God Centered Theology Goals And Philosophy Of Ministry

Hello, everyone. Welcome to God-Centered Theology. This is Andy Cain. It's a joy to be back with you once again. I just wanted to come to you today and do sort of an introductory video where we kind of go over our goals and our philosophy of ministry to give you a good introduction to what we're all about.

A God-Centered Worldview

So, without further ado, let's take a look at our goal. The first goal we want to cover is that we want to be God-Centered. To be God-Centered is to start with God and then reason down to man. If one starts with man and reasons up to God, they always create an idol out of their own desires.

So, this God-Centeredness needs to apply to all of life. Sort of like the fellow Christians say all of Christ for all of life. It's sort of in that same vein, but God-Centered is about a worldview. The scriptures are God-Centered.

The Bible is God-Centered. God is God-Centered. And so, we as Christians need to be God-Centered. So, we need to be God-Centered in the way we interpret scriptures. Not saying, you know, one of the worst questions you can ask the Bible study is, what does this mean to you?

No, it's, what has God communicated through the original author to the original audience? What is the actual literary meaning and then draw. So, we need to be God-Centered in our church, in our home, in our workplace, how we approach the scriptures.

It's all encompassing and it's a worldview change that I went through and I was very man-Centered and many of our churches are. And so, now we want to be God-Centered. Start with God and then we conform ourselves to what He has revealed.

Living in Submission to Scripture

Our next goal that we want to look at is that we want to be God-Honoring. To be God-Honoring is to operate in submission to scripture. It is to live righteously and always be killing sin in our bodies.

Now, we obviously are justified when we are saved. We are raised to life spiritually by the Holy Spirit. We repent of our sin, put our faith and trust in Jesus Christ and we are fully justified just like Abraham the believer.

We are accredited full righteousness. Christ's righteousness is righteousness not that is our own as Paul talks about in Philippians, but the very righteousness of God that we receive. But we still reside in sinful human flesh that's going to war against our spirit.

And so, we need to be putting to death the deeds of the body continually and consistently. And this is a very God-Honoring thing to do because we operate in submission to scripture. Now, just like with our goal God-Centered, this God-Honoring aspect is all-encompassing.

We are to be in submission to scripture in our personal lives, in our marriages, in our friendships, in our churches. That's one of the things that we are dealing with in our God-Centered Church Series.

So many churches are man-centered. They have no care of being submitted to scripture in any capacity and this needs to change. But in our workplaces we can be in submission to scripture and this example hopefully will bring others into a God-Honoring worldview.

Giving All Glory to God

Alright, this last goal of God-Centered Theology that we want to discuss is to be God-Glorifying. To be God-Glorifying is to recognize that all glory belongs to God alone. So one of the Solas of the Reformation, Soli Deo Gloria, all glory to God alone.

Meaning, it's all-encompassing of the glory. There's not a 1 of the glory that cannot go to God. It's 100 of the glory and the 100 of the glory has 100 the same destination and that is God alone.

So anything and everything we do in this life is to bring glory to God, not to ourselves. So the litmus test that you can go through when you're looking at doing something either in your life or in a ministry or whatever it is, is this primarily bringing God glory 100 or am I looking to keep back some for myself?

Is there an element of pride involved here? Or am I looking to bring all glory to God alone? Now, you've got to make sure you're also God-Centered and doing it to honor God in submission to scripture.

And the way these goals work, if goal one is nailed down and you're God-Centered starting there, then from there you're looking to be God-Honoring in your God-Centeredness, meaning you're going to submit to scripture and what God has revealed.

It will naturally lead to being God-Glorifying because you're already starting out with the right mindset. Alright, so let's talk about our philosophy of ministry. This philosophy of ministry comes directly from my heart and directly from my life, primarily from where I've messed up tremendously and had to learn to craft a philosophy of life and a philosophy of ministry that would actually fit the goals that I have.

I want to be God-Centered. I want to be God-Honoring, God-Glorifying. I need to make sure that my primary way of taking action fits those goals. And so what I have developed and come up with is, number one, start small.

