As of First Importance

As of First Importance. Thumb-typing a foreign mission update on the iPhone’s memo feature, in a plane, at 37,000-feet above sea level has for me all the markers of déjà vu. I did this last week on the inbound flight into Mozambique. I did that last year also, at Eswatini. I did many of these a decade ago, too, in Uganda. Although I have “seen this before,” as the word, déjà vu, means in French, foreign mission is never the same twice.

This time, Africa was all work and no play, because there was neither time nor energy nor money to play. Eight days, four of which were traveling, which left three days for teaching and one day for preaching, were—like my one small carry-on suitcase—extremely, densely, necessarily, aggressively packed to the fullest extreme. This was a no-nonsense trip to Tete, Mozambique—the medium-sized city in the northern part of the country at the place on the mighty Zambezi River where a hydro-electric dam was built several decades ago. I woke up, took some coffee, taught, ate, taught, then slept, skipping supper each night due to jet lag.

Twelve pastors, plus two who showed up outside the official roster, had been explicitly waiting for theological education for three years. Their ministries nevertheless continued during those three years with the normal tasks of preaching, praying, and problem-solving. However, this week was the first taste of theological education that any of them had ever received. I warned my translator, Pastor Bowman, that he would be tired from seven hours of speaking for three consecutive days. He was, and he predictably lost his voice on the third day of lecture. Another sister in the church had to translate my sermon.

The Holy Spirit is ever able and active to guide the church into all truth (John 16:13), in conjunction with the Scriptures. In that Spirit-led sense, these pastors were very effective in their ministries. They did not need, per se, a traveling lecturer from the States. At their invitation, I merely added to their homespun wisdom the first taste of more rigorous instruction, as formal as a brick and corrugated roof building can support with its six bare light bulbs. This was their beginning of sorts.

I wanted the pastors to know that these first lessons were the matters “as of first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3). Upon these first importance concepts, the things of second and third importance can later stand or fall. We sought to understand the attributes of God, which intersect with the gospel in each of the twenty-one lessons (e.g., God is holy, God is just, God is love, God is true, etc.). Correspondingly, twenty-one times I gave the same encouragement: “Theology is difficult but important work.”

God must be God. To reduce him is to lose him in the sense of biblical accuracy: “For [God] cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13). "With God all things are possible" (Matt. 19:26; Mark 10:27), but we need to separate out from our theology any of our imaginations about God that are inconsistent with the way God explained himself to us in the Bible. This is the true work of theology—we must guard the edges of what God has revealed about himself.