The Gift and Calling of Teacher

I can tell when a person really has the anointing to teach in the Body of Christ.  Usually a pastor has both the gift of pastoring (being a shepherd) and teaching.  Teaching requires patience. Love is patient 1 Cor. 13:4.

I was at Panera Bread eating Saturday, and I sat next to a woman tutoring a young child in Algebra.  I watched her, and I knew she was not the boy’s mother.  No parent has that much patience with their own children.  I think one of the most nerve wrecking experiences in my life was sitting in the car with my teenagers when they were learning to drive.   My husband was better with teaching my children (his step daughters) to drive a car stick shift than he was with his own children many times when it came to teaching.  I had to ask her if she was a teacher and she said, “Yes I do private tutoring.”  

When you are a teacher in grade school, junior high, high school, and college you don’t get to pick and choose your students.  My daughter’s fifth grade teacher wanted to take all his students to sixth grade, and teach the same class the following year, but only one problem student he got to pawn off on another teacher.  I’m glad my daughter had many male teachers, they were very good role models rather than just all female teachers in elementary and junior high.   More “alternative schools” have been developed for problem students in the public school system.

In life, we don’t always get to pick and choose the customers we serve and wait on.  It’s the same way in the Body of Christ.   I’ve worked with some of the most difficult people in life, helped the most difficult Christians. and worked for the most difficult managers at times on a job.

(It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Ephesians 4:11-13)

I had this one instructor at IUPUI at the Purdue School of Engineering in Unix (multi-user computer operating system).  I just did not understand his teaching style so I thought an extra credit project would help to bring up my grade from a C to a B.  He would only give credit for web projects because website design was very new back then so I made an online study guide since I understood html coding pretty well.   When I sat down with the instructor and showed him my project on a CD, he acted like it was a stupid idea and he threw my project across the room and yelled at me, and was very inpatient with me.  I did not know “what his problem” was, but instead of attacking him (a soft answer turns away wrath) I just told him I understand if he is frustrated with his job, and I was not trying to add to his work load by asking for extra credit.  

He told me to go work with another professor at Purdue which was Dr. Orr and Dr. Orr had made a printed on-line study guide for a course, and he really liked my project and thought it was very creative.  He said the problem with my Unix instructor was that he was an engineer from a workplace rather than having a teaching gift.  Engineers teach A and then skip to C, they don’t typically teach A, B, and C.   That instructor only lasted one year at the university.  In God’s kingdom, it’s the same way, a person teaching has to have patience to teach.  

As Paul directed Timothy in his teaching work, he emphasized meekness as a quality for him to cultivate within himself in dealing with those who "oppose themselves."

"And the Lord's servant must not strive, but be gentle towards all, apt to teach, forbearing, in meekness correcting them that oppose themselves; if peradventure God may give them repentance unto the knowledge of the truth, and they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him unto his will" (II Timothy 2:24-26).

The assumption of the passage is that there are very many people who, through different types of thinking or behavior, place themselves in the unenviable position of being in a state of self-contradiction. They do not need an opponent, for they are their own worst enemy!  

I know teaching is not my gift.  I tried to home school my son when he was younger and it just frustrated me all the more.  I think we tend to get more emotional when it comes to instructing our own children.  I can show people how to work on a computer at work with no problem.   

The problem is if you go to church or a home Bible study where you have a minister who is more of an evangelist, than they will inspire you, but typically an evangelist will be on to the next thrill ride.  Many times God will couple the evangelist gift with the prophet gift.   Prophets have more of the correction/rebuking/exhortation ministry.  My ministry has always been evangelist (light a fire under a person’s rear end/light a fire under the bushel), i.e. just like a stick of dynamite, and then it was coupled with the prophet (engineering) which is correction/rebuking and very heavy into exhortation or the encouragement ministry and trying to fix the problem.  I have just been learning more of the teaching or pastoring/nurturing ministry. But like the field of study at my job of computer programming, I am more left brained at times.  I was happily married to an engineer for 14 years.   There is not a whole lot of romance and hand holding a woman receives in being married to an intelligent engineer usually.   Same way in working or going to college with engineers --- not a very “nurturing” field of people like nursing.

My in-laws told me that their pastor thought my husband should have been in full-time ministry, but instead he majoring in civil engineering at Purdue, and married outside the church.  He did not attend church hardly at all for 13 years or seek God in his marriage relationship before I met him.  Anyway, I told them there is no way because I knew my husband too well, and he had no patience.  He did not like to work with difficult people.  He was an engineer and he liked to fix problems.

There are some problems in life that we can’t fix, and one is handicapped people.   It can be a handicap physically or mentally/emotionally.  Doctors can try to repair the damage of life physically to someone and grief counselor and psychologist try to repair the damage to some people that was done by their parents or circumstances in life.   I was always praying about my husband’s problem of losing a child.  That is where love comes in.  God sent his prophets to fix the problem and they got stoned, God sent his son to fix the problem, who was a prophet, and he got killed, but he poured out his  love which actually heals the problem.  That same love is poured out in our hearts.

Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now this hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. Romans 5:3-5

The only way any problem really gets totally healed is through God’s love.  I meet a lot of people in denial that they even have a problem, and I’ll cover that in another blog.

We love a person with an infirmity or weakness.  My husband had the infirmity of chronic asthma and allergies and I was concerned about his health every day of my life.  I would get upset if we went out somewhere and he thought he had his inhaler and would have to rush home because he could not breathe.  I know some people who lived with a child or spouse who had Cystic Fibrosis and that was their “daily” concern.  Paul talked about his daily concern was the responsibility of the churches.  I did not have a chronic health problem so I did not have something that was a daily trial or concern, except my eyesight and wearing eye contacts so I got that zapped last year with Lasix surgery.  Some problems get “zapped” in life, but not all, some problems take time to gradually heal, and some problems like Paul’s thorn in the flesh are continual battle (obstacle course in life).

Love “covers” a multitude of sins.  Agape loves will love unconditionally ---faults, weaknesses, handicaps and infirmities.  

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. 1 Peter 4:8

Carry one another's burdens (infirmities/quirks) ; in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.  Galatians 6:2