Start Small and Set a Manageable Scale

Starting small in scale. Because Rome was not built in a day, as they say. It is okay to dream big and have long-term goals, but one must start with something that is manageable so that we do not burn ourselves out trying to do too much too quickly.

This has got Andy written all over it. For a large part of my life, I'd get really excited, have big dreams, big ambitions, and there's nothing wrong with any of that. We need, I mean, as much as we've got so many Christians just sitting around thinking, you know, the end's going to happen any day now, Rapture's going to get me tomorrow, so why do anything?

Part of the reason we have so many issues in the world today is because Christians haven't been doing their part in taking action and being ambitious and working. But we need to have more Christians with more God-Centered goals, more ambition, dreaming big of what we want to see happen.

But understanding that when you start out, you've got to bring the scale down and make sure that your actions are in concert with what you can do at that moment in time. So you take something like website building, I started off with just simple things, understanding how you create one, what is hosting, you know, a domain, the address of a website, you know, all these things, storage limits, all these basic nuts and bolts.

Much like Christianity, we start with the basics of Christianity and then go on to deeper things. You know, and then I got to building pages and doing crafting articles and posts and learning how to embed videos and it grew and grew and grew to where now I'm at a point where I'm doing a lot of things that I wasn't doing 10 years ago and I'm sure 10 years from now I'll be able to do even more.

But I started at a manageable point. If there are 10 things you want to accomplish and you try to do all 10 from the get-go, you're going to fail. Just handle the first thing, and then the second, then the third.

And this is very difficult for many to wrap their heads around and to put into practice. And I speak from experience because we want to see so many things achieved and accomplished that we can look at and say, I did that and I did this.

But you'll have far more long-term success and bring much more glory to God if you are successfully, continually, and consistently growing at a pace that you can handle and manage. So start small. Alright, so the next part, or step two, of our philosophy of ministry once you've started small, is to do something.

Take Action and Avoid Bureaucracy

You can have all the plans in the world. You can have all the dreams in the world. You can have all the ambition in the world. But if you never actually do anything, you haven't accomplished anything.

This is why starting small in scale is vitally important. It allows us to achieve smaller, manageable goals and have something in place that we can then evaluate, which we'll talk about in step three.

You have to do something. This is one of the reasons that we should hate and detest bureaucracy. Obviously in politics, we don't need it there because nothing ever gets done. But in our churches, we should not have bureaucracy.

Here's a newsflash for probably many churches out there. Scripture doesn't teach anything about leadership that results in bureaucracy. Doesn't. And while there are things you need to watch out for with what I believe to be the biblical model, which is oversight by a plurality of biblically qualified elders, when you go against that and flip it on its head, which many of our American churches do with congregational rule, where everybody has a say, everybody has a voice, and they're so worried about how things are ran versus just simply serving God, you're going to naturally breed bureaucracy.

We see it right now. We have a committee for everything in Southern Baptist churches. Sometimes we have a committee for our committees. We have some churches where they'll create a committee just to decide how to spend a certain amount of dollars on this or that.

It's ridiculous, and it's bureaucratic, and it just bogs everything down. And what happens is you'd have all these committees, all these teams, and all these think tanks, and, oh, we should do this, we should do that.

Oh, would it be great if we did this? And nothing ever gets done because the second you try to do something, it's like, better not do that. You might make so-and-so mad. But true leadership does something.

And in your life, you're going to need to do something. Take a step out in faith. Achieve something. Create something. Make a considerable and intentional action and accomplish something. Because with all the ambition in the world, you can start as small as you want to, but until you've done something, you have nothing to evaluate.

So we start small in scale, and then we have to do something. Now, finally, once you have started small in scale with something manageable, which is crafted to where you're currently at with your knowledge, your ability, you don't want to start out, obviously, doing major podcasting or something like that if you've never learned how to turn on a camera, or even how to work a microphone, or which thing to buy, or this, that, and the other.

There's certain knowledge, and you think about it, people can say what they want about video games, and you go, oh, I like video games. Spare me. Video games, if nothing else, have taught us that there's levels to things.

