciate your prayers for a fruitful trip.

Likely you too have a busy schedule with much happening in the days leading up Christmas. Let us rejoice that God’s generosity flows toward us in real-time. How wonderful that He gives us strength sufficient for the day, but never more, lest we cease depending upon Him!

God, You are so good. You wait for and answer “sincere prayers and responsible actions”. Your coming is not reserved for Advent, but year-round You show up in our lives at just the right time with just what we need. Thank you. We declare our dependence on You anew and afresh today with gratitude for your faithfulness. Amen.

You will be enriched in every way for all generosity, which produces thanksgiving to God through us. 2 Corinthians 9:11

“Make us rich in ways that result in generosity on our part so You will be praised.”

Sandra Higley in prayer #9 of “12 Prayers to Keep Christ in Christmas” (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2003).

Today’s post is dedicated to all those who like short meditations and one-sentence prayers!

Freely you have received; freely give. Do not get any gold or silver or copper to take with you in your belts — no bag for the journey or extra shirt or sandals or a staff. Matthew 10:8b-10a

“God of generosity, may we emulate you in passing on to others a portion of the gifts you have given to us. In giving we experience Advent joy; in giving we are true to our being made in the image and likeness of you. Keep greed far from our hearts, Lord. Help us to experience the graced poverty of being open to your coming.”

Robert F. Morneau in Waiting in Joyful Hope: Daily Reflections for Advent and Christmas 2016-17 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2016) 19.

Our neighbor, Carol Sharp, whose faith it’s been our joy to encourage, blessed us this weekend with this prayer from her Advent devotional. Rather than keep the blessing to ourselves, we are sharing it freely and widely as today’s meditation. It’s beautiful!

Notice the posture it invites us to take before our generous God. It’s a posture of “graced poverty” which reflects dependence with anticipation. We are so confident that our Lord will care for us that we obey His instructions to “travel light” through life as we live our lives in mission: freely receiving and freely giving.

We also ask Him to help us avoid the desire for things (a.k.a. greed), so that our dependence remains fixed on Him. That’s what “graced poverty” is all about. Since our God is generous and each of us in made in God’s image, let’s reflect His generosity to the world this Advent.