Choose Your
Rut Carefully

Over the years, I have amassed a random collection sermon fodder on my computer in the form of ponderable questions, goofy jokes & funny pictures. Many of those pictures are of road signs. To the annoyance of friends and family alike, I have stopped the car in the most inconvenient places to get a snapshot of a random sign...It’s a quirky hobby, I know, but I have fun with it.

Road signs can tell us a lot...

Like the one welcoming you to Kettle Falls, Washington, the home of “1255 friendly people and one grouch.”



After Hurricane Gustav hit the Louisiana coast, I took a mission team down to help with cleanup efforts. There was a petrol shortage, so when you could find fuel, you stopped. I enjoyed taking a picture of our team in front of a service station's sign that proudly proclaimed, “WE’VE GOT GAS!”



Here’s a warning sign found along Oregon’s winding coast, “Emergency stopping only. Whale watching is not an emergency. Keep driving.” 

One of my favorite road signs is not one that I’ve seen, but I have read about! Pastor Ray Stedman described this sign as he crossed the border into Alaska:

“Choose your rut carefully.
You’ll be in it for the next two hundred miles.”

The same can be said about life and for many a church. Obviously, the preference is to avoid the ruts altogether...but sometimes we find ourselves there. Your choices will lead you to a destination... Many times, we make just enough conscious decision about our lives to find a relatively comfortable place and then go on autopilot... We don't really live, we just exist in a rut.

Churches are no different. Over the next few chapters of The Church Awakening, Swindoll offers insight into the enemy’s strategies for keeping the church distracted, off-track, and in a rut. I hope to walk through these insights with you, and we’ll also look at the early church as an inspired example for our success!

Before we get to those remedies, let's think a bit more about the challenges we face.

Swindoll’s assessment of the state of affairs in today’s church includes a warning of several distinct problems:

• uncertainty of purpose
• blurred vision
• 
fuzzy priorities

• compromised values
• 
replacing volunteerism with professionalism

The church can succumb to these subtleties and find itself painfully dysfunctional - off track and stuck in a rut. The church was never meant to be a “professional organization.” We’ll let the world have all of those. The church is not a slick, efficient corporation with a cross stuck on its roof. It is a ministry. 
We do not look to the government for support or to the state for direction.
We do not look to Wall Street for financial suggestions. We have one Head, the Lord Jesus Christ. We do not rely on any earthly organization or some rich individual to sustain the ministry. The church is a spiritual entity, built up and supported by its Founder, Jesus, who promised to build His church. (29)

John Piper, in his book Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, says that “We pastors are being killed by the professionalizing of the pastoral ministry. The mentality of the professional is not the mentality of the prophet. It is not the mentality of the slave of Christ. Our business is...to deny ourselves and take up a blood-spattered cross daily.” (Luke 9:23)