You get experience points, and you level up your character, level up whatever it is. It's a good life lesson. You start out at the bottom, and you create knowledge, you gain experience, you gain abilities, and you craft and grow.

Build, Grow, and Evaluate Your Work

And so once you've started small in scale, you've done something, and now you can build and grow. You can evaluate. So once someone has started small and accomplished something, you can evaluate and make decisions about what is working and what is not.

From here, we will see growth in those areas that are succeeding. We could also find those areas that are not leading to success, and either adjust them or leave them behind altogether. And this is something that can be tough, because there may be something you've invested a lot of time in, or a lot of money in, and you really want to see it through.

But this is where, and like I said, this comes from me, and this Start Small, Do Something, Build and Grow is my life story. And it's a lot of what I've done wrong in the past that I'm doing much better at now.

But I've seen this where it's like, I really want to see this through and keep pursuing it. But what you have to do is you have to balance goals, ambitions, desires, all these things. Obviously, through the lens of submission to Scripture, if God hasn't called you, do it.

Or if He hasn't equipped you, like for instance, I'm not a singer, never have been, never will be. There's absolutely no reason for me to ever get up and join a praise team or join a choir. It's not my gifting.

It's not where I belong. If I spend any amount of time in that direction, it's wasted time, because it's not what God has gifted me to do. There's plenty of other people that can fill that role and do it much better than I.

So you've got to sometimes balance all of what you may want in life with reality. And reality is a good balancer. It can tell us, you've got to do the reality test. I really enjoy this. I see some promise.

We've had some measure of success. But is reality telling us that this particular path is really where we should be going? Well, actually over here, it may be a little harder, or maybe it's not something we enjoy as much.

But I really feel like God is blessing over here. There are going to come times where you're going to have to be willing to let go of something you may enjoy more to pursue something God really wants you to pursue.

Now look, it doesn't mean that what we're pursuing in life for God isn't enjoyable. There have been times where I've had to make course corrections, adjustments, and go down a certain path for a certain amount of time that I may have enjoyed another path more, but I went down this path because I needed to learn certain skills or have certain experience, all these things.

It's all a framework of God taking you and molding you and growing you into more Christ-likeness, to be more usable for the kingdom, to impact the kingdom more, and yes, to create a legacy of Christian holiness and righteousness that others can look at and say, I can learn something from that person.

So we need to build and grow and evaluate as we go along. All right, so those are our goals and our philosophy of ministry. They come straight from the heart of Andy Cain. They are how I craft. It's not something that I've just taken on that, Oh man, that sounds good.

Man, that'll really turn a phrase. Boy, I can market that. No, it's these goals and this philosophy of ministry is literally born out of my mistakes, my missteps, years of beating my head against the wall because I was trying to have my own glory or my own way.

I was like, there's got to be a better way. Yeah, there is. It's called being God-centered. It's called honoring God, glorifying Him and not myself. And it takes taking baby steps, which grow into toddler steps, child steps, young adult, teen, adult, so on and so forth.

Growing up in all aspects into Christ and our maturity. It takes time. It takes planning. It takes course correction. It takes discipline. It takes, yes, success and failure. And it takes us coming into a greater reliance upon Christ and the Spirit of God.

And there's great joy in it. And there's a great satisfaction with knowing that even if I don't see, and this is tough because sometimes we want to see success. I know I struggle with this. I want to see and know that what I'm doing is making a difference.

Sometimes we won't. But if you know you're God-centered and you're walking in the calling and the giftings that God has given you and you're doing the things you believe He would have you to do, even if you can't see it, you've got to trust that God works all things together for good for those who are called according to His purpose.

God is sovereign. I am not. I can't sovereignly dictate or control things, but I can be obedient. I can do those things that I can do. I can be God-centered. I can be God-honoring and submitted to Scripture.

I can bring glory to Him. I can bring my scale down to a manageable level based on where I'm at. We increase the scale, evaluate, course-correct, and keep moving forward. So I hope you'll take these goals and this philosophy ministry to heart, apply it to your own life if you see fit, and I want to see that you become greater in your God-centeredness.

God bless.